Just 200 years ago during his remarkable 21-year tenure as president of Yale, Timothy Dwight wrote a book about his many travels throughout New England and New York.

Dwight offers some insights on what then kept his fellow Americans in this part of the country amused. The first pursuit Dwight listed was “visiting,” a highly developed and popular pastime.

The type of visiting Dwight identified would remain a staple of our social life until just a generation or so ago. For it is still within the memory of many that visitation and the art of storytelling – and conversational dexterity that goes with it – were a far more regular occurrence.

Moreover, even without having friends or relatives nearby, we Americans could always count on a parade of people at our doorsteps, hawking everything from cookies to encyclopedia, vacuum cleaners to cosmetics.

“It seemed that the front doorbell was ringing all the time,” Maine’s most venerable cultural historian, 95-year-old Richard Mallett, recalled for this columnist the other day.

Those who ventured onto the Mallett family’s and other doorsteps in the 1920s-era were often about as welcome as today’s call-center originated and e-mail spam solicitations, even though breakthroughs were common enough to nourish encouragement.

Overall, however, the doorstep solicitor was long regarded as an unwelcome intrusion. At the same time, Dwight wrote, for example, the British poet Coleridge blamed the unexpected knock on the door from a Porlock businessman for causing him to permanently forget the most triumphant portion of “Kubla Khan.” Though the poem achieved masterpiece status, Coleridge always felt that it could have become an even greater classic had this man from the nearby town of Porlock, England, not dropped by for an unanticipated mercantile encounter. The hour Coleridge spent with him made Coleridge forget lines of the poem that had otherwise come to him in a dream he was attempting to transcribe, thus forever diminishing his legacy to English literature.

Despite the popularity of social visiting in early America, a political candidate trekking from door to door was not a mode of winning favor with the electorate. The voters in local and state legislative elections would be more likely than today to have already met the candidates in other settings. With membership in churches and such fraternal organizations as the Masons and Odd Fellows and with attendance at other community functions quite pervasive, chances are a voter would already have experienced a personal contact with the candidate in a mutually voluntary, if not socially bonding, encounter. Chairs pulled up around the cracker barrels and woodstoves in neighborhood general stores were another common venue for interaction with voters.

A voter in early America might regard a candidate – especially one he had never met – knocking on the door seeking votes in the same manner a young person in that era might regard an unknown person of the opposite sex approaching him or her for a date, a case of attempted familiarity without pre-existing personal recognition and respect.

Moreover, even with the dawn of the 20th century as candidates became more assertive in seeking votes, doorsteps were so cluttered with commercial and charitable solicitations that it was more difficult for political candidates to cut through such a dense forest and impose a distinctive impression. To be sure, a candidate might well call upon his own relatives, friends and acquaintances seeking support, but soliciting the votes of strangers by a comprehensive door-to-door canvas of all households in a town or city was still not an ordinary means of campaigning some 75 to l00 years ago.

By the 1930s and 1940s, attitudes began to change and the notion of visiting all households in a voting precinct was no longer alien. Effectiveness of such a method could still be another matter.

Households were still overwhelmed with unsolicited visitors. The fact that the political candidate might only be currying personal voting favor rather than customer dollars wouldn’t dull the fatigue, if not irritation, that some households no doubt experienced.

Then, almost overnight, practitioners of door-to-door political campaigning – perhaps without many of them ever realizing it – were delivered a shot in the arm in the effectiveness of the technique. This was the enactment of laws in many states, including Maine, that put the kibosh on nearly all doorstep solicitations other than religious and political ones.

Note June 28, 1974, as the date in Maine when this happened. On that day, a state law took effect that prohibited nearly all home solicited sales unless the customer was given a three-day right to cancel the deal.

Because the law did not apply to sales that occurred at stores, the door-to-door salesperson seemed to vanish almost overnight.

Though this legal change was enacted in response to legitimate concerns about the lack of accountability of the here-today-gone-tomorrow vendor, the advantage it conferred upon home soliciting political candidates is that they no longer had to share a household’s limited tolerance and attention span with the itinerant salesperson.

Talk to Maine local and legislative candidates these days and one finds that the typical reaction of most households to their dooryard calls is almost always polite and often congenial. A reason for all this is that the typical homeowner – besieged as he or she might be by phone call, e-mail and postal solicitations – finds interacting with the unexpected visitor in the more personal and authentic context of a face-to-face encounter an unusual and, therefore, more likely a welcome experience.

The art of “visiting” has thus renewed its claim to one of our pastimes, though in a way not anticipated when it was celebrated by Yale President Dwight some two centuries ago.

Paul H. Mills is a Farmington attorney well known for his analyses and historical understanding of Maine’s political scene. He can be reached by e-mail: pmills@midmaine.com.

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