Book Review: Words To Win By

Margaret Kaplan, Words to Win By: the Slogans, Logos, and Designs of America's Presidential Elections. New York: Apollo Publishers, 2020.  ISBN: 9781948062640.

Genre: U.S. history and politics

Subgenre: reference, elections, pop culture

Format: paperback

Source: Hutchins Library, Berea College 

This is a compact reference book that looks at presidential election slogans, logos, signage, and other artifacts. The volume starts with the election of 1900 and takes us up to Trump's 2016 election. We get a glimpse of 2020, but at the time of publication the 2020 election had not been decided. The book looks at campaign materials as a way to learn about American politics and society. 

The book includes a preface to introduce the book. As stated in the preface, something every candidate has in common is their need to persuade the people to their cause. In the book we see the campaigns that worked as well as the ones that did not. 

For every election entry you get:

• Overview of the winning campaign, including names, party, electoral vote tally, popular vote percentages, and a sampling of slogans. 
• Text summarizing the campaigns in terms of their rhetoric, slogans, and art. 
• Images with samples of art and artifacts like photos, buttons, ribbons, posters, etc. 
• Same for the losing campaign. 
• Also included are any notable 3rd party candidates.
   

You can read this book cover to cover, and you get a pretty good overview of electoral presidential history in the United States.  You can see the slogans and images they used. Sometimes they stuck to traditions. Other times they went against tradition and tried something new. Reading through allows readers to see how campaigns have evolved from print to radio to television to the internet. We also get to see that certain slogans are not original, and they often get recycled. For example, Trump is not the first candidate to use "Make America Great Again." That one goes back to Reagan, and even then variants on American greatness and/or returning to it have been used before. 

You could also use the book as a reference book. If you need to find campaign details of presidential elections, such as who was say "America First" way before Trump, you can find it here. By the way, that was one of Woodrow Wilson's slogans in 1916. 

This is a pretty easy book to read. You can read a bit here or there. An issue for me was the size of some images were some text and/or details that were not easy to see. Still this is a cool book to look through just for the images. Book also includes some reference notes at the end. 

Overall I really liked this one. If you are a history reader, a political junkie, or a trivia enthusiast, you will likely enjoy this book. I recommend it for both public and academic libraries in terms of politics, history, and/or pop culture. For libraries doing book displays about elections, this is a good one to include on displays. 

4 out of 5 stars. 

 Qualifies for the following 2024 Reading Challenge: