Publicity Pro Recounts Campaign Adventures via Whistle Stop
By • August 26, 2024 0 437
The presidential nominating conventions are over. Candidates up and down the ballot from those vying to become president, representative, senators or other positions are listed. It’s the end of August — we are finally into the serious election campaigning season. And now, it’s reach-out-and-touch the voters time, as much as possible.
Georgetown community activist, public relations expert and author Edward Segal has a timely new book, “Whistle-Stop Politics: Campaign Trains and the Reporters Who Covered Them.” It tells the stories of presidents, first ladies, press secretaries and journalists who hit the rails to meet and talk to voters in an American invention: the whistle-stop campaign. Segal recounts the adventures of more than a century of campaign history, the successes and the politics of Presidents from Harry Truman to Joe Biden when they embarked on whistle-stop campaigns.
The stories are funny, inspiring, exciting and at times almost harrowing of long hours on the train, eager crowds and hecklers, brilliant speeches and duds. Segal also describes the ordeal of the traveling press that sometimes gets to use the long rides in between stops to bond with the candidate. At other times, some reporters end up missing the train all together. One story tells of a reporter who was running as fast as he could to catch a just departing campaign train and it was President Teddy Roosevelt himself who pulled him on board from the caboose balcony.
A former press secretary and aide to both Democratic and Republican presidents, Segal became enchanted and then immersed in the stories of whistle-stop campaigning after a personal experience. He organized a whistle-stop campaign tour for a Republican congressman from Oklahoma in 1984. A self-described “recovering political science major,” Segal recalled that when facing the challenge to get his congressman more face-to-face publicity he immediately thought of Truman’s famous underdog campaign in 1948. As it turned out, there were workable train tracks throughout the congressman’s district where a campaign train could stop for short talks with voters — announced and unannounced.
Sometimes, the campaigners would decide to stop along the tracks where there was a small crowd of people gathered to wave the politician as he passed. The train would come to a sudden stop and the candidate (or his wife or other spokespeople) would personally greet and chat with a crowd as small as a dozen people for as little as five to ten minutes.
“The trips generated a lot of local press coverage because they were hyperlocal,” Segal told The Georgetowner. With a little prior research, they could be customized with a local historical point or a personality. They could get down to the crowd’s complaints even. Truman used to refer to the “do nothing Congress” with cheers from the crowd.
Today’s candidates could use trains or busses (or even fancy vans) to do whistle-stops along backroads or at famous stops on U.S. and state highways, Segal said. He had half expected President Biden – who used Amtrak to commute from Washington D.C. to his home is Delaware every weekend for years – to have been the perfect whistle-stop candidate had he continued his campaign.
“There are many advantages to this kind of campaigning,” Segal said. “Candidates can be very personal, very real at a whistle stop, They can get off the campaign memorized rote speech and into some conversations that will mean something and stick with the voters. They can generate a lot of local media coverage always looking for the hyperlocal angle, and they can be very mobile, getting to a gathered crowd quickly. And they can be fun.”
The book is full of photos, drawings, maps and even cartoons. “Whistle-stop Politics” is a refreshing look at politics as it once was,” wrote political reporter Eleanor Clift. “Maybe could be again,” Segal added.
Edward Segal, author of “Whistle-Stop Politics: Campaign Trains and the Reporters Who Covered Them.”
