“One Day He Will Emerge as Our Greatest President—After Washington”: Remembering Andrew Johnson, 1932–50

By the 1930s, recent publications and commemoration events had “vindicated” Johnson, positioning him as an uniquely American hero, a symbol of national reconciliation, and one of the Democratic Party's most notable statesmen. It was a stark reversal on nearly a half-century of Johnson being castigated an accident, a drunkard or a traitor, in much of the public discourse. Johnson’s descendants had led the effort to correct what they saw as partisan, often-fraudulent accounts of their ancestor’s life. Upon her father’s death in 1932, Johnson’s great-granddaughter, Maragaret Johnson Patterson, assumed the role of the former-president’s chief-booster. She helped organize commemoration events, corresponded with historians, and propagated a characterization of Johnson as a working-class man who understood the deprivations that many Americans were experiencing. Johnson’s historical resurgence helped facilitate the federal government’s purchase of his Tennessee homestead and eventual establishment of the Andrew Johnson National Historic Site, and later MGM’s release of the motion picture, Tennessee Johnson (1942), which, riddled with historical inaccuracies, portrays a courageous Johnson securing white manhood suffrage and doing battle against a devilish Thaddeus Stevens. But Johnson’s star would fade by the mid-1940s as Franklin Roosevelt’s popularity placed him as the most popular Democratic president. Relying primarily on heretofore unexamined archival materials belonging to Johnson’s descendants, this paper examines how Johnson’s brief vindication began to wane well before the modern Civil Rights movement, as his supporters tried to rectify his small-government ideals with the New Deal’s expansion of federal power.