Rooney's Presidential Election Rankings

[Rooney]

Election of 1916, continued

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:

You are working---Not fighting
Alice and Happy---Not cannon Fodder
Wilson and Peace with Honor

Or

Hughes and Roosevelt and War
Roosevelt says we should hang our heads in shame because we are not at war with Germany on Behalf of Belgium…Hughes says He and Roosevelt are in Complete Accord

………………………………………………………………………..

The Lesson is Plain:
If You Want WAR, Vote for HUGHES
If You Want Peace with Honor
VOTE FOR WILSON!

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.                             

[Illuminati Blood Drinker]

You should write a book, dude.

[Hamster]

You should write a book, dude.

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

[Rooney]

#28: The Election of 1924

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.

[Rooney]

The Election of 1924, continued

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.                                       

[Rooney]

The Election of 1924, continued

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.    

[Rooney]

#27: The Election of 1952

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.”

[Rooney]

The Election of 1952, Part II

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.      

[Rooney]

The Election of 1952, Part III

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:

Reuben, Reuben I’ve been thinking
‘Bout the general and his mob
If you’re voting for the general
You really are electing Bob
Let’s vote for Adlai and John!

[/i]
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.”   

[Southern Senator North Carolina Yankee]

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.

[Mister Mets]

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

[Rooney]

# 26: The Election of 1844

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.

[Rooney]

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:

He wires in and wires out
And leaves the people still in doubt.
Whether the snake that made the track
Was going out or coming back!

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.

[Rooney]

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.        

[SPC]

Are you going to continue this?

[Rooney]

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!

[Rooney]

#25: The Election of 1940

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.”    

[Rooney]

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.

[Rooney]

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.   

[Rooney]

#24: The Election of 1796

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.”

[Rooney]

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.      

[Rooney]

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.      

[FEMA Camp Administrator]

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.

[Rooney]

#23: The Election of 1856

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:

To Canada Brooks was asked to go,
To waste a pound of powder or so,
But he quickly answered, NO, No, No.
For I'm afraid, afraid, afraid,
Billy Brooks's afraid

[Rooney]

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.