Anything for a vote

Anything for a Vote: Dirty Tricks, Cheap Shots, and October Surprises in U.S. Presidential Campaigns is a delight­ful lit­tle book by Joseph Cummins that pro­vides short insights into every pres­i­den­tial cam­paign from George Washington to Barack Obama.  The episodes end with the 2012 elec­tion since it was last pub­lished in 2015.

Each cam­paign con­sumes only about six to eight pages so the read­er is not del­uged with volu­mi­nous facts, just snip­pets — and the book can be put aside and picked up lat­er with­out miss­ing any­thing of impor­tance from one cam­paign to the next.

Here are some tid­bits from the book.

Washington was the only pres­i­dent nev­er to face oppo­si­tion for the office except for James Monroe in 1820, because the Federalists failed to nom­i­nate a can­di­date and par­ties had not yet formed dur­ing Washington’s terms.

The race between Jefferson and Adams (1800) is often cit­ed as one of the dirt­i­est in pres­i­den­tial history.

In 1824 there were four can­di­dates in the run­ning, and all Republicans.  Yep, all Republicans.  John Quincy Adams, Andrew Jackson, William Crawford (you prob­a­bly nev­er heard of him), and Henry Clay.  The race was decid­ed in the House of Representatives because no can­di­date secured a major­i­ty of elec­toral votes.

The 1828 elec­tion (Jackson vs. Adams again, with Jackson win­ning) was the first wide­spread use of the pop­u­lar vote.

1836 and 1840 both pit­ted Marin Van Buren (Democrat) and William Henry Harrison (Whig) against one anoth­er.  Van Buren won the first and Harrison the sec­ond.  1840 saw the first car­toon por­tray­ing the don­key as the sym­bol of the Democratic Party.

In 1844 Henry made his third and last run for the Presidency.  He lost to James K. Polk.

1856 saw the elec­tion of James Buchanan (Democrat) over John Fremont (Republican) with the third high­est turnout of vot­ers in American his­to­ry — 80%.  Regrettably, Buchanan is con­sis­tent­ly list­ed among his­to­ri­ans as one of the worst Presidents.

Lincoln won over Stephen Douglas in 1860 by 485,706 votes out of over 3.2 mil­lion votes cast, but Lincoln did not receive a sin­gle elec­toral vote from a south­ern state.

After Lincoln’s assas­si­na­tion, Andrew Johnson assumed the Presidency and was impeached in the spring of 1868.  Since he was a ruined pres­i­dent, Republicans put up Ulysses Grant that year against Democrat Horatio Seymour (sure­ly you remem­ber him), and for the first time over half a mil­lion black men voted.

In 1880, polit­i­cal car­toon­ist Thomas Nast first por­trayed the Republican Party with the ele­phant. James Garfield won by less than 2,000 pop­u­lar votes out of 8.9 mil­lion cast, but the elec­toral col­lege gave him 214 votes to Hancock’s 155. Garfield became the sec­ond pres­i­dent to be assas­si­nat­ed, turn­ing over the pres­i­den­cy to Chester Arthur who did not run to suc­ceed himself.

Grover Cleveland, in 1892 became the first and only pres­i­dent to hold the office for two non-con­sec­u­tive terms, hav­ing been elect­ed in 1884, los­ing to Benjamin Harrison in 1888.

William McKinley (Republican) defeat­ed William Jennings Bryan twice, in 1896 and 1900, and became the third pres­i­dent to be assas­si­nat­ed, on September 6, 1901, mak­ing his vice-pres­i­dent Theodore Roosevelt the youngest ever to hold office (Kennedy would become the youngest elect­ed pres­i­dent).

Woodrow Wilson took the 1912 and 1916 elec­tions, saw the US through World War I, and tried unsuc­cess­ful­ly to cre­ate the League of Nations.  His admin­is­tra­tion saw the insti­tu­tion of the fed­er­al income tax, but Wilson refused to advance the right for women to vote.

Herbert Hoover, the win­ner in 1928, was unlucky enough to see the onset of the Great Depression in 1929 and hand­i­ly lost to Franklin Roosevelt in 1932 by over sev­en mil­lion votes and an elec­toral col­lege spread of 472 to 59. Roosevelt became the only President to be elect­ed to three terms. The 22^nd Amendment was rat­i­fied on February 27, 1951, lim­it­ing pres­i­dents to two terms.

Harry Truman assumed office upon the death of Roosevelt in April 1945, woe­ful­ly igno­rant of the immi­nent plans to pro­duce atom­ic bombs, which he autho­rized to be used against Japan in August of 1945, bring­ing World War II to a close.

After an upset vic­to­ry in 1948 against Thomas Dewey, Truman was sucked into anoth­er war in Korea in June 1950 and suf­fered a loss of pop­u­lar­i­ty when he fired Douglas MacArthur over the con­duct of the war.

Truman chose not to run in 1952, and the con­test was between Dwight Eisenhower and Adlai Stevenson, as again in 1956.  Eisenhower won both times, but his vice-pres­i­dent Richard Nixon failed in his run against John Kennedy in 1960, a cam­paign notable for the fact that debates between the two can­di­dates were the first to be nation­al­ly televised.

Subsequent pres­i­den­tial cam­paigns are per­haps too recent or too bor­ing (for the most part) to mer­it men­tion here, but the list of con­tenders and vice pres­i­dents is inter­est­ing in itself, as are the var­i­ous par­ties which have come and gone, all of which can be eas­i­ly found on sites like Wikipedia.

Several vice pres­i­dents went on to become pres­i­dent, but here’s a par­tial list of those who didn’t and who are most like­ly obscured by his­to­ry:  Elbridge Gerry (who prompt­ed the name ger­ry­man­der­ing), Daniel Tompkins, Richard Mentor Johnson, George M. Dallas, William R. King, Hannibal Hamlin, Schuyler Colfax, Henry Wilson, William Wheeler, Thomas Hendricks, Levi Morton, Garret Hobart, Charles Fairbanks, James S. Sherman, Thomas R. Marshall, Charles Dawes, and Charles Curtis.