For more than a decade after the 1968 election, only one fringe candidate received widespread public attention. During these years there were, as always, many third party candidates—that is, those neither running for laughs nor widely ridiculed. In 1976, for instance, third party candidates represented the Libertarian Party, Communist Party, Socialist Party, Socialist Workers Party, Socialist Labor Party, United States Labor Party, People’s Party, Prohibition Party, Restoration Party, American Party, American Independent Party, and United American Party, along with former Democratic Party contender Eugene McCarthy running as an independent and self-described “housewife” Ellen McCormack running independently as an anti-abortion candidate. But the only campaign that triggered widespread amusement was that of, rather tellingly, “Nobody for President.”
As with Pigasus, the significance of Nobody’s candidacy resided in who was responsible for it. Which brings us back to Pigasus and the Hog Farm commune from which his candidacy arose. The driving force behind Nobody was none other than Hugh Romney, known more widely at this point by his nom de clown, Wavy Gravy. Because of his prior role in the 1968 candidacy of Pigasus, Wavy Gravy’s 1972 to 1988 presidential campaigns for Nobody provide us with a particularly clear view of political transitions taking place during this era.
As the chief aide in Nobody’s campaign, Wavy Gravy held the self-designated title of Nobody’s Fool. Indeed in every ironic respect, Wavy Gravy was nobody’s fool. Born in 1936, he entered the army in 1954 and, after his two-year stint, attended Brown University on the GI Bill, majoring in Theater Arts. Afterward he continued to hone his performance skills at New York’s prestigious Neighborhood Playhouse while earning his income working as the entertainment director at Greenwich Village’s Gaslight Cafe.1 Trying his hand as a stand-up comic, Romney was drawn to California in the 1960s, as were many of the artists and activists called Beats in the 1950s who went on to become part of what, in the 1960s, came to the called the counterculture. It was during these years that Romney put into practice the training he’d received in clowning. After having been clubbed by police in protests, he decided to attend future demonstrations as a clown. “Whoever heard of a cop beating up a clown?” he explained.2
While Wavy Gravy would later be called the Clown Prince of the Under-the-Counter Culture, he was never a headliner on the countercultural stage.3 Still, he was often on that stage—sometimes literally—in various capacities. His associations included Abbie Hoffman, Bob Dylan, the comedian Lenny Bruce, and the celebrity falsetto with a ukulele Tiny Tim.4 For a time he was one of Ken Kesey’s “Merry Pranksters,” the subject of Tom Wolfe’s long-popular book, The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test, in which Romney is repeatedly mentioned. Branching off from the Pranksters, he shared living accommodations with a number of others who increasingly earned money collectively by producing light shows and, in return for free rent on a California farm, tending hogs. Coalescing into the Hog Farm commune, they relocated to New Mexico, continuing to produce light shows but dropping the gig with the hogs.5
Still known as Hugh Romney, his first shot onstage in a major arena came in August 1969, when he and what were now some one hundred members of the Hog Farm commune were assigned to help maintain security at the Woodstock Music Festival. Romney made announcements from the stage over the three days of this event at which 300,000 had gathered, far in excess of expectations or accommodations for food and sanitation. His performance skills contributed to one state police official stating, “I can hardly believe that there haven’t been even small incidents of misbehavior by the young people.”6 Moreover, as a police lieutenant remarked, “There hasn’t been anybody yelling pig at the cops.”7 And this with the guy who ran a pig for president now onstage as the voice of good behavior.
Two weeks later Romney and those with whom he communed were called into service again, this time to help maintain the peace among more than 120,000 who gathered at the Texas International Pop Festival held outside Dallas. This time Romney not only got his name in the news but also got his adopted name. Exhausted from the intense, nonstop work, he was napping on the stage during a break in the music when, in his words, “I felt this hand on my shoulder, and a deep voice said, ‘You Wavy Gravy?’ I looked up and it’s B. B. King! I said, ‘Yes, sir. Yes, sir.’ I was getting ready to get up, but then he said, ‘Well, Wavy Gravy, I can work around you.’”8
Nobody for President comes from a long line of such presidential candidates, dating back at least as far as 1872, when Indiana’s Clay Country Enterprise took a poke at a rival paper in noting, “The Terre Haute Journal has declared itself in favor of nobody for president. Who is he?”9
Actually it’s an excellent question. When people support nobody for president, they present us with, in effect, a blank to be filled by others with whatever it is that might cause them to feel disconnected from the political process. Because such reasons can range from dissatisfaction with current presidential choices to feeling alienated from the society to fundamental opposition to our form of government, Nobody can be a widely but deceptively popular choice.10
Nobody can also appear in various guises. Over the years the most popular form has been Mickey Mouse, dating back to 1932, when he was first mentioned as a possible presidential candidate as part of a publicity campaign by the Walt Disney Company.11 No actual campaign, however, ensued. Still, when such candidates attract national attention, they provide some measure of the extent to which Americans feel dissatisfied with the political process. Mickey, alas, has been stymied from making this contribution by Disney’s famously ferocious lawyers baring their teeth at promoters of Mickey Mouse for president.12 Unhampered, however, were the four presidential campaigns of Nobody.
In February 1975 Wavy Gravy made a brief reference to running Nobody for president as the candidate of what he called the Birthday Party, but when Nobody surfaced again in July 1976 during the Democratic National Convention in New York City, he was the candidate of Wavy Gravy’s 1968 comrades, the Yippies. Apparently Wavy Gravy hoped Nobody would be the next Pigasus, as he was among those onstage at the band shell in Central Park to nominate Nobody before seven hundred people gathered for a Yippie rally. One day later, however, Wavy Gravy, in clown getup, was unable to attract a crowd outside the convention site.13
The campaign went from bad to worse when it headed next to the Republican National Convention in Kansas City, Missouri. “Well, fellow Americans, the Yippies are here again,” wrote the syndicated columnist Georgie Anne Geyer. Known for her conservative political views, Geyer may have been harsh, but she was not wrong when observing, “How the mighty have fallen. When the Yippies were formed . . . they had Abbie Hoffman and Jerry Rubin. . . . And today?” Among the examples she offered in answer was a “funny and sad young man in blue cheerleader’s uniform named ‘Wavy Gravy,’ who also works as a clown, and who led a circle of Yippies, clasping hands tightly while they did breathing exercises.” Geyer then asked, “And what kind of society did the Yippies, who led much of the opposition to Vietnam, want today?” That question she put to Dana Beale, then and for years to come a leader among what remained of the Yippies. “Five years ago, I would have had a lot of pat phrases,” Beale replied. “I don’t know any more.”14
Wavy Gravy may not have known either, but evidently he did know that, in his friend Bob Dylan’s words, “the times they are a-changin’”—and the Yippies they are a-not. He repossessed Nobody’s campaign, retooled it, and in October restarted it from what had become the nation’s countercultural Mecca, San Francisco. “Nobody Kicks Off Campaign” headlined an Associated Press report from that city that began, “They held a presidential campaign rally in front of City Hall—and Nobody showed up. But that was fine with Wavy Gravy and the rest of the crowd from the Nobody for President campaign, who kicked off a national tour.” The report described how Wavy Gravy, identifying his role as Nobody’s Fool, attracted a crowd with oratorical flourishes such as, “Nobody loves the poor!”; “Nobody will lower your taxes!”; and the capstone, “Nobody’s perfect!!” By then a couple hundred onlookers were revved up for the arrival of the candidate’s motorcade, which turned out to consist of one battered sports car with a bunting-festooned chair mounted in the trunk, upon which Nobody sat. With the help of Nobody’s Fool producing a set of plastic wind-up teeth, the candidate then answered questions about current political issues by chattering. The rally ended on a parody of soaring optimism when Nobody’s Fool declared that this year Nobody really had a shot at winning, since “forty percent of eligible voters in the last election voted for nobody.”15
For all its rag-tag hippie-dippy trappings, it was a highly professional show. And ready to go on the road. Traveling in an old bus advertising “Nobody for President,” Wavy Gravy and his crew next headed to the Hog Farm’s home state of New Mexico, seeking and getting a welcoming reception such as, in Albuquerque, an Associated Press report headlined “Wavy Gravy Brings Nobody’s Drive to State.”16 They then proceeded to the nearest college campus where the students were most likely to share their appreciation for zaniness, the University of Texas at Austin, the city that would adopt the slogan “Keep Austin Weird.” Six hundred people showed up, more than enough to keep the wire service humming.17
Just as attention was starting to build, however, the campaign ran out of time. It was already the end of October by the time they were in Austin. With the election just days away, they had to close the show for four years. But they hit the hustings again in the 1980 presidential election, again getting national attention with return rallies in Albuquerque and Austin, and similarly enthusiastic receptions at politically and comically conscious campuses such as the University of Wisconsin and the University of Michigan, and an Election Day finale in Washington DC, directly across from the White House.
While Wavy Gravy’s success in attracting widespread attention to Nobody for president reveals his awareness that the revolutionary antics of the Yippies had played out, it also reveals his further insight that the antics now had to be more broad-based in their appeal. For that reason he played up the fill-in-the-blank aspect of Nobody for president. And as the widespread news coverage of Nobody’s candidacy reveals, Wavy Gravy was aware of yet another shift in America’s political landscape at the time. Many of the news reports included his urging, on the behalf of Nobody, that “None of the Above” be included on presidential ballots. Wavy Gravy was not alone in this call; besides discontented leftists, Nevada’s Young Republicans urged the same in 1975. Likewise in 1976, conservative legislators in Kentucky and California sought (unsuccessfully) to enact the ballot choice.18 Wavy Gravy, truly Nobody’s Fool, knew the political breadth of the nation’s political discontent in the aftermath of the previous decade’s turmoil. He has “always been in the middle between the left and the right,” he told an interviewer in 1974, “always trying to communicate that edge to the other side.”19
Nevertheless when the Nobody for President bandwagon headed out again in the 1984 election, the press paid far less attention. In part the joke had been made. But also the political landscape had continued to change. It was now “morning again in America,” as a commercial for the reelection of Ronald Reagan exhaled in satisfaction. Indeed it was. The war in Vietnam and the antiwar protests were now sufficiently in the past, as was the violence that had so often exploded during the civil rights movement. Likewise the memories of the domestic scandals of Watergate under President Nixon and the international humiliation of the Iranian hostage crisis under President Carter had sufficiently wilted. Even if President Reagan was still the film and television actor he began as, he played the role of president with consummate skill, and a great many in the nation applauded the character he brought to it. Ironically perhaps, Wavy Gravy’s being a professional performer—seeing behind the curtain and being outraged—may be why he failed to discern in America’s increasingly television-dominated view of the world a new view emerging among voters.
Even if his instincts failed him in 1984, Wavy Gravy snapped out of it and found once again a way to retool Nobody’s campaign for the 1988 election, which would be his last hurrah. Retreating in one respect to his base, he teamed up with the rock group Vicious Hippies and booked the show at those college campuses where he knew he’d get the best reception. On the other hand—and revealing his awareness of the recent political shift that gifted the nation with Reagan—Wavy Gravy ended the show by pointing to Hog Farm assistants with voter registration forms and declared, “If Nobody votes, Nobody wins.”20