This article appears in the April 2023 issue of The American Prospect magazine. Subscribe here.

Joe Biden described his 2023 State of the Union address as a “blue-collar blueprint.” At a moment when inflation has been running above anything seen in the last four decades, the president championed greater investment in, price relief for, and empowerment to what he called forgotten places and people. “So many of you listening to me tonight, I know you feel it,” he said from the Capitol. “So many of you felt like you’ve just simply been forgotten. Amid the economic upheaval of the past four decades, too many people have been left behind and treated like they’re invisible.”

Amid this Rooseveltian, “forgotten man” rhetoric, there was one thing Biden did not mention: raising interest rates. The president ignored the main tool that macroeconomists have put forth as necessary to bringing down the high cost of living. Nor did he refer to the Federal Reserve or its chairman Jerome Powell.

Instead, he talked about hearing aids. Thanks to his administration, he said, “millions of Americans can now save thousands of dollars because they can finally get a hearing aid over the counter without a prescription.” The shift to an over-the-counter market aims to disempower a cartel of manufacturers that have kept prices artificially high, out of reach for those forgotten men and women.

Left-leaning economists have in the past identified problems of power and worked to solve them, rather than myopically following the unyielding blueprints of the textbook.

Biden followed up by adding, “Look, capitalism without competition is not capitalism. It’s extortion. It’s exploitation.”

Inflation-fighting economists were firmly in the saddle four decades ago. Ronald Reagan pinned his hopes on “Morning in America” after a setback in the 1982 midterm elections. What he truly meant was that, after a rough couple of years, he had wrestled spiraling inflation to the ground by letting Paul Volcker, then the Fed chairman, ratchet up interest rates to unheard-of levels, nearly 20 percent in 1980 and 1981.

In a speech offered just before the 1980 election, the Hollywood actor had asked Americans to think about whether they were better off than they had been four years earlier. The answer was no. In this same speech, Reagan saluted another actor, John Wayne, an “American hero” who embodied all that was great about swashbuckling swift action. Volcker’s interest rate spike, driving the economy into a recession, epitomized these tough-guy tactics. John Wayne, Paul Volcker: same difference. One just had an advanced degree.

Biden’s post-midterm speech suggests a pivot away from this 40-year tyranny of monetarists, and their politics of ritual sacrifice for the middle class. The president emphasized taming capitalism over cooling the economy; limits on corporate power over limits on fiscal aid; people over bond markets.

Monetary economists’ rise was bolstered by the claim from Margaret Thatcher that “there is no alternative” to their manner of thinking. But history provides evidence of a forgotten tradition, just like the forgotten people and places in Biden’s speech.

Instead of relying on interest rates to work their wonders, left-leaning economists have in the past seen questions of income distribution, industrial policy, and corporate concentration as key to resolving what historically and colloquially is called the high cost of living. They identified problems of power and worked to solve them, rather than myopically following the unyielding blueprints of the textbook. Whether the Biden administration will fully reconnect to this legacy will set the course of the nation.

The Institutionalists’ Rise

To capture that lineage, we have to go back to when economists began taking on fundamental social-policy questions. Before they were called economists, they called themselves political economists. One of the most iconic was Richard T. Ely, who founded the American Economic Association in 1885 and made Johns Hopkins and the University of Wisconsin the leading research institutes dedicated to the reform of American capitalism.

Universities ought not to be mere playgrounds for elite young men who socialized and networked before assuming their rightful place in government, business, and at the pulpit, Ely believed. Instead, experts would work with politicians to soften the edges of corporate capitalism. With like-minded advocates of the “Wisconsin Idea,” Ely favored a minimum wage, workers’ compensation, pension plans, and more. When he supported local unionization efforts for workers, his critics tried to run him off the Madison campus. In a signature moment that came to define the meaning of “academic freedom,” he kept his post when university trustees refrained from firing him.

Ely was no Marxist. He, too, believed in the market, as did the institutional economists for whom he laid the foundation. But instead of the utility-maximizing individuals of neoclassical economics, to him it was the presence of corporations that determined the distribution of a nation’s wealth. And it was the job of economists to push for exactly the kinds of public policies that would create the institutional basis for widely shared prosperity.

If the rise of corporations meant that workers could no longer set the terms of their own employment, the same was true for the modern consumer. Instead of peering into the cracker barrel and bargaining or bartering with the local merchant, a buyer bought Nabiscos in a prepackaged box at the price that the National Biscuit Company dictated. In the first decade and a half of the new century, the cost of living went up more than 20 percent, before skyrocketing further during World War I. “The high cost of living,” said the Progressive Era president Woodrow Wilson, “is arranged by private understanding.”

In 1917, the urban reformer Frederic Howe published a book under that title, The High Cost of Living. Like Louis Brandeis, who before he became the first Jewish Supreme Court justice famously explained how corporations and financiers borrowed funds to earn enormous profits and exploit the working class in his book Other People’s Money, Howe exposed what he believed were nefarious forces at work: “Monopoly is responsible for the conditions which confront us.” Rising food prices, the focus of Howe’s work, arose because land speculators, meatpackers, cold storage operators, and railroad managers exerted undue influence, which it was the obligation of government to bring to light and counteract. President Wilson’s newly created Federal Trade Commission buttressed these exposés, revealing that the “Big Five” packers, responsible for distributing two-thirds of fresh meat, established pooling agreements to parcel out the market and set prices.

The modern consumer instinctively shared this view. As Howe was writing about inflation, a group of women who recently moved to the city, and were now reliant on purchases in the marketplace rather than meat from their own farms, formed the Mothers’ Anti-High Price League. They wrote to President Wilson: “We, housewives of the City of New York, mothers and wives of workmen, desire to call your attention, Mr. President, to the fact that, in the midst of plenty, we and our families are facing starvation … The American standard of living cannot be maintained.” In cities across the country, consumers took to the streets in food riots, demanding meat at prices they could afford. Howe agreed.

That sage observer of American life, Walter Lippmann, remarked, “The real power emerging today in democratic politics is just the mass of people who are crying out against the ‘high cost of living’… To talk about ‘reasonable returns’ is to begin an attack on industrialism which will lead far beyond the present imaginations of the people who talk about it.”

From Morals to Economics

The attack on corporatism as a cause of the high cost of living led to a reaction from the industrial elite. Nothing, or no one, seemed to promise to revolutionize living standards as much as Henry Ford. Ford believed it was in the self-interest of the corporation to pay workers more money and to bring down the prices of the products they made, all in the service of creating a mass market. The purpose of the “five-dollar day,” introduced in 1914 at a time when job turnover was more than 300 percent, was to stabilize the workforce while mass production, made possible by the moving assembly line, would allow for drastically lower production costs. Well-paid workers would be able to own a house and buy a Model T.

Except if they couldn’t. William Green, president of the American Federation of Labor, said in the 1920s, “If America’s prosperity is to be maintained, it must be possible for the masses of workmen to buy and use the things they have produced.” Other labor leaders like Sidney Hillman and Rose Schneiderman, both of whom organized unskilled immigrants, including many teenage girls ignored by the AFL, echoed that view. Expressing a similar sentiment, the Wall Street economists Waddill Catchings and William T. Foster wrote in their 1927 book Business Without a Buyer, “The failure of consumer demand to keep pace with the output of consumers’ goods is the chief reason why prosperity ends in depression.”

These were not simply moral claims about the dignity of work and the right to an American standard of living. They were economic claims. At precisely this moment in the Roaring Twenties, a young Herbert Hoover was successfully asserting in his presidential campaign that the country was “nearer to the final triumph over poverty than ever before in the history of any land.” Yet beneath the Fords and the flappers, there were signs of trouble. Between 1914 and 1926, Detroit doubled its auto production, but the population grew by only 15 percent. At the same time, firms were awarding more of the productivity dividend to profits rather than to wages. Farmers suffered from a massive deflation as commodity prices plunged after WWI. So who would buy all these products? How exactly would the modern marketplace sustain demand? Catchings and Foster called this “underconsumption.”

A new group of economists, largely of liberal sympathies and mostly tied to the labor movement, came to the fore. Let’s call them “purchasing-power progressives.” They believed that even the most well-intentioned capitalists could not be trusted to make fundamental decisions about the allocation of the spoils of productivity among wages, prices, and profits. Instead, the state, organized labor, and a host of other organized groupings—like farmers or consumers—had to exercise what John Kenneth Galbraith would later call “countervailing powers.”

Two economists in particular serve to illustrate this new way of thinking. One was Paul Douglas, who published a seminal work in 1930 simply called Real Wages. Before he would become an illustrious liberal senator from Illinois, Douglas cut his teeth in the academy. In 1927, he introduced what became known as the Cobb-Douglas production function to measure labor and capital’s relative contributions to productivity, a formula that would become a staple of microeconomics.

However, Douglas’s abiding interest focused on what he called the “real wages” of workers. The inflation of the war years had been particularly corrosive to income gains. As he concluded, “American labor as a whole, therefore, cannot legitimately be charged with having profiteered during the war. Rather, like Alice in Wonderland, it was compelled to run faster in order to stay in the same place.” If wages were to sustain demand, then workers needed a way to grab a greater share of the productivity dividend. Otherwise, they collected what department store magnate and liberal reformer Edward Filene called “counterfeit wages.”

The other innovator was the economist Gardiner Means, who in 1932 wrote The Modern Corporation and Private Property along with the legal scholar Adolf A. Berle Jr. Together, these two reformers—both were sons of Congregational ministers—believed they had diagnosed the problem at the heart of the modern economy. It was too great a concentration of corporate power, presided over by an unaccountable managerial elite.

Before the Great Depression, 200 corporations controlled more than half of all corporate wealth. That meant that rather than setting prices “by higgling and bargaining in the market place” (a reference to Adam Smith), the managers of these large firms, what Means called a “small body of officials,” instead resorted to “administered prices.” Where classical economic theory would have suggested that a downturn in the market would have led to lower prices, instead these corporate managers turned to scarcity, reducing wages, cutting production, and removing competition. “Modern industrial organization … destroyed the free market,” said Means.

The Great Depression confirmed the view of these purchasing-power progressives, both that corporations had too much power and that the state had to step in to ensure consumer demand in the form of higher wages and lower prices. The solution was not to break up corporations; these were not trust-busting anti-monopolists. Rather, they pursued an entirely new idea that would become the basis of the New Deal: to socialize the price- and wage-setting function of private enterprise.

Building From the Bottom Up

Franklin Roosevelt had never taken much interest in economics. But he cared deeply about restoring prosperity, and he instinctively believed that the problem was underconsumption. In a 1932 campaign speech delivered at the San Francisco Commonwealth Club, written by Brains Truster Adolf Berle, Roosevelt said, “Our task now is not discovery or exploitation of natural resources, or necessarily producing more goods. It is the soberer, less dramatic business … of meeting the problem of underconsumption, of adjusting production to consumption, of distributing wealth and products more equitably, of adapting existing economic organizations to the service of the people.” Or as he put it in his first national radio address, “These unhappy times call for the building of plans that rest upon the forgotten, the unorganized but indispensable units of economic power … that build from the bottom up and not from the top down.”

In essence, Roosevelt’s New Deal enshrined a high-wage, low-price, full-employment agenda into public policy—and that was before John Maynard Keynes published The General Theory of Employment, Interest, and Money in 1936, which would argue for much the same intention through countercyclical spending policy. The Agricultural Adjustment Act, the National Labor Relations Act, the Social Security Act—all these New Deal laws had the purchasing-power purpose in mind. As the new president put it, “The aim of this whole effort is to restore our rich domestic market by raising its vast consuming capacity.”

That was especially true in the case of labor’s newly institutionalized right to form unions and engage in collective bargaining. Known as the Wagner Act, the 1935 bill rested squarely on the purchasing-power idea. As Sen. Robert Wagner’s chief legislative aide, institutional economist Leon Keyserling, explained, “The failure of the total volume of wage payments to advance as fast as production and corporate surpluses has resulted in inadequate purchasing power, which has accentuated periodic depressions and disrupted the flow of interstate commerce.”

Wagner, the liberal senator from New York, explained upon introduction of his bill that labor rights were essential to recovery and were in the modern marketplace a legitimate prerogative of Congress. He talked about how denying workers their rights robbed them of participation “in our national endeavor to coordinate production and purchasing power.” There was, to date, no national endeavor. But if the country ever wanted to get out of the Depression and break the back of business cycles where profits increased and real wages fell, there would have to be.

Frances Perkins, Roosevelt’s labor secretary, captured what was at stake. What seemed like a matter-of-fact proto-Keynesian position belied an underlying New Deal radicalism. “If the wages of mill workers in the South should be raised to the point where workers could buy shoes, that would be a social revolution,” said Perkins. Indeed, these Southern female laborers were some of the most exploited workers, and, as Perkins understood, it would take the state stepping in to offer protections that not only improved working conditions and wages, but also bolstered working-class purchasing power. Perkins liked to say the New Deal was born the day she was among the throngs of outraged onlookers at the Triangle Shirtwaist Factory fire in 1911, when 146 teenage girls jumped to their death to escape the flames engulfing their sweatshop workplace. The Great Depression made it clear that empowering these workers was not only the right thing to do, but also the necessary thing, if the country did not want to suffer from the scourge of low wages and inhumane working conditions.

These reformers also fought to keep prices down, as high wages and low prices were two sides of the purchasing-power coin. In 1937, when the economy slid backwards, New Dealer Leon Henderson, described in a profile as “more like a truck driver than a cap-and-gown economist,” fully rejected the idea that government spending was the cause of inflation. No, he said, the problem was the sticky prices administered by quasi-monopolistic corporations. This overran any gains made by collective bargaining and more robust wages, said this cigar-chomping “spittoon economist.”

Roosevelt did not disagree. In the spring of 1938, he adopted a Keynesian spending outlook as an antidote to what his enemies were calling the “Roosevelt Recession.” All along, he had supported large-scale public works as a way to restore the economy to full, or fuller, employment. That was, after all, the goal of the Tennessee Valley Authority, which sought to build up an entire backward region of the country, and the same was true of the Public Works Administration and the Works Progress Administration, all of which created millions of jobs. When Roosevelt trimmed the budget in 1937 and recovery faltered, he turned to deficit spending as a deliberate strategy to pump up demand.

Roosevelt’s New Deal enshrined a high-wage, low-price, full-employment agenda into public policy.

However, the structural issues of the corporation and its ability to distort the market were never far from the fore of public policy. In 1938, Roosevelt appointed Henderson and Thurman Arnold to lead the Temporary National Economic Committee, a congressional panel dedicated to studying the concentration of economic power. While their tools were largely the new antitrust powers of the federal government, their target was what they saw as price rigidity. In practice, that meant that these economists would fight, in the words of Arnold, to lower the “price of pork chops, bread, spectacles, drugs, and plumbing,” using the power of the Antitrust Division to put pressure on corporations. At the same time, Roosevelt pushed hard for the passage of the Fair Labor Standards Act, which, as Henderson testified, would “help to prevent a mass reduction in wages and purchasing power.”

The effort to maintain mass purchasing power became a matter of national security in World War II. With the military placing orders for 250 million pairs of pants, 250 million pairs of underwear, half a billion socks, plus thousands of tanks and planes, hundreds of fighting ships, and billions of rounds of ammunition, inflation soon became the leading problem. Civilian goods disappeared just as wartime full employment drove up consumer demand. “The fight against inflation is not fought with bullets or with bombs,” said Roosevelt, “but it is equally as vital. It calls for unflagging vigilance and effective action … to prevent profiteering and unfair returns.”

Henderson, who as a young professor at Carnegie Tech gave class credit to students for attending a talk by Eugene Debs, was put in charge of the Office of Price Administration. From that perch, staffed with twice as many economists as in the Treasury Department, he imposed price controls and rationing across the entire economy. A young Richard Nixon, who worked in the tire-rationing department, found the whole experience repugnant. “We both believed in the capitalist system,” said the other Republican in the office. “But the other lawyers were using rationing and price control as a means of controlling profits.” Indeed.

Along with Henderson, no one did more to devise this system of controls than John Kenneth Galbraith. Two days after Pearl Harbor, the 6’8″ agricultural economist, now working for the OPA, went around Washington, without any real authority to do so, getting signatures on an order he drafted to freeze the sale of new tires. It would take months and much congressional wrangling to institutionalize OPA’s power. But Galbraith believed the situation could not wait. He followed up the tire order with thousands of telegrams to the nation’s mayors, instructing them to enlist local police to enforce the ban. Soon, he would devise a system of rationing for gasoline and many other essential items. War required what Roosevelt called “equality of sacrifice.”

Armed with government-issued price lists printed in many different languages, housewives marched into local stores ready to do battle against profiteering. Was the butcher holding his thumb on the scale? Was there too much fat in a cut of meat? Was he letting his favorite customers buy on the black market? In response, some merchants called the OPA a “kitchen Gestapo,” and it was true; these shoppers now had the power of the state behind them. When shoppers spotted a violation, they could sue for overcharges. In any given week, OPA received more than 4.5 million phone calls and 2.5 million letters. It was not surprising to Galbraith and others that the OPA was one of the most popular agencies, with more than three-quarters of the public supporting it, even—or especially—in the months after the war ended.

The Eclipse of the Institutionalists

This success bred contempt. Sen. Robert Taft, perhaps the leading Republican critic of the New Deal, told Chester Bowles, Henderson’s successor, “What you are doing is organizing consumers against business … It is absolutely un-American and contrary to law and contrary to the Constitution.” With that, Taft led anti–New Deal forces in a takedown of the purchasing-power agenda.

The first fight came soon after the war’s end. Organized labor, which had grown in strength from 10 million to 15 during the conflict, wanted to preserve its wage gains. In November 1945, Walter Reuther led the United Automobile Workers on a strike against General Motors, demanding both higher wages and lower prices. “Purchasing Power for Prosperity” was the slogan, devised by former Agricultural Adjustment Administration and SEC employee Donald Montgomery, a University of Wisconsin–trained labor economist.

Understanding what was at stake, GM refused. “The UAW-CIO is reaching for power,” GM said. “It leads surely to the day when union bosses … will seek to tell us what we can make, when we can make it, where we can make it, and how much we can charge.” George Romney of the Automobile Manufacturers Association, future governor of Michigan and father of Mitt, saw Reuther as “the most dangerous man in Detroit … No one is more skillful in bringing about the revolution without seeming to disturb the existing forms of society.”

New Deal opponents fought back hard elsewhere. Rather than submit to controls, meatpackers starved the public into submission by withholding cattle from market. At the critical moment in the fight over the peacetime extension of OPA in the fall of 1946, slaughtering was down 80 percent from a year earlier. “Had Enough?” the 1946 midterm GOP platform asked Americans. Richard Nixon, back from his stint at OPA and in the Navy, ran a successful congressional campaign in this so-called “beefsteak election,” which returned Republicans to power for the first time since 1930. Controls were now dead, wholesale meat prices soared 89 percent, and overall consumer prices shot up 16 percent. As Bernard Baruch, the longtime presidential adviser, noted, “Next to human slaughter, maiming, and destruction, [inflation] is the worst consequence of war. It creates lack of confidence of men in themselves and in their government.”

With OPA out of the way, the GOP next went after organized labor with the passage of the anti-union Taft-Hartley Act in 1947, demonizing labor as the source of inflation. Whereas New Dealers had once attacked monopoly prices, conservatives came after monopoly unionism. “The price of MONOPOLY comes out of your pocket,” explained one National Association of Manufacturers full-page ad.

In 1948, Harry Truman ran a successful campaign against the “Do-Nothing” GOP Congress, calling for a return of controls, repeal of Taft-Hartley, and a Fair Deal that included universal health care, public housing, and an expansion of education. This shift to the left did not come naturally to the former senator from Missouri. As a haberdasher, he had been more sympathetic to small business than to organized labor. But he was helped by Keyserling, the Wagner Act author, who was now a member of Truman’s Council of Economic Advisers. Keyserling believed his job was not “mere forecasting” but rather to determine what the “components and composition of the GNP ought to be.”

But the more they succeeded, the more their opponents held their success against them. “Inflation has clearly become the breaking point of the Roosevelt coalition,” wrote Samuel Lubell in his classic work The Future of American Politics. Republicans built a coalition on the fear of inflation, bringing in white-collar workers on annual salaries, mortgage holders, and retirees on fixed incomes. In 1952, Dwight Eisenhower used the “high cost of living” to get elected as the first Republican president since the Great Depression, blaming “creeping inflation” largely on organized labor, which successfully negotiated cost-of-living adjustments into half of all union contracts.

By the time John F. Kennedy was in the White House, Paul Samuelson, author of the best-selling macroeconomics textbook, was a household name, and Keyserling was not. Paul Douglas, elected as a senator from Illinois in 1948, launched hearings into administered prices that tried to bring back that old New Deal magic, going after high-priced drugs and other consumer goods. But by and large, political attacks against the power of concentration proved more successful against labor—think of Robert Kennedy’s attack against labor’s mob bosses—than against corporations. As president, JFK famously took on U.S. Steel for raising prices, but mere jawboning was no substitute for the legal authority exercised by the OPA 20 years before.

The last gasp of price controls proved the point. In the 1970s, when inflation returned, onetime OPA critic Richard Nixon was in the White House. Understanding just how popular the wartime OPA had been, he imposed wage and price controls in August 1971, much to the chagrin of his conservative advisers. But Nixon’s heart wasn’t in it; there were no legions of housewives, no dollars-and-cents shopping lists, no local investigation boards. Everyone understood that the intent was, as one Nixon insider put it, to “zap labor.” Instead of Ken Galbraith in charge of the Cost of Living Council, it was Donald Rumsfeld.

The failure of Nixon price controls once and for all solidified their death as a tool of economic management. Paul Volcker was not yet Fed chair. But there were those in the Ford administration, namely Alan Greenspan, who were already pushing for austerity. Reflecting the final eclipse of this purchasing-power agenda, Ronald Reagan famously fired the striking PATCO workers and threw his full force behind Volcker’s shock therapy. If anyone had to pay the price of inflation, it would be the American working class.

Build Back Better?

Biden is bringing back all the sound bites of the kind of labor liberalism once at the center of the economics profession—a “living wage,” the “forgotten man,” “profiteering,” “exploitation.” Sound bites are one thing, of course; policy is another. And here too we see signs of Biden channeling his inner Roosevelt. The Inflation Reduction Act, along with the CHIPS Act and the Infrastructure Investment and Jobs Act, reflects the kind of industrial policy and government spending not seen since the Interstate Highway Act.

Add to these Biden’s push against what he has described as “junk fees,” empowering Lina Khan, the chair of the Federal Trade Commission, to go after what Means long ago called administered prices. Biden, with the help of a younger generation of economists, is harking back to an earlier period. He has also lined up behind labor unions in a way that presidents haven’t done in a long time. “When we do all of these things,” Biden has said, “we increase productivity. We increase economic growth.”

Biden’s blue-collar blueprint is not only good politics, but good economics too. Only time will tell if we are seeing a real pivot back to the progressive agenda of time gone by.

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According to Ed Holmes, the Bay Area is home to the world’s fastest growing “snack religion”: the First Church of the Last Laugh.

“150% less dogma, it’s a light religion,” said Holmes, who also goes by the moniker Bishop Joey, the “seminal and secular head” of the church. The group celebrates only one holy day, April 1, which they’ve dubbed Saint Stupid’s Day. In addition to the fastest growing low-cal religious organization, Holmes also claims that they’re the world’s most dangerous church (because they dare to tell the truth) and also the largest.

“Our religion is based on the DNA that we share with all humanity. Seven and half billion people share a little link, and that is a stupid gene. Everybody’s a member of the church, they just don’t know it,” Holmes said.

Bishop Joey aka Ed Holmes, middle, from Berkeley has been leading the annual Saint Stupid’s Day Parade in San Francisco for the past 35 years on Monday, April 1, 2013. Holmes was in a mime troupe for 26 years.

Hearst Newspapers/San Francisco Chronicle via Getty Images

Beginning in 1979, Holmes has gathered a motley crew of pranksters at noon on April 1 at Embarcadero Plaza and inducted the crowd into the church before embarking on the Saint Stupid’s Day Parade, soundtracked by drummers, horn players and lots of chanting. An Associated Press story published in the Midland Reporter-Telegram in 1983 summed up the ethos of the attendees: “’What you’re doing is totally stupid,’ a woman yelled at [a man] who was wearing a business suit and sandals while hauling his dollar-sign cross. ‘Thank you, that’s a compliment,’ he said.”

Over the years, the event has developed a set path through the Financial District. Paraders take part in a series of elaborate rituals like throwing lottery tickets up in the air outside the Federal Reserve Building or banging on a utility door at 101 California dubbed the “Tomb of Saint Stupid” to see if he’ll come out. There’s a “union-mandated” parade resting at the sunken Hallidie Plaza, and a tradition of screaming at people looking down from office buildings, compelling them not to jump or calling them slackers that need to go back to work. Along the way, pennies are tossed on the ground as tribute to the city’s temples of commerce.

Back in 1985, Holmes told the San Francisco Examiner that the vision for the event came to him while he was high… on dessert.

“One day I was overdosing on frozen yogurt right down here on the Embarcadero when I had a vision: It was a 600-foot Saint Stupid trying to panhandle me for $249. My sinuses started thawing out as I realized there were big bucks in religion. Immediately I appointed myself head of the First Church of the Last Laugh.”

Holmes, who has lived in Berkeley for the last 32 years, first arrived in San Francisco in 1969 by way of the US Navy. For seven years, he was a mechanic on submarines and an aircraft carrier stationed in Alameda. The GI Bill funded his education, but then he fell into theater “by accident” and has been a physical performer ever since in groups like the Fratelli Bologna (which appeared in the 1983 film “The Right Stuff”) and the San Francisco Mime Troupe , where he worked from 1986 to 2014 until he retired because of back and knee problems. He still teaches occasionally but identifies as a retired physical comedian, making an exception to head back into the office every April 1 to carry on one of San Francisco’s silliest rites of passage. Pre-pandemic, the event would draw a few hundred people when it was held on a weekday, and a thousand on a weekend.

Professor Violet from San Francisco holds his sign during the 35th annual Saint Stupid’s Day Parade in front of 100 California St. in San Francisco on Monday, April 1, 2013.

San Francisco Chronicle/Hearst N/San Francisco Chronicle via Gett

The event channels the attitude of San Francisco’s Merry Pranksters, an absurdist ’60s collective influential in the Summer of Love, and even counted founder Ken Kesey as the parade leader one year in the mid-’80s. As far as beliefs are concerned, main tenets of the church seem to be simply poking fun at authority and relishing in the absurd, with their main gathering space being a meme-filled Facebook group. But in addition to falling into the legacy of San Francisco counterculture, Holmes sees the event as a modern day extension of ancient traditions like Europe’s blasphemous Feast of Fools and rebellious archetypes that exist in every society.

“Around the world in every culture there’s this character called the trickster,” Holmes said. “For American Indians, it’s the coyote or the raven. In the South, it’s Br’er Rabbit. In China, it’s Sun Wukong, the Monkey King. In Africa, it’s Anansi, the spider. These are all characters that criticize and comment on culture and people. They teach lessons through these stories and events. Saint Stupid is just an update on this ancient tendency that happens in society.”

Geoff Walker, left, from San Francisco, weed man, middle, and Kelly Moore, right, from Marin meet at Justin Herman Plaza for the 35th annual Saint Stupid’s Day Parade in San Francisco on Monday, April 1, 2013.

Hearst Newspapers/San Francisco Chronicle via Getty Images

Unfortunately, the event has been on pause since 2020, and won’t officially return this year due to lingering COVID concerns and Holmes’ health problems. However, based on how active the community is online, the future of the parade seems to be in good hands. You can find countless videos of the parade on YouTube, and even a 33-minute documentary uploaded to Vimeo last year. There’s been talk of a last-minute Zoom edition of this year’s rituals (check the Saint Stupiders page for updates). And despite the fact that the bishop will be on the sidelines, Holmes has heard reports that some followers of Saint Stupid will still crawl through the Financial District flash mob-style, something that gives him hope that San Francisco hasn’t lost its counterculture charm .

“There’s still this wild spirit happening in San Francisco,” he says. “It’s getting squeezed out, it’s getting shut down, but there’s folks still doing it. I haven’t given up, San Francisco is still my favorite city.”

Lars Adams from Oakland takes a break during the 35th annual St. Stupid’s Day Parade through the Financial District in San Francisco on Monday, April 1, 2013.

Hearst Newspapers/San Francisco Chronicle via Getty Images

More vintage San Francisco counterculture

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HERCULES (KPIX 5) – A family in Hercules turns their home into a magical winter wonderland with 30,000 to 40,000 lights and hundreds of decorations every year.

Since its inception six years ago, all of their neighbors on the block have participated in decorating the Onyx Court.

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“Every year it just gets more and more, bigger and bigger,” says Bernardo Dunn. He and his wife Tracy Palma say they have both loved Christmas since they were little. After they got married, decorating for the holidays became something they really enjoyed doing together.

For Haley Hold and her two-year-old daughter Stella Mae, visiting the home of Palma Dunn has become an annual tradition.

“I think this year was special for her to walk down the path and then make Santa Claus dance,” said Hold as she walked over to the Santa Claus figure and clapped to make it move while looking at her daughter’s face watched. “She’s just in awe!”

“Of course we see the children. They smile. They appreciate it and it makes us feel good, especially with everything that’s happening, ”said Dunn.

Denise Domich brought her family from Pinole to tour the house after hearing about it on Instagram. “To see the magic of Christmas through the eyes of a child is indescribable. I mean, you can see it on his face, it’s just a lot of fun, “Denise said as she watched her son count some of the big lights in the driveway.

“If a spot is missing that isn’t lit, we will definitely do it next year. It just keeps getting bigger and bigger, ”said Palma. She thinks the roof looks dark – just framed by lights – and thinks that next year they will be putting fairy lights over the whole thing.

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On this year’s electricity bill, “We’ve gotten a little bigger this year, so we’re scared of what the bill will look like in December,” said Dunn. “This number will contain a comma.”

“It’s definitely worth it,” he added.

The Palma Dunns say they buy most of their decorations for post-Christmas sales but have spent tens of thousands of dollars over the years.

They have a storage room that they keep all of the decorations and they say it takes almost three weeks to set it all up.

The house is located at 145 Onyx Court in Hercules and the lights will be on until January 7th.

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It started out as a simple bargain about 35 years ago at the Mount Hoods Timberline Lodge: reading for a hot meal.

David Stuart Bull gave four readings by the Welsh poet Dylan Thomas ?? Ode to childhood Christmas this weekend in front of the lodge’s large fireplace.

The show was so well received that Bull says he and seven friends were given free ski passes.

?? I thought I was on something here ?? said the cheerful, English-born actor on Saturday.

Since then, Bull, now 74, has had several dramatic readings of “A Child’s Christmas in Wales” almost every year. for small crowds in Eugene during the holidays, accompanied by violinist Linda Danielson and guitarist Chico Schwall, who accompany the hour-long show with Celtic music.

On Saturday, about 25 people drank canapés and drank wine and cocktails while watching Bull ?? s reading ?? one of eight appearances this season ?? at Cafe Soriah in downtown Eugene.

Thomas’ descriptive story, heavy with ironic humor, reminds us of Christmas past through the eyes of a child: the snow, the chocolate cigarettes, the Christmas carol, the street cats and the drunk adults. It was first broadcast on BBC Wales radio in 1945.

For Bull, who grew up in Worchester in the Midlands of England and near the Welsh border, Thomas’s memories are “dead alarm clocks for the Christmas I knew growing up”.

Bull, a hoarse man who works as a chimney sweep, starred in local productions. He has been married for 55 years.

With a full of gray, curly hair, Bull rushes into reading with enthusiasm even after all these years.

When asked if he remembered one of his many appearances, Bull laughed and quoted from Thomas’ poem: “One Christmas was so similar to the other.”

The nice thing about it is that the story is so solid that a bit of freshness pops up almost every time ,? he added.

Ruth Romoser and Evelyn Nagy from Springfield have been coming to Bulls every year for the past four years.

??It is wonderful,?? said Romoser. ?? I love hearing great literature read aloud. The music also contributes to this.

Nagy added: It just gets me in the vacation mood.

Bull says Thomas found more esteem ?? and received greater financial rewards ?? for his work in the United States than in Great Britain.

Thomas toured the United States four times in the early 1950s as he struggled to support his wife and three children. A heavy drinker, he died in New York at the age of 39.

?? All poets of this era fought for money, ?? said bull. ?? Thomas always borrowed money and people lent him money. ??

Bull said Thomas might be amused to know that he is best known in the United States for his Christmas death, which is much more lighthearted and less dense than some of his other poems.

?? Some of (Thomas ?? poetry) are only suitable for English majors and for poets, ?? Bull joked.

Thomas, in urban legend at least, might even have a connection with Eugene himself, Bull said. Thomas visited Seattle and San Francisco during his American tours and possibly performed at the University of Oregon in between. A small table in Max’s tavern even claimed that Thomas had “drank”. a couple of beers there, said Bull.

?? But maybe that’s more myth than truth ?? he confirmed with a smile.

Follow Saul on Twitter @SaulAHubbard. Address emails to saul.hubbard@registerguard.com.

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The cover of the first issue of Catholic San Francisco, February 12, 1999. (Archived from Catholic San Francisco at catholic-sf.org)

June 14, 2021
Catholic staff in San Francisco

In 1858, Archbishop Joseph Sadoc Alemany OP, the first Archbishop of the Archdiocese of San Francisco (1853-1884), founded his first newspaper, The Monitor, and recognized the importance of communicating directly with devout Catholics through the church’s own media. Under the leadership of Archbishop Alemany, a Dominican and Spaniard who was an American citizen, the Archdiocese of San Francisco built an extensive system of schools, orphanages, hospitals and retirement homes and other charities.

Founded just five years after Archbishop Alemany’s arrival in California, The Monitor was committed, reporting, and conveying the faith and important issues to believers for nearly 130 years. Today, as the San Francisco Catholic newspaper moves into a magazine and increases its awareness of digital media, the commitment to connect with and guide the people of the Archdiocese continues.

“This is a tradition that goes back to the very beginning of this archdiocese – the desire to communicate directly to believers in the most effective medium of the day,” said Archbishop Salvatore J. Cordileone. “The new magazine will offer top texts, great graphics and photos as well as opportunities to promote the faith of the people of the archdiocese.”

“If the past year has taught us anything, it is that today’s shepherds must find new ways to communicate with their flock,” said Archbishop Cordileone, emphasizing the Archdiocese’s commitment to the new magazine and digital communication tools, E-letters, social media, and the website.

As the newspaper gives way to new forms of communication that best suit the current needs of the Church and the faithful, it leaves three crucial legacies as the newspaper that carried on the tradition of gifted writers and editors who became the Catholic media in the archdiocese since the 19th century.

Catholic San Francisco was created by everyone who worked on it: the newspaper’s five editors, Maurice Healy, Dan Morris Young, Patrick Joyce, Jack Smith and Rick DelVecchio, their collaborators and many thousands of loyal readers who had ideas and opinions for contributed more than two decades.

A record of local Catholic life

The local church leaders who founded the newspaper in 1999 understood their role in documenting local church history; the bishops and archbishops who helped define them, the people and events that shaped them, and the liturgical calendar that was all about.

In the first edition of Catholic San Francisco, published February 12, 1999, the former editor of The Monitor, which closed as a newspaper for the Archdiocese of San Francisco in 1984 after 126 years, welcomed the return of a local Catholic newspaper. (The monitor is available at sfarchdiocese.org/archives.)

“After the monitor was closed, not a single vehicle gave an overview of Catholic life in the Archdiocese of San Francisco,” wrote the late Father John A. Penebsky.

In 1995, then Archbishop William J. Levada, the seventh Archbishop of San Francisco, advocated the return of a newspaper because it could document “the pilgrimage that is the story of our salvation”.

“Our local Church is full of stories that will appear on these pages each week to deepen the bonds that unite us as faithful believers in the Word made flesh,” said then Auxiliary Bishop John C. Wester, now Archbishop of Santa Fe, in same opening edition.

Available in the San Francisco Catholic Archives at catholic-sf.org, the 22 year editions – 797 issues in total – are a time capsule of local Catholic life that is digitally preserved as a historical record. It represents a whole generation of liturgical events, priestly ordinations, anniversaries, school and community anniversaries, renovations, fundraising campaigns, chancellery events, service work, religious community projects, obituaries and more, always with the aim of conquering the loyal hearts of the people involved.

Tom Burke’s column, “On the Street Where You Live” was a popular page recap of little stories that included wedding anniversaries, local Catholic professional achievements, community picnics, and the like.

In a 2017 reader survey, respondents rated Burke’s Street column, which began with the newspaper’s first issue in 1999, as a popular feature. In the archdiocese, a freely designed photo page with unrelated snapshots turned out to be equally popular. The photos sent to staff by readers, sometimes grainy or blurry, nonetheless captured important moments for the local Catholics: a fundraiser from the Council of Knights of Columbus, school children returning to school in the fall, the annual meeting of one Religious community and more.

News from a Catholic point of view

As a newspaper, the editors of Catholic San Francisco treated news events – local, national, global, and in the Vatican – through a Catholic lens.

“One of my tenets was to get on the news,” said Maury Healy, the first associate editor of Catholic San Francisco to be appointed by Archbishop Levada. “And there is almost always a Catholic point of view.”

He named Dan Morris Young editor-in-chief of the weekly publication, which was mailed to registered community members.

“I always told the Archbishop that the newspaper was the ‘Catholic eye on the world and the eye on the local Catholic Church,'” Healy said.

For over 20 years, Catholic San Francisco covered the Catholic response to important news including the September 11, 2001 terrorist attacks, the sexual abuse crisis in 2002 and 2003, the funeral of Pope John Paul II, and Hurricane Katrina 2005, Philippine Typhoon Haiyan in 2013, California forest fires in 2017 and 2018, and the coronavirus epidemic in 2020.

Catholic San Francisco covered and nurtured the first Walk for Life West Coast, held on January 22, 2005. The walk was condemned in advance by all city overseers and Mayor Gavin Newsom, who declared “Stand Up for Choice Day” and a counter-demonstration. Smith wrote the story and photographed this walk. Healy wrote on the pages of Catholic San Francisco under the heading “Shame of San Francisco” and wrote: “Thanks to the repulsive rhetoric of city officials and the rowdy behavior of several hundred abortion activists, San Francisco came a long way on January 1st. 22 to cement its reputation as one of the nation’s most intolerant cities. “

Healy’s editorials were in the tradition of Father Peter Yorke, a diocesan priest who was editor of The Monitor in the 1890s and who was on the forefront of defending Catholic interests against attacks by the American Protective Association. Father Yorke published a series of revelations about the APA, participated in public debates, and played a key role as a labor activist.

In the Teamsters strike of 1901, Yorke firmly sided with the working class with the Catholic Church of San Francisco and delivered passionate speeches to thousands of workers. He said, “As a priest, my duty is with the working people who fight for their rights, for that is the historical position of the priesthood and because that is the command of the Lord.”

Catholic San Francisco also documented the Church’s role in advocating for immigrants, treating immigration and affordable housing, visiting prisons, and conducting prayer services for those killed on the city streets.

Healy said the biggest story the paper covered in 2010 was a PG&E gas pipeline explosion in San Bruno.

Eight people were killed, including a Catholic school child and her mother. The cover picture of the September 17th issue showed a group of students from St. Cecilia School crying during a memorial service for a classmate and her mother who perished.

Reputation for excellence

From its inception to its very last days, the editors and staff of Catholic San Francisco received annual awards from the Catholic Press Association (now known as the Catholic Media Association).

The membership organization of Catholic media professionals from dioceses in the USA and Canada recognizes outstanding achievements in an annual prize competition. In its 22-year life, Catholic San Francisco received 76 separate (CMA) awards in its division and circulation categories, underscored by five general awards, including Editor of the Year for ex-Editor Rick DelVecchio in 2018 and two for Best Newspaper.

What’s next?

Catholic San Francisco will continue to offer news in a Friday e-letter sent to those who have already signed up for CSF’s digital newsletter, as well as those who sign up at sfarch.org/signup. Social media channels of the

Archdiocese and the website will also bring information. The new San Francisco Catholic Magazine (profile on pages 6-7) will be a pleasure to read and hold local ministry and people stories and combine with timeless stories and resources for faith and life.

A new adventure in communication begins – based on a foundation of quality and commitment to preaching Jesus Christ that spanned from the first issue of The Monitor in 1858 to two decades of the San Francisco Catholic newspaper. The commitment to preaching the gospel that began with the life, death, and resurrection of our Savior Jesus Christ more than 2,000 years ago continues. As the Bible reminds us, the gospel must be proclaimed in due time and out of time (2 Tim 4: 2) knowing that Jesus Christ, regardless of medium, is the same yesterday, today, and forever (Heb 13, 8th). .

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