Taking on the establishment. America’s been here before
First published: May 2, 2025
We see frequent references these days to America’s seventh president, Andrew Jackson, who led the nation from 1829 to 1837. It’s partly down to President Jackson being the forerunner to whom President Trump is most likened. Jackson was a scourge of the establishment, defender of slavery and pre-Civil War white privilege, and a champion of the common man.
As we look back on the current president’s first hundred days back in office, the standout likeness is with Jackson’s first year in office when he fired more than ten percent of the federal workforce. It was an unprecedented tactic, ostensibly to remove time-servers, favor small government, and bear down on corruption; but it also marked the dawn of the Democratic Party and the deep party affiliations so recognizable in America. Jackson permanently extended the scope of presidential influence through establishing the spoils system, by which federal offices are packed with loyalists to each incoming regime; often with questionable regard to merit. It’s a principle that continues to this day.
Comparisons between the two men are clearly welcomed by the current incumbent; not least as Jackson was celebrated as a true national hero in his day. They soon wear thin, though, when you recall Jackson was also known not only for his impoverished upbringing and distinguished military service (notably in The War of 1812) but – as president – for his hatred of the money men and strict interpretation of the US Constitution. In short: if a power to act was not explicitly given to Congress or the President by the Constitution, then it probably could not or should not be done.
"The Constitution and the laws are supreme and the Union indissoluble."
Jackson’s face, if not his presidential record, is even more familiar to Americans today than it would have been to his contemporaries. His image has adorned every twenty-dollar bill since 1928. His equestrian statue also holds pride of place in the park facing the White House where anti-government protesters have gathered since the Civil Rights Era.
Hard money Jackson
Why President Jackson, an unapologetic slave owner and harrier of the Native American population, was chosen above others for the honor of being memorialized on the currency was never made explicit. Ironically, he abhorred paper money, believing it to be a store of fabricated value confected by corrupt bankers. Fired by the same loathing of the monied class, he is also remembered as the destroyer of the nearest thing America had in the nineteenth century to the Federal Reserve: the Second Bank of the United States.
Jackson was empowered to do something about that by his election to a second term in the White House in 1832. He vetoed a move in Congress to renew the Second Bank’s charter, leading to its liquidation four years later. (Its forerunner, the First Bank, had met the same fate in 1811.) For the next three-quarters of a century, until the Fed’s creation in 1913, there was no central bank as we now know it; not one that could coordinate the nation’s monetary policy, nor regulate the commercial banks or be their lender of last resort. It was an era of historic economic growth but also wild speculation, and the absence of these controls led to multiple financial panics and commercial bank failures.
The times, they are a’changin. Or are they?
In 2016, President Obama’s treasury secretary announced that the face of Harriet Tubman was to replace Jackson’s image on the twenty-dollar bill in 2020. In contrast to Jackson’s memory, Mrs Tubman owes her fame and distinction to her escape from slavery in Maryland in 1849, and her courage in returning there multiple times to help hundreds more slaves escape in the run-up to the Civil War.
Roll forward to 2025, and Andrew Jackson’s face still remains on the note. So, the battle to have Mrs Tubman succeed him has now been renewed. It seems, though, as if the second Trump administration, like the first one, remains quietly determined to do its best to delay that happening.
You can read more about the Jackson era and how strict adherence to the Constitution nearly sank the Smithsonian Institution before it was born in my chapter on its English benefactor, in my book Brits Who Shaped America.