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by glen e. thurow * Rappahannock News Contributing Writer
Today’s presidential campaigns are lengthy affairs. Months before the first crucial caucuses and primaries the candidates are out on the trail, sizing up the mood of the people and wooing their votes. It is often said that the campaign is too jlong — too tiring for the candidates j|nd too boring for the voters (as ►though the main criteria for judging »^ampaigns should be the ease of the candidates and the entertainment of 'the voters). I' But it is too little noted that the ‘practice of long, public campaigns by •the candidates both reflects and helps create a presidency strikingly different from (and, in some respects, inferior to) the presidency of America’s first century.
In the 1800s, presidential candidates did not publicly campaign at all. Elections were often hotly contested, but the candidates themselves were expected to stay home and — with rare exceptions — did. Although the development of railroads had made campaign tours easily possible by the time of the Civil War, it was not until the rise of the Progressives that .candidates personally campaigned.
William Jennings Bryan broke a century of tradition in 1896 by stumping the country on his own behalf. Mr. Bryan, of course, did not win. Woodrow Wilson, in 1912, became the first successful candidate for president to have gone on a fullscale speaking tour during the campaign.
This change from the “front porch” campaigns of the 19th century to the “whistle stop” and “airplane hop” campaigns of the 20th is not the result of transportation improvements so much as a change in the understanding of the presidential office and in the relationship of the campaign to the president’s powers and duties.
In the “front porch” elections, forties, not individual candidates, (carried the burden of campaigning. These campaigns were designed to protect the presidential office (and the future president) from dangers that were thought to arise from direct appeals to the voters by ambitious and contending candidates. In particular, there were three features of the presidency that were thought to be threatened by direct campaigning: its constitutional authority, its receptivity to genuine statesmanship and its accountability to the people.
The presidency was designed to be an office whose authority .stemmed from powers granted by
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