4 Historical Elections That Prove We're All Petty Morons

Remember earlier this year, when Ben Carson -- the sleepy teddy bear who was iffy on whether or not his campaign was a pyramid scheme -- was running for the Republican nomination? Remember when he insisted he had tried to stab someone to death and -- for some unfathomable reason -- his opponents accused him of lying? It's not the first time that's happened.

The election of 1852 was essentially a stopgap measure. The Civil War was on the horizon and the nation -- like many couples just before a divorce -- was trying to find something irrelevant to fight about. Enter Generals Franklin Pierce and Winfield Scott. During the Mexican-American War, the Democratic candidate, Pierce, fainted twice. This would come back to haunt him. It also ought to haunt every man who has ever lived, since the reason he first fainted was because his horse reared and jammed the pommel of Pierce's saddle so far into his groin that he fell unconscious from the pain. Yes: Franklin Pierce's testicles were crushed until he passed out.

Waterman Lilly Ormsby
Just one of the many, many, many reasons nobody's ever filmed
a Franklin Pierce biopic.

This would be -- I think most people would agree -- ample punishment for a lifetime. But Pierce clearly had some really rough karma to pay off.

It's one thing to have your gonads shoved so far into your pelvic cavity that your brain shuts down all consciousness. It's another to have that be the central issue upon which a nation of your peers will decide whether you are fit to govern. But that is very much what happened. No less than the New York Times asked whether it was physical weakness or cowardice that was "the cause of his being unhorsed." The Whigs made it their central campaign issue.

John Magee
That's Winfield Scott taunting Pierce with, "Don't you wish you had my cock."
Not even Trump was that blatant.

And the Democrats fought back. Their strategy: Accuse Winfield Scott of not being a murderer. Back in his early years, Winfield Scott -- whose military nickname, "Old Fuss And Feathers," came from his obsessive attention to protocol -- served with General Andrew Jackson -- whose military nickname, "Old Hickory," came from the renowned texture and toughness of his genitals in an age before sandpaper. In 1817, Jackson challenged Scott to a duel and Scott refused for a number of reasons including, no doubt, the fact that guns refuse to fire at Andrew Jackson.

The duel was essentially forgotten until 1852, when the Democrats accused Scott of cowardice. (Cowardice was a big issue in 1852. If you didn't punch any man that gave you a sideways glance, you had your job and family revoked.) In case the relevance of this has worn off with the dates and names in the previous paragraph, let me restate what happened: The Democratic party thought someone was unfit for the presidency because he had refused to murder their own presidential candidate 35 years earlier.

Nathaniel Currier
"He fought in a war and now doesn't feel like killing? How can
the American people trust such a flip-flopper?"

Pierce ended up winning the presidency, proving the old adage "You can't not assassinate the president and still expect to be elected, especially if a horse has humiliated your opponent." And speaking of 19th-century Democrats and their foibles ...

Andrew Jackson, our nation's seventh president and the current stand-in for Harriet Tubman on the $20 bill, was not an easy man to anger.

No, wait, I have that backwards. Andrew Jackson was the easiest man to anger who has ever lived. He was anger incarnate. He was to anger what James Bond is to venereal disease: its emblem and proudest avatar. Andrew Jackson without anger would just be a deflated hickory-bark penis. When a would-be assassin shot at him, Jackson chased the man down the street and beat him with a wooden cane. Jackson fought a duel in the midst of holding his chest wound closed. Then he fought in somewhere between 10 and 100 other duels. Jackson was angry before he got out of bed most mornings.

Library of Congress
"He tried to kill me" was simply a convenient excuse for something he was planning to do anyway.

But Jackson was at his best when he could just go ahead and needlessly slaughter his political enemies or send countless thousands of Native Americans to their deaths. He didn't care much for social gatherings where he couldn't be rendered furious and willing to murder. A critical weakness, it turned out.

In 1830, John Eaton -- an old friend of Jackson's as well as his newly appointed secretary of war -- stopped getting invited to dinner parties. The problem was that Eaton had married a widow and former tavern maid by the name of Margaret Peggy O'Neal. Marrying a widowed tavern maid was, to 19th-century women, the moral equivalent of a necrophiliac rampage through a family graveyard. Washington society ladies, led by Floride Calhoun and Emily Donelson, Jackson's niece, led a social embargo against the Eatons. They wouldn't speak to them, call on them, or have them over for dysentery and yellow fever (the primary social activity in the fetid swamp of 1830s Washington, D.C.).

R.C. Company
"You can't shit with us!"

Jackson sided with the Eatons, but he and Martin Van Buren were the only members of his cabinet who did. The very real result of this very stupid fight was that Jackson A) asked for the resignations of his entire cabinet, B) accepted all of those resignations, and C) essentially promised Martin Van Buren the presidency once Jackson was finished with it.

George Peter Alexander Healy
What he lacked in wanton bloodlust, he more than made up for in mutton-chopped glory.

Now, of course, we can look back at this whole silly fight as the exercise in sexism and classism that it was. In the many years since, our collective cultural imagination has softened toward poor Peggy Eaton -- a woman socially ostracized merely for marrying too soon after her first husband's death. Early Hollywood demonstrated what a difference a century of hindsight and reflection can make when they tastefully titled a 1936 film about the whole affair The Gorgeous Hussy.

Metro-Goldwyn-Meyer
Whose best scene is, naturally, Jackson beating the dog shit
out of someone who annoys him for 10 seconds.

Having exacted a blood sacrifice from the African Savannah, Roosevelt returned home. Of course, none of this is relevant to the 1912 election, unless you are an animal on the African Savannah. The real significance of the 1912 election was Roosevelt's third-party candidacy. Anyone complaining about modern superdelegates take note: It could be worse. Roosevelt actually garnered more delegates in the primary elections than Taft did. When the 1912 Republican convention in Chicago rolled around, though, Taft's men simply refused to let Roosevelt's delegates onto the convention floor. Infuriated, Roosevelt withdrew his name from consideration. Two weeks later, also in Chicago, he announced his candidacy as part of the newly formed Bull Moose Party, named after two of the many animals that were terrified of Teddy Roosevelt.

Leonard Raven-Hill
Taft, meanwhile, was a moose who just didn't give a fuck.

The campaign of 1912 was the first time that a candidate actively campaigned on his own behalf. It was also the first and only time that a candidate -- clearly Roosevelt -- was shot and delivered a 90-minute speech with a bullet still lodged in his chest. The results of the election, to the relief of animals everywhere, were that Taft and Roosevelt split the Republican vote and Woodrow Wilson -- a moderate, if incredibly racist, Democrat -- won the presidency.

But how did Harrison manage to rise to his position as a historical punchline? What events conspired to bring to power this object lesson in the consequences of ignoring common sense? What feats of silliness elevated Harrison into the position of America's most irrelevant president?

One answer is booze. Or, more precisely, Booz. Harrison's 1840 campaign was the first since 1828 where a candidate opposing Jackson's Democratic party stood a real chance of winning. Andrew Jackson's big innovation -- the discovery that led to his two-term presidency and the election of Martin Van Buren -- was populism. Populism, for anyone who hasn't been following Donald Trump's potentially apocalyptic rise to power, involves an appeal to the base instincts of the masses. It involves a narrative of elites versus the common people and the myth of a self-made man pulling himself up by his bootstraps. It's a presidential campaign by way of a Garth Brooks chorus.

Hulton Archive/Hulton Archive/Getty Images
Pictured: The old-timey equivalent of a guy who calls a million-dollar loan "small"
and actually gets people to agree with him.

Harrison's populism, like Trump's, was complete balderdash. Harrison ran as a man of the people -- a rough-and-tumble emblem of the newly expanding West. In point of fact, he was raised in a wealthy Virginia family. His major claim to fame was the battle of Tippecanoe, a battle where Harrison's primary military achievement was to defame a whole host of Native-American graves, initiating a violent backlash against Western settlers and an entire franchise of Poltergeist movies.

Still, rather than painting him as an out-of-touch aristocrat with a middling military record, Harrison's opponents played right into his hands. A Democratic paper accused him of being a backwoods yokel: "Give him a barrel of hard cider and settle a pension of 2,000 a year on him, and take my word for it, he will sit the remainder of his days in his log cabin." This was a real zinger for a 19th-century editorial.

Library of Congress
"He would live within his means and not bother anybody, and the American people deserve better than that!"

Rather than deny the charge, Harrison's Whigs positioned him as the "log cabin and hard cider" candidate. Some Whigs actually started handing out miniature log cabins filled with whiskey -- cabins made by none other than the E.C. Booz Distillery, which, with the addition of an E, is where the word "booze" comes from.

(Another American phrase, "keep the ball rolling," also emerged from this election. Some Harrison supporters created a 10-foot ball covered with Harrison campaign slogans out of newspaper and tin. Then they rolled it for hundreds of miles across the country, presumably demonstrating something that was clear at the time.)

New York Historical Society
More clear is that, even back then, people loved voting for presidents they'd like to get shitfaced with.

So what can we learn from all of this? What do we make of the fact that a man who didn't have the good sense to put on a fucking coat in freezing weather won the presidency because he handed out liquor? Or that the hobnobbing habits of 1830s socialites actually determined the eighth president? Or that an entire dialogue of an election can center around a horse rearing into your penis?

Probably nothing more than that the cocaine-fueled jug band of American politics continues apace, and that our current election is just one more droplet in an ocean of absurdity.

For more ridiculous things that happened during election season, check out 5 Insane Strategies That Won Elections (And Changed History) and Daniel O'Brien's classic 5 Presidential Elections Even Dumber Than This One (Somehow).

Subscribe to our YouTube channel, and check out Elexploitation: 9 Shameless Ways People Milked The Election, and other videos you won't see on the site!

Also, follow us on Facebook, and let's bring back the Bull Moose Party.