There was a time when Election Day—raucous, electrifying, a cause for hopeful celebration—turned metropolitan cities like New York upside-down. These days, most of us vote in elementary schools badly in need of fresh paint and attended by sleep-deprived poll workers. In contrast, Election Night (1907), by Ashcan School painter John Sloan (1871–1951), shows us just how exciting casting a vote and waiting for results could be at the turn of the century.
From Sloan’s diary, November 5th: “. . . took a walk in the afternoon and saw boys in droves, foraging for fuel for their election fires this evening. . . . after dinner . . . out again and saw the noisy trumpet blowers, confetti throwers and the “ticklers” in use—a small feather duster on a stick which is pushed in the face of each girl by the men, and in the face of men by the girls.”
That certainly doesn’t describe a day of civic duty in modern times. His painting, however, hums with modernity. The elevated trains in the background had been open to the public for less than 40 years. The first automobile was only a few months away. The crowd is sandwiched between the electric streetlights (some of the city’s first) that line streets. Sloan captures the scene, its movement, the cacophony. (And what’s with those ticklers? Surely one would get arrested today for trying to liven up the local poll site with “a tickler”.)
Four figures dominate the canvas. At the center, a woman in red, tickler in hand, leans over with as if to shout something to a friend in the crowd. But with closer inspection you notice her hand, shooing away the man behind her with the salacious grin who is showering her with a handful of confetti. In his other hand he holds one of the “noisy trumpets” Sloan wrote about. In fact, the trumpets, like the confetti, are everywhere.
To her right, a mysterious man wearing as derby hat faces away from the viewer. Odd for something so central in the picture. Though his back is turned its clear that he holds a tickler in his right hand. One could be forgiven for thinking it was a paint brush. Following the line up from his outstretched arm and down the thin stick you wind up looking at a blonde in the thick of the crowd, almost as if the man in hat placed her there.
Sloan’s quick brush strokes may distort some of the faces, but the way he manipulates paint on the canvas emphasizes the dynamic movement of the crowd and pulls the viewer in to the boisterous, chaotic atmosphere. “A good humored crowd,” Sloan wrote in his diary, “so dense in places that it was impossible to control one’s movement. A big election bonfire on Seventh Ave. with a policeman trying to keep its creators from adding fuel.”