American Experiment (76 page)

But Fanny Wright and the people around her had audiences rather than followers. It was not only that her advocacy of greater rights for women, more liberal divorce laws, equal education, “free” marriage, and less church influence in politics made her so unpopular that several times she was nearly mobbed. Her undoing was that she could not win the support of activist women, blacks, and immigrants in sufficient numbers to make a difference, and that few cadres of rank-and-file leadership were available to link her national, inspirational appeal to local needs and thus raise the political consciousness of the deprived. Deeply concerned about all deprived groups, she was yet not a coalition-builder. Mainly she walked alone. And ultimately, so did women, blacks, and the poor.

Historians tend to doubt that a massive, nationwide, organized collaborative reform or radical movement was possible in the United States in the 1840s or 1850s. The ideological and social and political makings of such a movement simply were not there, in this view. They point to the powerful inhibitors to social action: the essential powerlessness of the deprived groups, as in the inability to vote; racist and sexist biases that kept radicals separated; the American “pragmatic” tradition, as it came to be called, emphasizing day-to-day efforts and step-by-step progress rather than collaborative long-range political action; the fragmenting and pulverizing effect of the American political system on nationwide mass movements; the inhospitability of an essentially agrarian society to urban radicalism; the ideology of individualism, self-help, self-promotion, individual advancement; the hospitality of the American economy to individual
effort; the frontier as a social and political safety valve and escape hatch.

The issue, then, is not that the American reformers did not achieve power. The issue is that they fell so far short of achieving remedies for their objective situation, their sense of deprivation, and the gap between what they had and what they were entitled to, measured by the patriotic ideals of liberty and equality.

The second quarter of the nineteenth century, moreover, was a time of contagious intellectual and political ferment in much of the Western world. During the late 1840s, workers revolted in Paris; Louis Philippe abdicated; revolutions swept Berlin, Milan, Venice, Vienna; Emperor Ferdinand fled; Kossuth was proclaimed president of the Committee for National Defense of Hungary; Rome proclaimed a republic under Mazzini; the German national assembly framed a constitution; revolts broke out in Dresden and Baden; England enacted the Great Reform Bill after street riots and political tumult. Marx and Engels published the
Communist Manifesto.
The Western world boiled with Utopian, revolutionary, millennial, communitarian, reformist, anarchist, radical ideas and activity.

The dog that did not bark in the night was an American dog; it was the absence of that bark that had to be explained—and that suggested the different path Americans were taking from their forebears across the Atlantic.

A
BROAD VALLEY OUTSIDE
Dayton, Ohio, September 10, 1840.
Under sunny skies General William Henry Harrison, the Whig candidate for President, is addressing a vast throng packed together on the field around him. Excited newspapermen report that 100,000 persons have gathered to hear the general—the largest political rally in the half century of the republic. For days people have been streaming into Dayton, by carriages, wagons, and horses, by packets and freight boats via the Cincinnati canal. Hundreds of flags and streamers float from trees and housetops, proclaiming:
HAIL TO THE HERO.
Banners stretch 150 feet wide across Main Street:
HARRISON
AND TYLER—THE TYRANT’S FOES—THE PEOPLE’S FRIENDS
. Others proclaim the union between industry and high tariffs. Curtis’ mill has strung its own banner across to the rifle factory:
PROTECT US AND WE’LL CLOTHE YOU.
The banner of Pease’s mill on one side demands no standing army, on the other proclaims:
ETERNAL VIGILANCE IS THE PRICE OF LIBERTY.
On the morning of the tenth a mammoth crowd surrounds the Hero as he rides his white charger to the speaking platform.

Though Old Tip looks slight and elderly, his voice seems to penetrate to the farthest edge of the crowd.

“I will carry out the doctrines of my party, although I will make no more pledges than Washington, Adams, or Jefferson would. I was never, ever a Federalist.”

The crowd breaks into cheering.

“I am a true, simple Republican, aghast that the
‘Government
under “King Mat” ’
IS NOW A PRACTICAL MONARCHY!”

Louder and longer cheering.

“As President I will reduce the power and influence of the National Executive”—ecstatic cheering—“At the end of one term in office, I will lay down…that high trust at the feet of the people”—cheering beyond the power of the reporter to describe—“And I will not try to name my successor”—nine cheers.

Old Tippecanoe cites his sponsorship of the Public-Land Act of 1800. “Was I a Federalist then?”—cries of NO, NO, NO—But “methinks I hear
a soft voice asking: Are you in favor of paper money? I AM!”—shouts of applause—“It is the only means by which a poor industrious man may become a rich man without bowing to colossal wealth”—cheers—“But with all this, I am not a Bank man, although I am in favor of a correct banking system, able to bring the poor to the level of the rich”—tremendous cheering.

It was the climax of Harrison’s campaign. At first, he had refused to go on the stump. For a presidential candidate, campaigning was undignified, unthinkable; it had never been done. But his managers hoped to demonstrate that this gray-haired sixty-seven-year-old was fit to be President, that he would be a tribune of the people and not, as Van Burenites were charging, the tool of invisible party bosses. Soon Harrison was on his way to Columbus to show himself to the people. There, in a suddenly arranged speech from the steps of the National Hotel, he gave what was probably the first presidential campaign speech in American history. Once he started campaigning he would not stop; off went the presidential caravan to Cincinnati, Cleveland, Dayton, to more crowds and parades and speeches.

“This practice of itinerant speech-making,” old John Quincy Adams said glumly, “has suddenly broken forth in this country to a fearful extent.” No
Adams
had ever
campaigned.

The Whig speechifying and ballyhoo camouflaged a most ingeniously run campaign. Whig leaders knew only too well the sorry fate of those Federalists and National Republicans who had allowed Jeffersonians and Jacksonians to pose as the “friends of the people.” Whigs would now be more populist than those populists, more pleasing to the people. And where were the people? In the countryside. America in 1840 was still overwhelmingly rural; only about a tenth of the populace lived in places with more than 2,500 inhabitants. The Whigs would strike directly into the rural hinterlands that had sustained the old Republican party.

So Harrison was transformed from an aged general-politico, who had been born into a distinguished Virginia family in a fine plantation manor, into a simple farmer. Transparencies—an exciting media device of the day—showed him seated in front of his log-cabin “birthplace,” a barrel of hard cider at his side. “Log-cabin boys” were organized to produce loud huzzas for the speechifying. Horny-handed farmers lumbered to the stage to present a pitchfork to Harrison.

The campaign brought marvelous theater into the villages and hamlets. Songs glorified the “Hero Ploughman” and his “Buckeye Cabin.” Hawkers sold Tippecanoe buttons, tobacco, lithographs, canes surmounted by a miniature barrel, whiskey bottles in the shape of log cabins. Whigs would
have no truck with issues; their convention adopted no party platform. In the absence of genuine issues, invective flourished. Whigs routinely pictured “Old Van” as living in regal splendor, in a palace fit for Croesus, playing billiards with ivory balls. “Mr. Chairman,” demanded Congressman Charles Ogle, the Whigs’ chief billingsgate purveyor, “how do you relish the notion of voting away the
HARD CASH OF YOUR CONSTITUENTS”
for
“SILK TASSELS, GALLON, GIMP AND SATIN MEDALLIONS
to beautify and adorn the
‘BLUE ELLIPTICAL SALOON’?”
Soon the crowds were chanting:

Let Van from his coolers of silver drink wine,

And lounge on his cushioned settee, Our man on a buckeye bench can recline,

Content with hard cider is he.

The Democrats, not to be outdone in bombast, attacked the Whigs as an unholy coalition of old Federalists and new abolitionists, scourgers of the poor and starvers of laborers. They charged that the victor of Tippecanoe was really “Old Tipler,” a “sham hero,” a “granny,” a blasphemer, the sirer of half-breed children by Winnebago squaws. Van Buren did not deign to take the stump, but the top cadre of the Democracy—veteran warriors like Thomas Hart Benton and Vice-President Richard Johnson, young stalwarts like James K. Polk and James Buchanan—counterattacked their Whig foes, and even feeble old Andrew Jackson was exhibited at balls and barbecues to remind the voters what a
real
hero looked like.

Still, it was a battle more of party than of personality. Behind the scenes parties compiled master mailing lists of voters, mobilized state and local campaign committees, mustered the patronage brigades, ground out posters, leaflets, and propaganda tracts. Fifteen hundred newspapers—most of them partisan weeklies—carried news of the party battle even to the frontier. Whig newspapers were especially ingenious in publishing campaign sheets. Horace Greeley’s
Log Cabin
, full of chatty news about Harrison and his campaign, quickly went through a first printing of 30,000 and then sold at a weekly rate of 80,000 copies. Stealing the tune of “Jefferson and Liberty,” the
Log Cabin
published sheet music with lyrics ending “For
HAR-RI-SON
and
LIB-ER-TY!”

The result was the greatest outpouring of voters the nation had seen. Harrison beat Van Buren by about 53 percent to 47 percent, by 234 electoral votes to the Democrats’ 60. The Whigs carried the House elections, 133 seats to 102, and exactly reversed the Democrat’s previous margin in the Senate, 28 to 22. Harrison won the swing states of New York and Pennsylvania. The turnout was perhaps more remarkable than the election results. Almost two and one half million voted—about 80 percent
of the eligibles, compared with less than 60 percent four years before. Every state reached new peaks of participation, according to William Chambers, with New York achieving a turnout of almost 92 percent. Not until the crisis year of 1860 would such a large proportion of the eligibles vote again. Campaign organization plus campaign hokum had mobilized the electorate.

In out-huckstering the Democracy, the Whigs had opportunistically outflanked the Democrats “on the left,” through the use of democratic symbols rather than democratic substance. Their rustic, populist strategy had worked, at least for the moment. But to win one battle, they had disregarded, perhaps even betrayed, the essential conservatism of developing Whig doctrine, the elitist attitudes of many of its leaders, the skepticism about populist majorities the Whigs had inherited from the old Federalist party. Whiggery had tried to turn the shank of history. But history—a moving, organic network of causally related events—is hard to outwit or outflank. History embodies a logic and momentum of its own with resistances, rewards, and penalties. History soon outwitted the Whigs and left them in its dustbin.