Political Campaigns

The Long, Stormy Marriage Of Money And Politics

Thomas Fleming | November 1998

… or why in America campaign-finance reform never succeeds

In the summer of 1787 a sweaty group of politicians was debating the clauses of a proposed constitution in humid Philadelphia.

Flower Power, 1936

The Readers | September 1997

I had a special reason for covering myself with Alf Landon campaign buttons.

It was the fall of 1936, and students at West Grammar School in Portland, Maine, were excited. Alf Landon was coming to Portland! Mr. Landon was running for President against Franklin Roosevelt.

The Wimp Factor

Bruce Curtis | November 1989

A year ago we were in the midst of a presidential campaign most memorable for charges by both sides that the opponent was not hard enough, tough enough, masculine enough. That he was, in fact, a sissy. Both sides also admitted this sort of rhetoric was deplorable. But it’s been going on since the beginning of the Republic.

Just before George Bush announced his running mate in 1988, a one-liner going the rounds was that he should choose Jeane Kirkpatrick to add some machismo to the ticket.

How Media Politics Was Born

Greg Mitchell | September/October 1988

To keep Upton Sinclair from becoming governor of California in 1934, his opponents invented a whole new kind of campaign

The American political campaign as we know it today was born on August 28, 1934, when Upton Sinclair, the muckraking author and lifelong socialist, won the Democratic primary for governor of California.

How Pure Must Our Candidates Be?

Garry Wills | May/June 1988

The distasteful questions we ask our presidential hopefuls serve a real purpose

Has the press gone too far?” is a question that has been asked more frequently in this presidential campaign than any other.

Why the Candidates Still Use FDR as Their Measure

William E. Leuchtenburg | February 1988

It’s not surprising that Democrats seek to wrap themselves in the Roosevelt cloak; what’s harder to understand is why so many Republicans do too. A distinguished historian explains.

The Last Real Presidential Debate

Tom Swafford | February/March 1986

It took place in 1948, and it was orchestrated—with difficulty—by the program director of a faltering Portland, Oregon, radio station. He persuaded two Republican candidates to argue formally about an actual issue with no intervening moderator.

In October 1984 President Ronald Reagan and Sen. Walter F. Mondale came together on the same platform in Louisville, Kentucky, and again in Kansas City, Missouri. Correspondents tossed questions at them; each answered.

Four More Years

October/November 1984

Here is how political cartoonists have sized up the candidates over a tumultuous half-century.

AMERICANS HAVE BEEN turning out political cartoons since the dawn of the Republic, but in the nineteenth century the drawings tended to be verbose and cluttered, their characters trailing long ribbons of speech balloons as they stumbled ov

How To Be First Lady

Beatrice K. Hofstadter | August/september 1983

The ground rules have changed drastically since 1789. Abigail Adams, stifled in her time, would have loved being First Lady today.

ONCE AGAIN the candidates gear up for a national election; not only the candidates but their wives too. And pity the ladies!

How The Media Seduced And Captured American Politics

Richard C. Wade | February/March 1983

A noted historian argues that television, a relative newcomer, has nearly destroyed old—and valuable—political traditions

TELEVISION HAS BEEN accused of many things: vulgarizing tastes; trivializing public affairs; sensationalizing news; corrupting the young; pandering to profits; undermining traditional values.

“I Think Hiss Is Lying”

Fawn M. Brodie | August/september 1981

More than any other single event, Richard Nixon’s dogged pursuit of Alger Hiss made the young congressman from California a national figure.

The First Hurrah

Louis W. Koenig | April/may 1980

Presidential candidates stayed above the battle until William Jennings Bryan stumped the nation in 1896; they’ve been in the thick of it ever since

The most confident prediction that can be made about the 1980 presidential campaign is that the nominees will invest enormous energy, time, and money in stumping the country.

The Harrison Bandwagon

October 1975

Our forebears were much given to singing. They sang themselves through revolution with “The Liberty Song” and “Yankee Doodle,” and afterward each struggle of the young nation inspired songsters to extol in music and lyric the virtues of freedom.

Campaign Banners

Wilcomb E. Washburn | October 1972

Their homely symbols tell us more about voter behavior than party platforms do

Beneath the gaudy exterior and hoopla of American political parades of the nineteenth century is concealed a sober truth about ourselves. The banners used in such parades were designed to convert onlookers to a new political faith or to reinforce existing beliefs.

The Melancholy Fate Of The Loser

Gerald Carson | October 1972

It isn’t every day that one can see a man pushing a peanut with his nose along the main street of an American town.

Rocky’s Road

Joseph L. Sax | February 1971

Who runs the country? Administrative agencies. Who runs the administrative agencies? Well, there was this road they were going to put right through the old Rockefeller place, and …

The Front Porch Campaign

Margaret Leech | December 1959

While Bryan stumped up and down the land, McKinley let the voters come to his lawn in Canton—and they came

In 1896, the depression which had followed the Panic of ’93 was in its third year. Debt, business failure, unemployment, and labor unrest were spreading; to many, revolution seemed just a step away.

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Featured Authors

Acheson, Dean

Dean Acheson (1893-1971) was an attorney and statesman who served as Secretary of State from 1949 to 1953 under President Harry Truman. A key architect of the Truman Doctrine and the Marshall Plan, Acheson stressed the importance of multilateral organizations in the fight against totalitarianism. Prior to his service in the Truman Administration, Acheson clerked for Supreme Court Justice Louis Brandeis, worked at Washington law firm Covington & Burling, and served as Undersecretary of the Treasury for one year under President Franklin Roosevelt.

Ambrose, Stephen E.

Stephen E. Ambrose (1936-2002) was a historian and professor who wrote on military history, presidential history, and American expansion and foreign policy. Ambrose has been praised for his biographies of Presidents Eisenhower and Nixon, and for helping to galvanize interest in World War II.

Blight, David W.

David W. Blight is the Class of 1954 Professor of American History and Director of the Gilder Lehrman Center for the Study of Slavery, Resistance & Abolition at Yale University. Recently, Blight has written A Slave No More: Two Men Who Escaped to Freedom, Including Their Narratives of Emancipation, and Race and Reunion: The Civil War in American Memory, which won the Bancroft Prize, the Abraham Lincoln Prize, and the Frederick Douglass Prize.

Brinkley, Douglas

Douglas Brinkley, a distinguished professor of history at Rice University and Contributing Editor of American Heritage, has written more than 20 books, most recently The Wilderness Warrior: Theodore Roosevelt and the Crusade for America (Harper 2009) and The Reagan Diaries (HarperCollins 2007). Brinkley earned his B.A from Ohio State University University in 1982, and his Ph.D. from Georgetown University in 1989.

Catton, Bruce

Bruce Catton (1899 – 1978) was the Founding Editor of American Heritage and arguably the most prolific and popular of all Civil War historians. He wrote an astonishing 167 articles for American Heritage, and won a Pulitzer Prize for history in 1954 for A Stillness at Appomattox, his study of the final campaign of the war in Virginia. Catton received the Presidential Medal of Freedom, the nation's highest civilian honor, from President Gerald Ford, in 1977, the year before his death.

Commager, Henry Steele

A longtime member of the editorial advisory board of AMERICAN HERITAGE, Henry Steele Commager (1902-1998) taught at New York University, Columbia, and Amherst College, and authored more than forty books. He first gained attention in 1930 as co-author, with Harvard historian Samuel Eliot Morison, of The Growth of the American Republic, which became a standard textbook for decades. His anthology Documents of American History (1938) remained a widely used collection of primary sources for many years.

Dickson, Paul

Paul Dickson is the author of more than 55 nonfiction books and hundreds of magazine articles. Although he has written on a variety of subjects from ice cream to kite flying to electronic warfare, he now concentrates on writing about the American language, baseball and 20th century history. Bestselling books include: Baseball’s Greatest Quotations, The Hidden Language of Baseball, and The Joy of Keeping Score.

Dolin, Eric Jay

Eric Jay Dolin is a bestselling author of popular books on American history, maritime history, and the environment. His works include Fur, Fortune, And Empire, a history of America's fur trade, Black Flags, Blue Waters, about the history of pirating in America, and Leviathan, about the history of whaling in the U.S. His more recent book is A Furious Sky, which retraces 500 years of hurricanes in America and the impact they had on the nation's development.

Eisenhower, John D.

John D. Eisenhower, the son of President Dwight D. Eisenhower, is a retired United States Army officer and the author of several books on military history. He served as the U.S. Ambassador to Belgium from 1969 to 1971.

Ellis, Joseph J.

Joseph J. Ellis, winner of the 2001 Pulitzer Prize in History for Founding Brothers: The Revolutionary Generation (Knopf 2000), is the Ford Foundation Professor of History at Mount Holyoke College whose work focuses on the lives and times of the founders of the United States of America.

Fleming, Thomas

Thomas Fleming is a longtime contributor to American Heritage and former president of the Society of American Historians.

Flexner, James Thomas

James Thomas Flexner (1908-2003) was most famous for his extensive writings on American art history and a four-volume biography of George Washington, for which he won a special Pulitzer citation. Flexner's other historical biographies include the one-volume Washington: The Indispensable Man, The Young Hamilton, Mohawk Baronet (Sir William Johnson, 1st Baronet), and The Traitor and the Spy: Benedict Arnold and John Andre.

Foner, Eric

Eric Foner, the DeWitt Clinton Professor of History at Columbia University, has served as president of the Organization of American Historians, the American Historical Association, and the Society of American Historians. One of the foremost experts on the Civil War, Slavery, Reconstruction, and Abraham Lincoln, Foner's most recent book, The Fiery Trial: Abraham Lincoln and American Slavery, published in the fall of 2010, won the Pulitzer Prize for History in 2011.

Gates, Henry Louis

Henry Louis Gates, Jr. is the Alphonse Fletcher University Professor at Harvard University, and the director of the W. E. B. Du Bois Institute for African and African American Research. He recently completed The Henry Louis Gates, Jr. Reader (Basic Civitas Books, 2012), a collection of essays on history, culture, and African-American genealogy. Gates has hosted several PBS television miniseries, including the history and travel program Wonders of the African World and the biographical African American Lives and Faces of America.

Gordon, John Steele

John Steele Gordon has been a frequent contributor to American Heritage and the Wall Street Journal. He is the author most recently of An Empire of Wealth: The Epic History of American Economic Power (HarperCollins 2004). Gordon's writing concentrates on business and financial history, and his 1999 book, The Great Game: The Emergence of Wall Street as a World Power, 1653-2000, was adapted into a two-hour CNBC special.

Gordon-Reed, Annette

Annette Gordon-Reed is the Charles Warren Professor of American Legal History, Professor of History and Carol K. Pforzheimer Professor at Harvard University's Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study. She was awarded the Pulitzer Prize for History for The Hemingses of Monticello: An American Family.

Holzer, Harold

Harold Holzer, a frequent contributor and winner of a 2005 Lincoln Prize for Lincoln at Cooper Union: The Speech That Made Abraham Lincoln President (Simon & Schuster 2006), has written more than 40 books about the 16th president. He currently chairs The Lincoln Bicentennial Foundation and was awarded the National Humanities Medal by President George W. Bush in 2008. Holzer, educated at the City University of New York, first worked as a newspaper editor for The Manhattan Tribune, served as a political campaign press secretary for Congresswoman Bella S.

Lukacs, John

John Lukacs served as a Professor of History at Chestnut Hill College from 1947 to 1994, and is the noted author of over 30 books including:Outgrowing Democracy: A History of the United States in the Twentieth Century, The Legacy of the Second World War and The Future of History in 2011.

Maier, Pauline

Pauline Maier was the William R. Kenan, Jr. Professor of American History at MIT. She primarily wrote on the American Revolution and Early Republic. Her book, American Scripture: Making the Declaration of Independence, was named as a top book of 1997 by the New York Times Book Review and was a finalist in General Nonfiction for the National Book Critics' Circle Award. Her book Ratification: The People Debate the Constitution, 1787-1788 won the prestigious George Washington Book Prize in 2010.

McCullough, David

David McCullough is an author, narrator, historian, and lecturer. He is a two-time winner of the Pulitzer Prize, the National Book Award, and Francis Parkman Prizes.

McPherson, James M.

James M. McPherson, the George Henry Davis ’86 Professor of History Emeritus at Princeton University, is perhaps America’s foremost living Civil War scholar. Among his books are his one-volume history of the war, Battle Cry of Freedom, Lincoln and The Second American Revolution, and For Cause and Comrades: Why Men Fought in the Civil War, winner of the Lincoln Prize in 1998.

Reynolds, David S.

David S. Reynolds is a literary critic and historian who has written fifteen books about American history, literature and culture. These include Abe: Abraham Lincoln in His Times, John Brown, Abolitionist, Walt Whitman's America: A Cultural Biography, Waking Giant: America in the Age of Jackson and Mightier than the Sword: Uncle Tom's Cabin and the Battle for America.

Schlesinger, Arthur

Arthur Schlesinger, Jr. (1917-2007) was a historian, author, and political adviser who served as Special Assistant to President John Kennedy from 1961 to 1963. Schlesinger won the 1946 Pulitzer Prize for History for The Age of Jackson. In 1966, Schlesinger won another Pulitzer Prize for A Thousand Days: John F. Kennedy in the White House. He was honored with a National Humanities Medal and a Four Freedoms Award before his death in 2007.

Tuchman, Barbara W.

Barbara Tuchman (1912 – 1989) was an American historian and author who first became known for her best-selling book The Guns of August, a history of the prelude to and first month of World War I, which won the Pulitzer Prize for General Non-Fiction in 1963. She won a second Pulitzer for Stilwell and the American Experience in China (1972).

Watkins, T. H.

One of the foremost chroniclers of the American West, T. H. Watkins was an editor at American Heritage for six years and a long-time contributor. He also served as Editor of Wilderness magazine for fifteen years, and as Wallace Stegner Distinguished Professor of Western American Studies at Montana State University.

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