The Monster Must Perish

…by Jonas E. Alexis

Andrew Jackson developed a simple political principle which turned out to be true: You either kill the monster that is destroying the national economy, or the monster will eventually kill you. There is no other way. For Jackson, the monster was none other than the people who were manipulating the money supply for their own political and personal gain, not for the good of the nation. They were the usurious and rapacious bankers.

Jackson obviously did not want the bankers to kill both the economy and the nation, therefore he went on a quest to drive the money changers out of the diabolical temple. . “Vote Andrew Jackson,” the slogan went, and you will have “no bank” manipulating the system.

Jackson noted: “If the American people only understood the rank injustice of our banking and money system—there would be a revolution before morning.” Jackson was hardly alone in his critique of the banking system.

Because they often engaged in usurious activity, bankers were hated. In 1829, New York City passed a resolution denouncing bankers as “the greatest knaves, imposters and paupers of the age.”[1] During that time, “there was hardly a banker in the country who was not constantly and criminally violating the law by committing some species of fraud or other. Year after year the courts were full of lawsuits in which this or that banker was charged with fraudulent transactions.”[2]

During the same time, Nicholas Biddle, president of the Second Bank of the United States—and a vigorous opponent of Andrew Jackson’s policy with respect to the usurious bankers—was charged with theft and embezzlement.[3]

Earlier Biddle had made an alliance with the Rothschild family. James Rothschild likened this to “a financial marriage made in heaven.” Although the alliance did not bear much fruit,[4] Biddle’s banking system was clearly congruent with the Rothschilds’.

The men who put Biddle in charge of the Second Bank of the United States were none other than “his cronies…whose interests were equally at odds with those of ordinary men and women.”[5] Jackson knew that the rich and powerful were using their power to oppress the weak. They declared that “the mass of the people have more to fear from combinations of the wealthy and professional classes—from an aristocracy which through the influence of riches and talents, insidiously employed, sometimes succeeded in preventing political institutions, however well adjusted, from securing the freedom of the citizen.”[6]

Jackson continued, “The Bank has by degrees obtained almost entire dominion over the circulating medium, and with it, power to increase or diminish the price of property and to levy taxes on the people in the shape of premiums and interest to an amount only limited by the quantity of paper currency it is enabled to issue.”[7]

Jackson was probably the most intrepid man of his era to vigorously oppose a privately-owned central bank because he foresaw that eventually usurers would end up cheating the common people.[8] Jackson knew that fractional reserve banking was a sophisticated way of cheating that always ends up killing the economy. Jackson wanted to restore the economy, and he actually did by simply killing the monster.

The Jacksonians were not against all banking systems but against usurious bankers; Jackson called them “hydra-headed” monsters “eating the flesh of the common man.”[9] Speaking like a fire-and-brimstone preacher, Jackson wrote that such bankers “are a den of vipers and thieves” who will eventually destroy families if no one stops them. “I have determined to rout you out and, by the Eternal, I will rout you out,” he said.[10]

Jackson not only vowed to fight for a return to progress in the economy, but also to expose the usurious activities of bankers who were manipulating the nation for their own ends, meaning he had to get into a political fight with usurers like Nicholas Biddle. Jackson won, and he ended up reducing the national debt to zero!

Contrast that to our day, where the monster rises from the ashes and starts killing the economy and anyone who resists. What is now the national debt? $21 trillion![11] The solution? Jackson had a simple formula: “The bank, Mr. Van Buren, is trying to kill me. But I will kill it.” He killed the bank, and he saved the economy and the American peole.

Jackson, as E. Michael Jones rightly puts it, was a fighter for his entire life. Quoting William Cobbett, Jones says that Jackson was “the bravest man and greatest man now living in this world, or that ever has lived in this world, as far as my knowledge extends.”[12] We need people like that in our day.

In order to save the economy in our day, the monster has to be killed again. If the monster isn’t dead, then rest assured that the national debt will double in the not-so-distant future. We already know who will help double the national debt.

• [1] Myers, Great American Fortunes, Vol. III, 184.
• [2] Ibid., 184-185.
• [3] Ibid., 185.
• [4] Niall Ferguson, The House of Rothschild: Money’s Prophets, 1798-1848 (New York: Penguin, 1998), 373-74.
• [5] H. W. Brands, Andrew Jackson: His Life and Times (New York: Random, 2005), 496.
• [6] Ibid., 498.
• [7] Ibid.
• [8] Simon Johnson and James Kwak, 13 Bankers: The Wall Street Takeover and the Next Financial Meltdown (New York: Vintage, 2011), 14
• [9] Brown, Web of Debt, 1; also Jon Meacham, American Lion: Andrew Jackson in the White
• House (New York: Random House, 2009), 256.
• [10] Brown, Web of Debt, 78.
• [11] Laurence Kotlikoff, “Has Our Government Spent $21 Trillion Of Our Money Without Telling Us?,” Forbes, December 8, 2017.
• [12] E. Michael Jones, Barren Metal: A History of Capitalism as the Conflict Between Labor and Usury (South Bend: Fidelity Press, 2014), 927.

Jonas E. Alexis, Senior Editor

Jonas E. Alexis has degrees in mathematics and philosophy. He studied education at the graduate level. His main interests include U.S. foreign policy, the history of the Israel/Palestine conflict, and the history of ideas. He is the author of the book, Kevin MacDonald’s Metaphysical Failure: A Philosophical, Historical, and Moral Critique of Evolutionary Psychology, Sociobiology, and Identity Politics. He teaches mathematics in South Korea.

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