by Max Marbut
Staff Writer
Jacksonville Historical Society Executive Director Emily Lisska gave Rotary Club of Jacksonville members and guests Monday a look back at a timely topic: Jacksonville’s election history.
Lisska, speaking to the club a week before the 2010 federal and state general election, said that at one time, Jacksonville elected its mayor every year. That was changed to every two years and amended again to the schedule that’s now in place.
“Be glad it’s every four years now,” said Lisska.
Jacksonville’s election history goes back to the city’s namesake, Andrew Jackson. Lisska said he was embroiled in one of the nation’s “most legendary dirty political campaigns” in the 1828 presidential election, six years after the city had taken his name as its own.
“It was the worst mudslinging,” she said. Jackson and his wife were accused of bigamy and the campaign took a toll on the couple. Lisska said Jackson’s wife died less than a month before he was inaugurated and that Jackson always blamed her early demise on the stress of the campaign.
One of the most prevalent aspects of the campaign was Jackson’s opponents referring to him as a “jackass,” said Lisska. She said that probably led, years later, to the donkey becoming the symbol of the Democratic party.
In the 1888 mayoral race, which Lisska said “really upset the populace,” a winter tourist helped a fellow Republican, C.B. Smith, win the election. The defeated Democrat and the City Council then refused to relinquish their offices and the dispute eventually landed in the Florida Supreme Court, which ruled that Smith had the right to the office.
Lisska said that of the 51 men who have held the office of mayor of Jacksonville, perhaps one of the most interesting was J.E.T. Bowden, who was elected in 1915, and ran on a platform that promised to “bring back the women of the line.”
One of Bowden’s opponents had made a name for himself by cleaning up Jacksonville’s “red-light district” in LaVilla near the railroad station and the docks, but Bowden’s campaign prevailed.
“Bowden won overwhelmingly,” said Lisska. “That night, the women from the bordellos, who didn’t have the right to vote, thanked the men of Jacksonville. They gathered in Hemming Park, all dressed in red, for a victory party.”
The Rotary Club of Jacksonville, commonly referred to as “Downtown Rotary,” was founded in 1912 and meets weekly at the Omni Downtown.
Lisska shared some of the club’s history, including its highly visible contribution to Riverside Park. The “Winged Victory” statue in the park was donated by the Downtown Rotarians and dedicated in 1925 as a memorial to soldiers from Florida who died in World War I.
When the unclad female figure depicted on the statue was unveiled, “several society matrons swooned,” said Lisska.
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