The Thrill is Gone : Americans Weren’t Always Jaded About Politics. In the Days of Torchlight Parades and Great Oratory, We Were Crazy About It.

In 1888, as a marketing gimmick, the Honest Long Cut tobacco people sold their product with the contemporary equivalent of baseball cards, except instead of ballplayers, these were likenesses of the day’s 25 top presidential prospects. Evidently the cards were collected and traded, just as kids today might swap a Don Mattingly for a Darryl Strawberry.

Imagine such a time. Political campaigns were lusty affairs of torchlight parades, hearty eating and grandiloquent oratory. People were swept up. The Indianapolis Weekly State Journal on Oct. 9, 1856, chronicled a Republican rally of 80,000 supporters that lasted two full days. New Haven, Conn., home to 62,000 souls in the 1880s, generated 42 political clubs and 68 marching bands and other groups--for a single election.

It may be hard to believe in an era when a 50% turnout is cause for celebration, but during the last quarter of the 19th Century, almost everyone who was eligible to vote did so. The enthusiasm went too far at times; in 1892, when Democratic presidential candidate Grover Cleveland carried West Virginia, 12,000 more people cast ballots than were registered. But even without ballot-stuffing, turnouts of 85% to 95% were the rule.

In 1992, it seems, nothing can get most people near a polling place. We’ll be lucky, in this presidential year, if half the eligible voters cast ballots. In local elections, the proportion of voters who actually vote is much lower than this abysmal figure. The 44% turnout in last month’s California presidential primary was the second lowest ever.

American voter turnout is now so consistently low (in the presidential elections of the past 30 years, the percentage of turnout has been in the low 50s or 60s), it’s become an issue in and of itself. It’s said that we don’t vote because we’re disillusioned, unempowered, alienated, spoiled or irresponsible. We’re turned off to politics, the thinking goes.

None of this has much to do with what’s really going on. Actually, the big drop in voter turnout occurred 70 years ago. Turnout rebounded slightly in the 1930s and again in the early 1960s, but the last presidential election in which American voters came out in force produced Woodrow Wilson in 1916. If alienation and disgust keep people away this Election Day, those feelings are much older than the present Congress or the sitting President. The historical fact is that our leaders are no more silly and corrupt than ever.

The real difference is in how we amuse ourselves. In an age when people made their own fun, politics, political parties and, most of all, voting were a consuming aspect of the leisure and entertainment life of the American people. Before television and radio, MTV and the Super Bowl, the Democrats and Republicans enlisted everyone in putting on a show.

By contrast, today’s standard campaign is a bloodless, computerized affair of a few thousand participants in a nation of 250 million passive onlookers. Modern remote-control politics is so removed from the electorate that in California’s recent Senate primaries there was hardly any traditional “campaigning.” The race consisted of warring TV spots, and the candidates, who might have been holograms for all that the bewildered voters could tell, spent their time raising money--by phone.

But the gigantic voter turnouts that stalked the 19th-Century political landscape are by no means extinct. They’re just dormant. Lurking ahead of us, somewhere off in the future, is an election campaign that will stir the populace to the polls in a way that we haven’t seen in decades. And it may not be so far into the future: Witness the rise of Ross Perot, the presidential comet of 1992, whose wealth and newness have galvanized the electorate. But unlike campaigns of old, when the parties offered discipline as well as entertainment, the next big turnout will be a much wilder beast, because it will be roused by television.

Despite the advent of universal suffrage, American politics remains dominated by a ballot-wielding minority that is better educated, richer, whiter and more religious than the nation as a whole. Indeed, the dominance of this minority only grows. The politics of the 19th Century, by contrast, was firmly marked by the deep involvement of ordinary people.

Campaigns in those days were a never-ending gala of colorful processions, mass spectacles and huge manifestations in which the voters and their families personally took part. “At night marchers carried transparencies illuminated by the torches,” wrote historian Michael E. McGerr of a political campaign a century ago. “Parades lit up the dark cities and countryside. One witness to an Ohio parade said it looked ‘like the waves of a river of fire.’ Store owners lit up their stores for the parade, homeowners, if they could afford it, turned up all the gaslights, bystanders ignited Roman candles, and girls, dressed as goddesses of liberty, stood out on the lawn. Campaign buttons got more and more elaborate. There was much betting on the election by people who wagered money, dinner, hats, other articles of clothing. Sometimes losers had to push a winner or a pig around town in a wheelbarrow.”

Eating, drinking and merrymaking were an integral part of these marathon, partisan come-all-o’yas. There was lots of dancing, and starting in 1840, the election year that saw politics made into popular entertainment, people commenced singing campaign songs. Whole books of these were printed, replete with sheet music for a variety of instruments. They had bite and, sometimes, a bigoted tone. But they were emotional enough to build enthusiasm and help boost turnouts.

My name is Mike Dolan, I’m one of the boys,

I’m fond of good whiskey and plenty of noise;

I’m a rare politician you’ll freely admit,

Of conscience and honor have not a bit,

I’m called a repeater, but this is my trade,

I’m done with the pickax, the shovel and spade,

The Democrat Party depends on me

To give them a President don’t you see.

I’m a roaring repeater of Democrat fame,

And just from the state penitentiary I came,

For when the election is coming about,

The Democrats’ governor pardons me out. Campaign songs like this 1864 Republican ditty (about the opposition’s ballot-box stuffing) fell out of favor when Americans ceased to make their own entertainment; by the end of World War I these songs were all but eliminated by the phonograph, the movies and the radio.

Americans today complain about the duration of presidential campaigns, but in fact we have less politics in our lives than ever. Chicago 100 years ago was averaging one election every six months. People couldn’t get enough of them. In the New York City of 1880, the two parties needed no fewer than 72 primaries and 111 nominating conventions to fill their slates. The practice was to have a separate convention for every elected office, and far more offices were elected then than now.

Politics was in the air then, vibrant, violent partisan politics, with the clash and smash and ancillary chest-thumping of NFL football today. In the 1880s it’s estimated that fully 20% of the voters in the Northeastern cities took an active part in the many campaigns.

Will Hays, founder of the Hays Office that censored Hollywood movies during the 1920s and ‘30s and who later chaired the Republican National Committee, penned a recollection of his Indiana political boyhood that amply explains why everyone in the community would vote:

“In our county big glee clubs were organized by both parties, with the palm awarded in 1896 to the Republican clubs, both for size and quality. The Sullivan Republican Glee Club, composed of both your men and women and coached by a professional singing teacher, traveled around to the rallies in style. A huge wagon body extending out over the wheels, with a roof, curtains, flags and bunting, was further decorated with a string of ‘full dinner pails,’ the slogan of the McKinley campaign. . . . At all the chief meetings there would be excellent speakers, big crowds, the raising of a campaign pole 75 to 100 feet high, and a picnic dinner along with the raising. But a party pole had to be well guarded lest the opposing side cut it down in the middle of the night.”

THE OLD-FASHIONED POLITICAL CAVALCADE BEARS A close similarity to the earliest Tournament of Roses parades, before big corporations became involved, and to all the high jinks connected with college and high school athletic events today. It’s as though, sometime in the 1890s, the marchers behind the politicians peeled off and went their own way into the stadiums and arenas, where we can find them today. The culture that encouraged 90% voter turnouts was vanishing.

That culture included an appreciation for oratory that a Cuban listening to Fidel Castro’s three-hour speeches can understand, but which puzzles the modern American. Yet there was a time when getting to the meeting to hear “the speaking,” as it was called, was important. People were brought up to enjoy and be acute judges of good public speech, and young men everywhere were trained in it. Winners of elocution contests were as much admired as athletic heroes.

Few of us today could swallow the gigantic sound bites of yesteryear, even in the comfort of our own homes. Listen to this entry about a meeting in Farmington, Me., dated Sept. 4, 1879, in James A. Garfield’s diary: “Rainy as it was, nearly 3,000 assembled on the Common. Col. Moore of Nashua, N.H., spoke very effectively for one hour and I followed for nearly an hour, meanwhile a constant rain was drizzling, sometimes pouring down.”

Although people would throng to hear a good speech, they didn’t cotton to having presidential candidates going from place to place spouting off. It was considered undignified. (Garfield, who was elected President the following year, wasn’t a candidate for the office when he spoke in Maine’s cold autumn rain.) The office, people felt, should find the man, but it was left to the candidate’s political party and its hundreds of thousands of activists to carry the day for him. This led to the involvement of people in the campaign on a scale we cannot imagine. Vast throngs were in action everywhere, carrying out political ceremonies never heard of by 1990s Americans.

While the candidate sat on his front porch during the campaign, the party with its thousands of workers, some paid, many patrons, many volunteers, was out galvanizing every category of person in society to rally to the cause. When Republican William McKinley sat out the torrid 1896 campaign on his front porch in Canton, Ohio, no less than 9,000 railroad passenger cars carrying 750,000 people were brought to that famous porch to look on their champion and receive his blessing.

On one day alone, 40,000 traveling salesmen from 11 states came a’calling on Benjamin Harrison at his front porch during the 1888 campaign. Mary Lord Dimmick, his niece, remembered: “They wore linen dusters, high hats and carried parasols made of red, white and blue handkerchiefs. . . . Cheers upon cheers went up until Uncle Ben spoke and then, as always, you could hear a pin drop.” Uncle Ben made it a point to confine himself to platitudes but the masses left happy.

In the big turnout era, party nominees also didn’t give acceptance speeches to the national political conventions. The conventions sent delegations to the candidate formally proffering him the nomination. At the same time, the nomination was celebrated in “ratification” ceremonies throughout the country.

UNLIKE THE DAYS OF OLD, THE MODERN POLITICAL CAMpaign has almost nothing for people to do. (Part of Perot’s uniqueness has been his ability to energize volunteers to organize on their own.) Volunteers are an encumbrance, useful, really, only for Election Day activities, but it was the string of high energy, high excitement events that laid the groundwork for the big turnouts. “To do what we did in bringing out our vote, getting it registered and then polled required constant and very great as well as very expensive labor. At our great ratification meeting we have 50,000 life Democrats in procession. This was no small work to accomplish,” boasted Peter Sweeney, a deputy to New York’s fabled Boss Tweed, in 1869.

But America was changing. Thanks to rising costs, reform and technology, the campaign of 1888 was the last old-time classic. Cheaper paper, new typesetting systems and the development of high-speed, high-volume presses made a novel and low-cost way of campaigning possible. By 1896 observers were marking the diminishing number of bands and the winding down of the hoopla. “This is a year for press and pen,” said William McKinley of his own presidential campaign. “The sword has been sheathed.”

Relying less on people and more on millions of pamphlets, newspapers, broadsides and posters (the Republicans printed these in 12 different languages), both parties had set foot on a path that would one day take American politics to nine-second sound bites and 30-second commercials.

From a society of producers who made their own everything, including their entertainment and politics, the nation was becoming a society of consumers. Increasingly people preferred to buy instead of making it themselves. The body-thumping partisan competition that had been the hallmark of 19th-Century politics was softening as political fans turned into sports fans. Gradually, the home team ceased to be the Democrats and the Republicans.

Even the vitriol in campaigns softened. Nineteenth-Century politicians really put their back into negative campaigning in a way their modern day vanilla-pudding descendants wouldn’t dare. Every sort of mudslinging was common. In 1876, after Samuel Tilden, the Democratic presidential candidate, had broadsided the Republicans with a whiff of negative campaigning, New York Sen. Roscoe Conkling, one of the most important national politicians of his day, ridiculed Tilden’s claim that, as Conkling put it, “the Democrats had never elected to the presidency any man of as low standard of official life as the three Republican Presidents.”

Conkling shot back with both barrels: “Because one Democrat murdered Lincoln, I cannot see that it behooves another to tread thus rudely on his grave.” This would be like the Democrats today accusing the Republicans of having murdered John F. Kennedy and then laughing about it. In fact, juicy gossip and character assassination are entertaining and may well draw more people to the polls than they repel.

Another reason things changed was reform, a movement of democratic goals but patrician consequences. High-turnout politics is labor intensive and therefore expensive. The costs reached the point that even the robber barons, whose money helped to stoke the boilers of these machines, began complaining. Reform promised cheaper and ostensibly cleaner politics by lessening the power and prominence of the parties.

But it was the parties that got out the vote, not only directly through electoral activities but indirectly by propping up and subsidizing the small cells of social life from which the parties drew their strength. These cells played a crucial role in the community cohesion so often seen as lacking in American life today.

Party-based social and athletic clubs, once ubiquitous across blue-collar America, were the building blocks of political activity that got people to the polls. As late as 1930, 3,000 such clubs, with their little storefront club rooms, were counted in New York City. Chicago’s famous Richard J. Daley (the elder, that is) began his career in the Hamburg A.C.

As the political organizations grew smaller and less a part of daily life in America, and as the excitement, the entertainment, the camaraderie, pyrotechnics and us-versus-them rivalries drained from politics into sports and entertainment, it was inevitable that voting would drop off. With people listening to their radios and driving their new cars, the 1920s saw turnout plummet 30%, 40%, even 50% in some elections.

Back then, the reasons were clear. Historian William Slosson, writing at the time, explained: “So engrossing was the complex life of business, and so exacting the obligations of the life of pleasure, that politics was no longer needed as a popular amusement or topic of conversation . . . the fundamental cause seems to have been simply that people in general preferred the automobile and the movies to the affairs of the church or state.”

The shift in the nation’s political culture may explain why people don’t vote, though Congress is hoping to link applying for driver’s licenses with automatic voter registration, but President Bush is not keen about the measure. Still it doesn’t mean there isn’t a big turnout election slouching toward us. If it happens, it won’t be on account of painstaking door-to-door political organizing. Rather, it will spring to life thanks to a bolt of media lightning. The occasional power of radio talk-show hosts to upset Congress and local politicians gives an inkling of how. Perot, who understands all this better than his opponents, chose to use television’s “Larry King Show” to publicly affirm a candidacy he had already quietly launched.

Nowadays, something or somebody can catch on at any time. The mass media are conducive to overnight fads, and nobody can guess what form they may take. A media-driven political culture without the ballast and discipline of party organization can throw up anything in a few weeks. Call it pet-rock politics, and reflect on the mystery of why millions of little girls decided, yes, they, each and everyone, must have an ugly Cabbage Patch doll.

In Ross Perot the nation has a kind of Cabbage Patch candidate. Affiliated with no political party, unpopular with his fellow billionaires, a martinet with big ears and a less-than-euphonious twang, his meteoric rise in public favor couldn’t have been predicted, but only understood in retrospect. Like the Cabbage Patch doll, there’s no telling how long he’ll be popular or what that popularity will bring. In much the same way, advertising agencies never know which ads will actually move merchandise off the shelves. Some do and some don’t.

The chances are that Ross Perot can’t do it for the same reasons that most new records aren’t hits. A few will be and, every so often, one record will come along that smokes the charts and gets ‘em dancing in the streets.

A presentiment of what could happen may be found in Jesse Jackson’s candidacy of the previous two election cycles. It’s been argued that Jackson, a man with great media presence and no organization, drew people out from in front of the TV screens down to the polling place. Perot knows that television will make or break his candidacy, and has enough money to put himself on the air day and night. The results are already remarkable.

If Perot’s candidacy fails, we will still have had our warning. Someone someday will come along with the true juice of inspirational belief, the kind of belief that can make dead objects move and millions go vote. At long last, on that Election Day, the turnout will move above 80% or even 90%. Whether that will signal the revival of democracy or its death, no one can say.