The Age of Jackson
by Arthur M. Schlesinger Jr.
Summary
Arthur M. Schlesinger Jr. reinterprets Jacksonian democracy as a struggle over economic power rather than a story about the frontier remaking American character. Where earlier historians, following Frederick Jackson Turner, had explained Jackson's popular appeal as a product of the open West and its leveling effect on class distinctions, Schlesinger argues the real energy behind Jacksonian politics came from eastern working people and urban reformers pushing back against concentrated banking and commercial wealth, casting Jackson's war on the Second Bank of the United States as an early skirmish in a much longer American argument over who an expanding economy should actually serve. He traces that argument through the party politics, newspaper battles, and popular organizing of the 1820s and 1830s.
Schlesinger wrote the book while still in his twenties and while serving with the Office of Strategic Services during the Second World War, and the prose carries the confidence and forward momentum of a young historian making a deliberately provocative case rather than surveying settled consensus. He gives real attention to the specific fights, over the Bank's recharter, over tariff policy, over hard money versus paper credit, that turned an argument about the frontier into an argument about class, and he treats Jackson himself less as the story's driving force than as the figurehead a genuinely organized political movement gathered around. The book reads as an argument first and a narrative second, built to persuade rather than simply to recount, and later historians have pushed back on how cleanly Schlesinger's class based framework actually maps onto the messy coalition politics of the Jacksonian era. It suits a reader who wants to see a major historical interpretation argued forcefully, in the kind of prose meant to change how a whole period gets read rather than simply describe it.
Historical Context & Significance
The Age of Jackson won the 1946 Pulitzer Prize for History. Schlesinger was still in his twenties when the book appeared in 1945, an unusually young age for a Pulitzer winning historian, and the prize established him immediately as a major figure in American political history.
Schlesinger went on to a long career mixing scholarship with active political involvement, including work in John F. Kennedy's White House, and he won a second Pulitzer Prize twenty years later, in 1966, for Biography or Autobiography, for A Thousand Days, his account of the Kennedy administration, a wholly separate book in a separate category from this one. The Age of Jackson remains a landmark, if contested, interpretation of Jacksonian politics, still assigned as the classic statement of the economic reading of the era even by historians who argue against it.