Andrew Jackson Then and Now

morning all thank you for coming always defer to the senior professor yes it's a wise thing to do but on the other hand John I think you're the one who's responsible for the title of our session I am I emailed this from the back of a car about six months ago so not a great deal of thought hello always so I would tell you a quick story quickest story which I hope sets the frame here and it is absolutely true the other HW George HW Bush is involved and as is exactly three of my favorite topics it's Donald Trump George HW Bush and Andrew Jackson it sounds like a joke and there's one parachute and there's a rabbi I know it sounds that way but but this is a true story so in March of 2017 on Andrew Jackson's 250th birthday I'm sure y'all celebrated out here you had duels on the seventh green oh wait that was good the eye president Trump announces that he's coming to Nashville where I live to lay a wreath at the Hermitage at Jackson's house about seven miles from from the city center and it was one of the great things about presidents and their predecessors is it's always worth listening to and paying attention when they talk about their predecessors because my view is that presidents see as they wish to be seen and so you can almost always tell when there's they're seeking sanction or they're seeking approval inspiration they're linking themselves to to a predecessor in a positive light for instance when President Kennedy said to the Nobel Prize winners this is the greatest gathering of talent at the White House with the possible exception and when Thomas Jefferson dined alone one of the great lines it's kind of a little passive way of saying aren't I like Thomas Jefferson to think to have all of you come here right I mean it's sort of a subtle thing so Trump wanted to associate himself with with Jackson I had interviewed the then candidate Trump in May of 16 and Jackson never came up at all my own view is that in Karl and I were just we were just talking about this this was really Steve Bannon introducing the Andrew Jackson analogy into into the Trump cannon after the election but he wants to come down he's hung the portrait in the Oval Office the Ralph de ewl and so when I read that he's coming I think I should do something I'm at Jackson biographer I live here I should so I decided to write an open letter to the president saying if you're going to embrace Andrew Jackson don't just embrace the crazy parts right and there are plenty of crazy parts to embrace with Jackson you know he once said that he his only regrets in public life whether he had not hung Henry Clay the Speaker of the House and shot John C Calhoun his own vice president no one felt that way about their running mate until John McCain actually but anyway so but Jackson in my view and we'll talk about this Jackson and my view understood his vices he made them into virtues he was an experienced public servant by the time he came to the presidency and he believed in the Union above all the redemptive feature of Andrew Jackson is his belief that we had to be as he put it one great family sorry so I write this letter and the local newspaper runs and it's the entire front page of the paper very generous editorial decision it had no effect whatever of course but the next day true story I'm walking in to lunch and my phone rings and it was George HW Bush and the president has been a lot of that winner in the hospital and so he was bored and his staff was giving him stuff to read they given him this letter he'd read it he called up he said how you doing and I said I'm fine brother he said I read your letter to Jackson I thought ah you know the old boys losing it right he thinks I'm writing letters to dead people this is not good so I said just the truth I said thank you sir and I'm glad you're doing better you know actually if it was actually a letter to trump about Jackson and without missing a beat the old man said yeah have it Jackson will pay more attention so so the question is can we get the incumbent to pay more attention than a dead guy what do you think this incumbent yeah no but I'll tell you that one of the challenges for anybody dealing with Jackson today is to figure out why he was such a great figure in his time and why he's not now so when I was writing about when his dream research for my Jackson book I became aware that he was probably the most popular figure in the United States in the 19th century the most popular figure between George Washington and Franklin Roosevelt and I say that understanding that Abraham Lincoln's we've got a following but of course Abraham Lincoln's following is delimited by the fact that he was President of the United States in the Civil War and nobody in the south liked Abraham Lincoln and and I was trying when I was writing this book to figure out how I would measure the popularity of somebody who had died 160 years ago there were no public opinion polls in those days so you can't see approval ratings and I initially thought that I would examine the editorial pages of newspapers because sometimes editors are proxies for their readers and if there were lots of editors who like Andrew Jackson maybe i could extrapolate and say that their readers I liked Andrew Jackson too but but then I started into that and after a little bit I discovered well that wouldn't work either because newspapers in those days were actually very much like television news networks today they were organs of political parties and they were utterly predictable in that regard so if I was if I picked out a democratic paper then it would be in favor of Andrew Jackson if I picked up a Whig paper would be opposed to Andrew Jackson and it really wouldn't tell me that much so I came up with an idea and I still haven't decided how valid this particular measure is I went to my atlas of the United States and in the back of the atlas there's the index that lists all the place names all the names that are on the map I went down and I looked to see how many places were named Jackson Jax vil Jackson County Jackson Mountain Lake Jackson and so on and I actually didn't count him I just used I got out a ruler and I measured the column inches for Andrew Jackson now I have to say that I couldn't swear that all of them were Andrew Jackson some of them could have been Stonewall Jackson I might have been somebody else Jackson but I assumed Michael it it would be close enough and and then I I scan down other columns to find out who else was listed and Jackson had more inches in the index of this atlas than anybody else now I'll let you guess who the second and third place finishers were in nearly a time Washington but not Lincoln cuz Lincoln he gets washed out in the South not Jefferson Madison now Franklin Benjamin Frank and a favorite all over the country and I thought that this actually probably underestimated the popularity of Jackson because there was all sorts of stuff that was already named before anybody thought to name anything for Andrew Jackson so that was Jackson from the time he won the Battle of New Orleans in 1815 till through his death in 1845 and on down until well as late as the 1930s Andrew Jackson was the favorite of Democrats he was the favorite president of Franklin Roosevelt now times changed and so nowadays Andrew Jackson is almost nobody's favorite president perhaps some of you I don't know if yours are mine but I won't say he's my favorite president but but he has nothing like to purchase on in American culture that he had then and so at first as the biographer I have to figure out why he was famous and popular then and why he is not now and I will tell you I have another gauge for determining the depths to which Andrew Jackson's popularity has fallen during summers I often talk to workshops of elementary and high school teachers and I always ask them what they teach and what their students know and when I asked them about Andrew Jackson so what do your students know about Andrew Jackson the answer always comes in three words and you know what those three words are Trail of Tears this is what is known about Andrew Jackson and a job of a historian or biographer in part is to try to make sense of this a job of a historian I'm a history teacher as well as writer and I have to try to make my students understand that this guy that is known only for his sins and one sin above all was known for a lot else in those earlier times and I think this reflects a common tendency in human affairs maybe particularly in democracies to take for granted the things that happen and lose the imagination for the things that might not have happened so Andrew Jackson was known and was revered in his day for two things above all one is defending the United States against foreign enemies he was the one who defeated the British at New Orleans when if he had lost that battle if the US side had lost the Battle of New Orleans the British had a plan to peel off the entire west of the United States and either to make it into a British colony or an Indian satellite state or something like this the British in Jackson's day looked upon the United States and this emerging philosophy and idea of democracy the way the United States looked on the Soviet Union and communism during the Cold War the British and most of Europe were very skeptical about this idea of democracy which had overthrown their king is the ruler of the American colonies and was surfacing had given rise to the French Revolution and all these other nasty things if Jackson had not won that battle the British might very well have accomplished their purpose yes so though those of you who know your Andrew Jackson history or that era will know that the treaty ending the war had already been signed yes it had that it had not been ratified and had the British won that battle there's every reason to think they would not have ratified it and they would have proceeded so Jackson first came to American attention as the defender of the United States against its foreign enemies and for the rest of his life Andrew Jackson loathe and feared the British and in one of the last acts of his life he was aroused to insist on the annexation of Texas when Sam Houston his surrogate son and then President of the Republic of Texas threatened to form an alliance with Britain and Andrew Jackson almost rose almost from the grave he was dying to insist that the Democratic Party endorsed the annexation of Texas that's one thing he was known for and that was a huge deal it's something that's hard for us to recapture because for us and for a hundred years the United States has been the world's superpower and how could it have ever been in danger but it was at least those were the perceptions in Jackson staying why it was so valued the second thing is Jackson was the Herald of democracy of the idea that ordinary people should actually exercise political power and before Jackson came along this was a country in which the elites were supposed to rule and there was a learned and well-connected and wealthy succession of presidents before Jackson comes along and when he runs the first time in 1824 he has the prize stolen from him well that's the way they interpreted the so called corrupt bargain when he got the most popular votes in the most electoral votes but not a majority of the ahktar of electoral votes and John Quincy Adams came along son of John Adams and it looked as though the establishment was never gonna relinquish its whole and then when Jackson wins in 1828 then democracy takes hold now it was a very imperfect democracy in those days it was well you for it if you were an adult white male you could vote and that left a whole lot of people out but that was a huge expansion of the electorate from the time when George Washington was elected and so Jackson was the one who gave the presidency in particular would gave political power in the United States to ordinary people well once again it's something that we take for granted of course democracy was going to happen and maybe it was eventually but Jackson was the one who brings it in Jackson is the one who fixes it in the American mindset and from Jackson until today if you want to be a successful candidate for president you have to demonstrate the common touch and even if you don't have the common touch I recall I was working on my particularly if you don't have I was working on my Jackson book amid the election of 2000 and you will recall that George W Bush was run against Al Gore and these are two individuals who were born into political dynasties and between the two men they had three Ivy League degrees and they were up on stage in one of these debates and they were competing with each other to show that each one was just was more just folks than the other so I'll stop respond please no no keep going baby it's together so professor brands is from Texas and I'm from Tennessee so he owes his liberty to me because of the because of the Nexen work and I first went first time I met George W Bush where's Karl he's still here do you remember the 2000 campaign yeah a little PTSD so in 98 karl was running george w his first campaign and because karl has forgotten more about William McKinley than William McKinley knew he was running this front porch campaign down in Austin and so he was bringing in delegations to be charmed by the governor of Texas and the first time I went down I said as I just said the guy said you know you know governor it weren't for Tennessee you know you all would still be part of Spain and he said that's pretty funny it was the beginning of a beautiful friendship so my the ones that the one thought I have on what professor brands have said is Jackson by I'm more a biographer than a historian ultimately and I think the character is destiny and Jackson I believe because of the personal circumstances of his chaotic childhood I believe that had a distinct and discernible effect on the country as it unfolded and the way bill talks about it the he lost his mother and his brothers in the revolution his father died before he was born parenthetically there's a great essay to be written at some point about why it is that American presidents tend to either have a dominant father or no father at all if you're raising a normal child there's almost no hope that they will become prezi United States is this an unusual proportion of American presidents never knew their father Jackson Jefferson's father died very young Obama met his father once President Ford never knew his father President Clinton never knew his father then you have Bush and Adams and Kennedy's it's an interesting started early George Washington's father yeah when he was yeah and and he and his mama had some issues so the father dies for his born mother and brothers died in the revolution I really believe that in many ways he saw the country as his family he referred to it in familial language when he gave his most passionate State Papers they didn't give speeches too much and in those days he for instance when he talked to South Carolina which was as ever causing trouble and start trying to nullify federal laws he said I speak to you with the feelings of a father to a child who has entered the wrong course to repent and return that was the vernacular in which he saw the country and so you have to look at the world through his eyes the British were an enemy Native Americans were an enemy because they were often allied with the British or the Spanish they were an uncontrollable element bankers were the enemy not least because he was in debt a lot of the time he believed that clergymen were the enemy he was an early opponent of organized religion having too large a role in public life he basically saw in one of the things is also important to recover is the language of politics really until the Civil War a little bit after was very much that of the language of physical health when you think about it the body politic corruption to the 19th century 18th century didn't mean graft or theft it meant disease if the system was corrupted there was a sickness and the body politic might die he wanted to clean the body politic of what he saw as contaminants and contaminants were anything that stood between in his view him and his view of the people and so he would declare war and fight ferociously against any force that he saw as interfering with his conversation his embodiment of the will of the people now that sounds like strongman politics it sounds totalitarian it sounds dictatorial but he did it in a context of actually believing more or less in the institutions that had enabled him to rise and so I think that my sense of Jackson is that he's a far more complicated figure than as bill says the idea that this is simply a genocidal maniac with good hair that we want to take off the currency my other absolute conviction on this is and I kick it back to you see if you agree to condemn Jackson is to condemn ourselves his sins were our sins he might have been on the extreme edge of the mainstream on the Indian Removal and the bank and fighting any move toward abolition but he was within that mainstream so he was an embodiment sometimes an exaggeration a magnification but he was not outside what the white mainstream of the United States wanted done and I submit as part of the case for that the Indian Removal Act in 1830 and 31 went through a ferocious congressional debate once nobody ever went back and said let's look at this again Jackson basically did a lot of the work that really the only I think the only person who gets a good mark on Native American policies Henry Knox who was the first secretary of war and you gotta love a Thursday morning where somebody's talking to you about Henry Knox it means you all need to rethink your life while you're here but he was if we try to either mindlessly celebrate people from the past or mindlessly condemn them we foreclosed the possibility of learning from them and you can't knock him out of the national narrative nor should we blindly say what a great hero he was us on that subject I was when I was promoting my book on Jackson I was at a luncheon of independent booksellers and one of the things that was gonna bring the book sellers around was they were gonna get a free lunch and they were gonna get a free copy of the book and so we had lunch and we chatted and I was talking up the book and Jackson and after the lunch people got the books the books that I was lined up to get the book signed and everybody was happy they'd had a free lunch and they had a good conversation and they came up and they got a free book and one by one they congratulation the book and so on its own but there was this one guy who will made a point to be standing at the back of the line and he had a terrible frown on his face and as people would come up sometimes he'd say well you go first cuz clearly he wanted to get me alone and he finally did and so I had the stack of the books I would say here can I surely personalize it too he said I don't want that book and free yeah and he he leaned over I was sitting down he was standing up and he leaned over and he got right in my face and he said I hope you don't admire Andrew Jackson well nobody had quite put this challenge of this question to me I didn't know how to answer it but I certainly wasn't gonna disavow this guy that I had written this book about come on I want you to found people and what you got to sell the book so I thought quickly and I said I sort of lean up toward him and I said I admire Andrew Jackson's admirable qualities and it was something that I just sort of tossed off at the moment but I actually think maybe it was inspired or something but I think actually that is the way to deal with especially controversial figures from the past because they're controversial makers presumably in the case of Jackson at one time they were famous they were beloved and there must have been a reason for this so they had qualities that were admired in their day but nobody stands the test of time nobody interesting nobody important stands the test of time and this is why especially in our age when there is this impetus this compulsion to go a bit back and revisit pretty much everybody we've put up on a pedestal and if they don't match our current standards they come down from the pedestal the problem with this of course is that you can't put anybody on a pedestal with any confidence that they'll remain there for more than a generation at best if this is going to be your standard it's much more important to try to figure out sort of what these people were admirable for without feeling as though they have to be heroic 24/7 so I mean my theorem sometimes I've asked her who are your heroes in history and I say I don't have heroes I don't believe that there are heroes I do believe that there are people who sometimes do heroic things but being people they sometimes do things that are not so heroic and combined with this is a principle that I've deduced or inferred from my study of history and that is that history moves by half steps and anybody who pushes a country pushes a set of values forward is someone who has to have at least one foot in that country in that era and if you don't have that foot there then you have no traction in your era now to push it forward you also have to have your other foot a little bit farther ahead but this is why we get people like Andrew Jackson maybe the maybe the best example of this is Thomas Jefferson Thomas Jefferson just frustrates the heck out of liberals because they like his learning nest a like his sensibilities on all sorts of things that turn except for those slaves you know and if Jefferson just had not been a slave owner then I could really warm up to him and he would be fantastic but the problem with this reasoning is that everything that Jackson Sunni the Jefferson and I can say the same thing for Jackson everything that Jefferson did for the country depended on his being a slave owner and I say this because the most important thing that Jefferson did for the country was to write the Declaration of Independence with the five most important words ever written in American history a single sense that might be one of the most important sentences in world history may be religious revelation accepted and that is all men are created equal and how in the world could he say this while owning 200 slaves so this is the challenge and if he just hadn't owned those slaves then we could take him really seriously and he's a forward-thinking guy but the thing is if he hadn't owned slaves he wouldn't have been allowed to write the Declaration of Independence why do I say this because he was a delegate to the Continental Congress from Virginia and Virginia was a place where if you had a plantation if you had any manual labor you needed getting done and you were white person slaves did it you own slaves and furthermore he was the one who had to draft the Declaration of Independence because Virginia was the largest of the colonies and Virginia was the one who really had to step up and so if Jefferson in 1770 soon before 1776 it said you know what I think this slavery is immoral and I'm gonna free all my slaves Thomas Jefferson never would have made it to the Continental Congress he never would have had the opportunity to write the Declaration of Independence and much the same thing applies to somebody like Andrew Jackson so it's easy it's tempting it's quite understandable to look back on Jackson's policy toed Native Americans and say oh god that's horrible you know American Indies really got the short end of the stick and historically they did but if you're gonna make that criticism with any kind of attempt to understand the way politics works you have to propose an alternative and what was a plausible alternative in Jackson's day to the Indian policy in her pursuit I would first of all it was the Indian policy essentially of every president from George Washington through Ulysses Grant and grant tried something that was somewhat more humane and that failed so it wasn't Jackson alone Jackson was the one who articulated it in his his annual message proposing what became the Indian Removal Act but in fact and when I say that I pointed out earlier that Jackson is always associated with the Trail of Tears well I hope this isn't splitting hairs too finely but Jackson was not president when the Trail of Tears occurred he was retired he was at home at the Hermitage and it was successor Martin Van Buren but it followed from the Indian Removal Act but the thing was the Indian Removal Act in its day was seen as something of a humane alternative well Jackson was the so-called Five Civilized tribes the Cherokees and Choctaws and the others if you want to stay where you are if you want to stay in George if you want to stay in Tennessee if you want to stay in the Carolinas you can stay but you have to be subject to the laws of those states Jackson was a states rights man and if you lived in a state you had to be subject to the laws of the States if you choose not to if you want to retain your tribal government then you're gonna have to leave the states and in fact the federal government will help you do this will provide assistance and will help relocate you and half of the Cherokees took up the offer Jackson pointed out and so Jackson in his day was criticized mostly by Easterners for his Indian policy and Jackson looked to them and he said okay so where are the tribes of New England where are the tribes of New York where are the tribes of Pennsylvania they've all gone to their doom and he was offering a way for the tribes of the southeast to survive now I I don't want to sound as though I'm defending Jackson's Indian policy but the thing is if Jackson had had this sort of fit of oh you know let's protect the Indians in place well he would have ended up having to fight a war against the people of Georgia and everybody else who wanted to get the Indians out lyses grant thirty years late forty years later tried to do exactly this when he was trying to preserve the Black Hills to the Sioux but gold was discovered in the Black Hills and grant sent US troops to keep gold hunters out of the Black Hills trying to protect the Black Hills but the troops were overrun and grant had to make this decision can I actually order US troops to fire on US citizens under the search in defense of Indian lands and he realized politically he couldn't so one of the things I like about history one of the things that frustrates many people about history is it's complicated and I think this is sort of one of the things that John was getting at and that is that you know it's these issues that would be really nice to be heartwarming if they were clear-cut and easy and for many people that's one of the things that makes this tree frustrating as I say but for those people like us you know I lose myself here once I love the fact if you peel back one of the layers of the onion there's a null dead layer under that and another layer under that another layer under that lots of onions should we should we ask if there any questions we should have sown so one quick story because you made a mini brilliant points one one that sticks out is the Jefferson the sentence that all men were created equal maybe the most important sentence ever written in the English language which is a you have to check your hyperbolic claims sometimes one has to I say it a lot partly on the English language part because of the old story about the Texas gubernatorial candidate who was against teaching Spanish in the public schools and on the stump said if English was good enough for our Lord Jesus Christ it's good enough for Texas actually I've got so since you brought up and I wouldn't have done that if Rove weren't here okay so she brought up the language question there's a story about Andrew Jackson when he was offered an honorary degree by Harvard at the tot and John Quincy Adams the Harvard man and many people associated with Harvard were appalled by the idea that this uneducated Westerner who knew nothing just he was gonna disgrace Harvard to be given this degree and in order to embarrass Jackson this was in the days when academics all could speak and write in Latin so he was invited there and and one of the speeches ahead of Jackson was given in Latin and it was now I have to say that this is the story as it was reported I wasn't there so I can't say that it's verbatim true but Jackson listens to all of this utterly unforced and when his turn to speak arrives and I have to point out that this was at a time when he was having his dispute with John Calhoun over whether the Union was going to hold together whether the states were supreme or the federal government was supreme so Jackson waits his turn and all eyes are on Jackson to see what he's gonna do how he's going to embarrass himself and he stands up and he says e pluribus unum seen a Quan on sat down so ask the question in English please let's go here and then here ma'am that's you yes ma'am the question is we both agree that Bannon introduced Jackson to trump boy that must have been a dinner party and Big Macs for all do we think Bannon is still influencing Trump I I don't know my sense is he's still in the outer rim of darkness but there's no permanent outer rim of darkness in Trump land I think one of things I'd like to say about this maybe Steve Bannon made the suggestion but Donald Trump would like to be seen as the modern Andrew Jackson in terms of personal qualities there is almost no connection between the two in every aspect of sort of military courage under fire service to his country Jackson's reverence for women his insistence on integrity being loyal to friends to a fault and so that's jackson and you can draw your own conclusions about trump the man but there is a connection between the Trump phenomenon and the Jackson phenomenon and that is the people who elected Donald Trump have a sort of us feeling toward the American political system that's akin to what the people who elected Andrew Jackson had these are people who felt that the establishment had been in place too long and a vote for Jackson in 1824 1828 was a stiff finger in the eye of the establishment and a vote for Donald Trump in 2016 served much the same purpose so Donald Trump might hope wha I have no idea how much Donald Trump knows about Andrew Jackson so I don't know if any of the qualities of Andrew Jackson on the wall behind him are gonna somehow seep into him but I think there is I think there is a degree of comparison between the Jackson phenomena between Jacksonian populism and Trump e'en populism yes sir I think this goes on all the time I can here repeat the question so the question is this rewriting history the learned in question yes so the this question of re-evaluating figures from the past is this peculiar to our age or has it been going on and the answer is it has been going on for a long time and as long as people have been writing history and one of the reasons for this and I'll make it kind of contemporary is there's one reason there are a couple of reasons but there's one reason and that is that I have graduate students and the graduate students have to write about the past some of them write about the recent past for which there is new material coming out and so they don't particularly have to revise anything but if I have a student who wants to write about Andrew Jackson or the Civil War or something for which the information base is pretty it's pretty much as large as what it's ever going to be they have to come up with some new interpretation and so it is in their career interests or professional interests to challenge the past few and there's I mean there are some people who argue that history should be an ongoing argument okay there okay there's that part of it but the other part of it I mean the other part of it has to do with there was another part of it and I'm let's see maybe should I leave it at that well no I mean the other part of it is that I mean so that's the the job creation part but the other part of is that every generation has its own questions to ask of the past and has its own set of values to apply and it would be surprising given the fact that values do change if assessments of people in the past didn't change so as I say Andrew Jackson and the kind of person that he was was exceedingly popular in the 19th century but in the 20th century and again I'll go back to what I was saying earlier the battles that he fought have been won and there's no reason to keep fighting those battles so we can look back on maybe the lesser skirmishes and I have to say that in Jackson's day Indian policy was not a big deal it was on the sort of page 17 stuff people were much more concerned with is the Union gonna fall apart is Jackson gonna stand off the South Carolina challenge is well so here's one when and anybody writing about Jackson has to deal with a topic that in Jackson's day was a huge deal and I don't know if you had this feeling when you were writing about Jackson but how in the world was I gonna make the tariff interesting Oh God to modern readers but for those of us who write about that era Donald Trump has done us a good turn by making the tariff once again a live issue other questions yes ma'am what do we think about the removal of civil war monuments in the south my action from the state capitol grounds in Nashville Jackson this isn't Jackson isn't there a Jackson on the ground anywhere we're trying to basically we're trying to get James Kate Pope or James capo he's been buried three times one for every year of his term they're trying to get him get him back to Columbia Tennessee I I grew up on Missionary Ridge battlefield in in Chattanooga where that's how Sherman got to Atlanta we had cannons Bragg reservation was there I could still find monnet balls when I was a kid so I'm not a nut about this I do think I proposed to test when right after the Charlotte school stuff that at least was I thought was worth thinking about which is was the person being commemorated on public grounds in a public place of veneration not a school that's pretty school to fix the church house you decide that but in a Courthouse Square say or a State Capitol my question was was that person devoted to the pursuit of a more perfect union were they devoted to the constitutional experiment however flawed that particular hero was and so by that test Jefferson Jackson I may write about people who are being thrown off things would pass they wanted to keep the experiment going and that enabled us to get to where we think we're in a better a better place I think that makes it much harder for those a case for those who took up arms against the Union including General Lee if they had won that experiment would have ended and if you have any sentimental twitches about the Confederacy and again I say this as a southerner go Google up as George Bush would say use the Google machine to read Alexander Stephens as speech Savannah in 1861 the vice-president Federer see is called the cornerstone speech and after you read that come back and tell me if this wasn't about slavery and the views of innate racial inferiority so I'm I'm more hawkish on this than a lot of my conservative friends because I live in Tennessee that's redundant I'm not sure if I'm more hawkish or less hawkish because I'm not sure what the hot part refers here but I am generally opposed to the taking down of statues and but I do suggest so at the University of Texas where I teach there was sort of a hallway or a mall of Confederate heroes and at the head of the mall were three southern presidents now these statues were put up in the 1920 so almost a hundred years ago the three southern presidents were George Washington shirt Woodrow Wilson appeals from born in Virginia raised in Georgia although was elected from New Jersey and Jefferson Davis president of the Confederate States of America and Jefferson Davis rested on his statue without much controversy for about 80 years and then starting about ten years ago he became the object of protest and the university administration decided to take him down in the wake of the Charlottesville affair and while this was being debated and thought about I made a suggestion to the president of the University and I said leave the statues in place but around each statue put up a small addition and the small addition is simply the year in which the statue was erected and I thought that this might allow current generation and any current me the current generation now but also generations the future not to feel as though they are responsible for every bit of public art and architecture that exists so you don't you wouldn't be in a position where you're constantly having to reassess and meet and remake the built environment because people would go and they would walk on the University of Texas campus and they would see this statue of Jefferson Davis and they would say okay was erected in 1929 so the people who made decisions for the University of Texas in 1929 bought the Jefferson Davis deserved a statue now the president of University of Texas didn't follow my advice and one dark night the statue was taken down along with all of the other statues and so they're a bunch of empty pedestals there and students wandering by it's sort of a little bit like going through the ruins you know ancient Carthage or Rome it's a boy what used to be here and but one of the great things about doing this if you're the president of the university is the turnover time of students is very rapid and so this happened three years ago so most of the students don't know what was going on but the other thing is that for me it's a real one as an educator for me it's a real loss to my students to walk around a campus and where they could have seen okay here's Jefferson Davis honored in 1929 and here's the statue cuz on my campus there is a statute of Martin Luther King and he was honored in 1989 and here's a statue to Barbara Jordan an african-american member of Congress from Texas she's honored in 1995 and here's Cesar Chavez who was honored in 2003 now you see the final three statues as he Martin Luther King and Barbara Jordan Cesar Chavez but you don't see any Confederates and you have no idea of the meaning of these other statues you don't see there's no there's no historical memory and speaking as a history teacher I can say I wish my students and citizens generally knew more history but they don't and anything that detracts from those cues to history if anything any measure that detraction those accused of history like taking down statues is something that I'm very hurry up I see that we've run out of time thank you all for coming thank you thank you John thanks sir [Applause]

Channel: Rancho Mirage Writers Festival

Views: 2,327

Rating: 4.891892 out of 5

Keywords: H.W. Brands, HW Brands, Jon Meacham, Andrew Jackson, RMWF, Rancho Mirage Writers Festival

Id: rO8uzuQp2hY

Length: 46min 11sec (2771 seconds)

Published: Sat Feb 09 2019