Get Out The Vote!

On November 2, 2004, American citizens exercise a fundamental privilege granted by the U.S. Constitution. By the time ballots are cast on the first Tuesday of November, Presidential candidates have already spent months campaigning to win over the voting public. These campaigns and their strategies have evolved considerably since the first contested Presidential election in 1796.

This exhibition examines the process of campaigning and electioneering through partisan artifacts, symbols and ballots. Ten featured elections-all well represented in the Cornell Library’s collections-are represented alongside recurrent campaign themes. Bandannas, mugs, pipes, walking sticks, sunglasses, and yes, even bars of soap, demonstrate how campaigns have employed imagery to create mythic personae for candidates, to fashion party mascots, and to entice Americans to vote.

Presidential Portrait Tray

The Susan H. Douglas Political Americana Collection

Most of the items featured in the exhibition were collected by Susan H. Douglas and given to the Library in 1957. Her collection has since been augmented by several other groups of election materials, which together form the Cornell University Political Americana Collection. Recently, the Institute of Museum and Library Services awarded Cornell a two-year National Leadership Grant to catalog, conserve, and digitize the Political Americana Collection. Get Out the Vote! Campaigning for the U. S. Presidency highlights items treated and digitized as part of the grant, and celebrates the preservation of this remarkable array of Americana. Unless otherwise noted, exhibited materials are from the Susan H. Douglas Political Americana Collection.