Review: 1876

1876 by Gore Vidal
My rating: 3 of 5 stars

In this, the third of the Annals of America novels, Vidal comes to assert something he merely suggests as a possibility in the early ones: protagonist Charles Schermerhorn Schuyler is the illegitimate son of Aaron Burr. I like that detail, but I love what it does to the series as a whole. This alternative to the conventional American history really is a kind of bastard perspective.

At a broad level, the series takes us back to moments of American history that we think we know and then reimagines them. In the first, Burr, we get Charlie’s favorable impressions of the most maligned of the major “Founding Fathers.” In the second, we see Abraham Lincoln not as an idealist but as a pragmatist dragged into the Civil War almost against his will.

In each separate novel we see members of the extended Schuyler family, which means in one way that we are seeing an America in which Aaron Burr continues to make his mark. It’s a little like Vidal himself, scion of a family that has had political power for generations, watching from the outside and complaining that he no longer gets to assert his own truth.

With that, Vidal is still funny in an airy way. One of my favorite running jokes is that Charlie doesn’t think much of Mark Twain, regarding his just released Tom Sawyer as a come-down from his earlier work. Another is the great one-liner describing a young man he meets, “He was like the handsome son I never had, nor wanted.” That is, we sometimes get his admission that this alternative perspective isn’t necessarily a better one.

Still, the topic of the 1876 Presidential election is a tricky one. On the one hand, we get the chance to examine what was perhaps the most closely contested vote in American history. I hadn’t realized it, but Democrat Samuel Tilden is still the only person to win a majority of the popular vote and still lose the election. (I had to check, but Hillary Clinton won somewhat less than 50 percent even though she beat the current President by a well-documented wide margin.) Charlie desperately wants Tilden to win because he sees it as his way to get appointed to a ministership abroad.

On the other, this is an alternative history to…what, exactly? This is a chapter in American history that most of us have forgotten. It’s good to be exposed to it, I suppose, but it makes the corrective/alternative perspective harder to employ. I couldn’t follow what was happening because I didn’t know the history against which this version is set.

To make it worse, the ‘drama’ of this episode takes place in an extended set of election returns. There’s no real climax; it’s just the outcome of electoral votes from Oregon and Florida. And there’s not much happening in Charlie’s own life. His daughter plans to marry, but she makes those arrangements largely away from him. The personal drama taking place there happens outside our point-of-view. We get caught up on it, but the effect is as attenuated as the slow election returns.

As someone who has read this much of the series largely because I keep finding the volumes on sale, I still admire the overall project. This one is intriguing within that larger structure, but it doesn’t hold up too well on its own. I would like to see how Vidal reimagines later episodes in history, and I look forward to how he weaves the Schuyler family into it. So maybe I will keep going with this series.

In this volume, though, he looks back to an election that made clear the extent to which corruption has shaped who we are as a people. Right now, of all times, that’s an easy lesson to remember.


View all my reviews