Presidential Campaigns
Eastland, Terry
"Men would be much better if they acted always as if women were looking at them." Yet, when President Reagan made precisely the same point with his "skin tights" joke to a women's business...
...copies of single issue during preceding issue published nearest to 12 months filing date 10...
...The man who so famously said, "What this country needs is a good five-cent cigar," was Thomas Marshall of Indiana, the Democratic vice-presidential I candidate in 1912...
...Each chapter--each campaign--thus receives on average seven-plus pages, with the shortest chapter some two pages, the longest sixteen...
...The word is being used in the longtime meaning o f peddler, i t i n e r a n t salesman...
...Primarily Miss Santmyer is concerned with reflecting as faithfully as possible the sensibilities and mores of another age...
...I certify that the statements made by me above are correct and complete RonaldE...
...The author seems to understand these women intimately, viewing them with a compassion that never once falls into sentimentality...
...She laughed at herself ruefully: she was no Galsworthy, much less a Rolland or a Proust...
...Reading Ladies is rather like being transported by a time machine to witness the daily life, small dramas, and occasional tragedies of another age...
...Almost without exception they are women--women who sometimes die young or live out very long lonely lives...
...Most are poor, struggling to maintain themselves in a society in which they are largely marginal...
...and among intellectuals, it still suffers a certain disrepute...
...Presidential Campaigns is more accurately a volume of Americana than one of politics or history...
...The historical accounts are accurate, marred only by a typographical error or two...
...She vividly re-creates such cultural quirks as the bohemian lifestyle, which developed before World War I when several thousand urban iconoclasts moved to Greenwich Village in New York to manufacture costly art and free love...
...The Electoral Terry Eastland is a frequent contributor to The American Spectator...
...Her critics, secure in their unassailable sense of virtue, manage to ignore these admirable portraits of the injured, lonely, and damned...
...There is a sense that war is a terrible thing, bu~ that sometimes it is necessary to risk dying for your country...
...1 don't suppose he's ever known a poor man in his life, and he's no idealist: he knows very well that there are many who would rather be poor than work, and he's promising that the government will take care of them...
...Children may be considered unwanted and expendable now, but they were seldom viewed with loathing in the past...
...People draw on their own moral strength or on religion to see themselves through difficult and trying times...
...Like his previous book of similar design, Presidential Anecdotes, which was published in 1981, Boiler's Presidential Campaigns deserves a place on the shelf of anyone interested in American politics, especially those who write about it...
...But she would like to write an answer to Sinclair Lewis, whose Main Street had made her so angry after a decade she seethed when she thought of it...
...Doubtless few candidates ever had it as rough as Jefferson in 1796, when he was called an "atheist," "anarchist," "demagogue," "cowa r d , " "mountebank," "trickster," and "Franco-maniac," and whose followers were called "cut-throats who walk in rags and sleep amidst filth and vermin...
...She would be at the mercy of biology...
...Presidential Campaigns is a book of small ambition, but what it aspires to it does well, or at least well enough to merit consideration...
...Copies Each Actual no...
...Burr Publisher THE AMERICAN SPECTATOR NOVEMBER 1984 45 My favorite in the silliness category is a statement Alf Landon made in the 1936 campaign: "Wherever I have gone in this country, I have found Americans...
...The memory of the.Civil.War,hovers over the whole story...
...its relationship to principles of representation and federalism goes unexplored...
...4. Complete mailing address of known office of publication: The American Spectator, 102 West Sixth St., Bloomington, Monroe, IN 47402 5. Complete mailing address of the headquarters of general business offices of the publisher: Same 6. Full names and complete mailing address of publisher, editor, and managing editor: Publisher: Ronald E. Burr, 102 West Sixth St., Bloomington, IN 47402 Editor: R. Emmett Tyrrell, Jr., 102 West Sixth St., Bloomington, IN 47402 Managing Editor: Wladyslaw Pleszczynski, 102 West Sixth St., I~omington, IN 47402 7. Owner: The American Spectator Educational Foundation, Inc., 102 West Sixth St., Bloomington, IN 47402 8. Known bondholders, mortgagees, and other security holders owning or holding I percent or more of total amount of bonds, mortgages, or other securities: l<lone 9. For completion by Nonprofit organizations authorized to mail at special rates: The purpose, function, and nonprofit status of this organization and the exempt status for Federal income tax purposes has not changed during preceding 12 months Average No...
...Boiler could just as easily have written that Candidate Reagan had "more moderate" views than many of his supporters and that Candidate McGovern was an "ultra-leftist...
...it is funny enough...
...But it is more complex than that...
...Happy Days...
...Nasty charges designed to put off as many readers as possible--charges, interestingly enough, that are without foundation...
...The writing is lively, and Paul F. Boiler, Jr., a professor of history at Texas Christian University, has the good sense to call dull a campaign that was in fact dull (such as the campaign of 1880) and move on to the next one...
...What I learned best from this book is that socie.ty functions most harmoniously when single women perform the role for which they've been most derided-to generate sexual desire and, simultaneously, to frustrate it...
...McCune, " a little grasshopper of a man," pregnant with her sixth child and dying from tuberculosis...
...To live happily is an inward power of the soul," one of the quotations from Marcus Aurelius used by Miss Santmyer, might well be the message of the book...
...It would be artistically misplaced to insert godlike pronouncements of a Yuppy sensibility into the narrative, lamenting, say, the plight of blacks (termed Negroes throughout in keeping with period usage) or yearning for affirmative action and quotas...
...The chapters begin with a short essay on the candidates and the issues of the campaign and conclude with various "campaign highlights"--amusing incidents, major developments, dramatic happenings, unusual electioneering methods, and remarkable oratory...
...It is thus not by chance that this book has been the object of reviews in the liberal press ranging from the mildly disparaging to the downright hostile...
...These highlights seek to lend to the essay approximately what the "color," in a sports broadcast, intends to lend to the play-by-play: texture, flavoring, quick illumination...
...They come alive on the page with an extraordinary vividness...
...As for scurrility, it is hard to find one attack to beat all others...
...What makes Miss Santmyer's novel unusual, however, is not really what happens to her protagonists, but rather the way she presents so much of the lives of her secondary, often minor characters...
...There is no golden glow of a more innocent past, nor is there any vision of a perfect utopia coming one day on earth...
...The highlights that follow this essay include the stories of a toast Andrew Jackson made to Polk's health and of the grief-stricken reaction to Clay's defeat among some of his long-time followers...
...But, more likely, theirs is a much broader anxiety about the dramatic change in lifestyle and life status that they are about to enter into...
...Ariana, minister McCune's daughter who runs away with a circus hand only to return to die tended devotedly by an unmarried middle-aged woman in that woman's one act of true charity...
...The main plot-line deals with two best friends, Anne Alexander Gordon, the doctor's daughter, and Sally Corcoran Rausch, the banker's daughter...
...their marriages to Civil War veterans, their children and grandchildren...
...She hoped that times [1932] would be better when she had finished, or no publisher would look at it, nor anyone have the patience to read it...
...This aside, Presidential Campaigns accomplishes' its announced goal of showing that our quadrennial political exercises have not only their serious but also their silly and scurrilous sides...
...copies: 45,217 45,100 B. Paid circulation: I. Sales through dealers and carriers, street vendors and counter sales 2,309 2,195 2. Mail subscription 35,321 35,397 C. Total paid circulation: 37,630 37,592 D. Free distribution by mail carrier or other means samples, complimentary, and other free copies: 1,090 1,277 E. Total distribution: 38,720 38,869 F. Copies not distributed: I. Office use, left over, unaccounted, spoiled after printing 4,756 4,574 2. Return from News Agents 1,741 1,657 G. Total: 45,217 45,100 I1...
...The book is a valuable resource, full of basic facts, quotes, and stories about our every fourth year indulgence in the now yearlong race for the White House...
...I f there can be no easy solutions, the characters know how to bear their troubles with courage and dignity...
...Another canard that Rothman helps spread is the notion that a woman in the nineteenth century feared marriage beca'ase "she mrght rose control of her life...
...The women remain keenly interested in politics throughout the long book...
...And Ladies o f the Club" is a serious, unsentimental, above all stoic look at life in the small Ohio town of Waynesboro from the immediate aftermath of the Civil War to the election of FDR, a span of 64 years...
...STATEMENT OF OWNERSHIP, MANAGEMENT AND CIRCULATION 1. Title of publication: The American Spectator B. Publication no : 01488414 2. Date of filing: September 19, 1984 3. Frequency of issue: Monthly A. No...
...Kate Gordon, sister-in-law of one of the p r o t a g o n i s t s , independent farm woman who commits suicide when one of the young girls she has befriended runs off to marry...
...America will be a long toboggan slide downhill to Socialism...
...there is no explanation for the development of these institutions, which the Constitution did not contemplate and which many American founders did not want...
...The 49 chapters are not long...
...Rothman reads accounts of women being "apprehensive" and "trembling" on their wedding night and infers that they dread being shackled to kids...
...Agatha Pinney, elderly schoolteacher addicted to landanttm who chooses suicide, masking it as an accident in a desperate effort to end with dignity...
...The subsequent short takes include, among other things, numerous quotes and stories about gold and silver...
...and a wrap-up of the election results...
...Also, the book duly comments that the 1948 Republican Convention was the first to be televised, but it does not attempt to analyze the enormous impact of television since 1948 on the political parties, the candidates, and the campaigns, including the primaries...
...about boyfriends and room-mates, not suitors and beaux," Rothman writes...
...The 88-year-old author Helen Hooven Santmyer has been accused of being "insensitive," racist, and anti-Semitic...
...my italics) The omniscient voice of the author rarely intrudes upon the narrative of this book...
...AND LADLES OF THE CLUB" Helen Hooven Santmyer/Putnam/$19.95 Cynthia Grenier The summer of 1984 was certainly the appropriate time to publish " . . . And Ladies o f the Club," celebrating as it does several generations worth of " r o c k - r i b b e d Republicans" in Ohio, the state which has given this nation seven distinguished Republican Presidents...
...It covers such diverse topics as contraceptive technology, the art of approaching parents for their daughter's hand, designing homes after marriage, wedding gifts and gowns, and baptismal liturgies...
...Yet, when President Reagan made precisely the same point with his "skin tights" joke to a women's business group, he met with groans of "sexism...
...No less distasteful to these critics doubtless is the strong sense of patriotism underlying the book...
...Nor can one equate the isolated quirks of the bohemians or the eighteenthcentury pornographers with the license, infidelity, and abortions that have become mainstream in our culture...
...Indeed, her writing in these passages becomes remarkably energized...
...our ancestors did not have the self-centered view of pleasure and convenience that we do...
...Furthermore, opinion polls, a fact of campaign life for more than a half century, are cited, but there is no effort made to evaluate opinion polls or, more importantly, to understand the nature of public opinion, what it is and how it is changed...
...These indulgences notwithstanding, Rothman's book stays admirably clear of feminist harangue, which it certainly doesn't need...
...Indeed, they take only 368 pages, excluding footnotes...
...As for the novel itself, Proust it indeed is not, as its author is aware, but perhaps a comparison with Galsworthy is not far off the mark...
...Indeed, the book teems with examples of both...
...Happy Days Are Here Again" was sung at the 1932 Convention because some of FDR's advisers thought his choice of a nominating song, "Anchors Aweigh," sounded t o o much like a " f u n e r a l march...
...Similarly, political parties simply appear in this book...
...These short chapters are short on analysis...
...It sounds like the decline of the Roman Empire to me: bread and circuses...
...But what surely convinced Miss Santmyer's adversaries that she is the enemy of the liberals is her passage on FDR--a passage whose spirit is echoed in Paul Johnson's admirable Modern Times: " . . . that Roosevelt...
...on page 1169, seven pages from the end of the novel, author Santmyer sets Cynthia Grenier, a movie producer, is a former senior editor at Ballantine Books...
...Extent and nature of circulation: A. Total no...
...Thus, the chapter on the 1844 election contains a brief discussion of territorial expansion in general, the "Texas question" in particular, and also slavery...
...The men who experienced it forever feel its traces, remembering it not as a time of glory but as a time of testing of their souls...
...In the chapter on the 1896 election, the introductory essay emphasizes the "money question" that dominated the campaign before moving on to describe the conventions of that year and to discuss the campaign between McKinley and Bryan and its outcome...
...As for the charge of anti-Semitism it comes down, we find, to the onetime use of the term "huckster" on page 93 to describe the profession of a minor, sympathetic Jewish character...
...Terry Eastland College is mentioned only in the context of election results...
...The last President to write his own speeches was Herbert Hoover...
...It is perfectly clear from the context that no defamatory intent is meant, which makes criticism of the author on this point not merely excessive but in downright bad faith...
...Victims or rebels they are to a woman unself-pitying, and if not always strong are most assuredly stoic in their attitude to life: Mary McCune, wife of the Reverend Mr...
...Then she writes, "Even at a time when record numbers of Americans are delaying marriage, remaining single, or filing for divorce, marriage continues to represent the ideal expression of romantic love and sexual fidelity...
...And it appears in the bookstores with shrewd timing...
...concise accounts of the nominations of Polk and Clay and their campaigns...
...The most serious flaw in Presidential Campaigns occurs when Boiler attempts to place some recent presidential candidates in the context of their political beliefs...
...The author, who is reported to have worked and re-worked her material for over fifty years, is concerned more with "the relentlessness of time" than with producing a conventionally plotted novel designed to keep the reader turning pages ever faster...
...Indeed, there really is no analysis to speak of...
...Strictly speaking, this is true, but if marriage has survived, it has survived narrowly...
...Unlike feminist writing, which views the world through the perspective of a drinking straw, Rothman's work is opulent in detail and synthetic in its historical sweep...
...Amanda Reid, spinster bluestocking who prefers the integrity of her lonely life to marriage with the bereaved widower McCune...
...PRESIDENTIAL CAMPAIGNS Paul F. Boiler, Jr./Oxford University Press/S16.95 T h i s book has 49 chapters--one for each of the 49 presidential campaigns conducted from 1789 (the only oddyear campaign) through 1980...
...of issues published annually: 12 B. Annual subscription price: $21.00...
...Speaking through a minor character...
...I do not agree with Rothman's suggestion that promiscuity today is not substantively different from a century ago...
...Coming Next Month Books For Christmas forth quite simply her intentions: She felt ready to go to work on the book she had set her heart on writing: a long one, covering several generations of life in a small midwestern city: the sort of thing that had been popular a few years back, like Jean-Christophe and Remembrance of Things Past and The Forsyte Saga...
...And once the people get the idea that the government has an obligation to support its citizens, there'll be no end to what they will demand...
...Now we talk about relationships, not courtships...
...Through Sally's husband, Ludwig, an ambitious German immigrant, we venture out of the women's world into that of business and politics as he sets up and develops a factory for making rope, becoming in time a local Republican power broker...
...So does virginity: hence the message to American virgins inscribed on college T-shirts--"Thanks for nothing...
...Candidate Reagan, in 1980, has "ultra-rightist" views, but Candidate McGovern, in 1972, is defended as having "more moderate" views than many of the Democratic delegates who supported him at the Miami Beach convention...
...A l l of this noted, it must be said that a book does not have to be weighty to be worthy...
...46 THE AMERICAN SPECTATOR NOVEMBER 1984...
...But there was a chance that, after the depression had somehow been dealt with, some readers might still be interested in what she felt compelled to do: Old America changing, while New America seemed to be tumbling about one's ears...
...Just as the changing fashions in dress and decor are meticulously recorded for the Gordon and Rausch homes, so are the sagging stockings, bustle-less gowns, and drab quarters described for society's orphans...
Vol. 17 • November 1984 • No. 11
