Remembering the Runners-Up

When the winner of the U.S. presidential election moves into the White House in January, the loser will get a place of honor in the They Also Ran Gallery, in Norton, Kan.

When the winner of the U.S. presidential election moves into the White House in January, the loser will get a place of honor in the They Also Ran Gallery, in Norton, Kan. (pop. 3,012).

“They’re all very important men,” curator Lee Ann Shearer, 34, says about the 58 unsuccessful presidential candidates enshrined in the one-room photo gallery inside First State Bank. William Walter Rouse, the bank’s former president, created the gallery in 1965 after reading Irving Stone’s book, They Also Ran, about the nation’s presidential runners-up.

“Dad was interested in history and education and read that Horace Greeley had stopped in town,” says Rouse’s daughter Ann Hazlett, 76, of Norton.

Greeley, a 1872 presidential hopeful who founded the New York Tribune and editorialized on the “Go West, young man” theme, already was famous for staying overnight at the stagecoach stop in Norton during a westward journey. Rouse decided that a museum devoted to presidential also-rans like Greeley could be a boon for his town.

At the free museum, every major-party presidential wannabe from Thomas Jefferson to John Kerry is saluted with a wood-framed 16-by-20-inch official Library of Congress portrait and a 300-word biography. Minor-party candidates have been excluded since 1980 because of dwindling wall space.

“Gerald Ford’s photo was double-bolted and attached like the others to the wall, but it kept falling off,” Shearer says, with a laugh. “He was kind of a klutz, you know.”

While the names and faces of inductees such as Samuel J. Tilden, Horatio Seymour, Winfield Scott Hancock and Rufus King may not ring a bell, others, like Jefferson, Herbert Hoover, Richard Nixon and George H.W. Bush—who both won and lost presidential campaigns—are quite familiar.

Henry Clay holds the distinction of being the biggest presidential loser—or the most determined to win America’s highest political post. Clay ran as a candidate for three parties and lost three times: in 1824 as a Democratic-Republican, in 1832 as a National Republican, and in 1844 as a Whig.

“I’ve always been more interested in why people lost instead of why people won,” says Chris Bettell, 26, of Gothenburg, Neb. (pop. 3,619), who spent more than an hour reading the biographical sketches of the gallery’s inductees.

Though they didn’t win the Oval Office, many politicians in the “hall of losers,” as Shearer affectionately calls the museum, nonetheless were quite successful men. Henry A. Wallace, for example, the 1948 Progressive Party candidate who lost to Harry S. Truman, served as vice president to Franklin Delano Roosevelt and helped organize the New Deal programs.

Shearer’s favorite inductee is Greeley because of his fleeting ties with Norton. Shearer also likes Greeley’s casual appearance and friendly face in his portrait. “I’ve read that his wife was a slipshod housekeeper and he would exit the house in a rumpled coat with his hair messed and those neck whiskers,” Shearer says. “But he loved his country.”

A desire to serve their nation is a common trait of all of the museum’s honorees.

“They’re all good men. They just didn’t win the vote,” says visitor Goldie Anderson, 97, of Caldwell, Idaho (pop. 25,967), who has voted in every presidential election since 1932. “I’m not a Democrat or a Republican,” she adds. “I’m just an American and uphold the one I think is best for our nation.”

On Nov. 4, when voters send one presidential candidate to the White House, Shearer will hang a portrait of the loser next to John Kerry, ensuring that the latest “also-ran” won’t soon be forgotten in Norton.

Story by Marti Attoun, contributing editor.

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