The History and Meaning of the Election Night Bonfire

Abstract

The paper examines a practice commonly associated with American political elections in the nineteenth century—the building of large bonfires by gangs of young boys on the night of the vote—in order to make a larger point about the meaning that an election ritual communicates to a voting public. I argue that the ritual message that elections send to public is more fluid, even contradictory, than is often acknowledged. The election night bonfire operated as a symbol of the polysemic nature of the election ritual for nineteenth century urban publics. Its disappearance can be associated with a more general attempt on the part of American political elites to control the meaning of politics in American democracy.

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

An earlier version of this paper was presented at the Association for Education in Journalism and Mass Communication 2004 Annual Convention in Toronto, ON. The author would like to thank both the AEJMC and AJC anonymous reviewers for their suggestions. He would also like to thank Joli Jensen, professor of communications at the University of Tulsa, for her kind encouragement and input on an earlier draft of the paper.

Previously delivered to the Association for Education in Journalism and Mass Communication 2004 Annual Convention: Toronto, Ontario.

Notes

¹Although the extent of the election bonfire celebration does not affect the theoretical point that I wish to make about its message, it is worth commenting on the geographical limits of the current study. Clearly election fires were not unheard of outside of this region. (See the reports of the Cleveland Plain Dealer later in this essay), but the evidence of their popularity elsewhere is unclear. Because the research undertaken for this article focused on the Middle Atlantic region, and failed to find any extensive references to election bonfires outside of that area, the best that can be said is that the election night bonfire does not seem to have been as important a cultural marker outside the New York-Philadelphia axis as within it. Further historical research would need to be done to make any more confident a claim on this score.