“Whistlestopping” at Kankakee
- jwklasey
- 7 days ago
- 4 min read
By Jack Klasey
November 8, 2025
Until the 1900 election, campaigning by presidential and vice-presidential candidates was conducted primarily through speeches delivered in or near the candidate’s home, then widely printed in newspapers across the nation.
Republican presidential candidate William McKinley, who was seeking a second term, campaigned from the front porch of his house at Canton, Ohio. McKinley’s running mate, the dynamic “Rough Rider” Theodore Roosevelt, adopted a more active campaign strategy. Taking advantage of the nation’s wide network of railroads, Roosevelt delivered his message from the back of a private railcar. He made literally hundreds of speeches, mostly in smaller rural towns. The strategy apparently was effective: the McKinley/Roosevelt ticket defeated the Democratic slate of William Jennings Bryan and Adlai Stevenson I by an Electoral College margin of 292 to 155.
“Since that first whistlestop campaign,” noted a 2023 magazine article, “every U.S. president except William G. Harding, Calvin Coolidge, and Donald Trump has used the private railcar to connect with the voters in small-town America.”
The term “whistlestop” was originally used to describe small towns along a railroad line, as explained by author Edward Segal in his 2024 book, Whistlestop Politics, Campaign Trains and The Reporters Who Covered Them. “The term was coined by railroad operators to describe a town too small to receive regularly scheduled rail service,” Segal wrote. “If there were passengers to be discharged, the conductor would pull the signal cord, and the engineer would respond with two toots of the whistle.”
In 1948, almost one-half century after Roosevelt’s railroad-based campaign, “whistlestop” was specifically applied to an extensive train trip conducted by Democratic President Harry S Truman. “It was only during his campaign that reporters started referring to the practice as ‘going on a ‘whistlestop tour,’” wrote Segal.
“A train was the perfect way to organize a campaign trip,” Segal noted. “The candidate traveled in the rear car, which provided a portable platform for him (and it was almost always a “him”) to speak to a grassroots group. It was easy to assemble a crowd: The stop was in a small town, it was a chance to see someone famous, trains made a lot of noise coming in, and often there was music playing.”
While Kankakee is not, by most standards, a “small town,” its location on a major railroad line made it an attractive stop for two “whistlestop” campaigns during the 1950s. Both political visits involved the same individual: Richard M. Nixon.
The first event was on the afternoon of October 17, 1952, when Senator Nixon, the running mate of Republican Presidential candidate Gen. Dwight D. Eisenhower, arrived in Kankakee aboard a private train. The Kankakee Daily Journal reported, “Richard Nixon, the fighting senator from California, reached Kankakee this afternoon, where a roaring reception greeted him at the Illinois Central Railroad station. Kankakee schools were dismissed for the event, and many other community activities were suspended for his rear-platform address at 2:30 p.m.”
Bands from three local high schools—Kankakee, Bradley-Bourbonnais, and St. Patrick— were on hand to serenade the large crowd gathered at the depot. The original plan for the visit was to have a larger number of school bands providing music, but that plan had to be scuttled. In a separate front-page story, the Journal explained: “The appearance of eight Kankakee area bands for the visit of Sen. Richard Nixon…was called off at the last minute due to a ruling of the Illinois High School Association. The executive director of the association… notified the committee in charge of the reception that the [IHSA] board of directors…had ruled that ‘no member school may participate in any interscholastic music activity involving four or more schools that is not sanctioned by the board of directors of the association.’” As a result of the ISHA ruling, invitations to five area schools (Beecher, Momence, Manteno, Herscher, and Grant Park) were abruptly withdrawn.
Nixon’s whistlestop day of campaigning across northern Illinois was a busy one. It began with stops and speeches at Freeport and Rockford before his 20-minute speech at Kankakee, and would wrap up with stops at Chicago and north-suburban Winnetka. Eighteen days later, on November 4, 1952, Eisenhower and Nixon won the election in a landslide. They gathered 442 electoral votes to 89 votes for the Democratic candidates Adlai Stevenson II and John Sparkman (Stevenson’s grandfather, Adlai Stevenson I, was the unsuccessful Democratic vice-presidential candidate in 1900.).
The 1956 presidential election campaign brought Richard Nixon back to Kankakee on October 24 for another whistlestop appearance. “A record audience heard Vice President Richard Nixon declare here [on] Wednesday afternoon that Adlai Stevenson ‘just isn’t in the same league with President Eisenhower,’ and warn that Democratic programs would halt the nation’s present progress,” reported the Daily Journal. “News correspondents traveling with Nixon estimated the crowd at 10,000 to 12,000, [the] largest turnout on the vice-president’s tour. All the crowds have been large for a whistlestop campaign, the traveling newsmen reported.”
Accompanying Nixon on the train were his wife Pat, Illinois Senator Everett M. Dirksen, and Congressman Leslie C. Arends. The newspaper noted that they “received a royal welcome when their campaign special pulled in at the Illinois Central station,” and that “a festive spirit prevailed under perfect autumn skies.”
The vice president praised Dirksen as “a tower of strength in support of the president,” and urged the reelection of Congressman Arends. He declared, “We don’t have to settle for the second-best leadership. We have the best in Dwight D. Eisenhower, so let’s go out and elect him and the Republican House and Senate that he needs.”
On November 6, 1956, history repeated itself, as Eisenhower and Nixon were reelected by an even larger landslide than in 1952. They captured 457 electoral votes to the 73 gathered by Stevenson and his running mate, Sen. Estes Kefauver.
Jack Klasey is a former Journal reporter and a retired publishing executive. He can be contacted at jwklasey@comcast.net.