Presidential Lottery by James A. Michener Page A

which the great men who had studied there in past centuries paraded in antique costume to inspect and advise the contemporary students. As an American, I was always given the job of impersonating Wilson, and thus was driven to discover something about the man whose body, dress, and manner I was assuming, and the more I found out, the more impressed I became with the solid pragmatism he had carried from Scotland to Pennsylvania.
    I would suppose, therefore, that the genius of our election system has best been expressed when the nation has faced an election crisis, discovered an inadequacy, and moved swiftly to correct it. I think no man could successfully argue that the compromise devised by the convention was totally good; the defects were too many and too grave, the invitation to fraud too enticing. But at numerous climaxes the nation has patched the system, or allowed custom slowly to evolve new forms that have sufficed; and the advantage of the whole has been that it has worked. The stubborn pragmatism of James Wilson and his colleagues has allowed us to elect a series of reasonablygood Presidents in reasonable calm. But where troubles have arisen they have been corrected, and if we now do nothing in the face of the troubles I have been discussing, we shall be false to the spirit of our system. From time to time it needs patching; we are delinquent in our historical duty if we fail to apply the patches.
    Nothing could better illustrate this principle than the election of 1876. The Republican candidate was a large, amiable Cincinnati lawyer whose outward aplomb reminds one of a later President from the same state, Warren G. Harding, but whose performance when elected was much superior. A law graduate from Harvard, with a modest hankering for politics and a flair for catching and holding public approbation, he was in the Union army in July, 1864, when leaders of his district proposed that he run for Congress. From his encampment he wrote: “An officer fit for duty who at this crisis would abandon his post to electioneer for a seat in Congress ought to be scalped.” This statement, widely broadcast, ensured his election, whereupon he promptly resigned his commission, went to Washington, and served in the House of Representatives from 1865 to 1867.
    After having served twice as governor of Ohio, he was denied a third term and returned to the law, but when a vacancy on the Republican gubernatorial ticket opened up in 1875, he was approached by the leaders of his party and asked to run again. In his diary he wrote: “Several suggest that if elected governor now, I will stand well for the Presidency next year. How wild! What a queer lot we are becoming.”
    In the Republican Convention in 1876 he had little chance of winning the nomination, for a group of able men stood ahead of him, but as in the Harding case there was a deadlock, and after six unproductive ballots he was put forward as the compromise candidate. Handsome, polished, well spoken, and gifted in recalling if not waving “the bloody shirt” of southern rebellion, Rutherford B. Hayes was a formidable candidate, exactly the kind required to gloss over the scandals that were erupting across the face of the Grant administration.
    His Democratic opponent was Samuel J. Tilden, a strange man, moody, a retiring bachelor, a patrician railroad lawyer who had invested his substantial fees to build a personal fortune of more than $6,000,000 and who had built a strong reputation as a reformer by sending members of the Tweed ring to jail. On a strong reform platform he had become governor of New York. If Hayes reminds one of Harding, Tilden is clearly suggestive of Adlai Stevenson.
    The Democrats had a good chance of winning this election, for by capturing the House in 1874 they had won a platform from which they could attack Grant and his corrupt administration. The scandals their investigating committees uncovered provided powerful campaign material and in the hands of a