When Hunter S. Thompson Tried to Win the West

The gonzo reporter ran for sheriff in 1970, with the gonzo campaign posters to show for it.

T here’s no better time than today for a splash of Gonzo. Freak Power is the new exhibition at Poster House in Manhattan. It’s very fun, very serious, and very good. It’s about the posters promoting Hunter S. Thompson’s 1970 candidacy for sheriff of Pitkin County in Colorado, at the center of which is Aspen.

Political journalism is impoverished, except for sycophancy and hackery. In both of these, the field is alive, but alive like the Walking Dead. Hunter Thompson (1937–2005), now, there’s a journalist. Rolling Stone’s roving reporter-cum-novelist gave the profession a jolt with Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas in 1971 and his coverage of the 1972 presidential election.

Gonzo journalism is the ultimate in “you are there” reporting. Readers feel that the action is unfolding with them in real time, with the reporter the narrator, a character in his own storytelling, and the irreverent, blissfully biased wonk. Thompson’s writing helps liberate mine from the school of earnest, detached art criticism. Like Thompson’s, my work is part memoir. I try to toss a bonbon bomb now and then as well.

Poster House, on W. 23rd Street near Sixth Avenue, is the only museum in America dedicated to poster art. It’s such a vital little museum since poster art is the point where high-end graphics, crisp or sinuous, and seductive color meet the public square.

Posters market something, so if you’re concerned with hierarchies, it’s commercial art. I’m not. There’s good and bad art. Posters are art that message people where people gather and move. Attention-grabbing is key. Good art hits the eye with wall power and then the brain with a question “What’s this all about?”

Freak Power is about an election campaign for sheriff in Colorado’s Pitkin County in 1970. The candidates were incumbent Carroll Whitmire — think Officer Joe Friday with chinos and a ten-gallon hat — and Thompson, a wiry, wired freelance reporter who’d just written a book about the Hell’s Angels.

The art is Thompson’s pithy, snazzy campaign posters, most designed by local artist Thomas Benton, as well as campaign broadsides, all presented by Poster House with dazzle. The show’s in a small downstairs gallery, and that’s a good move, mostly. Campaigns are like pressure cookers, so a tight space makes sense.

There’s lots that’s epic in so puny a contest. Pitkin County in 1970 had only a little over 6,000 people, with 2,427 living in Aspen, but since 1960, the population of both had more than doubled, so there were lots of growing pains on the local level. Aspen was already a ski town but not a high-social, high-wealth one. The rest of the county lived by ranching and mining. Old-timers and newcomers lived in an anxious, simmering equipoise. Still, that doesn’t explain an election gone nuclear.

Thompson moved to Aspen in 1967 for beauty, peace, and quiet, leavened by the town’s growing counterculture of free-loving young people and a reliable supply of drugs. He wasn’t political until he covered the tumultuous 1968 Democratic National Convention. He said he “went as a journalist and came back as a raving beast.”

Thompson said some of the old-timers were old Nazis who came from Germany and Austria to work in ski tourism. The sheriff’s department had its own tough, unforgiving law-and-order cowboy culture. Thompson, the raving beast, had a platform, both a set of issues and a media megaphone in Rolling Stone. Nazis, cowboys, ranchers, and Rolling Stone. Combustible together.

Benton is a pamphleteer artist. He worked in a genre that started during the French Revolution, found its American legs via Thomas Paine, and thrived here. We live in an egalitarian, noisy culture. Printing presses aren’t hard to find. His style’s punchy and effective, even today. The exhibition has a robust selection.

Thompson’s platform was a mix of satire and meat-and-potatoes. He focused on overdevelopment and bad development, or land rape. He backed pedestrian zones, controlled hunting and fishing, better-quality development, a stop to police harassment, and a look-the-other-way drug policy. All was cloaked in good humor, like changing Aspen’s name to Fat City to dissuade tourists and installing stocks in the center of town to punish “dishonest dope dealers.”

Benton’s graphics are great. A reductive sheriff’s badge with a peyote flower in a red, clenched double-thumb fist is his central motif. Peyote is an ingredient in mescaline. The American Dream is a target with a brain in the crosshairs, a little peace dove flying near it. Posters with bloody handprints suggest not only the violence of war and the civil-rights protests but the local police-brutality theme.

Benton recycles motifs. He lived in Aspen for years and targeted more or less the same audience in the 1970’s sheriff’s campaign, the McGovern campaign in 1972, and other causes. Bloody handprints morph into a victory sign for a voter-registration drive, the target turns into the earth for rallies about the environment, and the skull appears in posters opposing wars in Vietnam and Iraq. It’s smart marketing. Benton is hitting the same crowd with motifs they’ve seen for left-wing causes they’ve liked in the past.

Ski Fat City — a photo of a herd of sheep in the middle of a paved road — is clever, good design, and messaging that stands the test of time. Now, though, a herd of sheep suggests Ivy League thinking, and people who consider themselves avant-garde but really have just bought fancy cant. I loved the satirical broadsheets Thompson wrote and Benton designed. “How Aspen Plans to Grow Old Gracefully” by eating wildcat stew and drinking sewer water is the high art of ridicule, once a high-end weapon of liberals. The cohort that calls itself “progressive” today is humorless in addition to priggish, pampered, and pedantic, angry, naïve, and blinkered, hubristic and narcissistic, under-sexed, lily-livered, mean-spirited, and dull.

There’s nothing wrong with taking a peyote cactus, though I’d prefer a maple or oak stick, and poking it in an Establishment eye. Thompson, though, ran to win, and he was a good candidate. Freak Power is accompanied by an 80-minute documentary released last year with the same title. It’s great, though it needs to go in a better space. It’s jammed in an awkward corner, and there’s no seating. The film has lots of Thompson in it and lots of Whitmire, who looks like J. Edgar Hoover in a cowboy hat. Thompson shaved his head as a campaign stunt so he could call Whitmire “my long-haired opponent.”

The broadsheets in the show are really Thompson stories. One, headlined “Between the idea and the reality lies a shadow,” dissects in Thompson-style Aspen’s development horror stories. “Yes, quick,” it reads. “Look up there through the smoke and the billowing gasses . . . that’s the site for our new municipal golf courses. . . . Indeed, it’s right above the slag heap and the rail yard and the smelter and those two gravel pits.”

One broadsheet is a wall mural running from the ceiling to the floor and then continuing on the floor. I loved it. A broadsheet handout for visitors is well done. It’s Thompson’s platform. He explains why he called his movement “Freak Power.” Hippies were called “freaks,” and Thompson thought it was best to own it, to turn the pejorative on its head. “To be abnormal, to deviate from the style of government I deplore,” he said, “is not only wise but necessary.”

Thompson described his base as “freaks, heads, fun-hogs, and night people of every description.” Aside from the business community, he counted among Whitmire’s base “cheap bigots, dope dealers, Nazi ski instructors, and spaced-out psychedelic farmers with no politics except self-preservation.” In total, a remarkable electorate! A month before the election, he wrote a story about the campaign in Rolling Stone. He thought the story hurt him. It mobilized the opposition, which thought he might win through national publicity alone.

On Election Night, as the tally showed Thompson losing, he said in a light-bulb-just-went-on voice, “Well, I guess we forgot Pitkin County’s not just Aspen.” He won Aspen but got schmatzed in the rural areas, which he neglected. Turnout was high as Thompson’s campaign registered hundreds. Whitmire served as sheriff until a scandal forced him out. The Freak Power movement mainstreamed, winning Aspen first and then the county by the late ’70s. Benton got a job as deputy sheriff in 1986. Aspen became Aspen, a resort for rich liberals. Thompson stayed in Aspen, where he was a much-loved eccentric, a gun nut, and drug-dependent. He died in 2005. His ashes, at his request, were fired from a cannon.

Thompson was both a cynic and an optimist. That’s a good combination for a journalist. Pessimism drains curiosity since it presumes all is lost. I think young journalists are poised, which Thompson wasn’t, and besotted with received wisdom, which is zero proof and makes for bland writing. Visceral journalism like Thompson’s is out of style.

Julius Klinger: Posters for a Modern Age is at the Poster House, too. It’s an absorbing, affecting survey of the ubiquitous yet little-known graphic designer. Klinger (1876–1942) worked in Berlin and Vienna. His aesthetic moved Art Nouveau and Vienna Succession style into the Roaring Twenties. It runs, like Freak Power, until mid August. It’s different but of the same high quality. I’ll write about it before it closes.