Andrew Jackson: A Rhetorical Portrayal of Presidential Leadership by Amos Kiewe (review)

As the former Boylston Professor of Rhetoric at Harvard University, John Quincy Adams spent the weeks after his presidency drawing parallels between Andrew Jackson’s election and the demise of eloquence in the late Roman Republic. In Andrew Jackson: A Rhetorical Portrayal of Presidential Leadership, Amos Kiewe again applies a rhetorician’s eye to Jackson’s political discourse—this time with two centuries of hindsight. Closely reading texts by Jackson, his aides, and his surrogates, Kiewe traces the evolution of the seventh president’s discourse from his campaigns through his two terms in the Oval Office. In turn, Kiewe demonstrates how Jackson reconciled principles and pragmatism in pursuit of an expanded persuasive role for the presidency.

Intervening in ongoing debates among political scientists and rhetorical scholars about the origins of the “rhetorical president,” Kiewe chronicles Jackson’s sophisticated efforts to reach beyond Congress to shape public opinion (p. 13). In a forerunner to twentieth-century communications teams, Jackson collaborated with advisers like Andrew Jackson Donelson, Martin Van Buren, John H. Eaton, and Amos Kendall to strategically adapt and distribute his views to the public. By examining subtleties of team members’ drafts, Kiewe reveals the array of rhetorical sensitivities that informed Jackson as he adapted his messages regarding nullification, the national bank, and other vexing issues. Alongside analyses of how campaign surrogates and visual artists shaped Jackson’s public persona, Kiewe makes a compelling case for Jackson as “the first rhetorical president” (p. 243).

Centering each chapter on a specific rhetorical act or policy area, Kiewe seldom veers far from Jackson’s compositional process and the choices represented by his rhetoric. The advantage of this approach is that it highlights political pressures and contingent choices, complicating clear-cut moral judgments of the seventh president and his legacy. Disadvantageously, the approach separates Jackson’s rhetoric into discrete silos, foreclosing opportunities to highlight thematic connections across texts.

For example, Kiewe misses an opportunity to interrogate the relationship between Jackson’s racist ideology and his conception of national identity. In a chapter on Native American removal, Kiewe discusses at length the racism embedded in Jackson’s rhetoric. Yet elsewhere in the book, this racism is treated as a passive element of Jackson’s ideology—as “blind spots” common to his era (p. 3). In turn, Kiewe does not factor race into his assessments of how Jackson characterized American identity during major speeches like his first inaugural address. Ultimately, Kiewe concludes that Jackson “constituted ‘the people’ as a new political force comprised of laborers, shopkeepers, mechanics, and farmers”—a racially neutral depiction (p. 245). Following the lead of presidential scholarship like Vanessa B. Beasley’s book You, the People: American National Identity in Presidential Rhetoric (College Station, Tex., 2004), Kiewe could have productively scrutinized how Jackson’s pronouncements of indigenous “savagery” constituted, by antithesis, the normative whiteness of the American “people.”

Despite these omissions, Kiewe accomplishes a great deal. He convincingly illustrates Jackson’s role in expanding the persuasive powers of the presidency. He rigorously synthesizes and contextualizes more than a decade of presidential rhetoric. He provides intricate analyses of Jackson’s decisions and justifications, offering a nuanced examination of national politics in the 1830s and 1840s. Ultimately, his portrayal helps further complicate the debate over Jackson’s place in American public memory.