Doris Haddock Is Dead at 100;
Walked for Campaign Finance Reform
By DENNIS HEVESI
Doris Haddock was almost 89, stoop-shouldered but stiff-spined, when she laced up her sneakers, threw on a backpack and began trekking 3,200 miles across the country on New Year’s Day in 1999 — a one-woman march for campaign finance reform that started in Pasadena, Calif., and ended on the steps of the Capitol in Washington 14 months later.
Granny D, as she
preferred to be called, drew considerable attention to her cause along
the way. Cameras captured her strides. Drivers who had seen her banner
on TV — “Granny D for Campaign Finance Reform” — honked. Politicians
came out to pose for pictures. Reporters scratched her utterances into
their notebooks.
In El Paso one Saturday night in April 1999, after passing strip clubs, fireworks stands and a sea of scrub brush along U.S. 62, Mrs. Haddock sat with a New York Times reporter at a Mexican restaurant.
“It just infuriates me!” she said, balling her hands into fists and striking the table. “I feel we are losing our democracy. The corporations are taking over and deciding who gets elected.”
On Tuesday, at her home in Dublin, N.H., Mrs. Haddock died of complications of emphysema, her longtime friend Maude Salinger said. Mrs. Haddock was 100.
Ms. Salinger was Mrs. Haddock’s spokeswoman in 2004 when, at 94, she tried to unseat Senator Judd Gregg, a Republican. Without accepting private campaign contributions and running as a Democrat, Mrs. Haddock garnered 34 percent of the vote.
That election bid was another in a string of demonstrations of feistiness. In April 2000, weeks after her cross-country trek ended, Mrs. Haddock returned to Washington and was arrested, with 29 other protesters, for illegally demonstrating inside the Capitol Rotunda. “Go, Granny, go,” bystanders chanted.
“Our right to alter our government must be used to sweep these halls clean of greedy interests,” she said.
Born in Laconia, N.H., on Jan. 24, 1910, Ethel Doris Rollins (she dropped her first name) was one of five children of Carl and Ethel Rollins. She studied acting at Emerson College in Boston for three years in the late 1920s. Then, secretly, she married James Haddock, a student at Amherst. When Emerson found out, she was expelled.
The Haddocks moved to Manchester, N.H., where she worked at a shoe factory and he was an electrical engineer. In 1972 they moved to Dublin, where Mrs. Haddock became active in local affairs and served on the planning board. Although Mrs. Haddock came late to fighting for campaign finance reform, she stayed with it to the end. When she turned 100 in January, a celebration was held at the New Hampshire House.
Three days earlier, a bitterly divided United States Supreme Court ruled that the government could not ban political spending by corporations. Granny D issued a statement:
“The Supreme Court, representing a radical fringe that does not share the despair of the grand majority of Americans, has today made things considerably worse by undoing the modest reforms I walked for and went to jail for and that tens of thousand of other Americans fought very hard to see enacted. The Supreme Court now opens the floodgates to usher in a new tsunami of corporate money into politics.”
Mrs. Haddock’s husband died in 1992. She is survived by her son, Jim; a sister, Vivian Mack; eight grandchildren; and 16 great-grandchildren.