In late August of 1866, President Andrew Johnson boarded a special train whose ultimate destination was Chicago where the newly installed statue of Stephen Douglass was to be dedicated. In attempt to demonstrate popular support in the face of stiffening opposition to his policies in Congress, Johnson turned the trip into a speaking tour, becoming the first sitting president to actively campaign while in office.
Historians have unanimously described this trip, dubbed the “Swing Around the Circle,” as a disaster that backfired and strengthened support for Radical Republicans in that year’s congressional election. Johnson, it is said, grossly misread the public mood and though his appearances attracted large crowds of the curious, his urging of the necessity of rapidly restoring southern states to Congress and his opposition to enfranchising freedmen, fell flat. Worse, Johnson’s pugnacious oratory and apparent drunkenness proved an embarrassment from which his public image never recovered.
Drawing primarily on Republican sources and Republican-allied newspapers, chroniclers of this trip have been satisfied with the superficial appearances of this event and have not found reason to delve further into how these unique presidential rallies were reflected in popular culture. One important constituency whose role in Johnson’s “Swing” has been completely unexamined is the nascent labor movement of that day. Most of Johnson’s stops along the “circle,” in Baltimore, New York, Philadelphia, Cleveland, and Cincinnati were labor strongholds and unions turned out in vast processions to welcome him. By carefully explicating the details of these demonstrations and then surveying all the surviving labor and popular press for commentary upon them, a picture begins to emerge that is far more rich and complicated than the time-worn assumptions of President Johnson’s stuporous “Swing Around the Circle.”
About the presenterTimothy Messer-Kruse
Timothy Messer-Kruse received his Ph.D. in History from the University of Wisconsin-Madison. In 1995 he joined the History department at the University of Toledo where he served as chair from 2003 to 2005 and was recognized with the university’s Outstanding Teaching Award in 2003. In 2006 he was appointed chair of the Ethnic Studies department at Bowling Green State University. In 2013 BGSU awarded him the Olscamp Research Award for outstanding scholarly achievements. Messer-Kruse is the author of six books. While his area of specialization is in the field of U.S. Labor History, he has published on a diverse array of subjects including race relations, Gilded Age labor culture and radical social movements, the Chinese exclusion movement, the impact of changing technology on child labor, the campus culture of the Ku Klux Klan, the invention of corporate lobbying, class conflict in early auto racing, and the intersections of art and industrial design at the dawn of the twentieth century. His first book, The Yankee International: Marxism and the American Reform Tradition, 1848-1876. (University of North Carolina Press, 1998) unearthed previously unknown connections between the abolitionist, women’s rights, and socialist movements in America. His detailed study of the largest Depression-era bank failure, Banksters, Bosses and Smart Money: A Social History of the Great Toledo Bank Crash of 1931 (Ohio State University Press, 2005), appeared several years before history repeated itself in 2008. His study of race and culture in the 1980s, Race Relations in the United States, 1980-2000 (Greenwood Press, June 2008), was the final volume in a five-volume series of American ethnic history. His most renowned work uncovers new evidence and boldly revises long-held interpretations of the famed Haymarket Bombing in Chicago in 1886 and the anarchist movement behind it. Out of this research he has written two books, The Haymarket Trial: Terrorism and Justice in the Gilded Age (Palgrave Macmillan, 2011) and The Haymarket Conspiracy: Transatlantic Anarchist Networks (University of Illinois Press, 2012). The Haymarket Trial was named the “Best Labor History Book of 2012” by the journal Labor History and awarded its annual book prize. Messer-Kruse’s most recent book Tycoons, Scorchers, and Outlaws: The Class War that Shaped American Auto Racing (Pivot Press, 2014) explores the cultural and class origins of American automobile racing.