“It was great meeting you, Barabbas,” Lennon said in return.
Derek Taylor, the Beatles’ press secretary, ordered Capp from the room, but Lennon stopped him.
“Leave it,” Lennon said. “We asked him here. He’s right.”
As Capp worked his way out of the room, Timothy Leary approached him and shook his hand. Lennon sang an impromptu revision of his song:
Christ, you know it ain’t easy,
You know how hard it can be,
The way things are going,
They’re gonna crucify Capp.
Later that day, in that same room, John and Yoko recorded “Give Peace a Chance.”
Capp’s campus dialogues kept him under the observation of at least one group that he openly endorsed and praised: the Federal Bureau of Investigation. He was alerted to the FBI’s most recent interest in his coming and goings, first, when he was contacted by an official from the Boston branch, and then, a short time later, when he received a July 3, 1969, letter from J. Edgar Hoover. The FBI director wrote to thank him for a letter Capp had written, published in the Boston Globe, responding to remarks by John Kenneth Galbraith in a commencement speech at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.
This was not the first time Capp had drawn the attention of the FBI. Nine years earlier, in August 1960, he’d received a letter from an overzealous agent in Arkansas. The letter, written in response to the July 31 “Li’l Abner,” chastised Capp for ridiculing senators investigating un-American activities.
“That surreptitious attack is a disservice to your country,” the agent wrote, “since the F.B.I., American Legion, American Bar Association and other American groups who have seriously and objectively studied communist infiltration warn that the House Committee on Un-American Activities and the Senate Internal Subcommittee constitute the very heart of our defense against communist takeover from within by revealing their inroads specifically.”
The letter-writer went on to suggest that Capp issue a statement or publish a comic strip stating that his satire “in no manner seriously implies that these committees actually perform as you depicted.” To better inform Capp of the Communist Party’s methods of infiltration, he enclosed several articles, including the FBI handout “Communists’ New Look: A Study in Duplicity.”
Capp responded with a letter that he copied and forwarded to J. Edgar Hoover.
“My studies of the Communist system,” Capp began, “have convinced me that its greatest evil lies in its rigid policing of the mind, its frenzy and fear of the slightest deviation from approved thinking.
“I am sure your typically Communist reaction to the mildly critical tone used in my strip,” he continued, “… was an unfortunate and unintentional resemblance to Communist response to the slightest criticism of Communist orthodoxy. I am also sure that investigation of your political affiliations would reveal no tie-up with subversive elements.”
Capp’s sarcasm might have been wasted on a man who missed the point in the “Li’l Abner” strip, but the episode ended without further action. No one in Washington, D.C., responded to Capp’s letter, and the FBI sent the Arkansas agent a letter that commended his concern and reassured him that Capp was being watched.
No one, of course, would ever find Hoover anything but diligent. The bureau kept files on everyone. In Capp’s case, they had at least some reason to suspect that he might be connected with the Communist Party: Capp’s brother Bence had been a member of the party and had worked to recruit new members and given lectures in several of the country’s large cities. He had even testified at Senate hearings investigating Communism in the United States.
Bence had become involved with the party in the summer of 1932, while studying at Commonwealth College in Mena, Arkansas. He had taken classes in labor history and politics, as well as Communist theory, and he’d spent time talking to students who were open Communists. He returned to New York, found a job in a drugstore, and reconnected with a high school friend who had originally recommended that he attend Commonwealth College. They attended Communist meetings together, but it wasn’t until 1938 that Bence became interested in formally joining the party. Once he was a member, he was shipped down to New Orleans, where he held the title of district organizer, which involved little more than sitting in a bookstore stocked with Communist literature, handing out Daily Worker newspapers, and meeting with occasional individuals, usually merchant seamen, interested in learning more about the party. He worked under the alias of Jerry Benton and eventually advanced to the position of secretary of the Communist Party in Louisiana.
He told no one in his family about his work, and brother Al would know nothing of his affiliation until long after Bence had left the party. While in New Orleans, Bence met his first wife, Ruth, and she, too, became a party member.
Bence worked in other capacities for the party in New York and Pennsylvania. He organized meetings and lectured; he handed out leaflets and Daily Workers in front of factories. He served as a delegate to the 11th Convention of the Communist Party of Western Pennsylvania. He met some of the party’s influential leaders. Eventually he grew tired of the activism. His wife dropped out of the party, and his involvement officially ended shortly before he enlisted in the army during World War II.
Bence was called to testify before the U.S. Senate subcommittee hearings in 1958. He’d been working for Capp Enterprises, and Al Capp knew of his party involvement at that point. Bence, testifying under the name of Jerome Caplin, cooperated fully and agreed to offer further assistance if needed. Oddly enough, no one at the hearing connected him to the famous cartoonist, even when he offered the name of the company employing him, and Al escaped the embarrassment of having to explain his brother’s past. Al never uttered a word about his brother’s Communist background to anyone.
Capp was back in the FBI’s sights three years later, in September 1961, when Frank J. Becker, a New York Republican congressman, took exception to Capp’s skewering corrupt policemen in a “Li’l Abner” story.
“One of the primary causes of juvenile delinquency is the loss of respect and confidence in authority,” Becker scolded. “If the youngsters read this kind of garbage in the funny papers, what respect are they going to have for police officers?”
Becker also contacted the FBI. In his letter to the organization, he enclosed a letter of protest that he’d submitted to the United Feature Syndicate. The syndicate had informed the congressman that Capp was an independent contractor and not an employee. The FBI responded with a letter commending Becker’s “forthright statement in defense of the loyal and dedicated members of the law enforcement profession,” but as before, the bureau did not bother to contact Capp. However, the FBI continued to monitor Capp’s activities and add to his growing file, which now included letters, news clippings, and FBI interoffice communications.
Capp’s conservative turn seemed to mollify the FBI in the mid- to late 1960s. He was regarded as a type of convert; his contentious speeches on college campuses were useful, particularly his statements critical of student agitation. In the wake of the violence at the 1968 Democratic National Convention—violence, as history would show, largely due to the actions of FBI agent provocateurs—the bureau appreciated any attempts to maintain peace on the campuses.
The campus unrest struck close to home for Capp when students at Harvard, “a stone’s throw” from his Cambridge home, as he complained, staged a series of demonstrations. He lashed out about the recent events at Harvard in an April 27, 1969, commencement address at Franklin Pierce College. Rather than speak directly about the issues relevant to the Rindge, New Hampshire, school, Capp ranted on in one of the most blistering speeches he would ever deliver. Harvard, he declared, had become “an ivy-covered Fagin” unwilling or unable to control its student body.
Feeling that the Franklin Pierce students might be in need of a history lesson, Capp took his audience back to the events of a couple of years earlier, when Lyndon Johnson’s secretary of defense Robe
rt McNamara had appeared at Harvard and protesters had shouted him down during his speech; afterward, a band of demonstrators from the Students for a Democratic Society had stopped McNamara’s car and menaced him as he was trying to leave the campus. But this was only the beginning. The fomentation at Harvard had continued, culminating in the recent events that, in Capp’s words, had turned the Ivy League institution “into the pigpen and playpen it is today.”
The address demonstrated the morbid shift in Capp’s professional life—a shift that left his comic strip a mess, his writing a polemical disaster, and his appearances so edgy that he risked losing influence every time he stepped up to a podium. The speech was pure venom, lacking the sharp humor that he’d used to score points earlier in his career. The assaults had become personal. At Franklin Pierce, Capp singled out a number of Harvard professors and administrators, including John Kenneth Galbraith, for what he considered to be woefully inadequate responses to the campus problems.
“Harvard,” he said, wrapping up, “which educated the President who brought America into the war that defeated fascism, today honors and encourages and rewards its fascists. Harvard, which once turned out scholars and gentlemen, now turns out thugs and thieves.” Here at the end, he brought Franklin Pierce back into his talk in the same manner he’d included the school in the beginning: Franklin Pierce College was fortunate that it wasn’t Harvard.
John Kenneth Galbraith had to wait until June 12 to publicly rebuke Capp’s remarks, and he did so in a commencement address. Galbraith’s speech at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology also addressed the student unrest on the nation’s college campuses. Galbraith deplored that some of the loudest voices responding to it were not “men with a record of long and intimate concern with the war in Vietnam, the military-industrial complex, the draft, race, [and] educational administration.” He listed a handful of the voices against campus disorder, including Vice President Spiro Agnew, J. Edgar Hoover, and, of course, Al Capp, whom he ridiculed as “the Fearless Fosdick of the youth-baiting right.”
Capp struck back in his letter to the editor of the Boston Globe.
“Instead of being the ‘youth baiter’ he called me,” Capp wrote, “it’s youth which offers me bait, namely the highest fees paid to any campus speaker, even knowing that for it they will get the roughest treatment.”
Capp devoted nearly half of his letter to a defense of Hoover, whom Galbraith had characterized as “a poor old man” trying to make “the unhappy transition from the good old-fashioned Communists he knows and cherishes to the incomprehensible S.D.S.”
“It is true that Mr. Hoover has grown old in the service of his country,” Capp said in Hoover’s defense, “and that, of course, makes him a legitimate object of Galbraith’s contempt.” It was not true, Capp argued, that Hoover lacked the credentials of an educational man. He possessed bachelor’s and master’s degrees; he’d founded his own learning institution, the FBI National Academy, in 1935.
“No student of Hoover’s ever burned his country’s flag, beat up his instructors, or screeched obscenities at his school the day he graduated,” Capp concluded.
Capp’s remarks pleased the FBI.
“Despite Capp’s previous background,” a July 2, 1969, memorandum read, “inasmuch as he has in recent years shown a tendency toward a more conservative point of view and since his letter to the Globe does contain favorable comments regarding the Director and the Bureau, it would seem appropriate to write him a letter expressing appreciation for these kinds of comments.”
J. Edgar Hoover’s letter, written on July 3, thanked Capp for his remarks. “I trust that our future endeavors will continue to merit your approval,” he said.
Less than two years later, the FBI would again be tracking Capp’s actions, for reasons that Capp would have preferred to avoid.
As influential as he’d become as a social commentator, moralist, and public figure, and as well connected as he was in political, media, and entertainment circles, Capp had never considered running for public office.
But late in the spring of 1970, word began to circulate that he was tossing around the idea of running for senator against incumbent Edward M. Kennedy. When pressed about these rumors, Capp offered vague, coy explanations about his intentions. He said he’d been approached by someone high in the Nixon administration—he declined to supply a name—and by what he described as “hordes of people” urging him to challenge Kennedy for his seat. He wasn’t sure that he wanted to run. He’d been assured by the Republican Party in Massachusetts that it was willing to match Kennedy “dollar for dollar in campaign financing” in what would undoubtedly be an expensive, spirited contest. Capp amped up the talk when he told the Boston press that he’d also been approached about running for office in New York, where he still maintained a residence and office. He admitted that he’d visited the White House twice during the month of May.
Capp might have been using the media attention as a means of gauging his general popularity, or he might have been using it as the first building block in a serious campaign, but there were other major reasons for his reluctance to formally announce his candidacy: he wasn’t a registered Republican in Massachusetts, and, perhaps most important, Catherine was dead-set against it. Capp could drudge up all the support he needed, including an endorsement from Nixon himself, but either of these two factors would have sunk his campaign before he filed his papers.
Massachusetts state election laws required that a candidate be a registered member of his chosen party for at least one year prior to running as a member of that party. Capp was not just unregistered as a Republican; he was, in fact, still a registered Democrat. Capp learned of the election law when he met with Cambridge election commissioner Francis P. Burns on June 24. Capp made noises about checking further into the law and exploring possible options, but he didn’t sound confident about his chances.
Still, this stumbling block to his candidacy, he said, was bad for the people of the state. Josiah Spaulding, already campaigning as a Republican candidate, was too far to the left, Capp thought, for those expecting conservatism in the GOP, and was unelectable.
Al Capp, encouraged by the Nixon White House, entertained a Republican challenge to Ted Kennedy’s Massachusetts Senate seat in 1970. The two appeared together at a public event in Boston’s Statler Hotel in June 1970.
“I think it’s fine to be Teddy Kennedy,” Capp told the press. “But I think Teddy Kennedy deserves an opponent who is as vigorous a champion of the other side as he is of his side.”
He went on to quip that his feelings about Spaulding and Kennedy didn’t matter anyway, since Catherine had threatened to divorce him if he ran. This was more than just a throwaway line. Catherine, who enjoyed entertaining at home but was not the extrovert that her husband was, was very emphatic about wanting nothing to do with being a senator’s wife.
Capp milked the publicity for all it was worth before issuing a formal statement about his candidacy on July 2. He announced that, after consulting with several experts on Massachusetts election laws, he had reached the conclusion that he could not run against Kennedy in the current election.
“I will remain, as always, interested in Massachusetts politics,” he stated, before delivering his parting shot. “A state which doesn’t object to a visit from Jerry Rubin or Abbie Hoffman but does object to a visit from the Vice President is not a healthy state.”
In the upcoming months, Capp registered to become a Republican. He made a special appearance at a fund-raiser for another Republican running against Kennedy; the fund-raiser became as much a bait-Kennedy event as an evening devoted to bolstering his opponent. By now, Capp could all but sleepwalk through these events. He’d mix heavy doses of cynicism, hardcore criticism, humor, and sarcasm into provocative speeches that usually outshined the candidates. An editor from the Worcester Telegram, after seeing Capp in action, wrote an editorial praising his endorsement of Kennedy’s opponent, calling Capp’s shift from Roosevelt Democr
at to Nixon Republican “one of the most amazing political transformations of our era.”
Despite all evidence to the contrary, Capp repeatedly insisted that he was not a conservative.
“I was always astonished when anyone called me a conservative,” he declared. “I said that I had once been a champion of liberalism, until it had gotten drunk with sanctimoniousness and that if it ever sobered up, I’d champion it again.”
In his early days, he explained, the far right had been the butt of most humorists’ and satirists’ jokes—and rightfully so. The Depression and its recovery period demanded progressive thinking. Conservatives looked foolish and pompous favoring big business when the average American was struggling to get by. Joe McCarthy and his supporters made it easy to dislike the paranoia of right-wingers suspicious of everyone. Conservatives invited derision.
But no more.
“Believe me, it was a wrenching experience for me suddenly to realize that the main source of lunacy in our society had moved over to the left,” he stated.
Television was a godsend for someone as gregarious, opinionated, and egotistical as Capp. He’d been around at the advent of the medium, and he’d seen its potential. He was as comfortable sitting in the guest seat of The Merv Griffin Show as he was at his drawing board, bantering with his assistants and inking the heads of his “Li’l Abner” characters. He could be charming or churlish, often on the same program.
When he was approached by two producers offering him his own television slot, he eagerly accepted. To Capp, the program represented a regular venue for the voice of opposition in an otherwise liberal medium. He would contribute five five-minute televised commentaries per week, and the show’s producers, John Thayer and Don Bruce, hoped he would attract the kind of audiences already listening to his daily radio commentaries, now running three times a day in 120 cities.
Al Capp Page 24