I’ve used this before, but since it got erased, here it is again. It is one of my favorites, but will probably be baffling to non-Americans. Even Americans will have to know their history to solve it.
Famous pairs #8
Other Crap
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Tippecanoe and Tyler Too
Yup. You beat the other responder by a minute!
Tippicanoe and Tyler, too!
Got it instantly. Didn’t hurt that I’m currently reading “The Carnival Campaign” about the 1840 Harrison-Van Buren race. Van Buren’s VP candidate campaigned with the line “Rumpsey Dumpsey, Rumpsey Dumpsey, Colonel Johnson killed Tecumseh” (he had possibly been the man who killed Tecumseh during the War of 1812).
Sounds great.
What are the best books about old-time Presidential campaigns?
I loved “Team of Rivals” by Doris Kearns Goodwin. It covered Lincoln’s entire presidency and not just the election, but it went into that in great detail as well.
I love that book, as well as her Roosevelt/Taft book.
What else?
Is there anything good on Hayes-Tilden?
How about Jackson vs Adams the younger?
Polk-Clay?
(I read Destiny of the Republic, about Garfield, which covered the 1880 election pretty well. One of the fascinating sub-plots is how the total party hack and general non-entity, Chester Alan Arthur, somehow got the Big Chair. He kinda did OK. While he didn’t turn out to be a star, he didn’t fuck up anything too badly, and earned a fair amount of praise from contemporaries.)
I’m into averted horror story histories. So, there’s “Reelecting Lincoln: The Battle for the 1864 Presidency” (no President McClellan); “I Like Ike: The Presidential Election of 1952” (no President Knowland*); “Final Victory: FDR’s Extraordinary World War Two Presidential Campaign” (TG no President Wallace).
Another good one on 1912 is “Four Hats in the Ring”.
* This is assuming Taft would have been nominated and won. He died of cancer in July 1953. His preferred VP candidate was Sen. Knowland of California, later to be known as “the Senator from Taiwan”. A President Knowland might have had us in Viet Nam in 1954 or Manchuria earlier. An asshole’s asshole. My first memory of how stupid Republican in-party politics could get was in 1958 (I was living in Whittier) when he decided that he wanted to be governor and that the incumbent Republican governor, a fellow named Goodwin Knight, should run for Knowland’s senate seat. Both got their butts kicked; the general consensus among historians is that they would have held onto their seats if Knowland hadn’t forced the switch. The new Democrat governor Pat Brown eventually gave us “You won’t have Nixon to kick around anymore” and his boy Jerry.