Disputed Elections, Concealed Facts.

• Author: Zinn, Howard
• Position: Brief Article

As the prize of the residency lurched back and forth in the last days of the year, with the entire nation hypnotized by the spectacle, I had a vision. I saw the Titanic churning through the waters of the North Atlantic toward an iceberg looming in the distance, while passengers and crew concentrated on a tennis game taking place on deck.

In our election-obsessed culture, everything else going on in the world--war, hunger, official brutality, sickness, the violence of everyday life for huge numbers of people--is swept out of the way, while the media insist we watch every volley of the candidates. Thus, the superficial crowds out the meaningful, and this is very useful for those who do not want citizens to look beneath the surface of the system. Hidden by the contest of the candidates are real issues of race and class, war and peace, which the public is not supposed to think about.

As the Gore-Bush match came to its frenzied finish, the media kept referring to the Hayes-Tilden election of 1876. The education the public received about this was typical of what passes for history in our schools, in our newspapers, and on our television sets. We were told how the Founding Fathers, in writing the Constitution, gave the state legislators the power to choose electors, who would then choose the President. We were told how rival sets of electors were chosen in three states, and how Samuel Tilden, the Democrat, had 250,000 more popular votes than the Republican, Rutherford Hayes, and needed only one more electoral vote to win the Presidency. But when a special commission, with a bare Republican majority, was set up by Congress to decide the dispute, it gave all three states to Hayes and thus made him President.

This told us a lot about the mechanics of Presidential elections and the peculiar circumstances of that one. But it told us nothing about how "The Compromise of 1877," worked out in private meetings between Democrats and Republicans, doomed blacks in the South to semi-slavery. It told us nothing about how the armies that once fought the Confederacy would be withdrawn from the South and sent West to drive Indians from their ancestral lands. It told us nothing about how Democrats and Republicans would now join in subjecting working people all over the country to ruthless corporate power.

Behind the Tilden-Hayes hullabaloo was a hard reality: The Republican Party, and the Northern industrial-financial interests that dominated it, were no longer...