Politicking and Emergent Media: US Presidential Elections of the 1890s by Charles Musser (review)

American political historians have often attempted to identify those presidents who adopted new media outlets to express their messages effectively: Franklin D. Roosevelt and radio, John F. Kennedy and television, and Donald J. Trump and Twitter. Trump has himself described his tweets as being “modern day presidential.” ¹ Charles Musser’s latest book, Politicking and Emergent Media: US Presidential Elections of the 1890s, explores the late nineteenth-century embrace of communication technologies like the phonograph, the stereopticon and the motion picture in four presidential campaigns (1888, 1892, 1896, and 1900), thus making a major contribution to the fields of Film Studies, Media Archaeology, American Studies, and Political Science.

As Professor of American Studies and Film and Media Studies at Yale University, Musser has an extensive history as a documentary filmmaker, ranging from An American Potter (1976) to Errol Morris: A Lightning Sketch (2014). He is perhaps best known for Before the Nickelodeon: The Early Cinema of Edwin S. Porter (1982), which brought to the screen the research for which he is globally renowned.

Musser’s books The Emergence of Early Cinema: The American Screen to 1907 (University of California, 1990) and Before the Nickelodeon: Edwin S. Porter and the Edison Manufacturing Company (University of California, 1991) helped establish early cinema as a major area of focus within Film Studies, which it remains to the present day. Along with such scholars as Tom Gunning and Thomas Elsaesser, Musser’s work set a new standard of rigor and methodological sophistication for film historiography, helping to forge what became known as “New Film History.”

In the “Introduction” to Politicking and Emergent Media, Musser writes that, in the late nineteenth century, “the virtual presence of the presidential candidates rather than their actual presence was becoming more and more noticeable” (5). For example, he identifies the significant role that emergent media played in the 1888 campaign, in which Democrat Grover Cleveland won the popular vote, but lost the electoral-college vote to Republican Benjamin Harrison. In terms of media influence, John L. Wheeler’s stereopticon lecture The Tariff Illustrated acted as something of a antecedent to modern political documentaries that one might associate with Michael Moore and Robert Greenwald. In this case, the educational propaganda promoted the Republican position on tariffs on imported goods, the result helping to secure Harrison’s victory. The stereopticon’s potency thus prompted its return in the 1892 campaign, which acted as something of a rematch between Cleveland and Harrison, with Cleveland finally victorious.

Musser’s discussion of these campaigns transitions into an extremely useful chapter on the stereopticon in the United States, its development and range of practices, which examines not only the various terminology used to identify the technology, but also the eras and frequency of such iterations in the press, the result of his careful, digital humanities-based approach to data mining. Despite the wealth of research that has been conducted, analyzed, and published in the era of New Film History, the American magic lantern and its related technologies and screen practices remains an area in urgent need of further work, including (one hopes) the publication of X. Theodore Barber’s planned monograph on the subject. As a result, Politicking and Emergent Media becomes a particularly effective intervention for those scholars interested in the subject of pre-cinema.

Then, in Chapter 3, Musser investigates the role of the nascent moving picture in the presidential elections of 1896. Here (and in Chapter 4) his work underscores the problems inherent in the term “pre-cinema,” as the 1896 election drew upon the stereopticon and the cinema, the two being overlapping forms that existed parallel to one another at that time and for the decades that followed. More specifically, Musser’s work reveals that “[s]everal prominent Republicans, including ex-President Benjamin Harrison, had invested in the American Mutoscope Company” (92). He details Biograph’s film program depicting Republican William McKinley, but also places the cinema in the context of...