Elbridge Gerry enters the Bob Zadek Show by three separate doors: as a delegate at the Constitutional Convention who would not sign the document, as the namesake of the gerrymander, and as the subject of a Washington aside that survives only because the chairman of the Convention was not permitted to speak in debate. The excerpts do not give his birth or death dates, his offices beyond the Massachusetts governorship and the vice presidency, or the content of any case or statute bearing on districting. What they do give is a consistent portrait of a founder who was, in Bob Zadek’s phrase, “an extremely difficult character,” and a set of disagreements among the show’s guests about what his most famous legacy actually means.
The Convention and the Refusal to Sign
Bob Zadek, in the 2011 episode with George Washington as guest, describes Gerry as “the father of the gerrymander” and as a delegate who “was at the Constitutional Convention but wouldn’t sign it.” Zadek treats the refusal as characteristic: “that was typical of him. It all had to be perfect or he didn’t go for it. He was one of those guys—he was like Jefferson—he wanted things to be the way he thought they should be, not the way they were, you know, or the way they were turning out.” In the same passage Zadek notes that Gerry “was vice president during the War of 1812,” a war he says the country “came close to obliterating the Republic” over, “because the Jeffersonians were running things” George Washington Was Our Guest (2011).
The 2019 episode with David Kaplan repeats the refusal and adds a number. Zadek calls Gerry “a founder who actually was at the Constitutional Convention but did not agree with the Constitution and would not sign it. He was one of the few framers who would not sign the Constitution” Demystifying the Supreme Court (2019). The 2022 episode with Nick Seabrook gives a different count: Gerry “was one of the three representatives in the Continental Congress who refused to sign the Constitution. He didn’t like it. There were three” Midterm Elections Special: The Surprising History of Gerrymandering (2022). The excerpts thus put the number of non-signers at “one of the few” in one episode and “three” in another, and they place Gerry in the Continental Congress in the later telling and at the Constitutional Convention in the earlier ones. The article records the discrepancy rather than resolving it.
Washington’s Aside on the Size of an Army
The most concrete scene in the excerpts comes from the 2011 episode. Zadek sets it at the Constitutional Convention, with Washington as chairman, during a discussion of “how big an army we should have.” Gerry “said that the army should be limited to 3,000 men.” Washington, as chairman, “couldn’t say anything, you know, he was forbidden to participate in the debates. But he could say things, shall we say, sotto voce, that the people in the first two rows could hear.” What he said was: “That’s a wonderful idea, as long as we could get everyone else in the world to promise not to invade us with more than 3,000 men” George Washington Was Our Guest (2011). The anecdote is the only place in the excerpts where Gerry speaks in his own voice, and it is a voice that proposes a number and is answered with a number.
The same episode contains a second Convention scene that Zadek uses to introduce the problem of money in politics, though Gerry is not a participant in it. A wealthy delegate from South Carolina proposed that the president be limited to men “worth at least $100,000,” which Zadek glosses as “the equivalent, I should add, of $10 million today,” with the vice president at $50,000. Benjamin Franklin objected, in Zadek’s paraphrase, that he was “opposed to anything that denigrates or lowers the self-respect of the average man,” and the proposal was “overwhelmingly” rejected. Zadek calls this “the first time that money versus politics—money in politics—sort of raised its ugly head” George Washington Was Our Guest (2011).
The 1812 Map and the Word
The 2022 episodes with Nick Seabrook supply the origin story of the term. Seabrook, a professor of political science and public administration at the University of North Florida and author of One Person, One Vote, traces gerrymandering back before the United States “into the mists of English political history to the creation of the Parliament of England after the Magna Carta,” and to the British tradition of the “rotten borough,” where a district “would be configured in such a way that it included a very small number of inhabitants,” in some cases “less than a dozen voters,” small enough that “the landowners, the aristocrats, were able to use bribery and patronage to essentially bribe their constituents into electing candidates of their choice” Midterm Elections Special: The Surprising History of Gerrymandering (2022).
Seabrook then locates the American origin in Massachusetts in 1812. Gerry, as governor, “was worried about the Federalists in the state Senate and the fact that they were thwarting his legislative agenda. And so he drew the boundaries of the state Senate districts in Essex County in order to ensure that the maximum number of Democratic-Republican candidates would be elected.” Seabrook is careful about the mechanism: Gerry did so “not by manipulating the populations of the districts and placing a lot more people in this one and a lot fewer in that one; he did so by instead manipulating who lived in particular districts.” The technique was packing: “by packing as many Federalists as possible into a single district in Essex County where they represented an overwhelming majority of the population, that would then allow his political party, the Democratic-Republicans, to win all of the other districts in the area.” Seabrook calls packing “one of the most common techniques in Gerrymandering,” in which you “reduce the influence of your opponents by cramming them together into as few districts as possible where they make up massive supermajorities, and that then allows you to win the rest of the seats by smaller majorities” Midterm Elections Special: The Surprising History of Gerrymandering (2022).
Seabrook’s account of the word’s coinage is specific. The “mander” comes from “a famous cartoon that was published in a newspaper called the Boston Gazette in 1812,” immediately after Gerry unveiled the map and “the legislature started considering it,” when it “was ridiculed by his political opponents in the tabloids as being kind of a naked and transparent power grab.” As the story goes, an editor “put a map of the districts up on his wall and drew a salamander shape on one particular district that kind of snakes around the border of Essex County”—the district into which the Federalists had been packed. An associate remarked that it looked like a salamander, and the editor replied, “Well, better say a ‘Gerry-mander’.” The cartoon “was reprinted in more than 80 different newspapers across the country in the six months following this original incident in Massachusetts,” and “within a year, in Maryland, the politicians there were being accused by their own local newspaper of Gerrymandering” Midterm Elections Special: The Surprising History of Gerrymandering (2022).
Pronunciation and the Indiana Transcript
Zadek raises the pronunciation question directly, noting that the governor’s name is Elbridge Gerry, not Jerry, and asking why the word is read as “Jerry-mandering.” Seabrook says he looked into it for the book, and that “when the term was first coined, it was in fact pronounced ‘Gerry-mander’.” He reports finding “an obscure reference in the transcripts of the Indiana State Constitutional Convention from the mid-19th century,” during deliberations on “a proposed amendment that would have banned Gerrymandering in the state of Indiana as part of their constitution.” A delegate turned to an opponent and said, “You’re constantly ‘Gerry-mandering’ the state, or ‘Jerry-mandering’ as I maintain it should be pronounced, the ‘G’ being soft.” Seabrook calls this “the earliest reference I could find to someone preferring the ‘Jerry-mander’ pronunciation over the original ‘Gerry-mander’” Midterm Elections Special: The Surprising History of Gerrymandering (2022).
The Founders and the Hard Question
The 2019 episode uses Gerry to frame a live controversy. Zadek notes that the Supreme Court had recently heard oral argument in a gerrymandering case and would “render” a decision in June, and that “the very word ‘gerrymander’ comes from—is a play on the name Elbridge Gerry.” His point is about originalism: “going back to the earliest days of our country, that practice existed, and the founders knew of it but didn’t see fit to express an opinion about it. That’s simply why I found it to be a hard issue, because I can’t go back to what the founders might have thought in drafting the Constitution to find an answer” Demystifying the Supreme Court (2019).
David Kaplan answers with a general theory of interpretation. He says he does not “much care what the founders might have thought about partisan gerrymandering,” because the founders “created a document that was relatively short and quite general,” including phrases like “due process of law” and “equal protection of the laws,” and “when you write a document with those kind of broad phrases, instead of spelling out a list of particulars the way some countries do with their constitutions, you necessarily, I think, are inviting future generations to interpret what those phrases mean.” He adds that “there’s no clause in the Constitution that says ‘thou shalt interpret me based on what the people who wrote me thought in 1787’,” and that the originalist program is “itself an act of interpretation.” Whatever the founders thought about “legislating weirdly shaped districts” is, to Kaplan, “as unimportant as what they thought about the rights of African Americans, or women, or unpopular views, or libel, or a dozen other areas” Demystifying the Supreme Court (2019).
Kaplan extends the argument to two other subjects in the same episode. He calls Heller, the 2008 decision recognizing “a limited right under the Second Amendment to own a handgun in your home for self-defense,” a “terrible decision,” and says that if “the D.C. City Council saw fit to outlaw handguns, it seems to me the people ought to get what their legislature chose.” He says he would “use that same argument, the same logic, with respect to abortion,” and that “the radicalization of the Republican Party that we saw in the 1970s that led to the election of Ronald Reagan in 1980 can be directly tied to Roe v. Wade in 1973” Demystifying the Supreme Court (2019). Gerry is the entry point to this argument, not its subject.
What the Sources Do Not Cover
The excerpts do not give Gerry’s dates, his signature on the Declaration of Independence, his terms in Congress, his diplomatic service, his governorship beyond the 1812 map, or the details of his vice presidency beyond the War of 1812 reference. They do not name the Supreme Court case argued in 2019 or state its holding, do not name the Indiana amendment, and do not give the date of the Boston Gazette cartoon beyond 1812. They disagree about how many framers refused to sign the Constitution, and they do not say which chamber or body Gerry was serving in when he refused.