Both tickets, same size: a 1956 USIA poster on the American election

Elections U.S.A. No. 2 is an English-language poster in the U.S. Information Agency series for Asia, Latin America and the Middle East, catalog date 1 January 1956. It prints four equal portraits: Stevenson and Kefauver for the Democrats, Eisenhower and Nixon for the Republicans (NAID 6948839).

The sheet

Four photographs in a grid, each with a caption of the same weight. The challenger's ticket is on the same footing as the sitting president's. Nothing else is printed: no slogan, no party symbol, no word on which man the agency's own administration would like to see win.

ELECTIONS - U.S.A.

Adlai Stevenson / Democratic Candidate for Presidency

Dwight D. Eisenhower / Republican Candidate for Re-Election for Presidency

Estes Kefauver / Democratic Candidate for Vice-Presidency

Richard M. Nixon / Republican Candidate for Re-Election for Vice-Presidency

THE CANDIDATES

Who sent it

The National Archives files the sheet in Record Group 306 among the U.S. Information Agency's posters for Asia, Latin America and the Middle East. The agency served under a Republican president who was on the ballot. The sheet itself does not name the agency, and FRAME classes the source as blurred.

Why it is worth a page

FRAME tags the sheet plain folks, and its own reading is that the layout treats the race as information, not argument. That is fair. It reports a contest an incumbent could lose, and it takes no side in it.

That is the strongest thing an American information office abroad could show, and it shows it by restraint. A government that prints its opponent's face at full size, for foreign readers, is advertising the fact that power in the United States is borrowed from voters. The same series printed sharper sheets in the same decade, such as Kremlin's Words and Deeds. This one simply lists the ballot. The record holds No. 2 of the set; this page does not describe the other numbers.