POLITICAL PUFFERY ALLEGHANIA, ALLEGHANIA, GOD SHED HIS GRACE ON THEE … A SOLDIER’S FRIEND A GENERAL ROUT PRESIDENTIAL MEASURES
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January 2011
In “The Story-Telling Cigar” (December, 1978) we noted that cigar-box labels and brand names of the nineteenth century mirrored the optimism of the time.
“Simplicity and Silence will characterize the 1912 Cartercar” began the copy in the company’s advertising brochure of that year. But however simple and quiet the machine may have been in operation, no automobile of the era enjoyed a more complicated and elaborate promotional campaign. In an age when most automobile manufacturers were content to draw public attention by fielding a racing team and running an occasional advertisement in Leslie’s or The Saturday Evening Post , the Cartercar Company ran out a line of ballyhoo with a vigor that most of its competitors wouldn’t adopt for years. One of the thousands of automobile companies that have dropped into obscurity since the beginning of the century, Cartercar was founded in 1906 by Byron J. Carter, shown here at the wheel of an early model of his four-passenger touring car. A skilled mechanic, Carter had developed a special friction transmission which, according to him, was infinitely superior to anything else on the market. He set about demonstrating its virtues—and those of the car he built around it—with exceptional energy.
“Cleveland is a ‘strong man’ exactly as the hog is a strong animal. Stubborn without courage, persevering without judgment and greedy without gratitude.… There are several other points of resemblance; but I have no desire to be hard on the hog.”
Thus William Cowper Brann memorialized his Chief Executive when Grover Cleveland left office in 1897. Not that Brann loved Cleveland’s successor: “The election of McKinley means that all hope … is past.…” In fact, Brann hated more things more noisily than anyone else in turn-of-the-century America. He hated doctors, temperance, atheists, Baptists, woman suffrage, plutocrats, public education, politicians, the jury system, and Englishmen. At the same time, he defended Catholics and Jews in an era when such a stand was far from popular, he revered William Jennings Bryan, and he wrote of the sanctity of womanhood with a fervor that would have embarrassed Sir Walter Scott.
The outdoor electric-light spectacular that transformed cities all over the world was born at the Chicago World’s Columbian Exposition of 1893, where a single lighted column glowed with no fewer than four thousand incandescent lamps. By 1900, fifteen hundred incandescent bulbs had been hung on the narrow front of the Flatiron Building in New York City to form America’s first electrically lighted outdoor advertising sign. After that, incandescent signs began to flicker on across the country. But neon, which would become the most pervasive part of the urban nocturnal landscape, did not get to the United States until the 1920’s.
The Honorable Hugh L. Carey, Democratic governor of the state of New York, made a speech in Dublin on April 22, 1977. After declaring himself unalterably part of “that segment of the human family called Irish,” Carey denounced extremists on both sides of Northern Ireland’s guerrilla war as practitioners of the “politics of death.”
The next day, in a newspaper interview, Governor Carey made his neutrality even more specific. He condemned the Irish Republican Army terrorists and said that they did not deserve “a nickel’s worth of support in the United States.”
Earlier in this century, had a Democratic politician made such a statement, he simultaneously would have announced his resignation from the party and his departure from the country. Huge rallies would have been organized to denounce him. He would have been called a “yellow dog” and a “contemptible cur”—two of the more printable epithets used to describe James Michael Curley of Boston when he said that he favored an English victory in World War I.