Roosevelt and Taft"Before the Battle"October 26, 1912

Who remembers the men who lost the presidency?

After the winners are announced, the lawn signs yanked up, and life returns to normal, who cares about the politicians who came in second?

Oh, some ex-candidates may linger in the public memory if they make a good concession speech. And some may hang on as the semi-official critic of the new president. Generally, though, the would-be presidents, whose names were once plastered in giant letters across the country—John W. Davis, Alton B. Parker, and James G. Blaine for example—are quickly forgotten.

However, one candidate—William Howard Taft—deserves to be remembered. Not just for his one-term presidency, but because his unsuccessful run for a second term shaped the course of history for America and the world in the 20th century.

The year was 1912. He was the incumbent. However, former President Theodore Roosevelt also wanted to run as the Republican candidate.

Taft won the nomination— he was the sitting president after all. But Roosevelt, not one to be easily deterred from a goal, formed his own Progressive Party. Between them, they split the Republican vote and underdog Democrat Woodrow Wilson would easily win.

The candidates of 1912: Eugene V. Debs (Socialist Party), E. W. Chafin (Prohibition Party), Theodore Roosevelt (Progressive Party), William H. Taft (Republican), Woodrow Wilson (Democrat). Miss Columbia hands out the presidency.

How did things come to such a pass? The field of candidates in the 1912 election was unusually crowded, as shown in this October 1912 Post cartoon (right).

Roosevelt had come to the end of his second term in 1908 with the desire to continue his progressive reforms. So he named Taft, then Secretary of War, as his successor. Roosevelt believed Taft would work just as hard to raise the living standards of American workers, curb the excesses of big business, and set aside land for conservation, public use, and more.

Taft didn’t want the presidency, but Roosevelt could be very persuasive. He was also Taft’s close friend. So Taft agreed to run. He duly won the Republican nomination, and then the 1908 election.

"Changed New England" October 12, 1912

Once elected, though, it was clear that Taft was no Teddy. Where Roosevelt had been passionate and impulsive, ready to push the limits of the law to achieve reforms, Taft was cautious and methodical. Unlike his predecessor, he would compromise with his opponents, and he always worked well within any legal limits on his authority.

Roosevelt soon grew disenchanted with his heir as Taft withdrew support from progressive Republicans in Congress and from several of Roosevelt’s initiatives. The worst offense came in 1910 after Taft put some land marked for conservation back into the hands of private developers. Gifford Pinchot, head of the U.S. Forest Service, publicly criticized Taft’s action. Taft fired Pinchot, who went straight to Roosevelt to complain.

Now Roosevelt was furious. He believed Taft had betrayed him and sold out the Progressive movement. In an interview with the Post (“Why Roosevelt Opposes Taft,” May 4, 1912), Roosevelt explained why he was now opposing his protégé in the race for the Republican nomination.

Mr. Taft was nominated for president … because of his outspoken endorsement of progressive policies. Opposed to these policies … were the Reactionaries. … Without a single exception these men are supporting Mr. Taft today—supporting him openly and with every political trick at their command. They are entirely in accord with his record in the presidency. … Have the Reactionaries become Progressives or has Mr. Taft turned Reactionary? I leave it to the people to judge.

The present Administration has acted for special privilege whenever there was found the slightest authority in law … and has acted for the people in those cases only where it was explicitly commanded by statute. … I gave the people the benefit of the doubt. This Administration has given the benefit of the doubt against the people. ["Why Roosevelt Opposes Taft," May 4, 1912. Read the full story here.]

Can he stick? "The Republican Situation" April 20, 1912

It was a dark time for Taft. The man he once considered his best friend—the man who had talked him into running for president—had denounced him and was planning to kick him out of the White House. To make matters worse, Taft knew he had no talent for campaigning. He hadn’t even a glimmer of Roosevelt’s shining charisma. He was a poor public speaker, and he was ridiculously overweight (in the last two years of his presidency his weight had climbed to 345 pounds).

Yet the Republican party leaders wanted him, even if he had no chance of defeating Roosevelt. In a 1912 assessment of “The Republican Situation,” the Post reported that the Republicans would choose Taft despite all odds because the party would rather “face defeat with him rather than disown and discredit him … and themselves.”  Assured of the party’s support, and determined to pursue his own style of progressivism, Taft decided to run.

Roosevelt launched his Progressive Party and campaigned hard—even giving a speech after being shot in the chest—and on Election Day, he received 15 percent more votes than Taft. But he was still 2 million votes short of Wilson.

Taft couldn’t have known that his decision to run would put Wilson into the White House at the beginning of a world war. Or that the new president would wait three years before bringing the U.S. into the war. Or that Wilson would be so focused on building a League of Nations, he allowed the Allies to take vengeance on Germany—an action that would ensure another, bigger war would be fought 20 years later. Nor could he know that, by splitting the progressive vote, he ended its power in the Republican party.

It’s curious to think that, a century from now, a historian may look back and say, “If only Mitt Romney and Barack Obama had known that by choosing to run in 2012, they would radically alter the path America took in the 21st century.” But would any candidate run for president if he knew all the consequences?

100 Years Ago—A Chaotic Presidential Election The Saturday Evening Post

Norman Rockwell at the Voting Booth

Massachusetts Mutual Life Insurance Company
advertisement
Norman Rockwell
November 5, 1960

“Here I am on November 8. As you can see, it’s not easy for me to make up my mind…” Norman Rockwell says in the caption of this 1960 Massachusetts Mutual Life Insurance Company advertisement (left).

The ad was one in a series of 81 pencil drawings Norman Rockwell sketched in the ’50s and ’60s for the insurance company. The advertisements depicted family life and ran in magazines such as Newsweek, Time, and The Saturday Evening Post. His artwork graced many ads, if not from A to Z, then at least from Acme Market to Western Union. The insurance series was Rockwell’s largest body of ad work.

Though we don’t know if he cast his vote for Richard Nixon or John F. Kennedy, we do know that he enjoyed working with both men in 1960, painting each of their portraits for The Saturday Evening Post covers. He found Nixon “as warm and friendly as the father of two pretty daughters could be.” And when he arrived to paint young Senator Kennedy, he found JFK still in his PJs. “The pajamas were rumpled, but he was wonderful,” Rockwell said. See “Post Presidential Covers” for both portraits.

Boy With Portraits of Taft and Bryan

Boy with Portraits of Taft and Bryan
J.C. Leyendecker
October 31, 1908

The third time was not the charm for William Jennings Bryan (portrait right). He lost the 1896 and 1900 presidential elections to William McKinley. And with the backing of popular incumbent Theodore Roosevelt behind William Howard Taft (portrait left) in 1908, Bryan lost again. J.C. Leyendecker, the Post‘s most prolific cover artist illustrated more than 320 Saturday Evening Post covers, from 1899 to 1943.

Leyendecker’s art ran the gamut, from lavish and elegant to humorous. Few covers were of a political nature, as Post editors preferred eye-catching portrayals of pretty girls or amusing scenes with children. However, Leyendecker depicted George Washington on five Post covers and did a memorable sketch of the corpulent William Howard Taft on the occasion of his 1909 inauguration (see “Post Presidential Covers”).

Votes for Women

Votes for Women
J.C. Leyendecker
December 30, 1911

For 37 consecutive years, J.C. Leyendecker welcomed the dawn of a brand new year with that famous New Year’s baby. Often, the cover was a reflection of the times: The 1910 New Year’s baby was flying a new-fangled biplane; the 1914 tot was riding a ship across the Panama canal. The precocious infants were aware of Prohibition and worried about the first global war and the Great Depression. The last New Year’s baby in 1943 wore a helmet and stabbed a swastika with a bayonet.

Our young lady (left) welcoming 1912 is ahead of her time; women didn’t get the vote until 1920. We’re reminded of Hillary Clinton’s quote from the 2008 primaries: “My mother was born before women could vote. But in this election my daughter got to vote for her mother for president.”

He Won’t Win!

He Won’t Win!
J.F. Kernan
Country Gentleman, October 25, 1924

J.F. Kernan illustrated nearly 30 covers for the Post and 28 for its sister publication, Country Gentleman, left. With arresting use of color, he depicted old sailors and frequently painted outdoor hunting and fishing scenes. It is indicative of his skill as an illustrator that he could move from a blue seascape or woodsy scene to a droll interior.

Four years before this issue of Country Gentleman hit newsstands, the 19th Amendment was passed, granting American women the right to vote. Women were still striving for political equality. In this cover, hubby is more than a bit skeptical of his wife’s choice. Clearly the artist was on her side: See Her Man Won! (below) which appeared on the very next cover (November 1, 1924).

Her Man Won!

Her Man Won!
J.F. Kernan
Country Gentleman, November 1, 1924

The Post’s sister publication, Country Gentleman occasionally ran two-part covers in the late 1910s and early ’20s. Part one of this scene appeared on the October 25, 1924, cover (see above). Left, the artist J.F. Kernan illustrated hubby having to eat crow after deriding his wife’s choice.

Another artist who had fun with the “wait until next week” concept was Norman Rockwell. Normally associated with The Saturday Evening Post, Norman Rockwell did 35 covers for Country Gentleman.

The Losing Candidate

The Losing Candidate
Norman Rockwell
November 8,1958

The model for this cover (left) was indeed politician Bernard T. Casey of Boston. For some years prior to this cover’s appearance, Casey, a telephone company executive, had served eight terms in the state legislature. He then quit running, but this natural-born leader with the winning smile never did quit helping other people campaign and win.

The cigar-chomping man to the right was Tom Carey, a fixture in Stockbridge, Massachusetts, where Illustrator Norman Rockwell lived. Carey delivered the mail from the railroad station to the post office via horse and buggy for more than 50 years. During the summer, he also drove tourists around the countryside in his surrey, pointing out places of interest such as the Old Corner House, which served as the Norman Rockwell Museum for 24 years.

First Vote in the New States

First Vote in the New States
Constantin Alajálov
November 12, 1960

“This week, for the first time in history,” wrote Post editors in 1960, “the citizens of the Sandwich Islands and of ‘Seward’s Folly’ go to the polls to help elect a President of the United States.” It was a record-breaking ballot year, and Russian-born artist Constantin Alajálov couldn’t resist illustrating the contrast between the voters of the two recent additions to the United States, Hawaii and Alaska.

Concerning Alajálov’s subject, editors wrote, “And who knows, perhaps one of them, an orchid-picker or a seal skinner, is casting the vote that carries the state that swings the election. … This amalgam of people living together in harmony is bright evidence of the democratic way of life they’re voting to preserve.”

Classic Art: Voting in America The Saturday Evening Post

We are thick in the middle of a presidential election, which has been a rancorous affair, causing many Americans to long for the olden days when we were governed by clueless English kings. I wonder if it’s too late to apologize to the British, abolish Congress, and ask the queen to take us back?

When I was a kid, elections were a happy event, earning us a day off school if we assisted the candidates by passing out their pencils, pens, matchbooks, and rulers. Naturally, as the date neared, every child in town took a sudden interest in the body politic and its attendant obligations. We would rise early and hurry to the voting sites to eat the doughnuts intended for poll workers who were overweight and should have been grateful for our intervention but seldom were. At noon, we would walk to the Dairy Queen and eat hot dogs cooked by a light bulb and revel in the democracy that was America.

At 6 o’clock, when the polls closed, we would gather in the courthouse on the town square and watch through the evening hours as the county auditor climbed a stepladder every few moments to write the latest votes on a chalkboard hung high upon the wall. The air was thick with cigarette smoke, making me queasy, causing me to associate nausea with politics, a pattern that persists to this day.

Around 10, the results from the outlying polls were called in, the numbers adjusted to allow for chicanery and error, and the victors announced. They would step to the podium and humbly thank, in order, God, their family, the long-deceased founders of our town, then end with an unrehearsed and lengthy speech on the general wonders of America and the specific virtues of Danville and Hendricks County, Indiana.

My father, the town board president, had raised the speeches to an art form. In my mind it was the acme of representative democracy, watching the votes accrue beside my father’s name on the board overhead, then listening to him extoll the town that had opened its arms to our family in 1957. With the presidency came the responsibility of keeping the groundhog population at bay, lest they destroy the backyard gardens that everyone had in those days. My father was a crack-shot, like Atticus Finch in To Kill a Mockingbird, and the terror of groundhogs everywhere. Most townspeople thought any man unable to exterminate rodents was unfit for public office. To this day, I still half expect presidential candidates to tell us their stance on groundhogs.

Being Indiana, everyone in our town was Republican, except for Bob Pearcy who owned The Danville Gazette newspaper. He also had a maple tree in his front yard that had been twisted a quarter-turn by the 1948 tornado. Pug Weesner, the owner of The Republican newspaper, lost his house in the same tornado, causing some in our town to believe God was a Democrat, temporarily swelling the ranks of that party and ushering Harry S. Truman into the White House.

There was a luster to government service in those days—a regard not only for the office, but also for those who held it. World War II was still fresh in our collective memory, a cataclysmic event resolved by government’s know-how and young men’s courage. If today the less capable are attracted to office, and there does seem to be a weakening in the strain, that was not the case then. The words, “I work for the government” were a statement of pride. One did not run for Congress for the lifetime healthcare; one ran to serve, to help, to make America the “shining city on the hill.” Service to the country was a calling, not a last resort when employment in the private sector didn’t pan out.

Election night, that holy night, was the one school night my parents let me stay up late. By 9 o’clock I would be flagging, so would curl up behind the pillar next to the marble staircase and fall asleep in that cradle of democracy. At 10 o’clock, the last precinct would phone in, and the cheering would waken me.

I would listen to the victory speeches, as one would a bedtime story, lulled to sleep by the soft cadence of freedom.

Voting Back in the Day The Saturday Evening Post

Click the image to read the full text.

Nobody said it was easy being a presidential candidate. You’re never more than just one misstatement away from putting your entire campaign at risk. A quick look through the record books reveals that Mitt Romney’s “47 percent” comment is rivaled by quite a few bloopers uttered by presidential candidates in modern times.

One of them was Romney’s father, George, who was campaigning for the Republican nomination in 1968. In a TV interview, he said he had been lured into supporting the Vietnam War because he “had the greatest brainwashing that anybody can get when they go over to Vietnam.” The press latched onto the “b” word and that was the end of his presidential run.

But years earlier, in 1963, candidate Barry Goldwater made a horrific blunder during an interview with The Saturday Evening Post when he candidly announced, “Sometimes I think this country would be better off if we could just saw off the Eastern Seaboard and let it float out to sea.”

Lyndon Johnson’s campaign team pounced, producing a TV ad released August 31, 1963, that showed a saw cutting through the states from Ohio to Florida.

Here’s an excerpt from the Post story, which ran in the August 24 issue:

The era when the South and West were semicolonial dependencies of New York-dominated capital is over, but in these areas “the East” is still regarded with a mixture of suspicion, dislike and envy. Goldwater perfectly expresses this attitude—to an extent hardly recognized in the East, he is the anti-Eastern candidate. He once remarked—perhaps only half jokingly—that the East Coast ought to be “sliced off and set adrift.”

Click here to read the full article: “Can Goldwater Win in 64?”

POST script: In the interest of fairness, it’s not just Republicans who shoot their mouths off and pay the price. There’s John Kerry’s infamous, “I actually did vote for the $87 billion, before I voted against it;” Howard Dean’s Victory Scream; and, of course, the endlessly spoofed, “I took the initiative in creating the Internet,” by Al Gore.

Campaign Gaffes The Saturday Evening Post

Republican Convention

Republican Convention
by John Falter
from June 19, 1948

The delegates are ready in this 1948 cover by artist John Falter. If you’re tying to make out the candidate’s face on those signs, save yourself the eyestrain; the image is purposely vague because … it wasn’t decided yet! And if you’re an aficionado of Post literature from this era, note the distinguished white-haired gentleman in the lower right-hand corner. Writer Clarence Budington Kelland was a long-time party leader.

The Great Debate

The Great Debate
by Norman Rockwell
from October 30, 1948

He’s for Dewey; she’s for Truman. The poor kid, the dog and the cat (on the back of her chair) are for peace. The Rockwell classic “was always one of my husband’s favorites,” said Bess Truman who spoke of the original painting that found its home, appropriately, in the Truman Library. “He enjoyed showing it to visitors when toured the library’s museum.”

1948 was not the first time Norman Rockwell showed a couple on either side of the great political divide—see below.

Election Debate

Election Debate
by Norman Rockwell
from October 9, 1920

The election of 1920, in the aftermath of World War I, brought Warren G. Harding vs. James M. Cox. This time the wife is for the Republican (Harding) and hubby is sure he is right about Cox.

The newspaper she holds shows Rockwell’s talent for portraiture—that’s his depiction of Harding, not a photograph, as with his depictions of Dewey and Truman above. In later years his political portraits would include Humphrey, Goldwater, and on subsequent Saturday Evening Post covers, candidates Eisenhower and Stevenson in 1956, and Nixon and Kennedy in 1960 (see “Post Presidential Covers”).

As for these two Rockwell covers, it would be, well, impolitic, to point out that the woman was right both times. So we won’t.

Politics by a Potbelly Stove

Politics by a Potbelly Stove
by Robert Robinson
from November 26, 1910

It was politics by a potbellied stove in 1910. Dang that dad-burned Teddy Roosevelt, anyhow. This cover is by Robert Robinson, whom we know little about today, except that he was great at painting old geezers. It shows us one thing: folks will argue about politics even when no one is listening (much as politicians will keep speaking).

Post-Convention Clean-up

Post-Convention Clean-up
by Constantin Alajalov
from August 18, 1956

“Ladies and gentlemen of this great nation, if elected I promise to clean up—and I’ve got the broom to do it!”

This 1956 view of the “after-party” was by Constantin Alajalov. It is a cover that inspires and gives hope: soon this will all be over!

Classic Covers: Election The Saturday Evening Post

"My father thinks you’re a bum."

Fall 1972

"The Senator now has three minutes for his rebuttal."

November 1984

"I'm running my campaign like a bra—not too revealing, but I still want your support."

Sep/Oct 2012

"I think I prefer the Republicans for clichés,
but the Democrats for platitudes."

October 31, 1964

 

Jan/Feb 2012

"He's reading his concession speech
instead of his victory speech!"

October 1976

Cartoons: Campaign Comedy The Saturday Evening Post

If it seems that the presidential campaign has changed dramatically in our lifetime, consider how it looked to Rebecca Harding Davis. In 1903, she wrote “Nothing… [shows] the change in this country during the last 50 years as the difference in our conduct of the presidential campaigns.”

She was 72 years old when she wrote “Presidential Campaigns of Today and Yesterday” for the Post, and she could look back over 19 presidential campaigns that she’d witnessed from her home in western Virginia. The biggest change was that elections no longer centered on a great moral issue, which divided the country before the Civil War. “The crucial question usually is, in fact; some difference in financial policy—a matter but vaguely comprehended by the masses. It is likely to affect the pocket of the country rather than its conscience. Hence, no voter now, unless he is looking forward to office, is likely to lose a night’s sleep in anxiety about the issue.”

The other difference was that the campaigns were no longer conducted at the local level. Now they were directed by distant “commanders” who spent the money and made the decisions in some distant city. How different, she wrote, from the elections she remembered from the 1830s, when “the campaign was a part of the personal life of each American.”

Henry Clay, though all the country knew his family and breeding, was always represented in his campaigns as a dirty, ragged boy coming home from the mill astride of a mule. For every vote Clay won for being a gentleman and statesman, he won a 100 for that bare-footed image.

In the old days a presidential campaign was a family feud. The candidates were known to every farmer, butcher and schoolboy from the Penobscot to the Missouri. They were called “Bill ” or “Jim” in every store and smithy, and were hated or loved with the passion of clansmen against or for their chiefs.

Men stabbed each other to the death in the fury of dispute as to whether Mrs. Andrew Jackson smoked a pipe after dinner or not, or whether Hamilton had maligned Burr, or Burr had murdered Hamilton.

Each village had its mass meeting, to which the farms and little towns of half a dozen counties sent deputations; there were party mottoes, party songs, party flags.”

The first of these campaigns which I remember was that of Harrison and Van Buren.

Every household was at work for weeks preparing for it. Hams were boiled, turkeys and chickens roasted by the scores. … An open table was set on the lawn or the porch of each dwelling, and every house was made gay with bunting and appropriate mottoes, such as “The latch-string is out.” “All welcome!”

Deputations came from towns and hamlets within a circuit of fifty miles. … Each division had its band of native talent and its homemade flag of original device.

The only duty of the convention, apparently, was to march and counter-march all day, up and down the long streets with flying flags, to the sound of fifes, drums, and clashing cymbals. Lawyers, farmers, butchers, and bakers marched under the queer banners with a stern exultation. … There were bands of men from the other side of the [Ohio] river, their horses and themselves covered with strings of horse chestnuts, or buckeyes, Ohio being the “Buckeye State,” and Harrison the “Ohio Pioneer.”

The town was in a frenzy of delight at these shows; the church bells rang, the people crowded the sidewalks, cheering as each band went by.

"There was a real forge, the sparks flying, the blacksmiths banging the iron and shouting out Whig songs." Illustration of a campaign float.

Undoubtedly the most popular of the devices were the floats on which were log cabins supposed to represent the birthplace and home of “Old Tip” [the nickname given to Harrison for his victory over Tecumseh’s tribe at the Battle of Tippecanoe.]

In some of them the boy Harrison, exceedingly ragged and unwashed, was seen squatted by the fire; sometimes he was engaged in cutting up a bear which he had just killed.

One cabin, however, drove the lookers-on into a fervor of loyalty to the candidate. In it the boy, a pistol in each hand, was holding at bay two gigantic Indians who were attacking the windows. Of course the people shouted. Nobody then doubted that the squatter always was a just, wronged man, and a favored child of God, and the Indian always a fiend, made up of all vices, the offspring of the devil. We never then looked on the other side. That is a modern uncomfortable habit.

In 1903, Ms. Davis watched the campaign between Teddy Roosevelt and Alton Parker, and wondered, “What quiet doctor or minister in any country town would now parade the streets bestrung with buckeyes and shouting campaign songs?” Those campaigners were part of a country that was still young in the 1840s and ‘50s. They hated and loved with unreasoning fury, she believed, and were led by personal likes and dislikes in a way that would seem childish “to this more adult generation, which is governed by high moral reasons, or by greed, or by expediency.”

What True Grassroots Campaigns Looked Like The Saturday Evening Post

"Another Voice for Cleveland"

There’s always the hope, with the start of every presidential campaign, that this time it will be different. This year, maybe the candidates will offer intelligent, practical solutions to the country’s problems. They emphasize what they’ll do, not dwell on the many shortcomings of their opponent.

And usually we’re disappointed. No matter how earnest and well-intentioned a presidential campaign begins, by the time it approaches the finish line, it usually assumes an atmosphere somewhere between a carnival midway and a bar fight.

We had an intelligent, respectable election once, and the winner was George Washington. By the time the next election came around, the gloves were off and the tar buckets filled, as Jack Anderson pointed out. [The Pulitzer-prize winning author's article—"The Dirtiest Campaign Tricks in History"—appeared in the Post on November, 1976]

In the 1796 election, John Adams suffered a blow when the Boston Independent Chronicle alleged that during the Revolution he had publicly supported Washington while surreptitiously attempting to have the General cashiered. In truth, it was Adams’s second cousin, Sam, who had sought Washington’s scalp.

Adams’s opponent, Thomas Jefferson … was accused of being the son of a half-breed Indian and a mulatto father. Voters were warned that Jefferson’s election would result in a civil war and a national orgy of rape, incest, and adultery.

Andrew Jackson's ultimate goal, according to opponents.

Andrew Jackson [was portrayed by his opponents] as a bloodthirsty wild man; a trigger-happy brawler; the son of a prostitute and a black man… his older brother had been sold as a slave [and] Jackson … had put to death soldiers who had offended him. Worst of all, Jackson and his wife were depicted as adulterers. Through a technical mixup, Rachael Jackson had married Andrew before her first husband divorced her. “Ought a convicted adulteress and her paramour husband be placed in the highest offices of this free and Christian land?” screamed the Cincinnati Gazette. Rachael succumbed to a heart attack before the couple could move into the White House, and many of Jackson’s advocates attributed her death to the calumnious campaign of 1828.

In 1839, Martin Van Buren was accused of being too close to the Pope, when, in fact, he had done little more than correspond with the Vatican in his job as Secretary of State under Andrew Jackson. His opponents, nevertheless, spread the canard that a “popish plot” was afoot to ensure Van Buren’s election.

During the Polk-Clay race of 1844 the Ithaca, New York, Chronicle [quoted] … one Baron Roorback … [who] had witnessed the purchase of 43 slaves by James K. Polk. The entire story was a hoax. Polk had purchased no slaves; in fact, there was no Baron Roorback. But that didn’t keep the story from gaining wide attention.

During the campaign of 1864, Lincoln was tagged with every filthy name in the political lexicon, from ape to ghoul to traitor. Midway through his first term, his detractors accused his wife of collaborating with Confederates, a charge which compelled the President to appear, uninvited, before a Senate committee which was secretly considering the allegations [and swear to his wife’s innocence.]

In a rather complicated cartoon, Satan lures James Polk toward war with Britain over the Oregon territory.Click image to enlarge.

The campaign of 1884 held the dubious honor of being the dirtiest in American history. … In July, the Buffalo Evening Telegraph … accused Cleveland of fathering an illegitimate son a decade earlier in Buffalo. It turned out that Cleveland, a bachelor, had dated the child’s mother, as had several other men. The boy, therefore, was of questionable parentage. Yet the inherently decent Cleveland had provided for him. A chant soon arose in Republican ranks: “Ma! Ma! Where’s my pa? Gone to the White House, ha! ha! ha!”

Cleveland’s opponent, James G. Blaine … involved in a business scandal. A railroad line had permitted him to sell bonds for a generous commission in return for a land grant. “Burn this letter!” Blaine instructed one cohort in a cover-up attempt. Thus evolved the Democratic comeback to Cleveland’s critics: “Blaine, Blaine, James G. Blaine, the continental liar from the State of Maine.”

Warren Harding… became the subject of a whispering campaign about his ancestry. A great-grandmother, it was alleged, had been a Negro, and a great-grandfather had Negro blood.

The dirty tricks don’t end once the ballots had been cast, either.

Candidate Lincoln, according to Pro-South Democrats, would lead the country straight into insanity.

In the election of 1876, Democrat Samuel Tilden won the popular election but fell one electoral vote shy of a majority. The electoral tallies in several states were counted and recounted, juggled and changed, until finally the election was thrown into the Congress. A Republican Senate and a Democratic House set up an Electoral Commission to decide the winner. Through some political maneuvering that fairly reeked of scandal, Republican Rutherford B. Hayes was declared the victor.

Lyndon Johnson first won his Senate seat in 1948 by an 87-vote margin when 203 previously unnoticed ballots were miraculously discovered several days after the election. The “voters,” curiously, had approached the polls in alphabetical order, and 202 of them had cast their marks beside the Johnson name. This election gave LBJ his nickname of “Landslide Lyndon.”

Dead men not only vote in American elections; occasionally they are candidates. Philadelphia’s Democratic party bosses, for example, ran a dead man in last April’s primary. The cadaverous candidate was Congressman William Barrett, who departed the scene fifteen days before the election. The party hacks kept Barrett’s name on the ballot in the hope that uninformed voters would select him anyway. Thus the bosses could handpick his replacement.Barrett won.

 

Next: The Big Change in Presidential Campaigns

The Long Tradition of the Smear Campaign The Saturday Evening Post

Seven motor trucks and Senator Long’s private automobile composed the campaign caravan. Two of the trucks were specially designed sound trunks developed by him for his Louisiana forays.

Remember as you read these excerpts from the October 15, 1932 Post that Frankin D. Roosevelt had not yet been elected president. Huey Long was the rising power in radical politics and many Americans people assumed he was an unstoppable demagogue that would destroy the country’s government and business. The media watched him with dread and fascination; he was ‘good copy’ but his ability to stir anger and sell his version of populist socialism could prove dangerous. In Arkansas, the Democratic party was about to learn just how dangerous he could be. On August 1, he brought his support to Hattie Caraway’s campaign for re-election by sweeping into Arkansas with his convoy of trucks:

Each is equipped with four amplifying horns. Inside the vehicle body are the loud­speaker panels, an attachment for play­ing phonograph records, several folding chairs, a folding table, a pitcher and glasses. On the roof of each truck is a slatted platform with two of the four amplifying horns on each side, and with nested takedown iron railings and a portable stairway. Where no speaker’s platform has been provided, the folding table is opened, and the pitcher filled with ice water and set atop, with glasses beside it and a microphone before. The stair­way is hooked into a special iron rail at the side of the truck and lo, there is a complete and commandingly placed speaker’s platform.

Naturally, Mrs. Caraway’s six opponents, accustomed to the frock-coated school of campaigning for high office, with just a dash of baby kissing, perhaps, as a concession from Olympus to the humanities, were bewildered by this high-pressure disturbance which moved across the land with such clock­like regularity, military precision and devastating efficiency. By the time they had rallied their political faculties und begun to strike buck, the damage had been done.

Hattie Caraway wasn’t just a bystander in this campaign. She quickly found her feet, spoke out, and developed her own style.

At the start of the march, one could not even properly have referred to her brief preliminary remarks as a speech. They were awkwardly couched and awkwardly delivered, a bumpy performance, which not even her shy closing remark that “I know I don’t talk like a statesman, but I’ve always tried to vote like one for you,” could quite make palatable.

Two days later she was an effective stump speaker in her own right. She had caught the knack of leading up to a climax, and then waiting for the burst of applause which is practically sure to follow when the audience is friendly. She did not need much tu­toring, for she possessed a happy gift for phrase making.

Nothing in the way of spectacular showmanship that could or would draw crowds to the meetings was over­looked, and the Arkansas electorate was jamming the highway to see and hear this much-discussed Kingfish, in the bundle compartment of whose automobile reposed, side by side, a well-thumbed Bible and a loaded atomizer of throat spray. However, the real task was not merely one of assembling crowds, but of proselyting, of evangelizing, of making converts and staunch believers out of voters to whom it had never occurred that a woman could be a serious contender for a Senate seat

So there were many, that week when Huey Long dashed over Arkansas, who came to scoff and who remained as prey. Farmers drove to town in their own automobiles—and no few of the cars were this year’s models—in such numbers that highways were con­gested in every direction. Fifteen min­utes after he began to talk, Huey Long would have these same farmers con­vinced that they were starving and would have to boil their old boots and discarded tires to have something to feed the babies till the Red Cross brought around a sack of meal and a bushel of sweet potatoes to tide them over; that Wall Street’s control of the leaders—not the rank and file—of both Democratic and Republican parties was directly responsible for this awful condition; that the only road to salvation lay in the reelection of Hattie W. Caraway.

Huey knew what worked with these voters and he delivered it better than anyone. He offered sympathy, outrage, a list of enemies to despise and heroes to admire, rounded off with old-time religion and garnished with humor.

“Think of it, my friend! In 1930 there were 540 men in Wall Street who made $100,000,000 more than all the wheat farmers and all the cotton farmers and all the cane farmers of this country put together! Millions and millions and millions of farmers in this country, and yet 540 men in Wall Street made $100,000,000 more than all those millions of farmers. And you people wonder why your belly’s flat up against your backbone!”

“You don’t have to look far as to how you can correct this condition. Herbert Hoover is calling together boards and commissions to find out what he should do about it. The only dad-blamed thing on the living face of the earth that he needs to do is read his Bible. The Lord tells us in Chapters 24, 26 and 27 of Leviticus, in Chapter 5 Of Nehemiah, and Chapter 5 of James, not only what to do but how to do it. He tells you that unless you redistribute the wealth of a country into the hands of all the people every fifty years, your country’s got to go to ruination. The trouble is we’ve got too many men running things in this country that think they’re smarter than the Lord.”

“I’m for [Winnie Caraway] like I was for an uncle of mine, the time he joined the church and got baptized… This uncle of mine was over forty, and we were all worried about him because we heard he was sit­ting in on card games at night, and if he didn’t hurry up and join the church before it got too late, he’d die an un­saved man and the devil’d get him sure. However, one time a real good preacher come through our town and preached one of these special hell-fire­-and-damnation sermons, and he scared my uncle up, so that be joined the church and offered himself as a candi­date for baptism.

Well, the next Sunday afternoon about three o’clock they took my uncle out to Dugdemona Creek to baptize him, and my aunt, his wife, was sitting on the bank with their little boy, and a big crowd was standing all around. And as the preacher led my uncle out into the waters of old Dugdemona, there floated out of my uncle’s pocket the ace of spades, face up. And a couple of steps farther, out come the king of spades and the queen, and finally the jack and ten-spot of spades following along behind.

“My aunt jumped up and flung out her arms and cried: “Don’t baptize him, parson! It’s no use! He’s lost! My husband’s lost!”

But the little boy said: ‘Now, don’t you get excited, ma. Pa ain’t lost. If he can’t win with that hand he’s got there, he can’t win at all.” And I’m here to tell you, my friends, that if we can’t win with Mrs. Cara­way’s record of standing by you people through thick and through thin, then we can’t win at all and we might just as well admit Wall Street is too strong for us.”

Campaigning With The Kingfish The Saturday Evening Post

In Louisiana, voters turned to the radical populist Huey Long, a long-time foe of the state’s established politicians and businesses. Long served as the state’s governor from 1928 to 1932, then took his idea to “share the wealth” to Washington.

Meanwhile, in Arkansas, Senator Thaddeus Caraway died expectedly. As often happened, the governor appointed the senator’s widow to complete his term. The appointment was confirmed in a special election held on January 12, 1932, which made her the first woman elected to the U.S. Senate. According to coverage in the Post that year,

this election had been a gracious gesture on the part of the Arkansas politicos and nothing more. Had Thaddeus Caraway died three days later than he did, no election would have followed. The remainder of his term would have been filled by appointment. As is often done in similar cases, the governor would have appointed Thad Caraway’s widow.

As matters stood, however, the Arkansas politi­cians had to call an election. Not only that, but they found themselves unable to agree on which of their own number was to fall heir to the Caraway toga. Rather than come to grips over a seat which, at best, could be warmed but a year or so, the state central committee compromised by declaring Mrs. Caraway the Democratic nominee. Democratic nomination in Arkansas is tantamount to election. Mrs. Cara­way thus became the first woman elected to the United States Senate.

Hattie W. Caraway tried to be more than just a symbolic senator in her short stay in Washington, but she had little experience in public service, and few of her colleagues in Little Rock or Washington took her seriously.

Washington had never devoted much of the lime­light to Mrs. Caraway, save for an occasional special article in one or another of the newspapers, describing her as “a demure little woman who looks as though she ought to be sitting on a porch in a rocking-chair, mending somebody’s socks.”

After the Arkansas bigwigs, because of internal jealousies, selected Mrs. Caraway to serve out the remainder of her husband’s unexpired term by way of compromise, they amiably forgot all about her and focused their activities at once upon their own cam­paigns.

Six men entered the Democratic sena­torial primary. All six began to jockey for support here, there, and everywhere. Mrs. Caraway received not a second thought; not even when, at the eleventh hour, she filed her name as a candidate and enlarged the list to seven. It is doubtful that her candidacy was ever seri­ously regarded prior to August first, one week before Election Day.

And that’s when the Kingfish stepped in, bringing his powerful campaign machine and his ability to tap the seething resentment of voters.

Hattie Caraway had made an ally of Huey Long months before when the Long, freshly sworn in as senator, proposed a resolution to limit Americans’ annual income to one million dollars [roughly equivalent to $14 million today]. Any income beyond this would be turned over to the government to fund jobs programs. Such ideas obviously earned him enemies among the rich, but adulation among the poor.

Long’s resolution was greeted with polite, bemused, but firm rejection.

With a paternal smile, the Demo­cratic leader, [Arkansas] Senator Robinson, turned thumbs down on the resolution. Things then began to happen. Huey Long immediately resigned all of his committee appointments, declaring he would have no honors conferred by a party leadership, which had betrayed a party principle.

He delivered n speech, “The Doom of America’s Dream,” in which he went into detail as to what would happen to the United States if wealth were further concentrated in the hands or the few.

Few had supported Long’s resolution, but senator Hattie Caraway was among them. Long remembered this when he heard she’d announced she would seek re-election. The fact the candidate was a widow appealed to his sense his chivalry. The fact that a bank had foreclosed on her mortgage while she was in Washington stirred his outrage. And the fact that she opposed his enemy, Arkansas Senator Joe Robinson, made it a fight he couldn’t ignore. He fired up his campaign squad and, with little more than a week before the election, he hit Arkansas so hard he left it stunned.

Next: Campaigning With The Kingfish

How the Kingfish Helped Elect the First Woman Senator The Saturday Evening Post