Harding earned more than 7 million votes than his Democratic opponent, James Cox. In the electoral college, Cox only carried 11 states and 127 votes, compared to Harding’s 37 states and 404 votes.
Matt Quay, William Jennings Bryan, and Richard Pettigrew as fish emerge onto the shore from the ocean of politics.
The caption reads “A fish story that is hard to believe.”
According to the New York Times, Quay, a Senator from Pennsylvania, had vowed that he would not again run for any elected office. Bryan, a two time presidential candidate, and Pettigrew, a former Senator from South Dakota, had previously made similar statements.
The Political Janus: It All Depends on the
Way You Look at Him, an illustration by Australian satirist Frank A.
Nankivell for Puck magazine, 1910.
Former American President Theodore Roosevelt is rendered as a polarizing
political figure, a simultaneous “savoir” and “menace.”
Image credit: Library
of Congress, LC-DIG-ppmsca-27682, from Symbols:
A Handbook for Seeing by Mark Fox and Angie Wang, published by The
Monacelli Press, 2016. Purchase from a retailer of your choice.
1939: Jack and Bobby Kennedy, sons of Joseph Kennedy, U. S. Ambassador to England, watch as their sister Eunice leaves with her mother from the Embassy for Buckingham Palace where Mrs. Kennedy presented Eunice at one of the last Courts of the season.
Truman and Carter never met (Carter never met LBJ, either), and I don’t know if Truman knew who Carter was. Truman died in 1972, about a year into Carter’s term as Governor of Georgia, but Carter wasn’t a national figure until a few months into his 1976 campaign for President. I’m not sure how plugged into Democratic politics Truman was during the last two years of his life, so it’s certainly possible that Carter may have been on his radar as a different kind of Southern Democrat, but I just don’t know for sure.
Don’t forget that Ronald Reagan was a very famous actor when Harry Truman was President. Truman probably would have known about Reagan just from Reagan being a pretty big movie star. But Reagan was also a Democrat (yes, Ronald Reagan was a Democrat) during the Truman Administration, and he (along with Lauren Bacall and Humphrey Bogart) campaigned for – and WITH – President Truman in 1948:
I’m not sure about George H.W. Bush and Truman. Bush’s father, Prescott Bush, was elected to the U.S. Senate while Truman was still President, and Bush 41 himself served in Congress and as U.S. Ambassador to the United Nations while Truman was still alive. I wouldn’t be surprised if they had met at some point, but it probably wasn’t anything extensive. If I had to guess, I’d say that Truman probably knew who George H.W. Bush was because he was familiar with Senator Bush. Even an elderly Truman would probably have been aware of who the U.N. Ambassador was towards the end of his life.
