Two major events are top of mind right now: Halloween and Election Day. One is frightening, scary, gruesome, forbidding, and spine-chilling. The other is Halloween.
Election Day, which is next Tuesday, used to be, for want of a better word, festive. Seemed like a holiday. And I say that even remembering my first Election Day as a participant was November 7th, 1972, when I voted for George McGovern, and the rest of the world voted for Richard Nixon.
I exaggerate, of course. Nixon won 60.7% of the popular vote and 49 of 50 states, the landslide coming despite the fact that 18-year-olds could vote for the first time. That set my wife and I on a long losing streak of presidential voting that finally ended in 1992.
But even when we lost, which was most of the time, Election Day had a congenial spirit about it. At the late great Bethlehem Globe Times, editor John Strohmeyer used to stride in every Election Day, midterm or presidential, and proclaim, "The people have spoken." It seemed that way, but now the thought of Election Day, even midterms, sets in me and millions of others, a sense of panic, dread about whether our institutions will survive.
So at times like this, I issue these words of hope. Look to the past. Maybe they were just as screwed up as we seem to be now. How many times have we heard in the last 10 years, "Oh, this is cyclical. We've always been polarized. This is normal"? No, it doesn't seem like normal, but let's pretend for a moment that we can honestly take consolation from past election days from the realization that our forefathers screwed it up as bad as we did and still emerged with a nation.
Take 1800, for example, when Congress was called upon to break a tie for president between Thomas Jefferson and Aaron Burr, and Treasury Secretary Alexander Hamilton began a campaign for Jefferson. Now, we know what Hamilton thought of Burr, but he didn't much like Jefferson either. In fact, he didn't like anyone except for presumably Lin-Manuel Miranda, and that's two centuries in the future. But he ramrodded Jefferson through while saying some particularly unflattering things about Burr, a rivalry that ended fatally on a field in Weehawken, New Jersey, in 1804. Burr won that skirmish, but Hamilton, playing the long game, eventually conquered Broadway.
Years later, cries of corrupt bargain ran through the 1824 election as Henry Clay got his people, the Claymations if you will, to switch their allegiance to John Quincy Adams and away from war hero Andrew Jackson. After JQA was elected, he made Clay his secretary of state, and, "Corrupt bargain," shouted Jackson, who vowed revenge and indeed got it, winning the 1828 election and ousting Clay.
Political patronage and backroom deals entering the world of national elections? I'm shocked.
Now let us go to 1920 where the Bernie Sanders of his time, a fellow named Eugene Debs, launched a Quixotic campaign for president. Well, that was nothing new. Debs also ran in 1900, 1904, '08, and '12. But in '20, Debs actually had some momentum, as did the cause of socialism. He had one problem, however. Debs had to campaign from prison since he had been arrested in 1918 on a trumped up espionage charge and had to run his campaign from jail.
Oh, how our present administration must think, "Ah, those were the days."
In previous election campaigns and election days, we've had George Wallace screaming about separation of the races, and the electric shock revelations of Thomas Eagleton, McGovern's running mate, and hanging chads, and most recently, lawsuits that have challenged the veracity of election results.
The republic has endured this craziness before. Let's hope we can do it again.
