Running for Office the Absurd Way
Richard A.C. Greene for State Lands Commissioner, 1968
We just survived election campaign time, complete with sleazy push-polls, shameless posturing, and outright lying. This is the season old local politicos gather around campfires and tell and retell the legend of the late, great Richard A.C. Greene to scare the Hell out of younger "serious" candidates who are sitting among them on moss covered logs.
Never heard of Greene? Well, gather 'round, kids. No education in Washington State political history is complete without a nod to the Greene campaign for State Land Commissioner in 1968.
Greene was born in Crete, Illinois ("the son of a well-known Cretin") in 1938 or 1939. It is unclear if he was related to the equally entertaining 1892 Washington State Prohibition Party candidate for Governor Roger Sherman Greene (who gained almost 5% of the vote). Richard had an interest in classical studies and early on earned a teaching assistant post at the UW in Greek and Latin. He was also the manager of a boarding house in the U District: the "Jean-Paul Sartre Memorial No Exit Rooming House."
As one of his tenants, Lorenzo Milam, outlined in the book entitled The Merkin Papers, the boarding house residents figured they should find a real job for him, so they registered Greene as a Republican candidate for State Land Commissioner against entrenched incumbent, the bowtied and gruff Democrat Bert Cole.
In spite of all of his other faults (and there were many), Cole will always earn my respect for the direct way he personally told me in 1969 or 1970 he would counter then-Olympia Mayor Tom Allen's attempts to turn Sylvester Park into a parking garage. His barnyard language left no doubt where he stood. If still alive, I have no doubt Cole would've joined all the living former Governors in opposing the Isthmus high-rises.
Anyway, out of the four Republican candidates in the primary, Greene easily won carrying 34 out of the 39 counties without any campaign at all. Greene = Land Commissioner. Hey, why not? In 1968, the year of the USS Pueblo, LBJ basically resigning from office, MLK and RFK assassinations, the bloody Democratic Convention in Chicago, George Wallace's incredibly strong racist 3rd party Presidential bid, riots, etc., etc., the Greene campaign came in under the radar. Greene himself didn't vote, keeping his ballot as a souvenir.
As it turned out, Greene was in Honolulu as a visiting professor during the entire election season. I recall at the time watching footage of a bald and rotund man with a bushy moustache and sunglasses, drink in hand, floating on an innertube in a sunny swimming pool telling Washington voters how he was thinking of them, really. Meanwhile, eccentric troublemakers in the U District's Blue Moon Tavern made that location Green's political HQ and got some press by inventing a campaign song for him.
Greene's voter's pamphlet statement included such gems as"
- "Land should be used gently but firmly."
- "Whidbey Island must be replaced."
- "Indian Fishing Rights: Individual catches will be limited to 4 Indians."
- "I shall be the sort of Land Commissioner who will go out fearlessly and commission the land."
Time magazine picked up on Greene's campaign, quoting him as wanting to cede eastern Washington to Idaho.
In the general election he was defeated in all 39 counties, not even coming close in any of them. We all enjoyed the joke, but that's all it was. A joke.
But as the great former P-I columnist Shelby Scates commented in 1992 hindsight on the Greene campaign: "While we laughed, Cole and his successor [Brian] Boyle allowed old growth to be stripped from state-owned lands and shipped unprocessed to mills in Japan."
Such are the limits of absurdism.
After 1968, Greene garnered some unwanted media attention. First, in 1974, he was involved in some sort of British Columbia gold scam that never had a satisfactory conclusion, and then he made headlines by losing a lawsuit against Union Pacific Railroad, where he had been employed. The court case revolved around his complaint that he had been discriminated against due to his overweight condition.
Greene left Seattle for Omaha in 1991 and returned to Illinois in 1995. He died in 1996 in Hoffman Estates, Illinois.
