Hubert Horatio Humphrey, a legislative giant who achieved more in the U.S. Senate than a number of Presidents have in the Oval Office, especially by calling on Americans to “get out of the shadow of states’ rights and walk forthrightly into the brighter sunshine of human rights," was born on May 27, 1911 in South Dakota to a druggist and his wife. Upon the death of his father, young Humphrey—now in Minnesota—took over the small family business, and customers came to like the young man.So far, the story sounds like the early trajectory of George Bailey in It’s a Wonderful Life, except that Humphrey was able to achieve many of his dreams—and, through his life’s work, helped more than a few others achieve theirs.
Friday’s New York Times included an excellent op-ed piece by Rick Perlstein on “America’s Forgotten Liberal.” "January was the 100th anniversary of Ronald Reagan’s birth, and the planet nearly stopped turning on its axis to recognize the occasion,” Perlstein writes (albeit slightly inaccurately: The Gipper’s centennial actually occurred on February 6—an error that the eagle-eyed copyditors behind “All the News That’s Fit to Print” still haven’t gotten around to correcting.) “Today is the 100th anniversary of Hubert H. Humphrey’s birth, and no one besides me seems to have noticed.”
Actually, I had intended to write about Humphrey’s centennial for awhile now. Humphrey is the type of leader who, in ways both ideological and personal, has now largely faded, if not entirely disappeared, from the national political scene, for reasons beyond even what Perlstein astutely notes.
Unfortunately, the lack of attention to Humphrey says as much about many progressives’ historical amnesia as it does about Americans’ as a whole, perhaps even more so. At the height of his career, when the Oval Office was within the grasp of Lyndon Johnson’s Vice-President in the closing days of the tumultuous 1968 campaign, the American left, judging him a Johnny-come-lately to the effort to end the Vietnam War, boycotted the election in large enough numbers that they were able to assure the political resurrection of Richard Nixon—and with it, four more years of the war they abominated, not to mention Watergate.
Much campaign journalism, from the likes of Theodore H. White and Hunter Thompson, examined the Minnesotan on the hustings in these and the three other Presidential races he mounted, but he has achieved little of the scholarly interest that Reagan has attained. You might be able to count on the fingers of one hand all the biographies that focus only on him.
But, if you want a vivid idea of what Humphrey achieved—and of the isolation he had to endure, first from the right, then from the left, to gain it—there are two other vivid accounts you can read where, though he is not the sole focus of the writers, he plays important roles. One is the “Orator of the Dawn” chapter in the third volume of Robert A. Caro’s Years of Lyndon Johnson biography, Master of the Senate. The other work is Robert Mann’s excellent history of the 16-year effort to enact meaningful civil-rights legislation, The Walls of Jericho: Lyndon Johnson, Hubert Humphrey, Richard Russell and the Struggle for Civil Rights.
The Caro biography lays out the painful price that Humphrey paid, after his 1948 election to the Senate, from Southern colleagues for his memorable advocacy of a civil-rights platform at the Democratic Convention that year. That segregationist bloc, led by Richard Russell of Georgia, consistently isolated this most gregarious of politicians, helping to assure that most of his legislative initiatives went nowhere.
Over time, Johnson, as Majority Leader of the Senate, managed to bring Humphrey in from the cold by relentlessly preaching the necessity of compromise, enabling the Minnesotan to forge relationships with the Southern bloc, enough so that he could begin to pass most of his non-civil rights bills. By 1964, LBJ—now esconsed in the White House—used Humphrey—now Senate Majority Whip—as his indispensable floor manager for the Civil Rights Act of 1964.
Humphrey’s partnership with LBJ led to his greatest political triumphs, as well as the deepest disappointments of his long public career. The Vice-Presidency, a thankless office to begin with, became for Humphrey the graveyard for his own longstanding Presidential ambitions, as LBJ insisted on repeated public support for the Vietnam War that was at variance with his longtime colleague’s private views. “Dump the Hump” began to be hurled at him by anti-war protesters.
When Humphrey finally broke with the President on the issue with a month left before polling, the far left judged it too little, too late. (Like Achilles sulking in his tent, Eugene McCarthy didn’t get around to endorsing his state colleague in the Senate as his party’s Presidential standard-bearer until a week before the election.)
The war sparked much of the left’s harshest criticism of Humphrey, but it wasn’t the only point on which they faulted him. As time went on, they regarded him with growing condescension. His call for a “politics of joy” was derided by those thrusting their fists into the air. Even the humble beginnings (watching his father “grinding his life away between unpaid bills and unpaid accounts” before finally having to sell the family home) that spurred his liberal fighting faith led to a mocking nickname: “Drugstore Liberal.”
Perlstein bemoans the passing of Humphrey’s brand of economic liberalism in favor of the free-trade, looser-regulation brand favored by Bill Clinton, but progressives are culpable in another manner for the passing of his type. From the 1970s through this decade, Democrats consistently marginalized pro-life Democrats, even those who, on every other conceivable measure of economic security were well within the party’s liberal wing. The apotheosis of that effort came when Kathy Taylor, a member of Pro-Choice Republicans for Clinton, was able to stand before the 1992 Democratic National Convention, but not pro-life Governor Robert Casey of Pennsylvania.
One last point: Humphrey’s deep generosity of spirit, an attitude increasingly gone missing on Capitol Hill. According to Caro, LBJ regarded Humphrey’s willingness to let bygones be bygones, to forgive his adversaries, as a weakness. But it also led to two of the finest moments of his life.
Mann’s biography recounts Humphrey’s dogged effort to make it to the 1971 funeral of Russell. Humphrey could have simply used the wicked storm that day not to attend final services for the colleague who had called him “a damn fool” when he first came to the Senate. But Humphrey’s plane braved the storm, making him the only Senate colleague to witness Russell’s burial.
Seven years later, Humphrey’s sensitivity to others led him even to look out for his opponent in the 1968 campaign, Richard Nixon. Humphrey blamed the GOP for a back-channel effort that led South Vietnam’s Nguyen Van Thieu to reject LBJ’s peace plan in the closing days of the election and assure a Democratic defeat.
But in the months before he died of cancer, Humphrey—now lionized by his colleagues—reached out to Nixon, by this point still in disgrace more than three years after being forced from the Presidency, to invite him to his funeral. Nixon showed up—the first time he came back to Washington after his ignominious departure.
There are two quotes, I think, that describe the essence of Humphrey. The first explains what he fought for all his life: "The moral test of a government is how it treats those who are at the dawn of life, the children; those who are in the twilight of life, the aged; and those who are in the shadow of life, the sick, the needy, and the handicapped."
The second describes the art of compromise that made him anathema to many in his own time and that, in the age of screaming blogs and cable channels of all ideological stripes, would make him even more suspect in today’s environment: "If I believe in something, I will fight for it, with all I have. But I do not demand all or nothing. I would rather get something than nothing."
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