completed in your magazine, "A Modern in Search of Truth." Yours very truly, C. W. REDPATH Kansas City, Missouri. My dear Editor, Please cancel my name from your mailing list. THE CENTURY and another monthly were sent me without my consent. Several years ago I was a constant reader of THE CENTURY-when it published worth-while stories, and criticisms on art and literature. Many of them from the pen of my esteemed friend, Dr. John Van Dyke. Then it began to deteriorate and I stopped reading for a considerable time. Whilst traveling I picked up a copy at the news-stand and was astounded to find in its pages one of the rottenest things I ever perused. Several papers spoke harshly of it. Since that time I have never again looked at it until it was sent me for Christmas. Last week in an idle moment I read one of the stories, "A Proudful Fellow," by a woman. The story winding up with a picture of adultery, murder and suicide! I pity the intelligence of any woman, who can thus advertise the eroticism of her imagination. Many bad books and plays try to palliate their offence by ending with some sort of moral. Julia Peterkin winds up her story with a vile pornographic vision. I shall do all in my power publicly and privately to keep THE CENTURY out of decent families. WILLIAM J. FITZGERALD, D.C.L. Camden, N. J. My dear Editor, May we thank you for your publication's humanness and ability to smile? Judging from some high-class magazines, to smile is vulgar and to laugh is shocking. We like THE CENTURY'S liberal attitude toward Russia, all countries in fact, its freedom as a whole from hate propaganda, though we much regret its militarism. We feel that THE CENTURY is nearer the true inwardness of our country than we find in many quarters. In spite of "Babbitt," in spite of the vials of wrath poured upon us by our own people, we feel that the real grain of the wood is fine. We like your attitude on prohibition also. Very sincerely, MINNIE H. JONES Why do you flatter that mass of conceit, who brought on the world that wholesale slaughter of men, who was too good to suffer for his inordinate vanity, he who proved the prophesy of his so far superior father the Crown Prince Frederick who said he hoped Wilhelm would not come into power while young for mentally he was not strong enough to bear it. Why do you want the invader of Belgium, the country he had sworn to protect, the man to whom a sacred treaty was only “a scrap of paper," to utter his self laudation? I should think all good Americans had had quite enough at the hands of the sinker of the Lusitania, and of the man who when his "frightfulness" had won the war, said he would pay himself all costs of it, with New York and other cities of the United States. New York City. My dear Editor, Sincerely, E. H. LATHROP I am profoundly impressed with the practicability and simplicity of the plan proposed by Foster and Catchings in their article "Progress and Plenty." The plan should be publicly pushed and finally adopted by the Government. Sincerely yours, South Bend, Indiana. My dear Editor, The plan which Foster and Catchings propose, if put into execution-like all concerted action based upon knowledge ought to be an important contribution to the solution of our economic troubles. Sincerely, SIR JOSIAH STAMP Vol 116 October 1928 No 6 H JACKSON AND SMITH Two Battling Democrats-A Century Apart ISTORY never repeats itself. Or history always repeats itself. Both these assertions are half true, half false. The course of history does not run in cycles on a plane surface. It does not bring us back to where we were before. Rather it follows the windings of a spiral, up or down. We come back to what looks like the same place, but we are on a higher or a lower level. This is especially true in politics. Situations recur, sometimes a whole century apart, with various fundamental similarities. But there are differences also, and because these are on the surface, they catch the unpractised eye more readily. Take the present election campaign as an illustration. It is said to be unique in the history of American politics. Superficially it is. Never before has a Catholic been nominated for the Presidency by one of the major political parties. A tradition has been broken and a new precedent established. But that is not enough to make a campaign unique in its deeper implications. Traditions of some sort are broken and new precedents established in almost every political campaign. Governor Smith is by no means the first Presidential candidate to assault a time-honored usage in connection with the highest office in the gift of the nation. Andrew Jackson did it in an even more obtrusive way exactly a hundred years ago. It may be interesting to draw a few comparisons between these two battling Democrats, Jackson and Smith, with a century intervening between their picturesque campaigns. In all the externals, of course, it would be difficult to find two Presidential candidates more unlike. At first glance they would appear to have nothing whatever in common except their allegiance to the Democratic party. Jackson was a favorite son of Tennessee; he came from what was then the nation's geographical frontier and had a distinguished military record behind him. He was, in fact, the most widely known American general of his day. He had served as a judge on the bench and as a member of Congress, but had occupied no executive Copyright, 1928, by THE CENTURY Co. All rights reserved. 641 office before becoming a Presidential them in personality, in affiliations, candidate. Old Hickory was a crusader by temperament and inclination. He fought the Congressional caucus before his election and he made war on the bank after it. He was fond of combat in all its forms. As respects his personal attributes, moreover, Jackson was the joint product of his military experience and his bucolic surroundings. His decisions were quick and erratic. There was no suavity or spirit of compromise in his rather ungainly frame. He chewed tobacco and went about unshaved. He told stories that would have shocked Boccaccio. Having fought both Indians and Englishmen, he went to the polls with a bullet in his body. Take a five-dollar United States note out of your pocket, if you are lucky enough to have one, and you will see his portrait, with firmness written in every line of an iron countenance. His opponent in the election of 1828, John Quincy Adams, called him "that brawler from Tennessee" and not without reason, for Jackson was vituperative in a vernacular that was all his own. He was neither studious nor teachable, and hence during his few terms at school never learned to use the English language correctly. He could employ a dozen adjectives in denouncing somebody or something, but he would misspell every one of them. 23 How sharp, then, may seem to be the contrast between this stormy petrel of the tremulous twenties and the man on whom his mantle has fallen to-day! "As far as the East is from the West," would appear to represent the difference between and in experience. Governor Smith hails from the metropolitan East Side, which is as far from the West as one can get in this land of generous dimensions—both in distance and in point of view. His political apprenticeship was served in Tammany, not in Tennessee. He has no war-record of tribes subdued or invaders repulsed. But he has a fine record of executive experience and it has made him as well known throughout the country as Jackson was. His opponents have searched his public and private life with a microscope, without finding anything reprehensible. There has been no tiger spoor in Albany during the past half-dozen years. The contrasts in personality are also great, for there is nothing uncouth about the Elijah who is now trying to lead the Democrats out of the wilderness. He can walk along Fifth Avenue and look the part. He has a legal mind, and a good one. In speech and attire and manners he has a decent respect for the opinions of mankind. If his visage ever gets a chance to adorn the currency, it will require no apology. Most important of all, perhaps, Governor Smith has a sense of humor—which Jackson sadly lacked. All in all, a rather characteristic product of that cosmopolitan city which was founded by the Dutch and conquered by the English in order that it might be ruled by the Irish for the benefit of the Jews. Not much like Jackson, you will say, is this knight-errant of the sidewalks, now sitting astride the donkey's back with a demijohn of wine on one shoulder and a thermos bottle of water on the other. Still, there are some underlying was this brawler from the wilds, an interloper, radical and rough-neck too, aspiring to a post which from the very beginnings of the Republic had been deemed beyond the reach of such as he. similarities between the two. The historian of the future will bracket Jackson and Smith as sons of the American frontier. Not of the same frontier, to be sure, for the borderland of national integration has undergone a great shift during these past ten decades. In 1828 the frontier was geographical; it lay in the West. Racially, that frontier was almost one hundred per cent American; the frontiersmen were largely of native stock, transplanted from the seaboard States into the great hinterland. It did not differ from the older areas in race or religion, but it differed enormously in social and political ideas. The old frontier was a strip of territory in which men developed an intolerance toward all human pretensions based upon ancestry or education, on social status or even on wealth. The common man was deemed to be as good as the best. Hence the right to seek and hold political office was looked upon, out there, as the patrimony of every mother's son. Even the highest office in the land was not deemed exempt from righteous plebeian aspiration. Coming as he did from this environment, Jackson was of the Newer America. His candidacy was regarded by the Older America as an intrusion upon holy ground, a challenge to the divine right of the seaboard dynasty. Every President of the United States down to Jackson's time had come from Virginia or Massachusetts. They had all been of the American aristocracy. Even Thomas Jefferson, although a radical in his habits of mind, was a Virginian and a gentleman. But here Just transpose the language, but keep the idea, and you will find that it has a familiar ring. To millions of our people, Governor Smith is merely trying to do what Jackson did, but from a different point of approach. For he also is a son of the frontier, the new frontier of twentieth-century America. This new frontier is not geographical, as the old one was. It is racial largely, and economic in part. Dividing the newer stock from the native, it does not cut vertically through valleys and plains, but horizontally through the social strata of the population. The true American frontier of to-daythe boundary along which the task of national absorption and integration is proceeding-lies for the most part in our great cities. It is there, on the East Side, or in the North End, or wherever the immigrants and sons of immigrants are massed together. Out of this frontier, the Democratic party has chosen its standardbearer for the campaign of 1928. Like Jackson, he is from the Newer America of his day. Hence Governor Smith's candidacy is similarly defiant of the old traditionalism. Perhaps it offends the primal emotions more deeply and over a larger portion of the country, portion of the country, for among all forms of human intolerance, the religious type is the most unyielding. Men and women who are otherwise open-minded allow themselves to be swayed by it. Mr. Bryan, for ex ample, was ahead of his generation in political liberalism, but in all matters affecting religious belief or affiliation he was one of the most intrepid rear-guards. The same was true of Mr. Gladstone in England a generation earlier. It is a commonplace of speech that race and religion should have no place in politics. But it is not a commonplace of action. It never has been. We have had in the past our Know-Nothings, Anti-Masonic parties, Ku Klux Klans, A. P. A.'s, and Molly Maguires-indeed the country has rarely been without some sort of organized intolerance aiming to keep political power in the hands of "true Americans." Governor Smith is by no means the first to project the racial or religious issue into politics. His candidacy has merely lifted to a national level what has hitherto been confined to State and local campaigns. Catholic governors and senators have at one time or another been elected in about half the States. It is difficult for Catholics to understand why so much consternation should be caused by a claim that is not new in principle, but only in degree. 22 In the election of 1828, most of the broader issues were lost to view. The tariff, the question of internal improvements, foreign policy, even the extension of slavery-none of these got much discussion. The whole campaign centered around the personal qualities, ideals, and idiosyncrasies of the candidates. Adams was no campaigner. A New Englander and an aristocrat, he recoiled from the sordidness of a rough-and-tumble campaign. He thus acquired the handicap of being placed on the defensive. Jackson, on the other hand, carried his fight to the people. He had the advantage of an organization the like of which had not been known in national politics before. Its nucleus was Tammany Hall, which declared strongly for the Tennesseean in September, 1827, more than a full year before the election was held. There were State committees and local committees everywhere. Never before had there been such a campaign of rumors and whisperings, with their effective appeal to sectional motives and class jealousies. Jackson was pressed upon the public imagination as the friend of the common man and the foe of privilege. That phantom fellow, the common man, bulked large in the campaign of 1828—and he will in this one before it is through. There were twenty-four States in the Union at this time. They had already gravitated into groups, Northeast, Middle States, South and West. New England was conceded to Adams and the Southern States to Jackson, even before the campaign began. Quite rightly so, as the outcome proved. We are accustomed to think of the Solid South as the product of the Civil War and Reconstruction. The reconstruction policy of the Republican party is often blamed for having thrown the territory below Mason and Dixon's line into the Democratic column to stay. But the South went solid for Jackson in 1828, every bit of it, and the border States as well. The real battle, therefore, was fought in the Middle Atlantic States and in the West. To a degree, history is repeating itself |