Books: The Old Deal

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Chronic Inflammation. It is Author Schlesinger's novel contention that the orthodox schoolmen have been wrong about Jackson's popular support. Says Schlesinger: The enduring basis of Jackson's strength was not the intermittent radicalism of the West and South, but the chronic radicalism of the Eastern working classes. It was alliance with them which enabled Jacksonism to advance beyond Jeffersonism, to the Jeffersonian insistence on political freedom, Jacksonism added the insistence on economic freedom—the catchword of the New Deal.

Says Schlesinger: "The Jacksonians believed that there was a deep-rooted conflict in society between the 'producing' and 'nonproducing' classes — the farmers and laborers on the one hand, and the business community on the other. The business community was considered to hold high cards in this conflict through its network of banks and corporations, its control of education and the press, above all, its power over the state. . . ."

Democracy, Schlesinger holds, is a condition of tension, in which neither side has a permanent advantage. This theory of tension distinguishes Historian Schlesinger's from Revolutionist Karl Marx's theory of class struggle, which ends each bout in a sullen victory for one side or the other, or "in the common ruin of the contending classes."

The history of the next few decades will tell which theorist is right.