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Presidential campaigning in a nobler era

by Jack Neely

Everyone I know is pretty sure that presidential politics have sunk to a whole new low. Veterans are questioning other veterans’ medals; there are sneaky allegations about divorce files; websites make insinuations of closet homosexuality and long-ago drug abuse; former professors make revelations about bad grades and bad attitudes.

Our forefathers would be astonished. Mostly, perhaps, by our politeness.

In another election, 168 years ago, many of President Andrew Jackson’s former allies, especially in Tennessee, believed the old man had turned tyrant, that he was circumventing democracy for his own ends. Jackson seemed confident that he could parlay patriotism and his own hero status into a shoo-in victory for his designated successor, Jackson toadie Martin Van Buren.

The election of 1836 proved several truths: one, that when it comes to politics fellow veterans don’t necessarily respect each other much, even their former commanding officers.

Davy Crockett specifically loathed what Jackson was doing to the Cherokee. The Tennessee congressman was then best known as a writer; his uninhibited autobiography was a blockbuster national bestseller of 1834. His readers wanted a followup, and Crockett was happy to oblige.

But some readers might have been disappointed that his followups weren’t quite as funny: one of the rootin’ tootin’ frontiersman’s next books turned out to be a biography of Martin Van Buren, the vice president from New York. The subject was the biographer’s sworn enemy.

Just before publication, Crockett promised, “If, when you read it, you don’t say I’ve used him up, I’m mistaken...”

Curious about how political partisans expressed themselves in those straight-shooting days, I went over to the public library’s McClung Collection in the new history center on Gay Street. There, a few yards away from the case containing Crockett’s rifle, Betsy, I read his last couple of books.

“Statesmen are gamesters, and the people are the cards they play with,” Crockett opens The Life of Martin Van Buren. “The people are tricked and cheated and, what is worse, they are satisfied to stay so.” Crockett had help writing the book, but the sentiments are his own.

Crockett figured his book “will convince every man...whose mind is not stupid as a drunken postmaster, as deceitful as an office-seeking Congressman” of his carefully considered opinion which was, more or less, that Van Buren was a twit.

“Martin Van Buren is not the man he is cracked up to be,” Crockett wrote. “If he is made president of the United States, he will have reached a place to which he is not entitled, either by sense or sincerity....

“He has become a great man without any reason for it,” he wrote, and added, as if to prove his humility, “and so have I.”

“He stands well with himself, and thinks if he ain’t fit for the office, he can make the people believe he is.”

The book flirts with libel. Comparing Van Buren to, in Crockett’s own assessment, “dung,” the Tennessean elaborated further that the vice president was “secret, sly, selfish, cold, calculating, distrustful, treacherous.”

Worse, the congressman from Tennessee explained, Van Buren just looked silly. Crockett, who still had a full head of hair at 50, cited the vice president’s baldness—“which reaches all round and over half down his head, like a white pitch plaster, leaving a few white floating locks... His face is a good deal shriveled, and he looks sorry, not for anything he has gained, but for what he may lose.”

Years earlier, Crockett recalled, “anybody could tell by his looks that he was not a woman....”

It would have seemed a rather odd thing to say, until you read on: By 1835, the vice president “is so stiff in his gait, and prim in his dress, that he is what the English call a dandy. When he enters the senate chamber in the morning, he struts and swaggers like a crow in the gutter. He is laced up in corsets, such as women in town wear and, if possible, tighter than the best of them. It would be difficult to say, from his personal appearance, whether he was man or woman, but for his red and gray whiskers.”

An Account of Col. Crockett’s Tour to the North and Down East, released the same year, is a loose-limbed travelogue—he describes, among other things, the notorious Five Points section of Manhattan, early in the Gangs of New York era. In that book, Crockett laid out his basic political allegiance, which is to himself alone. “I know nothing, by experience, of party discipline,” he wrote. “I would rather be a raccoon dog, and belong to a Negro in the forest, than to belong to any party.”

It particularly peeved Crockett that Americans had a non-democratic habit of idolatry. “This thing of man-worship I am a stranger to,” he wrote. “I don’t like it; it taints every action of life; it is like a skunk getting into a house—long after he has cleared out, you smell him in every room and closet, from the cellar to the garret.”

Crockett seemed to admire only one politician in Washington, a senator from Knoxville so tall and skinny that he was known in the Capitol as “the Skeleton.” Nominated by a committee that included Crockett and several other disgruntled Democrats, Sen. Hugh Lawson White ran for president. Crockett praises the Knoxvillian in both of his campaign-season books.

“Hugh Lawson White is a candidate for the presidency, and he can’t be bought off, and they know it,” he wrote in Tour. “His steel is too pure for them to think of bending him; the atmosphere that surrounds him keeps off all busybodies.”

Crockett said he didn’t want to live to see Martin Van Buren elected president of his country, and he didn’t. Crockett changed his country, left the United States for Texas. Then, while defending the new republic at the Alamo, Martin Van Buren’s unauthorized biographer died—several months before the U.S. election for which he so fiercely campaigned. Van Buren was elected, and Crockett’s man, Hugh White of Knoxville, came in third in the four-man race—perhaps because he’d lost his chief propagandist.

VARDATE © 2004 Metro Pulse