Andrew Jackson

Seventh U.S. president, who surfaces in two of Kyle’s book notes as the emblem of the populist, majoritarian democracy of his era. In John Quincy Adams (James Traub’s biography), Jackson is Adams’s great rival: the man whose “corrupt bargain” grievance over the 1824 election fueled a relentless campaign, who ran a Nashville “war room” — a Central Corresponding Committee of supporters working “in a time when the news cycle ran in weeks rather than hours.” Adams, who had once championed Jackson as a national hero, came to call him “incompetent both by his ignorance and the fury of his passions.” The notes frame the Adams–Jackson contest as a clash of political philosophies: Jackson’s program “sacrifices the future and remote benefits to the present,” appealing to “the prejudices and feelings of the people,” while Adams’s American System looked to a “longer range,” and Adams argued that the simplicity Jackson prized — “the essential characteristic in all slavery” — stood against the necessary complexity of free government.

In American Zion (Benjamin Park), Jackson is the namesake of Jackson County, Missouri — where the early Latter-day Saints sought to build Zion — and the personification of the Jacksonian-era democracy they collided with, what Alexis de Tocqueville termed “the tyranny of the majority.”

Context: Andrew Jackson (1767–1845) was U.S. president from 1829 to 1837, a founder of the modern Democratic Party whose era gave its name to “Jacksonian democracy” — the expansion of white male suffrage and populist politics — and whose record includes the Indian Removal Act and the destruction of the Second Bank of the United States.

Where this appears

• John Quincy Adams — Adams’s chief rival; the “corrupt bargain” feud, the Nashville campaign “war room,” and the Adams–Jackson clash over the American System vs. populist simplicity
• American Zion — namesake of Jackson County, Missouri and emblem of the Jacksonian “tyranny of the majority” the early saints contested