Not in a Celebratory Mood? America Has Overcome Hard Times Before, and These 5 Historical Facts Prove It
It’s all over the news: The president stands accused of raiding federal funds for personal projects. Members of Congress are caught paying and accepting bribes. Rival parties divide voters, then submit multiple conflicting sets of election results from the same state. Florida, predictably, is at the center of the mess. There are riots. The whole dispute ultimately gets handed to a special commission to sort out, and the country doesn’t have a new president for months after the election. Sound familiar? This tale of electoral chaos isn’t from 2020. Brace yourself: We’re talking about 1876 . “It is unquestionably the most corrupt presidential election we have ever had,” says historian Greg Jackson, an associate history professor at Utah Valley University and the host of the wildly popular podcast History That Doesn’t Suck . “And by a margin that makes everything else pale.” Jackson would know. He spent three years deep-diving into Am...