Louis Abolafia was one of a group of fringe candidates who received widespread attention in the 1968 presidential election. That year also saw the satiric candidacy of comedian Pat Paulsen, the not at all satiric candidacy of militant African American leader Eldridge Cleaver, the serious candidacy of African American comedian Dick Gregory, and the candidacy of a pig named Pigasus. That all of these fringe candidates received considerable national attention reflects the fact that a multitude of profound concerns were in the wind at that time.
In addition to those five newcomers, Homer Tomlinson conducted his last campaign in 1968. Notably both he and Abolafia advocated a restoration of life as it was in the Garden of Eden. Abolafia’s campaign poster, however, depicted him doing so as in the days of the Garden of Eden: buck naked. Outdoing all the other little-known presidential contenders that year, Abolafia threw everything except his hat into the ring. He held onto that in his poster, providing cover from the law. The poster featured his campaign slogan, “What have I got to hide?”
Needless to say, Tomlinson, despite invoking the Garden of Eden, would not have appeared thus fig-leafed. Nevertheless he and Abolafia shared other similarities. “A 24-year-old artist, who believes that he is being discriminated against by museums because he is not internationally famous, reached the fifth day of a hunger strike yesterday as a means of arguing his case,” the New York Times reported in 1965, that artist being Abolafia and that report being very similar to the Times previously reporting that Tomlinson commenced his 1952 presidential campaign by going on a twenty-one-day fast.1
As Abolafia’s campaign slogan stated, he did not hide the reason for his publicity-seeking acts. Prior to his hunger strike, he had smuggled one of his paintings into the Metropolitan Museum of Art and hung it on the wall. But it was spotted and taken down before becoming newsworthy. The announcement of his hunger strike was attached to the end of two other Abolafian strikes—one in which he picketed the Museum of Modern Art, again getting no news coverage, and the other picketing the newly opened, less venerable, more vulnerable, and short-lived Gallery of Modern Art. That protest managed to receive mention in the soon-to-be-defunct New York Herald Tribune.2
Being in his early twenties, Abolafia may have been youthfully impatient for artistic recognition, but he was impatient for a reason. By the age of ten he had already demonstrated such artistic talent that he received a scholarship to the Museum of Modern Art’s educational project, the People’s Art Center. He later graduated from Julliard, the nation’s preeminent performing and visual arts college. Along the way he may well have learned that making a splash in the art world entailed more than paint.
Abolafia persevered in seeking to call attention to himself as an artist. The year after his pickets and hunger strike, he ran for governor of New York, despite, at age twenty-five, being five years younger than the age mandated by the state’s constitution. But getting elected wasn’t his objective. Rather he began achieving his aim when a New York Times article on his campaign identified him as “Louis Abolafia, an artist,” in a report headlined “Gubernatorial Aspirant Throws Beret in Ring”—berets being associated with French painters. While his platform did not overtly promote his own art, it did call for more art schools, free art galleries, and subsidies for artistically talented students.3
Not surprisingly, then, bright and early in the campaign season for the 1968 presidential election, Abolafia announced his candidacy, this time aiming for nationwide recognition as an artist. To enter the presidential stage he produced a version of the hippie love-ins and be-ins (the distinction being unclear) that were getting widespread attention in the news media.4 He called his event the Cosmic Love Convention. It would be, he announced to the press, “a 72-hour Freakathon for Hippies and Saints.”5
The press bit the bait. Then, reversing the metaphor, reeled in ridicule.
“A delegate with a banana skin stuck on his nose was walking down the aisle of the Village Theater as Louis Abolafia spelled out his campaign platform for the presidency of the United States,” the Associated Press reported in an article that appeared nationwide under the headline “Hippie Seeking Presidency Stages Campaign Happening.” Similar headlines were “Platform of Love for U.S. President” and my personal favorite, “Help a Humble Beatnik Earn an Honest Living.” (The beatnik turned out not to be Abolafia; it was the guy selling bananas in the lobby.) The wire service’s photo from the event was captioned by one Pennsylvania newspaper, “Would you believe the bearded kook in the center—name of Louis Abolafia who wants people to smoke banana peels because it makes them happy—is running for President? He is. He announced his candidacy at a 72-hour ‘Cosmic Love Convention for Hippies and Saints’ at a theater in Greenwich Village.”6
Amid the rock music and moving images projected on all the surfaces of the venue, Abolafia proclaimed, “I want to spread love through art. If I become president, I will set up cultural centers throughout the country. People’s tastes would be improved. Eventually love would spread all over the world and wars would become impossible because everybody would love everybody else.” The Associated Press report ended with the least eye-popping, but actually most significant, detail regarding Abolafia’s candidacy. It noted that his campaign manager, Andrew Kent, admitted they did not expect to win. Kent, later internationally renowned for his photography, then said, “However, it’s a sign that Abolafia is emerging from the underground.”7
Emerging yes, but only to be ridiculed in the press. Brush-stroking a somewhat different picture than the Associated Press reported, the New Yorker included Abolafia’s Cosmic Love Convention in its “Talk of the Town” section, telling its nationwide readership:
It was supposed to continue day & night for 4 days, but when the writer arrived one morning at 10, no one was there . . . [except for] a girl campaign worker who said . . . a lot of people were worn out from the night before and she guessed that today’s Love-In would start around 2 PM. Writer came back to the theatre at that time and found it full of cheerful people. Louis had arrived. He said: “In running for the Presidency I’m trying to bring about a world unity. We should be a country of giving and giving and giving. The way we’re going now, we’re all wrong. We could be giants; we should be 10 times above what the Renaissance was.” The purpose of the Love-In, he said, was to bring all the arts together. He said he was a painter.8
Even New York’s hip newspaper, the Village Voice, described Abolafia as “a professional self-publicist who has made a career of fame-gaining schemes. . . . The campaign is as phony as a nickel bag of oregano.”9
Still, this initial blast of publicity got sufficient attention to attract interviewers from print and broadcast media. While ideal for Abolafia to create interest in him as an artist, the interviewers had their own interests for which Abolafia was ideal. For wire service correspondent Tom Tiede, Abolafia could be put on a pedestal as a representation of all that was eye-rolling about the tide of hippies unwashing across America in the latter half of the 1960s. Headlined in one newspaper “He Sees World Going to Pot,” his report began, “Louis Abolafia, 25, used to be just another unknown nuisance who let his hair grow to his shoulders . . . but now, he insists, ‘the whole world knows who I am.’” Indeed Tiede correctly smelled ulterior motives. But he was less interested in Abolafia’s motives than his own. “Thus he’s no longer an unknown nuisance; he’s a notorious nuisance,” Tiede continued. “By his own admission, Louis Abolafia has, through two years of concentrated mischief, become the best-known hippie in the land.” Tiede went on to castigate Abolafia’s “noxious” campaign poster featuring him “full-length in the buff” (no mention of the strategically placed hat) and scoffed at “the hundreds of protests he attends. Against the draft, against the war. Abolafia here and Abolafia there, continually on the search for a photographer, a reporter or a man with a microphone.” (No mention of similar behavior by mainstream politicians.) “He has even begun criticizing hippyism,” Tiede exclaimed, quoting Abolafia telling him, “Actually, I’m not a hippie. I just look like a hippie.”10 Citing an example of his not being a stereotypical hippie, Abolafia told Tiede about an endeavor he currently oversaw in the East Village, New York’s hippie mecca, which had also become a mecca for runaway teens. Their vulnerability so troubled him that he had organized an effort to offer them shelter in drug-free apartments whose occupants joined social workers in volunteering to help see if contact could be reestablished between these youths and their parents. Or, as Tiede described it, “his hippie lost-and-found bureau.” When the interview got around to the purpose of the candidate’s World Love Party, Abolafia’s frustration in seeking to create interest in his art appears to have slipped into Tiede’s reporting when he wrote, “‘The party,’ he sighs, ‘is mostly beauty and culture.’” A telling sigh.
Not all the interviewers were hostile, but all were as motivated by their objectives as Abolafia was by his. The syndicated columnist Sylvie Reice, for example, wrote of his views on the Vietnam War, on lowering the voting age to eighteen, and, with considerably more sympathy, on his efforts to help young runaways. The only levity she made of Abolafia’s candidacy was in her opening line: “You have to be at least 35 years old to serve as President of the United States but to Louis Abolafia, a 26-year-old New York painter, that detail doesn’t matter.”11 The detail about being a painter, however, mattered a lot to Abolafia, but not to Reice, for whom it was her only reference.
There was at least one interviewer who spotted the significance of Abolafia’s artistic quest and saw fit to include it. The syndicated columnist Mike Jahn wrote of Abolafia’s past efforts to have his art recognized and quoted him saying, “At most museums they didn’t show real American artists. You had to be a member of a clique, a group.”12 Jahn, himself only twenty-five years old, would go on that same year to become the first reporter hired by the New York Times whose full-time assignment was the rock music scene—the springboard to his becoming a highly regarded journalist and the author of nonfiction and fiction. Not surprisingly, then, because Jahn dug the arts, in his interview he understood Abolafia’s campaign.
Being a visual artist, Abolafia tried to convey his candidacy’s artistic quest visually. But the press still did not, or chose not, to catch on. In an Associated Press interview he sought to show himself as an artist through his clothing. “Over his turtleneck and skimpy dark suit he slings one of two black capes with gold or silver linings,” the article read, clearly aware that this garb differed from that of your typical hippie. “He seems a sort of hybrid Abe Lincoln and Batman.”13
Sigh. Lincoln-Batman? Not maybe a Degas-Rodin? Or a Warhol-Picasso?
So Abolafia tried other imagery. “Draped in a Roman-type toga and sporting a beard and shaggy hair, a presidential candidate addressed hundreds of followers Sunday in Boston Common,” another wire service reported.14 Shaggy hair and beard, no doubt about that: hippie. But toga? Rather than ask or speculate, the reporter just let it hang. An arts reporter might have caught on, recognizing Abolafia’s allusion to neoclassical sculptures in the pantheon of American art depicting George Washington, Benjamin Franklin, and Alexander Hamilton in togas, thereby connecting them to the democracies of ancient Greece and Rome.15
This same news item contained two additional details worthy of note. It quoted Abolafia proclaiming, “Make love not war,” which he did so frequently that, over time, the origin of that hallmark phrase from the antiwar era has often been attributed to him, becoming part of his legacy among later generations of hipsters and other aficionados of mid-twentieth-century dissenters. The phrase had actually been used a year earlier by one of the philosophical patriarchs of that era’s dissenters, Herbert Marcuse.16
Of note also was the report’s closing sentence: “His followers, dandelions in their hair and carrying balloons, shouted ‘Fascists!’ and ‘Warmongers!’ to anyone who dared heckle candidate Abolafia.” Which seems a bit contradictory for supporters of the World Love Party.
And that is what Abolafia’s fringe candidacy brings into very sharp focus.
The 1968 presidential campaign that Abolafia began the year before occurred at the peak of an era of intense and often violent social and political conflict. In 1967, 11,363 Americans died in Vietnam, a war that generated strong emotions, pro and con.17 In April of that year tens of thousands had gathered in New York and San Francisco to protest it. In October one hundred thousand joined in Washington DC to march against it—fifty thousand of whom joined hippie leaders Abbie Hoffman and Jerry Rubin and poet Allen Ginsberg in a chant to levitate the Pentagon. That same month police clubbed University of Wisconsin students protesting the presence of recruiters from Dow Chemical, manufacturer of napalm, which burned away dense foliage (and human skin) in Vietnam. The antiwar movement intersected with the civil rights movement in 1967 when African American students at Howard University vociferously protested a talk on campus by the director of the Selective Service, which drafted young men into the army. The joining of the two movements was underscored that year when Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. spoke out for the first time in opposition to the war in Vietnam—though clearly not due to a shortage of racial concerns. In June 1967 race riots flared in Tampa and Buffalo. And the next month in Newark and Minneapolis. And Detroit. And Milwaukee. And, in August, Washington DC.
None of which came close to equaling the turmoil in 1968. Race riots erupted in nearly every urban area in the United States following King’s assassination that year. His death was followed by the assassination of presidential aspirant Robert F. Kennedy, campaigning as a strong civil rights proponent and Vietnam War opponent. That year’s death toll in Vietnam rose to 16,899 Americans; likewise antiwar protests and violence swelled, culminating live on national television outside the Democratic National Convention in Chicago as police and protestors battled in the streets.
With so much upheaval, logic was often lost in the tumult. And not only among Abolafia’s peace and love supporters shouting hateful words.
“Hippies claim that . . . those who devote themselves to Beauty and Art at all times, except when they’re cashing their unemployment or allowance checks, should outrank those who merely produce,” Al Capp, the popular cartoonist of Li’l Abner, wrote as the person chosen (oddly if not illogically) by the journal Nation’s Business to review Harvard economist John Kenneth Galbraith’s 1967 book, The New Industrial State. Ever the comic, Capp added, “The hippies, however, don’t go along with those who believe that producers should be beaten up and all their productions burnt. That’s the Non-Violent Movement.”18
Capp was wrong. The leading voices for nonviolence, such as King and Ginsberg, never supported violence or vandalism. And Capp was right. Many who identified with those movements, such as Abolafia’s supporters at his rally in Boston, engaged in verbal and physical violence. All this upheaval was so politically dizzying, logic often lost its balance. Which explains why, at the center of Capp’s review of Galbraith’s book, we find Louis Abolafia.
“You can’t talk about John Kenneth Galbraith and his New Industrial State without talking about Louis Abolafia,” Capp wrote, going on to describe Abolafia’s presidential campaign poster and the length of his hair. But despite noting that the poster identified him as an artist, and despite Capp’s being an artist himself, he made no mention of how that might explain Abolafia’s campaign. After all, doing so would ruin the cartoon.
“Does Galbraith support Abolafia?” Capp then asked. “Let him answer in his own words,” he answered, quoting from Galbraith’s book, “Aesthetic achievement is beyond the reach of the industrial system—in conflict with it.” The review maintained that Galbraith supported Abolafia’s presidential bid by pinning this and other quotations from the book to Abolafia statements.
And here, from the original men in togas, is the essence of that logic. All cats have ears. Socrates has ears. Therefore Socrates is a cat. Just because certain statements by Galbraith resembled statements by Abolafia did not mean Galbraith supported Abolafia for president, any more than Socrates and cats having certain characteristics in common meant Socrates was a cat. In point of fact, Galbraith supported the Democrats’ nominee, Hubert Humphrey, in the 1968 presidential election.19 Yet so blown away was rationality that Capp’s outrageous (key syllable being rage) review was not only reprinted in newspapers across the country but was also entered into the Congressional Record.20
Reflecting this maelstrom—or, more accurately, refracting it—Abolafia’s fringe candidacy also lost its way. Whither it had blown by September 27, 1968, was visually displayed in Phoenix on page 14 of that day’s Arizona Republic. Tucked into an article at the bottom of the page headlined “Jackson Square, New Orleans: ‘Grease in Hippie Garb,’” we find mention of a shop selling hippie paraphernalia, including posters such as “a Revlon skin cream advertisement, altered with a hideously napalmed Vietnamese girl standing beside the attractive model; Louis Abolafia naked with the caption, ‘I have nothing to hide.’” Meanwhile, at the top of the page, an article headlined “New Antiwar Goal” told readers, “Leaders in the antiwar movement have drawn up protest tactics for a concerted attempt to disrupt the presidential campaign.” Nowhere in this article is Abolafia mentioned. It does, however, report, “They have their own candidate—a pig.”
While the countercultural candidacy of that pig (soon to be discussed) reveals other aspects of the political earthquake taking place, Abolafia’s absence in this report further reveals that those objectives were not his objectives. Having recognized back in July that his campaign had become peripheral, Abolafia now announced that he was ending his candidacy.21
But even his announcement was lost in those winds. A month later a Michigan columnist, writing about teen runaways and Abolafia’s efforts on their behalf, concluded his piece, “What he’s doing sounds a lot more worthwhile than all the political oratory I’ve heard from the other candidates. I may just vote for him.”22 Three months after Abolafia ended his campaign, the lead editorial in an Arkansas paper began, “If we were somehow forced to endorse a political candidate this election year, we suppose we’d have to settle for Louis Abolafia.”23 No matter that he had dropped out, was too young to be the president—no matter the reality of who Louis Abolafia really was—to many in the press he was a modern-day John Donkey.
November 4, 1980. “‘We are the solution for voters on the brink of terminal boredom,’ said Louis Abolafia, the favorite son of the Nudist Party.”24 Still at it over a decade later.
Abandoned, however, was his self-created World Love Party. Shortly after announcing the end of his 1968 campaign, Abolafia joined in a less than loving hijacking of the newly opened Fillmore East, a long-abandoned theater from the days of New York’s once immigrant-teeming Lower East Side. With the neighborhood now transforming into the East Village, rock music promoter Bill Graham had revitalized the theater, allowing it also to be used as a venue for other events. On October 23, 1968, a benefit performance was taking place to raise defense funds for arrested student protestors when, as Graham recalled:
Halfway through the show, Louis Abolafia, the Naked candidate for president whose slogan was “I Have Nothing To Hide,” came in with that element and then went on stage and said, “This is now the theater of the people.” . . . People with berets positioned themselves everywhere and down the center aisle came a mimeograph machine. For the rest of the night, they would . . . run off copies and then distribute them in the street, letting people know what was going on inside the theater. . . . The actors and performers knew that it was out of control and they had lost it.25
Abolafia too had lost it. Not only in the chaos of that evening but of that era. To some degree he too probably knew it when, in reading the extensive coverage of this incident in the New York Times, he did not find himself even mentioned.26
Abolafia drifted to San Francisco, where he tried his luck raising money for future presidential bids by organizing what came to be a major annual event in that city’s celebrated above-ground underground scene, the Exotic-Erotic Ball. But his 1976 and 1980 campaigns registered only brief blips in the press.27 While his slogan remained “I have nothing to hide,” one thing was still missing: he had nothing to show.
Opportunities had abounded to include his art in his campaign events, yet he had not. As for exhibitions in galleries, his presidential campaigns clearly created name recognition, and he clearly had enough talent that, back in 1966, his paintings had been displayed in New York’s prestigious Crespi Gallery on Madison Avenue.28 Was he still painting? Was he still really an artist? Or had he, by diving headfirst into that era’s presidential campaigns rather than stepping back and observing with brush and paint, emerged as dazed and confused as was that tempestuous era? His death from a drug overdose in 1995 says yes. But in truth, we don’t know.
We do know this: Abolafia’s hippie candidacy—in which we find not only an aspiring painter but also a future famed photographer (campaign manager Andrew Kent) and not-really-carefree runaway flower children—reveals that Louis Abolafia was not, nor was anyone else, a typical hippie.
Widening that view enables us to see that, in the political landscape, no one is a typical anything.