A Short History of Presidential Election Crises. Alan Hirsch
long preceded the forty-fifth presidency.
The fainting incident was a double-edged sword for Blaine: It postponed the congressional investigation into his affairs, but it concerned delegates to the Republican Convention, who were already assembling in Cincinnati. (Blaine recovered just before the convention convened.) Even so, he entered the convention sufficiently confident to send out feelers to Hayes about the latter’s interest in the vice presidency. Hayes nixed the idea, writing a friend that “I have the greatest aversion to being a candidate on the ticket with a man whose record as an upright public man is to be in question.”58
The convention opened on June 14, with a few days devoted to speeches, back-room meetings and maneuvering, and debate over the party platform. The latter served as a reminder that, over a decade after Lee surrendered at Appomattox, the Civil War had not really ended. The Republican platform that emerged in Cincinnati called for “permanent pacification of the Southern section of the Union” and accused the Democratic Party of “being the same in character and spirit as when it sympathized with treason.”
The nominating process commenced on Friday, June 16. As was typical in the pre-modern era, the outcome was unknowable because no delegates were bound by primaries (there were none) or anything else. Blaine, still the perceived front-runner, faced an anybody-but-Blaine coalition that could thwart him if it coalesced around any of the other six names placed in nomination.
On the first ballot, Blaine received the most votes, 285, but still ninety-four short of the 379 needed for the nomination. Morton was a distant second with 124, Bristow third with 113, followed by Conkling’s ninety-nine. Rutherford B. Hayes received only sixty-one votes, just seventeen from outside his home state of Ohio, making him closer to a favorite son than a serious contender. The clerk immediately called for a second ballot, but the results hardly changed—Blaine gained eleven votes, no one else more than five. Two more ballots barely moved the needle. Before the fifth ballot, the leader of the Michigan delegation, who opposed Blaine, pushed his delegation to vote Hayes as a compromise choice, and other states followed suit. Hayes gained thirty-six votes on the fifth ballot, while Blaine lost six. But the movement was not linear. On the sixth ballot, all of North Carolina’s eleven delegates who had switched from Blaine to Hayes now switched back to Blaine. Overall, Blaine gained twenty-two votes, reaching 308, whereas Hayes, despite the North Carolina defection, picked up nine more.
It had become a two-man race between the favorite and the dark horse, the former with the most passionate support and opposition alike and the latter exciting little passion in either direction. Finally, on the seventh ballot, Hayes received 384 votes, five more than needed for the nomination, and Blaine 351. The Republican nomination for president belonged to Governor Rutherford B. Hayes.
The process reflected, first and foremost, dislike of Blaine and the need to find someone. The great nineteenth-century historian Henry Adams offered this contemporary assessment of Hayes: He was “a third rate nonentity whose only recommendation is that he is obnoxious to no one.”59 In those days, the convention, not the presidential nominee, selected his running mate. The delegates opted for an inoffensive and obscure New York congressman, William Wheeler, primarily because he was popular among his colleagues and offered geographical balance to the ticket. (When Hayes heard, he wrote to his wife Lucy: “I am ashamed to say: Who is Wheeler?”)60 Blaine, for his part, took the defeat well, graciously congratulating Hayes and pledging his full support in the general election.
Hayes’s opponent in that race, Samuel Tilden, secured the Democratic nomination with far less intra-party division and drama, and figured to pose a real threat to Hayes in the general election. The Democrats had suffered terrible defeats during and in the aftermath of the Civil War, but a Wall Street panic in 1873 leveled the political playing field. In 1874, a so-called “Tidal Wave” gave Democrats a majority in the House and, it was believed, a realistic shot at the White House.
Tilden, like Hayes a successful lawyer (with an undergraduate degree from Yale and law degree from NYU), was an aloof figure who made his name as the prosecutor who broke up the notorious Tweed Ring that dominated New York City politics for a decade. He rode a wave of positive publicity to election as a state assemblyman, where he was ahead of his time as a machine politician, gathering an extraordinary amount of information about citizens’ voting records and distributing targeted campaign literature accordingly. Tilden was elected governor of New York in 1874, defeating the popular incumbent, John Dix, during the Democratic Tidal Wave. He used his platform as governor of the nation’s most populous state to criticize alleged corruption in the Grant administration, and the resulting attention elevated him to the status of presidential contender.
The Democratic field eventually included Delaware senator Thomas Bayard (whose grandfather played a pivotal role in breaking the Jefferson-Burr deadlock in 1800), Indiana Governor Thomas Hendricks, former Ohio governor William Allen (defeated by Hayes in 1875), General Winfield Hancock, and a few also-rans. The party convention took place in St. Louis in late June. The Tilden campaign touted the candidate’s electability in a general election, emphasizing that New York would be a large, crucial swing state. This was back in the day when, to a large extent, party bosses controlled their state’s delegates, and the Tilden camp was comfortable moving and schmoozing in smoke-filled rooms.
On June 27, the convention’s first day, the Democratic National Committee selected a Tilden supporter as convention president. The next day was given over to approving a platform largely drafted by Tilden’s people. The balloting began on June 29, and on the first ballot Tilden picked up 401.5 votes, easily outpacing the runner-up, Hendricks, who tallied 140.5, but falling well short of the 491 needed for the nomination. Between the first and second ballots, Tilden’s adroit operatives convinced several delegations that their man was the inevitable nominee and that they should cast their lot with him sooner rather than later. On the second ballot, he received 535 votes and the nomination. Hendricks was the virtually unanimous choice for vice president. The Democrats were united by a fervent desire to regain the White House after a long exile, and chose the ticket that seemed best designed for that purpose.
From the beginning, a close contest between Hayes and Tilden was expected. In the wake of several scandals plaguing the outgoing Grant administration, the issue of civil service reform favored Tilden and the Democrats. The Republican platform echoed the Democrats’ call for such reform, but as the candidate of the incumbent party, Hayes needed to do more. With that in mind, he pledged to serve only one term if elected.
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