Democratic Circulation: Jacksonian Lithographs in U.S. Public Discourse

In cartoons from the Jacksonian era, in New York, Boston, and Philadelphia, lithographers used their skills in partisan politics, portraying the United States president and other major political players in a proliferation of political cartoons for the first time. The more famous ones include “The Downfall of Mother Bank,” in which the Bank Veto scroll sends out thunder and lightning that bring down the “temple of corruption,” as the politicians resembling demons scramble to run out with money sacks; “Symptoms of a Lock Jaw,” in which Henry Clay ties shut the mouth of Andrew Jackson by censuring him following his Bank Veto; and “Hard Times,” which shows drunken men, orphans, and members of the laboring poor idling about vacant businesses and streets papered over with bank notes as “shinplasters,” currency so worthless that it was better as paper-mâché for shin splints and warmth for the poor rather than money.

These visual rhetorics draw attention to issues of circulation because of the questions they generate. Why at this historical moment do we have the proliferation of this democratic form, tearing down the deference that marked the previous era? Can it be explained by the growth of lithography technologies, the pre-existing partisan press, and the extended voting qualifications that gave poor white citizens voting privileges? It seems not simply so, with circulation not merely tied to technical innovation and political or media institutions, but also dependent on the type of issues portrayed, the characters depicted, and the cultural norms that defined the era. Almost all of these early lithographs depict the banking and economic debates of the early republic—rather than Indian removal, slavery and tariff issues, reform movements, or other key political debates. Economic-induced panic and emerging democratic identifications in Bank resistance, I suggest, were crucial to that new democratic form of circulation.

Spaces and habits of uptake, numbers explaining significance, and reception analysis show patterns that impact genre, style, and argumentative content. Although the idea of trope can be applied to most anything (after all, what in the world does not follow some logic of representation, substitution, or transfer), it is useful to understand circulation as such. Metaphors allow culture to understand texts through other means, when technology like lithography allows new modes of understanding. Synecdoche allows for sound bites to stand in for the whole speech, when time and attention are limited. Metonymy allows a leader like Jackson to claim that his Bank Veto substitutes for underlying anti-Bank sentiment. And as circulation increases through these forms beyond manageable amounts, ironic and satirical modes give texts new authenticity, unexpected humor, or critical perspective. Patterns of flow and patterns of textual invention and judgment are thus interconnected.

As Robert Hariman suggested in an essay on democratic public culture, allegories exemplify an aesthetic paradigm of circulation, one central to democratic circulation.¹ In the aforementioned cartoons, good and evil integrate old republican traditions with Bible stories, Shakespearean plays, and children’s tales. Exaggerated codes of moral clarity and simplicity, in the dizzying game of democratic circulation, can help “cut through” the apparent relativism presented by hundreds of arguments on any particular text—each a claim to truth. In this environment of overwhelming plurality of opinions and the seeming equality of texts, boldness and binary logics answer the dilemmas of excess.

This of course has dangers; the cartoons tended to dehumanize or at least lower credibility of leaders too far, especially in the age of Jackson, when the truly honorable still were supposed to rise to rule naturally. Even friends of the lithographers turned down the images as harmful to good politics.² They witnessed a relatively sudden shift toward democracy in irony, satire, and allegory. Allegory, in particular, can be read as a master trope of both production and interpretation when traditions wane, media proliferate, and new technologies of power arise. Societies that circulate objects democratically, according to Hariman, stress recuperation of the past and progressive values, simultaneously, which brings about greater pluralism of interpretation; more traditional reading practices become untenable given the proliferation of texts and the constant...