Our Straw Vote for President

How a Group of Representative Artists Have Reported Their Political Intentions

George Ade

Deems Taylor

THE Presidential election brick is a poor and sorry thing without a straw vote or two. A straw vote somehow makes it all more delicately opera bouffe than before. But this is a very serious election, and Vanity Fair's straw vote is a very serious straw vote, as you will see.

Lacking the facilities to poll a representatively chuckle-headed cross-section of the American electorate, Vanity Fair has been obliged to limit its experiments to a superior brand of potential voters. Its straw vote is dedicated to the proposition: Do Artists Think? and goes far to reveal them as civically very, very conscious. On election night they will be out in force with the torchlights, and the election of 1928 will go down in history as The Revolt of the Artists. For two hundred years the great aesthetic body of America has lain sleeping, but today the earth shakes with the thunder of its awaking. The Truth goes marching on, with Alexander Woollcott and Thornton Wilder holding either hand.

On looking over the results, we cautiously permit ourselves to observe that there seems to be a majority for Al Smith, but that Hoover gets some votes and Norman Thomas (the Socialist candidate, of course) is not neglected, at least by Upton Sinclair. We hope this observation will not offend any one, but after all someone had to win and after a certain point more popularity doesn't make much difference. Some very nice people seem to like Hoover, and Upton Sinclair is a majority all by himself.

Now, if never before or again, Frank Crane and Robert C. Benchley may be seen marching shoulder to shoulder, even as, though in an opposite direction, Mrs. Minnie Maddern Fiske and Jim Tully. Among the volte-faces, the Norris family is in the wildest confusion. Charles having been Republican in 1924 and Kathleen Democratic, they are now to be found exchanging places with hardly a relaxation of the features in passing. Other Democrats who have fallen for the Hoover sirens are Laurette Taylor and Robert C. Benchley, while such pillars of the Republican community as Clare Briggs, Rube Goldberg, John Held and Owen Johnson are staunchly upholding the Al Smith façade and George Ade is off by himself, upholding his own dignity. Vanity Fair has been liberal in its voting qualifications, recognizing the civic right of Charles Chaplin and John Riddell, both of whom are British subjects, but who have been in America long enough to be able to view the national political scene with discernment. Likewise has the term "artists" been broadened to include a few of the national champions of sport, who are, after all, artists in a different metier.

Voting in a democracy is a social, nonintellectual, non-individual affair and ordinarily has significance only when two or three million are gathered together in one name. This ballot has an explosive quality in being taken among artists who are notoriously anti-social, individual and loosely intellectual and put a considerable importance on their own opinions. At the drop of a hat, they ask to be forgiven if they write us a little apropos of their vote. Imagine that in an election! Twenty million artists marching to the polls and asking to be forgiven if they expand a little apropos of their vote;

Deems Taylor, for example, who writes:

"Forgive me if I expand a little apropos of your symposium. For the first time in a long period, this country has two candidates for president who are men of exceptional ability and personality. I exclude the Socialist candidate automatically because, regardless of the merits or demerits of socialism, I do not believe that a Socialist candidate can be elected, and I am more interested in seeing this country governed by the best available man than in registering my private political convictions.

Continued on page 140

How One Hundred Celebrated Artists Will Vote For President

FOR SMITH

F. P. Adams

Sherwood Anderson

Adele Astaire

Fred Astaire

Gertrude Atherton

Clara Bow

Clare Briggs

Heywood Broun

Charles Chaplin

Eddie Cantor

Irvin S. Cobb

Jane Cowl

Frank Craven

Jack Donahue

Ruth Draper

Finley Peter Dunne

John Erskine

Edna Ferber

Mrs. Fiske

Gilbert Gabriel

Norman-Bel Geddes

George Gershwin

John Gilbert

Alma Gluck

Rube Goldberg

John Golden

Texas Guinan

Helen Hayes

John Held, Jr.

Arthur Hopkins

Sidney Howard

Owen Johnson

Robert T. Jones, Jr.

George S. Kaufman

Alfred A. Knopf

Walter Lippmann

Anita Loos

John McCormack

W. O. McGeehan

Charles MacArthur

Kenneth Macgowan

Willard Mack

Edgar Lee Masters

H. L. Mencken

Edna St. Vincent Millay

Alice Duer Miller

Gilbert Miller

Helen Morgan

George Jean Nathan

Charles Norris

Dorothy Parker

Maxfield Parrish

Channing Pollock

Cole Porter

John Riddell

Ellery Sedgwick

R. E. Sherwood

Lee Simonson

Simeon Strunsky

Deems Taylor

Charles Hanson Towne

Jim Tully

June Walker

John V. A. Weaver

A1 Woods

Peggy Wood

Alexander Woollcott

FOR HOOVER

George Abbott

Bruce Barton

Robert C. Benchley

John Alden Carpenter

Frank Crane

Cecil B. DeMille

Corinne Griffith

Walter Hagen

Percy Hammond

Walter Hampden

Jesse Lasky

Neysa McMein

Frederick MacMonnies

Christopher Morley

Kathleen Norris

Edmund Pearson

Otis Skinner

Norma Talmadge

Booth Tarkington

Laurette Taylor

William T. Tilden, 2nd

Thornton Wilder

Helen Wills

FOR NORMAN THOMAS

Upton Sinclair

NOT VOTING

George Ade

Ralph Barton

Willa Cather

Theodore Dreiser

Douglas Fairbanks

Robert Edmond Jones

Rockwell Kent

Marilyn Miller

Walter Winchell

Continued from page 56

Of the two candidates o$ the major parties Hoover is, in my opinion, a shade the better man. He is an extraordinarily good executive and has an informed view of the European political and financial scene that would be of inestimable value to this country at the present time. Smith lacks only the latter qualification. He is obviously an equally good executive. Both men are honest enough not to have to talk about honesty.

Unfortunately, a President of the United States who hopes to get anything accomplished is constrained to do so, not by imposing his will upon a group of trained subordinates, but by coaxing, flattering and bullying a group of underpaid, uneducated, provincial-minded politicians (the Senate and the House of Representatives) to the point of having the courage of his own convictions. Hoover, I am afraid, is congenitally committed to the theory that the fact that a thing ought to be done is necessarily the reason why it will be done. His opponent, who is under no such delusion, is not only an honest man, and an extraordinarily talented executive, but a skilled politician who knows every trick by which stupid men may be coaxed and threatened into behaving intelligently. I shall, therefore, cast my vote for Alfred E. Smith."

DEEMS TAYLOR

But George Ade goes still further. He is not even voting, and still he asks to be forgiven if he expands a little apropos of not voting, after this fashion.

"I have your inquiry and I am not going to cast a ballot for any one but I will tell you what I think of the candidates and the parties at this time. The Republicans start with a big edge because they have reduced taxes for those influential citizens everywhere w'ho provide campaign funds and know howr to mold public sentiment by indirect methods. Their candidate has been a most useful citizen but I do not think he will ever be a popular figure. I think he is too clammy and autocratic. The party has treated the farmers of the middle west with extreme contempt. It is bad enough to starve to death without being scolded about it. The Republicans deserve defeat for their absolute cowardice and hypocrisy regarding Prohibition and the \olstead Act. The national and state legislators and the delegates to all of the conventions sit in their rooms and drink anything that comes out of a bottle and has an alcoholic content and then march over to the convention hall, stepping high, and vote for "rigid enforcement." They do not believe in it and if enforcement ever became rigid they would suffer greatly but they continue to enact the sickening farce because they are afraid of the Anti-Saloon League, the Baptists, the Methodists and the W.C.T.IJ.

The Democratic party is certainly a medley, an olio, a crazy quilt and an assortment of odds and ends. This year it has a good candidate. Sooner or later we should elect a Catholic to the Presidency just to prove that we are living in the 20th century instead of the 18th and that witch-burning and religious persecutions are no longer the pastimes of a free and intelligent people. A1 Smith is entitled to all the praise in the world for his courage and sincerity in telling the truth about the 18th Amendment and the Volstead Act. He said what ten thousand politicians in the Republican party knew to be true but were afraid to say out loud. He will develop great strength in the east and in the cities and will be ambushed by all of the Protestants and fanatics and bigots who have dark minds and are narrow between the eyes. When I check up on the principal opposition to Governor Smith I am tempted to vote for him because I do not wish, at any time, to be found in the same camp with the mental dwarfs and perverts who are raging against him. I think he would be a much pleasanter room-mate than Herbert Hoover. I suspect that Mr. Hoover would expect his room-mate to press the Hoover trousers and take orders every morning from an efficiency expert by the name of Herbert Hoover. A1 knows how to sing a song and to him the world is an alluring spectacle. No one can deny that Mr. Hoover has been a real humanitarian, but he does not sing. He has filled many a stomach but probably never made a heart beat any faster. If he is elected our beloved country will continue to be run on a factory system of scientific management, and prosperity will continue. If it continues much longer in the present direction, wre, who have invested our money in farm lands, will be playing checkers in the large red-brick poor houses which dot the middle west."

GEORGE ADE