Presenters
Abstract
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.”