Stay-at-home campaigns may make comeback in pandemic
MENTOR, Ohio — President Donald Trump and Joe Biden are wrestling with how to campaign safely during the coronavirus pandemic. Historians offer up precedent that might come with some lessons: James Garfield let the people come to him.
From the front porch of his Ohio home, the 19thcentury presidential candidate hosted thousands of people on his shady lawn to hear him talk about his plans. His at-home experiment proved successful in 1880. It was copied by Oval Office successors, made famous by William McKinley some 16 years later and left a lasting imprint on presidential politics — all while keeping White House hopefuls relatively safe from disease.
“It’s 1880. They can’t follow him on Twitter or look at his Facebook page or see him on CNN every night,” said Todd Arrington, site manager of the James A. Garfield National Historic Site. “Candidates were expected to basically stay home and really not say anything. So when people started showing up here, Garfield did kind of break the mold.”
The mold has broken again, thanks to the coronavirus, which essentially has frozen traditional campaigning.
Garfield wasn’t necessarily seeking attention when crowds began traveling to his farm, named Lawnfield, in northeast Ohio. The little-known congressman had been selected on the 36th ballot during a disputed convention, and people were curious about the mystery candidate. They started traveling from nearby cities and by train from neighboring states.
Campaigning was seen as a rude and uncivil form of self-promotion at the time, and Garfield was among those who believed “the office should come to the man, not the other way around,” Arrington said.
“At first Garfield really just didn’t know what to do because this was unprecedented,” Arrington said. “People didn’t just show up at a candidate’s house.”
A former Union Army general and college president, Garfield responded by strolling onto his wide front porch and talking to voters. He tailored his remarks to their issues, Arrington said. He spoke of civil rights to African American visitors, of tariffs when it was businessmen. He spoke German to German immigrants and, with female visitors, dodged the suffrage question while praising women’s service during the Civil War.
The events revealed a truth about campaigning.
“The fundamental question of any campaign is how you get people out of their normal routine to participate,” said Jon Grinspan, curator of political history at the Smithsonian’s National Museum of American History. “This is an important mechanism for answering that question. You make it an excursion. You make a day of it, you take a picnic. You get to meet the president himself and see he isn’t just some person in Washington. He’s one of us.”
Unwittingly, this aversion to campaigning may have helped spare politicians from contagious diseases common in the day, including yellow fever, cholera and typhoid.
What Garfield started, other Republicans would emulate and another future Ohio president would perfect. With McKinley’s 1896 campaign, the front-porch campaign became a frontporch strategy. Some 750,000 supporters and spectators visited McKinley’s lawn in Canton, about 70 miles south of Mentor, and full-scale campaign merchandising was born.