President Lincoln issued the first American Thanksgiving Proclamation for the “gracious gifts of the most high” who “has remembered us with mercy,” in 1863 before the last guns of the Civil War were ceased. He proposed the fourth Thursday in November for this celebration. (A century later, presidents would often move the date back to assist retailers, allowing more time for Christmas shopping).
As a child I remember dressing up in white aprons and Pilgrim hats to recreate the “first Thanksgiving” in 1621 near Plymouth Rock, Massachusetts, a matter of wishful thinking. My mother would read a story for children she’d written about that event for, based on the way the story had been told to her. We have gotten a more complete picture since.
More than a century and a half earlier, George Washington also proposed a Thanksgiving celebration in 1789 after Revolutionary warfare had ceased and the Treaty of Paris signed (1883).
But annual celebrations were inconsistent UNTIL President Lincoln declared a federal holiday and encouraged Americans to celebrate in unison: “It seemed for me fit and proper that it (Thanksgiving) should be solemnly, reverently, and gratefully acknowledged as with one heart and voice by the American people.” (Words written by Secretary of State William Seward) If it was good enough for Lincoln and the Americans who were coming out of the Civil War, so might it be for us today?
We often forget, or maybe never knew, that Lincoln used Secretary Seward’s words because he remained in his bed after contracting smallpox at the time of the Gettysburg Address in Pennsylvania, November 19, 1863. The nation then also experienced the threat of fatal disease.
“I invite my fellow citizens in every part of the United States, at sea, and living abroad, to set apart and observe the last Thursday of November as Thanksgiving . . .to heal the wounds of war and to restore as soon as may be consistent with Divine purposes to thee full enjoyment of peace, harmony, tranquility, and Union.”
In 2020, one hundred and fifty-seven years later, we Americans find ourselves once again divided, not North-South, but politically so that in some places the division is within households, between spouses, neighbors, and friends who struggle to find common ground. For some this is not based on philosophy, or dogma, but on the parsing of “facts” that may or may not be. May we test the waters for one day and find what we HAVE in common.
This is America’s prayer for Thanksgiving to appreciate what we have accomplished together as a nation. To acknowledge the combined efforts of each and every one, for example, the newborns and students who give us hope for the future, mothers and fathers who have the honor and the responsibility to create the next generation, teachers who instill a love of learning, generation X and Z already seeking solutions, the military who are on the frontlines in war and disasters, and the health care workers all over America working round the clock to assist the Covid patients. Thanksgiving for all the families who share them with us, cooks who prepare healthy meals, those who make products to help us be productive and think about what comes next, those who help us maintain our bodies (gyms and pools), workers who build our homes, fix our cars, preserve and restore our health, and volunteers everywhere who spread their human glue to hold it all together. Thank you each and everyone.
This comes as a reminder that Americans have been in tight places before. Somehow, through Providence, hard work, or sheer luck, we’ve succeeded as a nation—always with room to do and be better, but we stuck together.
Lincoln, like other Presidents after him who did not want to frighten their constituents, suffered alone and came under greater physical threat from disease than we originally knew, according to recent scholarship.
We now know that Lincoln had a fever, became dizzy, very pale, suffered severe headaches, and back pains and felt ill prior to delivering the address at Gettysburg. His valet, William Johnson, a black man who went with Lincoln to Gettysburg, contracted smallpox after serving Lincoln there, and died of the disease upon his return. The President mourned the loss of Johnson in Washington and he himself did not recover for three weeks, not in time for the Thanksgiving he proclaimed. Lincoln began to feel himself around December 10, in time to prepare for Christmas and pray for peace the following year.
Peace would not come until April 1865, the same week in which Lincoln died of an assassin’s bullet. But after Gettysburg Lincoln was able to see the Emancipation Proclamation begin to take effect and by 1865 be believed that the country would remain unified and eventually become one again. Had he not survived 1863, the outcome might have been different. For that we can be truly thankful and pray again that America’s people look at the glass half full, instead of half empty, and work together to fill it up.
P.S. We may be on the brink of an even more difficult moment, but again, ours is a strong nation, created by strong minds and stronger people. This division did not occur over night and it won’t be resolved quickly. But small steps, like finding areas of common interest, being willing to see what can be achieved together, might help begin a reconciliation between those willing to bridge the gap. That could be how Americans slowly emerge from their bunkers and begin the painful process of rebuilding trust and believing again that we can find ways, however small, to work towards being one nation again.
Thanksgiving 2020: Looking for a common denominator to bring the family together? Why not pie? In late November, nary a cherry or blueberry pie would suggest the right or the left to commemorate the season. This is the season when bright orange pumpkin pie, or apple/pear simmered together, or maybe even maple-flavored, Texas-grown pecan pies rule the side table, tempting little fingers to sneak a taste. Orange may become the purple of the season, bringing us together. Who can quarrel with pumpkin?
Maybe this is one time when dessert should come first. Send sweetness flowing throughout the room, mellowing dinners before the main course, when verbal fireworks would be more likely to commence.
Celebrity chefs Scotchman Gordon Ramsey, Italian Emeril Lagasse, Americans Bobby Flay and Barefoot Contessa Ina Garten might not swear to the success of bringing on the familiar pastry first to greet their guests, as a panacea to family division. But I might gamble that Paula Dean and Rachel Ray would join America’s sisters, mothers, and grandmamas desperate to create a peaceful kingdom in the dining room and just bring on the pie!
Of course, politics is not the only topic that can heat up a meal. Religion comes a close second, along with the usual cultural battlelines we’ve leaned into during the 2020 campaign. But this season, politics is the topic that haunts us. Maybe it’s time to bring out the board games? My understanding is that Chess sets are flying off the shelves/online during the Pandemic. Maybe some dinner guests can help initiate the less experienced players as they dig into a more cerebral contest.
Union—Is it out there?
If you’re a Past Becomes Present reader, you know I began a few weeks ago looking into Jordan Blashek and Christopher Haugh’s book Union, A Democrat, a Republican, and a Search for Common Ground. One a Republican, the other a Democrat, crisscrossed America from New Hampshire to the Carolinas and Chicago to Mobile, Washington, DC to Northern California and Los Angeles, in an inherited Volvo taking the temperature of the nation, and sometimes struggled to maintain their own equilibrium along the way.
As they pulled their way out of the Oregon lowlands to Crater Lake, the green forests made Chris a little homesick for California’s redwood groves. Chris’s role now to help Jordan write the “manly maid-of-honor” speech for his sister’s wedding by the time they reached Sonoma. “So tell me about your older sister,” Chris asked in his speechwriter mode. “Jenna always protected me growing up, “ Jordan explained, even though they went to different high schools. “She went to one of the most liberal high schools in the country, and there was a lot of Republican-bashing going on,” he said, wincing at the memory. “At one point she’d had enough and stood up before a school assembly—about 500 people,” Jordan said.
Jenna took no prisoners. “All of you need to stop it,” she said. “My parents and my brother are Republicans, and they are still good people!”
“I’ll never forget that,” he relayed to Chris.
Chris finished writing the speech prior to his sister’s wedding, then they found themselves back on the road a year later as Jordan started year two of business school and Chris flew to California after writing in DC that summer. They headed to Tijuana but made a detour to peruse a Trump rally in Phoenix after Chris noted hashtags #PhoenixRally and #Trump.
After the speech and the posturing by the various segments of the crowd and counter-protesters, they saw how people engaged. “What gave us hope was that performances are not who we really are,” Chris wrote. “Performances are artificial, like the borders and lines we draw around one and other. And that meant we could overcome them.”
They headed towards Zion National Park in Utah before sunrise. From a plateau atop a valley, their discussion led to: “We humans will likely always separate ourselves into tribes, requiring us to give up a piece of ourselves in service to the group’s rules and mores.” This came after an evening drinking with Marines who pulled Jordan in as one of their own, after two tours in Afghanistan, and accepted Chris as his road-trip buddy.
Chris and Jordan gave homage to community, as we are different people with a range of ideas: ”Community makes us stronger, and when done right it makes us less suspicious and more noble-–be it churchgoing folk gathering on a Sunday for a homily, soldiers swapping photographs in a foxhole, or protesters singing the same melodies as those who came before them.”
Their trips around America revealed to them that “the stories we tell each other and the parables we whisper our children” pinpoint responsibilities that grow out of each and DEMAND GENEROSITY!
That brings us full circle. By immediately sharing your orange pumpkin pie with those who put their feet under your Thanksgiving table (or neighbors and friends out the kitchen door), you could help promote a positive Thanksgiving. By changing the mood before the meal, you could encourage your guests to select a non-famous person who makes them happy to be alive. See where that goes.
Jordan Blashek and Christopher Haugh, Union, A Democrat, a Republican, an a Search for Common Ground. (New York: Little Brown and Company, 2020)
When did primary colors invade politics? NBC, the first television channel with color (Remember the expanding wings of the peacock?) wanted to show off their Crayola colors on a massive wall behind their newsmen (and newswoman Jessica Savage) in 1976. The authoritative voice of John Chancellor and much younger sidekick Tom Browkaw explained states tinted blue were for incumbent Representative Gerald Ford, while Jimmy Carter’s states would display in red. (Ron Elving, “The Color of Politics: How did Red and Blue States Come to Be?” Nov. 13, 2004, NPR.) Those original colors came from Union blue, during the Civil War, and rebels from the South were red.
Reagan’s Landslide Turned GOP Red
But by the time of the Reagan landslide in 1980, his GOP states were switched to red, which were there in abundance with his 270 electoral votes to Carter’s 15. NBC called the election at 8:15 pm Eastern for Reagan. But not all the other networks followed the same color scheme
By the 2000 Bush-Gore match-up, Red (GOP) and Blue (DEM) were an established function of political analysis because the decision process continued, so the media map returned to home screens night after night. Eventually to avoid confusion, red became the universal GOP color and blue represented the Democrats.
In that contest political journalist Michael Barone described it in a Wall Street Journal essay: “The 48 percent to 48 percent cut in the 2000 election (became) two nations of different faiths. One is observant, traditional-minded, moralistic. The other unobservant, liberation-minded, relativistic.” Church attendance was a better barometer of the divide by 2000 with 59 percent of the GOP voters for Bush regular attenders vs. 39 percent of the church attenders for Gore.
A slight majority of the more than 3,000 counties in the United States have voted the same way over the past seven elections, up until 2016. All but 10 states have repeated their choice of party three times. The current red-versus-blue map was mostly written by 1988, when the first president Bush defeated Michael Dukakis. (Robert David Sullivan, “How the red and blue map evolved over the past century,” American magazine, June 29, 2016)
The keynote speaker at the Democratic National Convention on July 27, 2004, attempted to erase the metaphor for partisanship that red and blue had become. “The pundits like to slice and dice our country into red state Republican and blue states for Democrats,” Barack Obama said. “But I’ve not news for them. We too worship an awesome God in the blue states and we don’t like federal agents poking around our libraries (referring to the Patriot Act) in the red states.”
Obama Flipped Nine States Blue
Four years later Obama was the candidate for President and won decisively 365-173 in the electoral college against John McCain. The screens were royal blue that year. Obama flipped nine states from 2004: Colorado, Florida, Indiana, Iowa, Nevada, New Mexico, North Carolina, Ohio, and Virginia. He pulled in 69.5 million votes, the most since LBJ in 1964 until the 2020 election.
Moving into 2014, the division became two more diverse systems– red America: traditional religious, self-disciplined, and patriotic, and blue America: modern, secular, self-expressive, and uncomfortable with patriotic display. Flash forward two years: self-discipline appeared to be excused at the top.
The divide between the states grew deeper in 2016. The proportion of voters living in counties that were won in a landslide for the Democratic or Republican presidential candidate has steadily increased over the last seven elections and now makes up a whopping 60 percent of the electorate, according to Gregory Aisch, Adam Pearce, and Karen Yourish, “The Divide Between Red and Blue America Grew Even Deeper in 2016,” November 10, 2016, New York Times. Nearly all this 10-point increase came from Republicans in rural and small-town America, who swept Donald Trump into office.
Bill Bishop, co-author of the 2008 book “The Big Sort,” found that in 1992, 38 percent of voters lived in one of these landslide counties, defined as being won by over 20 percentage points or more. This shift reflects the tendency of like-minded people to live near one another. Lifestyle, which drew people together in the past, has come to be reflected in politics.
By 2019, 64 percent of white Christians were Republicans and 30 percent white Christians were Democrats. (Ronald Brownstein, “How Religion Widens Partisan Divide,” CNN, October 22, 2019). Among Evangelicals, which make up 16 percent of the US population, 75 percent vote GOP (including a portion of the Hispanic vote) and 19 percent Democrat, which came into play in 2020, but the white suburban women helped make up the difference for the Democrats. As church attendance continues to drop, even the Evangelicals who provide the foundation for the GOP base could be less plentiful. Demographic changes as the aging White population disappears and people of color increase in parts of the country.
So where are we by 2020? Have we been convinced that people that reside in either the red or blue states, depending on our own preference, are so different from us that it would be difficult to live next door? Do people pick their location based on politics, or work, or family? Or has this political shorthand cast the people on the coasts in opposition to those in the middle and those in the upper Midwest against their neighbors and their Western neighbors?
Political writer David Brooks does not characterize this as a Wild West scenario. In “Nation Slightly Divisible,” in The Atlantic, December 2001, he saw it more like a high school cafeteria with the Jocks and the Nerds, the Creatives, the Cheerleaders, etc. where there are cracks, not division cleaved with a knife. For his article, he traveled from Blue Montgomery County in Maryland 65 miles north into Red Franklin County, Pennsylvania (a trip he or someone might need to repeat to explain where we are today after the election of 2020). He realized then as we understand now that there are differences that suggest not just political, but also cultural and demographic between the states. The Red vs. Blue system is based on a winner-take-all electoral college vote distribution by 48 states (not Maine or Nebraska, they split their electoral votes by congressional district and statewide).
At the local level, individual members of those parties have a variety of positions and outlooks, so that nearly every town, city and patch of farmland in the country is “purple,” a mix of neighbors, friends, and family, each of whose own mixed political preferences tip the scale to vote for one side or the other in a contest. They cannot be reduced to red or blue. Purple maps were drawn showing this idea in 2004, to consider the nation as less divided, made up by individuals. (Phil Fox Rose, “We Are All Purple: The Destructive Lie of Red States and Blue States,” Patheos, November 7, 2012.
What would it take to bring America together?
Brooks may have seen different world views when he spoke to residents of Franklin County nearly two decades ago. Issues that burn hot today–health care, racial justice, climate change, law enforcement, international engagement, and the economy—were important, but not as critical as they are now. The cost of living was cheaper where they live, and they appreciated the slower pace of life and the beauty of rural life. It was their choice to live in a small town where they knew most everybody. The coastal cities were far away, and they liked it that way.
Then post 911 the country came together after the shock of an attack on American soil that took 3,000 lives at three locations. Today’s threat to our families nationwide does not have the impact of a loaded 737 crashing into and destroying the Twin Towers. The threat is invisible until it strikes. By the end of July, it infected 9 percent of Americans. About one-third of these were in densely populated places like New York City, leaving those in small towns and rural areas to sigh in relief.
Now Covid-19 comes around for a second, and in some places third time, just in time for Thanksgiving, at least an awareness of the danger creeps across the nation. Smaller communities now being hit are farther from major health care facilities that could treat an outbreak. ICUs and hospital beds in small and medium-sized communities are reaching capacity. Since the beginning there has been a reluctance to wear masks and socially distance in parts of the country that believed they were immune or feared the financial loss due to closed businesses outweighed the danger of the disease. Now we are in this together: 10,904,891 Americans have been infected since March and 245,600 people have died. It might be time to find a way to treat this as a universal threat that could bring a purple agreement to save lives and prevent further loss of businesses before a vaccine eventually is available nationwide in spring or summer 2021.
Democracy word play, GoGraphics This image outlines some of the elements that play a part in America.
While Americans were eager to find out who would be the 46th U.S. President this week, I went backwards in time to discover the 1876 election of the 19th President. After President U.S. Grant left the stage under the cloud of Teapot Dome, whether deservedly or not, the 1876 Rutherford Hayes-Samuel Tilden Presidential race came on with all the steam the Republicans and Democrats could muster. Smithsonian Magazine called it “The Ugliest, Most Contentious Presidential Election Ever.”
When Republican Rutherford Hayes went to bed election night, Democrat Samuel Tilden led in the popular vote, eventually stretching ahead 260,000 votes. But eventually there were 19 electoral votes in dispute that denied the Electoral College to either candidate. (Stay tuned for key tips about the Electoral College.)
Trivia questions: 1) Who were the Five Presidents who lost the Popular Vote, but won the election?
2) Which Presidential election yielded the highest number of voters?
A bipartisan Electoral Commission went to work and devised The Compromise of 1877, which seems from here to have been a dirty bargain. During intense closed-door meetings, Democratic leaders agreed reluctantly to give Hayes all 20 outstanding electoral votes in return for the withdrawal of federal troops put in place after the Civil War in the last two still-occupied states—South Carolina and Louisiana. Republicans agreed to several handouts and entitlements, including federal subsidies for a transcontinental railroad line through the South (which never materialized).
The compromise ended Reconstruction and turned the South over to the Democratic “Redeemers,” who disenfranchised black voters. Jim Crow laws were strengthened in the South, suppressing Black votes and within time pushed a vast migration from the South into the Northern industrial towns. Support for Reconstruction had dwindled as plummeting cotton prices ushered in the economic downturn of 1873 and the severest depression the South had experienced since 1861-65. This paired with the allegations of corruption in Republican Grant’s Administration helped Democrats win control of the House in the 1874 Midterm Election—for the first time since the war.
We cannot determine what the results would have been if a fair election had been held without the violence and intimidations throughout the South that disenfranchised many African Americans made eligible to vote under the 15th Amendment. But it is likely that Hayes would have won 189 electoral votes to Tilden’s 180. (The term “bulldoze” came from this election — meant to intimidate by violent means, sometimes by whipping or flogging. Both Democrats and Republicans used this intimidation technique on political opponents and African Americans in Southern states, particularly Louisiana). Black voters now eligible to cast a ballot under the Fifteenth Amendment made up the majority population in South Carolina, Mississippi, and Louisiana would likely have voted for Republican Hayes. Florida with a majority White population would have gone to Tilden.
Wonder why America did not address racial issues during the Bicentennial?
Three years prior the Supreme Court came into play, not in the election per se, but through the Slaughterhouse Cases, which delivered a blow to Reconstruction. The Court ruled the 14th Amendment’s promise of due process and equal protection covered violations of citizen’s rights by the states, but not by individuals. This ruling made it more difficult to prosecute anti-Black violence perpetrated by the Klan and White supremacist groups, disenfranchising Black voters and reassert White control of the South. In 1876 the Supreme Court overturned the convictions of three white men convicted in connection with the massacre of more than 100 Black men in Colfax, Louisiana, three years earlier, as part of a political dispute. The men had been convicted of violating the 1870 Enforcement Act, which banned conspiracies to deny citizens’ constitutional rights and had been intended to combat violence by the Ku Klux Klan against Black people in the South.
Election 1876: Historic voter turnout
This election was the second of five presidential elections in which the person who won the most popular votes did not win the election (see Trivia question), but the only one in which the popular vote winner received a majority of (rather than a plurality) the popular vote—Tilden 50.9% to Hayes 47.9%. In the end, Hayes recorded the smallest electoral vote victory (185 Hayes – 184 Tilden). This election yielded the highest voter turnout of eligible voters in American history (81.8%). Final tallies for 2020 election are running at 41%, although the vote totals for mail-in ballots, triggered by the Pandemic, will likely be the highest number of ballots cast, but there were fewer Americans in 1876, so the percentage was higher.
President U.S. Grant considered running for a third term, but in 1873, the House by a vote of 233-18 passed a resolution declaring the two-term tradition put in place to prevent a dictatorship. This came for two reasons, to follow George Washington’s two-term example, and because the Teapot Dome and other financial shenanigans had come on Grant’s watch, whether he was involved or not the buck stopped on his desk.
The Republican National Convention had met in Cincinnati, Ohio, giving Ohio Governor Hayes a leg up and helping him reach 384 by the seventh ballot. In St. Louis, Tilden, the New York Governor and prosecutor who sent political boss William M. Tweed to jail, had a clear path among the Democrats from the beginning, eventually receiving 738 votes.
Here are accounts of each candidate, neither completely capturing its subject: Henry Adams, a historian of the period, said of Hayes, a wounded Civil War Major General: “A third-rate nonentity whose only recommendation was that he is obnoxious to no one.” Newspaperman John Defers described Tilden: “A very nice, prim, little withered-up, fidgety old bachelor, about 120 pounds avoirdupois (overweight), who never had a genuine impulse for many or any affection for women.” A bit cruel, in this era maybe even libelous without facts to back it up, but a picture from one reporter. (Holt, Michael F., By One Vote, University Press of Kansas, 2008, pg. 129)
Southern states and future elections
No Republican presidential candidate until Warren G. Harding in 1920 would carry any state that seceded and joined the Confederacy. That year he carried Tennessee, which never experienced a long period of occupation by federal troops well before the first Presidential election of the Reconstruction period (1868).
Long memory in the South: None of the Southern states that experienced long periods of occupation by federal troops after the Civil War (until 1876) was carried by a Republican again until Herbert Hoover in 1928. (He won Texas, Florida, North Carolina, and Virginia.) This was the last election in which the Republican candidate won Louisiana until 1956, when World War II General Dwight D. Eisenhower carried it. And the last in which the Republican candidate won South Carolina, until 1964 when conservative Republican Barry Goldwater carried it along with four other Deep South states (Louisiana, Alabama, Mississippi, Georgia), and his home state—Arizona, but nothing else. When we look at the birth of Red states and Blue states next week, we will see what changes have taken place.
The Electoral College—how did it come to America?
The Holy Roman Empire used an Electoral College from the Middle Ages through 1792. When the Founders met in Philadelphia for the Constitutional Convention (1787), this was one of the more challenging issues. The greatest number did not want Congress (and its politicians) to select the President, but rather the American people. Electors were to be from each state, but NOT politicians.
Actually “Electoral College” does not appear in the U.S. Constitution. Article II of the Constitution and 12th Amendment to the Constitution refer to “electors” not the College. The words do not appear in federal law until 1845.
Today the electors are bound either to a political party or a state
Nothing is in the Constitution about how the states allot the electoral vote. Now all the states, except Maine and Nevada, have passed laws giving electoral vote to the candidate who wins the popular vote in that state. Electors are no longer independent but promised to the state’s winner. They gather in their state capitols about six weeks after the election to cast their ballots.
Founders expected the House of Representatives would decide if no one won majority—each state one vote.
Founders figured there would be lots of candidates, which would help decide the electoral vote. In the beginning, there were no separate ballots for Vice President. The person with the second most votes became VP. But early on (see Jefferson-Burr run off) this did not work out, so they changed it. National parties formed and number of political parties shrank. Only two Presidential elections have been decided by House—the last in 1824 John Quincy Adams v. Andrew Jackson.
Much talk occurs during every Presidential Election about whether the system would favor the popular vote without the Electoral College, but then smaller states and rural areas might be short-changed. Eliminating the Electoral College is easier said than done, since to do so would require a 2/3 supermajority in Congress to pass a Constitutional Amendment. Then the amendement would need to be ratified by 2/3 vote in each of the states. A high bar.
Next week: How did America become divided into Red Republican states and Blue Democratic states?
Trivia 1) 5 elected Presidents John Quincy Adams beat out Andrew Jackson, who led in popular vote in 1824 and was ahead in the Electoral College, but Jackson lacked the winning number in the Electoral College. Jackson was shy 32 electoral votes, so it went to the House. After another deal, Adams won.
Rutherford Hayes (above) 1876
Benjamin Harrison 1888 beat Democrat Grover Cleveland, who won popular vote by 90,000. Cleveland lost electoral vote 233-168. Following election Cleveland took the prize.
George Bush 2000. Al Gore took the popular vote by 500,000, but the electoral votes came down to Florida and Gore lost, 271 to 266.
Trivia 2. An overwhelming number of Americans voted in 2020, but per capita the number of eligible voters who cast a ballot in 1876 nearly doubled 2020’s percent with 81% voting. At the time of this writing 41% of those Americans eligible to vote in 2020 did. About 150 million Americans out of 239, 931, 921 eligible voters. Not all 309 million Americans are eligible. (Census figure)
Notes: Gilbert King, “The Ugliest, Most Contentious Presidential Election Ever,” (Tilden’s opposition had called him everything from a briber to a thief to a drunken syphilitic.) September 7, 2012, Smithsonianmag.com
John Kelly, “What in the Word?” The racist roots of bulldozer, Oxford Dictionaries, Oxford University Press.
Between 1828- 1928. Voter Turnout in Presidential Elections: 1828-2008. The American Presidency Project. University of California, Santa Barbara.
Keith Ian Polakoff, The Politics of Inertia:The Election of 1876 and the End of Reconstruction (1973)
Table 397. Participation in Elections for President and U.S. Representatives: 1932 to 2010. Census Bureau. Statistical Abstract of the United States: 2012. U.S. Census Bureau.
Morris, Roy, Jr. (2003) Fraud of the Century: Rutherford B. Hayes, Samuel Tilden, and the Stolen Election of 1876. New York: Simon and Schuster, pp. 168, 239. ISBN 978-0-7432-5552-3.
Australians, you knew they might have a different take on it. Honest, it is the “barbie” for them. They are concerned to find the best BBQ place before selecting a polling place. Seems they queue up to grab their customary “Democracy Sausage.” The queue for the meat is often longer than the queue to vote.
Our neighbors, the Canadians, according to researcher Brandon Tozzo, pre-register when they file taxes and are mailed a slip with the location to vote. There are dozens of voting places in a riding (decided by a non-partisan federal institution) that is well staffed. A voter goes in, shows their voting slip, and casts a ballot. Rarely takes more than five minutes (course there are fewer Canadians, mainly stuffed near their southern border by the cities, but others are spread out throughout a vast wilderness).
One Canadian commentator in Ontario wrote that a nonpartisan national commission runs the election, while another note: “I’ve waited longer for a bus than I have ever waited to vote.”
An Irish woman told researcher Tozzo: “20 minutes (it took me to vote) but that was because I met a neighbor, then a friend, then knew the returning officer so said hello, then finally voted.
“Took another hour to leave the pooling station, nothing like an election for Irish people to get a chance to chat.”
Folks in Norway, Germany and other European countries said there were plenty of placed to drop off ballots ahead of time and that unlike in the U.S., most polling locations were a short walk from home. (In fairness these countries are more compact that the United States, which adds to the challenge.)
Voting is simplified in a variety of countries from Germany to Israel by scheduling Election Day on a weekend—thus not cutting into a working day or complicating day care for families (although children are welcome in polling booths in the U.S.)
One man from India, the second most populous country in the world, points out his country handles more ballots than any other democracy in the world. At the same time India has a higher level of illiteracy than the U.S. and a lot more people vote in India than in the U.S., but still without these long lines.
Some Appreciate the Enthusiasm
Some like Annie of Austin, TX, waiting in the dark and cold with friends for the polls to open on the first day of early voting, see enthusiasm in the line wrapped around the building and down the street. Pizza to the Polls in Austin, TX, came to the aid of voters there. The company vowed to “make democracy delicious” by delivering free food to all polling places with long lines. They reported scanning twitter for locations and have sent 2, 418 pies in 2020.
Roland Martin from Atlanta said he had voted all his life, but he had tears rolling down his face in his car outside Friendship-West Baptist Church in Atlanta. He drove up and saw a long line rolling down the street and felt honor in the length of the line.
Former Congressman John Lewis 1940-2020
Martin remembered civil rights leader John Lewis, who played a pivotal role in the Selma, Alabama march and later served decades in Congress. In July he was buried from Martin Luther King’s church in Alabama. Lewis’s words came to Martin: “The vote is the most powerful nonviolent tool we have.”
American citizens have different opinions about what the voting experience should be. Voting in America, particularly registering to vote, is more complicated than it needs to be. Yet as of Sunday, November 1, 2020, a total of 93 million early ballots have been cast 68% of the total votes cast in the 2016 Presidential Election. After the Pandemic we need to devise a simpler means of voting—polling places that don’t vary or confuse voters and a simpler mailing process, which will be proved a safe means of balloting after this election—moving closer to the true meaning of democracy.
Next week well have Part 2 of Union, the story of a cross-country road trip by two college graduates talking with Americans on all sides of the political circle. This story about polling around the world seemed to fit in better right now.
Past Becomes Present.Blog 