Progress--Day 1

[shalanna]

1354 / 50000 words. 3% done!

I still know it's crazy to do this, as I have no hope of getting it published in any legitimate forum. But the story intrigues me, and I like it when the sisters get to bantering. Who knows how I'll have the magick work in this one? We'll find out.

Resistance is futile! When it's inevitable, relax and enjoy it. Why not just say, "Hooray for Election 2008, no matter how it turns out!"?
I, for one, welcome our new robot overlords.
And, frankly, why vote for a *lesser* evil? Bwaa-ha-ha.

But if you wonder whether there's ever been an election like this one . . . there has. Election '08!

William Jennings Bryan vs William Howard Taft, in 1908.

Taft had the advantage as Teddy Roosevelt's hand-picked successor. Bryan suggested that there should be a federal deposit insurance program to protect depositors in banks--what we have now as FDIC insurance up to $100K per account. But Taft said banking was all about reputation, trust, and assurances, and that would impugn the poor little honest bankers just because of a few rotten eggs. However, if they had taken Bryan's suggestion in 1908, there might have been far fewer suicides in 1929 after the bank failures. I see Bryan as the Hillary Clinton of his generation, as he couldn't get elected for sche*sse, but people later took all his ideas and represented them as THEIRS and used them. **grin**

I was SO thrilled to hear Bryan's voice and Taft's voice this morning (off the original Edison-made cylinder recordings used in theirs, the first mass-media Presidential campaigns) on ALL THINGS CONSIDERED! I did a research project during my AP History year on Taft/Bryan (as well as one on Henry Clay and one on the Lincoln/Douglas debates; why, then, didn't I get a 5 on that exam? Because the exam asked for dates and exact dates, not for trends and in-depth studies. They cared not that I knew about Taft getting stuck in the White House bathtub. Pfft. I did get a 5 on the AP English exam, however. And a 4 on AP French. So there.) You can read about everything I learned back then and MORE--even hear the candidates from a century ago!--on the NPR website. Go to http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=96390250. Fascinating! History repeats itself. Those who do not remember the past are doomed to repeat it. And so forth.

Comments

[scythrop.livejournal.com]

Ha. If that's indeed the case with Bryan, he is definitely the Hillary of 100 years ago!

I know the fellow, Henri, who invented the Archeophone, the digital cylinder player used to reformat wax cylinders. My department bought the third one nearly ten years ago, and he had to fly in from Paris to tweak it! It's so great.

[blergeatkitty.livejournal.com]

I went to high school with a descendant and namesake of Taft. I never knew him very well though - my impression was that he was kind of a douche though. I was very disappointed when I met him for the first time and found out he wasn't big and fat with a walrus mustache.

[dennismhavens.livejournal.com]

Have you ever read Gore Vidal's "1876"? It's the story of that year's election, between Democrat Samuel Tilden and Republican Rutherford B. Hayes. It resonated, hugely, with the same kind of duplicity that we remember from 2000. In that year (1876), a lot of what we saw 124 years later in Bush vs. Gore, except that Al was in far better health than Tilden, who was several times believed to be dead by his people during campaign swings.

As in 2000, the Democrat won the popular vote, kicking off a fierce battle in the Electoral College. Hayes had a fellow Republican, Ulysses S. Grant, in the White House pulling strings on his behalf. (Maybe if Bill Clinton had been paying more attention . . . .)

The issue really hadn't been settled by the eve of Inauguration Day. Tilden let it be known he'd be on the inauguration stand to get sworn in as the legitimate winner. Grant, no stranger to unethical behavior, pulled a trick out of his top hat and had Hayes sworn in the night before, inside the White House. And so Rutherford Birchard Hayes became president.

For a mediocrity, Hayes had a more-or-less harmless single term (which is all he promised he would serve). He is probably best remembered today for being a teetotaler who never allowed alcohol to be served at White House functions. This earned his wife the sobriquet "Lemonade Lucy" and gave a contemporary wag the chance to say, about a White House social event, that "The Water Flowed like Champagne."

A fun bunch, our presidents.