I
remember putting Roosevelt leaflets on porches when I was pretty young.
It must have been his last campaign, when I was nine years old. I
remember hearing at school that he had died, and not believing it till I
got home and my grandmother confirmed it.
When I was in junior high school (1948), Henry Wallace,
who had been Roosevelt’s Secretary of Agriculture and then vice
president (before Truman) ran as a third party candidate. According to
Wikipedia,
“His campaign was unusual for his time in that it included
African American candidates campaigning alongside white candidates in
the American South, and that during the campaign he refused to appear
before segregated audiences or eat or stay in segregated
establishments.”
My
parents, my father especially, gathered hundreds of signatures to put
the Independent Progressive Party on the ballot in California. I rode
around the track of a stadium on the hood of a truck at a rally in Los
Angeles. My mother began writing songs during that campaign, and singing
at rallies...”My Congressman’s important, he hobnobs with Big Biz/He
soon forgets the guys and gals that put him where he is... (Sing Along).
We listened to the radio on election night. Wallace got about
2-and-a-half percent of the vote (I had to look this up, remembering a
larger number). He came in just behind Strom Thurmond,
but Thurmond got electoral votes because of course his votes were
concentrated in the South; Wallace got none. Truman won anyway, showing
that a divided Democratic Party doesn’t necessarily lose elections.
When
I was in the eleventh grade, my mother ran for Long Beach City Council.
High School juniors took “US History and Government” then, and the
teacher asked me and another girl with a parent running to give speeches
about it to the class. She talked about the campaign itself, about
people tearing down her dad’s election signs and stuff, much as the
media reports campaigns now. I gave a campaign speech, on issues of
corruption (Long Beach had oil revenues back then to be corrupt with)
and general progressive politics. My mom’s slogan (capitalizing on being
a woman candidate, rarer then) was “With hot water, soap, and a broom.”
My
mother had honed her public speaking skills at the “University by the
Sea,” an open forum on a widened part of the Rainbow Pier at the
downtown part of the beach. Its popular name was “The Spit-and-Argue
Club.” There were a lot of benches facing a raised covered speaking
platform. Someone was timekeeper, giving each speaker five minutes, and
the crowd (mostly retired people, of whom Long Beach had a lot) could
vote them ten more, which my mother generally got. She gave campaign
speeches there, and she and my father went door-to-door extensively in
our district. She made a good enough showing in the primary to get in
the citywide run-offs. The local paper ran a photocopy of her 1944 voter
registration as a Communist. She explained that though we were in 1951
in the midst of a “cold war,” back in 1944 Russia was our ally, and she
registered Communist so the party would have the numbers to be able to
stay on the ballot. (In those days of Republican control of California,
some progressives registered Republican just to be able to vote for the
less conservative candidate in the Republican primary—the opposite of
Grey Davis’s campaign ploy.) As I remember, my mom got about 15% of the
vote, not bad with the Press-Telegram against her.
All
this didn’t have any effect on my social life at school that I could
see. I ran with the oddballs anyway, and had Republican boyfriends who
were probably cocking a snook at their parents by going out with me. I
was a whiz at geometry, and my friends used to ask me for homework help
over the phone. We would joke about the FBI wiretappers’ eyes glazing
over as they listened to “OK, draw a parallelogram leaning to the right,
with A at the upper left-hand corner...”
It didn’t occur to me at the time, but...could they have thought it was a code?
©2008 by Nancy Schimmel
Tuesday, July 1, 2008
ELECTIONS I HAVE KNOWN
