Here, in the United States, we are now a
little over a month away from the Presidential Election...
To celebrate the not-too-distant end of this
election cycle's political hyperbole, we look at memorabilia from political campaigns
in America past-- some serious, some frivolous.
Some candidates won their elections, others lost theirs...
But, at the beginning, we note real change
may be effected not so much by politicians but by individuals committed to a
cause...
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| Lady Godiva rode naked through the streets unseen by all save God and Peeping Tom. Alive at the time of the Norman Conquest, Godiva was among the few Saxon nobles not to lose her properties and title. |
Here we travel across the ocean and through
time to find a case in point and remember the Lady Godiva (whose name means
"God's gift") and a legend that she tired of her husband's oppressive
taxation policies and the burdens they imposed upon the poor folk of Coventry
in the days before Duke William crossed the Channel. Hard-hearted Leofric jokingly agreed to ease
the tax load upon his peasants if his lovely wife would ride naked through the
streets. How little did he know that she
truly cared for those so weary and overworked...
What a raucous and lovely thing is the
democracy which took root in a former colony of Godiva's Saxon lands: a
constant feud between those who say the rich live only to soak the poor of
their life's blood and those who say the poor are shiftless bums whose sole
ambition is to suck at the public teat.
But, on rare and shining occasions, it is a debate between men and women
of principle concerned with the bettering of life in this land of cowboys and
fishermen and oil magnates and shopkeepers...
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| Republican Theodore Roosevelt, like his cousin Franklin, a Democrat, championed the vast resources and power of the federal government as a tool to create a better life for all Americans. |
Theodore Roosevelt, elected governor of New
York in 1898, had been a sickly, wealthy child who earned a reputation for
being a serious historian with his The
Naval War of 1812. A state
assemblyman in 1884, Roosevelt suffered the almost unimaginable pain of losing
both mother and wife on the same day. He
left politics and New York to deal with his grief and found himself ranching in
the Dakota Badlands. Roosevelt returned
to the East and became the Assistant Secretary of the Navy, resigning his post
to form his famous "Rough Riders" and fight in the Spanish-American
War...
Chosen to run as William McKinley's running
mate in 1900, he became the youngest US President when an assassin killed the
nation's 25th President. Historians
consistently rank Theodore Roosevelt as one of our best leaders-- fearless and
reform-minded, TR fought big business monopolies and championed conservation of
our natural resources. He saw America as
a force for good throughout the world, promoting the Panama Canal and using his
negotiator's skills to end the Russo-Japanese War (and winning the Nobel Peace
Prize for the latter feat). After Roosevelt
left politics, he continued a lifelong love of exploring and trekked through
the barely known Amazon River basin country of South America...
 |
| Progressive Theodore Roosevelt was added to the ticket to make the very conservative policies of William McKinley attractive to voters. McKinley's assassination threw a panic into the very men who wanted Roosevelt on the ticket solely to get votes. The moral of the story: Vice Presidents can become President. |
The years just before World War One to the
beginning of World War Two saw America wrestling with the question of its
political identity. Would it embrace the
staid policies of Calvin Coolidge, a taciturn man said to have been weaned on a
pickle, or progressive ideas espoused by the intellectual Woodrow Wilson who
lived in the White House in the decade before Coolidge took the nation's helm
upon Warren Harding's death. Would
Eugene V Debs and his Socialist policies take hold in the United States? Debs had not always been so-left leaning but,
after being called an "enemy of the human race" by the New York Times and sent to prison for
refusing to end a strike, Debs tended to suspect governments that would send
armed soldiers to kill striking railroad workers might need a bit of
reforming...
 |
| Tried for sedition and sentenced to prison for opposing the draft during World War I, Debs (one of the founders of the International Workers of the World union) addressed the court following his conviction: "Your Honor, years ago I recognized my kinship with all living beings... while there is a lower class, I am in it, and while there is a criminal element, I am of it, and while there is soul in prison, I am not free." |
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| Woodrow Wilson's vision of a "League of Nations" to prevent future World Wars and promote peaceful solutions to armed conflict was rejected by the United States Senate. |
Or it would be an America with "Every
Man A King" and Louisiana Senator Huey P Long as the kingiest man of all. Politics, the observation goes, makes for
strange bedfellows. They certainly did in
the case of Long, a leftist populist who broke with Franklin Delano Roosevelt
(Teddy's fifth cousin) and promptly allied himself with the fiery Father
Charles Coughlin, an anti-Semitic radio preacher who loudly praised Hitler and
Mussolini and thought a fascist America couldn't be all that bad. Long, incidentally, would inspire the
character of crude, rapacious Willie Stark in Robert Penn Warren's All The King's Men...
Franklin Roosevelt was the only man to be
elected President more than twice, dying in office early in his fourth term. FDR ranks among our truly Great Presidents
despite the controversy still attached to his policies: stricken and crippled
by polio as a young man, Roosevelt preserved American democracy through a time
of unprecedented economic collapse and worldwide battles against totalitarian
dictatorships...
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| Had Louisiana Senator Huey Long lived to challenge Franklin Roosevelt for the Presidency in 1936, the American polical landscape might be a vastly diffent place today. Some estimates suggest Long was in a position to win one-third of the popular vote nationwide and the electoral votes of the Deep South. |
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| Wealthy and aristocratic, Franklin Roosevelt was simultaneously despised as a traitor to his class and hailed as a champion of the working man. |
Nostalgists today paint the 1950s Presidency
of Dwight Eisenhower, one of Roosevelt's top generals during World War II, as a
Golden Era of middle-class conformity when Dad knew best and poor Mom could
always count on her rambunctious Beaver to liven things up when they got too dull. Yep, it was a time when the worst thing that
happened was the newspaper boy tossing the Daily Republican-Democrat on the roof.
Everyone sat down to dinner at the same time and the milkman and postman
made their rounds without fail. No black
people ever got lynched, no synagogues ever got bombed on the television
screens that slowly but surely reshaped American culture just as radio had
during the 1920s. But despite this
idyllic world, there were Iron Curtains drawn tight in the Eastern Hemisphere
and a persistent little man in Indochina who called himself Ho Chi Minh. He didn't like colonialism and he remembered
being treated like an unsavory ignorant animal when he sought a meeting with
Woodrow Wilson...
 |
| "Silent Cal" Coolidge won election as President in his own right in 1924. He was Warren G Harding's vice-president. The Ku Klux Klan attributed the sudden demise of Harding to deadly telepathic"brain rays" sent by Jesuits intent on destroying Protestantism in America. Another theory claims Florence Harding poisoned her philandering husband. In one version of this theory, Mrs Harding then poisoned the family's doctor who had assisted her in committing the nefarious murder. |
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| Adlain Stevenson attempted to link Dwight Eisenhower to the homelessness and breadlines of Herbert Hoover's Presidency. Stevenson ran against the war hero twice-- in 1952 and 1956-- and lost twice. His final attempt to win the Presidency came in 1960 when he lost the Democratic Party nomination to John F Kennedy. |
Candidates for the American Presidency come
from all walks of life. Some twenty-two
of those who won the nation's highest elective office served in the nation's
military, nine as general officers. One
was a mining engineer. Several were
farmers or planters. We've had a
historian or two in the White House. Two
saw themselves as educators. Several
were planters or farmers. Twenty-nine
were lawyers...
When John Kennedy and Richard Nixon wrestled
for the Presidency in 1960, neither man seems to have addressed the challenge
offered by a write-in candidate from the Golden State of California...
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| Gabriel Green's write-in candidacy for President used magazine and newspaper ads with clip-out and mail signature forms in his attempt to be the first President who admitted to speaking with space aliens on a regular basis |
The slight from Nixon was particularly rude
since Gabriel Green was born in the burg of Whittier where Nixon attended
college. Running unsuccessfully on the AFSCA
(Amalgamated Flying Saucer Clubs of America) ticket, Green would run again in
1972 and gather 200 votes in Iowa. Mr
Green assured the voters that he was in constant telepathic communication with
space aliens who would help him create a "united world universal
economics" system. He also informed
his supporters that he had a PhD from Berkeley in physics and had helped
developed the Standard Model for elementary particles. Investigative reporters could only find
records of his attendance at Woodbury Business College. His work as a physicist seems to have been
done after hours from his day job as a school yearbook photographer...
 |
| Catchy campaign slogans don't always work. |
One can only wonder how the nation would have
fared had the voters been awake to the possibility of real change in Washington
in1964...
Jayne Mansfield's candidacy for the White
House in 1964, the year Lyndon Johnson and Barry Goldwater squared off, was, alas, a publicity stunt to ramp up the career of the actress often
called Hollywood's "smartest dumb blonde". (Reportedly, Mansfield had an IQ of 163-- a
number placing her solidly in genius territory.
Audiences were generally more interested in three other numbers--
40-21-35-- than knowing Jayne spoke five languages and played classical piano
respectably...
There have been other candidates for
political office from the world of show business-- President Ronald Reagan being
among the best known. Comedian Pat
Paulsen also ran for the White House in a series of mock campaigns from 1968
through 1992, deftly using the opportunities to keep his career going while
reassuring voters that "If elected, I will win." Paulsen also noted most of America's problems
could be traced to the fact that Native Americans were much too tolerant when
it came to permitting immigration...
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| Attempts to estimate Presidential IQ usually devolve into partisan bickering. In 2006, the journal Political Psychology offered objective guesses that Presidential "smarts" range from genius (John Quincy Adams with an estimated IQ of 165) to slightly above average (Warren G Harding with an estimated IQ of 107). Jayne Mansfield, with an IQ of 163, would have been a contender for the most intelligent U S President. |
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CREDITS
Note:
All photographs for this essay were located through Google Images or Wikipedia,
without authoritative source or ownership information except as noted: Lady
Godiva sculpture by Sir William Reid Dick, 1949 from cmglee; Col Theodore
Roosevelt for Governor, 1898, from corbisimages.com; McKinley-Roosevelt
campaign poster, 1900, from brionmcclanahan.com; Woodrow Wilson campaign pin,
1916, from brittanica.com; Calvin Coolidge, 1924, from blogs.dickinson.edu;
Franklin Roosevelt campaign button, 1940, from
frsliberaldemocracy.blogspot.com; Gabriel Green memorabilia from Ron Schuler rsparlourtricks.blogs;
Jayne Mansfield for President, 1964, from glamouragogo.com
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