Elections and political campaigns often make for vivid memories. It’s fashionable to disdain them, to say the politicians are all liars, and there’s not a dime’s worth of difference between them. But first, that isn’t true – there’s often a LOT of very meaningful differences between candidates. For good or ill, if Al Gore had been president… as the voters chose… would we have invaded Iraq? The world could be a very different place today.

*Remember also that elections are what we do, rather than having gun battles in the streets. Elections are a much better choice.

*In no particular order, here are some vignettes of voting and campaigning in our area.

*Angelica lays claim to being the birthplace of the Republican party. More precisely, a political group in Angelica later joined the new Republican party. The Angelica group preceded the party, but it’s a bit of stretch.

*Rock-ribbed Republican Hammondsport, like much of the rest of the nation, voted for Franklin D. Roosevelt as president in 1932. Suffering the horrors of the Great Depression, voters hoped that F.D.R. could improve matters. In Hammondsport, though, the key issue was probably the fact that Roosevelt wanted to repeal Prohibition, which would be great news for the grape growers and winery owners. Within the year Prohibition was repealed, but Hamondsport voters, in the true American spirit of what-have-you-done-for-me-lately, went back to the Republicans. At least this gave them the distinction of having voted for Alf Landon, who carried exactly two states (Maine and Vermont) in ’36.

*When Roosevelt ran for governor in 1928, Republicans pulled long faces, insisting that while he was a fine, likeable fellow, they just feared that the office would be too much for his delicate health (he having been crippled by polio seven years earlier). Roosevelt’s response was to barnstorm through every county in the state by auto (mostly on dirt roads), giving multiple speeches every day and asking crowds “Do I look sick to you?” He didn’t, and he won. Locally he gave speeches at Elmira, Corning, Bath, Hornell, and onward, touting his progressive credentials to cheering crowds.

*Governor Al Smith was running for President that year – a CATHOLIC! Thousands of western New Yorkers, including ministers and public officials, openly joined the Ku Klux Klan to defend America from what they insisted was devilish plot by foreigners and immigrants to rule America by stealth. They flooded the region with anti-Catholic hate propaganda, burned crosses on hill after hill (and sometimes on people’s lawns), and goose-stepped down to the polls to vote for Republican Herbert Hoover.

*Franklin’s fifth cousin Theodore campaigned in and around Steuben County, more or less forced into our area by the routes of the railroads. Seeing a local man with nine children at Cameron Mills, TR shouted out that this was the most prosperous place he’d seen on his travels. (He only had five, himself.)

*William Jennings Bryan campaigned for president here in 1900, trying in vain to convince Americans to stop taking over other countries. He and his supporters marched from the depot in Bath to the courthouse square, where the “boy orator” made one of his famed speeches, then marched back to the train.

*Steuben County Historical Society has a photo, circa 1900, of the Bath Socialists meeting in Pulteney Park. Three of them.

*The Town of Fremont was named for “the Pathfinder,” military man and western explorer John C. Fremont. When he ran for President in 1856, the new town voted overwhelmingly in favor of their namesake.

*The 1835 directory states that there were three black voters in Steuben County, and three more in Livingston. By then just about any 21 year-old white male could vote, but New York went through a period when it loaded lots of extra property requirements onto African American men before THEY were allowed to vote.

*People in other parts of the country sometimes ask me, “What’s politics like out in your area?” I used to answer, “All you need to know is that in 1918 our U.S. Representative was a Republican named Houghton from the Corning Glass Works. And today, our U.S. Representative is a Republican named Houghton from the Corning Glass Works.”

*Ralph Nader some years ago came through our area on one of his symbolic campaigns for president. Having no hope of winning more than a trace amount of votes, he had no qualms about freely admitting his surprise when reporters at a press conference told him he was in Corning. It had been a very busy trip, and he’d thought it was Binghamton.