Buttons - Presidential Campaign - 1936

Landon Knox

The Republican ticket in 1936. Alf Landon was Governor of Kansas, hence the felt sunflower enhancement.

Buttons - Presidential Campaign - 1924

Keep Cool With Cal

Coolidge For President

Not an original pin. This came from a Farrell's Ice Cream Parlour, according to the info on the curl, probably in the early 1970s. 

Since we have many public offices coming up for primary and general elections, I thought I'd run some of the pins I have gathered over the years, mostly by accident. For some reason I have never thrown them out. Perhaps this is due to the fact they do not  take up a lot of room.

Favorite Movie Quotes: The Empire Strikes Back

"Luke! Don't give in to hate. That leads to the Dark Side."

Favorite Movie Quotes: Rubin and Ed

"Oh it's going to get weird now, isn't it?"

One of the greatest movies ever made

Favorite Movie Quotes: The Falcon and the Snowman

Christopher Boyce, a good Republican son of a FBI man as he was watching the 1974 House impeachment hearings on President Richard Milhous Nixon:

"I don't care what these people say, this man is innocent!"

Boyce was later convicted of selling classified information to the Soviets.

[Reviewed in Cheaper by the Dozen 24]

Phone photo 1139

Willard Mitt Romney looks to me like a vampire in the South Carolina debate

Trump Endorses Newt! Not.

An astute co-worker of mine brought this article to my attention as another entry in the catalog of inaccurate headlines. "Gingrich to get nod from Trump" ran in yesterday's Seattle Times, p. A3.

As we all know, Trump a short time later actually endorsed fellow gazillionaire Willard Mitt Romney instead of Newt. So what happened?

The intrigue of this all is, I'm sure, much more complex than us peasants will ever know. But I am entertained by the fact the Gingrich campaign assumed they had the backing of the Bad Hair Birther Crazyman.

Running for public office does indeed require self-confidence. Don't get me wrong, I really admire politicians who can direct that energy toward the public good.

But Newt's Ego is so big and real it could be his running mate when he splits and runs third party after Willard spanks him hard in the Republican primaries. Newt and his Ego in 2012! I can see the buttons and bumper stickers now.

Meanwhile, I would think an endorsement from Trump is not exactly something an intelligent person would want to embrace.

What a great show! And right now it is happening in Nevada! I wonder who the Rat Pack would endorse?

Newt Gingrich is more Disgusting Than a Big Piece of Snot

Some of you might be too young to remember that Newt Gingrich was, when he was at his peak, a low-down, lying, ethically challenged, sewage-spewing, petty, hypocritical psychopath who contributed nothing positive to our country during his destructive ego spree as Speaker of the House in the 1990s. Much of the current toxic tone of our national discourse rests on the shoulders of this moron. He comes across as an intellectual in his presentation, but any of my four cats are more qualified to be President.

I documented his political standing back then. The premise, in my 1996 comic Mukey the Mutant Membrane was that Newt was among the items even more disgusting than a giant walking talking wad of snot. I still stand by this comparison.

Every action he has taken since 1996 and subsequent to his disgraceful exit from public life only confirms my view. It doesn't matter whether you are a liberal, or conservative, libertarian, socialist, whatever-- Newt Gingrich is no damn good. I wouldn't let this sleazebag enter my house.

A bag. Of sleaze. Try to imagine it. Oozing. That's Newt.

So, of course, he's become a front runner in the Republican Party primary. It figures.

Red/Blue Republican/Democrat

For some reason in recent history, states that lean Republican are known as "Red" states while states that go for the Dems are known as "Blue" states.

McLuhan would've had a field day with this. But I suppose it has to with the color red being connected to a visceral, reactionary and regressive point of view compared with blue, a cooler, rational and more intellectual vantage point.

At any rate, I have been watching the original Star Wars trilogy on VHS again. This is a classic recognized for using universal symbols of good and evil. I hope you all notice Darth Vader and the bad guys use red light sabers while Luke Skywalker uses a blue light saber.

Phone photo 666

Hey, what an amazing coincidence with this number in the series!
It's a photo of Ronald Reagan!
What are the odds?

50 Years Ago -- December 1941

I used to write for our local museum newsletter here in McCleary, Washington. I'll be posting a bunch of these for a bit.

Unfortunately, my favorite article, "Henry McCleary and the Land of the Rising Sun" does not seem to be in my files, which is too bad since it is one of the more visual pieces I assembled for this periodical. However, the text can be found on OlyBlog, and it does relate somewhat to this scanned essay. Also, I'll includes the actual text from OlyBlog here:

Henry McCleary & the Land of the Rising Sun

Fri, 11/11/2005 - 10:58pm — stevenl [The following article was originally published in the McCleary Museum Newsletter v. 11 issue 3 (Sept. 2001). OlyBlog seemed like a good venue for introducing this local history to the online world. For those who don't know, the town of McCleary is about 20 miles west of Olympia].

According to conventional wisdom, Henry McCleary sold his entire operation to Simpson in the last hours of Dec. 1941 due to several factors: his age, the fact that his timber was played out, the unions were closing in, and the start of another war economy. Sam Lanning quoted Henry in Jan. 1942, "Sam, I am old and I have had enough. The whole world business has gone to war and production for war needs. I have closed out and bought 22,000 acres of grazing land stocked with cattle, quite a distance from town and prefer raising beef to making bombs."

But there was another, more subtle, reason for Henry's departure. One of his chief business clients, Japan, was now our enemy. Since Henry was a man of action, leaving very little in the way of written thoughts, we can only guess what was going through his mind in Dec. 1941. Pearl Harbor has never been mentioned as one of the reasons for his selling out, but one cannot look at the McCleary-Japan relationship without concluding Henry must have felt some sense of betrayal.

Japanese Railroad Workers
We have no photographs of them. They never figure in written or oral recollections of our area. Newspaper accounts of them are few and far between. Yet the McCleary region was home to over two dozen Japanese railroad workers for the better part of two decades. It is believed they lived in an encampment northwest of town, on the far western end of Mohney's Prairie.

McCleary's preference for foreign labor was well known. They were inexpensive and not likely to unionize. The early community was multinational, with a considerable number of Scandinavians, Greeks, and Italians. It was a melting pot-- almost.

How the Japanese came to be hired by Henry is not known, but we do have an account of their arrival. The July 23, 1904 Elma Chronicle made a note that McCleary had hired Japanese workers, "as men are very scarce." And the Elma newspaper also noted, "On the 2:13 train, Friday, there were several Japanese workmen, brought here by the Henry McCleary Lumber Co. They were met at the depot here, compelled to re-board the train, and to go on to the next station. It is reported that arrests are to be made on the charge of intimidation."

There was no shortage of work for these workers. Henry McCleary's empire would rapidly expand during the next 25 years, and his logging railroad would grow with it. It would seem almost impossible that anyone living in McCleary during this period would not see them. But trying to uncover information about this group is very difficult.

The Japanese somehow managed to avoid being listed in the 1910 McCleary census. Fortunately, some dutiful listmaker must have taken great pains to phonetically sound out the names of the workers recorded in the 1920 McCleary census. There are 28 workers, plus the wife of the section boss, and their 4 month old daughter, apparently born in McCleary in the fall of 1919. This was in a year when Grays Harbor County had only 155 Japanese total. As low as this number seems, it was actually the high-water mark for Japanese here in the first half of the 20th century. The 1930 census counted only 29 Japanese. This was partly due to the Johnson Immigration Act. More on that later.

Business Partners
Henry's employment of workers from Japan was apparently highly unpopular among some elements of Grays Harbor County. But Henry kept them on. Of Ada McCleary, John Anderson wrote, "Mrs. McCleary didn't care what nationality anyone was, be they Greek, Italian, Irish or Swede. As far as she was concerned one could learn from every culture. Indeed all these cultures made McCleary the great place it was to live." Unlike Ada, her husband was not known as a social activist. He had a business to run, and business being business, he followed the money. If that meant taking the risk of hiring Japanese railroad workers, so be it. It also meant trading with that strange and frightening land on the other side of the Pacific, Japan itself.

Mr. McCleary, always the economic risk-taker, was rewarded for his willingness to do business with a country most others feared and misunderstood. Here's a sample: according to McCleary's car sales book, if I'm reading it right, he grossed over $2 million between Sept. 1925-Jan. 1926 from loading up Japanese ships at his Westside Olympia mill. The ships were the Clyde Maru, Milan Maru, Malta Maru, and Tasmania Maru. The Milan Maru visited twice during that slice of time. They were bound for Osaka and Kobe. As a side note, all four ships became casualties of World War II in the Pacific.

The Apr. 4, 1929 Elma Chronicle told the readers, "Henry McCleary, president of the McCleary Timber Co., left last Saturday for Japan accompanied by his son Charles of Olympia and his nephew Jack, of McCleary, sailing from Victoria on the Empress of Russia. They plan to be gone about thirty days. Most of the time in Japan will be spent at Kobi with visits to other parts of the country also included." As another side note, the Empress of Russia was noted in future McCleary businessman Al Fleming's diary when he was stationed in Vladivostok, May 18, 1919: "... The largest ship that had ever been in this port. She is a beauty. Couldn't dock as the water wasn't deep enough." The Empress was used by the Allies in the Atlantic, survived the war, but burned in drydock, Sept. 8, 1945.

A photograph of the McCleary entourage in Japan, taken by a Tokyo photographer probably during his 1929 trip, shows each man accompanied by a geisha girl. All the businessmen look very happy, except for Henry, who appears somewhat perplexed.

Even in hard times Henry kept up his ties to Japan. The very same railroad that had been laid by Japanese workers was, during the Depression, torn out. According to Kramer Adams, "Like many another operator, Henry McCleary sold his rails to Japan for conversion into steel."

The Sept. 28, 1934 McCleary Observer reported, "The next few weeks will see the end of the McCleary railroad. A crew is taking up the rails and loading them on cars for shipment to Olympia where they will be transferred to a boat destined for Japan."

By this time, of course, militarists had gained control of Japan's political system. The steel no doubt went into their imperialistic expansion. On the morning of Dec. 7, 1941, McClearyite Lauren Bruner would survive being burned and shot while in the crow's nest of the Arizona. One has to ponder how much the McCleary rails contributed to that attack. Henry McCleary probably wondered too. And he probably felt betrayed.

In yet another of the growing ironies in this case, after Simpson acquired McCleary's operations, they dismantled the mill where the present Beerbower Park now sits. As the Elma Chronicle for Apr. 30, 1942 reported, "Now that the Simpson Company is dismantling the long idle mill its metal salvage is going into war production. Already some carloads have been shipped to the smelters at Cleveland ..."

Madison Grant and Albert Johnson, the Aristocrat and the Redneck
The weirdest part of this story is yet to come. Madison Grant (1865-1937), a Yale-educated lawyer and promoter of Eugenics, wrote The Passing of the Great White Race in 1916, a book the Holocaust Study Center considers, "A major text of the American racist movement from 1916 until 1925." Hitler himself personally wrote Grant and thanked him for writing this work, probably due to passages like this: "[Sterilization could] be applied to an ever widening group of social discards, beginning always with the criminal, the diseased and the insane, and extending gradually to types which may be called weaklings rather than defectives, and perhaps ultimately to worthless race types."

Substitute Grant's use of "Nordic" with Hitler's "Aryan," and it is indeed difficult to tell the two philosophies apart. Grant had Nazi ties, including Dr. Alfred Rosenberg, Hitler's chief scientific advisor and leading German Eugenicist. Grant's later work, Conquest of a Continent, earned this preface in the 1937 German edition: "No one has as much reason to note the work of this man [Grant] with the keenest of attention as does a German of today in a time when the racial idea has become one of the chief foundations of National Socialist States population policies."

Grant found a kindred spirit in the person of U.S. Congressman Albert Johnson (1869-1957), a Republican who served in Congress from 1913-1933. Johnson was a midwest transplant who was publisher of Hoquiam's Grays Harbor Washingtonian. He was elected as a crusader against "radicalism" and he favored immigration restriction. In his first campaign, Johnson stated, "The greatest menace to the Republic today is the open door it affords to the ignorant hordes from Eastern and Southern Europe, whose lawlessness flourishes and civilization is ebbing into barbarism." In 1913, Johnson proposed a "Panaryan Association" to unite the "white race." As Johnson was making pronouncements of this kind, Henry McCleary was offering employment and home for the very people the congressman despised, right in Johnson's district.

Johnson became the Chair of the House Committee on Immigration and Naturalization. In 1923, through his connection with Grant, he was elected the President of the Eugenics Research Association, based at Cold Spring Harbor, N.Y. This was, as one writer put it, "An incident that deserves at least one chapter in any full length biography of Johnson. Its title would probably be something like 'New York Aristocrat Courts Pacific Northwest Redneck,' as the 'chemistry' that brought together the patrician Madison Grant and the backwoods Congressman needs considerable explanation."

Johnson made his big move in 1924 as co-sponsor of the Johnson-Reed Act (with Sen. David Aiken Reed, R-PA), also known as the Japanese Exclusion Act. This placed quotas on immigration, rolling them back to 1890. This placed severe restrictions on immigration from Europe and eliminated Japanese immigration entirely. Said Johnson, "Our capacity to maintain our cherished institutions stands diluted by a stream of alien blood, with all its inherited misconceptions respecting the relationships of the governing power to the governed ... The day of unalloyed welcome to all peoples, the day of indiscriminate acceptance of all races, has definitely ended." He was especially applauded by the KKK.

The long-range effect of the Johnson-Reed Act is that tens of thousands of Europeans attempting to escape Nazi or Stalinist oppression were denied entry to the U.S., leaving a large percentage of them to perish. That is the legacy of Albert Johnson.

Henry McCleary's Kingdom
We must wonder what Henry McCleary thought about Albert Johnson and his "Panaryan" concepts. Surely Henry knew Johnson. They were both Republicans in the same district. Henry was a delegate for Coolidge at the 1924 GOP National Convention.

But in those days, as now, East County and Aberdeen/Hoquiam were worlds apart. McCleary's camp was his own kingdom, and the antics of politicians probably didn't concern him as long as they left him alone. Henry seemed content to let fellow executive Mark Reed be the political voice for the timber industry. We don't know the circumstances of the Japanese departure from McCleary, but if it was due to the Johnson-Reed Act, Henry must have had some conflicts concerning political party loyalty.

McCleary's Japanese workers, having arrived in 1904, predate the coming of the Italians and the Greeks. By McCleary standards, they are pioneers. Being here as early as they were, it is safe to say they were part of the foundation upon which McCleary built his empire. They deserve to be recognized for their contribution to the history of our town.

--Steve Willis

[2011 note: In the interests of revealing my personal bias, I should mention that Johnson's Democratic Party opponent in the 1918 congressional election was my great-grandfather, Theodore J. Hoss of Centralia. Theodore supported President Wilson's League of Nations and advocated the radical idea of equal wages for equal work for men and women. Johnson's people used Theodore's German surname against him in the campaign. Too bad Theodore didn't win]

Bezango: Ted Bundy-- Elected Official?

Olympia Power & Light # 39 (July 27-August 9, 2011).

Ted Bundy was not only politically active in Olympia, he was a rising star in the Washington State Republican Party. It is chilling to consider the potential of how far he could've gone in government policymaking if his campaign shenanigans had not been uncovered.

Bezango: Running For Elected Office the Absurd Way

From Olympia Power & Light, December 30 2009-January 12, 2010.

One reader wrote in, a bit confused. His memory mixed up Greene's 1972 Republican campaign with a later absurdist run for the same office, when the 1976 OWL (Out With Logic, On With Lunacy) Party ran Don "Earthquake" Ober (1922-1979) for Commissioner of Public Lands. A rather easy mistake to make in a state that draws so many colorful characters to the ballot.

The OWL Party didn't exist in 1968. No. Greene ran, hilariously, as a Republican. The fact he went under the radar and won the Republican primary is actually more subversive than running as a third party candidate.



Above: Greene's official entry as a Republican candidate for Commissioner of Public Lands, from the 1968 Official Voters Pamphlet for Washington State.

Phone photo 392

Dino Rossi is a three time loser Republican, 2 losses for Washington State Governor, 1 for US Senate. Now seen as a perennial candidate, his supporters never bother to take down his signs and his name has become part of the local landscape-- but to his detriment politically since even though he's not been in the State Senate for almost a decade, the fact his signs are still up paints him as a career politician.

Actually, I don't have anything against career politicians, they are professionals and can get things done if you are lucky enough to be represented by a decent one. However, in Rossi's case, he'll need the Tea Baggers if he wants to ever win. And keeping these signs up even though he's lost three times will not help his case with that crew at this point in history, in spite of the fact he's right of center on the political spectrum.

Cartooning Washington

This was an illustrated history of Washington State political cartoons and cartoonists published in the same year of the Evergreen State's centennial-- 1989.

Lots of big names in here: Brian Basset, Paul Fung, Steve Greenberg, Walt Crowley, David Horsey, Mike Lukovich, Bob McCausland, Shaw McCutcheon, Alan Pratt, Milt Priggee.

And of course Ray Collins from the Seattle Post-Intelligencer, a comic artist who once met with me for an hour of his busy day in 1977, looked over the portfolio of a nobody young man and gave me many valuable pointers such as any good cartoonist needs to study poetry. He was also delightfully irreverent of authority-- putting this into practice by being the number one cartoonist to expose the craziness of Gov. Dixy Lee Ray.

My work slipped into this book by accident, and I think I was included as sort the token little rural weekly guy with a different day job since I'm definitely not in the same league as the professionals listed above. Apparently someone connected with this book, perhaps it was Maury Forman who called me up, used a printshop in Oly that I frequented. The printers mentioned my work to him, and the next thing you know I'm in this book.

As for this particular strip, Grays Harbor County continues to be solidly Democrat, but in this last election the Dems lost one, perhaps two countywide seats-- the first time since the 1950s!

In McCleary there used to be this joke: The ballot counter is tallying the votes, "Democrat, Democrat, Democrat, Republican, Democrat, Democrat, Democrat, Republican! The sonofabitch voted twice!"

The Democrats here aren't like the liberal Dems on the I-5 Roman Road through Seattle-Tacoma-Oly. Out here they are old time good ol' boys in the not-so-admirable sense. Frankly, I'm glad to see them finally lose a seat or two. Usually they run unopposed.

Wild John refers to local legend Wild John Tornow, the Wild Man of the Wynochee.

I'll be running my East County Comix strip in this blog eventually.

Cranium Frenzy # 7

1st edition, March 1994, 100 copies, orchid cover. All editions are regular digest size.

2nd edition, May 1994, 50 copies, goldenrod cover.

Special Micky Saunders edition, October 17, 1999, 4 copies entirely in blue.

1st Danger Room Reprint Edition, June 2005, 5 copies, red cover.

If you have been following this blog since the start, you should be able to pick out the trivia with ease. The one difference here is that I think I have arranged all my usual touches with a slightly more complex storyline. Obviously I was preparing Morty for his 1999 McCleary Mayor run.

The Wrong Foot

1st published August 2001. 32 copies on yellow cardstock.

The 1st Danger Room Reprint Ed. of June 2005 had 5 copies on red cardstock.

Drawn with a #1 lead pencil.

As you can tell, I didn't have a lot of confidence in George W. Bush in his role as President even though he had only been in office for eight months when this was published. I'm afraid my opinion didn't improve over time.

Oddly, the most enthusiastic readers of this little comic were Republicans!