I was given Jon Meacham's American Lion for my birthday and started reading it yesterday. For those unaware, it is a Pulitzer-winning biography of Andrew Jackson centered on the years of his Presidency, written by an editor at Newsweek. I'm only fifty pages in, so I cannot really comment on the book itself, but it has made me think a bit about our seventh President.
The first thought, and the one which names this post, is the notion of Andrew Jackson as America's King under the Mountain. The King under the mountain (or in the mountain) is a legend common to a great many cultures, mostly Northern European, wherein a mighty folk hero (often but not always a historical figure) is not dead, but merely sleeps (usually in or under a mountain, thus the name) awaiting a great crisis to befall his country. At the hour of greatest need he will awake and save his people. Arthur is a common example for the Welsh/English (amusingly enough as Arthur gained fame as a war leader against the Anglo-Saxons, but I digress), Charlemagne and Frederik Barbarossa for Germany, Olaf the First for Norway, and Constantine XI for the Greeks (last Byzantine emperor, died in the fall of Constantinople and body never identified). http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/King_in_the_mountain
A fun diversion I occasionally entertained with friends, but admittedly more often with myself to stave off boredom, was the question if America was to have a King under the Mountain or sleeping hero myth (much less grand and romantic sounding that the former), who should get the nod?
I am restricting this to Presidents, so Zombie Patton and his Undead Armored Corps of Doom can wait in the hall.
George Washington of course always comes up, but I always felt he was a little too distant, too pleased to at long last rest with Martha at Mount Vernon to end his repose. Though he is it goes without saying an honorable and acceptable choice. I just think that, if left up to him, he'd be willing and able to rise and save us but would much rather we picked someone else.
Thomas Jefferson comes to mind as the second most likely Founder-President, but I don't think he's the man we'd want in a crisis. Jefferson was a great thinker rather than a great doer, and in a situation grave enough to raise heroes from the dead we would want more than a well written essay I should think.
I have heard FDR, Kennedy, and Reagan mentioned, but all are, to my mind, too recent and too divisive.
This leaves a final troika of strong candidates: Abraham Lincoln, Theodore Roosevelt, and Andrew Jackson.
Like Washington, Lincoln is a strong choice but, for reasons I cannot pin down, he leaves me a bit cold. I suspect it is simply my Southern upbringing. Similarly, I recognize that W.T. Sherman was an exemplary general but I simply can not feel for him the way I do for R.E. Lee. Perhaps I am letting my biases show and allowing emotion to cloud my judgement. I'll call it striking my blow against the creeping and continuous homogenization of our culture and more on.
Theodore Roosevelt is a very strong candidate. He has one heck of a life story (riches to rags to riches; was a successful politician, a cowboy, and the author of a standard study of the naval war of 1812 all before he was thirty; his only rival for the title of most intelligent President is Jefferson; read Latin authors in the original while conducting cattle drives; was shot int he chest but still delivered his speech with the bullet inside him). I have a feeling that he would dearly love to be America's Arthur, if only because he never got a war (the Rough Riders were only a regiment, and before he was President). Wilson wouldn't let him into the First World War for fears of what that would mean in the 1920 elections. If given the chance he would shout "Bully!" and leap on the nearest horse. He also lacks the darkness that laps around Jackson. TR never created a Trail of Tears, never bought or sold slaves.
But that very darkness is part of what gives Jackson the edge, to me. He was an indisputable SOB, but he was our SOB. He had a love for the United States that can only be described as vehement. As an orphan, he came to view the US as his surrogate family, and God have mercy on those who would threaten his family for Jackson would have none. If the US faced existential threat, sheer cussedness could raise Jackson to personally horsewhip who or whatever was responsible. When the you-know-what hits the fan, I'd kinda like for America's own Darth Vader to come to the rescue.
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