Alan Taylor: evaluation

Transcript context

…How democratic were the Jacksonians, anyway? Your mentor, Marvin Meyers, he wrote on this a great deal, as I’m sure you know. Yes, he did. He wrote extremely well about it. It depends on how we want to define a democracy. Let’s take the definition that we would use today, in which we’re saying it’s the vast majority of adults get to participate in making the political decisions that will affect them. By that standard, the Jacksonians aren’t particularly democratic because they’re not keen to expand the vote to African Americans, to say the least, and they were not keen to open up political rights to women. The great majority of adults in the United States were not included in the political system as direct participants. Now, if we say, by the standards of the 19th century in the transatlantic world — women were just not considered to be political participants anywhere, and we’re just talking about the male electorate — then you would say the Jacksonians were democratizers in that in most of the states, they have broadened the electorate by eliminating the property requirement to vote. They have not eliminated the gender requirement that you’d be male, and they have not eliminated the racial requirement that you’d be white. African Americans, even where free, could vote only in the New England states at that time and in New York, if they met a property requirement, which was pretty high. It’s not what we would consider democratic, but it is more democratic than what had preceded the Jacksonians. Insofar as you view the Jacksonian period differently from your mentor, how does that difference shape your view of 1850 to 1873, which is what you cover in your new book?…

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