History Lesson

Then and Now: A Historical Juxtaposition

“What has been will be again, what has been done will be done again; 
    there is nothing new under the sun.” Eccl. 1:9

Part of my job at the plantation is to do research and write articles for newsletters from time to time. Much to the editor's chagrin, I often send them 5 pages in the place of 4 sentences and am forced to essentially synthesize a novel into a tweet.  Thankfully I am not hindered on the blogospheres so I can share my unabridged work with my readers (all 2 of you :)   You may want to consume some strong coffee before reading this one though.

Another four years has passed and once again the United States is back in election mode.    For the next 3 months we will watch as two men vie for the highest office in the land, and the voting citizens will exercise their “inalienable” right to choose who they feel best represents them for the executive branch.  Since the entire country has been amped up for the occasion, it’s no wonder that this quadrennial ritual has been dubbed “the longest folk festival in the world.”  But unlike most folk festivals, the presidential race doesn’t necessarily bring the citizenry together in a unified show of patriotism and freedom.  In fact, it seems that the more recent presidential races have brought out the worst in all of us.  Specifically, the 2012 presidential campaign is being touted by many news organizations and political pundits as being the “nastiest” in history.  Well, recent history, I suppose.  If we think back to Obama v. McCain just four years ago, we’d likely remember the slanders and “misspeakings” of the maverick GOP VP nominee Sarah Palin, especially in the likes of saying Obama was guilty of “palling around with terrorists who would target their own country.”  How about the jabs the Obama campaign made by aligning McCain with Charles Keating or saying that McCain was “erratic” and “out of touch.”  How about the Swiftboat veterans from 2004 or the entire Bush v. Gore campaign of 2000?  These are just a few examples of modern campaigning, and of course the American voting population is often disgusted and annoyed by the time Election Day comes around.  Historian Clinton Rossiter posited back in the mid-90s, “Our manner of choosing the President…has converted the election into a process of decision-making far more centralized, direct, protracted, hot-blooded and popular…than the framers could have imagined in their most restless nightmares.”  So are our modern presidential races just getting nastier and more out-of-line every four years?  Perhaps taking a look back to the 19^th Century will shed some light on our current situation.

Obviously George Washington did not go from town to town throughout the 13 colonies kissing babies and making promises for reform, tax cuts and smaller government.  In fact Washington did not even campaign for the job.  He was chosen by the Continental Congress and he reluctantly accepted the position (he commented on the way to his first inauguration that he felt like “a culprit who is going to the place of his execution.”).  4 years later, things were still going well so he remained in the job until he chose to retire from political life.  This of course set the standard of two 4-year terms as the maximum that a president should hold office (save FDR, of course).  So once Washington left office, the job for president was ripe for the taking, which began the aforementioned quadrennial ritual.   Two founding fathers were nominated for the job from within the Continental Congress.  Thomas Jefferson and John Adams played active roles in the framing of our nation and its separation from the tyranny of King George and Great Britain.  They were both men of intellect, high moral character, and even thought highly of each other (remember what they both said on their death beds!)  So it would seem logical that these two men, though in competition with each other, would run respectful, morally righteous campaigns.  Nope.  The 1796 election was noted as having “widespread use of invective accusations, name-calling, and outright lies.”  In 1800 when the two men ran again, the electoral publications for that year reached “new heights in quantity and invective, disseminated hostile messages.”  An Anti-Jefferson pamphlet from 1800 mentions” that if Jefferson is elected, and the Jacobins get into authority…those morals which protect our lives from the knife of the assassin… [will] be trampled upon and exploded.”  By 1828, the 1800 election would seem like a croquet match.  John Quincy Adams and Andrew Jackson made matters more personal.  Jackson was “denounced for wanting to be emperor and for murder, dueling, and adultery.”  Rachel Jackson was even targeted for “bigamy, adultery, and promiscuity.”  Large broadside publications were distributed in 1828 known as “coffin handbills” which displayed images of more than 20 coffins with the names of men and stories of their demise linked to General Jackson, and accusing him of their wrongful execution.  To counter these ugly attacks, the Jackson campaign accused Adams of being a “monarchist, an effete snob, and procurer of American girls for the Russian czar when Adams was minister to St. Petersburg.”  This presidential race would also introduce the political cartoon depicting Jackson and the Democrats as jackasses (literally and figuratively) which eventually would cement the donkey as the icon for the Democratic Party (kudos to Thomas Nast).  The anti-Jackson sentiment even distributed a fake biography of fictional character Maj. Jack Downing, that posed him as an “intimate Jackson friend and advisor,” all in attempt to ruin Jackson’s character.  All of this seems pretty vile, especially when you compare it to the Bain Capital attacks or failed stimulus ads that we see on television today.  The irony of history, though, is that all of these attacks against Jackson, which we would classify today as being morally reprehensible, “apparently had few harmful effects on his popularity.”

Once the flood-gates for attacks and “mud-slinging” had been opened, the political sphere buzzed with scandal and outrageous claims even into modern day.  We all can recall through history class the illegitimate child of the Grover Cleveland campaign in 1884, the scandals of the Warren G. Harding administration, Watergate, and more recently, Monica Lewinsky.  There’s really been no shortage of fodder for campaign attack advertisements and mud-slinging in all of our modern campaigns, especially in the hyper-partisan political climate that we are experiencing in Congress today.  But just as “there is nothing new under the sun” with negative campaigning, the same is true for political partisanship.

It’s quite obvious that people from different walks of life or regions would have varying political opinions of how things ought to be done concerning the government.  Of course this fact of life encompassed the Constitutional Convention, with the gentlemen taking a partisan stance over the charter’s ratification, i.e. the Federalists and the Anti-Federalists.  Whether the lines are drawn over difference of opinion or political power struggle, even as soon as Washington’s first term had said lines were already blurred.  Alexander Hamilton and the Federalists butted heads with Jefferson and his Republicans over national vs. state sovereignty, which side to choose with in the French Revolution, and who should constitute the electorate.  Over time these divisions would shift into other divisive issues, would jump from one party to the other, and would be revered or discarded as the times dictated.  The so-called “Era of Good Feeling” from 1816 to 1824 gave a slight reprieve to hyper-partisan campaigns, but this time period was just the calm before the storm of the 1824 campaign.  Partisanship, of course took a different form during the Civil War and Reconstruction, and once the issue of North vs. South had vanished, partisan politics returned to their usual sides with taxation, the size and power of government, social issues etc.  Only in national crises like WW2 or 9/11 does partisanship take the back seat to the common good, and once those issues have been resolved so too does partisanship make a comeback.

The rise and fall of activism within each party would come and go as well.  We all marvel at the impact that the tea party had on the mid-term elections of 2010 and how it has impacted individual states, but the tea partiers are just an echo of the Jacksonians of the 1820s and the Whigs and No-Nothings of the 1840s and 50s.  Jackson’s supporters rallied behind their jilted candidate over what he called the “corrupt bargain” that lost him the election.  For the next four years, Jackson and his supporters did everything in their power to oppose the Adams administration and actively campaigned against him even in non-election years.  This faction also fought for the increase in the electorate as a whole, and by 1828 all states in the except one chose electors by popular vote (which of course made Jackson happy considering he had won the popular vote in 1824).  For the next 30 years, America would experience a dramatic evolution in partisan politics and activism the likes of which had never been experienced on American soil.   Political parties began to seek out “disenfranchised” voters in efforts to expand the popular vote and to bring them aboard the band wagon.  Campaigns began to organize rallies, marches, and sometimes protests in order to fire up their supporters.  This type of political strategy was dubbed “hurrah” campaigning by historian David Potter, and of course was the predecessor of “grass-roots” movements and the Tea Party of today.  Of course the Jacksonians played on Jackson’s war accomplishments and propped him up as being someone more like the people he represented; “a simple, brave and pious frontiersman” who wanted nothing more than to take back the country from the control of the rich elite that included the “effete and corrupt” John Quincy Adams (apparently Jackson was the 99% of his day).  Of course in order to pull off a campaign of this magnitude, Jackson required a highly organized political body that followed a structure on local, state, and national levels.  His supporters also realized the importance of the press, of which possibly half a million dollars in raised campaign funds was allotted for.  Countless rallies and celebrations were formed all around the country in support of “Old Hickory” and by the time the election had ended, the efforts of the Jacksonians had paid off.  Jackson won 56 percent of the popular vote and had 178 electoral votes to Adams’ 83.  The presidential campaign would never be the same since. 

Although this new style of “hurrah” campaigning was deemed “distasteful, debauched and demagogic” by the Washington establishment, it would be proven to be a winning formula.  Ironically, the opposition to the Jacksonian Democrats would prove this point in the 1840 election.  The Whigs developed in 1840 and ran the Log Cabin campaign of William Henry Harrison to cries of “Tippecanoe and Tyler too!”  What started as an attack on the character of William Henry Harrison was reversed into one of most iconic political images in history.  Using the same technique of the Jacksonians, the Whigs rallied behind the war hero and everyman that was William Henry Harrison who was born in a log cabin and preferred hard cider to elitist White House champagne. With party sentiment at an all-time high, the 1840 election was like no other presidential election in history.  “It was the first presidential campaign in which two competitive nationally organized political parties battled one another at nearly every level.  Both the Democratic and Whig parties were established and evenly matched in many states and even in local areas.”  The sheer bombastic enthusiasm and size of the Whigs shocked the Democrats who could not understand how these people had them “outmaneuvered.”  Subsequently, voter turnout had risen from 57.8 percent of adult white males in 1836 to 80.2 percent in 1840.  Historians have since come down on the Whig campaign as being “all form and no substance” which of course is often a criticism of the modern Tea Party.   They have also accused the Whigs as having ulterior motives: the ruse was established so that the Whigs could capture “the government away from the people to enhance manufacturing, banking, and commercial interests.”  Whether the Tea Party has ulterior motives has yet to be seen, but compared to the fanfare of the Whigs of 1840, the tea partiers seem like attendees at a chess match.  After Harrison’s defeat of Van Buren in 1840, the standard for presidential campaigning had been solidified.  The political ideologies, however, would shift from the national level to individual states and their specific stance on slavery, which of course would lead America and its presidents into the Civil War and beyond.

            The quadrennial ritual is still running strong in 2012.  The electorate takes part in this ritual in different levels of activism, organization and participation.  The methods of campaigning, like most of everything today, has become highly digital, and very few tangible items are created for the purpose of campaigning (save for bumper stickers).  Our modern politicians have focused on the television advertisement as the crux of their strategy since the majority of Americans own or have access to a television.  It’s a lot easier, today, for a politician to reach a larger audience of people through one T.V. commercial than for his party to mail letters or hold/sponsor large rallies and parades (though they still will have the occasional town hall meeting).  With voter turn-out staying steady at around 60%, it would take a lot of effort (and money) for either party to ignite a base to the zeal of the Whigs of 1840, so it makes sense that the parties would choose to focus on television or internet advertising (all of which can be done in air conditioned buildings far removed from the voting public).  Really the only thing that has changed is the people’s ideas on rhetoric and political correctness in the public sphere.  There’s a civility that exists now that was highly regarded during the “Era of Good Feeling.”  You can’t necessarily call your opponent a liar without facing return accusations of slander (even if said opponent actually lied about something and you have proved it!)  Basically each candidate molds himself to specific ideologies of his party and lives and acts within the confines of what is popularly accepted within their party.  This really is the only difference in our political landscape today than the politics of years gone by (and that’s mostly a cultural phenomenon brought about by post-modernism - but that’s a subject for an entirely different article).  So even though the avenues of modern presidential campaigns have shifted, the premise is still the same, and since the premise is still the same, the same tactics will be used again and again.  Super PACs are yesterday’s partisan newspapers, the Tea Party is the new Whigs, and mud-slinging will always exist.  Let’s just take pride in our modern civility, and try not to think about how much money is being raised for TV commercials that could be used to strengthen the economy or pay down the national debt.  And the next time you see an attack ad for either candidate, just be glad that neither of them is accusing the other of pimping for Putin.             
 

All quotations come from CNN.com’s coverage of the 2008 presidential campaign and from

Melder, Keith. Hail to the Candidate: Presidential Campaigns from Banners to Broadcasts. Washington D.C.: Smithsonian Institution Press, 1992. Print.