I ask my blog followers to simply read this article in its entirety before coming to any conclusions. Explanations on the source of this article, and a bit of the history, can be found immediately following. History often repeats itself. That which we think is unique to us and our current events, may not be.
TIRED OF POLITICS
Every day, and from all parties, we hear the remark, “I wish election was over, I’m tired of politics.” Nor are we astonished at it. For it has been politics at breakfast, politics at dinner, politics at supper, politics in the parlor, politics everywhere. The thing has been carried to an absurdity. It has affected business, soured old friendships, and even sown dissensions in families. Well may it be said, “I am tired of politics.” People see also that much of what they read about politics in newspapers, and hear from stump speakers is either false in fact or sophistical in argument, and very frequently both.
Demagogues declaim, by the hour, against this thing and that; lawyers prose away all night about the ordinance of ’87 on the right of secession; profligate politicians blacken each other’s characters with the fury of fishwomen; and ambitious office seekers promise anything and everything. The public mind, surfeited with such nauseous doses, begins to revolt. The cry is, “We are tired of politics.”
Lithograph: Political Game of Brag. Shew of Hands showing, James Buchanan, John C. Calhoun, Lewis Cass, Henry Clay, James K. Polk, Zachary Taylor, presidential election. Library of Congress.
“We must candidly say, that so far, the present contest has been productive of more harm than good. The canvass, conducted as it has been, has done that to exasperate South and North mutually against each other, which years will be required to allay. Whatever may be the issue of the contest, a bitter, suspicious feeling will remain in the bosoms of the defeated, which will long rankle and irritate. Confidence has been shaken, and, as Burke says, “confidence is a plant of slow growth.” When so vast a fabric as this Union has been set rocking by sectional criminations and recriminations, by threats of North against South and South against North, it will be a long while before it subsides into quiet. In this respect the wisest and best are “tired of politics.”
SOURCE: (Written 164 Years Ago) Dollar Newspaper, Philadelphia PA, 8 October 1856, page 3
HISTORICAL BACKGROUND: The 1856 United States presidential election was the 18th quadrennial presidential election, held on Tuesday, November 4, 1856. In a three-way election, Democrat James Buchanan defeated Republican nominee John C. Frémont, and Know Nothing nominee Millard Fillmore. James Buchanan;’s predecessor was none other than Franklin Pierce of New Hampshire.
HISTORICAL CONTEXT: Five years later, Confederate troops would fire on Fort Sumter in South Carolina’s Charleston Harbor, beginning a chain of events that is considered to mark the beginning of the Civil War.
*****ADDITIONAL READING****
WikiTree: James Buchanan’s Family Tree
Both brave and brilliant of you today, Janice.
The more things change, the more they stay the same. But I have to say that never in my life nor in what I know of American history have we had a man in the White House like this one. This is not just politics. This is demagogery.