The United States was in a bit of a mess, as usual. There was trouble with the economy; trouble with the money; trouble on the farms. There were struggles between the races and cries for civil rights. The President was a Republican, and pretty well entrenched, although some of his party were furious with him and his administration. In fact, they were teaming up with the Democrats, and there were more opposition candidates for the coming election than one could keep straight. There was a big Negro convention, too, and an outspoken woman candidate. The son of a famous Massachusetts Presidential family was a quiet but probably willing liberal candidate. His name, of course, was Charles Francis Adams, for this was 1872.

As we write (in March, 1972) the present election campaign has many amusing parallels with that of 1872, as it does in any year when a cacophony of candidates seeks to oppose a strong incumbent. The cast includes the usual full set of regulars, including the rich men, the poor country boys, the ill-disguised dark horses, the hard campaigners, and the men who are letting the nomination seek them (but keeping the path to their doorway brightly lit). We also have, here and there, our oddities. Who can identify, for instance, Linda Jenness, Richard B. Kay, James Boren, and the Reverend Clennon King? (They are the candidates, in the same order, of the Socialist Workers, the “American Party,” the National Association of Professional Bureaucrats, and the Party for God in Politics. Or so it is announced.) The spirit has not, as we write, yet moved the Prohibitionists to pick a candidate or the Vegetarians to cook up a slate either. Dr. Spock is running, for the People’s Party. Harold Stassen is not. There is a Black candidate and a Woman’s candidate, and both of her are Representative Shirley Chisholm.

But now look at 1872. General Grant’s first term had been something less than successful, with corruption rampant. The Crédit Mobilier scandal, a swindle involving the construction of the Union Pacific, had blackened the reputations of certain administration personalities, including Vice President Schuyler Colfax. But he had already been set aside in favor of Henry Wilson, who is known to history as the Natick Cobbler and who started out life, like his modern Vice Presidential counterpart, with another name: Jeremiah Jones Colbath.

Against this ticket there was a fantastic array. The “Straight-out Democratic” candidates, who could not stomach the choice of most of their party, were Charles O’Conor, a Catholic lawyer famed for his great courtroom victories, and the high-principled John Quincy Adams n, son of Charles Francis Adams and descendant of two Presidents. A Negro convention at New Orleans nominated the noted ex-slave Frederick Douglass, and the “Labor Reform Party” chose, of all people, the wealthiest man who had ever until then been put into nomination, Lincoln’s old friend Judge David Davis, who was supposed to be worth three