“Fine reporter I am. I’m ashamed to say I just found out the Vegetarian Party was running its own candidates for president and vice president in the fall election,” a syndicated columnist confessed shortly before the 1948 election, then speculated, “And the more you think about it, it seems they’ve got a good chance.” Notably the columnist was none other than Gracie Allen, who wrote a humor column from 1945 to 1949. In this instance her readers were undoubtedly licking their chops for vegetarian jokes and, true to form, she dished them out. The nation, she observed, was “chockful of vegetarians—especially the people who got that way whether they liked it or not, due to high meat prices.” She went on to point out, “A vegetarian president who could see in the dark because he ate lots of carrots would certainly be useful for dealing with the Russians. And it would probably be the first time there was spinach in the White House since the days of Presidents U. S. Grant and Benjamin Harrison, who both sported a good crop on their chins.”1
As often with humor, it emanates from serious issues—and not only the Soviet Union but meat prices as well were serious business in 1948, the year John Maxwell ran for president as the nominee of the Vegetarian Party. Odd as it may seem today, the Soviet Union too appears to have exerted an influence on his campaign. And even spinach and beards were a more prominent aspect of attitudes in that era than they are today.
Societies of vegetarians date back at least as far as 1850 in the United States and for just as long have been associated with having political missions. An editorial from that year downplayed concern over poverty in America when it snooted, “While much may be done to improve the conditions of the ‘landless poor’ by judicious individual and national effort, we still think that the country will not be seriously agitated by this question much before the Vegetarian Society succeeds in making it a sine qua non with candidates for Congress that they abstain from beef.”2
Fast-forward to 1948 and the platform of the Vegetarian Party on which Maxwell, an eighty-five-year-old proprietor of a vegetarian restaurant, ran for president. While the platform did not call for congressional candidates to disavow eating meat, it did call for a prohibition on raising livestock for meat. As for the seemingly separate issue of poverty, the party called for federally funded public housing, a massive program of public works (including creation of interstate highways), a broader and more generous social security system, and a federal program to encourage the formation of food cooperatives to provide an alternative to privately owned grocery stores. Both in the 1850 news item and the 1948 platform of the Vegetarian Party, produce and poverty were intertwined. Maxwell’s fringe candidacy amplified why the two were in harmony.
While the interstate highway system, the Department of Housing and Urban Development, and expansion of social security were all enacted during the next two decades, not enacted were the food co-ops or, needless to say, the prohibition on meat production. Nor were any of the Vegetarian Party’s additional ideas aimed at financing those projects. These proposals included the party’s call for giving Congress rather than the Federal Reserve control over the monetary supply and for taxes to be based on gross income rather than net income, thereby eliminating all tax deductions and credits.
What’s vegetarianism got to do with such stuff? Or with, I should also mention, the Vegetarian Party’s call for government ownership of radio and television broadcasting systems.
And electric utilities.
And the telephone system.
And all natural resources.3
Suppose we put the question this way: What would you call this party in 1948, with fear of the Soviet Union causing the Red Scare to get into full swing?
Not that they weren’t vegetarians. Indeed they were so vegetarian that a nationally reported dust-up occurred during the election when the party’s leaders repudiated George Bernard Shaw, the world-famous playwright who had long proclaimed his vegetarianism, as being insufficiently vegetarian by virtue of having once been treated for pernicious anemia with cod liver oil. “His goose is cooked,” Maxwell’s running made, Symon Gould, declared—demonstrating that being vegetarian doesn’t mean you don’t have snarly teeth. Or a sense of humor.4
What being vegetarian did mean for the members of the Vegetarian Party intertwined healthful and moral living. Both elements can be seen in a news item on Maxwell’s candidacy: “‘Thou shalt not kill.’ So the Vegetarian Party thinks it has a moral issue. . . . It’s all right if he doesn’t make a law to compel us to eat more carrots and spinach.”5
Gracie Allen’s gag about Maxwell’s candidacy and spinach provides a view of America’s social landscape at this time as, in both of these instances, the humor relied upon spinach being viewed askance as an unpleasant “health food” (which kids were encouraged to eat because it gave Popeye super strength). When Allen went on to link spinach to past presidents with beards, the joke relied on beards being considered old-fashioned as well as a sign of nonconformity during this cold war era when allegiance was widely demanded. “Whiskers don’t look so queer on poets as they do on basketball players,” one columnist noted in 1949 in a piece devoted to views of beards.6
Allen’s line about the United States being “chockful of vegetarians—especially the people who got that way whether they liked it or not, due to high meat prices,” held the key as to why, in that particular year, vegetarians formed a political party for the purpose of nominating a candidate for president. For the past five years, the availability and cost of meat were often front-page news in the United States. In 1943 meat rationing went into effect as part of the war effort. One of those who sought to ease concern over the reduced availability of meat was Maxwell. He received considerable news coverage for linking patriotic meat rationing with the health benefits of a vegetarian diet.7 One year after the war the meat supply was again front-page news with the onset of a nationwide strike by meatpackers. Once again Maxwell took the opportunity to gain adherents to vegetarianism, this time receiving even more news coverage than he had during the war.8 Following settlement of the strike, meat repeatedly resurfaced in the news as the price of beef commenced to rise, due to higher labor costs but also higher demand from a larger population as our military returned home and, not long after, the number of children dramatically increased.9
With the availability and cost of meat so frequently in the spotlight, Maxwell and many other vegetarians saw an opportunity to mount the national stage in the 1948 presidential election. Notably Maxwell himself was not the driving force behind the creation of the Vegetarian Party; the man at that helm was Symond Gould, his running mate. Nor was Gould’s ending up in the number two slot the result of political infighting, as neither Gould nor Maxwell had visions of winning the White House. Gould told the delegates at their convention in New York that their mission was to gain increased attention. And while their view of the importance of a vegetarian diet was central to that mission, Gould spoke to the moral components of vegetarianism when, in that speech, he held out hope for possibly three million votes that “would come from prohibitionists, anti-vivisectionists [those opposed to the sacrifice of animals in product testing and other research] and anti–cigarette smoking groups.” He then employed a particularly interesting phrase in saying, “We will also attract other groups of people of similar high moral principal.”10
Sounds a little like the High Moral Party created by Live Forever Jones. Where Jones asserted that adhering to a highly moral life could enable one to live forever, Maxwell similarly (though infinitely more reasonably) claimed, “There’s no question about it, vegetarianism does lead to longevity.”11 A reporter for the Associated Press conceded that Maxwell did not look as old as he was; indeed he wrote that Maxwell would have looked thirty years younger than his actual age if he shaved off his beard.12 Because he was so healthy and alert at his age, Maxwell was an ideal candidate to spread the word about the benefits of vegetarianism. As to the beard, to the extent that it made him look older, so much the better, though the downside was the extent to which it made him look like a nonconformist.
Maxwell was well suited to be the party’s standard-bearer because he was more widely known than any of its other leaders. He had appeared in news reports concerning the availability of meat from 1943 to 1948, and in the 1930s he was frequently mentioned in the press for his involvement in a movement called the Townsend Plan. Little remembered today, a physician named Francis Townsend commenced an effort in the early years of the Great Depression to enact federal pensions for elderly Americans. The creation of Townsend Clubs spread like wildfire. In Chicago, where Maxwell was well-known for having one of the largest vegetarian restaurants in the nation, he formed and led the Downtown Townsend Club and began to acquire a national name as a speaker and close adviser to Townsend. When the Social Security Act of 1935 failed to measure up to the legislation sought by Townsend and his followers, the movement continued, with Maxwell often appearing as an advocate for an expansion of the program. For a time Maxwell also hosted a radio show in Chicago and, prior to that, was a columnist for the Milwaukee Leader when he lived in that city. With the degree of name recognition he’d acquired through these activities, Maxwell was able to attract coverage as a presidential candidate in Time magazine, a full page with photo in Life magazine, and nationwide air-time on CBS radio.13
While Live Forever Jones was clearly far more idiosyncratic than John Maxwell, both campaigns amplified an attitude that had not changed and that periodically becomes political—a belief that healthfulness and righteousness go hand in hand. During the 1948 campaign, however, Maxwell had to concede that vegetarianism did not necessarily result in righteousness. Adolf Hitler, after all, had been a vegetarian. Still, the duality can be traced back to biblical times, as Leviticus intertwines dietary and religious tenets. Similarly Muslims, Hindus, Seventh Day Adventists, Mormons, and numerous other religions conjoin the two, just as, on the secular side, a coach at my high school would cite and then translate a maxim from Ancient Rome: Mens sana in corpore sano—a healthy mind in a healthy body.
The 1868 candidacy of Live Forever Jones and, eighty years later, the 1948 candidacy of John Maxwell bring into focus the persistence and power of this belief. Sharp focus, for their candidacies also provide perspective on just how powerful it was.
Or wasn’t.
Never powerful enough to elect a president. Not even enough to avoid considerable ridicule.
One local columnist in Illinois went hog wild—or perhaps the more apt pun would be completely corny—when he penned a mock speech in which Maxwell says: “We do not meat today to lambast the other parties, and neither do we want to turnip our noses at the opposition although we think some of our hecklers artichoke. . . . Some of the things that have been said about the way our country is being run are parsley true and parsley false. . . . We believe it to be a berry good suggestion that we all peach in and win the Cucumber election.”14
In one instance ridicule of Maxwell’s candidacy even turned up in the classified ads. Amid the listings of houses for sale it read:
The Vegetarian Party
The other day a fellow wanted me to join the Vegetarian Party and try to elect a non–meat eating president. It sounded pretty sensible at first. Remove meat from the budget and high food prices would fall; people would be calmer and less animated. . . . But then I thought things might not be so smooth for a vegetarian nation in a meat eating world . . . so I didn’t join the party. In fact, to make sure . . . I ate a hamburger right away; and it made me so animated I dug out all these real estate bargains.15
A shrewd use of filler for days when the page ran short of ads.
From the moment of Maxwell’s nomination, the press began slinging zingers. “Lettuce-Nibblers Will Put Up Doctor for President” a headline in a Wisconsin newspaper declared, competing with “Meat Tee-totaler Candidate for Party” in an Iowa paper. A Missouri newspaper wondered if the Vegetarian Party “would be against muttonheads in public office and all form of pork-barrel legislation.”16
Curiously (but answerably) the press mentioned but did not make fun of Dr. Maxwell’s claim to be a “naturopath physician.” Similarly (and getting us closer to answerably), only rarely did the press mention that Maxwell was born in England, which disqualified him from becoming president.17 Neither of these facts is funny. And for the press, the value of fringe candidates is that they can be made funny. Which more than just rhymes with money.
And that is yet another way fringe candidates, whether they like it or not, help shape this nation’s political landscape. Through mockery of fringe candidates the media adds to its coffers and all who engage in such ridicule contribute to enforcing society’s prevailing norms.
No record exists of the number of votes Maxwell received. Probably less than the number of newspapers that couldn’t resist one last poke, running an Associated Press report that began, “The Vegetarian Party’s presidential candidate, Dr. John Maxwell of Chicago, made sure of one vote in today’s election—his own.”18 Maxwell, who sought only to bring attention to his issues, anticipated the outcome, taking it not only in stride but with humor. “We’ll try again next year,” he told the press. “I’m young yet and will only be ninety in the next election.”19
As it turned out, by then aging was beginning to snare him. He relocated to the warmer climes of California, where he passed away—though not until 1963, at the age of one hundred. Having outlived so many who had known of his achievements and having no offspring, Maxwell was buried in a grave that remained unmarked for the next fifty years. When a professor of history brought this oversight to the attention of the press, even in death one newspaper could not resist a parting shot. “Lettuce Adorn Vegetarian Presidential Candidate’s Final Plot” its headline read.20
As for the Vegetarian Party, it moved on to another candidate in the 1958 election. This time around, however, the campaign received less attention, in part because an internal conflict interfered with its message. In the 1960 election the party received only scant notice, as many of the programs it originally advocated were now either in place or had become part of the platform of the mainstream candidates.