[75 years ago this week, Dewey didn’t defeat Truman—but the 1948 election was close and contested enough that one newspaper famously reported he did. So this week I’ll AmericanStudy that election and a few other hotly contested ones (not including 2020, because it really wasn’t), leading up to a special Guest Post from an FSU alum and talented young journalist who would never get it so wrong!]
On two clear
and important factors in one of our closest elections ever, and one
significantly more ambiguous but perhaps even more meaningful one.
1)
TV: I ended yesterday’s post on the 1948
election with a comparison to the role of TV specifically and mass media more
generally in
1960, which is often seen as the first truly
modern election as a result of that
influence. As those three hyperlinked articles (and the many others I could
have included) reflect, this is a factor that has been very thoroughly
explored, and for good reason: it’s difficult to overstate how much TV and mass
media have shifted our politics, and continue to do so even in the age of the
internet (which is of course its own form of mass media). I don’t have a great
deal to add to all those voices, but will say that I wrote a good bit in my
recent book
Of Thee I Sing about the “Camelot”
mythos around the Kennedy administration as an exemplification of
celebratory patriotism, and that whole narrative was deeply intertwined with
Kennedy’s boyish good looks and media-friendly charm.
2)
Johnson: Kennedy’s TV appearances (in both
senses of the word) unquestionably influenced such narratives, and likely
brought folks out to vote as a result. But in American presidential elections
voting matters more in a state-by-state way than an individual voter way, and to
my mind the single biggest influence on state voting patterns in the 1960
election was Kennedy’s choice
for a running mate: Texas Senator and Senate Majority Leader Lyndon B.
Johnson. It’s not just that Johnson was a masterful party leader and political
negotiator, although those roles were never more crucial than in such a tightly
contested election. It’s also that the Dixiecrat revolt about which I wrote in
yesterday’s post had only continued and deepened, and without a VP who could
truly bring in Southern Democrats there’s no way Kennedy would have won the electoral
votes of the majority of the Southern states. Like Lincoln’s
VP choice Andrew Johnson, similarly chosen for strategic reasons, this one
also became president himself due to a tragic assassination—but that’s a story
for another post.
3)
Religion: The combination of Kennedy on TV and
Johnson on the political landscape probably played the largest role in deciding
this very close election (and it seems
pretty clear that fraud did not, despite the contemporary
and persistent arguments to the contrary). But throughout the campaign,
there was a consistent debate which overshadowed either of those and any other
factors: the questions surrounding Kennedy’s Catholicism. I wrote for my Talking
Points Memo column back in 2015 about those debates, and won’t rehash the
same points here (although they’re worth remembering in an era when the majority
of our Supreme Court are devout Catholics, a clear reflection that these
narratives have changed). Instead I’ll just note that whatever the effects of
these religion debates on the election—and that’s a very complicated question,
since Kennedy’s religion may at the same time have pushed some voters away and
brought in other new ones—they, and Kennedy’s significance as the
first Roman Catholic President (and only one until our
current administration), remind us that no election exists in a vacuum, and
that historic significance often goes far beyond the winners and losers in a
given year.
Last
contested election tomorrow,
Ben
PS. What
do you think?
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