Write-Ins are Personal: Wayne Morse

 How fascinating that during the month of February we learn the origin of the 'Write-In Wayne Morse The Dark Horse' for President bumper sticker I picked up a few years ago on ebay from a seller in Washington State. If you are patient, with the massive digitizing of older media, you will eventually stumble upon some answers. 

The assumption of this sticker was that it was issued in support of Morse's 1960 presidential effort. He only entered three primaries that year (Maryland, DC, and Oregon) and therefore if you had wanted to vote for Senator Morse you would have had to write him in your state if there was a presidential primary. Case closed right? Wrong! 

After doing a search for the slogan 'Wayne Morse the Dark Horse' I came upon a personal ad of all things. The ad appeared in papers across Washington State in 1964 for the General Election. Here is the ad 

What makes this so interesting is that the person placing the ad was himself a candidate for the Democratic nomination for U.S. Senate in Washington state that year. Mr. Arthur C. DeWitt. We know some about Mr. DeWitt thanks to the KRAB-FM archive, made up of various clippings from  Washington state newspapers. Seemed to be a colorful individual. He owned Art's Unlimited and Art's Magazines, an adult bookstore in downtown Seattle. He was convicted under obscenity laws and accused of being a 'smut peddler' that led to an eventual mental health breakdown.

 In 1964 he would have been running in the primary against Scoop Jackson. Clearly Mr. DeWitt did not win, but he ran as a staunch anti-right wing candidate. He thought Jackson and Warren Magnuson both too conservative for the party.  The ad indicates that you will be sent free stickers. A short story covered DeWitt's unusual tactic. 

Write-In Wayne Morse for President instead of voting for Johnson or Goldwater. Vote for DeWitt instead of the Johnson backed Scoop Jackson. It's an interest tactic. It did not work. DeWitt ended up with only 4% of the vote. 

He issued a second ad after the one above 

 Here is an ad from the fall of 1964

By 1968, he had started placing ads that explained his platform in more detail 

By 1968 (Senate Poster)he was claiming to be a Peace and Freedom Party candidate running in the primary against Magnuson. His platform included reopening the Kennedy assassination investigation, lowering the voting age from 21 to 18, legalizing weed and getting out of Vietnam. No mention of asking voters to write in Wayne Morse for President in 1968. The KRAB Radio archives has a little more information on Mr. DeWitt.

While it is somewhat disappointing that the Morse for President bumper sticker was not from his 1960 effort, it seems even cooler that this sticker is from a 1964 liberal write-in effort. As for Mr. DeWitt, I could find no further mention of him after 1971.