Jackson’s story highlights America's history of racial divisions, NPR host tells Book Rap

The story that National Public Radio host Steve Inskeep writes in Jacksonland: President Andrew Jackson, Cherokee Chief John Ross and a Great American Land Grab has many similarities to today, Inskeep told a National Press Club Book Rap May 28.

“You are talking about Congress and the Supreme Court. You are talking about lobbyists in Washington and the Religious Right and different racial minorities, and you are talking about a changing country,” he said.

The award-winning “York Project” that Inskeep produced with his colleague Michele Norris indirectly led him to write about the events leading up to the removal of the Cherokee Nation along the “Trail of Tears,” he said.

Norris and Inskeep wanted to embark on the York Project – a series of three in-depth conversations about race – because they recognized that the country was grappling with changing demographics. "Jacksonland" takes place in a time when people were “dealing with this really big question” of putting “different kinds of people” into one country, Inskeep said.

The resulting story is a tale of two men, one of whom was president of the United States and one who was a chief of the Cherokee Nation.

“It is tough to be fair” when writing about the seventh president because Jackson owned slaves, and the forced removal of Native Americans was a “central project” of a “crowded life,” Inskeep acknowledged.

Jackson was also an American hero, winning the Battle of New Orleans and becoming the subject to a song familiar to many.

It is for Jackson’s heroics and his creation of the Democratic Party that he is featured on the $20 bill. Inskeep supports the movement to change the $20 bill.

Although some have called for Jackson’s removal from the $20 bill, Inskeep would prefer to have Jackson on one side and on the other side the other subject of "Jacksonland," John Ross.

Inskeep wrote a recent New York Times oped about his proposal that would put two faces on every bill in an attempt to tell different stories from American history. Each bill would feature “different kinds of people from the same era who relate to each other in some way,” he said.

Inskeep’s presentation included a slide show depicting the two maps that were simultaneously legal in the United States in 1812.

The first map, “the White Man’s map,” shows roughly the borders of many of the states in the southern United States. The second map, the one used by the Native Americans, shows a large portion of the south being split among five Native American nations. The purpose of the Indian removal was to replace the Indian map with the White Man’s map permanently, Inskeep said.

Joseph Luchok, a member of the NPC's Book & Author Committee, introduced Inskeep at the event.