Then we have this recent study, from Open Left, depicting how white men (the only ones eligible to vote in 1860) voted in 2008:

Now, obviously it would be very easy to overdraw an analysis from these two maps.  And indeed, I think Open Left is a bit too Whiggish (despite trying not to be Whiggish) about the links between the expansion of voting rights and the election of Progressive presidential candidates–after all, the expanded electorate has certainly elected its share of conservative Presidents.

But it’s still pretty interesting.

What the 2008 Electoral College map shows more than ever is that the Republicans now find themselves with the coalition the Democrats had at the beginning of one of their least competitive periods a century or more ago. That would be the William Jennings Bryan coalition of the Solid South plus the Plains and mining West, the Great Commoner’s ticket to presidential election losses in 1896, 1900, and 1908. While Bryan was far more intelligent and humane than either John McCain or Sarah Palin, he appealed heavily to rural Protestant self-righteousness, building on the remains of the Populist Party, and lost crucial northeastern working-class Catholic votes that the Democrats have always needed to win national elections.  Twisting the Populist platform of economic reform into the nostrum of “Free Silver,” with an assist from western mining interests, the Bryan Democrats were defeated in 1896 by William McKinley and his “Full Dinner Pail” of typical Federalist/Whig/GOP trickle-down economics, which seemed the safe and rational alternative when contrasted with Bryan’s emotionalism.

Far from learning from their mistake, the Bryan Democrats nominated their favorite two more times and saw him beaten even more badly each outing. In his later years, Bryan made his alliance with evangelical Protestantism (and status as a political ancestor of modern Christian conservatism) even clearer by stumping against evolution and taking the anti-monkey (I mean, anti-evolution) side in the Scopes “Monkey” Trial.  Coming from Nebraska, Bryan also forged the political and cultural connection between the Plains states and the South that disappeared for a time at mid-century but reemerged with a vengeance in the the GOP culture wars that have raged ever since the Clinton sex scandals.

Let’s go to the maps. From Dave Leip’s Atlas of U.S. Presidential Elections, here’s the election of 1896 (note the historically correct use of red for the Democrats and blue for the GOP):

Now 2008:

The South’s larger, migration-fueled population in recent times made the Bryan coalition a bit more winnable for the modern GOP than it was for the Bryan Democrats. That is, until one consequence of northern migration below the Mason-Dixon inevitably made itself felt: as educated Northeasterners moved further south down I-95 into northern Virginia and then fanned out into the burgeoning cities of central North Carolina, they brought some of their more tolerant attitudes and modernity-friendly politics with them. This effect is certain to spread in the future. The solid South will go back to its loser status and stay there for awhile as key parts of it become more diverse and break away, and the rest gets more and more offensive to everyone else.

After the jump, a salute to the sort of “culture and heritage” that today’s GOP increasingly follows in the footsteps of:

That’s what I plan be subjecting my “Age of Jefferson” class to in the morning, as a way of explaining the “celebratory politics” of the Early Republic and also keeping my Election Day emotions in check a little better than speaking too much will.  From the 1790s on, highly detailed political songs were a popular and important part of most campaigns and movements. They were published in newspapers and on their own, to be read for amusement and actually sung at banquets, meetings, parades, and taverns. The lyrics were usually written for a particular occasion, but most of the tunes were standards like “God Save the King,” “Yankee Doodle,” or that British drinking song they play at the start of baseball games. Less often but increasingly, original melodies were created and the songs published as sheet music. Paul Erickson at AAS passed on a link to a Library of Congress online collection of campaign sheet music that mostly comes from the middle and later 19th-century when the major parties were in the habit of commissioning official campaign songs. In the earlier Federalist/Democratic-Republican era, where most of my research interests reside, political songs were a considerably more local, informal, and quirky affair. As one example, here (at right) is a song from 1797 New Jersey that is an earlier example of the Republican complaints about female Federalist voting that Rosie Zagarri’s recent book and “Lost Atlantis” post described. There are many, many more political songs where that comes from, and perhaps I will throw a few more of them up here on the blog from time to time.

Interestingly, music has not been a big part of this election cycle, has it? There has been nothing like the outpouring of politically charged pop music that occurred in 2004, in the heydey of MoveOn. Remember The Future Soundtrack for America or the Eminem Internet video “Mosh” ? They seemed pretty powerful at the time, but electorally speaking, not so much, it turned out. I have to say the relative lack of musical activity this time seems like a good sign for Obama. Post-JFK, the entertainment industry’s occasional bursts of enthusiasm for moderately left-wing party politics have not generally coincided with Democratic presidential victories. Quite the opposite. I’m looking at you, McGovern campaign.

P.S. Just to fill out the post, I am also including a Federalist drinking song penned for the “Joe Six-Packs” of Vermont in 1799 by playwright/poet Royall Tyler.

P.P.S. These are from the original newspapers, but you can find these and many other wonderful political songs reprinted in the book Vera Brodsky Lawrence, Music for Patriots, Politicians, and Presidents: Harmonies and Discords of the First Hundred Years (New York: Macmillan, 1975).

This was the first case of a U.S. party in power trying to save itself by juicing up the atavistic fears of Christian voters. In 1800, it was the supporters of John Adams who tried to paint challenger Thomas Jefferson as an alien infidel out to destroy traditional values and shut down the churches, even though there were almost no federal policy issues related to religion or the sanctity of the family being debated.  (Jefferson was also accused of palling around with terrorists, in the Reign of Terror sense anyway.)

These 1800 attacks on Jefferson were what Joe Biden was referring to the other day in a comparison that made headlines a few places, “Biden compares Obama attacks to past presidents“:

Democratic vice presidential candidate Joe Biden on Monday cast White House hopeful Barack Obama with presidential giants, likening attacks against his running mate to criticisms lobbed against Thomas Jefferson’s Christianity, Abraham Lincoln’s commitment to individual rights and John F. Kennedy, for being a “dangerous choice in difficult times.”

“Sound familiar?” Biden asked the crowd. “The defenders of the status quo have always tried to tear down those who would change our nation for the better.”

That comparison seemed a trifle strained (only a trifle) when Biden uttered it, but apparently the Elizabeth Dole campaign down in North Carolina looked up the 1800 race and decided that the Federalists’ “No God” line needed to be echoed even more literally:

The Trail – washingtonpost.com
North Carolina’s U.S. Senate race erupted this week after Sen. Elizabeth Dole (R-N.C.) launched an ad accusing her Democratic challenger of supporting the agenda of a political committee devoted to atheists.

State Sen. Kay Hagan (D), who polls show is narrowly leading Dole, filed suit in a North Carolina court Thursday accusing the incumbent of defaming her in the advertisement, which ends with an image of Hagan on the screen and a female voice saying, “There is no God.”

Here’s the commercial itself, for the comparative record:

WAS ANDREW JACKSON REALLY THE PEOPLE’S CHOICE IN 1824?

by Donald J. Ratcliffe
Rothermere American Institute, University of Oxford

[Click here for .pdf version, with footnotes]

Well, of course he was. American historical narratives have always told us so, and recent prize-winning tomes that agree on little else confirm it. Old Hickory’s fame as victor of New Orleans gave him widespread popularity, the story goes, especially with newly enfranchised voters. So when he ran for president in 1824, he came first in the Electoral College but, with four candidates in the race, did not quite win an absolute majority. When the House of Representatives broke the deadlock in favor of the second-placed man, John Quincy Adams, Jackson’s supporters screamed that the people had been cheated of their choice by “bargain and corruption” and avenged the old general with a massive victory in 1828.

But was Jackson’s “stolen” victory in 1824, the emotional heart of this tale, really quite so clear-cut? In 1884 Edward Stanwood pointed out the problem. In six states the choice of presidential electors was in the hands of the legislature and we have no direct indication of how a popular vote would have resulted. In the states where there was a popular vote, not all the candidates were on every ballot, and in some the overwhelming popularity of one candidate-not necessarily Jackson-resulted in very low turnout. All that can be reported with fair certainty is the vote in the fourteen states where there was a popular ballot, either on the district or the general-ticket system. According to Stanwood, those states gave Jackson 153,544 compared to 108,740 for his nearest rival, John Quincy Adams, who was far ahead of the other two, Henry Clay (47,136) and William Harris Crawford (46,618).

Even in these fourteen states, there is really little evidence of Jackson’s nationwide popularity in 1824. He may have won 43 percent of their popular vote, but, as Lee Benson pointed out in 1957, 42 percent of that vote came from winning four-fifths of the popular vote in just three states (Alabama, Tennessee, and Pennsylvania), which together cast 23 percent of the national vote. Local concerns explain his victories in those three states, while his success in the Carolinas followed John C. Calhoun’s decision to throw his support to Jackson in return for becoming vice-president. In other parts of the country-notably New England and New York-Jackson received negligible support in 1824, in the face of Adams’s evident popularity.

Even in some states where the electors were chosen by the people, Jackson was less popular than appears at first sight. In North Carolina, the popular contest was fought between the Caucus ticket (for Crawford) and the People’s ticket (for whoever had the best chance of beating Crawford in the Electoral College), which won by 20,145 to 15,621. The state’s electoral votes were duly cast for Jackson, and it is often assumed that they measure his popularity in that state. But in eleven counties voters followed the pre-election suggestion that they mark their ticket for electoral candidates with the name of their preferred presidential candidate. In those counties Adams men supplied about one-fourth of the People’s vote, which reconciles with contemporary estimates that about 5,000 of the 20,415 were given by friends of Adams. So we need to move 5,000 votes from the Jackson column to the Adams column.

In the case of Georgia, Philip Lampi’s research reveals a measurable popular vote on the presidential question although the decision was made by the assembly. In the election to choose the assembly, candidates were identified as friends of either Crawford or Jackson, and one ticket representing each side was run in each county. The Jackson men lost to the Georgia candidate, but still attracted (on my arithmetic) 15,478 votes, which need to be added to the Jackson column. That takes the calculation to 164,022 for Jackson to 113,740 for Adams.

But what of the other states that gave the choice of Electors to the legislature? In these cases we have to resort to informed guessing, but the number of votes involved in four of them will not greatly affect our overall calculation. In two states there was fair unanimity (in opposite directions), and that would have greatly reduced turnout. In Vermont, where Jackson was not considered a candidate, the Adams ticket was chosen “by nearly a unanimous vote.” In the case of South Carolina-inappropriate as it is to think of a popular vote for president there before the Civil War-it is clear that once Calhoun had thrown his support to Jackson, there was minimal opposition; in the legislature Jackson won 132 to 25. Contemporaneous congressional elections give some sense of the size of turnout in both cases, though we must reduce it since the presidential election was not contested. The effect is to increase Adams’s vote by about 11,000 votes, and Jackson’s by 18,000.

Delaware and Louisiana divided their Electoral College votes, reflecting an internal division of opinion that is difficult to put numerical values on. The number of voters involved is, however, very small. In the Delaware legislature there was almost no ticket voting, but the Adams candidates won 41 votes compared with 16 for Jackson, suggesting Adams was at least twice as popular. Given that only 6,550 men voted in that year’s congressional election, those results suggest Jackson would have won about 1,179 and Adams 2,947 votes. In Louisiana, Henry Clay was the most popular candidate in the legislature but could not produce an absolute majority, and so was outvoted by a Jackson-Adams coalition that managed to split the electoral votes between them, 3-2. If the original balance in the legislature reflected popular opinion and if as many folk had voted as did in the congressional election, then Jacksonians would have received about 1,693 popular votes, Adamsonians 774, and Clayites 2,371.

These penny-ante numbers make little difference to the picture of Jacksonian supremacy. They simply move Jackson to 184,894, compared with 128,461 for Adams. But we have yet to deal with the key state, New York, then the most populous in the nation, which saw a genuine uprising of the electorate, in the form of the People’s Party, in 1824. In the gubernatorial election, New York State alone cast 193,354 votes, enough to swamp the entire national vote of the leading candidates.

The presidential election of 1824 in New York has long been a by-word among political historians for Byzantine intrigue and legislative legerdemain. But what is clear is the commitment of Martin Van Buren and the leaders of the regular (Democratic-)Republicans to the Crawford presidential candidacy as representing the good old party, and the unwillingness of Republicans of New England origin-half the state’s population-to go along. Once and future governor DeWitt Clinton had his eyes on the prize at one time but his lack of support elsewhere ruled him out, leaving Adams as the only available northern candidate. When the People’s party charged to victory in the state elections, its favored presidential candidates were Adams and, to a lesser extent, Clay. The choice, however, remained in the hands of the old lame-duck legislature, which included a strong bloc of Van Buren-allied Crawford holdovers in the senate. Adams’s success in winning the lion’s share of New York’s electoral votes owed much to newspaper editor-political manager Thurlow Weed’s sly and skilful maneuvering, but Weed’s influence depended on the fact that he spoke for the largest political force in the lower house, namely the Adams supporters. In the end, the joint session of the legislature gave 25 electoral votes out of 36 to Adams.

By contrast, Andrew Jackson did not appear at all as a candidate in New York. Clinton was partial to him but could not find much outside support in the state. During the legislative maneuvering a Jackson ticket appeared one day as an attempt by some Crawford men to create a diversion, but he did not win a single electoral vote. At the meeting of New York’s Electoral College, Van Buren’s underhand machinations to reduce Clay’s final vote resulted in Jackson receiving one electoral vote, while 26 went to Adams (with five for Crawford and four for Clay). It seems not unreasonable to say that Adams probably had the support of about half the New York voters of 1824, while Jackson had far, far less than a tenth. In other words, Adams with over 96,000 votes probably outran Jackson, who at best would have had well under 10,000. Greater precision is unnecessary to make the point that the undeniable imbalance between the two candidates in New York, and the extent of voter involvement there in 1824, was probably enough to overwhelm Jackson’s advantage in the rest of the nation. We are left with a notional guess of about 195,000 votes nationwide for Jackson and at least 224,000 for Adams.

These calculations are not mere idle musings. As the Jacksonians mounted their campaign on behalf of their wronged Hero in 1827-28, their opponents in the North insisted that the congressmen who voted for Adams in the House election of February 1825 had no moral obligation to vote for whoever headed the ballot in the Electoral College; otherwise, why did the Constitution refer the election to the House of Representatives? Furthermore, these northerners claimed, Jackson’s lead in electoral votes did not reflect the opinion of voters. After all, Jackson owed the size of his lead to the electoral votes he won through the three-fifths rule, which enhanced a state’s voting power if it held slaves, even though slaves could not vote. That reduced the moral force of the argument that the most popular candidate ought to win, as did the fact that he had won some electoral votes in states where he was not the most popular candidate. In Maryland, for example, Jackson ran behind Adams in the whole state, but the vagaries of the district system gave Jackson seven electoral votes to Adams’s three. There was, they claimed, every reason for thinking that Adams had enjoyed more popular support nationally than Jackson, and that therefore Adams’s election satisfied every democratic criterion.

If these arguments mattered to contemporaries, so they should influence historians. Our view of Andrew Jackson and his presidency is still too often influenced by the assumption that somehow his candidacy uniquely expressed and exploited the impact of a new democracy on American public life. In fact, elections had long been decided by a broad electorate, and public men had long lauded the moral force of the popular will. The opposition to Jackson did not represent an old elite, even if it enjoyed some elite support in the North, just as Jackson did in the South. To say Jackson won in 1828 because he was more popular is mere tautology. He won because of a range of political forces peculiar to the 1820s, which enabled him and his henchmen to put together a winning coalition. That process deserves the proper analysis that easy generalizations about democracy and popularity tend to inhibit and obscure.

DID THE ELECTION OF ANDREW JACKSON USHER IN THE “AGE OF THE COMMON MAN”?

by Andrew W. Robertson
City University of New York

One of the most persistent myths in American history is the idea that the election of Andrew Jackson in 1828 marks the first “democratic” election in the history of the United States. The dawn of the so-called “Age of the Common Man” supposedly brought forth universal (i.e., white manhood) suffrage and a truly participatory democracy for the first time in the United States.

This mythology obscures the messiness of the actual history of voting in the years following the Revolution and preceding the Age of Jackson. It reflects a fundamental misunderstanding of American voting practice that too often ignores the ways in which American democracy ebbed and flowed — in fact, was redefined and restricted — in the years preceding the Civil War. Poor white men could and did vote in unprecedented numbers in the years following the election of 1800. Free men of color voted not only in New England and Pennsylvania, but also in some southern states, including Maryland and North Carolina. Women who held property in their own right — widows and spinsters — could vote in New Jersey from 1776 to 1808.

Rather than seeing the election of Old Hickory as a landmark event in American democratization, we should recognize that it was the preceding period, from 1800 to 1824, that marked the first efflorescence of American democracy, in all its messy inconsistency. Nowhere in the Age of Jackson could any woman vote; free blacks faced increasing race-based restrictions on their voting, and in most states voter turnout in the Jacksonian elections of 1828 and 1832 never equaled the peak turnout of the preceding quarter century.

Authorized by the Jacksonian mythology to ignore the elections of the period, historians of high politics have long portrayed the history of the United States from the Constitutional Convention in 1787 to the end of the Virginia Dynasty of presidents as a bright stage upon which great men enter, deliver memorable lines, and exit. This top-down approach is understandable, given the brilliance of the group that Jefferson called an “assembly of demi-gods” at Philadelphia. It diverts attention, however, from the fact that Jefferson and his contemporaries delivered their lines to an audience of ordinary men and women. In so doing, it obscures one of Jeffersonian America’s most enduring contributions to posterity: the emergence of the first truly democratic political culture in an extended republic anywhere in the world.

Contrary to the “Age of the Common Man” myth, my research suggests that the era of mass democratization began 28 years earlier, with Thomas Jefferson’s election to the presidency. The years from 1800 to 1816 saw the most dramatic surge in voting turnout in the nineteenth century, and the greatest expansion of the voting universe until woman suffrage a century later.

Suffrage Expansion and Electoral Competition, 1800-1820

In the first years of the nineteenth century, the United States was already a highly partisan, deeply polarized political culture. The Federalists and Republicans were fiercely and increasingly competitive in state elections from the middle of the 1790s to the end of the War of 1812. Thomas Jefferson’s election in the so-called “Revolution of 1800″ was not the culmination of these electoral battles, as he asserted, but it inaugurated a largely forgotten era of intense if uneven democratization.

Many of more conservative Federalists stoutly maintained they would never degrade themselves by pandering to the masses. Nevertheless, when faced with the grim reality of campaigning for votes or facing political extinction, they responded vigorously to the challenge of expanding the voting universe. In the midst of this free-for-all competition, free men of color and women in New Jersey initially had enhanced opportunities to vote, until the institution that allowed their participation, property-based suffrage, fell victim to same democratizing trends.

Beginning in the 1790s, Republicans in the North generally supported the end of property requirements for voting, since this augmented their natural electoral base among the lower orders. In many states, even before the restrictions on voting were lifted, unpropertied white men began voting, and state suffrage property restrictions were sometimes retroactively amended to reflect the reality of “boots on the ground” (or ballots in the box). In most cases the expansion of the unpropertied white male franchise was the result of strenuous Republican and Federalist competition for votes. What followed this extension of voting rights was remarkable: voter turnout rates in many states exceeded sixty or even seventy percent of the total adult male population.

Historians of the early republic have known about these high rates of turnout ever since the pioneering work of J. R. Pole and Richard P. McCormick nearly two generations ago. The peak figures for turnout are truly astonishing. In the highly competitive election of 1812, for example, New Hampshire and Vermont turnout in the gubernatorial elections amounted to 75 and 80 percent of adult male inhabitants, respectively. That same year Massachusetts gubernatorial turnout was 65 percent of all adult males, and Georgia’s congressional election turnout was 63 percent of all adult white men. In the year 1820, the so-called Era of Good Feeling, when party competition was supposedly at its nadir, Maryland registered turnout of 69 percent of its adult white male inhabitants in state legislative elections; in Kentucky’s election for governor that year, turnout measured 74 percent of all the adult white male inhabitants.

How do these turnout figures compare with participation in the Jacksonian era? One way to gauge the significance of this pre-Jacksonian democratization is to compare peak turnout before 1824 and again in the Jacksonian elections of 1828-1832.

TABLE 1: Turnout in Jefferson and Jackson Era Elections (click to see table in new window)

According to Table 1, only New York, Maryland, Virginia, Louisiana, Ohio, and Indiana showed higher turnout in Jacksonian-era elections than they had in the peak races earlier. The apparent voter “surge” in Jacksonian New York, Virginia, and Louisiana is partly explained by the fact that these states, along with South Carolina and Rhode Island, were the only ones that maintained restrictive voting requirements into the 1820s.

Climbing the Peaks: Presidential Election Turnout, 1808-1828

Of course, the turnout figures in Table 1 actually compare apples and oranges: state elections pre-1824 and presidential elections post-1828. Peak turnout in the Jeffersonian-era elections happened elsewhere: party competition was focused at the state level, so the highest turnout mostly occurred in state elections. Let us then actually compare apples and apples: turnout in presidential elections. Historians and political scientists who study elections argue that 1828 was a so-called “critical” election. As these scholars have shown, most critical elections generate a spike in turnout because these elections reorient the youngest cohort of voters to ally themselves to a different political party. The elections of Thomas Jefferson in 1800, Abraham Lincoln in 1860, and Franklin D. Roosevelt in 1932 each saw a change in voting patterns that lasted a generation and also generated a sharp rise in turnout.

Table 2 shows that in the Northeast, the presidential elections of 1828 actually did not mark a dramatic upsurge in the levels of voter turnout recorded in the presidential elections of 1808 and 1812. Table 2 lists a sample of adult white male turnout (for consistency’s sake) in presidential elections in 1808, 1812, and 1828.

Table 2: Turnout In Presidential Elections, 1808-1832

The most striking thing about these figures is that in New Hampshire, Massachusetts, Rhode Island, New Jersey, and Pennsylvania, turnout in 1828 was not dramatically higher than it had been in 1808 and 1812. In the sample drawn for this table, at least, only Ohio voters surged in unprecedented numbers to the polls in 1828. Unlike other realigning elections, the presidential election of 1828 does not seem to have caused an unprecedented national surge in voter participation.

Voters did eventually surge to the polls but only after the retirement of Andrew Jackson. Table 3 compares peak turnout in the first party system and turnout in the presidential elections of 1828 and 1840.

Table 3: Turnout In Jefferson Era, 1828, and “Log Cabin” Elections (click to see table in new window)

The Age of the Lowest Common Denominator Man

It turns out that the presidential elections were democratized not by Old Hickory, but by his Whig knock-off William Henry Harrison, “Old Tippecanoe.” The Age of the Common Man was not introduced by the first “log cabin” president but by the spurious “Log Cabin Campaign,” in which Harrison, born on a James River plantation, masqueraded as the nineteenth-century equivalent of “Joe Six-Pack.” Though the country was still reeling from the aftermath of the Panic of 1837, Harrison and the Whigs never seriously addressed the critical state of the economy during the 1840 campaign. Four years earlier, when Harrison was first put forward as a candidate, Bank of the United States president and anti-Jacksonian leader Nicholas Biddle forbade “Old Tip” from saying anything at all during the campaign. Biddle issued this chilling directive about Harrison: “Let him not say one word about his principles or his creed — let him say nothing. . . .Let the use of pen and ink be wholly forbidden as if he were a mad poet in Bedlam.”

This marks the salient difference between voter mobilization in the so-called first and second party systems, as historians have designated the Federalist-Republican and Whig-Democrat eras, respectively. Ultimately, the “mature” second party system surpassed its predecessor in mobilizing sheer numbers of voters to the polls, but at what cost? The Federalists did their best to make Thomas Jefferson’s character and religious views the major issues of 1796, 1800, and 1804, but debates over foreign policy, trade policy, military spending, separation of church and state, and domestic repression clearly predominated, and almost did the Federalists in. As Philip Lampi will point out later in this series, it was Jeffersonian policy errors, especially the Embargo and the War of 1812, that eventually let the Federalists restore their electoral competitiveness.

Even in the popular political culture that was used in campaigns, the politics of the age of Jefferson seems mostly driven by the issues. The electioneering rhetoric, the rituals, and the songs associated with the Republican and Federalist parties centered on critical questions before the voters.

The Jacksonian era that began in 1828 marks a transitional phase from substantive to symbolic politics, with Jackson’s opponents smearing his staid but supposedly bigamous marriage and launching more justifiable character attacks against his record as a military commander. It was the later second party system, the Harrisonian era, that marked the nadir of serious public discussion. The high turnout in 1840 was not generated by a debate or even metaphorical battle over the issues, but by the first fully “symbolic” campaign in American history. The substantive partisan newspapers that had done much of the political heavy lifting in the Jeffersonian era were supplanted for the first time in 1840 by sloganeering campaign-only rags like the New York Log Cabin of Horace Greeley.

By examining two popular campaign songs from the elections of 1800 and 1840, we see the transformation clearly. The first election song, “Jefferson and Liberty,” was written as an attack on the repressive Alien and Sedition Acts, which the song calls the “Reign of Terror.” Here is the last stanza and chorus:

From Georgia up to Lake Champlain
From seas to Mississippi’s shore;
Ye sons of freedom loud proclaim,
The Reign of Terror is no more.
Rejoice-Columbia’s sons, rejoice!

To tyrants never bend the knee;
But join with heart, and soul and voice
For JEFFERSON and LIBERTY.

A very different form of “attack music” appeared in the election of 1840. One Democratic “hit” was a song called “Rock-A-Bye Baby, Daddy’s a Whig.” The entire song is an assault on Harrison’s personality. He is a “fake”: the song attacks his war record and his consumption patterns. Harrison exaggerated his war heroism; he would swallow the fancy liquor of his Tidewater forbears rather than drink the hard cider of western frontiersmen. In this song and others like it, the politics of identity, with references to class and consumption, have obliterated references to policy.

Rock-A-Bye Baby, when you awake,
You will discover Tip is a fake.
Far from the battle, war cry and drum,
He sits in his cabin, drinking that rum.

Our whole trajectory of American democratization has got it wrong by celebrating Andrew Jackson as the avatar of American democracy. In fact, all of the elements that we celebrate in our political culture — mass participation, popular deliberation, substantive discussion of policy alternatives — were launched and in place in the age of Jefferson. Electoral gimmickry and substanceless campaigns dominated by fake identity politics — elite men masquerading as commoners — all awaited the election of a doddering hero from a dubious battle.

American democracy has never entirely recovered from this fateful turn from issue-based to identity politics. Our form of democratic politics assumed its familiar idiosyncratic form, incomprehensible to the rest of the world, and has persisted as our other “peculiar” institution ever since.

FURTHER READING

Among the works most heavily informing the discussion above are: Walter Dean Burnham, Critical Elections and the Mainsprings of American Politics (New York: Norton, 1970); David Hackett Fischer, The Revolution of American Conservatism: The Federalist Party in the Age of Jeffersonian Democracy (New York: Harper, 1965); Alexander Keyssar, The Right to Vote: The Contested History of Democracy in the United States (New York, Basic, 2000); Jeffrey L. Pasley, Andrew W. Robertson, and David Waldstreicher, eds., Beyond the Founders: New Approaches to the Political History of the Early American Republic (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2004); Andrew W. Robertson, “‘Look on This Picture! . . . And On This!!!’: Nationalism, Localism and Partisan Images of Otherness in the United States, 1787-1820,” American Historical Review 106 (2001): 1263-1280; Byron E. Shafer, and Anthony J. Badger, eds., Contesting Democracy : Substance and Structure in American Political History, 1775-2000 (Lawrence: University of Kansas Press, 2001); Chilton M. Williamson, American Suffrage : From Property to Democracy (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1960); and Rosemarie Zagarri, Revolutionary Backlash: Women and Politics in the Early American Republic (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2007). For pioneering examinations of early American voter turnout statistics, see J. R. Pole, Political Representation in England and the Origins of the American Republic (London: St. Martin’s, 1966), pp. 543-64; and Richard P. McCormick, “New Perspectives on Jacksonian Politics,” American Historical Review 65 (1960): 292-301.

You would never know it from the media coverage, but John McCain is not one of America’s greatest war heroes. He is a former POW who survived, heroically. He deserves to be honored for that heroism.

But one thing distinguishes McCain from other war heroes, the kind whose heroism changes history rather than their life stories.

America’s two greatest war heroes were Ulysses Grant and Dwight Eisenhower. Grant saved the union. And Ike saved civilization.

And neither one ever bragged about their experience. (Can you imagine Ike smacking down Adlai Stevenson by saying that while Adlai ran a nice medium-sized state, he was the Supreme Allied Commander who ran D-Day, defeated Hitler, and liberated Europe?).

Impossible. Like Grant, Eisenhower did not brag.

Actually, modesty about military accomplishments is typical of war heroes and not just here. In Israel, it is unheard of for great military leaders to brag about their service.

Former Prime Minister Ehud Barak was the most decorated soldier in Israel’s history (he was a commando who, among other amazing feats, dressed as a woman — with a handful of soldiers — invaded a terrorist stronghold in Beirut, killed the terrorists, and then fled to a waiting dinghy and headed home). Yitzhak Rabin led the IDF in its Six Day War victory. Ariel Sharon saved Israel from destruction in 1973 when he snuck up behind the Egyptian army and encircled them in the Sinai.

None of these guys talked about it. McCain does. Continuously. His lack of modesty — about something war heroes tend to be modest about — does not become him.

Now it might well be true that Grant and Eisenhower were this reticent about using their military careers, but if so their modesty stands apart from a long pre-existing tradition. Perhaps President-Generals Washington, Jackson, Harrison, and Taylor did not personally make speeches about their war experiences, as far as I am aware, but the people who campaigned for them had no such compunctions, to say nothing of their lower-ranking successors Frank Pierce and Teddy Roosevelt. In the middle of the 19th century, bragging about war heroism was practically the default strategy of American presidential politics. There were campaign biographies galore, but probably more important were my true love (historical evidence division), the campaign songs. It was “The Hunters of Kentucky,” promoting Andrew Jackson’s role in the Battle of New Orleans, that really launched the trend:

I s’pose you’ve read it in the prints, how Packenham attempted
To make old Hickory Jackson wince, but soon his schemes repented;
For we with rifles ready cocked, thought such occasion lucky,
And soon around the general flocked the hunters of Kentucky.

You’ve heard, I s’pose, how New Orleans is famed for wealth and beauty
There’s girls of every hue, it seems, from snowy white to sooty.
So Packenham he made his brags, if he in fight was lucky,
He’d have their girls and cotton bags in spite of old Kentucky.

But Jackson he was wide awake, and wasn’t scared at trifles,
For well he knew what aim we take with our Kentucky rifles;
So he led us down to Cyprus swamp, the ground was low and mucky,
There stood John Bull in martial pomp, and here was old Kentucky.

A bank was raised to hide our breast, not that we thought of dying,
But then we always like to rest unless the game is flying;
Behind it stood our little force, none wished it to be greater,
For every man was half a horse and half an alligator.

Jackson won two terms against non-military opponents partly on the strength of such epic bragging. But his opponents were not to be outdone, unseating Jackson’s hand-picked successor in 1840 with an elderly veteran named William Henry Harrison. The Whigs’ campaign songs boasted even more broadly and folksily about Old Tippecanoe’s triumphs during the War of 1812 than Jackson’s had. Everybody knows “Tippecanoe and Tyler, Too,” but there were many more, like “The Buckeye Song“:

In the end, I have to demur from M.J. Rosenberg’s broader interpretation of past American political practice. What is more unique and distinctively modern about John McCain’s politicization of his wartime service is the McCain story’s emphasis on suffering and endurance in the midst of military failure. There is a personal triumph there, to be sure, and a spiritual and psychological success. But surely there is a tremendous difference between the war record of a long-term POW in a losing cause and success as a field commander in a winning one. One might be said to make a bit more sense as a qualification for Commander-in-Chief than the other. Truly it took our modern therapeutic culture, in which people routinely publicize their past personal traumas as badges of honor and the subjects of best-selling books, to turn McCain’s sort of war heroism into a recommendation for high national office. [Probably the closest previous example at the presidential level would be the carefully retailed legend of JFK and PT-109. Even there, the war was won even if the boat was sunk.]

Finally, we come to the sense-shattering climax of Veepstakes 2008. It does give the TV & blog people something to talk about, at least until the hurricanes hit. I don’t mean to be a killjoy. I have long been a fan of Joe Biden, despite his serial hopeless presidential candidacies, and choosing him was a nice, low-key way to address Obama’s East Coast Catholic and foreign policy flanks. And with this Sarah Palin pick, we finally have our 49th & 50th states represented on a national ticket (if we count Obama for Hawaii). Of course, I have not looked to check that North Dakota, Idaho, Rhode Island, and such have been covered, but we now can rest assured that Delaware and Alaska are in the bag.

Yet I would lose my political historian’s license if I did not emphasize just how little vice-presidential picks matter, electorally speaking. Voters vote for president, the top, nation-embodying office, and always have, even back in 1796 when only local electors were actually running.

Now, the fact that the Veep might have to assume the main office, we should take seriously. [Something McCain, apparently, does not take seriously.] The Whigs wished they could have had a do-over on that John Tyler pick, and the Radical Republicans nearly succeeded in doing Andrew Johnson over. Yet electorally, and barring presidential death, it has almost never been a big thing. Lyndon Johnson and John Nance Garner brought some Texas-style political muscle to their respective tickets, yeee-haawww, but Texas was still a Democratic state back then.

The example that seems to hang over the veep-stakes in recent times has been Missouri’s own Tom Eagleton from 1972. While the Democrats’ craven handling of that episode certainly did not help McGovern in November, the idea that a 49-state, 23-point pulping like 1972 could truly hinge on a momentary running mate snafu is the kind of thing that only a pundit could actually believe. Let’s just say there were some larger forces at work.

In most other presidential elections, even objectively disastrous picks have just not mattered. Dan Quayle, anyone? Take Dukakis running mate Lloyd Bentsen’s celebrated pantsing of Dan Quayle in 1988.

It became “one of the most famous moments in US political history” (per the YouTube caption) and entered the permanent cultural lexicon, all the way to getting referenced in children’s Christmas specials. Yet it hardly saved the Dukakis-Bentsen ticket, or even made any difference at all as far as I can tell. Perhaps a non-Quayle would have helped Bush père a bit more in 1992, but I am really just saying that to be nice.

1992 may only be the second-best example of why running mates don’t matter very much. The best one is probably 1836. Martin Van Buren’s controversial veep pick was Richard Mentor Johnson of Kentucky, a national hero in some circles for allegedly killing Tecumseh and fighting to keep the post offices open on Sunday. Suffice it to say that Johnson turned out to have some serious negatives. In a country where only white men could vote, and where questioning racism in any way drew vilification and mob violence, Johnson was exposed as having lived openly with an African-American woman named Julia Chinn and the couple’s two mixed-race daughters, whom Johnson educated and married off to white men. The Whig press, really still just proto-Whig at this point, heavily publicized Johnson’s private life and clucked that such race-mixing was the inevitable result of Democratic slumming and demagoguery. The U.S. would be seen as a “national of mulattoes” if Van Buren and Johnson were elected, one newspaper warned. A racist political cartoon was published depicting the Johnson family at home. [For an excellent article on the incident, see Thomas Brown, "The Miscegenation of Richard Mentor Johnson As an Issue in the National Election Campaign of 1835-1836," Civil War History 39 (1993): 5-30.]

Old Kinderhook’s problematic image down south was not improved by the controversy, but he won the election anyway, carrying Mississippi, Alabama, Arkansas, Virginia, and other states not known for their open-mindedness on racial matters. Looking at the map, Johnson’s unorthodox living arrangements may have hurt Van Buren as much with northern bluenoses, also usually racists, as it did with southerners. At any rate, Van Buren was hardly doomed even by such a catastrophic pick as Johnson.

Andrew Sullivan’s take on the Sarah Palin pick seems about right. Ruth Rosen’s too, in a less happy vein:

Sarah Palin is the inexperienced woman Sen. John McCain has chosen as his running mate, hoping that she will attract the vital female vote. It’s the worst kind of affirmative action, choosing a person he barely knows, who is completely unprepared to assume any national office. It’s like nominating Clarence Thomas for the Supreme Court.

You might even say it is the Republican version of affirmative action, where any member of the underrepresented group will do as along as they espouse GOP orthodoxy.

McCain’s “bold” move would also seem to be based on a fairly puerile piece of political analysis, as well: that disgruntled female Hillary supporters are so disgruntled they would now vote for any woman, even if she was only second place on the ticket and agreed with them on no issues. This seems based on typical old white guy assumptions about the narrow, shallow motivations of women and minorities seeking equality in votes and jobs.

Miraculously, the mainstream media (AP and CNN and ABC) are joining the story some, showing just a touch of shame for the DC press corps’ slavering promotion of McCain over the years. We can also hope that even some of the TV-star media types who have lavish lifestyle issues themselves may want to show their common touch by expressing some shock at the McCains’ wealth or even feel a twinge of jealousy that even they, nightly guests in every American living room, are not quite this rich. (The New York Times, however, continues to search for false equivalences. To paraphrase Steely Dan, the things that pass for objectivity I can’t understand.) What Obama really needs is for the late night comedians to pick this up.

Here is Obama hitting the theme cautiously, but reasonably well:

On to historical context: There is, of course, a long tradition in American presidential politics of attacking an opponent’s lavish lifestyle, especially in times of economic hardship. It will be interesting to see how badly this hurts McCain. In the past, the tactic has been most successfully used against incumbent presidents, often by opponents who were wealthier or represented wealthier interests than the candidate who was being attacked. So the forces supporting rich planter, slave dealer, and land speculator Andrew Jackson raked John Quincy Adams over his billiard table.

The most successful example from the Early Republic was the well-funded 1840 Whig campaign defining tavern-keeper’s son Martin Van Buren as a pampered aristocrat, while the country suffered through the depression following the Panic of 1837. The key document was a massive speech-turned-pamphlet about the furnishings and operating expenses of the White House, published under the title “The Regal Splendor of the President’s Palace.” Here is a little explanation from Common-Place‘s sturdy old precursor, American Heritage:

THE TIME MACHINE
1840 One Hundred and Fifty Sixty-Eight Years Ago

. . . On April 14 the Whig congressman Charles Ogle of Pennsylvania addressed the House of Representatives on the subject of Van Buren’s White House. The President had asked Congress for $4,675 to renovate the Executive Mansion, and Ogle greeted the request with a three-day tirade in which he mercilessly vilified Martin Van Buren. The packed galleries laughed and cheered as the congressman described a plumed and perfumed dandy “strutting by the hour before golden-framed mirrors, NINE FEET HIGH and FOUR FEET and a HALF WIDE,” in a “PALACE as splendid as that of the Caesars, and as richly adorned as the proudest Asiatic mansion.” Van Buren was too vain to eat “those old and unfashionable dishes, ‘hog and hominy,’ ‘fried meat and gravy,’ … [and] a mug of ‘hard cider,’ ” Ogle said. On the presidential table instead were gold utensils and “Fanny Kemble Green finger cups,” into which the President dipped his “pretty tapering soft, white lily fingers, after dining on fricandaus de veau and omlette souffle.”

The only response from the White House was a simple certification that “no gold knives or forks or spoons of any description have been purchased for the President’s house since Mr. Van Buren became the Chief Magistrate of the Nation.” Ogle published his “gold spoon oration” at his own expense, and copies that circulated throughout the country made him famous. Ogle had set the tone for the Whig campaign that was to propel Gen. William Henry Harrison, the “hard-cider man” and war hero, to an overwhelming victory in November.

The American Heritage site also has an excerpt from Ogle’s speech, in fact more of a mini-edition of it. I am getting together a pdf of the whole thing, or perhaps we can convince the AAS to do that. Compare Ogle’s lovingly detailed descriptions of “the magnificent decorations of the Presidential palace”and its grounds matching “the style and fashion of some of the most celebrated royal gardens In England” to TPM’s post “Lifestyles of the Rich and Mavericky,” which includes a realtor’s listing of the McCains’ quite regal Phoenix mansion describing its “Finest entertaining backyard in the Valley – 3 ramadas (2 w/full bar set-up), BBQ, play house, cantera stone decking, pavillion, spa, and large lap/play pool.” Another parallel is that Ogle got the information he did not make up from a proud description of the White House from the pro-Van Buren Washington Globe and an administration appropriations request. Among the sources for McCain’s detractors are a spread in Architectural Digest about one of his pads and adoring video tours of the others from Fox News and McCain’s own campaign website.

McCain’s attacks on Obama as a celebrity, including an ad that jibed “Life in the Spotlight Must Be Grand,” would be more typical of the inversionist faux-populism that has worked in past campaigns. But it’s now looking (tentatively) like it may have backfired. People who live in eight glass houses shouldn’t throw stones, I guess.

This appears to be my 100th post on this blog, so I’m glad it was accidentally a double-size special issue.