October 31, 2023: Contested Elections: 1824

[75 yearsago this week, Dewey didn’t defeat Truman—but the 1948 election was close andcontested enough that onenewspaper famously reported he did. So this week I’ll AmericanStudy that electionand a few other hotly contested ones (not including 2020, because itreally wasn’t), leading up to a special Guest Post from an FSU alum andtalented young journalist who would never get it so wrong!]

In yesterday’spost on the pivotal presidential election of 1800, I made the case for how thatprofoundly contested and controversial election very easily could have markedthe end of the nascent American experiment—and how it fortunately andimportantly did not. As I usually do when I start a post with references to anotherpost of mine, I’ll end this first paragraph here and ask you to check out thatpost (if you didn’t read it yesterday, of course) and then come on back.

Welcomeback! While that election of 1800 ended up reinforcing fundamental Americanideas like the peaceful and orderly transfer of political power, it’s certainlyfair to say that it also reveals just how fraught and fragile the electoralsystem was in that Early Republic period. A quarter-century later, another andeven more contested and controversial election, the presidentialelection of 1824, drove home that point and then some. Thatexcellent educational resource highlights the main elements to this scandalouselection: due to a variety of factors, the election came down to a group ofcandidates from the same political party, the Democratic-Republicans; one ofthem, Andrew Jackson, received a plurality (but not a majority) of both thepopular and electoral votes; but when the election was thus thrown to the Houseof Representatives (per theConstitution), another candidate, John Quincy Adams, was elected to the presidency,possibly due (in the “CorruptBargain” narrative advanced by Jackson and his supporters, atleast) to Adams’close relationship with Speaker of the House Henry Clay. Whateverprecisely took place in the House, that narrative became a defining one overthe next four years, contributing directly to Jackson’s successfulpresidential challenge in 1828.

It’s thatfinal note that I would say offers a potential and problematic warning forpolitics and elections in our own contemporary moment. I want to say this asclearly as I possibly can: the election of 1824 was unquestionablycontroversial, and even if it was on the up-and-up relied on a highly unusualand quite strange Constitutional quirk to decide the victor; the election of2020, on the other hand, was ultimately quite straightforward, with onecandidate receiving a clear majority of both the popular and electoral votes. Yetin the three years since that election, the losing candidate—one who I wouldargue bears a striking resemblanceto Andrew Jackson in some clear and disturbing ways (althoughthere are those historianswho disagree)—and his supporters have been just as consistent in advancingtheir own narrative of corruption and cheating and a fraudulent election andpresident that need challenging. Whatever did or didn’t happen in 1824, afterall, it was the next four years’ worth of “Corrupt Bargain” narratives thatreally influenced the 1828 election—making clear just how fully we have to pushback on our 2023 version of that narrative.

Nextcontested election tomorrow,

Ben

PS. Whatdo you think?