They Also Ran [antikvár]

PrologueTms IS THE STORY of the twenty-three men who enjoyed, or suffered, an identical fate: they were all defeated for the presidency of the United States. The stories are not told in their chronological order but are grouped according to those analogies which give history a fascinating plot structure.The truth can sometimes be seen more accurately at an oblique angle than head on: the lives of the presidents too often have been sweetened to salve nationalistic pride; no one has thought it necessary to whitewash the defeated candidates. Their lives provide a high-powered and amusing lens with which to judge the standards of their times, the qualities of their victorious opponents and the political wisdom of the electorate.How often were the voters discerning, how often dumb? How frequently were they fooled, and how frequently did they go unerringly to the better man? How often did they elect the apparently superior candidate, only to find that the presidency was the one job in the nation that he could not handle? How often did they choose the man who was more capable of solv-, ing the existing problems, only to have a radical change in the [ ' course of history render his particular qualities useless and Imake the defeated one the ideal executive to handle the new' situations? What is the box score on democratic elections Isince 1800? Are the voters getting smarter all the time, mak-ing fewer and fewer mistakes, or are they repeating the identical errors they made a hundred years ago? What is our percentage of wins, loses and draws?I have attempted to extract the vital essence of each man ^ , rather than to tell his full life story; in this sense the sketches are biographical line drawings rather than portraits in oil. IHowever, the protagonist of the book is not merely the revela-^ ^! tory human pattern, but the inner design which led this group to i .; its peculiar end: for men who share a common fate rarely do ,so by accident. What were the inherent traits in the char-acters of such disparate individuals as Wendell Willkie and Henry Clay, Alfred E. Smith and Horace Greeley, Charles Evans Hughes and William Jennings Bryan, Alf Landon and John C. Fremont, which led them all to the same sacrificial block?