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James
Gillespie Blaine
(1830-1893)
Tattoos
and politics certainly
make strange bedfellows.
As our presidential
campaign moves
into new stages
of mud slinging
at each newscast,
it brings to mind
the infamous 1884
election. Many
election watchers
consider it, as
America's "vilest" presidential
campaign.
That race was in November 1884,
between State Governor Grover Cleveland
and Congressman James Blaine. Cleveland
had dallied with a widow and refused
to marry her when she became the
mother of his child, and Blaine
had taken gifts from businesses
and lied about them. The choice,
as a local paper put it, was between
a private immoralist and public
immoralist.
Then enters Bernard Gillam, a political
cartoonist working for Puck, an
independent Republican weekly.
Having a strong anti-Blaine line,
Puck commissioned Gillam to do
a series of drawings showing Blaine's
political no-nos tattoos as words
on his body. It was no coincidence
that the Blaine in these drawings
resembled the famed tattooed Greek,
Constantine. The National Democratic
Committee ordered huge stacks of
these issues and distributed them
as campaign literature. This helped
push Puck's sales to new heights.
See the front and back covers of
this issue for examples of Gillam's
work.
Much to everyone's surprise, the
tattooed images of Blaine stuck
in the voter's minds. This was
long before our modern "Teflon" candidate.
For the rest of the campaign these
issues dogged Blaine, and in November
1884 Grover Cleveland became the
22nd President of these United
States. It just goes to show that
even more than one hundred years
ago, Americans could live with
sexual misconduct easier than with
political wrong doings.
Tattoo Archive © 1998
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