Democrats, "with a little D"

by Mark Silva

Out on the grass mall where protesters have camped, marched and clashed, thousands of poetry- prose- and history-lovers huddled under tents shielding them from a steady, cold drizzle, reminded by a best-selling Iranian writer and freshly minted American citizen that it wasn't poets who had bankrupted this great nation.

Out on the landscape of a Capitol where South Carolina, the concept, has captured the news lately, a Pulitzer Prize-winning writer from Tennessee allowed that back home: "We think of South Carolina as Tennessee without the hardcover books." Jon Meacham, editor of Newsweek and author of American Lion: Andrew Jackson in the White House, quickly added that he was joking.

This was only some the stew brewing today at the National Book Festival, where writers drew the sort of crowds that politicians might envy, where Meacham had to advise autograph-seekers that he is not John Grisham, and where Azar Nafisi, author of Reading Lolita in Tehran, made the case for the absurdity of speaking of "the Muslim world" and offered a fine description of the "idiot" running her homeland - "with a smile that looks like he broke a neighbor's window and got away with it."

Between the lines of the readings and the commentaries, there were lessons in democracy to be learned under rain-pelted tents.

"The thing about Jackson's presidency that drew me to it is how modern it feels," Meacham said. "It really is the beginning of the presidency as we recognize it now."

Jackson, like Barack Obama, was raised without a father. Obama, as a senator, once told Meacham that he spent a lot of time trying to live up to his father's expectations and learn from his father's mistakes. It is self-made men, Meacham was suggesting, who have loomed large in the office of the president.

Jackson, "the creator of populism as we have come to understand it," looked out for what Harry Truman would later know as the little man, the first self-made man elected president, a republican, with a little R, and the first to see himself as a democrat, with a lower case D.

He also was "arguably the cruellest president," a slaveholder who vehemently opposed abolition and cut a trail of tears for the American Indian.

The best one can do with the "sins and omissions and crimes of people like Jackson," Meacham said, is to look around at our own times. "Before throwing rocks at the past," the editor and writer suggested, "we have to look at the moral failings of our own era."