Booze and elections have a long, colorful history in America. Even before we were an independent nation, politicians plied voters with a nip or three.
According to Tracy Campbell, a University of Kentucky professor who has written on election fraud, even George Washington did it. While running for the Virginia House of Burgesses in 1758, Washington fretted that he hadn't bought enough rum, wine, brandy and beer to win the votes of his neighbors.
"It was not beneath his dignity to lubricate the thirsty throats of prospective voters who may have trudged many miles to make it to the polls," Campbell writes in "Deliver the Vote: A History of Election Fraud, an American Political Tradition - 1742-2004" (Carroll & Graff, 2006).
Colonists called the practice "treating." James Madison, said Campbell, derided it as "swilling the planters with bumbo." (Notably, Madison lost his Virginia election.)
By the mid-1800s, "treating" had evolved into what one reformer described as "a serious menace to the welfare of the nation."
Saloons had become the rough-and-tumble center of city commerce. Immigrants flooded them, looking for jobs and handouts. Big-city political machines operated out of the back rooms, controlling judges, cops and inspectors. According to one estimate, half of New York's aldermen under Tammany Hall were bar owners who worked in concert with breweries and "liquor interests" to run the city for their own profit.
Philadelphia was no different. In the Moyamensing section, for example, a notorious Irish Catholic thug named William McMullen controlled things from his own saloon.
Each Election Day, McMullen - a racist who once stabbed a policeman - dispatched roving gangs of drunks to intimidate blacks and attack opponents. Full-scale riots were not uncommon.
