Child’s play became political weaponry with a notorious attack ad from 1964.
The "Daisy Girl" spot detonated a new era in political advertising.Probably the first political attack ad was painted on a cave wall somewhere in France. But the one we first remember was aired on U.S. television September 7, 1964, during Monday Night at the Movies:
“One, two, free, four…” A tiny girl pulls petals off a daisy. Birds chirp in the distance. Then her count-up is muffled by a bellowing countdown. The camera closes in on her dark, innocent eye, where a nuclear bomb blast swells.
President and presidential candidate Lyndon Johnson’s voice runs over the image of a mushroom cloud.
These are the stakes! To make a world in which all of God’s children can live, or to go into the dark. We must either love each other, or we must die.
People were appalled by the ad, which never aired again. But it drove home the idea that Johnson’s Republican opponent for the presidency, Barry Goldwater, was trigger happy, and in an age of hideous weaponry could bring world holocaust.
With today’s splintered media and niche advertising, it’s incredible that a one-time-TV-spot could have had such an impact. ““I think LBJ would have won without it. It probably didn’t win or lose him any states,” says Sean Wilentz, of Princeton’s history faculty, “but it was a real moment in advertising history.” Jesse Greenspan of history.com discloses that “Johnson himself told his secretary of labor that the ad may have gone overboard.”
Moveon’s remake of the Daisy Girl ad, 2003, attacking Bush’s suppy of weapons to Iraq.
In our view, the simple daisy game is what makes this such powerful propaganda. A childhood pastime, so familiar it seems born of Nature, is blown apart by technologies of hate. Daisies have been associated with women’s purity and girlish innocence for many centuries. By the “logic” of the ad, a vote for LBJ was an act of sanity first, but also of chivalry. (Here’s a 2012 interview with a grown up Monique Corzilius, who was the child in the ad.)
There are a number of commentaries about both the original ad and a version MoveOn made in 2003 to oppose George W. Bush’s reelection.
Some suggest that the TV attack ad has had its day (and certainly the failed MoveOn experiment suggests that’s so). Democratic congressional candidate Colleen Callahan of Illinois filmed her own take of the daisy ad, 2008, condemning her Republican opponent Aaron Shock for proposing to sell Taiwan nuclear weapons. (Callahan lost by more than 20 percentage points.) Here’s yet another: Rob Astorino versus Governor Andrew Cuomo!
It seems to us that Daisy Girl was just the first sally in the long war of political advertising. Considering Robert Mann’s book on the subject, Greenspan contends that prior campaigns “generally took a fact-based approach to ads, selling their candidates like they would a bar of soap. Many of Johnson’s ads, on the other hand, were pithy, short spots designed to generate a visceral emotional response.”
How about George Bush Sr.’s appallingly effective “Willie Horton” commercial? For an arsenal more, look at Jack Geer’s wonderful Attack Ad Hall of Fame.
This illuminating article by Michael P. Auerbach doesn’t take us quite back to the neolithic age but proves negative political ads have been with us, at least in the U.S., for centuries. John Adams branded Thomas Jefferson an atheist, Lincoln’s enemies mocked his looks, and Benjamin Harrison, touting his own military record, called Grover Cleveland a lily-liver who “skulked behind the nearest substitute.”
Auerbach goes on to show that negative political ads actually declined some in recent presidential cycles (though he doesn’t study the 2024 race, which we recall as being vitriolic, bordering on nuclear negativity).
The next couple of months will be revealing, no doubt. Who and what will be deflowered between now and November?
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