Edward Estlin Cummings, October 14, 1894 (Cambridge, Mass.) – September 3, 1962 (Madison, NH)
VP candidate for Independent (1956)
Running mate with nominee: Ezra Pound (1885-1972)
Popular vote: 0 (0.00%)
Electoral vote: 0/531
The campaign:
To include the poet ee cummings as a member of the third party vice-presidential nominee club might be stretching things a bit, but the story is too good to bypass. I did the same thing with the Spirit of George Washington in the 1952 election.
Omni-artist Bruce Conner (1933-2008) was just starting his professional career during this election year. Conner credited himself and his friend Frank English with cooking up the idea of running the poet Ezra Pound for President, starting around Feb. 1956. Heavily influenced by Marcel Duchamp and the conceptual artists of his time, Conner's campaign of "Ez for Prez" could be viewed as a dry humor art exercise rather than a political statement.
Pound, who I would like to note gives us another Pacific Northwest connection as he was born in Idaho, was a major figure in the American and expatriate literary scene during the Lost Generation and Jazz Era. By the 1930s-1940s he was an outspoken anti-Semite and fascist who embraced Hitler and Mussolini. During WWII he was a paid propagandist for the Italian government. Pound was no doubt saved from being executed for treason when the US courts ruled he was mentally ill and unfit to stand trial, and by 1956 he had been incarcerated in St. Elizabeth's Hospital in Washington, DC for a decade.
One of the many fellow poets agitating for Pound's release was ee cummings. Although not especially political, a trip to the Soviet Union in 1931 had shifted Cummings to the far Right and he quietly supported Sen. Joe McCarthy's efforts to root out "subversives." Conner, who Cummings described to Pound as a "young scamp," had struck up a correspondence with both poets.
On the 28th of June 1956 Conner wrote to Cummings, "Ez says he wd. be most happy for you to be running mate if you wd. accept. Would you?" There is no record of Cummings declining the honor, so I will for the purposes of this blog take that as a "Yes."
Unfortunately for Pound, several people in Right-wing hate groups loved the idea of supporting this fascist for President and promoted it as well, which no doubt made the poet's release more problematic. What started as an artistic joke, Ez for Prez became an American fascist rallying cry. One of the chief organizers was John Kasper, a white supremacist, anti-Semite, KKK member, and accused Right-wing terrorist. In 1964 he ran for President with the National States' Rights Party.
Needless to say the Pound/Cummings ticket was not any ballots.
Election history: none.
Other occupations: poet, painter, essayist, author, playwright, soldier (WWI),
Buried: Forest Hills Cemetery and Crematory (Jamaica Plain, Mass.)
Notes:
Buried in the same cemetery as William Lloyd Garrison, Eugene O'Neill, fellow third party VP nominee Samuel Clarke Pomeroy, and Anne Sexton.
