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March 4, 2008 is the 179th anniversary of the inauguration of Andrew Jackson as President of the United States, an occasion that was accompanied by a memorably rambunctious celebration. Unencumbered by the eastern elite’s standards of decorum, Jackson the frontiersman invited the entire nation to his party. Thousands of supporters dressed in homespun clothes and coonskin hats, instead of silk and top hats, converged on the the White House. Men in muddy boots stood on elegant chairs in order to get a better view. Priceless china and crystal were shattered in the rush for refreshments. In the words of Margaret Smith, a grande dame of Washington society at the time, “Ladies fainted, men were seen with bloody noses and such a scene of confusion took place as is impossible to describe.”
Historically alert readers (HARs) will recall from last month’s column that John Quincy Adams, whom Jackson defeated in the 1828 election, described his rival as a “barbarian.” But it wasn’t simply proper Bostonians whose eyebrows were raised by the behavior of Jackson and his retinue. Chief Justice John Marshall, a Virginian who had administered the oath of office to President Jackson, is quoted as having said, “These wild asses of the West, led by Andy Jackson, will ruin the government.”
Jackson, it should be noted, didn’t particularly care what Chief Justice Marshall thought of him. After Jackson signed the Indian Removal Act of 1830, which resulted in the ethnic cleansing of thousands of Native Americans, the Cherokee Nation challenged the policy in the U. S. Supreme Court. When the Marshall court sided with the Cherokees, President Jackson reputedly said, “John Marshall made his decision, now let him enforce it.” Whether Jackson ever actually uttered these words is still in dispute among historians.
The first historical reference to Andrew Jackson that I ever encountered had nothing to do with Cherokees and their Trail of Tears, but instead involved his role in the Battle of New Orleans, which took place on January 8, 1815. In the words of the singer Johnny Horton:
In 1814 we took a little trip
Along with Colonel Jackson down the mighty Mississip.
We took a little bacon and we took a little beans
And we caught the bloody British in the town of New Orleans.
Unfortunately, as I learned from an HAR named Marshall Hier, there are some serious inaccuracies in the second most popular song of 1959. For one thing, in 1814 Jackson and his army marched to New Orleans from Florida, in the East. They didn’t travel downriver to get there. They subsequently traveled downriver to Chalmette Plantation, where the battle was fought. But their little trip down the mighty Mississip was away from the town of New Orleans, not towards it, as the song implies. More important, Andrew Jackson was a general, not a colonel, at the time of the battle.
I have to admit that upon receiving this comment from Hier the HAR I felt a certain amount of envy for Johnny Horton, whose audience, unlike the readership of The Growler, must not have included a lot of ARs ready to pounce on every minor inaccuracy or solecism. In searching for an explanation for why readers of this publication seem to be so hypercritical, I chanced upon a recent study by Central Connecticut State University that once again named St. Louis as one of the most literate cities in the United States, ahead of Boston and San Francisco, among others. Eureka! I’m either blessed or cursed with some of the most literate readers in the country. No wonder they’re always nit-picking.
As a member of the board of directors of the St. Louis Public Library, to which I’ve been appointed and re-appointed by four different mayors, I was particularly pleased to note that the Central Connecticut study ranks St. Louis second in the nation in library resources. On this point, two of the many reasons for our excellent library resources are Jean Gosebrink and Adele Heagney, both of whom work at Central Library, eight blocks east of The Tap Room. (Adele is a former employee at The Tap Room and is still a loyal customer.) In addition to providing superb service to patrons, Jean and Adele recently published a book that I highly recommend titled Historic Photos of St. Louis. This fascinating volume costs twice as much as my own book, A New Religion in Mecca, and is worth every penny.
Another fine book that will enhance St. Louis’s reputation as a supremely literate city is Robbi Courtaway’s Wetter Than The Mississippi, which is due to be released some time this summer. I have been privileged to see an early draft and can report that it is an eminently entertaining and interesting history of Prohibition in St. Louis. Thanks to Ms. Courtaway, I now know about Heber Nations, a state official who conducted more than 100 raids on bootleggers in Cole County and who was in 1925 convicted in federal court of taking bribes to protect Griesedieck Brothers Brewery. Thanks to her I also know that Nations was a big fan of the Ku Klux Klan and that the assistant attorney general who prosecuted him, Mabel Walker Willebrandt, was called “That Prohibition Portia” by Democratic presidential candidate Al Smith.
Ms. Courtaway writes about the medicinal exceptions to the Volstead Act, under which wine and whiskey could be prescribed by physicians and dispensed by pharmacies (and were in massive quantities). She also describes the religious exceptions that permitted state prohibition directors to issue sacramental wine permits to “ministers, priests, rabbis or other church congregational officials.” Under these exceptions members of congregations could purchase “sacramental wine” from their clergymen. Thus, under the oversight of a mobster named “Big Maxie” Greenberg, a lot of purportedly Jewish congregations had dues-paying members named Sullivan, O’Brien and Caruso.
The opening chapter of the book describes a raid by Prohibition agents at the newly opened Chase Hotel on New Year’s Eve, 1922. More than 2,200 of St. Louis’s most prominent and influential citizens were at the party and were in no mood to let the agents spoil their fun. The trouble began when one of the agents shot three patrons, one of whom was dancing with his wife at the time and another of whom was returning from the powder room. In Ms. Courtaway’s words, “The resulting crowd that gathered injured an agent, sent a hail of silverware, plates, salt and pepper shakers and entrees flying across the room and, as many continued to dance and dine, drove out the agents in an angry mob 250 strong.”
One wonders whether John Marshall would have described these pillars of St. Louis society as “wild asses of the West” in the same league as supporters of Andy Jackson.
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