Description:
One of the most significant achievements of American democracy is that it has held a presidential election every four years, without a single interruption, since the nation's inception. Hats in the Ring chronicles each one of these elections in separate chapters, featuring prose by Evan Cornog and illustrations selected by Richard Whelan. The text is concise (eight or nine pages for each campaign) and generally provides a good summary of why the voters chose as they did. But the best parts of this book are the images. As the authors write in a short introduction, these have been selected "to embody the remarkable amalgam of serious purpose and carnival spirits that has characterized the process of choosing a President." Among the highlights are a poster from 1804 revealing that negative ads aren't recent inventions: it compares Thomas Jefferson unfavorably to Washington. A political cartoon from 1880 portrays James Garfield and Chester Arthur, both future presidents, as ballerinas. And there's a hilarious photo of Calvin Coolidge campaigning in 1924, wearing the massive feathered headdress of a Sioux Indian--and looking terrifically uncomfortable. There are plenty of serious illustrations, too: many of the 19th-century figures are shown in handsome portraits, and the 20th-century pols are the subject of photographs (there are especially good pictures of William Jennings Bryan and Theodore Roosevelt). There are a few odd choices: there's only one picture of Dwight Eisenhower in the two chapters devoted to his elections, and it isn't very good. (Adlai Stevenson, the man Ike beat both times, gets a pair of photos.) And it must be said that Cornog's discussion of the 1988 election is partisan in a way many Republicans would find objectionable. Yet Hats in the Ring, by and large, is a capable volume--worth reading and even more worth looking at. --John J. Miller
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