[I don’t have
high hopes for Tuesday’s elections, but I also know they’ll be far from the
most complex or significant ones in American history in any case. So this week
I’ll AmericanStudy five such exemplary elections and election years. I vote
that you add your thoughts, on this year’s elections or any others!]
How an American
Studies approach can help us better understand and analyze our most contested
presidential election.
The 1876
presidential election was not only the most contested in American
history—with the electors for four states remaining up for grabs for months
after election day, leaving the nation with no newly elected president until
January of 1877—but also, and for related reasons, one of our most overt
historical turning points. Historians have in recent years worked to complicate
narratives of the compromise—or “crooked bargain” as it had long been called—by
which Rutherford B. Hayes was awarded the electors of key Southern states and
thus elected president
over Samuel Tilden, but the fact remains that one of Hayes’ first official
acts as president was to withdraw federal troops from the South, thus
explicitly and dramatically ending Federal Reconstruction.
An
interdisciplinary, American Studies analysis of the election wouldn’t entail
eliding the complex political and historical complexities of the election, its
aftermath, and the trajectory and conclusion of Federal Reconstruction. But it
would, I believe, contextualize those details with other social and cultural histories,
narratives and moments from earlier in the year that exemplify how much the
election compromise reflected and solidified existing national trends. I opened
my
first book by highlighting one such cultural history, the striking shifts
in advertisements
for the Howard’s touring Tom Show; where February 1876 newspaper ads
highlighted the show’s “vivid picture of life among the lowly” and “great moral
drama,” three months later May ads described instead a “new version, in
commemoration of the centennial,” one “adapted to the sentiment of the times”
and featuring “old-time plantation melodies of pleasant memory.”
The Centennial
Exposition itself (which opened in May in Philadelphia) further illustrated
such cultural sentiments, both in its invitation to Confederate veteran and
poet Sidney
Lanier to write the opening ceremony’s “Centennial
Cantata” and in its on-site “Southern
Restaurant,” a culinary concession where “a band of old-time plantation
‘darkies’ [sung] their quaint melodies and strum[med] the banjo before the
visitors from every clime.” And an American Studies analysis of these
narratives could connect them to prominent 1876 literary works: from
Mississippi lawyer James Lynch’s epic poem “Robert
E. Lee, or Heroes of the South” which casts Lee as a staunch defender of
the antebellum South and its slave society; to Lanier and his brother
Clifford’s short tale and folk poem “Uncle Jim’s Baptist
Revival Hymn,” in which “a certain Georgia cotton-planter” laments the
grass’s “defiance of his lazy freedmen’s hoes and ploughs.”
Such cultural
and literary trends don’t mean that the election’s results or effects were
inevitable, nor that there weren’t competing, very distinct narratives about
region, race, and history in the year and era. But engaging with them helps
illuminate the moment and contexts in which the election took place, and helps
us analyze how and why it unfolded as it did. Next exemplary election tomorrow,
Ben
PS. What do you think? Other elections you'd highlight?
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