Mugwumps, Dixiecrats, Square Deals, New Deals, hanging chads, A Chicken in Every Pot, murder and paternity scandals are just a few of the subjects two professors are tackling in a mission to improve knowledge of political history among America's students.

Political science professors Scott Hammond and Bob Roberts have written the Encyclopedia of Presidential Campaigns, Slogans, Issues and Platforms. The new reference book is aimed at undergraduates and high school students and includes synopses of each presidential campaign since George Washington in 1789. The professors hope that historical anecdotes and explanations of major campaign slogans, issues and platforms will spark an interest in
politics among today's students.

"A lot of literature now just focuses on campaign techniques: how to run a campaign versus the issues involved in the campaign," says Roberts. "We tried to combine the focus on issues and platforms and the tactical nature of running a campaign."

Both professors trace the advent of their own political awareness to the '60s. "The first election I remember was 1960," says Roberts, who is a frequent commentator on presidential campaigns. "I remember following that campaign very closely. From my experience growing up in elementary school [in Iowa], there was much more emphasis on politics and world affairs when I was growing up. That had a lot to do with the fact that the period was a very anxious period due to the Cold War."

Hammond marks his political awakening on Nov. 22, 1963, the day John F. Kennedy was assassinated. "That's the first time I even heard of a president," he says. He was 5.

He also recalls growing up under the threat of nuclear attack -- "this idea you could be vaporized" at any moment. "I remember the Cold War and can compare that anxiety with the anxiety that people talk about today, how we're worried about terrorism."

The events of 1968 "left a big impression on me as a 10 year old," Hammond says. "Even in a small town in Colorado, you just had the awareness of all this turmoil around you." The 1968 campaign was the "most volatile" -- second only to 1860, which preceded the outbreak of the Civil War, says Hammond. In a "time of tremendous turmoil" -- the Vietnam War and protests against it, the assassinations of Robert Kennedy and Martin Luther King Jr. and rioting at the Democratic National Convention in Chicago -- the '68 presidential campaign pitted a regenerated Richard Nixon against Hubert Humphrey, who ran after incumbent Lyndon Johnson withdrew, and with Alabama's George Wallace thrown in the mix as a third-party candidate. "This was a very complex campaign and like '64, it reverberates beyond," says Hammond.

  The '64 campaign with its Daisy advertisement was a contest reminiscent of the 1800s, when mudslinging was rife, according to Roberts. In the television ad, a little girl is playing in a field of daisies. Her counting of plucked petals becomes a missile launch countdown; then, suddenly, a nightmarish mushroom cloud fills the screen. "As the atomic death cloud billows," write the authors, "the grave voice of Lyndon Johnson darkly warns that 'these are the stakes: to make a world in which all of God's children can live or to go into the dark. We must either love each other or we must die.' An announcer then urges: 'Vote for President Johnson on Nov. 3. The stakes are too high for you to stay home.'" The ad aired only once, and "became the archetype for the modern attack ad."

"1964 was to me a turning point in presidential campaigns, whether good or bad," says Roberts. "It represented a major change in the nature of the campaign by using the mass media as a modern way to dismantle an opponent."

What has changed in recent decades, says Roberts, is politics in the home and in the media. "Coming out of the Great Depression, [there were] heavy levels of political socialization within the family. Conversations around the table focused on Roosevelt the wonderful person or Roosevelt the devil. Now what you
get is all politicians are bad. That has become more dominant of a philosophy pushed by the media since Watergate. The media portrays politics as dirty or evil and throughout the 19th and early 20th century the media was part of the campaign. Campaigns were dominated by newspapers that were openly affiliated with parties. That had a big impact on the generations that have come, because they view politics as not a very honorable profession.

"Much of what the media focuses on is a horse race," adds Roberts. "They just focus on who's in the lead in the polls, and they really don't spend as much time as they should on the issues or the differences between the parties and the candidates."

For all the doom-and-gloom perceptions of politics today, however, Roberts and Hammond contend that modern political campaigns are tame compared to a century ago. The classic negative campaign
was the 1884 contest between Grover Cleveland and James Blaine. Blaine had a terrible record and was almost indicted numerous times for various problems, while Cleveland was lambasted for allegedly fathering
an illegitimate child.

"Mudslinging is still around," says Hammond, "but it's nothing compared to the 19th century." Andrew Jackson, for example was accused of murder during a campaign.

"Negative campaigning isn't anything new," says Roberts. "Campaigns really haven't changed that much. There's nothing new about slogans or sound bites. The way we reach voters has changed, but not the campaigns. Campaigns are still often fought over issues and beliefs  on what the future should be."

Roberts and Hammond, who have a new chapter to write since Nov. 2, hope their reference book will play a role in renewing an interest in political issues.

-- Janet L. Smith ('81)

 

Encyclopedia of Presidential Campaigns,
  Slogans, Issues and Platforms

2004 Greenwood Press
ISBN: 0313319731
 

 

Be a freshman again: required reading at 2004 Orientation

1990
Houghton Mifflin/
Seymour Lawrence
By Tim O'Brien
ISBN: 0767902890

 

The Things They Carriedis Tim O'Brien's testament to the men who risked their lives in Vietnam. Readers learn their personal stories, and through their relationships, see the soldiers' isolation, loneliness and fear. Readers witness soldiers finding sympathy, kindness, frailty, love for one another, and the courage, determination and luck needed to survive. This year it's required reading for freshmen.

 

Review: The Things They Carried
By Mark A. R. Facknitz,
JMU professor of English

 

Tim O'Brien graduated with honors from Macalester College in the summer of 1968 and by January of the next year he was in Vietnam. He was astonished. He didn't really expect to be drafted or to find himself in harm's way hearing from an NCO, "I don't want to scare the bejasus out of you -- that's not what I want -- but, shit, you guys are gonna die."

By the time he returned to America, he was a sergeant, had a Purple Heart from some shrapnel, and had knocked off some newspaper stories. He never imagined they would become the basis of a literary career -- or even his first book, the memoir If I Die in Combat, Box Me Up and Ship Me Home (1973).

Well, maybe he had no idea. He confesses to a lot of mischief. Was the early journalism straight? Or did he always make it up as he went along, maintaining a tormented relationship between metaphoric truth and the
literalism native to good war stories?

Was he a really a sergeant? One biographical note (Contemporary Authors) says so but this important fact never figures
in his fiction. Was it really shrapnel from a hand grenade that injured him? Or was he shot in the ass, pelvis nicked and bowel torn as is suggested in another place?

Don't bother trying to find out for sure. O'Brien is lying on purpose, and he wants you to know he is.

True, all good fiction writers are liars, but few, even among today's postmodern sports, match O'Brien in telling their readers in quite so many ways, or so adamantly, trust nothing I tell you. This lesson -- you might even call it a game -- O'Brien had down pat by the time he wrote The Things They Carried. It may not be his best book, but certainly it is the most widely read, and, among hundreds of fine books, the one that most often serves to tell us what we must know and can stand to know about the Vietnam conflict.

The Things They Carried is to Vietnam what All Quiet on the Western Front is to the first World War, or Catch-22 is to the second World War.

One needs to wonder what this means. The novel's relentlessly reiterated lesson is that we must not expect truth in the midst of a war in which nothing is sure, nothing makes sense -- in which each certainty proves bogus, comes undone and slips away. Memory and dream become the same mapless place, now full of nostalgia, next full of menace.

Perhaps the lasting message of The Things They Carried is that when you want the world to make sense you might do well to remember that just knowing where you are is nearly impossible in the best of circumstances. Take along something from home. Not for the crossing but to prove once you get to the other side that something -- you cannot say what, exactly -- has been true somewhere, sometime. That's about what we can be sure of. Somewhere, sometime. Maybe. Maybe not.

 

2005 Boyd Mills Press
By Richard Hilliard
ISBN-1-59078-293-3

 

On May 25, 1961, President John F. Kennedy set a goal for the nation: to put a man on the moon before the decade was over. On July 20, 1969, the world heard Neil Armstrong announce, "The Eagle has landed." JMU art professor Richard Hilliard's first illustrated children's book follows the exciting story of Apollo 11 and the three men who completed the historic flight to the moon. Neil, Buzz and Mike go to the Moon features age-appropriate text, bold illustrations and informative sidebars, written and illustrated by Hilliard. With 20 years experience as an art director and illustrator, Hilliard  has designed everything from toys to robotic displays for theme parks.

www.richhilliard.com