 few of us stop to think how unique we really are in the eyes of many in the world this every four year ceremony we accept as normal is nothing less than a miracle the oath I have taken before you and before God is not mine alone but ours together in the orderly transfer of power we celebrate the unity that keeps us free every four years we gather on these steps to carry out the orderly and peaceful transfer of power this ceremony is held in the depth of winter but by the words we speak and the faces we show the world we force the spring we meet on democracy's front porch a good place to talk his neighbors and his friends for this is a day when our nation is made whole when our differences for a moment are suspended there is no way we can go forward except together and no way anybody can win except by serving the people's urgent needs we cannot stand still or slip backwards we must go forward now together I want to thank my predecessor he has done to heal our land our duties are defined not by the words I use but by the history we have seen together every so often the oath is taken amidst gathering clouds and raging storms at these moments America has carried on not simply because of the skill or vision of those in high office but because we the people have remained faithful to the ideals of our forebears and true to our founding documents that's all video from the c-span archives as we kicked off the afternoon from the College of Liberal Arts programs for Purdue University all right thanks to Dean Ryan Gold and Laurie Sparger for setting up this panel and we're going to look at history today the two people you see on your screen are people who spend an enormous amount of their lives in the classroom they are history professors at Purdue University and they are both authors and it's just it's really interesting that we're going to have this time together before I'm going to ask you a probably a tough question but before we dig into the real history that we're going to go into I need to ask you if you were to choose the next clip in that series where the Biden clip would go at the very end from what you saw just an hour and a half ago what would you choose Randy Roberts for the Biden I would have chosen his when he speaks about unity you know he talks about he talked about unity throughout the his uh his speech and the one thing I found really interesting about his speech was his complete repudiation of a man who was never mentioned throughout the entire speech and who didn't attend a speech but on every position climate control position with our allies how we feel about our allies race coronavirus it was complete repudiation of the Trump administration Katherine Kramer Brownell one of the lines that stuck out to me is he said that we are in a winter of peril and significant possibility and I thought that that was that really captured it he was both honest and inspiring he addressed the fragility of our democratic institutions that we have seen challenged very violently in the past couple weeks so we've seen challenged over the past few years and he was very honest in the specific challenges we we we face he's called them out systemic racism the challenge of systemic racism white supremacy domestic terrorism misinformation and then he called everyone to be part of the solution and he really emphasized the responsibilities that we have as democratic citizens to be aware of our history and to be aware of how history will judge our actions that we're taking right now and I would also say that one of the lines that resonated with me was actually not spoken by President Biden but actually came from that brilliantly eloquent poet Amanda Gorman when she said that we are Americans by quote the past we step into and how we repair it and I thought those were really powerful words that show how we have to reckon with our history and this dark history that we've seen on display we've seen surface in the past few weeks but we've seen surface again for centuries this this darker history of nativism and violence and inequality and racism in order to move forward to make that rhetoric of equality and liberty and freedom a reality for all. Randy Roberts I was interested in in the modulation of the Biden I maybe I've spent too much time in the c-span archives I suppose when I you know that when we saw these past presidents almost yelling this speech across the Capitol on and yet the Biden speech seemed to me to be very almost as if he was just speaking to you across a room what did you think of that? It reminded me really of a fireside chat it reminded me very much of Roosevelt and you were he's speaking to you you felt like you were just sitting across from him you know it it didn't seem scripted it just seemed almost not off the cuff but it was it was an eloquent speech but but it it seems so so comfortable so relaxed and I just love the line where he really took them from the song America where I gave America I gave my best to you which was a song that was kind of a leap motif in Ken Burns's documentary on World War II and that resonated a great deal with me maybe I'm getting old but but I found that the entire process really emotional and uplifting. Randy Roberts and Catherine Kramer Brownell are the two historians who are here for this hour we're so glad to be able to kind of dig into some of the history we have four to go four elections to go through to try to make connections with what went on in those years and what's going on today so let's start with 1796 Katie Brownell well I'm thrilled to be part of a panel that looks at this this history of contested elections because we do have a long history of contested elections and the debates that they have generated offer an opportunity to reassess the political landscape what works about American democracy how it can be changed and sometimes these have created positive changes and sometimes very negative changes and I think that we'll be able to explore that today I would emphasize let's go ahead and put up the yeah the 1796 graphic that we have so that people can see who we're talking about and what we're talking about okay so I think that the the 1796 election is a key year because it's the first time that candidates from two very different political factions run against one another for the presidency so we have John Adams and Thomas Jefferson this is notably different from the first two elections where George Washington you know was the undisputed candidate he ran for re-election he really exemplified that model that many founders had when they thought of that you get called for public service and that you stood for office you didn't run for office you stood for office you were called by your peers because they trusted you as an honorable man to serve in that office and but but Washington of course understood the importance of what he was doing the power of precedent and the power of of setting norms and so the key here was that he understood the need to step down and before getting into the specifics of the 1796 election I think that looking at his farewell address is really powerful in setting the stage for that electoral context because he's leaving office he's he understands that leaving office is making a statement but he's giving this farewell address and he's looking he's surveying the scene of what's unfolding around him and he makes a very specific warning about the danger of factions that were developing that in many ways Jefferson and Adams were embodied and so I'm going to take a moment to to stop and allow you to hear some of his words that are being read actually starting during the civil war for the first time congress members of congress started to read his farewell address and into the 20th century it became a tradition that on George Washington's birthday the the Senate would take turns it'd be a republican one year a democrat the other the other year they would take turn reading his farewell address and so this part I think is really powerful and reverberates today let's listen and warn you in the most solemn manner against the baneful effects of the spirit of party generally this spirit unfortunately is inseparable from our nature having its root in the strongest passions of human mind it exists under different shapes in all governments more or less stifled controlled or repressed but in those of a popular form it is seen in its greatest rankness and it's truly their worst enemy the common and continual mischiefs of the spirit of party are sufficient to make it in the interest and duty of a wise people to discourage and restrain it it serves always to distract the public councils and infeval the per-public administration it agitates the community with ill-founded jealousies and false alarms kindles the animosity of one party against the nether pomements occasional riot and insurrection it opens the door to foreign influence and corruption which finds a facilitated access to the government itself through the channels of party passions thus the policy and the will of one country are subjected to the policy and will of another so anti-parties definitely well I think that what you see here is that Washington is warning he's very concerned about the the growing emotion and this idea of factions and I would emphasize that factions are that part that the attitude of parties and he's talking about they're not the organized parties that we see today rather they represented two different ways of thinking about power and the federal government and how to interpret the constitution so federalists like john adams wanted a strong central government they had support among merchants in the north wanted to strengthen diplomatic relations with great britain on the other hand democratic republicans led by thomas jefferson sometimes called jeffersonian republicans wanted to ensure states rights they supported revolutionaries in france they always claimed that they were fighting against their opponents who had a tendency towards monarchy but yet they also wanted to ensure the stability of slavery so these are the two different factions that really come together at a head in the 1796 election that year john adams won the most electoral votes and thus won the presidency thomas jefferson received the second most votes and then he assumed the vice presidency but the two men truly saw one another as enemies they had opposite views about the role of the federal government versus the role of the state and how they would implement again this constant the rules of the constitution that were so new and were not always clearly written out and so again precedent mattered so deeply in the early republic they did not work well together as you might imagine and in fact when adams and the federalists passed the alien and sedition acts of 1798 they did so to silence jefferson and his supporters in the press making it a prime to quote write print utter publish or shall cause or procure to be written print uttered or published any false scandalous and malicious writing or writings against the government of the united states with the intent to defame the said government so this really shows that the animosity that develops over that administration between adams and jefferson it really all it continues to intensify and then it comes to a head once again in the very divisive election of 1800 and which which resulted in jefferson winning but adams and other federalists kind of working to manipulate the electoral college returns to elevate erin burr to the presidency above above jefferson because they received the same number of votes i again there's not that coordination there's not a ticket in place there's not a coordination for who will win the presidency and who will win the vice presidency ultimately in the end i took 36 votes in congress to finally declare jefferson the president and erin burr as the vice president john adams was angry and bitter he fled washington the morning of march fourth which until 1937 was inauguration day he was bitter and resentful he did not attend the inauguration but yeah historians call that that election of 1800 the revolution of 1800 1800 because it was a constitutional crisis it was a bitterly fought election where mudslinging and misinformation abounded but in the end it also resulted in the peaceful transfer of power between two opposing factions i would add that it also resulted in the creation of the 12th amendment as i created the ticket of president and vice president which ultimately would be really central to forming parties down the road two decades later so you kind of already have done taken us through what the comparisons would be to today but it blows my mind to think of you know the possibility of donald trump and tim kane as president and vice president or hillary clinton you know and mike pens we're trying to work together doing something like that are there any other are there any other comparisons uh to today i'm thinking about the violence of the past week uh on capitol hill and and racial issues um against uh facing the country at that time well of course at that time i this is a slave nation i so only white white men are allowed to white property holding men so only white elite men are allowed to engage in the political process um ultimately the the rules that were introduced with the 12th amendment and the ways in which uh thomas jefferson and other southerners notably from virginia were able to manipulate the rules really assured the virginia dynasty as it's called to dominate national politics um in part because of the three fifths clause written into the constitution that owning slaves gave them more political power as well so i think that the reality of american society in this early republic uh you see again those legacies um very much are part of the challenge the history that we have to confront as a nation today so our goal in this hour is to get through the 1796 election the 18 uh while you mentioned 1800 1824 and 1876 and 2000 which are the elections that kind of have some comparisons randy roberts let's move to you slide us into 1824 from where uh katie brownell left us on the uh with the 1800 election i will but my problem now is that katie's got a great song that she can sing uh for for for this early period george washington's going home i can hear hamilton in my it's echoing in my mind you know king george saying you know oh yes i remember that little man to adams this is going to be fun to watch what happens next unfortunately for mine i don't have a great song that will echo in my mind um where do i want to start i want to start the idea that there's nothing new under the sun okay it's it's happened before what's been happening lately has happened before and and we got through it before and 1824 shows it the other thing i wanted to mention is how young america is i noted that that last year in 2020 lion tyler died okay who was lion tyler lion tyler was the grandson of our 10th president john tyler john tyler was the first president born in the washington administration so he was born john tyler i mean john tyler was born in 1790 his grandson just died last year there's three generations span literally the entire history of america and if you feel too bad for that and it is shame that he died his brother's still living harris and tyler is still living so he still has a living grandson so i start with the idea of we're a young nation yet even as a young nation things have changed i'm going to look at 1824 okay i'm great great great election to look at because it it it shows america changing again katie talked about the rise of what historians call the first party system the federalists and the democratic republicans well that first party system broke broke apart in the war of 1812 okay it it just was shattered and then we had this period of what was called the era of good feelings where we almost go back to a washingtonian vision of a single party rolling america well in 1824 that's going to break apart in 1824 a lot of people were tired of this virginia dynasty they wanted to break it off they they wanted to be president we start off this campaign season with 17 different people candidates vying for election that's just an enormous amount of people vying for election uh five people are serious candidates and they go into the end game uh we see on our map here on our election map we have four of them right here we have john quincy adams who was really a northeastern was northeastern urna was popular in the northeast we have two people that were popular in the west henry excuse me andrew jackson and henry clay and then we had two people that were popular in the south one is uh uh william crawford and the other is is uh calhoun john calhoun now calhoun dropped out so it left us with four calhoun interestingly enough will be the become the vice president and he's the vice president on the ticket for vice president with both adams and jackson so you know he he's covering his bases he's going to get that vice presidency uh slot so what happens contested election bitter election an election filled with i might say very quality candidates you have you know john adams who is a secretary of statement wrote them and wrote doctrine spectacular in foreign affairs you have henry clay the great compromiser speaker of the house of representatives another really quality candidate you had william crawford uh who was who had been uh in in a presidential administration he had been a senator he was uh george and he was well liked he was amiable uh and and he's a great candidate and then you have andrew jack andrew jackson a senator but known mostly as a general as a war hero battle of new orleans various indian wars so you've got a really compelling race of people um for people for the for for the presidency what happens elections held jackson receives the most popular vote though not a majority of the popular vote though we know that doesn't matter in the electoral college it's split i don't know if you can see those numbers uh on on the election map but jackson received the most electoral votes not half that he was needed to get president but the most he received 99 electoral votes uh adams received the next most which was 84 electoral votes uh crawford received 41 and cal who issues me and um and clay received uh 35 i believe electoral votes uh anyway so what happens it goes to the house of representatives they have to make the decision only the top three candidates can go to the house of representatives so that's crawford uh uh adams and jackson clay who's who kind of helps control the house of representatives he had been speaker remember he's forced out so he's going to be the kingmaker in this uh crawford's really not considered uh crop poor crawford number one he was chosen by the caucus but by that time the caucus has looked at his some sort of an imperial force it it doesn't jive with the new age of democracy with the democratization of american politics uh he's chosen by the caucus and suddenly he represents the factions the the pop professional politicians and this is an age where the people is important the will of the people is important okay that crawford had that one strike against them strike two and it's a big strike he suffered a paralytic stroke right after he was nominated and so he's in extraordinarily bad shape okay so he's not he's not in contention so it goes down to two people who who is a congress going to choose jackson or adams bitter both sides are rumored to be talking to clay saying look if if if you get me elected you can be secretary of state which was viewed as a stepping stone to the presidency both did adams and jackson both say it they both said no who knows all we will know is he's going to end up as secretary of state um so it goes down to the house of representative and by one one state each state had one vote uh adams is going to be elected well it's by more than one state but adams is going to be elected president jackson immediately calls corrupt bargain this is not good you know i didn't lose the will of the people has not been vindicated from day one of losing this election he's running for the election of 1828 so what do we have we have bitterly contested election we have a president excuse me a candidate that says i didn't lose it was a corrupt bargain we have adams appointing jack appointing uh clay secretary of state and the beginnings of the second party system has started so katie brownell before we move on to 1876 how do you see 1824 fitting into today's uh politics in terms of comparisons and contrast well i think one of the most important things that comes out um into this party system that randy was talking about is that uh jackson leaves you know he's very bitter about that election of course uh and he just he starts campaigning for the presidency in 19 or sorry 1828 immediately he starts coordinating across different states and this is also at a time that many states start to change the way that they award um electors to do a winner take all so if you have more coordination um and you're tapping into uh you know thinking about what's happening in a variety of these different states and they're starting to change the way that they award electors you're you're giving the the the institutional structures that then allow parties to become much more powerful in 1832 we you know see the first democratic convention so again all of these these things that we have come to expect from parties in terms of organization and institutions really come out of the anger and frustration that jackson has from losing that election and how he's committed to organizing more effectively to win four years later um and you know continue that organization down the road so ready roberts i was thinking uh i remember seeing a musical about andrew jackson recently and now i commiserate with you because it's already the songs are starting to go in my head already so andrew jackson is around so next we're going to go up to 1876 so ready roberts take us into that era oh i like 1876 and i haven't seen that jackson musical you're talking about i wish i had a lot of step okay i say it took me 30 years to be hamilton what can i say uh 1876 is great america is 100 years old right it's the centennial year all sorts of things are happening i think colorado became a state in 1876 um it's interesting by 1876 america is kind of divided politically we have basically 16 states in a country that virtually always go republican okay we have 14 states most of many old confederacy that will always go democratic so the key is the about the five or six states that could go either way okay they were just really really close states anything could happen and if you took those states particularly the three key states were new york ohio and and and indiana but if new york and ohio particularly if you took those states you were going to win the election it was that you know very just like today very very close elections in the electoral college uh and if you take a look at presidents and presidential candidates from the late 19th century from about this time through the first half of the 20th century virtually all of them are from ohio or new york the key the key ticket would be to run a person from ohio uh and a vice president from ohio vice president from new york or president from new york and vice president from indiana indiana had by six has had six uh vice presidents by the way since i'm in indiana i'll say that it's a hoosier um so this is an interesting election you have the civil wars over but the bitterness is still there you have this the whiff the stench of grantism still in the in the air you have that desperate need for some sort of civil service reform going to take place we still have reconstruction going on and and and what's going to happen to blacks in the south was a very real problem okay so you have these two candidates get the nomination of their parties first of all they're very much alike they're both reformers uh haze is a reformer for a reformer you've been a governor of ohio tilden was a reformer he's a guy that threw a boss tweet into jail from new york okay so they're both reformers they both want clean government they both believe in hard money they don't want paper money uh they both believe that we should end reconstruction in the south so you know you would think this is a election there's nobody's going to say anything bad about anybody else wrong you'd be very very wrong if you believe that um they they throw mud at each other rudderford hazes people talk about democrats they wait what's called waving the bloody shirt talking about the civil war as one as one pundit said not all democrats were rebels but all rebels were democrats if you have a wound if you've lost a leg if you've had a friend who's lost her life a democrat did it okay that's hitting below the belt but be that as a may the elections held okay bitterly contested all these elections 82 some percent of the eligible voters voted you know it's it's the highest turnout i believe that we've ever had in an election so it's very close what happens votes come in in electoral college tilden receives 184 electoral votes haze receives 165 electoral votes so what happens tilden wins right no wrong to get half the electoral votes you needed 185 electoral votes remember that 185 electoral votes uh tilden didn't get that we have 20 disputed electoral votes the votes from louisiana florida south carolina and one measly vote from oregon which is an anomaly we won't even consider it the voting was so corrupt so nobody knew who won those southern states two sets of of votes were ballots were sent up to congress one with democrats winning one with republicans winning uh there was intimidation in the south there was bribery there was corruption there was violence that it was it was a mess so how do we how do you define up these votes that we don't really know who won i mean in in in louisiana and south carolina you had black majorities okay these are still in reconstruction and there was a black majorities in florida you had a white majority but who do you give you give two states to haze and one state to tilden two to tilden one to haze put together electoral commission uh cruise was just talked senator cruise was talking about we needed an electoral commission for the last election well it doesn't work out very well what happens in this election 15 people in the electoral commission commission we have five from the south excuse me five from the house of representatives five from the senate and five from the supreme court seven were democrats seven were republicans supposedly i won't go into what happened but they had to reappoint one person another new supreme court justice uh onto the commission he had been appointed by grand but he's supposed to be neutral he's supposed to be neutral right so what happens a vote's taken on all the crucial votes the the commission votes eight to seven to give the all of the to give the vote to electoral votes to haze and up haze gets 185 electoral votes tilden gets 184 electoral votes by one electoral vote haze is elected president now everybody looked at that and said this just this doesn't smell right this doesn't look good we need to do you what what can we do and haze and and and some of the southern democrats get together and they say here what do we want the southern democrats say look we would like we first of all want an end of reconstruction we want the race question what happens to blacks in the south left in the south we want to decide it ourselves we want a southerner on the cabinet we want more federal appointments we want the building of a transcontinental railroad in the south like the transcontinental railroad in the north a haze says fine you got it the democrats say okay we'll contest in the next election the election's over there really wasn't any violence there were threats of violence but there was very little violence that took place after the election because the democrats really just conceded you talked about the sure you talked about the the corruption that there was a lot of corruption where did the corruption come from was it from the parties yeah it was it was polka you know intimidation for example voter suppression voter intimidation uh you know paying for votes a corruption at a whole series at the state level at well less than the state level at the precinct level at the lowest level you can get where people were voting uh you had corruption taking place throughout so i would add to that because i think that this is one of those moments where i referenced that the the debate over what happened in that election actually starts to change the terms of democracy for ill uh because white southerners used accusations of voter fraud to disenfranchise black voters uh white southern democrats form violent vigilante groups like the kkk to intimidate black voters who are loyal republicans at that time they wanted to roll back efforts that granted the vote to black americans after the civil war and you know randy touched on this but i think it's really telling that there's one black majority district in georgia that the vote was 211 to in favor of the democrats uh and i think that just goes to show that there's so many different ways that corruption and violence are factoring in and then the consequences of this matter deeply because after winning uh local elections again frequently through violence that's how white southern democrats implemented jim crow laws that further disenfranchised and discriminated against uh black americans um it would ultimately take you know over half a century of the civil rights movement to mobilize um and even more violence that they they faced in challenging that so elections have consequences um and i think that what you see a lot is that many white southerners are using the language of voter fraud to justify their own fraud so uh katie did mr tilden go quietly into the night well i actually think that this is a really important um part of what happens in the 1876 election because after the decision comes out of that commission uh congressional democrats they they protested the decision yes they made all of these compromises but many of them were not happy uh they threatened to use all sorts of parliamentary delays to prevent um uh haze from taking office um outside of washington there was a lot of anger among these democrats um that were fueled by the the animosities that still lingered from the civil war and tilden received many letters from supporters uh and they declared that they they were willing to take to the streets uh to to protest these results and it seemed that all of a sudden what happened in 1860 uh remember that the civil war was sparked uh by that 1860 election and white southerners refusing to recognize uh the results of abraham lincoln winning that election um and and that was the thing that ignited a succession that again had been on the horizon for a while but it's that refusal to accept the results of the 1860 election people remembered that um and it seemed that uh restarting the civil war could happen and um and tilden believed that he was the rightful winner um but he remained silent um and he refused to speak out he refused to indulge all of these efforts um uh by his supporters saying that they would you know they would take that they would resort to violence that he told them to um he refused to challenge the courts or the uh to challenge the results via the courts even more um many people told him that he should but he instead allowed to believe that he needed to remain silent and allow for a peaceful transfer of power and i think that again i can't emphasize enough that for people who had just gone through the civil war uh they understood the consequences of this violence that could come in uh challenging an election and not going through that peaceful transfer of power and so concessions um i think it highlights the importance of concessions and accepting defeat so here is that go ahead yeah interestingly enough there were groups called uh tilden Hendricks Minuteman Hendricks was the vice presidential candidate and they had expressions they talked it resonates with today on to washington tilden or blood you know they they were determined to to use violence to overturn this uh decision but again tilden kind of said no i don't i don't want that let's accept the will of the let's accept the election and later in life he said you know i i got elected i was elected president but i didn't have to do any of the hard work of being a president so he he he viewed it it benevolently later in life so thinking about your issues uh your discussion of concessions uh made me dig into the c span archives again because i was curious to see how since 1987 at least when the c span archives uh began what concession speeches really looked like and what were some of the keys so we have some video and uh take a look at it it's just a minute long and then i want to get your two reactions and i know i speak for all of you and for all the american people when i say that he will be our president and we'll work with him there is important work to be done and america must always come first so we will get behind this new president wish him wish him well i congratulated him and i've said no i've said repeatedly wait i've said repeatedly in this i've said repeatedly in this campaign that the president is my opponent not my enemy while i strongly disagree with the court's decision i accept it i accept the finality of this outcome which will be ratified next monday in the electoral college and tonight for the sake of our unity as a people and the strength of our democracy i offer my concession we had a good conversation and we talked about the danger of division in our country and the need the desperate need for unity for finding the common ground coming together today i hope that we can begin the healing a little while ago i had the honor of calling center of barack obama to congratulate him please to congratulate him on being elected the next president of the country that we both love i wish godspeed to the man who was my former opponent and will be my president this is a time of great challenges for america and i pray that the president will be successful in guiding our nation donald trump is going to be our president we owe him an open mind and the chance to lead our constitutional democracy enshrines the peaceful transfer of power and we don't just respect that we cherish it randy roberts what's your reaction to that especially when we all know we've seen these exact candidates react since their concession speeches in a in a much different way than what we saw there well you know it's wonderful and it reminds me a little bit of the end of a tennis match you know you always shake hands at the net in the old days there used to be people who would losers or would even jump over the net to shake hands with their opponent and so they're all they're all doing the same thing i love i love the fact that john mccain was behind dole when doles accepted was had to give his speech and then he maybe he learned from dole and he did a great job himself the hardest one had to be gores uh the rest of them lost the elections it was clear they had lost the elections gore's election was so razor thin so painfully close that it makes him what he said even more eloquent i believe there are there might be people on this program who are not familiar with either one of you so let me just say randy roberts you are the 150th anniversary professor of history here at purdue university how long have you been teaching here i've been teaching here since 1988 how many books do you have i don't know 25 or so a bunch 25 last year's was war fever what's that war fever is a book about 1918 and about three people who go through 1918 and become either heroes or villains uh and it deals with the pandemic of 1918 a little bit so it's a a tempestuous year during the last year of world war one and one of the first years of modern society published by published by basic books okay see my c-span history makes makes it mandatory that i ask these questions so that you get your books out katie brownell first of all give your reaction to the concession video well i think that it shows that concessions play an important role and i think this has actually um really been the case in the 20th century uh the first really public concession that we we hear about it happened in 1896 when william jennings bryan learned that he had lost and he wrote a telegram to william mckinley congratulating him on his win but then what you see happened is that this process becomes very public and very mediated through radio al smith conceded on radio in 1928 and then it's become you saw all of these are televised addresses and it's become an important media event and a political ritual to it's not required there's no law that requires it but but it's a really important political event in which you know there there's a shared commitment to democracy and the fact that who wins an election the number of votes will decide um and and that you have to respect the rules of the game if you're going to play in the game and and i think that that shared commitment to the outcome of elections you see through that concession speech in my three years here at purdue i have heard about a lot of good classes and a lot of not so good classes as it as in in the opinion of students let's just say it that way as you will know uh and i will tell you that uh i hear a lot of great things about katie bronell about your president's class and also randy roberts about your world war two class and your class on the history in sports so these are two professors who do have a lot of students coming through their classes uh so so katie you have uh your first book with showbiz showbiz politics yes and what do you have coming out uh so i'm currently working my first book looks at the rise of the celebrity presidency and the role of entertainment and politics and right now i am working and well hopefully finish in the next couple of months uh my new book on the political history of i cable television c span is a big factor in there we have 10 minutes left so good disgrace is 10 minutes left for 2000 so katie bronell take us into the 2000 election again this is one that people a lot of people will have lived through or have talked about but uh why is 2000 one of the elections that should be looked at and compared to the one we've just gone through so i think there are many lessons that we can learn um from the the 2000 election i and from my point of view and when i've actually it's part of my my new book i'm actually ending with the 2000 election because it really does highlight a defining feature of the 20th century american politics and the presidency and that is the really powerful role that media plays um in shaping political conversations um and the experiences of um civic ritual like elections um and how people understand how uh the world as it's unfolding around them and we see media contributing to this chaos um during the 2000 election um calling uh election results this idea that the networks will call a winner uh this is something that's relatively new um actually it's for the first time in 1980 uh the networks called the presidency um for uh ronald reagan before the polls even closed in california uh there was actually it was really controversial um uh jimmy carter actually gave his concession speech before the polls closed as well uh tippo neal the the democratic leader the speaker of the house was incredibly angry because he felt that that cost democrat seats because it really suppressed turnout among democrats on the west coast so this idea that the television networks are going to invest money into things like exit polls and try to assess what's happening and make predictions um really the challenge of that and the problem of that really comes into the forefront um of the 2000 election and uh media does media competition between the different networks to make that first call uh really ultimately backfires um and it created tremendous confusion and distrust in the process so i just want to outline a couple of time periods for you to think about uh if you go back to remembering watching the election returns uh unfold this year and how for days people like stared at that electoral map and they waited for are you going to call arizona you know who's going to call arizona when one you know when fox called it and others others didn't well there was that that heated race that unfolded very quickly um between 750 and 802 p.m. on election evening um abc cbs nbc cnn msnbc and fox news all projected al gore to win the critical state of florida um it was before polling had actually closed in in the panhandle um so that that it was a very early call two hours later that call was retracted um so again it seemed that gore won the presidency and then two hours later they pulled it back and said actually we're not entirely sure uh then between 216 and 220 a.m. the networks reversed course and they declared bush the winner of florida um and yet two hours later that that call two was retracted so voters woke up incredibly confused uh conspiracy theories started to circulate conservatives believed that the liberal media uh tried to sway the election for gore with the initial projection while liberals saw the management of the fox news desk um by john ellis um i george w bush's uh w bush's cousin as a clear violation of the journalistic integrity of a network that's already be staking on a name for itself and becoming more right-leaning um so it was clear that television news both network news and cable news failed the american people that evening there was a congressional investigation into it um and uh and one of uh the the representatives leading that investigation lamented quote al gore was not the only one who lost that night the american people lost that night and the news media lost that night for many years public confidence in the news media has been on the decline and i suspect that it took a nosedive on election night so there's that evening of confusion but then it was only compounded and over the next 36 days with a legal battle um generated by a debate over um ballot box decisions and how uh voter cards were actually punched in florida so everything came down to florida um and it seemed that only 537 votes separated uh the two candidates in florida so the supreme court uh or the florida supreme court issued a recount and put and it put the entire voting system under the national national microscope so again remember those images that we had this year of of people actually physically counting the votes um this is you know there's a tremendous attention paid to the the machinery of democracy and and it exposed some problems it exposed how the secretary of state in florida who is also a state co-chair for the bush campaign had purged voters um from voter rolls uh notably uh 2,800 people who had named similar to convicted convicted felons uh but they were not actually convicted felons and 8,000 people who only had misdemeanors um and thus still had voter rights um there was a debate about standards applying to to votes and disputes um and so again everyone is debating the very intricacies again this machinery of democracy and it ultimately was decided by a very controversial uh 5-4 decision uh by the supreme court that ruled that that time had essentially run out and this also was controversial uh because of the ideological lines of the ruling uh more conservative judges backed uh the the result that favored bush and more liberal judges really opposed that decision and then this was compounded by the fact uh that for the first time in over a century uh gore won the popular vote uh but he lost the electoral college vote that's something that's become more common since then of course uh but but that also really played into this idea that something went wrong but again i have to emphasize that's why gore's concession speech was so powerful um because he did not agree with the supreme court decision he could have continued to try to challenge it but he ultimately said that he needed to accept it for the democratic process to move forward and it's a really and i think this is a really pivotal election in understanding some of the polarization that that surrounds us that's so much a factor in politics today that president biden addressed um in his inaugural address as well um is that you know historians have actually noted that both bush and gore really veered towards the center and the way they ran their campaigns um a lot of their uh their their rhetoric their their stance on issues was very they tried they both tried to kind of reclaim the center uh but the result uh this bitter debate over the results really intensified um these these partisan uh this conservative the liberal this idea of a red blue divide really comes out of that election randy roberts have we learned anything from the 2000 election i i don't know i it's we're entering into a period where it appears because of the population shifts and populations in different states that we're almost always going to have in the near future anyway the democrats have it receiving more popular votes in the republicans and that seems like okay the democrats should get it so but it's decided in electoral college and so all these elections are going to be you know bitterly contested and there's going to be hard feelings afterwards where people will say well wait a second hillary clinton received more popular votes than donald trump she should be president and there's calls to change the system now the system is is is aimed at a kind of a conservative approach towards things a very un-tempermental approach so i don't know if we've learned that much it just keeps repeating if history as a person much smarter than i said doesn't repeat itself it certainly echoes and from the elections we've looked at we've heard those echoes in modern times final word from you katie i do think that media networks underwent a scrutiny in terms and their process in terms of how they calculate and they call electoral contest it involves a lot more than it did involve into the 2000 election they've been much more cautious you absolutely saw that on display in 2020 and and i also think that many state officials learned from that as well and they set up guards against any any of these questions about partiality and partisanship and i think you also saw that in the the display of how vote tallies are taking place and when you saw you saw that there are officials from both party looking over contested ballots as they reviewed them and you saw the cameras captured those scenes in 2020 and so i think that we can have utter confidence in the election results as as they played out in the 2020 election because i think one of the the important the things that you see by looking at this history of contested elections is that the 2020 election was actually not a contested election there was a clear winner and in fact i it was notable for the the the the results the the mathematical numbers that gave joe biden more than seven million votes over uh i'm donald trump and so oops looks like we lost katie there uh so we're out of time anyway so thanks and thanks very much randy roberts thanks very much for being with us today appreciate it very much and katie brownell thank you very much also want to add uh thank also uh dean rhine gold and lori sparger for their work on all of this and for asking us to do this today in about a half an hour you're going to uh there's going to be another panel discussion moderated by c-span's brian lamb so i hope you can stay around for that thanks