The question she wanted people to ask was not how (on earth!), but why. Why, in January 1999, had she set off to walk from Pasadena to Washington, DC? The simple answer was that she had lost patience with the power of big money in American politics. Congressmen and senators did not listen to people like her—people who spent years nursing their husbands when they had Alzheimer’s, or who battled to keep the interstate out of their small towns, in her case Dublin, New Hampshire. They patted little old ladies like her patronisingly on the head, while taking wads of money from special interests for whom they would do favours later. Mrs Haddock was sick of it. She had organised petitions for campaign-finance reform, with tens of thousands of signatures, but got nowhere. So it was sneakers on, and hit the road.
Boldly in February 2000 she marched into Washington and up the Capitol steps, announcing that she was going to sweep the scoundrels away as thoroughly as leaves from her porch. The scoundrels stayed, shameless as ever. The election that November proved the most costly to date. In advance of the next one Mrs Haddock—now universally known as “Granny D”, for Doris, with her straw hat brightly banded and stuck with a turkey feather—tried a new tack of driving in a gaudy bus through swing states, persuading women to register to vote. She was then 93; she covered 22,000 miles. The next year she ran against Judd Gregg, pretty creditably, on small donations only, for the Senate.
The campaigner for election reform, died on March 9th, aged 100.
Use the above link to read the entire story.
Michael H. Drucker
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