DOGE in the 1830s The war against big government has been going on for a long time. by Robert Spencer
https://www.frontpagemag.com/fpm-plus/doge-in-the-1830s/
The war against big government has been going on much longer than President Trump has been in office. One of the first arenas in which it played out was the struggle over the Bank of the United States. Such a bank, a private corporation, had been established during the
Washington administration in 1791, but its charter expired in 1811 when a vote to renew it was narrowly defeated: the Senate vote was a tie, and President James Madison’s vice president, George Clinton, voted against the bank. Nevertheless, the idea of a central bank for federal funds did not die.
The Bank’s advocates contended that it was necessary to put the nation’s finances in order; its foes, including Madison, argued that it was an unconstitutional power grab on the part of the federal government. It was also dangerous, then as now, to turn power over the public funds to an oligarchy of private financiers; the possibility for corruption, and for a de facto second government developed by buying favors until large enough to challenge the government of the United States, was immense. Nonetheless, it was the Bank’s great foe, Madison, whose signature brought the Bank of the United States back to life in 1816.
Opposition to the Bank was one of the issues that later propelled Andrew Jackson into the White House in 1829. President Jackson called the Bank of the United States a “monster,” and denounced its “power and corruption.” He charged it with interfering in the political process and bribing elected officials and journalists with “loans” so that they would do its bidding. There was ample evidence for this. The New York Courier and Enquirer, which up until the 1832 election had opposed the Bank, received a substantial loan from it and suddenly became a vocal supporter of rechartering the Bank.
The pro-Jackson Washington Globe accused pro-Bank senators George Poindexter of Mississippi and Josiah Johnston of Louisiana of accepting enormous bribes in return for their support of the Bank, and indeed, Poindexter had received from the Bank a $10,000 loan ($300,000 today) and Johnston one of $36,000 (over $1 million today). These were by no means the only loans the Bank gave to politicians.
Jackson warned that if the Bank, a “mere monied corporation,” could use its money to buy politicians, “then nothing remains of our boasted freedom except the skin of the immolated victim.” Just imagine what he would say if he saw all the politicians of today who have become multimillionaires while in the “public service.” Jackson told his close friend and advisor Martin Van Buren, who became his vice president in 1833 and succeeded him as president in 1837: “The Bank, Mr. Van Buren, is trying to kill me, but I will kill it!”
He did. The Bank’s charter, the document that gave it the United States government’s permission to exist, didn’t expire until 1836, but in early 1832, the president of the Bank, Nicholas Biddle, applied for a new charter. His sole reason for doing this was to force Jackson to refuse to recharter the Bank; Biddle assumed that Jackson’s opposition to the Bank would be unpopular and lead to his defeat in the upcoming election, and so he wanted to make sure the president committed publicly to this opposition during the campaign season.
Jackson duly vetoed a bill for rechartering the Bank in July 1832, whereupon Biddle poured massive amounts of money into the campaign of Jackson’s opponent, Henry Clay. Clay campaigned on the issue of the Bank, but this issue did not prove as popular as he and Biddle had hoped. The American people saw Jackson as their champion against moneyed interests that were corrupting the body politic, in exactly the same way as they saw Trump in 2024. Henry Clay was resoundingly defeated, with 49 electoral votes against Jackson’s 219.
In 1836, the Bank’s federal charter expired, and it became a private corporation. It was liquidated in 1841. The struggle against federal overreach, however, was by no means over. DOGE has many antecedents, but one of the primary and most important ones was Andrew Jackson’s fight against the powerful interests who were fattening themselves at the expense of the American people by means of the Bank of the United States. Like the targets of DOGE today, they, too, insisted that they were performing indispensable services for the American people. And like the targets of DOGE today, they were lying.
Comments are closed.
