Michael Kazin: Permanent Campaign? It's a National Tradition
How much American political history do political journalists know? Take the ubiquitous claim, or complaint, that the presidential campaign is starting earlier than ever. Today's candidates, marveled one reporter, are subjected to "longer, more intensive scrutiny" than in the past. Why can't they emulate their predecessors and wait until election year to make their pitches and raise their millions?
Like most evocations of a golden age, this is a myth. In fact, the nearly permanent campaign has been a feature of American politics since before the Civil War, when mass parties first emerged to contend for the votes of a mass electorate, albeit one then composed almost exclusively of white men. In a nation of ambitious entrepreneurs and furious battles for market share, the race for the presidency -- as with most sales efforts -- has rarely taken a break.
It began with Martin Van Buren. Two years before the 1828 vote, "The Little Magician" began to build the first modern party, soon named the Democrats, in part to avenge Andrew Jackson's unjust defeat in the previous election. Van Buren secured the allegiance of influential pols up and down the East Coast and helped establish pro-Jackson newspapers from New England to Louisiana. A decade later, William Henry Harrison, who hoped to be the new Whig Party's first nominee, began touring key states more than a year before the 1836 election. Soon after losing that race (to Van Buren), the 64-year-old military hero took to the road again. After all, his party rivals Henry Clay and Daniel Webster were doing it, too.
During the final decades of the 19th century, the pace of campaigns accelerated. Fast trains, fierce competition among big-city papers and two closely matched national parties all produced a bull market for candidates seeking press attention and needing to develop a network of loyalists.
The prize for the earliest start probably goes to William Jennings Bryan. A month after his loss to William McKinley in 1896, Bryan and his wife, Mary, issued a thick account of the campaign whose title -- "The First Battle" -- made his intentions clear. The book was a bestseller, and the post office in Bryan's home town of Lincoln, Neb., was flooded with letters from thousands of admirers. Bryan's wife and brother used the correspondence to start a huge card file of supporters. By the spring of 1897, Bryan was wooing Democratic insiders at state party conventions....