Overwhelmed by Political Ads? Blame Ike
Dwight Eisenhower's first TV ads aired 72 years ago this week
Welcome back to the This Day In Esoteric Political History newsletter. Each week, a member of our team (or a friend of the show) gathers together bits of America’s past and attempts to find a throughline that might add a little understanding to our current moment.
It’s not too late to get tickets to our upcoming live show in Boston on September 13th: You can buy them here! And a lot of you have asked whether this will be recorded for the podcast — the answer is yes!
Here’s what happened over the week ahead in American history…
September 5
1836: Sam Houston elected President of the Republic of Texas
1882: New York City union leaders organized what is now considered the nation’s first Labor Day parade
1905: The Treaty of Portsmouth is signed, concluding the Russo-Japanese War; US President Theodore Roosevelt will receive the Nobel Peace Prize for his role as mediator
1991: Members of the group ACT UP erected a giant yellow condom over the home of North Carolina Senator Jesse Helms to protest his stance on AIDS research and awareness
September 6
1839: Cherokee people ratify a new constitution in Tahlequah, Oklahoma
1901: President William McKinley is shot by Leon Czolgosz, an anarchist, while visiting the Pan-American Exposition in New York
1918: During the seventh inning stretch of a World Series game between the Chicago Cubs and Boston Red Sox, a band played the “Star Spangled Banner” for the first time at a major sporting event
September 7
1813: Uncle Sam is “born”
1933 : Journalist Upton Sinclair launches a campaign for California governor
September 8
1883: The Northern Pacific Railway is completed in Montana. Former President Ulysses S. Grant drove in the final "golden spike"
1892: The Pledge of Allegiance is first published.
1935: Sen. Huey P. Long, the "Kingfish" of Louisiana politics, was shot at the state capital building in Baton Rouge; he died two days later.
1971: Consumer advocate Esther Peterson works with the supermarket chain GIANT to come up with the first nutrition labels
September 9
1776: Congress officially renames the country as the United States of America 🇺🇸
1850: California is admitted as the 31st U.S. state.
1965: The United States Department of Housing and Urban Development is established to allow the federal government to “tackle urban problems including substandard and deteriorating housing in a coordinated manner”
1971: The four-day Attica Prison riot begins, eventually resulting in 43 dead, most killed by state troopers retaking control of the prison.
1987: Former Colorado Senator Gary Hart gives an interview on Nightline where he, finally, admits that he’d been unfaithful to his wife. But it was too little, too late.
September 10
1813: Oliver H. Perry sent the message, "We have met the enemy, and they are ours," after an American naval force defeated the British in the Battle of Lake Erie in the War of 1812
September 11
1773: Benjamin Franklin writes "There never was a good war or bad peace."
1789: Alexander Hamilton is appointed as the first Secretary of the US Treasury.
1952: Dwight Eisenhower records his first campaign commercial, “Eisenhower Answers America” heralding a new age of campaign ads
In which we take the above collection of events and find themes, throughlines, rabbit holes and more. This week it’s Nicole Hemmer’s turn at the typewriter.
If you live in a swing state, the surest sign that it’s almost fall are not the dropping temps or yellowing leaves or even the appearance of candy pumpkins in the grocery store — it’s when campaign ads go from a steady drip to a full-on flood. Candidates displace consumer goods on nearly every ad-based platform.
If you’re looking for someone to blame…well, blame probably should go to the Supreme Court and Citizens United. But also spare a thought for Dwight Eisenhower, who on Sept. 11, 1952, recorded his first campaign commercial. “Eisenhower Answers America,” a series of 20-second ads focused on a single issue. You can watch them here, and they’re well worth your time. Not because they’re cutting-edge political art — to the modern eye, they’re corny at best. But for the American watching television in 1952, they were a revolution.
Television itself was a revolution. Only around 9% of households had a TV in 1950; by the end of the decade, nearly 90% did. Expectations for television production were still low in 1952, with flat lighting and stilted dialogue. But the Eisenhower campaign, which tapped Hollywood actors and Madison Avenue admen to shape its television campaign, represented a new era in campaign advertising. It was in many ways a perfect fit. Eisenhower was, after all, an American celebrity, one of the most recognized men in the country after his key role in carrying out the Allied strategy in World War II.
And while the ads now seem old-fashioned, the themes are the same that are pounding swing-staters’ airwaves today: taxes and corruption, the high cost of living, inflated grocery prices, government spending, the national debt. Much has changed about campaign ads — they’re more emotional, drenched in swelling music and quick-shifting images, often made to go viral — but some of the core features of today’s televised campaign ads were there from the start.
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