Robert Remini Dies At 91, Renowned Andrew Jackson Biographer Leaves Volumes Of Scholarly Work As Legacy

Robert Remini dies at 91-years-old in Evanston, Ill., leaving behind volumes of scholarly work for generations to study and glean from. The admired historian is best known for his study of Andrew Jackson, which includes an exhaustive three-volume biography that traced how America’s seventh president harnessed his populist appeal to wield unusual executive power during his time in office.

Remini’s daughter, Joan Costello, cited complications from his recent stroke as cause of death.

“No historian knows more about Andrew Jackson than Robert V. Remini,” said John William Ward, a Jackson biographer himself, in a review in The New York Times in 1981.

Mr. Remini, who spent most of his academic career at the University of Illinois, Chicago wrote numerous books about the emerging American democracy in the first half of the 19th century. He has written biographies of Henry Clay, Daniel Webster and John Quincy Adams. Later in his life, as official historian of the House of Representatives, he wrote “The House” which was published in 2006.

“The Life of Andrew Jackson,” which is considered his magnum opus, had been conceived as a single volume. But Mr. Remini concluded that he would need two – one to cover Jackson’s early life and military career, the other to focus on his presidency, from 1829 to 1837. His editor, Hugh Van Dusen, insisted that one would be enough.

Mr. Remini shared, in a 2006 interview with Steve Cully of C-Span, of his editor, “No way, I can’t sell two volumes.”

Mr. Remini kept pressing, nonetheless. When Mr. Van Dusen came to see him to watch the Lyric Opera of Chicago, both men love the opera, Mr. Remini first took him to a fine French restaurant. The historian restated his need for two volumes. The editor initially held his ground. Mozart was instrumental in changing his mind to capitulate to Mr. Remini’s request.

As Mr. Remini reminisces, “We were sitting there in the middle of ‘The Marriage of Figaro’ and he turned to me and he said, ‘You can have two volumes.’ Then, when the presidential years grew to be more than another volume, I needed a third volume. I took him to see ‘Tristan und Isolde’ — and it worked!”

The three volumes of work, which totaled 1,600 well-researched pages, were published in 1977, 1981 and 1984. The last volume won a National Book Award.

Mr. Remini’s portrayal of Jackson was that of an imperfect yet very heroic man. Jackson in Mr. Remini’s lens is a passionate and outsize man on horseback whose victory in the Battle of New Orleans in the War of 1812 helped make him a symbol of American strength and independence. As president, Jackson was a very popular outsider with little patience for the ways things are done in Washington. He butted heads frequently with Congress and left a legacy of violence against the displacement of American Indians.

At a time when historians focused on broad political, intellectual and cultural shifts in their work, Mr. Remini stayed closed to the individual. He stood firm on his view that Jackson was a defender of the common man, however limited the president’s concept of common might have been.