06-04-2025
For 60 years Kansas town has honored presidential runners-up, like Kamala Harris
In the heat of social media battles, Donald Trump fans use two words to smack down Kamala Harris supporters and critics of his thus-far tumultuous presidency: You lost!
'Tis true.
But in one hamlet of about 2,800 residents in the northwest corner of the Sunflower State, once little more than a stop on a stagecoach route, there is no shame in running for president and losing.
In Norton, Kansas, presidential runners-up are celebrated.
For 60 years, the town has invited tourists to visit a museum on the second floor of The First State Bank downtown. Bank customers can see it from the lobby.
It is called the 'They Also Ran Gallery,' a collection of black-and-white pictures and brief biographies of men and women who lost their bids to become U.S. president.
A picture of Thomas Jefferson, the loser of the 1796 presidential race, hangs there. Jimmy Carter, George H.W. Bush, Al Gore, John McCain, Mitt Romney and Hillary Clinton are there, too.
So is Trump, who lost his bid at reelection to Joe Biden in 2020.
Once, a National Portrait Gallery spokeswoman pooh-poohed the idea of a losers museum as 'a bad idea if you are a losing candidate.'
Created in the 1960s by a civic-minded businessman to lure visitors to town, the quirky gallery was never meant as a political statement, even in an undeniably red state.
With politics as ugly and divisive as they are today, holding that bipartisan line is challenging the gallery's sole keeper who hasn't yet written the brief biographies for Harris or Trump, whose photo has been displayed since 2021.
The museum's benign guiding principle since day one has been this: Let's not forget the also-rans.
Lee Ann Shearer, the bank employee who has curated the gallery for nearly two decades, wondered if everyone had forgotten about the gallery itself when no media called her after Inauguration Day in January.
'I haven't tooted our horn or anything, we're just kind of one of those not-so-exciting museums unless you're really into politics,' Shearer told The Star this week.
Over the years, the gallery has attracted interest and visitors from across the country, especially in and around presidential election years. The latest induction of Harris, though, came and went with none of the usual fanfare.
Typically on Inauguration Day, Shearer sets up a TV, chairs and snacks in the gallery for visitors. Then about a half hour before the president takes the oath of office in D.C., she unveils the portrait of the person they vanquished.
That didn't happen this year.
'We've had a few parties, a few inaugural parties and such,' she said. 'But we didn't in the COVID year and we didn't this year because of Inauguration Day landing on a Monday that we were closed, Martin Luther King Day. We weren't open, so we didn't have much excitement around it.'
Shearer began as a bookkeeper at the bank in 1998 and now works as a customer service representative. She jokes that she's a 'busy bee' around Norton, working with the Chamber of Commerce and helping to promote local tourism.
Norton is one of the state's many pass-through communities sustained by agriculture, a town people don't stumble upon because it sits far off the well-traveled paths of Interstate 80 to the north and Interstate 70 to the south.
Both Kansas City and Denver are more than a four-hour drive away.
'It's not mountainous, it's not forest. It's just the plains, we're only plains, I suppose,' said Shearer.
Back in the mid-60s when William Walter Rouse, a noted history buff and former president of the First State Bank, opened the gallery, the town had maybe 75 businesses downtown, she said. Today, there's just a handful.
Rouse and fellow community leaders hatched a plan to recreate a stagecoach station that had served the town in the late 1800s when the area was a stop on the line running between Leavenworth, Kansas and Pike's Peak in Colorado.
They built a replica of the station and named a street after Horace Greeley, the famous publisher of the New York Tribune who, according to town lore, stayed overnight at the station in 1859.
Stagecoach Station 15 still stands, one of the town's other attractions that goes 'hand-in-hand' with the gallery, Shearer said.
Later, someone gifted Rouse a book called 'They Also Ran,' by Irving Stone, which told of 19 men who lost when they ran for president. Greeley was one of them, losing in a landslide to Ulysses S. Grant in 1872.
A big fan of Greeley, Rouse began collecting black-and-white copies of portraits and photos of presidential also-rans from the Library of Congress to showcase.
'His friends called him a nut and said, 'What are you doing? Who is going to stop and see this?'' Shearer said.
When the bank in 1965 moved into its current location, a former theater, Rouse displayed the photos in the building's former mezzanine. They're all the same size, 16-inches-by-20-inches, and all black-and-white for that archival look.
In the beginning Rouse displayed independent and third-party candidates, but when space got tight only runners-up earned a spot. That's why the gallery features 63 photos, even though Trump is currently president No. 47.
Democrat Adlai Stevenson is there. He lost to Dwight D. Eisenhower in 1952, and has been described as 'the most beautiful loser' in presidential history.
'It is traditionally American to fight hard before an election. It is equally traditional to close ranks as soon as the people have spoken,' Stevenson said in his concession speech.
'That which unites us as American citizens is far greater than that which divides us as political parties. I urge you all to give to General Eisenhower the support he will need to carry out the great task that lie before him. I pledge him mine. We vote as many. But we pray as one.'
John Kerry, too, spoke of national unity and the values Americans hold in common when he conceded to George W. Bush in 2004.
Kerry rejected the term 'loser.'
'In an American election, there are no losers,' Kerry said. 'Because whether or not our candidates are successful, the next morning, we all wake up as Americans. And that is the greatest privilege and the most remarkable good fortune that can come to us on earth.'
The gallery wound up in Shearer's care 'mainly because I found it so interesting why people would come all the way out to Norton to a town of 2,800 people to look at a place that collects all the first runner-ups,' she said.
'I used my creative juices that I don't have anywhere else in my job to try to come up with a way to make it interesting and make sure our local tourism group promotes it, when people do come in, as one of the highlights of Norton.'
Visitors are hit-and-miss, maybe 200 in an election year. Not many have stopped in to see Harris' picture, said Shearer, who admits the museum 'is kinda hard to find' but hopes new signage coming helps.
'I haven't given a lot of tours in the last couple of weeks. They come in very randomly,' she said. 'Sometimes I might have two in a day, sometimes might not have one for two weeks.'
No losing candidate has ever visited. Shearer just missed a chance to have former Kansas Sen. Bob Dole stop by years ago. The Russell, Kansas native, who died in 2021, is featured in the gallery because he lost his presidential bid to Bill Clinton in 1996.
The last two pictures, Trump and Harris, are displayed without biographies, though each has a brief one on the gallery's website,
Shearer can't find the right words to write. She's frozen in her desire to 'make everybody feel comfortable,' a tough task given that one candidate is associated with the attack on the U.S. Capitol on Jan. 6, 2021.
'I haven't got a biography for Trump yet and I haven't got a biography for Kamala yet because it's an ongoing story,' she said. 'It's not complete. Some parts of it are historic but there's so much more to what I can put in three paragraphs in the frame.
'And it's kind of bugging me that since everything is current I can't put everything encapsulated into a paragraph because it's hard at this moment in time to know what is true and what is not true.
'We definitely don't want to make it feel any one way versus another way politically. I am by no means putting anything that's going to offend anyone in any story. It's very hard and that's probably why I've been unable to finish.'
She's already had a taste of what landmines could lie ahead.
'There's only been one time that anybody has been a little bit aggressive about it and it was a lady yelling downstairs at the tellers,' she said.
The woman wanted Trump's biography, when it appears, to proclaim that he incited violence on Jan. 6, one of the things Shearer is uneasy to write because she personally doesn't know what's true and what's not.
'It made us feel bad because we've never really had anyone put up any fire ...' she said. 'I make sure (visitors) know that this is to honor these people because it's the highest pinnacle of almost-success in their lives.'
She is so resolutely loyal to the museum's 60-year-old tradition that it bothers her when headlines refer to the gallery's honorees as 'losers.'
Oh how she doesn't like that word.
'It's ornery and it's hurtful,' she said. 'We have been referred to as, I probably shouldn't say it, but (media) have said ... hail to the losers. But I try to call them 'challengers' and 'candidates.'
'I try to keep it pretty positive. But there's people poking at everything in the world, I guess.'
