2020 election is 1876 all over again. Here's why that's scary.
Stephen H. Provost
Are we on the brink of a new civil war?
Maybe the question we should be asking ourselves is why we never resolved the first one.
It’s been 75 years since the end of World War II. Japan, which brought us into that war by attacking us, is now our ally. Germany has outlawed anything that glorifies Nazism: You can be sent to jail for displaying Nazi symbols.
Here? We don’t lynch Black Americans anymore. We just hire police officers who kneel on their necks. Racists are still “very fine people” to the elected leader of our country, and he still defends he Confederate battle flag flow in a war that was fought, not 75 years ago, but 155 years ago.
We fought a hot war over racism for three years, but we’ve been fighting a cold race war ever since. And every time we make progress, the same kind of racists who fought for the Confederacy rear their pathetic, ugly heads and do their best to stamp out that progress —to send us back to 1950 or, 1830.
Right now, we’re more than three-quarters of the way to that latter date, when the United States of America had a population of 12.8 million people — and the Oppressed States of America, the enslaved population, was 2 million.
We’re in 1876 all over again.
What we’ve forgotten
It would look familiar to us if we, as a country, had any kind of collective memory that went beyond George Washington’s cherry tree and Abe Lincoln’s log cabin. Our self-congratulatory mythos has little room for ugliness. And if you think the 2020 election is unprecedented in its ugliness, I invite you to look back at 1876.
In the words of Yogi Berra, it’s déjà vu all over again.
The Union had won the Civil War, just as the Civil Rights movement would carry the day in the 20th century. Those victories both led to great, almost unimaginable progress: During Reconstruction, 16 Black Americans served in Congress, and more than 600 were elected to state legislatures and local offices across the South. In 2008, the United States elected its first Black president.
And in both cases, the reaction was extreme, and violent.
We all know what’s happening in the United States today, so I’ll spare you a rundown of all the white supremacist bullshit we’ve gone through, from Charlottesville to police brutality. But what most of us don’t realize is that we’re stuck in a time loop: Those who refuse to learn from history are doomed to repeat it. Which is exactly what we’re doing, because we’ve forgotten about 1876.
Then, as now, we were in the midst of a close and vicious election that divided us based on race.* The parties were flipped: Republicans supported a diverse electorate, while Democrats played to a white base and sought to keep Black Americans from voting.
They largely succeeded, keeping Black voters away from the polls by force, and intimidating others into staying home with a campaign that included lynchings, torture, and the destruction of homes and farms. In South Carolina’s gubernatorial campaign that year, 150 Black Americans were killed.
Deal with the Devil
It worked.
Samuel Tilden, the Democratic candidate for president, won the popular vote that year — something he never could have done if Black Americans hadn’t been browbeaten, and literally beaten, to keep them from casting their ballots. He also won the Electoral College vote, 184-165.
There was, however, no President Tilden, because neither the popular vote nor the Electoral College decided the 1876 election.
The electoral count didn’t include 20 votes from three Southern states: South Carolina, Florida, and Louisiana. Each party claimed its candidate had won those 20 votes — which would either make Tilden the clear winner or give Hayes the election by a single electoral vote.
Tilden supporters claimed they’d march in force on Washington if their candidate was denied the presidency, shouting the slogan, “Tilden or blood!”
Each side claimed the other had engaged in voter fraud by stuffing ballot boxes, intimidating voters, and altering ballots after they’d been cast. With no constitutional means of resolving the dispute, Congress appointed an “electoral commission” to decide the issue.
The commission struck a deal: Hayes would be recognized as president, but in return, he’d have to appoint at least one Southern Democrat to his cabinet, remove all federal forces from the South, and end Reconstruction. This, of course, meant Democrats would be able to intimidate (and effectively disenfranchise) Black voters without interference from that day forward.
The irony of this is, of course, that the deal endorsed the same kind of cheating Republicans claimed Tilden had used to win the popular vote. Republicans were, in effect, willing to lose the war in order to win the battle for the White House.
Jim Crow revisited?
The result was that, for the next 80-plus years (until the Civil Rights movement), Southern Democrats were able to keep Black Americans from voting, and worse. They instituted poll taxes and literacy tests. The KKK and their supporters continued their campaign of intimidation and violence.
Having deprived them of their voting rights, they subjected them to perpetual poverty via the economic slavery of sharecropping. Then they segregated them into slums, barring them from “whites only” businesses, schools, and entertainment.
The compromise of 1877, as it was known, put Hayes in the White House for four years (he didn’t seek a second term), but handed the South to Jim Crow for nearly a century.
Today, we face a situation that seems like a replay of 1876: the prospect of a close election in which the underdog, relying on a nearly all-white party base, has already threatened to contest the vote if he loses. In fact, he’s pre-emptively declared that any vote he doesn’t win will have been “rigged.”
If history holds any precedent, the prospect of such a contested election should scare you.
Will Donald Trump’s supporters cry, “Trump or blood!” if he loses? Will they threaten a violent march on Washington?
And what if a disputed result forces some sort of “deal” along the lines of the 1877 compromise? What then? What would Trump accept in exchange for “allowing” Joe Biden to claim the presidency? And would the Democrats, like the Republicans nearly a century and a half ago, give away too much in order to win the White House?
One can only imagine what such a deal might look like in the hands of a man who considers himself the ultimate deal-maker.
Key distinction
Sam Tilden, like Donald Trump, was a New York politician born into a wealthy family whose followers were less interested in his policies than in beating the Republicans.
But Tilden and Trump differed in two key respects. Unlike Trump, who defended white racists in the Charlottesville (Va.) violence as “very fine people,” Tilden tried to distance himself from Southern white violence against Black Americans.
More crucially, Tilden knew when to quit: He entered the 1880 and 1884 campaigns as the favorite for the nomination, but declined to run either time. Trump’s goal has always been personal power, and he has steadfastly refused to step aside, either as a candidate or as president.
It therefore seems unlikely that he would be willing to strike a deal to step down, even in exchange for the kind of concessions the Republicans offered the Southern Democrats in 1876.
That’s a good thing, insofar as it wouldn’t create another century-long setback in the fight for civil rights.
But what would such a situation create? Would the bloody march on Washington that was threatened in behalf of Tilden come to fruition if Trump were to lose? Would he encourage such action? And what would the outcome be?
Would the military intervene? And on whose side?
Whatever might happen, such events would sully our nation’s reputation and create the kind of damage that might take decades, or even generations, to undo: the same kind of lasting damage created by the compromise that put Hayes in the White House.
Welcome (back) to 1876, America.
*Some historians argue that the Confederacy’s decision to wage war over slavery was really a fight for economic survival — because the plantation system depended on slaves. While it’s true that the South’s agrarian economy was heavily dependent on slaves, that’s certainly no longer true. Yet racism and the violence used to defend it persists. If it had really been just an “economic war,” the racism would have ended with the economic system it supported. It didn’t.