November 3 is Election Day, and today we take a look at books about presidential elections.
The genre as we know it today was largely invented by Theodore H. White in his The Making of the President series. White’s books on the 1960, 1964, 1968, and 1972 elections covered the campaigns from the primaries to Election Day; they were written almost as if they were novels, making the candidates characters in a compelling narrative. But they were filled with serious reporting and behind-the-scenes details that the average reader had never before had access to.
White’s book on the 1960 Kennedy-Nixon election won the Pulitzer Prize and spent weeks on the best-seller lists. Later volumes weren’t quite so successful, in part because White’s success had inspired competitors, and the market was divided.
The next great success in the form came after the 1988 election, in which G. H. W. Bush defeated Michael Dukakis. In What It Takes, Richard Ben Cramer focused on six of the candidates, two of whom—Bob Dole and Joe Biden—would be presidential nominees themselves in later elections. The book was so thoroughly reported and carefully written that it wasn’t published until 1992.
More often, these books are published (as White’s were) fairly soon after Inauguration Day. The presidential election narrative returned to the best-seller charts with books by John Heileman & Mark Halperin on the two elections of Barack Obama—Game Change, about the 2008 race against John McCain; and Double Down, about the 2012 race against Mitt Romney.
The 2016 election between Donald Trump and Hillary Clinton was so sharply divided that it is hard to find a single narrative that will be seen as fair and objective by readers on both sides. Perhaps the best we can do for that election is to offer a pair of narratives, one from the perspective of each camp: Roger Stone borrows White’s title for The Making of the President 2016, a view from Trump World; and Jonathan Allen & Amie Parnes offer the view from Clinton Land in Shattered.
As campaign narratives have become popular, historians have gone back to write similar volumes on earlier elections, with historical research taking the place of on-the-ground reporting.
The 1800 election found the incumbent, President John Adams, running against his own vice president, Thomas Jefferson. It was a rematch of the 1796 election, and it was the first presidential election in which two parties formally nominated presidential/vice-presidential tickets. Edward Larson tells the story of this election, in which several other Founding Fathers were eventually asked to take sides, in A Magnificent Catastrophe.
The 1844 election, the first to be held in November, centered on the issue of whether Texas should be annexed to the United States, which might, and eventually did, lead to war with Mexico, and which was increasing the growing political tension over slavery in the United States. Democratic candidate James K. Polk supported annexation; Henry Clay, representing the Whig Party, opposed it. Polk won a narrow victory, with a third-party candidate getting 2% of the vote, more than the gap between Polk and Clay. John Bicknell tells the story in America 1844.
Perhaps the most controversial election in our history was that of 1876. Democrat Samuel Tilden had won the popular vote by about 3 percentage points over Republican Rutherford B. Hayes, but the elections were close enough in three states that both parties claimed victory, and the winner of the Electoral College would be decided by those three states. The Democrats (at the time, they were the conservative party) agreed to let Hayes claim victory in those states, and therefore the Presidency; in exchange, the Republicans agreed to withdraw federal troops from the states of the former Confederacy, ending Reconstruction. As Roy Morris, Jr. relates the election, it was the Fraud of the Century.
For a cautionary tale on the dangers of relying too heavily on polling, we turn to the 1948 election. Harry Truman had become president after the death of Franklin D. Roosevelt, but his Democratic party was divided; southern Democrats launched a third-party “Dixiecrat” campaign for Strom Thurmond. Pollsters agreed that Republican Thomas Dewey was sure to win, but polling was less sophisticated than it is today, and pollsters were not getting a genuinely representative sample of public opinion. The election is remembered today for the famous photo of Truman holding up a newspaper headline that incorrectly announces his loss. A. J. Baime borrows that headline for the title of his book, Dewey Defeats Truman.
It has now been long enough since Theodore White’s seminal Making of the President books that the elections he covered as a reporter are being revisited from the perspective of historians. Gary A. Donaldson describes the 1960 Kennedy-Nixon election as The First Modern Campaign, and it did introduce new features to the election landscape. It was the first election in a 50-state country, the first to feature presidential debates and the first in which the incumbent president could not run because of the term limits set by the 22nd Amendment, which had been ratified in 1951.
Lawrence O’Donnell covers the 1968 election between Richard Nixon and Hubert Humphrey in Playing With Fire. As in 1948, a southern segregationist candidate was on the ballot; George Wallace received 13% of the vote and won five Southern states. It was a tumultuous election year, marked by political assassination and anti-war protests. Nixon won the popular vote by less than 1 percent, but won a decisive Electoral College victory, ushering in an era of Republican dominance broken only by the fallout from his own Watergate scandal.
As we near the end of the election campaign between Donald Trump and Joe Biden, there is still time to vote if you haven’t already done so. We don’t yet know who will write the definitive history of this election, but in voting, you have the chance to make your voice heard and to become a piece of that history.
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November 3, 1500
Benvenuto Cellini was born. Cellini was an Italian sculptor and poet. During the last five years of his life, he wrote his autobiography. It’s a lively, racy, energetic overview of a colorful file, filled with scandal, murder, and romantic intrigue. Cellini is often not content with mere truth, and is prone to fantastic exaggerations which make the tale even more entertaining. Even Cellini’s flights of fancy weren’t enough, though, for French composer Hector Berlioz, whose operatic version of Cellini’s life is almost entirely fictional.
November 8, 1921
Walter Mirisch was born. Mirisch began working as a Hollywood producer while still in his 20s. In 1957, he founded the Mirisch Company with his brothers; they produced almost seventy movies in the next thirty years, including three Oscar-winning Best Pictures. Mirisch’s memoir is called I Thought We Were Making Movies, Not History; two of his finest productions—West Side Story and The Magnificent Seven—are available for streaming at hoopla.
November 3, 1930
Lois Smith was born. Smith is an actress who made her Broadway debut in 1952, and her film debut in 1955’s East of Eden. Her career has run the gamut from daytime soap operas to Tony nominated appearances on Broadway. Most of her film work has been in supporting roles; she had a rare starring role in the 2017 science-fiction drama Marjorie Prime.
November 8, 1980
Laura Jane Grace was born. Grace is the lead singer of the punk rock band Against Me! The band began as a solo project in 1997, before expanding to a quartet. In 2012, Grace came out as a transgender woman, and has continued to lead Against Me! since her transition. Music by Against Me! is available for streaming at hoopla and Freegal; Grace’s memoir is Tranny: Confessions of Punk Rock’s Most Infamous Anarchist Sellout.