June 5, 2006
Issuing a Sherman Posted by John Steele Gordon at 12:30 PM EST On June 5, 1884, 122 years ago today, General William Tecumseh Sherman, in flatly refusing to seek the Republican nomination for president, made one of the most famous and atypical statements in American political history: “If nominated I will not run; if elected I will not serve.”
Such an unequivocal political statement has been known ever since as a “Sherman,” and they are rare indeed. Every politician above the rank of assistant sewer commissioner dreams in his heart of hearts of winning the White House and frames a response to any questions on the subject as a “non-denial denial”: “I have no immediate plans . . .” “I’m very happy in my present job . . .” etc. Today, of course, there are legal reasons having to do with fundraising as well as tactical ones not to formally announce a run for the White House, and even people who obviously are aiming for 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue avoid saying they are running. Senator Hillary Clinton, running this year for reelection to the Senate, will avoid saying she is running for the White House several hundred times before November at the least.
The election of 1884 contributed several other enduring words and phrases during the course of a nasty and very close campaign. Senator James G. Blaine (“the continental liar from the state of Maine”) won the Republican nomination while Grover Cleveland, governor of New York, was the Democratic candidate. Blaine still had the “Mulligan letters”, letters found in 1876 by a Boston bookkeeper named Mulligan that showed Blaine to have been on the take while he was speaker of the House to deal with. Many Republicans, known as “Mugwumps,” refused to support him.
And the Republicans were delighted to find out that the strait-laced bachelor Cleveland had fathered a child out of wedlock. “Ma! Ma! Where’s my pa? Gone to the White House, ha ha ha!” they cried. The Democrats countered with an honest admission of an “illicit liaison” and their own ditty: “Hurrah for Grover, hurrah for the kid! We voted for Cleveland and glad we did!”
The election was a squeaker that was in all likelihood determined by yet another famous American political phrase. In the last week of the campaign a group of Protestant clergymen, led by the Rev. Samuel Burchard, called on Blaine and pledged their support, damning the disloyalty of the Mugwumps. Burchard stated that “We are Republicans, and don’t propose to leave our party and identify ourselves with the party whose antecedents have been rum, Romanism, and rebellion.”
The newspapers didn’t notice the slur on the Catholic Church, but a Democrat in the audience certainly did, and he made sure that New York City’s large Irish population noticed it too. As a result, Cleveland carried New York State by a whisker: 1,047 votes out of 1,167,003 cast, winning the state’s 36 electoral votes. He won the election with 219 electoral votes to Blaine’s 182.
|
