Cooping was a practice in which gangs would coerce innocent bystanders into electoral fraud by getting them drunk and making them vote multiple times. It was tolerated by police officers and judges on the payroll of the candidate. Edgar Allan Poe’s death may have been a result of cooping. The practice ended in the US, but is still used in other countries to legitimize fraudulent elections.
In Martin Scorsese’s film Gangs of New York, a scene shows a bearded man under the booze as he is forced to sit in a barber’s chair. Members of a gang loyal to Boss Tweed hold him down while the barber cuts his beard. The gang then change his clothes and drag him to another voting booth to once again vote for their candidate. This practice of coercing innocent bystanders into electoral fraud was known as cooping.
Despite its violent nature, the cooperation was largely tolerated by local police officers and probate judges mainly because they were on the payroll of the political candidate in question. The traveling gangs scoured the streets on Election Day to find men of voting age who would “agree” to vote early and often for the candidates chosen by the gang. Recruits were often invited to houses of ill repute before voting, if they weren’t already there.
Cooperation also involved getting the recruits blindsided drunk before starting the process of a sanctioned election fraud day. If a poll taker became overly concerned with repeating the recruit’s business, gang members would change the recruit’s physical appearance and clothing. If the recruit sobers up and refuses to vote again, the gangs would use other powers of persuasion to convince him otherwise.
Once the recruit had repeatedly and fraudulently performed his civic duties, he was often unceremoniously dumped behind the same tavern that had served as a legal polling station hours earlier. Cooperating was not a practice for sentimentalists, as a number of recruits did not survive the process. The only results that mattered were in the polls, and the gangs enjoyed the protection of elected politicians.
Perhaps the most famous alleged victim of cooping was Edgar Allen Poe. Poe’s body was discovered in a gutter behind a tavern in Baltimore on Election Day. That particular tavern had served as a polling place earlier in the day, and the cooperative was a common practice in Baltimore during the 1840s. He was said to be wearing someone else’s clothes, much cheaper quality than his usual attire. This was also consistent with cooping, since gang members routinely dressed recruits in ragged clothing as a disguise.
While not the only theory surrounding Poe’s mysterious death, cooperation explains many of the circumstances leading up to it. Poe had planned to move to Philadelphia, but was also leading a fundraising speaking tour at the time of Poe’s death. Poe was indeed a depression-prone alcoholic, but the condition of his body at the time of his death seemed to indicate recent physical trauma, another byproduct of organized cooperation. Although Poe would have been recognizable enough to most Baltimore citizens at the time, it is possible that a gang of coopers made him incoherent through alcohol and altered his appearance.
Thankfully the practice of cooping ended in the United States through voting reform laws, but it is still a tactic used in other countries to legitimize a fraudulent election. The recent elections held in Zimbabwe, for example, may have been tainted by wholesale cooperation on behalf of the incumbent president, Robert Mugabe. Voters were essentially forced to vote for Mugabe after the opposition leader resigned from the electoral process under extreme duress. Other countries are also known to use cooperation as a means of keeping a dictatorial ruler in office while appearing to follow the democratic process.
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