It’s time to look at the work of Arthur M. Schlesinger, Jr.

Much of it is starting to stink. And that’s serious. For not only did Schlesinger win two Pulitzer prizes and two National Book Awards, but as political scientist Benjamin Barber has said: “[N]o single name [is perhaps] more closely associated with the history, the biography, the political experience and the intellectual positions of liberalism’s ‘vital center.’”

Let us suppose that La Rochefoucauld was right when he said that, “Rank is to merit as a beautiful dress is to a pretty woman”; that is, that one’s position can exaggerate one’s accomplishments. Let us suppose that there are “name” historians whose books were trumpeted more for their politics, their length and their author’s academic standing than for their abiding merits. But, more than that, could Schlesinger have been not only a not particularly substantive “name” historian, but even a bit of a fraud?

As Schlesinger has written many books, necessarily one can find an occasional absurd or erroneous passage if one looks long enough. Therefore, in judging his work, we must not examine it on the basis of arbitrarily chosen passages or by considering obscure details. We must look at his major books and the central issues that impinge upon them.

The work Schelsinger did which established his reputation was The Age of Jackson. Schlesinger prepared the field for his entry into it. For like the actors Michael Douglas and Kate Hudson, Schlesinger is the product of a famous figure in his field; his father was famed historian and Harvard Professor Arthur M. Schlesinger, Sr.

That said, the book was not a slight undertaking, but rather a 500-page tome about a long past era. And it’s full of lively writing. It’s what the book says —- and what it doesn’t say —- that’s the problem.

The Age of Jackson presents “Old Hickory” as an admirable populist and man of the people. Jackson, the book suggests, was a sublimely able and energetic figure, one who in founding the modern Democratic party provided a useful example to both Northern Liberals and Southern boll-weevils — two groups Schlesinger sought to bring together. Since the book is mostly hagiography, Jackson’s crimes aren’t discussed.

Thus, the book contains no mention of the persecution of the Cherokee and the “Trail of Tears,” the route on which they fled to Oklahoma once Jackson forcibly threw them off their land.

Here’s one author’s account of this episode that Schlesinger chooses to pass over:

White resentment of the Cherokees had been building and reached a pinnacle after gold was discovered in Georgia, and immediately following the passage of the Cherokee Nation constitution, and establishment of a Cherokee Supreme Court. Possessed with ‘gold fever,’ and a thirst for expansion, the white communities turned on their Cherokee neighbors and the U.S. government decided it was time for the Cherokees to leave behind their farms, their land and their homes….

President Andrew Jackson, whose command and life was saved due to 500 Cherokee allies at the Battle of Horseshoe Bend in 1814, unbelievably authorized the Indian Removal Act of 1830…

The displacement of Native People was not wanting for eloquent opposition. Senators Daniel Webster and Henry Clay spoke out against removal. Reverend Samuel Worcester, missionary to the Cherokees, challenged Georgia’s attempt to extinguish Indian title to land in the state, winning the case before the Supreme Court…

President Andrew Jackson defied the decision of the court and ordered the removal, an act of defiance that established the U.S. government’s precedent for the removal of many Native Americans from the ancestral homelands.

The U.S. government used the Treaty of New Echota in 1835 to justify the removal. The treaty, illegally signed by about 100 Cherokees known as the Treaty Party, relinquished all lands east of the Mississippi River in exchange for land in Indian Territory and the promise of money, livestock, various provisions and tools, and other benefits…

Under orders from President Jackson and in defiance of the U.S. Supreme Court, the U.S. Army began enforcement of the Removal Act. More than 3,000 Cherokees were rounded up in the summer of 1838 and loaded onto boats that traveled the Tennessee, Ohio, Mississippi and Arkansas Rivers into Indian Territory. Many were held in prison camps awaiting their fate.

An estimated 4,000 died from hunger, exposure and disease. The journey became an eternal memory as the “trail where they cried” for the Cherokees and other removed tribes. Today, it is remembered as the “Trail of Tears.”

The reader gets no sense at all of the scoundrel that Jackson not infrequently was, one indicated by his comment about Supreme Court rulings on the Cherokee: “Justice Marshall has made his ruling, and now he may enforce it.”

Similarly, Jackson’s own standing as a slaveholder is ignored.

The book also fails to acknowledge the long-term consequences of Jackson’s decision to destroy the 2nd Bank of the United States. While The Age of Jackson discusses the Panic of 1837, it fails to admit that the absence of the strong central currency provided by the Bank was pivotal in bringing the crisis about. One can only conclude that the author again seeks to absolve Jackson, who denied the bank its charter renewal. Further, the book does not note that the depression that followed was not succeeded by a characteristic American boom, and that the U.S. economy didn’t really return to its prior rates of rapid growth until almost 1850.

This omission is especially curious in that the failure of the U.S. economy to develop quickly during the 1840’s provides a compelling rejoinder to libertarian claims that central government involvement in banking and the economy is unnecessary. As a Liberal, one might think that Schlesinger would have been eager to make these points.

But The Age of Jackson is a book much like those Hollywood costume dramas that pretend to be about Queen Elizabeth’s time as they try to teach the audience a valuable lesson about tolerance or the need for unity during wartime. The book’s real subject is the era in which it was written, the 1940’s - not the 1830’s. It was only because the work’s Democratic populist message resonated with Liberals anxious to unite different regions and party factions that no one bothered to consider if it adequately treated its subject from a social, political or economic perspective.

Reading it now, one becomes aware that there may have been an unwelcome personal motivation behind Schlesinger’s decision to write his undeniably excellent 1992 book about racial and ethnic separatism, Disuniting America. By attacking the excesses of mulicuturalism, Schlesinger was setting up a defense against future critics who might question his apologia for Jackson, a slaveholder and a defender of the “peculiar institution” who brought deceit and death to American Indians. Schlesinger was open to the criticism that he, and many other whites, hadn’t bothered to think much about minorities back in the 1940’s.

Disuniting America did not, of course, discuss the gross delinquencies of his own earlier The Age of Jackson in dealing with just these topics.