Hillary's America: The Secret History of the Democratic Party (6 page)

For most Democrats, the topic is both touchy and distasteful. It’s one thing to rob from the rich but quite another to rob from the poorest of the poor. Some of the Democratic primary support for Bernie Sanders was undoubtedly due to Democrats’ distaste over the financial shenanigans of the Clintons. Probably these Democrats considered the Clintons to be unduly grasping and opportunistic, an embarrassment to the great traditions of the Democratic Party.

THE ELUSIVE FOUNDER

But what are the great traditions of the Democratic Party? Is the behavior of the Clintons unique, or is it part of a pattern that can be traced through Democratic Party history? This question cannot be answered without understanding what this party is, where it came from. Oddly enough the origins of the Democratic Party are shrouded in myth. Who is the actual founder of the party that we know today as the Democrats?

We all know that Abraham Lincoln is the founder of the Republican Party. Democrats sometimes attempt to claim Lincoln. Obama took a train journey from Illinois to Washington, D.C., to be inaugurated president in 2009, just as Lincoln had nearly a century and a half earlier. Obama took his oath of office on the Bible that Lincoln used at his first inauguration.

These symbolic appropriations of Lincoln are commonplace in politics; at the same time, they are deeply misleading. Let’s just say that Obama is no Lincoln. Lincoln was a founder of the Republican Party and the first Republican president. His values and beliefs were radically
opposed to Obama’s. If Lincoln were alive to see today’s Democrats, he would likely recognize them to be the same type of dirty rotten scoundrels that he encountered among Democrats in his own day. More about this in the next chapter.

But if Lincoln was a founder of the Republican Party, who started the Democratic Party? Here we get a range of confusing answers. According to the television network PBS, “The Democratic Party was formed in 1792, when supporters of Thomas Jefferson began using the name Republicans, or Jefferson Republicans, to emphasize its anti-aristocratic policies.”
¹¹

Now this on its face is strange. How can the Democratic Party trace itself back to a man and his followers who called themselves Republicans? Right away we suspect that progressive PBS is pulling off a scam. Jefferson and his supporters were not the actual founders of the Democratic Party.

First, as PBS concedes, Jefferson’s party—founded to challenge the Federalist Party—called itself the Republicans. Later Jefferson’s party was called the Democratic Republican Party. Still, this nomenclature hardly establishes any meaningful kinship with either today’s Republican or Democratic parties.

Jefferson’s party stood for rural agricultural interests against urban commercial interests represented by Hamilton and the Federalists. In a sense, this was the ancient clash between the “country” and the “city.” Today’s Democrats don’t represent rural people against city people; on the contrary, rural America heavily supports the GOP and the greatest stronghold of Democratic votes is the cities.

Jefferson’s party also represented states’ rights in contrast to the Federalists who represented the rights of the national government. Once again, today’s Democrats have little sympathy for Jefferson on that score. If forced to choose, they would undoubtedly be on the Federalist side of that clash. Today’s Democrats want a strong, centralized national government, which was anathema to Jefferson.

Now in one respect, Jefferson does harbinger a proclivity that would later come to be associated with the Democrats—especially with the
Clintons. Thomas Jefferson seems to have taken sexual liberties with a young female slave, Sally Hemings, and had several children by her. The issue, for Jefferson as for Bill Clinton, in his notorious sexual misconduct as governor of Arkansas and president of the United States, is not extramarital sex or having an affair. The issue is abuse of power.

In 1787, young Sally Hemings was dispatched from Virginia to Paris where Jefferson was serving as America’s foreign minister. According to a blacksmith who worked on Jefferson’s plantation, Sally was “very handsome” and “mighty near white” with “long straight hair running down her back.”

While Sally’s main duties involved looking after Jefferson’s daughter Polly, she was, according to a later account given by her son Madison, also charged with “taking care of Mister Jefferson’s chamber and wardrobe.” Hemings was only fourteen when she arrived in Paris. This was when Jefferson seems to have made his first moves on her.

No, this was not a love relationship between consenting adults; it was a reprehensible abuse of position and power. The fact that it was fairly common among slave owners does not make it less reprehensible. So while there is no straight line between Jefferson’s party and the Democrats, there is a tradition of sex abuse that connects Thomas Jefferson with Bill Clinton. In this respect it may be worth noting that Clinton’s middle name is Jefferson.

“I did not have sexual relations with that woman.” This is Bill Clinton, famously lying about what he did. He didn’t get away with his lie. Jefferson maintained complete silence about his relationship with Hemings. He almost got away with it. Until the late 1990s, Jefferson’s impregnation of Hemings was considered a foul rumor. It was traced to a scandal-mongering journalist named James Callendar, who in 1802 published an allegation in a Richmond newspaper that Jefferson had borne children by a slave “concubine.”

Recent scholarship, however, has established to a high degree of likelihood Jefferson’s paternity. In fact, DNA tests conducted in the 1990s show that Jefferson sired six children by Hemings.
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At first the mainstream community of Jefferson biographers, as well as the foundation that
runs Jefferson’s family home at Monticello, resisted this evidence. The skeptics said evidence could point to any male in Jefferson’s family being responsible for paternity. Accusing fingers were pointed at Jefferson’s son.
¹³

But in two important books, historian Annette Gordon-Reed has shown that Sally gave birth at times when only Jefferson could be the father. There is further circumstantial evidence that points to Jefferson’s paternity. He named Sally’s children after people important to him, like Madison. He personally ensured that Hemings received special treatment among the slaves. He freed all her children and some of them—being light-skinned—lived out their lives as white people. (The other slaves on Jefferson’s plantation were auctioned off to pay off his debts.)

Today historians concede that the oral history of the Hemings family is correct: they can trace their lineage right back to Sally and Thomas Jefferson. Even Monticello, the foundation that administers Jefferson’s family home, acknowledges Jefferson’s paternity.
¹⁴
Whether William Jefferson Clinton sired any children with the various women he abused is not known. What is known is that in December 1997 he got Gennifer Flowers pregnant and gave her $200 in cash to have an abortion.
¹⁵

Back to our main point: If Jefferson didn’t found the Democratic Party, who did? Another common answer we hear is Franklin D. Roosevelt. Now this is a better answer because FDR was certainly a Democrat, and he inaugurated an important phase in the development of the modern Democratic Party.

Even so, was FDR the first Democrat? FDR was elected in 1932, so was there no Democratic Party in the early twentieth century, or in the nineteenth century? Of course there was. The Democratic Party actually predated the Republican Party.

THE FIRST DEMOCRAT

The real founder of the modern Democratic Party was Andrew Jackson. Jackson, an orphan from Appalachia, rose from obscurity to become America’s most celebrated general and military hero after George Washington. He won the presidency by a landslide in 1828 and an even
bigger one in 1832. His proteges dominated the Democratic Party for half a century, until the Civil War. During his lifetime Jackson was immensely popular with ordinary people, earning him the reputation of being the common man’s president.

One might expect the Democrats—who even today purport to be the party of the common man—to embrace Jackson and acknowledge his paternity of their party. This, however, is not the case. So why do they distance themselves from Jackson? Why do progressives consider him such an embarrassment?

Not only do many on the Left refuse to acknowledge Jackson’s founding role in the Democratic Party, they also want to kick him off the $20 bill where his face currently appears. Progressives want to see him replaced on the currency with the woman who ran the Underground Railroad, Harriet Tubman.

To some degree, the progressive objective seems clear. Jackson, after all, owned some three hundred slaves during his lifetime. At one time he ran a plantation that had 150 slaves. So Jackson’s expulsion seems consistent with the general progressive antipathy toward slavery. The same antipathy explains the choice of Tubman, who was a female abolitionist. Moreover, Tubman was a woman. If the Democrats are going to place a woman, Hillary, on the presidential ticket, why not also have a woman, Tubman, on the currency?

Even so, the proposal is interesting because Jackson was a Democrat—the founding father of the Democratic Party—while Tubman was a Republican. Admittedly progressives have no intention of highlighting that fact about Tubman; indeed it goes virtually unmentioned in the news reports. The progressive media is not comfortable with a female black abolitionist representing the Republican Party while a white male slave owner represents the Democratic Party.

Yet Jackson was not unique in owning slaves; Jefferson did too. So what makes Jackson especially embarrassing for Democrats? Why are they so eager to disavow an individual from humble origins who rose to such fantastic heights, in the process successfully representing and delivering for the common man? Why don’t Democrats cherish this aspect of their party’s founder?

In this chapter, I will show that Jackson has become
persona non grata
precisely because of how he delivered for the common man. He did so by stealing land from the native Indians and then making it available for cheap purchase by white people, thus making those people beholden to Jackson and his Democratic Party.

Now it is shameful enough to use military power, political intimidation, and trickery to seize and occupy other people’s land. It is even more disgraceful to do so while pretending to be the friends of those you are stealing from, giving them the impression you are helping them. Jackson mastered the art of posing as the ally of Native Americans while robbing them blind.

Today’s Democrats in this sense are heirs of Jackson. They too appropriate resources from others and distribute them among Democratic constituencies, trading favors for votes. They too pose as the friends of those they are stealing from, justifying their confiscations as good for the victims and good for the country.

Jackson started this racket by seizing Indian land and then using it to make white settlers a bargain they could not refuse. He was, in a sense, a merchant trading in stolen goods. In this respect he exposes the low, disgraceful origins of Democratic success with the common man. No wonder Democrats are eager to bury this record, or at least foist it on someone else.

The second, less-known story of Andrew Jackson concerns the way he enriched himself through his land dealing and land stealing. Most historians ignore this story. Arthur Schlesinger’s 1945 biography
Age of Jackson
says nothing on the subject. Neither does Sean Wilentz’s 2005 biography
Andrew Jackson
. Jon Meacham’s Pulitzer Prize–winning biography
American Lion
, published in 2008, continues the progressive conspiracy of silence. Shhh!

FROM JACKSON TO HILLARY

The full story, however, is told in Steve Inskeep’s recent book
Jacksonland
, which I will rely on for my subsequent account. “Jackson
managed national security affairs in a way that matched his interest in land development,” Inskeep notes. “He shaped his real estate investments to complement his official duties, and performed his official duties in a way that benefited his real estate interests.”
¹⁶

As Inskeep shows, typically Jackson would set his eye on a large tract of Indian territory. Then, even before chasing the Indians off that territory, Jackson would send surveyors in to assess the land in terms of its real estate value. Jackson would then alert his cronies, and together they would make a bid to purchase that real estate. In this way Jackson became a Tennessee plantation magnate and one of the largest slave owners in his home state.

Jackson was a ruthless con artist who became fabulously wealthy by trading on his political office. Sound familiar? His career illustrates the familiar Democratic story of leaders making sure that when there are spoils to be distributed, the lion’s share goes to them. Obviously not all Democrats use their political positions to get rich, but a number of them, from Jackson himself to Lyndon Johnson to Bill Clinton, certainly did.

Jackson’s true modern counterpart—as you have probably figured out by now—is Hillary Clinton. Their stories are closely parallel. If Hillary started out “dead broke,” as she claims she did, after her husband’s presidency, so did Jackson begin with nothing as an orphan. Neither of them became successful through starting and running a successful business. Rather, they cashed in on their political influence. Just as Jackson made money on land deals stemming from his success as a general, Hillary too figured out ways to enrich herself through her government positions, becoming fabulously wealthy in just a few years.

It may seem that Hillary “succeeded” through foreign policy while Jackson “succeeded” through domestic policy. Actually, they both succeeded through foreign policy. Let’s remember that Jackson was dealing with the Indian tribes who were, as a matter of law, separate nations. Consequently we may accurately say that the current nominee of the Democratic Party is a worthy successor of its founder. The roots of the Clinton Foundation can be found in the land-stealing policies of Andrew Jackson.