How photography – and phrenology – helped make Abraham Lincoln president

[unrepentant progress]

We all know that TV likely helped give us JFK instead of Nixon, but technology, and our relationship to it, has been influencing elections for a long time.

As the technology improved in the late 1850s, Lincoln embraced it. He was the first president to send his supporters photographs that had been made as multiple paper prints. Sold for around a dollar a dozen, Lincoln’s face appeared all over the nation.

Consumers of these card-portraits believed the images provided them with a far deeper connection to the subject than we might imagine – one that was based on an intimate personal knowledge of the subject’s character. This was an idea that had taken root as a result of two popular sciences: physiognomy and phrenology.

A photograph, then, allowed you to know a person who was in every other way a stranger to you: if you could read a face, you could judge a character. As Harvard professor Oliver Wendell Holmes Sr put it in 1863: “The picture tells no lie."

The popularity of this “science” had direct political implications. As the 1864 election approached, one author who styled himself a “practical phrenologist” offered himself up as a guide to an electorate who (as he put it) “had neither time nor opportunity to gain reliable knowledge of the candidate.” Through his own skills, he promised to “reveal unto you the character of Abraham Lincoln”.

Full article: http://historynewsnetwork.org/article/157445

Note: Read the one comment there too.

[sorechasm]

1. Now that's a forward thinking President.

The first candidate to hologram themselves into people's homes will win the next election. (Provided it's not the bedroom.)

[yurbud]

2. Bill Clinton will be the test pilot for the latter part of that

[unrepentant progress]

4. "Good evening, I'm holographic Mitch McConnel and I'd like to discuss your sex life."

*shudders*

[MisterP]

3. Mackenzie King ran Canada via the spirits, Reagan's astrologer pushed him into avoiding WWIII

and much of the fight in Texas 1836 was Scottish Rite vs. yorkinos! whee!