This copy of Fields For President, the one I bought from a tiny bookstore in the mountains of LA at a family reunion on my mom's side, was published in 1972 and aimed to be part of the campaign literature of that year. It was originally published in 1939. I bought it with another book, one about Kissinger called Superkraut that I've since lost. I think they were fifty-cents each.
WC Fields was a funny, funny man, and his humor translate mostly okay because of his mostly cynical and weary view of how government works. His view is also conspiratorial, one of the "the government is out to get me" types, but this attitude is laced with self-deprecating sardonic wit.
That's probably why it was re-introduced in 1972 early in that election year: it wasn't outdated. After a conversation I had with my godfather, the idea that films are harder to date when the protagonist is cynical and weary, whereas if they're happy-go-lucky, the times in which it was filmed shine through too brightly, and the piece become (often) badly dated.
With chapters titled "How to Beat the Federal Income Tax---And What to See and Do at Alcatraz" and "How I Have Built Myself into a Physical Marvel", you get a pretty quick idea just exactly where Fields goes with all this.
Full of pictures, it's an interesting artifact of a comic from an earlier time that knew what funny was, having found success in vaudeville, on the radio and eventually in films. Fields is mostly forgotten today, and I've yet to see if his movies are dated...judging by this book's sense of humor, they may have lasted.
Inside this book is an advertisement for Club Cocktails Whiskey Sour in a can, with two young people in swimsuits, wading in knee-deep water, sharing a can with two straws. (Shudder)
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