Driving Political Opinion

By 1952, when Gen. Dwight Eisenhower ran against Sen. Adlai Stevenson the self-adhesive bumper sticker was as much a part of retail politics as the campaign button.  Bumper stickers were rectangle in shape, generally red, white and blue in color or printed in Day-Glo ink on a dark background, and were simplistic in text. They normally sported the last name of the candidate, sometimes a photo, occasionally a slogan. Their purpose was to get a simple message out, and to do so with an economy of words. Eisenhower was a war hero known as Ike. Many of his bumper stickers, buttons and political signs read, "I like Ike." His slogan was a brief political poem, if you put it on three lines it would be a haiku with alliteration.

Candidates' names had not yet become logos in the graphic sense, not the way we have seem them evolve into logos, such as the W for President George W. Bush or the O that looks like a horizon in the bumper stickers and yard signs for Barack Obama. Candidates were not yet using an exclusive font yet in their campaign advertisements. Candidate advertising was often cleaver, and sometimes quite sophisticated, but politicians were not yet "brands" to be sold.

In 1936 Gov. Alf Landon from Kansas ran against President Franklin D. Roosevelt, he used the Kansas sunflower as an icon. The yellow and brown sunflower motif was a unifying motif that appeared on his campaign materials.

Not since William Henry Harrison's 1840 campaign where he used the log cabin as an icon of his rugged origins had a single image been used in such an iconic manner as a campaign logo. According to Robert C. Williams, author of Horace Greeley: Champion of American Freedom, Greeley is the inventor of modern political campaigning. Greeley was an American editor and founder of the Republican Party. To promote Harrison's candidacy, Greeley created a newspaper, the Log Cabin. Harrison's running mate was John Tyler and their campaign slogan "Old Tippecanoe and Tyler Too" was a reference to Harrison's defeat of Shawnee Chief Tecumseh at Tippecanoe Creek in 1811. The log cabin motif was used on all sorts of items including medals, badges, flags, handkerchiefs, even a rousing campaign song. It was "retail politics" in its infancy. The ironic thing about the log cabin logo was that Harrison did not have log cabin roots. Harrison was pressed into service by the Whig party as a hard cider drinking, humble frontier Indian fighter and they thought the log cabin motif would give him credibility with frontier America. Though Harrison won the presidency by a majority of just 150,000 votes, he swept the Electoral College, 234 to 60 votes; he then died a month after taking office.

President Theodore "Teddy" Roosevelt could have used the bear as a campaign motif in his re-election campaign in 1904. After his famous hunting encounter in 1902 with a tethered bear that he refused to shoot, the Teddy Bear became his personal mascot. However, most of his campaign materials remained traditional with patriotic images, colors and many jugate photos of Roosevelt and his running mate, Charles W. Fairbanks. It wasn't until 1912 when he ran unsuccessfully as the Bull Moose/Progressive candidate that he adopted the moose as a political motif. One of his campaign buttons had an interesting motif of Uncle Sam looking at him as if he was the sun coming rising up. Barack Obama's use of the "O" and the horizon motif echoes back to Roosevelt's image of a new day. Obama's logo was created by Sol Sender of Sender LLC, a Chicago Chicago brand consultancy and design studio.