Think America’s never seen an election like 2016? Think again

Clinton and Trump: Two candidates that have secured their nominations, if not the love of voters. Party members bolting for the other side. Third-party candidates.  Allegations of corruption. Unseemly personal attacks. The next shoe…  And you may be thinking, no race for the White House like this has ever happened before. 

Maybe. Then again, there was the election of 1884.   

{mosads}That year was supposed to be a mild contest. Republicans had won five straight presidential elections in a row and most pundits predicted they couldn’t go six. They were defeated in the 1882 midterms by Democrats on the issue of civil service reform. Instead of embracing reform, they nominated former House Speaker James G. Blaine. He was widely known for providing legislative favors for railroads in return for cash. He had barely escaped prosecution in publicized Congressional hearings that had blocked his earlier run for the presidency.

Worse, more embarrassing letters mysteriously surface from a decade before where he asked for favors and then told the recipient to “burn this letter” on the back. These “hacked” letters from Blaine’s past are published. The corruption issue makes Blaine unpopular not just with Democrats, but also with reform-minded Republicans, a group labeled “Mugwumps,” an Algonquin word for holier-than-thou types.  

Many of these “NeverBlainers” pleaded to the opposite party to please nominate someone they could get behind.  

Significantly, they lived in New York. That state was the prize; it was the Florida and Ohio of 1884 with most of the U.S. population and nearly 10 percent of America’s electoral votes (double its electoral status today).

It’s a competitive for Democrats in this era because of Tammany Hall, and Irish-Catholic support. But a Democrat who took Tammany’s support would be shamed in the national press as a tool of the bosses.

The Democrats have an answer. The new governor of New York, Grover Cleveland. He has a reputation for frugality and honesty. He is from Buffalo, not New York City, and he’s bucked Tammany and vetoed pork barrel spending several times. Along with a VP candidate from the state of Indiana, it was a dream ticket.  

What could the split GOP do against “Grover the Good,” as he was known? Well, if you’ve got a flawed candidate, find some flaws in the other guy.

It doesn’t take Campaign Blaine long. A GOP-friendly reporter hears that Cleveland told politicians about a ‘woman scrape’ he had in Buffalo. Quickly it’s uncovered that Cleveland, a bachelor, has been making payments to a woman named Maria Halpin for years, to support a child he presumably had with her. The story is published. Forget tariffs, forget taxes, forget civil service. The election was now about Cleveland’s sex life and his morals.  

Democrats admit the story is true but insist nothing is wrong with his conduct. He was not married, it was a consensual relationship and Cleveland was unsure whether it was he or his law partners who fathered the child. To save his married law partners trouble and to help the woman and child, he paid support. Cleveland paid support for the child.  

But Halpin had a different story. She said Cleveland had pursued her relentlessly, and he was forceful and violent, and later promised to ruin her if she went to the authorities. This leads the head of Cleveland’s hometown’s Presbyterian church, Henry W. Crabbe to call him a “corrupt and licentious man.”  

Now the top of the ticket is damaged on both sides.  

There are no TV ads or Twitter feuds in this election, but newspaper columns and cartoons eat this story up. The flawed candidates were savaged in ink and watercolor. Blaine is shown as a circus geek show, with tattoos of corruption letters and bonds all over him. Grover Cleveland is depicted on a sidewalk, accosted by Halpin and the baby boy. The boy screams “Ma, Ma Where’s my Pa?”  

[[{“fid”:”119814″,”view_mode”:”original_image”,”fields”:{“format”:”original_image”,”field_file_image_alt_text[und][0][value]”:”Halpin political cartoon Where’s My Pa”,”field_file_image_title_text[und][0][value]”:”Halpin political cartoon Where’s My Pa”,”field_url[und][0][value]”:”Wikimedia Commons”,”field_folder[und]”:”1″,”field_free_html[und][0][value]”:”

Halpin political cartoon Where’s My Pa

“,”field_free_html[und][0][format]”:”full_html”,”style”:””},”type”:”media”,”attributes”:{}}]]

The screaming is so loud Cleveland’s cartoon hat blows off.

There’s more mud. A Democratic newspaper spread the rumor that Blaine had “betrayed the girl whom he married, and then married her only at the muzzle of a shotgun.” It didn’t stick.  

Republican newspapers added to this true scandal with more false stories and attacked Cleveland for avoiding service in the Civil War. This thrust was easily parried, as their own candidate Blaine also hadn’t served.  

With one candidate flawed in public affairs, the other in private ones, this was a close-call election. Attention turned to two third party candidates — the Prohibition party, which could steal votes from temperance-minded Republicans, and the Greenback party, which could steal votes from Tammany Hall Democrats, never Grover lovers anyway.

Nobody could quite tell what was going to happen.

But then a small comment made at a New York rally turned the contest. A Blaine supporter called the Democrats the party of “Rum, Romanism and Rebellion.” Attacking rum or rebellion was fair enough. But Catholicism? Blaine was in the hall at the time, but he never disavowed the comment (how could he? he didn’t hear it, he claimed). Irish-Catholics rallied to the Democrats. The Prohibition third-party effort took more from Blaine than the Greenbacks did from Cleveland, and he won New York by just a thousand votes out of a million cast and won the presidency.  

Unlike today’s Donald and Hillary contest,  there was never a visceral moment where Grover and James battled in front of an audience. The candidates made few statements or speeches. But 1884 marked a shift for its time, where reputable papers got involved in street-talk and rumors and where candidates were forced to address their flaws.  

Indeed, at the end of the contest the victors reflected the new world of politics when they embraced an embarrassing slogan. The GOP cartoon had asked “Ma, ma, where’s my Pa?” After November, the Democrats answered: “Gone to the White House, ha ha ha.”      

Carlson is the host of My History Can Beat Up Your Politics Podcast. Subscribe on iTunes and follow him on Twitter at @myhist.

The views expressed by contributors are their own and not the views of The Hill.