This paper examines the 1884 presidential election between Democrat Grover Cleveland and Republican James Blaine, widely considered one of the dirtiest campaigns in American history. Beginning with the razor-thin final vote totals, the paper traces the escalating mud-slinging that defined the race: Cleveland's illegitimate child scandal, Blaine's corrupt business dealings and the infamous "Burn this letter!" episode, and Blaine's premarital pregnancy controversy. The paper also notes the positive legacy of the campaign — the establishment of the modern practice of candidates personally campaigning before live audiences — and concludes that the tactics of 1884 set a troubling precedent for negative campaigning in American politics.
The paper uses a case-study approach: rather than surveying multiple elections broadly, it concentrates analytical attention on one election to draw detailed, evidence-supported conclusions about the mechanics and consequences of negative campaigning. This technique allows even a short paper to achieve depth by layering multiple scandals — Cleveland's Halpin affair, Blaine's Mulligan letters, and Blaine's premarital pregnancy controversy — within a single narrative arc.
The paper opens with a broad framing of clean versus dirty political campaigns and narrows quickly to the 1884 race. It then moves through background on the candidates, the escalation of attacks from both parties, and a brief positive legacy section before concluding. The reverse-chronology hook (starting with vote totals before explaining causes) creates an effective narrative tension that draws the reader into the historical analysis.
American politics have always been a hotbed of debate. Just how far politicians are willing to go in the quest to win revolves around the type of campaign they run. If the campaign is "clean," the opponents stick to the issues and debate their platforms with little attempt to discredit the others in the race. If the race is "dirty," it means that the politicians and those supporting them are willing to fling mud at their opponents. This can mean that personal lives, personal problems, and the problems of candidates' family members become acceptable tools to sabotage an opponent's campaign.
Throughout the history of the nation, campaigns have run the gamut from clean to dirty, with everything in between. In recent years, the campaign between Clinton and Bush Sr. became dirty when each side brought up non-job-related issues in the hopes that discrediting the opponent personally would cause voters to turn their backs on him on election day. While this is a common practice, it is a carefully walked line — if a campaign gets too dirty, the plan backfires and voters begin to turn on the mud-tosser instead.
Many political campaigns have started out clean and then turned dirty as each side sank lower in the quest for votes. One presidential campaign that reached historic proportions in the area of mud-slinging was the presidential election of 1884. That race has been recorded as one of the dirtiest campaigns in the history of the nation.
Most stories start at the beginning and work their way to the end, but to fully understand the significance of dirty politics in 1884, it helps to start with the outcome and then explain how the race arrived there. The final vote totals in 1884 were among the closest in American history. The contested 2000 race between George W. Bush and Al Gore was often compared to the race of 1884 because of the similarly narrow margins involved.
The opponents were Grover Cleveland and James Blaine. When the electoral and popular votes were counted, Blaine lost by a very small margin. Cleveland received 219 electoral votes against Blaine's 182, and he received 4,875,971 popular votes compared to the very close 4,850,293 that Blaine garnered. The race went down in history not only because of its closeness, but also because of the depths to which each party stooped in the effort to win. As one of the dirtiest races in United States history, there is much to be learned about politics through the study of this single election.
The presidential election of 1884 has been noted by political writers and historians as the dirtiest presidential election in the history of the nation — a distinction it retains even when compared to more recent contests. The race between Cleveland and Blaine sank to such depths that history teachers continue to use it as an example of dirty politics. The campaign became so personal that charges were levied on each side about the nastiness occurring. Some of those charges included bigotry, graft, and lasciviousness (Cresswell, 2001).
In nominating Blaine, the Republicans were selecting their clear front-runner. Blaine had been Speaker of the House, a member of the Senate, and a strong presidential hopeful in both 1876 and 1880. He had served as President Garfield's Secretary of State. He was an excellent speaker, and had even earned a flamboyant nickname from a congressional colleague: "the plumed knight" (Cresswell, 2001).
Cleveland already held major advantages in popular support. To damage that standing, his opponents made public the affairs he had conducted, and when the news of his illegitimate child became known, the race nosedived even further into scandal.
Before the election, Blaine had been steadily building his political career. During his career, he had believed himself to be the target of an assassination attempt that was actually carried out against President Garfield (Harper, 2001). He initially refused to entertain the idea of running for president, partly because of that incident. However, his resolve could not withstand the public and private support of fellow party members who lined up behind him across several arenas.
Due to Blaine's prominence in calling for tariff protection and the exclusion of Chinese immigrants from American soil, Western Republicans lined up solidly behind him. His campaign was also effective throughout the North, challenging his rivals even in their home territories (Harper, 2001). By late May, Blaine's only serious obstacle to the nomination was President Arthur, who was unlikely to win outright but could force a deadlocked convention to turn to a compromise candidate. The inability of Arthur to unite the New York delegation behind him proved detrimental to his chances (Harper, 2001).
By the time of the Democratic National Convention in Chicago on July 8–10, the formidable front-runner was Governor Grover Cleveland of New York. Several favorable factors accorded Cleveland that position (Harper, 2001). Elected governor in 1882, Cleveland gained a reputation as a reformer by signing a civil service reform law, a bill preserving Niagara Falls as a state park, and other reform measures (Harper, 2001). He was from the largest electoral state — a swing state the Democrats had to win in order to capture the presidency. His position on the controversial tariff question was not clearly delineated, making him acceptable to both high- and low-tariff factions (Harper, 2001). In all, Cleveland seemed like the candidate most likely to win in November, and after almost 30 years without a presidential victory, Democratic strategists were playing it smart (Harper, 2001).
There were seven party candidates named for the election race (Graff, 2002). One of those candidates was humiliated through a smear campaign about his personal love life. The detractors wanted St. John to withdraw, but he refused even in the face of their publicizing his early marriage and divorce and the child born of that union years before (Harper, 2001).
The election of 1884 went down in history as one of the dirtiest America had ever seen. Today, some of the things revealed about each candidate in 1884 would still be considered scandalous, but perhaps not to a ruinous degree. In that era, however, the scandals that emerged were deeply embarrassing and powerful enough to destroy any candidate almost instantly. Each candidate participated in, and lent support to, a smear campaign that eventually reached epic proportions. The example set by this campaign laid the groundwork for the negative campaigning that is still witnessed in American politics today.
Grover Cleveland / Thomas Andrews Hendricks — Party: Democratic — Home State: NY / IN — Electoral Votes: 219 — Popular Vote: 4,874,986 (48.5%)
James Gillespie Blaine / John Alexander Logan — Party: Republican — Home State: ME / IL — Electoral Votes: 182 — Popular Vote: 4,854,981 (48.3%)
Benjamin Franklin Butler / Absolom Madden West — Party: Greenback and Anti-Monopoly — Home State: MA / MS — Electoral Votes: 0 — Popular Vote: 175,370 (1.7%)
John Pierce St. John / William Daniel — Party: Prohibition — Home State: KS / MD — Electoral Votes: 0 — Popular Vote: 150,369 (1.5%)
Total electoral votes: 401 (from 38 states). Majority needed to win: 201. Total popular vote: 10,052,706.
Summers, Mark Wahlgren. Rum, Romanism, & Rebellion: The Making of a President, 1884. University of North Carolina Press, March 2000.
Graff, Henry, and Arthur Schlesinger Jr., ed. Grover Cleveland (The American Presidents Series). Times Books, August 2002.
Brodsky, Alyn. Grover Cleveland: A Study in Character. St. Martin's Press, September 2000.
Cresswell, Stephen. "Nastiest Campaign Ever: The 1884 Presidential Sweepstakes." Buttons and Ballots, Issue 25, Spring 2001.
Harper, HarpWeek. "Republican Candidates and Convention: Overview 1884." Accessed April 19, 2003.
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