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He nominates Cabinet members, Supreme Court justices, and many other high officials. These nominations must be approved by the Senate However, he can fill thousands of other important posts under his own power.

The President is Commander in Chief of the Armed Forces and commissions officers in all branches of the service.

How is the President elected? The voters of each state choose a number of electors equal to the number of senators and representatives they have in
Congress. The electoral college, made up of the electors from every vote for the candidate supported by the voters of their state When there are more than two presidential candidates and none gets a clear majority,
Congress selects the President from the three candidates who received the most votes.

How long is the President in office? The President is elected to a term of four years. Since Article XXII of the Constitution became effective, in
1951, no President may be elected to more than two terms

When does the President take office? The new President takes office at noon of January 20 of the year following his election, on taking this oath of office: "I do solemnly swear (or affirm) that I will faithfully execute the office of president of the United States, and will, to the best of my ability, preserve, protect, and defend the Constitution of the United
States."

Thomas Jefferson

Jefferson's Reason

Jefferson's words are written and spoken in the USA many times everyday; most often as if the words, phrases and ideas, by themselves alone, constituted some sort of complete statements, some sort of ultimate and final truths about man, world and society. This is a deep, though very popular mistake; one this piece shall try somewhat to amend. The phrases and ideas are admittedly grand, noble and inspiring; most Americans - at least those native born - do not read these words without emotion (due of course to intellectual and emotional culture and education). They are an essential part of what it is to be an "American". Even persons in the USA who may only be educated in the most meager way (and there are unfortunately tens of millions in the USA who are labeled "functionally- illiterate"), often still can at least repeat portions of these famous words quoted above. (This author has observed some of the very poorest, least educated, most socially- and economically - disadvantaged people in
America- whose daily lives are surrounded by chronic poverty; drugs, uncontrolled crime and random violence; joblessness; hopelessness; broken families, etc. - repeat small parts of Jefferson's words, in trying to explain their lives. Jefferson could never have pictured this.)

Jefferson had been raised as a child in the moderate beliefs, doctrines and services of the Anglican Church; it had its original lineage from the
Roman Catholic Church, and generally in America became the Episcopal
Church. It was the established church of the Virginia colony where
Jefferson lived. (Later Jefferson would be influential in disestablishing this church. In other words, he was raised as a boy in the traditions and beliefs of the Christian cosmos with its ancient elements. But this would soon be profoundly challenged. When he, beginning at the age of 16, attended the College of William and Mary, he began a rapid transition from a mild, uncritical world of theological beliefs the Anglican Church is not one of emotional fervor in religion) into the modem critical ideas of the so-called Enlightenment, into the "Age of Reason". And in fact it is necessary to understand not only what Jefferson believed when he wrote
Declaration of Independence at the age of 33, but what he did not believe, in order to clearly recognize the meaning of the "American Creed".

From his personal notebooks - where he wrote ideas which were of real importance to him (they also constitute one of the few sources of insight we have as to the young Jefferson's mind) - we are able to see into his new ideas of the world. Jefferson, while young, was deeply affected by his educational experiences at the College of William and Mary, both by his personal contacts (for example, he came to dine and converse regularly with the Governor of Virginia, whose father had worked for Sir Isaac Newton), as well as by his readings. While only one of the seven faculty members at the
College was not an Anglican clergyman: Dr. William Small of Scotland; it was he who the young Jefferson was most influenced by. Of him Jefferson later wrote that he was "a man profound in most of the useful branches of science...from his conversations I got my first views of the expansion of science and of the system of things in which we are placed." (This is a clear, if later-written, indication of Jefferson's transition from a theological-religious to a natural scientific world-view.)

We know from his notebooks that be was deeply impacted by the writings concerning religious and philosophical themes and history of Lord Boling broke (1678-1751), whose works are a rather tedious, rationalist, empiricist critique of all of the religious and philosophical systems then known of in the world. Jefferson seems, from his note-taking, to have read all of the several volumes at this early period as a student. (Jefferson would eventually come to assemble one of the greatest personal libraries of his time in America; it became the core of the current Library of Congress, for, after the British burnt the first one in 1814, Jefferson sold his personal library of about 6,500 books to the US Congress to rebuild its library. Even with this comparatively small reading in Boling broke,
Jefferson received a broader and more solid intellectual education than today most Americans do after many years of schooling.)

If Jefferson lived uncritically in the Christian cosmos as a child,
Boling broke's critical works (and not only this author) would have deeply affected the Jefferson's young understanding - and this effect in his ideas and philosophy lasted for the rest of his life. So that when we look to see what Jefferson did mean of man and cosmos when he wrote the words still famous around the world today, we find that he did not hold a religious or spiritual view of man and cosmos, as had the early settlers (and still many of Jefferson's contemporaries) of the "age of faith" in American history.
Indeed, Jefferson had rejected most of their ideas and beliefs, believing rather in a material, physical, natural scientific view of man and world.
(He held a Deist view of God, as the original creator, who had ordered nature and life through the "laws of nature", but otherwise was detached from earthly life. And in general he tended to reduce all religion to morality.) Closer to Darwin in spirit and time (of whose later writings he could know nothing of course), Jefferson would later symptomatically place busts of Bacon, Locke and Newton in his self- designed home of Monticello - which is now become a place of American pilgrimage. This is an indication of his lifelong adherence - beginning as a student - to a natural- scientific view of man and world. Jefferson rejected most religions and metaphysical philosophies and their ideas as myths. (He especially disliked for example Plato, St. Paul, Athanasius and Calvin.) Sometimes he viewed them as the deliberate fabrications of priests and kings to manipulate and control their people. Jefferson thought that man's "reason" should rule man.

The “American Creed" and Mankind's Spiritual History

Jefferson's words came to be repeated on e. g. "Fourth of July
Celebrations" throughout America over the years and came to be a sort of creedal statement as to what it means to be "American" - as we saw also in the President's address in November of 1995 But in fact very few Americans are clear about either the original context or meaning of the "American
Creed" - the "cosmos" of these words - or of Jefferson’s rejection of most of the spiritual beliefs which many of these Americans personally hold, commonly blended together with Jefferson's contrasting, antithetically- conceived grand expressions! In other words, these ideas from 1776, still alive today, are in fact only truly to be understood within a scientific- natural view of man, nature, society. God and world. And this is so even though the religious, spiritual and philosophical beliefs of the vast majority of the US people - who often use them in close association with
Jefferson's phrases, when they explain and understand America and life - were in fact rejected by Jefferson before (and after) he wrote them. His human and social ideals were conceived within a natural cosmos of man; they are ideals of man in this world. He had rejected a spiritual cosmos and anthropology to man.

Jefferson would, symptomatically, at the end of his great life (devoted largely to serving America) attempt (unsuccessfully) to exclude the teaching of religion from the University of Virginia which he had brought into being. Contrariwise, most Americans - in their (generally) extremely limited knowledge of even their own nation's history-place together views which Jefferson himself considered to be fundamentally antithetical. The beliefs of a greater spiritual cosmos, e.g. Dante's world's, the spiritual- metaphysical beliefs of man and world, cannot properly be fit inside of
Jefferson's world and his ideals - at least not realistically intellectually. The cosmos of the "American Creed" has its own reality and dignity - but it is not such that all of the ideas which Americans have come to place inside of its famous phrases, can, truthfully and unproblematically, be placed.

In my view - and no one who reads this great man's biography can doubt his devotion and service to America, Jefferson was true to the history, reality and life of mankind in his time. One of his biographers called him
"one of the most devoted disciples of the Age of Reason". (Nostalgia and longing for the "age of faith" - like the time before the "Fall of Man" - is understandable; but the "age of reason" was, if not an inevitability or necessity of history, still nevertheless a new more realistic relationship of man to nature. So that no mere easy return to the past is true or realistic.) He was a realistic man of science; he could not and would not rest in the "age of faith". And, as was characteristic of this and later time, once the Bible and religion were subjected to the "age of reason", the beliefs of the "age of faith" could never be immediately accepted unquestioned again.

While he was close to Darwin in his scientific attitude, he would have deeply lamented Darwin's eventual rejection both of a creator God (chance and natural selection rather than divine design) and the view of man's reason and conscience as special "gifts" (Jefferson) of God to man.

In fact, Darwin and Jefferson (as well as many of their contemporaries of course), were offended by many of the same "unbelievable" aspects of
Christianity and in relationship to Jefferson's phrases as well!

Here is an aspect - perhaps even more fundamental and definitive in some ways than the problem of the popular and noble "American Dream" - of how
Americans are unaware and unconscious of the lineage of their own spiritual and intellectual origin and history. Very, very few even college-graduate
Americans could even begin to give a serious account of the relation-ship between their own personal spiritual beliefs, the cosmos of their "American
Creed" and the intellectual and spiritual history of mankind (e.g. Indo-
European sources, Dionysus the Areopagite's cosmography, Dante's Comedy, even Newton, Laplace, et al). They are simply unaware and uninformed of how
America's "ideas" acutally stand inside of not only European, but
Occidental and world intellectual and spiritual history. Indeed, I am certain that even the current President of the USA himself- himself an active Christian Southern Baptist believer - would find it difficult to give such an account of the relationship of his Baptist religious beliefs, to the natural ideas of man and cosmos in the "American Creed" which he had cited in his November 1995 speech, in which he defined America to the world. But American ideals - the cosmos of the American Creed-do stand within the entire spiritual and intellectual history of Mankind - however little this may be clearly conceived and worried by Americans themselves.

The cosmos of the "American Creed" is a natural, not a spiritual one. The failure to recognize and understand this clearly cannot be of spiritual and intellectual hope, health and help to Mankind. If America is now in many ways leading the world, it should, presumably, know and understand more deeply and clearly what America and her ideals are actually about.

Jacksonian Democracy

Andrew Jackson became the U. S. President in 1828. For weeks thousands of people had been coming to Washington, D. C. to see his inauguration.
Jackson was the hero of common people. He was truly a President of the people.

Jackson was a fighter. He took part in the Revolutionary War. His soldiers called him "Old Hickory" because hickory wood was the toughest thing they knew. When he had moved to Tennessee he served its people as a lawyer, judge, Congressman and senator. But he won his greatest fame as a soldier. Because of his activities in Florida, the U. S. was able to take control of that area from Spain.

Jackson believed in people who loved him. He felt that common people could run the government. This idea has come to be called Jacksonian democracy. These people elected him as their President. He gave them their first chance to really have a part in government.

Not everyone benefited while Jackson was President- Women, black and
Native Americans were not able to take part in gov_ernment. In fact, in some cases, the government worked against them.

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