Campaigning 1913 Style: William Jennings Bryan

By 1913 political campaigning by automobile was an accepted practice. On Saturday, September 6, 1913, U.S. Secretary of State William Jennings Bryan conducted a speaking tour of Penobscot, Waldo, and Kennebec counties by car to promote Democratic candidates running for office that fall. In staunchly Republican Maine, he received the polite welcome due a national figure who had run for president three times and currently was serving as the senior member of Woodrow Wilson’s cabinet. This real photo postcard by Belfast photographer Charles A. Townsend shows Bryan at the right in the back seat of his touring car being driven through the city. In the front seat is Obadiah Gardner, a Rockland businessman and U.S. Senator from Maine from 1911 to 1913. While in Belfast, Bryan addressed a crowd of 2,000 from a speaker’s stand on Schoolhouse Common before traveling on to Waterville.

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Text by Earle G. Shettleworth Jr., Maine’s State Historian

Photo courtesy the Maine Historic Preservation Commission