You could be forgiven — when browsing the Smithsonian’s political history collections, where I work as a curator — for assuming that the chief battle in American political history was fought in 1892, between two great leaders named Grover Cleveland and Benjamin Harrison. Cleveland playing cards and Harrison top hats fill glass cases and steel cabinets. By 1892, a giddily consumerist, venomously partisan Gilded Age society had gotten good at churning out campaign tchotchkes.
Americans were less good at picking leaders. The 1892 election was Cleveland and Harrison’s second contest against each other. It was an unwanted rematch between unloved combatants. People liked to joke, of the cold Harrison and the cussed Cleveland, “One had no friends; the other, only enemies.”
But as we are seeing again, it is possible for an election to make the public simultaneously fighting mad and bored to tears. The repeated, deadening matchups of Cleveland and Harrison in 1888 and 1892 did just that. They may be the best parallel for what is coming with a second Biden-Trump race. There are other rematches in American presidential history, but 1892 was the only time a sitting president who had lost re-election ran four years later against his vanquisher and won. That weird race has a message for all those planning to hit snooze on the coming campaign: Great political change can unfold when the system seems woefully stalled.
Historians gravitate toward big moments of decisive transformation. Few care about 1892. But that neglected race accomplished something of a vibe shift. Without the competitive fun that usually kept Americans transfixed on their political system, the election offered a race so dismal that it could actually generate change. A dynamic third party emerged, and reformers finally had the breathing space they needed to rethink democracy. For those who were frustrated with the candidates and the parties, with corruption and income inequality, 1892 provided a quiet workshop to assemble what the progressive editor William Allen White would call “the new weapons of democracy.”
Presidential personalities don’t drive the comparison between 1892 and 2024. Certainly the gabby Joe Biden is little like the sour Benjamin Harrison. And though some supporters of Donald Trump invoke Grover Cleveland as a model of a president who served two nonconsecutive terms, the parallel is flimsy. Cleveland won the popular votes in 1884, 1888 and 1892, only losing the Electoral College (and thus the presidency) in 1888. That makes him one of the winningest popular-vote presidents in American history — surpassed only by Franklin Delano Roosevelt and tied with Andrew Jackson. Donald Trump joins John Quincy Adams and Martin Van Buren as the only presidents who lost the popular vote twice.
The parallels are not personal but structural. The Gilded Age political system and its grumpy electorate look oddly familiar. Two evenly matched parties grappled for power across the years, fighting out the closest, highest turnout elections in our history. But neither could ever land a decisive blow. From 1876 to 1892, no president won a majority of the popular vote; two lost the popular vote altogether. This did not stop huge party machines from framing every race as a do-or-die test of democracy. By the 1890s, an editor at The Atlantic Monthly joked, “One year one party is ‘obliterated’; two years later the other party is ‘obliterated.’”
Gilded Age Americans loved to boast about progress — and fret about collapse — but really, the political system was doing neither. Americans were stuck in a loop, driven by little more than what one snarky reporter called “the happy thought of voting against each other.”
By 1892, neither party had much momentum left. Both Harrison and Cleveland had already been president; neither had done a great job. Republicans and Democrats were still eager to obliterate each other, but the famous orator Robert Ingersoll joked that both parties would have been happy “to defeat the other if it could do so without electing its own candidate.” So they spent more than ever before, together paying an at the time staggering $4 million, in part for the novelties that fill the Smithsonian’s shelves today
Yet despite that spending spree, a journalist complained that the public “refuses to get noisy.”
The noise was coming from the sidelines. As the two main political parties argued over tariff rates, the new Populist Party asked voters to tackle income inequality and corporate power head-on. The movement had been brewing for years, and the generative dullness of 1892 was a perfect launchpad. And while the Populists called for greater controls on railroads, banks and money, much of their campaigning targeted the “sham battle” between the two parties. Their famous 1892 Omaha Platform called for presidents to be limited to a single term. No more rematches.
They did not win, but the Populists did better than any third party had in a generation, taking 8.5 percent of the electorate and 22 electoral votes. Third parties don’t usually break up the two-party system; at best, they force ideas into the discourse for Republicans and Democrats to later adapt. The Populists got Americans thinking about income taxes and direct democracy and economic reforms in ways that were unutterable in polite society before. And they proved it was possible to win over one million votes with an issue-focused campaign, even as the two parties were hawking Harrison and Cleveland belt buckles.
Some went further, arguing that all political parties stood between the people and good government. The poet and humorist James Russell Lowell argued that processes were the key, telling a huge crowd in Manhattan, “If the parties won’t look after their own drainage and ventilation, there must be somebody who will do it for them.” In Oregon a former blacksmith named William U’Ren wondered, “Why had we no tool makers for democracy?” He began to experiment with what would one day become procedures like referendums, initiatives, primaries and recalls. The first generation of independent journalists — the men and women who would later be called muckrakers — took the same approach. Starting around 1892, innovators like Ida B. Wells and Henry Demarest Lloyd delved into specific events like lynchings and strikes, using those cases to tackle larger crises.
It would take years for these approaches to conquer the mainstream, but the tools that revolutionized American life after 1900 were wrought during the fertile boredom of 1892.
New tools also helped bad actors. The Southern arm of the Democratic Party had grown tired of stealing elections through fraud and violence and afraid of renewed federal intervention. State legislators also began to think like mechanics during the doldrums of the early 1890s. Starting with Mississippi’s 1890 Constitution, Southern states created impediments to Black voting that were more complete than their old shotgun tactics. The percentage of African Americans registered to vote in Mississippi fell from roughly 90 percent during Reconstruction to 6 percent in 1892. Black voting would be nearly extinguished there for generations.
Cleveland’s win in 1892 let Democrats loose to spread Jim Crow voting laws across the South. It turned out that 1892 was no “sham battle” after all. So much was at stake, but the parties’ hoopla and the public’s bad temper drowned out what really mattered. The shape of the 20th century is first visible, for good and for ill, in the depths of 1892.
So was 1892 a dull do-over? Or a trinket-filled bonanza? Or a wonky restructuring that pointed the nation toward tackling socioeconomic issues, even as it abandoned racial ones? It was all three. Americans tend to expect elections to be all or nothing, landslides or sleepers, normal politics or unprecedented catastrophe. There are elections like 1860, noisy, high-drama affairs that break the bounds between politics and civil war. And then there are contests like 1892, unfulfilling but formative, revolutions we notice only in retrospect.
One other attribute makes poor old 1892 matter today: It was the fifth presidential election in a row won by a candidate who failed to win a popular-vote majority, the longest streak in American history. This November — owing to a rising tide of third-party challenges, in particular the campaign of Robert F. Kennedy Jr. — it seems very likely that this race will end without a majority’s mandate as well. Such streaks (in the Gilded Age and the antebellum era) indicated an electorate that could not muster even the barest measure of popular agreement and tended to culminate in a game-changing realignment. The question is: How many sleepers will it take for our own game to change?
It’s a question we should be considering today, three presidential election cycles into the political universe that began in 2016. By now, we should be getting good at being bored, scared and creative at the same time. Even the potential death of democracy can start to feel like a rerun after a while.
It may take several more elections for voters to tire of trying to obliterate one another and start tinkering with other options. This is not a case for staying home in 2024 — far from it; it’s an argument for devoting the best of our energies outside the political cycle. We can deny the parties the full depth of our imagination, even as we prefer one side over the other.
You get, at most, one vote, no matter how many campaign novelties you buy or how many hours of cable news you watch.
If our civilization shares one central attribute with the Gilded Age, it’s not just the income inequality or the partisanship but also the slow, stuttering realization that the progress we’ve been boasting about isn’t coming. Most of us know this by now, but every four years, we pretend a big climactic election will answer it all, resolve our culture wars, vanquish our enemies and decide what America really means, once and for all. In 1892, watching the same two mediocre guys run yet again undermined Gilded Age Americans’ belief in landslides that never came. Finally, they were bored enough to think small and began to see that consequences come not just through elections but around them as well.
Jon Grinspan is a curator of political history at the Smithsonian’s National Museum of American History and the author of the forthcoming “Wide Awake: The Forgotten Force That Elected Lincoln and Spurred the Civil War” and “The Age of Acrimony: How Americans Fought to Fix Their Democracy, 1865-1915.”
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