Hunter S. Thompson was a journalist, commentator, “doctor,” gonzo pirate, troublemaker, and once, he was almost a sheriff. In 1970, Thompson followed his guts and spirit in an attempt to hold onto the ’60s in Aspen, Colo. He birthed the “freak power” movement following the success he witnessed in the Aspen mayoral race from the prior year, using it for a run at the sheriff’s office that forced those in power to take notice, and forced Thompson to come to terms with what he already knew about the American dream: it was dying and both political parties had their hands out to pull the plug.
It’s shocking that, more than 40 years later, the American dream is still on life support in the eyes of many, especially now, as many have called the current political environment the most tumultuous since 1968. We’ve been rocked by a string of tragic events, at home and around the globe, making it easy to compare this summer to the one leading up to the infamous Democratic convention in Chicago.
The nation had seen plenty of shocking moments at that point like the grim reality of the Vietnam War (which played out on television during the Tet Offensive), and the assassinations of Martin Luther King Jr. and Robert Kennedy in the preceding April and June. Chicago was a point of change for many, especially those infused with the social spirit of the 1960s. Despite Woodstock the following year, this was the end of a period of free love and optimism for many and the beginning of something else. And Hunter S. Thompson was on the front lines. Sent out to find “the death of the American dream” by Random House, Thompson ended up witnessing the showdown between protestors and police in Chicago. For him, it was “the end of the sixties” and a moment that was hard to recollect in his biography, Kingdom of Fear:
That week at the convention changed everything I’d ever taken for granted about this country and my place in it. I went from a state of Cold Shock on Monday, to Fear on Tuesday, then Rage, and finally Hysteria — which lasted for nearly a month. Every time I tried to tell somebody what happened in Chicago I began crying, and it took me years to understand why.
Thompson would soon continue to search for the American dream in the desert with Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas before becoming a political junkie on the campaign trail in 1972, an affliction that lasted until his death in 2005. But Chicago planted ideas in Thompson that would change him from being a bystander or observer into someone who could “mount a new kind of power to challenge the rotten, high-powered machinery” of those who stood behind what spilled into the streets of Chicago.
The Birth Of Freak Power
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UtqYT0LcA8Y
That power would be, per Thompson’s term, “Freak Power” — the platform he laid out following the failed 1969 campaign of Joe Edwards a motorcycle riding hippie lawyer from Houston who came close to taking the Aspen mayor’s office following the retirement of Dr. Robert ‘Buggsy’ Barnard, the previous mayor. Freak Power spoke to the many “freaks, heads, fun-hogs, and weird night people” that would typically not be found at the polls on election day. This included Thompson, who had never before gotten so personally invested in politics but who helped to construct something that he said in Kingdom of Fear combined, “Woodstock vibrations, New Left activism, and basic Jeffersonian democracy.” There’s also some mention of the Boston Tea Party, but with more marijuana smoke on the water than tea leaves. To bring attention to the fight, Thompson went to Rolling Stone to pen an article on the campaign, which drew national media attention and helped turn the 1970 local election into the final salvo for one group’s version of the American dream.
Thompson’s ideas were meant to shock, awe, and represent those who felt their voices either weren’t being heard or were silenced by events like Chicago. Tearing up the streets to ensure all public movement was on foot or “a fleet of bicycles” was number one on the platform, followed by controlled drug sales on the courthouse lawn, disarming the sheriff and his deputies while in public, excluding all non-residents from hunting and fishing in the area, and even changing the name of Aspen itself:
“Change the name “Aspen,” by public referendum, to “Fat City.” This would prevent greedheads, land-rapers, and other human jackals from capitalizing on the name “Aspen…”
“Aspen,” Colo would no longer exist — and the psychic alterations of this change would be massive in the world of commerce: Fat City Ski Fashions, Fat City Slalom Cup, Fat City Music Festival, Fat City Insitute for Humanistic Studies…etc. And the main advantage here is that changing the name of the town would have no major effect on the town itself, or on those people who came here because it’s a good place to live.
It would also be Thompson’s policy to “savagely harass” those who undertook or engaged in what he deemed “land rape” by using loopholes and “antiquated laws.”
Surprisingly, Thompson went from being the head of what should’ve been a comedic platform attempting to give voice to the outsiders of American politics to being a serious contender with close numbers in the polls. He reflected on this realization in his biography, Kingdom of Fear, confirming how far he had planned to take Freak Power and when the shock of reality hit him:
My idea, when I wrote it, was to line out the “freak power” concept for massive distribution — with the blueprint and all the details — in the hope that it might be a key to weird political action in other places…
Clearly we were all doomed. Half the population would never live to vote, and the other half would perish in the inevitable election-night holocaust. When NBC-TV showed up about midway in the campaign, I advised them to stick around. “There’ll be a bloodbath if I win,” I said, “and a bloodbath if I lose. The carnage will be unbelievable either way; you’ll get wonderful footage…”
When The Establishment Woke Up
This was back when we could still laugh about the hideous Freak Power challenge. But now the laughter was finished. The humor went out of the campaign when the Aspen establishment suddenly understood that I looked like a winner.
Thompson believed he had a chance to win in Aspen but the important part was not the outcome. The Aspen campaign was pushed more for the effect it had on the mainstream powers and thought around the nation.
It was also around this point that Thompson acknowledges that his campaign was marked for doom, noting the self-destruction and hubris of his own doing in Kingdom of Fear:
The record will also show that we learned our political lessons pretty well…Our mistake, of course — which was actually my mistake — was in publishing what we had learned in a national magazine that hit the news stands just in time to become a millstone around our necks in 1970…
Rolling Stone was a disaster of the first magnitude, for several reasons: 1) because it scared the mortal sh*t out of our opposition 2) because it got here just a week or so too late to be effective in our crucial “freak registration” campaign; and 3) because it outlined our campaign strategy in such fine detail that the enemy was able to use it against us, with hellish effectiveness all, all the way to the end.
According to Thompson, “The Battle of Aspen” in Rolling Stone and his antics forced the Republicans and Democrats to strike a deal across party lines in an effort to ensure that they did not split votes in the major races during the election. As Thompson notes in Kingdom of Fear, the Republican forces dropped their own candidate for sheriff and Democrats pulled away from a concurrent county commissioner race. This left each party to essentially gobble up all of the votes left behind in those respective races, proving to observers and Thompson the realities of politics:
What we’d learned in Aspen was that if you “work within the system,: you’d damn well better win — because the system has a built-in wipe out mechanism for dealing with failed challengers.
Freak Power’s Lasting Legacy
While this moment seems like one that would crush the spirit, Thompson took what he learned about the political machine during his failed sheriff’s campaign and applied it to his observation and response to the presidential race and those who followed it in the hugely influential, Fear and Loathing: On the Campaign Trail ’72.
Thompson’s willingness to pull back the curtain with his political writing earned him respect on the campaign trail, an attitude that was captured in Timothy Crouse’s classic book, The Boys on the Bus:
“After the revolution, we’ll all write like Hunter,” a local TV man in Los Angeles confided to me. “We’ll stop writing all this Mickey Mouse sh*t.”
Not many people in the press corps went that far in their admiration. But reading Thompson obviously gave them a vicarious, Mittyesque thrill. Thompson had the freedom to describe the campaign as he actually experienced it: the crummy hotels, the tedium of the press bus, the calculated lies of the press secretaries, the agony of writing about the campaign when it seemed dull and meaningless, the hopeless fatigue…
Thompson was free to write the unmentionable — that the campaign was essentially meaningless, that some of the candidates were shams and liars, that the process was unjust and anachronistic.
Thompson could see where the wave of the ’60s crested and clearly had some idea where the thing was heading but you have to wonder what he’d think of these times just 11 years after his death.
Despite the abundance of technology and access that the public has today, people are still starved for honesty from politicians. It’s an evident desire and one that has reached the point where it has become another political angle to use against voters, it seems. Donald Trump is running against the “establishment” while calling out supposed liars and crooks, but there’s a big difference between Thompson’s freak power campaign and Trump’s campaign.
If there has been a modern equivalent to Thompson’s Aspen campaign, it lived within the supporters that powered Bernie Sanders’ presidential campaign. Sanders swept up non-traditional voters before eventually falling short to an establishment candidate, just like Thompson and his micro-movement did in 1971. A deflating end for those who hope for a “sea change” in politics, but there’s a real distance between a local sheriff’s election and a national campaign for a major party nomination and that progress does carry the spirit of Thompson, planting the seeds for future change and possibly giving the “freaks” their day, eventually.
(Via Kingdom of Fear / The Great Shark Hunt / The Boys on the Bus / Gonzo / High Noon in Aspen / The Atlantic)