Erik Visits an American Grave, Part 2,168

This is the unmarked grave of Herman Cain, who is buried near his family but does not have a marker of his own. Supposedly this is to stop publicity, but really, how many people other than myself want to see the grave of Hermain Cain?

Born in 1945 in Memphis, Cain grew up mostly in Atlanta. His father did a bunch of working class jobs, including working for a time as a chauffeur for Robert Woodruff, head of the Coca Cola Company. It’s unclear precisely when Herman Cain turned batshit insane, though it doesn’t seem to have been the case when he was a kid. Of course, the black capitalism that Cain would embody has a long history and not every black capitalist has become batshit insane. Probably we will never quite know what turned Cain into a right-wing extremist.

Anyway, Cain went to Morehouse, like so many upwardly mobile black men of his time. He was a math major. He does not seem to have been particularly active in any civil rights struggle, but that wasn’t so uncommon either, regardless of his later politics. Lots of people chose to sit it out and focus on themselves. He went on to Purdue for a master’s degree in computer science. He got a job as a ballistics expert for the Navy at the same time, though he was not in the military. Cain got involved in the food business after his education. He took a job with Coca-Cola working on computers. Then it was Pillsbury. He became director of business analysis over its food division in 1978, so he was a skilled guy with a big future ahead of him.

Pillsbury owned Burger KIng at the time. His bosses assigned him to evaluate the 400 BK franchises in Philadelphia. By the way, as a total aside, this recent Burger King marketing campaign is hilarious–“we got rid of the King and are focusing on you!” is great, because the underlying idea is that the problem with Burger King isn’t that it is an abomination to food. Anyway, he became particularly successful at customer service by forcing employees to smile. Literally–his mandate was the workers force themselves to smile at customers so that the customers return. I suppose that works, but talk about emotional labor. Smile at some asshole, ugh.

Anyway, Cain did so well that Pillsbury appointed him the head of another of their fast food companies, Godfather’s Pizza, in 1986. Have I ever had Godfather’s? I’m not sure. I don’t recall it being a big thing in Oregon, or maybe we just didn’t go there. Cain closed a lot of stores of this poorly performing brand and then gathered a bunch of investors to buy it off Pillsbury and he would run it solo. He did well and returned the company to profitability, keeping it focused on its core center in the Midwest, an area of the country that does not require food to be good for people to like it.

I’m not sure when exactly Cain moved to extremist right-wing politics, but by the 1980s, he was already ranting against things such as the minimum wage. To say the least, this is not a man who ever understood what the civil rights movement stood for. He left Godfather’s in 1996 to become the head of the National Restaurant Association and this NRA wasn’t much better than the more notorious NRA. He led lobbying campaigns against the minimum wage, against mandatory health care for employees, against banning cigarettes in restaurants, against lowering blood alcohol levels for drunk driving arrests. Great positions there!

George H.W. Bush named Cain head of the Omaha Branch of the Federal Reserve Bank of Kansas City in 1989. Reasonable Moderate Bush sure loved him a far-right black appointee. Then in 1992, he became one of the board of directors for the Kansas City bank. He became more famous when Bill Clinton idiotically answered a question from Cain at a Kansas City roundtable meeting over the president’s health care plan and Cain got the better of him, at least in the media. This led some to credit Cain with its defeat. He became more of a Republican star at this point, though minor, the kind of black guy who Bob Dole could prop up in 1996 and claim that he cared about black voters.

Cain spent the first years of the 21st century as an industry lobbyist and right-wing media figure, but a pretty minor one. He had a syndicated column that didn’t get picked up many places. He’s appear on far-right talk shows. He complained about taxes, which he hated. He worked for Americans For Prosperity beginning in 2005 and got a lot of speaking fees from Republican groups.

Cain also started trying to run for office. This was to mostly comical results. He ran for the Republican nomination for president in 2000. I had no idea. No one else did either. Then in 2004, he tried to run for the Senate from Georgia. He actually finished second in the Republican primary, behind Johnny Isakson, but was well behind.

But in 2012, Republican voters took Cain’s next run for the presidency seriously, at least for 5 minutes. This is a great example of why Trump is symptom, not disease. For several election cycles, Republican base voters were looking for a crazy person to run. Sarah Palin, Michelle Bachmann, Ben Carson, and Herman Cain would all have boomlets before they finally settled on Donald Trump. They want someone to blow up the entire system. And, notably, so long as the black guy hates other black people too, they seem mostly fine with the figure also being black.

Cain had embraced the Tea Party and was a popular speechifier about the horrors of taxes and big government and the fact that he was black made his audiences really feel like they were sticking it to Obama. So he decided to run. He then won the Florida Republican Party straw poll and a few other early party activist polls. Again, they wanted someone crazy. He articulated his 9-9-9 tax plan, which would have gotten rid of the tax code and replaced it with three 9% taxes–business transactions, income, and sales. This is pure regressive taxation that helps the owners of terrible pizza chains. But of course Paul Ryan liked it. And so did Larry Kudlow. So now Cain had a little mainstream Republican credibility too from Serious People.

It’s entirely possible Cain would have had a serious shot at that nomination. The party faithful did not want Mitt Romney. But like a lot of rich guys, Cain also liked to use his power to force sex out of his employees when he was head of the National Restaurant Association. What Cain did not have was the genius that Donald Trump had–don’t even really deny it, just embrace it and say “yep and you wish you could do this too, vote for me.” It’s possible the voters weren’t quite ready for that either. His poll numbers slipped and he dropped out before Iowa, all because of these allegations.

After his “campaign,” Cain got himself his own radio show in 2013 but it was cancelled in 2016. He remained on the right-wing circuit. Then, in 2020, Covid-19 happened. Cain thought masking and social distancing were part of the liberal lies to destroy freedom. So he attended a Trump rally in Tulsa. He got Covid and he died. He was 74 years old. Rarely has a death been so deserving. Shortly after his death, his family used his Twitter account to say that Covid death tolls were vastly overstated.

Herman Cain is buried in Westview Cemetery, Atlanta, Georgia.

If you would like this series to visit other famous people who died of Covid (or “with Covid” if you think like a moron), you can donate to cover the required expenses here. Charley Pride is in Dallas and Joe Diffie is in Old Hickory, Tennessee. Previous posts in this series are archived here and here.