[On April 14, 1922, the Wall Street Journal published a story breaking the news of a crooked deal that became known as the Teapot Dome scandal. So this week I’ll AmericanStudy that history and four other presidential scandals, leaving aside the Grant administration as we’ll get to them in a couple weeks and the Trump administration because ugh. Share your thoughts on these & other histories, including Grant or Trump if you’d like of course, for a scandalous crowd-sourced weekend post!]
On a scandal
that reveals the fragility of our election system, and what that means in 2022.
In this
post on the pivotal presidential election of 1800, I made the case for how
that profoundly contested and controversial election very easily could have
marked the end of the nascent American experiment—and how it fortunately and importantly
did not. As I usually do when I start a post with a link to another post of
mine, I’ll end this first paragraph here and ask you to check out that post and
then come on back.
Welcome back!
While that election of 1800 ended up reinforcing fundamental American ideas
like the peaceful and orderly transfer of political power, it’s certainly fair
to say that it also reveals just how fraught and fragile the electoral system
was in that Early Republic period. A quarter-century later, another and even
more contested and controversial election, the presidential
election of 1824, drove home that point and then some. That excellent educational
resource highlights the main elements to this scandalous election: due to a
variety of factors, the election came down to a group of candidates from the
same political party, the Democratic-Republicans;
one of them, Andrew Jackson, received a plurality (but not a majority) of both
the popular and electoral votes; but when the election was thus thrown to the
House of Representatives (per
the Constitution), another candidate, John Quincy Adams, was elected to the
presidency, possibly due (in the “Corrupt
Bargain” narrative advanced by Jackson and his supporters, at least) to Adams’
close relationship with Speaker of the House Henry Clay. Whatever precisely
took place in the House, that narrative became a defining one over the next
four years, contributing directly to Jackson’s successful
presidential challenge in 1828.
It’s that final note
that I would say offers a potential and problematic warning for politics and
elections in our own contemporary moment. I want to say this as clearly as I
possibly can: the election of 1824 was unquestionably controversial, and even
if it was on the up-and-up relied on a highly unusual and quite strange
Constitutional quirk to decide the victor; the election of 2020, on the other
hand, was ultimately quite straightforward, with one candidate receiving a
clear majority of both the popular and electoral votes. Yet in the 18 months
since that election, the losing candidate—one who I would argue bears a striking
resemblance
to Andrew Jackson in some clear and disturbing ways (although there are
those historians
who disagree)—and his supporters have been just as consistent in advancing
their own narrative of corruption and cheating and a fraudulent election and
president that need challenging. Whatever did or didn’t happen in 1824, after
all, it was the next four years’ worth of “Corrupt Bargain” narratives that
really influenced the 1828 election—making clear just how fully we have to push
back on our 2022 version of that narrative.
Next scandal
tomorrow,
Ben
PS. What do you
think? Takes on this scandal or other ideas you’d share for the weekend post?
No comments:
Post a Comment