LITMIR.BIZ

      Introduction

      The process of election affords a moral certainty, that the office of President will never fall to the lot of any man who is not in an eminent degree endowed with the requisite qualifications. Talents for low intrigue, and the little arts of popularity, may alone suffice to elevate a man to the first honors in a single State; but it will require other talents, and a different kind of merit, to establish him in the esteem and confidence of the whole Union.

      —Alexander Hamilton, Federalist No. 68, 1788

      The newspapers were merciless. One candidate for president was a “libertine” with a “lust for power.” He and his followers were “discontented hotheads” who had “long endeavored to destroy the Federal Constitution.” If he was elected, warned one political adversary, “murder, robbery, rape, adultery and incest will all be openly taught and practiced, the air will be rent with the cries of distress, the soil will be soaked with blood.”¹ Similarly sharp language zinged back toward his opponent, the embattled incumbent. The sitting president was a man of “limited talents” who was not a defender of democracy, but the head of a “monarchic, aristocratic, tory faction” that only cared about the rich and powerful elite.²

      As the election got tighter, the allegations became more personal. Drawing-room whispers about the challenger’s affairs with his female slaves became printed denunciations of his “Congo Harem.” His earlier expressions of religious tolerance stoked allegations that he was a “howling atheist” who would confiscate the Bibles of God-fearing people. Perhaps the lowest blows of the campaign fell on the incumbent, whom one scribe accused of having a “hideous hermaphroditical character, which has neither the force and firmness of a man, nor the gentleness and sensibility of a woman.”³

      Although modern conventional wisdom has it that American presidential elections are nastier and more polarizing than ever, few recent elections can compare with the down-and-dirty partisan warfare on display in the election of 1800. The targets of all this mudslinging: Federalist president John Adams and his Democratic-Republican challenger Thomas Jefferson, two now-beloved architects of the American Revolution.

      Once great friends, the men had become bitter political enemies with profoundly different views about how the young nation might reach its destiny. On the one hand, Adams and his Federalist allies believed that the future of the young nation was in its cities and in commerce, and it needed a strong central government to do things like acquire new territories and regulate foreign trade. On the other, Jefferson and the Democratic-Republicans believed that the heart and soul of the United States was in the agricultural countryside, and that all should be done to protect the independent interests of the yeoman farmer. Geography divided them as well. The Federalists had strongholds in the towns and cities of the North; the Democratic-Republicans drew support from the slave-owning South and the hardscrabble Western frontier.

      The stakes in 1800 seemed extraordinarily high. In the first years of the new republic, the two-party system as we know it today did not exist, and there was a reason for that absence. Many of the Founding Fathers believed partisan elections did more harm than good. “The common and continual mischiefs of the spirit of party,” George Washington had remarked as he left office in 1796, “are sufficient to make it the interest and duty of a wise people to discourage and restrain it.”⁴ The election of 1800 was only the nation’s second partisan election, and the first that resulted in a turnover of the presidency from one party to another. The toxic campaigning and divided polity resulted in a deadlocked election that had to be decided by the House of Representatives barely two weeks before Inauguration Day. Jefferson won, and called his victory over the incumbent “the Revolution of 1800.”⁵ While subsequent observers have argued over the degree to which the moment truly was a “revolution,” the election precipitated the passage of the 12th Amendment to the Constitution, which took the responsibility of breaking a deadlock away from the politics of the House and established a separate, ostensibly nonpartisan Electoral College.

      In the two centuries since, many presidential election contests have provided ample evidence that partisan politicking can bring out the worst in human nature. Personal attacks, apocalyptic pronouncements, and intricate political machinations have been hallmarks of nearly every competitive presidential race. The growth of modern media has further amplified the less appealing qualities of the American electoral process. By the time it was completed, the 2012 presidential contest between Barack Obama and Mitt Romney had lasted more than two years, involved campaign expenditures of close to $2 billion, unleashed thousands of television hours of vitriolic campaign advertising and political punditry, and lit up the Internet with heated commentary and name-calling.

      Yet the Obama-Romney race also demonstrated that—just as in 1800—the American democratic system could withstand the blows of partisan warfare. In referring to the election that made him president as “the revolution of 1800,” Jefferson believed that the basic freedoms for which the American Revolution had been fought were imperiled by the rise of the Federalist Party and its leaders like Adams and Alexander Hamilton, who had advocated for a stronger central government, trading relationships with Great Britain, and more limited democracy. Jefferson saw his election as bringing about a restoration of the founding principles of limited government and individual liberties. Power moved from one party to another without a drop of blood being shed. It was, in his mind, the true culmination of the revolution of 1776.

      Historians have since argued over the degree to which 1800 was as significant a turning point as Jefferson liked to portray it, and debates continue to rage over whether his small-government vision was, in fact, truly the Founders’ intent. What is indisputable, however, is that a fiercely contested election did not shatter the fragile new republic, as some observers worried. Candidates fought, political operatives schemed, but the system survived and thrived.⁶

      More than that, elections from the age of George Washington to the age of Barack Obama have showed the power of presidential contests to provoke and inspire mass engagement of ordinary citizens in the political system. Elections are expressions of national identity, and mirrors of individual desires and priorities. No matter how frustrated or disinterested voters might be about politics and government, every four years the attention of the nation—and the world—focuses on the candidates, the contest, and the issues. As elections have become tighter, and the money spent on them greater, attention and enthusiasm about them has increased rather than decreased. George Washington may not have approved, but the partisan election process has been a way for a messy, jumbled, raucous nation to come together as a slightly-more-perfect union. As they cast their ballots, ordinary people make history.

      This book looks back at four presidential races of the past hundred years to show how this history was made. It begins with the rowdy four-way contest in 1912 between Teddy Roosevelt, William Howard Taft, Eugene Debs, and Woodrow Wilson that resulted in Wilson’s victory. It continues with Franklin Roosevelt’s New Deal campaign and his win over Herbert Hoover in 1932. The third case profiles the eventful and tragic campaign of 1968 and the election of Richard Nixon, and the final story follows the three-way race that led to Bill Clinton’s victory in 1992.

      Why these four elections? Why not 1948, when Harry S Truman beat Thomas Dewey in perhaps the greatest election upset in American history? Or 1980, when Ronald Reagan’s election ushered in a new age of conservative resurgence? Part of the reason is personal: having worked on the 1992 Clinton campaign, I could bring an eyewitness perspective to an election, and an era, that historians are now beginning to explore. Yet there are larger reasons as well. I wanted to use elections as a way to explore bigger changes in American society, from industrialization and urbanization, to the crisis of the Great Depression and response of the New Deal, to the rise of the Sunbelt and the advent of the high-tech economy. These four elections thus help tell us about more than who got elected and why; they illuminate the trajectory

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