For those who know me best, you know my favorite topics are writing, reading, politics and history. This week's blog covers three of those likes. I am, obviously, writing, and the topic is both politics and history. So sit back and enjoy the ride. I promise it will either be fun or will dip into the shallow gene pool I have mentioned previously.
Here it is, nearly a month after the election and President Trump, although still debating and fighting over the election results, has finally allowed the transition process to begin. Although he still has not conceded and is still filing lawsuits claiming he won.
This election was considered historic for several reasons. The most obvious one being that more people voted prior to Election Day than in other presidential election in history. Unlike the Bush v. Gore race in Florida, which took weeks to determine a winner because of ballot issues, and, unlike the election in 2016, when Trump failed to win the popular vote, yet still managed to win the White House, Biden was an obvious winner in regards to the popular vote, which still took almost a week to ultimately decide.
This is another reason why we should focus more on the popular vote and do away with Electoral College all together. It will not only avoid future lawsuits and recounts by candidates, but will also avoid a repeat of history, something we Americans tend to do a lot of from time to time, as we seem to have learned little from what has transpired in the past. It also might mean four more years of Trump tweeting what he would have done in his second term, much like what Hilary Clinton has done for the past four years under Trump.
Another notable fact about this year's election was the number of first-time voters - that is, those who just turned 18 this year - who turned out to vote. The younger generations are the ones who can ultimately determine the direction we take as a nation.
It was the younger generation, after all, that helped decide the closest popular vote in American history: the election of 1880.
In the second half of the 19th century, running an American political campaign meant energizing young partisans to march at midnight, wearing capes and waving torches. Politicians on both sides hoped that such youth parades would demonstrate their party’s energy and popularity. Though many of these campaigners were too young to vote, they were often the toughest foot soldiers - and the most loyal future voters, in a system where few partisans ever switched sides. The sight of 30,000 of them pouring through New York’s Union Square during elections in the 1880s - or even a few hundred stomping down a small town’s Main Street - was a powerful and persuasive spectacle.
Gearing up for the 1880 presidential race, the parties gathered up tens of thousands of youths - Baptist farm boys, Irish immigrant factory hands, freed African Americans and young girls dressed as the Goddess of Liberty - and gave them their marching orders. “Night after night from now until the 1st of November our streets will be filled with the bearers of torches and banners,” Philadelphia Inquirer reported. Youths in capes would decide the future of a noisy democracy.
One of those capes was worn by an unknown young Republican in 1880. Some late summer night, a boy or girl donned a red oil-cloth garment, tied the white pilgrim collar, lit a torch and went out marching. The slim dimensions of the cape - which is on display at Smithsonian's National Museum of American History - make it likely that the wearer was in his or her early teens. Yet they showed up to sing partisan songs or holler nasty rhymes about the other side. These marchers lived under a Constitution much the same as ours, but they pursued political ends in ways that were dramatically different from today’s. The cape, then, is as much a fossil as any dinosaur bone: It is physical proof, hidden in our own past, of the forgotten possibilities for young people to shape, and reform, democracy.
Though uniformed young partisans marched in elections from 1860 through 1900, the 1880 race was particularly consequential. It would be the first presidential election since the end of Reconstruction in 1877, after which African American voters faced violent suppression by Southern Democrats and could no longer count on protections from the federal government. One New York Republican warned that 1880 would decide, for many years, whether the country shall be Republican or Cossack. The end of the Civil War era also left both parties scrambling to recruit young voters, who were not as invested as their parents in finger-pointing over the war. In 1880, Republicans and Democrats alike claimed to represent a fresh movement, the true party for young Americans. In the “struggle for a generation,” the now shuttered Rocky Mountain News stated in an editorial, both sides bought up marching capes by the thousands.
In November of 1880, a 78 percent voter turnout helped decide the closest popular vote in United States history, in which James Garfield, the moderate Republican and former Union general from Ohio, narrowly defeated his rival, Winfield Scott Hancock. The youth in the red cape must have celebrated. Michael Campbell, an Irish immigrant factory worker who marched for the Democrats in New Haven, Connecticut, did not. According to his diary, he had made a bet on the outcome with his factory foreman, and owed him a $1 silk necktie.
Young Americans of the era understood that democracy was a nasty game, deeply fraught for black voters, run by crooked machines in many places and often decided by chicanery. (Sounds a lot like the democracy in which we currently reside). The youths who marched in 1880 would help revolutionize this system over the coming decades. William U’ren, a young blacksmith in Gunnison, Colorado - and later newspaper editor in Tincup - marched in 1880. He was incensed by the dirty tricks he saw and took a blacksmith’s approach to the problem, wondering, he later explained to the muckraking journalist Lincoln Steffens, “Why had we no tool makers for democracy?” Over the next few decades, U’ren worked with a national network of reformers to hammer out new tools, such as open primaries, referendums, the direct election of senators, and women’s suffrage in Oregon. By 1920, the new democracy they built would have been almost unrecognizable to the cape-wearing youngsters of 1880.
Which begs the question: Will the democracy formed in 2020 be recognizable to the generations which are to follow or the ones which preceded it? History has a way of repeating itself and Americans are quick to forget.
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