Above: Adams as Beecher; Below: the real Beecher
Below: the real Twain
Above: McLinn as Twain meeting the Pope; Below: a button from McLinn's 1980 campaign
Douglas Glenn Adams, April 12, 1945 (DeKalb, Ill.) - July 24, 2007 (Jackson, Calif.)
VP candidate for Anti-Doughnut Party (aka Anti-Do-Nothing Party) (1984)
Running mate with nominee: William McLinn (1943-1989)
Popular vote: ? (0.00%)
Electoral vote: 0/538
The campaign:
William Lewis McLinn was an actor and former congressional staff member who had developed a one-man show starting in 1975 centered on impersonating Mark Twain (1835-1910). He had run for President as Twain in 1980 but apparently without a VP. From what I can piece together, McLinn sought to be ordained as a minister in the 1980s and while attending the Pacific School of Religion he met professor Douglas G. Adams. McLinn's solo act morphed into a political ticket for 1984 as Adams had a teaching method that included impersonating Twain's contemporary figure Henry Ward Beecher (1813-1887). Thus the Twain/Beecher team running on the Anti-Doughnut Party hit the campaign trail. As it turns out Adams was distantly related to Beecher.
Henry Ward Beecher was a celebrity figure in his day and an ardent abolitionist and political activist. Twain attended a Beecher sermon and commented on the flamboyant preaching, "sawing his arms in the air, howling sarcasms this way and that, discharging rockets of poetry and exploding mines of eloquence, halting now and then to stamp his foot three times in succession to emphasize a point." Twain also said of Beecher, "Mr. Beecher is a remarkably handsome man when he is in the full tide of sermonizing, and his face is lit up with animation, but he is as homely as a singed cat when he isn't doing anything."
Beecher's reputation was tarnished as a result of an alleged sexual scandal in 1875. Later in life he approached Twain for help in publishing his memoirs but died of a stroke before the project got off the ground. Twain commented on the scandal in a letter, "What a pity that so insignificant a matter as the chastity or unchastity of an Elizabeth Tilton could clip the locks of this Samson and make him as other men, in the estimation of a nation of Lilliputians creeping and climbing about his shoe-soles."
The Anti-Doughnut Party was a metaphor for anti-bribery. Twain claimed it dated back to his boyhood episodes but he revived it around the turn of the century, long after Beecher died.
Adams appears to have been somewhat active in the electioneering, but most of the focus was on McLinn posing as Twain running for President. Many of Twain's thoughts were used as an indirect way of addressing America in the mid-1980s, an example of the old saying "The more things change the more they stay the same." Some McLinn/Twainisms:
I am in favor of anything and everything anybody is in favor of. There could be no broader platform than mine.
I was born modest, but it wore off.
Perpetual peace. We cannot have it on any terms I suppose. But we can reduce the world's war strength down to where it ought to be. Then we can all have peace that is worthwhile. And when we want a war, anybody can afford it.
On Congress: I had never seen a body of men with tongues so handy and information so uncertain. They would talk for a week without getting rid of an idea.
To kill has been one of the chiefest ambitions of the human race ... now they are improving their weapons of slaughter.
On Theodore Roosevelt: I think the President is clearly insane in several ways, and insanest upon war and its supreme glories. I think he longs for a big war wherein he can spectacularly perform as chief general and chief admiral, and go down in history as the only monarch of modern times that served both offices at the same time.
More on Roosevelt: The President is easily the most astonishing event in American history-- if we except the discovery of the country by Columbus. He is far and away the most formidable disaster that has befallen the country since the Civil War-- and also the the most admired and the most satisfactory. The vast mass of the nation loves him, is frantically fond of him, even idolizes him ... And here we may go and elect him for another term.
On Democrats: Good and motherly old benevolent National Asylum for the Helpless.
More on Democrats: Now I suppose I should say the Republicans will win unless they commit some very bad blunder, and blundering is the prerogative of the Democrats.
The best among us will do the most repulsive things the moment we are smitten with a presidential madness.
I have tried all sorts of things and that is why I want to try the great position of ruler of a country. I have been in turn reporter, editor, publisher, author, lawyer and burglar. I have worked my way up, and wish to continue to do so.
I do not care what the opposition say of me just so long as they do not tell the truth.
Twain himself actually wrote a short tongue-in-cheek essay tossing his hat in the ring in 1880. McLinn ran for President a third time in 1988 as Twain but it seems it was more low key and without a running mate. Sadly he died as a result of AIDS in Sept. 1989. Several other Mark Twain impersonators would run for President in subsequent elections.
Election history: none
Other occupations: professor of Christianity and the Arts at Pacific School of Religion, minister, author, playwright
Buried: ?
Notes:
Washington trivia connection!!! Adams was the summer pastor in 1974 at Richmond Beach United Church of Christ, just north of Seattle (now in present-day Shoreline, Wash.). I have driven by that church hundreds of times in the past 1982-2006.
