Collage by Carlie Burton
I will not watch this year’s election returns, and you can’t make me. It’s not that I’m terrified of what will happen when 2024’s historic lunacy climaxes. I just don’t follow election night coverage anymore. I hate it. Remove all the shiny graphics and swooshing sound effects, and what do you have? A bunch of game-show hosts staring at an enormous hourglass, analyzing each individual grain of sand as it falls.
No, thanks. I recommend going to bed blissfully ignorant and waking up to actual news, good or bad. If they’re still bickering over the results in the morning, what was the point of crawling through them last night?
Maybe you’d prefer the ways Cincinnati used to report election returns long ago. In 1904, for example, blissfully ignorant sleep was not an option. Voting results were announced by rocket bombs launched from vertically-buried cannons every hour at six locations around town. Newspapers instructed everyone to run to the window each time they heard the bombs bursting in air so they could see the flaming colors slowly falling: Red indicates that Roosevelt is elected, green that Parker is elected, silver means doubtful but probably Roosevelt, blue means doubtful but probably Parker. Eventually the rockets’ red glare proclaimed that Teddy Roosevelt had been elected president, and that’s why neither you nor I have any idea who Parker was.
Rocket bombs were only one of the ways Cincinnati announced election returns in the days before electronic media. For those of you who will be obsessed with tracking the votes this year and for all you election-night junkies intravenously connected to your screen(s), join me in wading through what life was like for Cincinnatians like you in years past. It wasn’t pretty. Quite often it wasn’t sanitary.
The bombs of 1904 were kind of a milestone. For the first time ever, you could stay home and still find out who’d won or lost. Before then, people who couldn’t wait for the morning papers—you, let’s say—had to put on a coat and go out into the November night to catch the latest numbers.
Downtown Cincinnati was more than ready for you and your buddies. It was probably more rowdy and chaotic than Oktoberfest had been just a few weeks earlier, because election night ended an excruciating day of a city without saloons: Alcohol sales were illegal during voting hours. Remember, we’re talking about 19th century Cincinnati here. The minute the polls closed, the bars opened, and the parties erupted. Gentlemen, start your livers!
It’s hard to overstate how big a social event election night in America was. It rivaled New Year’s Eve in size and suds, thanks mostly to the impact of the telegraph. The telegraph of the 1890s was as common as the fax machine of the 1990s, but with one major difference: Telegraphs were found only in businesses and institutions, never in homes. Anyone desperate for the latest vote tallies—you, let’s say—had to go someplace that had a ticker. Lucky for you, almost every type of store, restaurant, theater, social club, concert hall, hotel, pharmacy, etc. owned one.
On election night you expected, and welcomed, news interruptions during your concert or play. Venues that normally closed before midnight scheduled extra shows that kept the updates (and drinks) coming. Those who couldn’t afford tickets or reservations—you, let’s say—went to an outdoor location, joining crowds in front of large displays beaming the latest rankings.
Cincinnati’s major newspapers, including The Enquirer and The Post, treated this night as their Super Bowl, heavily promoting their prowess at getting results fast. (It turns out The Post had invested in those rocket bombs.) We can’t say for sure how much all that pressing of the flesh contributed to the era’s many epidemics, but ask your doctor if old-time Cincinnati was for you.
Go back even further, and election nights regularly spilled into sunrise. Without telegraphs or telephones or cars, Cincinnati got painfully slow results. Official returns from remote rural areas—in 1882, a place like Harrison fit that description—would sometimes not arrive until a farmer ambled into town with his crops. Newspapers desperate for the latest numbers would bribe workers at the printing plants of competing papers to get their hands on fresh editions before they hit the streets. Then came the 1890s, and all of downtown Cincinnati was wired. As were the parties.
And then, suddenly, a revolution overthrew it all. The first sign of the coming disruption happened quietly, barely noticed during 1904’s Night of Big Bombs. Inside the Chamber of Commerce building downtown, the Cincinnati Business Men’s Club held its usual private party. Here were assembled the town’s most esteemed, well-off, and well-connected aristocrats—not you, let’s say—enjoying a fine banquet as they received the voting results.
Through countless miles of wire, dots and dashes arrived at the telegraph room on the sixth floor. But this year the telegraph was connected to a radio transmitter provided by the Marconi Wireless Telegraph Company. The transmitter “broadcasted” the dots and dashes up to the banquet hall on the seventh floor, and Cincinnatians got their election returns out of thin air for the first time. It happened for only a few dozen people over a short distance, but it was the shot fired across the bow. Within a few years, most Americans would be getting voting results on their radios at home. The downtown crowds would slowly begin to thin out.
Stop me if you’ve heard this before, but newspapers were slow to acknowledge and adapt to change. In 1913, The Enquirer threw huge dollars into giant searchlights and strobes atop the new Union Central Tower (today’s Fourth and Vine Tower). The lights were easily seen from surrounding hills, with elaborate choreography indicating which candidates were winning: The shaft of light swinging from east to west means Mayor Hunt is winning, from west to east means Judge Spiegel is winning. The light show was really cool at first if you owned a compass, but long after almost every home and car had a radio, as late as the election of 1930, The Enquirer was still doing this annual stunt. The Great Depression put an end to it.
Now it’s the 1940s, and World War II is raging. Don’t worry. A Cincinnati election-night junkie like you can still get a fix, but with fewer choices (except for radio stations, which have grown like weeds and have blanket coverage). You can still don your November coat and visit one of the downtown displays. Theaters and concert halls still offer special shows with regular breaks for election news. The Post, desperately trying to catch up with technology in 1944, brags that they’ll send updates to theaters via motorcycles. Wow, motorcycles! Next year they might even use telephones!
And then came television. Everything changed again. And then came the internet. The apple cart keeps flipping, with each new thing pushing aside all the old things, and yet the old things somehow keep going. Well, not all of them. Nobody is launching bombs or shining giant searchlights anymore.
Personally, I kind of wish those old stunts had stuck around longer. Just imagine: A searchlight sweeping east to west means that John Kennedy has won the state of Illinois, putting him ahead of Richard Nixon by 29 electoral votes. A rocket shooting orange flames will mean that Chicago’s Mayor has been caught adding several thousand dead voters to JFK’s Illinois count. That would have been a fun night.
I have never regretted skipping the steady drip-drip of election night coverage. But to be honest, this year I wonder if I’ll have the fortitude to completely ignore everything going on out there. Especially if I start hearing bombs every hour.
What about you? Have you always had election night fever, or have you been immune like me? I realize that I may be too late in asking. You might not read this column until long after it’s all over. And what will “it’s all over” mean in 2024? God Bless America.
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