Richard H. Thompson (philatelist)

Transcription

Lots of kids growing up in the USA might dream of becoming President of the United States... (record scratch) or being a comic book superhero! but I never knew I could have been BOTH! As we all know, politicians will do just about anything to get their face and message out there, especially if it means capturing that elusive youth vote. So what was the presidential hopeful to do before TVs invaded all our living rooms? They got their message out on whatever they could: radio, badges, banners, buttons, ribbons. But that brings us back to the first question: how did they target young voters? The late 1940s and 1950s were the heyday of the political comic book. (music) From bureaucrats to sitting presidents, Republicans and Democrats, everyone was in on it. Today we'll be talking to curator Larry Bird who's part of our political history division. It's his responsibility to take care of a lot of our presidential campaign collection so he's the perfect person to ask as to why guys like Harry Truman, Dwight Eisenhower, and Richard Nixon have their own comic books. Larry, thank you for joining us today. Thanks for inviting me in. Excellent. So I see you've got a bunch of folders here and they're all chock full of comic books. Right? When we talk about comic books I mean most people are familiar with the colorful strip story format, almost a storyboarded kind of thing that's bound; and the first one that we have in our collection that even approximates something like that was from the 1930s and it's a picture life of a great American which happens to have been Herbert Hoover that appears to have been done as a kind-of-a just a one-off. But it isn't really until 1948 that you get an example of the format that you think would be familiar today And that's with the Democratic National Committee's story of Harry S. Truman. And this the story begins with Vice President Truman learning about the death of President Roosevelt, FDR, the way that most Americans did, which is sitting around the radio. And so from that shock it goes back in time and dramatizes his rather average and ordinary life in Missouri up until the time he joins the Congress, and then is elected Roosevelt's vice president. So I see also that this one obviously has a lot more color, it's got a lot more of the kinda bubble-talking this looks a lot more like the kinda comic book that we recognize. Right, and again even though it's packed with information it isn't that packed that it doesn't move along as a kind of an aesthetic accomplishment. So after the Truman story every campaign had to have comic; but for my money that the penultimate example is in 1956 and it's this one which was drawn up for the Eisenhower/Nixon campaign. Wow. With their themes of peace, progress, prosperity; it suggests it's a pretty strong statement of the parallels between voting and consumption And there's a page in which it focuses on a housewife who goes shopping, and she comes up with a what she calls a shopping list kinda ballot. And there's no doubt as to where you know she's calling your attention. The point of the pencil goes to Republicans, and I just It says: "Peace, tax cuts." Republicans, peace; Democrats, war. Republicans, tax cuts; Democrats, highest taxes in history. And so it goes all the way down to peacetime jobs for everyone, wars to solve unemployment. Not being subtle. But she's she's coming to this conclusion with her list up outside a grocery store and then the next little bubble shows the hand in the in the voting machine polling the lever for the Republican party. So there really isn't anything very much that's left to chance in any these things which is why I like them. They are very straightforward. And they're not... they're completely transparent and they so elegantly express in just unvarnished terms what the aims are and even who the audience is. Yes. Tell us about that. The average voter. The job of any political medium is to get down where the voter lives, and to put itself between your eyes and the candidate; to get his or her message in front of you. And that's what this storyboard format does so well. Now I have to ask, I know the answer is probably no, but when I first think about presidential comic books i really wanna see Harry Truman in a cape. Are there any presidential candidate comic books of them fighting crime? Not as an imaginative candidate. I mean that's sort of a tricky tricky terrain, but we do have other examples where they show up as themselves in these fantastic situations. We have some examples of Barack Obama in a comic. And of course along with that you have a now celebrated Spiderman. Yeah, that's where I'm going! Well this has been reallyinteresting and who would have thought we had comic books like this. It surprised me when I started working here. It's not the kind of thing that you expect to see. The format is so familiar but the subject matter is just so... Buttons, hats, signs: those are understandable. So obtuse. These are very new. Well this has been really interesting! Thank you for joining us and sharing all this great stuff. You're welcome. Thank you for joining us today on our fourth episode. Remember to visit our website to check out what objects we'll be doing next and submit any questions you got. We're always looking for good ideas. See you next time!