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Past elections cast light on 2000 race

By Hope Green

What will the history books say about the Clinton legacy? Will the president be portrayed as a guardian of big government, a right-leaning Democrat, or a little of both?

Bruce Schulman, a CAS professor of history, intends to explore this question in a lecture entitled Campaign 2000: The Election That Will Change the Past, which will be held on Thursday, November 2, at 12:15 p.m. at Boston’s Old South Meeting House.

"In my articles for the popular press in the past few years, my main theme has been to ask what the Clinton years say about us, and how they fit into long-term patterns of American history," says Schulman, director of the GRS American and New England Studies Program. "In trying to solve this problem, I’ve realized historians are going to have to change the script depending on the answer the voters give us on November 7. How we understand the past 20 years, going back to the Reagan presidency, will be very different depending on whether Bush or Gore wins."

In his talk, Schulman plans to sketch two rival views of this era that may result from the election’s outcome. He will draw examples from two other critical presidential races, William Henry Harrison’s "log cabin and cider campaign" of 1840 and Al Smith’s unsuccessful bid against Herbert Hoover in 1928.

Hoover won by a landslide. But as Schulman explains, the 1932 election cast the previous race in a new light. Smith, who preceded Franklin D. Roosevelt as governor of New York, "represented the urban, immigrant, liberal wing of the Democratic Party that the whole Roosevelt coalition would later embody."

Harrison’s victory over incumbent Martin Van Buren in the 1840 election, according to Schulman, was a precursor of today’s Madison Avenue—style candidate packaging. As a Whig, Harrison represented the nation’s wealthiest classes, but on the campaign trail he spoke often of his hardscrabble childhood.

"This was the first time in a generation that a party associated with elite, aristocratic interests was able to win a popular election," Schulman says. "The Whigs did so by inventing modern political marketing."

6 December 2000
Boston University
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