US election

The good old days

Nicholas von Hoffman

Once upon a time in the United States, the autumn of a presidential election Year was undisturbed. George Washington never made a campaign speech, never, in search of a vote, kissed a baby or an old ladY. In the early years of the Republic, the etiquette surrounding the office of presi- dent was drawn from the British throne. Since the King did not go off on the stump, a man seeking to become the American republican monarch ought to hold himself on the same high ground. It was a good idea which saved a lot of wear and tear on the ears of the citizenry. President Martin Van Buren nibbled at the edges of the no-campaigning custom by "ting a few letters on his own behalf. He gclt into trouble for it. 'The pressure of circumstances must be severe,' the chief 111, agistrate was rebuked by the National intelligencer, 'when a gentleman of tact !lid prudence is driven to the expedient of `tescending from the presidential chair into toe political arena to fight in the ranks.' The evil hour came in the morning of 6 'Lune 1840 on the steps of the National tel in Columbus, Ohio, when General William Henry Harrison became the first Presidential candidate to make a campaign speech on his own behalf. Henceforth, °Mee-seekers would traverse the land by stage coach, steamboat, railroad train, automobile and jet `bloviating' to the masses, to use Warren Gamaliel Harding's ‘vord for blowing breath into the faces of tlte unwashed. The Niles Register greeted Harrison's meParture from tradition with a headline of approval: 'Broke Loose At Last', but the Cleveland Advertiser was less enthusiastic: 'When was there ever before such a specta- cle as a candidate for the Presidency traversing the country, advocating his own claims for that high and responsible sta- ti°n? . . . Never.' The more you talk, less you should say,' Wrote Philadelphia banker Nicholas Biddle !.0 one of Harrison's managers, 'Let him [Harrison] say not one single word about

his principles, or his creed —let him say nothing — promise nothing. Let no com- mittee, no convention, no town meeting ever extract from him a single word, about what he thinks now, or what he will do hereafter. Let the use of pen and ink be wholly forbidden as if he were a mad poet in Bedlam.'

Wendell Willkie, the 1940 Republican candidate, did himself in by not heeding Biddle. He got off the mark early in his Willkie Special campaign train, which was to chug through thousands of miles and long weeks of ill-considered, vehement speechifying. Spurning voice lessons, the candidate, who had not run for office before, insisted that only sissies used loud- speakers. After two days, he was croaking like a wounded thing, and a doctor was summoned who told his patient to 'lean back and open your mouth'. 'Go to hell,' replied the anointed one, 'and take your tools with you,' to which the MD replied, 'Personally, I don't give a damn, but that throat of yours right now is the only way some twenty million Americans can ex- press themselves. Lean back.'

The man to whom we owe the tortured modern non-stop presidential campaign was one of the smartest politicians to practise his craft in America, James Gilles- pie Blaine. His arduous 1884 vote-seeking trek was the first extended railroad train campaign and, as it came to an end, an enervated and depleted Blaine allowed himself to be talked into attending a meeting where a cretinous Protestant clergyman denominated the Democrats as the party of 'rum, Romanism and rebel- lion'. If he had been awake, he would have instantly caught the minister's words and repudiated them. As it turned out, it was a wire service reporter who heard them, and Blaine, with less than a week before election day in front of him, couldn't undo the damage in time.

The champion presidential campaigner, the uncontested winner for endurance, persistence and volume was Nebraska's boy orator from the River Platte, William Jennings Bryan, the messianic, thrice defe- ated Democratic nominee about whom the Massachusetts brahmin, Senator Henry Cabot Lodge, remarked that 'the Platte is a stream 1,250 miles long, with an average depth of six inches and a wide mouth.' By the time the 1908 campaign ended, the candidate had travelled over 18,000 miles making as many as 80 speeches a day. And unlike Wendell Willkie, Bryan, who spoke without a microphone to crowds as large as 50,000, did not get hoarse.

The antithesis of the modern candidate with his pollsters, his policy-paper people and his media buyers, Bryan had no staff, no advance men, no money. He just went down to the railroad depot, looked at the train schedules and bought himself a ticket. He solved the laundry problem by taking off his clothes between stops, and he took care of personal hygiene by washing his teetotal self down with gin, so that occa- sionally this God-fearing Presbyterian populist appeared 'smelling like a wrecked distillery'.

Nonetheless Bryan's biographer tells us that 'farm men and women travelled as much as a hundred miles by foot, horse- back or carriages, sometimes waiting for hours huddled in blankets, sodden with rain or blowing in the cold winds of night in order to hear him and try to shake his hand or touch the hem of his coat. Babies by the hundred were named William or Jennings.

In rural areas, Bryan's reception was often coloured by a holiday mood, pageantry, and democratic simplicity. He would be met by wagonloads of maidens dressed in white, or 16 girls in white riding horses and a young man dressed in gold on a yellow horse.'

Bryan's opposite number in 1896, Wil- liam McKinley, chose not to compete with the stump speaker of the age. He would not move off his front porch in Canton, Ohio, even when Mark Hanna, his worried campaign manager, told him, 'Things are going against us, William. You've got to stump or we'll be defeated.' But William would have none of it, replying 'I will not try to compete with Bryan. I am going to stay here and do what campaigning there is to be done. If I took a whole train, Bryan woud take a sleeper. If I took a sleeper, Bryan would take a chair car. If I took a chair car, he would ride a freight train. I can't outdo him, and I am not going to try.'

So McKinley sat on his duff as did Warren Harding in 1920. Legend has it that Boise Penrose, the Republican boss of Pennsylvania, was reponsible for keeping Harding on his front porch. 'Keep Warren at home,' the old boy is supposed to have said, no doubt rolling a well chomped cigar from one side of his mouth to the other.

'Don't let him make any speeches. If he goes on tour, somebody's sure to ask him questions and Warren's just the sort of damn fool that'll try and answer 'em.'

The other famous front-porch campaign was waged by Abraham Lincoln in 1860.

Lincoln stayed in Springfield receiving delegations and saying little. Missouri's Senator Carl Schurz left us this sketch of what that most agonising of all our pres- idential campaign summers was like:

The inevitable brass band took position in front of the house and struck up a lively tune, admonishing us that the time for the business of the day had arrived. 'I will go to the meeting with you', said Mr Lincoln, 'and hear what you have to say.' The day was blazing hot. . . When he presented himself for the march to the Capitol ground, I observed that he had divested himself of his waistcoat and put on, as his sole garment, a linen duster, the back of which had been marked by repeated perspirations and looked somewhat like a rough map of the two hemispheres. On his head, he wore a well-battered stovepipe hat which evidently

had seen several years of hard service. In this attire he marched with me behind the brass

band, the local campaign committee and the Wide-awakes. . . When I had finished [speaking], a few voices called upon Mr Lincoln for a speech but he simply shook his head, and the crowd instantly respected the proprieties of the situation, some even shout- ing: `no, no. .' at which he gratefully signi- fied his assent.

The Wide-awakes were a campaign mar- ching society with local branches wherever the new Republican Party was strong. Its members nightly tramped through city and town wearing hats on which were pinned lanterns. As a campaign manifestation, the Wide-awakes were typical of the epoch. From the Jackson campaign of 1832 to the 1896 struggle, presidential campaigns caught up and involved hundreds of thousands of people. Nineteenth-century Americans would not recognise modern campaigning, which has turned politics into a speectator sport.

A hundred years ago when Americans were not bathed and swaddled in around- the-clock sports, music, movies and TV, politics, like revivalist religion, was a ma- jor entertainment in the lives of the iso- lated, hard-working half of the population. The campaigns were even longer than they are now, allowing people the time to stage the mass political carnivals which characte- rised elections in the last century, such as the Jacksonian Democrats' hickory poles', around which to rally and picnic. By 1840, the Whigs were having log-cabin raisings' for Harrison. People loved it. Whenever a cabin was put up there would be a parade, a communal feast with aspects of a mediaeval fair and, in 1840 at least, a lot of drinking. At one blowout in Wheeling, Virginia, that year the assembled company ate up 360 hams, 26 sheep, 20 calves, 1,500 pounds of beef, 8,000 pounds of bread, 1,000 pounds of cheese and 4,500 pies.

The Harrison campaign marked the be- ginning of the large-scale manufacture of campaign souvenirs and the distribution of miniature log cabin whiskey bottles to the travellers and boatmen on the Eire Canal. The most famous of these doubtless popu- lar products was manufactured by the E. C. Booz Distillery of Philadelphia, and that is how that word got into the Amer- ican version of the English language.

Then as now, campaigns had their sex

• scandals. Governor Cleveland's bastard child was an issue in the 1884 campaign,

but, years later, Wendell Willkie's mistress was not. The press did not write about Iota Van Doren, perhaps because she was one of their own, being the literary editor of

the New York Herald Tribune. Nonethe- less, the already married Willkie made it

hard on the reporters. He held a press

conference in his mistress's apartment ex- plaining that 'everybody knows about us —

all the newspapermen in New York. If somebody should come along to threaten or embarrass me about Irita, I would say, `Go right ahead.' The Democrats got hold of their love letters, which the cads called the Dolly Letters', and they were holding them In reserve in case the Republicans released another set of embarrassing letters, which

they had filched, between Roosevelt's ato- ning mate, Henry Wallace, and a White Russian spiritualist who seems to have been regarded as a kind of émigré Ras" putin. FDR had worked out a way, if need be, to get his retaliatory poison into general circulation. 'We can't have any of out principal speakers refer to it,' he mused, 'but the people down the line can get it out-

I mean the Congress speakers, and state speakers, and so forth. They can use the raw material. Now, now, if they want t° play dirty politics in the end, we've got out own people. Now you'd be amazed at how this story about the gal is spreading around the country.'

Dirty tricks, as opposed to raw dishones- ty, appear to have changed the outcome 0f only one election. In 1888, Grover Cleve-

land got more popular votes than his Republican opponent but was beaten In the electoral college, because he lost the Irish vote and therefore could not carry New York State. At the time, England was regarded as the centre of a world-wide free

trade conspiracy to pauperise the Amer- ican working man and destroy the Republr

can Party, which was founded on a rel1" gious belief in protective tariffs. So Presi- dent Cleveland, who had negotiated a

fishing treaty with the British, was alreaciY, suspected of being a closet Britophile. All that was needed was one more push.

That was provided by Mr George Osgoodby, an American born of English parents. Writing under the name of

Charles F. Murchison, he sent a letter to the British Ambassador to the Unite.

States asking who he should vote for. This dolt, one Sir Lionel Sackville-West, who had already offended Calvinist America. taking up residence here with his Spanis.b

mistress and their three illegitimate eh!'" dren, wrote back that Her Majesty's In; interests would best be served by Cleveland s

getting a second term. The Los Angeles Times printed the letter and, though Cleveland declared Sackville-West persona non grata and kicked him out, New York was lost. Would that something half so livelY would happen this year.