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Re-running the
Y-H-P White House Race
Yale,
Harvard, and Princeton alums are clashing in this year's battle
for the White House. It seems like old times.
October
2000
by Judith Ann Schiff
Judith Ann Schiff is Chief Research Archivist at the Yale University
Library.
Whatever
the outcome, the Year 2000 presidential election will be remembered
as a clash among ideologies—and the alumni of three Ivy League
colleges. Yale is represented most prominently,
being the alma mater of the entire Republican ticket—George W. Bush '68 and Richard B. Cheney '63—and the vice-presidential
side of the Democratic slate, with Joseph Lieberman '64, '67LLB.
Democratic presidential hopeful Albert Gore Jr. represents Harvard
and its Class of 1969, while Princeton's standard bearer is the
Green Party's Ralph Nader, who graduated in 1955.
But this is not the
first Y-H-P election. That honor belongs to the 1912 race, a campaign in which
all three major presidential candidates had undergraduate roots at one of the
three traditional rivals. Republican William Howard Taft was a member of the Yale
Class of 1878; Democrat Woodrow Wilson belonged to Princeton's Class of 1879;
and Republican-turned-Bull Moose candidate Theodore Roosevelt represented the
Harvard Class of 1880. In fact, two of the candidates in that race had already
served as Republican presidents, with Taft as Roosevelt's handpicked successor
in 1908.
Taft may have been
Yale's first alumnus to occupy the White House, but he was not the first Yale
man to launch a campaign. That distinction belongs to Federalist candidate Jared
Ingersoll of the Class of 1766, who ran unsuccessfully for vice-president in 1812
with DeWitt Clinton against James Madison. The first alumnus elected vice president
was John C. Calhoun, Class of 1804. He won twice: in 1824 with John Quincy Adams
and in 1828 with Andrew Jackson. Then Yale men would stay out of the races for
the nation's highest elected offices until 1872 when Democrat Benjamin Gratz Brown,
Class of 1847, ran a losing campaign for vice president on a ticket headed by
Horace Greeley.
The next presidential
campaign proved to be an exciting, but ultimately disappointing, one for Yale.
Samuel J. Tilden, Class of 1837, was the Democrat's nominee for the White House,
and in a hotly disputed election, Tilden actually outpolled his rival, capturing
4,284,265 votes to 4,033,295 for Rutherford B. Hayes. But in a controversial decision,
the electoral commission gave Hayes the nod, with 185 votes to Tilden's 184.
Through most of Yale's
history, few students could in fact vote in these elections. (The minimum age
was 21 until 1971, when it was lowered to 18.) Nevertheless, undergraduates vigorously
debated the issues, formed clubs, and marched in support of candidates. In the
fall of 1908, a Yale Taft Club was formed and 83 students in the First Ward claimed
the right to vote. Fifty-six students signed up to go to New York City to monitor
the allegedly corrupt polls on the East Side. New York students who were voters
were particularly encouraged, as they would receive no cuts for being absent from
class. On March 4, 1909, New Haven proudly held its own inaugural parade in honor
of Taft. His popularity here soared as the new president, who had been elected
a Fellow in 1906, continued to attend Yale Corporation meetings.
In 1912, Yale was
confident that Taft would be reelected. Almost daily it seemed, students paraded
from the campus to the station and the Hyperion Theater, meeting and escorting
the candidates to rallies. The Yale Daily News straw poll results had Taft winning
with 530 votes, to Wilson's 441, Roosevelt's 373, and Socialist Eugene V. Debs
garnering 19.
"To give election
news to the hundreds who will throng the streets and campus tonight for information"
the Daily News employed the latest technology: a high-power electric lantern that
flashed the tabulations and results on a large screen. Unfortunately, former president
Theodore Roosevelt's Bull Moose Party split the Republicans, enabling Wilson to
be elected with only 42 percent of the popular vote but an electoral college landslide.
At the
Brown game the following Saturday, the Whiffenpoofs held their annual
frolic at halftime. It featured a race to a canvas White House,
and in keeping with the results, Wilson won by dint of being pushed
by Roosevelt. Eli football fortunes would turn similarly glum. After
beating the Bruins, Yale, undefeated before the presidential election,
could only manage a 6-6 tie against Princeton. Harvard shut out
the Elis, 20-0.  |
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