Vote for Yetta and Things Will Get Betta
Now, when I really die, I’m afraid no one will believe it.
Thirty-eight years later, he made his second – and final – appearance among The New York Times obituaries. “Alan Abel, Hoaxer Extraordinaire, Is (on Good Authority) Dead at 94,” the headline reads. The paper goes on to note that – unlike the first time out – it had double-checked that the Ohio native was, really, truly dead.
“This time around,” the paper notes, “Mr. Abel’s death was additionally confirmed by the Regional Hospice and Palliative Care in Connecticut, which said it had tended to him in his last days, and Carpino Funeral Home in Southbury, which said it was overseeing the arrangements.”
The 94-year-old received significantly more column space than he had under the 1980 header, “Alan Abel, Satirist Created Campaign To Clothe Animals.” That piece centered his creation of the Society for Indecency to Naked Animals. The 1959 campaign had been presided over by Buck Henry in the role of group president, G. Clifford Prout, Jr.
"[Y]ou must only demonstrate a desire to be decent by clothing your animals, and in some instances those of your neighbors,” the SINA manifesto read.
After being informed the entire project had been a put-on, America’s most respected broadcaster raged at its creator. “When Cronkite eventually found out that he’d been conned, and I was the guy behind it, he called me up,” Abel noted in an interview a few years later. “I’d never heard him that angry on TV — not about Hitler, Saddam Hussein, or Fidel Castro. He was furious with me.”
Discovering the 50-year-old prankster was still alive and well, The Times offered a more even-keeled follow up to it own error, noting, “Mr. Abel held a news conference yesterday” outlining the details of his death. “Now, when I really die,” he told The New York Post later that year, “I’m afraid no one will believe it.”
Between the animal clothing campaign and his untimely first death, Abel led back-to-back presidential campaigns for a Yetta Bronstein. Two days prior to the 1964 election, reporter Ben A. Franklin noted that large swaths of the electorate had little time for either Johnson or Goldwater in what could prove a banner year for third parties. Among those highlighted was a candidate from New York leading a newly-minted party.
“Mrs. Yette [sic] Bronstein, the write-in Presidential candidate of another distinctly minority political alignment that she chooses to call the Best party, has defined the issues in 1964 as the lack of support among her opponents for nationwide bingo and sex education in the schools,” Franklin writes. “There appears to be no national consensus for bingo, and Mrs. Bronstein, a New York City housewife, may fail to carry a single precinct.”
Bronstein offered a platform that also highlighted fluoridation, a stronger government and a “mink in every closet.” She championed the creation of a nude Jane Fonda postage stamp, “to ease the Post Office deficit and also give a little pleasure for six cents to those who can’t afford Playboy Magazine.”
The campaign also sported one of the most memorable campaign slogans since Eisenhower’s 1952 landslide victory. “Vote for Yetta and Things Will Get Betta” adorned placards held aloft by followers who crashed that year’s Democratic National Convention in Atlantic City. Further signage featured a broom, promising voters a “Clean Sweep with Yetta.”
Bronstein lived in the Bronx with a son named Marvin who was learning the drums. Both were the creation of Abel and wife Jeanne, with the former playing the role of campaign manager during interviews. An image of his mother stood in for Bronstein on campaign material, and Jeanne acted as her voice. "I got a lot of press," she admitted years later. "I only appeared on radio because I was then only in my 20s and I was blond and not a Jewish mother."
She related homespun political wisdom like, “If you want simple solutions, then you gotta be simple.” Asked by the press who she intended to appoint to her cabinet, she answered, "I'll have one." In another interview, she sang a modified rendition of “When the Saints Go Marching In,”
There’ll be a change
There’ll be a change
There’ll be a change in government
When Yetta gets to be First Lady
And also President
Bronstein failed to carry a single precinct, as Franklin had predicted. She demanded a recount that never materialized and in 1966 went on to publish, The President I Almost Was. Running again in 1968, yielded the same results, in spite of an even more glowing feature by The Times’ future culture editor William H. Honan.
He quoted Bronstein: “I figure we need a Jewish mother in the White House. A mother will take care of things. Maybe our country could use a queen, you know. It certainly wouldn’t do any harm.”
Ahead of the 2016 election, a piece in The Times acknowledged that the paper had been taken in twice by the fake candidate. Two years later, it would report Abel’s death for a second time.
Sources:
The True Story of a Fake Presidential Candidate https://www.npr.org/2016/04/01/472531699/the-true-story-of-a-fake-presidential-candidate
The Hoaxster Who Revealed Sad Truths About Americahttps://priceonomics.com/the-hoaxster-who-revealed-sad-truths-about-america/
Alan Abel, Satirist Created Campaign To Clothe Animals https://timesmachine.nytimes.com/timesmachine/1980/01/02/113930109.html?pageNumber=39
The Third Party: Mostly Extreme https://timesmachine.nytimes.com/timesmachine/1964/11/01/132710812.html?pageNumber=71