Edward J. Larson: LIberal Democrats are ashamed of many of their party's past leaders
[Mr. Larson, a Pulitzer Prize-winning historian, is the author most recently of "A Magnificent Catastrophe: The Tumultuous Election of 1800, America's First Presidential Campaign" (Free Press, 2007). President Bush read his book, liked it, and told him so in a note in which the president seemed to identify with Thomas Jefferson more than John Adams.]
... At one time, Democrats everywhere staged Jefferson-Jackson Day Dinners to honor their party's founders much like Republican still hold Lincoln Day Dinners. Democrats now keep their founders at arm's length. Jefferson may have written that all men are created equal, but he owned slaves and allegedly sired children by a black woman he never freed. Even worse, although Andrew Jackson personified popular democracy and battled the national bank, he not only owned slaves but ordered the massacre and removal of Native Americans. Last week, I attended a performance in Los Angeles of "Bloody Bloody Andrew Jackson," an edgy rock musical clearly not written by conservatives. The printed program posed the question implicit throughout the show, "Was Old Hickory a great president or an American Hitler?" If this is how they view it, no wonder liberal Democrats don't dwell on their party's past.
For the party faithful, there are a lot more blemishes on the Democratic record. The spokesman for the modern Democratic reform impulse, William Jennings Bryan, ended his life battling the teaching of evolution. The progressive standard-bearer Woodrow Wilson was also a notorious racist who led the country into World War I. Franklin Delano Roosevelt instigated the internment of Japanese Americans as well as the New Deal. Lyndon Johnson brought us the Vietnam War in addition to Civil Rights legislation and Medicare. In a liberal historian's tableau of American history, these are the party's jewels whose half steps forward marked the nation's democratic progress.
Liberal Democrats have always looked to the future with hope and embraced marginalized groups. When they look back, even to the deeds of their own former leaders, they see trails of tears like the one over which Andrew Jackson drove out the Cherokee. Blemishes on past presidents, even those who pointed the way toward future progress, tend to stain them wholly for at least some key elements within the Democratic coalition.
In contrast, conservative Republicans look to the past for inspiration but often to the future with trepidation. Originalists at heart, they tend to see only the shining city on a hill of earlier times and not its darker neighborhoods. George Washington's slaves are forgotten along with Adams's Alien and Sedition Acts. For some Republicans, both Lincoln and Robert E. Lee become models of Christian virtue as if they never ordered millions of men into battle against the other. As his letter to me suggests, even Mr. Bush can embrace Jefferson by selecting aspects of the third president's character and career.
Our political leaders can best learn from history by appreciating its rich complexity. We are served neither by its neglect nor by its uncritical adulation.
Read entire article at WSJ
... At one time, Democrats everywhere staged Jefferson-Jackson Day Dinners to honor their party's founders much like Republican still hold Lincoln Day Dinners. Democrats now keep their founders at arm's length. Jefferson may have written that all men are created equal, but he owned slaves and allegedly sired children by a black woman he never freed. Even worse, although Andrew Jackson personified popular democracy and battled the national bank, he not only owned slaves but ordered the massacre and removal of Native Americans. Last week, I attended a performance in Los Angeles of "Bloody Bloody Andrew Jackson," an edgy rock musical clearly not written by conservatives. The printed program posed the question implicit throughout the show, "Was Old Hickory a great president or an American Hitler?" If this is how they view it, no wonder liberal Democrats don't dwell on their party's past.
For the party faithful, there are a lot more blemishes on the Democratic record. The spokesman for the modern Democratic reform impulse, William Jennings Bryan, ended his life battling the teaching of evolution. The progressive standard-bearer Woodrow Wilson was also a notorious racist who led the country into World War I. Franklin Delano Roosevelt instigated the internment of Japanese Americans as well as the New Deal. Lyndon Johnson brought us the Vietnam War in addition to Civil Rights legislation and Medicare. In a liberal historian's tableau of American history, these are the party's jewels whose half steps forward marked the nation's democratic progress.
Liberal Democrats have always looked to the future with hope and embraced marginalized groups. When they look back, even to the deeds of their own former leaders, they see trails of tears like the one over which Andrew Jackson drove out the Cherokee. Blemishes on past presidents, even those who pointed the way toward future progress, tend to stain them wholly for at least some key elements within the Democratic coalition.
In contrast, conservative Republicans look to the past for inspiration but often to the future with trepidation. Originalists at heart, they tend to see only the shining city on a hill of earlier times and not its darker neighborhoods. George Washington's slaves are forgotten along with Adams's Alien and Sedition Acts. For some Republicans, both Lincoln and Robert E. Lee become models of Christian virtue as if they never ordered millions of men into battle against the other. As his letter to me suggests, even Mr. Bush can embrace Jefferson by selecting aspects of the third president's character and career.
Our political leaders can best learn from history by appreciating its rich complexity. We are served neither by its neglect nor by its uncritical adulation.