THE CARNIVAL CAMPAIGN

_Nonfiction

_{Puffs of steam and other lies}

_{THE CARNIVAL CAMPAIGN:
How the Rollicking 1840 Campaign of “Tippecanoe and Tyler Too”
Changed Presidential Elections Forever
By Ronald G. Shafer
279 pp. Chicago Review Press}

_{Reviewed by Marty Carlock}

_{There was a happy time in American history when presidential candidates did not campaign for themselves. They sat modestly at home and let their adherents extoll their virtues. This golden age came to an end in 1839.}

_{In December of that year the Whig party met to choose a candidate for the presidency. The Kentucky statesman Henry Clay expected to win, but the convention thought he had too many political enemies and, as a slave-holder, would be a loser in the North.}

_{They settled instead on ex-General William Henry Harrison, a hero of the Indian wars, who had been out of the public eye for so long that no one had any idea what his policies might be. Not to worry – the Whig politicos’ strategy was “never to defend or explain anything, but persistently to assail the other party.”} 

_{As nasty as contemporary politics are, they seem civilized compared to mid-19th-century journalism. An Ohio newspaper wrote that Harrison’s “imbecility and incapacity is universally acknowledged.” Anti-Whigs dubbed him Old Granny Harrison (at 67, he was the oldest man ever to seek the presidency) and called Whigs Grannycrats. In turn, the Whig press painted the Democratic nominee, president Martin Van Buren, as an effeminate dandy and an elitist spendthrift; they dubbed him “Little Matty.”}

_{Van Buren and his party were at first delighted with their opponent, who appeared so much less formidable than Clay might have been. That was before the Whig image-makers got to work.}

_{A journalist by trade, Shafer writes in straightforward just-the-facts-ma’am style. Diligent research provides the details that save his prose from boredom. Here’s part of the first rally/carnival, taking place in pouring rain in Columbus, Ohio, for Harrison:}

_{Cheering crowds lined the muddy streets. Hundreds of flags and banners waved up and down the parade route. Some read, THE PEOPLE ARE COMING. And come they did, with at least sixteen bands playing at full volume. Leading the way were scores of marching volunteer militia infantry soldiers from three counties in full military dress…Right behind the militia came a big canoe on wheels, pulled by eight white horses…Rising from the front was a forty-foot-high buckeye tree with a full-length portrait of the Hero of Tippecanoe in his prime.}

_{The parade continued with a grizzled veteran of the Revolutionary War on horseback, followed by a delegation carrying a ten-foot buckeye pole topped with a live bald eagle, then a fort on wheels carrying twelve cannons and forty men, a steamboat on wheels with a revolving paddle and puffs of steam, and a huge banner with a picture of the FARMER OF THE NORTH BEND, meaning Harrison, life-sized, pausing at his plow to sip a cup of hard cider.}

_{Everyman frontier images – raccoons, log cabins, barrels of hard cider – propped up the image of the candidate as a man of the people – as opposed to the bankers who were blamed for the prevalent economic hardship.}

_{But, says Shafer, it wasn’t true.}

_{The Whigs’ champion of the poor wasn’t born in a log cabin in Ohio, but in a Southern mansion on the family plantation sprawling over 1400 acres in Virginia. His father was a signer of the Declaration of Independence, and his mother a relative of Martha Washington. Dad was governor of Virginia; the family owned more than 100 slaves.}

_{William Henry was sent to college to study medicine, but when his father died unexpectedly, the boy quit college for what he really wanted to do, fight Indians.}

_{After 1815, he capitalized on his military fame to serve in the House and the Senate; as that career waned, he began angling for cushy government jobs. At the time of his nomination, he was clerk of a county pleas court.}

_{Van Buren in actuality was more representative of the common man. His Dutch immigrant parents farmed and ran a tavern. They couldn’t afford to send their children to college, so at the age of fourteen Martin went to read law with a local lawyer. In 1812 he won election to the New York legislature; within a decade he was a U .S. Senator. From there he climbed into the favor of President Andrew Jackson.}

_{The voters didn’t care about facts. They swarmed the Tippecanoe bandwagons. What’s more – another first – their man abandoned the tradition that candidates did not campaign and began to make speeches, although he never said a word about policies.}

_{The popular vote was close, but Harrison swept the Electoral College, 234 to 60. After his inauguration he spent a month complaining about the swarms of people wanting cushy government jobs. Suddenly he contracted pneumonia and died, the first president to die in office.}

_{Seldom have I found history so entertaining. Despite its terrifying parallels with the current election, this book was a delight to read.}

_~

_{Once a journalist chasing facts for The Boston Globe, Marty Carlock finds it’s more fun to make things up; her short fiction has appeared in a dozen-plus journals and quarterly publications. She’s author of A Guide to Public Art in Greater Boston and several unpublished novels. She sometimes writes for Sculpture and Landscape Architecture magazines.}