Driving Political Opinion

After the “invention” of the bumper sticker, politicians began using them as an inexpensive way to advertise themselves in campaigns. The bumper sticker allows John or Jane Q. Public to express their opinion in the public square. You don’t have to buy your ink by the barrel to “publish” your opinion on your automobile. In most cases political bumper stickers are free for the taking.

Placing a campaign bumper sticker on one’s car, like putting a political sign in one’s yard or wearing a political button, is an indicator of engagement in the political process. It expresses not simply support for a candidate, but it demonstrates to others one’s intention to vote for a particular politician. In doing so, it may help others to also decide to support the candidate.

The first presidential election following World War II was in 1948. Harry S. Truman from Missouri had been Vice President during Franklin D. Roosevelt’s third term and became the thirty-third president upon Roosevelt’s death in 1945. Truman, a Democrat, was president as World War II ended. In the 1948 election, Truman faced Thomas E. Dewey, the Republican governor from New York, and Strom Thurmond, a South Carolina Dixicrat, a splinter of the Democratic party opposed to Truman and the Democrats’ platform that for civil rights reforms.

Despite polls and the predictions of political pundits, Truman won the election in a surprising upset, carrying 28 states and receiving 24,179,347 popular votes and 303 electoral college votes to Dewey ’s 21,991,292 popular votes and 189 electoral votes. Strom Thurmond’s candidacy garnered 1,175,930 popular votes, and although he only carried four states, he had 39 electoral votes.

Ephemera

Derived from the Greek word εφήμερο, ephemera simply means “for a day.” To collectors and historians, ephemera is transitory written and printed material, such as event tickets, advertising and trading cards, greeting and post cards, banners, posters, paper signage,and -- yes -- bumper stickers. They were not created to be collected. They were intended for an immediate purpose. Many private collectors, museums and libraries today catalogue various forms of political ephemera,  include campaign posters, election flyers, and inaugural programs.

Bumper stickers dating from the mid-1940s are rare. Despite the fact that Harry S. Truman was from Independence, Missouri, hardly 15 minutes from downtown Kansas City, Missouri, where Forest P. Gill was printing bumper stickers, it is hard to say if the politician did business with the printer. Gill Studios does not have any Truman bumper stickers in their collection, and since bumper stickers were not originally produced with the idea that they would become collectables, the few remaining bumper stickers from this era are indeed rare finds. The Harry S. Truman library in Independence, and the LBJ library have window stickers, but no self-adhesive bumper stickers in their collections.

Collectors of Truman campaign memorabilia can find campaign buttons for Truman fairly easily, but other artifacts are harder to come by. Thomas Dewey’s campaign was better financed and there seem to be many more campaign collectables available for the Republican challenger than the incumbent Democrat.

The election truly was an upset as Irwin Ross wrote in his 1968 book The Loneliest Campaign:

“As early as September 9, Elmo Roper announced that he was no longer going to publish a poll on the Presidential race. ‘Thomas E. Dewey,’ he declared, ‘is almost as good as elected . . . That being so, I can think of nothing duller or more intellectually barren than acting like a sports announcer who feels he must pretend he is witnessing a neck and neck race.’”

“The outcome seemed so certain that many journals printed Truman political obituary even before the votes were cast. On the eve of the election, Life declared that ‘the U.S. was about to ditch Truman and take Dewey for reasons that involved the brain as well as the emotions.’ Life wound up its eight-page story on the campaign with a handsome full-page picture of Governor and Dewey, captioned, “The next President travels by ferry boat over the broad waters of San Francisco Bay.’”

Give ‘em Hell Harry had the last laugh as he held up an early edition of the Chicago Daily Tribune at a press conference the next day while stopping in St. Louis in route to Washington D.C.. The paper's  banner headline announced that Truman had been beaten by Dewey. A November 3, 1948 copy of the Chicago Daily Tribune is a valuable piece of ephemera. Copies on eBay sell for several hundred to more than a thousand dollars depending on the condition of the paper. The clipping to the right is from the November 4, 1948 edition of the  Burlington Free Press.

[If anyone out there has an old Truman bumper sticker, especially one printed by Forest Gill, please let me know. i would love to put a picture of it on this blog.]