Campaign mechanics: how candidates got it done without public appearances

Watching Joe Biden cooped up in his basement studio this campaign season has been demoralizing -- but it did remind me that aspirants running for president didn't always trot around the country tooting their horns. The modern campaign with its rallies and "press availabilities" is a 20th century invention. For the previous 120 some years of the United States, aspiring presidents were expected to hole up and hope their party was doing the work of turning out the vote for them. That was being "presidential."

Happily, Dr. Jon Grinspan, curator of political history at the Smithsonian’s National Museum of American History, has written How to Run for President in the Middle of a Pandemic which vividly describes the evolution that got us to today. It's informative and fun. He points out that until national sanitation conditions improved considerably after 1900, wading into crowds to shake hands was dangerous. Interacting with constituents, or anyone, could be lethal:

Every chief executive elected in the 1840s most likely died of a communicable disease within that decade: William Henry Harrison from typhoid in 1841, James K. Polk from cholera in 1849, Zachary Taylor from viral gastroenteritis in 1850.

Yet candidates did seek elective office and they counted on mobilized citizens to win for them.

The fundamental question of campaigning is who performs the labor. In the 19th century, ordinary citizens did incredible amounts of work for their parties, while nominees sat idle. ...

As it happens, I'm well aware of this because I have a couple of artifacts from 19th century campaigns that exemplify the story. Two of my great grandfathers (unrelated to each other) were early enthusiasts of the new anti-slavery, pro-industrial development Republican Party in the 1850s. And both were ardent boosters of Abraham Lincoln's 1860 campaign for the presidency. What did that mean? It meant they worked to bring out his vote in their own cities, speaking and writing and lining up support from voters. And what was Lincoln doing, the summer and fall of 1860? Writing hundreds of letters to his supporters all around the country, helping them with messages, suggesting how to consolidate support, and thanking them for their efforts.

Two of these missives have come down in the family. One (not pictured) concerns how to describe the prohibition of slavery in the Northwest Territory (Ohio, Indiana, Illinois, Michigan, and Wisconsin) in 1787 accurately in advocacy speeches. In the copy of a letter pictured here, written to a Buffalo businessman who later was elected to Congress, Lincoln approves the recipient's efforts to consolidate support within a fractious party. This apparently required some shoring up.

The more conditions change, the more some campaign fundamentals remain the same.