Civil War
This is not a “Sunday Story”. This essay will try to explore America at its most extreme. It’s hard to examine our current era, so polarized, so unable to find a “middle ground” where both sides can meet, without looking back at our history and trying to see when we’ve been here before, and how we handled it.
I can think of four times in US history where the country has been at this “extremis”. Obviously, the Civil War was one. Let’s hope that we don’t allow ourselves to fall that far, though it seems more possible today than ever before. Thirty-one white supremacists arrested in Idaho this weekend, heading for a Gay Pride rally. They weren’t going to join in the celebrations. A nation where owning a weapon of war has become a symbol, so important, that we are willing to sacrifice our children on that “altar of freedom”. Information in our country is “siloed. Strangers can debate on a Facebook post, and not be able to agree even on the “truth” of the 2020 election results.
Adams and Jackson
One side looks at the election of 2020 and sees the election of 1824. In that one, Andrew Jackson won a plurality of the popular vote (41%), but fell short in the electoral count in the four-way race. John Quincy Adams was second in both popular (30%) and electoral votes, with William Crawford and Henry Clay both far behind.
Jackson had 99 electoral votes, below the 131 required to win. Adams had 84, and the decision went to the House of Representatives as mandated by the Twelfth Amendment. There Henry Clay was able to influence House members to choose Adams over Jackson. Many claimed that Adams offered Clay the Secretary of State position in return for his support. Clay did indeed take that office after Adams was inaugurated. That became a center-piece of Jackson’s campaign in 1828, called a “Corrupt Bargain”.
The 1828 results were very different, as Jackson won 55% of the popular vote and 178 Electoral votes to win the Presidency.
Trump and Jackson
Many Trump supporters look to that history as a template for their actions today. They believe that the Biden victory in 2020 was a “Corrupt Bargain” (they call it “Stop the Steal”) and they are impatiently waiting for their opportunity to come roaring back like Jackson did in 1828. That also justifies their complete opposition to any examination or hearings into the 2020 election. It doesn’t matter what happened in 2020. The election was “stolen” from them, and there can be no “legitimacy” without the retribution of the return of Trump to power.
To them, whatever comes out of the January 6th Committee hearings is “fruit from the poison tree”, fully contaminated by the “stolen” election it supports. They ignore it, ridicule it, and do everything they can to denigrate the effort. Watch a few minutes of Tucker Carlson on any given night to see evidence of that.
Hayes and Tilden
The other side sees a different historic “corrupt bargain”, the election of 1876. In that election, Republican Ohio Governor Rutherford B. Hayes was running against Democrat New York Governor Samuel Tilden. Tilden won the popular vote with just under 51%, but fell one Electoral vote short of winning at 184. Hayes won 48% of the popular vote, and 165 Electoral votes. Twenty electoral votes were “contested” with slates for both candidates sent from some Southern states to the Congress.
Rather than follow the “tie-breaking” process of the Twelfth Amendment, a Committee of the House determined to resolve the “contested” electoral votes. A “deal” was struck between Southern Democrats and Republicans on the Committee. The “deal” was simple: if the Democrats would withdraw their Electoral slates, allowing Hayes to get a 185 vote Electoral majority, the Republicans would withdraw all of Union troops from the South, and end the Reconstruction Era.
American Regression
The “Hayes-Tilden” deal took the Presidency away from the legitimate winner, Tilden, and gave it to Hayes. But from an historic context, it did a great deal more. When the Union troops left the South, the “Jim Crow Era” officially began. The former enslaved Black Americans lost most of their civil rights, including the right to vote or serve in office. In fact, the old Confederacy returned to a white dominated society, and remained that way for almost a century.
Many believe today that if we don’t fully reveal the illegalities of the Trump era, we are doomed to repeat them. They look back at the Civil War, and the hope for Black Americans that the Reconstruction Era created. They see the possible re-election of Trump, or a Trump-like President, as the same kind of “corrupt bargain” that was struck in the Hayes/Tilden deal. A triumph of Trumpism to them represents a step back into a white dominated society of the United States of the 1940’s and 50’s, just as the ending of Reconstruction put the South back into a “slave-like” era of the 1830’s and 40’s.
Joseph McCarthy
Others look to the McCarthy Era of the early 1950’s as the historic example. Joe McCarthy, a Republican Senator from Wisconsin, used the post-World War II fear of Communism to gain national power. McCarthy falsely claimed that the US Government and other institutions were filled with Communist agents of the Soviet Union. His assertions put the entire nation on edge. Even the Cincinnati Reds baseball team became the Cincinnati “Red-Legs” for several years: the “Reds” were Communist!!
McCarthy wasn’t particularly interested in the “facts”. His willingness to tap into American fears altered the Nation. Books were burned, government officials required to take “loyalty oaths”, and many banned from jobs and careers; all to “purge America” of Communists, that didn’t really exist. Today’s “Don’t Say Gay” laws are echoes of the “Anti-Red” laws of the 1950’s.
Even Republican President Dwight Eisenhower was unwilling to step into the controversy. It took the courage of many, including the lawyer Joseph Welch (“Have you no decency, sir?”) and the CBS News Commentator Edward R. Murrow, to change the course of the Nation. But the damage done lasted decades.
Trumpism
Is Trumpism just another version of McCarthyism, or something worse? Is the nation on the verge of retreating from all of the social advances of the last sixty years? Does Donald Trump represent the popularism of Andrew Jackson, with all of the dangers releasing “the mob” might bring?
History can inform us what we did – but it can’t tell us what we must do. That is our choice.
