Apparently Plenty Of Room At the Top For Political Theorists

In 2025 I read about Germany and Kampuchea, even a little about Rwanda, though nothing about Yugoslavia that I can recall. Perhaps my tastes have been improving! In all cases, though, I found myself thinking of someone who wasn’t of the twentieth century, wasn’t a dictator, wasn’t unpopular – indeed, he came in first in three presidential elections. Andrew Jackson wasn’t genocidal, but I think you could call him a fiery demographer. He sure had a firm opinion of the locals. Why is this guy still on the $20 bill?

Because he mattered. He was significant. And then he went away. Or, he won the last battle of the War of 1812 – maybe that was all it took! As I was reminded by revisiting The American Pageant, the Thomas A. Bailey history textbook of my youth. I was a bit surprised to find the page following the Monroe Doctrine appraisal begins the story of Jackson’s rise to the presidency and what he did when he got there. I mean, John Quincy Adams's term came between Monroe’s last and Jackson's first. This was for me a much-needed refresher. At the end of this post I will expand a bit on it. But right below the fold, I propose to address a detail glided over, perhaps rightly, but hard to ignore entirely: John C. Calhoun, Jackson’s veep until he quit in high dudgeon, is called on page 251 “one of the few top-flight political theorists ever produced by America.”

How is such greatness measured, or if no objective data are available, roughly ranked? If you’re handed precisely two political theorists, can you say This’n’s better than t’other? What makes anyone an even half-good political theorist?

Is it sheer output of ideas? Or output of ideas that work? Is it getting lots of other people to quote, not you (although that’s nice), but one another? That’s the impression I get, not just from this book, but from Wikipedia and Britannica too. Once Calhoun won this reputation, it became a perpetual-motion machine.

Henry Clay gets at least as much print: I wonder why the Great Conciliation isn’t political theorizing. Maybe because it isn’t purely speculative. Some of those darn compromises get voted into law. And some of those backroom deals determine who sits in the Oval Office. In the 1824 election, Jackson came in first, Adams second, and Clay fourth; but as nobody got a majority of the votes, the result would be determined in the House of Representatives, where Clay, otherwise out of the presidential running, still ruled as Speaker. It was somehow agreed that Adams would get the win.

The chapters on The New Democracy are well-written, indeed cogent: Western states with plentiful land could simply make irrelevant property qualifications for voting, though Vermont was the first state to eliminate this requirement. Jeffersonian democracy thought the people should be governed as little as possible, the Jacksonian kind thought they should be governed as much as they themselves wanted. Also, although I find no specific reference online to this now – what Thomas Bailey called the Eaton malaria, everyone nowadays calls the Petticoat Affair - the two-paragraph summary of the splintering of Jackson’s cabinet conveys information efficiently as well as entertainingly. These crackling assessments may be what make American historiography (which is not the same as American history) great. This edition of The American Pageant was by the way published in 1966, a different time – a time when apparently some scholars still thought this intramural dustup caused the Civil War. Bailey himself disagreed, but it certainly propelled Calhoun out of the more nationalistic phase of his long career. He became the far more sectional politician we remember now.

If we remember him at all.

He died well before open warfare broke out. He hardly appears elsewhere in this book, and, by the way, neither does abolitionism. The Civil War did not merely settle that cause; it extinguished it. On the way, Calhoun resurfaced in the Senate in 1850, too sick to deliver a speech objecting to the Compromise of that year. But there he sat, bundled up and glowering while an assistant read his words. Not revealed in them, but learned presumably after his death, was his proposal to have the U.S. elect two presidents, North and South, both with veto power. If this could remind me of the Roman tetrarchy, it probably would have done the same for antebellum listeners or readers. But they and everything about them – the real parts and the theoretical ones too - are all gone now.

For a while, perhaps. Surely there are fashions in history-writing, and as difficult as it is to imagine, even antebellum America could make a comeback. If it does at all, that will be conspicuous because so little of the era is visibly commemorated now. The one place I ever saw a reference to an early-1800s cleanup operation was in Camden, South Carolina. On a historical marker, I found a mention of a (or “the”) Floridian War. But then this state may do things its own way. The only place and time I saw anything marking anything from the Revolutionary War was on that same 2002 bicycle trip. I also found, a little farther down the road, a monument to one of the astronauts killed in the Challenger disaster. And though I did not swing by when my siblings and I were last in the area, in late 2023 to install Mom's ashes next to Dad's, I am willing to bet that Calhoun's house is still around.

Mainly because it was convenient to me, but also because I just like checking books, I checked the ones I have on hand about the Civil War. One by Bruce Catton, the three-volume set by Shelby Foote, and also the notes that came with Gary Gallagher’s CDs on the Confederate high command. There is almost no mention of Calhoun. Which makes sense, and not just because he died more than a decade before the bombardment of Fort Sumter.

All that political theorizing just didn’t matter. Unless it is possible and useful to atomize the antebellum period. Some segments of it may have proven totally forgettable, others resounded into the war itself, and perhaps a few can be perceived to this day. I kind of doubt it. But this is what we have poli-sci for: to tell us what we’re doing wrong!