American Elections, No. 1: explaining the 1964 vote to Japanese readers

American Elections, No. 1 is a Japanese-and-English poster that the U.S. Information Agency distributed in Tokyo, catalog date 12 October 1964, signed United States Information Service. Under a photograph of Abraham Lincoln it calls elections the basis of democratic politics and asks how a presidential election works in a two-party country (NAID 6949283).

What it shows

This is the first sheet of a series. The archive describes a Japanese headline over a photograph of Lincoln, then a classroom lesson on government, a large campaign crowd at Texarkana, and voters lined up at a polling place. A short paragraph of Japanese text sets the question the series will answer.

アメリカの選挙

第16代大統領 エブラハム・リンカーン

[...]

民主主義の国アメリカの政治のありかたは、リンカーンの「人民の、人民による、人民のための政治」という言葉に象徴されている。そしてこのような政治の基礎となっているのが選挙であり、そのなかで最も重要なものが4年毎の大統領選挙である。二大政党制の国アメリカで、それはどのようにして行なわれるのであろうか。

[...]

AMERICAN ELECTIONS 1

UNITED STATES INFORMATION SERVICE

[in photograph:] TEXARKANA; KENNEDY-JOHNSON

Issuer and audience

The sheet is signed in English, "United States Information Service," and the archive codes it as openly sourced. It sits in the National Archives series of posters distributed in Asia, Latin America and the Middle East, Record Group 306. The audience is a foreign public. The archive describes sheet No. 1 only.

How to read it

FRAME tags glittering generalities and transfer: Lincoln's authority is attached to the electoral system as a whole. The tag fits, and this is a mild use of the technique. The sheet does not tell a Japanese reader whom to favor. It describes a process and asks a question about it.

A sign in the Texarkana crowd reads "KENNEDY-JOHNSON." The record does not date the crowd photograph, and the text around it names no current candidate. It is the only party sign in the transcription, and it belongs to the Democratic ticket of 1960; no Republican sign appears.

An earlier sheet in the same vein is Elections U.S.A.: The Candidates from 1956, which gave both tickets equal space. At home, Johnson's campaign spot "Daisy" is dated a month before this poster. The agency's other sheets are collected on the USIA overseas posters hub.