Pivotal Tuesdays
Page 1
Pivotal Tuesdays
Pivotal Tuesdays
Four Elections That Shaped the Twentieth Century
Margaret O’Mara
PENN
UNIVERSITY OF PENNSYLVANIA PRESS
PHILADELPHIA
Copyright © 2015 University of Pennsylvania Press
All rights reserved. Except for brief quotations used for purposes of review or scholarly citation, none of this book may be reproduced in any form by any means without written permission from the publisher.
Published by
University of Pennsylvania Press
Philadelphia, Pennsylvania 19104-4112
www.upenn.edu/pennpress
Printed in the United States of America on acid-free paper
1 3 5 7 9 10 8 6 4 2
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
O’Mara, Margaret Pugh, author.
Pivotal Tuesdays : four elections that shaped the twentieth century / Margaret O’Mara.
pages cm
Includes bibliographical references and index
ISBN 978-0-8122-4746-6 (alk. paper)
1. Presidents—United States—Election—History—20th century. 2. Political campaigns—United States—History—20th century. 3. United States—Politics and government—20th century. I. O’Mara, Margaret Pugh. II. Title
JK528.O43 2015
2015009532
For Molly and Abigail, future voters
CONTENTS
Author’s Note
Introduction
PART I: 1912
Chapter 1. The Great Transformation
Chapter 2. The Progressive Campaign
PART II: 1932
Chapter 3. The Road to the New Deal
Chapter 4. The Promise of Change
PART III: 1968
Chapter 5. The Fracturing of America
Chapter 6. Improbable Victories
PART IV: 1992
Chapter 7. Reagan Revolutionaries and New Democrats
Chapter 8. The CNN President
Conclusion. Hope and Change
Notes
Index
Acknowledgments
AUTHOR’S NOTE
A presidential election changed my life. On 9 July 1992, I stood on the lawn of the Arkansas Governor’s Mansion on a stickily hot Southern summer day. Along with the crowd packed tightly around me, I was waiting to see Bill Clinton emerge from inside with his newly announced running mate, Tennessee Senator Al Gore.
I’d graduated from college earlier that summer without having secured a job, and so returned reluctantly to my hometown of Little Rock to live at home, save some money, and wait until rosier opportunities emerged in seemingly more glamorous and distant cities. Yet within a week of arriving, I had discovered that something very exciting was happening in my sleepy little town: our governor was about to become the Democratic presidential nominee, and his campaign headquarters was a mere mile from my house. I knew Bill Clinton—everyone in this small Southern state knew Bill Clinton—but working for his campaign had never really occurred to me.
Until 9 July. Three days before that, I had rather timidly trekked downtown to Clinton campaign headquarters and offered my services as a part-time volunteer. Immediately, I found myself in the center of a whirl of activity and excitement. Young people from Washington, New York, and Chicago scurried around the building, working from early in the day to late at night. My first day in this hive of activity was spent standing at a copy machine, churning through contribution slips from small donors, watching the currents of campaign energy stream around me. I came back for a second day, and a third. This was turning out to be rather exciting. Then the announcement of the vice presidential nominee prompted all of us, even the lowliest of copy room volunteers, to make the trip to the Governor’s Mansion to see Gore introduced in person.
Standing on the lawn, the July sun beating down on my head, we watched the Clintons and Gores and their children wave to the crowd and the television cameras crowd all around us. My post-graduation funk started to evaporate. This is a cause worth joining, I thought. This is thrilling, and bigger, and important. When offered an official campaign job the next day—moving up from the copy room to the mailroom—I didn’t hesitate.
Twenty years later, after five years as a staff person in the White House and elsewhere in the executive branch, five in graduate school, and ten as a teacher and writer of American history, I was asked to give a series of public talks about presidential elections, 1992 included. In putting together these lectures, I discovered things I had forgotten about the history I had lived through, and realized how elections through modern history connect to and feed back on one another.
My time on the campaign trail and in Washington had spurred me to become a scholar of American politics and policy. With this project, things have come full circle.
As I witnessed the scene on the lawn of the Governor’s Mansion that July day, I had little understanding of the broader forces that propelled its possibility and its ultimate trajectory. This was a political moment made possible by cultural and political changes that had been decades in the making: economic and geographic realignments, the rise of a new generation of Democratic centrists and Reagan Revolutionaries, the restructuring of the media and the rise of cable television, the ascendance of professional political consultants. It built on the experiences and triumphs and failures of the 50 elections that had come before it. It was a reflection of history, and history in the making. There are many of these moments, in every campaign. They are pivotal to the election at hand, yet possible because of broader historical shifts.
The purpose of this book is to make these connections.
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-Republic
an 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 of the nation’s experience through what publisher Henry Luce proclaimed “The American Century.”7
While I was writing this book, it became clear that everyone has an opinion about the most important presidential elections in history; indeed, debating the merits of one’s list is part of the fun of being a political junkie. But there is more to it than personal preference. Many a former political science major will be familiar with the theory of “realigning” elections, which argues that certain years have been watersheds in terms of both partisan affiliations and policy innovations. Historians, too, once embraced the idea that political history was cyclical, and that the nation’s mood swung back and forth from left to right in successive eras.8 As the criticisms of these theories have showed, however, abstract formulations can ignore the contingencies, the messiness, and the unpredictability of history. Relying heavily on data about voter turnout and preferences, such approaches tend to isolate the process of politicking and voting as something separate from the broader tapestry of economic, social, and cultural change. This obscures the intricate and fascinating interrelationship between formal politics and lived experience, between governments and markets, between the rhetoric of the leaders and the actions of the voters.9
The four electoral contests profiled here reveal these rich connections, and underscore the important dynamics of political change that occur in nearly every presidential election cycle. Each of them opens a revealing window not just into their moment in history but into particular aspects of the American political process: its interdependence with economic and social realignment, its distinctive partisan organization, its changing modes of mass communication, and its periodic disruption by particular interests, factions, and third parties.
To be sure, there are many other elections of the past century that served as both hinges of history and windows into a wider landscape of social change. The story of the era’s “pivotal Tuesdays” could cover twenty-five elections just as easily as only four. My point here is not to pick favorites. In fact, I deliberately avoided profiling so
me of the most familiar races and personalities, for to focus on them alone can keep us in the conventional wisdom comfort zone.
Alone, each of these four races is a terrific story. But by putting them together in one book, we can also see the connective tissue between them and better understand the patterns and continuities of history, as well as the remarkable disruptions and pivot points. They reveal the messiness of the past, the foibles of our leaders, and the fractious, frustrating, two-steps-forward, one-step-back nature of politics and policy. Taken together, the cases also challenge modern notions of what is “left-wing” or “right-wing.” Candidate and party ideologies in this pluralistic, bumptious political system are rarely black or white, but often made up of many shades of gray. The reality is that elections are evolutionary, not revolutionary; they provide clues to bigger changes that have happened, that are underway, that are soon to come.
It’s hardly surprising that presidential contests have received so much attention from scholars and writers, not to mention pundits, policy wonks, Hollywood screenwriters, and pop-culture commentators. Filled with oversized personalities, overheated rhetoric, and unpredictable twists and turns, American presidential campaigns can make for some of the most entertaining kind of history. Yet they are more than just ripping yarns. They are moments that both reflect their times and shape what comes next. They remind us that leadership matters, and that certain individuals have had an outsized effect on the course of national and international affairs. That’s not all. The stories of presidential campaigns remind us that political leaders are one part of a vastly larger picture, and that presidents and would-be presidents are products of their times. Their electoral success and failure depend on a whole host of factors, including ones far out of the candidates’ control.