Losers Take All in Gallery of Presidential Also-Rans

Americans are familiar with Thomas Jefferson, Andrew Jackson, Bob Dole. But what about Charles Pinckney or Lewis Cass?

Some are famous and others forgotten, but they all share this: They ran for president and lost.

For a short but concentrated introduction to losership, visit this town on the high plains of northwest Kansas, where 56 large black-and-white drawings and photographs hang in the Gallery of Also-Rans at the First State Bank of Norton.

The bank’s late president, W.W. Rouse, started the gallery in 1965. “Basically he was interested in history. What Dad had in mind was a tourist attraction,” said Ann Hazlett, Rouse’s daughter and gallery curator from his death in 1981 until her retirement from the bank in 1995.

Sixty miles north of Interstate 70, Norton is a bit remote for the mass tourism market. Nonetheless, about 120 people visit the gallery each year, says Patsy Barnard, the curator.

The gallery, free and open during regular bank hours, is thought to be the only one of its kind in the nation. During the 1970s, the Smithsonian Institution had a similar but temporary exhibit.

The gallery of wood-framed portraits from the Library of Congress starts with Jefferson, who lost in 1796 to John Adams and won four years later against Aaron Burr, and ends with Dole, the Kansas native defeated by President Clinton in 1996.

Barnard said it took more than a year after Dole’s defeat for the Library of Congress to send his photo.

“They kept passing me to people, and finally I got somebody who got back to me,” Barnard said.

Dole wasn’t the only problem photograph. Hazlett recalled the trouble her father had with George Wallace, the longtime Alabama governor who lost to Richard Nixon in 1968.

“George kept signing it, and Dad didn’t want it signed,” Hazlett said.

Barnard said she likes the nicknames of some candidates, such as Gen. Winfield Scott, “Old Fuss and Feathers,” who lost to Franklin Pierce in 1852, or explorer John C. Fremont, “The Pathfinder,” defeated by James Buchanan in 1856.

There are many whose moment in the spotlight faded with time.

Take Charles Cotesworth Pinckney, who lost to Jefferson in 1800 and 1804 and to James Madison in 1808. He’s credited with saying, “Millions for defense, sir, but not one cent for tribute” when it was suggested that money might make the British stop impressing American seamen.

There’s Lewis Cass, defeated by Zachary Taylor in 1848. As secretary of State on the eve of the Civil War, he urged President Buchanan to send reinforcements to Charleston, S.C., where the war began in 1861. Buchanan refused and Cass resigned, saying, “I saw the Constitution born, and I fear I may see it die.”

And Horace Greeley? He ran against Ulysses S. Grant in 1872. But most people remember him as the editor credited with saying, “Go West, young man, go West.” (The man to whom he said that, J.B. Grinnell, took his advice and moved to Iowa, where he founded a small town and a college that bear his name.)

Gerald Ford, who lost to Jimmy Carter in 1976, is also featured in the gallery.

“Mr. Ford fell off the wall a few times,” Barnard said. “I guess it didn’t hang right.”