The Machinery of Democracy

 3

WILLIAM L. BIRD, JR.

“When they lay down the weapons of argument and attack us with musical notes, what can we do?”

— A DEMOCRATIC PARTY SUPPORTER OF MARTIN VAN BUREN, 1849

THE RISE OF INSTITUTIONS AND ACTIVITIES NOT SPELLED OUT IN THE Constitution helped make America’s participatory political system possible. State and national parties, nomination and ratification conventions, and campaigns for public office gave life and form to the ideas in the Constitution. By 1840, elections featured the relentless projection of consistent and personally meaningful political imagery—a kind of rough-hewn vocabulary typically deploying animals, log cabins, hatchets, or homes—that the framers of the Constitution could only have imagined.

The necessity of getting people to the polls on Election Day for the intended purpose of exercising the franchise to achieve a specific outcome was democracy’s most pressing popular problem. The recently established practice of political commemoration—something quite different from the activism and agitation required of a political campaign—dated to the first inauguration of President George Washington, with a riot of metal clothing buttons engraved “Long Live the President.” Yet from this modest beginning of the commemorative tradition in America emerged the material culture of party and candidate, a new and altogether different proposition.

Model log cabin hoisted on a pole and carried in parades by supporters of William Henry Harrison during the 1840 presidential campaign. Gift of Ralph E. Becker Collection of Political Americana.

The tension between historical commemoration and the new necessity of the presidential campaign led to an outpouring of devices and wares already made familiar by the established practice of national commemoration. A commemorative button, after all, could become a campaign button, run down an opponent, spread misinformation, spin, and outright lie. The same could be true for a badge, a ribbon, a banner, or a print. Usually their messages went for the middle with a friendly candidate portrait and a slogan absent of specifics.

Nature’s Way

The most enduring popular images in American political life were drawn from the natural world. Rivers and springs, for example, suggested the ever-changing course of politics. Animals came to suggest the capricious temperament of competitive parties; the apportionment of voting districts into distended and jagged jurisdictions to consolidate voting strength suggested monsters. The “Gerry-Mander” cartoon, for example, expressed opposition to state election districts newly redrawn by Massachusetts’ Jeffersonian Democratic-Republican Party, led by Governor Elbridge Gerry. Fearing that the Federalist Party would lose power in the 1812 election, Gerry consolidated Federalist voting strength in a salamander-shaped voting district. The practice—though not invented by Gerry—became known as gerrymandering.

The analogy between politics and springs and rivulets that jump and rejoin their banks was popularized by Thomas Houghton’s “Diagram of the Rise and Fall of American Political Parties, from 1789 to 1880, inclusive,” published in the Conspectus of the History of Political Parties and the Federal Government in 1880. Houghton’s timeline of parties, presidential candidates, and events courses like a river through graphic space in four-year intervals. The parties appear in different colors. The ascendance of a party is gauged as its stream rises above the centerline and above the streams of other parties. The thickness of a stream indicates the party’s strength. The diagram dramatized U.S. political history on a single page as a service for educators and a ready reference for scholars, statisticians, and statesmen.

Party symbols from the natural world helped dramatize political issues for Americans who could not read. The earliest appearance of the donkey, for example, dates to the late 1820s, when Whig attacks against Andrew Jackson rendered his name as “A. Jack-ass.” Medals engraved with pigs and donkeys bore slogans criticizing Jackson for removing federal deposits from the Bank of the United States.

Editorial cartoonist Thomas Nast sharpened the tradition of using animals as symbols. Democratic and Republican Party leaders would never have chosen the animals that Nast did to embody their ideas and policies, instead preferring national symbols, such as the eagle and the flag. A Harper’s Weekly cartoon featured Nast’s Democratic donkey for the first time in 1870. (Nast had often used the donkey in the past to represent ignorance.) Nast featured an elephant for the first time to represent the Republican vote in 1874. He pictured the animal, apparently unaware of its own weight, plodding across the creaky planks of the Republican Party platform. Nast’s elephant and donkey appeared together in a cartoon for the first time in 1879.

Counting the Vote

Because the Constitution gives states the job of running elections, ways of voting in the United States vary. Americans have developed a patchwork of manual, mechanical, and electronic balloting. Many methods once common in the past are still used in some places today. The earliest elections were conducted by voice vote or with paper ballots put into ballot boxes. These paper ballots, called party tickets, listed names from just one party, and they were counted under the watchful eye of local party and election officials. As the United States grew and the electorate expanded in the decades following the Civil War, improvements appeared in the form of the Australian or blanket ballots that listed the names of all candidates, ballot boxes with mechanical security features, and mechanical ballot counters. Between 1860 and the 1880s, the glass ballot jar became a symbol of democratic self-government, typical of the transparent devices used to secure paper ballots.

Glass ballot jar with lockable wooden housing, 1884.

Voting in the nineteenth century usually involved casting a printed paper ballot. State election laws typically specified the dimensions and thickness of the paper, even the size of type to be used. The rest was left to the issuing parties, local party operatives, and candidates, resulting in various ballot forms and styles—and a potential for voter confusion and fraud. More so than the distinguishing marks of party symbols or candidate portraits, color helped observers identify party ballots as they were cast— and who cast them. Voting was still not entirely secret. The introduction of a complex color scheme distinguished the official ballot of the 1878 Regular Republican ticket in Massachusetts.

Political manipulation and election fraud were often compared to a well-oiled machine. Reformers determined to fight political machines with ballot reform and voting machines. The Acme, an improvement upon the open-slot box, has a lever mechanism that accepts one ballot per voter into the box and counts the ballot at the same time.

Developed in South Australia in the 1850s, the blanket ballot—listing all candidates for office regardless of party—was gradually adopted in the United States after 1888. The printing and distribution of such all-inclusive ballots became a function of government rather than competing parties. The voter typically marked the ballot with a crayon tied to the writing surface of a booth in which voters could mark their ballots in private, sometimes guided by party symbols—like the eagle guarding a glass jar ballot box representing the Republican ticket of William McKinley and Garret A. Hobart, top left, in the figure here.

Americans came to associate the mechanical improvement of voting machines with accuracy and security. The gear-and-lever voting machine rendered the Australian ballot in steel. From 1900 through the early 1960s, the gear-and-lever voting machine was promoted as an ideal technology. Small models acquainted voters with the workings of the actual machine; the row-and-column ballot of parties and candidates was based upon the graphic design of the Australian ballot that these machines began to displace after the turn of the twentieth century.

Australian or blanket ballot with party symbols, Long Island City, NY, 1896.

Later, computerized punch-card ballots became an acceptable alternative that allowed for the speedy tabulation and announcement of returns. The inventors of modern vote-recording systems try to make the technology tamper-proof and user-friendly—although not always successfully. The recount of ballots in Florida during the 2000 presidential election created debate about the reliability of punch card ballots and precipitated a national crisis of public confidence in voting systems in general. Most previous national elections had sufficiently large margins of victory to mask the shortcomings of vote-recording systems. But a close presidential election race, ballot templates that allowed for off-center punches of computer cards (“chads”), and a confusing “butterfly” ballot design in one Florida county tested public confidence in the nation’s vote-recording machinery.

Democratic Outfitting

The Constitution made the presidency and the positions of senator and representative elective offices. By the early nineteenth century, rivalries among political factions in the new government led to the creation of a competitive party system. The promotion of candidates among an expanding electorate placed increasing importance on the success of popular political campaigns.

The earliest objects commemorate George Washington’s inauguration as the first president in 1789. Washington was the nation’s overwhelming choice, and the popular artifacts associated with his presidency generally celebrated the man and the office. With the realization of an in-and-out party system in the era of Andrew Jackson, advocacy replaced commemoration. Clothing buttons, sewing boxes, and crockery gave way to expendable campaign advertising novelties such as badges, buttons, and ribbons. The rise of printing and engraving led to the production of ribbons for political campaigns and commemorative events. Simple and straightforward, the graphic appeal of the ribbon neatly fit the politics of personal association reflected by all manner of knickknacks, household items, and specialty merchandise imprinted with a symbol or emblem.

Presentation hatchet, “Crockett” and “Go Ahead.” Gift of R. C. Moore through National Institute for the Promotion of Science and the U.S. Patent Office. Credit 57

The expansion of white male suffrage in the 1830s led to an expansive strategy of political imagery that coopted log cabins, axes, and hatchets as empathetic symbols that could be understood by anyone. Use of the axe as a political symbol dates to the era of Representative Davy Crockett of Tennessee. Like his fellow Whigs, Crockett recognized the political value of assuming a self-effacing personality. His partisans played along. The Young Men’s Whig Association of Philadelphia, for example, presented Crockett with a ceremonial silver, mahogany, and ivory-tipped hatchet in 1835. One side of its head is engraved “Crockett.” The other side is engraved with his motto, “Go Ahead.”

Thornwood cane with “Hard Cider” and “Tippecanoe” barrel head, 1840. Gift of Ralph E. Becker Collection of Political Americana. Credit 59

The exclusive use of rustic symbols masked the difficult and contentious positions of rival candidates and partisans who, with a wink and a nod, universally embraced the rough-hewn values of the American frontier. A critical remark made by a Democratic newspaperman, for example, gave birth to the log cabin and the hard cider barrel as Whig symbols to promote the presidential candidacy of William Henry Harrison. The newspaperman wrote that Harrison’s rivals could easily “get rid of” the old general with “a barrel of hard cider, and settle a pension of two thousand a year on him, and my word for it, he will sit the remainder of his days in his log cabin by the side of a ‘sea coal’ fire and study moral philosophy.” Though the Democratic press reprinted the suggestion as a cutting remark, Harrison’s Whig friends embraced the everyday attributes of log cabins and hard cider. An outpouring of everyday ceramics with designs of cabins and canes with miniature hard cider barrels for heads soon followed. Whig glassware, spoons, covered dishes, and children’s tea sets all declared for log cabins. The Whig campaign of 1840 established the practice of predetermined thematic imagery from which later campaigns have seldom deviated.

The closely contested election of 1860 generated mass entertainments such as “Wide Awake” torchlight parades staged on behalf of Republican presidential candidate Abraham Lincoln. Axe-wielding supporters of the “rail-splitting” candidate proclaimed allegiance to the Constitution and the Union. The imagery reversed Lincoln’s public persona from the railroad attorney he was, to the rail-mauling day laborer he had been.

By her own account, temperance reformer Carry A Nation used rocks, a sledgehammer, and a billiard ball to destroy illegal Kansas saloons—before she settled on a hatchet. Explaining her choice of weapon, Nation recalled that the state’s “liquor interests” had nothing to fear from the usual temperance advocates, “but they were not prepared for a furious woman and a hatchet.” A Topeka, Kansas, druggist supplied Nation with little pewter hatchets to sell to cover her legal fines and travel expenses. Nation found that the public clamored for hatchet souvenirs and readily grasped the meaning of them. Her saloon smashings became known as “hatchetations”—a play on words coined by the publicity-savvy Nation.

The mechanisms of popular politics not specifically called for in the Constitution—parties, nominating conventions, and electoral campaigns—drew freely on the evocative imagery of such festivities in promoting candidates and building the momentum of the campaign. Mass campaign spectacles arose as a way of demonstrating partisan strength and of mobilizing indifferent and easily distracted voters.

The Lincoln campaign perfected the nighttime torchlight parade as an entertainment on an unprecedented scale that attracted the attention of men, women, and children. The concept originated in Hartford, Connecticut, in 1858, and was revived for Lincoln’s campaign in 1860 by the city’s young Republicans. Tailored, oil-resistant, enamel-cloth capes distinguished the marchers, some of whom were too young to vote. Their example spread from Hartford to cities in the northeastern United States, which contributed traveling companies totaling some ten thousand uniformed men with torches to a Grand Procession in New York City on October 3, 1860. The martial spectacle—including fireworks, Lincoln “Wide Awake” transparencies, and floats—created envy among the city’s Democrats and panic among southern sympathizers who regarded the torch-lit parade as a provocation.

With the success of the Lincoln Wide-Awakes of 1860, manufacturers of torches and oil-resistant parade clothing redoubled their efforts to supply ready-made paraphernalia across the political spectrum. New York City’s Unexcelled Fireworks was one of several companies that developed a robust trade in oilcloth parade clothing, hats, and torches made for political clubs and their marching units throughout the northeastern United States in the late nineteenth century.

Child’s medalette collection, 1860. Gift of Ralph E. Becker Collection of Political Americana. Credit 63

Even though children and adolescents could not vote, they participated in the presidential campaign. Thirteen-year-old Goodwin Palmer, for example, documented the election of 1860 with a collection of four ferrotype medalettes depicting that year’s presidential candidates, each attached by thread to a piece of card stock. Lincoln won a plurality of the popular vote in the four-way race, followed by Stephen A. Douglas, John C. Breckinridge, and John Bell.

The colorful pin-back buttons that we think of today appeared for the first time in the campaign of 1896. Coated with “celluloid,” a new plastic material, the pin-back button was a stylish departure from the metal clothing buttons that celebrated George Washington’s first inauguration, the metal tokens that lampooned Andrew Jackson’s attack on the Bank of the United States, and even the stickpins that acquainted voters with the likeness of Abraham Lincoln. The celluloid button—made using a patented process that sealed a paper disc under a shiny layer of clear plastic on a metal shell— presented colorful graphic possibilities. The celluloid button became a collectible in its own right on the way to commercial success as a wildly popular advertising medium. By the mid-twentieth century, badges, buttons, and ribbons began to be displaced by investments in radio and television advertising and opinion polling.

Handbill, “If You Are Satisfied, 1884.” Gift of Ralph E. Becker Collection of Political Americana. Credit 65

Politics and Personal Meaning

By the late nineteenth century, symbols of home and family life had become mainstays of American political life and culture. The home became a setting in which the policies of the major parties and their presidential candidates played out. Rival claims for the promotion and protection of personal well-being and improvement turned electoral politics into social drama that likened the nation’s political affairs to a disheveled—or a well-kept—home.

Rival parties and their presidential candidates claimed the idea of housekeeping as a metaphor for governing. In the 1880s, the distribution of lapel pins in the form of miniature whisk brooms required no explanation other than the addition of the candidate’s name or portrait. The domestic idea of sweeping-clean continued into the 1950s, with graphic renditions of hand-held brooms whisking fat, puffy bureaucrats and congressmen into the air over the U.S. Capitol dome.

Harrison miniature pin-back brooms, 1888.

With the advent of radio, candidates began to perfect the techniques of broadcast address that successfully projected their interests more directly into the homes and lives of voters. The popularity of President Franklin D. Roosevelt’s “Fireside Chats,” for example, could be measured in decorative novelties such as custom-made mantle clocks that in one case, featured a miniature mechanical figure of FDR mixing a cocktail—a reference to the repeal of Prohibition in 1933. The clock featured supporting figures of National Recovery Administration Chairman Hugh Johnson and Secretary of Labor Frances Perkins.

The parties and their candidates deployed every medium to advantage in proportion to its place as an object of attention in the home. Traditional commemorative wares such as ceramic plates bearing the likenesses of the presidents were joined by advertising novelties and specialty merchandise that carried likenesses on objects that aspired to everyday use, typically in the kitchen.

As they learned to speak in personally meaningful ways, the parties acquainted their candidates with the importance of how to conduct themselves on television. Many specialists believed that the new medium promised to extend the participatory premise of American democratic institutions to every home. Telecasts of nominating conventions, rallies, and speeches would allow a new home-based audience to experience the spectacle of a presidential campaign first-hand. By the 1960s, specialists capitalized on television techniques that emphasized performance and stagecraft, including the candidate debate (or joint candidate appearance) and the spot advertisement. For a time, traditional campaign objects helped to ease television’s entry into the home and heart of American political culture. During the 1960 presidential campaign, for example, the Democratic National Committee distributed paper cups encouraging voters to watch its new morning television program, Coffee with Senator and Mrs. Kennedy. Similar attention was paid to the organization of “watch parties” for the schedule of television debates between Kennedy and Richard Nixon, the first joint-candidate appearance of its kind, televised or not.

The Nielsen Audimeter—the “black box” of the television ratings system—gathered information from households about media listening and viewing habits from 1949 until the early 1970s. Connected to a radio or television receiver in the home, it registered set use and station tuning by exposing 16mm film to a pinpoint of light. When changed by the homeowner weekly, the film cartridge ejected a quarter to ensure timely mailings to the Nielsen Company for analysis. The data gleaned from sample homes enabled campaign pollsters to track viewing patterns during candidates’ television appearances and to refine schedules of paid political advertising. Those campaigns join today’s political performances and advertisements in a cloud of competing images and cross talk on the Internet.

In all of its glorious shapes and mediated forms, the modern American presidential campaign continues to generate interest and excitement on a mass scale—resulting in a crescendo of cumulative popular effect at the polls on Election Day. As the presidential campaign evolves as a televised spectacle, it draws inspiration from the tangible material of political activism and engagement, created to keep close and to hold in deeply personal ways.

Nielsen Audimeter, cartridge, and television diary. Gifts of A. C. Nielsen and Nielsen Media Research. Credit 72

Archbishop Theodore McCarrick addressing pro-immigration rally on the National Mall in Washington, April 2006. Credit 73