How to Run for President in the Middle of a Pandemic

Is it possible to run for president during a pandemic, without the handshaking and the baby-kissing? Can Joe Biden and Donald Trump stay a safe six feet from their own campaigns? Ever since the arrival of the coronavirus, we’ve all wondered whether democracy can operate at such a distance.

Not only is it possible, but history shows that for the first century of American politics nearly all candidates stayed home. Parties ran their races for them. The idea of a man promoting his own election, The New York Times wrote in 1892, “disgusts the people.” In an age of tribal partisanship, feuding candidates and frequent epidemics, this style of socially distanced stumping drew record turnouts and protected a candidate’s honor, and maybe his health. Such a retro campaign might suit the weird world in which we live today.

In early America, presidents were expected to “stand,” not “run,” for office. They did not attend conventions and whiled away a dull election season at home. Lincoln read joke books. Grant took a vacation. Andrew Jackson had to be reminded by campaign advisers: “You live in retirement on your farm, calm and unmoved by the excitement around you, taking no part in the pending canvass.” One can imagine Jackson’s handlers repeating that line as his temper flared.

Instead, an ideal candidate was expected to “sit cross legged and look wise,” as an antsy James Garfield complained. Running for one’s own election betrayed what The Atlantic Monthly condemned as “vulgar self-assertion,” proving that a man was too narcissistic to hold high office. In a time of otherwise brutal politics, the president was set apart as a virtuous national grandfather, above the fray. An incumbent running for re-election from the White House seemed especially craven.

Though candidates stayed home to guard their virtue, they may have protected their health as well. The 1800s were a time of frequent, terrifying, unstoppable epidemics. All the factors that made modernizing America exciting — its size, its diversity, its incredible growth — also made it a haven for infectious diseases.

Yellow fever, cholera and typhoid surged. Tuberculosis killed an estimated one in every five Americans before the Civil War. And Americans’ habits — their peripatetic lifestyle, their love of crowds, their constant tobacco spitting — made things worse. Though the 19th century was a time of incredible scientific innovation, life expectancy actually fell from 1790 to 1890.

Presidents were not immune. Every chief executive elected in the 1840s most likely died of a communicable disease within that decade: William Henry Harrison from typhoid in 1841, James K. Polk from cholera in 1849, Zachary Taylor from viral gastroenteritis in 1850.

But while candidates stayed home, their campaigns shook the nation. Across the mid-to-late 19th century, parties hosted huge rallies and drew thousands of supporters to torch-lit parades. Little did they know that cramming tens of thousands of hollering partisans into Union Square in Manhattan was a gift to the tuberculosis bacillus. Such marchers often “serenaded” candidates, storming onto their property and singing campaign songs outside their windows late at night. Anonymous partisans played the active role, while candidates were the spectators.

One Swedish immigrant wrote home in 1884 that, in America, the leaders sat back while the people “all work with both hands and feet to get the party they belong to on top.”

Perhaps these disease-vector campaigns explain some of the revulsion — especially among elites — toward candidates who ran for office themselves. When the populist Benjamin Butler ran for governor of Massachusetts in 1871, he infuriated Boston Brahmins with a campaign of “multitudinous hand-shakings,” wading into rallies of 20,000 to embrace his supporters. One Tammany Hall boss complained that while his organization welcomed impoverished immigrants, there was not an aristocratic leader in the city “who would shake hands with them.” Much of this was class snobbery, but a fear of the “dirty cesspool of politics” blurred politics and public health.

And when maverick politicians actually campaigned for president, including Stephen Douglas in 1860 and Horace Greeley in 1872, and died of mysterious diseases soon after, critics clucked their tongues.

But sitting at home was tough. In 1880, James Garfield found a solution. A warm and affectionate man, “Gaffy” bristled at the idea that he could not interact with his admirers. So he welcomed supporters to his front porch in Lawnfield, Ohio, all with the plausible deniability of merely receiving guests at home.

Four years later, the Republican presidential nominee, James Blaine, went further. Called “the Magnetic Man” for his incredible charisma, Blaine was “one of the best hand-shakers in public life,” and refused to keep his talents to himself. By 1896, the Republican Party boss Mark Hanna had mechanized the humble Porch Front strategy, transporting 700,000 spectators to William McKinley’s lawn in Canton, Ohio over the course of the campaign.

Those candidates had to fight on two fronts. In addition to defeating the opposition, they needed to find a way around the bosses who controlled their parties. Campaigning for oneself promised freedom. In the Gilded Age, as Americans admired do-it-yourself tycoons and inventors, voters fantasized about a single bold president cleaning up democracy. “Personal leadership” was the trick, one writer argued in 1894: “The people will not come out for a principle, but they will for a man.”

In 1896, that man was the radical William Jennings Bryan. Known for his mystical “power over the audience,” Bryan broke tradition and set out on a ferocious tour. He gave 500 speeches in 100 days, traveling some 18,000 miles of railroad and reaching millions. Washington elites sniped that Bryan was “begging for the presidency as a tramp might beg for a pie.”

But he thrilled audiences, a word that kept coming up in the diaries and letters of those who saw him. This was something new: The thrill came from watching a candidate campaign, rather than doing it for him. The nominee was the actor; the voters were spectators. Bryan lost, but he forever changed campaigning in the process.

If what voters wanted was “personal leadership,” Theodore Roosevelt would suit them. People joked that after a conversation with him, you had to “wring the personality out of your clothes.” Though he first entered the White House because of President McKinley’s assassination — denying Roosevelt the opportunity to campaign as vigorously as he surely would have — he made the presidency a physical presence in American’s lives.

Roosevelt’s gnashing teeth and glinting glasses were everywhere, on buttons and dolls and board games. He had “a practice of kissing babies indiscriminately.” Roosevelt’s buzzing handshakefulness overwhelmed a nation used to retiring presidents. At one event, he reportedly shook the hands of 8,500 well-wishers, inviting all sober, clean citizens to press the flesh.

That cleanliness mattered. The growing willingness of presidents to campaign coincided with a revolution in public health. A greater understanding of germ theory helped Americans control many of the diseases that had raged in the 19th century. Basic hygiene — washing hands, clean drinking water, less spitting — cleaned up society well before antibiotics. It’s no coincidence that political ads and soap ads both filled newspapers around 1890. Presidents really were safer shaking hands.

Those presidents used their new power to promote public hygiene, cleaning up slums, and guaranteeing “pure” food, drugs and milk. It began a cycle of increasingly prominent presidents and greater social reforms, making it both safer and more virtuous to campaign. Disease still raged, but by the 1930s, Franklin Roosevelt, himself a polio survivor, made improving public health and his own re-election open causes of his presidency.

This may all sound like ancient history, but so did the fear of epidemics in America until a few months ago. History keeps mutating and reconfiguring, and the model of campaigning that we have grown used to is not the only option. There is nothing in the Constitution about the packed convention, the debate-night handshake, the candidate you could have a beer with. We have to adapt, and our politics may be suited for a stay-at-home candidate in 2020.

Partisanship powered those old campaigns and will motivate much of this one. It just didn’t matter much who the candidate was, so long as voters could support their tribe and crush their rivals. Many would “vote for the devil,” The Atlantic Monthly joked in 1880, “if he received the party’s regular nomination.” Large numbers of 19th-century voters cast party tickets without knowing the name of their candidates. When ballot reforms required them to select leaders by name, after the 1880s, turnout crashed.

A distant candidate also helped bitterly divided parties unite under one banner. By not focusing too much on a single man, parties used to aim different appeals at diverse audiences. These two-faced campaigns left an awful legacy, helping slavery survive for decades by allowing parties to simultaneously run pro-slavery and antislavery campaigns in different regions.

But Lincoln’s Team of Rivals also made use of this approach, enabling former opponents to campaign for him among their fractured constituents. In our own time, Joe Biden triumphed after a divisive primary and struggles with an enthusiasm gap, while Donald Trump has the lowest average approval ratings of any president on record. A campaign centered on party rather than nominee might help reach wider audiences.

The fundamental question of campaigning is who performs the labor. In the 19th century, ordinary citizens did incredible amounts of work for their parties, while nominees sat idle. From the Porch Front campaign to Theodore Roosevelt’s handshaking to Donald Trump’s rallies, candidates took on more and more of the work themselves, centralizing the campaign in the body of one person. The curbing of many infectious diseases allowed this greater risk.

But in a distanced nation, equipped with social media, Zoom accounts and simmering partisan outrage, there’s no reason we can’t devolve this work to millions sitting at home.

A less present candidate might be a good thing for our democracy. The constant focus on the presidency drowns out much of the dynamism of political life. And executive power has inflated in proportion to the labor of the candidates; it’s no coincidence that Mr. Trump both campaigns more than any past incumbent and believes that the authority of the president of the United States “is total.”

“Democracy” and “pandemic” share the same root in “demos,” the Greek word for people. What affects us all should reflect us all. We could use less focus on one man on a stage, or in his basement. While the 19th-century style of politics brought many of its own problems, maybe in 2020 we could use a little less running for office, and a little more standing.

Jon Grinspan, a curator of political history at the Smithsonian’s National Museum of American History, is the author of the forthcoming “The Age of Acrimony: How Americans Fought to Fix Their Democracy, 1865-1915.”