Where the Buck Stops

by Harry Truman

  Clay then got the Senate to censure Jackson for moving the money without congressional approval, but the House of Representatives showed that it was on Jackson’s side by passing resolutions approving Jackson’s actions and calling for an investigation of the bank, and the censure was expunged from official records in 1837. The Bank of the United States went out of business when its charter ended in 1836 though it later turned up as a private bank until it finally collapsed entirely in 1841, and Biddle was indicted for fraud but wasn’t convicted.

  It was a great thing that Jackson did, seeing to it that the government rather than private and outside interests controlled the finances of the country. And he wasn’t really undoing Hamilton’s work. He was meeting the situation as it developed, eventually, out of Hamilton’s work. No matter how good any situation is, or how good any organization, it can be turned into a racket if there isn’t somebody watching to see that that isn’t done. And that’s what Jackson accomplished when he enabled the United States government to regain control of our finances.

  It wasn’t an instant or miracle cure for the country’s banking problems, of course; like most solutions to problems, it brought some new problems of its own. The state banks, rich with all the money that Jackson poured into them, became far too easy and careless in giving out loans. They felt that Jackson’s comments about the difficulties the average man had encountered in getting loans, when the Bank of the United States was in control, gave them a sort of mandate to loan out money quickly and at high interest charges, using the government money as a financial base and multiplying it by issuing paper money of their own.

  Hundreds of other banks sprang up, so-called wildcat banks because they really had no resources at all, and they too issued carloads of paper currency and thrived by loaning out their own funny money. All these newly rich banks didn’t just give out loans for genuine need or solid business expansion, either; they began to give more and more loans for land speculation in the West, which became wilder every day. Between 1832 and 1836, land values in the West increased by more than 1,000 percent, and inflation gripped the country.

  To counteract this, Jackson issued a proclamation he called the Specie Circular, which required that, henceforth, public lands could be bought only with hard currency - meaning gold and silver. That slowed down inflation and curbed wild land speculation, all right, but it also caused a lot of runs on banks by people who were nervous about the banks anyway or now wanted gold or silver to pay for their land speculation, gold and silver that the banks didn’t have. Within a short time, more than 900 banks went out of business, and this in turn, combined with a number of major crop failures around the country, brought on a terrible depression that lasted until 1843 and made Van Buren one of the most unpopular presidents in our history, even though it was hardly his fault.

  But even this did some good in the long run, because it caused Van Buren to introduce some worthwhile financial measures of his own. He felt that the federal government should control government finances on its own, rather than banks of any kind, and he developed the system of subtreasuries around the country to hold federal funds. And, eventually, we also prohibited the issuance of currency by any institutions other than the United States itself, and instituted the policy of watchdogging all banks that exist today.

  THERE WERE OTHER major accomplishments by Jackson as well, and one of these helped once again to make it clear, as we had to do frequently in our early history, that we were becoming a stronger and stronger country and wouldn’t always be a weak, upstart little nation that had to kowtow to the big European powers. This all happened because France had damaged a lot of American vessels during the Napoleonic Wars, and of course, Jackson asked France for reparation to the United States and to the shipowners. France, however, didn’t pay up and apparently expected Jackson to forget all about it. But Jackson didn’t forget it; he just broke off diplomatic relations with France and mobilized our army and our navy. France quickly sent payment in the form of four installments that Jackson had told them were past due.

  I’ll just mention one other thing, and this was something that Jackson accomplished on his very last day in office. The territory of Texas was then owned by Mexico, as you know, but the people of Texas had been trying to separate themselves from Mexico for a number of years, and it all came to a head during Jackson’s administration. Mexico had itself been a sovereign nation only since 1823, when they broke loose from Spain, but when Texas tried to do the same kind of thing, Mexico sent large forces of soldiers into the territory to quell what they considered a revolution.

  In particular, one man, Antonio Lopez de Santa Anna, who became president of Mexico in 1833, was particularly tough; he sent more and more soldiers into the territory, and when Texans fought back, the Mexicans captured 300 men in a battle at Goliad and then killed them instead of imprisoning them, and then, as everybody remembers, wiped out the Texans at the Alamo, killing Davy Crockett, Jim Bowie, and about 180 other men. But “Remember Goliad!” and “Remember the Alamo!” became rallying cries for Texans, and on April 21, 1836, Sam Houston, who had served under Jackson during the fighting with the Creek Indians in 1814, managed to turn the tables on the Mexicans. In a battle at San Jacinto, he not only defeated the Mexican Army, but captured Santa Anna himself, and Mexico gave up the Texas territory. It became an independent republic and then asked to become a territory of the United States.

  Jackson was undecided about the situation for a while, wanting Texas on the one hand, but hesitating on the other hand because Texas was a slave territory and a lot of northerners opposed any kind of alliance for that reason. (There was no question about Texas’ attitude toward slavery; the constitution of the Texas Republic was patterned after our own Constitution in most ways, but it also contained language expressly accepting slavery.) But on Jackson’s last day in office, he decided to recognize Texas’ independence officially, regardless of northern opposition, and this led to Texas’ eventual entry as a state. It became our twenty-eighth state in 1845, during James K. Polk’s administration.

  Jackson left office on March 4, 1837, and had the satisfaction of seeing his friend and supporter, Martin Van Buren, follow him into office. The campaign in 1836 was again very bitter and nasty, with Jackson’s and Van Buren’s enemies calling Van Buren “Martin Van Ruin” and a puppet of “King Andrew the First,” and contrasting Van Buren unfavorably with his principal opponent, William Henry Harrison, saying that Van Buren was a man who grew up in wealth and luxury and Harrison was an honest, homespun fellow who grew up in a log cabin. The truth was that Harrison grew up in a mansion in Virginia, where his father, a signer of the Declaration of Independence and governor of Virginia from 1781 to 1784, owned a large plantation, while Van Buren was a self-made man whose father owned a small farm and a tavern in Kinderhook, New York.

  And there were also some problems with the man chosen by Jackson to run for the vice-president’s job, Richard Mentor Johnson, a controversial and flamboyant fellow who was badly wounded at the Battle of the Thames during the War of 1812 and claimed to have killed Tecumseh, the Shawnee chief who allied himself with the British during the war, personally in that battle before he fell himself. (This was a big battle between an American force led by old William Henry Harrison and a British force led by a British general, Henry A. Proctor, plus about 1,200 Indians led by Tecumseh. It took place at the Thames River - not the one in England, but another Thames River in Chatham, Ontario, Canada.) Johnson was also hated by southerners because he’d taken a slave as his common-law wife and brought up their mulatto daughters as free people who, he said, were as good as anybody else.

  None of these problems mattered in the end, anyway, for two reasons. First of all, both men were Jackson’s stated choices, the most important factor of all. And second, the opposition was pretty much in disarray; they’d re-formed as an entirely new party, the Whigs, but they couldn’t seem to agree on their presidential choice. They finally settled, if it can be called settli
ng, by running their separate choices: The western faction put up Harrison, the easterners put up Daniel Webster, and the southern faction put up a man from Tennessee named Hugh Lawson White. There were also two separate Whig candidates for vice president, Francis Granger of New York and John Tyler of Virginia. The result was that Van Buren got more popular votes than his three opponents combined, 765,483 to 739,795, and 170 electoral votes to Harrison’s seventy-three, White’s twenty-six, and Webster’s fourteen. (A fellow who wasn’t even running, Willie P. Mangum of North Carolina, got the remaining eleven electoral votes.)

  Johnson had a bit more trouble. He would have had a majority of electoral votes if he got Virginia’s votes, but the state’s electors refused to vote for him and gave their votes instead to a man named William Smith. This created a contest between Johnson and Granger - Tyler got only forty-seven electoral votes and was out of it - and put the matter in the hands of the Senate, the only time this has ever happened in a vice-presidential race. Well, the Senate finally gave Johnson thirty-three votes and Granger sixteen votes, and that was that.

  Tyler, incidentally, happens to have been my great-great-uncle, and I guess you know that he finally became president himself in 1841, our tenth president, though he certainly wasn’t one of our great ones. My family never thought much of him because they said he had a mean disposition, and that all the family had mean dispositions as a result of being related to him. But he did some good things as president, and he established a couple of precedents that are still a part of the policy of all the presidents of the United States, which I’ll mention in a couple of sentences a little later on, so I guess I have a sort of soft spot for him. He was a stubborn son of a bitch in many ways, and I suppose that’s what’s called having a mean disposition. But when a man is stubborn and believes what he believes and carries it out, I think it’s a good trait. And when old John Tyler had to make some keynote decisions, he made the right ones.

  Jackson returned to Tennessee after he left office and lived the remaining eight years of his life at the Hermitage, his 1,200-acre plantation. It wasn’t a period free of troubles for him. His tuberculosis had gotten worse, and he only had one functional lung; he was also blind in his right eye because of a cataract and had a case of dropsy that distorted his face. He was in such constant pain that he was unable to lie down and had to sleep sitting up in bed. But his good, tough old mind was as strong as ever, and when he was dying on June 8, 1845, his last thought was for the relatives and servants he heard crying nearby. “Please don’t cry,” he said. “Be good children, and I hope to see you all in heaven, both white and black, both white and black.” And then he was gone.

  MARTIN VAN BUREN lasted only one term because of the depression, even though he had about as much to do with it as you and I did. That depression, as I’ve said, was caused partly by crop failures but mostly by all the speculation in land that had been opened up for settlement - paper speculation that made the depression inevitable and probably unavoidable.

  Some writers have even wondered in recent times why Van Buren became president at all, when there were other people around who seemed more brilliant - Calhoun, Webster, and Clay, for instance. Well, one reason Van Buren was elected was that the Democrats were the popular party in the country at that time and there were few other prominent men in view on the Democratic side at that point - Webster and Clay, as you know, being in the other party. Another reason, and the main one, was that he was Jackson’s vice president and he was elected because Jackson wanted him to be elected; it was a time when it looked as if the country had reached the heights of prosperity, which was the way it appeared just before the Panic of 1837, and he was supported by old Andy Jackson, so he got elected. And a third reason is that in that day, in the period from about 1820 to about 1850, the man who had the most outstanding career as a member of the House of Representatives or as a United States senator or as vice president of the United States was the man most certain to become president - because of his former position and because he displayed the fact that he probably understood better than anyone else what the government stood for.

  And the truth is that none of those other men were better qualified for the job than Van Buren. Van Buren had a distinguished career in New York and in Washington, and then he became Jackson’s closest advisor, and I don’t think he ever gave Jackson any bad political advice or bad advice on any other subject. The other three men, on the other hand, developed their reputations mostly on the grounds of their ability to make speeches. Webster, for example, is remembered to this day mostly because he was such a great orator, and he was certainly always making orations, but that’s just another way of saying he was an old windbag, and he certainly wasn’t much else. It’s also coming out now that he was in the pay of the United States Bank all the time he was in the United States Senate, which I guess he had to be in order to pay his bills. It’s true that he later served as secretary of state for Harrison, Tyler, and Millard Fillmore, and I imagine he was a good secretary of state if three different presidents kept putting him into the job, but he was still a windbag. Calhoun had some good points, too, but he was such a states’-rights man that he was all too ready to push for destruction of the Union. And Clay had good points, too, but I think he was tainted permanently by that sneaky deal he made with John Quincy Adams.

  I’m not saying, you understand, that Van Buren was a great president or even a good president; on the contrary, I’ve got to say that our country would have done just as well not to have had Van Buren as president. But my reasons are different from the fact that that catastrophe came along in the form of a depression while he was president. My particular reason for not thinking much of him is that he was just too timid and indecisive. I don’t know whether or not he even had any personal philosophy on the role of government; I think he was a man who was always worrying about what might happen if he did this or that, and always keeping his ear to the ground to the point where he couldn’t act as the chief executive, and for that reason he was just a politician and nothing more, a politician who was out of his depth. He was known as the Cautious Dutchman, and he was a cautious Dutchman. But he was just too cautious; he was always too busy listening to what people told him about what might be the result of what he might do, when what he should have done was gone ahead and done what was necessary to be done, and then listen to what happened.

  One example is that depression, which Van Buren might not have been able to prevent, but which he could almost certainly have shortened. When the panic of 1837 came along, he just wasn’t there with remedies for the situation. As I’ve mentioned, old Andy Jackson arranged things so that he paid off the national debt, and it was a great thing to do, but there’s one advantage of having a national debt under certain other conditions, which is that it shows the people that the government is functioning and has the funds and the ability to make loans at a time of real emergency. And if Van Buren had just gone ahead and taken the bull by the horns and restored that debt to prevent the panic or at least bring it to an end, I don’t think he would have had any trouble, but he didn’t have the nerve to do it. Maybe it was a little too early in our history to expect a president to be capable of meeting a situation of that kind, but I don’t think so.

  And another example was his inability to make up his mind on the admission of Texas as a state of the United States. He kept hesitating and kept hesitating because he didn’t know which side popular opinion would be on. If he had any conviction on what ought to be done, he would have ended up all right, but there he was again, trying to find out what people wanted so he could give them what they wanted, instead of having a policy of his own and telling people that it’s the best policy. And you can’t behave that way when you’re in a position of responsibility, as he was; you’ve got to make up your mind on the basis of what you think is right and then go ahead with it. All the South voted against him on that account, and that’s another reason he was defeated for reelection.

  Van Buren r
an against William Henry Harrison again, with my stubborn old great-great-uncle as Harrison’s vice-presidential candidate, and this time the Whigs got in, with Harrison getting 1,275,017 votes, representing 53 percent, to Van Buren’s 1,128,702 votes, which was about 47 percent. Harrison got 234 electoral votes and Van Buren got sixty. For the first time in our history, the campaigns for both candidates were as brassy as the ones we have today, with political posters, campaign songs, and all the rest, and as I’ve mentioned, with Van Buren pictured as a rich old dandy and Harrison as a plain fellow in a log cabin even though the exact opposite was true. (For the record, Harrison’s boyhood home in Virginia, the Berkeley plantation, was one of the largest and most elaborate in the state, and his house in North Bend, Ohio, his residence while he was running for the presidency, was a structure with a mere twenty-two rooms. He was a very rich man for his time, and the family was a well-known and powerful family. Harrisonburg, Virginia, was named for the family.)

  Anyway, as you’ll recall, Harrison didn’t last very long as president. One of the principal campaign slogans on the Whig side was “Tippecanoe and Tyler, Too,” because Harrison had been a general fighting against the Indians in a battle near the Tippecanoe River, which is above Lafayette, Indiana, on November 7, 1811, and had won that battle, and he’d also fought in a battle or two in the War of 1812. And Harrison was a show-off and insisted on riding to the White House on a white horse and in his fancy uniform. He wouldn’t wear an overcoat because that would conceal the uniform, and he wouldn’t wear a hat or gloves either, and it was a particularly cold March day with an icy wind blowing. And he caught cold on the way to the White House and died a month later, and Tyler was president.