This poster, with a play on Patrick Henry’s famous words “give me liberty, or give me death,” was used at the Tea Party demonstration on Tax Day 2010 in Washington, D.C.
The successful presidential campaign of Republican Abraham Lincoln perfected the nighttime torchlight parade as an entertainment of unprecedented scale that attracted the attention of men, women, and children. The concept originated in Hartford, Connecticut, in 1858, and was revived for Lincoln’s campaign by the city’s young Republicans. Tailored oil-resistant enameled cloth capes distinguished the marchers, some of whom were too young to vote. Their example spread from Hartford to cities in the northeastern United States, which contributed traveling companies totaling some ten thousand uniformed men with torches to a Grand Procession in New York City on October 3, 1860. The martial spectacle—including fireworks, Lincoln “Wide Awake” transparencies, and floats—created envy among the city’s Democrats, and panic among southern sympathizers who regarded the torch-lit parade as a provocation.
President William McKinley needed a new running mate for his re-election campaign in 1900 because his first vice president, Garret Hobart, had died in office. McKinley chose Theodore Roosevelt, governor of New York and hero of the Spanish-American War. The Democratic challenger William Jennings Bryan who had lost to McKinley in 1896 also chose a new running mate in 1900, Adlai Stevenson. McKinley defeated both Bryan and Eugene V. Debs who ran with Job Harriman on the Social Democratic Party ticket and finished a distant third.