With Election Day coming up in less than three weeks, there is nothing quite as relevant and topical as U.S. politics right now. And with Irrelevant History being the archetype of a relevant and topical column, I’ve decided to write a two-part series on some cows and a pig that played an important role in the history of American politics.
And because we’re talking about American politics, for the next three weeks, I’m changing this column title and theme to Irreverent History. Okay let’s go, this is part one of Irreverent History and it’s about cows.
Americans are pretty bad at voting. According to UC Santa Barbara’s American Presidency Project, 55 percent of the voting age population voted in the 2012 presidential election. That’s pretty sad for a country known to be a bastion of democracy. So candidates make it a big strategy to get as much of their own ‘basket of deplorables’ out to the polls. What’s the best way to do that though? They could use sensational demagogic rhetoric, pander to niche interests or unleash a barrage of tweets urging Americans to do their civic duty in 140 characters or less.
Or they could give voters steak. A lot of steak. Like throw a banquet of steak, an event which is otherwise known as a ‘beefsteak’. (All the cows in this story are dead.)
Although there has been a recent revival of beefsteaks in recent years, the real Golden Age of beefsteaks originates all the way back to the late 1800s and the early 1900s. The menu for these fine evening events consisted of sliced beef short loin, beef kidneys, baby lamb chops, bacon, butter, bread and beer.
One particular beefsteak is noted to have served 3,000 pounds of steak, 425 pounds of beef trimmings, 1,300 pounds of beef kidneys wrapped in bacon. To contextualize, that is over two cows worth of meat and two hundred cows worth of kidneys.
There was no need for luxuries and pleasantries such as forks, knives, napkins, chairs and tables. Men congregated in the back of saloons in cellars of restaurants and laid out a couple of wooden crates on the ground as chairs and tables. In order to maximize the beef-into-body intake, they would wear big aprons to wipe clean their beefy, buttery fingers without having to go through the trouble of napkins.
Brass bands at times would be playing in the background, and every so often, someone would stand up and tell a story about the old country of Europe. And if you were too full, you would just sing some hits of the era like “My Wild Irish Rose” with your pals until you regained your appetite.
Okay, back to voting and politics. So the notorious Tammany Hall Democratic party political machine of New York City would round up working class men and recently arrived immigrants to “persuade” them to vote for a particular candidate by hosting these beefsteaks. And of course it was effective. Nothing is quite as inspiring to the working man as an endless feast of meat and mead.
But unfortunately, this grand tradition could not last. First came the 18th Amendment in 1919, so no more alcohol. Then came the 19th Amendment in 1920: Women could vote. So Tammany Hall began inviting them too. For some reason, however, women weren’t as inclined to sit on crates in a basement, grabbing meat with their hands and putting it into their mouths. What followed was silverware, then “etiquette” and then... salads.
And then Fiorello “Little Flower” La Guardia, the five foot two mayor of New York City and eponym for objectively the worst airport in the United States rose to power and killed the Tammany Hall political machine.
This marked the end of using steak to get votes in American politics until Republican party presidential candidate Donald Trump used the “success” of Trump Steaks as a symbol of his business acumen. We’ll see in less than three weeks whether or not that worked.
