Vicki Lynne Cole, 13, carried a sign reading ‘Bring Us Together’ at a Nixon rally in her home town of Deshler, Ohio during the campaign. Nixon mentioned the Deshler rally and the sign in his victory speech on November 6, 1968, adopting the phrase as representing his administration’s initial goal. Cole came forward as the person who carried the sign, and was the subject of intense media attention.
About Bring Us Together in brief
Vicki Lynne Cole, 13, carried a sign reading ‘Bring Us Together’ at a Nixon rally in her home town of Deshler, Ohio during the campaign. Nixon mentioned the Deshler rally and the sign in his victory speech on November 6, 1968, adopting the phrase as representing his administration’s initial goal—to reunify the bitterly divided country. Cole came forward as the person who carried the sign, and was the subject of intense media attention. Nixon invited Cole and her family to the inauguration, and she appeared on a float in the inaugural parade. The phrase was used ironically by Democrats when Nixon proposed policies they disagreed with or refused to support. In newspaper columns written in his final years before his 2009 death, William Safire expressed doubts that Cole’s sign ever existed. In interviews, Cole related that as the crowd surged forward, she dropped her sign amidst the pushing and shoving. She later stated that she did not even look at the sign until she was teased about it by a classmate, who suggested the sign was about boys, not politics. She told the media that she kept the dress, but kept the sign. She said she thought he was a good family man, looking warm and friendly and appearing much as she expected him to be. She declined to comment on Nixon’s 1974 resignation, but subsequently expressed her sympathy for him. The campaign was one of the most bitterly fought in the nation’s history.
It was set among national divisions over the Vietnam War, social policy, and against the backdrop of riot and assassination, none of the campaigns made healing divisions a major theme. By 1968, candidates were appealing to the electorate through television, rather than through whistle-stop train tours. Nixon had included them in his past national campaigns—he had broken off one such tour in 1952 to make the Checkers speech, and in 1960, had stopped at Deshler. The rural Ohio village, about 45 miles southwest of Toledo, was popular among whistle-stopping presidential candidates as two main lines of the Baltimore & Ohio Railroad crossed there. Other visitors in search of votes had included Al Smith, Harry Truman, and Barry Goldwater. Deshler voters would respond in 1968 by giving Nixon an overwhelming majority of their votes. In 1960, the incumbent President, Democrat Lyndon Baines Johnson, could give Humphrey little support because of his own unpopularity. In 1968, Nixon asserted that though his opponent, Vice President Humphrey, claimed that Americans had never had it so good, he should tell that to the farmer. He recalled that his father had hailed from Ohio: ‘His roots are mine and mine are too!\’ Nixon said he would make the Secretary of Agriculture a White House advocate to restore order.
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This page is based on the article Bring Us Together published in Wikipedia (as of Nov. 04, 2020) and was automatically summarized using artificial intelligence.
