What summer event filled with spectacle and circumstance, speeches and ovations, and capped by a balloon drop happens every four years? No, it’s not the Olympic Games; it’s political party convention time! These quadrennial events are the formal nominating process for the presidential and vice-presidential candidates.
In addition to the serious work of nailing down the party platform and voting for nominees, convention delegates have a lot of fun too. The two photographs featured today give testament to that fact. The first photo features California delegates to the 1912 Republican Convention arriving in style with pennants flying on board a stagecoach. In the second photo, delegates show their support for candidate Jimmy Carter by donning masks highlighting his famous smile.
Learn More:
- View images relating to political conventions in the Prints & Photographs Online Catalog, including images both outside and inside the convention halls as well as some equal opportunity skewering of politicians in the illustrations from the humor and satire magazine Puck.
- Along with every presidential campaign there are great campaign posters. There are also ridiculous ones. See and hear the Webcast "Presidential Campaign Posters: Two Hundred Years of Election Art" in which editors and curators of the Library of Congress have mined the institution’s extraordinary collections for 100 posters, from the campaigns of Andrew Jackson to Barack Obama.
- Re-familiarize yourself with the winning presidential candidates. View portraits of Presidents of the United States as well as their First Ladies and the Vice Presidents. Test your knowledge even further by seeing how many names you recognize on the image list of Also Rans: Losing Presidential Candidates of the United States.