WI: Thomas Edison in Politics

Celebrity presidents are a trope in alternate history. Very often, an unfortunately overdone one. However, I will use that trope to explore a topic I have never seen discussed. What if Thomas Edison, the scientific inventor and innovator, had run for political office, up to the presidency?
 
I remember reading about such a scenario in a science fiction story.

If he does run, it will be as a technocrat in the 1900-1912 period, and as a Republican due to that party's domination of the period.
 
I read a story called "Eyes of America" by aeronautical engineer and science fiction writer Geoffrey A. Landis, which has the premise of Roosevelt having apparently won in the 1900 election, only to be killed by an Anarchist (possibly Leo Czogloz, though not named), and the Republicans choosing Thomas Edison to run in his place. Edison promises to bring electricity to every home in America. William Jennings Bryan, trying to one up his opponent, recruits Nikola Tesla to help him bring electricity to America.

The long and short of it is television is invented 20 years early.
 

cpip

Gone Fishin'
Well, his son Charles went into politics, so there's that.

As for Thomas... perhaps he runs in New Jersey while in Menlo Park, in something akin to how Woodrow Wilson tried to persuade Henry Ford to run in Michigan (and Ford and Edison were neighbors at their summer homes in Florida, and was not Wilson governor of New Jersey, after all?). Edison did, after all, accept a political appointment to the Naval Consulting Board -- perhaps he finds himself proposed as Assistant Secretary of the Navy, and then from there he develops a taste for politics. His views on violence might have impeded him (while he worked on weapons, he claimed he worked on only defensive weaponry), not to mention the allegations of atheism.
 
I remember reading about such a scenario in a science fiction story.

If he does run, it will be as a technocrat in the 1900-1912 period, and as a Republican due to that party's domination of the period.

It was probably Donald R. Benson's And Having Writ . . .(1978).

A most amusing romp, with (for example) the narrator thinking how they must be dreadfully boring to the people at Edison's Menlo Park workshop, because after talking for a few minutes to the four aliens about technology, each guide, one after the other, pleads the press of most important business, hands them over to someone else, and runs back to his workbench.

 
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