Election years have their assortment of ritual appendages: sacrificial meats eaten at outdoor festivals, lies, scandals, poll numbers that grow increasingly useless as a country learns not to pick up the phone, dog whistles, prejudice, and metaphors that nearly always fail in their effort to pile the whole country into one pot. There is also, by some logic unexamined yet adhered to, a rush to publish books. As an article printed in The Baltimore Sun in March 1964 noted, “Somewhere at the moment in this favored land, it can be safely conjectured, a harried writer is racing the calendar in the composition of a political biography of Henry Cabot Lodge.”
With more than a year to go before the 2020 election, it seems like most of the scurrying has already occurred; the market is flooded with campaign memoirs. Just go to your local bookstore and look for any book that has either a smiling—or very serious-looking—person staring into the distance and thinking about the problems on the cover. America, American, Heartland, or Resistance are probably in the title.
These modern election books sag under wet folksiness. They are boring. One can almost feel sympathetic to whines about the death of the good campaign biographies that sometimes accompany these sprees of content creation. “Campaign biographies seem to have fallen on hard times,” said one review in the New York Times in 1984.
The current fashionable campaign book takes the form of a memoir, often ghostwritten, that unsuccessfully tries to argue that a candidate had a relatable American upbringing despite the fact said upbringing made them want to be president. But that was not always the trendy delivery method for the backstories of candidates. When these biographies functioned as more straightforward propaganda—written not in the first person, but from a distance that allowed maximum bragging—a few candidates lucked into having novelists write their life story. Nathaniel Hawthorne and General Lew Wallace each wrote one. William Dean Howells wrote two. Other famous writers, like Rose Wilder Lane and Jacob Riis, also took part in the tradition. Having read them, I can say that the good campaign biography is as much of a myth as the stories these writers were selling. They are not to be envied, having done no good.