[For this last
week before the most painful, frustrating, and potentially disastrous election
season in my lifetime—and perhaps American history—concludes, I’ll
AmericanStudy the histories, stories, and stakes of five prior exemplary elections.
Would love to hear your ElectionStudying thoughts—or your recipes for staying
sane for one more week—in comments!]
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 and
destructive historical turning points. Historians have in recent years worked
to complicate and challenge narratives of the Compromise of 1877—or the “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 whatever the precise nature of the election’s
conclusion, the fact remains that one of Hayes’s first official acts as
president was to withdraw federal troops from the South, thus explicitly and
dramatically ending Federal Reconstruction and fundamentally altering the
course of American history as a result.
An
interdisciplinary, AmericanStudies analysis of the 1876 election wouldn’t
entail eliding the political and historical complexities of the election itself,
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 1876
shifts in advertisements
for the Howard company’s touring Tom Show (a stage production based on
Harriet Beecher Stowe’s novel Uncle Tom’s
Cabin): where February 1876 newspaper ads highlighted the show’s “vivid
picture of life among the lowly” and “great moral drama,” only three months
later May 1876 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 shifting 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 AmericanStudies 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? Thoughts on this or any prior election?
PPS. I also
blogged about the election of 1876 in direct
relationship to this year’s election here.
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