Broadsides to Broadcasts

Abstract In 1888, Scottish scholar and statesman James Bryce observed that during election campaigns in the U.S. “For three months, processions, usually with brass bands, flags, badges, crowds of cheering spectators, are the order of the day and night from end to end of the country.” Such business, Bryce continued, “pleases the participants by making them believe they are effecting something; it impresses the spectators by showing them that other people are in earnest, it strikes the imagination of those who in country hamlets read of the doings in the great city. In short, it keeps up the ‘boom,’ and an American election is held to be, truly or falsely, largely a matter of booming.” The “booming” Bryce described is as alien to modern Americans as it was to Bryce. Most of us now experience presidential campaigns in the privacy of our living rooms, and little more than half the population emerges from them on election day to vote. But substitute “political advertising” as the subject of Bryce’s observation, change the idiom to modern English, and David Broder could comfortably open a column with the resulting claims: “For three months political advertising is the order of the day and night from coast to coast.