The 1960s and 1970s
Capp, who by all accounts was contrary and contentious by nature, was a maverick politically. Characteristically, he went against the grain. He was a liberal during the conservative 1950s, only to switch to conservative during the liberal, hippie-era 1960s.
Capp and his family lived in Cambridge, Massachusetts near Harvard during the entire Vietnam War protest era. The turmoil that Americans were watching on their TV sets was happening live—right in his own neighborhood. Campus radicals and “hippies” inevitably became one of Capp’s favorite targets in the sixties. Alongside his long-established caricatures of right-wing, big business types such as General Bullmoose and J. Roaringham Fatback, Capp began spoofing counterculture icons such as Joan Baez (in the character of Joanie Phoanie, a wealthy folksinger who offers an impoverished orphanage ten thousand dollars' worth of "protest songs"). The sequence implicitly labeled Baez a limousine liberal, a charge she took to heart, as detailed years later in her 1987 autobiography, And A Voice To Sing With: A Memoir. Another target was Senator Ted Kennedy, parodied as "Senator O. Noble McGesture," resident of "Hyideelsport." The town name is a play on Hyannisport, Massachusetts, where a number of the Kennedy clan have lived.
Capp became a popular public speaker on college campuses, where he reportedly relished hecklers. He attacked militant antiwar demonstrators, both in his personal appearances and in his strip. He also satirized student political groups. The Youth International Party (YIP) and Students for a Democratic Society (SDS) emerged in Li'l Abner as "Students Wildly Indignant about Nearly Everything!" (SWINE). In an April 1969 letter to Time, Capp insisted, "The students I blast are not the dissenters, but the destroyers—the less than 4% who lock up deans in washrooms, who burn manuscripts of unpublished books, who make combination pigpens and playpens of their universities. The remaining 96% detest them as heartily as I do."
Capp's increasingly controversial remarks at his campus speeches and during TV appearances cost him his semi-regular spot on the Tonight Show. His contentious public persona during this period was captured on a late sixties comedy LP called Al Capp On Campus. The album features his interaction with students at Fresno State College (now California State University, Fresno) on such topics as "sensitivity training," "humanitarianism," "abstract art" (Capp hated it), and of course, "student protest." The cover features a cartoon drawing by Capp of wildly dressed, angry hippies carrying protest signs with slogans like "End Capp Brutality," "Abner and Daisy Mae Smoke Pot," "Capp Is Over the Hill!!," and "If You Like Crap, You'll Like Capp!"
Highlights of the strip's final decades include "Boomchik" (1961), in which America's international prestige is saved by Mammy Yokum, "Daisy Mae Steps Out" (1966), a female-empowering tale of Daisy's brazenly audacious “homewrecker gland," "The Lips of Marcia Perkins" (1967), a satirical, thinly-veiled commentary on venereal disease and public health warnings, "Ignoble Savages" (1968), in which the Mob takes over Harvard, and "Corporal Crock" (1973), in which Bullmoose reveals his reactionary cartoon role model, in a tale of obsession and the fanatical world of comic book collecting.
The cartoonist visited John Lennon and Yoko Ono at their 1969 Bed-In for Peace in Montreal, and their testy exchange later appeared in the documentary film Imagine: John Lennon (1988). Introducing himself with the words "I'm a dreadful Neanderthal fascist. How do you do?," Capp sardonically congratulated Lennon and Ono on their Two Virgins nude album cover: "I think that everybody owes it to the world to prove they have pubic hair. You've done it, and I tell you that I applaud you for it." Following this exchange, Capp insulted Ono ("Good God, you've gotta live with that?"), and is asked to "get out" by Derek Taylor. Lennon allowed him to stay however, but the conversation had soured considerably. On Capp's exit, Lennon sang an impromptu version of his Ballad of John and Yoko song with a slightly revised, but nonetheless prophetic lyric: "Christ, you know it ain't easy / You know how hard it can be / The way things are goin' / They're gonna crucify Capp! "
According to an apocryphal tale from this era, in a televised face-off, either Capp (on the Dick Cavett Show) or (more commonly) conservative talk show host Joe Pyne (on his own show) is supposed to have taunted iconoclastic musician Frank Zappa about his long hair, asking Zappa if he thought he was a girl. Zappa is said to have replied, "You have a wooden leg; does that make you a table?" (Both Capp and Pyne had wooden legs.) The story is considered an urban legend.
In 1968, a theme park called Dogpatch USA opened at Marble Falls, Arkansas, based on Capp's work and with his support. The park was a popular attraction during the 1970s but was abandoned in 1993 due to financial difficulties. As of late 2005, the area once devoted to a live-action facsimile of Dogpatch (including a lifesize statue in the town square of Dogpatch "founder," General Jubilation T. Cornpone) has been heavily stripped by vandals and souvenir hunters, and is today slowly being reclaimed by the surrounding Arkansas wilderness.
On April 22, 1971, syndicated columnist Jack Anderson reported allegations that Capp made indecent advances to four female students when he was invited to speak at the University of Alabama in February 1968. Anderson and his associate Brit Hume confirmed that Capp was shown out of town by university police, but that the incident had been hushed up by the university to avoid negative publicity.
The following month, Capp was charged in Eau Claire, Wisconsin in connection with another alleged incident following his April 1 lecture at Wisconsin State University-Eau Claire. Capp was accused of propositioning a married woman in his hotel room. Although no sexual act was alleged to have resulted, the original charge included "sodomy." As part of a plea agreement, Capp pleaded guilty to the charge of "attempted adultery" (adultery was, and as of 2011 still is a felony in Wisconsin) and the other charges were dropped. Capp was fined $500 and court costs. In a December 1992 article for The New Yorker, Seymour Hersh reported that President Richard Nixon and Charles Colson had repeatedly discussed the Capp case in Oval Office recordings that had recently been made available by the National Archives. Nixon and Capp were on friendly terms, Hersh wrote, and Nixon and Colson had worked to find a way for Capp to run against Ted Kennedy for the U.S. Senate. "Nixon was worried about the allegations, fearing that Capp's very close links to the White House would become embarrassingly public," Hersh wrote. "The White House tapes and documents show that he and Colson discussed the issue repeatedly, and that Colson eventually reassured the President by saying that he had, in essence, fixed the case. Specifically, the President was told that one of Colson's people had gone to Wisconsin and tried to talk to the prosecutors." Colson's efforts failed, however. The Eau Claire district attorney, a Republican, refused to dismiss the attempted adultery charge. In passing sentence in February 1972, the judge rejected the D.A.'s motion that Capp agree to undergo psychiatric treatment.
The resulting publicity led to hundreds of papers dropping his comic strip, and Capp, already in failing health, withdrew from public speaking. Celebrity biographer James Spada has claimed that similar allegations were made by actress Grace Kelly. However, no firsthand allegation has ever surfaced.
"From beginning to end, Capp was acid-tongued toward the targets of his wit, intolerant of hypocrisy, and always wickedly funny. After about 40 years, however, Capp's interest in Abner waned, and this showed in the strip itself," according to Don Markstein's Toonopedia. On November 13, 1977, Capp retired with an apology to his fans for the recently declining quality of the strip, which he said had been the best he could manage due to declining health. "If you have any sense of humor about your strip—and I had a sense of humor about mine—you knew that for three or four years Abner was wrong. Oh hell, it's like a fighter retiring. I stayed on longer than I should have," he admitted, adding that he couldn't breathe anymore. "When he retired Li'l Abner, newspapers ran expansive articles and television commentators talked about the passing of an era. People magazine ran a substantial feature, and even the comics-free New York Times devoted nearly a full page to the event," wrote publisher Denis Kitchen.
Capp's final years were marked by advancing illness and by family tragedy, with the unexpected deaths of one of his two daughters and a beloved granddaughter. A lifelong chain smoker, Capp died in 1979 from emphysema at his home in South Hampton, New Hampshire. Capp is buried in Mount Prospect Cemetery in Amesbury, Massachusetts. Engraved on his headstone is a stanza from Thomas Gray: The plowman homeward plods his weary way / And leaves the world to darkness and to me, (from "Elegy Written in a Country Churchyard," 1751).
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