I’ve been revisiting a lot of older sitcoms lately. Last night I watched Green Acres 1x06 “Furniture, Furniture, Who’s Got the Furniture?” (October 20, 1965) where Oliver’s perpetually snobbish mother is appauled to see a “Vote for Coolidge” billboard. Today I watched Bewitched 1x07 “The Witches Are Out” (October 29, 1964), where perpetually confused Clara creates a “Vote for Coolidge” protest sign. The two episodes did not have the same writers. I’m thinking this was a meme (before the coining of the term) for something that is terribly outdated/someone old and confused. Or was it mere coincidence that both picked Coolidge for the distant candidate? Any more examples of “Vote for Coolidge” used like this?
TV Tropes (under a generic ‘waving signs around’ category) blamed it on Clara being absent minded.
The only thing I found for Green Acres was a random comment that said “Another gag is how out of touch Hooterville is-one epsiode has a election sign that says “Vote for Coolidge”! In another episode there is the remark Herbert Hoover is still President”
So maybe just a coincidence due to similarly aged writers picking a president from their parent’s generation. Like if I was writing a show and had an absent minded character holding up a sign for Reagan or Carter. Even when I specifically (but not very in depth) search for it, those are the only two examples I can find.
There was that turn-of-the-millennium Hotbot.com commercial where a search for “political scandals” on a competitor’s search engine turned up “revealing photographs of Coolidge.”
“Vote for Hoover” would have a political air to it (as when Archie sings “Mister, we could use a man like Herbert Hoover again”). “Vote for Roosevelt” - same. If you want someone way out of date, and so bland that it’s funny that someone is actually enthusiastic about him (someone who you can’t even remember which party he belonged to without a moment of thought), Coolidge is the way to go.
Agreed. Harding was tainted by scandal, Hoover was still disgraced by the Depression, and Roosevelt was not only still controversial, but he had only been dead for 20 years at that point. (Heck, Hoover lived until 1964!) Coolidge hit the absolute sweet spot of being someone only the oldest people in the community would remember, and being politically inoffensive.
In the Li’l Abner comic strip, there were occasionally references to how the residents of Dogpatch are fuzzy on who is the current President (e.g. McKinley or Teddy Roosevelt).
Those are different props in the OP. I’m just saying I could see the billboard in a backlot, and writer for Green Acres saw it one day and thought it was funny.
In “The Case of the Hooterville Refund Fraud”, Mr. Douglas gets a letter from the federal government. Fred Ziffle asks him whether he’s been “writing nasty letters to Herbert Hoover”.
Hoover, Coolidge, et al. Hooterville was out of touch. They didn’t even know about income tax, which was how that episode got started.
I think endorsing Gerald Ford would get a similar reaction today. Never elected, didn’t even serve one full term, and not much of a footprint outside of his presidency.
Coolidge (a.k.a., “Silent Cal”) didn’t do much as president aside from seeing to it that Prohibition was enforced. That’s probably why my uncle put up a reproduction of a “Keep Cool With Coolidge” 1924 campaign poster in his basement bar.
