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NYC museum offers 200 years of campaign history

amNY.com with wire reports from The Associated Press

7:05 PM EDT, June 23, 2008

If you thought you were getting tired of the endless loop of presidential campaigning that you've been subjected to the past months, consider this: Presidential politics go back 200 years or so, and if you ever windered what a dress worn by one of the Nixon-ettes looked like, or what it meant for James Madison to throw his hat in the ring, now is your chance to find out.

"Campaigning for President: New York and the American Election" opens Tuesday at the Museum of the City of New York -- an exhibit that traces the state's role in presidential elections by putting forth memorabilia that evokes its own particular time: A pamphlet that asks if Catholics can aspire to the presidency (courtesy of the Al Smith campaign), a button that declares bluntly "We don't want Wall Street Again.'"

Although they might well get an argument from other states, exhibit curators Sarah Henry and Thomas Mellins list eight presidents as from New York -- the same as Virginia, the self-described "home of presidents." Along with Martin Van Buren, Millard Fillmore, Chester A. Arthur, Cleveland, Theodore Roosevelt and Franklin D. Roosevelt, they include Texas-born Dwight D. Eisenhower, who Henry says used his position as president of Columbia University as a planned springboard to the White House in 1952, and California native Richard M. Nixon, who was a partner in a Manhattan law firm when he ran for president in 1968.

"It's not really about bean counting but there was an era, from the mid-19th to the mid-20th century, when virtually every race for president or vice president involved a candidate from New York," said Henry, the museum's deputy director and chief curator.

In fact it was true almost from the start, as New Yorkers served as vice presidents for three of the first five presidents. Overall, the state has produced 11 vice presidents from Aaron Burr to Nelson A. Rockefeller and some 25 nominees for the two top offices, along with countless others who didn't make the cut.

In a few cases, New Yorkers ran against each other -- in one example, FDR versus Wendell Willkie, described by one wag as a "simple barefoot Wall Street lawyer." (Willkie was born in Indiana.) Nor have city and upstate voters always agreed: New York City hasn't backed a Republican for president since Calvin Coolidge in 1924.

As television moved politics from the street to the living room, New York's role as the nation's media and advertising center helped preserve its political influence, as did its concentration of policy experts and power brokers.

"In some periods of history, you could argue that it has been about the 'New York-ification' of the federal government," Mellins said.

Some 700 items -- 400 of them campaign buttons -- were chosen from the 1.2 million amassed over 40 years by Jordan M. Wright, a lawyer, businessman and publisher who died May 11 at age 50. Wright, who had hoped to create his own "museum of democracy," was working as a guest curator for the exhibition at the time of his death.

Additional items, from the city museum's own collection and from other lenders, help highlight such topics as third parties, negative campaigning and memorable advertisements, including the 1964 "daisy ad" that implied GOP candidate Barry Goldwater would use atomic weapons.

The exhibit explores the very nature of democracy.

The viewer can stand on a platform as a candidate would at a political convention, next to a podium that may have been used by Abraham Lincoln during the 1860 speech at New York's Cooper Union that turned the little-known Illinois lawyer into a national political figure.

Original flags, posters and odd campaign gimcracks abound -- a toy train with Gen. Ulysses Grant as the engineer; an 1883 flier with pictures of four pigs that when folded creates a "portrait" of Grover Cleveland; and razors, knives, packaged coffee, silk stockings with the name of Alfred E. Smith, the New York governor who lost to Herbert Hoover in 1928.

Along with dolls, fans, jugs, bumper stickers and paper dresses for campaign workers, there are top hats, canes with carved heads of candidates, fragile paper lanterns from 19th century campaigns, and Good Humor ice cream bars promoting Nixon and John F. Kennedy.

Henry said the exhibit shows that campaigning in a form recognizable today began around 1828, when Andrew Jackson of Tennessee defeated incumbent John Quincy Adams of Massachusetts in a bitterly contested race.

It was the first time nominees were chosen by party conventions and state legislatures rather than by closed-door caucuses and "gentlemen's agreements." "It was then that political parties emerged as a basis for organization, and ... encouraged a more direct relationship between the selection of the president and the actions of the voters," Henry said. "Public opinion took on a different role, with candidates being more concerned about how they were perceived." While the exhibit deals with the past, it does not ignore the present: There are buttons, posters and life-size paper dolls relating to presumptive nominees Barack Obama and John McCain -- along with candidates who lost in the primaries.

AP-ES-06-23-08 1821EDT