History Buff's Guide to the Presidents (23 page)

The David figure of newspaper editor Horace Greeley attempts to slay the warrior Ulysses S. Grant and his militarist backers. Goliath would win this battle by a landslide, and David would be the one to die.

On Election Day, voter fraud was prevalent, especially in the South. Results from Arkansas and Louisiana were thrown out altogether. In the Northeast, hundreds of women suffragists tried to vote and were arrested, including Susan B. Anthony. At day’s end, Grant’s war record and Greeley’s eccentricities made the result a foregone conclusion. The general won a second term with 286 electors out of a possible 352.

Greeley was to say, “I was the worst beaten man who ever ran for high office.” His exaggeration would soon become fact. In the span of a month, Greeley lost his wife of thirty years, the election, then his job at the
Tribune
, after which he checked into a mental hospital and abruptly died. Consequently, his votes were transferred to lesser candidates, making Greeley’s total count in the Electoral College officially zero.
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Though many accused Grant of drinking again, the only confirmed alcoholic in the race was Greeley’s running mate, B. Gratz Brown, a.k.a. “Boozy.” After several rumored incidents, Brown became severely inebriated at a campaign banquet at Yale, where he proceeded to deliver a slurred, rambling tirade against Ivy League intellectuals.

9
. A WAR FOR THE LAWYERS—2000

Al Gore telephoned his adversary a few hours after midnight, believing George W. Bush had won the critical state of Florida. When an automatic recount showed a gap of a few hundred votes, the Tennessean retracted his earlier offer. The first of the attorney exchanges began the next day, when Gore’s operatives requested a hand recount in key Florida districts. Two days later, Bush’s legal advisers solicited a stoppage of the review. Thus began a rich circus of baneful rants, public cries of institutional racism, and a president’s ransom in legal fees.

Starting things off, Florida Secretary of State Katherine Harris refused to extend a November 14 deadline for vote submissions. Though she later extended the cutoff by a day, she roused the ire of Gore people because she happened to be the co-chair of Bush’s Florida campaign staff.
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Next were the “Butterfly Ballots” of Palm Beach County, double-columned sheets with center-punch holes. When the election results came into question, county residents filed a protest in Florida’s Supreme Court, deriding the ballots’ design. Other counties experienced problems with their punch cards, many of which had incomplete perforations, adding the noun
chad
to the American vocabulary. While deriding the ballots as archaic, many pundits failed to mention that more than a third of the voting machines in the country were punch-type.
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Meanwhile, legal teams continued to file suits and appeals with reckless abandon, and judgeships responded in kind—from a federal judge in Miami, to the Leon County Circuit Court in Tallahassee, to the Eleventh District Court of Appeals in Atlanta. The Florida Supreme Court alone rendered verdicts in seven different cases. Finally, the U.S. Supreme Court stopped the recounts, leaving Bush ahead in Florida by just over five hundred votes.

Both political parties acted less than democratically. Bush never trailed, yet his attorneys worked diligently to hinder recounts. Gore’s advisers also moved to dismiss votes, specifically absentee ballots from the counties of Martin and Seminole. But the election itself was commendable for a number of reasons.

Differences were voiced through free speech, press, and assembly. Citizens petitioned their state and local governments, and though the country was divided in mind, the body politic peaceably abided by the rule of law. Partisan violence was virtually nonexistent. If any party was guilty of an offense, it was the one hundred million voters who declined to cast a ballot.
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The infamous butterfly ballot of Palm Beach County was designed by a Democrat, approved by both major parties, and published in local newspapers before the election.

10
. WILLIE HORTON AND THE PLEDGE OF ALLEGIANCE—1988

Until the late twentieth century, candidates rarely dirtied themselves on the schoolyard of personal attacks, leaving that work to news media, party bosses, and the general public. Much of that changed with the invention of presidential debates, and the nominees took on the role of party chieftain. Witness the race between Vice President George H. W. Bush and Massachusetts Governor Michael Dukakis, a contest that began with Bush promising “a kinder, gentler nation.”

It started blandly, with both sides selecting weak running mates. The Dukakis camp went with Texas Senator Lloyd Bentsen, an aging and distinguished congressman but exceedingly reserved and plain. Bush followed with a choice that utterly confused his constituents—James Danforth Quayle, a meek, unaccomplished senator from Indiana.

During the campaign, the nominees drifted away from major issues, opting instead for platitudes on flags, country, a strong defense, and the death penalty, enunciated with toxic strikes against their opposition. Bush emphasized the Pledge of Allegiance, a thinly veiled attack against Dukakis’s veto of a state law making the pledge mandatory in Massachusetts schools. But then came the story of Willie Horton, a convicted murderer who brutally raped a woman while he was on furlough from a Massachusetts prison. The Republicans saw their opening.

Bush’s campaign manager, Lee Atwater, vowed to “strip the bark off that little bastard [Dukakis]” and “make Willie Horton his running mate.” Ads featuring the Horton incident ran nonstop, along with other “evidence” that Dukakis was soft on crime. A GOP party chairman in Maryland, where the rape occurred, also distributed campaign literature featuring separate images of Dukakis and Horton with the caption: “Is This Your Pro-Family Team for 1988?”
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The Democrats were slow to point out that Dukakis’s predecessor, a Republican, started the furlough system, and that forty-two states had similar policies. California’s dated back to the governorship of Ronald Reagan, when two separate incidents of temporary release resulted in murder. Yet rather than exercise restraint, Democrats shot back with negative ads of their own, including the report of a halfway house program in Bush’s Texas, where a resident had molested and murdered a minister’s wife.
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For much of the disgusted population, neither candidate was worth a vote. Turnout hit a fifty-year low, as half the electorate stayed home. The other half leaned toward staying the course, and the vice president moved into the White House with 426 electoral votes to his opponent’s 111.

At the 1988 Democratic National Convention, Texas Governor Ann Richards won thunderous applause when she said George Bush “was born with a silver foot in his mouth.” Richards would later lose her governorship to another Bush, in part because she debated poorly against him.

In 1800, the federal government was spending ten million dollars per year. In 1900, the rate was ten million dollars every two days. In 2000, it was ten million dollars every three minutes. Even with adjusted dollars, Washington at present consumes money forty thousand times faster than when it first began. With such an open purse, it is not surprising that the country has seen periods of cost overrun.

The tradition is for one party to blame the other for the growing debt. In reality, the reasons are manifold, but there are two chief causes. One involves a rapidly growing population that demands a more perfect union, with established justice, ensured domestic tranquility, unrivaled defense, and copious amounts of general welfare. Through revenues, bureaucracy, technology, and a great deal of borrowing, political leaders have largely delivered on these demands and have been eager to do so. The word
help
never appeared in the first seventy annual messages from the presidents. In the last fifty years, the term has utterly littered the State of the Union. Barack Obama’s 2012 State of the Union Address mentioned “help” nineteen times.
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Yet by a large margin, the primary cause of debt has been warfare. Not “defense” per se, but major armed conflicts have swallowed public funds and resources faster than they could ever be replaced. As the following audit demonstrates, war has proven to be the ultimate nonprofit venture.

Listed below are the administrations that have overseen the greatest percentage increases in national debt. Notably, they are a relatively even mix of Democrats and Republicans, and they are joined by two Founding Fathers.
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1
. ABRAHAM LINCOLN (4,208%)

NATIONAL DEBT IN 1861: $65 MILLION

NATIONAL DEBT IN 1865: $2.8 BILLION

When he was a congressman, Abraham Lincoln fundamentally believed in pay-as-you-go government, covering expenses with increased tariffs, duties, and sales of public lands. He acknowledged, however, that deficits were “reasonably to be expected in time of war.” Farsighted as he was, Lincoln did not foresee that the federal debt would grow forty-three times larger during the course of his presidency.
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When the Civil War began, the federal budget was a modest seventy million dollars. Over the next four years, the Union navy alone would eventually consume over four times that, building an armada of more than one hundred steamships and ironclads. An army of fewer than seventeen thousand in 1860 grew to more than one million. There were more Union generals in 1865 than there were government employees in 1800.

Both the presidency and the Republican Congress attempted to control the cost of the conflict by enacting the first-ever federal income tax in 1861—3 percent on all yearly income above eight hundred dollars (well above the average earnings of most farmers and laborers). Spiraling expenses forced Washington to impose a greater burden in 1862—surcharges on cigarettes, liquor, stamps, inheritances, plus income taxes on anyone making more than six hundred dollars a year.
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Before the money came in, it was already spent, prompting Treasury Secretary Salmon P. Chase to demand the issue of a first-ever federal paper currency. Backed by neither gold nor silver, printed money would at least allow the broke government to keep operating. Congress agreed, and the Legal Tender Act of 1862 dumped $150 million in “greenback” notes into the economy. Nearly $300 million more would soon follow. When tax and paper failed to cover the margins, the government sold billions of dollars’ worth of bonds, selling them through brokers who gladly pocketed millions in commissions.
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