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Maryland Politics and Political Communication, 1950-2005
Maryland Politics and Political Communication, 1950-2005 is not a survey of all that occurred between 1950 and 2005. Rather, this book focuses on a set of interesting political events in which communication is a very important variable. These events, be they elections or episodes of governance, are also_arguably_the most dramatic ones during the period. It begins with an examination of George Wallace's 1964 and 1972 campaigns in the state's Democratic presidential primary, considers William Donald Schaefer's flamboyant communication strategies as Baltimore mayor and the vicious 1986 U.S. Senate campaign between Democrat Barbara Mikulski and Linda Chavez, and runs through the 2002 gubernatorial race between Kathleen Kennedy Townsend and Robert L. Ehrlich. Sheckels highlights the similarities and differences between political communication at state and national levels and looks forward to questions and scenarios that may emerge in future elections.
196 pages, Paperback
First published January 1, 2006
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November 4, 2025
Maryland, like every other state of the United States of America, has a distinctive political culture of its own. One way in which Maryland’s politics could be considered unique relates to the sheer variety of landscape and human culture within 10,577 square miles (42nd in size in the Union) – a distinction that has gained Maryland the nickname of “America in Miniature.” And the reader who wants a sense of how Maryland’s “America in Miniature” distinctiveness has affected the state’s political culture would do well to consult Theodore F. Sheckels’s 2006 study Maryland Politics and Political Communication, 1950-2005.
Author Sheckels is a professor of English and Communication at Randolph-Macon College in the Richmond-area community of Ashland, Virginia. Therefore, in contrast with the “typical” approach to politics from the disciplines of Government or Political Science, Sheckels approaches Maryland politics of the 20th and 21st centuries from a refreshingly different standpoint. His focus on the rhetoric of political communication, as exemplified (successfully or unsuccessfully) by various Maryland politicians from both major parties, gives this short work a thought-provoking quality that I liked.
I grew up in Maryland, lived most of my life there, resided or worked in 6 of the state’s 23 counties, and still consider Maryland my home state – and therefore, the political leaders that Sheckels discussed were all quite familiar to me. Readers of Maryland Politics and Political Communication, 1950-2005 will encounter some of the most memorable Maryland leaders of the last 75 years, including William Donald Schaefer, the colorful and combative Baltimore Mayor who later became Governor of Maryland; Barbara Mikulski, the longest-serving woman in the history of the United States Senate; and Lieutenant Governor Kathleen Kennedy Townsend, whose seemingly certain path to the governorship unexpectedly came to grief in 2002.
Among the most interesting chapters, for me, was one titled “What Kind of Man, Ted Agnew Is.” We all know that Spiro T. Agnew made a meteoric rise from Baltimore County Executive to Governor of Maryland to Vice President of the United States, before resigning in disgrace from the vice-presidency in 1974. What many people outside Maryland may not know, however, is that in 1966, when he ran for governor, Agnew was actually the “good guy”; in those racially troubled times, the Republican Agnew ran as a moderate on racial matters, while his Democratic opponent, George Mahoney, ran a frankly racist campaign, opposing open-housing legislation under the motto “Your Home Is Your Castle – Protect It!”
Yet the Agnew who won the governorship in 1966 as a racial moderate showed a decidedly different side in 1968, after the Baltimore riots that followed the assassination of Martin Luther King Jr. Summoning a group of moderate African American leaders to the state office building in Baltimore, Agnew delivered a blistering address in which he in effect blamed the moderates for helping “contribute” to the riots by failing to somehow “contain” more radical black leaders. More than 70 of 100 attendees walked out of Agnew’s address.
I find the speech that Agnew gave on this sad occasion appalling; you can read it for yourself at https://msa.maryland.gov/megafile/msa..., and don’t be surprised if you find it appalling, too.
Sheckels subjects the address to an Aristotelian rhetorical analysis, invoking Aristotle’s ideas of ethos (the character that a rhetor establishes through what they say and how they say it) and pathos (the way in which a rhetor appeals to the audience’s emotions). In that context, Sheckels suggests that Agnew “should have shared with his audience how upset he was by the nights of urban rioting (exhibiting and evoking pathos); he should have communicated his commitment as governor to order and justice (establishing and communicating his ethos)” (p. 50).
Agnew, clearly, chose a different path; and while his reputation as a racial moderate was left in tatters, he seems to have revelled in the favorable attention that he garnered from conservative whites who were frightened and angered by the rioting in Baltimore and other U.S. cities. One of those conservative whites whose attention Agnew drew was Republican presidential candidate Richard Nixon; and 4 months after giving this address that outraged and angered so many African Americans of Baltimore, Agnew was a nominee for Vice President of the United States. Agnew came closer to the U.S. presidency than any other Marylander since John Hanson in the 18th century; he rose a long way and then fell a long way, like a character from classical or Shakespearean tragedy, and his is truly a strange story to contemplate.
The chapter on “Who Told the Better Story: Negative Advertising in the 1998 Glendening vs. Sauerbrey Gubernatorial Campaign” brought back a lot of memories for me. Both 1994 and 1998 furnished the spectacle of a gubernatorial campaign between two candidates who were not particularly well-liked. Democrat Parris Glendening, a former college professor, was widely regarded as “professorial” in the worst sense of the word – aloof and standoffish. Republican Ellen Sauerbrey, a conservative with a confrontational approach, had gained the unfortunate nickname “Ellen Sourgrapes” when she refused to concede after a close election defeat in 1994.
For the 1998 rematch campaign, therefore, it should be no surprise that the campaigns for these two candidates engaged in plenty of negative advertising against one another. For Sheckels, the Glendening campaign was more successful at using negative advertising to make voters question Sauerbrey’s fitness for the job of governor: “Drawing attention to [Sauerbrey’s] challenge of the 1994 results helped to reinforce the ‘sour grapes’ narrative” – a narrative that “dogged Sauerbrey to an extent that is surprising, since good sportsmanship is not usually listed among the character traits that candidates stress and voters care about” (p. 105). By contrast, the Sauerbrey campaign’s “efforts were uneven. [Sauerbrey] wasted time getting angry and sharing her indignation. That strategy might have appealed to her most ardent supporters; it did not, however, help with voters who were receiving negative information about Sauerbrey’s views and record” (p. 105). Glendening won this rematch election; and, from having lived in Howard County at the time, I could remember many of the ads that Sheckels analyzes here, and my impressions of the two campaigns’ ads were similar to his.
A particularly thoughtful chapter provided a comparison and contrast of Governors Theodore McKeldin and Robert Ehrlich – both Republicans who successfully rose to the governor’s chair in predominantly Democratic Maryland (McKeldin in the early 1950’s, Ehrlich in the early 2000’s). Aptly, Sheckels sets forth the similarities of the two – “Both men sounded similar campaign notes; both men were advantaged by division among the Democrats; and both men had to deal with ‘divided government’ once on the job in Annapolis.” But the differences between McKeldin and Ehrlich may be of greater significance for our times: “Whereas McKeldin dealt with [divided government] by – rather quickly – adopting a non-partisan approach to many matters, Ehrlich chose a much more partisan route” (p. 153). Those differences in approach may have had to do with the two governors’ long-term electoral success: McKeldin won a second term, and was a popular governor throughout his tenure, while Ehrlich was defeated in his bid for re-election in 2006.
It would be interesting to sit down with Sheckels, at a crab restaurant somewhere, and hear his thoughts on those Maryland governors whose terms extend beyond the period covered by this book – Martin O’Malley (Democratic, 2007-15), Larry Hogan (Republican, 2015-23), and Wes Moore (Democratic, 2023-present). In the absence of opportunity for such a conversation, I will simply say that I found Maryland Politics and Political Communication, 1950-2005, published by the Lanham-based Rowman & Littlefield publishing company, to be a pleasant and informative study that helped me to better understand the politics of my home state.
Author Sheckels is a professor of English and Communication at Randolph-Macon College in the Richmond-area community of Ashland, Virginia. Therefore, in contrast with the “typical” approach to politics from the disciplines of Government or Political Science, Sheckels approaches Maryland politics of the 20th and 21st centuries from a refreshingly different standpoint. His focus on the rhetoric of political communication, as exemplified (successfully or unsuccessfully) by various Maryland politicians from both major parties, gives this short work a thought-provoking quality that I liked.
I grew up in Maryland, lived most of my life there, resided or worked in 6 of the state’s 23 counties, and still consider Maryland my home state – and therefore, the political leaders that Sheckels discussed were all quite familiar to me. Readers of Maryland Politics and Political Communication, 1950-2005 will encounter some of the most memorable Maryland leaders of the last 75 years, including William Donald Schaefer, the colorful and combative Baltimore Mayor who later became Governor of Maryland; Barbara Mikulski, the longest-serving woman in the history of the United States Senate; and Lieutenant Governor Kathleen Kennedy Townsend, whose seemingly certain path to the governorship unexpectedly came to grief in 2002.
Among the most interesting chapters, for me, was one titled “What Kind of Man, Ted Agnew Is.” We all know that Spiro T. Agnew made a meteoric rise from Baltimore County Executive to Governor of Maryland to Vice President of the United States, before resigning in disgrace from the vice-presidency in 1974. What many people outside Maryland may not know, however, is that in 1966, when he ran for governor, Agnew was actually the “good guy”; in those racially troubled times, the Republican Agnew ran as a moderate on racial matters, while his Democratic opponent, George Mahoney, ran a frankly racist campaign, opposing open-housing legislation under the motto “Your Home Is Your Castle – Protect It!”
Yet the Agnew who won the governorship in 1966 as a racial moderate showed a decidedly different side in 1968, after the Baltimore riots that followed the assassination of Martin Luther King Jr. Summoning a group of moderate African American leaders to the state office building in Baltimore, Agnew delivered a blistering address in which he in effect blamed the moderates for helping “contribute” to the riots by failing to somehow “contain” more radical black leaders. More than 70 of 100 attendees walked out of Agnew’s address.
I find the speech that Agnew gave on this sad occasion appalling; you can read it for yourself at https://msa.maryland.gov/megafile/msa..., and don’t be surprised if you find it appalling, too.
Sheckels subjects the address to an Aristotelian rhetorical analysis, invoking Aristotle’s ideas of ethos (the character that a rhetor establishes through what they say and how they say it) and pathos (the way in which a rhetor appeals to the audience’s emotions). In that context, Sheckels suggests that Agnew “should have shared with his audience how upset he was by the nights of urban rioting (exhibiting and evoking pathos); he should have communicated his commitment as governor to order and justice (establishing and communicating his ethos)” (p. 50).
Agnew, clearly, chose a different path; and while his reputation as a racial moderate was left in tatters, he seems to have revelled in the favorable attention that he garnered from conservative whites who were frightened and angered by the rioting in Baltimore and other U.S. cities. One of those conservative whites whose attention Agnew drew was Republican presidential candidate Richard Nixon; and 4 months after giving this address that outraged and angered so many African Americans of Baltimore, Agnew was a nominee for Vice President of the United States. Agnew came closer to the U.S. presidency than any other Marylander since John Hanson in the 18th century; he rose a long way and then fell a long way, like a character from classical or Shakespearean tragedy, and his is truly a strange story to contemplate.
The chapter on “Who Told the Better Story: Negative Advertising in the 1998 Glendening vs. Sauerbrey Gubernatorial Campaign” brought back a lot of memories for me. Both 1994 and 1998 furnished the spectacle of a gubernatorial campaign between two candidates who were not particularly well-liked. Democrat Parris Glendening, a former college professor, was widely regarded as “professorial” in the worst sense of the word – aloof and standoffish. Republican Ellen Sauerbrey, a conservative with a confrontational approach, had gained the unfortunate nickname “Ellen Sourgrapes” when she refused to concede after a close election defeat in 1994.
For the 1998 rematch campaign, therefore, it should be no surprise that the campaigns for these two candidates engaged in plenty of negative advertising against one another. For Sheckels, the Glendening campaign was more successful at using negative advertising to make voters question Sauerbrey’s fitness for the job of governor: “Drawing attention to [Sauerbrey’s] challenge of the 1994 results helped to reinforce the ‘sour grapes’ narrative” – a narrative that “dogged Sauerbrey to an extent that is surprising, since good sportsmanship is not usually listed among the character traits that candidates stress and voters care about” (p. 105). By contrast, the Sauerbrey campaign’s “efforts were uneven. [Sauerbrey] wasted time getting angry and sharing her indignation. That strategy might have appealed to her most ardent supporters; it did not, however, help with voters who were receiving negative information about Sauerbrey’s views and record” (p. 105). Glendening won this rematch election; and, from having lived in Howard County at the time, I could remember many of the ads that Sheckels analyzes here, and my impressions of the two campaigns’ ads were similar to his.
A particularly thoughtful chapter provided a comparison and contrast of Governors Theodore McKeldin and Robert Ehrlich – both Republicans who successfully rose to the governor’s chair in predominantly Democratic Maryland (McKeldin in the early 1950’s, Ehrlich in the early 2000’s). Aptly, Sheckels sets forth the similarities of the two – “Both men sounded similar campaign notes; both men were advantaged by division among the Democrats; and both men had to deal with ‘divided government’ once on the job in Annapolis.” But the differences between McKeldin and Ehrlich may be of greater significance for our times: “Whereas McKeldin dealt with [divided government] by – rather quickly – adopting a non-partisan approach to many matters, Ehrlich chose a much more partisan route” (p. 153). Those differences in approach may have had to do with the two governors’ long-term electoral success: McKeldin won a second term, and was a popular governor throughout his tenure, while Ehrlich was defeated in his bid for re-election in 2006.
It would be interesting to sit down with Sheckels, at a crab restaurant somewhere, and hear his thoughts on those Maryland governors whose terms extend beyond the period covered by this book – Martin O’Malley (Democratic, 2007-15), Larry Hogan (Republican, 2015-23), and Wes Moore (Democratic, 2023-present). In the absence of opportunity for such a conversation, I will simply say that I found Maryland Politics and Political Communication, 1950-2005, published by the Lanham-based Rowman & Littlefield publishing company, to be a pleasant and informative study that helped me to better understand the politics of my home state.
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