What The Election of 1952 Tells Us About Social Media's Failure

What The Election of 1952 Tells Us About Social Media's Failure to Grow Political Influence of the Average American

In 1952, the United States elected in a landslide the first Republican President in 20 years. How he arrived at that role is more fascinating than what he did when he got there.

POLITICS VS. PUBLIC SERVICE

In 1952, long before computers and social media, and for some, long before television - there was a social campaign underway. It was the Draft Eisenhower campaign, and it was the first successful political draft of the 20th Century.

Eisenhower stated many, many times that he didn't want to run for President. He was content as a general and hero of WWII. Even President Truman, convinced that Eisenhower would run as a Democrat, tried to press him to run, all the while he replied with a resounding "no".

So people who believed he would be a great President tried a different approach - they would get the people to demand it.

This was a different era - politics was still seen as a "public service", that Eisenhower himself said he would not feel comfortable turning down if the American People determined he would be the best man for the job.

So how would they be able to convince a man, in a era with no social media or quick communication, that the people wanted him?

I LIKE IKE

The TV show Mad Men outlines some pretty impressive old school marketing tactics. They likely didn't mention that the very type of marketing they described was used to help elect a President.

"I Like Ike" (named after Eisenhower's nickname, Ike), was a grassroots movement that became a symbol of the efforts to drive Eisenhower to run - developed by a marketing businessman who later became Secretary of Commerce under Nixon. It was launched in 1951 by a few Republican Governors and Senators, but was fueled by a citizenry who was passionately in favor of America's last wartime hero who purchased the merchandise like candy.

Still, Eisenhower rejected calls to run. Instead, the Democrats and Republicans were still moving forward with their candidates as expected.

Then, in January of 1952, Eisenhower's name was added to the New Hampshire Republican Primary - without his permission and with no marketing or fanfare.

24 Newspapers soon endorsed Eisenhower, including the New York Times, despite having not announced a bid to run. Millions of Americans purchased I Like Ike paraphernalia (sounds like Make America Great Again hats of 2016), driving forward the notion that "Ike" was the people's candidate.

"SERENADE TO IKE"

Even with all of this, Eisenhower didn't believe the hype. He thought the media was exaggerating. After all, you couldn't track likes and metrics in 1952. How did he know it wasn't just the elites pressuring him?

The I Like Ike movement held a massive rally in Madison Square Garden - at the time a capacity of 16,000 - and 25,000 Americans showed up to show their support, refusing to leave even when the Fire Marshall asked them to leave. Famous businesswoman and aviator Jacqueline Cochran flew to Paris a few days later to show Eisenhower Serenade to Ike, a tribute film she had made - ending with a toast "To the President of the United States.

Then, in March, having not campaigned or spent any money, Eisenhower beat his Republican Primary opponent Robert A. Taft 50% to 38% in the New Hampshire primary (his opponent had spent precious time and money there). A few days later, he received 106,000 write in votes (some as Isenhowr or just "Ike") in Minnesota, only 20,000 behind the on-ballot candidate in the State.

Eisenhower was now convinced - the people did want him. The movement was real. The rest, as they say, is history.

SOCIAL MEDIA'S POTENTIAL

Social Media is often praised as a way to connect people. A way to deliver ideas more rapidly. Some argue so far as to say that Social Media has reshaped the political climate, and led to major changes in how politicians campaign, how entertainers entertain, and how people interact.

People will cite the ability of "sharing" memes and statuses throughout the internet, which can garner hundreds of thousands of likes and build a narrative, as evidence that people have more of a voice now than they ever had before.

But how much of that voice is actually reaching its target? How much have Americans really seen their ability to change their fates expand tangibly through Social Media?

In 1952, long before social media, millions proved that Americans as a unified voice could change the Country. 106,000 people woke up in Minnesota and wrote in a candidate who wasn't even on the ballot.

Why was that? Was it because there weren't hundreds of comments on Social Media telling people that their vote was "wasted"? Was it because people were more aware of civics, or just more willing to be involved? Was it because people had to communicate more in person, and thus ideas could still permeate in a very different way?

Even with social media and ubiquitous TV sets, third party candidates, let alone "drafted candidates", have immense trouble raising awareness.

People will argue that Ike had the establishment behind him, so of COURSE it was easy for the idea of him running could permeate - today, the establishment holds back independent ideas. But therein lies the problem - the promise of social media was supposed to be independent information.

How is social media useful, if it can't even evolve our ability to communicate and affect change beyond what we could 60 years ago?

WHAT WENT WRONG?

In 1952, the American People, sparked by an idea, fueled an 8-year Presidency. Today, ideas are generated on social media every single day, but are unable to gain traction. Those that do, are polarized and dismissed.

There are hollow echoes of similar activity today - President-Elect Trump's rallies and usage of social media to directly reach the people, being two of them - but they are often misunderstood and manipulated by those who want to rebrand the messages for their own purposes.

The issue lies in the very nature of social media. The Average American citizen isn't aware - but on things like Facebook and Twitter, THEY are the product. They want users to feel comfortable so that they keep coming back. People don't typically come back if they are challenged - they come back if they see things they agree with.

This is why, today, even though we have the tools as American citizens to do what we did in 1952, without the backing of the establishment - we won't. We can't agree on doing it, let alone how to do it.

Perhaps if civics hadn't been all but abandoned prior to social media's rise, we would see a much different situation. Then again, perhaps even with civic awareness, social media itself is the cause, not the symptom, of the current political disconnect. Would America of 1952 have been more or less likely to nominate Ike if social media had existed back then? Or would everyone have talked each other out of it?

We can never answer that question, but hopefully, with the internet entering it's mature phase and people becoming more aware of fake news, we will start to see a shift back towards awareness - in spite of our own desires to remain in the bliss of our own echo chambers.
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Intellectuallenza: The Collapse of Knowledge in America

Intellectuallenza: The Collapse of Knowledge in America

In an increasingly global society, Americans are increasingly ignorant of the rest of the world's history and culture - even as they claim otherwise.

My grandmother is now almost 90 years old. In her life, she has been a teacher, a soldier's wife, a mother to both a lawyer and an alcoholic, a young widow, and a caring grandparent.

One of my favorite parts of sitting down to talk with her is that no matter what topic I seem to bring up, she has input. A story to tell, perhaps. Or knowledge to bestow. Nowhere is this more apparent than our discussions about foreign countries.

News in Turkey? She will go on and on about the collapse of the Ottoman Empire, a bit before her time, and the ensuing Young Turks who took over. China? She can go at length about the personality of the Chinese and how their culture influenced their diversion from Soviet-type communism.

Riots in France? She can tell me at length about how DeGaulle used to handle riots in the streets back in the 50's. 

Some of this knowledge can be attributed to age. After all, as we move through life we tend to absorb knowledge along the way.

However, there is another element to her knowledge, and this element is one that seems to be missing from today's intellectuals. 

IT'S ABOUT WHO YOU KNOW, NOT WHAT YOU KNOW

I have tried to have conversations with my peers similar to those with my grandmother. It falls on ears that are not only disinterested, but often actively repulsed. Younger circles (and not JUST Millennials), even those who consider themselves "intellectuals", simply do not have the same level of historical knowledge as the generations before us. And those of us who do are looked at as know-it-alls or condescending. As though somehow this level of knowledge is aberrant or unnecessary.

From anecdotal evidence, with my teacher in Freshman Year of High School not understanding that an exchange student from Georgia was coming from the country, not the State, to actual statistical evidence of Americans simply not knowing the world around them, it is very clear that there is a brain drain - even as more Americans than ever go to college.

My grandmother was by no means an intellectual. She was a woman who went to college - Douglass College for Women, now part of Rutgers University - which was much rarer back then. But she was not a professional. She didn't remain in academia. She was a stay at home mother of two, dealing with an alcoholic father and son, and a husband who was sick with hemachromatosis.

"Make no mistake, we are producing a highly skilled labor force. We just aren't producing a highly knowledgeable one."

Nonetheless, she has knowledge. It is an old type of knowledge - one that has existed since the beginnings of human civilization - but one that seems to be dying quickly. It goes deeper than just understanding history, or understanding what is going on in other parts of the world.

It is the knowledge of people. The journey of people all around the world from our starting point all the way to where she finds herself now. The full story - the only story - of our legacy on this planet. 

It is a knowledge that doesn't discriminate. It doesn't see a country as unimportant, or a race as un-qualifying. It doesn't see Islam or Christianity or America or Asia with any biases, it simply sees all of these elements and follows them through the ages. 

For all of the faults of the "Greatest Generation" and those prior, they understood their fellow man and woman around the world because they understood where they had come from. 

WHAT IS "OLD KNOWLEDGE"

When we follow a modern saga - say, Star Wars - it isn't a story just of the galaxy and politics (and the movies that tried to be only that were arguably the worst of the group). It was a story about people, a family, love, lust, loss and hate, and their impact on the galaxy as a whole. Understanding these people and how they feel about their surroundings is our eye into the story as a whole.

We seem to have forgotten that history was written by people with their own stories and biases. We have sterilized history of all of the personality, suffocating interest. You don't understand a culture by simply understanding how it's borders changed, or what group of countries it was allied to in WWII. You understand a culture by understanding its people and their experiences.

This is what is so vital about this old type of knowledge. My grandmother's stories were filled with people - either that she met, that she read from, that she knew, that she heard about on the news. It wasn't just for flavor. This is how she learned her history, and about other cultures. 

A textbook can teach you about events. It can't teach you emotion.

There are stories this interesting scattered all throughout our history, sprinkled here and there in matter-of-fact Wikipedia articles for flavor. 

There was a time when these stories were how history moved forward. In fact, up until relatively modern times, telling stories was the primary means of relaying knowledge to the next generation.

As you can imagine, these stories were filled with anecdote and emotion. With people.

So why then today, in a time where we are more connected with the rest of the world than ever before, are Americans so ignorant of it? Why are the cultures of other people being so lost to us, even while we can interact with them at any time?

EDUCATION TODAY IS FOCUSED ON SKILLS, NOT KNOWLEDGE

As much as we like to pride ourselves in the first world that we are sending so many people to college to get an education, I have some bad news for you: we are still sending our kids to school simply to learn a skill or trade. That skill or trade just happens to be different than what it used to be.

While people used to apprentice to be a mason, they now go for 8+ years to school to be a Doctor, coming out "educated" in our eyes but in reality just extremely skilled in one specific sector of our economy.

This is the nature of a capitalist economy. There is nothing wrong with this system, simply how we view it.

Make no mistake, we are producing a highly skilled labor force. We just aren't producing a highly knowledgeable one.

Older generations went to school for trades, but since college wasn't part of the equation, they didn't have any illusions of intellectualism from it. Those who wanted to be educated - to understand the rest of the world - had to seek it out. Many, like my Grandmother, did so.

Today, the pseudo-intellectuals of the nation don't think they need anything else. After all, they are highly educated, right? That is what they spent all of that money for.

I call it "Intellectualenza" - the over-emphasis of higher education as the "ending point", leading to an entire generation of Americans who cal call themselves "higher educated" while not possessing even a third of the knowledge of the generations before them.

CULTURE IS AS CULTURE DOES

Our inter-connectivity to other cultures belies our lack of knowledge of them.

Iran today is a Muslim theocracy. Many people know this. It isn't hard to get in touch with an Iranian either at home or abroad and understand their current perspective.

Few people even know that "Persia" and "Iran" are the same thing, and fewer still can go back and know that Islam wasn't the religion there for a majority of the country's history.

Throughout history, it has been an Ancient Zoroastrian Empire, a Secular Dictatorship, one of the wealthiest parts of the world and also one of the most powerful.

These sorts of marks on a country's history don't simply disappear. The people carry it with them. This type of knowledge helps us in negotiations, in interactions, in empathizing and sympathizing.

Our generation claims to be the harbingers of a new multicultural society - of a global paradise where we can live in harmony. Yet, in the most simplistic test of understanding another culture - knowing it's past - we consistently fall flat.

Those who don't know history are bound to repeat it. Unfortunately for us, I don't think many people even know what it is we are repeating.
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