Disputed Elections, Concealed Facts.

As the prize of the residency lurched back and forth in the last days of the year, with the entire nation hypnotized by the spectacle, I had a vision. I saw the Titanic churning through the waters of the North Atlantic toward an iceberg looming in the distance, while passengers and crew concentrated on a tennis game taking place on deck.

In our election-obsessed culture, everything else going on in the world--war, hunger, official brutality, sickness, the violence of everyday life for huge numbers of people--is swept out of the way, while the media insist we watch every volley of the candidates. Thus, the superficial crowds out the meaningful, and this is very useful for those who do not want citizens to look beneath the surface of the system. Hidden by the contest of the candidates are real issues of race and class, war and peace, which the public is not supposed to think about.

As the Gore-Bush match came to its frenzied finish, the media kept referring to the Hayes-Tilden election of 1876. The education the public received about this was typical of what passes for history in our schools, in our newspapers, and on our television sets. We were told how the Founding Fathers, in writing the Constitution, gave the state legislators the power to choose electors, who would then choose the President. We were told how rival sets of electors were chosen in three states, and how Samuel Tilden, the Democrat, had 250,000 more popular votes than the Republican, Rutherford Hayes, and needed only one more electoral vote to win the Presidency. But when a special commission, with a bare Republican majority, was set up by Congress to decide the dispute, it gave all three states to Hayes and thus made him President.

This told us a lot about the mechanics of Presidential elections and the peculiar circumstances of that one. But it told us nothing about how "The Compromise of 1877," worked out in private meetings between Democrats and Republicans, doomed blacks in the South to semi-slavery. It told us nothing about how the armies that once fought the Confederacy would be withdrawn from the South and sent West to drive Indians from their ancestral lands. It told us nothing about how Democrats and Republicans would now join in subjecting working people all over the country to ruthless corporate power.

Behind the Tilden-Hayes hullabaloo was a hard reality: The Republican Party, and the Northern industrial-financial interests that dominated it, were no longer interested in the fate of the former slaves. The Fourteenth and Fifteenth Amendments had given blacks a few years of new freedom in which they could vote and be elected to office. But the ex-slaves would be given no land, no resources to give meaning to their political freedom. President Hayes, awarded the election, would make concessions to the Democrats, remove the soldiers who had protected black rights in the South, and white supremacy would be restored.

In 1877, the country was in the midst of a depression. Farmers and workers were beginning to rebel against the new economic order and the national government that was giving huge favors to the railroad corporations and the manufacturers. The Northern elite now needed to reconcile with the leaders of the white South. In his classic study of the 1877 compromise, Reunion and Reaction, the historian C. Vann Woodward asked: "Could the South be induced to combine with the Northern conservatives and become a prop instead of a menace to the new capitalist order?"

That new order was in trouble. The country had been in a depression since 1873. By 1877, desperation was widespread, and railroad workers went out on strike all over the country, in one of the most violent episodes of class warfare in American history: 100,000 workers were on strike, 1,000 went to prison, the death toll reached 100, the cities of Chicago and St. Louis were brought to a halt. President Hayes, withdrawing soldiers from the South, used some of those same soldiers to smash the strikes.

Other soldiers would be used in the westward expansion of the United States. Ironically, the man who had been head of the Freedman's Bureau and worked to help ex-slaves get some land of their own, General O.O. Howard, now led troops against Indians in the far West.

These were the facts of race and class and Western expansion concealed behind the disputed election of 1876. The pretense in disputed elections is that the great conflict is between the two major parties. The reality is that there is a much bigger conflict that the two parties jointly wage against large numbers of Americans who are represented by neither and against powerless millions around the world.

The ferocity of the contest for the Presidency in the last election concealed the agreement between both parties on fundamentals. The evidence for this statement lies in eight years of the Clinton-Gore Administration, whose major legislative accomplishments--destroying welfare, imposing more punitive sentences on criminals, increasing Pentagon spending--were part of the Republican agenda.

The Democrats and the Republicans do not dispute the continued corporate control of the economy. Neither party endorses free national health care, proposes extensive low-cost housing, demands a minimum income for all Americans, or supports a truly progressive income tax to diminish the huge gap between rich and poor. Both support the death penalty and the growth of prisons. Both believe in a large military establishment, in land mines and nuclear weapons and the cruel use of sanctions against the people of Cuba and Iraq.

Perhaps when the furor dies down over who really won the tennis match and we get over our anger at the umpire's calls and the final, disputed score, we will finally break the hypnotic spell of the game and look around. We may then think about whether the ship is going down, and if there are enough lifeboats, and what should we do about all that.

Howard Zinn is a columnist for The Progressive.