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Show ("PROSPERITY IS V88! " J- . A J, -RETURNING xSfeS-;. rfl DONV THROW iTBpf 1 "Bargain and Corruption!" W glM U I B t I Vtllllll :sWiiiiSo4KP f'i: sputter" and Lincoln himself set current a num- fcllliiB ber of dignified political maxims that were V- "V-V ' ' "V adopted as slogans by the orators, such as "A Xv yy 1 IfV House Divided Against Itself Cannot Stand" and "V f"i jJ i 'VI 1 & "Slavery Is a Moral, Social and Political Wrong." OT C? dk' if H Grant's famous "Let Us Have Peace" was used WthCoolidge fe;"i ' A to good advantage as a slogan in electing the "ttTT 4-Tt 4- y5" "Man from Appomattox" but the corruption tie isept US (Jut of Warl which marked his two administrations provided splitter" and Lincoln himself set current a number num-ber of dignified political maxims that were adopted as slogans by the orators, such as "A House Divided Against Itself Cannot Stand" and "Slavery Is a Moral, Social and Political Wrong." Grant's famous "Let Us Have Peace" was used to good advantage as a slogan in electing the "Man from Appomattox" but the corruption which marked his two administrations provided By ELMO SCOTT WATSON j "" mmm OW that the Presidential campaign is N beginning to warm up, the sloganeers will soon be busy inventing apt and ! easily-remembered catchwords with I .Ssi' which to charm the ear of the voter. '5SkEII.1 Already senatorial groups in both . .SKjjfc'i P&rties have chosen from those sub-; sub-; mitted in a recent contest mottoes i '4'rf?l 'nn'cn they hope will advance the i jstSflnl cause of their standard-bearers the j 11 Democrats with their "Hee-haw I iiinifiimWfiJ 'We're coming back!" and the Republicans Repub-licans with their "Prosperity Is Returning Don't Throw It in Reverse!" And already there are dissenting opinions to the value of both slogans, jboth of which have been characterized as "un-'Impassloned, "un-'Impassloned, uninspired and uninspiring." So it would seem that there's still a chance to coin a phrase which will play its part in electing our I next President and, if we may judge by past 'history, that slogan may be brought into being let the most unexpected time and under the most (unexpected circmustances any time between 'now and November 8. How potent a slogan may be In winning for a Presidential candidate (and also for losing (one !) is easily seen' by an examination of American Amer-ican political history. The first effective use of the campaign slogan was away back in 1S00 i.when the Republican party (which later became ,the Democratic) raised the cry of "Equal rights ,for all ; special privileges for none !" in protest against the aristocratic tendencies of the Federalist' Fed-eralist' party and swept Thomas Jefferson into i office over John Adams, who was a candidate for re-election. Then followed 24 years of rule by the "Virginia "Vir-ginia dynasty" Jefferson, Madison and Monroe and the Federalist party disappeared from the icene, leaving only the Republicans, who now called themselves Democrats, with various factions fac-tions within the party. In 1S24 there were four outstanding candidates John Quincy Adams, Monroe's secretary of state ; William Crawford, his secretary of the treasury ; Henry Clay, a ember of the house of representatives, and Andrew Jackson, a member of the senate. In the election Jackson led in both the popular and the electoral vote but did not have a majority. ma-jority. So the election was thrown into the house of representatives and there Clay threw ihis support to Adams, resulting in his election. When the new President Adams offered Clay the post of secretary of state, Jackson adherents raised the cry of "Bargain and Corruption!" (They kept that slogan warm for four years and in the election of 1S2S it helped Jackson defeat Adams and sent him to the White House, there to stay for eight years. Tn the meantime the Whig party had been formed but its strength in the 1S32 campaign was divided and Jackson again was an easy winner. When "Old Hickory" was through with being President he passed his mantle along to his secretary of state, Martin Van Huron, who was elected in 1$"C over four Whig candidates, one of them, William Henry Harrison. Then came the famous campaign of IS 10 when a slogan very definitely won an election. This time one of the defeated Whig candidates of the previous election elec-tion was swept into ollioe on a platform of slogans slo-gans and song. Affairs had gone badly for Van Buren during his four years. They had been four years of "continued executive autocracy, of undiminished official partisanship, of Increasingly violent interference in-terference with the fiscal system of the nation, of unrelenting administrative abuse of power." There had been a panic and Van Buren was proposing pro-posing measures which might upset the financial stability of the nation. Then, too, this President Presi-dent who was supposed to be an upholder of democratic ideals had become considerable of an aristocrat. So when the Whigs nominated the type of man that Andrew Jackson had once been a frontiersman, frontiers-man, an Indian fighter and a military hero, the nation was ready to turn (to state it paradoxically) paradox-ically) from a Democrat who was an aristocrat to a Whig who was a democrat. Unwittingly a Democratic newspaper gave the Whig candidate" the greatest boost it could possibly have given him. Sneering at his intellectual caliber (which admittedly was small) it said, "Give him a barrel of cider in a log cabin the remainder of his life." i And what a godsend that was to the Whigs ! Immediately the log cabin and the hard cider barrel became their symbols and Harrison's Indian-fighting record furnished them the ringing war cry of "Tippecanoe and Tyler, Too !" Just for good measure they threw in a few pointed remarks at Van Buren, such as "Van, Van is a Used-Up Man" and "With Tip and Tyler We'll Bust Van's Biler." They also anticipated the "full dinner pail" appeal to the voter with "Van's Policy : Fifty Cents a Day and French Soup ; Our Policy: Two Dollars a Day and Roast Beef." Four years later the campaign witnessed not only the appearance of the first "dark horse" in a Presidential campaign but also another telling slogan. The "dark horse" was James K. Polk of Tennessee and the slogan was "Fifty-Four Forty or Fight!" At that time the United States was involved in two disputes, one with Mexico over Texas and the other with Great Britain over the Oregon country. The Democrat's stood for "re-occupation "re-occupation of the Oregon country and re-annexation of Texas." The Fifty-Four Forty, or Fight" represented the northern boundary line which the United States demanded 54 degrees, 40 minutes, min-utes, north, latitude. What we actually got (and not by fighting either, but by arbitration) was 49 degrees. So the slogan didn't mean so much after the election, but it did play a vital part in deciding the election In Polk's favor, as did the slogan "Polk and Texas ; Clay and No Texas" In regard to the Texas question. In the war with Mexico which followed so soon after Polk's election one of our victorious generals gen-erals was Zachary Taylor and from an incident in the battle of Buena Vista came a slogan which helped elect Taylor President In 1S48. It was the famous "A little more grape, Captain Bragg" which struck the popular fancy as being just what a great military commander would say under the circumstances. What he actually did say on that occasion was the laconic "Give 'em hell !" But that didn't matter so much as the fact that the combination of the "grape" slogan and his popular nickname of "Old Rough and Ready" (so reminiscent of "Old Hickory" and "Old Tippecanoe") had much the same appeal as the Jackson combination and the Harrison combination com-bination of slogan and nickname. In the same year was born a slogan that crystallized crys-tallized in popular phraseology the most fateful movement in American history. It was "Free Soil, Free Speech, Free Labor and Free Men," taken from a plank in the platform of the Free Soil party of 1S4S, the forerunner of the Republican Repub-lican party that nominated and elected Abraham Lincoln in 1 SCO. The stirring campaign of 1800 was fruitful in slogans, as it was one of the bitterest bit-terest in our history. Among them were, "Millions "Mil-lions for Freedom, Not One Cent for Slavery," "Intervention Is Disunion." 'Topular Sovereignty and National Union." "Free Homes for Free Men," "The Constitution and the Union, Now and Forever," "Let Liberty Be National and Slavery Sectional," and scores of others, on both sides of the slavery controversy, In similar appealing ap-pealing strains. Xumerous catch pnrases were woven about the title "Old Abe" and "The Rail- the Democratic opponents oi ms successor, nuyes, with the best possible type of slogan. So "Til-den "Til-den and Reform" echoed throughout the campaign cam-paign in 1S76 as a powerful rallying cry for the Democrats. By all the rules of slogan logic, the brevity and the force of that slogan should have won for Tilden but election boards and an electoral commission decided otherwise. In the campaign of 1884 there was a case of history repeating itself in that, just as in the case of Harrison and the Whigs in 1840, Cleveland Cleve-land and the Democrats profited by a blunder made by the opposition. In that year Blaine was the Republican candidate and his Presidential Presi-dential aspirations were favored by his nicknames nick-names of the "Plumed Knight" and the "Rupert of Debate" as well as by the tuneful quality of the rallying cry of "Blaine, Blaine, Blaine of Maine." These were offset, however, somewhat by "Nosey Blaine," "The Tattooed Man" and "Jim, the Penman," the latter referring txrthe famous fa-mous Mulligan Letters. But the fatal blow to his chances was struck when an enthusiastic Blaine supporter, Rev. R. B. Burchard declared in a speech that all conscientious con-scientious Americans should vote the Republican Repub-lican ticket because the Democrat's stood for "Rum, Romanism and Rebellion." Blaine was present at the time but did not hear him distinctly dis-tinctly enough to realize the gross error and to repudiate this slur upon the religious belief of millions of Americans. So the slogan which the Republicans had attempted to tack on the Democrats proved to be a boomerang and aided in defeating their candidate. Cleveland's first campaign contributed "The Man of Destiny" and "Tell the Truth" to the slogan stock, both of which had a strong appeal to the voters. The tariff campaigns were prolific with slogans among the most telling ones were "Protection and Prosperity," "Free Trade and Pauperized Labor" and "Free Trade and the Destruction of American Industries," which the practical Mark Hanna boiled down into the vote-getting slogan of "The Full Dinner rail." William Jennings Bryan, who is associated in most Americans' memory with Clay, Tilden and Blaine as men "who just missed the Presidency," had a strong slogan strong in Its brevity and its capability of being easily remembered In his "Sixteen to One." But It wasn't strong enough to win the election for him the first time he tried and he never was able to get another w-hich brought him any nearer to the White House. Sometimes a slogan will have a "kick-back" after it has accomplished its purpose. There is no doubt but that "He Kept Us Out of War" helped re-elect Woodrow Wilson in 1910. And then fate decreed that with six months after his election we should be "in" and not "out" of war. "Too Proud to Fight" was another phrase that haunted him. As for the slogans of recent years, they are too familiar to most of us to need much comment. War-weary America turned "Back to Normalcy" with Warren G. Harding in 1920. In 1924 when the Democrats hoped that it was restless under Republican misrule and hot for a change, they learned that it had decided to "Keep Cool With Coolidge" Instead of vote for "Better Days With Davis." In 102S the Democrats, wearing a brown derby and singing "The Sidewalks of New York" asked America to remember its "Eight Years of Wall Street" and to "Give Main Street a Chance." But instead of heeding this advice America voted for "Hoover and Prosperity." What slogans America will be repeating this year will depend upon who Is nominated at the two conventions in Chicago next June and which will be the better of the two slogans will be decided de-cided at the polls in November. g by Western Newspaper Union.) |