Elbridge Gerry-manders

“Fame is a bee. It has a song. It has a sting. So, too, it has a wing.”  -Emily Dickinson

Were he alive today, Elbridge Gerry, born this week (July 17) in 1744, would likely think he felt the sting of fame far longer than the song, for it is his terrible fate to be famous—or more appropriately, infamous—for an act of legislative skullduggery that, at the time, seemed to Gerry and his compatriots to be a relatively harmless partisan political maneuver.

This is a man, after all, who justly earns the title “Founding Father.” A graduate of Harvard College, Gerry was a leader of the colonial resistance to Britain prior to the American Revolution; he signed the Declaration of Independence; he twice served in the Continental Congress; he helped draft America’s Constitution (he would not sign it, despairing the lack of a Bill of Rights and the amount of power granted the federal government); he served in the first U.S. Congress as a representative from Massachusetts; he was twice elected governor of that great state and ultimately gained the second highest office in the land when he served as vice-president during (my hero) James Madison’s second term as president.

So what is Gerry famous for? He is famous for dividing Massachusetts into a series of strangely shaped congressional districts in order to ensure that his political party, the Democratic-Republicans, maintained its majority over the Federalists in the Massachusetts General Assembly. One of these newly created districts struck an observer as resembling a salamander, which—when combined with the name “Gerry”—resulted in the now-famous political term, gerrymandering.

The legacy of this political act is, of course, still with us today. At one time or another, in every state in the Union, the political party in power has attempted to re-draw Congressional districts to ensure that it stays in power, and in modern times the issue has become so controversial—and has taken on so many new dimensions—that gerrymandering cases have even reached the Supreme Court. To give one example, several years ago the Court ruled unconstitutional a state’s attempt to gerrymander districts to ensure the election of minority candidates.

It has been said that it is better to be damned than forgotten—to feel fame’s “sting” rather than having it take “wing”—and perhaps Gerry would agree with that. While gerrymandering was an accepted practice in the early 1800s, today it connotes back-room dealing, deception and political intrigue. Yet if it weren’t for the term “gerrymandering,” nobody would remember Gerry at all, just as nobody remembers the other very important and powerful Founding Father who served as vice-president under Madison.

Go ahead, then, name him.