The President of the United States has an almost mythic stature in American history. He's the dominant figure in American politics and the most powerful man in the world. But few of us today realize that this was not the kind of president the Founding Fathers had in mind.
In the Founders eyes, it was Congress that would take the lead in deciding what direction the country should go. And the job of the President, or Executive, to execute what Congress decided. Back to the founders, James Madison wrote a letter to Thomas Jefferson in which he said, we don't have to worry about the executive.
That's the weaker branch of the government. We want the legislature to be the centerpiece of government. Not only did the founders want Congress to be dominant over the president, but they did not want average Americans to have a role in choosing who that president would be.
Their reasoning was that average Americans were not capable of making a wise choice. In the early years of the republic, voters were not called on to choose the president of the United States. Choosing the president was quite honestly and quite deliberately an elitist operation. The people who were thought to be the insiders in state government became the presidential electors and they chose the president based on which set of Washington insiders they thought was the best.
And the people were basically expected to accept that decision without complaint. During the terms of our first six presidents, the government functioned pretty much like the founding fathers planned. But our seventh president, Andrew Jackson, had an entirely new vision of how things should work. First of all, he thought that the people should elect the president. Jackson and his supporters decided to reinvent American politics.
So they organized all kinds of popular demonstrations, rallies, conventions, assemblies of people who would get together and hurrah for Jackson. And this was the kind of tactic that didn't require finagling behind closed doors. It could take place in the boondocks. It could happen in rural Tennessee, rural Alabama, rural New York.
And this kind of stirring up popular vote and giving the people the notion that they should choose the president and not the caucus members in Washington, that revolutionized American politics. The people have not been willing to give up the choice of president ever since. Jackson also thought that the man the people chose to be president should dominate American politics.
Andrew Jackson was the first modern president because he was the first one who asserted that the president was not merely a member of the government's symphony, he was its conductor. He said, I am the only person elected by all the people, and therefore I have a special role in leadership, in setting a direction for the country, in imposing my will on the legislature or the court, if I wish, and if people don't like it, they can vote me out next time. But Jackson's vision deeply frightened many Americans. Men like Henry Clay worried about Andrew Jackson courting the will and sentiment of the people precisely because it was, in their mind, demagoguery. You whip the people into a frenzy over something which may or may not be true, and then you ride their energy into office and then commit mayhem as you will.
President Jackson's actions would only feed Clay's fears, for it was his goal to make himself into the most powerful president America ever had. Andrew Jackson's first strategy for increasing the power of the president was to fire hundreds of federal employees and replace them with his own supporters. When this got to be debated in Congress, a Jacksonian supporter from New York said, well, that's the way it is in politics.
To the victor go the spoils. So ever since then, Jackson has been blamed for the so-called spoils system. of giving high-paying offices to all of his most faithful lieutenants.
Jackson also frequently wielded a power his predecessors rarely used, the veto. And that becomes the weapon by which he intrudes into the legislative process. He goes to the Congress and he says, you've got to ask me first whether I'm going to approve what you do.
Because I can veto, and it's not going to be very easy for you to override my veto. So it would be best to have me help you. But the most important thing that Andrew Jackson did to reinvent the presidency was to found what is today the oldest political party in the world, the Democrats. The founding fathers had considered political parties a great evil. When this country was first established, there was, I think, a general feeling that parties are formed for the simple purpose of achieving selfish ends.
Particular men come together with a need or a desire to achieve selfish ends. desire and help one another to gain power in order to satisfy their greed. And so parties were looked upon as something that we did not want in this country.
Though Jackson firmly believed that political parties were a way to give average Americans a role in politics, the man who gained the most power from the founding of the Democrats was the head of the party, Andrew Jackson. One of the effects of the Jacksonian revolution of electoral politics is it concentrates power in the presidency, not so much in government per se, but because the president is the head of the party, and the party is the machine that secures the presidency. seeds in winning elections. So in a sense, Jackson helps create an extra-constitutional institution, a system that is not called for in the Constitution, but which we still have today, the two-party system. And those parties are absolutely essential for mobilizing the political capital and the energy that candidates, successful candidates, then turn into what they call their mandate.
With the president also the head of a political party, the members of that party in Congress are often reluctant to challenge him. After all, weakening the president means weakening their party, and that means weakening their own chances for reelection. But the result is that Congress doesn't operate as the check on the president that the founders intended. So ironically, putting all this emphasis on the people actually empowers one man, the President of the United States, to call the shots for the whole government. And as a result, the office of the President is strengthened enormously by somebody who said, I only want to follow the people.
Now, nearly two centuries after Andrew Jackson, the ideal of a powerful president is firmly established. But it's important to remember that the founding fathers thought that powerful presidents were a bad idea because they worried that somebody who couldn't be trusted would get the job. So now it's up to us to do what the founding fathers were afraid we couldn't. Choose our presidents wisely.