Democrats can’t excuse their political ineptitude by claiming that partisan redistricting is new. The term gerrymandering was coined after just such a scandal. In February 1812, the governor of Massachusetts, Elbridge Gerry, signed into law a map that heavily favoured Jefferson and Madison’s Republican Party. After seeing the strangely shaped new district running up the west and north sides of Essex County, breaking up a Federalist stronghold, the painter Gilbert Stuart is said to have exclaimed: ‘That will do for a salamander!’ ‘Better say a Gerrymander,’ Benjamin Russell, the editor of the Boston Centinel, replied. Another account attributes the neologism to the cartoonist Elkanah Tisdale, who supposedly entertained guests at a dinner party hosted by the Boston merchant Israel Thorndike by adding wings and claws to the new district. A cartoon showing the ‘Gerry-Mander’ was published in the Boston Gazette in March 1812.
In 1878, the House Speaker, Samuel Randall, a Pennsylvania Democrat, wrote to the party leadership in Ohio stressing that it was of the ‘utmost importance to the Democratic Party that the Ohio legislature should redistrict the state’. Between 1878 and 1886, Ohio engaged in five rounds of redistricting, with new maps being used for every congressional election held during those years. Ohio’s ‘dose of gerrymandering’ triggered bitter public recrimination. In 1890 the New York Times complained that there had been ‘more changes in the map of Ohio than have occurred in African geography in recent years’. Ohio wasn’t alone. In every year of the same period at least one state redrew its map. In Alabama, the Democratic majority packed every single ‘Black Belt’ county – where Black majorities were likely to vote Republican – into a single district, the Old Fourth. Congress was unwilling to do anything about such behaviour. The Apportionment Acts that followed every census sometimes required that states maintain equal-population districts, but this was often ignored.
New maps were not the only way of ensuring a particular result on election day. When the 1920 census revealed how decisively the United States had shifted from a rural to a majority-urban population – the fruit of Gilded Age industrialisation, the Great Migration and European immigration – rural representatives tried to argue that its results were misleading. Because the census had been held in January, they said, it had seriously undercounted the farm population. Census workers couldn’t reach many snowed-in farms, and seasonal workers were in the cities. Homer Hoch, a Republican from Kansas, produced a table showing that the number of unnaturalised aliens in the cities had supposedly further skewed the results. As a result of this campaign, Congress failed to alter the allocation of House seats as it usually did in response to the census.