[In honor of this once-in-four-years phenomenon, I wanted to highlight and AmericanStudy a few interesting leap years from American history.]
On a
couple significant election contexts 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 (for more on which see this
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 Abraham
Lincoln and Andrew 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 leap
year studying tomorrow,
Ben
PS.
Thoughts on this year or other leap years that stand out to you?
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