”Senate Candidates Rush to Television to Define Their Images,” a headline in one newspaper announced in July as the 1986 election campaigns began heating up. In their haste, the candidates more and more seem to be bypassing such memorable traditions as town-square rallies and handouts of buttons, banners and ribbons once prized by American voters.
As one political historian puts it, ”In the privacy of our respective living rooms, there is no contagious enthusiasm compelling us to demonstrate our political loyalties to each other with insignia of various sorts.”
And yet the shift from street parade to TV screen can be overstated, say the members of a research team at the Smithsonian Institution`s National Museum of American History in Washington, D.C. The staff is examining the role campaign devices play in the political process. ”This stuff has been relegated to the back seat,” Larry Bird, a member of the team, acknowledges. But ”if a candidate doesn`t have some of these things, then, in the voter`s mind, he or she is not a candidate, does not exist. `Where`s the campaign?`
everyone asks.”
The Smithsonian collection of campaign memorabilia–at best count, in the neighborhood of 60,000 objects–represents the ”selling” of federal candidates from Washington to Reagan. The specimens range from rare, hand-painted banners, sets of china, torches, coins and ”curiosities” to T-shirts and videotapes. There are samples of simple, mass-produced lapel button pins (KEEP COOLIDGE); there are the ”unusual” items (hairbrushes and electric bow ties bearing the names of favorite sons), and there are one-of-a- kind specimens, among them the ostrich egg political shrine crafted in the
`50s by one of Adlai Stevenson`s ardent admirers.
Historians and others have written extensively about campaigning, of course, but ”the idea of analyzing political campaign objects as devices for the marketing of ideas and candidates has, so far as we know, never been tested systematically,” project director Dr. Keith Melder explains. Adds Edith Mayo, another team member: ”With objects, you see repeated slogans, repeated visual devices. More than with documents, you see what was reaching the public.”
Building an image for a candidate was as important in George Washington`s day as it is now. Just the methods of communicating have changed. ”Campaigns will take whatever forms are popular and adapt them for political ends,” Bird says. ”The question is the same in the 1980s as in the 1840s: What`s effective?”
Long before television, campaign managers and ”media experts,”
including writers and artists, experimented with various ways to present their candidates to the public. From the first, campaigns had a military bearing, though sometimes candidates` records were embellished almost beyond recognition. Some images grew out of the personalities of the contenders:
Lincoln the ”railspitter” was contrived at the 1860 Illinois Republican convention but was based on Abe`s frontier past.
These images were reflected by various objects that often signaled the opinions and qualities voters wanted in their leaders. Objects ”created a bond between the candidate and his supporters and gave his cause social credibility,” Melder says.
At no time was this more true than during the 1896 skirmish between William Jennings Bryan–a crusader for the common man, a foe of gold and monopoly–and William McKinley, a crusader for conservatives, the protective tariff and sound money. To Melder, the campaign was a ”hard-fought, expensive, unprecedented image contest.”
With the nation in the most severe depression to date, the obvious issue was prosperity and how to regain it. The McKinley camp vehemently preached that leaving the gold standard would guarantee financial ruin, to which Bryan, electrifying the public, declared: ”You shall not crucify mankind upon a cross of gold.”
The intensity of rhetoric was matched by a voter`s need for something to show his loyalty to McKinley or Bryan. ”Eventually,” notes Fred Voss, a historian at the Smithsonian`s National Portrait Gallery, ”the trove of mementos for 1896 contained one of the richest assortments of partisan sundries ever to come out of a presidential race.”
Whatever the occasion, there was, or so it seemed, a McKinley or Bryan item: Bathers could wash with soap endorsed by either candidate. Republican children could play with McKinley dolls. Their Democratic playmates could blow ”free silver” whistles. Ashtrays and cigar holders, walking sticks and watches were but a few products of human activity that didn`t escape political partisanship.
It is not unknown for a candidate`s image to be crafted (and successfully at that) out of a campaign mix-up. Such was the case in the 1840 contest between William Henry Harrison (”Tippecanoe and Tyler too”) and Martin Van Buren. Harrison, a Whig, came from aristocratic Ohio roots, but a Democratic newspaper suggested that the candidate could best serve his country by retiring to a cabin back home.
The Harrison camp ran with it. In no time, a one-room log cabin was emblazoned on everything from sheet music to cider barrels, giving Harrison an image of humble, down-home origin. Clearly, the campaign had struck the public`s love of the ”common touch” that threads through later presidencies of Lincoln, haberdasher Harry Truman, peanut farmer Jimmy Carter and, surprisingly perhaps, Ronald Reagan, a man often photographed on horseback or splitting wood at his mountaintop ranch.
Political historians consider the 1840 contest ”the first media campaign,” and for good reason. An outpouring of manufactured keepsakes made possible by the steam of the Industrial Revolution assured that each candidate would have a supply of snuff boxes, kerchiefs and ceramics for his supporters. The campaign broke other ground. The distribution across the nation of the likeness of Harrison on ribbons and other devices marked one of the first times voters could see how their candidate looked–no small matter then or now.
In the 1830s and `40s, many items such as plates, spoons and pitchers were produced with women in mind. Though they were not enfranchised, women had considerable indirect and informal influence in the political process in those days. ”Women,” Mayo explains, ”were considered mothers of the Republic,”
and the objects were ”associated with the Victorian cult of the home–a refuge, a place of sanctity. But the paradox,” Mayo points out, ”was that these items were mass produced.”
Campaigns, of course, are never all sweetness and baby-kissing. Vilification has its own long tradition. As early as 1828, Andrew Jackson, the great populist, was hit with accusations of being a would-be emperor, a murderer, duelist and adulterer, among other things. His opponent, John Quincy Adams, was written off by many as an effete snob. In the media extravaganza of 1840, the Harrison forces, having made hay of their critics` sniping, made sure that Van Buren was down and out by ”suggesting” that he was a corseted luxury-lover who used French perfume and dined at the White House on gold-plated tableware–all that during the depression of 1837.
Surviving political memorabilia often has special value in that the objects show graphically why a campaign went awry. Voss points to the 1856 campaign of John G. Fremont, who had won fame as an explorer of the American West. The new Republican Party`s first candidate campaigned on the slogan
”Free men, free soil, and Fremont.” Such ”blatant trumpeting of the Republicans` hostility to slavery proved too extreme” for North and South alike, Voss says, and in the end Fremont was soundly defeated.
Other election-year objects provide researchers a vivid comparison of competing campaign styles. The 1952 Eisenhower-Stevenson contest came at the outset of the television age. The Republicans, Bird explains, best understood and utilized the vast communications changes taking place.
Bird shows a visitor a brochure from Ike`s camp. It bears large black-and-white photographs and terse captions. If the resemblance to a TV spot is somehow missed, a line of type on the cover advises: ”Reading time–40 seconds.” A second brochure, a Stevenson ad, looks dated for its time. ”It borders,” Bird says, ”on the visual, but there is a lot of print compared to the Republican ad.”
Whether the campaign devices come in the form of buttons of the latest 20-second TV spots, the Smithsonian political historians agree that they surely add to the spirit and color that has long been part of America campaigns. Says Melder: ”It seems to me that the serious study of politics has tended to overlook the entertainment side of it. The show–putting on a display to hold the crowd–is as old as Greek civilization.”
