Politics wasn’t always hateful
Glad you asked; OK, you didn’t. I’ll tell you anyway — hold on — about my favorite presidential photo.
It’s a picture that wouldn’t be taken today; security concerns, you know. It shows Franklin Roosevelt, in an automobile, greeting voters (some of them were voters, anyway) in “little” Washington.
It is 1932. The Great Depression. Squeezed into the back seat of a touring car, a jubilant FDR can be seen doffing his grey fedora to the folks lining Main Street. A little girl, her right finger tips clinging to one of the stone pillars in front of the Washington County courthouse (the pillars are still there), offers a return wave.
Nearly all the men are wearing topcoats; the women, long dresses or skirts. The crowd is 15 to 20 rows deep. The photo is so perfect, it looks like something out of an early Warner Brothers movie.
“Never was there a man as loved as he is,” FDR’s friend and aide Harry Hopkins once said. The photo suggests the outpouring of warmth for Roosevelt, who was not yet president in 1932.
One of my favorite word-portraits of a presidential appearance was written by Buzz Storey, the late, great Uniontown newspaper editor and historian. It describes a scene that, again, won’t be replicated in 2016.
In the midst of the 1936 campaign, Roosevelt passed through Uniontown on his way to a campaign stop in Connellsville. Storey, a youngster of 14, was near the train station on Gallatin Avenue as the presidential locomotive trundled into town.
“I was jammed into the crowd,” Buzz recalled. “Finally, the train crept around the curve and there he was — Franklin Delano Roosevelt, president of the United States, sitting and peering out from the rear observation car, framed in the window almost like a painting by one of the old masters.
“The famous grin broke, the hand waved and a thousand hands raised aloft in reply, in almost perfect unison.”
It’s possible to visualize Roosevelt and his well-wishers, isn’t it?
The point is, if you’re interested, you can visit some of the places where presidents put in an appearance and live, or relive, the experience, vicariously.
In the fall of 1964, President Lyndon Johnson flew into Morgantown, W.Va., to attend a ceremony dedicating a new municipal airport terminal, about as flimsy an excuse for a visit imaginable.
It was a Sunday, just a beautiful day, with a gorgeous blue sky. It was warm, approaching hot, but it still had that distinctive September-fall smell to it.
I know, because my 16-year-old self was there.
The large crowd assembled for the ceremony a few hundred yards from Mileground Road groaned when it was announced that the Johnsons — Lady Bird was accompanying the president — had changed planes in Pittsburgh. Air Force One was too large for the Morgantown runway.
Most everyone had been eager to catch a glimpse of the president’s big blue-and-white bird.
The Morgantown High School band played some tunes as the majorettes, their bare legs kicking beneath short skirts, kept time with the music. After what seemed an eternity, the aircraft appeared in the sky and then landed — a loud white streak across the runway.
I can recall LBJ striding to the podium, and thinking how tall he was. He began to speak. Now, Johnson was not so incidentally running for president against the deeply unpopular Republican Barry Goldwater. In 1964, LBJ wanted to be “president of all the people,” and “united” was a byword of his campaign.
Just as a united people had built this fine new terminal, Johnson said, a united people could build a better America.
And you thought empty campaign rhetoric was a recent phenomenon.
Bill Clinton stumped in Greensburg in 1994 on behalf of Hillarycare, the failed attempt to expand health care coverage devised by his wife, First Lady Hillary Clinton.
Clinton spoke from a stage erected on Main Street next to the Westmoreland County courthouse. Afterward, pressing the flesh, the president of the United States come upon Tommy Ward, the young son of Kim Ward, today a Republican state senator.
Tommy Ward shook Clinton’s hand. Later, he told his mother, who was then the Republican party chair in Westmoreland County, “He’s not such a bad guy.”
Kim Ward laughed and said, “Well, you don’t understand,” but then she remembered a famous photograph snapped in the Rose Garden years earlier.
“Clinton shook John Kennedy’s hand and you shook Clinton’s,” she said.
Now, that’s about as good an anecdote about a presidential visit as you’re likely to read.
Besides, it gives a pretty good notion of the potential for congeniality in politics, a notion that’s been lost in today’s hyperpolitical environment.
Goodness knows, party feelings were hot and heavy in the 90s; Clinton would soon be impeached by rabid House Republicans. Still, partisanship, at least at the local level, had its limits, as Ward’s comments to her son demonstrated.
Richard Robbins lives in Uniontown and is the author of two books — “Grand Salute: Stories of the World War II Generation” and “Our People.” He can be reached at grandsalutebook@gmail.com.