Get Out the Vote Meals
Courtesy of the Library of Congress
We continue our series Stumping and Eating the role of food in elections. It wasn’t until the cost of buying votes with a meal and stiff drink became too expensive that party leaders championed the secret ballot during the Gilded Age (1877-1920). Historian Joe Gray Taylor insists “the most striking fact about the diet of the New South, from the Civil War through World War II, is not that it changed, but how little it changed.” Some traditional get out the vote meals included chicken and biscuits, turkey dinners, roast beef dinners, and soup and sandwiches.
