CASSt Your Vote!
Cass Elliot & Politics

"I don't think it's so important who you vote for-you vote for who you believe in.  The important thing is to vote, because it's our way and it's the best way." ~ Cass Elliot, appearing on The Midnight Special in August 1972 in a Get Out The Vote drive. 

The political process was another area in which Cass Elliot set the pace for many of her peers.  While actors and actresses were heavily involved in politics in the 1950's and 1960's, popular musicians, and particularly, Cass' contemporaries in the sixties rock scene were not generally political activists. This is one of the reasons that during her remarks, as she accepted her mother's Induction into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame, Cass' daughter Owen made mention of her mother's passion for young people to be politically involved.   

Having grown up in the nation's capital and cut her teeth in the politically vibrant early sixties folk hotbed of Greenwich Village, Cass was sensitive to and interested in the political process.  "I remember when I was ten years old, in Washington, D.C.," she once recalled,  "and I lived with fear of the atom bomb that would keep me awake nights and make me wake up screaming.  I used to baby sit for my younger brother and sister and I’d be terrified if I heard a siren, a police car, or an ambulance.  I’d say, “My God, what if this is it!  How do I protect them?”  We used to have duck-and-cover exercises in school, where they’d ring a bell at any time of the day, sometimes five or six times a day, and we’d crawl under our desks and put our hands like this to protect the back of our necks from the bomb.  We all carried that with us."   

Cass also claimed to have been "a radical at American University" in 1962.  When President Kennedy was shot in November 1963, Denny Doherty recalls that she "cried all the way home" from the Midwest where she was playing with The Big 3. 

While with The Mamas and The Papas, Cass' political vocals lost precedence to those she her musical ones. While she was with them, she once declared, "We don't sing protest songs."  And once, when dodging the subject of Vietnam in 1966, she said,  “If we expressed ourselves on Vietnam, it wouldn’t be what the elders wanted us to say.”    Those were years she did criticize her state government, nonetheless!  She once claimed to want to leave  California because, “it’s a police state.  I know, because I bought an Aston-Martin and I put a Reagan sticker on it, only because I know if I’m speeding through Orange County late at night with a Reagan sticker on that kind of expensive car, I’ll never be stopped.  If I were in a Renault, I might go to jail.” 

After The Mamas and The Papas went their separate ways and Cass had become a mother, she turned her own attention to politics.  In the Rolling Stone Interview with her in October 1968 she offered:  "I think everybody who has a brain should get involved in politics.  Working within. Not criticizing it from the outside.  Become an active participant, no matter how feeble you think the effort is.  I saw in the Democratic Convention in Chicago that there were more people interested in what I was interested in than I believed possible.  It made me want to work.  It made me feel my opinion and ideas were not futile, that there would be room in an organized movement of politics for me to voice myself. 

She went on to explain more about how the 1968 Democratic Convention kindled her political passions:  "It made me want to work, made me feel my opinions and ideas were not futile, that there would be room in an organized movement of politics for me to voice myself and change things.  I was asked to participate in Bobby Kennedy’s campaign.  I thought about McCarthy and I realized I thought McCarthy was a little too lyrical, but I agreed with his ideas.  I felt much stronger about McGovern; I don’t know why.  But I didn’t participate in any way, for anyone.  I was just a voyeur and watched it--- to see tragedy heaped upon tragedy.    

She went on, "I’d say I’m gonna be active.  I’m gonna do everything I can.  Whatever it is, and I’m sure there are people who know what it is, and they’ll tell me.  I’m guilty of the sin of omission as much as anybody else.  I never spoke up." 

A year later she succinctly said, "I feel strongly about the war in Vietnam, about  Biafra , about poverty, about ignorance, but these are things which come from love for fellow men, not from words.”