Share some favorite political anecdotes

Miscellaneous and Personal Stuff I Must Share
1

One of my favorites, and I cannot speak to its truth, is about Huey “Kingfish” Long. A journalist accompanied him on one of his campaigns and had unprecedented access on the proviso that he publish nothing until the campaign was over. I’m sure the tale’s online but I can’t find it after a simple google so I’ll reconstruct it, and since I can’t remember the exact names of churches/ministers/tiny towns so the names that appear below are made up for this retelling. (Wish I had a camcorder cause I do one kickass Huey Long and one kickass hellfire minister if I do say so myself.)

At a huge Baptist Voters rally in Baton Rouge Huey addressed the crowd with

A few days later Long and the journalist were in New Orleans addressing a huge audience of Irish Catholic voters. Huey was introduced by their priest, and he took the podium.

The journalist is at first perplexed, but then Huey’s hardly the first person, especially in Louisiana, to have a set of Catholic and a set of Baptist grandparents. A few days later they’re addressing a group of Presbyterian women voters in Shreveport.

In the bus later the journalist says to Huey Long “Now Huey, I’ve known you long enough to know you’re capable of things other men just aren’t, but I just don’t see how even you could have three sets of grandparents!”

Huey nodded his head and laughed and said “Three sets of grandparents? Hell boy, when I was coming up we didn’t even have a mule!”

When my parents were newlyweds they lived in Cullman, Alabama, an area with the descendants of so many German settlers some displayed swastikas until WW2 and they still had accents a century after arriving there. It was also the home of non-German Jim Folsom, who was hated by the Germans for things he said about Germans in his early campaigns and by the non-Germans and the Germans for being too liberal (he was by far the most liberal governor Alabama had in segregation). He was so hated that, as a notorious womanizer, he was the father of an [acknowledged] illegitimate child by one of the women in the community and the reason he never married her is his father said “I’d rather have a bastard for a grandson than that bastard for a son-in-law”.
During a big parade for their Founders Day Big Jim (so called because he was huge in both height and girth) road on the float of honor. My parents always remembered that the crowd cheered the marching bands and the other floats and that when Big Jim’s float passed by 3/4 or more of the audience instantly fell silent and turned their backs until he passed.

When he was running against one opponent in 1954 (the name of the opponent eludes me) Big Jim began touring with a “real live hillbilly band” (basically Grand Ol’ Opry/bluegrass) and drew bigger crowds and ovations because of the live music. His opponent began touring with a model of the Capitol and sexy girl singers [ala the Maguire Sisters] who outdrew Folsom. Folsom ditched the band and began touring in a helicopter and people came in droves because they’d never seen a helicopter, and those who pledged to vote had a drawing for a ride in it. Folsom won.

2

HOW A HOLLYWOOD B-MOVIE HELPED LEAD TO BULL CONNOR (sorta kinda)

As mentioned, Big Jim Folsom was a liberal (by the standards of his day) on race matters. He was also one of the first U.S. politicians to appear on TV when plastered out of his mind- at one point he imitated a cuckoo clock and at another point he forgot the name of his son. In his defense he had many children, though some pointed out that the fact that the son’s name was Jim, Jr., (later and lamentably governor himself) should have made it easier to remember. Big Jim died penniless and blind, but I digress.

Alabama had always practiced Dixie apartheid, but some times were worse than others, and of course the '50s was when it hit the fan. Big Jim could not succeed himself and the race came down to his protege (and eventually his nephew by marriage) George Wallace and another man few people had ever heard of until 1955 named John Patterson.
John Patterson was the Atty. General of Alabama in the election year (1958) but that wasn’t enough to have him well known (quick: who’s your state’s Atty. General? I’m sure some of you thought of it instantly, others probably had to stop and think about it- point is that it didn’t make him that famous). However, he became, briefly, the most famous man in Alabama due to a long forgotten movie- literally a B-movie, meaning the second feature on a double feature.
The Phenix City Story was based on fact. Now a small city bka a bedroom community of Columbus GA, but in the 1940s/1950s it was the most organized-crime controlled city in America with gambling parlors and whorehouses on every street; when Patterson’s father was elected Atty. General on the promise to clean it up he was shot dead, and John Patterson was appointed to the position, and cleaned up Phenix City.)
The movie was The Phenix City Story and it was a hit not just in Alabama but in other states (but particularly in Alabam and Georgia where it played for over a year). Because the South has always (as I’ve mentioned before) been probably more obsessed with pop-culture than more urban areas, a movie about somebody in their state- especially a young handsome somebody from their state- was HUGE, and thus EVERYBODY knew who John Patterson was, and he used this to run for governor. Wallace had his work cut out for him, because while he was a very bright man and a pretty good bantam weight boxer he was also deaf as a post (which some took as arrogance- he was vain about it and people often thought he was ignoring them) and he didn’t have a movie about himself.

George Wallace was also a race moderate, which might seem the kiss of death automatically in post Rosa Parks/MLK era Alabama, but not as much as you might think. He was in fact far more conservative than his mentor, Big Jim, on race, and Big Jim had many supporters. (Wallace didn’t want anything really radical like blacks voting, but he did call for an end to some segregation of businesses [not schools] and other ‘baby steps’.)
However, Patterson made Wallace’s liberal (for the times) racial views the key issue of the campaign and he whipped up the Negro Baiting into a near artform. Among other things Patterson began touring with a chimp dressed in academic robes, telling crowds that “here’s who Wallace wants your children to go to school with… be best buds with… MARRY!” (The movie about Patterson had completely glossed over the fact that while Patterson was Atty Gen’l. he not only cleaned up Phenix City but unleashed as much power as he could on the NAACP and harassed King and other Civil Rights activists [harassed Rosa Parks so much that she left Montgomery, permanently], etc.- he was a white supremacist zealot even by Alabama in the 1950s standards.)
In the end Patterson won by a landslide first by his movie recognition and then by playing the race card (if you can call it that). Wallace famously vowed “I’ll never be outniggered again”, and when he next ran he towed the party line about “segregation now, segregation tomorrow, segregation forever!” and, as a racist (which in his private life he had never been [not by the standards of the time] he won. By betraying his principals he helped lead to Bull Connor and the “Bombingham” climate and the casting of his beloved Alabama as a hell-on-Earth backwards state, all of which caused him (by reliable accounts) incredible psychic pain before and especially after his shooting. And it started because of a low budget Hollywood double feature…

Afterwards: In the 1980s George Wallace, humbled from the non-stop pain of his paralysis and a life that largely went to hell and tormented by guilt ever since the church bombing especially, publicly and unexpectedly (without cameras present or press notification) entered MLK’s former church in Montgomery and very tearfully apologized to the congregation. I know several people who saw it and they claim there were few dry eyes in the house and none doubted its sincerity.
John Patterson never did other than in passing, the “well different time… we had some ideas I now wouldn’t follow” type deal. He’s still alive and well (though old as god), retired from a lucrative law practice and a Federal judgeship. When the justices of the Supreme Court of Alabama recused themselves in the Roy Moore case he was called upon to serve as Chief Justice in Moore’s impeachment. In that case he ruled correctly and Roy Moore was removed.

It occurs to me again how much I detest populism, but I just can’t quite figure a fair way around the universal suffrage thing.

3

Tara Singh Varma (born British Guyana, 1948) is a former Dutch politician and former member of the Dutch parliament for the GreenLeft party. She became infamous when her claim to suffer from incurable cancer turned out to be a complete lie. Formerly admired for her bravery to spend her “last ailing days” wheelchair bound and yet still attending parliament, people were outraged, and the Greenleft party was subject to much ridicule, when it turned out Varma’s only ailment was a bad case of “Pseudologica fantastica” and that in fact, she didn’t even need the wheelchair at all.

4

Sir John A. Macdonald, the first Prime Minister of Canada, was a noted lush (what we would call today a “functioning alcoholic”).

He was at a political debate one day, on the stage, listening to his opponent speak. It was the morning after the night before, if you get my drift, and Sir John was feeling the effects.

Part way through his opponent’s spechifying, John A. got up, went to the back of the platform, and threw up. Crowd gasps.

Came back, commented to the crowd, “Every time I hear that man speak, it turns my stomach.”

5

I haven’t seen that movie in years! It used to piss off my grandmother, who moved there during the war. She insisted that as long as you didn’t go into the “bad part of town” you’d have never known all that stuff existed.

6

It’s pretty hard to beat George Smathers, who campaigned against the legendary Claude Pepper and won a Senate seat in 1950:

“Are you aware that the candidate [Pepper] is known all over Washington as a shameless extrovert? Not only that, but this man is reliably reported to have practiced nepotism with his sister-in-law and he has a sister who was once a thespian in wicked New York. He matriculated with co-eds at the University, and it is an established fact that before his marriage he habitually practiced celibacy.”

The only problem with the story is that Smathers denied ever saying such things.

7

Moved from IMHO to MPSIMS.

8

Williams Jenning Bryan (IIRC) was speechifying in rural country. So everyone could see him, he climbed up onto a manure spreader.

“For the first time in my life, I am speaking from a Republican platform.”

Or, attributed to Teddy Roosevelt -

A heckler at one of Teddy’s speeches said, “I’m a Democrat.”

“And why are you a Democrat?” asked Teddy.

“Because my grandfather was a Democrat, my father was a Democrat- that’s why I’m a Democrat.”

“And what would you be if your grandfather was a jackass, and your father was a jackass - what would you be then?”

"A Republican!’

Regards,
Shodan

9

Family lore: Minnie Fisher Cunningham, my great aunt, was instrumental in gaining womens suffrage in Texas, helped secure the Nineteenth Amendment and helped start what turned into the League of Women Voters (She started her career as the first woman pharmacist in Texas, but quit and became a suffragist when she learned that the kid who stocked the shelves made twice what she did.)

When the Nineteenth Amendment was coming to a vote, Minnie Fish visited several of the Washington whorehouses. She would wait in the lobby until a congressman or senator who hadn’t declared for suffrage arrived. She would greet them cordially, mention her hopes that they would support the amendment and would then leave them to do whatever they would.

10

Probably some truth to that based on what I’ve read. A lot of the places had false fronts- a cafe or bait shop or shoe store out front, but the backroom’s a high stakes poker game or a dice parlor or the top two floors are a whorehouse. Still, if you just wanted to have a milkshake or buy shoes you could, just don’t go in the back or downstairs.

That is brilliant! :stuck_out_tongue: It would also make a great scene in a movie.

11

I got stuck inside a revolving security door inside the Houses of Parliament. Boris Johnson was coming the other way & he started shouting at me, “push it, you fool.” When I finally escaped, I smiled at him and said, “thank you, Mr Yeltsin.” He didn’t look amused.

12

I’ve heard a very similar claim made about Strom Thurmond; that he accused his opponent’s sister of being a thepsian, and that his opponent was a known homo sapien.

Another anecdote that I like : Supposedly Rev. Jesse Jackson in one of his election runs was shaking hands with the crowd, and one man told him that while he admired Jackson, he couldn’t vote for him because he was a Republican. Rev. Jackson thrust one palm towards the man, another towards the sky, and said “HEAL !”

13

In Chicago, it was set up to where the first floor was legit, the second floor had gambling, and the third floor had whores. The further up you went, the more money you’d lose.

My favorite anecdote, if you can call it that, is the disappearance of Judge Crater in New York. He entered a taxi and…

14

You didn’t mention the third leg of that discription of his opponent. He said he was also known to have matriculated while attending college.

15

My favorite story is about LBJ in the early years. Hunter Thompson tells the tale thusly:

“Back in 1948, during his first race for the U.S. Senate, Lyndon Johnson was running about ten points behind, with only nine days to go. He was sunk in despair. He was desperate. And it was just before noon on a Monday, they say, when he called his equally depressed campaign manager and instructed him to call a press conference for just before lunch on a slow news day and accuse his high-riding opponent, a pig farmer, of having routine carnal knowledge of his barnyard sows, despite the pleas of his wife and children.

His campaign manager was shocked. “We can’t say that, Lyndon,” he supposedly said. “You know it’s not true.”

“Of course it’s not true!” Johnson barked at him. “But let’s make the bastard deny it!”