Hustings (pronounced huhs-tingz)
(1) The temporary platform on which candidates seeking
election to the UK House of Commons stood and from which they addressed the
electors.
(2) Any place from which political campaign speeches are
made.
(3) By extension, the campaign trail in election
campaigns; the proceedings at a parliamentary election; of political
campaigning in general.
(4) In certain jurisdictions, as Hustings Court, a court
of law (obsolete).
Pre 1050: From the Middle English & Old English husting (meeting, council, tribunal),
from the Old Danish hūs- (a house),
from the eleventh century Old Norse husðing
(hūsthing), the construct being hūs- + ðing (thing) (assembly; meeting), so called because it described a meeting
of the men who formed the "household" of a nobleman or king (the
native Anglo-Saxon for which was folc-gemot). Husting is a noun, functioning as both
singular & plural, the verb use inherently plural; the formation was
originally the plural of husting (and established as the usual form by circa
1500), later construed as a singular but the spelling hustings.
On the hustings
The sense of "a temporary platform for political
speeches" developed by the 1720s, apparently a reference to London's Court
of Hustings, presided over by the Lord Mayor and conducted on a platform in the
Guildhall. The sense widened first to
other platforms on which candidates spoke and, by the mid nineteenth century,
to electoral campaigning generally, a use which appears first to have been
documented in 1872 but is thought already to have been in use for some time
In England, the
hustings evolved as physical platforms on which candidates spoke to seek the
support of electors, a show of hands the usual expression of approval. It was an informal process in the sense no
records were kept of the “votes” but on the basis of the expression of support,
a candidate might decide to proceed to the actual poll or decline to contest
the seat and reports at the time confirm hustings were often noisy and occasionally
violent affairs with more than a whiff of corruption. The mechanism of the hustings evolved into
the more structured pre-selection processes such as primaries and caucuses, the
latter the closest (and now the most controversial) in form to the original.
When voting was restricted to a small fraction of the
male population, there was sometimes only a single hustings in a parliamentary
constituency (especially the geographically small such as the university seats)
but were usually more numerous. The
arrangements were formalized by the Reform Act (1832) which somewhat extended
the franchise, specifying a separate hustings for every 600 electors, the
number reflecting the practical maximum capacity for buildings such as the municipal
halls often used for the purpose. An
interesting aspect of the development of democracy in England is that even
though voting at the hustings was limited to certain men (the rules varied but
involved age, property, income or educational tests and even after the first
reform act those eligible were fewer than 10% of the population), it was
permitted for others (including women) to attend and view the proceedings,
something like the “observer status” at the United Nations (UN), granted to
various entities and even at times the odd sovereign state. The hustings were abolished by the Ballot Act
(1872) which made the secret ballot the universal mechanism of election. The idea of public nomination by acclamation was
replaced by the now familiar filing of duly executed and witnessed papers and
it was at this point the stranglehold of the parties on the democratic process was
effectively institutionalized, their structures evolving as much around the
candidate selection process as the actual election.
In 2015, Lindsay Lohan posted on Instagram the suggestion she might be taking to the hustings, running for president in 2020. History might have been different had Lindsay Lohan been given the launch codes for nuclear weapons.
A candidate’s performance of the platform at public meetings had long been an important part of the electoral process but the advent of photography and later, movies, added new layers, politicians increasingly borrowing the techniques used in dramatic production on stage and screen. Politicians and their handlers quickly realized the potency of manufactured images and few were as assiduous in their creation as Adolf Hitler (1889-1945; head of state (1934-1945) and government (1933-1945) in Nazi Germany) for whom the realization of a talent for rabble-rousing public speaking came while working as a nationalistic agitator in the chaotic aftermath of the First World War. After his release in 1925 from the far from unpleasant nine month stint in Landsberg during which he (by dictating to some with better grammar and spelling) wrote his autobiography, Hitler’s political career became more focused, in terms of both the structure and organization of the Nazi Party (Nationalsozialistische Deutsche Arbeiterpartei (NSDAP, the National Socialist German Workers' Party) and his own public image, one footnote to the process his publisher’s decision to shorten the name of Hitler’s book from Viereinhalb Jahre (des Kampfes) gegen Lüge, Dummheit und Feigheit (Four and a Half Years (of Struggle) Against Lies, Stupidity and Cowardice) to the punchier Mein Kampf (My Struggle). It is a dreary and repetitive work.
More significantly, he worked at honing his techniques of presentation on the hustings, aware of the effects of lighting and camera angle, deliberately he rehearsed movements and gestures to find those most appropriate to use before a live audience, developing an understanding that what was suitable before small, intimate gatherings would lose effectiveness at mass meetings. He was interested too in the movements and stances which would translate especially well on film, contemporary notes indicating some analysis of the relationship between camera angle and effect. Hitler’s method of rehearsal was that used by many actors: he performed in front of a mirror, trying to gauge the effectiveness of each pose. Late in 1925, he had the photographer Heinrich Hoffmann (1885–1957) create images from a variety of angles, better to understand what would best work to appeal to those in an audience which in some cases might be seated in a surrounding circle. Hitler studied the photographs with great interest and conscious of public perception, ordered the negatives destroyed.
Hoffman however retained the negatives, along with a number of others the Führer had indicated should shredded and published them in his memoir Hitler was my friend, a title which was probably close to the truth, the photographer part Hitler’s inner circle and the one who introduced him to the woman who would for a few, final hours be his wife, Eva Hitler (née Braun, 1912–1945). Most of Hoffmann’s image archive was seized by the US-American military government during the Allied occupation of Germany as spoils of war and is today held mostly by the US National Archives and Records Administration. What remained in Germany was assembled as a collection now housed in the Bayerische Staatsbibliothek (Bavarian State Library) in Munich.
The technique remains the same. Crooked Hillary Clinton on the hustings.
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