Skip to main content

The Campaign Trail

March 2023
1min read

There are as many ways to campaign for the Presidency as there are to skin a cat—or an elephant or donkey. These two pages suggest the variety of things a candidate, sometimes to his surprise, may find himself doing. At upper left, Franklin D. Roosevelt shakes a miner’s hand in Wheeling, West Virginia, while holding a local moppet on his lap (1932). Next, William HlcKinley makes his nomination acceptance speech from his own front porch in Canton, Ohio—a rostrum from which he would address thousands during the campaign of 1896. In a fascinating innovation, Joint F. Kennedy and Richard M. Nixon debate before television cameras and an audience of millions (1960). Wendell Willkie rides gallantly through enthusiastic crowds in his home town, Elwood, Indiana (1940). Al Smith confronts a pair of microphones in 1928. The “raddio,” as he called it, may have done him more harm than good. Estes Kefaitver, capitalizing on his Tennessee origin, made the coonskin cap his trademark in 1952 and again in 1956. William Howard Taft piles on a few more ounces at a barbecue after his victory in 1908. Teddy Roosevelt suits bellicose gesture to bellicose oration in a. warm-up for the campaign of 1912. President Harry Truman demonstrates that tlie whistle-stop speech is still a highly effective device (York, Pennsylvania, 1948).

UNDERWOOD & UNDERWOOD; UPI; ACME; BROWN BROTHERS; WIDE WORLD; CULVER PICTURES

We hope you enjoy our work.

Please support this 72-year tradition of trusted historical writing and the volunteers that sustain it with a donation to American Heritage.

Donate

Stories published from "August 1964"

Authored by: E. M. Halliday

War heroes have often made good presidential candidates. Sometimes they have even made good Presidents

Authored by: The Editors

A Selective Bibliography

Authored by: Gerald Carson

How a Pennsylvania congressman dug Martin Van Buren’s political grave with a golden spoon

Authored by: The Editors

Presidents on the Presidency

Authored by: The Editors

To endorse their products, early admen used even the President. Permission? They seldom bothered to

Authored by: D. W. Brogan

The Presidency has outlas fed the thrones of emperors and kings, shoguns and cxars, to become the world’s principal place of power

Authored by: Bruce Catton

When Harry Truman was President of the United States he kept on his desk a little sign with the reminder: “The buck stops here.” This was his way of telling himself that when the responsibility for decision conies to a President, he has to meet it all alone. He can ask for all kinds of advice, and any amount of briefing, but he has to make up his mind by himself. Once in a generation or so his decisions send powerful echoes down the years. They may take the country along a path never before followed, enlarge the powers of the American government itself, or commit the whole nation to a policy or a program that will have permanent and vital effect. At such moments the President has to have vision, courage, and a sense of historic mission. To illustrate the matter, we consider below five moments in time in which a President made a decision whose consequences to the republic still endure.

As a national celebrity, only the Chief Executive himself outshines her. Within the awesome confines of the White House, some remarkable women have presided

Authored by: Bernard A. Weisberger

The American system of choosing a President has not worked out badly, far as it may be from the Founding Fathers’ vision of a natural aristocracy

Authored by: The Editors

Their job, said John Adams, was nothing in esse but everything in posse. Each of them went to sleep every night and

Featured Articles

Rarely has the full story been told how a famed botanist, a pioneering female journalist, and First Lady Helen Taft battled reluctant bureaucrats to bring Japanese cherry trees to Washington. 

Why have thousands of U.S. banks failed over the years? The answers are in our history and politics.

Often thought to have been a weak President, Carter was strong-willed in doing what he thought was right, regardless of expediency or political fallout.

In his Second Inaugural Address, Abraham Lincoln embodied leading in a time of polarization, political disagreement, and differing understandings of reality.

Native American peoples and the lands they possessed loomed large for Washington, from his first trips westward as a surveyor to his years as President.

A hundred years ago, America was rocked by riots, repression, and racial violence.

During Pres. Washington’s first term, an epidemic killed one tenth of all the inhabitants of Philadelphia, then the capital of the young United States.

Now a popular state park, the unassuming geological feature along the Illinois River has served as the site of centuries of human habitation and discovery.  

The recent discovery of the hull of the battleship Nevada recalls her dramatic action at Pearl Harbor and ultimate revenge on D-Day as the first ship to fire on the Nazis.

Our research reveals that 19 artworks in the U.S. Capitol honor men who were Confederate officers or officials. What many of them said, and did, is truly despicable.

Here is probably the most wide-ranging look at Presidential misbehavior ever published in a magazine.

When Germany unleashed its blitzkreig in 1939, the U.S. Army was only the 17th largest in the world. FDR and Marshall had to build a fighting force able to take on the Nazis, against the wishes of many in Congress.