Las Vegas Review-Journal (Sunday)
Political veteran covers long road to election
Book tells wild history of campaign trains
CRESTLINE, Ohio — From its earliest days as a village, Crestline was synonymous with trains. A railroad station inspired this northern Ohio town, railroad workers populated it and the passengers who flocked here helped it grow.
So it seems only fitting that a politician’s stop in Crestline would go on to popularize the word “whistle-stop.”
The tale of underdog 1948 presidential candidate Harry S. Truman’s decision to capitalize on the remark of an opponent — Ohio’s own “Mr. Republican,” U.S. Sen. Robert Taft — to own the term, and win the election, is just one of dozens of colorful anecdotes in Edward Segal’s new book, “Whistle-stop Politics: Campaign Trains and the Reporters Who Covered Them.”
Segal, a former press secretary and aide to both Democratic and Republican candidates, explains that whistle-stop was a railroad term at the time to describe small towns without regularly scheduled train service. The conductor would signal the engineer that passengers needed to disembark, and the engineer “would respond with two toots of the whistle,” he writes.
By 1948, though, the term had become shorthand for describing a community that was viewed as backward or undesirable. So when Taft accused Truman — not long after his “special” train had stopped in Crestline — of going around the country on this campaign train tour “blackguarding (attacking) Congress at every whistle-stop,” Truman embraced the opportunity.
The Democratic National Committee asked voters, “Was it nice of the Senator to call you a whistle-stop?” Seventy-three percent of respondents said they didn’t approve. Truman began using the term himself, Segal writes, and it soon lost its pejorative meaning.
Altogether, Segal has cataloged at least 180 campaign train trips throughout U.S. history — from William Henry Harrison to Joe Biden, with dozens of presidents, vice presidents, first ladies, representatives, senators and governors in between. He continues to update the record on this uniquely “American invention” on the book’s website: Whistlestoppolitics.com.
Segal, a self-described “recovering political science major,” thought immediately of Truman’s famous underdog campaign of 1948. “And it turns out there was a set of workable train tracks in the congressman’s district,” he said.
The letters and interviews used to inform the book date back to that time. They include: George Mcgovern, Adlai Stevenson III, Jody Powell, other candidates and candidates’ relatives and a host of journalists. Other details are drawn from books, news accounts, and historical documents, photographs and political cartoons.
The book also revisits whistle-stop speeches and the crowds that gathered to hear the likes of Robert Kennedy, Richard Nixon, George Bush or Barack Obama. It recounts, too, tales of hecklers, pranksters and protesters and describes the ordeal of the traveling press.
The stories are at times humorous, at times harrowing — as when one reporter nearly got left behind by President Theodore Roosevelt’s campaign train in 1904 when he got off during a short stop to buy stationery. As the train pulled out, and the reporter “ran at top speed, puffing and huffing” to hop aboard. It was Roosevelt himself who pulled him up.
Back in Crestline, Mayor Linda Horning Pitt is buoyed by the fresh attention on her town. Crestline — once “all about the railroad,” she said — has suffered since Amtrak pulled out in the 1990s, but its new train-themed logo and renovated historical museum with a railroad theme are holding space for the future.