Serving the High Plains
Serving the High Plains
The last time our election results were as fraught as they are today was in 1877, when a candidate who lost the popular vote in 1876 won the election quite literally by an act of Congress.
Of the four candidates involved in the 1876 and 2020 races, three were honorable.
It's sad to note that the exception is currently sitting in the White House with the apparent intent of occupying it in the same sense that Occupy Wall Street wanted to overturn the corporate world, without adequate popular support and, it seemed, by any means fair or foul.
According to several online historical sources, in the 1876 race, candidates James Tilden, a New York Democrat, and Rutherford B. Hayes, an Ohio Republican, both honorable men, were competing for the White House then occupied by President Ulysses S. Grant, another Republican.
As a general, Grant won the Civil War, but as a president he apparently was powerless to prevent glaring bribery scandals that polluted his presidency. His term was also marred by significant economic woes.
Conditions like these usually bring the opposition party into power, and if the popular vote would have prevailed, Tilden would have been our 19th president, but he came up one electoral vote shy of the majority.
Congress had to improvise, because the Constitution did not cover this “what-if,” and appointed an election commission consisting of five Congress members from each party and five Supreme Court justices, two nominally representing each party and one independent.
As it turned out, the independent justice accepted an appointment to the Senate and was replaced by a Republican.
Squabbling, recounts, accusations and tension continued well after the usual Jan. 20 date of presidential inauguration. Eventually, however, a Congress as divided as today's came up with the Compromise of 1877, which resulted in Hayes taking the oath of office on March 5, 1877.
Under this compromise, Hayes would become president but would remove federal troops from southern states, thus ending the post-Civil War Reconstruction, which was both good news and bad.
It was good news because it restored states' rights to the South, but bad news because it ended racial diversity in Southern governance in an era long before diversity was cool. It brought on the Jim Crow era of outright cruelty to African-Americans in the South that continued to the 1960s.
The big difference between the elections of 1876 and 2020 is the honest tie of 1876. Our current election controversy has been manufactured by President Donald Trump who seems to have a pathological inability to acknowledge his loss of both the popular vote and the Electoral College to President-elect Joe Biden, who is honorable.
But Trump retains the power of the presidency to prolong his phony controversy, and his attempt to change some rules, due to his uncanny influence over his base and the U.S. Senate, just might work to subvert an honest election.
Democracy was not in danger in 1876, but it certainly is now.
Steve Hansen writes for Clovis Media Inc. Contact him at: