by Ben Shapiro
Now the victor of the Battle of New Orleans was setting his sights on the presidency. And he had backing from the common people. Jackson’s supporters in Philadelphia, for example, pledged not to “surrender to a self-constituted aristocracy,” but rather to back Jackson, “a statesman and a warrior . . . a friend to the rights of man and universal suffrage.”25
J. Q. Adams was similar in style, temperament, and appearance to his father. He was perceived as aristocratic and monarchical. During the 1824 campaign, he was mocked for his “slovenly dress and ‘English’ wife.”26
Though Jackson won the popular vote in 1824, Adams became the president through a series of political machinations culminating in Henry Clay’s decision to throw his supporters to Adams. Adams’s victory was to be pyrrhic, however; after Adams appointed Clay as his secretary of state, the public reacted by accusing Adams and Clay of engaging in a “corrupt bargain.”
By 1828, Adams’s fate had virtually been sealed. Like his father, Adams was accused of monarchic pretensions and spendthrift habits as president. A Jackson election handbill with the list of Jacksonian candidates carried the message, “No ‘favored few, booted and spurred, ready to ride us legitimately by the grace of God’ ”—an oblique reference to J. Q. Adams.27Adams was labeled a “pimp and a gambler”—at the time, an insult—and bizarrely accused of “[procuring] an American girl for the Czar of Russia when he was minister to that country.”28
And just as in 1824, Jackson’s campaign portrayed him, in the words of historian Paul Boller, “as a man of the soil who dropped his tools in the field like Cincinnatus of old to respond to his country’s call to duty in time of crisis.”29
This time Jackson won both the popular vote and the presidency.
And the beauty of the boots strategy was that Jackson did not need to fear being labeled an aspiring dictator or power-hungry boor. When he ran again in 1832 against Henry Clay, one Republican newspaper headlined, “The King upon the Throne: The People in the Dust!!!” 30
Nice try. Jackson destroyed Clay—trampling him, like Adams, under boot.
ABRAHAM LINCOLN TOOK ADVANTAGE of his wilderness roots in 1860. Though Lincoln was running against two western candidates in Stephen Douglas and John Bell, and a southern candidate in John Breckinridge, Lincoln recognized the value of his dirt-poor upbringing. Lincoln was no political slouch; he had campaigned for William Henry Harrison in 1840, and had seen firsthand the value of the boots strategy. During the 1840 campaign, for example, he debated Colonel Dick Taylor. Taylor accused the Whigs of “foppery.” Lincoln, who was already known as “the Rail Splitter” and was fond of wearing blue jeans,31 moved toward Taylor . . . then, in a move Justin Timberlake would reenact a century and a half later, Lincoln suddenly ripped open Taylor’s coat. Underneath, Taylor was wearing a ruffled shirt, velvet vest, and gold watch chain.
Lincoln quickly took advantage, contrasting Taylor’s childhood full of “ruffled shirts” and “kid gloves” with his own Spartan lifestyle. He had “only one pair of breeches,” he said, “and they were buckskin . . . Now if you know the nature of buckskin when wet and dried by the sun, it will shrink,” Lincoln continued. “[And] whilst I was growing taller they were becoming shorter, and so much tighter that they left a blue streak around my legs that can be seen to this day. If you call this aristocracy,” Lincoln quipped, “I plead guilty to the charge.”32
Lincoln’s supporters would use his wit and “hick from the sticks” reputation to similar effect in the 1860 election. At the Republican state convention in Illinois, Lincoln’s cousin introduced him by walking down the aisle carrying two fence rails with a sign attached: “The Rail Candidate for President in 1860. Two rails from a lot of 3,000 made in 1830 by Thomas Hanks and Abraham Lincoln . . .” Lincoln took the stage, then declined to identify the rails as his handiwork, musing, “It is possible I may have split these rails but I cannot identify them . . . I can only say that I have split a great many better-looking ones.”33
Campaign songs citing Lincoln’s rail-splitting prowess became the rage. One, to the tune of Stephen Foster’s “Old Uncle Ned” (a virulently racist song, ironically enough), went like this:
We’ve a noble rail splitter, and his name is Honest Abe,
And he lives in Illinois, as you know;
And he has all the tools there to carry on his trade,
And the way he piles them up isn’t slow.34
The cartoons of the 1860 campaign routinely depicted Lincoln as a man of humble origins—the Paul Bunyan of presidential candidates. One, entitled “Taking the Stump” or “Stephen in Search of His Mother,” shows all the other presidential candidates decked out in suits. Meanwhile, Lincoln stands to the side, wearing a simple white shirt unbuttoned at the top, leaning against—you guessed it—a rail fence.35 Another print, also Republican, shows Lincoln in the same simple white shirt, this time wearing work boots and carrying an axe for rail-splitting.36
Even Lincoln’s opponents fell into the trap of connecting him with the rail-splitting imagery. One cartoon entitled “The Rail Candidate” portrays Lincoln riding a rail labeled “Republican Platform,” carried by New York editor Horace Greeley and an African American. Lincoln is turning to Greeley and complaining, “It is true I have split Rails, but I begin to feel as if ‘this’ rail would split me, it’s the hardest stick I ever straddled.” The rail refers to the 1860 Republican platform plank opposing the extension of slavery to the territories.37
Lincoln wasn’t elected specifically because of his rail-splitting, but it certainly didn’t hurt. It is fortunate for our country that Americans of 1860 were just as fond of logs as Americans of 1840.
PRESIDENT THEODORE ROOSEVELT’S prospects for reelection looked excellent in 1904. Roosevelt had assumed office after the assassination of President McKinley in 1901; he had become McKinley’s running mate in 1900, adding weight to the ticket as a Spanish-American War hero. Roosevelt wore the prototypical campaign boots—he owned a ranch in North Dakota and was a hunting fanatic. His fondness for wilderness was legendary.
And he knew how to campaign. During the presidential campaign of 1908, TR would advise his would-be successor, William Howard Taft, on how to cultivate a sufficiently rustic image: “Photographs on horseback, yes, tennis, no, and golf is fatal.” When a concerned Illinois voter sent TR a letter warning that golf was a “dude’s game” and that Taft should “cast aside golf and take an axe and cut wood,” TR informed Taft of the request, adding, “It is just like my tennis. I never let a photograph of me in tennis costume appear.”38 The boots strategy in a nutshell.
During the 1900 campaign, cartoonists ubiquitously portrayed TR in his Rough Rider outfit, so it wasn’t as though Roosevelt needed to remind the public of his boots credentials in 1904, particularly while running against a judge from New York, Alton Parker. Nonetheless, with the help of cartoonist Clifford Berryman of the Washington Post, TR created a powerful personal myth combining new humanity with his already mythical toughness.
In 1902, TR went bear hunting in Mississippi. After an unsuccessful morning, TR headed back to camp. Suddenly TR’s bear catcher, Holt Collier, signaled that he had captured a bear. When TR reached the bear, however, he was disappointed to see that it was a scrawny specimen, already concussed by Collier and tethered to a tree. TR didn’t have the heart to shoot the bear and told Collier to “put it out of its misery.” Collier obliged using his hunting knife.
This wasn’t a particularly important event in TR’s career.
Or was it?
Cartoonist Berryman certainly thought it was. Berryman parlayed TR’s sportsmanlike refusal to shoot the bear into some of the most important presidential imagery in American history. His cartoon depicted Roosevelt virtuously sparing the life of a black bear that had been tied around the neck by a white hunter—the cartoon was an attempt to analogize TR’s mercy toward the bear to TR’s protection of Southern African Americans against white oppression.39
Washington Post reader
s may not have understood Berryman’s racial point, but they were universal in their love of the bear. As Roosevelt biographer Edmund Morris put it, “Berryman obliged—again and again, as he realized he had hit upon a symbol the public adored. With repetition, his original lean bear became smaller, rounder, and cuter . . . it became the leitmotif of every cartoon he drew of Theodore Roosevelt.”40
In fact, Berryman went to ridiculous lengths to include the bear in all of his cartoons of TR. Even when Berryman criticized TR, he included the bear. One famous Berryman cartoon from 1906 was designed to criticize TR’s vacationing at his Pine Knot retreat in Virginia. The cartoon shows TR running into the woods—so far so good—but also has a cute little black bear following TR, bearing his suitcase and umbrella.41 Note: criticizing a president by connecting him with adorable forest animals is not an effective editorial strategy.
The bear frenzy didn’t end with Berryman’s cartoons. Berryman had timed his imagery auspiciously for TR: toy stores in the United States began issuing plush toy bears just as Berryman coined his bear cartoons. These bears soon became known as “Teddy” bears—to the everlasting delight of children worldwide.42
Who could vote against the boot-wearing man for whom teddy bears were named? Certainly not the American public, which reelected Roosevelt in a landslide.
FROM 1912 TO 1948, America developed a peculiar fondness for suits. The transition from boots to suits is a testament to the power of President Woodrow Wilson, who won the 1912 election only because TR ran a tremendous third-party campaign, splitting the vote with incumbent president William Howard Taft.Wilson was a high-minded fellow, a former president of Princeton University, and subsequent governor of New Jersey. And he had a bold new plan for the direction of American government: government as an administrative agency. Such a plan would require an energetic executive who could get things done—and that executive would require tremendous power. In Wilson’s view, the president was the only true representative of the people as a whole, and as such, the president would lead the way from the murkiness of politics to the practical business of administration.
Though Wilson was born in Virginia, he was a prototypical suit. It wasn’t just his academic background—it was his method of speaking, his mode of dress, his general holier-than-thou manner. Wilson described himself as “a vague, conjectural personality, made up more of opinions and academic prepossessions than of human traits and red corpuscles.”43Harper’s Weekly, which endorsed Wilson a full year before the 1912 election, portrayed Wilson alternatively as a bespectacled and suited businessman44 and a robed and capped professor45 in its editorial cartoons. As George E. Mowry wrote, “Wilson was easy to respect, but difficult to love. Had the times not been what they were—a product of progressivism’s decade-long emphasis upon moral duty and righteousness—Wilson might never have been nominated.”46
In 1912, Wilson did not run as the progressive ultra-reformer he turned out to be. But during the course of his presidency, Wilson changed the very notion of what the presidency meant. The role of the president changed from that of statesman to “visionary”; the president became the “embodiment of the public will,” as Ronald Pestritto put it.47
And as the embodiment of public will,Wilson used the kind of rhetoric that would make Julius Caesar blush. H. L. Mencken described Wilson’s speeches thus: “When Wilson got upon his legs in those days he seems to have gone into a sort of trance, with all the peculiar illusions and delusions that belong to a pedagogue gone mashugga.”48
In assuming his status atop a pedestal of his own making, Wilson destroyed his own popularity and the popularity of his party. He also created a powerful image—the image of the banker, self-assured, competent. Warren G. Harding would look the part, as would Calvin Coolidge and Herbert Hoover. FDR would fulfill the image best, combining the imagery of Wilsonian vision with the able administrator, and adding a common touch altogether foreign to Wilson.
WITH FDR’S DEATH, however, the line of bankers ended. In the election of 1948, Harry Truman would bring back boots in a big way. Behind his spectacles and close-trimmed silver hair, Truman was a boots candidate. A former haberdasher, judge, and farmer from Missouri, Truman had assumed the vice presidency during the 1944 election and the presidency after FDR’s death in 1945. His popularity waned during his first term, leading to the election of Republican House and Senate majorities in 1946. By 1948, most observers thought that the Republican nominee, New York governor Thomas Dewey, would win the presidency in a walk.
Truman had one advantage, however: he was a boots candidate, and Dewey was a suit. While Dewey remained aloof and distant from the voters, Truman engaged with them, beginning a two-month whistlestop tour that would crisscross the country, covering some twenty thousand miles and delivering 250 speeches. His speeches were “hard-hitting and frequently folksy,” and Truman focused heavily on farming interests.49
Reading Truman’s campaign speeches today, it is amazing how much he reaches out to rural interests, relying on his own Missouri past for legitimacy. In his nomination acceptance speech, for example, Truman referred to “the 26th day of July, which out in Missouri we call ‘Turnip Day’ ” while pledging to call Congress back into session.50 In a speech in Iowa in September 1948, broadcast to a national radio audience, Truman stated, “It does my heart good to see the grain fields of the Nation again. They are a wonderful sight.”51 He then launched into a full frontal assault on Republican farming policies, allying himself repeatedly with the folks of the earth.52 Of course, cultivating the farm vote was part of Truman’s basic strategy; a report composed by his campaign aides suggested that Truman would have to carry the “West and the farm vote” if he hoped to win the 1948 election.53
Truman’s boots strategy wasn’t a masquerade; the man was folksy by nature. During a campaign stop in Ardmore, Oklahoma, Truman saw a cowboy riding a palomino horse. Truman disembarked from the train, opened the horse’s mouth, and declared it to be six years old. “Correct!” the cowboy said. “Truman Gets Right Dope from Horse’s Mouth” read the headline across the country.54 Apparently Truman repeated the routine in Texas, declaring the horse to be eight years old. “Who’d of thought that the president of the United States would know about horses?” exclaimed the young owner of the horse.55
And Truman wasn’t just a gutsy campaigner—he was a smart campaigner. In 1952, when Adlai Stevenson was running for president against General Dwight D. Eisenhower, Stevenson asked Truman what he was doing wrong. Truman went to the hotel window and pointed to a man on the street. “The thing you have got to do is to learn how to reach that man,” he told Stevenson.56 Stevenson never learned, but Truman was a master.
While Truman got along famously with crowds—crowds of thousands would show up to yell, “Give ’em Hell, Harry!”— Thomas Dewey seemed largely mechanical. David McCullough wrote, “Dewey, it was cracked, was the only man who could strut sitting down.”57 Even Dewey’s stilted exclamations—“Good gracious” and “Oh, Lord”—drew ire.58
Dewey generally refused to sling arrows at Truman and barely deigned to discuss policy during the campaign. His speeches were full of tautologies and generalities. Just as today’s politicians do, Dewey would meaningfully utter sentences like “America’s future is still ahead of us,”59 then wait for applause.
Dewey’s suit strategy led him down the primrose path to electoral defeat—and afterward, he recognized it. While vacationing with his family after the 1948 election, Dewey “took off his coat, rolled up his sleeves, squatted in the dust, and began pitching pennies with his two boys,” as Paul Boller described it. “When his wife warned that photographers might catch him in an undignified pose he told her: ‘Maybe, if I had done this during the campaign, I might have won.’”60
“EGGHEADS OF THE WORLD, UNITE! You have nothing to lose but your yolks!” So ran the most memorable slogan of 1952 and 1956 Democratic presidential nominee and former Illinois governor Adlai Stevenson, the biggest suit in the history of presiden
tial politics. It is no wonder that Stevenson lost the 1952 election by nearly 11 percent and the 1956 election by a whopping 15 percent margin.
Yes, Stevenson was running against one of the best presidential candidates of all time in Dwight D. Eisenhower. But Stevenson personified stuffiness, stiffness, and stilted philosophizing. He tried to channel Woodrow Wilson; instead, he channeled Ben Stein.
Stevenson recognized that he was no boots candidate; he quashed the idea of a campaign biography by remarking, “I don’t see how you’re going to do it. My life has been hopelessly undramatic. I wasn’t born in a log cabin. I didn’t work my way through school, nor did I rise from rags to riches, and there’s no use trying to pretend I did.”61
Still, Stevenson never understood Eisenhower’s appeal, or his own inability to reach the people. “If I talk over people’s heads,”
Stevenson quipped during the 1952 campaign, “Ike must talk under their feet.”62 Of course, that was precisely his problem: talking over the people’s heads—treating them like students—is what being a suit is all about. And Stevenson talked over the people’s heads routinely. After one speech, a television executive stated, “How did he get to be so sure of everything? He speaks as though he just got a wire from God. Somebody should ask him, ‘Tell me, Adlai, how are the apostles?’ ”63
Stevenson campaign stories abound. He constantly rewrote his speeches to the extent that he could not read them, so defaced were they with his notes.64 Despite the fact that Stevenson’s speechwriting team was one of the most star-studded in history—it included such notables as Arthur Schlesinger, John Kenneth Galbraith, Bernard DeVoto, Herbert Agar, John Fischer, etc.65 —the speeches themselves were masterpieces of pretentiousness. Stevenson’s 1952 nomination acceptance speech contains passages like this: “Let’s tell them that the victory to be won in the twentieth century, this portal to the Golden Age, mocks the pretensions of individual acumen and ingenuity. For it is a citadel guarded by thick walls of ignorance and of mistrust which do not fall before the trumpets’ blast or the politician’s imprecations or even a general’s baton.”66