In 1878 House Democrats set out to prove corruption by the campaign of President Rutherford B. Hayes, or “Rutherfraud” as they affectionately called him. But the investigative committee eventually boomeranged back on the Democrats when it was discovered that the nephew of Samuel Tilden, Hayes’ Democratic opponent, had been involved in chicanery.
It’s a remarkable parallel with today’s Democrats who set out to prove that President Donald Trump’s campaign colluded with Russians to steal the election from Hillary Clinton. So far, the only actual known collusion—or what might loosely be called collusion—is that the Clinton campaign and the Democratic National Committee bankrolled the Steele dossier, the anti-Trump document that cites as sources “a senior Russian Foreign Ministry figure” and a “top level Russian intelligence officer active inside the Kremlin.”
After election day 1876, electoral votes in Florida, Louisiana, South Carolina, and Oregon were contested. The outcome was decided by a 15-member commission made up of senators, House members, and Supreme Court justices. By an eight-to-seven party line vote, the commission picked Ohio’s Republican governor Hayes, outraging Democrats. Tilden, the New York governor, didn’t write a book called What Happened, but he did proclaim the outcome, “a great fraud, which the American people have not condoned and never will condone—never, never, never.”
Congressman Clarkson Potter of New York, Tilden’s personal friend, led a special committee to investigate the 1876 election. The Potter select committee was formed in the hopes of embarrassing Hayes and maybe even driving him from office. But instead of toppling Hayes, the bombshell from the Potter Committee was a massive plot by Democrats involving attempted bribery and secret codes.
The New York Tribune, a Republican newspaper, published coded telegrams that it had deciphered between Tilden’s nephew, Colonel William T. Pelton, and other Democrats, including Manton Marble, editor of the New York World. The telegrams showed there were attempts to bribe election officials. Pelton lived with his uncle, which made matters look even worse.
The Tribune reported that Democrats offered bribes of $50,000 to electors in Florida, $100,000 to electors in South Carolina, and paid $3,000 in Oregon to ensure support for Tilden. One of the Tribune’s headlines read: “Oregon Fraud: A Full History of the Tilden Plot, How the Democratic Reformer Attempted to Purchase a Majority of the Electoral College—The Cipher Dispatches.” An editorial was headlined “The Secret History of 1876.”