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| From the Award-Winning Author of 1920: The Year of the Six Presidents |
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Neo-Nazis, Beatniks, Vegetarians—and Uncle
Sam: The Long, Strange Roster of 1960’s Third
Party Presidential Hopefuls
David Pietrusza
The 1960 great presidential debate. A perspiring Richard Nixon
versus a bronzed John Fitzgerald Kennedy—but no Lar Daly.
Yes, Lar “America First” Daly, for not only were Tricky Dick and
JFK on the ballot so was a host of truly lesser lights, starting with
perennial third-party icon Lar Daly but spreading far left and far right
and far weird in a dozen other directions. No Theodore Roosevelts
appeared on the horizon in 1960, no Gene Debses or Fighting Bob
LaFollettes, not even a Norman Thomas, a Henry Wallace, a J.
Strom Thurmond. George Wallace and Ross Perot and John
Anderson and Ralph Nader lay years ahead. But while 1960 clearly
marked a nadir, a deep, distinct mucky slough, in third party quality,
it did not reflect a diminution in quantity.
Most noticeable, though not necessarily most popular in terms of
votes cast was Mr. Daly, a 48-year old Chicago bar stool
manufacturer who sang and played the fiddle in taverns—and
unsuccessfully competed for every office he could think of, all the
while attired in a beautifully-tailored Uncle Sam suit.
Over the years, Lar Daly had vociferously boosted Douglas
MacArthur and Joe McCarthy. He had once offered to Harry
Truman to personally drop an atom bomb on the Kremlin. Most
recently, however, he had become an expert on the Federal
Communications Commissions’ arcane Equal Time Rule and used it
as a crowbar to euchre precious free air time, whether back home in
Chicago or nationwide.
He never did succeed in gaining a podium at the Kennedy-Nixon
Great Debates (though only because the United States Congress
passed special legislative to prevent his presence) but when JFK
guested on Jack Paar’s late-night NBC talk show, Daly demanded—
and got—his own appearance with Paar.
Paar fumed. The studio audience booed. And Daly calmly informed
the nation: “You only choice is America first—or death.”
The nation thought otherwise.
Lar Daly, apostle both of nuclear war and the equal time rule, was,
however, merely the most piquantly-clad contestant in 1960’s
unusual rag-bag of hopeless hopefuls. Measured by votes cast,
meaningful platforms, or ability to lead, all offered negligible value.
But in understanding what lay below the neat Madison Avenue-
driven world of Washington politics, in delving into the murky,
irrational subconscious of the American mentality on the cusp of the
pressed gray flannel 50s and the frayed blue denim 60s, into the
contradictory madness (or, sometime, truth) that lay just below the
Lazy Shave surface, 1960’s third party aspirants possessed rare,
inestimable, often overlooked, value.
They were, in their virtually anonymous aggregate, the men who
made the Democratic and Republican parties look sane.
Yes, some were, indeed, quite mad, not in the sense of such up-and-
coming phenomena as the John Birch Society or the Students for a
Democratic Society, nor merely conniving or eccentric, but simply
outright mad.
Such was the rather obvious case of Dick Nixon’s fellow Whittierite,
Gabriel Green, who boldly claimed to have personally observed
seventy-five flying saucers and had secured the backing of the
30,000-member Amalgamated Flying Saucer Club of America.
“With the help of spacemen,” the lanky, wild-eyed, 35 year old
bachelor confided to skeptical terrestrials, “I believe I can carry
millions of votes and many areas. They will help me, not necessarily
at the precinct level, but by supplying me with information.”
Of course, Green was not the only one in contact with the
spacemen. “All of our high scientists have been taken to other
planets,” he stated rather matter-of-factly, “President Eisenhower
flew out to Edwards Air Force Base for a briefing with a saucer crew.
“I know that Nixon has been contacted, but I am not sure about
Kennedy.”
In some ways, however, Gabe Green seemed far ahead of his major
party rivals, in fact, downright prescient. While Messrs. Kennedy and
Nixon prattled on about non-existent missile gaps and rock-strewn
Quemoy and Matsu, Gabe Green foresaw giving everyone a credit
card—and free health and dental insurance. “I may not win in 1960,”
he forecast, “but I’m sure of 1964.”
But most were not so prescient—or so mad.
Some bore the tattered standards of long established parties, though
among those were parties on their last legs, political movements that
could have used whatever assistance little green men might offer, and
it was difficult to understand how they had survived at all, in any
form, with even the smallest membership. Discovering such entities
with hearts still beating was akin to finding a species of marine life
thought to have become extinct millions of years ago.
Such was the case of the rapidly-expiring Greenback Party.
The cheap-money Greenbacks had been around since 1876,
although they hadn’t mounted anything approaching a real campaign
since 1884. In 1960, Greenbacks made Prohibitionists seem like the
wave of the future. Unable to hold a convention, nonetheless, in late
February 82-year old party chairman John Henry Zahnd (also its
1924, 1928, 1936, and 1940 hopeful) announced his party’s
candidates: Oklahoma-born 65-year old Los Angeles “ambulance
first aid man” (and occasional author) Whitney Hart Slocomb and 75-
year Boston-based book publisher Edward Kirby Meador
(coincidentally, the Slocomb’s publisher). Meador, the party’s 1956
vice-presidential candidate, claimed descent from Benjamin Franklin.
The party barely had time to announce its team and its slogan (“all
reform waits for money reform—then let us get money reform first”)
before submerging once again into the murky depths of organisms
largely thought extinct.
The Socialist Labor Party (SLP), just as old as the Greenbacks,
had, on the other hand, taken its time getting started but once it did
had evinced remarkable staying power for such a small group
plagued such higher-profiled rivals as Gene Debs’s once-vibrant
Socialist Party. Founded in 1876, the SLP didn’t bother naming
slates of electors until 1884, speaking English (as opposed to
German) until 1890, or designating an actual presidential candidate
until 1892, but it had offered candidates every four years since—
despite the disadvantages of having its 1920 standard bearer jailed
for murder and its 1928 candidate expire while rescuing a drowning
child.
The 1960 SLP platform, adopted in convention at the ballroom of
New York’s Henry Hudson Hotel that May, screamed: “the
overriding issue . . . is—SOCIALISM and SURVIVAL V.
CAPITALISM and CATASTROPHE!” Displaying unusual—
though, nonetheless, admirable—terseness for a party platform, the
document paid only lip-service to nationalizing business and industry,
displaying far more passion regarding nuclear waste (“high-level,
boiling hot”) and smashing “the present procapitalist unions.”
The SLP’s ticket consisted of New Yorker Eric Hass, longtime
editor of the party official organ, “Weekly People,” and 45-year old
Wisconsin housewife Georgia Purvis Cozzini—the team it had
offered in 1952 and 1956. When the blond, bespectacled, Nebraska-
born Hass (a former railroad brakeman, reporter, and advertising
man) wasn’t editing or running for president, he ran almost
compulsively for everything else: once for city City Council President,
twice for United States Senator, three times for Governor, and four
times for mayor. Cozzini was no slouch, either. She herself had run
for United States Senator and Governor (the first time when she was
just 27—Wisconsin’s first female gubernatorial candidate) twice
times each.
Upon the campaign trail, the grim-looking Haas (a self-proclaimed
“bona-fide Marxist”), armed himself with charts to illustrate his bona-
fide Marxist views of how to organize society, traveling coast-to-
coast to address equally “grave, expectant” listeners. “When he talks
the language of socialism,” the New York Times noted, “he
somehow sounds more like an insurance salesman than a didactic,
doctrinaire radical.”
That may not have been a compliment.
The rival Socialist Workers Party (SWP), on the other hand, was
less socialist than communist, essentially being a Trotskyite offshoot
of the Communist Party USA. Existing in various forms since 1928,
the SWP advocated, among other items, increasing America’s
supposed missile gap by destroying the nation’s nuclear armaments
and withdrawing all U.S. troops from foreign soil.
Poised against both the Stalinist and post-Stalinist East and the
capitalist and post-capitalist West, the SWP posed no particular
threat to anything, save to its proponents’ ability to earn a living. In
1960, it nominated—as in 1952 and 1956—two New Yorkers: 53-
year old former New York City truck driver Farrell Dobbs, a
personal friend of the martyred Leon Trotsky, and former “cannery
worker, waitress and labor organizer” the petite, 43-year old petite,
yet fiery, Myra Tanner Weiss.
Mrs. Weiss’s Mormon grandfather had fled to Canada when his
church banned polygamy in 1890. She had long since abandoned her
proletarian activities and was now the stylishly attired wife of a
Trotskyite psychotherapist.
Originally a Herbert Hoover Republican, Dobbs had performed
yeoman work in making the Teamsters union a national force.
Federal authorities had jailed Dobbs during World War II for
advocating “violent overthrow of the US Government.” Though not
the only candidate to have served behind bars, Dobbs was 1960’s
only presidential candidate to visit Cuba during the campaign. He
liked what he saw.
The Communist Party USA (CPUSA) was not running. Still reeling
from McCarthy Era scrutiny, it hadn’t run for much of anything in
quite a while, and when it so attempted, it usually didn’t achieve
ballot position. In August 1960, the party undertook a reasonably
unusual move, publishing a resolution in its official organ, The
Worker, basically favoring the Kennedy-Johnson ticket. While
refusing to describe the Democrats as a “lesser evil,” the CPUSA
lectured followers that “it would be a still greater error to adopt a
negative, defeatist, ‘curses-on-both-your-houses’ position.”
Such thinking, the party continued, would “only encourage ‘stay-at-
home’ moods and feed such sects as the SLP or the Trotskyites [the
SWP], who render only lip service to socialist aims.”
And, the CPUSA advanced, such above-the fray attitudes would be
irresponsible, in view of “the indisputable fact that the Nixon-Lodge
ticket has abandoned the peace pretexts of the Republican Party, and
today symbolizes before the country and the world those two-faced,
double-dealing provocative policies of the Eisenhower regime . . .”
“Moreover, Nixon’s record in the House, in the Senate and as Vice
President is marked by one long series of anti-labor reactionary
deeds. A defeat for this ticket would be heralded everywhere as a
defeat for those war-inciting and anti-labor policies.”
“We should,” the Communists continued, “be sharply critical of the
past role on peace and social and labor legislation of both Kennedy
and Johnson . . .” but “what we must clearly recognize is that the
mass of the common people with whom we must march forward—or
stand still—are to be found in that camp . . . because they have been
influenced to believe in the platform commitments of the Democrats.”
It required a rather pedestrian, maddeningly-similarly named, quartet
of rightist parties to counterbalance the one Marxist party not running
and the two who were: The Constitution Party, the Constitution Party
of Texas, the Conservative Party of Virginia, and the Conservative
Party of New Jersey.
The Constitution Party had rattled around since 1952, when it
nominated two candidates not particularly interested in its
endorsement: Douglas MacArthur and Virginia United States Senator
Harry Flood Byrd. In 1956 it nominated a candidate who did want
its endorsement, former IRS Commissioner T. Coleman Andrews.
Andrews received 107,929 votes, quite possibly the highest total
ever recorded by a certified public accountant. But the glory days of
T. Coleman Andrews were long past, and in Dallas, in July 1960, the
Constitution Party, demanding withdrawal from UN and abolition of
the income tax, designated a ticket consisting of virtually unknown 68-
year old insurance executive Brig. General Merritt B. Curtis (USMC-
Ret.) and 66-year old retired stockbroker Curtis B. Dall, known
merely for being FDR’s ex son-in-law.
Splintering from the Constitution Party (or perhaps never related to
it, it was tough to tell in such circles), the “Jeffersonian Democrat”
Constitution Party of Texas met on August 10—coincidentally also in
Dallas—naming 35-year old Clarksburg, Mississippi attorney
Charles L. Sullivan, as its presidential candidate. The youthful, and
even more youthful-looking, Sullivan finished third for governor the
preceding year. He accepted the CPT nomination despite disagreeing
with party demands for (what else) withdrawal from UN and
abolition of income tax.
To confuse already confused matters, when the Constitution Party of
Texas finally got selected a running mate for Sullivan, it turned out to
the Constitutional Party’s own presidential candidate, Merritt B.
Curtis!
In New Jersey, an outfit calling itself the Conservative Party of New
Jersey nominated Utah’s ornery former Republican governor—and
1956 vice-presidential nominee of Texas Constitution Party—J.
Bracken Lee. The New Jersey party seemed to have no particular
strategy or reason for existence. That was not so a few states to the
south, where an outfit designating itself the Conservative Party of
Virginia selected Augusta County farmer and active segregationist C.
Benton Coiner. Coiner’s job was to provide the dominion’s electors
a chance to bolt the Democratic Party in November and cast their
twelve votes for Harry Flood Byrd.
Moving beyond simple traditional left and right, we now come what
may best be described as the dietary parties.
The American Vegetarian Party didn’t want you to eat meat. They
also didn’t want to bother getting on the ballot, and urged supporters
to write-in their candidates—two New Yorkers: balding,
bespectacled 67-year old publisher, editor, and movie and debate
promoter Symon Gould (party founder; 1948, 1952 and 1956 VP
nominee; and one-time victim of U.S. postal service harassment) and
50-year old naturopathic physician Dr. Christopher Gian-Cursio. In
1942 and 1947 authorities convicted Gian-Cursio of practicing
medicine without a license. In Gian-Cursio’s latter trial, radio
comedian Fred Allen appeared as a character witness.
Back in 1947 Gould had higher hopes, projecting 5 million
Vegetarian votes in the upcoming 1948 contest:
That same year, candidate Gould became embroiled in a trans-
Atlantic feud with the one of world’s more prominent—and older—
vegetarians, octogenarian playwright George Bernard Shaw,
regarding revelations of Shaw’s heretical ingestion of cod liver oil.
Gould ordered Shaw to stop—or, at least, cease calling himself a
vegetarian. Shaw declined.
By 1960, the Vegetarians had larger goals in mind than protecting
the humble liver of the humble cod: world peace. Their platform
promised:
The Prohibition Party didn’t particularly care what you ate, but did
care what you drank, and had passionately so cared for quite some
time. From 1884 through 1920, their ticket had received at least
100,000 in each election (271,058 in 1892)—and, of course, 1920
saw national prohibition take effect. But 1920 was decades—and the
repeal of one constitutional amendment—ago. Drys still understood
the importance of getting on the ballot, but they were getting scarcer
and older, and irrelevant to a martini-imbibing, Rat Pack-admiring
world.
In March 1960 Prohibitionists nominated 56-year old Rev.
Rutherford L. Decker, pastor of Kansas City’s Park Hill Baptist
Church, and 47-year old E. Harold Munn, assistant to the dean of
Michigan’s Hillsdale College. Eleven states listed the party on their
ballots.
“America’s greatest need is for a revival of reality in religion which
will throw off the yoke of oppression the liquor traffic has fastened
upon the nation,” Decker pled at one of his rare rallies, “Twenty-five
million citizens are directly and adversely affected by alcohol through
the alcoholism of over 5,000,000 victims of this disease.
“More people are killed each year in America by drink caused
accidents and drink induced and complicated diseases than any war
in which this country was ever engaged.”
Last, but definitely least, in this category, was retired farmer Mr.
Connie B. Watts, the “Front Porch Party” write-in candidate who
pursued a leisurely campaign, gently rocking away on his very own
Banks County, Georgia front porch. Early press attention (what there
was of it) focused on Watts’s vow to pass “a law to keep them ‘vine-
ripened’ stickers off of them mushy green tomatoes,” but Watts was
no off-his-rocker, one-issue crank. His platform really centered on
better housing for birds (Watts had long contended all birds could
talk—though, he cautioned, only the Baltimore Oriole could sing in
ragtime) and he proposed putting the unemployed to work boring
holes in trees to further that goal.
Kennedy and Nixon worried about separating church and state.
Bishop Homer A. Tomlinson, leader of the Queens Village, New
York-based Church of God didn’t. Campaigning once again on the
Theocratic Party ticket—with fellow Church of God Bishop Bill
Rogers as his running mate—Tomlinson pledged to “end all taxes,”
substituting the principle of taxation with the more lucrative principle
of tithing—to him.
Tomlinson’s church was a family-based denomination. His father, A.
J. Tomlinson had founded it—dubbing it the “Tomlinson Church of
God.” When A. J. expired, Homer and his brother, Overseer Milton,
squabbled over who might lead their father’s flock, an argument
Bishop Homer chose to settle by taking a sledge hammer to his
sibling’s real estate.
Police intervened.
Having temporarily abandoned hope of reclaiming the entirety of the
family-founded church, the pink-faced, usually cheery, Bishop Homer
embarked upon a grander mission: proclaiming himself “King” of all
fifty states, every individual nation on earth, and, eventually, of the
whole world (duly crowned behind a Tennessee tobacco barn in
1954). Such coronations were relatively easy operations, facilitated
by an inflatable globe, a $6 folding aluminum lawn chair/throne, and a
modest crown that presaged those distributed to countless youngsters
at neighborhood Burger Kings.
It must be said, the coronation held in Red Square particularly
startled onlookers.
Despite Bishop Homer’s earlier lack of electoral success, in August
1960, at Cape Giradeau, Missouri, running-mate Bishop Rogers
issued a call for 30 million write-in votes for the ticket—a rather
ambitious total since Dwight Eisenhower had only received 35 million
in 1956.
Another seasoned campaigner was Henry Krajewski, now
ensconced on the American Third Party ticket. The 48-year old
Secaucus tavern owner (and former pig farmer) had first sought the
White House, back in 1952, polling 4,203 votes with the “Poor Man’
s Party,” before, seeing his popularity recede in 1956—much like
Adlai Stevenson’s, in Krajewski’s case, to a more modest 1,829
votes. In 1952, the 6’2”, 240 pound Krajewski—a man of many
talents, he spoke six languages and could play the “piano, accordion,
guitar, banjo, organ, drum, and bugle”—advocated not a two-party,
but, rather, a “two-president” system.
“If you had a Democrat and a Republican in the White House,”
Krajewski philosophized, “they’d be so busy watching each other
that there would be no danger of dictatorship.”
Mr. Krajewski was a candidate of the old fringe politics, advocating
such relatively mainstream items as tax cuts (particularly on alcohol),
McCarthyism, and free milk for school children. The American Beat
Consensus Party successfully ostentatiously avoided the mainstream
trap.
By 1960 everyone knew what a beatnik was—countercultural,
alienated, espresso-swilling, guitar-strumming, folk song-singing,
black-bereted and bearded (if male; long, straight-haired if female),
marching to the beat of a different drum, usually a bongo—even
though few squares had yet actually met one. The American Beat
Consensus Party introduced two bearded Chicago beats—36-year
old William Lloyd Smith and 45-year old black pacifist/
anarchist/poet Joffre Stewart—to the political system with stream-of-
consciously platform “abolishing the working class, a $10 billion
subsidy for artists, forgetting the budget and balancing the debt,
making peace with everyone (since all beatniks are cowards) and
legalized nepotism, excess profits and mink coats.”
Smith was a Chicago bookseller (“the only Midwesterner who has
been nominated”) of distinctly limited business acumen who listed
himself in the Yellow Pages as “Philosopher.” Stewart’s claim to
fame hung largely from being depicted in Allen Ginsberg’s poem
“Howl”:
The beats convened in unconventional convention in a Greenwich
Village nightclub—Lincolnesque former cowboy and former-fellow
Chicagoan Slim Brundage’s properly black-walled, black-floored,
black-ceilinged, properly-misspelled “The Colledge of Complexes”
on West 10th Street. Each delegate marching to a different bongo,
the party took four ballots to nominate Smith, as he rolled past Joffre
Stewart, various other beats, and other higher profile nominees of
decidedly varying beat characteristics—Jack Kennedy, Senator
Eastland of Mississippi, and Adam Clayton Powell.
Smith capped his nomination by promising to abolish the federal
government and then resign from office. To heal any breach in party
ranks he selected his strongest opponent, Stewart, as his running
mate. It was, noted one witness, “a gesture as shrewdly and coolly
political as Kennedy’s pick of Johnson.” College of Complexes
owner Brundage became Smith’s campaign manager.
Smith went on to picket the Republican National Convention in
Chicago with his 23-year old girlfriend, Mary Lou. “I liked what I
heard,” she said (presumably from Smith, not the GOP). They (Smith
and Mary Lou) married, and the American Beat Party Consensus
campaign fell strangely silent.
The fates conspired to resuscitate it. As Mary Lou recalled: “Our
honeymoon was in New York because CBS had Bill on a show
called ‘Other Hats in the Ring.’ The network put us up in an elegant
hotel one night. We spend the rest of the time on the floor of one of
his friend’s apartments.”
“Other Hats in the Ring” was a third party candidate’s dream—an
hour of free air time on a nationwide TV hookup. One would
surmise, that if Richard Nixon and John Kennedy could agree on a
debate format, this collection of beggars certainly could.
They couldn’t.
Eric Hass fumed that CBS had promised him that he would share
their stage with representatives of the Socialist Labor, Prohibition,
Constitution, and States Rights parties. Reaching CBS’s studios to
tape the program, however, he found neither Constitution nor States
Rights candidates, but rather beatnik William Lloyd Smith,
Prohibitionist Rutherford Decker, and Vegetarian Symon Gould.
Hass didn’t mind debating Decker. He didn’t even mind meeting with
States Rights Party neo-Nazis, but he did very much mind being
reduced to the level—“a farcical flea circus”—of beats and health
food nuts.
He might have been right. When cameras rolled, William Lloyd
Smith termed the choice of either JFK or Dick Nixon akin to one
between “syphilis and gonorrhea, cholera and cancer.”
And yet neither Lar Daly, William Lloyd Smith, Henry Krajewski,
nor Bishop Homer Tomlinson and company were the most
improbable candidates, Comrade Eric Hass might have appeared
with.
The Rev. Clennon King was.
Though both Clennon King and Martin Luther King were black,
both were ministers, both had roots in Alabama and Georgia, the
Rev. Clennon King was clearly not to be confused with the Rev.
Martin Luther King.
Clennon King, at this stage of his career was primarily an educator—
or at-least an ex-educator. A decade earlier, teaching at all-black
Virginia Union University, he organized an airborne, world tour of
fifty students to combat communism. It never got off the ground.
Teaching history at Mississippi’s all-black Alcorn A & M College in
1957, King penned a series of articles for the Jackson State Times
defending segregation and attacking the NAACP (it “fights
freedom”). Alcorn’s entire student body struck. The administration
fired, but later re-instated, King.
He kept writing, defending segregation, moving to national
publications, took up preaching (bounced from his first congregation
and arrested for trying to break back in), attempted to send his
daughter to all-white Gulfport, Mississippi elementary school, and
finally left Alcorn for good. In June 1958 (three years before James
Meredith’s experience) King embarked upon the implausible next
step of attempting to integrate an all-white institute, the University of
Mississippi.
Ole Miss’s white authorities committed him as insane.
Released twelve days later, in part through NAACP efforts, King
pathetically advertised selling his household furnishings to bankroll a
back-to-Africa movement, faced charges for family abandonment,
and departed the South for California. In November 1959, he also
left his wife and six children—this time, for good, on a Mexican
beach.
Thus, when 39-year old Clennon King announced for the presidency
in January 1960—the first black ever to do so—as standard bearer
for the newly-formed Independent Afro-American Unity Party—and
further announced that he had selected Richard Nixon as his running
mate—California authorities wanted him for abandonment.
Nobody seemed to connect the two events.
King achieved ballot position, albeit without Vice President Nixon,
as the Afro-American Party, as the nation’s first black presidential
candidate—in just one state.
Being Clennon King, master of the improbable, that state was, of
course, . . . Alabama.
The Rev. King may—or may not have been—the most unorthodox
candidate to actually gain access to any state ballot (Lar Daly and
Bishop Tomlinson and William Lloyd Smith and Gabriel Green and
Symon Gould were, after all, only write-in candidates; the
Communists weren’t even writing-in), but there was no contest for
which on-the-ballot party harbored the most vicious and dangerous
elements—that award went to the National States Rights Party
(NSRP). Founded by youthful, yet veteran, hate-mongers Dr.
Edward R. Fields and J. B. Stoner (the former a chiropractor, the
latter an attorney), the NSRP bore only marginal resemblance to
Strom Thurmond’s 1948 third-party effort, the States' Rights
Democratic Party. Thurmond’s party was establishment
segregationist, 1960’s NSRP was Klan-based at best, neo-Nazi at
worst—homegrown fuehrer George Lincoln Rockwell and his chief
lieutenant Matt Koehl had participated in its efforts two years
previously —and usually operated at its worst level. Adolf Hitler,
Stoner once remarked, was “a moderate.”
“Compared to Stoner,” one fellow right-winger observed, “Hitler
probably was a moderate.”
The party (its motto: “Honor—Pride—Fight! Save the White”; it’s
symbol a suspiciously SS-like thunderbolt) traced its roots back to
the earlier officially subversive Columbians movement, the Christian
Anti-Jewish Party, and the United White Party.
A Kentucky newspaper described the NSRP platform thusly:
In 1960, Fields (now, still only 28) and Stoner (now 36) still called
the shots and aimed to nominate Arkansas Governor Orval W.
Faubus (distinguished for resisting Little-Rock school de-segregation
in 1957). In March 1960 over 100 “delegates” gathered in solemn
convention at Miamisburg, Ohio (just outside Dayton) and did just
that.
Faubus might have made a credible George Wallace-style third party
effort, save for three factors: one, the South had not yet been
substantially integrated, and backlash levels remained relatively low;
two, Faubus possessed few of Wallace’s special talents; and, three,
Faubus, once he realized what sort of folks were nominating him,
quickly backtracked from the adventure—and, in fact, endorsed,
with some enthusiasm, the Kennedy-Johnson ticket (though not the
national Democratic platform).
Robert Bolivar DePugh, a 47-year old Norborne, Missouri
veterinary drug manufacturer and leader of the newly-formed
extremist (and, in actuality, never very large) Minutemen movement,
pinch-hit for Faubus. Running for vice-president was retired Rear
Admiral John G. Crommelin, of Wetumpka, Alabama, commander of
the carrier Enterprise during World War II, and cashiered in 1949
during the fight over armed forces unification. Crommelin might have
been the General Billy Mitchell of his generation; instead, he was
merely another racist, anti-Semitic, anti-Catholic crackpot.
Faubus, however, remained on a number of state ballots, including
that of Florida, and that latter fact was to prove significant. The
Sunshine State contained a fairy significant, though typically
dissension-riven, KKK contingent. In September 1960 reporters
asked long-time Florida Klan leader, 49-year old Tampa Bay-area
general contractor (and two-time gubernatorial candidate) Bill
Hendrix, if he was backing Faubus. He answered yes. They then
interviewed Hendrix’s rival Grand Dragon, W. J. “Bill” Griffin. Griffin
hated Hendrix, and knowing Hendrix was supporting Faubus, he
couldn’t. Reluctantly, Griffin endorsed Richard Nixon.
Ordinarily, this wouldn’t have attracted much notice beyond Griffin
and Hendrix’s Tampa Bay home base, but in the third Kennedy-
Nixon debate, diminutive (under the five-foot mark) New York
Herald Tribune columnist Roscoe Drummond queried JFK regarding
Adam Clayton Powell’s recent claim that “all bigots will vote for
Nixon and all right-thinking Christians and Jews will vote for
Kennedy rather than be found in the ranks of the Klanminded.”
Kennedy smoothly responded:
Of course, he didn’t.
Nixon quickly repudiated Klan support, but the Klan was used to
being repudiated, and the next day Griffin sputtered, “I don’t give a
damn what Nixon said. I’m still voting for him.”
Grand Dragon Griffin controlled few votes, but that was hardly the
point. He could stampede votes in the opposing direction, particular
in the days before the election, when newspaper after newspaper
dutifully noted his weeks-old endorsement. “In an election in which
Kennedy’s narrow victory depended so heavily on the overwhelming
margins piled up in Negro precincts in cities such as Chicago,” Klan
historian David Chalmers theorized, “perhaps W. J. Griffin’s words
helped make the difference.”
Upon such ephemera as the sheet-clad feuds between not-so-grand
Dragons, the fate of nations may hang.
Sam: The Long, Strange Roster of 1960’s Third
Party Presidential Hopefuls
David Pietrusza
The 1960 great presidential debate. A perspiring Richard Nixon
versus a bronzed John Fitzgerald Kennedy—but no Lar Daly.
Yes, Lar “America First” Daly, for not only were Tricky Dick and
JFK on the ballot so was a host of truly lesser lights, starting with
perennial third-party icon Lar Daly but spreading far left and far right
and far weird in a dozen other directions. No Theodore Roosevelts
appeared on the horizon in 1960, no Gene Debses or Fighting Bob
LaFollettes, not even a Norman Thomas, a Henry Wallace, a J.
Strom Thurmond. George Wallace and Ross Perot and John
Anderson and Ralph Nader lay years ahead. But while 1960 clearly
marked a nadir, a deep, distinct mucky slough, in third party quality,
it did not reflect a diminution in quantity.
Most noticeable, though not necessarily most popular in terms of
votes cast was Mr. Daly, a 48-year old Chicago bar stool
manufacturer who sang and played the fiddle in taverns—and
unsuccessfully competed for every office he could think of, all the
while attired in a beautifully-tailored Uncle Sam suit.
Over the years, Lar Daly had vociferously boosted Douglas
MacArthur and Joe McCarthy. He had once offered to Harry
Truman to personally drop an atom bomb on the Kremlin. Most
recently, however, he had become an expert on the Federal
Communications Commissions’ arcane Equal Time Rule and used it
as a crowbar to euchre precious free air time, whether back home in
Chicago or nationwide.
He never did succeed in gaining a podium at the Kennedy-Nixon
Great Debates (though only because the United States Congress
passed special legislative to prevent his presence) but when JFK
guested on Jack Paar’s late-night NBC talk show, Daly demanded—
and got—his own appearance with Paar.
Paar fumed. The studio audience booed. And Daly calmly informed
the nation: “You only choice is America first—or death.”
The nation thought otherwise.
Lar Daly, apostle both of nuclear war and the equal time rule, was,
however, merely the most piquantly-clad contestant in 1960’s
unusual rag-bag of hopeless hopefuls. Measured by votes cast,
meaningful platforms, or ability to lead, all offered negligible value.
But in understanding what lay below the neat Madison Avenue-
driven world of Washington politics, in delving into the murky,
irrational subconscious of the American mentality on the cusp of the
pressed gray flannel 50s and the frayed blue denim 60s, into the
contradictory madness (or, sometime, truth) that lay just below the
Lazy Shave surface, 1960’s third party aspirants possessed rare,
inestimable, often overlooked, value.
They were, in their virtually anonymous aggregate, the men who
made the Democratic and Republican parties look sane.
Yes, some were, indeed, quite mad, not in the sense of such up-and-
coming phenomena as the John Birch Society or the Students for a
Democratic Society, nor merely conniving or eccentric, but simply
outright mad.
Such was the rather obvious case of Dick Nixon’s fellow Whittierite,
Gabriel Green, who boldly claimed to have personally observed
seventy-five flying saucers and had secured the backing of the
30,000-member Amalgamated Flying Saucer Club of America.
“With the help of spacemen,” the lanky, wild-eyed, 35 year old
bachelor confided to skeptical terrestrials, “I believe I can carry
millions of votes and many areas. They will help me, not necessarily
at the precinct level, but by supplying me with information.”
Of course, Green was not the only one in contact with the
spacemen. “All of our high scientists have been taken to other
planets,” he stated rather matter-of-factly, “President Eisenhower
flew out to Edwards Air Force Base for a briefing with a saucer crew.
“I know that Nixon has been contacted, but I am not sure about
Kennedy.”
In some ways, however, Gabe Green seemed far ahead of his major
party rivals, in fact, downright prescient. While Messrs. Kennedy and
Nixon prattled on about non-existent missile gaps and rock-strewn
Quemoy and Matsu, Gabe Green foresaw giving everyone a credit
card—and free health and dental insurance. “I may not win in 1960,”
he forecast, “but I’m sure of 1964.”
But most were not so prescient—or so mad.
Some bore the tattered standards of long established parties, though
among those were parties on their last legs, political movements that
could have used whatever assistance little green men might offer, and
it was difficult to understand how they had survived at all, in any
form, with even the smallest membership. Discovering such entities
with hearts still beating was akin to finding a species of marine life
thought to have become extinct millions of years ago.
Such was the case of the rapidly-expiring Greenback Party.
The cheap-money Greenbacks had been around since 1876,
although they hadn’t mounted anything approaching a real campaign
since 1884. In 1960, Greenbacks made Prohibitionists seem like the
wave of the future. Unable to hold a convention, nonetheless, in late
February 82-year old party chairman John Henry Zahnd (also its
1924, 1928, 1936, and 1940 hopeful) announced his party’s
candidates: Oklahoma-born 65-year old Los Angeles “ambulance
first aid man” (and occasional author) Whitney Hart Slocomb and 75-
year Boston-based book publisher Edward Kirby Meador
(coincidentally, the Slocomb’s publisher). Meador, the party’s 1956
vice-presidential candidate, claimed descent from Benjamin Franklin.
The party barely had time to announce its team and its slogan (“all
reform waits for money reform—then let us get money reform first”)
before submerging once again into the murky depths of organisms
largely thought extinct.
The Socialist Labor Party (SLP), just as old as the Greenbacks,
had, on the other hand, taken its time getting started but once it did
had evinced remarkable staying power for such a small group
plagued such higher-profiled rivals as Gene Debs’s once-vibrant
Socialist Party. Founded in 1876, the SLP didn’t bother naming
slates of electors until 1884, speaking English (as opposed to
German) until 1890, or designating an actual presidential candidate
until 1892, but it had offered candidates every four years since—
despite the disadvantages of having its 1920 standard bearer jailed
for murder and its 1928 candidate expire while rescuing a drowning
child.
The 1960 SLP platform, adopted in convention at the ballroom of
New York’s Henry Hudson Hotel that May, screamed: “the
overriding issue . . . is—SOCIALISM and SURVIVAL V.
CAPITALISM and CATASTROPHE!” Displaying unusual—
though, nonetheless, admirable—terseness for a party platform, the
document paid only lip-service to nationalizing business and industry,
displaying far more passion regarding nuclear waste (“high-level,
boiling hot”) and smashing “the present procapitalist unions.”
The SLP’s ticket consisted of New Yorker Eric Hass, longtime
editor of the party official organ, “Weekly People,” and 45-year old
Wisconsin housewife Georgia Purvis Cozzini—the team it had
offered in 1952 and 1956. When the blond, bespectacled, Nebraska-
born Hass (a former railroad brakeman, reporter, and advertising
man) wasn’t editing or running for president, he ran almost
compulsively for everything else: once for city City Council President,
twice for United States Senator, three times for Governor, and four
times for mayor. Cozzini was no slouch, either. She herself had run
for United States Senator and Governor (the first time when she was
just 27—Wisconsin’s first female gubernatorial candidate) twice
times each.
Upon the campaign trail, the grim-looking Haas (a self-proclaimed
“bona-fide Marxist”), armed himself with charts to illustrate his bona-
fide Marxist views of how to organize society, traveling coast-to-
coast to address equally “grave, expectant” listeners. “When he talks
the language of socialism,” the New York Times noted, “he
somehow sounds more like an insurance salesman than a didactic,
doctrinaire radical.”
That may not have been a compliment.
The rival Socialist Workers Party (SWP), on the other hand, was
less socialist than communist, essentially being a Trotskyite offshoot
of the Communist Party USA. Existing in various forms since 1928,
the SWP advocated, among other items, increasing America’s
supposed missile gap by destroying the nation’s nuclear armaments
and withdrawing all U.S. troops from foreign soil.
Poised against both the Stalinist and post-Stalinist East and the
capitalist and post-capitalist West, the SWP posed no particular
threat to anything, save to its proponents’ ability to earn a living. In
1960, it nominated—as in 1952 and 1956—two New Yorkers: 53-
year old former New York City truck driver Farrell Dobbs, a
personal friend of the martyred Leon Trotsky, and former “cannery
worker, waitress and labor organizer” the petite, 43-year old petite,
yet fiery, Myra Tanner Weiss.
Mrs. Weiss’s Mormon grandfather had fled to Canada when his
church banned polygamy in 1890. She had long since abandoned her
proletarian activities and was now the stylishly attired wife of a
Trotskyite psychotherapist.
Originally a Herbert Hoover Republican, Dobbs had performed
yeoman work in making the Teamsters union a national force.
Federal authorities had jailed Dobbs during World War II for
advocating “violent overthrow of the US Government.” Though not
the only candidate to have served behind bars, Dobbs was 1960’s
only presidential candidate to visit Cuba during the campaign. He
liked what he saw.
The Communist Party USA (CPUSA) was not running. Still reeling
from McCarthy Era scrutiny, it hadn’t run for much of anything in
quite a while, and when it so attempted, it usually didn’t achieve
ballot position. In August 1960, the party undertook a reasonably
unusual move, publishing a resolution in its official organ, The
Worker, basically favoring the Kennedy-Johnson ticket. While
refusing to describe the Democrats as a “lesser evil,” the CPUSA
lectured followers that “it would be a still greater error to adopt a
negative, defeatist, ‘curses-on-both-your-houses’ position.”
Such thinking, the party continued, would “only encourage ‘stay-at-
home’ moods and feed such sects as the SLP or the Trotskyites [the
SWP], who render only lip service to socialist aims.”
And, the CPUSA advanced, such above-the fray attitudes would be
irresponsible, in view of “the indisputable fact that the Nixon-Lodge
ticket has abandoned the peace pretexts of the Republican Party, and
today symbolizes before the country and the world those two-faced,
double-dealing provocative policies of the Eisenhower regime . . .”
“Moreover, Nixon’s record in the House, in the Senate and as Vice
President is marked by one long series of anti-labor reactionary
deeds. A defeat for this ticket would be heralded everywhere as a
defeat for those war-inciting and anti-labor policies.”
“We should,” the Communists continued, “be sharply critical of the
past role on peace and social and labor legislation of both Kennedy
and Johnson . . .” but “what we must clearly recognize is that the
mass of the common people with whom we must march forward—or
stand still—are to be found in that camp . . . because they have been
influenced to believe in the platform commitments of the Democrats.”
It required a rather pedestrian, maddeningly-similarly named, quartet
of rightist parties to counterbalance the one Marxist party not running
and the two who were: The Constitution Party, the Constitution Party
of Texas, the Conservative Party of Virginia, and the Conservative
Party of New Jersey.
The Constitution Party had rattled around since 1952, when it
nominated two candidates not particularly interested in its
endorsement: Douglas MacArthur and Virginia United States Senator
Harry Flood Byrd. In 1956 it nominated a candidate who did want
its endorsement, former IRS Commissioner T. Coleman Andrews.
Andrews received 107,929 votes, quite possibly the highest total
ever recorded by a certified public accountant. But the glory days of
T. Coleman Andrews were long past, and in Dallas, in July 1960, the
Constitution Party, demanding withdrawal from UN and abolition of
the income tax, designated a ticket consisting of virtually unknown 68-
year old insurance executive Brig. General Merritt B. Curtis (USMC-
Ret.) and 66-year old retired stockbroker Curtis B. Dall, known
merely for being FDR’s ex son-in-law.
Splintering from the Constitution Party (or perhaps never related to
it, it was tough to tell in such circles), the “Jeffersonian Democrat”
Constitution Party of Texas met on August 10—coincidentally also in
Dallas—naming 35-year old Clarksburg, Mississippi attorney
Charles L. Sullivan, as its presidential candidate. The youthful, and
even more youthful-looking, Sullivan finished third for governor the
preceding year. He accepted the CPT nomination despite disagreeing
with party demands for (what else) withdrawal from UN and
abolition of income tax.
To confuse already confused matters, when the Constitution Party of
Texas finally got selected a running mate for Sullivan, it turned out to
the Constitutional Party’s own presidential candidate, Merritt B.
Curtis!
In New Jersey, an outfit calling itself the Conservative Party of New
Jersey nominated Utah’s ornery former Republican governor—and
1956 vice-presidential nominee of Texas Constitution Party—J.
Bracken Lee. The New Jersey party seemed to have no particular
strategy or reason for existence. That was not so a few states to the
south, where an outfit designating itself the Conservative Party of
Virginia selected Augusta County farmer and active segregationist C.
Benton Coiner. Coiner’s job was to provide the dominion’s electors
a chance to bolt the Democratic Party in November and cast their
twelve votes for Harry Flood Byrd.
Moving beyond simple traditional left and right, we now come what
may best be described as the dietary parties.
The American Vegetarian Party didn’t want you to eat meat. They
also didn’t want to bother getting on the ballot, and urged supporters
to write-in their candidates—two New Yorkers: balding,
bespectacled 67-year old publisher, editor, and movie and debate
promoter Symon Gould (party founder; 1948, 1952 and 1956 VP
nominee; and one-time victim of U.S. postal service harassment) and
50-year old naturopathic physician Dr. Christopher Gian-Cursio. In
1942 and 1947 authorities convicted Gian-Cursio of practicing
medicine without a license. In Gian-Cursio’s latter trial, radio
comedian Fred Allen appeared as a character witness.
Back in 1947 Gould had higher hopes, projecting 5 million
Vegetarian votes in the upcoming 1948 contest:
- Three million of these would be the American vegetarians and
the remainder of the votes would come from prohibitionist,
anti-vivisectionists and anti-cigarette smoking groups. We will
also attract other groups of people of similar high moral
principle.
That same year, candidate Gould became embroiled in a trans-
Atlantic feud with the one of world’s more prominent—and older—
vegetarians, octogenarian playwright George Bernard Shaw,
regarding revelations of Shaw’s heretical ingestion of cod liver oil.
Gould ordered Shaw to stop—or, at least, cease calling himself a
vegetarian. Shaw declined.
By 1960, the Vegetarians had larger goals in mind than protecting
the humble liver of the humble cod: world peace. Their platform
promised:
- The philosophy of Vegetarianism is synonymous with Universal
Brotherhood and Universal Peace. Its fundamental principle of
“anti-killing,” if internationally adopted, would unconditionally
eliminate wars. In furtherance of this anti-slaughter ideal,
vegetarians are opposed to the killing of animals for
sustenance, sport or style.
The Prohibition Party didn’t particularly care what you ate, but did
care what you drank, and had passionately so cared for quite some
time. From 1884 through 1920, their ticket had received at least
100,000 in each election (271,058 in 1892)—and, of course, 1920
saw national prohibition take effect. But 1920 was decades—and the
repeal of one constitutional amendment—ago. Drys still understood
the importance of getting on the ballot, but they were getting scarcer
and older, and irrelevant to a martini-imbibing, Rat Pack-admiring
world.
In March 1960 Prohibitionists nominated 56-year old Rev.
Rutherford L. Decker, pastor of Kansas City’s Park Hill Baptist
Church, and 47-year old E. Harold Munn, assistant to the dean of
Michigan’s Hillsdale College. Eleven states listed the party on their
ballots.
“America’s greatest need is for a revival of reality in religion which
will throw off the yoke of oppression the liquor traffic has fastened
upon the nation,” Decker pled at one of his rare rallies, “Twenty-five
million citizens are directly and adversely affected by alcohol through
the alcoholism of over 5,000,000 victims of this disease.
“More people are killed each year in America by drink caused
accidents and drink induced and complicated diseases than any war
in which this country was ever engaged.”
Last, but definitely least, in this category, was retired farmer Mr.
Connie B. Watts, the “Front Porch Party” write-in candidate who
pursued a leisurely campaign, gently rocking away on his very own
Banks County, Georgia front porch. Early press attention (what there
was of it) focused on Watts’s vow to pass “a law to keep them ‘vine-
ripened’ stickers off of them mushy green tomatoes,” but Watts was
no off-his-rocker, one-issue crank. His platform really centered on
better housing for birds (Watts had long contended all birds could
talk—though, he cautioned, only the Baltimore Oriole could sing in
ragtime) and he proposed putting the unemployed to work boring
holes in trees to further that goal.
Kennedy and Nixon worried about separating church and state.
Bishop Homer A. Tomlinson, leader of the Queens Village, New
York-based Church of God didn’t. Campaigning once again on the
Theocratic Party ticket—with fellow Church of God Bishop Bill
Rogers as his running mate—Tomlinson pledged to “end all taxes,”
substituting the principle of taxation with the more lucrative principle
of tithing—to him.
Tomlinson’s church was a family-based denomination. His father, A.
J. Tomlinson had founded it—dubbing it the “Tomlinson Church of
God.” When A. J. expired, Homer and his brother, Overseer Milton,
squabbled over who might lead their father’s flock, an argument
Bishop Homer chose to settle by taking a sledge hammer to his
sibling’s real estate.
Police intervened.
Having temporarily abandoned hope of reclaiming the entirety of the
family-founded church, the pink-faced, usually cheery, Bishop Homer
embarked upon a grander mission: proclaiming himself “King” of all
fifty states, every individual nation on earth, and, eventually, of the
whole world (duly crowned behind a Tennessee tobacco barn in
1954). Such coronations were relatively easy operations, facilitated
by an inflatable globe, a $6 folding aluminum lawn chair/throne, and a
modest crown that presaged those distributed to countless youngsters
at neighborhood Burger Kings.
It must be said, the coronation held in Red Square particularly
startled onlookers.
Despite Bishop Homer’s earlier lack of electoral success, in August
1960, at Cape Giradeau, Missouri, running-mate Bishop Rogers
issued a call for 30 million write-in votes for the ticket—a rather
ambitious total since Dwight Eisenhower had only received 35 million
in 1956.
Another seasoned campaigner was Henry Krajewski, now
ensconced on the American Third Party ticket. The 48-year old
Secaucus tavern owner (and former pig farmer) had first sought the
White House, back in 1952, polling 4,203 votes with the “Poor Man’
s Party,” before, seeing his popularity recede in 1956—much like
Adlai Stevenson’s, in Krajewski’s case, to a more modest 1,829
votes. In 1952, the 6’2”, 240 pound Krajewski—a man of many
talents, he spoke six languages and could play the “piano, accordion,
guitar, banjo, organ, drum, and bugle”—advocated not a two-party,
but, rather, a “two-president” system.
“If you had a Democrat and a Republican in the White House,”
Krajewski philosophized, “they’d be so busy watching each other
that there would be no danger of dictatorship.”
Mr. Krajewski was a candidate of the old fringe politics, advocating
such relatively mainstream items as tax cuts (particularly on alcohol),
McCarthyism, and free milk for school children. The American Beat
Consensus Party successfully ostentatiously avoided the mainstream
trap.
By 1960 everyone knew what a beatnik was—countercultural,
alienated, espresso-swilling, guitar-strumming, folk song-singing,
black-bereted and bearded (if male; long, straight-haired if female),
marching to the beat of a different drum, usually a bongo—even
though few squares had yet actually met one. The American Beat
Consensus Party introduced two bearded Chicago beats—36-year
old William Lloyd Smith and 45-year old black pacifist/
anarchist/poet Joffre Stewart—to the political system with stream-of-
consciously platform “abolishing the working class, a $10 billion
subsidy for artists, forgetting the budget and balancing the debt,
making peace with everyone (since all beatniks are cowards) and
legalized nepotism, excess profits and mink coats.”
Smith was a Chicago bookseller (“the only Midwesterner who has
been nominated”) of distinctly limited business acumen who listed
himself in the Yellow Pages as “Philosopher.” Stewart’s claim to
fame hung largely from being depicted in Allen Ginsberg’s poem
“Howl”:
- Who reappeared on the West Coast investigating the F.B.I in
beards and shorts with big pacifist eyes sexy in their dark skin
passing out incomprehensible leaflets.
The beats convened in unconventional convention in a Greenwich
Village nightclub—Lincolnesque former cowboy and former-fellow
Chicagoan Slim Brundage’s properly black-walled, black-floored,
black-ceilinged, properly-misspelled “The Colledge of Complexes”
on West 10th Street. Each delegate marching to a different bongo,
the party took four ballots to nominate Smith, as he rolled past Joffre
Stewart, various other beats, and other higher profile nominees of
decidedly varying beat characteristics—Jack Kennedy, Senator
Eastland of Mississippi, and Adam Clayton Powell.
Smith capped his nomination by promising to abolish the federal
government and then resign from office. To heal any breach in party
ranks he selected his strongest opponent, Stewart, as his running
mate. It was, noted one witness, “a gesture as shrewdly and coolly
political as Kennedy’s pick of Johnson.” College of Complexes
owner Brundage became Smith’s campaign manager.
Smith went on to picket the Republican National Convention in
Chicago with his 23-year old girlfriend, Mary Lou. “I liked what I
heard,” she said (presumably from Smith, not the GOP). They (Smith
and Mary Lou) married, and the American Beat Party Consensus
campaign fell strangely silent.
The fates conspired to resuscitate it. As Mary Lou recalled: “Our
honeymoon was in New York because CBS had Bill on a show
called ‘Other Hats in the Ring.’ The network put us up in an elegant
hotel one night. We spend the rest of the time on the floor of one of
his friend’s apartments.”
“Other Hats in the Ring” was a third party candidate’s dream—an
hour of free air time on a nationwide TV hookup. One would
surmise, that if Richard Nixon and John Kennedy could agree on a
debate format, this collection of beggars certainly could.
They couldn’t.
Eric Hass fumed that CBS had promised him that he would share
their stage with representatives of the Socialist Labor, Prohibition,
Constitution, and States Rights parties. Reaching CBS’s studios to
tape the program, however, he found neither Constitution nor States
Rights candidates, but rather beatnik William Lloyd Smith,
Prohibitionist Rutherford Decker, and Vegetarian Symon Gould.
Hass didn’t mind debating Decker. He didn’t even mind meeting with
States Rights Party neo-Nazis, but he did very much mind being
reduced to the level—“a farcical flea circus”—of beats and health
food nuts.
He might have been right. When cameras rolled, William Lloyd
Smith termed the choice of either JFK or Dick Nixon akin to one
between “syphilis and gonorrhea, cholera and cancer.”
And yet neither Lar Daly, William Lloyd Smith, Henry Krajewski,
nor Bishop Homer Tomlinson and company were the most
improbable candidates, Comrade Eric Hass might have appeared
with.
The Rev. Clennon King was.
Though both Clennon King and Martin Luther King were black,
both were ministers, both had roots in Alabama and Georgia, the
Rev. Clennon King was clearly not to be confused with the Rev.
Martin Luther King.
Clennon King, at this stage of his career was primarily an educator—
or at-least an ex-educator. A decade earlier, teaching at all-black
Virginia Union University, he organized an airborne, world tour of
fifty students to combat communism. It never got off the ground.
Teaching history at Mississippi’s all-black Alcorn A & M College in
1957, King penned a series of articles for the Jackson State Times
defending segregation and attacking the NAACP (it “fights
freedom”). Alcorn’s entire student body struck. The administration
fired, but later re-instated, King.
He kept writing, defending segregation, moving to national
publications, took up preaching (bounced from his first congregation
and arrested for trying to break back in), attempted to send his
daughter to all-white Gulfport, Mississippi elementary school, and
finally left Alcorn for good. In June 1958 (three years before James
Meredith’s experience) King embarked upon the implausible next
step of attempting to integrate an all-white institute, the University of
Mississippi.
Ole Miss’s white authorities committed him as insane.
Released twelve days later, in part through NAACP efforts, King
pathetically advertised selling his household furnishings to bankroll a
back-to-Africa movement, faced charges for family abandonment,
and departed the South for California. In November 1959, he also
left his wife and six children—this time, for good, on a Mexican
beach.
Thus, when 39-year old Clennon King announced for the presidency
in January 1960—the first black ever to do so—as standard bearer
for the newly-formed Independent Afro-American Unity Party—and
further announced that he had selected Richard Nixon as his running
mate—California authorities wanted him for abandonment.
Nobody seemed to connect the two events.
King achieved ballot position, albeit without Vice President Nixon,
as the Afro-American Party, as the nation’s first black presidential
candidate—in just one state.
Being Clennon King, master of the improbable, that state was, of
course, . . . Alabama.
The Rev. King may—or may not have been—the most unorthodox
candidate to actually gain access to any state ballot (Lar Daly and
Bishop Tomlinson and William Lloyd Smith and Gabriel Green and
Symon Gould were, after all, only write-in candidates; the
Communists weren’t even writing-in), but there was no contest for
which on-the-ballot party harbored the most vicious and dangerous
elements—that award went to the National States Rights Party
(NSRP). Founded by youthful, yet veteran, hate-mongers Dr.
Edward R. Fields and J. B. Stoner (the former a chiropractor, the
latter an attorney), the NSRP bore only marginal resemblance to
Strom Thurmond’s 1948 third-party effort, the States' Rights
Democratic Party. Thurmond’s party was establishment
segregationist, 1960’s NSRP was Klan-based at best, neo-Nazi at
worst—homegrown fuehrer George Lincoln Rockwell and his chief
lieutenant Matt Koehl had participated in its efforts two years
previously —and usually operated at its worst level. Adolf Hitler,
Stoner once remarked, was “a moderate.”
“Compared to Stoner,” one fellow right-winger observed, “Hitler
probably was a moderate.”
The party (its motto: “Honor—Pride—Fight! Save the White”; it’s
symbol a suspiciously SS-like thunderbolt) traced its roots back to
the earlier officially subversive Columbians movement, the Christian
Anti-Jewish Party, and the United White Party.
A Kentucky newspaper described the NSRP platform thusly:
- 1. Encourage voluntary resettlement of Negroes in their
African homeland.
2. Restore segregation in the Armed Forces.
3. Permit only “White Folk to take part in affairs of
government or serve in courts.”
4. Demand that government should refrain from competing
with private enterprise.
5. Demand that confiscatory taxation policies of the federal
government be ended immediately.
6. Demand the removal of all federal control over National
Guard units and law enforcement agencies of the states.
7. Demand that all financial and moral support to the State of
Israel cease as a basis for the rebuilding of Arab-American
friendship.
8. Favor complete separation of all non-White and dissatisfied
racial minorities from “our White Folk Communities.”
9. Preservation of Indian national life in America and unlimited
development of reservation facilities.
10. Demand that total segregation be maintained in the nation's
schools and that only “members of the White Folk Community
be allowed to engage in the educational and cultural activities
of our White society.”
In 1960, Fields (now, still only 28) and Stoner (now 36) still called
the shots and aimed to nominate Arkansas Governor Orval W.
Faubus (distinguished for resisting Little-Rock school de-segregation
in 1957). In March 1960 over 100 “delegates” gathered in solemn
convention at Miamisburg, Ohio (just outside Dayton) and did just
that.
Faubus might have made a credible George Wallace-style third party
effort, save for three factors: one, the South had not yet been
substantially integrated, and backlash levels remained relatively low;
two, Faubus possessed few of Wallace’s special talents; and, three,
Faubus, once he realized what sort of folks were nominating him,
quickly backtracked from the adventure—and, in fact, endorsed,
with some enthusiasm, the Kennedy-Johnson ticket (though not the
national Democratic platform).
Robert Bolivar DePugh, a 47-year old Norborne, Missouri
veterinary drug manufacturer and leader of the newly-formed
extremist (and, in actuality, never very large) Minutemen movement,
pinch-hit for Faubus. Running for vice-president was retired Rear
Admiral John G. Crommelin, of Wetumpka, Alabama, commander of
the carrier Enterprise during World War II, and cashiered in 1949
during the fight over armed forces unification. Crommelin might have
been the General Billy Mitchell of his generation; instead, he was
merely another racist, anti-Semitic, anti-Catholic crackpot.
Faubus, however, remained on a number of state ballots, including
that of Florida, and that latter fact was to prove significant. The
Sunshine State contained a fairy significant, though typically
dissension-riven, KKK contingent. In September 1960 reporters
asked long-time Florida Klan leader, 49-year old Tampa Bay-area
general contractor (and two-time gubernatorial candidate) Bill
Hendrix, if he was backing Faubus. He answered yes. They then
interviewed Hendrix’s rival Grand Dragon, W. J. “Bill” Griffin. Griffin
hated Hendrix, and knowing Hendrix was supporting Faubus, he
couldn’t. Reluctantly, Griffin endorsed Richard Nixon.
Ordinarily, this wouldn’t have attracted much notice beyond Griffin
and Hendrix’s Tampa Bay home base, but in the third Kennedy-
Nixon debate, diminutive (under the five-foot mark) New York
Herald Tribune columnist Roscoe Drummond queried JFK regarding
Adam Clayton Powell’s recent claim that “all bigots will vote for
Nixon and all right-thinking Christians and Jews will vote for
Kennedy rather than be found in the ranks of the Klanminded.”
Kennedy smoothly responded:
- Well, Mr. Griffin, I believe, who is the head of the Klan, who
lives in Tampa, Florida, indicated a—in a statement, I think,
two or three weeks ago that he was not going to vote for me,
and that he was going to vote for Mr. Nixon. I do not suggest
in any way, nor have I ever, that that indicates that Mr. Nixon
has the slightest sympathy, involvement, or in any way imply
any inferences in regard to the Ku Klux Klan. That's absurd. I
don't suggest that, I don't support it. I would disagree with it.
Mr. Nixon knows very well that in this—in this whole matter
that's been involved with the so-called religious discussion in
this campaign, I've never suggested, even by the vaguest
implication, that he did anything but disapprove it. And that's
my view now. I disapprove of the issue. I do not suggest that
Mr. Nixon does in any way.
Of course, he didn’t.
Nixon quickly repudiated Klan support, but the Klan was used to
being repudiated, and the next day Griffin sputtered, “I don’t give a
damn what Nixon said. I’m still voting for him.”
Grand Dragon Griffin controlled few votes, but that was hardly the
point. He could stampede votes in the opposing direction, particular
in the days before the election, when newspaper after newspaper
dutifully noted his weeks-old endorsement. “In an election in which
Kennedy’s narrow victory depended so heavily on the overwhelming
margins piled up in Negro precincts in cities such as Chicago,” Klan
historian David Chalmers theorized, “perhaps W. J. Griffin’s words
helped make the difference.”
Upon such ephemera as the sheet-clad feuds between not-so-grand
Dragons, the fate of nations may hang.