Fields of Glory.

• Author: Cantor, Paul A.
• Position: W.C. Fields

The absurdist anti-politics of W.C. Fields

Like many Americans, I'm having trouble getting excited about this year's presidential race. Somehow the candidates don't measure up to my standards of political greatness. Confronted with this group of diminutive talents, I think back nostalgically to earlier days of American politics, when giants strode the earth. Take 1940, for example-- the last time an authentic Great Man ran for president of the United States. No, I don't mean Franklin Delano Roosevelt, and not Wendell Wilkie or Norman Thomas either, but the one candidate in the race who had the right attitude toward the government: W.C. Fields.

Few people today are aware that a great comedian took a fling at presidential politics and, in anticipation of today's campaign hucksters, even got a book out of the process: Fields for President, published by Dodd, Mead in 1940.

Fields built his campaign around a winning slogan--"A chickadee in every pot" --and made candor his chief concern in addressing the American people. "When, on next November fifth, I am elected chief executive of this fair land, amidst thunderous cheering and shouting and throwing of babies out the window, I shall, my fellow citizens, offer no such empty panaceas as a New Deal, or an Old Deal, or even a Re-Deal," he promised. "No, my friends, the reliable old False Shuffle was good enough for my father and it's good enough for me." Fields cut through the usual campaign rhetoric and got right to the heart of how to elect someone to the White House: "The major responsibility of a President is to squeeze the last possible cent out of the taxpayer."

Fields' obsession with the IRS threatened to turn him into a one-issue candidate. He kept harping on the dreaded moment when IRS payments come due, explaining, "That is the day when all the citizens of our fair land may practice their inalienable rights of sending a fat slice of their yearly increments to Washington; in return, our Congressmen will forward packages of radish seed or intimate candid-camera shots of themselves weeding their farms or kissing their grandchildren."

Fields' antipathy to tax authorities dated back to the days when he toured the world as a celebrated juggler. In 1913, he complained about being stopped by a policeman in Prague: "I was informed that I would have to pay a tax of five cents for coming home at that hour. (It appears they tax everyone who remains out after nine o'clock.) I asked the policeman what would happen if I didn't come home at all. He said I wouldn't have to pay in that case. And, ashamed as I am...