[For this last
week before the most painful, frustrating, and potentially disastrous election
season in my lifetime—and perhaps American history—concludes, I’ll
AmericanStudy the histories, stories, and stakes of five prior exemplary elections.
Would love to hear your ElectionStudying thoughts—or your recipes for staying
sane for one more week—in comments!]
On a couple significant
AmericanStudies stories beyond “Dewey Defeats Truman.”
Don’t get me
wrong—“Dewey Defeats Truman”
was a unique historical moment, and the shot of a jubilant Truman holding a
copy of that November 3rd Chicago
Tribune is one of the more rightfully iconic 20th century
photographs. The moment also reminds us of just how much American newspapers
have always been affiliated with partisan politics: the Tribune was a solidily
Republican-leaning paper with no love lost for the incumbent Democrat, and
its choice to allow veteran political analyst Arthur
Sears Henning’s electoral prediction to determine their next day’s front
page (the paper went to press prior to the close of polls on the West coast)
was no doubt due at least in part to editorial wishful thinking. It’s easy to
decry the partisanship of contemporary newspapers and news media (on which more
in the upcoming weekend post), but in truth that’s been part of their identity
throughout American history.
But even if the Tribune had gotten its prediction right,
the 1948 presidential election would still be a hugely significant one. For one
thing, there was South Carolina Senator Strom Thurmond and his
third-party run as a Dixiecrat (or, officially, States’ Rights Democrat). Few
American histories have been more influential than the long, gradual
realignment of politics, race, and region, a story that starts as far back as
Tuesday’s focal figures Lincoln and Johnson and extends right
up to our present moment. Yet despite that century and a half long arc, the
splintering of the Democratic Party at the
1948 national convention represents a striking and singular moment, a
fulcrum on which those political and social realities permanently shifted. There
were all sorts of complicating factors, not least Thurmond’s
own secrets and hypocrises when it came to race—but at the broadest level,
few election-year moments have echoed more dramatically than did the Dixiecrat
revolt.
For another
thing, both Truman and Dewey used the mass media in an unprecedented way in the
campaign’s closing weeks. The two
campaigns created short newsreel films that were played in movie theaters
across the country, reach an estimated 65 million filmgoers each week. The
first televised
1960 debate between presidential candidates John F. Kennedy and Richard
Nixon is often described as the first national
political moment of the media age—or even as a
moment that “changed the world”—and certainly its live broadcast to a
national audience represented something new in American electoral politics. But
since so much of politics in the media age has not been live, has instead
comprised constructed and produced media images and narratives, it’s fair to
say that Truman’s and Dewey’s competing movies likewise foreshadowed a great
deal of what was to come in the subsequent half-century and more of elections.
Last exemplary
election tomorrow,
Ben
PS. What do you
think? Thoughts on this or any prior election?
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