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BITES AND BLIPS 127

party of ‘Rum, Romanism, and Rebellion’ as the Republican James G.
Blaine stood by without demurral—which may well have cost Blaine
the election. 13
Is the preference for personality over issues new? Once elected
president, Andrew Jackson set to wiping out Indian tribes—but this was
not an issue in the campaign that elected him, any more than the New
Deal was an issue in the campaign that elected Franklin Roosevelt in
1932. (Indeed, Roosevelt campaigned for a balanced budget.)
Are the blip and the bite new? Tippecanoe and Tyler Too’, the
leading slogan of 1840, does not exactly constitute a Lincoln-Douglas
debate. That year, followers of William Henry ‘Tippecanoe’ Harrison
carried log cabins in parades, circulated log cabin bandanas and banners,
gave away log cabin pins and sang log cabin songs, all meant to evoke
the humble origins of their candidate—although Harrison had been born
14
to prosperity and had lived only briefly in an actual log cabin. A half
century later, in 1896, Mark Hanna, McKinley’s chief handler, was the
first campaign manager to be celebrated in his own right. Hanna
acquired the reputation of a ‘phrasemaker’ for giving the world such
bites as ‘The Advance Agent of Prosperity’, ‘Full Dinner Pail’ and
‘Poverty or Prosperity’, which were circulated on posters, cartoons and
envelope stickers, the mass media of the time. Hanna ‘has advertised
McKinley as if he were a patent medicine!’—so marveled that earnest
student of modern techniques, Theodore Roosevelt. In that watershed
year, professional management made its appearance, and both
candidates threw themselves into a whirl of public activity. 15
The historian Michael E.McGerr has mustered considerable evidence
that between 1840 (the Tippecanoe’ campaign) through 1896, vast
numbers of people participated in the pageantry of American
presidential campaigns. Especially during the three decades after the
Civil War, mass rallies in the north commonly lasted for many hours;
there were torchlight parades; there were campaign clubs and marching
groups. ‘More than one-fifth of Northern voters probably played an
active part in the campaign organizations of each presidential contest
during the ’70s and ’80s,’ McGerr writes. And with popular
16
mobilization came high voter turnout. National turnout between 1824
and 1836 averaged 48 per cent of eligible voters; but between 1876 and
1900, it averaged 77 per cent. In the north, it was up to 84 per cent of
the eligible (all-male) electorate in 1896 and 1900 before it slid to 75
17
per cent during the years 1900–16 and 58 per cent in 1920–4. (It rose
again in the 1930s, with the Great Depression and the New Deal, and
then started sliding again.) Arguably, the mass mobilization and hoopla