Talk Elections

Elections are what bring us all together at this site. We love the hand shaking, back slapping, ass-ahem-baby kissing that makes an election the greatest show on earth. There is no denying that of all elections the quadrennial calumny of the United States Presidential contest is the gaudiest and grandest of all elections in this Land of the Free.

However, which elections were the best and which were critical and commercial flops? The United States has experiences fifty-seven national contests. Some are historic battles of ideologies, others a game of Trivial Pursuit while some were nothing more than flops.

In this list I will count down all fifty-seven of these elections from the most mundane to the most exciting. In this list I will not take the ideology or politics of the winner into account. For example, in a comparison of the 1836 election and the 1912 election I much prefer the victor in 1836. However, there is no denying that 1912 has many more intriguing, unique and entertaining factors. Thus, even though the victor of 1912 is not to my ideological liking the election is an excellent one that will attain a high ranking.

Now I am off to analyze the campaign trail. After all, while elections may very well make history and alter the policy of a nation we all know what they are supposed to do: entertain us.

This crazy train starts out with a leisurely caboose ride. In 1820 the nation was riding high on a time of unchecked pork barrel politics and internal “improvement” spending spearheaded by the mild-mannered President James Monroe of Virginia. Leading the nation in a time known as “The Era of Good Feelings” Declaring that political parties were “incompatible with free government” Monroe had sought in his first term to coopt members of the defunct Federalist Party into the Republican fold. Known to some as the “Young Washington”, Monroe’s one-party rule produced a lull in election action but not in political troubles.

The main reason why the election of 1820 is such a bore is that it could have been an incredible contest if there had been any formal opposition to Monroe and Vice-President Daniel Tompkins. In 1819 the heavy borrowing and inflationary monetary policies of the U.S. government brought about a specie strain that led to the Panic of 1819. This first great economic struggle could very well have caused an issue for Monroe’s reelection had he faced an opponent willing to run against the Second Bank of the United States and the lose money policies of the Madison and Monroe governments. Additionally, the sectional trouble caused by the Missouri Compromise could also have led to an anti-slavery candidacy from a Northern or Western candidate to oppose Monroe. Alas, there was no vessel and so Monroe, a former wily politico turned pacific executive, was reelected by the margin of 227 to 1.

The reason why this election is the most boring in American history is the lack of good drama. This is not to say that there was no drama in the election. There simply was no memorable drama. There was the surprise vote for John Quincy Adams from Baptist lay preacher William Plummer of New Hampshire. While it would be nice to believe the story that he voted for Adams in 1820 in order to ensure that only Washington was unanimously elected close scrutiny has shown this dramatic response is quite tepid. It appears that Plummer voted for Adams because he thought Monroe to be a “mediocrity” and Tompkins to be “negligent” of his duties as vice-president. These are very logical conclusions and while logic is nice it is hardly dramatic.

There was also a brief struggle over whether or not Missouri’s electoral votes would be counted. This came down to the technicality that Missouri was not actually a state when it cast its electoral votes for Monroe. New Hampshire proved itself to once again be the only state that wanted to make this election interesting when Congressman Arthur Livermore of the Granite State raised his voice in protest of the Show Me State’s electoral votes. The Senate, however, destroyed all drama by passing a resolution allowing for the state’s electoral votes to count provided they did not change the outcome of the election. This could have been a great controversy had the election been so close that the state’s three electoral votes been the linchpin for a presidential victory. However, this was not the case and is merely a legal footnote in the history of elections.

Monroe’s near unanimous reelection was a major personal victory for him and for his one-party state. If the election of 1820 is to teach us anything we should take from it two lessons. The first is that one-party states are either boring or tyrannical. Sometimes they are both! The second lesson we should take is that while political parties can be annoying they make elections a heck of a lot more fun.

Not much to comment on, but I do intend on following this series until its conclusion.

Will Definantly continue reading this.

This is wonderful. Count me as another person who will closely follow.

Thomas Jefferson’s reelection campaign was hardly a dramatic or interesting election. His first term as president is fascinating, no doubt. In his first term he had slashed taxes, reduced Adam’s bloated navy, destroyed the Additional Army, purchased Louisiana, increased free trade on the Atlantic and managed to sever the close alliance of the Barbary States. While the constitutionality of Louisiana and the mission to Tunisia, as well as the later Lewis and Clark Expedition, stands on shaky ground the American people always seem to love constitutional violations. In 1804 President Jefferson was highly popular and looked forward to a sunny second term.

Jefferson had also spent his first term dedicated to coopting Federalists into the Republican Party. “We are all Federalists, we are all Republicans” he waxed eloquent in his first inaugural address, one of only two public speeches he would make as chief executive. If only the current occupant of the White House was so economical with his words. Jefferson rejected highly partisan judicial appointments and broadly interpreted the constitutional powers of his office in order to appeal to those Federalists excluded by the High Federalists and the Essex Clique. Thus, the Federalist Party was a weak shadow of its former self when it nominated former Minister to France Charles Cotesworth Pinckney for president and former Senator Rufus King for vice-president. Pinckney, who was once mocked in a sermon by the mercurial Reverend Timothy Dwight, never stood a chance outside of Connecticut.    

This scenario makes for one boring election. Landslides are usually boring. They are like when the Miami Heat plays the Detroit Pistons. It is fun to watch a beat down for a little while but pretty soon you turn off the TV and open up a book on moral philosophy. This is not to say that there were not some exciting and dramatic moments in this election but none of them had anything to do with the ultimate outcome.

One amazing moment of 1804 was, of course, the field of honor at Weehawken. The Burr-Hamilton Duel was attached to an election in 1804, just not the presidential campaign. President Jefferson had already dropped Burr (“The American Cataline”) for the jovial, doddering Governor George Clinton of New York. As all students of history know, Burr shot Hamilton over Hamilton’s machinations against him in his ill-fated quest for the New York governor’s post. The story of the duel and Burr’s later dreams of an American Empire stretching from Mobile Bay to Monterrey is one of the epics of American History. However, it plays very little to no role in the reelection of Jefferson. In fact, it played no role at all. Thus, this grand drama has nothing to do with Mr. Jefferson’s reelection.

There is also the story of Jefferson’s gunboats. The Federalists mocked Jefferson for his gunboat fleet. Gunboats were far cheaper to maintain than any ship-of-the-line so Jefferson, a penny pincher in public and a spendthrift if private, obviously fell in love with them. Fifteen gunboats floated across the Eastern seaboard to defend the nation from piracy. In September 1804, a terrible hurricane off the coast of Savannah, Georgia, picked up Gunboat Number One and tossed it into a cornfield. The proprietor of the cornfield actually tried to sue the government for damages! The Federalist campaign mocked Jefferson by stating that he had finally found a good use for his gunboat: as a scarecrow. While these gibes made victory starved Federalists smirk and giggle they are merely fun historical trivia. They added nothing to the campaign itself and added no drama to the final outcome.

A third interesting story that came from the election was the scurrilous charges that Jefferson had sired children from one of his female slaves. In September 1802, political journalist James T. Callender, a disaffected former ally of Jefferson, wrote in a Richmond newspaper that Jefferson had for many years "kept, as his concubine, one of his own slaves." "Her name is Sally," Callender continued, adding that Jefferson had "several children" by her. Jefferson never commented on these accusations and Sally, who could not write, never recorded any letters or documentation to back up the story. Callender, who was found drowned in less than three inches of water in 1803, was a well-known political crank and scandal monger. While the faltering Federalist campaign tried to make “Black Sal” a campaign issue it never gained traction. This was not the first time that base rumor mongering would be used in an election but many times such dark tactics can dramatically effect an election. In 1804 this was not the case.

The main reason why the election of 1804 is the second most boring presidential election is that there was no drama. While Jefferson and Pinckney are “big names” in American history neither ran an active campaign. Unlike in 1796 and 1800 both parties were docile and tame. There was no incredible politicking for control of state legislatures or wonderfully juicy accusations of atheism and monarchism. The campaign was bland and calm. That makes for a nice tea party but a downright dull presidential campaign.            

It may have been pointless, but it was the first election under the new rules.

The rule change made absolutely no difference in the outcome of the election. While the addition of the 12th Amendment made a difference in other races it is not really all that consequential to the election of 1804. Thus, 1804 ranks as #56 on the list. 

1816 ends up at the number fifty-five spot for more or less the same reason that 1820 and 1804 are ranked low: it was a one-party show. James Monroe’s first election to the presidency boasted more struggle than the previous two elections, no doubt. However, the struggle was primarily in the Democratic-Republican caucus. This makes for one important episode but when compared to elections to come this one blip of excitement does not even register on the scales.

The end of the Madison Administration ushered in a civil, silent election. The War of 1812 was over without victory, the Second Bank of the United States was in full swing and the nation was slowly recovering from the economic disaster of the war. One would think that in such an environment a strong Federalist challenge may well have arisen against Little Jemmie’s government. The great trouble was that the Federalist’s opposition to “Mr. Madison’s War” and the meeting of secessionist High Federalists at the Hartford Convention had made the party as dead as their founder, Hamilton. Federalism was no longer even relevant in Massachusetts or Connecticut. “Our two great parties have crossed over the valley and have taken possession of each other’s mountain,” former Federalist President John Adams wrote. Yes, the Federalists were no longer a legitimate threat to anyone, not even to themselves.

The great drama of the campaign was the Democratic-Republican Congressional Caucus. This could very well have been an incredible battle of egos. Potential candidates for the Democratic-Republican nomination included Monroe, Secretary of War William H. Crawford, House Speaker Henry Clay, New York Governor Daniel D. Tompkins and former Senator and the Hero of New Orleans Andrew Jackson. Clay, Jackson and Tompkins bowed to the inevitable. While New York Republicans grumbled about the “Virginia Dynasty” all they could do was grumble. Crawford ran a spirited race in which he questioned Monroe intelligence and vision, but the well-liked Monroe was always the front-runner. The Congressional Caucus of March 1816 was close but the Monroe was the winner by a decently wide margin. The overwhelming selection of Tompkins for vice-president concluded what could have been a wild, crazy caucus.

The Federalists failed to even nominate a candidate for the general contest. Senator Rufus King was nominally selected as the candidate but he knew from the very beginning that he was a sure loser. Long before the electoral votes were counted in December 1816 King had commented: “Federalists of our age must be content with the past.” It is to be applauded that Senator King realized the fight was lost but that does not add to the joy of the campaign.

The contentious fight for the Democratic-Republican Party nod proved to be quite anti-climactic. So too did Senator King’s pathetic candidacy. Monroe, the only man to serve as both secretary of state and secretary of war at the same time, coaxed to victory without writing and letter of issuing a statement. The main reason why this election is ranked low is because it was yet another one party romp. The one party romp may well have been interesting had more legitimate candidates jockeyed for the Republican presidential nod but that did not occur. While there was a controversy over whether or not Indiana’s electoral votes would count the issue was worked out quickly and with no issue. Additionally, it is not as if the 3 electoral votes from the Hoosier States mattered for the final outcome.

I believe that the former Federalist newspaper the Boston Daily Advertiser put the election of 1816 the best: “We do not know, nor is it very material, for whom the Federalist electors will vote.” John Randolph of Virginia further commented that amongst the people there was a, ‘Unanimity of indifference if not approbation.”        

“The era of big government is over,” President Bill Clinton declared in his 1995 State of the Union Address. With the help of known troll Dick Morris he was able to trick the nation into actually thinking what he said was true. Yes, Clinton is one of the master politicians of our time and that is the reason why the 1996 election- his triumphant reelection- ranks as #54 on the list.

The election of 1996 could have been the Waterloo for Clinton and his curious Little Rock Crew. His wife had been temporarily silenced by her health care beat down, Clinton had fumbled Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell and the Republicans were in a post-Poppy Bush resurgence. A strong Republican presidential nominee running on eloquent conservative, free market principles could very well have evicted Bubba and his buds from the Oval Office. It was the Grand Old Party’s golden opportunity to settle the score with their most successful and hated rival. They gave the world Bob Dole.

The main reason why 1996 falls into the #54 spot is that the election was not very exciting. There were no great moments of drama, no epic arguments and no real discussion of contentious issues. Dole and Clinton agreed on many core issues: national defense, education, gay rights and welfare reform. Dole, when not talking about himself in the third person or stage diving, muttered about a 15% tax cut but never explained how he would get this tax cut done, how he would pay for it or how this loss of revenue would affect his pledge to balance the budget. In the 53rd quadrennial contest Dole more or less proved that he was a relic of the 1960s. He referenced the Brooklyn Dodgers as a baseball team and appeared sleepy at the debates. Clinton rarely fell below 50% in the public opinion polls and led Dole in different tracking polls by margins ranging from nine to fifteen points. At no point was the election’s results in doubt and Bob Dole did little to fight back.

Massive landslide reelection victories do not naturally deem an election boring. In 1972 and 1964, for example, upstart senators were able to manipulate party rules in order to surpass establishment candidates. Even though their nominations led to the incumbent winning by a wide margin the election is still thrilling because one was able to witness the meteoric rise and noble decline of the upstart underdog. In 1996, Pat Buchanan was the underdog who had managed to beat Dole in the New Hampshire Primary. Beaten in New Hampshire in all three of his quests for the presidency, Dole commented that he realized how the Granite State got its name: “It’s tough to crack.” Buchanan, like Ron Paul in 2012, attempted to use the machinations of party to attain the nomination but was stopped time and time again by establishment party attorneys and bigwigs. A Pat Buchanan vs. Bill Clinton race would have showcased real differences between candidates and made the election of 1996 a memorable race. Buchanan would have won 39% of the popular vote and 60 electoral votes but the race would have been a real difference. It would have offered the American people a choice, not an echo.

H. Ross Perot was not even able to add flavor to the campaign’s stoic soup. His Reform Party was plagued by intraparty rivalries and laws which set up obstacles for third parties. Perot was unable to attend the debates because the League of Women Voters had had their power over the debates snatched from them by the cold, iron grasp of a major party amalgamation known as the Commission on Presidential Debates. Despite lawsuits, the CPD set the bar so high that Perot was not allowed to talk straight to the American people as he had in 1992. Plagued by ill health and a party that was not totally united behind the Lilliputian leader, Perot was a nonentity in the 1996 race.

In the end the main reason why 1996 is ranked as #54 on the list is because it offered no surprises and took no chances. The establishment Republican ran a lackluster campaign against a popular incumbent. The economy was decent and the nation was not embroiled in any unpopular wars so the incumbent won by a large margin. It was a “nice” little election. Yawn.      

Sure 1996 is boring, but number 54?

1936, 1956, 1924, and a few other national elections are infinitely worse.

I would hardly call 1924 and the Klanbake a boring election, even if most of the excitement was at the DNC.

Of all the re-match elections, this is your pick? 1832, 1900, 1944, 1940, 1956, and 1984 are all worse/ more boring.

1832 had Henry Clay losing, something that never gets old. If you mean 1828, where-in Jackson came back to beat Adams after the election four years earlier, that was pretty epic. 1900 is a McKinley victory, which is never boring. 1940 saw the British sabotage of an American political party's convention and its sequel took place with the backdrop of one of the most epic conquests of human history. 1956 and 1984 at least had good results, and the 1984 Dem primaries would've been pretty cool to see play out.

What is this?  I don't even.  . . . . .

1832 was pretty much a showcase of the then new political alignment in America.  THe narrative was entirely about Jackson vs. "OMG EVIL BANKERS!", something that isn't really boring at all.

1900 had the return of William J. Crazyman Bryan and was basically a AMERICA RULES! campaign on the GOP side.  While it might've been a cakewalk, both sides were out in style, something that can't be said about 1996.

1944. . .. . are you f***ing high?  Did you forget World War II existed?

1940. . . . okay, a little dull compared to 1944, but the backdrop of the election is certainly notable.

1956. . .. . okay, I actually might agree with you on this one.  In fact, 1956 and 1996 could be twins.

1984. . . . Reagan's re-election.  The campaign was hardly "boring".

I don't remember the 1996 election campaign.  That's how "boring" it was.

I will get two updates in tonight. Thank you for your patience. I teach special education and have had a huge amount of IEP paperwork for the start of the month. You guys are awesome for waiting.

George Washington’s triumphant reelection in 1792 is ranked as #53 because it was a great deal of humdrum with only one major moment of dramatic suspense. This in itself is a disappointment because the emergence of the First Party System in the United States promised far better than what the people were given.

Haunted and depressed by divisions in his government, President George Washington had intended to refuse to seek reelection. The emergence of Hamilton’s Federalists and Jefferson’s Republicans had caused Washington much torment. While he leaned strongly toward Hamilton and the Federalists, the general hoped that the emergence of factions could be nipped in the bud. This was not to be and Washington’s own strong support for the National Bank, tariffs, whiskey taxes, debt consolidation and other Hamiltonian centralization plans did little to heal the divisions.

The race for president in 1792 was never in doubt. Washington’s popularity was no longer at its height as it was in 1789, but he was still the hero of the Revolution. His reelection was never in doubt. The reason why 1792 could have been a great race lies in the vice-presidential contest. With Washington assured one vote from every elector the second electoral vote was the one to fight over. Vice-President John Adams assumed that he would be the easy choice for vice-president. In a system with no parties this very well would have been the case. However, anti-Hamiltonians put forward three opposition candidates to the stout vice-president. Governor George Clinton of New York was the principal anti-Hamiltonian vice-presidential candidate but five votes were given to Thomas Jefferson and Senator Aaron Burr. Anti-Federalists vice-presidential candidates managed to win 55 electoral votes to Adam’s 70. Upon reading the results Adams later commented to his wife Abigail, “Damn them, damn them, damn them.” The race for vice-president was far closer than the crotchety Adams had expected or wanted.

The vice-presidential contest is a testament to the fact that there was obvious resistance to the Washington-Hamilton system. The fact that George Clinton, with no campaigning or even a letter stating he would accept electoral votes, managed to win 50 electoral votes shows that the Federalist system was propped up strongly on the shoulders of Washington Rex. Washington chose to run for reelection in 1792 out of fear that a partisan campaign for the top office would weaken the new republic and toss the system into civil war. It is in the opinion of this writer that Washington truly feared that the Federalist system that Hamilton had built would collapse if he was not there to be the face on the billboard of the unpopular programs. The general and the president was to be proven correct when Adams became president.

1792 is an election that could have been a great one but in the end was tame and calm. That is to be expected when George Washington was a candidate but that does nothing to further its place in campaign history or, more importantly for me, the ratings.

The election of 1808 winds up at the number fifty-two on the list. This marked the last campaign of Jefferson’s America and the old First Party System. The Federalist Party was given a major shot in the arm by Thomas Jefferson’s unpopular Embargo Act. Throughout his presidency Jefferson had made it a habit to ignore his classical liberal roots. The Louisiana Purchase, the Lewis and Clark Expedition and the First Barbary War were all highly unconstitutional. However, they all pale in comparison to the Embargo Acts. Known as the Damnbargo in Federalist New England, the embargo betrayed all of Jefferson’s work in his first term to encourage free trade and instead forced recession and trade war onto the United States. The arrests of innocent merchants trying to make a living only reminded Americans of the Federalist regime of John Adams and his arrest of innocent printers. The Federalist Party, which was on the ropes in 1804, was given a boost by the unpopular new law.

The fact that the Federalists had an unpopular law in their favor is one of the reason why the election of 1808 places at fifty-two on the list. The Federalists, in theory, could have made a triumphant return to the White House on the back of Jefferson’s economic fumble. However, this was not to be the case because the Federalists were old hat by 1808. The candidate they produced was a nationally famous also-ran. Former American Ambassador to France Charles Cotesworth Pinckney (of XYZ Scandal fame back in the year 1798!) was informally selected as the Federalist Party presidential nominee and former New York Senator Rufus King was selected as his running-mate for the second time in a row. The same uninspired ticket from 1804 was hardly enough to energize Federalist candidates for state assembly in New York or state voters in Pennsylvania. The party of Hamilton was a as dead as its founder.

1808, however, was not a completely anti-climactic contest. The 1808 Democratic-Republican Caucus was a bitter affair that would spill over into the general election and the electoral vote canvass in December 1808. Secretary of State James Madison, Jefferson’s long-time protégé and acolyte, was the front-runner for the party’s presidential nod but faced opposition from sitting Vice-President George Clinton and popular former Virginia Governor James Monroe. The aging Clinton, who secretly yearned for retirement, was put forward as the candidate in opposition to the “Virginia Dynasty.” Clinton did not actively seek the nomination and would not be given it. Monroe actively wrote letters to congressmen stating his interest in the presidential nomination but this small time campaigning also proved to be useless. Madison had spent the better part of a year convincing Republicans in Congress that he was the choice of Jefferson, who was still the idle of the Democratic-Republican brass. The final tally for the presidential nod at the caucus was hardly close: Madison 83, Monroe 3, Clinton 3.

On the day in December when the electoral votes were cast Madison won an easy victory over his hapless Federalist challengers. Pinckney’s ability to win almost all of New England, Delaware and three electors from North Carolina are a testament to an election battle that might have been. Had Chief Justice John Marshall tossed his hat into the presidential ring perhaps a stronger race would have happened in 1808? It is to be noted also that there were some divisions in the Democratic-Republican fold. George Clinton attained 6 electoral votes from his native New York while Monroe won over 4,000 popular votes from his native Virginia. While these defections did not manage to make a difference in the overall election these defections are to be noted as factors that may have caused trouble to Jefferson’s party had the Federalist Party had a stronger ticket.

In the end the reason why the election of 1808 is ranked at number fifty-two is because it fell at the end of the First Party system. The Damnbargo and the anger from New England gave it some drama as did the opposition to Madison at the convention but in the end it had to fall in the bottom part of the list. The election offered much promise but in the end delivered very little action.     
           

Both 1940 and 1944 were pretty easy victories for FDR, and it was very obvious he was going to win in both years. Wilkie and Dewey did better than Landon, but there wasn't much of a challenge between the two elections. Besides, who would, as Lincoln put it, switch horses in the middle of the stream?

1832 had Jackson win easily against someone who made a deal to keep Jackson out of office, if anything the previous election was the re-alignment.

1900 was another failed attempt by William J. Bryan. I guess this should be a little higher for Theodore Roosevelt, though.

1956 of course is 1996 in 40 years; a peacetime election with a popular president.

Jesus couldn't beat Reagan in 1984. Reagan was at the height of his popularity at that point. The Democrats couldn't get anyone good enough to oppose Reagan.

Also, since Rooney posted again, 1792 has got to be one of the least important too.

Again, I'll re-quote my post:


I'm not contending these are Oscar nominations here, just that they don't fall into 1996 territory. An argument that is extremely easy to make if you aren't blind/deaf.

On 1832 I was referring more to the explosion of media involvement in the race compared to the previous ones.  THere was a lot more money and a lot more inventive politicking in the 1832 race than in 1828.  THe realignment began in 1828, obviously, but the usage of open ad politics exploded in 1832 when Jackson ran for re-election.

1940 and 1944, just because a race is easy doesn't mean it is boring.  The FDR campaign commercials, like the "HEll Bent Till Election" cartoon are classics.  Whatever you may say about how easy these were, there was still a lot of interests in the races and there was still a lot of innovation (something you seem to be missing in justifying that these somehow belong in the same category as 1996).

1984 is memorable not because of any competition between Mondale and Reagan (there wasn't) but because it was a landmark election that showed the success of conservatism.  It is the Republican 1936, full stop.  And the media run up to election day was pretty interesting compared to say . . . . 1996.  Don't forget the Democratic Primaries, that brought memorable appearances by Gary Hart, Jesse Jackson, and crew.

Again, your reasonings, which seem to only involve analysis of electoral results and not the actual history behind the races, are flawed if you seriously think any of these (besides 1956) were as bad/boring as 1996.  1996 brought nothing, NOTHING, of interest.  If you think it did you either don't remember it (like everyone else), come from a town where the local student races generate a load of publicity, or thought Gigli should've won an Oscar.

Coming in at number fifty-one is the last election of the Reagan Years. In 1988 the United States was given an uninspiring choice between a career resume builder and a liberal Northeastern governor. The election was one in which it appeared that it would emerge as a climactic struggle between Reagan’s America and the days of Roosevelt and Johnson. In the end it turned into a trivial pursuit.

By 1988 President Reagan was a great deal like Thomas Jefferson in 1808: personally popular but dogged by policy failures and political scandal. While Reagan’s inflationary spending and tax policies continued to prop up the economy the Republicans could continue to claim that it was “morning in America.” Vice-President George H.W. Bush, the son of a senator and a walking resume in a suit, scrambled to claim the mantle of the Reagan Revolution. Conservatives at the National Review sighed at the thought of the man who called Reagan’s economic program “voodoo economics” leading the crusade to vindicate supply side theories. Senator Bob Dole, Congressman Jack Kemp, former acting president Al Haig and the Reverend Marion “Pat” Robertson (as well as Du Pont of Delaware and some others) attempted to steal the Gipper’s crown from his nerdy veep, but in the end the GOP Primary was fairly tame. Following Dole’s win in Iowa, which is hardly that important to winning the nomination in retrospect, Bush steamrolled his neophyte opponents and won the nomination in New Orleans. It is to be applauded that Bush selected Senator Dan Quayle as his running-mate and in doing so introduced a little anarchy to what was a fairly even headed Republican primary. This adds a little spice to the campaign soup. One also needs to applaud Bush’s “Mr. Rogers” like reading of the Peggy Noonan speech he was given. The “read my lips line” is a classic no matter how silly it sounds.

This campaign was greatly helped by the adorable efforts of the Democrats. In 1984 the Reverend Jesse Jackson had run a spirited campaign for the presidential nomination and was an early leader for the party’s presidential nod. Former Senator Gary Hart could easily have made the Democratic Primary as boring as the GOP contest had he been able to control his libido. Thank God that most politicians have no self-control. The meltdown which Hart was kind enough to show the nation from 1987 to 1988 entertained the sadistic amongst us almost as much as the crying fit that Congressman Pat Schroeder volunteered to the 1988 Democratic Primary freak show. I do not know what was in the water in the Rocky Mountain State in 1988 but one can only thank the god of campaigns that it was present in the H2O. Jackson emerged as the front-runner but was not alone after Hart sunk along with his Monkey Business. The primary struggle between Jackson, technocratic Massachusetts Governor Mike Dukakis, Senator Al Gore, Congressman Dick Gephardt, bow tie enthusiast Senator Paul Simon and Senator Joe Biden was very memorable. Biden, a well-known piece of skin with a grin stretched over it, decided that he did not want to take time to write his own speeches. Al Gore was insulted when a heckler told him he would make a really good vice-president. The 1988 Democratic Primary remains the primary in which the most candidates won states and delegates. That is exciting and it shows what a weak field of candidates can really do when they are unleashed on the nation. When Dukakis finally emerged as the bloodied primary victor at the Democratic Convention in Atlanta he held off Jackson’s delegates and then declared that the election was about “competence.” Dukakis then went on to prove he had none.

The 1988 campaign is a disappointing one because the general election was very bad. To be fair Dukakis, who started out with a huge lead in the polls, started out the race by pointing to the social and economic disparities of the Reagan years and these attacks seemed to stick. Bush was down by 20-points following the Democratic Convention. That is when the GOP had a brainstorming session and came up with a brilliant strategy that won them the race but place the 1988 campaign at number fifty-one on the list. They attacked the ACLU, spoke about the Pledge of Allegiance and scared middle class, suburban voters with a scary looking black man named Horton. One had to give a hand to Atwater and Ailes since they are the men who saved the boring Poppy Bush from himself. Steady attacks on Dukakis’s patriotism and performance as governor led to his campaign going into a steady downhill spiral of failed PR touchups. While the helmet and the tank are iconic the writer can hardly claim that they place the campaign in the upper echelon of elections.

As the Bush campaign toured American flag factories in New Jersey and Senator Symms of Idaho accused Kitty Dukakis of burning American flags the Dukakis campaign proved itself unable to respond to the attacks. One needs to remember that at this time there was a farm crisis, an ending Cold War and a saving and loan crisis. All of these issues could have been major focuses of the Dukakis campaign but he allowed Bush’s men to set the agenda. This is to the credit of Bush’s men but that does nothing to further the rankings of this campaign on the list. The debates themselves produced some memorable lines. Bush’s reference to Dukakis as “the ice man” and Bentsen’s well received, but ultimately useless, “Jack Kennedy” line are fond to remember but they did  not have any effect on raising the campaign’s rhetoric or changing the results of the race in November 1988.

In conclusion, Bush won the election of 1988 as was to be expected. He was the vice-president to a fairly popular president. He was one of only four vice-presidents to be elected directly to the top job from the second job. This was to be expected when the campaign offered so little serious discussion of issues, very few surprises and an incompetent opponent who blew a big lead. The election of 1988 was a game of pursuing the trivial and this is why it places at fifty-one on this list.            

Will 1860 be number one or not?

Don't be so impatient!  Altho personally I doubt it would be as Lincoln's victory in electoral college was widely expected by election day whereas in 1800, 1824, 1876, and 2000 it wasn't until well after election day we knew who would be President.  I'd think 1860 would be in the top ten, but not number one.

Christ, boy, we're in the 50's! We've got quite a ways to go, young one, and other contenders (though some are more viable than others) would have to be 1824, 1968, 1912, are out there.

Landing in at number fifty on this list is an election that involved the enigmatic personality of Theodore Roosevelt. Why is it at number fifty then? It is because TR failed to show any personality during the campaign. As the sitting United States President Roosevelt stayed in the White House and did not utter a word on his behalf. While TR’s presence in the 1912 contest places that campaign in the upper echelon of contests his refusal to break tradition and campaign as the incumbent place his triumphal reelection at number fifty.

“Czolgosz, Working man, Born in the middle of Michigan, Woke with a thought And away he ran To the Pan-American Exposition In Buffalo, In Buffalo!” So goes the “Ballad of Czolgosz” in the great Stephen Sondheim’s classic musical Assassins. As soon as the anarchist Czolgosz had unleashed the bullets from beneath his handkerchief it was only a matter of time before the eccentric Renaissance man Vice-President Roosevelt became the man in the president’s chair. In his first three and a half-years in the White House Roosevelt battled J.P. Morgan, ended a coal strike, overthrew Colombia’s government in Panama and started a legal war with Standard Oil. With such an active and controversial first term one could reasonably hope for a great reelection struggle for the president who had turned the nation on its head. This, however, proved too much to be expected.

The Old Guard of the Republican Party could have made this election a good one at the Republican Convention. Angered by Roosevelt’s usage of government power against business conservative elements in the Grand Old Party maneuvered to contest TR’s nomination with the person of Senator Mark Hanna of Ohio; this plan never materialized. Hanna, a Northern Ohio businessman who was friendly to his own laborers but not to organized labor, would have been an effective opponent to run against TR as he was a business conservative and also an anti-imperialist. The epic struggle between Hanna and “that damned cowboy” never came to be as Hanna passed away in February 1804. The Old Guard toyed with running Speaker of the House “Foul Mouth” Joe Cannon against TR but Cannon figured he already had more than enough power as the master of the House. At a prosaic Republican Convention in the usually raucous Chicago, Illinois, all 994 delegates voted for Roosevelt for president and the bearded iceberg Senator Charles Fairbanks for vice-president.

Death would be an enemy to this election. Not only did the Grim Reaper rob election junkies of a great Republican Convention battle it also cleared away the strongest opponent Teddy Roosevelt could have faced in the general election. Former U.S. Naval Secretary and millionaire financier William C. Whitney was the frontrunner for the Democratic nomination in 1902 and 1903. A prominent Bourbon Democrat (though he never called himself that name as it was considered odious), Whitney would have been a fine opponent to oppose Roosevelt. A gold Democrat and anti-imperialist, Whitney had the strong support of both urban and rural Democrats. Then came the nasty winter of 1904 and in February 1904 Whitney died. The remaining Democrats in the campaign were all underwhelming. Judge Alton Bruce Parker, a solid jurist on the New York Court of Appeals, emerged as the Bourbon Democrat choice and the front-runner. Former President Grover Cleveland, who had worked with a young Assemblyman Theodore Roosevelt when he was governor of the Empire State, refused to enter the contest. 1896 and 1900 nominee William Jennings Bryan, “the Boy Orator of the Platte”, also withdrew from the race leaving a free-for-all as the successor for the populist Democratic mantle. Absentee Congressman and newspaper mogul William Randolph Hearst and Senator Francis Cockrell of Missouri competed with each other for populist Democratic backing. In the end, however, none of these three candidates do anything to heat up the campaign. While Hearst is an engaging and incredible figure in American history his campaign for president was disjointed and disorganized. With the sachems of Tammany Hall and Mayor George B. McClellan, Junior, opposing Hearst and supporting Parker there was no doubt whom would carry the delegates of the Empire State and with them the party’s nomination. At the St. Louis national convention Parker won an easy victory over Hearst and to add to the fun of this race the 80-year old former Senator Henry Winter Davis of New Jersey was named as vice-president. Davis is, to date, the oldest major party candidate ever nominated for national office.

Neither of the primaries offered a great deal of surprise nor did the general election. If Hearst had been the nominee it would have been unique to see the force of his personality and media empire unleashed on Roosevelt. A full court press by Hearst against TR might very well have chased Roosevelt out of the White House and led to a truly epic campaign. However, the polite and conservative Judge Parker refused to point out any differences between the incumbent and himself. When one reads the party’s opposition platforms one can understand why Parker chose not to say much: there were few differences. Big business pumped money into the Roosevelt campaign. H.C. Frick and E.H. Harriman donated a combined $400,000 to TR. When TR targeted U.S. Steel in 1905 Frick commented: “We bought the son of a bitch and he did not stay bought!” Roosevelt later denied that he had sought Harriman and Frick’s assistance. The Democrats were broke and were unable to run a national campaign.

The only drama of the general election came from Joseph Pulitzer’s New York World which accused U.S. Corporate Commissioner George Cortelyou of accepting bribes from the beef, oil, steel, sugar, coffee and paper trusts. Judge Parker gave a speech in October 1904 assaulting “Cortelyouism” and TR responded by calling Pulitzer’s attack “blackmail.” The scandal did not catch on and was quickly forgotten. This was unfortunate because in 1911 the charges would prove to be correct. Oops!

In the end the election of 1904 was a predictable curb stomp. Theodore Roosevelt won a landslide victory, taking every Northern and Western state. Roosevelt was the first Republican to carry the state of Missouri since 1868. The reason why this election is rated low while elections such as 1936, 1964 and 1984 are rated much higher is because this landslide election left very little to the imagination. Two primaries were ruined by death as was the general election. Exciting candidates either were claimed by death or failed to gain nomination. The greatest drama of the election came at the end of the campaign when Teddy Roosevelt announced that he would not seek reelection in 1908. That little address proved to be the greatest speech Roosevelt ever lived to regret. Something can be said for an election where the drama occurred after the votes were all counted and the shouting, what little there was, ended.             

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The election of 1956 lands at forty-nine on the list. This election was a rematch of one of the truly great contests in American history. In 1952 victorious Supreme Allied Commander Dwight Eisenhower gave into the pressure and admiration of the American people and allowed himself to be made into a presidential candidate. An epic Democratic Convention elevated Illinois Governor Adlai Stevenson to the unenviable position of opposing the war hero. Stevenson proved himself to be a scrappy underdog and made the campaign a memorable bout. 1956 was very much the opposite. While it had some moments of suspense and drama the entire election was a very mild affair. This is quite disappointing considering that the world was on fire in 1956.

President Eisenhower had made it known to his wife that he wanted to only serve as single term in office. A series of health related shocks and surgeries in 1955 seemed to edge him that way. In March of 1956, after “facing the sheer, God-awful boredom of not being president”, Ike announced he would seek a second term in office. One potential area of dramatic tension in the Republican Primary came with Eisenhower’s strange ideas about reelection. He had told Press Secretary James Haggerty that he had visions of ditching the GOP and running as a “third choice” candidate. He had toyed with naming his brother Milton as vice-president. He also brought up the name of Treasury Secretary Robert Anderson and even Democratic Ohio Governor Frank Lausche. When Milton told Ike that this dream was absurd Eisenhower attempted to pry the devious Vice-President Richard Nixon from the chair one heartbeat away by naming him Defense Secretary. Despite the fact that the vice-presidency isn’t worth a bucket of warm piss Nixon knew that it was his best chance for the presidency. At the GOP Convention in San Francisco gadfly former “Boy Governor” Harold Stassen attempted to lead a conclave for former Massachusetts Governor Christian Herter. However, this did not amount to a heal of Boston baked beans. The 1956 Republican Convention at the Cow Place in San Francisco was a real downer. This was not to be repeated when the GOP came back in 1964.

The 1956 contest is greatly aided by the Democratic Primary. Stevenson had been an all but announced candidate for the 1956 nod as soon as he conceded the 1952 election. Known for his whit (“Eggheads of the world unite, you have nothing to lose but your yolks!”) and intelligence, Stevenson was the darling of the progressive, internationalist wing of the Democratic Party. The enigmatic former First Lady of the World Eleanor Roosevelt gave vocal support to “the Man from Libertyville.” Stevenson, however, was forced to battle for the nomination. In 1956 there was to be no draft. This lessens the drama but ups the campaign joy. His major opponent was the comic book crusader Senator Estes Kefauver. After taking on the crime families of New York, Harry Truman and Tales from the Crypt, Kefauver was back to make his second run for president. The battle between Kefauver and Stevenson was a great one in the history of Democratic Primaries. Kefauver’s upset wins in New Hampshire, Indiana and Minnesota allowed him to stay into the battle all the way to June. Stevenson was thoroughly disgusted by the primary campaign. In the pivotal California primary he was forced to don blue jeans, a bolo tie and a ten-gallon Stetson hat in a parade. Following the parade he threw the tie off in disgust and loudly declared for all to hear: “God, what a man won’t do to get public office!”

The additional wildcard of millionaire New York Governor W. Averell Harriman, the candidate backed by the exiled Harry Truman, adds a great deal to the 1956 contest. In May 1956 Stevenson and Kefauver also squared off in one of the first televised presidential debates. These factors led to a good convention in Chicago. What added even more spark to the election was the open battle for vice-president. Senator Kefauver faced off against the youthful, if unaccomplished, Senator John Fitzgerald Kennedy of Massachusetts. While JFK’s father Joe told him not to touch the vice-presidency because “Stevenson is a loser” Kennedy was able to make a strong bid for the nod. It took two ballots for the experienced Kefauver to dispatch of the neophyte Kennedy. The emergence of the doomed Stevenson-Kefauver ticket is a great election story and one that adds a great deal of drama to the campaign.

“Eisenhower stands for “gradualism.’ Stevenson stands for ‘moderation,” comedian Mort Stahl said during his San Francisco night club act. “Between these two extremes, we the people must choose.” Stahl’s bit of gibe says a great deal about the election of 1956. The year was not a placid year but the election was. While Hungary was invaded by the Red Army and French, British and Israeli paratroopers landed in Egypt, neither military event played out a great deal in the election. Stevenson did not let the fact that he was down badly in the polls stop him from campaigning hard. He attacked Nixon as unfit for the presidency in four years. He came out for farm relief and nuclear arms limitation. He openly questioned the intelligence of the “hidden hand presidency.” Eisenhower opposed Stevenson’s call to end the draft.

Despite his strong campaign, Stevenson never stood a chance. When Stevenson asked a farmer who was upset about Ike’s farm policy, “But why aren’t people mad at Eisenhower?” the farmer replied: “Oh! No one connects Ike with his Administration.” A campaign that could have been a close one if Nixon had taken on Stevenson was a landslide because the incumbent was such a beloved figure. Stevenson is to be applauded for trying to make the election a contest but in the end Eisenhower was too much of an institution to be toppled. Perhaps Chicago businessman and NFL hockey team owner “Dollar” Bill Wirtz put it best: “If the Electoral College ever gives an honorary degree, it ought to go to Adlai Stevenson.”  

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Landing at number forty-eight on the list is the election of 1928. President Coolidge called it quits in South Dakota in 1927 leaving the path open for hos progressive (if meddlesome) Secretary of Commerce Herbert Clark Hoover. Hoover steamrolled his way into the GOP nomination and over big city New York Governor Alfred E. Smith. It was the election which pitted the East Side against West Branch.

The Republican Convention in Kansas City, Missouri, was a repeat of the 1924 affair. Hoover, though he underperformed in the primaries, was the easy winner on the first ballot. Governor “Pockets” Frank Lowden was the only opponent who seemed he could take on Hoover. However, he dropped out of contention the day before the convention opened. With Coolidge refusing a draft and Vice-President Charles Dawes an unpopular, pompous jackass there was no one who could stop the Hoover tidal wave. “Who but Hoover?” was more than just a slogan; for Old Guard Republicans it was the dim, sad reality. Coolidge’s “Wunduh Boy” was an easy winner in both the primary and the general election. A hero for his work in Belgium during World War I, leading the 1927 relief of the Mississippi flood and meddling in many free market affairs as Commerce Secretary, Hoover was a national figure who was popular with the populace. His very name was a synonym for trim efficiency: “I’ll never learn to Hooverize when it comes to loving you.”

The Democratic Convention was a good deal more interesting because the candidate who emerged as the nominee was as different from the straight laced Quaker Hoover as night and day. Ebullient and friendly, Governor Alfred Smith had no education but did not need it to become the multi-term governor of the Empire State. A fixture of Tammany Hall and a hard drinking Irish Catholic, Smith grew up on the sidewalks of New York and did not hide from the fact. While more closed minded neighborhoods in Kansas and Iowa hardly were taken by Smith, the cigar munching politico was beloved by his fellow urban Catholics. At the Democratic Convention in Houston, Texas, Smith did not face serious opposition. Congressman Cordell Hull and Senator James Reed ran as pro-prohibition Protestants and were both soundly defeated on the first ballot. The great drama that came from the Democratic Convention was that a Roman Catholic was placed at the top of a national ticket from a major party. Smith, who had sought the nomination in 1920 and 1924, took the prize but in the end would prove to be hardly a match for the Republican Roaring Twenties. In the end the boulder donning guv was Hooverized by Main Street.

One of the great myths of the 1928 election is that Smith lost because of his religion. He lost because no Democratic could win in 1928 with a booming Stock Markey and easy credit sustaining the economic bubble known as the Roaring Twenties. However, his religion did not help his cause. Smith’s campaign manager was businessman John J. Raskob, a wet Catholic, and his campaign song was the diddy “The Sidewalks of New York.” These campaign choices only alienated Middle America from the Democratic standard bearer. Smith made it clear that he believed the separation of church and state and Hoover, to his credit, did not directly attack Smith’s religion. In the end, however, he also did not do a great deal to stop the attacks. The Protestant assaults on Smith’s religion add some bigoted suspense to the race but in the end the election was never so close that religion could turn it against either candidate. “Well,” Smith is said to comment after the election was said and done, “The time has not come where a man can say his beads in the White House.”

In the end the 1928 election involved two unique candidates. It is by no means a boring election but compared to other races it does not register as one of the greats. Hoover’s victory was only a matter of time. Democratic attacks on him failed to register. The production of a falsified photo showing Hoover dancing with a black woman in Mississippi did not bring the Solid South or border states back to the Democratic fold. The final election results are unique, no doubt. Hoover carried such Democratic standard states as Texas, North Carolina, Florida, Virginia and Tennessee. Smith, on the other hand, carried nine out of the top ten most populous American cities. This is a result that matters. In 1932 the South would head back to the Democrats but the GOP has never managed to reclaim the urban environments which clamored to Smith. The Coolidge prosperity is what won the election for Hoover as well as the Great Engineer’s personal popularity. 1928 was an election in which GOP newspapers asked, “Smith or Hoover? Who would you want to run your business?” As happens so often, the interview process was not needed as the job was already safe for one applicant.     

Landing at number forty-seven is the reelection victory of George W. Bush. Following the free-for-all that was the 2000 election the general canvass of 2004 was hardly as exciting. This is not to say that Bush’s reelection lacked suspense and drama but the cast of characters assembled was uninspiring. In the end a seemingly back and forth battle had a straight forward ending that could have been predicated from the start.

After his highly unique election in 2000, President George W. Bush had managed to deficit spend his political capital into two tax cuts and two wars. The genesis of the global “War on Terror” allowed for him to grab unimagined presidential powers. The Patriot Act, National Security Letters, indefinite detainment, extraordinary rendition and billions in overspending were all given the thumbs up by a Congress composed of limited government Republicans. These decisions proved to be, uniquely, popular and polarizing. The haughty left mocked George W. Bush as “chimpy” and questioned his literacy, but as they chortles down their herbal teas a Neoconservative junta in the West Wing set about building up the “Bush Brand” for the 2004 reelection bid. Karl Rove and Andy Card proved highly adept at molding the illegal Iraq War into a worthy struggle. Despite rising casualties, no WMDs and the fact that the new Iraqi “government” was held up by American bayonets, the Mad Men of the RNC were able to sell the war to the American people as just and necessary. Polls in January 2004 showed both Bush and his war polling at 51% of higher in terms of approval. The economy “grew” steadily, with unemployment so low Hubert Humphrey would have called it “full employment”, as the Neoconservative junta built up a persona around Bush that would prove unbeatable in the general election. The “crazy cowboy” image Bush had attained in Europe was effectively spun as a positive. Bush, who fancied himself an international sheriff of sorts, was portrayed the leader of a posse who were going to throw the noose around the neck of terrorist leaders and their supporters in world capitals throughout the Middle East. In the United States of 2004 this image was a hard one to beat. The Democrats needed to produce an unbeatable candidate who could counter this image and show the nation that the U.S. needed to reject the Neoconservative sheriff’s posse. The man they nominated was not the right man for the job.

The election of 2004 is made disappointing because the eventual Democratic nominee was hardly the correct foil for the Bush image. Senator John Forbes Kerry (JFK?) was not a bad nominee by any means. He was a solid Great Society liberal who was hawkish on foreign affairs. He could debate well and, while not a soaring public speaker, had competence on the stump. His wife was loaded with cash and he had been a senator since 1985. His Vietnam War experience and three Purple Hearts technically should have appealed to defense minded swing voters and independents. This leads to the question: “If Kerry was such a solid candidate then why was he not the best man to take on the president?” The answer is that Kerry was far too much like Bush. The 2004 election falls low on the list because there was little to no contrast between the two candidates. They argued about tax cuts but only in the sense of how much money the rich should be given back. They disagreed on the Iraq War but only in terms of how the war should be fought, not whether it should have been fought. Kerry’s vote for the Iraq War Resolution coupled with his selection of pro-Iraq War Senator John Edwards as his running-mate effectively made Iraq a null-and-void issue. The Kerry/Edwards campaign was simply a non-neoconservative Republican campaign. Yes, Kerry gave lip service to liberal standards like health care and the minimum wage but his campaign never really found an issue to run on. In the end Kerry was simply “Not Bush.” That type of a campaign can be effective but it is hardly memorable. Memorable campaigns give people something to vote for, not just against.

The great tragedy of the 2004 election is that in 2003 it looked as if the race was going to be an epic struggle of the neocons versus the doves. Powered by youthful supporters and the internet, former Vermont Governor Howard Dean looked to be the likely opponent to take down King George the Second. I will admit that I was a “Deaniac” in 2003 so this part of the post may seem biased…because it is. Governor Dean was not a perfect candidate. He had the tendency to ramble, get off message and say things that could be easily misconstrued by the media. Dean was also rabidly leftist on issues like war, health care and the economy. The Bush Campaign was well prepared to oppose Dean. The campaign that Rove and Card had worked up to battle Dean was akin to Nixon’s 1972 smear fest against Senator George McGovern: “Acid, amnesty and abortion.” Dean, however, showed he was willing to fight back. An election between Bush and Dean would have been a great contest between two different ideologies. While Dena was a pragmatic centrist as governor, his presidential campaign was a left-wing dovish crusade against the Neocons in the White House.

Would Dean have won? This is doubtful. The Democrats felt the same way. Kerry appeared to be more “electable” in the general election. Dean rubbed people the wrong way, or so it appeared. Kerry was more center-left and did not appear weak on defense. The 2004 Democratic Primaries proved to be anti-climactic. Kerry won Iowa and New Hampshire. While John Edwards and General Wesley Clark won a handful of contests Kerry was never seriously challenged from January 2004 until the start of the general election in July 2004. This is no good for campaign ratings.

It can be argued that the general election of 2004 was exciting because it came down to a few key states. The struggle for Ohio and Pennsylvania are both case studies in voter outreach and campaign organization. Yet in the end Bush won Ohio and Kerry took Pennsylvania, both of which polls generally pointed to in the closing days of the campaign. The Real Clear Politics average of polls in Ohio, for example, showed Bush leading by 2.1%. He ended up winning the state by about that margin. While the campaign’s polls were close the eventual victory of Bush was a sure thing throughout much of October.

The October Surprise that year was the October 29, 2004, release of yet another Osama bin Laden video. The media hyped this up as a main reason Bush was reelected but it was not. By October 29, 2004, Bush led in the national polls despite three weak debate performances.

Kerry Campaign was simply unable to catch fire with the nation’s voters. The main reason why 2004 falls in at forty-seven is that it offered little surprises. In the Democratic Primary Kerry won easily. He was able to revive a dying campaign, that is true, but he took the ball and ran it across the line with ease once his campaign was up and running. The Republicans offered no surprises the whole election. Bush fell below 50% approvals occasionally and Kerry led nationally at different points but in the end the incumbent president won reelection. The closeness of the race is hardly a reason to place it high on the list. Close elections can be as anti-climactic as landslides if the candidates are not interesting. The election between Kerry and Bush was a lot of shouting over very few differences.             

That last sentence is a nice summary of some of these low-ranked elections.

I'm guessing 2012 is #46 then.

Nah, 2012 was honestly pretty fun in both the primary season and some debate moments.

2012 should be #27 since 9+9+9 = 27 and it can't be #47% now.

Winding up at number forty-six on the list is the battle of the two Williams. In 1908 the eccentric and enigmatic Theodore Roosevelt sat out the race and allowed his friend and protégé
William “Big Bill” Taft to take the reins as the Republican standard bearer. The Democrats plodded out well-worn candidate William Jennings Bryan. The boy orator was now losing his hair and his prestige. The Great Commoner, the old war horse, stood no chance against Taft, the Secretary of War.

“What is the real difference between the Democratic and Republican Parties?” puzzled Joseph Pulitzer in 1908. The war lover was correct to puzzle until his puzzler was sore because there were precious few differences between Taft and Bryan on most important public policy issues. The trust busting, railway regulating, interventionist government of Teddy Roosevelt was the only issue of the campaign and both Bryan and Taft supported the reforms. “The voters,” declared the conservative Washington Post, “refuse to go into hysteria over the puny little questions that divide the two parties.”

On the Republican side there was precious little struggle. On the night of his great victory in 1904, TR had announced he would not be a candidate in 1908. Roosevelt famously wrote to military advisor Archibald Butt that he would “gladly give a hand” if he could take back those words. Roosevelt loved the presidency and the press loved Roosevelt. His big teeth, oversized mustache, high pitches voice and bombastic energy made for great print copy. Who could take his place? The answer was none but Roosevelt made sure his protégé was given the position. The friendly and magnanimous Secretary of War William Howard Taft was the only serious candidate for the nomination in 1908. It is a unique fact that 1908 was the first election in which statewide presidential primaries came into vogue. However, they made precious little difference in either of the major party’s final nomination. Conservatives in the form of Joe Cannon and Joseph B. Foraker vied against Taft as did another Roosevelt man: Senator Philander Knox. Taft, prodded on by an ambitious wife with an appetite for power to meet Bill’s for food, entered into several state primaries and won most of them. The legal minded Taft won the party’s nomination with over 700 delegate votes on the first ballot at the convention in Chicago. The greatest excitement of the convention was the forty-nine minute demonstration for TR accompanied with the chant of, “For-four-four years more!” Teddy, however, pulled the strings to make sure that Congressman “Sunny Jimmy” Sherman was nominated as Taft’s running-mate mate on the first ballot. As Taft left the convention it was joked that T.A.F.T. stood for “Take advice from Theodore.”

On the Democratic side William Jennings Bryan, the elder statesman of the Party of Jackson, was the only real candidate for the nomination. Bryan was so much the front-runner for the nomination that at the Denver convention his handlers made sure that the demonstration for him lasted exactly one-minute longer than the demonstration Bryan had received for the “Cross of Gold” speech in 1896. “Are we over time yet?” they asked each other as they checked their pocket watches. After being paired with perennial loser John W. Kern as his running-mate, the ticket of perennial losers decided to not campaign for the first few weeks. Bryan instead worked on his newspaper, The Commoner, and Kern went home to Indiana to sew wild oats. “Shall the people rule?” Bryan asked. He declared this question to be the “pivitol issue of the campaign” and in the end the people would not rule in favor of him.

The reason why the election of 1908 is placed at number forty-six is because it has excellent candidates but they had very little to argue about. “Hit them hard old man!” Roosevelt had advised Taft. Taft only liked to hit hard when he was playing baseball. He knew that Bryan had nothing to offer the nation that Teddy had not already done. In fact, Bryan made one of the main themes of his campaign the fact that he could bust trusts better than Taft. He argued he was the better heir to the Roosevelt legacy. Taft gave some public addresses but he hated them. He told his wife Helen that the idea of giving his acceptance speech in Cincinnati before a crowd of a few hundred people hung before him “like a dark nightmare.” It is unique to mention that Taft and Bryan had their speeches recorded for the phonograph and played around the nation. However, this did not change the outcome.

Taft beat Bryan and beat him badly. Gadflies commented that everytime Bryan was nominated for president he was nominated in a city further and ruther away from the White House. Some wagged that in 1912 he would be nominated in Los Angeles and in 1920 Manila and in 1924 Shanghai. Bryan himself asked his readers to answer “THE RIDDLE OF 1896” and explain to him why he had lost so badly. The fact was that Bryan scared people. He promised to nationalize the railroads if elected president. This turned the railroad magnates against him and towards Taft. Despite the Hepburn Act and its unpopularity with railway men it was far better than nationalization. Businessmen supported Taft and the people loved Teddy. In the end there could be no other alternative to a Taft victory. Bryan joked that he felt much like the drunken man who was thrown from a bar three times. When the drunk came back a fourth time he proclaimed indignantly: “Something tells me you fellows don’t want me around!”                    

Coming in at number forty-five is the election of 1936. Franklin D. Roosevelt’s massive reelection is an incredible victory for the forces of progressive labor in the United States and a catastrophic defeat for the “me-too” branch of Republicanism. The reason why it lands at number forty-five is simply because the election offered few surprises and the Republican Party failed to learn much from the contest. “There is one issue in this campaign,” FDR told Raymond Moley, “It’s myself, and people must be either for me or against me.” In the end the people would be overwhelmingly for the sunny chief executive.

The New Deal, which Roosevelt promised in the far more memorable 1932 canvas, had not created prosperity. Millions of people still wanted for jobs, housing and food in the summer of 1936. Despite millions in government spending and a strange group of Utopian socialists called the “Brain Trust” trying out their weird societal views for the first time, unemployment was still high and the GDP was still abysmal. However, the nation felt like happy days were indeed here again. FDR’s first term in office is one of the turning points in American political and governmental history. It is an era all to itself in not just government programming but propaganda. New Deal sponsored art, photography, radio and drama programs pumped the idea that the depression was ending into the minds of Americans on a daily basis. The propaganda worked and it worked well. In 1936 millions of Americans felt that the government had saved them from the doldrums of the depression and that they were far better off in 1936 than they had ever been during the Republican 1920s. FDR’s New Deal propaganda machine is to be applauded. It made an election that should have been competitive into a walk for the man who pulled the strings from behind the curtain. FDR was indeed the Wizard of Oz and no one throws the wizard from the Emerald City.

The assassination of Huey “Kingfish” Long stole a fascinating component from the 1936 campaign because the candidacy of the wild Louisiana governor would have made the election fall in the top ten. He had threatened that he would run on his socialistic “Share Our Wealth” platform as an independent in 1936. His 1935 assassination ended those plans and cast the idea of a Long 1936 candidacy into the realm of “what-if.” T. Harry Williams, the incredible historian, has written that Long had no intention of running in 1936 but instead running another candidate under the “Share Our Wealth” independent banner. If this is the case the death of Long does not totally ruin the 1936 race but even a 3rd party campaign from a Long surrogate would have made the election more dramatic.

To unseat Roosevelt the Republicans did not have a very deep bench. Former President Herbert Hoover, the only nationally known candidate, was sitting in toxic expulsion at the Waldorf-Astoria. The party’s pathetic Cleveland convention named the moonfaced Kansas Governor Alfred Landon as the party’s nominee. A former Bull Mooser who had introduced New Deal like programs in the Sunflower State, Landon was not a conservative alternative to FDR. No, he was simply a pale pink of the real red. During the campaign Landon himself attacked the New Deal and Roosevelt but failed to answer how he would repeal the New Deal. The GOP slogan in 1936 was “Off the rocks with Landon and Knox.” The two Republicans never managed to even see the rocks; they were sunk far before that.

The general election campaign itself was given some life by Socialist Norman Thomas and Union Party candidate Congressman William Lemke. The anti-New Deal pixie triumvirate of Father Charles Coughlin, Dr. Francis Townsend and the Reverend Gerald L.K. Smith formed the backbone of the Union Party movement. “Liberty Bill” Lemke was simply a good face to put on an odd operation. Critics pointed out that Liberty Bill might also be cracked. Norman Thomas brought his folksy charm to the campaign trial once again. When asked if FDR had carried out the Socialist Platform of 1932 Thomas quipped: “If he has he has carried it out on a stretcher.” The antics of Coughlin and the Hearst papers against Roosevelt also make the election memorable. Who could forget Coughlin’s wonderful nicknames for Roosevelt? I personally like “Franklin Double-crossing Roosevelt” the best. That is memorable.

FDR’s class warfare campaign in 1936 is also very memorable, Railing against the “malefactors of great wealth” he told the nation that he “welcomed the hatred” of the Melons, Morgans and Insuls. His government had already targeted Andrew Mellon’s art collection and raised taxes on the rich. He gave fiery speeches in defense of labor and the social security act. His government also targeted those businessmen who donated to the Republican campaign. Roosevelt’s bloody assaults on the wealthy and business would be copied by Democrats for years to come going all the way to Barack Obama’s 2012 successful reelection campaign. The 1936 FDR campaign is important to political history because it shows how effectively candidates can run against wealth in a capitalist nation.

The hilarious results of the 1936 Literary Digest poll, the powerful FDR campaign and the laughably pathetic Republican campaign all create a memorable campaign. The main reason why it is ranked at this place is because the campaign does not stand up that well when compared to the other candidates for the top sports. In the end the screaming of the Radio Priest and the blustery anger of the “malignant rich” could not stop the Roosevelt Express. FDR’s first reelection was a forgone conclusion. Alf Landon himself commented the night before the election on what his odds against Roosevelt were. He commented, “No chance.”

The contest of 1888 lands at number forty-four and one can argue it is one of the most unknown energetic campaigns in American history. The struggle between an incumbent president and a Civil War general would seem to be one of the most memorable races in American history. Additionally, it was an election which was ran and won on one issue: tariff. I cannot think of many one-issue campaigns in American presidential history. 1888 was battled out on one issue and one issue alone: the tariff. This makes the election a fine historical anonymity and a lot of fun.

The Democrats in 1888 had only one candidate. President Stephen Grover Cleveland had called on Congress in December 1887 to lower tariffs. “What’s the good of being elected or reelected unless you stand for something?” Cleveland had asked his cabinet. Grover the Good also vetoed a silly Civil War pension act and also created the Federal Trade Commission during his first term in office. The head-on struggle between the Democratic House and the Republican Senate over the tariff reduction galvanized the GOP and lionized the president in his party’s ranks. The Democratic Convention in reliably Democratic St. Louis nominated Cleveland by acclamation. The campaign was not aided by the tagging on of the 75-year old former Ohio Senator Allen G. Thurman as Cleveland’s running-mate. The Democratic Party faithful were not inspired by the Cleveland/Thurman Ticket. Cleveland refused to campaign at all as incumbent president. Cleveland’s refusal to allow cabinet secretaries campaign for him forced the brunt of the campaign on the elderly Thurman’s shoulders. The old man collapsed at one point on the stump. A collapsing old man is the best way to sum up the Democratic campaign. Thankfully, the Republicans were not as pacific.

The great bright spot of the 1888 canvas is the Republican campaign. Following their narrow defeat in 1884, the Republicans were determined to toss “Fat Grover” out of office and retake the reins of government. A raucous and hilarious convention in Chicago attracted an incredible number of simply joyous candidates. The front-runner when the convention opened was the eccentric judge and Treasury Secretary Walter Q. Gresham. The aging sage of Ohio John Sherman, patrician NY Central Railroad President Chauncey Depew, silver mained Senator William Boyd Allison of Iowa and Indiana Senator and General Benjamin “Grandfather’s Hat” Harrison rounded out the interesting array of candidates. The back and forth struggle between Gresham, Sherman and Depew allowed for Harrison to emerge from obscurity in his Indianapolis law office to become the party’s nominee on the eight ballot. The convention was simply the tip of the Republican iceberg. The general election allowed for them to show exactly how vicious an uncaged elephant can be.   

The well-oiled Republican machine makes the campaign worth following. The GOP was backed by big money interests who wanted to see high tariffs. High tariffs, after all, allowed for inferior products to be sold cheaper than far better foreign goods. That is just good, government backed business. Millions of dollars flowed into the Republican war chest, which was managed by the multimillionaire Philadelphia merchant John Wanamaker. Harrison ran an epic “front porch” campaign from his home in Indianapolis which would be copied by Bill McKinley in 1896 and Warren Harding in 1920. The stories of the thousnads of men and women around the country who travelled to Indianapolis to see the Republican candidate make for excellent campaign anecdotes, which in the end is one of the hallmarks of a good election.

The dirty tricks of the Republicans are also the thing of electoral legends. They called the incumbent president the “Beast of Buffalo” and accused him of being a drunkard who beat his young wife Francis Folsom Cleveland. Republican women groups even whispered that Francis beat Grover. The First Couple were both accused of being drunks who gambled on Sundays. These attacks alone are rapturous but the underhanded tactics of the Murchison Letter place the Republican campaign into the stuff of underhanded legend. In a campaign where the Republicans made British bashing a past time, they managed to troll the British minister in Washington. Sir Lionel Sackville-West replied to a man named “Charles F. Murchison” who had inquired of him on how to vote in November. Murchison claimed to be an American citizen of English birth who wished to vote for the candidate who would best serve the needs and desires of the British Empire. Murchison praised Cleveland for his devotion to “free trade” and assaulted Harrison as a high-tariff man who was on, “the American side of all questions.” However, Cleveland had stood up the Britain when it came to fishing rights between Canada and Maine. Murchison wanted to know if Cleveland was a man that a Brit could trust. Sackville-West fell for the 19th century Rick-roll and replied that Cleveland was the best choice for the British lion. The Republican ran with the story and portrayed Cleveland as a Red(coat). Cleveland asked the British to recall Sackville-West. In the end, “Murchison” turned out to be Republican dirty trickster Charles Osgoodby and the British diplomat was played by some truly clever tricksters. In my opinion the Murchison Letter is probably the most clever, inventive dirty trick every played in the history of presidential campaigns.

The final results are also intriguing. Cleveland won the popular vote but lost his home state of New York. The excellent Republican campaign in the Empire State, coupled with deep divisions in the Democratic Party of New York, won the state and the election for Harrison, the little general. The Election of 1888 is by no means a “bad” election. I find it to be an exciting one which shows real differences between two candidates and some clever campaign tricks. It is ranked at forty-four simply because there are other elections which had greater contrasts and more clever campaign capers. I take my hat off to Cleveland, Harrison, the tariff and that dastardly Murchison Letter!     

Great job Rooney!

It must be hard for you to do these rankings at this point.

I'm quite sure he can manage.

Thank you very much, windjammer, I appreciate it. :)

I have a list made out but I have the terrible little habit of changing it at the last minute. I have also been swamped by my work the last few days. I hope to have another one up soon.

Landing at number forty-three on the list is the election of 1872. The campaign of 1872 has great moments of excitement but the fact that it had a widely popular candidate in the running never put the outcome in a doubt. President Ulysses S. Grant, the savior of the Union, was the assured winner from the very beginning. The scandals of his administration made for some limited political hay for his hapless opponents. The best thing to come from the election was a party movement which, had it not been fumbled, could have led to the emergence of a unique Fourth Party system.

The Liberal Republican movement was a unique amalgamation of elitist New England Republicans, “political reformers” from the Midwest and old Southern Whigs. Angered by “Grantism”- a newly coined verb meaning corruption- and the fact that Ulysses Grant did not have an Ivy League law degree, Charles Sumner and Charles Francis Adams decided to bolt the Republican Party. Grant, the great hero of the Union who had aptly led the ship of state since 1869, would not be thrown from the Republican presidential nomination by the perennially unlikable and smug Sumner or Adams. The Democrats were still rebuilding themselves from the 1866, 1868 and 1870 elections. They stood no chance at ousting Grant. Thus, the Liberal Republican movement was born.

Led by the defeated 1848 communist revolutionary, Union General and Missouri Senator Carl Schurz, “reform minded citizens” met in Cincinnati in May 1st, an appropriate date for Schurz and his strange fellows. After putting together a progressive, pro-civil service reform, anti-corruption platform, the real fun of the convention began. The eccentric publisher of the New York Tribune and former Congressman Horace Greeley emerged as the party’s presidential standard bearer over Adams, Senator Lyman Trumbull and Chief Justice Salmon Chase. With his big head, cherubic face, flashy blue eyes and outrageous facial hair Greeley seemed as if he had stepped from the pages of a Dickens novel. The anti-Grant cabal was overwhelmed in grief. The Nation commented that Greeley’s nomination was the greatest national disappointment since the news of the first Battle of Bull Run. The New York Times, a good Republican publication, commented that Greeley’s nomination was a “joke” and added insult to injury “If any one man could send a great nation to the dogs, that man would be Mr. Greeley.” Greeley was a lover of odd causes for the 1870s. He supported vegetarianism, communal living, free love and free thinking. A strong supporter of civil rights he had also called for Lincoln to work out a negotiated peace with the Confederacy and had donated money to bail Jefferson Davis out of prison. The 1872 campaign was given a mixed blessing by Greeley. The enigmatic printer turned politician campaigned across the nation on his behalf, the first candidate to do so since Stephen Douglas in 1860.

The failure of the Democrats to nominate their own candidate detracts from the election. Greeley won the nomination of the party he had long accused of being the right arm of Lucifer. A joke was spread around the nation that when Dr. Livingstone returned from five years in African isolation he was told a few things by Henry M. Stanley, his rescuer. Stanley told Livingstone of the Austrian-Prussian War, the execution of the Mexican Emperor Maximillian and the defeat of Louis Napoleon at the hands of Bismarck and the Prussians. Finally he mentioned that Greeley had been nominated for president by the Democratic Party. “Hold on,” Livingston told Stanley, “You have told me stupendous things and confiding with simplicity I was swallowing them down; but there is a limit to all things, and when you tell me that Horace Greeley is become the Democratic candidate I will be hanged if I believe it!”

The general campaign of 1872 was a great deal of fun. The Liberal Republicans ran against Grant with a vengeance. They called the president an “ape”, “barbarian”, “dime store Caesar” and “king of corruption.” Greeley, realizing that the fight was in vain, fought his very best. He attacked the gold cornering scheme of Fisk and Gould, the Credit Mobiler scandal, the corruption in the Bureau of Indian Affairs and spoke in favor of civil service reform. “While there are doubts as to my fitness for president,” Greeley said at a campaign stop, “Nobody seems to deny I would make a capital beaten candidate!” Thomas Nast, the partisan Republican political cartoonist who would end his odd days as Ambassador to Ecuador, agreed to make Greeley a “capital beaten candidate.” His cartoons were called a “shower of mud” by the New York Sun. Nast drew Greeley as a near-sighted, pumpkin-headed buffoon in baggy pants with strange novels and tracts falling from his overstuffed pockets. Nast famously drew Greeley grasping hands “across the bloody chasm” with the KKK, John Wilkes Booth and Jeff Davis over the grave of Abraham Lincoln. Greeley replied by making lofty, statesman-like speeches which even impressed his long-time rival Henry Raymond at the New York Times. “The voice of a statesman,” Raymond was forced to concede in October 1872 after hearing Dr. Greeley speak for himself.

In many ways the campaign of 1872 was the Vanderbilt Election. Commodore Cornelius Vanderbilt, master of the New York Central Railroad, was closely tied to almost all of the major and minor candidates for president in 1872. Vanderbilt and his son-in-law William Allen gave freely to the Grant campaign chest. The president himself wrote a thank you letter to Vanderbilt for the money he gave to the cause. Vanderbilt had given financial support to Greeley on more than one occasion. Charles O’Connor, the Roman Catholic Bourbon Democratic presidential nominee, was Vanderbilt’s corporate counsel for years. Even the gadfly candidacy of Victoria Woodhull was tied to the Commodore. Woodhull, an apparent stockbroker and attorney who would do time behind bars for mail fraud, was nominated by the hopeless People’s Party. Woodhull adds a lot of color to the campaign even though her ticket took very few votes. Woodhull had exposed the pious Henry Ward Beecher as a philanderer, been divorced, lived by the dictates of free love and had attended the First International. She met Cornelius Vanderbilt during her work as a spiritual medium. Yes, Vanderbilt even had his hands in the pockets of the Woodhull candidacy. 1872 was the Commodore’s election.

Election Day 1872 was even an exciting day. Susan B. Anthony was famously arrested for trying to vote and fined $100. The Judge would famously declare the fee already paid and let the case drop. The abolitionist Frederick Douglass, the unwilling running-mate of Woodhull, also served as a New York elector for Ulysses Grant. The election results themselves are worth noting. President Grant won a massive victory which showed the people were behind him and his administration. He became the second Republican to be reelected president joined the (at that time) small club of reelected presidents. Electors from Arkansas and Louisiana were rejected. Then, the funny yet faithful Greeley died November 29, 1872, leaving his negligible electoral votes to be fought for by many neophytes.

Poor Greeley died having lost everything. His wife passed way in October 1872, he lost the election by a landslide, was defrauded out of millions by conman Phillip Arnold and Whitelaw Reid, owner of the New York Herald, took over the New York Tribune in a hostile takeover. Mark Twain, an admirer and sometime friend of Greeley, referred to Reid as “Outlaw Reid” due to the takeover. Greeley descended into madness. A few days before his death he confronted Reid at the swanky Delmonico’s Restaurant, yelling in his face, “You son of a bitch, you stole my newspaper!” The 1872 campaign was greatly aided by the eccentric Greeley. Sam Grant, always too shy to campaign on his own behalf, was quiet but his opponent was a good sport. The 1872 campaign is an exciting one in which the ending was known from the beginning. Greeley did not let the election become a boring campaign. He fought hard. Perhaps Greeley put it best himself when he wrote: “Apathy is a sort of living oblivion.” His life may have fallen apart in 1872 but Greeley could leave knowing that his campaign was not one of “living oblivion.”

I think this one probably should be lower. Unpopular Democrat dies before he could even lose properly? Compare 1888, which was stolen, but from the Democrats by the Democrats.

Tell me, which one is more interesting?

1872 has the far more interesting cast of characters. 1888 had it's good moments, no doubt, but I stand by my choice. 

This is a great series, and I like your reasoning and a lot of things I didn't really know about.

Yes.

I especially liked the description of the Murchison Letter by Rooney.  Wikipedia's description of it was quite brief and gave more of an impression that it was an outreach attempt at Irish Catholics (which given the amount of hostility against Republicans, why bother?) rather than, as Rooney pointed out, yet another attempt at playing the AMERICA! card by the Republican Party (which they did since the Civil War at the time).  Given that Cleveland lost New York state by only a percentage point, Rooney's explanation makes a lot more sense.

This is very well-written and informative. Do carry on!

Ranking at number forty-two is Andrew Jackson’s landslide reelection. This election has an incredible premise and involves the first political conventions in American history. Additionally, it hosts the first third party challenge in American political history. The battle between Old Hickory, the Great Compromiser as a firm anti-Mason is a strong campaign with an expected outcome. Jackson, the people’s hero, was an easy winner but the campaign was a hard fought campaign.

The election of 1832 began as early as 1830. President Andrew Jackson had declared the Second Bank of the United States an enemy of the common man. The Democratic Party aimed at dismantling the bank by taking away its charter to do business. Henry Clay, leader of the National Republican opposition to Jackson, decided to make the bank a campaign issue in 1832. Believing the bank to be overwhelmingly popular with the nation’s voters, the clever Clay maneuvered to put Mr. Biddle’s Bank’s up for re-charter in July 1832. As the Kentuckian expected Jackson vetoed the re-charter of the bank in 1832. This led to Nicholas Biddle withholding money from the U.S. and brining about a small recession that summer and early fall. The Jackson campaign was able to spin the “stingy banker Biddle” against Clay. Jackson was no fan of “rag, tag banks” but he especially disliked massive corporate banks backed by federal money. Jackson’s assault on the “Monster Bank” and his brilliant veto message were just the class warfare that was needed for him to win reelection by a landslide. “The veto works well,” Jackson assured his friend John H. Eaton, “instead of crushing me as was expected and intended, it will crush the Bank.” The fact that the Bank War falls into the campaign of 1832 earns it excellent marks in terms of historical importance and drama.  

King Caucus was dead by 1832. The controversial congressional caucus system which selected Jefferson, Madison, Monroe and William H. Crawford was relegated to the ash heap of history by the Ant-Masonic Party. In September 1831, this third party nominated former Attorney General William Wirt at a peaceful gathering of delegates. This nominating convention inspired the National Republicans and Jackson’s Democratic Party to hold their own conventions. The Democratic Convention in Baltimore is especially important because it adapted a rule which would make the 1912, 1920 and 1924 Democratic convention magnificent catastrophes: the two-thirds rule. At the 1832 convention the Democrats made the rule that the presidential nominee needed to win two-thirds support from all delegates to be nominated for the presidency. This wonderful little rule worked well when Old Hickory was the nominee but it would give elections lovers the world over limitless amounts of joy in the years to come.

The general election of 1832 was a great deal of fun. Nicholas Biddle made a strange bedfellow for Henry Clay. Biddle was the son of a long-line of Philadelphia gentry. Educated at home and abroad, Biddle had worked in the printing business and had emerged as a leading banker with the help of his brother Thomas. Biddle did not swear, drink or gamble. He was considered a boring, straight laced bank executive. The Jackson people attacked Clay as a drinker, womanizer, gambler and duelist. Clay was all four and he knew it. Biddle believed that Jackson appealed to the “Great Unwashed” and declared the Bank veto message a “manifesto of anarchy.” Biddle printed over 3,000 copies of the president’s veto message with condescending annotations. His printing company sent these out to voters in the Middle and Western states to show them how barbaric Jackson was. This backfired as people seemed to like Jackson’s dedication to hard currency and opposition to corporations and “rag money.”

“The Jackson cause is the cause of democracy and the people against a corrupt and abandoned aristocracy,” the Jackson press wrote time and time again. The Clay and Biddle campaign had no idea the can of worms they had opened when the made the Mammoth Bank an issue in 1832. “Prince Hal” was outfoxed by the earthy Jackson at every turn in the 1832 campaign. Jackson’s surrogates declared the campaign as a struggle between “The People’s Champion” and “Czar Nick” Biddle.  Clay’s National Republicans struck back by declaring it was Jackson who was the real tyrant. Daniel Webster declared that through the bank veto Jackson had become Louis XIV and proclaimed, “I am the state!” Screamed one anti-Jackson campaign line: “THE KING UPON THE THRONE: THE PEOPLE IN THE DUST!!!” Clay’s Bankites made great usage of political cartoons. These drawings portrayed Jackson as a corn poe king being crowned by a devilish Martin van Buren, his running-mate. They portrayed Jackson as a doddering Don Quixote tilting toward the marble pillars of the bank. Most ludicrous, one cartoon portrays Jackson and Clay in a horserace with Clay leading by half and length. That was, as Jackson well knew, a delusion.

Wonderful viciousness punctuates the 1832 race. Jackson was attacked as being seriously ill or near death. Francis P. Blair, a Democratic newspaper publisher, released a hilarious story painting Clay as a philandering gambling drunkard. Writing in the Washington Globe, Blair wrote that once Clay got into a drunken brawl in Lexington, Kentucky, and was taken in by a friend and his lovely young bride. “He was taken to a kind friend’s house. He was treated with the utmost courtesy and tenderness by that friend’s wife and family.” While enjoying that great care, Blair concluded, Clay repaid the courtesy by sleeping with the man’s wife and “winning the money of his kind host.” Clay almost got into a fist fight with Senator Thomas Hart Benton of Missouri when Clay made a speech declaring that Benton had stated that Jackson was a lawless man. Benton, who had brawled with Jackson in 1813, declared Clay a liar. Benton nearly punched Clay but two senators restrained the massive Missouri lawmaker. “I apologize to the Senate!” Benton declared, “but not to the Senator from Kentucky.” The brutal campaign was felt amongst the common voters. Late one night in Kentucky, it is said, a farmer split a dressed pig into halves and left it outside his home to be taken to market for sale the next morning. When he woke up he found half the hog was gone. “I have been robbed by a Clay man!” the farmer told the local sheriff. “How do you know it’s a Clay man who has done it?” the sheriff asked. The farmer laughed and replied: “Because a Jackson man would have gone the whole hog!” Yes, it was a wonderfully brutal campaign of mud and muck.

Another excellent factoid in this race is the South Carolina nullification struggle in 1832. Jackson’s strong stance for tariff reform as opposed to nullification led to his own vice-president resigning and the South Carolina Democratic Party turning on him. The Nullifier Democrats in South Carolina cast their electoral votes for Virginia Congressman John Floyd. This small rebellion, however, proved to be unimportant because the voters of the Palmetto State did not matter in the end.  

The election of 1832 was a lot of fun and drama but falls at number forty-two because the end was never in doubt. Jackson told his friend and Kitchen Cabinet member Isaac Hill, “It’ll be a walk. If our fellows didn’t raise a finger from now on the thing would be just as well done.” The huge landslide he and Van Buren won was a testament to that logic. Mile long Jackson parades in New York City and a massive rally for Old Hickory in Clay’s hometown of Lexington turned out to be an accurate reflection of the will of the people. The election of 1832 was a campaign that Jean-Jacques Rousseau would have been proud of. The “General Will” of the people was heard loud and clear. The Banksters under Biddle and Clay spent freely but lost badly. Clay was so shocked by his massive beating that he declared he was :shocked and alarmed” by the election. William Wirt, the Anti-Masonic candidate, knew it all too well: “My opinion is that [Jackson] may be president for life if he chooses.”

About how much research did you put into this?

I wrote for over an hour. I looked at a few different books and tracts. Hope you enjoyed it.

I also thank everyone for their kind remarks. Another election will be up tonight! :)

Taking the spot of number forty-one is FDR’s wartime mandate. The election of 1944 offered a highly dramatic and suspenseful vice-presidential battle which would decide far more than an election. The outcome of those heated days in Chicago would change the history of the post-World War II world.

The first wartime presidential election since 1864, President Franklin Delano Roosevelt declared he would run for a fourth term. “The first twelve years are the hardest,” Roosevelt clipped as he entered the race. The United States was embroiled in World War II. Over a million men were stationed all over the globe battling the Axis Powers. Roosevelt (Dr. Win the War) had been as controversial as commander-in-chef as he had been as the New Deal chief executive. Japanese internment, price controls, a national draft, million dollar armament deals and a very cozy relation with the murderous Joseph Stalin were all controversial aspects of Roosevelt’s war time stewardship. However, by July 1944 the war had turned around in Europe and the Pacific. Some wondered if the imperialistic FDR would hold an election at all with the war waging. “All these people here haven’t read the Constitution,” Roosevelt joked with the press when they asked him about canceling the election, “Unfortunately, I have.” FDR had no reason to cancel the 1944 contest because he knew he would win it and win it by a wide margin.

The Republican primary campaign is a little disappointing. There was an incredible number of interesting characters in the campaign. The front-runner, and eventual nominee, for the party’s presidential nomination was the suave, urbane New York Governor Thomas E. Dewey. A fearless District Attorney who put Lucky Luciano behind bars (before FDR got him out in 1942), Dewey was targeted by Dutch Schultz’s notorious Murder, Inc., before being elected governor in 1942. A trained opera singer turned attorney, Dewey’s deep baritone voice and charismatic debating style made him an effective governor and candidate. He was challenged by the right from Ohio Governor John W. Bricker and from the left by Wendell Wilkie, the 1940 GOP nominee who had transformed into Eleanor Roosevelt’s BFF. Following a thrashing of Wilkie in the Wisconsin Primary the “Stop Dewey” movement focused on General Douglas MacArthur. “Old Brass Hat” MacArthur stayed out of the race in order to complete the conquest of the Pacific. That was probably an easier task than taking on FDR. Dewey won the nomination on the first ballot with only one delegate from Wisconsin voting for MacArthur. The reason: “I am a man, not a jellyfish.” Dewey wanted the progressive Governor of California Earl Warren as his running-mate but the big Swede did not want anything to do with the hopeless Dewey cause. Instead Dewey tapped Bricker and came up with one of the most catchy slogans in American political history: “Win the war quicker with Dewey and Bricker!” The 1944 Republican Chicago Convention is a real let down. Dewey and Bricker were easily nominated. The 1944 campaign is not saved by anything the Republicans pulled. No, when the Democrats were blown into Chicago that is when the campaign fireworks began.

Henry Agard Wallace was simply a strange cookie. A utopian socialist working as vice-president, Wallace admired Siberia and regularly wrote a mystic shaman for political advice. The 1944 election is made exciting because Wallace is a great character and his struggle to stay on the ticket is a wonderful political cloak and dagger story. FDR did not personally dislike Wallace. In fact FDR wanted to keep Wallace on the ticket. Roosevelt did not seem to care who his running-mate was as he was reshaping the post-war world in his own image. While Roosevelt didn’t care the political bigwigs of the Democratic Party certainly did. They knew FDR was a dying man and that they were picking not one but two presidents at the Chicago convention. On July 20, 1944, the Democratic Convention nominated FDR for a fourth term overwhelmingly. Wallace delivered a solid New Deal speech leading delegates to cheer for over half and hour, “We want Wallace! We want Wallace!” Democratic National Chairman Robert E. Hannegan did not want Wallace. FDR, who said he “liked” and “respected” Wallace, was not willing to make a fight over the second place spot. FDR personally liked “assistant president” Jimmy Byrnes as vice-president but Sidney Hillman of the AFL/CIO could not stand the anti-labor Byrnes. Party leaders sat around in their hotel rooms, smoking heavily and thinking about who would work bes to beat Wallace. Hannegan, a Missouri man, decided that Senator Harry S Truman (the “Senator from Pendergast”) would be a fine choice for second place. Truman rejected the idea at first but Hannegan refused to let him run. FDR himself interceded. When Truman was cornered in Hannegan’s hotel room the president called him up. “Have you got that fellow lined up yet?” FDR asked in a rehearsed phone call. “No,” said Hannegan, “he is the contrariest damned Missouri Mule I’ve ever dealt with.” “Well,” FDR replied with drama dripping from his every word, “you tell him, if he wants to break up the Democratic Party in the middle of the war, that’s his responsibility.” Truman had heard the whole thing because FDR spoke so loudly. “If that’s the situation I’ll have to say yes,” a bewildered Truman responded, “but why the hell didn’t he tell me in the first place?” Wallace’s support from labor and the big cities kept him in the lead on the first ballot. However, his failure to win on the first ballot allowed for Hannegan to rally enough large Northern, Midwestern, and Southern states to the Truman banner to win Give em’ Hell Harry a victory on the second ballot. One humorist called Truman the “Missouri Compromise.”

The dramatic battle between Truman and Wallace is only added to by the presence of Red Sydney Hillman. New York Times columnist Arthur Krock reported that FDR had told Hannegan in regards to the Vice-Presidential pick: “Go down and nominate Truman before there’s any more trouble. And clear everything with Sidney.” Red Sidney Hillman was the head of the Afl/CIO PAC and close friends with communist Earl Browder. The Republicans jumped on the red baiting issue with gusto. “Everything in your government will be cleared with the radical Sydney Hillman and his communist friend Earl Browder,” Governor Bricker warned voters, “if Roosevelt and Truman win election this November.” One Republican poet even Waxed eloquent against the communists:

Red baiting was a new tool in the Republican box of dirty tricks. It was played to the hilt in the 1944 campaign. Dewey accused Roosevelt of cozying up with the Soviet Union and allowing Stalin to murder and imprison millions of innocent Eastern Europeans. The young and dynamic Dewey assaulted the “tired old men” in the Roosevelt government who had been allowed to “grow old in office.” Herbert Brownell, Dewey’s campaign manager, urged Dewey to attack Roosevelt over his poor health. In July 1944 Roosevelt suffered a collapse in San Diego. The ebullient FDR referred to his ailment as “the collywobbles” and laughed as reporters asked if he felt he could survive another four years at the helm. Had Dewey chosen to run against Roosevelt’s health that would have made for an interesting campaign dynamic. In the end Dewey proved too magnanimous to go into the mud over Roosevelt’s health. This would not be the only time Dewey pulled his punches.

Continued on next post.        

The Pearl Harbor issue adds some excellent drama to the 1944 campaign. Republicans began to question how much Roosevelt knew about the Japanese surprise attack. Dewey himself spoke about the issue. General George C. Marshall sent intelligence officer Carter C. Clarke to speak one-on-one with Dewey. Dewey told Clarke that military cryptographers had cracked “certain Japanese codes before Pearl Harbor” and that FDR “knew what was happening before Pearl Harbor.” “Instead of being reelected he ought to be impeached,” Dewey said to Clarke. Clarke demanded that Dewey drop the Pearl Harbor issue but Dewey, who had stood up to mobsters with tommy guns, refused to be intimidated by the little intelligence officer. General Marshall, who was afraid that the investigation of Pearl Harbor might reflect dimly on him, refused to back off on the issue. Marshall met with Dewey himself and browbeat him by declaring that the U.S. government had no prior knowledge of Japanese codes before the Pearl Harbor attack. Marshall accused Dewey of aiding the enemy by bringing Pearl Harbor into the debate. No one knows what else Marshall said or threatened in the meeting but we do know that in the end Dewey relented to stop the political questions about Pearl Harbor. It is now known that Japanese codes had been cracked by the MAGIC decoding machine and that Marshall was not entirely truthful with Dewey. However, Dewey dropped the issue and in doing so gave up a second effective issue that could have been used in the 1944 general election against FDR.

The general election of 1944 is a good one but by no means great. Organized labor came out in force for Roosevelt. The United Steel Workers released a fairly hilarious cartoon called “Hellbent for Election” in which they compared the Republicans to Hitler. The AFL/CIO sent campaign workers door to door in order to ask people, “Where were you in 1932?” Dewey’s attacks on the “tired old men in Washington” was successfully countered by Senator Robert Kerr’s keynote address at the DNC. He named the “tired old men” of the Roosevelt government. “Shall we discard as a ‘tired old man’ 59-year old Admiral Nimitz…62-year-old Admiral Halsey…64-year-old General MacArthur…66-year old Admiral King…64-year-old General Marshall? No, Mr. Dewey, we know we are winning the war with these ‘tired old men’ including the 62-year old Roosevelt as their commander-in-chief.” The Republicans more or less swallowed their tongues on the age issue following this brilliant rebuff.

The 1944 campaign was a good one in many ways. The final results are interesting themselves. Dewy won an impressive 46% of the vote against the popular war time leader. Roosevelt remembered the 1944 contest as the “meanest of my life” but his big win was hardly unimpressive. Republicans even went after Fala, FDR’s little dog. They claimed that FDR had sent a destroyer to pick up Fala who had been left at a Pacific island. Roosevelt joked that while his family did not despise the attacks “Fala does.” Roosevelt’s massive win was a sweet victory over the Republicans and it would be the last time he would be able to do it. He would be dead by April 1945 and the Missouri Compromise would be in the president’s chair. Dewey, to his credit or disgrace, refused to concede the race at first. It was not until 3:16 a.m. the morning after the election that Dewey admitted Roosevelt beat him. “I still think he is a son of a bitch,” Roosevelt bitterly told a friend. Dewey would be back in four years and would surrender as much ground as he had in 1944. However, that would happen in a much more exciting race. 

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Landing at number forty on the list is the election of 1984. Ronald Reagan’s landslide reelection offered an incredible Democratic Primary battle followed by a lackluster general election battle. Themes, as opposed to issues, dominated the campaign. Like FDR in 1936, the incumbent president was the only issue in the 1984 campaign. Photogenic and friendly, Ronald Wilson Reagan was the larger than life personality who dominated a decade. His eventual Democratic opponent was former Vice-President Walter “Fritz” Mondale. Mondale’s gutsy running-mate choice and liberal general election campaign was hardly enough to stand up against the Hollywood projected image of Dutch Reagan.

The election itself was not one that many voters followed strongly. Much like 1988, the voters seemed content to sit back and watch the campaign unfold. The novelties of the campaign include the campaign of the Reverend Jesse Jackson, the first serious African-American presidential candidate for a major party nomination, and selection of Congresswoman Geraldine Ferraro as Mondale’s running-mate. The selection of the first woman to ever run on a major party’s presidential ticket did little to give Fritz’s campaign a needed jolt. Mondale himself complained to his campaign manager Bob Beckel: “This campaign is glacial.”

The 1984 Democratic Primary was hardly glacial, though. It is one of the best campaigns in the history of United States presidential campaigns. While Reagan was only challenged by perennial candidate Harold Stassen and “Boxcar Ben” Fernandez for the Republican nomination, Mondale faced a whole array of opponents. The Reverend Jackson ran a spirited campaign based on the social justice themes of his friend and mentor Martin Luther King, Junior. The tall Senator Alan Cranston of California, 1972 nominee George McGovern, Florida favorite son Reuben Askew, South Carolina Senator Ernest “Fritz” Hollings, astronaut and Senator John Glenn and Senator Gary Hart of Colorado entered the fray against the former vice-president. Hart emerged as Mondale’s primary rival, yes that pun was intended. Senator Hart ran on a campaign of “change” and “new ideas.” While these platitudes were just what the doctor ordered in 2008 Mondale hatchet man Bob Beckel knew exactly how to hand Hart is heiney. Mondale quoted the famous Wendy’s hamburgers advertisement: “Where’s the beef.” Hart was never able to respond to the commercial quip. Mondale and Hart traded primary victories throughout the campaign. Ernest Hollings endorsed Hart while calling Mondale a “lap dog” and Glenn a “Sky King” who was “confused in his capsule.”

The vicious battle between Mondale and Hart is worth placing the primary battle in the upper echelon of primary campaigns. Hart won more popular votes at the end of the campaign and was seen by many Democrats as the right energetic campaign to place against the seventy-three year old, grandfatherly Reagan. The two candidates attacked each other so viciously that at one debate hosted by Phil Donahue that Jackson had to tap on his water glass in order to get a word in edgewise. Mondale used arcane rules in the Democratic rulebook to use his big wins in industrial and reliable Democratic states to defeat Hart, who won caucuses in heavily Republican states. In the end it came down to the highly undemocratic Democratic superdelegates who voted heavily for Mondale. At the San Francisco Convention Mondale won the party’s nomination of the first ballot, but only narrowly beat Hart in the delegate count. Governor Mario Cuomo excited the delegates by giving a speech accusing Reagan of separating the nation into “two cities.” Shortly afterwards, Congressman Gerald Solomon of New York threw the reference back in his face by declaring that Cuomo’s Tale of the Two Cities was nothing but a Dickensian farse. “You will have plenty of time to read your Dickens, Mr. Cuomo, after November” Solomon said, “When Reagan will take your candidate, Mondale, and beat the dickens out of him (Charles Dickens, that is).” That is exactly what Reagan would do. In 1984 the Democrats would end up inheriting a Bleak House while Reagan lived up to his own Great Expectations.

The general election of 1984 lacks the pop and glamour a Reagan Campaign should have had. Reagan made his share of clever quips during the campaign and Mondale did throw all he had at the incumbent. When asked about his health Reagan said he kept in shape by jogging three times a day around Speaker of the House Tip O’Neil. When Mondale questioned the wisdom of increasing the already ballooning deficit Reagan laughed it off: “I don’t worry about the deficit. It’s big enough to take care of itself.” When Mondale rightly questioned Reagan’s age the Gipper delivered his most famous one-liner ever: “I am not going to, for political purposes, exploit my opponent’s youth and inexperience.” The whole campaign of 1984 was Reagan making funny quips and Mondale failing to get any point across at all.

This does not mean that Mondale did not try. In the first debate with Reagan the former vice-president cleaned the Gipper’s clock by being conversational and knowledgeable. “He out-Reaganed Reagan,” complained campaign manager Ed Rollins. However, Mondale made far too many missteps to make the race even slightly competitive. In order to combat the deficit he promised to raise taxes. A Saturday Night Live skit from November 1984 entitled “What Were You Thinking?” made the greatest point ever:  no one who has ever ran for office had ever promised to RAISE taxes. Mondale’s gutsy selection of Ferraro as a running-mate also backfired.  Only 22% of women were excited about her selection, versus 18% who agreed that it was a "bad idea". 60% of all voters thought that pressure from women's groups had led to Mondale's decision, versus 22% who believed that he had chosen the best available candidate. Ferraro’s husband John Zaccaro proved to be a mobbed up, bank fraudster who pedaled pornography. “Fritz and Tits” proved to be little too no match for the Reagn/Bush campaign of “It’s Morning Again in America.”

In the end the 1984 campaign offered a great primary campaign but a very lackluster general election campaign. Issues of religion, abortion, school prayer and tax credits for parochial school dominated the scant issue plane of the campaign. Lee Iacoca threw his hands into the air in anger: “These guys aren’t running for pope!” In the end the issues of religion and taxes did not mean a great deal. Reagan won a landslide because the people liked him and the economy was expanding. A scant 53% of voters braved the polls as Reagan won every state except Minnesota. When Reagan was asked in December 1984 what he wanted for Christmas he joked, "Well, Minnesota would have been nice" You know what would have been a good gift for America in 1984? An exciting presidential race. Well, at least they got a primary battle worth remembering.        

Number thirty-nine on the list is the election of 1900. The campaign of 1900 was a repeat performance of the epic election of 1896. Incumbent President William McKinley ran for a second term in a nation transformed from the depression ridden, globally exclusive America of 1896. By 1900 the American Army marched across Cuba, Puerto Rico and the Philippines. In a war attacked by Mark Twain and others as “imperialist” the United States had humbled an already humble Spain and acquired new lands and troubles from the “splendid little” Spanish-American War. William Jennings Bryan fought the good fight but the Boy Orator of the Platte found that his views from just four years back were already old hat. In just four short years the world, the nation and the campaign trail had changed irreversibly. “The period of exclusiveness is past,” McKinley declared in Buffalo in September 1901. The period of free silver was also past. Bryan never learned.

The campaign of 1900 falls at number thirty-nine because it involves some excellent episodes and characters but a lackluster climax. 1900 was not another free-silver campaign. The 1892 and 1896 Populist campaigns were out of style in a world where increased supplies of gold led to inflation in prices. The complaints about the low cost of corn and unfair freight rates were a hollow shout in world gilded in gold and glory. When the Democrats met in Kansas City to nominate a candidate they found the cupboards bare. The bookish and bewhiskered Admiral George Dewey appeared to be a good candidate to place against Big Bill McKinley. The admiral was a hero following his smashing victory over the Spanish Admiral Patricio Montojo y Pasarón at Manilla Bay. However, Dewey brought baggage along with laurels. Dewey’s short lived candidacy was plagued by public relations gaffes. Newspapers started attacking him as naïve after he was quoted as saying the job of president would be easy, since the chief executive was merely following orders in executing the laws enacted by Congress, and that he would "execute the laws of Congress as faithfully as I have always executed the orders of my superiors." Like Wes Clark in 2004, Dewey was also forced to admit not voting in a presidential election in years. Dewey additionally made a prophetic gaffe when he told the New York Times that the next war was to be with Germany. With Dewey sinking faster than a Spanish Fleet the Democrats turned to Nebraska and William Jennings Bryan. The Great Commoner was nominated on the first ballot without any opposition. His running-mate was a retread: former Vice-President Adlai Stevenson, whose grandson would go on to become a twice beaten Democratic candidate. As a young Harry S Truman served as a paige at the convention and his father John Truman shouted himself hoarse for Bryan, the Democrats must have realized they stood no chance. When Senator Reed of Missouri stated in a speech at the convention that Mrs. Bryan would be sleeping in the White House after March 4 a delegate from the Midwest replied: “If so she’ll be sleeping with McKinley.” Hope did not spring eternal.  

The main reason why Bryan fell flat on his face in 1900 is because he simply had nothing to bellow about. In 1896 the issues were almost tailored made for the silver tongue, leather lunged populist orator. By 1900 his issues seemed out of place. An anti-imperialist who was nominated for president by the Anti-Imperialist League, Bryan had nonetheless supported the 1899 Treaty of Paris and acquiesced to the U.S. gaining control over the Philippine Islands. While Aguinaldo and his rebels fought against the U.S. troops and General Arthur MacArthur led an inhuman war of attrition against them, Bryan failed to make an issue out of the occupation. Bryan was made a colonel during the war but spoke out against the very war he had entered on his own free will. Bryan had difficulty getting Americans excited as they had been in 1896. His calls for free silver were not taken seriously because the nation was no longer involved in an economic depression. Bryan still rode the rails from shore to shore decrying the evils of big business and the gold, but there seemed to be no one who cared to listen. Former Speaker of the House Thomas Brackett Reed was quoted to have said that Bryan, “Would rather be wrong than be president.” Running as an anti-imperialist in an age of victory and a pro-silver salesman in an age of prosperity were the wrong positions to win high office in 1900.

The Republican Convention offered far more drama and that is why this campaign has been given a decent rank on the list. The machinations of Senator “Boss Tom” Platt of New York and his fellow Big East Republican bosses make the Philadelphia Convention one to remember. Senator Tom Platt was known as Roscoe Conkling’s sidekick for most of his life. When Conkling opposed the nomination of Theodore Roosevelt, Senior, as Collector of the Port of New York Platt jumped up to support him. Upon his death, the New York Times stated of Platt that "no man ever exercised less influence in the Senate or the House of Representatives than he," but "no man ever exercised more power as a political leader." Platt, who was drawn by Pluck magazine as a small weather balloon trailing off of an overinflated Conkling, had made the mistake of nominating Theodore Roosevelt for governor of New York. By 1900 he wanted him gone. Roosevelt was an eccentric of incredibly varied talents and interest. A rancher, writer, police commissioner and colonel, Roosevelt rode the fame of Teddy’s Terrors and San Juan Hill into the governor’s office in 1899. Immediately he began to annoy Platt and the Republican controlled State Legislature. The death of Vice-President Garrett A. Hobart gave Platt and his friends a great place to retire the Lion of Sagamore Hill.

While T.R. disclaimed all interest in the vice-presidency he had to admit that it was an honor to be thought of as the candidate. A funny story mentions when Governor Roosevelt visited the State Department in 1900 and told Secretary of State John Hay that he had no interest in the vice-presidency. Hay responded, “Why Theodore, no one is thinking of naming you as vice-president.” Roosevelt swallowed his anger and stamped out of the department. Hay commented that Roosevelt’s angry response was, “As fun as a goat.” The fact was that TR wanted the vice-presidency. It was one heartbeat away from the bully pulpit of the presidency. When Roosevelt arrived at the Philadelphia Convention he did not don a straw hat like all of the other men. He instead donned a broad-brimmed black hat like those of his famous Rough Riders in Cuba. “Gentlemen,” one delegate said, “that’s an acceptance hat.” On the first ballot McKinley won the presidential nomination and TR won the vice-presidential nomination. The Republican Ticket is arguably one of the strongest ever assembled: “William McKinley, a western man with eastern ideas, and Theodore Roosevelt, an eastern man with western ideas.”                            

The last campaign of the 19th century was considerably tired when compared to the Republican Convention. Mark Hanna warned of “that damned cowboy” being so close to the president’s chair but Roosevelt was a hit on the campaign trail. Bryan and Roosevelt ran against one another in the only campaign the two giants of oration would face off head-to-head. McKinley did not even run a front-porch campaign. He widdled on a stick and planned a grand national tour after the election was over. Teddy Roosevelt traveled 21,000 miles, spoke in hundreds of towns and cities and held audience as spell bound as any who listened to Bryan’s bombastic spiels. A cartoonist noted that Teddy was not running for vice-president, “He’s gallopin’!” The Republican Campaign out messaged, out financed and outdid the pathetic Democratic effort at every step. The Republican message of “four more years of the full dinner pale” and “victory” was an incredible message when compared to the memory of Cleveland the Panic of 1893. While Bryan tried to run against imperialism the war loving Roosevelt fired back: “We are a nation of men, not weaklings!” “The American people,” he declared were, “as ready to face the responsibilities of the Orient as they were ready to face them at home.” Bryan responded by declaring that the Philippines should be given independence and the war against the insurgents ended as soon as possible. “I would not exchange the glory of this Republic for the glory of all the empires which have risen and fallen since time began,” Bryan eloquently stated in response to jingoistic Republicans. Bryan also assaulted the sugar, oil, steel and coffee trusts and their control over the pocketbooks of the American consumers. Bryan introduced his own Axis of Evil in the campaign: empire, trusts and gold. A nation in the midst of economic growth due to gold and industry had no interest in hearing the cries of the Cassandra Bryan. As Teddy Roosevelt was leaving a campaign stop in Ohio a small girl ran to his train with a dinner pale. “It’s full just like you promised!” she cried to a beaming Teddy. Bryan was no match in the end for the marketing.

McKinley’s easy, but by no means landslide, reelection was what would be expected given the campaign. All Bryan managed to do was lose his hair in a campaign that was doomed from the beginning. It is not to be believed that the election win was a mandate for the imperialism of the Spanish-American War. It appears more likely that it was in response to the general productivity and economic growth of the McKinley Administration. During the campaign a young Bryanite had pleaded for his Missouri farming community to resist militaristic imperialism. “Well I guess we can stand it,” a farmer replied, “as long as the hogs are 20 cents a hundred.” This anecdote explains why the 1900 campaign is a good one but not a great one. Incredible issues were argued by excellent characters and personalities. Backroom deals dominated a convention and a potential candidate talked himself into oblivion. However, in the end the victory of McKinley was assured. Senator and industrialist Mark Hanna told McKinley soon after the election, “It is your duty to the country to lvie for four years from next March.” The failure of McKinley to live up to that duty is one reason why the election of 1900 is so important. Once his last words of “Nearer my God to three,” slipped from McKinley’s lips in that September sun of a Buffalo summer the nation would never be the same again. Boss Platt told reporters after TR was nominated for veep, “I am glad that we got our way.” He quickly corrected himself, “The people, I mean had their way.” Oh Boss Platt, Matt Quay, Mark Hanna and the rest really did give the people what they wanted. However, it was hardly what they wanted.   

Placing at thirty-eight on the list is the Great Depression election of 1932. Incumbent Republican President Herbert Hoover, a hard working but misguided public servant, faced off against the sunny Governor of New York Franklin Delano Roosevelt. The election is dramatic due to the incredible comeback of FDR from defeat in 1920 and the debilitation of polio. The election of 1932 is a great contest with an expected ending.

With much ho-hum the Republicans nominated Hoover for a second term. Once a nationally hero who was elected president by a massive majority, Hoover had shown himself ill-tempered for the White House. He seemed to shy from the press only when it could benefit him. As the nation’s economy dipped into the first part of the Great Depression he made it clear he would raise taxes, cut spending and increase tariffs. All three are a wonderful recipe for economic disaster. While the media saw Hoover raise taxes on those who needed tax cuts they failed to see his human side. When two boys from Detroit hitchhiked to Washington, D.C, to meet with Hoover he made sure to make time to see them. He gave them both money and sent them home with a promise of work for their father. This type of story would have been exploited by practical politicians like Bill Clinton or Barack Obama, but Hoover failed to mention the tale of the two boys once. In fact, he told no one to tell the press about it in fear of making the boys “unwitting celebrities.” Hoover’s failure to make himself into an interesting candidate was one of the major reasons he failed as president. The successful orphan of Quaker background refused to engage in political games. That was his undoing…along with a outrageously bad economy and a trade war he started.  

The Democratic campaign is a great deal more interesting than the Republican one. The three candidates who emerged as the potential Hoover slayers were all very different and interesting. The Southern, dry candidate was Speaker of the House “Cactus Jack” Garner. Garner, a former Texas judge, had supported prohibition but constantly held meetings of the alcohol swigging “board of education” where he called his drinking binges, “a blow for liberty.” John Nance Garner advised the Democrats that they needed to “sit down, do nothing and win.” Newspaper mogul William Randolph Hearst pushed hard for Garner as well. 1928 nominee and former New York Governor Al Smith ran as the choice of big city bosses once again. The capitally beaten Catholic of 1928 was the same old Roman hat in 1932. He still was opposed by western and southern Democrats. Governor Franklin Delano Roosevelt, the 1920 vice-presidential nominee and controversial former Assistant Secretary of the Navy, emerged as the choice of rank-and-file party men. His campaign was attacked as “vague” by pundits. Heywood Broun mocked FDR as a “corkscrew” and the liberal columnist Walter Lippmann commented that Roosevelt was “an amiable man” but not much more. These three candidates arrived in Chicago in July 1932 and none had the edge. This allowed for an incredible struggle at the Democratic Convention. FDR led comfortably on the first three ballots but the Curse of 1832 haunted him as it did Smith in 1924: he could not attain that blasted two-thirds majority. The drama of the campaign is greatly increased by a late night meeting between “Prince Will” Hearst and Roosevelt campaign manager “Big Jim” Farley. The “Treaty of Chicago” established that Hearst and William Gibbs McAdoo would throw California, which had been for Garner, to FDR in exchange for Garner being placed as vice-president on the ticket. An angered Al Smith would never forgive FDR for working behind his back and join the anti-New Deal Liberty League in 1935. “It’s a kangaroo ticket,” a Texas delegate would say of the Roosevelt/Garner ticket, “Stronger in the hindquarters than the front.” This Texan and millions of others would discover FDR was no paper tiger.

The campaign of 1932 is an exciting one but one that is kept out of the top thirty elections because the ending was expected. It is like a novel in which the protagonist is charming and charismatic but the villain is so vile there is no way the ending can be in doubt. While I am not fan of FDR one cannot deny he was a sunny figure on a gloomy day. Hoover, on the other hand, was a gloomy day on a funeral. FDR declared that he would not allow his disability, his lack of leg usage due to polio, to keep him from the campaign. “There is nothing I love more than a good fight!” he told Farley as the campaign opened. He made history by flying to Chicago to give his own acceptance address in person to the delegates at the Democratic Convention. Quoting a popular Rollin Kirby cartoon Roosevelt pledged to himself and the nation, “A New Deal for the American people.” Despite the fact that Walter Lippmann had claimed that FDR was “no crusader, no champion of the people against the entrenched interests” Lippmann would later eat his words and be ostracized at Manhattan cocktail parties for the comments. FDR ran an active campaign assailing Hoover. However, he assailed him for overspending, high taxes, unbalanced budget and talk of taking the U.S. off of the gold standard. The New Deal of Rexford Tugwell and the other utopian socialists was not spoke about in the campaign. Instead some saw Hoover and Roosevelt as the same candidate. The socialist newspaper of Reading, Pennsylvania, bemoaned the election between “Herbert Roosevelt” and “Franklin Hoover.” The socialist-leaning Eleanor Roosevelt told the press years later that she would have voted for Socialist nominee Norman Thomas if she had not been married to Franklin.

The campaign was at time shrill and negative. “Hoover Derangement Syndrome” dominated the campaign and Republicans came back with very ugly rhetoric themselves. Hoover’s life was threatened as his campaign swung through Baltimore. Angry crowds screamed “lunch him” as Hoover spoke. The thin skinned and soft-spoken Hoover burst into tears following the speech, telling his wife Lou Henry, “I can’t got through with it.” John Nance Garner delivered only one speech the whole campaign but in it he accused Hoover of “inching toward socialism.” Hoover was convinced FDR’s polices would spell doom for the nation. If Roosevelt was elected, Hoover warned, “The grass will grow in the streets of a hundred cities, a thousand towns.” Hoover also called Roosevelt “Un-American” and said that he was under the foreign control of Red Russia. In the end all of the shouting was for naught.

Democratic Senator Thomas P. Gore of Oklahoma commented to FDR a few days before the election that if every Democrat in Iowa was arrested the day before the election he would still carry Hoover’s native state anyway. Iowa was won by Roosevelt along with nearly every other state in the Union. 1932 was an election of great excitement but the ending was expected. It ranks at number thirty-eight because it offered some great campaign moments but very little suspense. I blame Hoover for this, of course.

Landing at number thirty-seven is our most recent presidential campaign. The contest between incumbent President Barack Obama and former Massachusetts Governor W. Mitt Romney will not rate as one of the great campaign of American History, but it will register as a pretty good election. The campaign offered some drama and twists of plot, much more than 1932, 1900 or 1984 had in store for the voter. The gods of elections offered many tokens to the hungry masses in 2012.

Incumbent Democratic President Barack Obama should have been toast in 2012. All of the signs pointed to him losing his job as president. The economy had not recovered nearly enough during his three and a half year tender, his signature achievement in health care was highly controversial, Republicans were united against him and his approval ratings were mediocre at best. The president seemed far too intellectual and aloof as if the Oval Office was his professorial pulpit and the nation the drunken frat boy hoping for a C-. The first African-American president, however, was underestimated. The 2012 election is unique in one way because the approval polls and economic indicators could not be used to pinpoint where Obama’s election chances fell. His brilliant on-line presence and community of local activists made the sagging economy and controversial health care law secondary in the campaign. Republicans claimed that they wanted to make Barack Obama the issue of the 2012 election. Obama also had the idea of making himself the issue of the campaign. David Plouff, his brilliant campaign manager, realized that making Obama the issue was a good thing. Republicans seemed unable to stop making dumb comments about the president while the president united Democrats and independent minded voters. The GOP foolishly allowed Obama to become the issue as opposed to his policies. Had Obama had to run for reelection on his record odds are he would have lost. The 2012 election is unique in the Obama made himself the issue and was able to win. The Republican sideshow of primaries is also a big reason why he won a second term.

Former Massachusetts Governor Mitt Romney was in many ways the ideal Republican candidate: a perceived moderate conservative businessman who was governor of an East Coast State. His voice was a fine baritone and his hair was impeccable. He had a lovely wife and photogenic children. In short, he looked and sounded much like a president in a Hollywood movie, right out of central casting. If that is so than why did he lose? The answer goes down to the second great treat of 2012: the Republican Primary. I never thought I would see so many debates where people cheered for executing people. However, they were there on display for the world to see from 2011 to 2012. One can only applaud the wonderful cast of characters given to the political state by the 2012 Republican Primary. Romney was dull compared to the egocentric book peddler New Gingrich, the ever bombastic Congresswoman Michelle Bachmann, the pious porn crusader Rick Santorum, bombastic businessman Herman Cain the cowboy impersonator Rick Perry and, my favorite, the eclectic Congressman Ron Paul of Texas. Romney, it is fair, outshone John Huntsman and Tim Pawlenty, yet a piece of dull obsidian could have done that.

The 2012 Republican Primaries were a great deal of fun because the Republican Party had a front-runner every week. This is odd for the elephant derby because that party usually selects its candidate for president early on and generally holds a primary coronation. This was not the case in 2012. Between October 2010 and July 2012 the Republicans hosted no fewer than nine front-runners in the general public opinion polls. Such diverse figures as Governor Chris Christie, Rudy Giuliani, Donald Trump, Bachman, Perry, Cain, Gingrich and Santorum all managed to top Romney in the public opinion polls before the Iowa Caucus. The colorful Herman Cain made Republican cheer for his 999 Plan as Newt Gingrich insulted the media for daring to have debates. In the end what saved Romney was the money he had raised and the fact that his opponents seemed to commit political suicide one after another. Cain said that he had made women perform sexual acts for jobs but Jesus had forgiven him. Bachmann claimed that vaccinations caused autism. Rick Santorum was simply himself, for better and for worse. The same can be said for Ron Paul. Newt Gingrich allowed his love of open marriages and fancy clothes to sink his already skeleton heavy boat.

The problem was the Tea Party voters were just not into Romney. He was not the man they wanted. He had supported tax increases, abortion, gay marriage and Obamacare in the past. He was the moderate governor of a liberal state. The man they wanted was Mike Huckabee, but he was too busy making money on Fox News peddling CGI conservative rehash American history DVDs to run for president in 2012. Romney won the Iowa Caucus and then magically lost it to Santorum two months later. He was beaten in Missouri, Kansas, South Carolina, Georgia, Tennessee, Mississippi and Alabama to more socially conservative opponents. More fringe-like candidates such as Santorum, Gingrich and Paul appealed to Tea Party conservatives far more than Romney, even though they could never defeat Obama in the general election. The 2012 Republican Primaries are important to history and to the ranking of the election because they showcase the failure of the Tea Party to crystalize around one candidate (such as Reagan in 1976 and 1980) and also their failure to vote against a person who did not share their worldview. One can say that if the Tea Party could not beat Romney in 2012 it is likely they will never elect a Tea Party president.

The 2012 general election is a treat. I feel everyone can agree to that. Romney’s selection of Congressman Paul Ryan as his running-mate was a good one. Ryan appealed to the Tea Party budget hawks as well as the mainstream Republican voter. The Republican Convention was a hit with John Kasich declaring he could golf better than Vice-President Biden and Clint Eastwood delivering a unique and creative impromptu speech comparing the president to an empty chair. The establishment media mocked the veteran actor but the Eastwood speech was unique, inventive and highly memorable. Even Romney’s acceptance address was well delivered with his polished diction. This GOP convention, however, was not any fun at all when compared to the Charlotte Convention which gave Obama and Biden the nod for a second term. It was at this convention where Obama would come up with his divisive and effective reelection strategy. It is the strategy which won him reelection and made the 2012 election one to watch.

No one knew who Sandra Fluke was before she was strangely called to speak to important members of Congress. A random law school student who is truly not all that good at public speaking, Fluke was called a “slut” by right-wing talk radio guru Rush Limbaugh for simply wanted the government to pay for her birth control. This fairly noncontroversial medical program was made into one of the lynchpins of the Obama 2012 reelection campaign. Republican missteps, or possibly full truth telling, concerning rape and women’s health issues were an incredible help to the Obama reelection campaign. The third most memorable part about the 2012 election was how effectively the Obama campaign was able to divide Americans along gender, racial and class lines. It is to be applauded how effectively Plouff and Axelrod set people apart in order to win votes. The Republicans only helped the Obama campaign with such memorable gaffes as “legitimate rape” and “the 47%.” The 2012 election will be a decently remembered one because the Obama Campaign was able to take social issues such as abortion and immigration, fringe issues the right usually used to divide and conquer, and use them to benefit the Democratic Party. Some claim that Obama is a babe in the woods when it comes to politics but his 2012 campaign strategy shows he is a devious, intelligent political player.

The general election offered a lot of laughs and plenty of thrills. The polls were generally close with the exception of two spots. In September 2012 a successful Democratic Convention, coupled with Romney’s awkward 47% insult, placed Obama eight to nine points ahead of Romney. The second time was in mid-October when Romney decimated the president in the first debate. The debates themselves give a lot of humor to the race. Romney’s wonderful awkwardness was on full display as the nation watched. He spoke about the “binders full of women” he has reviewed as governor. Romney brought up a want to get rid of Big Bird and all of PBS. Obama worked in some clever one liners, such as his reminder to Romney that the U.S. military doesn’t spend much money on horses and bayonets anymore. Perhaps the best moment of all the debates occurred when CNN’s Candy Crowley reminded Romney that the president had referred to the assault on the U.S. consulate in Benghazi, Libya, as a “terrorist attack.” One can only imagine Obama giving himself a mental high five when he asked Crowley, “Could you repeat that for everyone to hear?” The debates were a lot of fun, far better than the boredom they wrought in 2008, and for that reason are another example of 2012 being a decently entertaining race.

In the end the election of 2012 was a good race but not a great one. While the polls changed hands several times and it was a close race nationally, Obama led in the swing states a good deal of the time. In the end only a few swing states were even that close. Florida was decided by a hair but even if Romney had carried the Sunshine State he still would have lost. 2012 was no 2000. The most memorable event to come out of the 2012 election was the victory and vindication of the Obama Coalition. Like the Roosevelt Coalition of the 1930s, the Obama Coalition was a disparate group of voters united under the banner of a single, effective political leader. I know it can easily be argued that Obama is not FDR, not am I saying that. The Obama Coalition, however, is real. Early voting, voter drives and prodigious Election Day GOTV efforts enabled urban, suburban, blue collar, college educated professional, middle aged white, Hispanic, Asian and moderate voters to all reelect the president. Despite the fact that he had a meager 51% approval rating and 65% of voters thought the nation was on the wrong track, this coalition trusted Obama to do the right thing for another four years. That is some incredible power and, if Obama can hold on to his coalition, it could spell victory for the Democrats in 2016, 2020 and beyond. 2012 will be an historic race even if not the most memorable.                  

Why isn't 1932 above 2012? That's a pretty important election.

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Finding its unique place at number thirty-six is the election of 1836. The last election in which a vice-president was directly elected to the presidency until 1988, the election of 1836 pitted the elegant and ingenious Democratic Vice-President Martin van Buren against a cadre of accomplished Whig Party opponents. It was the first election of the Third Party System of U.S. political history and it offers some unique and interesting moments.

In February 1835, President Andrew Jackson decided to not seek a third term despite the fact he would have won without breaking a sweat. Still the hero of the common people and the Democratic Party, Jackson urged his party to hold a national convention composed of delegates “fresh from the people.” These “people’s delegates” made sure to nominate Jackson’s team at the 1835 Democratic Convention in Baltimore: Vice-President Martin van Buren of New York for president and former Senator Richard Mentor Johnson of Kentucky for vice-president. While there is no drama in the selection of the candidates there is a great deal in the acceptance of the Van Buren/Johnson ticket. The selection of Van Buren as the nominee made many Southern Democrats angry. Virginia delegates hissed angrily at the Van Buren selection and then walked out of the convention. To Southern Democrats the Baltimore Convention was the “Northern Van Buren Convention” and they charged it was as closed as the old King Caucus system. It was pointed out by some that many states sent only one delegate to the convention while others sent so many they were vastly over-represented. Jackson’s own Tennessee, for example, did not send a single delegate “fresh from the people.” Nashville attorney Edmund Rucker was in town and agreed to cast all fifteen delegate votes from Tennessee for Van Buren and Johnson. The anti-Jackson and anti-Van Buren mocked “ruckerism”, which was used as a synonym for engaging in political hijinks.

The nomination of Richard M. Johnson for vice-president was especially controversial. While Van Buren was attacked for being a fence sitter his running-mate was something far worse for the 19th century: a man who lived with an African-American woman and had children by her. Johnson was a war hero who was credited with slaying the Shawnee war chief Tecumseh at the Battle of the Thames (“Rumpsey dumpsey Colonel Johnson slew Tecumseh!”) but he had lived with Julia Chinn, an octoroon slave, as an informal common-law wife since he inherited her from his father. This interracial relationship led to great controversy as the general election opened. Southern Democrats who were already angry at the Jackson Administration’s tariff increases and rejection of nullification grew even more uncomfortable with a Northern Democrat for president and a man with a black “wife” for vice-president. South Carolina electors would not vote for Van Buren and Johnson but instead cast their votes for North Carolina Senator Willie Person Mangum, a member of the disorganized but growing Whig Party.

One main reason why the election of 1836 is unique and exciting is because of the genesis of a new major political party. The birth of new political parties is nothing new. Political parties get started every day in people’s living rooms. However, none of these parties ever become major political parties that control Congress and elect presidents. The anti-Jacksonian Whig Party was able to become a major party almost overnight due to the genius of its founders and the lack of steady opposition to the Democracy. By 1834 disgust with Jackson’s Bank War, veto of internal improvements and fetish for gold backed currency united the many disparate anti-Jackson groups into one political force. Former Federalists, Southern Nullifiers, western merchants and Anti-Masons formed into the Whig Party. The English Whigs of old, such as John Wilkes and Lord Grey, opposed royal despotism. The American Whigs of 1836 opposed the despotism of King Andrew the First. The Democrats mocked the new party at first. They laughed at it as a new grouping of “Federalists, nullifiers and bank men” which constituted an “organized incompatibility.”

The Democrats claimed they had nothing to worry from the Whigs but the campaign strategy they formed did scare the Little Magician of Kinderhook. Too loosely united to hold a national convention or run a national campaign, the Whigs instead nominated regional tickets. This adds a great deal of color to the campaign as it increases the number of players. The hope of the Whigs was that they would win enough electoral votes to deny Van Buren a majority of the electoral votes. This would throw the election of the House of Representatives where the Whigs would unite to support one candidate. This is a clever and ingenious plan for a party that had just been born and had no way of competing with the established Democratic Party. The three candidates who ran as the Whig standard bearers came from three different sections of the country and all were nominated by state legislatures. The western candidate was General and former Governor William Henry Harrison of Ohio. The man who had led the soldiers of the republic against Tecumseh at the Thames, “Old Tippecanoe” had defeated Tecumseh’s crazy brother The Prophet at the costly Battle of Tippecanoe in Indiana. Harrison was the Whig candidate for the West. Southern Nullifiers placed Tennessee Senator Hugh Lawson White into contention for the presidency in 1834 soon after his break with Jackson. White was a moderate on the states' rights issue, which made him acceptable in the South, but not in the North. The third candidate had appeal in his native Massachusetts but really nowhere else: the mercurial Senator Daniel Webster of Massachusetts. A grand orator who had represented two states in Congress, Webster ran on Henry Clay’s American System. His campaign in 1836 would define the Whig platforms in 1840 and 1844.

The general election of 1836 is a wonderful contest. The Whigs mocked Van Buren incessantly as a “dandy” and even referred to him as “hermaphroditic.” The anti-Jacksonian triumvirate of the United States Senate of Henry Clay, John C. Calhoun and candidate Webster made chaos in the Senate chambers whenever Van Buren was presiding. The lady’s man clay blew kisses to women in the galleries as Webster encouraged disorder in the galleries. Clay, who had learned politics from his former client Aaron Burr, knew how to run a good nasty race. Masters of parliamentary procedure, the three senators arranged for tie votes which forced the waffling Vice-President Van Buren to have to cast a vote and take a stand. Clay made fun of “vanburenish” behavior. Van Buren was known for his refusal to commit to anything of importance. The Whigs told a story that when Van Buren was once asked to take a stand on whether the sun rose in the east he replied: “I have heard that is fact but since I never rise until after the sun is up I cannot possibly make a comment.” Former Whig Congressman David Crockett, the “King of the Wild Frontier”, unleashed a scathing campaign book entitled “The Life of Martin van Buren.” In the work Crockett stated that at six Van Buren “could actually tell when his book was wrong ends upward; and at twelve could read it just as well upside down as right-side up.” Furthermore, Crockett attacked Van Buren as “what the English call a dandy.” “He is as different from General Jackson as dung is from a diamond,” Crockett declared as the mud continued to fly.

The Democrats responded in kind. Harrison’s intelligent and military record were openly mocked by the Democratic newspapers. Webster’s financial record was scrutinized and Hugh L. White was attacked as a radical nullifier because he was a moderate on the issue of state’s rights over federal authority. In the end, all the mud did not matter. The Democrats won because they were the better funded and organized political party. Despite the fact that the Tammany Hall and “Locofoco” branches of the  New York Democratic Party were at war with each other Van Buren still easily won his home state against Harrison. Van Buren comfortably won the election of 1836 but his running-mate did not. When the electoral vote was counted in Congress on February 8, 1837, Van Buren was found to have received 170 votes for president, but Johnson had received only 147 for vice-president. The Virginians who had stormed out of the 1835 convention had come back to bite the Democrats in the behind. While all the Democratic electors had pledged to vote for both Van Buren and Johnson, the state's 23 "faithless electors" refused to vote for Johnson, leaving him one electoral vote short of a majority. This led to a first and only when the Senate was charged with electing the Vice President under the provisions of the Twelfth Amendment. In a party line vote Johnson was elected over one of the two Whig Party vice-presidential candidates, Francis Granger. John Tyler was not considered for the vice-presidency by the senate in 1836 but by 1841 he would have far larger fish to fry.

The election of 1836 is a fun election in which a lot of incredible things happened. It was the first election to feature the Whig Party and was the first time Van Buren and Harrison would face off in a presidential election. The second match between the two will be rated a lot higher because of its use of gaudy, and fairly modern, campaign tactics and hoopla. The Senate electing the vice-president, Crocket’s vicious campaign book and the Whig strategy all make a for a memorable and interesting race.  

Important, yes, but the ending was a sure thing. It got a pretty high rating so no need to complain.

This is excellent, please continue!

The number thirty-five spot goes to the election of 1852. The last election to field a Whig Party candidate, the election of 1852 is a unique race. It is one in which a major political party was torn apart by its own inner demons and an intriguing Democratic convention produced a unique dark-horse nominee.

By 1852 the nation had lived through four tumultuous years. The presidency of Zachary Taylor had been a rough road to hoe. The crotchety Old Rough and Ready was prone to butting heads with Congress. Secretary of War George W. Crawford was investigated for improprieties involving the Galphin land purchase in Georgia while Taylor threatened to veto the special interest fueled Compromise of 1850. Taylor’s death from bad milk and cherries in July 1850 elevated the consummate New York politico Millard Fillmore to the president’s chair. President Fillmore’s administration signed off on the Compromise of 1850, including the opening of slavery into the New Mexico Territory and the controversial Fugitive Slave Act. Despite the fact that both technically existed before the compromise, Northern “Conscience Whigs” broke with the administration over what appeared to be major concessions to slave holders. Some formed their own “Union Party” and declared they would nominate a strong anti-Southern man for the presidency in 1852. The Democratic Party, divided by warring factions as per usual, was little more united when the canvass of 1852 came around. With Fire-eaters in the South and the sliver tongued abolitionists in the North it is no wonder why 1852 was a great election.

Neither party knew who they were going to nominate for the highest office in 1852. This makes for two highly intriguing and dramatic national conventions. Rarely in American history do both the major parties struggle to find a nominee for president. In 1852 the Whigs and the Democrats went into the convention cities with no front-runner and no idea on who they would pin their hopes for the White House in November. The Whigs, having won the election of 1848, with a Mexican-American War hero looked to rally around General Winfield Scott. The brilliant conqueror of Mexico City, General Scott was a career soldier. A lover of uniforms and a blustering martinet to his good friends, Scott was known as “Old Fuss and Feathers.” As a young soldier he was so impressed by his figure in uniform that he purchased three body length mirrors and set them up so he could look at three different angles of his martial form. Scott was known for primping like a prima donna before meetings and as a the commander of the Mexico City Campaign he had worked above the Polk Administration’s head to make peace with Santa Anna. Extremely rank conscious, he constantly battled with Democratic General Gideon C. Pillow over who got to lead parades down the main thoroughfare in the conquered Mexican capital. Scott was vulnerable to attacks because of his flamboyant nature. Democrats warned of a “Reign of Epaulets” if Scott was elected president. When the Whigs met in Baltimore, Maryland, their party was bitterly divided. New England Whigs clamored for the long-awaited nomination of “God-like Daniel of Massachusetts” for the presidency. Secretary of State Daniel Webster was openly interested in the nomination and felt he deserved it after decades of loyal service to the anti-Jacksonian Democracy cause. Rank-and-file Whigs from the West and Mid-Atlantic states liked Scott because he was a national figure. Southern Whigs and office holders stood behind President Millard Fillmore. A deadlock occurred because most New England delegates supported the hopeless Webster. On the first ballot, Fillmore received all delegate votes from the South except four, but only received 18 northern delegate votes. The vote was 133 for Fillmore, 131 for Scott, and 29 for Webster. This type of close voting would occur for the next fifty-two ballots until on the 53rd ballot Scott bested Fillmore 159–112. The final ballot was an entirely sectional vote with Northern Whigs siding with Scott and Southern Whigs joining with Fillmore. The party was badly divided. The placing of Secretary of the Navy William Alexander Graham, a sometimes poet but a constant North Carolinian, was done to bridge the divide between the Cotton Whigs and Conscience Whigs. In the end this would prove to be a bridge too far.

The wonderful Whig Convention appears boring when compared to the raucous Jacksonian convention the Democrats convened in Baltimore. There was no candidate who stood out as the Democratic front-runner but there were a good deal of candidates who wished to have that role. Former Secretary of State James Buchanan, the 1844 front-runner, returned to the fold as the choice of Northern moderates on the slave and sectional issue. 1848 nominee Lewis Cass trumpeted the call of popular sovereignty, but his age made him a less than ideal nominee. Supreme Court Justice Levi P. Woodbury appealed to Northern Democrats who leaned against the South but were not abolitionists. Former Secretary of War William Marcy counted on his home state of New York to deliver the nomination to him. The loudest of all the candidates was Senator Stephen Arnold Douglas of Illinois. “The Little Giant” was the represent of the Young American Movement. Tammany Hall politician Daniel Sickles was Douglas’s man at the convention and raised considerable hell when he called Buchanan, Cass and Marcy “Old Fogies.” Douglas was running as a man who wanted a young and vibrant nation to expand West with railroads, canals, roads and land grants. Realizing he stood to make a lot of money off of building a Transcontinental Railroad from Chicago to San Francisco, Douglas attacked the Democratic policy of opposing internal improvements. The “Old Fogey” comments of Dan Sickles, who would kill Francis Scott Key’s son in a rage of passion in the same house where William Seward was almost stabbed to death, did not endear the little Douglas to the big Democratic Party. In fact, none of the candidates seemed to be able to break through. Former Senator Franklin Pierce of New Hampshire, who was supporting Woodbury, rose as a compromise choice when a few Pennsylvania delegates through his name in contention as a possible compromise choice. By the 49th ballot Pierce had emerged as the second dark-horse Democratic presidential nominee in eight years. The Buchanan delegates were given the right to name Pierce’s running-mate. They chose Buchanan’s close friend and associate Senator William Rufus Devane King as Pierce’s running-mate. Known to some as “Mr. Buchanan’s Wife” or “Mr. Buchanan’s better half”, King was dying of tuberculosis in Cuba when he was nominated. He would never campaign for the office and would die before ever arriving in Washington to assume his vice-presidential duties.
The general election of 1852 was highly negative and that is mostly because the two candidates differed so greatly in terms of background and temperament. Hen being told of Pierce’s nomination, a friend from his home town in New Hampshire commented wryly: “Now Franks a good fellow…and nobody can’t complain of him as a Congressman, but when it comes to the whole United States I do say that in my judgment Frank Pierce is going to be spread durned thin.” This low opinion of the former Granite State Senator was one of the Whigs major talking points. Accusing him of making money off of public land grants, the Whigs also maligned him as an alcoholic. Criticizing Pierce’s decent war record in the Mexican War, the Whigs mocked him as the “hero of many a well fought bottle.” As Democrats maligned the martinet Scott for his love of pomp and protocol, the Whigs called Pierce “the fainting general” because at the Battle of Conteras his horse was startled by a cannon blast and injured Pierce’s groin. The pain would cause Pierce, a general named by President Polk, to faint during the heat of the struggle at Churubusco. Pierce was accused of cowardice by General Scott himself at Churubusco, so it was to be expected his campaign would do the same. It was said that when one Scott orator in Ohio fell from his platform on a church’s step he commented that he had only been showing, “How General Pierce fell from his horse.” It is to be noted that General Ulysses S. Grant, the military genius who saved the Union, wrote this about Pierce in his memoir: "Whatever General Pierce's qualifications may have been for the Presidency, he was a gentleman and a man of courage. I was not a supporter of him politically, but I knew him more intimately than I did any other of the volunteer generals." This is not half a bad endorsement.

Scott, knowing that his party was falling apart at the seams, engaged in an unheard of “non-political” tour of the West in October 1852. On his “non-political” tour he made sure to attack the Democratic platform and speak on behalf of several Whig Party congressional candidates. Scott’s claim that he was traveling to find a suitable spot for a soldier’s home fooled no one and the first ever campaign swing embarrassed Scott more than bolstering his party with “drum and fife” enthusiasm.

The election of 1852 was made exciting by the conventions and by the general election, but the final incredible moment of the election was the utter destruction of the Whig Party. The Whigs were badly fractured in 1852. The Union Party, led by angry Southern Whigs, had nominated Webster for president and the Sage of Massachusetts had agreed to accept votes. The Union Party nominated Webster while attacking Scott as nothing more than a military figure used as a puppet by Northern Whigs like William Henry Seward. The Democrats, on the other hand, ran a united, organized campaign. The Locofocos supported Pierce over Senator John P. Hale, the Free Soil Party nominee, and the Southern Fire-eaters backed him over the Southern Right’s Party. In the end “Gunpowder Glory” failed to save the Whig’s campaign or their party. Pierce’s overwhelming win the electoral and popular vote began the rapid deterioration of the party of Clay and Webster.

The death of a party is always a dramatic and unique experience in American political history. While the final outcome of 1852 was never in doubt the conventions and campaign do a great job entertaining election followers. The piercing of the Whig’s overinflated balloon would cause a massive explosion that would produce another major party and eventually a bloody civil war.     
             

Coming in at number thirty-four is the election of 1868. The first general contest after the end of the American Civil War, the contest pitted a national hero against a classical liberal New York politico. The 21st presidential campaign was marked by both national unity and deep, vicious racially charged division. The campaign focused on one major issue: Reconstruction. Perhaps the most divisive and transformative moment in 19th Century America, Reconstruction deeply divided the nation in terms of North and South, black and white and Grant and Seymour.

Following the tragic martyrdom of Abraham Lincoln at the hands of John Wilkes Booth, a mischievous and vainglorious actor, the nation was handed over to Andrew Johnson. A tailor by trade and hell raiser by temperament, the Johnson Administration passed through the stormy tempest of Reconstruction with very little easy sailing. Following a brief honeymoon with the Radical Republicans, Johnson then insulted them by declaring that presidential reconstruction was the way of the future. During 1866 and 1867 Johnson vetoed one Reconstruction act after another and even encouraged states to not ratify the Fourteenth Amendment. In an epic struggle over civil rights, Johnson agreed to giving ex-slaves limited rights while Radicals called for full suffrage and equality. General Ulysses Simpson Grant, the savior of the Union, was greatly in favor of full rights for African-Americans. His relationship with Johnson soured during Grant’s brief, unpopular tenure as acting Secretary of War and Johnson’s humorously inept “Swing around the Bend” campaign tour in 1866. The Radicals in Congress eventually plotted to replace Johnson with Senator Benjamin Franklin Wade of Ohio and in 1868 the House of Representatives impeached the president. The president survived conviction because eight Republicans in the Senate decided that being a son of a bitch was not enough of a reason to impeach a president. “The country is going to the devil!” the bald, crippled Pennsylvania radical Thaddeus Stevens steamed histrionically on the floor of the House when the acquittal was announced.

It was in this highly partisan and volatile atmosphere that a most pacific nominee for president would be nominated. The campaign of 1868 ranks as an election which put forward two qualified, honest candidates for the nation’s highest office and honor. On May 20, 1868, the Republicans convened in Chicago, Illinois, and the Windy City swept General Ulysses Simpson Grant into the position as presidential nominee. Grant was by no means the most politically savvy choice, nor had he spent years struggling to become the president. Senator Charles Sumner of Massachusetts, Senator Ben Wade, Senator Zachariah Chandler of Michigan, Governor Andrew Curtin of Pennsylvania or Speaker of the House Schuyler Colfax from Indiana would have all been better politicians to serve as the GOP nominee. General Grant was something far more than a mere politician. Grant was the savior of the Union, the conqueror of Donaldson, Vicksburg and Lee. Perhaps the greatest military mind to ever wear a U.S. uniform, Ulysses Grant represented far more than just military glory. His simple, American features showed the people that he was a common man who was forced to become great. Grant was honest, simple and quietly intelligent. A math genius and lover of novels, Grant had risen slowly through the Union ranks through hard work, victories and the constant efforts of Congressman Elihu Washburne. His nomination for the presidency in 1868 was a message to the nation: the struggle of war and Reconstruction will soon end. Paired with the perennial politician Colfax, Grant shrewdly declared to the convention: “Let us have peace.” The great irony of this statement is that Grant’s close friend and military aide John Rawlins wrote most of Grant’s acceptance speech, all of which has been forgotten except the comment “let us have peace.” Grant read and approved of Rawlins’s speech, signing the bottom of the address, “Let us have peace, U.S. Grant.” “By God!” Rawlins declared, “That clinches it!” The comment was added and has become one of the most well-known campaign slogans in political history.

On the opposite side of the political coin, the Democrats met in New York City. The seat of a great deal of political corruption and talk of treason during the late war, the Democrats wanted to shake the shadow of Fernando Wood and Clement Valandigham. The 1868 Democratic Convention is a great show of wonderful political theater and drama. The front-runner for the presidential nod was the party’s 1864 vice-presidential nominee, former Ohio Congressman George H. Pendleton. A Copperhead during the war, Pendleton was hardly a good candidate to face off against the man who saved the Union. Several candidates lobbied to pick up Pendleton’s slack, including Lieutenant General Winfield Scott Hancock, Supreme Court Justice Stephen Field,  former Congressman Francis P. Blair and even ex-Republican Party grandmaster Salmon P. Chase, the U.S. Chief Justice. No candidate managed to emerge with the needed 2/3rd majority. The Curse of Jackson deadlocked the convention until Governor Horatio Seymour of New York broke through with the backing of Ohio Democrats. Chase withdrew in favor of the heavily whiskered Seymour and a massive stampede occurred for Seymour.  “I must not be nominated by this Convention, as I could not accept the nomination if tendered!” Seymour cried out as the stampede continued. Finally, by the 21st ballot Seymour was declaring from the floor that he would accept the nomination if it would help the country and the Democratic Party. “Then accept the damn nomination then!” a wily Illinois delegate cried out. Seymour reluctantly agreed to run against the popular Grant. His constant refusals to take on the mantle as Democratic nominee gained him the unshakable nickname “the Great Decliner.” General Francis P. Blair was named as running-mate after not one but three other men declined the honor. The 1868 Democratic Convention is a lot of fun and should be remembered as one of the great conventions in American politics.

The general election of 1868 would, at first glance, seem like a mismatch. Grant, a popular war hero in a nation that sorely needed heroes, took on a tainted New York politico in Seymour. Seymour was mocked as “the rioter” because his apparent encouragement of Irish riots in New York City in July 1864. Despite this different the volatile issues of the campaign made it a close and memorable race. Reconstruction was the only issue of the campaign and the Democrats felt that it was one which worked well for their side. Blair wrote a nationally published letter which declared boldly that the “real and only issue in this contest was the overthrow of Reconstruction, as the radical Republicans had forced it in the South.” The Democrats attacked Grant mercilessly as a Black Republican whom wanted to force whites to serve free blacks. They sung a grotesque song to the tune of the minstrel ditty “Captain Jinks of the Horse Marines”: “I am Captain Grant of the Black Marines/The stupidest man that ever was seen.” The intelligence of Grant was a favorite Democratic punching bag in 1868. The only time Grant had ever voted was in 1856 and he voted for the Democrat James Buchanan. The Democrats mocked Grant as a “deaf and dumb” candidate who was a mere puppet of Wade, Stevens and Sumner. Seymour went on the stump and toured the nation speaking against Radical Reconstruction while Grant stayed at home in Galena, Illinois, in the house that the admiring citizens of the town erected for him. A silly little Democratic pamphlet entitled “The Lively Life of U.S. Grant, the Dummy Candidate” mocked the general by claiming, “Grant has nothing to say and says it day and night.”

With little ammunition to use against Grant, the Democrats unleashed even more vicious assaults on the free African-Americans of the North and South. Blair, the veep nominee, unleashed the most vitriolic assaults on the Republicans and their Reconstruction Plan. Blair accused Thad Stevens of wanting to “Africanize” the South. “This is a white man’s country, let white men govern it,” a popular Democratic slogan in Southern states proclaimed. One of the most interesting aspects of the Seymour Campaign is that it was two campaigns in one. In the South the Seymour men ran as strong anti-black, anti-Republican crusaders. In the North, however, Seymour’s supporters tried to win the votes of newly enfranchised African-Americans. A writer in Nashville offered some unique logic to encourage freed slaves to vote for the Democrats: “If your State and her sister Southern states had not seceded from the Union you would not today be free…If you are indebted to any party or power for your present liberty, you are indebted to the Southern People [and]….the Democratic Party.” Most African-American voters did not fall for this pretzel logic.

The Republicans gave as well as they took. “Scratch a Democrat,” cried the New York Tribune, “and you’ll find a rebel under his skin.” Seymour was portrayed as a Devil by the Republican media machine. The New York Tribune led the cartoon campaign with the picture of Seymour standing on the steps of the City Hall calling a mob of murderers "my friends." The Hartford Post called him "almost as much of a corpse" as ex-President James Buchanan, who had just died. Additionally, Republicans alleged that insanity ran through the Seymour family, citing as evidence the suicide of his father. As for Frank Blair, he was attacked as a drunkard. A famous anecdote of the time was when Blair stayed in a Harford, Connecticut, hotel and spent $10 on room and board but over $60 on liquor and lemons.

In the end the 1868 election came down to the black vote. 500,000 or so freemen voted for Grant and that is how he won the day. The electoral college was a landslide for Grant but the popular vote was fairly narrow. Had the freemen not voted for Grant the New Yorker Seymour would have won the White House in November 1868. This is one of the main reasons why within four months of the election the Fifteenth Amendment was passed by the Republican state legislatures. This amendment was focused on protecting suffrage for blacks. This amendment is one of the great heritages of the 1868 election.

The 1868 election is a great election with some good candidates. While Grant should have been an easy winner a tough campaign was needed for Ulysses to cross over the finish line first. 1868 took place during an incredible moment of time and is a fine election which fits the temper of the times like a glove. It is a great campaign that only is placed in the thirties because there are many others which are even better.               

Placing at number thirty-three on this election list is the election of 1880. A contentious Republican Convention and a truly narrow victory for “Boatman Jim” Garfield place this otherwise placid campaign in the number thirty-three spot.
Compared to 1876, the campaign that preceded 1880, the election is fairly dull. At one point Pulitzer’s New York World gave higher billing to the arrival of English actress Sarah Bernhardt in America than the nomination of the Democratic presidential nominee. One could argue that the election of 1880 was ignored by many at the time because the nation had gone through hell and back during the Grant and Hayes years. Reconstruction’s end in 1877 was followed by massive labor unrest. The Great Railroad Strike of 1877 paralyzed much of the Eastern seaboard. As Maryland National Guardsman fired on railway strikers in Baltimore the unpopular President Rutherford B. Hayes sent in the military to break up strikers in Pennsylvania. As the Pennsylvania Railroad burned in a Pittsburgh evening, the military opened fire on strikers. In Scranton vigilantes shot and killed three strikers. The strike would spill over into Illinois and Missouri before it was all said and done. The controversial election of  1876, the bloody Reconstruction and the disastrous Great Upheaval of 1877 made many Americans turn from politics in 1880. A power vacuum in the Republican Party would save the campaign from political oblivion and make for one of the most entertaining conventions in American history.

“I believe in a party that believes in good crops, that is glad when a fellow finds a gold mine, that rejoices when there are forty bushels of wheat and acre,” Republican orator Robert Ingersoll waxed as the 1880 Republican Convention opened in Chicago, Illinois. “The Democratic Party is the party of famine, it is a good friend of an early frost, it believes in the Colorado beetle and the weevil.” This highly partisan, if fairly odd, diatribe began a truly intriguing political convention which should rank with the 1912 and 1924 Democratic Conventions. As delegates filed into the convention hall they all had one name on their mind: Ulysses S. Grant. Encouraged by his incredible world tour from 1877 to 1879 and the calls of conservative Stalwart Republicans to “save the party from itself”, the former president openly declared he would seek a third term in the White House. Backed by New York Senators Roscoe Conkling and Thomas Platt, Grant was the choice of Pennsylvania Railroad President Tom Scott and the board of the New York Central Railroad. Mocked as “a Trojan horse’ by the reform minded Half-breed Republicans, it appeared as if Grant was going to walk away with the nomination. Ingersoll’s “Plumed Knight” James G. Blaine, senator from Maine and 1876 candidate, was only one of many anti-Grant candidates. Pennsylvania boss J. Donald Cameron, Illinois boss John Logan, and Conkling were attacked as the “triumvirate” who would rule the nation if Grant was elected president in 1880. However, there seemed to be no way to stop the “Hero of Appomattox.” Conkling came up with the brilliant scheme of forcing a Unit Rule on the convention. If passed, it would have meant that every delegate in a state’s delegation would have to vote for the choice of the majority of the state’s delegation. This rule would have handed Grant the nomination. This was the first real battle of the convention where Congressman James Garfield would boldly declare, “I regard it [the unit rule] as being more important than even the choice of a candidate.”

J. Donald Cameron, the chair of the convention, planned on using his position of power in the party to adopt the unit rule without a vote from the delegates. When Stalwart delegate William E. Chandler heard about this he recruited Colorado Senator Jerome Chafee to oppose the ruling. The Half-breeds removed Cameron as chair and the convention would have fallen apart had Conkling lieutenant Chester Arthur not intervened. In a deal he made with the 30 most anti-Grant delegates, Arthur brokered the decision that Cameron would return as chair and the unit rule would be voted on by the convention. This deal is what opened the way for James Garfield. A longtime Ohio Congressman and Civil War veteran, Garfield was the son of a widowed mother who had one almost drowned in the Erie Canal. Known as “Boatman Jim”, “Sunny Jim” or “Preacher Jim” Garfield, the Ohio congressman had offended no one on either side of the debate. When the unit rule was voted down the convention was thrown open. The high drama of the unit rule debate is only eclipsed by the balloting itself. Grant, Blaine. Senator John “the Ohio Icicle” Sherman and ex-Secretary of State Elihu Washburne all competed for the nomination, along with many favorite son candidates. James A. Garfield, who was representing the Ohio delegation, gave a major speech in support of Sherman, but soon found himself among those receiving delegate votes. When a rogue elector from Pennsylvania decided to vote for Garfield on the eight ballot a slow and steady tidal wave began to overtake the convention. Senator Ben “Kid Gloves” Harrison was sent to Garfield’s hotel room in Chicago to ask him to accept the nomination. The teacher from Mentor Ohio reluctantly agreed to seek the nomination and by the 36th contentious ballot he had beaten Grant and Blaine. Arthur, the man who saved the convention and killed the unit rule, was made vice-presidential candidate in order to appease Conkling, Cameron and the other pro-Grant bosses. The high drama of this convention is one of the finest moments in American political history.

The Democratic Convention was no bad either. Meeting in Cincinnati, the Democrats could taste victory. The nation was in recession and the incumbent president was an unpopular Republican. All they needed was a top tier candidate; however Governor Samuel Tilden, the 1876 nominee, had withdrawn his name from consideration. Congressman Samuel Randall of Pennsylvania, a Copperhead during the Civil War, emerged as the top choice of the Tilden men. Wary of naming another Seymour or Greeley, the Democrats looked to someone else to lead the campaign. Major General Winfield Scott Hancock, a West Pointer who served with bravery at Cemetery Ridge as Pickett’s legions were thrown at it, emerged as a potential game changer. He had tried for the party’s nod in 1868 only to be denied. With his opposition divided and weak, Major General Hancock was nominated easily on the third ballot and given businessman and pro-gold Hoosier activist John English as his running-mate. A conservative ticket adopted a conservative platform calling for the end of greenbacks, withdrawal from world affairs, reduction of the tariff and even a nod for civil service reform. “Hancock was superb,” Major General George Brinton McClellan said of Hancock’s serve on the field of Gettysburg and it was hoped by the Democrats his campaign would also be superb. After two excellent conventions the general election would be messy and vindictive. Mud would fly and sully the superb uniforms of both General Hancock and Garfield.  

The great conventions of 1880 are only partially complimented by a good general election. The two parties spent little time discussing the serious economic or social issues of the day. Congressman James B. Weaver of Iowa, the Greenback-Labor Party nominee, and former Augusta Portland Neal Dow, the nominee of the dry and daring Prohibition Party, were the only candidates to make serious comments about the new industrial order in the U.S.A. Dow, who had notoriously taken all the rum in Portland and killed those who tried to take it back, spoke passionately about the evils of “Demon Rum” and the need to give women full property and voting rights. Congressman Weaver introduced the Progressive Party platform decades before TR would don the Bull Moose antlers. Weaver’s party called for full civil service exams, the regulation of interstate commerce, the eight hour day, an income tax, the direct election of U.S. Senators, the abolition of child labor, free and funded public schools and a uniform national sanitation code. These radical theories, for the 1880s, played well with European ethnic voters and urban city dwellers. As Dow and Weaver spoke about issues it is upsetting to note that all the major parties wished to do was insult one another. Dow and especially Weaver make for great characters in this election and did much to elevate the discussion. The Republicans and Democrats did a great deal to deflate it.   

While Republicans boosted Garfield they did all they could to insult Hancock. He was attacked because his son married a Southern girl, called him a coward on the battlefield, questioned his leadership at the Battle of the Wilderness in spring 1864 and released a pamphlet of blank pages entitled, “A Record of the Statesmanship and Political Achievements of General Winfield Scott Hancock.” If one issue was discussed in full it was the tariff. Republicans mocked Hancock for declaring in his acceptance address, “The tariff is a local issue.” The Republican-leaning Harper’s Weekly declared in amazement that Hancock’s statements were, “loose, aimless, unintelligent, absurd.” More and more it looked as if Hancock did not understand political issues. Thomas Nast famously drew a cartoon of a perplexed Hancock whispering into someone’s ear as he spoke: “Who is tariff and why is he for revenue only?”

The Democrats answered the “Hancock is ignorant” charge with “Garfield is corrupt.” In 1868 Garfield received a $329 check from the corrupt Union Pacific dummy corporation Credit Mobilier. Garfield never once allowed the money to nudge him toward Union Pacific’s way of seeing things but the Democrats called it a bribe. The Democrats reminded voters that as chairman of the House Appropriations Committee Garfield had made $5,000 off of a pavement contract for D.C. Above all the Democrats tried to jockey for half-breed support by reminding voters that Arthur, the Republican VP nominee, had been removed from his job as Collector of the Port of New York because of corruption. It was a Republican president who removed him and Republicans had stopped the reform-minded Theodore Roosevelt, senior, from taking the job. The October Surprise of 1880 came from the Democrat’s campaign. On October 20, 1880, a New York newspaper called the Truth published a letter allegedly written by Garfield to an H.L. Morey of Lynn, Massachusetts, the preceding January. Just three sentences long, this letter—written on congressional stationery—implied that Garfield fully favored Chinese immigration. It also charged that Garfield was in favor of importing Chinese whiskey. The fear of the “Yellow Peril” was felt so strongly on the West Coast that Garfield was forced to attack the letter. He called it a forgery and it turned out that it was. However, it would cost him California and almost the election.

The election results of 1880 are highly entertaining and dramatic. Many Republicans feared that their run of luck was over. In Plymouth Notch, Vermont, a young Calvin Coolidge asked his father, Justice of the Peace John Coolidge, for a penny to buy some candy. John told Calvin that the Democrats were going to win the presidency soon and that this meant hard times were coming. No pennies could be spared for candy. When Garfield and the Republicans narrowly kept the White House the ever dry Calvin asked his father, “The Republicans won so may I have the penny now?” The Republicans won but it was by the skin of their teeth. Garfield won the popular vote by a little more than 9,000 votes. Hancock won 53% of all the counties in the country, including Adams County, Pennsylvania, where he had struggled for the Union at Gettysburg. Both sides won 19 states and the switch of only a few thousand votes in New York would have changed the winner of the popular vote. Republican shenanigans in Indiana returned that state to the GOP Column as did vote buying in Connecticut. In December 1880, Vice-President-elect Arthur enjoyed a sumptuous feast at Delmonico’s Restaurant in New York City. He laughed about the voter fraud in Indiana as Conkling and Cameron applauded the dirty tricks that won the election. In the Democratic Solid South voter suppression was used to keep Republican blacks from the polls as well as lynching, shootings and other forms of violence. Both sides used voter intimidation and dirty tricks to try to win in 1880. This is just one of many reasons why it is a dramatic and interesting election. It shows what lengths people are willing to go to in order to triumph in our nation’s quadrennial contest.   

Hancock's II Corps faced Pickett's charge on Cemetary Ridge, not Cemetary Hill, which the XI Corps defended along with what remained of the I Corps. I should note that elements of the I Corps were also reinforcing Hancock's position partically between the Angle and Cemetary Hill and towards to the South of the Angle where the Vermont brigade and a few others were stationed.

Senator, I meant ridge and not hill. I will make a change. One has to admit that for all I wrote one error is not too shabby.

This is not an Atlasia board, so there is no need for addressing me by that title here.

I am generally satisfied with your series Rooney and look forward to its continuance, so don't think otherwise based on that post about Gettysburg. Hancock is one of my favorite Civil War Generals.

In the revolutionary year of 1848 the election that year will land at thirty-two on this list of lists. As Europe plunged into fire and socialist chaos the United States experienced the first election after the great land grab at Guadalupe-Hidalgo. A vastly expanded nation faced vast problems in terms of slavery and sectional rights. 1848 was the first presidential election to occur on the same day. The same day voting was directly correlated to the incredible economic and technological strives the capitalist United States had experienced since the dawn of the 19th Century. The 1848 election would be fought in a nation in transition.

The election of 1848 can be included in the aftermath of the U.S.-Mexican War. President James Knox Polk, elected by the whisker of a hair in 1844, had put forward a plan to achieve four main goals for the United States in four years. He wanted to lower tariffs, establish an Independent Treasury System, gain the Southwest from Mexico and acquire the Oregon Territory from Great Britain. Through an ingenious mixture of diplomacy, warfare, double dealing and intense political angling Polk achieved all four goals. The Democrats in 1848 would run with the Polk Legacy proudly as their platform. The gaining and tired president had no interest in the presidential nod and he did not have a preferred candidate. The Whigs, in contrast, sought to reverse most of the Polk Administration’s accomplishments, especially in the economic sphere. The Mexican Cession, one of Polk’s greatest accomplishments, reintroduced an old political issue with new, steaming vitriol.

The expansion of slavery was the dominant issue of the 1848 election. Democratic fire breathers in the South saw the Wilmot Proviso as a Northern scheme to deny them their rightful political place in the new territories. More and more Americans were beginning to form strong opinions about the moral and economic place of slavery in American society. Pro-slavery southerners argued strongly that slavery was protected by the U.S. Constitution and could not legally be kept from the new territories. Northern and border state Whigs and Democrats began to espouse the theory of popular sovereignty- the idea that slavery should be determined by a popular vote in the territories. The idea that human rights can be put to a vote is, as Abe Lincoln would later say, a doctrine that is as morally robust as, “a broth made of the shadow of a crow which starved to death.” However, in 1848 one can see why popular sovereignty was so appealing. The idea that slavery would go down to a handful of voters in the Western territories is a nice idea because it does not require deep political and philosophical thought on morality and economic policy. In 1848 the Democrats would run proudly on the doctrine of popular sovereignty. This would lead to a rebellion in their ranks and the rise of a new, dynamic political party.   

1848 is an exciting race because it introduced a political party which would contest two national elections and poll well in both of them. As some argued that slavery was Constitutionally protected and could not be limited, some Northern Democrats and Whigs contested that the Congress was given power to regulate the territories by Article I of the U.S. Constitution and pointed to the Northwest Ordinance of 1787 as proof that slavery could be banned from territories. These individuals, mostly Northern Democrats who belonged to the radical reformist Locofoco faction in New York State, rebelled against the Democratic Party as a whole and met to form the Free Soil Party. The Free Soil Party stood for, “Free labor, free men and free soil.” Radically opposed to the spread of slavery into the territories they would play the role of spoiler in the 1848 contest and in so doing make the election much closer than it should have ever been.

The Democratic Convention of 1848 is interesting because of the battle inside the New York State Delegation. Following the death of former New York Governor Silas Wright, a former U.S. Senator who declined the 1844 Democratic vice-presidential nomination, the state party began to tear itself apart. The “Hunkers” were conservatives who “hunkered down” in their views to win office squared off against the “Barnburners”, antis-slavery men whom Hunkers charged would burn down the barn to get rid of the rats. Hunkers from New York liked Senator Lewis Cass of Michigan, the general who famously broke his sword over his knee at Fort Detroit to protest General William B. Hull/s surrender of it. Barnburners liked former President Martin van Buren or New Hampshire Senator John Parker Hale for the presidential nomination. Senator Cass, who had almost won the nod in 1844, was an easy winner over Van Buren, former Secretary of State James Buchanan and Associate Justice to the Supreme Court Levi Woodbury. His nomination was coupled with the nomination of General William Orlando Butler for vice-president. Butler, who had been in charge of the administration of Mexico City after General Winfield Scott captured it in, was a southerner and slave owner. Cass and the Democratic Platform endorsed popular sovereignty whole heartedly and in so doing alienated the Barnburners. They walked out of the convention and in June and July held a convention which created the Free Soil Party. This convention nominated Martin van Buren for president and Charles Francis Adams, the son of the late, great John Quincy Adams, for vice-president. The histrionic storming out of the convention coupled with the creation of a new political party headed by a former president is excellent political theater. The Democratic Convention in Baltimore in May 1848 is a good convention and one that adds to the story of the campaign.

The Whig Convention in Philadelphia is also quite entertaining. Perennial candidate and soothing statesman Henry Clay threw his hat into the ring one more time. Clay, who stewed angrily that he had been denied the 1840 nomination when he was sure to win, was afraid that the Whigs would nominate a Mexican War general only because they wanted to win. Clay had lost his son in the war and was bitter towards anyone who had achieved glory in the war. He compared military glory to a rainbow over a field of skulls and he meant it too. Senator Daniel Webster, another candidate, was equally unimpressed with the warlike candidates. He referred to General Zachary Taylor as “an illiterate frontier colonel” and warned there were thousands of Whigs who “will not vote for a candidate brought forward only because of his successful fighting in this war against Mexico.” The Whigs were not united behind Major General Zachary Taylor, the nominee who had never voted in an election and did not even vote for himself. Taylor also refused to even read the letter informing him of his nomination because the postage was not paid in advance on it. The Whigs eventually had to send a prepaid letter to Baton Rouge and made a big deal out of how frugal their nominee was. Senator Webster was nominated for vice-president but declined the honor, quipping: “I do not wish to be buried until I am actually dead.”

The general election of 1848 is a wonderful ride. The Whigs attacked Cass as being corrupt and dishonest as the Democrats called Taylor stupid, unhealthy and purposefully vague. Taylor never took a firm stance on the issue of the expansion of slavery. A Louisiana slave owner, it was assumed that Taylor was for the expansion of slavery to the West. A dark joke went around the campaign trial that Taylor had died of lockjaw. The Whigs never attempted to put forward a wordy platform that said much beside praising Taylor’s war record. Outgoing Congressman Abraham Lincoln addressed the Democrat’s point in a memorable speech on July 27, 1848. Lincoln made a virtue of vagueness. “The people,” he said, “say to General Taylor, ‘If you are elected, shall we have a national bank?’ He answers, ‘Your will, gentlemen, not mine…If you do not desire [one] I will not attempt to force [it] on you.’” Lincoln also insulted Andrew Jackson’s love of forcing his will on the people and viciously ridiculed Lewis Cass’s war record. Indignant Democrats on the House of Representatives floor threw up their arms and left the room crying out, “We give up!” It was one of Lincoln’s finest hours.

Taylor remembered the campaign as one marked by the “vilest slanders of the most unprincipled demagogues this or any other nation was ever cursed with, who have pursued me like bloodhounds.” Yes, the Democrats called Taylor semi-literate, England’s candidate and a man so cheap that he refused to wear nice clothes, but the Whigs gave as good as they got. They found in Cass a fountain of evils. He was accused of encouraging white slavery in the Northwest Territory, engaging in graft as chief of Indian Affairs and making millions off of insider land speculation deals as Secretary of War for Jackson and Van Buren. One Whig newspaper simply entitled a headline: “GEN. CASS IS NOT A TRUTHFUL MAN.” In the end it is quite a safe bet to state that neither side told the full truth.

The election results are intriguing. Van Buren’s Free Soil campaign took 10% of the vote and outpolled Cass in New York State. In a nation experiencing massive economic growth and incredible land expansion over the past four years, one would have expected the Democrats to have won easily. The Whigs ran a smart campaign by nominating a vague, uncontroversial war hero and exploited the Democratic weaknesses on slavery. The narrow Taylor win can be directly tied to the Van Buren candidacy and the votes he syphoned from the Cass ticket. The election of 1848 is a memorable campaign because it introduced a third party political force and focused on the major issues of the post-Mexican War political sphere. The issues of slavery’s expansion would dominate the elections of 1852, 1856 and 1860. 1848 was the first election dominated by this important issue and that makes this election an important one in U.S. history.

Landing at number thirty-one on the list is America’s bicentennial campaign. The election of 1976 involved the rise of a Southern dark horse candidate and a spirited conservative primary challenge to an incumbent president. The election was one of “insiders” versus “outsiders” with both sides claiming victories in America’s two-hundredth year.

The campaign of 1976 is a truly wonderful election because it allows the election watcher to witness the rise of not one but two Washington outsiders, both of whom would become president. The nation hungered for an outsider following the incompetence, dishonesty and government meddling of the Nixon and Ford years. President Richard Milhous Nixon, a perennially sinister Washington man, and his well-meaning vice-president for a few months Gerald R. Ford had mismanaged the nation’s affairs for eight long years. The nation was crushed under the heel of stagflation and betrayed by the lies of Watergate and Vietnam. Nixon’s resignation and pardon showed the country that the nation’s capital could not be trusted to deliver change. To find that agent of change the Democratic Party would turn to a peanut farmer from Plains, Georgia. The Republicans would make a selection between President Ford, a politician since 1949,  and a former actor and businessman who wanted to take the left-leaning Republicanism of Nixon and Ford and transform it into a conservative alternative in American politics.  
              
The 1976 Democratic Primaries are fascinating for one reason: the metamorphosis of Jimmy Carter. Former George Governor Jimmy Carter had transformed himself from a small town, petty racist state senator into a progressive executive of the New South. A fiscally conservative governor who spoke the populist talk, Carter entered the 1976 primaries soon after the McGovern travesty in 1972. Hamilton Jordan and Pat Caddell, Carter’s political brain trust, sat with the governor in December 1974 and put together their game plan for victory in November 1976. Carter, they said, was not a lawyer, not from Washington and not a career politician. In short, Carter was everything President Ford was not. Carter was also everything his better known primary opponents were not. Carter’s announcement for president was mocked at first. Even his mother did not believe it when he told her he was running for president. “President of what?” Ms. Vivian Carter had asked. A famous newsreel from 1975 portrayed people giggling in confusion when asked the question, “Who is Jimmy Carter?” The best answer came from a young man who replied with a smile, “I know who Jimmy Carter is. Jimmy Carter’s a basketball player!” As Birch Bayh, Terry Sanford, Sergeant Shriver, Hubert Humphrey, Mo Udall, Scoop Jackson, Frank Church and George Wallace laughed; Carter began to show that young man that while he did not have the skills on the court he did have them on the trail.  

Carter’s campaign made effective use of public funding. He was able to tackle one obstacle after another and attain public funding of his campaign. This was a public relations coup because it showed the nation that his campaign was one to be taken seriously. Carter was determined to prove to the media that he was no also run. Carter’s fervent religion proved to be a media attention getter as much as his successful campaign for public financing. A devout Baptist, Carter picked up support from the newly minted evangelical movement. George Gallup, Junior, called 1976 the “year of the evangelical.” The economic hardships of the 1970s coupled with the black despair of the unwinnable Vietnam quagmire drove thousands into the fold of born again Christianity. Carter’s sister Ruth Stapleton was a famous evangelist and he had served in the inner cities as a missionary in the 1960s. Just ten years after meeting with black youth leaders in New York City he was not running for president. The evangelical flair of his young campaign staff and workers was equaled only by his pious observance of the Bible. The Carter Campaign of 1976 is one of the most interesting case studies in presidential politics. It was half-political campaign and half-tent revival. Carter was, according to Time, the “most unabashed moralist to seek the presidency since William Jennings Bryan.” In a nation betrayed by war and scandal, the Sunday School teacher who wanted public funding for his campaign and a Bible on his campaign busses was just the moralist they wanted.

The story of the 1976 Democratic Primary is one of Carter running ahead of everyone else. A long series of “anti-Carters” rose and were punched down by the plucky peanut picker. Carter’s strategy to win the Iowa Caucus, despite the fact that it had no delegates at stake, proved to be wise as it gave him a lot of airtime with very little money spent. His big win in the Hawkeye State created a media buzz around the former Georgia governor. By the time he arrived in New Hampshire his opponents were campaigning that the media was ignoring them. Senator Henry “Scoop” Jackson, “the Senator from Boeing”, made a fateful decision not to compete in the early Iowa caucus and New Hampshire primary, which Jimmy Carter won after liberals split their votes among four other candidates. Carter then stormed into the South and walloped Governor George Wallace, a former arch-segregationist and presidential gadfly, in the Florida and North Carolina Primaries. While Jackson won victories in Massachusetts and New York, his campaign ran out of military-industrial complex money and he was beaten badly by Carter in Pennsylvania. Mormon Congressman Mo Udall, a gifted wit, then took the place as the “anti-Carter.” Udall ran closely behind Carter in several primaries before staking his campaign on Wisconsin. Carter’s evangelical campaign workers overwhelmed the Latter Day Saint powered Udall team. Carter beat Udall in Wisconsin with the clever congressman quipping, “The people have spoken, the bastards.” As Carter closed in on the nomination, an "ABC" (Anybody But Carter) movement started among Northern and Western liberal Democrats. They saw Carter as far too tightfisted with public collars and not at all in love with the Great Society. The leaders of the "ABC" movement - Idaho Senator Frank Church and California Governor Jerry Brown – decided to destroy their chances at stopping Carter by both announcing their candidacies for the Democratic party’s presidential nomination. The divided opposition divided their victories and Carter won the party’s nod at the 1976 Democratic Convention in New York City. The exciting primary season ended with a spirited speech by Congresswoman Shelia Jordan and the nomination of Senator Walter “Fritz” Mondale for vice-president. “Gritz and Fritz” were off and running into a wild general election.

The real marquee race of 1976 does not lie in the Democratic fold, but on the right side of the aisle. Neoconservative and social conservatives in the Republican Party were sick of the Nixon and Ford years. After toying with the idea of forming a conservative third party, the William F. Buckley crowd called former Governor Ronald W. Reagan from his ranch and into the sling and arrows of outrageous political fortune. Reagan entered the campaign assaulting the “evil incarnate in the buddy system of Washington.” This thinly veiled assault on Ford’s pardon of Nixon started off the Republican Primary on rocky ground and it only got more vicious. The 1976 Republican Primary is exciting because Ronald Reagan was always an interesting player to watch on the public stage. Folksy and witty, he could be serious and determined when he needed to be. President Ford, with all the powers on the presidency behind him, was able to spend freely and won a narrow victory in the New Hampshire Primary. This was followed by large wins in Florida, Massachusetts and Illinois, the birth state of Reagan. When it looked as if the Reagan campaign was finished the Gipper pulled out what would become his signature issue: military spending. Reagan assaulted Ford and Henry Kissinger for “allowing” the Soviet military to surpass that of the United States. Pounding away at the “arms gap”, like JFK in 1960, Reagan was able to cream Ford in the North Carolina and Texas Primaries. The pipe smoking Ford nearly swallowed the tobacco accessory when he saw that he was behind in delegates to the renegade Californian. Ford came back to beat Reagan in his home state of Michigan and ran neck and neck with Reagan as the two arrived in Kansas City for the convention. Very rarely in modern presidential history has the nominee of a major party not been selected by the time the convention opened. Reagan and Ford faced off in a duel of wills in the old cow town of Kansas City and Reagan blinked. By selecting liberal Pennsylvania Senator Richard Schweiker as his running-mate, Reagan alienated conservatives in Mississippi who threw their support to Ford. Reagan gained no support from liberal Republicans who never vote for conservatives but often whine that conservatives will not vote for them. Had Reagan named the conservative Senator Jesse Helms of North Carolina as his running-mate odds are he would have held onto Mississippi and won the nomination. However, only one outsider campaign could win in 1976 and Reagan’s was not it. Ford was nominated on the first ballot and selected moderate Senator Bob Dole of Kansas for vice-president. In a fairly boring address Ford defended his policies and did what people who are behind in the polls always do: challenge their opponent to a ridiculous number of face-to-face debates. Reagan’s impromptu speech following Ford’s was more memorable and left many delegates thinking they had nominated the wrong guy. They were right.  

The incredible primary season of 1976 eclipses the general election. While it was by no means a boring campaign, it just does not shine as bright as the sterling primary campaigns. Carter started out the campaign thirty points ahead of Ford. Carter then went to work chipping away at the huge lead. Before the campaign began he had foolishly sat down for an interview with the pornographic Playboy magazine. After telling the magazine that he had committed adultery by “lusting in his heart” and claiming “I’m human…I’m tempted” the media made a huge joke out of the honest responses. The Washington, D.C., news corps- a more out of touch, pompous group can rarely be found- wrote a clever parody of the barbershop song “Heart of my Heart” called “Lust in my Heart.” Carter also stayed vague on almost all important issues. While Ford laid out clear plans to combat inflation and poverty Carter seemed to only want to discuss lofty platitudes. One reporter joked that while paying bridge with Carter he raised the contract to three spades. Carter replied, “Well then I’ll bid four.” “Four what?” the reporter asked. “I’ll tell you after the election,” Carter replied in kind. Another story relayed that when young Jimmy Carter was asked if he had cut down the family’s peach tree he replied, “Well perhaps.” Ford assailed Carter for being “everything to everybody” and “wavering, wiggling and waffling.” Carter’s poor performance in the first debate cost him ten-points in the polls.

Odds are quite good Ford would have won had he canceled the second debate. I do not need to retell the story of the infamous “No Soviet domination” gaffe as it has been told a million times. What does need to be said is that the gaffe reversed the Ford momentum. One cannot imagine Reagan making a similar gaffe in 1976. Yes, Reagan may well have lost the general election but in 1976 he was no old and doddering. He could be well trained and rehearsed like any good actor. Ford’s gaffe allowed Carter and the media to hammer him for days and made the president look just like the Chevy Chase parody on the new show Saturday Night Live. Ford retreated to a “Rose Garden Strategy” of making speeches from the White House and Bob Dole assaulted the Democrats for, “Starting every war in the 20th century.” Racist comments by Secretary of Agriculture Earl Butz forced him from Ford’s team and alienated minorities that he needed badly to win in Ohio and New York. In the end for Ford the campaign fell apart at the seams. That was no good for Ford but for election watchers it is always unique to see an incumbent president’s campaign melt like cheese.

The 1976 election was nearly as close as the epic campaign that happened 100 years before it. Ford’s advisers told the president the day before the election that Carter had 24-hours to make a fatal error. If that did not happen then the president would be sent back to Grand Rapids. The comments were correct. The voters gave Carter 50.1% of the vote to 48% for Ford. In terms of the electoral college the results were also quite tight: 297 to 240. One Republican elector from Washington voted for Reagan because she could not stomach to vote for Ford. Carter had campaigned as an “outsider” and it was a brilliant campaign move. Many would copy the Carter candidacy but none would ever perfect the art of hating Washington as well as the down home peanut preacher from Plains. In the end the 1976 campaign is a lot of fun and involves two incredible primary battles. Carter’s outsider appeal is perhaps best summed up in what he said to disillusioned Southerners: “Isn’t it time we had a president without an accent?”       

Coming it an even number thirty is the election of 1884. A wonderfully nasty and vitriolic campaign, the election of 1884 involves all that sex, filth and mudslinging that makes presidential campaigns worth watching. A presidential assassination three years before, coupled with a long running recession, had changed the nation’s politics once again. A walrus of a reformer rose up as the presidential nominee of the Democrats and he faced off against the patron saint of shady politicians, a certain Monumental Liar from the State of Maine. The dirty laundry was spilt and the ink ran deep with accusations and counter assaults. Yes, 1884 is a gem of an election.

“I am going to the Lordy, I am so glad,” prayed presidential assassin and would-be ambassador to Austria Charles J. Guiteau deliriously before he was hung for shooting the president of the United States. The quirky communal coed turned wayward barrister and plagiarist preacher, Guiteau had killed Garfield in an attempt to save the nation from James Gillespie Blaine, the secretary of state who had told Guiteau to stop bothering him about the ambassadorship. Blaine, an ebullient politician christened “the Plumed Knight”, had been with President James A. Garfield when he was shot in the back at Union Station. He had held Garfield’s hand as the president lay bleeding on the train station floor. Blaine had seen the deed done and it affected him enough to change his views on civil service reform. President Chester Alan Arthur, a former Conkling-Platt political neophyte, rose to the occasion and signed the Pendleton Act to change the way a few civil service jobs were selected. This decision changed the political dynamic of the nation. The era of stand patism on government reform drew to an end when Garfield died and the Pendleton Act was brought to life. Voters struck out against the crusty Republicanism which had dominated state and national government for far too long. The 1882 midterms were a disaster for Arthur, Blaine and the Grand Old Party. In New York State, the administration’s own Treasury Secretary was handily beaten by Buffalo Mayor Stephen Grover Cleveland, a reforming sheriff turned reforming mayor. On the eve of the election of 1884 those Republicans who made up the Liberal Republican Party of 1872 were preparing to jump ship to the Democrats. Carl Schurz, Henry Ward Beecher, William Graham Sumner and Charles Francis Adams declared that they could never support the “Tatooed Man” Blaine for the White House. New York State Assemblyman Theodore Roosevelt rolled his eyes at the Mugwumps, as the New York Sun Charles Dana derided them. He referred to them as “effeminate” and “lacking a spine.” These types of attacks would pepper to national conversation of 1884.

The Republican Convention in Chicago is as “fun as a goat” to quote Secretary of State John Hay. The Reverend F.M. Bristol prayed as the convention opened that the coming contest would be marked with, “decency, intelligence, patriotism and dignity of temper which becomes free and intelligent people.” God does not always answer prayers. Blaine stood out in 1884 as the most popular and well known candidate, even more than President Arthur. “Elegant Arthur” was dying of Bright’s Disease and, while desiring re-nomination, failed to utilize his popularity among Southern delegates to contest the nomination. When Blaine was nominated for the presidency for the third straight convention “whole delegations mounted their chairs” the New York Tribune reported. As every American flag in the vicinity was marched up and down the aisles the Half-Breed Republicans stewed in their chairs. Teddy Roosevelt, Henry Cabot Lodge and Benjamin Harrison, three Republican reformers, hoped for the nomination of little known Vermont Senator George F. Edmunds. It was hoped by the reformers that Blaine could be stopped by retired Major General William T. Sherman but his oft quoted Shermanesque statement stopped that dream cold. So did the refusals to mount candidacies by Robert Todd Lincoln and Phillip Sheridan. Blaine’s overwhelming nomination was welcomed by liberal Republicans as much as a flu is welcomed by a school. One observer noted that the reformers, “applauded with the tips of their fingers held immediately in front of their noses.” While Teddy Roosevelt would reluctantly support Blaine many of his fellow eastern Republicans bolted the convention and set up a camp in Boston and New York. At these conventions they added much fuel to the fire of 1884 by announcing they would support the Democratic nominee for president in 1884. The fact that the Republicans split and entered a tough election year as a wounded, divided party adds to the flavor of the election.  The Mugwumps should have recalled the words of the holy scriptures: Proverbs 11:29, which in the King James Bible reads:

He that troubleth his own house shall inherit the wind:
and the fool shall be servant to the wise of heart.  

The Democratic Convention is not that thrilling but the nominee who emerged from it is larger than life. New York Governor Grover Cleveland had been an anonymous lawyer in Buffalo, New York, just eight years before he was nominated for the highest office in the land by one of the two major political parties. The New York World, a reliable Democratic publication, backed Cleveland for three reasons: “1. He is honest, 2. He is honest, 3. He is honest.” Cleveland worked well with Republicans in the State Assembly and passed multiple laws limiting the power of cities over public improvements. These laws enraged Tammany Hall, who needed public works dollars to doll our graft, and delighted the liberal press. Influential Republican journals such as the New York Times, the Nation and Harper’s Weekly gushed for Grover the Good and turned their GOP backs on Blaine. When Cleveland was hailed for the “enemies he has made” Tammany Boss Jim Kelly rushed the stage and declared he was honored by the compliment. Tall and wide, Cleveland was a bachelor who had loved Biergardens as a youth and had more than once dalliance with the German fraus of Buffalo. Accepted by the vast immigrant voter base of the big cities and also the small town reformers, Cleveland seemed to be loved by everyone except Jim Kelly. Mugwumps pinned their hopes of reform to Cleveland. His nomination is one of the highlights of the 1884 election. While Cleveland would do no campaigning, his broad mustached visage served as the symbol of cross partisan reform. Not since Grant was there such a figure in American politics.

The conventions are child’s play when compared to the wonderful wickedness of the general election. While Cleveland stayed at home with his ward Francis Folsom, Blaine took to the streets in a full campaign. Blaine loved campaigning and the platform he was running on. He barbed the Democrats by condemning them as “rebels” and “free traders.” The Mugwumps, according to Blaine, were “agents of foreign interests.” The Democrats responded with the first letter of the campaign, one of many. The Mulligan Letter was used to show that Blaine was a corrupt politician and a corrupt man. The first released in 1876, the letters from James Mulligan tied Blaine to insider trading deals connected to the Little Rock Railroad. One letter was written to the railroad’s legal counsel and it ended with these damning words: “Burn this letter.” Blaine was assailed as “Old Mulligan Letters” and “Burner Jim.” Democrats mocked Blaine with the taunt of: “Burn this letter!” Some clever New York Democrats even formed the most memorable line of the campaign: “Blaine! Blaine! James G. Blaine! The Continental liar from the State of Maine!” Yes, Blaine’s lies actually spread a whole continent. That’s the type of political assault we election fans like to see.

The fiendish Republican response to the Mulligan matter will live in the annals of dirty campaigning for generations to come. On July 21, 1884, the Republican Buffalo Evening Telegraph unleashed the dirtiest piece of dirty laundry they could find on the unimpeachable Grover Cleveland. “A Terrible Tale: A Dark Chapter in a Public Man’s History!” The story was of a young lawyer named Grover Cleveland whom had a sexual relationship with a local Buffalo runaround named Maria Halpern. It was from this little romp through Cupid’s Glen that a boy named Oscar Folsom Cleveland was born. Cleveland’s response to the story is great and adds much to the story of the 1884 election. In reality the child was not that of Cleveland’s at all. In fact, the child Oscar most likely was that of Cleveland’s friend, the late attorney James Folsom. The father of Francis, Folsom was a known womanizer who had asked Cleveland to take on responsibility for Oscar since he did not want to ruin his marriage and reputation. Cleveland, who had volunteered to stay home during the Civil War because he knew he was not needed, simply shrugged and accepted the expenses of the child. When Maria proved herself to be odd and erratic as a parent Cleveland found a new home for Oscar, who would become a successful man. “Above all tell the truth” Cleveland advised his political handlers when they faced the terrible news of the sexual misconduct. E.L. Godkin of the Nation applauded Cleveland’s honest response and commented that it contrasted greatly with the deceptive campaign of James G. Blaine. One Mugwump even joked that of Blaine was so honest in private life it would be best of he simply stayed in private life. The Maria Halpern affair might well have sunk Cleveland but he handled it like a seasoned professional and that is what makes it such a good story for such a nasty little campaign.

No general election is complete without a debilitating gaffe. On October 29, “black Wednesday” befell the beleaguered Blaine campaign. As Blaine gouged himself on a sumptuous feast in the toss-up state of New York, the Reverend Dr. Samuel Burchard, made this fatal statement: “We are Republicans, and don't propose to leave our party and identify ourselves with the party whose antecedents have been rum, Romanism, and rebellion.” Prohibitionist candidate John St. John was already being backed by the Democrats in New York to siphon votes from Blaine. The anti-Catholic gaffe was not good for the health of the Republican cause. While James A. Garfield had used a similar phrase in 1876, this time the Democrats took note of it. Cleveland operatives released copies of the speech into heavily Catholic precincts in New York City. Those Tammany voters who hated Cleveland now found a reason to hate Blaine more. Burchard’s bluster is one of the great moments of any presidential campaign.

The final reason why 1884 stands as a fine campaign is that it came down to just one state and a little over 1,000 votes. Anger over Blaine’s anti-Roman Catholic banquet and the votes for John St. John handed New York over to Cleveland. In the end a razor sharp race was decided on public integrity, though Cleveland’s private virtues were dragged through the mud. The bitterness of the 1884 election was one of many reasons why President Grover Cleveland told a four-year old Franklin D. Roosevelt: “I have a very strange wish for you my little man. May you never become president of the United States.”       

I do have one complaint.  God does always answer prayers but is he doesn't always answer them the way we want.

Number twenty-nine on the list is the election of 1916. The campaign was waged during a time of war in Europe. The American people were divided by the Great War in Europe. A nation which had emerged from splendid isolation in the late 19th century as a global political and economic power, the great question of 1916 focused on what role the United States would play in the bloody pageantry in Europe. The great issue of 1916 was what position would the United States take in World War I and what type of a world would wait for it after the great maelstrom of war was passed through by the global community. The internationalist Democratic president would run as a tepid non-interventionist and the Republicans would nominate a candidate whom attacked Wilson’s military adventurism without distancing himself from the pro-war members of his own party. In the end the election of 1916 ranks in the top thirty elections because it is an election between two strong personalities with the backdrop of Armageddon.  

The first  reason why the election of 1916 falls in the top thirty is because of the ordeal of Professor Thomas Woodrow Wilson. President Woodrow Wilson, a progressive Democrat from New Jersey, had no experience in foreign affairs when he took office in 1913. Recruited for the governor’s office in 1910 by reforming journalist Ray Standard Baker and Democratic publisher George Brinton McClellan Harvey, Wilson emerged as the front-runner for the 1912 Democratic presidential nomination due to the act that he was a progressive to the progressives and a conservative to the conservatives. In an election which will rank in the top five contests, Wilson was able to carve out a middle of the road stance in 1912 and win the election by a wide margin. As early as 1913 Wilson was forced to deal with foreign conflicts. Mexico was involved in a nasty civil war with multiple sides fighting for multiple goals. Wilson ordered General John “Blackjack” Pershing to invade Mexico in 1913 in order to capture the renegade bandit Pancho Villa. Stoked on by William Randolph Hearst, Wilson’s invasion of Mexico enraged the Mexican and the American people. The great tragedy of Woodrow Wilson is that he had no interest in foreign affairs when he took office in 1913. Wilson’s New Freedom program was pro-labor, pro-tariff reduction and pro-small business- the warfare state was not a part of the program. The explosion of the Balkan Powder Keg in June 1914 forced his hand. His narrow scoped New Freedom was coopted into Teddy Roosevelt’s New Nationalism- a warlike socialist program. Wilson took up “preparedness” and sponsored legislation to expand the nation’s armed forces. Wilson’s hope was that a prepared America- united by a strong army and a strong government- would emerge as a “Big America” when the war ended in Europe. In 1916 Wilson hoped that he could focus his reelection campaign on his progressive legislative accomplishments. Tariff reduction, farm land reform and labor legislation were just not all that sexy when compared to Mexico and Europe in flames. “[It] would be the irony of fate if my administration had to deal chiefly with foreign affairs,” Wilson told his Roman Catholic secretary Joe Tumulty in 1914. The irony makes for an intriguing election in 1916.

The Democratic Convention of 1916 is a good example of a convention that kept to message. In 1968 and 1992 the incumbent political party lost control of the convention and that caused incredible damage in the general election. 1916 was the exact opposite of those nightmares. As the Democrats convened in St. Louis in June 1916 the Democratic campaign slogan was marketed like soapflake’s. Former New York Governor Martin H. Glynn started his keynote address talking about Wilson’s progressive “Americanism.” Quickly the spellbinding Glynn realized this was not a good topic and so he threw his text away. Glynn then declared with a booming voice that the “paramount issue” of the campaign was the war in Europe. He then began to give examples of how the United States had handled foreign crises without going to war. The speech caused wild applause as the delegates shouted, “Go on! Go on!” Glynn then outlined how Wilson had avoided war over the 1915 Lusitania crisis as well as the extensive German U-Boat warfare. “What did he do?” the delegates screamed out as Glynn responded, “We did no go to war!” “This policy…”Glynn went on with a not so subtle attack on Teddy Roosevelt, “May not satisfy…the fire-eater or the swashbuckler…But it does satisfy the mothers of the land…” The next day Senator Ollie James of Kentucky and Secretary of State William Jennings Bryan hammered home the winning campaign slogan of 1916: “Vote for Wilson who keeps us out of war.” “He kept us out of war” ranks as perhaps the best remembered campaign slogan in American history. Wilson’s firm hope that he could run for reelection based off of his progressive agenda was more or less ended at the convention. What sprouted up in its place was an effective campaign slogan which would be used to flog Republicans over the head until November. The well managed and orchestrated 1916 Democratic National Convention adds much to the ranking of the campaign because it shows how effective a good convention can be on a major party presidential campaign. President Woodrow Wilson and Vice-President Thomas Riley Marshall, the first Democratic vice-president to ever be re-nominated for that office, faced the Republicans with a united party and a thankful nation behind them.

The Republican Convention is a fine example of an opposition party trying, and failing, to unite the disparate factions pulling it from one side to the other. Much like in 2012, the Republicans found a good middle of the road candidate whom seemed he could appease both sides. Supreme Court Justice Charles Evans Hughes, the man who had defeated Hearst for the New York governor’s office in 1906 and had gutted the multimillion dollar life insurance business in the Empire State, seemed to be the perfect choice to unite the party torn by 1912. Former President Roosevelt commented that he wanted the 1916 presidential nomination so bad he “could taste it.” However, his temperamental defection in 1912 made him a pariah to conservatives and party professionals. TR would not be able to win the 1916 nomination in his wildest fevered dreams. Justice Hughes emerged as the choice of progressive Republicans with Senator John W. Weeks of Massachusetts and former Vice-President Charles Fairbanks, a man so cold they named a city in Alaska after him, as the candidate of conservatives. Teddy Roosevelt liked Elihu Root, his much trusted cabinet secretary, for the nomination but Root’s ties to corporations made him far too toxic for Middle America. Party regulars fell in behind Hughes as Senator Warren G. Harding presided over the convention. Harding coined the term “Founding Fathers” as he chastised Wilson for his illegal and unconstitutional intervention in the Mexican upheaval. Hughes won an easy nomination on third ballot at the Coliseum in Chicago, Illinois. The “Bearded Iceberg” Hughes was paired with former Vice-President Charles “Ice-banks” Fairbanks and the Republicans wrote a platform attacking Wilson for his pro-labor polices as well as his opposition to women’s suffrage. Above all they assailed Wilson’s supine foreign policy. It seemed that Hughes was the perfect choice to oppose Wilson. He was a moderate, pro-suffrage former governor with a good working relation with conservatives and business elements. The 1916 Republican Convention shows political watchers that a compromise candidate usually does nothing more than make a the campaign tepid. Hughes refused to take a stand on the war in Europe and in so doing offended everyone. Above all he enraged Theodore Roosevelt, a belligerent war lover, who would take it on his own shoulders to craft the GOP into the “Party of War.” As was said later on, TR would have better served the party if he had just stayed home.

(Fixed image link - TF)

TR turned down the Progressive Party nomination in 1916. He wrote them a sad letter informing them: “There is no place for a third party in our politics.” TR decided to back Hughes, but not until, “He declares himself. We must know where he stands on national honor, national defense and all other great questions before we accept him.” Roosevelt assaulted Wilson for not going to war in Europe. He accused the “Byzantine logothete” Wilson of lacking a spine and perhaps being “pro-German.” The 1916 election is given great excitement by the energetic Theodore Roosevelt. If it had not been for Roosevelt the two major players, while both stately gentlemen, would seem quite bland. TR even wrote to a friend that the only difference between the clean faced Wilson and the bearded Hughes was “a shave.” The hilarity of Hughes’s campaign strategy in 1916 is memorable because of his inability to say anything on the war without insulting someone. Midwestern Republicans of German heritage encouraged him to assault Wilson’s overtly pro-British foreign policy but Hughes could not do this out of fear that this line of attack would be used to paint him as being pro-German. That would not work to unite the hawkish Republicans under the sway of Roosevelt and Massachusetts Senator Henry Cabot Lodge. Hughes decided to attack the Germans in anti-German areas and attack Wilson in the pro-German areas of the country. His refusal to take a place made TR compare Hughes to a bowl of jelly and gave Hughes a new, unflattering nickname: “Charles Evasive Hughes.”

Hughes was powerless to stop Roosevelt from blowing his horn over the war. It is not too much to say that Teddy the Terror cost the Republicans a million votes with his shilling for war in Europe. Wilson made great hay out of the “little war chief” Roosevelt. Wilson and Roosevelt shared a mutual hatred of one another so the president relished anytime he could make a joke out of the former president. A full page newspaper ad appeared on November 4, 1916, across the nation declaring:


This is the type of hyperbole that makes an election worth following. Hughes offered no decent response to these type of attacks. Like Romney, he appeared to be quite aloof when attacked on the big issues of the campaign. His surrogates made the attacks stick quite well. TR campaigned far more for war than he ever did for Hughes. After the election a wise guy New York Democrat sent an angry Teddy Roosevelt a congratulatory telegram. He congratulated Roosevelt on assuring Wilson’s reelection and four more years of the Party of Jackson in the White House. “You contributed more than any person [to Wilson’s victory,” the message read, “Wilson ought to give you a Cabinet position, as you elected him, beyond doubt…You made Wilson a million votes.” One can imagine that Roosevelt then went outside and shot a deer dead. Those Democrats had some real guts gauging the irascible Theodore Rex.

With the war too hot to handle, Hughes groped around for a good issue to attack Wilson on. Hughes’s attempt to gain mileage from the chaos in Mexico was not successful either. Wilson’s establishment of a joint Mexican-American commission to settle tensions between the two nations made this issue seem null and void to voters. Republicans attacked Wilson over his labor policies, including the Adamson Act which set up an eight-hour workday for railroad workers. Hughes attacked the law as “labor’s goldbrick” and a “force law” which would bankrupt the nation’s railways. This line of attack did more to alienate labor minded Republicans and labor unions from the Hughes campaign. Democratic financier Bernard Baruch asked President Wilson, who was running a front porch campaign from his summer home in New Jersey, if he wanted  to respond to the attacks. “I am inclined,” Wilson told Baruch, “to follow the course suggested by a friend of mine who says that he has always followed the rule never to murder a man who is committing suicide slowly but surely.” The Hughes Campaign, like the Romney/Ryan effort in 2012, suffered a death by a thousand cuts.

Despite the missteps by Hughes and Roosevelt, the election of 1916 came down to a single state and two different meetings. These two meetings are the type of presidential drama that even an Aaron Sorkin cannot write. In October 1916 Woodrow Wilson was so sure that he was going to lose that he wrote up a plan so Shakespearean that it boggles the mind. Meeting with his always sympathetic secretary Joe Tumulty, Wilson wrote out a plan to allow Hughes to become president early. Due to the war crisis, Wilson did not think the nation should suffer a lame duck period between his defeat and Hughes’s inauguration. Without telling Vice-President Marshall not Secretary of State Robert Lansing, he formulated a plan to appoint Hughes secretary of state and then to resign as president with the mustached Marshall also resigning his position. This would place Hughes in as president in November 1916 and allow him to take the reins of government months earlier. One can imagine a tortured Tumulty trying to talk sense to his depressed friend and chief.

The second dramatic meeting was one missed. Hughes needed California to win the election and to take California he needed the backing of Governor and senator candidate Hiram Johnson. TR’s running-mate in 1912, Johnson was the kingmaker in the Golden State. He had not endorsed Hughes and was seen as not a loyal Republican. When Hughes visited the state of California in August 1916 the famous “forgotten handshake” occurred. On that fateful day, Hughes stopped at the same hotel in Long Beach as Johnson. Johnson expected to hear from the 1916 Republican presidential nominee, but Hughes’s squeamish handlers never notified Hughes of the presence of Johnson in the hotel. They believed that if Hughes shook hands with Johnson it would reopen the wounds of 1912 because Johnson was seen as a loose cannon by the party’s rank and file. This turned out to be the “one dollar error.” Congressman John W. Dwight of New York commented after the election that Hughes’s chances in California rested on a single dollar. “If a man of sense with a dollar would have invited Hughes and Johnson into his room when they were both in the same hotel in California,” Dwight commented, “He would have ordered three Scotch whiskies, which would have been seventy-five cents and that would have left twenty-five cents for the waiter…that little Scotch would have brought the three men together; there would have been mutual understanding and respect and Hughes would have carried California and been elected.” Alas, the drink was not imbibed and Johnson did not campaign for Hughes. His powerful Golden State machine helped him win a landslide to the United States Senate over Democratic rancher George S. Patton, father of the famed general, but they would not lift a finger to help Hughes win the state. A drink missed and a plan hatched make for some great campaign drama in 1916.

The greatest drama of 1916 comes down the election results. The fate of the presidency and the world rested on the voters of California. When the results began coming in on November 7, 1916, it looked like a Hughes sweep. By midnight the justice was at 254 electoral votes and only needed California to win the presidency. At the White House a depressed Wilson prepared to concede the election. His poor, overworked secretary Joe Tumulty had to talk him out of doing it. As papers declared Hughes the “president-elect” and they demanded interviews with him, Hughes refused to give a victory speech to over 100,000 excited Republicans milling around outside of the Hotel Astor in New York. It turned out to be a good thing because he ended up losing. As the West and South came in strong for Wilson the president became a much happier man. The famous story of Hughes and the hotel room is so oft repeated it needs to be repeated again. While it is probably apocryphal, the story goes that in the wee hours of the night a reporter arrived at the Hotel Astor and asked a valet if he could speak with Hughes. “The president has retired,” the valet replied. “When he wakes up,” the reporter states in the tale, “tell him that he is no longer president.” A stunned Hughes did not manage to concede the election until November 22, 1916. The dry witted Wilson replied upon receiving the concession telegraph: “It was a little moth-eaten when it got here but legible.”

The election of 1916 has many other memorable moments. Republicans assaulted Wilson as “Peck’s Bad Boy” when some of Wilson’s love letters to Mary Peck, an old flame from the early 1900s, came to the public. In the end, however, none of the attacks could stick as the nation faced the crucible of war. 1916 is a dramatic election in which much hinged on the outcome. The fact that Wilson was reelected determined the course of the American nation in the war in Europe. Had Hughes, Weeks, Root, Roosevelt or Fairbanks won the 1916 election the Paris Peace Conference of 1919 would have been much different. It has been said that for want of a nail the army was lost. It is not too much to say that for want of a Scotch a presidency was lost.                             

You should write a book, dude. :)

This would make a great pop-history book. I would buy it.

Landing at number twenty-eight on the list is President Calvin Coolidge’s triumphant reelection. It is able to land in the top thirty not because of a thrilling general election but because of an incredible convention and a spirited third party challenge. The 1924 election was an election held amongst peace and prosperity which did not limp along in the doldrums of predictability. It has many excellent twists or plot and a wide, colorful array of characters. As the old 1920s song crooned the same can be said for the 1924 election: “Every morning, every evening, aint we got fun?”

In the wee morning hours of August 3, 1923, the sleepy town of Plymouth Notch, Vermont, slept a Green Mountain sleep. The farm of John Calvin Coolidge, Senior, was awakened by a messenger. Since the Victorian Era farm had no electricity or telephone the messenger was sent to tell the father of Vice-President Calvin Coolidge that his son was the 30th president of the United States. Popular President Warren Gamaliel Harding had died in San Francisco of a stroke. In front of a small group of observers, including Coolidge's wife Grace and United States Representative Porter H. Dale, his father, John Calvin Coolidge, Sr., a notary public, administered the oath of office. The swearing in took place in John Coolidge's family parlor by the light of a kerosene lamp at 2:47 a.m. on August 3, 1923; the new President Coolidge then went back to bed. It was a quiet start for a man who worked hard to be known as “Silent Cal.” By 1924 Coolidge’s presidency had not been all that quiet, however. The Teapot Dome Scandal led Coolidge to ask Attorney General Harry Daugherty to resign from office. Daugherty was replaced by the New Hampshire jurist Harlan Fiske Stone, an Amherst classmate of President Coolidge. Coolidge was forced to clean out the Harding Cabinet of Attorney General Daugherty and Navy Secretary Edward Denby, a decorated marine in World War I. He also worked closely with Teddy Roosevelt confidant of Pennsylvania Governor Gifford Pinchot to end an anthracite coal strike in Pennsylvania. President Harding used bombers to quiet the strikers of Blair Mountain and made an enemy of many people. Coolidge, in his quiet and taciturn way, worked with Governor Pinchot to end the strike with a good ending for all. Secretary of the Treasury Andrew Mellon, no fan of the deal made with the Pennsylvania miners, worked with Coolidge to save the Harding tax cuts from an increased Democratic presence in the Congress. 1922 had been a bad year for the Republicans and it was feared that the Harding/Coolidge tax reform program would be taken to the chopping block, especially if the Democrats managed to win the White House back in 1924. Coolidge realized he would face a strong challenge both in the primary and the general election. In the end he would be pleasantly surprised to see how wrong he was.

The 1924 Republican Primaries are a portrait of presidential power brokering. The long-time chairman of the Republican National Committee Will Hays had moved to California to regulate the movie industry. Chairman Hays was a master of political arts and had forced party discipline in the 1920 election. His replacement was a quiet Massachusetts lawyer and cotton goods producer, William Morgan Butler. Butler lacked the experience and drive of Hays so many progressive minded Republicans thought they could go around him and take a fight to Calvin Coolidge in the 1924 Republican primaries. Calvin Coolidge took it upon himself to whip the progressives and save his own nomination. He would prove to be more than a match for the progressive forces of the GOP. Senator Hiram Johnson, Teddy Roosevelt’s 1912 running-mate and a leading opponent of the League of Nations, announced he would oppose Coolidge. Senators William E. Borah of Idaho and James Watson of Indiana also eyed the White House. Coolidge kept them in check by using the power of patronage. Like Taft in 1912, Coolidge benefited from the South because most Republican delegates from the Democratic land were appointed by the president and owed their jobs to him. Coolidge and Bascomb Slemp, his personal secretary and a former congressman from Virginia, announced that they would remove all African-American delegates from Southern delegations and replace them with whites. This appealed to Southerners but greatly enraged pro-civil rights elements of the Republican Party. Coolidge used the power of appointment to knock Governor Frank Lowden of Illinois from the running as well as Senator Watson. Senator Johnson formally entered the election on January 2, 1924, and gave a rip-roaring speech attacking Coolidge for supporting Álvaro Obregón in the Mexican Civil War, speaking in favor of U.S. membership in the World Court and cutting taxes for the wealthy. Johnson also assaulted Coolidge’s campaign strategy of stocking the convention full of political appointees. "I shall not concede," Johnson declared as he pounded the podium with his massive right hand, "that collectors of revenue, U.S. Marshals, postmasters, and other officeholders may themselves alone nominate candidates for the Presidency."

Unfortunately for Johnson, Coolidge’s campaign was already ten steps ahead of him. Johnson put forward a platform calling for the arrest of Harry Daugherty and Edward Denby, the ending of Chinese immigration, opposition to U.S. entry into the World Court, strict enforcement of Prohibition and urged the immediate payment of a World War I veteran’s bonus. Coolidge dealt with the campaign through a combination of patronage, money and trickery. Coolidge entered the California Primary against Johnson, the favorite son candidate, and beat him. In Michigan, Johnson hoped to repeat his primary victory of 1920. The Coolidge forces countered Johnson’s popularity by running an old farmer from the Peninsula named Hiram Johnson for president. The two Hiram Johnsons split the vote and allowed for Coolidge to win in Michigan. Johnson’s campaign was further crippled with progressive Idaho Senator William Borah endorsed Coolidge for reelection. Coolidge had promised Borah the position of Attorney General but Borah turned it down. This was probably for the best. When Coolidge told Bscomb Slemp he was going to name Borah to the open Attorney General position Slemp had said, “You can’t, that man is a son of a bitch.” “Well don’t they need representation to?” Coolidge asked in response.

The Republican Convention in Cleveland, Ohio, was so pacific that the great Will Rogers joked that they needed to open up the churches to liven things up a bit. Coolidge had proven to be the master of the Republican Party in the primaries. When Senator Watson gave a seconding speech for Coolidge’s nomination he spoke far longer than he should have. Watson declared at one point he was “speaking for the benefit of posterity.” Will Rogers told his colleagues in the press gallery, “If he don’t get done with that thing pretty soon, they’ll be here.” He had kept Henry Ford, Herbert Hoover and Hiram Johnson at bay and won the Republican Party’s presidential nod on the first ballot. The only great mystery was who was going to be the vice-presidential candidate. Coolidge himself did not select a running-mate. He instead left the decision to the convention. “It did in 1920,” he added, “and it picked a durned good man.” Many progressives wanted Commerce Secretary Hoover, one of the most popular men in the country, named as the vice-presidential candidate. Conservatives called for Frank “Pockets” Logan, the runner-up for the 1920 presidential nomination. Logan was nominated for vice-president but turned down the honor of being vice-president because he believed he had more power as governor of Illinois. He further thought that the governorship of the Land of Lincoln would be a better springboard for the 1928 Republican Party presidential nomination. Hoover looked like a pretty good vice-presidential choice because of his progressive credentials and California ties. California was an important state for November and with Senator Robert LaFollette of Wisconsin entering as a third-party progressive candidate California was feared to be a state in the balance. Coolidge would not have Hoover as vice-president. “That man has offered me nothing but unsolicited advice for the last eight years,” Coolidge would say of Hoover in 1928, “all of it bad.” Coolidge mocked the energetic Hoover as “Wunderboy” and did not like the fact that the man from West Branch put his nose into the affairs of every cabinet office.  Illinois’s own Charles G. Dawes, a conservative who was the first director of the Bureau of the Budget, won the nomination on the third ballot. He defeated Herbert Hoover, the choice of National Chairman Butler, by 682 votes to 234. Both candidates suffered from unpopularity with one major group of voters: Dawes with organized labor for his opposition to certain strikes, Hoover with wheat farmers for his role in price fixing during the war. The ticket of Coolidge and Dawes left Ohio as the leaders of a unified political party running with the tailwinds of prosperity. They were on their way to an easy win in November and the Democrats were going to make it easier. The greatest convention in American history was about to begin.

The Democratic Convention more than made up for the boring days in Ohio. Meeting at Madison Square  Garden in a June heat wave the Democrats thought victory was within reach. The big wins of the 1922 midterm elections had encouraged the Democrats. The scandals of the Harding Years- Teapot Dome, Veteran’s Bureau, Liquor Licenses- all made the Democrats feel like victory was around the corner. The Democrats first had to deal with the awful split in their own ranks. The Eastern, urban, “wet” and Roman Catholic Democrats met face-to-face with the rural, protestant and “dry” Democrats in the forms of Governor Alfred E. Smith of New York and former Secretary of the Treasury William Gibbs McAdoo. McAdoo, who had married one of President Woodrow Wilson’s daughters, was the front-runner as the convention started. One of the founders of United Artist, along with Chaplin, Fairbanks and D.W. Griffith, McAdoo was a flawed candidate. He had taken a lot of money from Laurence Doheny, one of the two oilmen accused of impropriety in the Teapot Dome Scandal. After McAdoo had resigned from the Wilson Administration in 1918, Joseph Tumulty, Wilson's secretary, had warned him to avoid association with Doheny. However, in 1919, McAdoo took Doheny as a client for an unusually large initial fee of $100,000. By 1924 McAdoo was up to his ears in the tainted oil money of the mischievous Mr. Doheny. Major Democratic financiers such as Bernard Baruch and Colonel Edward House urged McAdoo to end his campaign in 1924 due to his ties to Doheny. Even William Jennings Bryan, a McAdoo man, declared that the lawyer needed to end his campaign. Encouraged by his ambitious wife, McAdoo refused to end the campaign. After all, it was not as if Alfred E. Smith was a saint.

Cigar chomping, bourbon swilling, curse word spewing, bowler and bowtie donning Governor Alfred E. “Al” Smith smelled fishy, and it was not just because he worked at the fish factory as a young boy. Smith as a Tammany Hall boy through and through and also a former altar boy, something the protestant South did not forget. Smith and McAdoo were two seriously flawed candidates. Cordell Hull, the Democratic National Chairman, found both of them to be distasteful and grasped for a third choice. When the convention opened Hull and the other delegates would quickly discover that there was more than just one alternative candidate. The excitement of the “Klanbake” is one of the main drivers of the 1924 election. The bald boy wonder of Nebraska William Jennings Bryan refused to support a platform plank condemning the Ku Klux Klan as big city Democrats railed against a plank supporting the enforcement of Prohibition. The divided party faced the presidential balloting with dazed looks and heavy hearts. Franklin Delano Roosevelt heroically emerged from his wheelchair to nominate Governor Smith for president. The sunny FDR gave Smith the timeless moniker, “The Happy Warrior.” Neither Smith nor McAdoo had the votes to win the nomination so they sought different strategies to win the nomination. Smith’s campaign managers figured that they should hold back until later in the balloting. This would give McAdoo the impression he was strong when really his support was a mile wide and an inch deep. As McAdoo collapsed in later ballots Smith would then emerge as the strong choice. McAdoo’s balloting battle plan was to come in weak at first and then throw all he had at the convention.

No sleight of hand, however, could out deal the Curse of Jackson- the dreaded 2/3rds majority. Smith was hated in the South, McAdoo in the Northeast. These two Democratic mainstays were required if a candidate was to win the party’s nod. Thus, the most exciting balloting in presidential elections history would slog on from June 24th to July 9th, 1924. Humorist Will Rogers opined, “New York asked the Democrats to visit, not live there!” One Massachusetts delegate joked that the broke delegates needed to, “Either find a more liberal candidate or move to a cheaper hotel.” The delegates battled it out for 103 ballots. Much like the Battle of Shiloh the winning sides changed hands as flanks were assaulted. At first McAdoo led, and then Smith would take the lead only for McAdoo to return. Along the way compromise choices rose and fell like the tides of the Hudson. Colorful Indianapolis political boss Thomas Taggart lobbied FDR, Cordell Hull and 1920 nominee James Cox on behalf of his favorite son: Indiana Senator and ex-governor Sam Ralston. Ralston, a favorite of the KKK and William J. Bryan, was looked upon by the Great Commoner as, “The most promising of the compromise candidates." Senator Joseph Robinson of Arkansas, Kansas Governor Jonathan M. Davis and the patrician Delaware Senator Willard Saulsbury, Jr., of Delaware all would rise and fall. Senator Ralston seemed to be the man on the make until his doctor advised the 300-pound Hoosier that his heart was too weak to make the race. Ralston dropped out on the 100th ballot.

Thus, the nomination went to a Democratic loyalist- Former Ambassador, congressman and corporate lawyer John W. Davis. Ambassador Davis was not a dark horse candidate. He had been third or fourth on most of the ballots throughout those heady summer days. In 1920 a serious “Draft Davis” movement had taken the convention by storm. Out of “a sense of public duty” Davis accepted the useless Democratic nomination as was paired with the affable, sunny Governor Charles W. Bryan of Nebraska, the only brother of a former presidential nominee to be nominated on a national ticket. Bryan, the brother of William Bryan, was a prairie radical. He had been elected governor of Nebraska on a promise to lower taxes but had turned the state into a socialistic experiment in collective government ownership of business. Governor Bryan assaulted the natural gas companies of Nebraska and even set up a government owned Ice Company in Lincoln. The corporate lawyer Davis and the prairie socialist Bryan made a strange couple and the ticket was laughed at as a “schizophrenic ticket” and not a balancing act. As boos filled the air and the Klan burned crosses the Davis/Bryan ticket limped out of New York. The 1924 Democratic National Convention is by far the best convention in American history. A movie needs to be made about this convention. The Democratic Party was so badly splintered by the self-inflicted beating that the immortal Will Rogers quipped soon after: “I’m not a member of an organized party, I’m a Democrat.”

As if the machinations of Coolidge and the criminally incompetent Democratic Convention were not enough a powerful third-party force entered the 1924 election. This third-party movement is one of the reason why 1924 is an excellent race. Outraged by the Harding and Coolidge governments, Bull Moose Republicans threw off the trunks and placed the antlers on their heads as they had done 12-years earlier. The radical progressive Committee of 48, led by utopian dreamer John A. H. Hopkins, had met in 1922 and declared that a viable progressive third-party was needed to rebuff the conservative trends in the GOP and the Democratic Party. Wisconsin Senator Robert LaFollette, who had coveted the GOP presidential nod in 1912 and 1920, emerged as the leader of a new Progressive Party. In a nation where Wall Street boomed while farmers starved the Middle West called out for an alternative to the corporate parties. LaFollette had told papers that he would not run for president if one of the two parties nominated a non-reactionary. However, “Battling Bob” saw Coolidge and Davis as two corporate reactionaries and agreed to lead a third-party crusade. The Committee of 48 met in Cleveland, Ohio, in July to nominate LaFollette for president. The 1924 Progressive Party convention was a sad reflection of the 1912 frenzy. Whereas the nomination of Teddy Roosevelt was a large and diverse gala, the coronation of LaFollette was an affair attended mostly by students and “ethics societies.” The farmers were too poor to attend, African-Americans had given up on politics in 1920s and Eastern intellectuals did not want to tie themselves to yet another failed progressive crusade. The radical Jacob Coxey and “Red Sydney” Hillman of the American Federation of Labor managed to attend, however, making the convention look like a gathering of outdated Marxists. LaFollette was easily nominated by the delegates and matched with Democratic Montana Senator Burton K, Wheeler as his running-mate. Senator Wheeler had recently played a big role in the show trial of the disgraced Attorney General Harry Daugherty. His nomination was seen as a boon to the ticket.                                       

After the thrilling conventions the general election itself proved to be dud. Coolidge’s beloved son Cal died from an infected blister caused by a game of tennis with no shoes in July 1924. The always somber Coolidge did not want to campaign with the black memory of his dead son in his mind. John Coolidge, Calvin’s second son, wrote that the death of Cal produced a depression that would linger in his father for the rest of his life. Coolidge refused to even have pictures taken for the campaign. When a Kansas congressman asked Coolidge for a picture the president asked why he wanted it. “I have one of you but it is from two years ago,” the congressman explained. The sour faced Coolidge snapped back, “I don’t see what you want another one for! I’m using the same face.” Republicans, flushed with cash from Wall Street, told America to, “Keep Cool with Coolidge.” The progressive sage of Emporia, Kansas, William Allen White sighed, “In a fat and happy world, Coolidge is the man of the hour.” John W. Davis’s campaign was broke and Wall Street donated far more heavily to Coolidge. The Democrats were so broke that very few picture campaign buttons were even produced. If one can find a campaign button with the visage of both Davis and Bryan on it that person can be a wealthy man. Davis campaigned in the South, Southwest and Middle West with strength and vigor, but the Democrats knew that they were running against peace and prosperity. Progressives are the only people who made the general election worth following. Despite the fact that he was ill with pneumonia and absent from the senate in the spring, LaFollette hit the campaign trail hard. La Follette urged that military spending be curtailed and soldiers' bonus paid. He called for the “crushing” of monopoly and the creation of an effective Small Business Administration that would encourage local business growth. Socialists aligned with the Wisconsin Republican due to his call for public ownership of water power and gradual nationalization of the railroads. He also supported the nationalization cigarette factories and other large industries, strongly supported increased taxation on the wealthy, and supported the right of collective bargaining for factory workers. Republicans rolled their eyes at the “wooly mained, fiery eyed” Wisconsin radical. Communist Party chairman William Z. Foster attacked LaFollette as a reactionary who was engaged in a small business fetish. Despite the attacks LaFollette’s campaign is the one bright spot in the dull general election.

The results of 1924 are also interesting. They showcase how the Democrats had disappeared as a force in much of the Mountain West and also how progressives had not been silenced by the rise of the conservatives in the Party of Lincoln. Coolidge won by a landslide in the electoral college, carrying 382 electoral votes and 35-states. Yet, he only won 54% of the popular vote, a far cry from the 60% Harding took in 1920. A stronger, more unified Democratic opposition would have done decently well against Coolidge. Coolidge showed a quivering weakness in the Mountain West. The Progressives only took LaFollette’s Wisconsin but made a race in Montana, North Dakota, South Dakota, Idaho and Nevada. The breaking-up of the Republican hold on the West was in the making.

The election of 1924 was a spending election in a splendid time. A great Democratic Convention paired with a dour president and a colorful third-party movement make for a memorable campaign. It ranks as a great race which would only have been helped by a better main event. The lack of competition in the general election is what stops this race from making the top then elections. Those races are marked by incredible primaries/conventions and even better general elections. 1924 was a time to keep cool and it is indeed a very cool election.    

Number twenty-seven is the election of 1952: when a general ran against an egghead. The election of 1952 occurred as the bottom was falling out of the tub for the Democratic Party of the old New Deal Coalition. President Harry S Truman, a failed haberdasher turned machine politician, had failed to keep the party afloat during his tenure in the Oval Office. Massive corruption and incompetence stalked the halls of power in the White House and in the Party of FDR. In 1952 Republicans thought they finally had found the sure-fire formula for taking the White House back after a twenty-year eviction: K1C2. The formula called for one Korea, one dose of corruption and more than just a pinch of communism. The 1952 campaign is a thoroughly entertaining affair in which an affable Illinois politico and a straight-laced, but broad grinned, military man faced off for the top prize.

President Truman’s full-term in office was a difficult affair for the Missourian as well as the nation at large. Truman would comment, “Sherman was wrong, peace is hell.” As a wartime president Harry Truman had led the nation to victory over Nazi Germany and Imperial Japan. The alliance against the Axis made the world a clear cut black-and-white. The Soviet Union and the sadistic Josef Stalin were allies against Hitler and the dark empire of evil he represented. Communism- outside of those of the Dies Committee- was an unseen threat that few cared about. Then, peacetime arrived and the term seemed to be a big lie. The Korean War, which began in 1950, was in a stalemate by January 1952. Communist infiltration of the State Department was in the headlines and public mistrust of Democratic officials over mafia bribery scandals dogged Truman’s long days. The Truman IRS began to resemble the seedy bars and smoke filled rooms of Jackson County, Missouri, in which Truman began his political career. IRS agents were paid off with cash and their wives were given expensive mink coats as gifts. The IRS agents agreed not to report the non-payment of income taxes by several mafia figures and the agents were gifted with color televisions and shiny new refrigerators for their cooperation. Truman never fired a person over the scandal. To the public, who grew enraged when Truman fired war hero Douglas MacArthur over disagreements in the Korean War, Truman was a small man in a job that required a giant. The president’s approval ratings fell through the floor. By March 1952 the president’s job performance was disapproved of by 66% of those polled by George Gallup. Only George W. Bush and Richard M. Nixon would attain worse disproval ratings. The weakened incumbent president would prove to be a plumb target for ambitious Democrats and Republicans alike.

The Republican Primary of 1952 is a good one as it serves as both a bridge to the past and future. Senator Robert A. Taft, the archconservative son of William H. Taft, had run for president in 1940 and 1948. Known as “Mr. Republican” Taft represented the forces of the Old Right. An opponent of the interventionist Marshall Plan, a critic of the Nuremberg Trials and a man wary of peacetime alliances, Taft emerged as the choice of conservative Republicans. His opponents would all be on the other side of in terms of foreign policy intervention. Governor Earl Warren, the 1948 vice-presidential nominee and the governor of California, ran as a favorite son candidate with the hope of proving to be a kingmaker at the convention. Former “boy wonder” Harold Stassen, a Minnesota governor and staff officer in World War II, ran as a liberal alternative to Taft in the New Hampshire Primary. What made the Republican Primary worth watching, however, was the entrance of General Dwight David Eisenhower, the former Supreme Allied Commander during World War II. At one point in Ike’s career he feared he would retire as a major, the peacetime army allowed for little advancement. The outbreak of a World War in 1939 allowed for Ike, who had cultivated excellent connections in the forms of Generals MacArthur and Marshall, to head up the invasion of North Africa and eventually be made the Supreme Allied Commander. Eisenhower proved to be a master of media manipulation and the United States fell in love with the affable, wide grinning general officer. In 1948 Eisenhower declined running for either the Republicans or the Democrats. He commented that he did not want his name placed in nomination for any office be it dogcatcher all the way to “grand high Supreme King of the Universe.” In 1951 a mass rally for Einsehower for President held at Madison Square Garden finally forced Ike off the fence. He entered as a Republican and turned out to be a moderate. In domestic policy Ike was a critic of government spending but embraced most of the New Deal. In foreign affairs he was an unabashed nationalist and as the former NATO Commander he was fully in support of U.S. intervention in Europe.

The struggle between Taft and Eisenhower is unique in three specific ways. First, it showcases the pivoting of the Republican Party from the Harding-Coolidge-Hoover “Party of Normalcy” to that of Eisenhower’s New Republicanism. The old anti-interventionist theories of normalcy were being challenged, and would eventually be replaced, by more modern interventionist theories. Second, it foreshadowed a more epic struggle for the heart and soul of the Republican Party that would play out from 1960 to 1980. As Taft spoke on behalf of conservative Republicans of the West, Midwest and South he was matched by Eisenhower’s East coast brand of liberal Republicanism, soon to be rebranded as “Rockefeller Republicanism.” Ronald Reagan, Barry Goldwater and John Ashbrook picked up the ball where Taft fumbled it in 1952 and the Gipper would eventually score the great touchdown that Taft was not able to do himself. The third reason why the GOP Primary of 1952 is unique and interesting is that it involved so many twists and turns. Eisenhower won the New Hampshire Primary without campaigning. Senator Richard Nixon, the redbaiting California Republican, politicked on the train from Los Angeles to the Republican Convention in Chicago to get Eisenhower nominated for president, all while pretending to back Governor Earl Warren for the nomination. Nixon would prove himself to be an extremely effective manipulator at the convention. Nixon proved to be important in getting more Eisenhower Delegates seated in the convention than Taft delegates. When Senator Everett Dirksen of Illinois, a Taft supporter, pointed at pro-Ike man Thomas Dewey and yelled, “Twice you led us to defeat”, it was Nixon who was instrumental in churning out the jeers to quiet the silver tongued prairie politician. Nixon’s behind the scenes machinations to ensure Fair Play- the refusal to seat many Southern Taft delegates- and his active lobbying to deny Warren any votes outside of California led to Eisenhower being nominated for president on the first ballot. Nixon was rewarded for his strong work on behalf of the old general. He was nominated for vice-president and the exciting convention where fist fights broke out over delegate seating ended.

The Democratic Primary of 1952 makes the election highly enjoyable as well. The unpopular Truman thought that he could perhaps win the 1952 Democratic nomination through the power of incumbency alone. Truman's main opponent was populist Tennessee Senator Estes Kefauver. The coonskin hat donning lawyer had chaired a nationally-televised investigation of organized crime in 1951 and had made Louis Lempke, a feared underboss in New York, plead the Fifth. Kefauver would go on to chair the 1954 committee that went to war with comic books such as “Tales from the Crypt.” Though this anecdote has nothing to do with the 1952 election it bears repeating that Senator Kefauver was able to get William M. Gaines, a noted comic book publisher, to state that one could depict the image of a severed female head in “good taste.” This comic crusade was in the future, in 1952 the New Hampshire Primary was the real struggle. Kefauver beat Truman in the New Hampshire Primary and Truman dropped out of the race. Truman’s anti-social wife Bess Wallace Truman- who was always paranoid that her father’s gruesome suicide would become public knowledge- was so excited by the announcement that an aide told President Truman, “When you said you were not going to run again Bess’s face looked just like yours when you draw four aces.” Truman stated in his memoirs his upset defeat to Kefauver had nothing to do with his withdrawal from the election. If you believe that than I have a habedersahery in Independence I can sell you. Democrats who were not entranced by Kefauver began to thrash around for an “anti-Kefauver.” Illinois Governor Adlai E. Stevenson III, the grandson of a vice-president, was running for reelection but was eyed as the best man for the top job in the White House. Despite the fact that Stevenson had overwhelmingly ousted corrupt GOP Governor Dwight Green in 1948 and cleaned up corruption in Springfield he was smart enough to know that he could not beat a war hero. When one Democrat told Governor Stevenson he was going to be nominated for president Stevenson firmly replied, “I just do not want to be nominated for the presidency.” “Well,” the persistent Democrat retorted, “what’ll you do if we nominate you anyway.” Stevenson, who had accidently shot and killed a young girl with a rifle as a boy, replied darkly, “Guess I’ll just have to shoot myself.”

Despite all this talk and refusal Stevenson had an inkling that the nomination was his if he asked for it. He did so in his welcoming address to the Democratic Convention in Chicago, Illinois. “I thought I was welcoming you, not you welcoming me!” Stevenson quipped as the delegates chanted “We want Stephenson.” The witty speech, peppered with assaults on the GOP which made Stevenson sound just like a candidate, propelled Stevenson into the nomination on the third ballot. Some worried that the intellectual Stevenson was “too smart” to be president. Paired with Senator William Sparkman of Alabama, Stevenson was now forced to answer these questions head on. New York Herald Tribune columnists Joseph and Stewart Alsop attacked Stevenson and his advisors as, “eggheads.” This was in reference to Stevenson’s grand baldness and the intellectual university background of his key speechwriters and policy advisors. Stevenson laughed off the two scions of Roosevelt by crying: “Eggheads of the world unite, you have nothing to lose but your yolks!”

Yes, Adlai Stevenson is one of the reason why the 1952 election “works.” He was smart, witty and often hilarious. He was a passionate liberal and progressive on issues of civil rights, economic justice and war. Despite a lack of funds, Stevenson declared he was going to “reason with the American people” and embarked on a nationwide tour. He assaulted the build-up of nuclear arms, spoke in favor of ending the Korean War and the draft and warned of a return to “Hoover Era bread lines and soup kitchens” if the Republicans were allowed to regain the White House. Major newspapers ignored the Ike momentum and backed the intelligent-but plain- speaking governor of Illinois. Stevenson delighted reporters and campaign followers alike in his offbeat, intelligent way. When a writer approached Stevenson with the idea of writing his campaign biography the governor threw his hands in the air and cried, “I don’t see how you’re going to do it. My life has been hopelessly undramatic. I wasn’t born in a log cabin. I didn’t work my way through school, nor did I rise from rags to riches, and there’s no use trying to pretend I did.” If only politicians today were that brutally honest. Stevenson’s Democratic campaign train rolled through countless states and he made the crowds laugh as hard as any journalist. In Pontiac, Michigan, Stevenson was speaking when it started to rain. Thousands of people huddled together in misery and the often longwinded Stevenson felt their pain. “I’m not going to talk to you about labor policies,” Stevenson told the wet crowd. “I’m not going to talk to you about foreign policies. In fact, I am not going to talk to you about a thing because of this dammed rain! Good bye!” The crowd chuckled, cheered and dispersed as Stevenson walked- bald head bare- through the Michigan storm. Stevenson lost Michigan by 12% to Ike and that is just not very appreciative of the people of the Wolverine State.  The Democrats were reliant on Stevenson’s wit and brains to make up for their total lack of money. When an aide told Stevenson that it would cost $60,000 to broadcast one of his speeches the governor calmly replied: “I wish you hadn’t told me that. Now, every time I start to put a word on paper I’ll wonder whether it’s an expensive ten-dollar word, or a little, unimportant word like ‘is’ or ‘and’ that costs only a $1.75.” This little anecdote proved to be deadly serious when the Democrats were forced to have to exhort money from a wealthy donor during a live televised broadcast of a Stevenson speech. One another occasion Stevenson’s televised broadcast was cut out when the Democrats could not pay for the entire hour of airtime. The campaign took a terrible toll on Stevenson’s health. An insomniac by nature, Stevenson did not sleep regularly during the campaign. One of the main reasons why 1952 is an excellent campaign is that Adlai Stevenson made the election worth following.

The Republican campaign of 1952 is worth remembering because of communism, corruption and Korea. This ingenious political formula worked both ways for the Grand Old Party in 1952. One can laugh out loud at how effective and incompetently C2K was used by Ike and his handlers during the campaign. Eisenhower was a stiff, military man who needed a lot of time to transition to the off color, informal world of retail politics. In June of 1952 candidate Eisenhower touched down in Kansas City and was greeted by Colorado Governor Dan Thornton. Thornton, a Texas born cattle man who donned a ten gallon Stetson hat and cowboy boots, saw Ike and gave him a hearty slap on the back. “Howya, pardner!” Governor Thornton cried jovially. Eisenhower’s eyes blazed with indignation and his back stiffened. His handlers looked at him and Ike exhaled: “Howya, Dan?” This story perfectly illustrates the stiffness of the Ike 1952 campaign and how the political formula of C2K was utilized.

Communism was a huge issue in the election and Ike and Nixon made sure to assault Stevenson and the Democrats on the issue of red infiltration. However, the irascible Senators Joe McCarthy and William Jenner of Indiana made for an embarrassing photo op. Nixon assaulted Stevenson as “Adlai the Appeaser” and brazenly declared that Stevenson had attained his Ph.D. from “Dean Acheson’s College of Cowardly Communist Containment.” The greatest moment for the “communism” component of C2K was when McCarthy opened fire on General George Corley Marshall, the former Army Chief of Staff and Secretary of State. McCarthy accused Marshall of being an agent of the reds who “lost China” for the forces of freedom. Senator Jenner stated that Marshall was not a traitor, but a “front man for traitors.” Marshall and Ike had been friends since before World War II and it was widely expected he would defend his associate from the attacks of McCarthy and Jenner. On October 3rd, 1952, Ike’s train rolled into Milwaukee, Wisconsin, and he entered the belly of the beast. Senator McCarthy was in a tough battle for reelection against Attorney General Thomas Fairchild and the whole state GOP ticket was running on the name and coattails of General Eisenhower. Ike faced a dramatic decision: would he attack McCarthy or leave Marshall out to dry? Ike planned to give a speech that included this part: “I know that charges of disloyalty…have been leveled against…Marshall. I have been privileged for thirty-five years to know General Marshall personally. I know him as a man and as a soldier, to be dedicated with singular selflessness and profound patriotism to the service of America. And this episode is a sobering lesson in the way that freedom must not defend itself.” This part of the Milwaukee speech was never delivered. The speech with the Marshall defense was released in press reports but was left out of the speech itself. Democrats howled with delight as pro-Ike Republicans felt their stomachs turn. “The Republican candidate has been worrying about my funny bone,” Stevenson said when Ike accused him of being to witty on the trail. “I’m worrying about his backbone.” President Truman declared that the entire GOP campaign was a sellout of “friends and ideas” to the anti-communist cabal. Arthur Sulzburger, the Republican editor of the New York Times, told Ike, “Do I need to tell you that I am sick of heart?” Ike, thoroughly embarrassed by the whole thing, was further maligned by a small time TV make-up man. “What a come down!” the make-up man said as he applied cream to Ike’s face, “I used to be a paratrooper in France. Now I just smear this stuff on homely mugs.” The TV make-up man, clearly angry over Ike’s surrender to McCarthy in Wisconsin, then coldly added: “And you used to be a five-star general, but now you’re just a politician.” Communism was a two-way street for Ike and he mishandled it.

Corruption proved to be another double-edged sword in C2K. Truman was a corrupt Democrat, no doubt, but the Democrats knew that the Republican trunk wasn’t as clean as a Dutch whistle either. Democrats challenged Eisenhower to release his tax returns to the media as Stevenson, Sparkman and Nixon had done. Ike had made a bundle off of his book Crusade in Europe and had received countless gifts from a thankful free world since 1945. He did not want to show the nation every penny he had. The Democrats, thus, decided to target Richard Nixon, Ike’s attack dog. On September 18, 1952, the New York Post ran the headline, “SECRET NIXON FUND” followed by the tagline, “Secret Rich Men’s Trust Fund Keeps Nixon in Style Far Beyond His Salary.” Sixty-six wealthy California Republicans had indeed set up a “slush fund” of over $18,000 to cover Nixon’s political expenses. This was a tried and true method for covering political expenses for most senators who were not millionaires but since Ike was not realeasing his own tax records the Democrats made political hay out of Nixon’s misfortune. The second most dramatic moment of the 1952 election played out as Richard Nixon, shut down in Denver, called Thomas E. Dewey and asked him what to do. Dewey, the man who took down Lucky Luciano, was blunt and told Nixon he had to fight or die. Nixon then called up Ike and told him he was going on national TV to tell the world his fund was honest and he was not a corrupt IRS agent getting mink coats from the mob. “There comes a time in even your life general,” Nixon told Ike, “when you need to either sh**t or get off the pot.” On September 23, 1952, Nixon appeared on TV with his wife Pat at his side. Yes, he talked about his dog Checkers at the end and took some potshots at old Harry Truman by telling the nation that Pat did not have a Democratic mobster mink coat, “but a respectable Republican cloth coat and I always tell her she’d look good in anything.” Dewey had told Nixon that the Eisenhower people wanted him to drop off the ticket when his speech was over. That, Dewey told him, was what the general expected. Nixon went over Ike’ head with his conclusion: “Wire and write the Republican National Committee whether you think I should stay or whether you think I should get off. And whatever their decision is I will abide by it.” Ike broke the tip of the pencil he was holding and angrily hissed at RNC Chairman Arthur Summerfield, “Well Arthur, you sure got your money’s worth.” Nixon stayed on the ticket but Ike never forgave him for violating the chain of command. In 1956 Eisenhower would seriously consider dropping Nixon from the ticket, would refuse to campaign for Nixon in 1960 and would only reluctantly endorse his own veep for president in 1968. Nixon and Ike were now a pair or rivals.      

The final part of C2K- Korea- turned out to be the most dramatic masterstroke of the whole campaign. In a speech in Detroit, Michigan, on October 24, 1952, Ike dropped the October Surprise: “I shall go to Korea.” In this speech Ike declared that the Korean War was “never inescapable” and that he was going to travel to Korea as soon as he was elected president to find a way to make peace as quickly as possible. Stevenson had toyed with the idea of announcing he would travel to Korea but his handlers told him that this was a gimmick that could backfire. Instead, it erased the many gaffes of the Ike 1952 campaign and is the most remembered campaign stunt of Eisenhower’s political career. “For all practical purposes,” one reporter wrote when the election was over, “the campaign ended that night.” Eisenhower had shown he wanted peace so bad he would go into Hell to find a way. Stevenson later said, “If it had not been for that going-to-Korea business, I might have beaten him.” That is a fantasy but it shows how well a war weary populace will respond to a man who wants peace. It is the most dramatic part of the election.         

The final unique and interesting part of the election of 1952 is the usage of television advertisements. TV had been used in a limited way in the 1948 election and in the 1950 midterm races, but in 1952 the medium came into its own in the national presidential contest. The Republicans used TV to portray Eisenhower as a wise, worldly grandfather figure. Beside a Walt Disney produced cartoon add featuring the Irving Berlin tune “I Like Ike”, most Republican TV ads started with the announcer declaring “Eisenhower Answers America” with a voter asking the general a question and the general giving a quick, intelligent response. Stevenson’s broke campaign released fewer TV ads but they packed more of a punch. In one ad a heart named “Bob”, for Robert Taft, and another named “Ike” swoon over what the other is saying. The TV ad ended with a jaded little poem:
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Another cartoon advertisement told the story of Old MacDonald and his broken down farm of 1931. This advertisement was made to show the nation what happened the last time a Republican won the White House. Stevenson himself hated TV. “The idea that you can merchandise candidates for high office like breakfast cereal is the ultimate indignity to the democratic process!” he roared. However, the usage of TV ads makes the 1952 election unique and interesting in the history of presidential elections. Nothing changed the way men and women campaign for president like television and it all started in 1952.

The final results of the election are not all that dramatic or interesting when one looks at the polls. Eisenhower won by a landslide and carried the Republicans over the top in the U.S. Senate. Ike won 39 states and 442 electoral votes, crushing Stevenson who only won a few states in the Democratic South. The election does reveal that the Jim Crow hold on the South was slipping from the greasy fingers of the big Southern Dimmycrats. South Carolina- where session loftily bared its head in 1860- only voted for Stevenson by 51-49% margin. Florida, Texas and Tennessee bolted for the Republican Eisenhower, showcasing the rise of conservative Republican voters in the South. The Democrats hold on the Sunny South was over. The 1952 election had a big win for a national hero but it was also a lot of fun to watch. It is an exciting race with an expected ending. Stevenson, when asked about the election returns, quoted Abraham Lincoln: he said he felt like the little boy who stubbed his toe in the dark, “he was too old to cry, but it hurt too much to laugh.”   

Really enjoyed these last two.


Though I would point out that whilst Ike was "Supreme Allied Commander" such only applied to the European Theater of Operations and then only to the Western Front. In fact, MacArthur's superiority in rank was one of the main reasons Ike landed the job. There was some desire for Marshall to lead the invasion and to replace him bring Ike back as Chief of Staff, but putting Ike in charge of MacArthur and Marshall, who both outranked him, was impossible. The use of the title Supreme Commander was meant to ensure he had complete command on the air, land and sea to ensure complete coordination and avoid inter-service bickering, but it only applied to that Theater. The Supreme Allied Commander for the whole war would have been the Combined Chiefs of Staff and then only for the US and Britain together as Russia and China acted independent by and large.

When you're finished with this, you should type it up as a book. Although in that context, chronological order would make more sense.

Taking the twenty-sixth spot on the list of lists is the campaign over Texas, Oregon and America’s manifest destiny. By 1844 a new brand of statesman had risen up to replace the cocked-hatted, knee-breeched generation of wig dotting politicians. These new, hardy men from the West called themselves the “Young Americans.” Strongly they called out for America to show its dominance over the continent, to free enterprise from the shackled of regulation, to invest anew in the youth of the nation and to leave behind the doddering theories of “old fogies.” To the Young Americans the United States was a beacon of hope that was going to define the 19th and 20th Centuries. “All history is to be re-written!” triumphantly declared journalist John O’Sullivan in 1837. Political science and the whole scope of all moral truth have to be considered and illustrated in the light of the democratic principle!” O’Sullivan, who coined the term “manifest destiny”, called for America to take the wilds of the West from Mexico and the Native Americans and take its rightful place as leader of the civilized nations of the Western world. It was against this exciting backdrop that two scions of the American West did battle for the White House and over the momentous issues of expansion, slavery and the future of the American people. 1844 is an exciting race.

The conventions of 1844 are the first ingredient in a truly mesmerizing contest. The Whig Party convention, however, is not the one to look at. Henry Clay, the talented compromiser whom was elected Speaker of the House on his first day in Congress, was the titular leader of the Whig Party in 1844. In 1840 he was snubbed for an easy White House win by William Henry Harrison, but the death of Harrison and the ascension of John Tyler to the presidency had increased Clay’s hopes of taking the nomination. Tyler, who wanted to run for president as the candidate of Southern independence, had vetoed a Third National Bank and had worked with Secretary of State John C. Calhoun to annex Texas and create a new slave state. Clay, a slaveholder who dreamed of manumission, was the national voice that was needed to hold off sectional struggle. With the issue of slavery’s expansion eating away at the Whig Party Clay was seen as the Western voice of compromise. The architect of the Compromise of 1820, Clay was nominated without opposition at a nearly quiet Baltimore convention. Two-weeks before the convention Clay had made his position of the annexation of Texas “clear.” In his infamous Raleigh Letter, Clay responded to Secretary Calhoun’s pro-slavery, pro-Texas annexation Packenham Letter. In Clay’s Raleigh Letter, he flatly denounced the Tyler annexation bill and predicted that its passage would provoke a war with Mexico, whose government had never recognized Texas independence. Clay went as far to write that even if Mexico was willing to sell Texas without a fight he would not accept the territory. It seemed to Northern Whigs that Clay was their man: a Westerner who opposed Calhoun’s dream of an “Empire for Slavery.” The Whig Convention and campaign was thoroughly underwhelming. Clay was nominated by acclamation and paired with the pious “Christian Statesman” Senator Theodore Frelinghuysen of New Jersey, who still has a relative serving in Congress in the form of Congressman Rodney Frelinghuysen. One can only wonder how Clay and John Boehner would get along. The anti-slavery, anti-alcohol Frelinghuysen was paired with the slave-owning, hard drinking, card playing Henry Clay. The Whig Campaign was a real downer, though. After writing a pathetic platform of a little over 10 words, the Whigs adopted the weak campaign slogan “Hooray for Clay.” “Ugh,” is all the writer can say about this most pathetic of campaign sloganeering. One bright spot for the campaign was that a group of enterprising Whigs from Pennsylvania came up with a way of rhyming the confusing Dutch last name of their vice-presidential nominee: “"Hurray, Hurray, the Country's Risin' – Vote for Clay and Frelinghuysen!” Whoever came up with that deserves an A for effort.

1844 continued


The disappointment of the Whigs Convention is easily eclipsed by the incredible Democratic fracas at the Odd Fellows Hall. The Democratic Party was in the midst of a civil war that makes the current imbroglio in the Grand Old Party pale in comparison. Texas was the powder keg of the Democratic Party and the old fire breather John C. Calhoun looked likely to ignite the issue. As Secretary of State, Calhoun had worked out the treaty of annexation with Texas and had the backing of President Tyler. Calhoun hoped he would follow in the footsteps of Jefferson, Madison, Monroe and J.Q. Adams and assume the White House after stints at the State Department. Northern Democrats who opposed annexation, derisively called “Locofocos’ by their critics, were determined to stop Calhoun from taking the nomination and they had a candidate and the issues (what I hear to be a deadly combination). Anti-Texas Democrats focused around former President Martin van Buren. The Little Magician had been practicing his tricks in Kinderhook, New York, since he was unceremoniously kicked out of the White House in 1840 by hard cider fueled Whig mobs. The issue of slavery had bubbled up as an issue in American politics following the departure of General Jackson from the White House and van Buren had situated himself on the side of free soil. Southern Democrats wanted nothing to do with van Buren but Calhoun was far too extreme to appeal nationally. Thus entered Gideon Pillow, an ambitious Nashville lawyer with a dream to place his former law partner James Knox Polk in the president’s chair.

Polk was hardly presidential timbre in 1844. An ambitious lawyer who had once had gallstones removed without any pain killers, Polk had served as Speaker of the House of Representatives and was a loyal solider of Jackson during the epic Bank War, yet his terms as governor of Tennessee had fallen flat. A boring speaker with little personality, Polk was sent packing in 1841 and 1843 by Whig politician and former circus performer James C. Jones. The governorship gone Polk seemed to be retired. The most exciting part of the 1844 election was the Democratic Convention and what is arguably the greatest political resurrection in American history. The Democrats meeting in Baltimore were Odd Fellows themselves: they had five candidates vying for the nomination and none of them could win the dreaded 2/3rds majority of the delegate’s votes. Moderate Senator James Buchanan- who had yet to take any position on slavery or Texas- appeared to be the favorite, yet he lacked the support of old Jacksonians due to his Federalist background. Former Vice-President Richard Mentor Johnson was too controversial due to his former slave common law wife. Van Buren had offended the South over Texas with his controversial Hammett Letter. In this letter van Buren declared that as president he would refuse to allow for the entrance of Texas into the union. Senator Lewis Cass of Michigan, who famously broke his sword over his knee when the American surrendered Detroit to the British during the War of 1812, looked like he might emerge as a compromise choice. However, Southern Democrats threatened an open revolt if Cass won the nomination and President John Tyler, who was still hoping to run as a Southern independent in 1844, was only too happy to welcome them. Henry Clay may very well have won the presidency had his old archenemy Andrew Jackson not stirred himself from his sickbed at the Hermitage to spur on Gideon’s trumpet and lead to the nomination of Young Hickory Polk.

The drama of Jackson issuing a clarion call for his supporters is the stuff that movies are made of. Concerned that Britain would Balkanize Texas, outlaw slavery there and form a bulwark against the American South, Jackson turned on van Buren. Martin van Buren had made Andrew Jackson president through his political machinations in New York State. Van Buren had been Jackson’s most loyal subordinate for eight years and faithfully carried out Jacksonian fiscal and Indian policy for the four years of his tough tenure in the White House. The code of political Omerta dictates that if someone helps you than you must help them. As always, Jackson played by his own set of rules. In a well-publicized announcement he called on Southern Democrats to reject van Buren and find a candidate who was acceptable on both the issues of slavery and expansion. Ironically, it was a man from Massachusetts who formally introduced James K. Polk as an acceptable compromise candidate. Historian George Bancroft introduced Polk as a nationalist and champion of the expansionist theories of the Young America. The rush to nominate Polk was more of a walk but in the end Polk was nominated on the eight ballot. Gideon Pillow rejoiced as did Southern Democrats. While Polk had not said he supported expanding slavery into Texas as Calhoun had he was a slave holder himself and so he worked fine from the slave power in the Democracy. Anti-annexation Senator Silas Wright of New York turned down the honor of the vice-presidency but Pennsylvanian George M. Dallas, an associate of Buchanan, accepted the prize. The Democrats adopted a fierce platform calling for Young America to live up to its Manifest Destiny. The Democracy called for low tariffs, an independent treasury, the annexation of the disputed Oregon Territory to the lines of 54’40 and the annexation of Texas. The slogan they ran under was fiery and strong: “Fifty-four forty or fight!” That was a real strong slogan and Polk would live up to it.

The campaign of 1844 is as grand as the conventions. One would have expected Henry Clay to be jubilant over the nomination of a light-weight dark horse such as Polk. Clay’s son Henry, Junior, (who would die in the war against Mexico) had been in Lexington, Kentucky, at the home of Robert Todd as the Democratic Convention was in full swing. When he returned he excitedly told his father that the Democrats had selected a candidate. “Is it Matty?” Clay asked. His son said it was not. “Buchanan, Cass, Tyler?” Clay asked again. The son replied in the negative. “They could not have been mad enough to choose Calhoun of Johnson?” a perplexed Clay asked his son. Unable to contain his giddiness the boy blurted out: “It’s James Knox Polk!” Clay did not respond as his son had hoped. The old statesman stood up from his chair, walked to his liquor cabinet, poured a glass, chugged it down as sighed: “Hal, I am beat again.” Clay knew Polk was no fool. He was just the right man for the 1844 campaign. A Southern nationalist, Polk had the support of Democrats around the country. He was a uniting figure and Clay was the perfect antagonist to get Democrats to turn out in force. There was also the sticky issue of Texas. Polk was in favor of annexing Texas, Clay had made a strong stand against it. He knew that this would hurt him amongst Southern voters. Thus the Great Compromiser tried to play both sides of the fence. Northern “conscience” Whigs and Southern “cotton” Whigs both tried to make Henry Clay into their man. In the North Whigs ran Clay as “the abolitionist candidate of the North.” This was in an attempt to keep Northern Whigs from bolting to the anti-slavery Liberty Party and their colorful standard bearer James G. Birney, a reformed slave master. Henry Clay, the consummate gambler, bet all his chips on the Texas issue…and lost. Clay tried to play both sides of the issue, telling Southerners in letters that he had “warmed to the issue of Texas’s annexation.” This proclamation created such a hoopla in the North that Clay retracted with an open letter in September 1844 declaring, “I am decidedly opposed to the immediate annexation of Texas to the United States.” Much like John Kerry 160-years later, Clay was mocked by his partisan opponents for being for Texas annexation before he was against it. A Democratic Missouri editor put the issue of Clay’s tango with Texas in the form of a silly limerick:


If that is not political theater at its most comical than I have no idea what is.

The 1844 campaign was greatly helped by the ingenious campaign strategies of the opposing camps. Polk’s campaigners placed it upon their shoulders to assault Henry Clay for being a drinker, gambler, duelist and womanizer. In a widely circulated pamphlet entitled “Henry Clay’s Moral Fitness for the Presidency, Tested by the Decalogue” the Democrats outlined line-by-line how Clay had violated all of the Ten Commandments. Another pamphlet was entitled “Twenty-One Reasons Why Clay Should Not Be Elected.” This tract gave all the best details of “the seedy, slimy life of Hal Clay.” Reason Number Two to vote against Prince Henry was: “Clay spends his days at the gambling table and his nights at the brothel.” This would be reason enough for me to happily vote for Clay but in 1844 America this was quite the charge. Clay himself threatened legal action (and one duel) against the publishers of the Twenty-One Reasons leaflet.

1844, Part III

The Whigs found it impossible to reply in kind to these attacks. Clay was colorful and controversial, but Polk was colorless and calm. Even his Democratic friends referred to the staid Polk as “Polk the Plodder.” Thus the Whigs unleashed an unusual, yet imaginative, assault on the dull Democrat. First, Whigs made fun of the less than well-known Polk. While Polk was no political novice he palled in comparison to the celebrated Henry Clay. Whigs chortled, “Who is Polk?” and John Crittenden of Kentucky commented to Clay concerning his opponent’s nomination: “Great God, what a nomination!” Whigs laughed as they sang a funny little song, “Ha,ha, what a nominee is Jimmy Polk of Tennessee!” The second great assault on Polk was novel for the time. Polk was a slaveholder, so was Clay. However, Polk was painted as an “ultra-slave holder” due to the large amount of land and slaves he owned. In order to appeal to Northern Whigs, Clay’s men told nasty tales of J.K. Polk- the cruel slave master. Clay’s campaign found a reference to Polk in Roorback’sTpur through the Southern and Western States in the Year 1836 in which the author commented that Speaker Polk had purchased forty fresh slaves and, “was informed by [Polk] that the mark of the branding iron, with the initials of his name on their shoulders to distinguish them from the rest.” This excerpt tuned out to be made up but it had an effect on the campaign. Northern Whigs attacked Polk for buying a new plantation in Mississippi but also made sure to accuse him of being a religious bigot who wanted to ban Roman Catholicism from the United States. In New York City ingenious Whigs tried to persuade Democratic Irish Catholic voters to turn against Polk and instead cast their ballots for “Patrick O’Clay.” Yes, they thought of everything.

The high point of the Whig Campaign was a great rally in Polk’s home state of Tennessee. At a Whig rally in Nashville, S.S. Prentiss of Mississippi- a celebrated orator and lawyer- gave a four hour address to a spell bound audience. His speech was so filled with Whig red meat and soaring praise of Henry Clay that the audience demanded that he give an encore. That night Prentiss spoke again and his heated words against Polk and the Democrats caused his face to turn red and his voice to soar to dizzying heights on the octave scale. At the very climax of his eloquence Prentiss grabbed his head and fell in a swoon into the waiting arms of Tennessee Governor James C. Jones. Jones, the old comic, whispered into Prentiss’s ear: “Die, Prentiss, die! You will never have a more glorious opportunity!” Daniel Webster once commented that he had never beheld more powerful speaker than Prentiss. That has to be the highest compliment ever paid to an orator.

In the end all of the screaming, hoping and scheming landed Polk in the president’s chair. This was seen as an upset by Clay and the Whigs. Clay himself assumed he would win the race and had even purchased a fine new bed for his White House residence. The dark-horse Polk won only 38,181 popular votes than Clay. The results of the contest are a dramatic conclusion to a thrilling contest. 1844 is a treat for presidential election fans and one of the most important elections in American history.        

Are you going to continue this?

I'm sorry I've not updated this much. I have been overwhelmed by work and now with school starting I have even more to do as a teacher. I will try to update this before the week is out. I have not forgotten so take heart! :)

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1940 lands at number twenty-five on the list. In the year of the Blitzkreig and the Battle of Britain President Franklin Delano Roosevelt defied history and won a third term as president of the United States. This feat, one may argue, should have placed this election in the top ten. After all, this impressive feat is to be respected. The election of 1940 is an election that deserves respect, no doubt. It offers the presidential election watcher some wonderful theatrics. However, the overall story arch of the election is affected by a cast of characters who are interesting but lack originality.

The casting of the election of 1940 is one that seems to have been botched by the muses of history. This is truly disappointing when given the historic scenery of the world stage. In 1940 Europe was engulfed in fiery combat and Asia was being conquered by the marching armies of the Empire of the Rising Sun. Two days after the French Republic was conquered by Nazi Germany the Republican Convention opened in Philadelphia. The United States lingered in the thralls of the Roosevelt Recession of 1938-1940 and the Republicans tasted victory. The Republicans had a cadre of decent candidates. These are candidates who could have potentially made the 1940 race close and far more competitive than it turned out to be.

The best GOP candidate by far in 1940 was Manhattan District Attorney Thomas Dewey. Dewey (who inspired the DC comic “Mr. District Attorney”) was one of the most admired public officials in the United States and polls showed he would run a close race with President Franklin Delano Roosevelt, the untouchable incumbent. Dewey, who was only 38-years old, was mocked by a frightned “Big Jim” Farley as haiving, “Thrown his diaper into the ring.” Dewey was a real threat to the Democratic hold on the White House. An internationalist who was not a hawk, Dewey embraced certain aspects of the New Deal and was a national hero for putting away mob leaders Charles “Lucky” Luciano and Louis Lempke. Dewey was the prototype gang-buster and he would have proven a strong opponent for any Democrat in 1940. Dewey’s main opponents came in the form of Senator Robert Taft, Senator Arthur Vandenberg and media mogul Frank Gannett. Taft and Vandenberg assaulted Dewey from the right. Both frustrated isolationists, Taft and Vandenberg railed against an “international cabal” dedicated to plunging America into the stormy tempest of Europe’s war. They would not be too far from the truth.

Patrick J. Buchanan has described the election of 1940 as one of the greatest “false choices” in American history. Buchanan speaks the truth and the farce of the 1940 Republican Convention does a great job showing this fact. The only real great drama of the 1940 election occurred behind the scenes in Philadelphia. The British desperately wanted the United States involved in World War II and hired William Stephenson (codename “Intrepid”) to meddle in U.S. public affairs to influence the American political campaign of 1940. The goal of the British Cabal was simple: make sure that only pro-intervention, pro-war candidates were nominated by the two major parties. This made Dewey unacceptable. Dewey had not made a single speech calling for the United States to enter the war on the side of the British Empire. Taft and Vandenberg were openly hostile to intervention. Former President Herbert Hoover- running an ivory tower campaign for the nomination from his perches in Stanford and the Waldorf Towers- had given a stinging speech against American intervention in the war in Europe. The British Cabal under Stephenson threw their support behind a former Democrat: Wendell Wilkie.

Wilkie both makes and tampers the election of 1940 in terms of excitement. The former Democratic Wall Street attorney and utilities executive was hardly the front-runner for the GOP presidential nomination when the election season opened. Wilkie was the son of an Indiana farmer who had been given an important name in the theory that he would live up to it. While in college Wilkie donned a red sweater in solidarity with Bolsheviks and applauded communist journalist John Reed’s book “Ten Days that Shook the World” as the greatest piece of literature in the English language. Wilkie eventually moved beyond his youthful indiscretion with Marxism and became a millionaire corporate attorney. He represented several Hollywood film production companies as corporate counsel and went on to head up the one thing a Bolshevik would hate even more than a tsar: a private power company. Wilkie left FDR, whom he had voted for in 1932 and 1936, over the Tennessee Valley Authority and the government-created monopoly in power production that directly competed with his own privately held firm. The New Deal created a lot of Republicans and Wilkie was one of them. By 1940 he had gone from a Bolshevik to a social democrat to a New Dealer to a Republican. No one should ever comment that Mitt Romney underwent the greatest political facelift of any Republican presidential nominee. When Wilkie arrived in Philadelphia he was greeted by Senator James E. Watson of Indiana. A Taft conservative, Watson did not want his fellow Hoosier Wilkie nominated. “Jim,” the very charming Wilkie asked, “Can’t you be for me?” “No Wendell,” Watson replied, “You are just not my type of Republican.” “I admit I used to be a Democrat,” Wilkie answered. “Used to be?” a skeptical Watson rejoined. “You’re a good Methodist,” Wilkie replied, “don’t you believe in conversion?” Watson sighed and replied: “Yes Wendell. If the town whore truly repented and joined the church I would personally welcome her. I would lead her up to the front pew, but I’d be damned if I’d ask her to lead the choir the first night.”    

Election of 1940, II

Backed by wealthy internationalist such as Oren Root, Junior, and Fortune editor Russell Davenport, Wilkie entered the 1940 campaign with no political experience but the money and support of the British Cabal. The pro-war lords of the press, such as Henry Luce of Time, and wealthy New York bankers tossed their money behind the pro-intervention Wilkie. The “We Want Wilkie” boom of 1940 is something the Koch Brothers wish they could replicate. Wilkie went from being an embittered corporate attorney to a front-runner for the 1940 presidential nomination almost overnight. Despite the fact that less than 2% of Republican voters backed Wilkie in public opinion polls in 1939 by June 1940 Wilkie polled second to only the unstoppable Dewey. Money talks, even if we would rather be forever in blue jeans. Stephenson, a man named Intrepid, made duplicate tickets for the Republican Convention and handed them out to pro-Wilkie Republicans. Cash gifts were offered to iffy delegates from the American South. The Union Jack was not flown over the Wilkie Headquarters but it might as well have been.

The battle for the Republican Presidential nominee was a thrill ride. The eventual candidate was not. Dewey led on the first ballot and Taft was at his heels. The epic struggle between these two Republican heavyweights would be played out again in 1948 but 1940 was the first struggle. Just like when Cassius Clay beat Sonny Liston, the first fight is always the better one. At the 1940 Republican National Convention itself, keynote speaker Harold Stassen, the Governor of Minnesota, announced his support for Willkie and became his official floor manager. The future perennial candidate was the “Wonderboy” governor of Minnesota in 1940 and his endorsement of Wilkie carried a lot of weight, especially in the mostly pro-Taft Midwest. By the fourth ballot all of the British machinations had worked. Wilkie took the lead and he never looked back. Wilkie, in all fairness, was not simply helped by Intrepid and the Brits. He was greatly helped by the fact that Dewey and Taft’s forces disliked each other so much they refused to join forces. A “Stop Wilkie” dream ticket of Dewey for president and Taft for vice-president was rejected by Mr. Republican Taft himself and Dewey simply could not muster the power to win with Taft pulling him down. On the 6th ballot Wilkie took the nomination. The drama was over in Philadelphia and the internationalist bankers and lawyers had won. The Republicans adopted a platform written by the ward bosses, but their presidential nominee was the big show. He was paired with the crusty, conservative Senator Charles McNary of Oregon, the minority leader in the Senate. McNary was conservative on every issue except, ironically, public power. McNary and Wilkie did not get along well and probably had the most distant relationship of any national ticket for the presidency.

The Republican struggle was not equaled by the Democratic campaign. Yes, President Franklin Delano Roosevelt claimed that he would not seek a third term unless he was “drafted” by the delegates. Much like the “overnight” Wilkie boom the “spontaneous” Roosevelt draft had to be skillfully managed. Roosevelt did not want to give up the presidency. He had grand designs on the post-war world and he wanted to be in the room when the world was rebuilt. Harry Hopkins, lauded as the Assistant President by the press, managed the campaign from Chicago. Roosevelt was opposed for his third term by Vice-President John Nance Garner, Postmaster General James Farley and Maryland Senator Millard Tydings. These liliputians were hardly annoying gnats to a political colossus like Roosevelt. However, Roosevelt had to face the memory of a marble man greater than he: George Washington. The great George Washington had set up a two term tradition and even FDR was frightened by the precedent by the primary president. Harry Hopkins, working from the bathroom of his suite in Chicago, manipulated the 1940 Democratic Convention in the Windy City with the talent of a master puppeteer. Senator Alban Barkley of Kentucky, who wanted the vice-presidential nomination, made sure that in his speech as chairman of the convention he mentioned Roosevelt’s name loudly. As soon as Barkley mentioned FDR Chicago Mayor Ed Kelly signaled for one of his cronies to begin yelling loudly into a microphone: “We want Roosevelt!” Barkley then played up his part like a master thespian: “The President has never had and has not today any desire or purpose to continue in the office of President…he wishes in all earnestness and sincerity to make it clear that all delegates are free to vote for any candidate.” As was expected, Mayor Kelly had his boys begin shrieking, “We want Roosevelt! The party wants Roosevelt!” Yes, the well-orchestrated, minutely planned spontaneous draft worked like a charm. Roosevelt was easily nominated and threatened to not accept the nomination if the socialistic Secretary of Agriculture Henry Wallace was not nominated for vice-president. FDR was nominated for president and he got Wallace for veep. FDR had met with William Stephenson and said he was proudly an agent for intervention. The British Cabal had pulled off the greatest coup in the history of American politics. Wilkie and Roosevelt were two-heads on the same interventionist coin. Intrepid was one great agent.

Election of 1940, III

The election of 1940 saw a general election with two huge personalities. Wilkie and Roosevelt were charming, articulate and well read. However, the election is akin to a professional wrestling match. Both sides claim to hate one another when in the end it does not really matter who wins. Ironically, Wilkie and FDR promised that they would not send any American boys into a foreign war. Wilkie, who had only won the Republican nomination because of his support for intervention on the side of Britain, tried to appeal to the Taft wing by claiming he was never pro-intervention and declaring that the New Deal, which he supported in 1933, had failed to restore the economic growth of the 1920s. These talking points would have meant something coming from the mouth of Taft, Dewey, Hoover, Charles Lindbergh or Joseph Martin. These talking points from Wilkie simply came off as forced. He did not believe them, they were simply lip service.

FDR could hardly believe his luck in running against Wilkie. “You know Wilkie would have made a good Democrat,” FDR told Hopkins in October 1940. FDR’s campaign was not that active. While Wilkie traveled over 34,000 miles and thirty-four states and made over 500 speeches, FDR did relatively little campaigning. On September 3rd Roosevelt pulled off the coup of the campaign when he issued an executive order issuing the British destroyers for long-term leases on some bases in the Caribbean. FDR attacked the Republicans (“Martin, Barton and Fish”) for opposing defense bills in the 1930s. Wilkie, who was no fan of the conservative Congressman Martin, Barton and Fish, had no real way of responding to Roosevelt. After all, he supported intervention in the war. His only attack on Roosevelt was that he had not spoken to Congress before making the decision. This was a good point but running on the Constitution is not way to win a presidential election.

Wilkie did not have much to offer the nation that Roosevelt had not already given them. This led his campaign to focus on some trivial issues that diminished the campaign. In October 1940 Wilkie, flailing for a good attack strategy, attacked Roosevelt for appointing his son Eliot as a captain in the Army Air Corp. Wilkie mocked Eliot as an “overnight captain” and questioned how effective an army led by such men would be in combatting the armies of Germany. FDR, as always, had a ready reply. “I wanna be a captain too!” Republicans jeered, but no one realty listened. Wilkie attempted to question FDR’s health by pointing out his lack of campaigning. When FDR started a train tour in October 1940 Wilkie mocked this as a “show of strength.” Wilkie simply did not have much to offer as a general election candidate. The big money backers he had for the GOP primary seemed to mean nothing in the general election.

The election of 1940 is best remembered as the election in which a president won a third term. Yes, the Republicans tried to make this an issue. Juvenile Republicans mocked Democrats as “Third Termites” and asked, “Maybe Roosevelt is all you deserve?” Democrats shot back, “Rather a third termer than a third rater.” When one looks at the fact that the world was burning in 1940 this nit picking tit for tat seems to shrink from the world stage. Thus one may ask, “Why include this election as number twenty-five?” It was not close. FDR won by over five million votes and took 449 electoral votes to Wilkie’s anemic 82. The candidates had so much in common that after the election FDR hired Wendell Wilkie as a good will ambassador. Wilkie befriended Eleanor Roosevelt and the First Lady of the World attended Wilkie’s funeral in 1944. There seemed to be so little difference in the general election. Why make this race number twenty-five?

It comes down to the British Cabal. The fact that Stephenson was able to manipulate a convention as well as he did is incredible. His story is told by the man himself in his 1976 work “A Man Called Intrepid” and it is incredible to read. The GOP Convention, and the Democratic one, are marked by high drama and carnival. Intrigue at the level of an Ian Fleming novel can be seen in June 1940 in both Philadelphia and Chicago. The election of 1940 is a fascinating election due to the fact that it shows how cool professionals can manage human emotion and politics like a well-oiled corporation. The general election was the FDR Show. A nation, fearing war at any minute, was not going to remove the tested FDR for the untried Wilkie. It is human nature to turn to what we know when we are scared. In a time of peace Wilke may well have scraped by with his big money backers against another Democrat. FDR was not that Democrat. The election of 1940 is a race in which the opening outshone the ending. It is an historic race and a fun one to read about if one revels in behind the scenes machinations. It well deserves its spot on the list.   

Taking the number twenty-four spot is America’s third presidential campaign and first partisan throw down. The Washington Presidency- the deceiving lull of partisan agreement- was drawing to a conclusion. As a weary George Washington prepared to hand over the yoke of public office to a worthy successor the nation prepared for a battle royale between two of the Founding generations’ most accomplished statesmen. The development of political parties charge this election as nothing had since Franklin’s lightning rod.

The 1796 campaign arguably began as soon as George Washington started his second term as president. The “spirit of party” overtook Washington’s brilliant cabinet. Thomas Jefferson, his brilliant Secretary of State, and Alexander Hamilton, his ambitious Secretary of the Treasury and close friend, saw America as two different nations. Hamilton, who had risen from poverty to become the chief advisor to the nation’s first president, viewed America as an expansive industrial empire of finance, factories and high finance. His shining city on a hill was a modern city of bankers, lenders and merchants. Jefferson, the son of agriculture, saw this city as the city of Dis. Jefferson dreamed of a nation separated into small wards, a government small enough to drown in a washtub and an economy based on farmers, small shopkeepers and simple pleasures. The struggle between the Hamiltonian central authority and the Jeffersonian agricultural system smothered Washington, whom fancied himself “above” the business of party.

This is as if Washington was a non-partisan. The American Fabius was hardly above the political games of the 1790s. Firmly in the Hamiltonian camp, President Washington added a great deal to the partisan rancor of the time. His presidency established a powerful national bank, opened up a pro-British foreign policy in the form of Jay’s Treaty and brutally enforced federal taxation, such as the unfair Whiskey Act introduced with the hope that Hamilton and his cronies could skim money off the top. While Washington played innocent when Thomas Jefferson angrily resigned his cabinet position, there is no denial that he had played on Hamilton’s side in terms of all major foreign and domestic policy questions. Hamilton was the son Washington never had.

One could easily argue that the greatest moment of the 1796 election came from Washington himself. In September 1796 Washington, who had wanted to retire four years earlier, officially released his much lauded Farewell Address. The first president warned against the political party system his policies had nourished, urged no foreign entanglements while his treaties seemed to always favor Britain against France and applauded his centralized economic system as the proper vision for the nation’s future. Like all farewell addresses President Washington’s was highly partisan and political, even though he claimed that it was not meant in that spirit. Washington’s valedictory attracted praise from Federalists and anger from Republicans. Hamilton praised the farewell as a “reservoir of wisdom” and circulated copies of the speech in every major Federalist publication. Republicans saw the speech as nothing less than an unabashedly partisan Hamiltonian screed. The Republican newspaper Aurora was not shy in sharing their open feelings about Washington’s final public address.  Editor William Duane panned the Farwell as, “fraught with incalculable evils to your country” and declared: “Would to God [Washington] would have retired to a private station four years ago…” Duane’s negative review was a mere love tap when compared to what Benjamin Franklin Bache, Dr. Franklin’s grandson, said about Washington. Lightning Rod, Junior, wrote bluntly: “If ever a nation has been debauched the American nation has been debauched by Washington.” When it came to telling it like it is the grandson was just like his celebrated grandfather.  The irascible pamphleteer Thomas Paine, recently imprisoned in Revolutionary France, added to the assault on Washington's reputation by calling him a treacherous man unworthy of his fame as a military and political hero. Paine described Washington as an incompetent commander and a vain and ungrateful person. In a scathing open letter to President Washington in 1796, he wrote: “the world will be puzzled to decide whether you are an apostate or an impostor; whether you have abandoned good principles or whether you ever had any.”

1796 election, Part II

Why such anger at a man who should have been a national hero? Had the frozen waters of the Delaware and the drunken Prussian blood of Trenton lost its staying power? The answer is a simple yes. One of the reasons why 1796 is a great election for election buffs is because it falls during one of the greatest moments in the history of human freedom. The French Revolution was still festering in Europe. The Council on Public Safety had fallen, Robespierre had his jaw and head removed, Marat was murdered and the Directory ruled in Paris. The Terror was over, yet the Hamiltonian Federalists had not forgotten it. Benjamin Franklin Bache hated Washington primarily for his perceived “treason” against France, America’s first ally. The Neutrality Act, declaring that America would not side with France or Britain in their never ending war over the Revolution, was viewed by the Republicans as a blanket endorsement of British economic and foreign policy goals. Jay’s Treaty, which Washington saw as his signal foreign policy achievement, was also hated by Jeffersonian Republicans due to the fact that it named Britain as America’s chief trading partner while refusing to mention the crisis of American impressment and slavery to the Royal Navy. Jefferson saw Washington as a puppet of Hamilton. Hamilton saw Jefferson as a radical Jacobin atheist who would not rest until the crimson blood of capitalists dripped from his agrarian collectivist fangs. “Washington’s Farewell Address,” remarked Congressman Fisher Ames of Massachusetts, “was a signal, like dropping of a hat, for the party races to start.”

1796 could not ask for a better cast of characters. The luminous names of the combatants for the presidential crown are something to behold. The Federalist Party presidential nomination was not a contest of wills, but the struggle of two men. Alexander Hamilton did not like John Adams, the rotund vice-president of the United States. The bald, almost toothless but highly intelligent Adams had served eight miserable years as vice-president. He was refused the honor to speak in the Senate, made a few tie breaking votes and twiddled his thumbs as he waited for his chance to win the leading role. Hamilton, whom Adams referred to as the “bastard brat”, far preferred Thomas Pinckney, former Governor of South Carolina. The son of one of America wealthiest women, Pinckney looked to Hamilton like the perfect puppet to keep him in power for four years more. Adams, “The Atlas of Independence”, proved himself to be more than a match for Hamilton’s machinations. While by no means as popular as Washington, John Adams was admired the nation over for his statesmanship during the Second Continental Congress and his eloquence as the first American Ambassador to the Court of St. James. Federalists electors around the nation seemed to agree on Adams for president and Pinckney for vice-president, much to the chagrin of Hamilton. Hamilton would not be beaten so easily and he would plot to deny the presidency to Adams.

The Republicans did not have a Judas-like figure such as Hamilton to throw mockey wrenches into their system. They instead had a marble man in the form of the imperfect Thomas Jefferson. A deist who denied the existence of miracles and invented swivel chairs in his spare time, Jefferson was the renaissance man of his time. They did, however, have Aaron Burr. The wily New Yorker Burr had bested Phillip Schuyler, Hamilton’s wealthy father-in-law, in a New York Senate election and had tried for the vice-presidency in 1792. The brilliant but abominable Burr had built a powerful Republican political network in New York and was being credited with the Jeffersonian comeback in the Empire State. The son of a president of Princeton University, Aaron Burr expected the Republicans to give him their nod for vice-president. Jefferson was supported by most Republicans but Burr was not. The New Yorker gave even his own Republican Governor George Clinton a terrible feeling. It seemed to Clinton that Burr wanted power too much and commented that Burr should remember what ambition had done to Lucifer. One can only imagine that Burr would not have minded having a kingdom in Hell; at least he would have a kingdom.

The first real presidential contest in American history is deliciously venomous. It is worth reading about to simply list the number of sins that Jefferson and Adams are accused of by the unfair and highly biased news publications of the day. Federalists painted Jefferson as the “candidate of guillotines.” The former Secretary of State was attacked as being an atheist, Jacobin and parlor Robespierre. Publications spread rumors that Jefferson was planning to outlaw religion and that his presidency would be marked by children’s heads impaled upon pikes and piles of Bibles being burned in the streets. Jefferson was a riotous revolutionary who would instill an American Terror to achieve an agricultural anarchy in his time. The Republican presses and pamphlets gave as well as they took. Adams was a highly unlikable figure. Short tempered, vain and egotistical, Adams had a dislike of the common people that entered the realm of elitism and bordered on monarchism. The Republican press mocked Adams’s lack of faith in the people and his preference for high handed government. Adams was attacked as being an “avowed friend of monarchy” who was preparing to name his sons as his “seigneurs and lords of this free country.” Jefferson, on the other hand, was the opposite of a king for the Federalists. He was a rabble rouser who was the leader of “cut-throats who walk in rags and sleep amidst filth and vermin.” One should comment that the comments made about young Obama voters in 2008 and 2012 were polite when compared to that previous statement. The viler the campaign the more fun it is to watch and 1796 is one of the most vile.  

Foreign policy is another great boon to the campaign. In October 1796 the Republican Party was embarrassed by Pierre Adet, the French ambassador to the United States. Monsieur Adet publicly denounced the Federalist foreign policy and proudly declared that French-American relations would improve under a Jefferson Presidency. While Republican campaign partisans quickly denounced and sitanced themselves from Adet the damage was done. Federalists reminded people that Jefferson had dined with the controversial Citizen Edmond-Charles Genêt, the French ambassador to the United States, during the French Revolution. Citizen Genêt had publicly called for America to war with Britain on behalf of Revolutionary France, had used American ports to build privateers from captured British ships and had used his position to raise an American Army to battle British troops in France. Genêt had been removed from his position when the Terror government had fallen and was ordered to return to France to face trial and execution. Washington had granted Genêt asylum in New York City and he had faded into supposed obscurity. The Adet issue brought the forgotten citizen back into the forefront and Federalists reminded the nation that Jefferson had honored the controversial Genêt with dinners and toasts. Jefferson had never disavowed his support of Genêt and now the Adams Campaign made sure the nation knew it. They loudly screamed that Adet’s statement was “an outrageous attempt on the dignity of an independent nation” and indignantly claimed that it proved that Jefferson was the tool of a foreign power. The Republican campaign never really recovered from Adet’s not very adept comments.

The final great moment of the campaign came during the weeks of balloting that marked the first several elections in American history. States voted for presidential electors in many different ways. Some elected them by popular votes, others had the governor appoint them to the position while others gave the job of selecting presidential electors to the state legislatures. Aaron Burr worked hard in New York City to win the state of New York for the Republican legislature candidates. He was not successful in 1796 with the wind of Washington’s legacy in his face. Burr would be back in four years and he would not fail. The failure of Republicans to win the legislatures in New York, Pennsylvania and New Jersey doomed Jefferson and Burr in terms of the election. However, salvation came in a strange form for Jefferson. Alexander Hamilton did not want to see Adams as the second president of the United States. Hamilton knew that Adams, a smart and independent man, would never allow his government to be manipulated by him. Hamilton needed Pinckney to be his willing puppet at the president’s chair. The fact that electors were allowed to vote for two candidates allowed Hamilton to try his hand at manipulating the presidential field in 1796.      

1796  election, Part III

Hamilton realized that the only way he could get Pinckney elected president was to steal votes from Adams. To elevate Pinckney to the post of president and relegate Jefferson into the powerless position as vice-president was far too sweet a perspective for Hamilton to turn his scheming mind away from. The mischievous Hamilton began working behind the scenes to elect Pinckney over Adams by convincing Jefferson electors from South Carolina to cast their second votes for Pinckney. This would lead Adams to finish third and go home to Braintree a bitter former vice-president. Hamilton’s little scheme ultimately failed when one of the South Carolina electors chose to go public with the deal, but it set the stage for tension between Adams and Hamilton for the next four years. In Pennsylvania supposed Federalists electors did listen to Hamilton and bolted to Jefferson’s fold. In February 1797, Samuel Miles, Federalist electors from Pennsylvania, cast one of his votes in the Electoral College for Jefferson. “What!” cried an angry “Gazette of the United States”, “Do I choose Samuel Miles to determine for me whether John Adams or Thomas Jefferson shall be President? No! In choose him to act, bot think!” That is one of the greatest comments in the history of voting.

In the end Adams, at the age of sixty-one and boasting few functional teeth, was elected the second president but not by a wide margin. When the balloting was over, Adams won71 electoral votes to 68 for Jefferson, 59 for Pinckney and a mere 30 for the devious Burr. Republicans jeered Adams as “president by three votes” and Federalists let out a collective sigh of relief. It was assumed that the Hamilton-Washington economic system was safe for four more years. Despite the backstabbing and name calling one also has to applaud Adams and Jefferson for remaining friends during the struggle. Jefferson shook hands happily with Adams and declared that he, “has always been my senior.” The last great treat of the 1796 election is the fact that America ended up with a divided executive branch for the first and only time in its history. The Federalist President John Adams and Republican Vice-President Thomas Jefferson took the oath of office on March 4th, 1797, as Washington watched on. The nation saw a peaceful transfer of power.

The 1796 election was a wonderful contest. Two men of high skill and intelligence ran against each other as the world burned behind them. They stayed as friends as their two parties waged bitter partisan and personal warfare. The political environment of partisanship that Washington had wrought through his years at the helm was seen perfectly through the kaleidoscope of the 1796 presidential contest. The election of 1796 is a fantastic election with good characters, high drama and a flash finish ending. All students of early American history should study the election of 1796. It perfectly shows the challenges which Washington, Adams, Jefferson and Hamilton faced as the American Republic was awkwardly finding its place in the world.      

Since I first read about it, 1796 has been one of my favorite elections, filled with my favorite "characters" of American history. I was glad to read your take on it.

Coming in at number twenty-three is the election of 1856. This election is a pleasing campaign for all fans of the Civil War Era as well as those who revel in the immortal rivalry between the Democrats and Republicans. With a bleeding Kansas and a nation poised on the brink of Civil War as the backdrop to this historic election, election history buffs should find this contest a great treat.
The first reason why 1856 stands out as a good election is that the times that surrounded the campaign could not be any better. The year 1856 was a year of violence. "We are treading upon a volcano," grimly stated Senator Thomas Hart Benton. The volcano, Benton feared, would erupt at the slightest trouble and engulf the nation. The troubles of 1856 were long in coming. The major issue of sectionalism had been annoyed time and time again by the politicians in Washington. The overarching issue of slavery seemed to be the most perplexing of the sectional issues which threatened the unity of the United States. President Franklin Pierce, who had been overwhelmingly elected in 1852 over a hapless Winfield Scott, had tried to appease both sides during his presidency. Pierce vetoed unconstitutional internal improvement laws to appear Southern and Eastern Democrats. In 1854, with the backing of Northern Democrats and Senator Stephen Douglas, Pierce signed the Kansas-Nebraska Act. The Kansas-Nebraska Act of 1854 was a law introduced by Douglas, a Northerner, for Northern industrialists and farmers. The point of the law was to organize Kansas and Nebraska intro territories so that they could elect a legislature. The legislatures would then issue land grants to Northern farmers and those wishing to invest in a Transcontinental Railroad. Douglas himself owned land in Nebraska and was hoping a railroad through the land would make him a wealthy man. Countless Northern businessmen lobbied for the passage of the Kansas-Nebraska Act.

The South, however, was opposed. Southerners did not want the law because a transcontinental railroad would only diminish the usage of the Mississippi River and Southern ports such as Mobile and New Orleans. Pierce, whom wanted to unite the Democratic Party across the nation, and Douglas, whom desired the White House in 1856, introduced to the bill what seemed to be a fine compromise. Southerners desired an expansion of their political and economic power yet their entire political and economic system was based on chattel slavery. The expansion of this odious institution was strongly opposed by Northern capitalists for multiple reasons. First, the Western territories, won during the Mexican War, were lands fertile for free labor and free men. The territories, according to free soil Whigs and Democrats, were meant for free white farmers. Congressman David Wilmot expressed this idea clearly in his famous Wilmot Proviso. Second, Northerners did not want slaves to enter territories due to the fact that they would give the South extra votes in Congress under the 3/5th Compromise. Despite these arguments Pierce and Douglas introduced to the Northern-backed Kansas-Nebraska Act the stipulation of popular sovereignty. This term meant simply that those who moved to a territory were given the right to vote on the issue of slavery in the territory. This is why the term is sometimes referred to as "squatter sovereignty"- in reference to the right of squatters, settlers to decide the issue of slavery in the territory.

Senator Douglas and President Pierce saw the Kansas-Nebraska Act as the answer to all the sectional strife of the last several years. The North would get great deals of nearly free farm land and a transcontinental railroad. The South would get very little except the chance that they would be given new slave states. To Douglas slavery was not the problem, the slavery controversy was. The Little Giant of Illinois believed that the Kansas-Nebraska Act, which passed comfortably, would cement his path to the presidency. Senator Douglas was completely wrong on all fronts. The Kansas-Nebraska Act is a fine example of how the best laid political plans of mice and men can go wrong in an eic way. The creation of the Kansas and Nebraska Territories opened up a bloody battle for domination which sensational newspapermen in the East dubbed "Bleeding Kansas."
Free-soilers and pro-slavery settlers descended on Kansas Territory like a plague of locusts. Both sides were driven by a lust for political power and the blood of their enemies. Missouri slavers crossed the border and stuffed ballot boxes when the elections for the first Kansas Legislature occurred. More people voted in the elections than lived in the territory and the pro-slavery side won. The Lecompton Constitution was written with Kansas as a slave state. Anti-slavery forces, armed illegally with rifles from anti-slavery minister Henry Ward Beecher which arrived in boxes marked "Bible", formed their own government in Topeka and adopted a constitution admitting Kansas as a free state. A brief civil war broke out in Kansas. While it can be argued how bloody Bleeding Kansas really was, there is no denying that a crop of crazies were indeed raised amongst the wheat and sunflowers of the Prairie State. John Brown, a perennial bankrupt and deadbeat, declared that God had spoken with him and that he had commanded him to kill all pro-slavery settlers in Kansas. Brown, his sons and followers massacred unarmed men who did not even own slaves with broad swords at Pottawatomie Creek. The madness in Kansas added to the stress of the year.

Nothing, however, makes a finer backdrop to the 1856 election than the proceedings on the floor of the United States Senate in May 1856. Senator Charles Sumner, a stuffy yet brilliant barrister from Massachusetts, delivered a blistering speech for two days called "The Crime against Kansas." This feat of excessive hyperbole skewered the South for the practice of slavery and Sumner attacked South Carolina Senator Andrew F. Butler of South Carolina most fiercely. Sumer declared that Butler was the "Don Quixote of Slavery" and mocked him as choosing, "a mistress to whom he has made his vows, and who, though ugly to others, is always lovely to him...the harlot Slavery!" This line gained applause from the abolitionist press but the anger of Congressman Preston Brooks, the nephew of Senator Butler. On May 22, 1856, Brooks appeared on the floor of the United States Senate with a cane in hand and a mission of blood in his mind. "Mr. Sumner I have read your speech twice over carefully!" Brooks boldly declared to a stunned Sumner, at work at his desk. "It is a libel to South Carolina and to Mr. Butler, who is a relative of mine..." As Sumner sighed and looked up in his haughty manner, Brooks beat the Massachusetts radical over his thickly maimed head with a stout gutta-percha cane. Blood blinded Sumner as he fell from his desk, pulling it from the bolts on the floor. "Don't kill him!" cried the elderly statesman from Kentucky John J. Crittenden. Brooks guffawed: "I did not intend to kill him but I did intend to whip him!" Two New York Congressmen entered the chamber and held back the angry South Carolinian. This caning stunned the nation. Southern fire-eaters cheered Brooks and sent him new canes to beat Sumner with. "Hit him again!" cried the Richmond Whig, whom also lauded the beating as "a good deed." Northern presses were frightened by the beating. While an investigation chided Brooks the congressman resigned his post only to be reelected to it by a landslide in the special election. Northern Congressmen began to arm themselves and one even challenged Brooks to a duel in Canada, where the anti-dueling laws of the U.S. would not affect them. Brooks turned down the duel as was mocked by Northern press:

The Election of 1856, Part II

Bleeding Sumner and Bleeding Kansas make a great background for a great election.

The second reason why this race is worth following is that it was the first election to feature a new party known as the Republican Party. On February 28, 1854, a number of anti-Kansas-Nebraska Act Democrats and Whigs met at a small school house in Ripon, Wisconsin, to recommend the formation of a new political party opposed to the expansion of slavery. This meeting led to a mass meeting on July 6, 1854, in Jackson, Michigan, where strange remnants of liberal Democrats, Conscience Whigs and Northern capitalists came together to form the Republican Party. A party dedicated to upward mobility, capitalism and free soil, the Republicans opposed expansion of slavery in the Western territories and wished to see it eradicated from the District of Colombia. This party is unique due to the fact that it was the first sectional party in U.S. history. The Republican animal was a Northern one. The South hated the party due to the fact that it was a real threat to their way of life. After all, upward mobility and anti-slavery sentiments were in no way a Southern tradition. By the fall of 1854 the Republicans were a power in the East and the Midwest. While some Whigs, such as Abraham Lincoln and the sons of Daniel Webster and Henry Clay, were slow to join the amalgamation, the Republicans were a force to be reckoned with.

The 1856 Republican Convention in Philadelphia was a mixed bag. It is exciting to read about the first presidential convention of one of America's major parties but the race for the nomination was no memorable contest. The front-runners for the nomination were famed "pathfinder" John C. Fremont, Supreme Court Associate Justice John McLean and Speaker of the House Nathaniel Banks. Fremont was a colorful candidate. Known as the "Wooly Horse" for his massive beard, Fremont was the husband of Jesse Benton Fremont, the belle of Washington society. When Fremont won the nomination of the first ballot as his fans cried, "Free men, free soil and Fremont!" Former Illinois Congressman Abraham Lincoln won a good deal of votes for the vice-presidential nomination but the nod went to New Jersey Senator William Dayton. The highly energetic Republican Platform did not pander to Southern views. It called for the abolition of slavery in D.C., the admission of Kansas as a free state, opposition to the annexation of Cuba, opposition to slavery in the territories and held up an economic system based on centralized banking, internal improvements, inflationary currency and a railway to the Pacific. The Republicans knew they would not win a single vote in the South and wrote a platform that assured it.

While the Republicans did not see a competitive convention the Democrats more than made up for the disappointment. The third reason why 1856 is a race for the ages is the Democratic imbroglio in Cincinnati. The Queen City hosted a battle royale between the three political giants of the Democratic Party of the 1850s. President Pierce and Senator Douglas, basking in the blood of Kansas-Nebraska, took on one another for the nomination. Both of these Democratic standard bearers had made themselves unelectable through the failed compromise of the Kansas-Nebraska Act. Douglas, who had introduced the bill in an attempt to make easy money from cheap land in Nebraska, hoped to lead his Young America movement into the White House while Pierce sought vindication for his presidency through re-nomination. Southern Democrats united around Pierce on the first fifteen ballots. Douglas lingered behind Pierce, but James Buchanan was the man to beat. Buchanan, a popular Pennsylvania Democrat, was not tainted by the Kansas-Nebraska troubles. A career politician, Buchanan had served as a congressman, U.S. Senator and Secretary of State under Polk. He had spent the last four years serving as the American Ambassador to the Court of St. James, thus he was an ocean away from the bleeding years of 1854-1856. Buchanan was also backed by Northern and Western Democrats. Pierce and Douglas combined their strength on the 16th ballot to try to stop Buchanan but the efforts of Handsome Frank and the Little Giant proved useless. Buchanan, who was not offensive to many people, won the nomination and, in order to appease Southern slave owners, Congressman John Cable Breckinridge of Kentucky was selected for vice-president. Breckinridge was only thirty-six years old and had not coveted the vice-presidential nod. In fact, he had been one of the convention's delegates and was pushing for the nomination of former Speaker of the House Linn Boyd for the veep nomination. The exciting convention concluded with a rather dull platform. The great irony was that while the convention had rejected Pierce the platform it adopted vindicated his policies. Pierce's Kansas-Nebraska Act popular sovereignty, low taxes and tariffs fiscal strategy and opposition to massive internal improvements projects were all approved of unanimously by the convention. Sitting in the White House Pierce and his good friend Nathaniel Hawthorne mocked the convention for "accepting the message but shooting the messenger."

A fourth flourish of the 1856 campaign is the wonderfully vindictive presence of the Know Nothings. A powerful society of Catholic hating and immigrant bating WASPS, the Know Nothings had taken control of the American Party and had coopted many former Whigs into their ranks. While the Know Nothings made much of their hatred of the pope and the Irish, the American Party leaders tried in vain to show that they were not the same as their shadowy benefactors. In 1854 and 1855 the American Party seemed to be the shining light of compromise in a nation destined for the bloody travail of civil war. The American Party found the support of steamboat magnates Cornelius "the Commodore" Vanderbilt and the enigmatic George Law. Law and Vanderbilt, rivals who used to race each other’s steamboats in the Narrows of New Jersey, were both potential presidential candidates in 1856. Vanderbilt backed the American Party as the only sane choice in a nation caught between extremes. The party had taken control of the governments in Maryland and Massachusetts and had managed to elect congressmen in states across the nation. It seemed to many voters that the American Party was the national party of compromise and constitutional theory. This was all a facade to a house divided falling.

When the convention opened in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, in February 1856 the American Party was divided into three parts, all hating each other and demanding control of the party. Anti-immigrant activists (the Know Nothings) demanded that the platform attack the pope and include a plank accusing Irish immigrants of being a part of a wide scheme to pollute the U.S.A. with willing agents of Rome. George Law, a serious businessman, shook his head at these conspiratorial comrades. He represented the business wing of the party whom were good Protestants but did not hate Catholics. The second part of the American Party was comprised of pro-Kansas-Nebraska Southerners. The third part was led by the American Party of Ohio. The Ohio branch of the party had passed an anti-Kansas-Nebraska Act platform plank at their 1855 convention. Many Northern American Party members walked lockstep with their leaders from Ohio. On the first day of the convention the battle of the platform was waged. Law prevented the Know Nothing conspirators from polluting the platform with their inane theory but he failed to stop them from forcing a twenty year residency requirement for U.S citizenship and a "Catholic Cap" on immigration into the platform. Law's failures were minimal when compared to the coup of the pro-Kansas delegates. The convention narrowly approved a plank approving of the Kansas-Nebraska Act. The convention went crazy and would prove to be a prequel to the 1860 Democratic Convention in Charleston. Delegates from Ohio, Pennsylvania, Illinois, Iowa, New England, and other northern states bolted when a resolution declaring that no candidate that was not in favor of prohibiting slavery north of the 36'30' parallel. These delegates would form their own party called the North American Party and nominate Speaker of the House Nathaniel Banks for president. Banks would decline the nomination and the anti-slavery American Party would back Fremont. The regular American Party nominated former President Millard Fillmore for president over George Law and, to appeal to Democrats, paired him with newspaper editor and presidential in-law Andrew Jackson Donnellson.

The Election of 1856, Part III

The American Party would add much flavor to the soup of 1856. An election like 1856 had not been seen since the log cabin, hard cider campaign of 1840. The ballyhoo and hubbub makes for a great general election campaign to match the incredible pre-election build-up. The Democrats and Republicans squared off for the first time in a battle for the nation's very soul. Democrats had the upper hand in many ways. Buchanan was a well-known and respected politician. Fremont, the Republican leader, was not trusted by very many. Fremont was court martialed during the Mexican War, only to be saved from dishonorable discharge by his father-in-law Senator Thomas Hart Benton. Fremont was also a notorious land speculator who had made dishonest money in the California land boom of 1850s while serving as one of the Golden State's first U.S. Senators. Fremont's trouble was not that he was unknown, it as that he was well known for the wrong things. In St. Louis, Missouri, former U.S Army Major and broke firewood peddler Ulysses S. Grant would cast his first vote of his life for James Buchanan. His reason: "I knew Fremont."

The Democratic mud fest make the election of 1856 a great deal of fun. Calling their opponents "Black Republicans" Democratic politicians scared the dickens out of Wall Street by screaming, as Governor Wise of Virginia declared: "If Fremont is elected there will be revolution!" The issue of secession was one of the major points of the campaign. While Republicans desperately tried to convince the South that they had no interest in their slaves the Democrats made hay of the fact that the party did not support the expansion of the curious institution. Businessmen in New York and Boston, needing cheap southern cotton for textile production and a harmonious nation for Wall Street stability, decided to "take the Buck by the horns" and filled Democratic coffers with thousands of dollars. Secession would destroy the U.S. economy and business was not going to be party to that folly.  New York Herald editor and Fremont supporter Horace Greeley, who had agreed to serve as treasurer for the campaign, said flatly, "We Fremonters of [New York City] have not one dollar where Fillmoreans and Buchaneers each have ten!"

While the Democrats bathed in money the Republicans made do with old fashioned grassroots activism. In New York, Michigan, Pennsylvania and Illinois the Republican organized Rocky Mountain Clubs, Wide Awake Clubs, Freed Clubs and (in Fremont's California) Bear Clubs. These groups paraded through city streets with songs mocking the South for being backwards and feudal in nature. The Young Americans of Douglas jumped to Fremont and declared that Buchanan and Fillmore were "old fogies" opposed to American expansion and exceptionalism. In Clermont, Ohio, a young boy decided to make some money from the election and make some hay from the famous Republican Wide Awake marches. The wide awakes were young men whom would march through the streets of cities after dark with bright torches and signs decorated with a big wide eye. They wanted to show the nation that the Republicans were awake to the threat of slavery and the great aptitude for the United States. A boy in Clermont was selling puppies as some Republican Wide Awakers marched by. One Republican saw the pups and asked the boy, "Are these Fremont pups?" The boy said they were and the man happily bought two of them. The next morning the Republican marcher overheard the boy doing business with a prominent local Democrat. "My lad," the Democrat asked, "are these Buchanan pups?" "They're Buchanan pups sir," he boy replied. Angered the Republican confronted the boy. "See here, you young rascal!" the Republican intoned, "didn't you tell me last night that these pups were Fremont pups?" "Y-E-S sir," the little boy replied with a smirk, "but those pups were sleeping. It was night and their eyes were closed." Pointing to the blinking puppies the boy quipped: "These are Buchanan pups. Their eyes are open."
Puppies would not prove to be the greatest threat to Fremont. The Know Nothings, angered by their losses at the convention, dedicated themselves to stopping the election of Fremont. The best lie of the election was started in October 1856 by a Know Nothing newspaper in Baltimore. The paper declared that Fremont was a secret Catholic. According to the article Fremont had told a professor at West Point that he was a Romanist, he worshipped at a Catholic Cathedral in Washington, D.C., he had been married by a Catholic priest and he refused to say the Episcopal prayers of the Episcopalian prayer book. Fremont, to his credit admitted that some of the accusations were true. Fremont had been married by a Catholic priest but it was not through a Catholic marriage ceremony. Fremont and Jesse Benton had fallen in love but her powerful father did not want her to marry the army officer. The two ran away and married quickly before the father could ever now. The person who married them was a man of the collar, a Catholic priest. Fremont told his friends he was an Episcopalian but he did not deny th charges. He had two reasons for this, one political and the other profound. First, Fremont knew that the accusations of Catholicism could HELP him in New York and New Jersey, where many Irish Catholics lived. Second, Fremont did not see a point in attacking Catholics. He brought up the point that religious tests were not allowed under the Constitution and that Catholics had as much right to the presidency as any protestant. Thus he did very little to counter the scandal. In the end this hurt his candidacy because he did not gain very many Irish Catholic votes but he did lose the support of Whigs-turned-Know Nothings. This loss of Northern Whigs undid Republican hopes in Pennsylvania, Illinois, Indiana and New Jersey.

The final outcome of the 1856 election is as satisfying as the campaign itself. The sectional Republican Party won eleven Northern states, including the key states of Ohio and New York. Buchanan-backed by big money-won the race, but it was far closer than anyone expected. The results from Maine in October 1856 had scared the Democrats. The Republicans won big in the traditionally Democratic state. The influential Massachusetts Whig Rufus Choate, who had spoken for Buchanan in Maine, angrily declared that Maine was foolish for voting for a sectional party based on "glittering generalities." Poet and essayist Ralph Waldo Emerson, a good Republican, shot back at Choate: "Glittering generalities? Glittering ubiquities rather!" All the American Party and Democratic fear over Maine proved to be much ado about nothing. Buchanan won with 45% of the popular vote and 174 electoral votes. He had won states in the North, South and West. The Republicans were the party that had only won the in North. Fillmore won only the Know-Nothing controlled state of Maryland but the 25% of the popular vote he won showed that former Whigs were still a sizable minority. They would return in 1860 with John Bell, the Tennessee statesman, as their nominee and great white hope.

Though Democrats won a sizable victory it cannot be understated how exciting it is to see a party not yet three years old come in second in a national contest. The power of the Republican Party in 1856 is akin to the electricity of the 1912 Bull Moose campaign. Both parties were powered by grand ideas, puritanical principles and a lightning rod of a presidential candidate. The Republicans even cheered the loss as a "victorious defeat." Poet John Greenleaf Whittier penned a poem:


The 1856 election is a wonderful race for the White House. The three candidates battled it out with a nation on fire as the backdrop. Any fan of antebellum American politics must hold this race up as the marquee election of the age. All the classic Jacksonian issues were present along with immigration- an issue of the future- and slavery, the issue that would tear the nation asunder. 1856 is an election which the muses of history wrote well.

Please continue this!

I can probably do some work over Christmas Break. I have recently become chair of my department at the school I teach at. That-added to the fact that I write IEPs, do Medicaid billing work and also have to teach six classes-has eaten up so much of my time. I'll try to get another update up.

Finally caught up.


More please! :)