The Forgotten Precedent for Our ‘Unprecedented’ Political Insanity
The decades after the Civil War saw mass participation and mass outrage, followed by a period of orderly reform. What can we learn from that era today?
By JON GRINSPAN
04/24/2021 07:00 AM EDT
Jon Grinspan is curator of political history at the Smithsonian’s National Museum of American History. His new book is The Age of Acrimony How Americans Fought to Fix Their Democracy, 1865-1915.American democracy has had a rough few years. We seem to have worn out the word “unprecedented.†Even if the pace of the news out of Washington has slowed in the Biden era, the respite still feels precarious.
But if you look back further in history, American democracy has seen some crazy before. In fact, in the years between the Civil War and the turn of the 20th century, U.S. politics was far more unruly, violent and corrupt than it’s been before or since, for politicians and ordinary Americans alike. It was a period of mass participation, but also mass outrage. Even as millions turned out to vote, march and fight, many agreed with the populist newspaper the Nonconformist when it grumbled, “we are the worst governed country on the face of the earth.â€
It might be hard to accept that the political worries of a nation of mutton-chopped Rutherfords could feel as urgent as our own. But the volume of politics in the late 1800s drowns out anything any living American has experienced. For one thing, that era saw the highest turnouts in U.S. history. Imagine if, instead of the impressive 66 percent of eligible voters who went to the polls this past November, the 2020 election drew a turnout of 82 percent, as in 1876. Or if, instead of being decided by hundreds of thousands of votes in half-dozen swing states, elections were won, as in 1884, by just 1,047 voters in one state. Or if, instead of lies about widespread fraud, tens of thousands of votes really were stolen at each election.
Imagine a 2020 every four years, for 40 years.
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https://www.politico.com/news/magazine/2021/04/24/forgotten-precedent-unprecedented-politics-age-of-acrimony-484072
