Gumption: America's Gutsiest Troublemakers

by Nick Offerman

  Once she got a taste of succulent independence, Eleanor Roosevelt began to comprehend how her life could be much more satisfying. She began to remain “unavailable” to her older relatives and in-laws, upon whom she had theretofore depended for advice in every aspect of life. As she put it, “Had I never done this, perhaps I might have been saved some difficult experiences, but I have never regretted even my mistakes.” As tragic and life-altering as FDR’s paralysis must have been, I can’t help but also see it as the catalyst that made an American hero of this previously timid housewife.

  Eleanor also noted that “Franklin’s illness proved a blessing in disguise, for it gave him strength and courage he had not had before. He had to think out the fundamentals of living and learn the greatest of all lessons—infinite patience and never-ending persistence.” I believe that’s two lessons there, Mrs. Roosevelt, but I’ll let it slide . . . this time.

  As the governor of New York and then the president of our nation, Franklin Delano Roosevelt could not have provided his wife with a better role model for sagacity in leadership. She often noted the way in which he, being no expert in any particular field, would calmly hear all sides of a given problem before issuing his considered judgment. She also observed the success he enjoyed in canvassing his electorate so thoroughly that even the remotest farmers felt his attentions.

  Every president, especially in modern times, is going to have his or her (fingers crossed) high points and then also those other kinds of points in which they, oh, I don’t know, assume office despite receiving fewer votes than Al Gore. FDR must have been doing something right, since he was the only president to be elected into office four times.

  Invigorated by cheating death-by-polio, Roosevelt instituted a set of programs that he called the New Deal, designed to bring relief to a very depressed United States. His various policies were very effective in bringing about relief, recovery, and reform, at least until the politicians mired his decency once again in, well, politics. His was a great legacy, one you can read about in even more depth than my three recent, deeply researched, resplendent sentences. He was such a badass that he has been portrayed onscreen by Jon Voight, Bill Murray, Kenneth Branagh, Jason Robards, and, of course, Alan Cumming in Reefer Madness.

  Eleanor also took note as Franklin developed a talent for gleaning a great deal of information through simple observation during his campaign trips. “From him I learned how to observe from train windows; . . . the crops, how people dressed, how many cars and in what condition, and even the washing on the clothesline.” She continued to report that her husband was “impressed by the evidence of our wastefulness, our lack of conservation, our soil erosion.” This was 1932, mind you. I can’t imagine what the Roosevelts might think of the sad, cold, monocultural state of our agriculture today.

  This habit of cropland scrutiny was perpetuated by Eleanor for the remainder of her career as a diplomat and humanitarian. In all her travels, she paid special attention to a nation’s farming habits and how they affected the health of that country’s population, both bodily and economically. Her husband’s example, combined with her own burgeoning interest in people from every walk of life, culminated in her manifestation as a true activist for world peace and tranquility.

  Although she was always quick to denigrate her own gifts, there was no denying that Eleanor, once she had escaped her mother-in-law’s nest, was busting her ass. During her husband’s tenure, Mrs. Roosevelt wrote a syndicated newspaper column, “My Day,” no less than six days a week, even while touring the South Pacific, even when she had to stay up all night to get her column turned in. She typed out this prolific diary-style feature from 1935 until 1962, missing only six days upon the passing of FDR.

  Meanwhile, she was commanding a veritable beehive of social activity. A year’s worth of guests at the White House in 1939 tallied 4,729 who came to a meal (thirteen a day), 9,211 who came to tea (twenty-five a day), and 1.3 million (and change) who came through to tour the staterooms. I’m hoping she didn’t also have to provide that teeming horde with cheese and crackers. I know she didn’t personally feed all those guests, but just imagine having that many strangers in your dining room year in and year out. You’d better have a substantial supply of gumption ready to hand. She often cited her exceptional work ethic as a great source of comfort in her life. “At least, I have never known what it was to be bored or to have time hang heavily on my hands.”

  During the second term of FDR’s presidency, Eleanor began to work with the American Youth Congress, hoping to learn from them how to improve the lives of the younger generation, particularly those from less fortunate backgrounds. Unfortunately, she recounted learning much more about the unscrupulous methods employed by the aspiring communists in the group. Apparently, these young strategists were getting an early start in politics, as they would demur to debate certain subjects, causing delays until the other members would tire out and go home. Once enough of the opposition had left, the communists would hold and carry the vote. Mrs. Roosevelt found these shenanigans very annoying at the time, but their lessons would come to serve her well when she eventually had to deal with the exact same tactics on the floor of the United Nations.

  With her personable and down-to-earth daily column, Eleanor Roosevelt gave women of the day a sense of empowerment when they were able to learn the First Lady’s opinion on any number of subjects. She became an instrumental voice in the struggle to right the imbalance felt by both women and minorities in our country. While touring England, she was inspired by women performing every manner of job that one was accustomed to see being performed by men: “I saw girls learning how to service every kind of truck and motor car and to drive every type of vehicle; I even saw girls in gun crews. . . . I visited factories in which women did every kind of work.”

  Eleanor was moved by the myriad women, from all walks of life, working side by side for the greater good of their mother England, just as the men were fighting as one for the same cause. Her reason for pointing this up was that the British Isles were considered to be very class-conscious, but here in wartime those distinctions fell away and the citizenry “became welded together by the war into a closely knit community.” From her purview, she saw a new set of group values emerge.

  This is a nice observation on her part, one that I can certainly understand and get behind: a sense of collective nationalism, brought on by the mutual jeopardy of having guns and bombs aimed at one’s entire country. The thing is, it makes me wonder what has become of our own population’s ability to stick together. We seem to be beyond a time when another military power can hold us at gunpoint with sheer brute force, and so have we complacently lost interest in what all the other Americans are up to, since we’re not “at war”?

  It would seem that we still are looking down the barrel of destruction; it’s just not perhaps as bluntly presented as a German tank. Water shortages, the exhaustion of fossil fuels, not to mention the subsequent pollution and global warming, the neglect of our own agricultural communities, the insatiable appetites of our mining companies . . . all these seem fully lethal as well. Maybe they won’t kill us as succinctly as the Blitz, but we have come to know that they will kill us, and I’m afraid it will be in a much more permanent way than the carnage of a gun battle. Cities can be rebuilt with much greater ease than ecosystems.

  Like many rational human beings, Eleanor Roosevelt had an instinctive abhorrence of war, and yet she didn’t hesitate to get all up in its grill. This was back before it was all long distance, war by remote control. Eleanor joined the Red Cross and took to visiting the soldiers in field hospitals who were wounded in both body and psyche. Exhausted from walking miles of corridors and witnessing every color of injury and trauma, she wrote emotionally, “But that was nothing in comparison with the horrible consciousness of waste and feeling of resentment that burned within me as I wondered why men could not sit down around a table and settle their differences before an
infinite number of the youth of many nations had to suffer.”

  Her answer may reside hidden right within her question—in the noun men. Human beings are complex. We’re complicated as shit. But I can’t help but think that planting a few Eleanor Roosevelts in seats of power might help the scales of justice (held by a lady, after all) tip back toward “not killing people.” Women can be assholes too, surely. I realize that war is more than just the men and their Freudian passion for shooting at one another with their penises. It is also about the billions of dollars being funneled into their pocketbooks. Women have those accessories as well.

  Once FDR had to dance the jig of equivocation that is the American presidency (meaning he had to play both sides of the fence enough to keep his majority), Eleanor began to make waves, what with her commonsense acceptance of all people, regardless of race, political affiliation, or genital inventory.

  To put things in perspective, there was a bill sponsored by a couple of Democratic senators from Colorado and New York, called the Costigan-Wagner Bill, that was simply trying to cut down on the number of lynchings taking place in the South. This was 1934. Edwin Hubble, with his swell telescope, showed in a photograph as many galaxies as the Milky Way has visible stars. George S. Kaufman and Moss Hart’s Merrily We Roll Along opened on Broadway. Katharine Hepburn won an Oscar for Morning Glory at the age of twenty-seven, and some uppity Yankee senators thought there should be fewer mob-driven murders of black fellows; the sort wherein they were hanged with a rope by the neck until they were dead.

  Now, get this—FDR wouldn’t back the bill! He was afraid of losing the southern congressional delegations when he needed their votes to support his legislation! That’s how fucked-up it is to be president. You can seem as decent a chap as FDR, and yet you can’t get behind the suggestion that we make lynching illegal. Eleanor lobbied for the bill, so white Southerners didn’t like her. Black people, on the other hand, did like her. Go figure.

  After the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor, bogeyman-fear politics saw Franklin sign his Executive Order 9066, a directive born of hysteria that ended up imprisoning Japanese Americans in internment camps; about 120,000 Americans of Japanese descent were incarcerated for two to three years. That was in the 1940s, gang. Eleanor was very opposed to this racist, cowardly act on the part of our nation, for which she was again widely ostracized.

  Her famous uncle, whom you might recall from chapter 5, was a Roosevelt with a decidedly less savory attitude toward national violence. I obviously revere much of what he had to offer, but I cannot get behind his opinion that a great country was one that picked fights. Methinks that Uncle Theodore could have used a strong dose of his niece’s prudence when it came to dealing with his fellow earthlings.

  I’m referring to the lady who penned this: “Nothing we learn in this world is ever wasted and I have come to the conclusion that practically nothing we do ever stands by itself. If it is good, it will serve some good purpose in the future. If it is evil, it may haunt us and handicap our efforts in unimagined ways.”

  This American champion took some common sense, a healthy dollop of elbow grease, and some natural compassion and set for us a shining example of how we can begin to “settle our differences around a table” instead of looking into the business end of a gun. She worked and worked until her working parts quit on her. I hate to think where we would be today without all the good she did for each and every one of us.

  8

  TOM LAUGHLIN

  Tom Laughlin. May he rest in peace.

  You may recognize him better in the slight guise of his heroic alter ego, Billy Jack. If not, please gently toss this book aside, hie ye to your nearest video store (if you’re reading this in the 1980s), or I guess whichever Netflix or Amazon channel is providing you with feature-length film treats these days, and watch Billy Jack, a movie that may be little known now but was at the time (1971) both a cultural revolution and the highest-grossing independent film of all time, a record it still holds. You’ll likely want to devour it at least thrice, so please notify anyone who might be relying upon you to deliver their medication or perhaps pick them up from school, Scouts, or 4-H, if they’re especially lucky.

  My own obsession began twenty-five years ago. I was in college at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign in 1989, when I first met Darren Critz. Although he was enrolled in the class behind mine, he was a couple of years my senior, having bounced between majors for a minute before landing upon theater, with a focus in directing. His appearance upon our first meeting bears reporting: He was extremely buff, with a wild, shoulder-length mane of black curls festooned with little plastic star beads framing handsome hawkish features, neck entwined in an intimidatingly thick rope of Mardi Gras beads that would have made the My Little Pony hidden inside Mr. T green with envy. He shaved his body hair with clippers, which made the extreme definition of his musculature stand out in all the real estate visible under his flannel shirt with the sleeves and collar cut off. His legs were equally exposed in tattered cut-off jeans before they disappeared into a pair of old-fashioned cowboy boots that Darren had spray painted gold. He was, in short, a self-made psychedelic superhero.

  Darren was one of the initial pillars of the Defiant Theatre, the Chicago company comprised of my most invaluable college friends, who inculcated in me the sense of counterculture that would come to define my artistic life. Among the moments of whimsy in which Darren draped me were some powerfully enjoyable sessions of hallucinating and giggling (in the haremlike cave of an apartment he shared with Bobby Goliath Taich, another estimable tea-head) and, of course, a reverential screening of Billy Jack.

  One of the most popular features in any visit to Darren’s place was the tactile art experience known as “Grandma’s ’gina.” Although you can sadly never know the wonder of this sexual petting, let me walk you through it vicariously as best I can. Generally, before one was ready to comprehend this delight born of Darren’s fecund, puckish imagination, one wanted to “put on a buzz” of some sort. Fortunately, the living room that served as the gallery for this masterpiece also housed his roommate’s eight-foot bong, which rendered just such a mood elevation handily achievable.

  Once suitably baked, the initiate would next sit in the cushioned chair beneath which the “objet d’art” resided. At this point, a fellow stoner, or “docent,” would retrieve the large glass bowl filled with a mass of bread dough into which an upsettingly realistic rendition of a woman’s genitalia had been shaped. The bowl would be placed in the lap of the participant, who would then, with eyes closed, feel the crusty orifice with his or her fingers. Sometimes a few drops of water would be sprinkled upon it before fondling, upping the verisimilitude. Ladies and gentlemen, I give you Grandma’s ’gina.

  During my colorful years in Chicago theater, I was inspired by a great many women and men, eccentric iconoclasts who marched quite charismatically to the beat of their own strange drums, but Darren was one of the first to show me how a person could fly a flag that was extremely freakish and still command the respect of professionals in the world of theater. Thanks to his inspiration, I was able to make a great many fashion choices of my own that my dad would describe only as “squirrelly,” but they nonetheless allowed me to feel like I was announcing to the world that the particular brand of entertainment I had to proffer was redolent of substance and mirth.

  Whether or not it was his intention, Darren made of me a lifelong Billy Jack adherent. When I arrived in LA in the late nineties, my newly discovered best friend, Pat Roberts, was also a fan, and together we couldn’t get enough of the film. The Internet showed up, and I found Tom Laughlin’s website and learned of the politics and philosophy he had been espousing all along. I then set out to learn everything I could about him.

  A midwestern boy who played football at both Wisconsin and Marquette, Tom Laughlin was bitten by the theater bug after taking in a production of A Streetcar Named Desire. He met the love of h
is life, Delores Taylor, while attending the University of South Dakota with her. The pair ended up in Los Angeles, where Tom began to work steadily, landing his first leading role in Robert Altman’s The Delinquents. This followed his on-screen debut on the television program Climax!, which was also known as Climax Mystery Theater and was not remotely as prurient as its title. Apologies.

  He worked on other films as an actor and a director, leading to the first appearance of his character Billy Jack in the 1967 film Born Losers, directed by, as well as starring, Laughlin. Considered a box office hit, Born Losers paved the way for the (sort-of) sequel, Billy Jack. Which brings us to the meat of the matter.

  Much like our former president and star of chapter 5, Theodore Roosevelt, Billy Jack makes some statements, both overtly and indirectly, that can be confusing to an audience. First of all, it must be stated that the title character is, in the modern parlance, awesome. Billy Jack is a half-breed Navajo Indian, a recent veteran of the Vietnam War (ex–Green Beret), as well as a master of hapkido, a Korean martial art. When he intuits an impending fight, he slips off his boots and socks. Billy Jack also possesses a supernatural ability to sense danger and wrongdoing, a sort of “Spidey sense.” To top it off, he lives in a cave, but his clothes are always clean, and he might show up on a horse, on a motorcycle, or in his Jeep, wearing a full suit of denim and his iconic “rez” hat. So badass.

  His heart, the film instructs us, is very much in the right place, as he is a disciple of peace and love, living under the tutelage of the local tribe’s shaman, or medicine man, on the reservation. His apparent romantic partner, Jean Roberts (played by his real-life wife, Delores Taylor), runs the Freedom School outside of town, with an openly “hippie” agenda, promoting nonviolence and an open-minded approach to living: “No drugs, everyone had to carry his own load, and everyone had to get turned on by creating something, anything, whether it be weaving a blanket, making a film, or doing a painting.”