Still, for all of his overwhelming availability and showmanship, Jerry Springer was a tough nut to crack in some ways. Even amid the chaos of fist fights, incest intimations, and erotic equestrianism, Springer maintained a certain level of gravitas. As Fights, Camera, Action recounts, Springer was even adamant about making sure that everything on his talk show was “real,” and never scripted. In exerting some of his vestigial journalistic ethics over world’s worst TV show, it was almost as though he was insisting “it’s the world that’s this stupid, not me.”
As we’ve come to find out about many public figures of late, it’s impossible to produce something truly terrible without being at least a little bit interesting. And Jerry Springer was a profoundly interesting man. To fully understand why, one needs to look into his life before The Jerry Springer Show when he was a rising politician. Fights, Camera, Action does make brief mention of Springer’s time as mayor of Cincinnati, Ohio but it doesn’t quite give it the full context it deserves.
Jerry Springer wasn’t just a politician, you see, he was an incredible politician – both in the sense of being a charismatic swamp creature and a legitimately helpful public servant. The best recounting of Springer’s transition from politician to carnival barker comes from public radio program and podcast This American Life. In the 2004 episode “Leaving the Fold” (since lightly updated in a re-run after Springer’s death in 2023), host Ira Glass and journalist Alex Blumberg delve into Springer’s uniquely American political life.
Born in 1944 to Jewish refugees escaping the Holocaust, Springer was raised in Queens, New York before moving to the Midwest to get educated at Northwestern University School of Law in Chicago and eventually entering into politics to work on Robert F. Kennedy’s 1968 presidential campaign. Following Kennedy’s assassination, Springer settled in Cincinnati, Ohio where he worked at the Frost Brown Todd (then Frost & Jacobs) law firm and began his electoral career in 1970 by running for the United States House of Representatives. Springer lost that race but tremendously over-performed expectations, pulling in 45% of the vote as a Democrat in a traditionally Republican district.
Springer would go on to get elected to Cincinnati city council three times, even after becoming immeshed in a scandal during his second term in which he used a personal check to pay for a sex worker’s services. Despite that very Jerry Springer Show-esque moment hanging over his head, he won re-election and eventually served as the council-appointed mayor of Cincinnati, being the most popular and electorally-successful member of the council at that point. The political insiders from this era speak of Springer’s prowess in shockingly reverent terms.
Democratic strategist Mike Ford told This American Life: “I worked with [Bill] Clinton [in] ’88, ’90. [In] ’92, [Michael] Dukakis. ’80, I worked for [Ted] Kennedy. ’76, I went through Birch Bayh, Mo Udall, and Jimmy Carter. [Jerry Springer] is the best I’ve ever seen, bar none.”
