A Short History of Presidential Election Crises. Alan Hirsch

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      Against that backdrop, Democrats sought to win their first presidential election in forty years, while the Republicans aimed to extend their four consecutive terms in the White House. (There were four Whig Party presidents during the 1840s and ’50s.) The fight for the nomination of both parties was wide open. Unlike the three previous cycles, in which Republicans more or less anointed the incumbent presidents, Lincoln and Grant, they had no prohibitive favorite (given Grant’s intent to step down after two terms, following the precedent established by George Washington and adhered to by every president since). The Democrats, too, lacked a clear front-runner.

      The Republican field included three prominent U.S. senators: Maine’s James Blaine, New York’s Roscoe Conkling, and Indiana’s Oliver Morton. Morton, who as governor of Indiana during the Civil War had supplied the Union far more troops than requested, suffered a stroke in 1865 that left him permanently disabled but did not diminish his lust for the presidency. Blaine and Conkling, who sowed the seeds of their candidacies for years, were such bitter enemies that Conkling, asked whether he could imagine supporting Blaine, replied, “I don’t engage in criminal practice.”⁵⁶ Another Republican candidate, Grant’s secretary of the treasury Benjamin Bristow, was a hero of the liberal wing of the party who advocated less aggressive policies toward the South.

      Blaine, who had been Speaker of the House for six years before his recent selection to the Senate, was widely perceived as the front-runner. At the opposite end of the spectrum was dark horse Rutherford B. Hayes. A successful criminal defense attorney (with a degree from Harvard Law School) who had represented a number of escaped slaves and a Union general badly wounded in battle, Hayes was elected to Congress in 1864 and re-elected in 1866, but resigned shortly thereafter to seek the governorship of Ohio. He was elected to that position in 1868, and served two terms before retiring in 1872. However, three years later the Republicans drafted him to run again for governor. No sooner was Hayes again elected to that position than his name began to be bandied about as a long-shot presidential candidate.

      In the run-up to the Republican Convention in June in Cincinnati, all of the candidates craved the endorsement of President Grant, and courted him assiduously. The other major activity in the spring of 1876 was the holding of state conventions to select delegates committed to one of the candidates. However, many states opted to eschew the declared candidates and instead support a “favorite son” (their own governor or some other local politician) in order to maintain their flexibility and leverage at the national convention.

      Blaine might have been a more commanding favorite if he hadn’t been dogged by charges of corruption, especially the claim that shortly after he was elected to Congress in 1863, he received a $64,000 bribe from Union Pacific Railroad. It wasn’t until 1880, when Blaine again sought his party’s nomination, that Democrats trotted out their famous rallying cry: “James, James, James G. Blaine, the continental liar from the state of Maine.” But questions about Blaine’s probity surfaced throughout the run-up to the 1876 Republican Convention in Cincinnati. A lengthy congressional investigation into his alleged misdeeds was ongoing when, on June 11, while walking to church on a hot day, Blaine collapsed and fell to the ground unconscious. The New York Sun, a Democratic-run newspaper, ran an article titled “Blaine Feigns a Faint.”⁵⁷ That others shared skepticism about Blaine’s alleged faint indicates the widespread doubts about his character, not to mention the fact that “fake news” long preceded the forty-fifth presidency.

      The fainting incident was a double-edged sword for Blaine: It postponed the congressional investigation into his affairs, but it concerned delegates to the Republican Convention, who were already assembling in Cincinnati. (Blaine recovered just before the convention convened.) Even so, he entered the convention sufficiently confident to send out feelers to Hayes about the latter’s interest in the vice presidency. Hayes nixed the idea, writing a friend that “I have the greatest aversion to being a candidate on the ticket with a man whose record as an upright public man is to be in question.”⁵⁸

      The convention opened on June 14, with a few days devoted to speeches, back-room meetings and maneuvering, and debate over the party platform. The latter served as a reminder that, over a decade after Lee surrendered at Appomattox, the Civil War had not really ended. The Republican platform that emerged in Cincinnati called for “permanent pacification of the Southern section of the Union” and accused the Democratic Party of “being the same in character and spirit as when it sympathized with treason.”

      The nominating process commenced on Friday, June 16. As was typical in the pre-modern era, the outcome was unknowable because no delegates were bound by primaries (there were none) or anything else. Blaine, still the perceived front-runner, faced an anybody-but-Blaine coalition that could thwart him if it coalesced around any of the other six names placed in nomination.

      On the first ballot, Blaine received the most votes, 285, but still ninety-four short of the 379 needed for the nomination. Morton was a distant second with 124, Bristow third with 113, followed by Conkling’s ninety-nine. Rutherford B. Hayes received only sixty-one votes, just seventeen from outside his home state of Ohio, making him closer to a favorite son than a serious contender. The clerk immediately called for a second ballot, but the results hardly changed—Blaine gained eleven votes, no one else more than five. Two more ballots barely moved the needle. Before the fifth ballot, the leader of the Michigan delegation, who opposed Blaine, pushed his delegation to vote Hayes as a compromise choice, and other states followed suit. Hayes gained thirty-six votes on the fifth ballot, while Blaine lost six. But the movement was not linear. On the sixth ballot, all of North Carolina’s eleven delegates who had switched from Blaine to Hayes now switched back to Blaine. Overall, Blaine gained twenty-two votes, reaching 308, whereas Hayes, despite the North Carolina defection, picked up nine more.

      It had become a two-man race between the favorite and the dark horse, the former with the most passionate support and opposition alike and the latter exciting little passion in either direction. Finally, on the seventh ballot, Hayes received 384 votes, five more than needed for the nomination, and Blaine 351. The Republican nomination for president belonged to Governor Rutherford B. Hayes.

      The process reflected, first and foremost, dislike of Blaine and the need to find someone. The great nineteenth-century historian Henry Adams offered this contemporary assessment of Hayes: He was “a third rate nonentity whose only recommendation is that he is obnoxious to no one.”⁵⁹ In those days, the convention, not the presidential nominee, selected his running mate. The delegates opted for an inoffensive and obscure New York congressman, William Wheeler, primarily because he was popular among his colleagues and offered geographical balance to the ticket. (When Hayes heard, he wrote to his wife Lucy: “I am ashamed to say: Who is Wheeler?”)⁶⁰ Blaine, for his part, took the defeat well, graciously congratulating Hayes and pledging his full support in the general election.

      Hayes’s opponent in that race, Samuel Tilden, secured the Democratic nomination with far less intra-party division and drama, and figured to pose a real threat to Hayes in the general election. The Democrats had suffered terrible defeats during and in the aftermath of the Civil War, but a Wall Street panic in 1873 leveled the political playing field. In 1874, a so-called “Tidal Wave” gave Democrats a majority in the House and, it was believed, a realistic shot at the White House.

      Tilden, like Hayes a successful lawyer (with an undergraduate degree from Yale and law degree from NYU), was an aloof figure who made his name as the prosecutor who broke up the notorious Tweed Ring that dominated New York City politics for a decade. He rode a wave of positive publicity to election as a state assemblyman, where he was ahead of his time as a machine politician, gathering an extraordinary amount of information about citizens’ voting records and distributing targeted campaign literature accordingly. Tilden was elected governor of New York in 1874, defeating the popular incumbent, John Dix, during the Democratic Tidal Wave. He used his platform as governor of the nation’s most populous state to criticize alleged corruption in the Grant administration, СКАЧАТЬ