The 19th Century Map Tha...rization | New Republic

8/11/2014 The 19th Century Map That Shows the U.S.'s Politicial Polarization | New Republic

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HISTORY AUGUST 9, 2014

The Story Behind the Ancient Map ThatInvented Red and Blue StatesThe country was just as polarized 125 years ago—except the colorswere upside down

e live in what is endlessly described as an era of unprecedented partisanship,

with Americans polarized into red and blue camps and no convergence in

sight. But much of the nation’s history was characterized by intense political

rivalry, especially the late nineteenth century.

In 1876 the United States celebrated its centennial in the midst of a terrible depression

sparked by the Panic of 1873. In some cities unemployment reached 25 percent, casting

a significant pall over the celebration mounted in Philadelphia that spring. The mood

worsened after the November presidential elections, which left Democrat Samuel

Tilden in an electoral tie with Republican Rutherford Hayes. The atmosphere was

chaotic, with accusations of voter suppression, rigged ballots, questionable returns,

and eleventh-hour statehood for Colorado, which threw three crucial electoral votes to

Photo: Courtesy of Library of CongressBy Susan Schulten

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Hayes. The election was ultimately decided by a committee, which gave Republicans

ongoing control of the White House.

This “Great Compromise” came during one of the most partisan periods in American

history, and much of the staunch party loyalties had been forged in the recent Civil

War. White Southerners were committed in their resistance to the Republicans for

years after Appomattox, and by 1876 had coalesced into a bloc of unquestioned

support for the Democratic Party that would last well into the twentieth century. In

response, Republicans repeatedly “waved the bloody shirt” to remind Americans that

it was they—the party of Lincoln—that had preserved the Union through the late war.

The riveting and decidedly partisan centennial election also coincided with the

emergence of politics as a field of academic study. At its outset, “political science”

focused on the evolution of American democracy and party behavior. This heightened

interest in the nation’s political history prompted a slew of charts, maps, and graphs

designed to make sense of the past “century of progress.” Among the most fascinating

of these was Walter Houghton’s huge, elaborate chart of U.S. political history. A

Midwestern educator, Houghton touted this as a “compass” to guide Americans

through their complex political past.

Courtesy of University of Denver Penrose Library

At first glance the chart is disorienting, but it has its own internal logic. The top half is a

straightforward timeline of elected leaders, important events, and landmark legislation

rendered in ridiculously small type. It’s in the lower half where Houghton tried to find

patterns in that chronolo y. He assigned a line to every party in electoral history, then

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measured the popular support for the party with comparatively thicker or thinnerlines. The party occupying the White House is always placed on top.

The detail below captures the runup to the Civil War, when the decline of the Whigsand the erosion of the Democrats created a vacuum filled by a new Republican party,devoted to halting the extension of slavery into the territories.

Houghton’s “conspectus” of political history caught on, and was copied and updatedthrough the end of the century. Like so many other timelines and charts made tocommemorate the nation’s centennial, it resonated with readers as an attempt to seesome order—or at least form—in the chaos of history.

At the same time that Houghton was charting the evolution of political behavior, theCensus Office released an ambitious effort to map the nation’s electoral history. In 1883,Census Superintendent Henry Gannett published the massive Scribner’s StatisticalAtlas, which included maps of each presidential election. The series ended with anunprecedented attempt to map the returns of the 1880 presidential election not just atthe state but the county level.

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Courtesy of Library of Congress

Such data maps are routine today. But this one stunned nineteenth-century Americans

by showing them a nation organized not according to railroads and towns, or

mountains and rivers, but Democrats and Republicans. The parties, of course,

represented entirely different agendas then, and even their color associations were

reversed. On the Scribner map, red denotes Democrats, while blue marks Republicans.

Yet the overall portrait is strangely familiar, with red blanketing much of the south

while blue spreads across the north. (As to the color scheme reversal, it’s a bit of a

mystery. Republicans are now generally represented with red and Democrats with

blue, a change that seems to have taken hold sometime after the 2000 election. But

other colors - http://www.davidrumsey.com/luna/servlet/s/wirte3 - were used as well

through the twentieth century, as in Paullin and Wright’s Atlas of 1932.)

The 1880 campaign itself was rather routine, with little of substance to differentiate the

two parties aside from their positions on tariff policy. Yet the election itself was as

much of a nail biter as 1876 had been: nine million Americans turned out, and when it

was over Republican James Garfield had outpolled the Democrat by a margin of just

7,000 votes nationwide.

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Focus on the outcome by states—the only measure that matters in the ElectoralCollege—and the map shows a nation that seems hopelessly divided along a north-south axis, still fighting the Civil War by other means. Democrats control the formerslave states, while Republicans hold an edge in the northeast and Midwest, as the insetcaptures.

And in a move that would have impressed Nate Silver, Superintendent Gannett rankedeach of these states according to the decisiveness of party victory, from least to mostpartisan.

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But Gannett realized that though the state outcomes determined the presidentialelection, a far more nuanced picture of voter behavior could be captured at the countylevel. For this reason he relegated the Electoral College map to an inset in order tofeature a much larger map of county outcomes. Take a look again at the larger map,and notice the variation. Though the “solid south” had already materialized, a fewpockets of support for Garfield endured, as in eastern Tennessee, where anti-Confederate sentiment during the Civil War translated into Republican countiesthereafter. Further south, blacks enfranchised by the Fifteenth Amendment created a

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few small Republican strongholds along the cotton belt, though these disappearedonce the black vote was effectively suppressed by poll taxes and other tools. Across thecountry, the map showed just how much variation the Electoral College concealed.

Then Gannett went even further with his geovisual adventure: it was not enough just tosort the nation into red and blue counties, so he designed a scale of shade to measurenot just victory but depth of victory. In any given county one could see not just whowon, but how handily.

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The light pink areas of the upper south indicated that while the Democrats hadprevailed, their control was relatively weak. Conversely, light blue areas throughoutthe northeast—such as in Pennsylvania below—indicated a Republican partystruggling to maintain its hold over regions of massive immigration, industrial turmoil,and growing class conflict. In fact, even though Garfield easily won the Electoral

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College, the switch of just a few thousand votes in New York would have changed the

outcome.

The map may not look advanced today, but in 1883 it broke new ground by enabling

Americans to visualize the spatial dynamics of political power. Readers responded

enthusiastically. One reviewer pointed to the Republican counties in

Arkansas—something left invisible on a map of the Electoral College returns—and

wondered what other oddities of geography and history might be uncovered when

election returns were more systematically measured. In other words, the map revealed

spatial patterns and relationships that might otherwise remain hidden, or only known

anecdotally. Perhaps its no coincidence that at the same time the two parties began to

launch more coordinated, disciplined, nationwide campaigns, creating a system of

two-party rule that we have lived with ever since.

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Susan Schulten is a history professor at the University of Denver and author, most

recently, of Mapping the Nation - http://www.mappingthenation.com/ - .


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