Being a Millennial, I’m probably one of the youngest Dopers here.
From as early as I could follow American politics, it was nasty. The Lewinsky scandal, Gingrich era, George W. Bush, Obama - all pretty venomous eras. Then Trump came along and it was triple-nasty.
Were the 1980s better? I know the 1960s-1970s were tumultuous. The 1950s had McCarthyism. Was World War II the only recent united time? The Civil War and Reconstruction, of course, weren’t nice times.
By what metric? If you look at governmental bipartisanship, my guess would be the ‘50s through the mid-60s. But there’s never really been an overall civil political era.
It wasn’t a united time though.
Politico: How World War II Almost Broke American Politics
In the years leading up to its entry into World War II, the United States was bitterly divided over the New Deal and vehemently at odds over whether it should enter the conflict erupting in Europe. Even during the war, the country remained beset by racial and ethnic animosities that pitted Protestants against Catholics, Catholics against Jews and white Americans against people of color. Partisan rancor posed a steep barrier to the extreme measures that mobilization required: mass taxation, rationing, wage and price fixing, conscription, and surveillance. The business community sharply resisted the shift from civilian to military production. Organized labor loudly demanded its share of wartime prosperity. Even as the country fell in line with this vast expansion of state authority, outwardly uniting behind the war effort, discord boiled just beneath the surface, revealing itself in violent homefront outbursts and acid displays of political demagoguery.
The war almost tore America apart. And yet, it didn’t. The country ultimately rallied behind its popular but controversial wartime president to transform itself into the “arsenal of democracy.”
They weren’t united. Partisanship was particularly bitter during World War II. They set it aside the bare minimum necessary for the war effort, but it was still nasty. A lot of what you think of happening during McCarthyism was happening during the war too.
Elections have never been nice. In one of the earliest Congressional races, in one of the southern states, one candidate accused his opponent of spreading syphilis among his slaves.
Era of Good Feelings?
Well, if you ignore the HUD rigging scandal, cutting support for school lunches, the Savings & Loan scandal, various scandals and undercutting of the EPA, military bribery scandals and procurement fraud, and of course, the Iran-Contra Affair for which, despite the fact that it violated the Boland Amendments which specifically prohibited using CIA or Defense money to support the Contras and ended up providing arms to Iran, nobody involved actual served any prison time and for which most of the participants were pardoned by George H. W. Bush. If you sum it all up, the Reagan administration was easily the most corrupt and scandal-ridden since Harding which is pretty impressive given that it came less than a decade after Richard ‘Tricky Dick’ Nixon resigned from the presidency under imminent threat of being impeached and removed.
But hey, we had commercials like this:
Stranger
My metric is the ever-vague, totally subjective, and nondescript criteria of “feelings.” Like, did it feel nicer or more polite in the 1970s than now. Etc.
I do watch debates of Carter, Kennedy, Nixon, etc. though and it’s shocking how superbly educated and polite those guys are compared to Trump. Well, even Obama vs. Romney sounded like the pinnacle of civil discourse compared to Trump. In college, I remember the 2008 election being surprisingly nice compared to how bad it could have been - much credit to McCain for that.
It was never nice, but it may have been nicer.
I’d nominate 1940 when a lifetime Democrat (Wendel Wilke) ran as a Republican and a lifetime Republican (FDR) ran as a Democrat.
After losing the election, Wilke joined the FDR administration to solicit world wide support for the president.
Tip O’Neal seemed able to work with Republicans.
I think FDR was a Democrat from his first political office. It seems to me from watching the American Experience documentary on him, he had questions as a very young man about his leanings.
Conflicted because of Teddy Roosevelt.
Because Reagan was a professional politician going back to his days as President of the Screen Actors Guild (yes, he was head of what is essentially a labor union) and understood that despite all of the political rhetoric you actually have to negotiate and compromise if you want to effectively govern. Reagan did not get deep into policy (despite all of the revisionism which has attempted to reframe him as a policy wonk) but he understood how to work people and build relationships even with political opponents.
Still ran the most corrupt presidential administration of the latter half of the 20th century, thought. And according to some, did it single-handedly:
Stranger
I’m curious. Whatever did you find ‘venomous’ about Obama?
The Obama era was politically venomous. Obama himself was a nice guy.
Although, really, the entire time of 2008-2016 seems positively chill compared to today.
Thank you for the clarification.
And I certainly agree about your second point.
I’d guess post WWII to the sixties as well. (1945-1960(ish))
This is the answer right here. How come nobody’s paid it any mind?
The Era of Good Feelings was James Madison’s administration. The Federalist party had spent Madison’s first term self-destructing, so that by 1820 he won re-election almost unanimously. The (Democratic-)Republican party was the only show in town. That lasted until the 1824 election when it fragmented into four factions. One of those factions went on to become the Democratic party.
I disagree; it was more that the political mainstream was still in full denial about how bad the Right was. There was plenty of venom from the Right.
But didn’t the Democrats dismiss Willkie’s campaign image as “a simple barefoot Wall Street lawyer”?
The high point of niceness and civility was — McCarthyism?
There was always nastiness in American politics but it was never concerted and orchestrated the way it is now before Fox News arrived on the scene in the mid Nineties.