These days, Martin Van Buren is mostly remembered as the balding 19th century president with

mutton chops and a funny name, but spent some time speaking with Dr. Mark Cheatham, professor

of history at Cumberland University, and director of the Martin Van Buren papers.

And you'll come away understanding, not only did Van Buren pull together the coalitions

that formed the Democratic Party, the oldest continuous

political party in the history of the world, he was also the architect of the modern party system

under which we've been living for close to 200 years. On this episode of The Road to Now,

Martin Van Buren and the Age of Jackson.

I'm Bob Crawford, and I'm Ben Sawyer, and this is the road to now.

Bob, why Martin Van Buren?

Well, the eighth president of the United States was not the best president, and he certainly doesn't deserve to rank up in the top 20,

probably even. But if you look at the man's life as a whole, he accomplished something

truly lasting that he established the party mechanism, the way that a state party, there's these little committees throughout the

state and they report to the chairman of the party in the capital of the state, and really the

idea that a party should be connected not regionally, not regional coalitions, but ideological coalitions,

keeping everybody on the same page,

the fine nuances of the machinations of politics,

making little deals here and there to get legislation passed.

We owe a lot of that to Martin Van Buren.

And the Democratic Party, the oldest continuous political party in the history of the world.

So Martin Van Buren definitely deserves our study.

And more importantly, the age of Jackson, the age of Andrew Jackson, under which he served and under which

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