the flemish gables and the triple stacked to on either side -- chimney on either side of the house. on the opposite side we have hme on the second -- a chimney on the second floor and a kitchen fireplace. this is where we have the chance to get up close and personal with the architectural style. this is the anniversary of its being built, it was built in 1665 stop we are very excited we are able to continue preservation efforts and hopefully we will keep it around for another 350 years. >> you can watch this and other

american artifacts programs anytime visiting our website c-span.org/history. >> you tweak american history -- each week american history tv sits in with a lecture from one of the nation's college professors. you can watch the classes here. next, university of tennessee-knoxville professor daniel fowler and his class talk about president andrew jackson and the politics of the mid-19th century. they also talk about how jackson's presidency was interpreted by historians. this is about an hour and 50 minutes. professor feller: we are considering the problem of drug sodium democracy and let me frame the problem. there is this phrase, jacksonian democracy, that shows up. -- jacksonian democracy and let me frame the problem.

there uses this phrase, jacksonian democracy that shows up. it is pervasive in a historical literature. what is jacksonian democracy? is it a political movement? is it merely jackson's democratic party? if so, what does that party stand for. does it lay legitimate claim to the name of democratic? or is that just a party label? if the jacksonians are the democracy, does that mean democracy is contested and their opponents are not democratic? or is democracy the spirit of an age in which case, jacksonian democracy does not mean jackson's political movement. it is the political limit the political environment which has been somehow -- political environment which has been somehow democratized from an

earlier period. if the latter, if jacksonian democracy is somehow -- really merely a word to describe the times, then why did we name it after jackson? which brings up the question, to what extent is jackson representative of jacksonian democracy, whatever jacksonian democracy is? and another question is to what extent are we talking about politics, and to what extent are we talking about something beyond politics? if jacksonian democracy is a political movement, what is the relationship between that political movement and wider social phenomena and social change? we started looking at this from the perspective of arthur schelsinger jr.'s the classic

"age of jackson," published in 1945. i think he claims that jacksonian democracy is indeed a political movement. that democracy is contested, and the other people, the business community, formerly federalists and no are not democratic or only reluctantly democratic. that jacksonian democracy is not centered on the frederick jackson, something that comes out of the west. american democracy does not come out of the west except in a monday and political sense that the western states believe everyone to have the vote. according to schlesinger, there

is a component that does not come out of the west. it is an updated version of the jeffersonian resistance to the federalist, but by the jacksonian period, the resistance to business domination is no longer centered among farmers. it is centered among workers. it is centered in the factories. it is centered in the mills. those are in the east. just like cities in philadelphia and boston represent the cutting edge of social and economic change, that is where the emerging, dare i say it, class struggle, first take shape. the democrats represent, at their hearts, the working class against the employing class.

now i think we saw it is a class conflict according to schlesinger that is maintained in the search and bounds -- in certain bounds. it is not a once and for all fight to the death struggle to conquer the other side. the two sides being the business community and everybody else particularly the working class. it produces a kind of cyclical equilibrium in a society that is both democratic, small d, and capitalist. the democratic side and sometimes gets the upper hand politically and fixes the mess that the business community made, and then the business community then reasserts its power: comes into control of

government, and this happens over and over and over again. so, andrew jackson fits into a pattern of democratic, small d anti- business community reform that started with the jeffersonians, but then moves primarily to the cities as exemplified by jackson, leader by franklin roosevelt and kennedy and johnson. does that sound like a fair summary of? and last week we saw a whole bunch of people responding to this. and one more thing. what do the indians have to do with this? basically nothing. you can tell that story completely really without mentioning indians at all. and mentioning what is going on on the frontier or on the west only tangentially.

so, last week we saw hammond responding by saying this class struggle is not class struggle. it is a struggle between old capitalists and new capitalists, between old money and new money. people who are already rich, and people who wanted to be rich and who had to shove aside the old rich. we saw lee benson suggesting democracy is indeed the spirit of an age. that the democratic party has no particular claim to it. and in fact they do not come to it first. and that there is a disconnection between politics and -- not so much between politics and society, but

between policy politics and electoral politics. you know, most of the voters are either voting ethnocultural antagonisms, or else reflexively voting for a party that they attached themselves to for some reason in the past. we saw marvin meyers suggesting that what jacksonian democracy is not really about is class conflict but instead, in his words, a persuasion. that would characterizes jackson -- that what characterizes jackson and his party was not so much a program as a sense of unease. the whigs speaking to americans' hopes and jacksonian democrat speaking to their fears. so that if there is anything

that divides whigs and democrats, it's more a frame of mind. than a class position. and taking that even further, we saw daniel walker howe, "the political culture of the american whigs," celebrating the whigs as carriers of progress. as optimists. they are, in certain parts of the business community, but it is not a business community that is cowering in fear and trying to fight off the bastions of modernity as schlesinger would have it. instead, they are the progressives of their day. they are the doers, the people who want to make america better. and are not unwilling to use

government to do that. those two, myers and howe, fit together very well. and then lastly we have charles sellers, coming along some years later. with the idea of the market revolution in the 1990's, and sellers is market revolution. sellers is market revolution. comes back to the idea of class conflict, but kind of supercharges it. it is about the business community or the bourgeoisie against the rest of us. what were solicitor has those -- but where schlesinger has those contending forces in a really salutary equilibrium, because it some point schlesinger says if the capitalists won altogether we would lose democracy and if the democrats won absolutely we would lose capitalism and they

are in contention with each other. seller says, no, that is not true. capitalism and democracy do not naturally go together. they are naturally antithetical. and what happened in the period ovi the market revolution is that the capitalists one -- over the market revolution is that the capitalists won and the rest of us lost and we have been suffering under bourgeois hegemony. for schlesinger, it is a kind of continuing cyclical pattern over the years. with sellers, it is a one off. there is one titanic struggle, a before and after in american history. there is before the american revolution when what sellers calls land characterizes american society, and then there is the market revolution and from then on, it is market. i think the jacksonian period may be unique in the way that

different historians, all of them making arguments that on the face, compelling, can disagree so completely with each other that you wonder if they are describing the same phenomena. so, with that as prologue, we now have michael rogan, "fathers and children: andrew jackson and the subjugation of the american indian." what does ro have to say aboutgan -- rogan have to say about what jacksonian democracy is really all about? >> there is a pit the sentence to that. it describes the core of jacksonian democracy as being truly agrarian nostalgia and acquisitive capitalism. you ask the question, where does jackson fit in? of those three, we can give him

the primitive rage leg of that stool. it is pretty clear he is at odds with schlesinger on the importance of jacksonian democracy in that regard. >> you think he is at odds with schlesinger. you mentioned the specific points. first of all, with schlesinger you have a jacksonian democracy forming in the crucible of the eastern cities where class conflict was born, so different classes are in close proximity to each other. with rogan, this takes place in the west. the story of americans venting their primitive rage toward the west, a place where they can exorcise these feelings of childish omnipotence. that is more or less what it comes down to.

the claim to paternal authority. that is the west. the west -- it is not like a safety valve for economics, but much more of a psychological safety valve. you can -- the expanding west, the promise out there can distract you from the actual problems facing capitalism back east. so jacksonians are looking very much westward rather than eastward. you can go with, there are father points, that is just one to start us with. >> it does seem to be a striking similarity between charles sellers' argument and the market revolution and rogan's argument in this book in the sense that the market quote-unquote underlies everything and is the driving force behind all of the

change that is occurring. it is the force that is creating individualism, bourgeois values, but for sellers, of course jackson is the individual, the kind of heroic figure opposing all of these changes, and for rogan, this is -- jackson is at the forefront of the market revolution. he is the one that rogan says, look, conquering the indians is what liberalism is all about. it is what the market revolution is all about. without indian lands, the market revolution does not happen.

>> so there is a thought that i had and i struggled until i finally discovered one sentence from this book one of a defined what i was struggling with. -- where it defined what i was struggling with. this idea of paternalism over the indians. what does it mean? i struggled because i was thinking removal, forced removal does not sound necessarily fatherly. but then on page 207 -- and i was rather excited when i found this. once the indians were removed then the market revolution could take place -- the advancing tide of white settlement in the east would protect them in the west.

once they move towards the west, they saw the error of their ways to accept this notion of capitalist democracy. >> that is benevolence. this idea of paternal benevolence. jackson seems to think of this according to rogan. the idea of your children moving west. west is the salvation for them. those were latent elements in jackson's psychological arch here. before that, when he first begins using the language -- paternal language, rogan thinks it is significant, only 1814 after he has militarily conquered many of them and signed treaties, i wonder if he starts using it then because that is when he begins to find -- signing treaties and that is when the occasion arises. inrogan's -- iom -- in rogan 's interpretation, this early

paternal language is all about defining paternalism. paternalism ought to be to dominate, but not to protect. this ties in with the whole thesis about primitive rage. the desire of the child for total freedom, which is what you mean the west. paternal authority, but not responsibility. eventually i guess they come to this decision, well, can i continue doing this on the grounds of benevolence? that is my take on his take. >> think there are also some great points about martin van buren on the world stage they had to justify this removal. you can civilize them, make them capitalist by removing them. you can justify it. >> and again, it seems to me that rogan is saying liberal society produces a nostalgia for the paternalistic, more

structured society that existed before the revolution, and it is that nostalgia that it creates within americans and most prominently jackson himself. paternalism evolves to control to oversee indians. that's another interesting point to me, is -- this is a similarity i see with schlesinger and with sellers that what came after the revolution or what happened after the revolution is, as schlesinger says it in i believe it is chapter one, the title of chapter one of schlesinger's book. it is "the end of arcadia." and that seems to be the general sense i get from all of those books in that respect. >> a couple of comments, one

about what you have said in one about what you have said. what we have not gotten into that i think we need to, the centrality is the question about indian removal and what is different with sellers, and rogan argues it is the indian removal that initiates the market revolution by securing, by taking the land out of common use that the indians reporting it into -- war -- were putting it into and putting it into private and secure title, so on and so forth. the other thing with the age of paternalism, you still want to ascribe benevolence to the idea of paternalism and i think rogan makes it clear that from jackson's point of view, indians were subjects. and they were not members of the new nation. and words, -- and the language, it

is almost a rhetorical device. his later career was paternal benevolence in contrast with his earlier career which was extermination. his language was benevolent but the goal was to establish control. the whole idea of what we can do to civilize the indians so many will move west -- there is no more civilized indian than the ones in georgia who have large scale agriculture and were fitting in quite nicely into the market revolution. professor feller: paternalism actually, that word has a nice sound to it. if i am reading rogan correctly paternalism is to a certain extent a delusion, explainable only by distasteful psychological processes. [laughter] professor feller: and beyond that, it is a shock. it is a fraud. he actually says, and i think

he may be right on this, the dialogue between indians and whites is structured by the great white father. but he says that is not the indians' idea. the first time a white man said to an indian, your great white father in washington wants, he gets interrupted. the indian said, he is not my father. get out of here. paternalism is a device that whites use basically in order to justify what they are doing to the indians. and it is also a way of blaming the indians for what happens to them. >> to jump in here -- professor feller: have i got that wrong? >> no. i could not help -- and i do not want to get off the subject -- but i could not help thinking, these books were published about the same time, and thinking very

much about this other paternal -- but journalism. where is the reciprocal obligation? i do not see that in rogan. i think it would have been helpful, and not to criticize the author for not writing something he did not write, but i will -- how does slavery and paternalism in jackson for life kind of affect this whole idea of jacksonian democracy? indeed, it may downplay the role of slavery. in was bored expansion. -- in west word -- westward expansion. if you have an all inclusive focus on his relationship with how he could use native americans on a psychological basis, using that as a theory, to understand that, it seems like there just to be more to the story here. >> i did think that was lacking in the book, because the only

time i think he ever mentioned andrew jackson as a slave owner was when he was on the deathbed of the slaves go out and they cried -- and the slaves go out and they cried because their paternal father figure was no longer in the picture. but i'm a you know, i feel like there is no political inquiry into where slavery -- >> considering the extent and the number that he owned. even at an early age. it seems that this would have had some sort of affect post adolescence. professor feller: and he should do with it as, say, arthur schlesinger did? >> i would not say that. professor feller: how did arthur schlesinger deal with the fact that of -- of andrew jackson as a slaveholder? >> well, i think that in schlesinger these sort of things -- you sort of paints this idea of the democrats becoming the anti-slavery party. professor feller: yeah, so

jackson as a slaveholder does not appear to my memory in schlesinger at all. and i think the only time when they really mentioned that he owned slaves is when jackson is on his deathbed and says, i hope to meet you all in heaven, one and all, white and black. and yes, you are right. slavery only appears -- and i think we talked about this -- a kind of frivolous, or the slavery issue only appears as the fruitless conceit of a bunch of reformers who ought to be out campaigning for the independence -- independent treasury if they really cared about what happens to the downtrodden until the democrats embrace it, and lo and behold, provide the real life blood of abraham lincoln's republican party. [laughter] >> when he draws this line connecting the democracy to the emergence of the republican party, the direct line -- professor feller: the challenges

here that rogan is making are stark and direct. and so direct, that our natural tendency to say, well -- you emphasize this and you emphasize that and you put them together and you synthesize and come up with something, some platform on which all of these different takes on jacksonian democracy can coexist. i don't know how we would do that with schlesinger and rogan. schlesinger, who thinks you can tell pretty much the story of not only jacksonian democracy but of the age of jackson encompassing politics, literature, religion, reform -- all of these things that he has chapters on -- and leave out indian removal.

not directly talk about it at all. implicitly, and i think rogan says this, implicitly it is just kind of a natural backdrop. it is like the weather. everybody understands that white people are going out west and the indians are receiving -- receiving before them -- receed ing before them and the country is getting bigger. but that is a backdrop to the -- it is like background scenery to what is actually going on with the actors and -- the actors in jacksonian america. am i making sense here? then you have rogan, and i pulled out some sentences -- jackson first developed in indian relations, the major formula of jacksonian democracy. the cherokee treaty negotiations introduced the rhetoric of jacksonian democracy into american politics. historians have interpreted the

age of jackson -- note the phrase -- from every perspective but indian destruction, the one from which it actually developed. [laughter] professor feller: if rogan is right, that schlesinger is telling what he presents as the story, is telling a side story. [laughter] professor feller: a story that has almost nothing to do with what made american society what it was. >> you do not have the same addition, but in his new introduction he sharpens that point even more saying schlesinger is telling the story -- i'm sorry -- of andrew

jackson as fdr, and he says, i am telling the story of andrew jackson as ronald reagan. >> yeah. professor feller: yeah. [laughter] >> yeah, he would have liked that. professor feller: i don't think ronald reagan would have liked that. [laughter] professor feller: and that point i would be tempted to say that rogan is -- >> it is a vivid metaphor. professor feller: what it does bring out nakedly as this. that is this. -- is this. my guess is rogan did not particularly like ronald reagan and did not mean that to become -- like that to be complementary, so that clarifies the point he does not like jackson. [laughter] professor feller: jackson is the hero in schlesinger's story. i will go ahead and say it. he is a villain in rogan.

the only reason i hesitated villain is, with the fascinating neo-freudian or crypto freudian or plain old freudian analysis and those passages you just go whoa. and by the way, i think most historians today would just kind of go, whoa. and now i lost my train of thought. >> i wanted to mention -- professor feller: now i remember. somehow describing jackson's , you know, feelings about his mother and his feces -- >> his first possessions. [laughter] >> personal property. professor feller: yeah, whatever i see a -- psycho historian. that was the term. whenever i see historians doing that, you are acting as a doctor, as a clinical analyst,

but somehow the reader, it is hard not to believe that this is somehow distasteful. what am i trying to say here? you know. as an analyst, you have an unfortunate cancer -- which i hope you don't. i would not immediately follow that with "ew," and "get away from me." [laughter] professor feller: but when he discusses jackson, you know, jackson is not merely -- even if he is, according to the analysis, his delusions, his rage, is uncontrollable and therefore not his fault, it

comes off as kind of his fault. doesn't it? the line between characterizing and insulting is kind of hard. so on the one hand, jackson comes off as one sick puppy and generally we tend to sympathize with sick puppies because they are sick. it's not their fault they are sick. but he also comes off as one bad dude. >> he is not going to be invited to many jackson day dinners as a speaker. professor feller: i was at the hermitage, january 8, the celebration of the battle of new orleans, the anniversary. and these were not historians there. except for two or three. it was all celebrationists.

and they were all celebrating. andrew jackson, he wanted the seminal -- won the seminole war. he conquered this and settled that and they were all cheering. and you would read this program and think, if rogan's right, if rogan's point is legitimate, what does it say -- i'm not going to pull any punches here -- what does it say about americans, that we think this guy is a heroic figure? to put it in another way, the westward expansion, the westward movement. westward the course of empire takes its way. this has been pointed out a lot. movement expansion, those are neutral terms, they are kind of

natural called -- natural. things expand. what are rogan's terms? conquest, expropriation? >> infanticide. professor feller: infanticide. primitive accumulation. these are not natural processes. and these are not processes we would normally cheer about. but rogan is arguing these processes, not only did they happen, because a lot of historians will point out -- but that this is what jacksonian democracy is all about. this is the core. >> yeah, i want to answer one of these questions. so, why do we name it after jackson? rogan sure does a lot of talking about and using the phrase "age of jackson" throughout the book, but for him, it seems like we do name it after an individual. because it seems like it is

embodied in jackson's inner child self, and this is where it is birthed. and i'm not exactly clear from rogan's presentation of it. how did it get filtered out to the public? our these -- harvey's -- harvey's a --re these all of jackson's inner demons from childhood? it is not clear how that kind of permeates american society? >> i think there is actually an interesting tension within the book. on one hand, rogan -- you can't help but get the impressions on this that if jackson had had a longer lasting relationship with his parents, for instance, you can make this moral argument that jackson in some way is a living aggregate of all of these

characteristics of the american personality of the time. that his response to these developments in capitalism, in capital l liberalism, his sense of alienation, his need to be self-reliant, all of these things were in some way reflective of the persuasion of the times. i do not know. >> i'm not entirely persuaded by that. because he makes a distinction between the indian policies of monroe and john quincy adams and jackson. he says because monroe and adams were much more respectful of treaty obligations, but jackson viewed them as subjects and not as people. to negotiate with. so, i think that answers part of the question, why you can say this is andrew jackson. but for andrew jackson, any -- indian policy would have taken a different turn. he may have come up with a similar result, but it would have been perhaps really different.

because they are two different approaches. professor feller: would it have taken a different turn? i'm thinking out loud here. had the indians not been removed , not been all over the other things that removed is a nice euphemism for, before andrew jackson? if i understand correctly, and maybe i don't, what we are bringing up here is the tension between the individual explanation and the national explanation? to what extent are jackson's characteristics, is his mindset and his actions typical or

reflective of what the country is or it to what extent is it just him? i got that question right? would it have been different? certainly in some immediate, short-term ways, yes, but if we are going to argue it is jackson, then we have got to explain why in a larger sense indian-white relations -- you could say they looked a lot different when jackson got there. >> i think that there is a line in the book. it might be in the introduction. i don't remember. he does make the claim that jackson is a symbol for the american populace. and i think that makes it clear. at least in rogan's case, indian removal was inevitable, no matter who was in charge. >> rogan spends a painstaking

amount of time in the chapter entitled "indian removal" that jackson was, yes, very active in bringing this about. it was not an issue that he could not stop the georgians without fomenting a crisis. no, he was very involved in this for 20 years. he himself he was the single most responsible individual. but i think there's also an indication in rogan from narrative that jackson aligns at an interesting moments in capitalism in relation to the revolutionary fathers, who were both there as an inspiration . also, the legacy of the english parents that they never fully is, because what do they escape into, the constitution and the rule of law and more capitalism. i think this is the first moment that he arrives that which is why he says jackson did not necessarily believe in all of these values. even if i did not articulate the

case as clearly as i could out -- could have, i think there is a chance that somebody was going to do this. >> in other words, if not jackson, somebody else? >> that gets close to answering your question of why it is that relations are the same but not quite. professor feller: i found this book to be incredibly rich in a ingenious explanation. at the same time, this is as close as i can come right now to answer to my own question. not necessarily consistent in its scheme of explanations. at times i got the feeling it was explanatory venue shopping. if we can bring in a little freud here, let's use a little freud and let's use this

psychoanalytic theory and that psychoanalytic theory and i suspect not all of those psychoanalytic theories are in agreement with each other. and we can explain this and kind of whatever works or it which means you have multiple, in fact, layers of explanation for everything, which, if we were to be logically entirely consistent, we might say, no you can have -- if this explanation is true, then that explanation isn't true. in that sense i found, and tell me if you found this also. where schlesinger fits everything together, whether or not you think the parts really historically fit, he fits them altogether. everything has a -- all of the pieces are part of the same puzzle. and they all fit neatly with each other.

now that requires you to do some stuff like turn the democrats into the heart and soul of the republican party, which, by the way, we talked about this, those democrats that went into the republican party did think that they were the heart and soul. but the democrats who seceded also thought they were the heart and the soul -- i'm sorry, that they represented, yes, they thought they were the heart of the republican party, but they also thought they represented true democracy. in the 1850's you have democrats going everywhere politically and each one is swearing, i'm the only real democrat. everyone else is a false democrat. [laughter] professor feller: the secessionists swear that. the anti-slavery now republicans swear that. but at least his scheme logically holds together. i am not sure that rogan really cares so much about making it all logically hold together.

in that sense, the book is in a way not so much a blueprint or a schematic. it's an expose. and when you're doing an expose since basically what you're doing is attacking something. you don't have to be consistent. you can attack it anyway you want to. you can attack it with what ever tools, rhetorical tools come to mind. does this make sense? >> we had a similar conversation about this book earlier. you know, the difference between the way schlesinger fits it in and he has the last little mary -- very precise bit of evidence that he can work in print. it shows that the jacksonian democrats were --

professor feller: it may be wrong but he does say it. >> he takes the evidence that fits in. rogan, the impression we got, he is going through andrew jackson 's life, and instead of getting things to work, it he goes, how can i fit this in and do a psychoanalytic and marxist theory? that was why we were having a hard time. making complete sense of this, seeing what ties the different parts of his life. is there a different trajectory in this? >> it makes for a convoluted and contradictory narrative, certainly. >> one of the things he did pretty well, i thought, was -- he says his two governing ideologies of his pre-presidential policy was paternalism, which we touched

on, but also the treatment of indians as individual freely contracted men. and he shows quite well, i thought, how it was jackson's speculators, basically the learned classes of people who were able to sort of manipulate dupe if you will, coercion other kinds of legal devices -- in other words, it seems like rogan does a pretty good job of showing how the law was important to jackson to use and maintain but how it was easily manipulated. it made me think of horowitz wrote a book, the transformation of american law where the people are swept away by these legal formalisms and things of that nature. therefore it seems some of the subjugation of the american indian happened through the

legal process. professor feller: yeah, but a legal process -- that was deliberately almost cynically manipulated. he talked about the creeks, for instance. the creek indian treaty gave every creek indian as an individual a landholding, a piece of a landholding in the territory they were leaving. and this -- if i'm getting rogan right, rogan says that's a neat trick. you want the land. you give it to them as individuals. it is yours, that means you can sell it. and then you turn speculators and everybody else loose on them, and of course the creeks who are not brought up to deal in market relations and immediately they all get fleeced. but then that enables you to say, it wasn't our fault. >> it removes the guilt. professor feller: exactly.

it removes the guilt. >> and in that sense of the heat is a pretty good job of showing how manipulation -- in that sense i think he does a pretty good job of showing how manipulation through whatever legal mechanisms were at hand were able to subjugate the indians. professor feller: so, i'm not sure we can answer this question, but in a way we have reached -- where the question becomes -- granted, schlesinger is vulnerable a lot of grounds but there are some historians who would like to salvage some of schlesinger. and in fact when i read schlesinger, yeah, this is really compelling. can we salvage anything of schlesinger? and i don't so much mean can we salvage a little vignette here

a little episode in new york city? because rogan, in a way, does not talk about those. it is a different universe. but can we salvage anything of schlesinger's conception of what jacksonian america is about? >> having read rogan? professor feller: let's say having read rogan and not necessarily vouchsafing every point reagan has to make. -- rogan has to make. >> even if i bought what rogan was saying and i thought his methods were correct, which i don't, if you read schlesinger schlesinger, of course, it is jackson fighting the big bad capitalists. he is the hero. he is the devil himself in rogan. and so, no, you can't salvage

anything from schlesinger through the lens of rogan. courts i think -- >> i think schlesinger and rogan would that be, you know -- yes, but -- professor feller: if you were republican -- which some i am sure did against ronald reagan. which is another caution of drawing to close historical lines. >> the explanations may be different. but the idea of jackson battling against the elites, i do not think that that is inconsistent with rogan's idea in the chapter on the banking controversy. now rogan would extend it as this is his latest incarnation of paternalism versus paternalism toward my soldiers and paternalism towards the indians and now it is to the average person being burdened by a least.

-- elites. that does not seem to be at odds, at least not 180 degrees. >> yes, i think both authors do get on that fear of dependence. the fear of dependence on the motorbike. -- mulder back -- mother bank. whether it is we do not want to be dominated by this paternal figure in rogan's book or in schlesinger, the fact that we do not want to be dependent on a credit system. i think that is brought up relatively well in both. professor feller: did it sound like marvin myers? >> yeah, yeah. the collective thought processes. i think they were both pretty terrible. professor feller: yeah, well, we want all the things that acquisitive ms. will bring us -- acquisitiveness will bring us but at the same time we want to blame somebody for all of the things about acquisitiveness that make us uneasy so we blame the back.

-- banks. there are paragraphs in rogan that almost seem like they were taken from myers. >> yeah. professor feller: that probably were. [laughter] professor feller: one thing, he is very eclectic in his drawing on scholars, some of whom we have encountered. for instance, when he uses the phrase "regeneration through violence." there is a historian named richard slotkin who wrote a whole book called "regeneration through violence." he is pulling in, he is definitely pulling in from myers. i think he is pulling from lee benson. >> and without regard to rogan or at least rogan does not deal with this directly, i think you can salvage from schlesinger the idea of this equilibrium of tension between capitalism and

democracy seems to hold up pretty well as an explanatory feature. of history. >> rogan also talks about how jackson set precedents for the kind of presidency that came to emerge in the 20th century, and the presidential power that was expensive, that was in rogan's view paternalistic. and i think schlesinger expresses a similar kind of sentiment of course at the end of his book when he tries to create a link between jackson and the new deal of fdr, now rogan might have a much more cynical view of what paternal presidential power means as opposed to schlesinger, but --

>> it is important. he links him to regulator on, -- reagan later on, fdr, however dubious that may be. i find a dubious that idea of capitalism and democracy, just because i see rogan as being a little more similar to sellers in that there is something climactic about this triumph of capitalism. something irreversible about this process that andrew jackson unleashes on america. and i do not think it is fundamental to rogan's argument i do not think it lives or dies on that. professor feller: let's tackle this issue of capitalism, a word which now, like some virus, has

so infected historiography and we will see in some of things we are reading later. at i'm not saying capitalism is something we should avoid or inoculate ourselves against. it just can be used in so many different ways to so many different ends and along with that being market revolution. i was startled when i came back to reading rogan a few years ago. i read it way back when. i read it. i have forgotten that he is using this term. he is not using the term "market revolution." he has one third of the book titled "the market revolution." he was way ahead of his time. a better phrase that was ahead of its time. -- bad phrase that was ahead of its time. and the reason that i say bad in sellers' book, which we have discussed without delving into

but i think i am not incorrectly characterizing it in saying the market revolution is the onslaught of the acquisitive bourgeoisie. that's the big economic and social transformation. there is a transformation, this is the jacksonian period is the period of that transformation in american history. which i think rogan also says. as opposed to all of those other periods of transformation in american history. nobody has ever written a book about the period they specialized in and called it "the age of stasis." [laughter] professor feller: "the age of nothing happening."

the period that you are studying , it is always the age of transformation. and sellers says again it is the onslaught of the bourgeoisie. and again drawing on schlesingerian ideas, be champion of the people against the capitalists is andrew jackson. he is the leader of the resistance in sellers' book to the market revolution. in the market revolution in sellers' book is bad and andrew fought nobly against it. now we go back in terms of when they wrote it chronologically to michael rogan who probably introduced the term, used it far more prominently than anyone else had at the time and to some

-- for some years afterwards. and we have a market revolution which seems to have the same characteristics as sellers. certainly marked by unrestrained acquisitiveness. and these guys are greedy. they want to get rich. they also want to subjugate or kill pretty much whoever gets in their way. and they are not particularly -- and anyway, -- in any way what's , the word? restrained in their methods. rogan, rogan has these gleeful chapters on the land speculation on the frontier where everybody is trying to cheat everybody. i am freelancing a little here. perhaps the difference is that

the bourgeoisie is at least restrained by some internal mechanisms of morality. [captions copyright national cable satellite corp. 2014] [captioning performed by the national captioning institute, which is responsible for its caption content and accuracy. visit ncicap.org]