While researching George Armstrong Custer this evening, I came across an interesting paragraph about the 1876 presidential election:
The Republicans and the Democrats—or we should rather say the Republican and the Democratic newspapers—are now engaged in the pleasing and morally elevating business of blackening the reputations and disparaging the ability of each other's candidates for the Presidency and Vice-Presidency. It is a lovely and an edifying sight to see journalists heaping scorn and contempt, even if nothing worse, upon certain men, when we are positively sure that if the tables were turned, and the Republican were Democrat and the Democrat Republican, the same journalists would laud the very same men to the skies. If this process has any very serious effect upon the balloting in November, it speaks very ill for the common sense and the right feeling of the American people. But we venture meekly to suggest that a political canvass might be conducted, and with spirit, with this element of personality entirely left out of it. Until we are compelled to do so, we shall refuse to believe that the representatives of either of the great political parties which divide the country have selected a dishonorable man or a political charlatan as its candidate for the Presidency, or that either party would quietly submit, when its opponent was elected and occupying the Presidential chair, to have him denounced by a foreigner as its own journals are denouncing him now. Perhaps our brethren of the daily press may dimly perceive the conclusion which in a nebulous manner looms before them.
The passage appears in the September 1876 issue of The Galaxy magazine (volume 22). Much of the paragraph could have been written today, about the 2016 presidential election.
