The End of the Myth: From the Frontier to the Border Wall in the Mind of America

by Greg Grandin

“A proletarian orgy” was how one writer later recalled the scene at Jackson’s inauguration, as the president’s crude supporters “descended upon the city like a great swarm of locusts, by stagecoach, cart, and wagon, on horseback and on foot.”22 Wearing homespun dresses and rough canvas jackets, they made the White House their own for a day, leaving the rugs muddied and porcelain shattered when the festivities were over.

The Age of Jackson, or what some scholars have called the Jacksonian consensus, entailed a radical empowerment of white men.