That’s “Impeachment Polka,” written in 1868 by the composer Charles Dupee Blake. It’s an odd artifact of the moment but only in the abstract — only in the way that a mass-produced button depicting a peach with a blond coif might be to an observer 150 years from today. By all accounts, Blake’s polka aimed at precisely the same goal: turn something everybody was talking about into a little pocket change.
And make no mistake. In 1868, everybody was talking about the Johnson impeachment.
“Tickets to the impeachment trial in the Senate for Johnson in 1868 were the hottest items in town,” said Brenda Wineapple, author of “The Impeachers: The Trial of Andrew Johnson and the Dream of a Just Nation,” when we spoke with her by phone Wednesday. “They were very hard to get hold of. People were lined up outside the building early in the morning to try to get in.”
Newspapers printed multiple editions a day in some places with updates on the developments — and on the drama surrounding it.
“The newspapers were not only covering what was going on, but they were covering who was there, who was sitting in the ladies gallery, what were they were wearing,” Wineapple said. “It was very built into the culture — and it was a major cultural event.”
And, she said, a lot of people were capitalizing on it.
Including composer Charles D. Blake. That might seem like an odd occupation from which to try to make a buck off politics, but remember, this was only three years after the end of the Civil War. The phonograph wouldn’t be invented for almost another decade. It was a time when many middle- and upper-class homes had pianos and, in lieu of recordings of favorite songs, families would buy sheet music that allowed them to play the songs themselves.
Sheet music “was really a big business,” said music bibliographer Donald W. Krummel in a phone conversation with The Washington Post. “It was all over the country, little publishing firms in little towns but also in big cities.”
“This is like rock today,” he added. “It was a popular business.”
The biggest publisher of them all, he said? Oliver Ditson in Boston — the publisher who produced “Impeachment Polka.”
It’s not clear how this particular piece came about. Krummel speculates that perhaps Blake, a prolific composer, approached Ditson with the idea.