Our
legislatures were and still are the strongholds of special and local
interests, and anything which undermines executive authority in this
country seriously threatens our national integrity and balance. It is to
the credit of the American people that they have instinctively
recognized this fact, and have estimated at their true value the tirades
which men no better than Henry Clay level against men no worse than
Andrew Jackson.
The reason for the failure of the Whigs was that their opponents
embodied more completely the living forces of contemporary American
life. Jackson and his followers prevailed because they were simple,
energetic, efficient, and strong. Their consistency of feeling and their
mutual loyalty enabled them to form a much more effective partisan
organization than that of the Whigs. It is one of those interesting
paradoxes, not uncommon in American history, that the party which
represented official organization and leadership was loosely organized
and unwisely led, while the party which distrusted official organization
and surrounded official leadership with rigid restraints was most
efficiently organized and was for many years absolutely dominated by a
single man.
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