A great deal of time passed between the inconclusive Election of 1824 and the ratification of the 20th Amendment in 1933, of course. Time, that is, and history. In the intervening century, several wars were waged in which the United States was a participant, not the least of which was the exceptionally bloody conflict that pitted American against American between 1861 and 1865. Railways were built, and roads were paved, and the automobile became commonplace, and the first commercial airlines came into existence. And the telegraph, in a very real way, revolutionized long-distance communication, which the telephone accomplished again, and then the radio did for a third time. And in the midst of all of this, and presidential assassinations, and the rise of the motion picture, not one presidential election was again thrown to a lame duck Congress. At least one more election did come to an inconclusive end, ironically amidst the centennial celebrations of 1876. But while previous impasses had resulted from a failure of any candidate to secure a majority in the Electoral College, the Election of 1876 instead witnessed failures on the parts of several states in the South to agree on which of the two candidates had actually secured their votes for president.
In Florida, Louisiana, and South Carolina, it seemed, both parties claimed that their slate of electors had been chosen, the result of which was a stalemate leaving Democrat Samuel J. Tilden (1814-1886) with one hundred eighty-four of the required one hundred and eighty-five votes and Republican Rutherford B. Hayes (1822-1893) with one hundred and sixty-five. Neither party wishing to either concede to the other or else simply dismiss the stalemated states and proceed to a vote in the House, the result was a hastily convened bipartisan electoral commission which thereafter awarded all twenty disputed voted to Hayes. The point of this anecdote – if it has not already become clear – is to reaffirm the statement made above that no presidential elections were again decided by a contingent vote in the lame-duck House after 1824 and before 1933. The Election of 1876 came extremely close to this exact outcome but was saved by a last-minute settlement resulting from both public and private negotiation. Resorting to the House in some ways might have been the tidier solution. There was no precedent at all for the electoral commission that Congress ultimately convened, and the election itself – particularly in the three disputed states – had resulted in a distressing amount of fraud, intimidation, and exceptionally deadly political violence. Holding a contingent vote in the House, on the other hand, was a proven mechanism for resolving such disputes, and one which carried with it both the stamp of experience and the implicit imprimatur of the Framers of the Constitution. That both parties sought to avoid such an outcome, however, likely had little to do with which of the options available to them had been proven by experience.
Circa 1876, the Civil War yet loomed large in the popular memory while two southern states – not coincidentally, South Carolina and Louisiana – remained under federal military occupation. And while certain strides had been made in the field of Black civil rights – between the 13th, 14th, and 15th Amendments and a raft of anti-discrimination laws approved by Congress between 1866 and 1875 – violence, vigilantism, and electoral fraud directed against the Black community were still quite common in certain parts of the country. A contingent vote in the House, particularly if it dragged on through several ballots, would surely have brought all of the ill-feelings resulting from these developments to light, potentially igniting further controversy and making it that much harder for the eventual victor to claim a clear mandate to govern. It was likely for this reason – potentially among several others – that contemporary Democrats and Republicans settled upon the more contained and more expedient solution of an electoral commission. At fifteen total members, it could meet and conduct its business with relative ease and efficiency. And because its conduct was not public – and because both sides had agreed to abide by its conclusions – it’s members could transact their business without fear of excessive scrutiny. The result, as it happened, was what the situation seemed to call for. The commission worked quickly, delivered a decisive answer, and allowed the stalled election to conclude.
For the purpose of the present discussion, however, this might be said to have done little more than kick the can down the road. Having avoided another instance in which a lame-duck Congress was permitted to exercise a frankly terrifying degree of authority, the American people were once more given permission to ignore the fact that their system of government occasionally allowed such things to occur. And most Americans did ignore it for most of the next sixty-odd years. Congress continued to be sworn in biennially on March 4th, the ballots of the Electoral College continued to be counted quadrennially on January 6th, and while occasionally someone was given to remark upon the inconvenience of the delay, there nevertheless didn’t appear to be any pressing reason to alter this long-standing federal timetable. Woodrow Wilson (1856-1924) came closest to acknowledging the difficulties inherent to the same near the end of his second term in office when he conceived a substantially creative solution to his own potential relegation to lame-duck status. Apparently eager to prevent the American people from being robbed of decisive leadership in the event of his defeat in the Election of 1916 – the substance of which concerned the American position vis-a-vis the ongoing war in Europe – Wilson proposed that he appoint the victorious Republican candidate, former Supreme Court Justice Charles Evans Hughes (1862-1948), as his Secretary of State, at which point both he and his Vice-President, Thomas Marshall (1854-1925), would resign. In keeping with the Presidential Succession Act (1886), Hughes would then ascend to the office of President several months in advance of his scheduled inauguration on March 4th, 1917, thus obviating the need for a lame-duck chief executive in the midst of a potentially decisive period in American history.
In all fairness to Wilson – a man
whose legacy is complicated at best – he is to be commended on both his
conscientiousness and his creativity. That he believed it undesirable for the
American people to have to suffer his own lame-duck leadership after having
rejected his effort at reelection represents a greater degree of sensitivity to
the often-troubling ambiguities of republican government in America than most
American statesmen ever seem capable. The plain fact of the matter is, of
course, that none of it ever became necessary. Wilson was reelected in
1916, his two hundred and seventy-seven Electoral Votes edging out Hughes’ two
hundred and fifty-four. And so, for the better part of the next two decades,
the lame-duck issue was once more largely forgotten. Not entirely forgotten,
mind you, for there remained, as ever, a few thoughtful fellows about. One of
these, as it happened, was a Nebraska Republican named George W. Norris
(1861-1944). Elected to the Senate in 1913, Norris served until just slightly
over a year before his death and made a name for himself over the intervening
three decades as a champion of progressivism, liberalism, and reform. At the
start of his career, for example, he came out strongly in favor of the direct
election of Senators. During WWI, in the midst of a great deal of debate
between isolationists and interventionists, he ultimately arrived at the
conclusion that the entire conflict was the product of corporate manipulation. And
when Congress was finally requested to grant a declaration of war in 1917,
Norris was one of only six Senators to vote against it. In keeping with this
record of reformist iconoclasm, Norris also proposed, in the 1920s, two major
amendments to the Constitution, neither of which were adopted at the time. One
would have eliminated the Electoral College entirely, a reform arguably as
necessary as it is impossible to actually achieve. And the other would have
shortened the aforementioned lame-duck period.
At the time, again, nothing came of
this latter proposal. In the midst of a period of relative peace and prosperity
– compared, at least, to the rather tumultuous 1910s – few members of Congress
in the 1920s likely felt the need for a swifter transition of power. But then,
at the end of the decade, something catastrophic occurred. Between September
and November of 1929, share prices listed on the New York Stock Exchange
unexpectedly crashed. There had been warning signs, in fairness, as early as
May of that year when a notification from the Federal Reserve on the dangers of
excessive speculation led to a rapid sell-off that was only halted by a credit
guarantee on the part of banker Charles E. Mitchell (1877-1955). But while this
brief slump had the effect of sowing momentary doubt on the part of investors,
the market’s seeming recovery by June and July effectively allayed any fear
that a much greater crisis was in the offing. When the market began to crumble
for a second time in September, therefore, the popular response, rather than
damage control, was one of out and out panic. A renewed slump turned into a
slide, which turned into an all-out crash as investors responded to the efforts
of men like Mitchell to once again shore up the market by dumping all of their
assets and recouping as much liquidity as they could. By October 29th,
tens of millions of shares were actively being sold, resulting in the loss of
billions of dollars and an even greater increase in panic selling. At month’s
end, some stocks were incapable of finding buyers at any price and the efforts
of financiers like the Rockefellers and Thomas Durant (1861-1947) to staunch
the bleeding proved entirely futile.
The Great Depression (1929-1939)
having thus begun, the American people understandably looked to their political
leaders for a way out of the crisis or, barring that, some manner of solace. The
office of President, unfortunately, was then held by one Herbert Hoover
(1874-1964), a former mining executive and public functionary who’d made a name
for himself during WWI as a kind of technocratic polymath. A firm believer, in
the traditional Republican mold, in the importance of small government and
fiscal conservatism, Hoover first tried to spin the crash as a fundamentally
necessary market correction only to then advocate strongly against any manner
of federal intervention in the economy. Going “on the dole,” he said, would
only cultivate a culture of dependence, and the American people were better
than that. In place of direct assistance, Hoover accordingly proposed a raft of
private, state-level, and generally passive responses ranging from wage freezes
in the railroad industry, the continued funding of farm loans, a general
lowering of federal interest rates, and the creation of a federal agriculture
tariff. Such policies, Hoover hoped, would create a kind of cushion for the
American economy, ameliorating the worst effects of the crash while the private
sector and the states worked to repair the damage in the meantime. As events
would very soon prove, however, such a hands-off approach vastly misread both
the severity of the crisis and the mood of the country. When Hoover requested
of Congress the agriculture tariff that he had campaigned on in 1928, they
returned to him – at the hands of Oregon Representative Willis Hawley
(1864-1941) and Utah Senator Reed Smoot (1862-1941) – a whole host of tariffs targeting
both industrial goods and produce. Various members of Congress, it
seemed, in exchange for their support of the President’s measure, demanded that
industries in their home states also receive federal trade protection. The
result – arguably unsurprising in the midst of a nationwide economic crisis –
was a bill that raised import prices on several thousand items to record high
levels, the likeliest result of which was almost certain to be international
retaliation.
Business leaders and economists in some
cases literally begged President Hoover not to sign the relevant bill into law.
But while he was sensitive of the effects that the measure was likely to
elicit, the pressure from his party, his cabinet, and certain other voices in
the business world were evidently too much to bear. On June 17th,
1930, Hoover accordingly signed off on the Tariff Act, the result of which,
over the next several months, was a drastic decline in international trade.
Nations like Canada, France, and Britain responded by imposing retaliatory
tariffs on American imports, further squeezing the American economy and
worsening the ongoing financial recession. By the middle of the following year,
the nation was in truly dire straits, with unemployment rising to fifteen
percent while banks failed across the country and countless farmers had their
properties foreclosed on. In the midst of these unheard-of levels of privation,
Hoover’s continued opposition to direct federal intervention – combined with
his rather reserved personality – effectively transformed him into the cultural
embodiment of the American people’s collective misery. Viewed as aloof, cold,
uncaring, and rigid, the President was soon lending his name to numerous
features of the indigent experience, with shantytowns increasingly known as
“Hoovervilles” and discarded newspapers referred to as “Hoover blankets.” All
the while, the economy continued to flounder, a drought was shaping up in the
prairie regions of states like Texas and Oklahoma that would go on to
obliterate the productive capacity of some sixteen million acres of farmland,
and the federal government continued to preach the paramount importance of
strictly private and local assistance. The American republic, in short, was in
extremely rough shape.
As unemployment rose to twenty-three
percent at the beginning of 1932, President Hoover finally began to soften his
anti-interventionist position, though never to the extent that his millions of
constituents cried out for. In January, for example, he persuaded Congress to
authorize the creation of the Reconstruction Finance Corporation, a
government-owned-enterprise whose purpose was to lend financial assistance to
private entities like banks and railroads as well as public entities like state
and local governments. In July, he went further still by signing into law the
Federal Home Loan Bank Act (1932), the intent of which was to provide federal
loans to various sectors of the housing and real estate industries, and the Emergency
Relief and Construction Act (1932), an early public works program targeted
mainly at shoring up existing federal infrastructure. These were, to be sure,
much-needed measures, particularly as they sought to lower housing costs and
provide jobs for the unemployed. But ultimately, they did very little to either
speed the process of economic recovery or shore up Herbert Hoover’s flagging
reputation. The President, in fairness, actively hindered himself as often as
not. In defiance of the advice of certain of the era’s leading economists that
deficit spending was the surest way to speed the Depression along to its end,
Hoover and his traditionalist compatriots in the Republican Party insisted on
trying to maintain a balanced federal budget, the product of which was a series
of tax increases that did nothing at all to stimulate the economy while also
failing to generate the desired financial equilibrium. Furthermore, in response
to calls from local authorities to loosen the enforcement of – if not outright
repeal – the 18th Amendment in the hopes that taxes on alcohol sales
might provide a much-needed funding source, Hoover likewise remained
uncompromising, in large part because he feared losing the support of his party’s
prominent “dry” faction.
The man, in short, seemed almost determined
to undermine himself, a quality which all but guaranteed his defeat in the
forthcoming Election of 1932. The Democrats, of course, had not held the
presidency since the end of Woodrow Wilson’s second term in March of 1920,
failing even to capitalize upon the blatant corruption of the administration of
Republican Warren G. Harding (1865-1923). But as winter gave way to spring and Hoover
remained as rigid as ever, the prospects of the GOP began to look positively
dismal. While the incumbent president continued to encourage his fellow
Americans to allay their anxieties by remembering that the United States was
built upon a foundation of “personal liberty” and “free enterprise,” prominent
Democratic officials like New York Governor Franklin D. Roosevelt (1882-1945)
were developing and implementing expansive anti-poverty programs like the
Temporary Emergency Relief Administration, a public works project on a broad
scale that sought to provide employment, vocational training, and material
relief to those in the Empire State most effected by the ongoing Depression. By
March of 1932, Hoover’s prospects seemed all but non-existent while the
Democrats seemed destined to once more claim the White House. If what most
observers assumed would take place did in fact occur, however, the result was
almost certain to be an unusually awkward period of transition.
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