On April 22, 1848, John Donkey, at the urging of many and against his will (or so he claimed), declared his candidacy for president of the United States. Mr. Donkey’s name was initially mentioned (or, one might argue, self-mentioned) as a candidate months earlier, when it was speculated in the pages of a national magazine called The John-Donkey, an American periodical that sought to replicate England’s widely admired satiric magazine, Punch. According to The John-Donkey, “The free and independent citizens of Ann Arbor, Michigan . . . have unanimously nominated our venerable and beloved patron, the great and good JOHN DONKEY, for the Vice Presidency.” Not the presidency. But being, by design, a political ass, he responded only to the part he wanted to answer when he replied, “If I am elected President . . .”1 And soon after, he was off and running.
“Off and running” resonates with the significance of the fact that John Donkey ran for president in 1848. After the Revolution the United States was a new nation and, more important, a new democracy—indeed the first of its kind since the Roman Republic and Ancient Greece. Consequently the oratory of politicians seeking the presidency was now also being newly developed. Clearly, however, by 1848 Americans had begun to recognize patterns in such political rhetoric, as for example: “The various and conflicting reports which my friends have at various times, constantly against my will, caused to be circulated in regard to my intentions with respect [to] the approaching canvass in relation to the next presidency, appear to me to furnish a proper occasion for a full, free, frank, and explicit exposition of my feelings, sensations, emotions, desires, hopes, wishes, views and expectations on that subject.”
John Donkey? Daniel Webster? Or Stephen A. Douglas?
Whichever one you answered answers the question, since one could correctly say oratorical hot air now wafted over the political landscape. And in so saying one would have used an idiom, “hot air,” which the Oxford English Dictionary identifies as a term originating in the United States in the mid-nineteenth century.
The quote, for the record, was from John Donkey.2
He may have been a joke candidate, but it was no joke that John Donkey’s candidacy resonated with and amplified realizations and attitudes easily overlooked in this era of American history.
Not all of John Donkey’s presidential campaign was aimed at ridiculing politicians. Nor was his humor entirely benign. In replying to his “supporters” in Ann Arbor—whose unanimous vote, according to The John-Donkey, was reported in “the B’hoy’s Eagle”—the reluctant candidate stated, “In regard to the . . . great questions of national interest, I have never had time to form an opinion, being for the most part engaged in chasing up the cockneys with blood-hounds and the dunces of my own country.” Back in the day, “b’hoy” was a derogatory term for an Irish male, though it came to be embraced by a variety of urban toughs. His mention of the “cockneys” he’d been engaged in chasing was a similarly derogatory reference to lower-class British immigrants. Ann Arbor, Michigan, arising at the time as a regional railway hub, was home to a great many immigrants, particularly among the Irish fleeing starvation resulting from that nation’s potato famine in the 1840s. Not true, however, was the occurrence of any such convention in Ann Arbor, nor the existence of a newspaper called the B’hoy’s Eagle. Both creations, with their whacks at the Irish, were just for laughs.
Laughter, however, is serious business. And good for business—a fact borne out by the number of newspapers that sought to boost readership by reprinting John Donkey’s declaration of his candidacy.3 Other newspapers capitalized on his candidacy with their own tongue-in-cheek articles and editorials. “Must be [that] John Donkey . . . has seen our advertisement for a candidate to be run on the Federal Republican Democratic Whig Taylor ticket,” boasted a column in Missouri’s Democratic Banner.4 The “Federal Republican Democratic Whig Party” was this article’s satiric amalgam of that era’s political parties, through which the paper poked fun at Whig nominee Zachary Taylor’s avowal not to hew to any party line. A number of the nation’s more staid newspapers glommed on by reporting his candidacy poker-faced, as in the June 1, 1848, Indiana State Sentinel:
Presidential Candidates
The Democrats having made their nominations, the candidates in the field may be summed up as follows: Whigs—Daniel Webster, Henry Clay, John McLean, General Scott, Tom Corwin. Abolition—John P. Hale, Wm. Lloyd Garrison, and Abby Kelly. Independent Whigs—General Taylor, John Donkey, James Gordon Bennett, Joseph Lawson.
John Donkey did not, of course, simply spring from a pot of ink. He was the creation of his magazine’s editors, George G. Foster and Thomas Dunn English. They were as oddball a publishing partnership as John Donkey was a candidate. English commenced his career as a physician, trained at the University of Pennsylvania. But his father did not view medicine as a worthy occupation and urged his son to learn carpentry. He did, but while doing so he also studied law on the side, and not long after was admitted to the Pennsylvania bar. All these endeavors were sidelined, however, during an illness in which, to keep occupied, he took up writing, penning a play that was produced by one of that era’s preeminent actor-managers, Junius Booth (whose son John would grow up to become the nation’s preeminent assassin). Despite The John-Donkey’s mockery of politicians, English later ran successfully for the New Jersey legislature and afterward was elected to Congress. Throughout he continued to write plays, poetry, nonfiction, and literary criticism—including criticism of Edgar Allen Poe that led to their having a lengthy literary snowball fight and one fist fight, which, alas, predated iPhone videos. Poe claimed to have given the cocreator of John Donkey “a flogging which he will remember to the day of his death,” which English not only didn’t remember but denied.5
English’s coeditor, Foster, was described in his New York Times obituary as a “remarkable example of a brilliant talent unguided by moral purpose or a decent regard for the conventions and proprieties of civilized society.” And to think that’s putting it respectfully. Like English, he too was a playwright and author of nonfiction, but with some differences. Foster’s nonfiction explored the underbelly of urban life in ways (also in the words of his obituary) “to exclude them from the hands of [fastidious] readers.” His work in the theater differed as well from that of English in Foster’s additionally having been an actor, musician, and forger of a wealthy actor-manager’s signature—for which he spent a year in the clink.6
In the 1848 election Zachary Taylor received upward of 47 percent of the 2,876,818 votes, edging out his two major competitors, Democrat Lewis Cass and former president Martin Van Buren, who ran as a candidate for the antislavery Free Soil Party. As for John Donkey, it is not known how many of that year’s 121 write-in votes he received. But 121 votes, taken together, represented just over 0 percent of the voters—a fact that is significant when, in later elections, a far larger percentage of Americans voted for particular fringe candidates.