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Sunday, August 01, 2004

This is pretty interesting
Tapped brings us a translation of an article on the 1884 Presidential election by Jose Marti, Cuban independence hero, statesman, poet and journalist who lived in New York between 1880 to 1895. The election of 1884 is widely acknowledged to be one of the dirtiest and closest in U.S. History. The Democrat Grover Cleveland, won by .3% of the popular vote. Marti's words are also surprisingly and eerily prescient:

"It's brutal, and nauseating, a presidential campaign in the United States. The mud comes up to the chairs. The white beards of the newspapers forget all about the decorum of old age. They dump buckets of mud on all our heads. They knowingly lie and exaggerate. They stab each other in the belly and the back. Any defamation is treated as legitimate. Every blow is good, as long as it staggers the enemy. He who invents an effective slander proudly struts ...

[...]

The evil was very grave: the Republicans, entrenched in power, cynically abused it; they subverted the integrity of the vote, and of the press; they mocked the spirit of the Constitution through partisan legislation, and copying the tactics of tyrants, used overseas wars to deflect attention from their actions. Who had a chance to compete against them? Defeat them? -- if elections are won by the force of money, if the Republicans have a free hand with the national coffers?

But a wave rose up that no one saw forming on the margins, and no one knows how it came, breaking over the heads of all the ambitious and illustrious politicians of the nation -- despite the anger of the members of his own Democratic party, despite time-proven practices and conceits -- and landed in the White House a man just a little more than barely known, a tough but humble man, fit for the task of fearlessly and patiently reforming the corrupt government … the wave brought Cleveland.

I'm not an expert on the Gilded Age of American politics by any means, but perhaps one can look at the Halliburtons and the Enrons as the robber barons of today, with the Bushies aiding and abetting...

"He who receives money in trust to administer for the benefit of its owner, and uses it either for his own interest or against the wishes of its rightful owner, is a thief. The vote is a trust more delicate than any other, for it involves not just the interests of the voter, but his life, honor and future as well. He who uses the office he owes to the voters wrongfully and against them is a thief."
--Jose Marti

posted by claudine |Added at 9:50 PM| | politics, presidential elections

 
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