Artwork by Robert Satterfield
In 1928, the current primary system of selecting a presidential nominee was still decades away from becoming the norm for both Democrats and Republican. Instead, party elders still held sway and most candidates waited until the convention itself to announce their intentions. Publicity work leading up to the conventions, meanwhile, were handled by “unofficial” organizations hoping to spread the word and show popular support for a potential candidate.
The New York State Hoover-for-President Committee was one such organization. The committee’s publicity department was overseen by Edward Anthony, on leave from publishing house Crowell-Collier. Although Herbert Hoover was serving as Secretary of Commerce under President Calvin Cooledge at the time, he had never been a candidate for public office and was relatively unknown by most Americans.
Edward Anthony’s job was thus to introduce the future president to residents of New York state. In 1960, Anthony recounted those efforts as part of his memoirs, This Is Where I Came In: The Impromptu Confessions of Edward Anthony. His first priority was to ensure press coverage in New York newspapers and devised a weekly newsletter containing human interest stories on Hoover, the type of material not readily available to small to medium size newspapers. The newsletter was an immediate success, not just in New York but other states as well.
Although Edward Anthony was making headway on one front, he was less successful at convincing newspapers to publish biographical material on Herbert Hoover. “You’ve got to develop a new approach,” one newspaper editor told Anthony. “Just what it is, I don’t know. But you’ll have to do something different. I agree that the interest in Mr. Hoover is great but you can’t capitalize on it in a big way until you find a new means of dishing up the facts of his life, most of which our paper and many of the others have already published in various feature stories.”
Anthony and his colleague Charles “Doc” Morris had already been floating the idea of creating “a cartoon biography” of Hoover. Since the traditional path wasn’t working, they now decided to pursue it. “What we had in mind was a series of eighteen strips, with four panels each, and two lines of text under each panel,” Edward Anthony explained in This Is Where I Came In. “In other words, we planned to tell the eventful life story of Herbert Hoover in 72 drawings and 144 lines of text.”
Edward Anthony and Doc Morris scoured the details of Herbert Hoover’s life, then whittled it down to 72 events and wrote the corresponding two-line captions. Afterwards, the “scripts” were handed off to staff cartoonist Robert W. Satterfield, who created the illustrations. The plan was to create proofs of the finished strips and then send them to newspapers considered sympathetic to Hoover’s candidacy, along with cards to be mailed back expressing interest in publishing the strips.
Edward Anthony had another usage in mind as well. “I always felt that most campaign literature is a waste of money,” he later wrote. “Tons of stuff is printed that goes largely unread. It seemed obvious that we would reach a much bigger audience if we got away from the conventional pamphlet with its solid pages of forbidding type, and created a type of campaign literature that would be largely pictorial.” The strips were thus collected into a 24-page booklet and sent to potential supporters under the title Picture Life of a Great American.
A personal friend of Herbert Hoover saw the proofs and was excited by the idea. He therefore “borrowed” the proofs, took them to Washington, D.C. and presented them to the candidate. Unfortunately, they did not go over well. Word came back that the proofs had been “shown around” and the general consensus was that a cartoon biography of Hoover was “undignified.” The project was dead.
William Hill – a former congressman and chairman of the Hoover-for-President Committee – immediately left New York for Washington and personally met with Hoover. By the time he returned, the decision was reversed and the comic strip officially given the green light.
The pledge cards that were sent to newspapers along with the proofs began pouring into the committee’s office within days of having been mailed out. By May 1928, The Picture Life of Herbert Hoover – as the strip was called – was appearing in 6,324 newspapers. Despite only having jurisdiction over publicity efforts in the state of New York, Edward Anthony was besieged by requests from newspapers across the country and was more than happy to oblige.
Each newspaper received actual printing plates for the strip. In order to cutdown on shipping costs, the committee contracted with a manufacturing plant in San Francisco to produce and distribute the plates for California newspapers and the rest of the West Coast.
After Herbert Hoover was successful in his bid for the Republican nomination for president, Anthony was retained by the subsequent campaign. Tweaks were made to The Picture Life of Herbert Hoover, now ending the story with his nomination. Edward Anthony also oversaw the creation of two additional strips, Pictorial History of the Department of Commerce that highlighted the achievements of Hoover as secretary, and Pictorial History of Tammany.
The latter told the story of the infamous political organization in New York City known for its graft and political corruption. The 1928 Democratic nominee for president was New York Governor Al Smith, and although Pictorial History of Tammany never mentioned his name, his association with Tammany Hall was well known at the time.
“If not the best, this was certainly the most dramatic job our office produced,” Edward Anthony wrote regarding Pictorial History of Tammany. “It was an immediate success as a plate and mat feature and was carried by about 8300 dailies and weeklies. In booklet form it became one of the most widely distributed documents of the campaign.”
The novel approach employed by Anthony was noticed by the press. “Herbert Hoover will be the successor of Calvin Cooledge in the White House if ‘superior salesmanship’ has anything to do with the election,” an article in the August 26, 1928, edition of the Brooklyn Daily Times declared. While a biography of Democrat Al Smith – Up From the City Streets by Henry Moskowitz and Norman Hapgood – was available for purchase at stores, Picture Life of a Great American was being handed out directly to voters for free.
Although geared towards adults, the illustrated pamphlet was also given to children by canvassers hired by the Republican National Committee – whose primary job was to go door-to-door and talk to potential voters about Herbert Hoover – as a way to break the ice with their parents.
“The canvasser coming to the door of the home presents the child of the house a ‘Picture Life,’ and immediately the worker, man or woman, is on friendly terms in the household,” William Hill explained to the Brooklyn Daily Times. “The children delight in these books and the workers report they really should have truckloads of them, for one child tells another and soon the canvasser’s bundle is exhausted.”
Herbert Hoover won the 1928 presidential election in a landslide, with 58.1% of the popular vote and 444 electoral college votes compared to Al Smith’s 87. Both pundits at the time and later historians attribute Hoover’s victory to a strong economy that benefitted Republicans, as well as anti-Catholic sentiment directed at Smith. Although the unorthodox efforts of Edward Anthony are seldom – if ever – mentioned, they were an instrumental part of Hoover’s campaign nonetheless, and quite possibly a factor in the election results.
It would be another five years before the term “comic book” was coined with the release of Famous Funnies: A Carnival of Comics in 1933, and ten years before the publication of Action Comics #1 and the first appearance of Superman, but Edward Anthony demonstrated the popularity of the format in 1928 – turning Herbert Hoover into not only a President of the United States but a comic book superhero as well.
Anthony Letizia