“You may insult me but, by God, you are not going to insult the ex-governor of Missouri and I’ll be damned if you’re going to shout me down. You people asked me here for a speech and you’re going to get one. I read all your little signs and you can call me a country bumpkin, a redneck hillbilly all you want. But at least at home we have manners enough not to invite somebody somewhere and then treat them like a dog. Right now I’m proud to be a redneck but I’m no bigot. When I say I’m for everybody in this country, I mean everybody, even all you hippies out there. I feel sorry for you because you don’t know better.” He looked down at the front row. “I’m for everybody except for these pea-headed, lily-livered college professors you got sitting down there who have been brainwashing you against your own country. Filling you full of subversive ideas . . . egging you on to burn your draft cards and letting you wear the American flag on your behinds.” He pointed at the faculty. “No wonder you teach kids; if you tried to push all that anti-American propaganda on grown men you’d get the living tar kicked out of you. I have a message for you. If you don’t like it here, I’ve got me a whole bunch of boys down at the VFW and over at the American Legion just itching to help you move to Russia. Those Russkies won’t put up with your whining and bellyaching for one second. I believe in freedom and individual rights as well as the next man but nobody has the right to live here and do nothing but run us down.”
Then he addressed the protesters, who were still marching and chanting at the top of their voices, “Hell no, we won’t go,” and “Hey hey, how many boys did you kill today?”
“All you people are just delighting the Communists, and when you spit on one soldier or one policeman, you spit on this nation. You’re nothing but a bunch of scared little momma’s boys who let the others do the fighting for them. A lot of them poor black boys you are so worried about—their mommas and daddies don’t have the money to send them off dodging the draft. You’re the bigots. And if the Communists ever do get over here, these same little pantywaist professors are going to look around for somebody to protect them and there ain’t gonna be nobody here; you’ll all be up in Canada.
“So chant all your little chants and wave all your little signs and have all your sit-ins but one day when you grow up you’re going to be ashamed of yourselves. If you really want to help this country I suggest all you deadhead beatniks get a haircut, take a bath, and go over and pay a visit at the veterans hospital to those who fought so you could wave your little signs.” He stopped for breath. The din was continuous. “When I got here today your president informed me I was not going to be presented the usual plaque of appreciation for coming because your so-called college board doesn’t approve of me. Well, that’s fine, because I don’t approve of them. My staff did a little research and I found out that in the past few years you’ve had Fidel Castro, Nikita Khrushchev, and a member of the Black Panther Party up here and you couldn’t wait to give a plaque to all three of these guys, avowed enemies of our government who would destroy your country if they got half a chance. So if that’s who’s getting the plaques of appreciation around here, then I appreciate not getting one.”
He walked off to boos and jeers and catcalls and was rushed out to the car to find its tires slashed and orange paint poured all over it. When they finally made it off campus, riding on the hubcaps, Rodney turned around and gave the protesters the finger and laughed his head off. When Wendell asked him, “What’s so damned funny?” he said, “They’re so pig ignorant they don’t even know this car belongs to them.”
Hamm didn’t laugh. He had given a speech that no one had heard. The audience had screamed and stomped their feet and booed the whole time. But later Hamm said that was all right; he had heard what he had said, and it made him feel better.
When they got back home, the verdict was unanimous. Even he had to admit that the Hamm Sparks appeal had not worked. Still, they thought that was to be the end of it. But a student reporter, anticipating that the speaker might be shouted down, had placed a small tape recorder on the podium that Hamm did not notice. It had recorded every word he said. Later, the student played the tape and typed it up, word for inflammatory word, and printed it in the university newspaper.
Somehow, having people read what he said in black and white was not something Hamm had counted on. Hamm had assumed that no one was listening. The reporter with the love beads had assumed that printing the speech would damage Hamm even further. However, in Akron, Ohio, the reporter’s father, a World War II vet like Hamm, picked up the paper his son had wrapped his dirty clothes in when sending them home for his mother to wash. After he read the speech, the man said to himself, “Yeah, buddy.” And sent mimeographed copies to all his friends, who sent them to their friends. Instead of the article doing damage to Hamm Sparks, as the reporter had hoped, his father stopped paying his college tuition, making him suddenly eligible for the draft. Love Beads had to hitchhike all the way to Canada.
Soon, copies of Hamm’s speech were slowly but surely making the rounds of every VFW and American Legion hall. Police stations, firehouses, and union halls across the country stuck it up on their billboards and Hamm started to receive hundreds of letters of support and contributions from every state. A month later the headline in one major magazine read: HAMM VS. EGGHEADS: HAMM 10, EGGHEADS 0.
This set off a number of other articles. Soon, a spokesman from the NRA called and asked if they could name a gun after him, and when the sale of LOVE IT OR LEAVE IT bumper stickers almost doubled in a week, the printing company sent him a thank-you note with a nice donation.
People thought this sudden groundswell of support was what gave Hamm the misguided notion that he should run for president.
The day Hamm made his surprise announcement, Cecil Figgs was delighted, and went weak in the knees just thinking about all the wonderful parties and entertainments he could plan at the White House. Vita was more ambivalent. She would never stand in the way of anything he wanted, of course, but she was deeply uneasy about this decision. Politics was no longer just a bunch of men in a back room making deals. It was lethal business. People were getting killed. And Hamm already had a lot of political enemies. But for Hamm not to run would almost be the same thing as killing him.
Later that night she glanced down and beheld the sight of the de facto governor of the state and perhaps even the next president of the United States asleep at her breast and thought to herself, “God help us all.”
Hamm’s unexpected and rash decision to run for president had caught everyone off guard, but no one more so than Betty Raye. He had not discussed anything with her. As usual, she had no idea he was going to do it until he did it. And almost overnight, it seemed, Hamm was off and running, starting to campaign all over the country, and she was really left in the lurch. Her number one “assistant” was no longer there. Before he left he promised a panicked Betty Raye she had nothing to worry about, that nothing would really change, they could handle everything over the phone. This worked for a while but as the days went by Hamm was becoming less interested in the state and more interested in lining up his campaign; in fact, he was becoming harder and harder to get in touch with.
When Hamm was out of the state, Wendell helped her as much as possible but more and more Hamm was dragging Wendell and the rest of the staff off with him, leaving her alone for days at a time. Consequently, Betty Raye wound up trying to run the state by herself, a job she’d never wanted, did not know how to do, and had not been trained for.