Old Hickory’s Victory

The Birth of Modern Politics

Andrew Jackson, John Quincy Adams, and the Election of 1828
by Lynn Hudson Parsons
Oxford, 272 pp., $24.95

Americans today don’t have a very high opinion of politics. We like the idea of democracy, it is just politics that we are not so crazy about. Every campaign year brings more rending of garments in the media about the rise of “negative campaigning” and serious concerns over the “tone” of our politics. Bipartisanship is now viewed as the logical end of democracy.

The corollary to this distaste of politics is the idea that, in the not-too-distant past, there existed a time when politics was not as polarizing. In this telling, such a utopia was broken by the Lee Atwaters, Newt Gingriches, and Karl Roves of the world, who had the audacity to divide the electorate and highlight, in harsh tones, differences with their political opponents. This narrative is pretty much nonsense, and there is no better proof than how incessantly Barack Obama has alluded to ending our partisan divide, all the while pushing his own very partisan political agenda.

As Lynn Hudson Parsons shows in The Birth of Modern Politics: Andrew Jackson, John Quincy Adams, and the Election of 1828, politics was pretty messy in the early 19th century, too. Parsons is not the first to call the 1828 presidential campaign the first modern campaign, but he gives a readable and balanced overview of not just the election, but also the politicians who helped create our contentious system of campaigning.