Call it a tale of two centennials. Ronald Reagan’s 100th birthday was greeted with immense fanfare in conservative circles, and favorable coverage in mainstream news outlets as well. A few months later, a second man who might rightly be called an architect of 20th century American politics also celebrated a centennial. In this instance, the silence was resounding; few today even recognize his name. Fewer still can explain his significance. But Hubert Horatio Humphrey, senator, civil rights champion, vice-president, also-ran, also passed the 100 mark in 2011.
Who was Hubert Humphrey? A pharmacist’s son born in Huron, South Dakota, Humphrey moved to Minnesota, and slowly began to establish an alternative to the Republican Party in a state that hadn’t sent a Democrat to the Senate since it had been admitted to the Union in the 1860s. Combining the Midwest progressivism of the Farmer-Labor Party to the organizational structure of the state’s moribund Democratic Party, Humphrey successfully ushered the merged DFL Party into dominance in Minnesota politics, while purging the Farmer-Laborers of its few residual communists. Blessed with a quick mind and indefatigable energy, Humphrey thrived as mayor of Minneapolis and then senator from Minnesota. Chosen to speak at the Democrats’ 1948 convention, Humphrey gave a bold speech in favor of a robust plank for black rights. Correctly recognizing that “states’ rights” was the last refuge of scoundrels and a thin veneer for institutional racism in the Dixiecrat South, Humphrey uttered an unprecedented admonishment to “get out of the shadow of states’ rights and walk forthrightly in the warm sunshine of human rights.” This was a daring move in the danger it presented his party: Most of the Southern delegations bolted, formed a short-lived third party, and nominated Strom Thurmond, an act which nearly cost Harry Truman his re-election.
When Humphrey, never more than modestly well off, sought the Democratic nomination in 1960, he was pummeled by the Kennedy family fortune and charm offensive. Yet, he found his way into the executive branch by being chosen as Lyndon Johnson’s vice-president four years later. In those intervening years, Humphrey had a singular role as senator. Peace Corps? His idea; Kennedy stole it. More importantly, HHH shepherded the 1964 Civil Rights Act, a landmark piece of legislation decimating many of the legal vestiges of de jure segregation, through Congress. He successfully organized both his own party’s mainstream with liberal and moderate Republicans to stave off an aggressive filibuster led by Southern Democrats (who had some help of their own from conservative icon Barry Goldwater, who also voted against the act.)* This was no mean feat; Dixiecrats had successfully staved off all but token, toothless civil rights laws throughout the 1950s and early 1960s through filibuster threats and committee chairmanships. While countless informal vestiges of racism remain, it is only a small exaggeration to say that Humphrey’s legislative skill and moral strength broke the legal back of Jim Crow.
But as Tom Lehrer asked rhetorically in That Was the Week That Was, “whatever became of Hubert?” One answer is Vietnam, the graveyard of American ideologies. There is consensus among Humphrey’s confidants and biographers that Humphrey was privately quite critical of America’s role in Southeast Asia. But as Lyndon Johnson’s vice-president, Humphrey was compelled to support LBJ’s aggressive policies, both in public and even in the closed quarters of the Cabinet room. In 1968, after the death of Robert Kennedy and the deflation of Eugene McCarthy, party regulars– even those who deemed him too liberal just a few short years earlier– turned to HHH as their nominee when Johnson took himself out of consideration. Humphrey, a favorite of party bosses and labor unions, won the nomination despite not seriously contesting a single primary election– exposing serious flaws in the two major partys’ nominating system where primary elections were erratic, irregular, and often non-binding.
Complicating this, of course, was the tumult of 1968. As the Democrats gathered in Chicago in 1968, Yippies, New Leftists and a constellation of antiwar activists descended onto the Windy City and clashed with Mayor Daley’s police force in the middle of the Democrats’ convention. As the crackdowns began, the protesters shouted “the whole world’s watching,” and it did. It was the worst of both worlds: antiwar protesters, young and full of unbridled political energy, cursed Humphrey’s name, even as Middle America associated Hubert’s candidacy with the violence and chaos that broke out in the Windy City. His candidacy was doomed from its inception. But even then, Humphrey came within 1 percentage point of stealing the popular vote from Nixon.
The ambition to be president never quite left him– he made an aggressive run for the nomination in 1972, losing to his former neighbor, George McGovern. (McGovern later told me how he tried to engineer a Humphrey-McGovern ticket for 1976 that would have united old-line Democrats with the youthful activists McGovern had wooed into the party. This would have been a tantalizing possibility had not the bladder cancer that would later claim Humphrey’s life prevented such a run.)
Humphrey died in 1978, long enough to see his protege, Walter Mondale, become vice president as well. But almost immediately upon his death, Humphrey was forgotten, marginalized, or misremembered by the public, and less forgivably, by sundry members of his own party. (When eulogizing him at the 1980 DNC, Jimmy Carter mistakenly called him Hubert Horatio Hornblower.) As early as the 1980s, Gary Hart, the champion of the suburban Democrat and the upwardly mobile yuppie, argued that his party needed to produce candidates who “weren’t little Hubert Humphreys.” And so it went. He had a metrodome in Minneapolis named after him, but that’s about it. In short, the only people who hold Hubert Humphrey in high esteem are either dead or living in Minnesota (which is its own peculiar kind of death.)
Humphrey’s life and Humphrey’s work were a testament to the successful coalition-building and politics of consensus that constitute the lifeblood of American politics.Moreover, Humphrey had a keen sense of what he called “the politics of joy.” Few statesmen relished the handshakes and the baby-kissing, and visiting 10 towns in one day quite so much as Humphrey did. Hubert’s people were the urban blue collar worker, the hardscrabble farmer, the Polish-American who went to the tavern after a hard day’s work. And they were precisely the people who left the party in droves by 1980, the demographics who became known as Reagan Democrats to the following generation of political scientists.
George McGovern once said that he opened the doors of the Democratic Party, and 40 million people walked out. His 1972 candidacy thrived on strong support from youths, feminists, black and hispanic Americans, and even gay Americans. It made the party more inclusive, and it fulfilled the sense of political justice that Humphrey’s civil rights activism made possible. But it wasn’t enough to win elections; not by a long shot. The McGovernites who would set the party’s tone in subsequent years wrongfully forgot the courage Humphrey showed in perilous times, as well as his blueprint for making the Democratic Party attractive to a winning coalition of farm, urban, black, and labor interests- able to incorporate large cities and isolated hinterlands with equal aplomb. After Humphrey’s decline, his party became balkanized, disorganized, and rent with internal interest groups. Four of the next five elections after his 1968 run (1976 being the exception) were devastating landslide defeats in which a grand total of 18 states were won.
A second reason behind Humphrey’s obscurity today is that was that he was a parliamentarian at heart. Just as Aquinas thrived within the labyrinthine confines of canon law, Humphrey cherished the obscure and antique rules that guided the U.S. Senate. Much of what he did most effectively took place outside of the public eye and the television camera, and required compromise and tact– sometimes with mouth-foaming demagogues who happened to have a key vote or committee chair..
A final piece of the puzzle may be that the liberal mind privileges history, or perhaps even teleology, over heritage and pantheon, the provinces of the conservative mind. Heritages and pantheons are inaccurate or oversimplified, but they are strong forces for both identifying and motivating oneself. While a clear Reagan hagiography developed over the last 10 years within a tightly-knit conservative community, nothing similar transpired for the American liberal. While conservatives may tend to oversimplify and overpraise their forebears (witness the 2008 GOP debates at the Reagan Library), liberals tend to be nitpicking and too critical of theirs.
Such was the case with Humphrey, whom party greybeards still revile for “selling out over Vietnam.” This may be so, but in the broader brushstrokes of social justice, Humphrey accomplished far more than many men with cleaner consciences than he. He strongarmed some of the century’s most crucial legislation through Congress, and in doing so, he didn’t trim his sails, as so many do nowadays, by calling himself a “progressive.” Humphrey was a liberal. He embraced the term and understood its direction and its significance. Aware of structural inequities that become cankers in an undistilled state of non-interfering “liberty”, Humphrey believed that the American state was up to the task of framing and rough-hewing a more meaningful and substantive justice. Hubert Humphrey was nothing less than the paradigmatic liberal in an age of broad, even bipartisan, consensus on the role of the state in society, a consensus that has since passed us by. When we ask “whatever became of Hubert?”, we might do well to remember that the failure to remember this man is our flaw, and not his.
(note: midway through writing this, I was directed toward Rick Perlstein’s piece on HHH in the Times. Hence, a few unintended similarities between his thoughts and mine.)
*- Goldwater, I hasten to add, did not have a racist bone in his body, but a “no” vote against a civil rights act is still a “no” vote against a civil rights act, constitutional scruples notwithstanding. Sometimes, strict constitutional scruples act as a barrier against the very human rights the Constitution is designed to promote, something I wish Congressman Paul’s supporters would bear in mind.
Alex,
This is another masterpiece from your keyboard. I love reading your political history like a scotch connoisseur savors a glass of 21 year old, single malt Glen Livet.
A couple of observations and questions…
1. Is it my imagination, or did Humphrey make a special point of inviting his old foe Richard Nixon to speak at — or at least, attend — his funeral? I thought I read that somewhere. If so, it wouldn’t surprise me in the least. Humphrey struck me as a man who genuinely loved people and cared about them…even those on the opposite side of the political fence. If I recall correctly, Nixon accepted the invitation and thus emerged from the other side of Watergate, somewhat redeemed. And he went on to do some good in his later years. That’s so “Humphrey”, if you ask me. Or perhaps it’s urban legend and I just wanted it to be true.
2. Humphrey’s magnificent Civil Rights Speech in 1948 should be required reading for every American. It’s a magnum opus and a hymn to human decency that is excelled only by the soaring poerty of Dr. Martin Luther King, Junion. If I am not mistaken, Humphrey’s speech was either preceded or followed by another spectacular appeal to human rights by Fanny Lou Hamer who was “sick and tired of being sick and tired”.
We shall not see their like again, I fear.
I won’t do so without permission. But I would dearly love to post a link to your HHH tome on my Facebook page. Let me know what you prefer via email or PM.
Thank you. You have a gift, my friend.
Jim
thank you, as always, for your kind words, Jim. 1) Humphrey did indeed ask Nixon to attend his funeral, which he did– one of his first public appearances after his resignation. (Perhaps less admirably, Humphrey also congratulated Nixon after the 1972 election expressing his relief that his former opponent won.) By all means, feel free to post a link, as long as my identity isn’t mentioned.
1948 was the last year H. L. Mencken covered conventions. I’ve never looked up to see whether his views of Humphrey are worth anything, but it may be a good time to do that.
When I first got to Senate staff in 1974, Humphrey was back and in full force. It was a marvel to see. I was substituting in the cloak room one day when Sen. Dan Gurney of Florida got up to proposed a surprise amendment to block all school busing to integrate schools. Humphrey stuck his head in the cloakroom and yelled “Somebody call Ted and get him over here quick!” Then he stopped back on the floor and politely asked Gurney if he’d yield to a few questions, as I recall. As a perfect gentleman in a very calm voice, he queried Gurney about race segregation in Florida, surgically laying out the ugly bones of the case Gurney was trying to make. Within 15 minutes Ted Kennedy arrived, stepped out on the floor and asked if he could join the conversation (Senate manners being what they were, then, Gurney agreed), and proceeded nicely to cut all the meat off the bones Humphrey had exposed, ending with an impromptu plea for civil rights especially in Boston where busing was the hot issue. When Kennedy was done, so was Gurney’s amendment.
In the warm embrace Kennedy and Humphrey exchanged in the cloakroom no one who didn’t know could have guessed that Kennedy represented the last surviving male in the political clan who did in Humphrey’s presidential chances, intentionally in 1960, and in 1968 by RFK’s running, and then his sad absence from the convention.
Humphrey was a great people guy. Senators have one elevator reserved for them alone, but Humphrey was always pulling aides from other senators into the thing to get them to the floor faster, or just save energy — or just have someone to talk politics with.
Probably about the last time I saw Humphrey he was rushing to the floor to vote. It was a close vote, and about 14 of the 15 minutes allowed had elapsed. Humphrey got to the elevators in the basement with maybe 30 seconds to spare. Some tourist woman screamed, “Oh, my God! It’s Hubert Humphrey! He’s real.” Humphrey stopped to talk, discovered they were tourists on their way to the galleries. “Let me show you one of the most spectacular events in our democracy,” Humphrey said, and he ushered the woman and her family into the senators’ elevator. He took them to the third floor, ushered them into the gallery and made sure they had good seats. The Sergeant-at-Arms staff told the clerk to hold the vote, because Humphrey was technically in the chamber. Then he went back down to the second floor, walked out onto the chamber floor and cast his vote. The clerk took the vote and quickly called an end to voting. Humphrey turned and waved to the woman and her family.
The elevator operator told me later that the woman revealed she wasn’t from Minnesota, and hadn’t voted Democrat in years. Didn’t matter to Humphrey.
Thanks for the reminder about him.
(Who did the painting?)
Wow- fantastic story, Ed! It’s nice to know that the version of Hubert Humphrey I’ve entertained in my own imagination wasn’t too far from how the man actually behaved!
On a personal note, I am so glad to see Alex and Ed getting to know one another. These are two first-rate minds. And even better hearts.
This is a Presidential ticket I would support!
Jim
I would put Hubert Humphrey in my top 10 favorite Senators. I can’t think of any politician more responsible than Hubert Humphrey was for making the Democratic Party the more progressive of the two parties on the issue of race.