Liking Ike: Eisenhower, Advertising, and the Rise of Celebrity Politics

by David Haven Blake

Overview

Liking Ike reveals the prominent role that celebrities and advertising agencies played in Dwight Eisenhower's presidency. Guided by Madison Avenue executives and television pioneers, Eisenhower cultivated famous supporters as a way of building the broad-based support that had eluded Republicans for twenty years. While we often think of John F. Kennedy and his Rat Pack entourage as the beginning of presidential glamour in the United States, celebrities from Ethel Merman and Irving Berlin to Jimmy Stewart and Helen Hayes regularly appeared in Eisenhower's campaigns. Ike's political career was so saturated with stardom that opponents from the right and left accused him of being a glamour candidate.

Author David Haven Blake tells the story of how Madison Avenue executives strategically brought celebrities into the political process. Based on original interviews and long neglected archival materials, Liking Ike explores the changing dynamics of celebrity politics as Americans adjusted to the television age. By the 1920s, entertainers were routinely drawing publicity to their favorite candidates, but with the rise of television and mass advertising, political advisers began to professionalize the way that celebrities brought attention to presidential campaigns. In meetings, memos, and television scripts, they charted a strategy for leavening political programming with celebrity interviews, musical performances, and elaborate television spectaculars.

Commentators worried about the seemingly superficial values that television had introduced to political campaigns, and writers, filmmakers, and fellow politicians criticized the influence of glamour and publicity. But despite these complaints, Eisenhower's legacy would live on in the subsequent careers of John F. Kennedy and Ronald Reagan-and, ultimately, provide a template for the presidential campaigns of Barack Obama, John McCain, Donald Trump, and Hillary Clinton.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780190278182
Publisher:	Oxford University Press
Publication date:	08/25/2016
Edition description:	New Edition
Pages:	298
Product dimensions:	6.50(w) x 9.30(h) x 1.00(d)

About the Author

David Haven Blake is Professor of English at The College of New Jersey. He is the author of Walt Whitman and the Culture of American Celebrity, and the co-editor of Walt Whitman, Where the Future Becomes Present.

Table of Contents

Preface
Introduction: Eisenhower, Televised and Memorialized
Chapter 1: Ike Day
Chapter 2: Riding the Roosevelt Special
Chapter 3: The Coriolanus Candidate
Chapter 4: The Spectacle Campaign
Chapter 5: Corn Flakes
Chapter 6: Madly for Adlai
Chapter 7: The Biggest Fan in the World
Chapter 8: Happy Birthday, Mr. President
Conclusion: The Glamour Republic
Index

Editorial Reviews

"[W]ell written and thoroughly researched....The book also has some significant contributions. First, it shows the influence and relevance of television, advertising, and celebrity status on the modern political system....Another strength...is its interdisciplinary content, which makes it a valuable volume for anyone interested in the presidency, politics, television history, advertising, public relations, and cultural history. In summary, this book adds a new hue to the existing historiography of presidential campaigns. It might even provide insight into the 2020 election and beyond."—Pam Parry, Presidential Studies Quarterly

"David Haven Blake's study adds a new dimension to the literature of celebrity politics through examination of how advertising agencies crucially shaped its development in the 1950s....[T]his book is very deserving of attention from modern political historians, and not only those focused on the United States. The civic use of celebrity and the publicity it generates has permeated the modern body politic. The process may be most advanced in the United States but is not confined to that country. Historians would do well to consider Blake's analysis of its genesis in the America of the 1950s and its attendant effort to use fame as a shroud to hide ideas and issues."—Iwan Morgan, English Historical Review

"By studying the process by which politicians worked with experts from the advertising, public relations, and entertainment industries during a period of dramatic technological change, Liking Ike makes an important contribution to literature on the historical intersections of the media industry and politics. By asking substantial questions about the 'production of celebrity politics,' Blake has penned a significant history that does not simply lament the product of media change but also explains the complicated historical process by which political attitudes, cultural values, and social structures shaped and were shaped by television."—Kathryn Cramer Brownell, Journal of American History

"Blake shows how advertising and television conspired to create a kind of perverse identity politics disconnected from real issues and resistant to the possibility that presidents can grow, evolve, or be anything other than the symbol they had become."—Grant Madsen, Reviews in American History

"[C]ompelling and convincing....His thorough analysis and contextualization draws on his research in a wealth of primary sources, which he marshals to achieve his aim of demonstrating the spectrum of American opinion on these developments. Engaging writing and a light touch with cultural theory add to the book's merits. Altogether, Liking Ike productively expands our knowledge of the political past and our understanding of the political present."—Jennifer Frost, American Historical Review

"[Liking Ike] serves as a useful account about the beginning of the modern presidential campaign, as we have come to know it....We would all do well, in this environment, to meditate on the story Blake tells and to begin to reimagine how our politics can be different going forward."—John Kitch, VoegelinView

"[A] lively and entertaining chronicle of the intersection of politics, advertising and celebrity in the 1950s...Liking Ike makes an important contribution to our understanding...of how modern politics has developed, particularly through the commodification of the presidency itself and the changing nature of Americans' relationship to the concept of celebrity...David Haven Blake has succeeded in producing a book that stands on its own terms as a significant piece of historical research, while also prompting the reader to consider how we choose our political leaders and the means by which the foundations of presidential images are created."—Dr. Thomas Tunstall Allcock, Reviews in History

"A highly entertaining and informative book for collections on the media and American politics...Highly recommended."—CHOICE

"Liking Ike is the most comprehensive treatment yet of the ways in which the two Eisenhower presidential campaigns launched the commodification of American politicians."—The American Conservative

"David Haven Blake's Liking Ike is an outstanding contribution to the growing literature exploring the intimate links between Hollywood and politics. His lively narrative reveals how during the early 1950s, movie stars and advertising agencies recognized the importance of television and worked with Dwight Eisenhower to transform the ways in which candidates were sold to a mass audience of potential voters."—Steven Ross, author of Hollywood Left and Right: How Movie Stars Shaped American Politics

"Liking Ike leavens the necessity of advertising with the buoyant yeast of celebrity when television was new. Blake's carefully researched and elegantly argued political history of celebrity's charming and disarming effects upon the American presidential campaign and the conduct of government arrives not a moment too soon."—William L. Bird, Curator Emeritus of the Smithsonian Institution's National Museum of American History

"Liking Ike has never been easier than in David Blake's fascinating account of the transformation of the heroic General Dwight David Eisenhower into Ike, the plain-spoken man from Abilene. Madison Avenue used television to mobilize voters by reassuring them that Eisenhower was someone they could relate to, and exposing the back room machinations of entrenched local Republicans. A good read for anyone interested in the intersection of media and politics."—Samuel L. Popkin, author of The Candidate: What It Takes to Win-And Hold-The White House

"This excellent book is an important contribution to the study of politics and culture in the United States."—Anne Mork, History

From the Publisher