rly 150 years after his Presidency, Andrew Jackson remains a model of the "strong" Chief Executive. Alonso Chappel's painting of the victor of the Battle of New Orleans hints at the "native strength" Nathaniel Hawthorne saw in the general. It "compelled every man to be his tool that came within his reach; and the more cun- ning the individual might be, it served only to make him the sharper tool."
The Wilson Quarterly/Autumn 1985
100
Perhaps no American period has...
Arthur M. Schlesinger, Jr., whose portrayal of Jackson as a 19th- century FDR stirred scholarly de- bates for years. While all agree that the age was (as Daniel Webster said) "full of excitement," historians have differed in their measurements of the general himself.
Few have been as underwhelmed as Samuel Eliot Morison: In The Ox- ford History of the American People,
vol. 2 (Oxford, 1965, cloth; Mentor, 1972, paper), he argues that Jackson "catered to mediocrity" and was so...
public agencies and private institutions
Center for Middle Eastern Studies, Harvard Univ., 1737 Cambridge St., Cam-
bridge, Mass. 02138.36 pp. $4.95. Authors: Mark Heller and Nadav Safran
The history of Middle Eastern politics since World War I1 has shown that tra- ditional monarchies fall when a res- tive, secular middle class reaches a "critical mass." That has happened in Egypt (1952)- Iraq (1958), Yemen (1962), Syria (1963), and Libya (1969). Saudi Arabia could well be next, ac-...