Where It All Began....
The ultimate origin story of personal campaigning for president that led to candidates blanketing Iowa every four years
With presidential candidates once again hand-shaking their way across Iowa, it might surprise you to know there was once a time when candidates for president not only didn’t saturate Iowa, they didn’t even make speeches, ride in parades, or down corn dogs at the State Fair.
Anywhere.
Ever.
For the first 91 years of American history, the role of a presidential nominee in their own campaign was, in the words of President Rutherford B. Hayes (1877-1881) to “sit cross legged, and look wise.”
The national, state and local political parties handled presidential campaigns, organizing teams of speakers to spread out across the states and throughout the nation between the party conventions and the general elections, beating the drum for the nominees - who stayed home, mostly stayed quiet, and waited for election day - and the verdict of the people - to arrive.
That’s quite a change from how things work today. Especially in Iowa every four years when the caucus campaigns are in full swing.
How did that change happen? Well, it all started with the 1880 campaign of James A. Garfield.
According to Alan Gephardt, a National Park Service Ranger and Tour Guide at the James A. Garfield Historic site in Mentor, Ohio - the immaculately preserved home of President Garfield, only two previous candidates before Garfield ever tested the boundaries of that “sit cross legged and look wise” tradition. It did not end well for either of them.
Those candidates were William Henry Harrison (1840) and Winfield Scott (1852). Both were Whigs, and both were very harshly criticized for their “unseemly, taboo behavior” of actually personally campaigning for the presidency. Their public efforts were short and ended quickly due to the harsh criticism they received for it.
This was back in the day when the widely held popular view was that “the office seeks the man, the man does not seek the office.”
What changed that view was the Garfield presidential campaign in 1880, when Garfield launched his famous, and first ever, “front porch campaign.”
Pretty much by accident.
Here’s the story.
Shortly after Garfield unexpectedly received the 1880 Republican nomination, delegations of well wishers - many of whom were led by old friends and former colleagues from his student, college instructor, and Civil War days, started to show up on the front lawn at his farm home in Mentor, Ohio, to wish him well.
The freshly minted nominee, Garfield, would come out and greet them. In the words of Ranger Gephardt, Garfield would make brief "warm and sincere” remarks from his front porch. He would even often invite the delegations into his home to meet the family and to continue the visit. If the delegation was too large to make practical an invitation to come inside, Garfield would at least invite the leaders - often old friends - into his home, or his family would come out and join him on the porch.
Newspapers widely reported the visits - and Garfield’s remarks - across the country.
The “front porch campaign” was born.
As other groups, again, mostly from Garfield’s home state of Ohio, and nearby Indiana, read the news reports about the visits taking place on Garfield’s lawn, many decided to make a similar pilgrimage.
The visits made “great copy” for the newspapers, which eagerly covered them in easy to digest, brief stories. What had once been unseemly and inappropriate, had morphed into something the press and public both liked.
Garfield’s “front porch campaign” according to Gephardt, “symbolized and marked the first time a presidential candidate actively and publicly participated in their own campaign, speaking to the people.”
Those visits and speeches, Gephardt says, were pretty much spontaneous. There was no campaign or Republican party outreach to recruit groups and bring them to Mentor as there surely would be today.
Groups simply decided they wanted to visit, wrote or telegraphed Garfield that they were coming, and showed up. Eventually, Garfield’s campaign office, in Garfield’s former library located just behind his home, started to coordinate a schedule for the visits to avoid crowd pile ups on any given day.
Today’s hectic and often chaotic personal campaigning for the presidency, including caucus campaigns going on in Iowa today, are the direct descendants of Garfield’s “front porch campaign.” The campaign office he put in place in his back yard to control the traffic in his front yard eventually started sending out press statements, too - and thereby became the first presidential campaign headquarters office in history. It still stands in Mentor, today.
The text of many of the Garfield’s front porch speeches still exist. Gephardt says they show Garfield spoke to the groups in broad and general terms, but were mostly friendly and personable. They weren’t heavy with policy or politics. Among topics Garfield spoke on were the value of education, the importance of the Union, civil rights for Black Americans, and the economy. Again, in very broad terms. He was not a “There’s the problem, here’s my plan,” kind of candidate, but then again, no one else was, either, in those days.
Mostly Garfield’s front porch speeches recalled the warm associations he had in the past with many of those in the delegations that visited him.
Presidential campaigns never looked back after Garfield ushered in a new era of personal campaigning by a candidate who spoke directly to voters. As any Iowan can attest, that era is still with us and is still going strong.
The “front porch campaign” remained a popular, and dominant form of presidential campaigning through the end of the 19th century, until Democrat William Jennings Bryan ushered in another sea change.
In 1896, Bryan invented the railroad whistle stop style of campaigning. There was no more pretending candidates were being “forced” to speak for themselves directly to the people by the fact that hundreds were showing up on their lawns every day. Bryans’s personal campaigning and speeches were very intentional.
Far more personally active than any “front porch campaign,” Bryan, who was already a popular public speaker, gave over 600 speeches to more than five million listeners that year during his whistle stop tours. He didn’t win the presidency, but studies have shown he boosted his vote totals with every whistle stop speech.
Whistle stop campaigning - direct, intentional campaigning by train - remained the major form of campaign activity by candidates at least until the Kennedy-Nixon election in 1960 when airplanes began to replace trains as the preferred method of covering the country.
For example, Harry Truman’s famous farm speech in Dexter, Iowa during the 1948 campaign was part of a whistle stop tour he made across the state which included stops in Davenport, Iowa City, Oxford, Grinnell, Des Moines, Dexter, Melcher, and Chariton.
The biggest changes that established Iowa as a focus of prolonged and personal campaigning in the state by presidential candidates came in the 1970’s. That’s when first, George McGovern (1972) and then, Jimmy Carter (1976) demonstrated that a candidate who could score a surprise “victory” in the Iowa Caucuses - or in both their cases, just somebody who does better than expected - could be launched to their party’s nomination.
From that point on, personal campaigning by presidential hopefuls, especially in pre-caucus campaigns in Iowa, kicked into over-drive.
Nobody even pretends to be coy about wanting the office these days, or that the office is “seeking” them. It pretty much all started with James Garfield and his unintentional, pretty much accidental, major campaign innovation, the “front porch campaign.”
History journalists everywhere, take note.
Once again, Barry Piatt draws a nugget from our nation’s storied past and breathes life into his subjects in such a way that stirs the senses and transports his readers within arm’s length of these historic figures. What a terrific public service. Thank you, my friend, for sharing these fascinating insights with us. Keep up the good work.