Signs of Another Time

“. . . go forth in love and peace — be kind to dogs — and vote Democratic"

Guess who said that.

The first year of my brief first marriage was also the year of the first Presidential election I was able to vote in.  1972.  Nixon had one term under his belt.   Muskie, McCarthy, and McGovern were struggling for the democratic nomination against each other and more importantly against George Wallace, an unrepentant racist who might as well have had horns growing out of his forehead as far as I was concerned.  I was still a teenager, but old enough to get married and -- since the voting age had been lowered to 18 the previous year -- old enough to vote.

Stuart had left his job at Lockheed in Los Angeles the year before to come home and farm with his father.  When we got married in December of 1971, I quit school half-way through my sophomore year in college to move from Austin (which had recently given birth to weird) to Roby (which was then and still is in a dry – and I don’t mean arid -- county smack dab in the philosophical heart of the Bible belt).  We moved into the first house Stuart had ever lived in – a two-bedroom, stucco, shotgun house five miles east of town; a hundred yards from Stuart’s grandparents’ larger, lovelier home; half a mile from his parents; a stone’s throw from the massive barn which was no longer used for anything except storing defunct tools and some hay.  Our house, like the barn, suffered from neglect, having stood empty on the wind-blown plains for over a decade.  In spite of that Stuart was tickled to be home, shed of the defense industry job that had got him a draft deferment.  And I was naïvely happy to accept things, like what house I lived in or the political habits of my new in-laws, without question.  The house faced south toward the highway which hurled whining semi-trucks and speeding cars past us on a straight shot from Fort Worth to Hobbs, New Mexico.  Behind us was a field planted in cotton, cradled on two sides by the Clear Fork of the Brazos.

Inside the house, Stuart and I were cracking open the lid on Pandora’s box.  This isn’t a story about addiction or misspent youth or the many troubles we let loose in our lives way back when, though.  It’s about politics.

We couldn’t go on a honeymoon after the wedding because the cotton hadn’t been harvested yet.  Back then you couldn’t harvest cotton until after the first freeze had killed the plants, and there had not been a freeze in the fall of 1971.  The first freeze of the winter came in January launching every farmer in the county into the hardest job in the cotton-farming cycle – stripping.   Stuart and the hired hand spent painfully cold days, working their way through acres of cotton, taking turns driving the stripper or standing in the trailer behind to stomp the cotton down into the trailer bed before the howling wind blew it away.  It was a bitter piece of physical labor.  But that’s the way it was done.  Then.  In 1972 there were not even any air-conditioned tractors in Fisher County.   Everyone plowed in an open-air tractor and harvested in an open-air stripper without even the benefit of radios.   Sometime in 1973, Stuart got wind of a new tractor on the market, a John Deere with an enclosed, air-conditioned and heated cab.  He immediately began lobbying for one.  But his father, who was his partner and no longer spent anytime on a tractor himself, thought it was an unnecessary extravagance. 

Stuart’s father was an archetype right out of a Southern gothic novel – big, powerful, demanding, smart.  He had been a Senator in the state legislature and had run for Congress. He was also the Chairman of the Fisher County Democratic Party, a position he took seriously.  He believed that politics was a serious business.

Come primary day in the spring of 1972, everyone in Stuart’s family – mother, father, grandparents, sons, daughters, daughter-in-law – went to the courthouse for the precinct convention, which, as anyone who’s ever been to their precinct convention knows, did not warrant the name “convention.”  Maybe twenty people gathered in a conference room upstairs in the courthouse.  About half of them were my relatives so it wasn't exactly intimidating.

When the time arrived to declare which candidate you supported for the Democratic nomination, I came out in favor of McGovern.   I found out on the drive home that Stuart considered that an act of naivete.  He had remained undeclared -- I think others in his family did, too -- a move he thought improved his chance of being elected as a delegate to the state convention in San Antonio.  The way the Stuart explained it, if the Wallace supporters didn’t know who you actually did support they might think that you supported their candidate and vote for you as a delegate.  I doubt that anyone in Fisher County was that dumb.  Even the Wallace supporters.  It was no secret that Stuart’s family leaned to the left, and Stuart had a pony tail.  It didn’t really matter though.  No one else was interested in going to the convention so Stuart and his brother were unanimously elected as delegates just on the basis of announcing their availability. 

Although McGovern did ultimately get the nomination, I doubt it was because of the maneuverings of savvy supporters in the heartland.  But honestly, there was enough at stake with Wallace as a contender to make any effort to block him worthwhile.  And who knows?  So many trivial and important things were at play.  Muskie cried, for God’s sake.  Actually, I think his voice just cracked, but apparently that was enough to get you run out of town on a rail in 1972.  Someone shot Wallace a week after the precinct convention.  Funny to think that both those events had the same impact on the candidacy of those two men.

Everyone in Stuart’s family was pleased with McGovern’s nomination.  I was, too.  McGovern was against the war which was the issue I cared about.  The war, the draft, and the atrocities of war that we glimpsed every night on the 6 o’clock news.  Those were the things I cared about. 

I’d never heard of Agent Orange in 1972 so I didn’t know to care about that.  I wouldn’t hear about Operation Ranchhand and the chemical defoliant U.S. troops were using in Vietnam for tactical purposes until long after the war was over.  I remember now, though, that the hottest topic of conversation at the Fisher County Farmers Union meeting in the summer of 1972 was the new product the Treflan salesman was peddling – a defoliant that worked.  The conversation only penetrated the periphery of my consciousness.  I didn’t want to be at the Farmer’s Union meeting, but, like the precinct convention, skipping it did not appear to be an option in Stuart's family.  I had no interest in or opinion about any topic of conversation at the meeting including defoliants or anything else to do with the farm.  I knew more about what was going on in Vietnam than I knew about the farm.  But I find it interesting now to look back and realize that by the mid-70s none of the farmers in Fisher County had to wait for the first freeze to strip cotton.  Sometime around 1972 they started using defoliants which meant that the cotton could be harvested in the fall. By that time the defoliant they were using had been field test thoroughly in Vietnam.

Stuart didn’t strip cotton in the fall of ‘72, though.  He and I had moved back to Austin that September so that he could begin law school and I could pick up my undergraduate education right where I had left off -- studying too little, barely squeaking by academically, partying too much.  We went to hear music a couple of times a week.  We saw movies constantly.  I had lunch every day in the Chuckwagon, a cafeteria style restaurant on the ground floor of the Student Union; I would often miss classes to sit in the Chuckwagon all afternoon talking about politics or books or time travel with other students who fancied themselves students of life and could argue passionately that institutional structures and strictures (like classrooms and classes scheduled at particular times) actually interfered with real learning.  Sometimes I would tell people that I went to the University of Chuckwagon which I thought was a pretty funny joke.  I loved the Union – smoked cigarettes and read in the corridor upstairs, listened to music at Potpouri which is now the Cactus Café, and went to all the lectures.  That’s how I saw Linda Jenness, the Socialist Workers’ Party candidate for President, speak.  I left that lecture all fired up, feeling elated that finally a candidate had articulated my thoughts and values, clearly and unequivocally. 

McGovern had slipped in my estimation.   I still feel a little upset when I think of Thomas Eagleton.  The fact that McGovern dumped him as a running mate when it came out that Eagleton had had electroshock therapy seemed to me like an unforgiveable act of disloyalty and cowardice.  Truth is, the Eagleton debacle sat so wrong with me, that years later when Gary Hart tried a Presidential run, I wouldn’t consider supporting him simply because he had been McGovern’s campaign manager.  Needless to say, I was not feeling enthusiastic about McGovern in the fall of 1972.  On top of his disloyalty to Eagleton, in every campaign ad McGovern sounded like he was apologizing for opposing the war.  And the closer we got to election day the more apologetic he sounded.  I couldn’t understand why he didn’t just hammer the points adamantly – the war is wrong; the draft is wrong; I will end the war, bring our troops home, and offer amnesty to those who left the country to avoid the draft.  I couldn’t see what was hard about that.  I was that young.  

I’d never heard of absentee voting, but that was the rule in Stuart's family, not the exception.  That way if you died before election day, your vote would still count.  Since I did not doubt the family wisdom, I was a willing soldier in their army.  When the general said, “Vote absentee,” I voted absentee.  But when I cast my early ballot, I voted my conscience and instead of voting for George McGovern I voted for the candidate I thought would do the best job – Linda Jenness.

I didn’t tell Stuart.  I didn’t tell anybody that I had voted for the Socialist Workers’ Party candidate.  Didn’t seem necessary for one thing.  For another, it was my business who I voted for.

On the weekend before election day, Stuart and I went home to Roby and stayed over until Wednesday.  That seems odd now because Stuart was actually an excellent student and never cut classes.  Still that’s what we did – we went to Roby for the election.  As if it were Christmas or Thanksgiving.  On that Tuesday we didn’t go to the courthouse to vote because, of course, we had already voted, but when the polls closed we all – again, father, mother, grandparents, children –  went to the courthouse.  We weren’t the only ones.  The courthouse square was bustling with cars, and inside people were busy doing the work of citizens. The industrious and mature, like my Aunt Fi, were working, counting votes, posting the count on the big black board above us in the lobby. The rest of us, like me, were just hanging out, watching the numbers go up on the board.

That’s when things got tricky.  The first number to go up and the only count that never changed on the blackboard all night long was the tally on absentee votes. Turns out eight people had voted absentee in Fisher County that year.  When the votes were posted in big, neat numbers so that the old folks wouldn’t have to squint, it was revealed that seven of the absentee voters had voted for George McGovern.  One had voted for Linda Jenness. 

I hadn’t anticipated the blackboard and it didn’t occur to me when I cast my ballot that so few people voted absentee. 

Who?  I heard people ask around me.  Linda Who?  I have an image of Stuart’s father looking at the blackboard.  He knew, of course, as we all did, that all eight absentee votes had been cast by his family.  He’d distributed the ballots himself.  He also knew that anyone with a lick of sense in the room would know that all the votes in the absentee column were his family’s.  But he met the information on the blackboard with a poker face, and I never saw him look at the numbers in that column again. The younger generation of the family eyed each other and me cautiously. Trying to figure out which one of us had violated the family code of honor.  I sat there all night, with the good citizens of Fisher County, looking quizzically at Linda Jenness’s name on the board as if I wondered who she was, too.   I avoided making eye contact with Aunt Fi who had remarkable analytical skills and didn't appreciate many of the choices I was making that year to start with. 

I don’t remember hearing anyone explain who Linda Jenness was.  I didn’t hear anyone say “You’re kidding?”  or “Socialist what?  What party?”  or even “I’ll be damned.”   But as the evening wore on I realized that people were no longer asking the question. That’s how gossip works in Roby.  It’s what you don’t hear that you need to worry about.   The truth of what people think or say about you lies behind a mask of civility and layers of triangulation, and once public opinion starts building against you, you're up to your eyebrows before you know it.  Good mothers in Fisher County teach their children that lesson when they’re very young.  I didn’t make a conscious decision to be a chickenshit that night, but I didn’t step forward and save Stuart or anyone else in his family from being undeservedly labeled a socialist.  I’m sure it didn’t occur to me to worry about their reputations.  And to tell the truth I wasn’t worried about any of our reputations as much as I was worried about being discovered as the traitor in our voting block.  I was so consumed by that worry that I barely noticed that the opponent of any candidate I would support – Richard Nixon – won the election.

Oddly, Stuart’s parents never mentioned Linda Jenness after election night.  In my presence at least.  I imagined they must’ve puzzled over it in private.  But I was confident they had no idea which one of the younger generation was the outlier.  I wasn’t the only rebel in the bunch by a long shot. 

Sometime after the election, though, I had a conversation with Stuart’s father that probably gave him some satisfaction.  I told him in a moment when we were oddly alone that I thought you should vote for the best candidate, the candidate you believed would do the best job.  I said party affiliation didn’t matter.  Or if it did, it ran a distant second to the importance of the individual.  That seemed like a no-brainer to me and I was shocked to discover that Stuart’s father adamantly disagreed with me. He said that an individual doesn’t have enough power to get anything done.  The individual has to work within a party to have any strength, and the party is much more powerful than any one candidate.  If you want to change something, if you want to make things better, he advised me, work within the party.  Shape the party.  Make it see the issue you care about. Get the party to put its weight behind platforms and initiatives that reflect your beliefs.  The candidate comes later.  It’s hard to remember the specifics of things that long ago especially since I was probably high and trying to hide it, but I remember my imposing father-in-law giving me a piercing look and saying something along the lines of  “You think everyone deserves a fair shot.”  He had an expression on his face that suggested he was old and wise and would be amused at how young and naïve I was if it weren’t so tragic.  A look that made me suspect he knew I was voting for socialists.  As intimidating as he was, his arrogance made me mad and I came back with a defiant, “Yes, I do.”  He said, “I do, too.  That’s why I’m a Democrat.”

Yesterday I heard a report on the radio about why young people don’t vote.   In interviews, young non-voters said that they weren’t interested in the election, that they don’t know enough, that the candidates are all the same, that their vote doesn’t matter.  I felt sad listening to them and wished that I could give them a fraction of my own abundant emotion about the election.  To this day there is something about the Presidential election that inspires awe in me. The significance of what we all participate in – Republicans, Democrats, Libertarians, and Socialists alike – seems sacred and wonderful to me.  I always feel tears welling up when I vote.  It’s almost like having a hormone imbalance.   Four years ago around this time of year, as the likelihood of a miracle – that in my lifetime we could move from George Wallace as a possible candidate to Barack Obama as President -- loomed larger everyday, I began to feel like I was going to burst into tears all the time.

I look back on my first Presidential election and I think about how naïve we were.  And how that blinded us to things.  For instance, how is it that we bought defoliants hook, line, and sinker two years after the first Earth Day, a decade after Rachel Carson published Silent Spring?  And kept buying them after we found out about Agent Orange?  I think about the advice Benjamin Braddock got in The Graduate: “Plastics.”  We were savvy enough to know how clever that joke was, smart enough to see where we were headed.  But not smart enough to take another route.  Maybe we were lazy.  Or high.  Maybe none of us – even the hardworking and sober – could handle the complexity of everything.  But today I find myself being nostalgic and wishing farmers would have kept stripping cotton in open-air strippers after the first freeze. I realize that it's easy for me to wish that since I don't plant or plow or harvest anything.  But I can't help noticing that some progress has hurt more than it's helped.  I also wish I could take every young person who doesn’t vote and sit them down in the old county courthouse in Roby, Texas in 1972 to watch citizens of all stripes tally votes on a blackboard till way past bedtime.  Till all the votes were counted.   It’s hard to live through that and think it doesn’t matter.

It’s all about politics.  The semi-trucks on the highway, the cotton field behind the house, the Farmer’s Union meeting, racism, shock treatments, stripping cotton, skipping class.  All politics.  That’s why it’s a serious business.  That’s why little things -- like showing up at the precinct convention or paying attention to the conversation at the Farmers’ Union meeting or voting -- matter.  That's probably the most important thing I learned in 1972.  I imagine George McGovern and Thomas Eagleton and Linda Jenness all three would back me up on that.

“. . . go forth in love and peace — be kind to dogs — and vote Democratic"

Senator Thomas Eagleton’s dying wish

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sSYzSMbwpx8&feature=share