Art under a frontier president

When Arthur M. Schlesinger Jr.'s "The Age of Jackson" appeared in 1945, it was hailed as a landmark study for its identification of the radicalism of Eastern workingmen as a vital component in Jacksonian democracy.

While over the past 60 years there have been some dissenters to that view, it has by and large held its place in historical thinking, most recently from Sean Wilentz. In his 2005 study, "The Rise of American Democracy," he notes the importance of Jackson's coalition of "the urban mechanics" of the North and "the yeomanry" of the South to advance a program of economic democracy.

Schlesinger is an immediate touchstone for readers of David S. Reynolds's "Waking Giant," if only because of its allusive subtitle, "America in the Age of Jackson." And in an extended note, Reynolds pays tribute to Schlesinger's work as "[remaining] an influential overview [written] from a liberal-Progressive standpoint."

In Reynolds, a professor at City University of New York, there is no such obvious political subtext, although he does present a lively account of the battles in which Jackson's political and economic democracy ultimately prevailed over the old establishment represented by John Quincy Adams.

But Jackson, the war hero from the West, has come, and is all but gone, by the time Reynolds has reached page 122, with some 260 pages yet to come.

It is in a summary assessment of Jackson's presidency that Reynolds suggests where his account is headed. "Jackson," he writes, "powerfully influenced politics and culture," and he goes on to tick off the political highlights -- the battle over the Bank of the United States, the expansion of the nation's infrastructure, and the removal of Native Americans from the East.

While slavery was already a festering issue, Jackson "established the middling course that his immediate successors would also adopt."

But the key word in Reynolds's assessment is "culture," and Reynolds devotes close to half the text to an illuminating appreciation of the Jacksonian influence on literature and art, with shorter discussions on religion and popular fads.

Reynolds divides the literature of the period into "pre-Jacksonian and Jacksonian phases," placing the dividing line around 1828, the year in which Jackson won the presidency over Adams.

The "pre-" phase saw the most important works of Washington Irving and James Fenimore Cooper, writers who "although they often experimented with American themes and characters, still wrote in a style that typically showed a strong European influence." In later writers, European influences "mingled with the styles and idioms of an emerging popular culture that was distinctly American."

Those tensions Reynolds finds reflected in Irving's "Rip Van Winkle," the shiftless farmer who awakens in the 1830s to find that "the very character of the people seemed changed. There was a busy bustling, disputatious tone about it, instead of the accustomed phlegm and drowsy tranquility."

Reynolds identifies the fascination which popular culture had for the later writers.

Nathaniel Hawthorne was "open to the wild forces of popular culture," Reynolds writes, and in "The Scarlet Letter" showed his fascination with "the seamy side of Jacksonian popular culture," with characters lifted out of the sensational fiction of the time.

For Ralph Waldo Emerson, '"Jacksonism' was associated with common people, average life, wildness, and expansiveness." While he would "complain" about those traits, Reynolds notes that Emerson "liked to frequent the rough North End .... where he would observe the unrestrained behavior of common workers,"and thought that "the American writer's best school was the street."

And in "Moby Dick," Reynolds finds "the culminating statement" of the period, "[mingling] the lowly and the lordly, roistering common folk and meditative isolates, offering fresh, provocative variations on the conflicting political imagery of the Democrats and Whigs."

While there is no explicit support for a political program here -- unlike Schlesinger, who was seen as making a case for Roosevelt's New Deal -- a hint of current events is not absent.

There was "[a] mass hunger for economic reform" in the election of 1840, Reynolds writes, and the victory of William Henry Harrison, a war hero in the Jackson mold, was seen as "[a] mandate for change." But a stalemate between Congress and President John Tyler, who had succeeded Harrison, precipitated a financial crisis with continuing bank failures and growing unemployment.

And when Congress cut appropriations, even "the White House became shabby [with] its drapes in tatters and its paint faded." The contemporary note? It was during those very years that the firm which became the just-failed Lehman Brothers was established.

Waking Giant: America in the Age of Jackson
By David S. Reynolds, Harper, 466 pp., illustrated, $29.95

Michael Kenney is a freelance writer who lives in Cambridge.