Historian Rick Perlstein has a terrific article in the New York Times commemorating the 100th anniversary of the birth of Hubert Humphrey.
But the article is also about us, Democrats and progressives, the road we took in the Johnson-to-Clinton years, and the road we didn't. In the process, Perlstein reshuffles the list of "saints and sinners" who got us to this place. For many, chief on the sinners list is Hubert Humphrey.
Humphrey is one of the most misunderstood Democratic politician of the 20th century (along with, in my view, Robert Kennedy and that old Pendergast fellow, Harry Truman). Humphrey's reputation went through three stages. He started as a strong Minnesota New Dealer and fierce advocate for civil rights, rose as a prominent Senate liberal to become Lyndon Johnson's VP, then became tarred by the Vietnam War prosecuted hard by Johnson's determined muscular anti-communism.
By 1968, when he was eventually nominated for president, he was either an old-style FDR pol in the eyes of older voters, or a Johnson-picked sell-out in the eyes of younger ones. He narrowly lost to Nixon and never attained the national stage again.
Humphrey's "third age" occurred again in the Senate, where he argued unsuccessfully for economic (New Deal–style) coalitions in a time poised between (1) the New Dems of the then-present, whose push for quotas in hiring threatened to split the interests of struggling whites from those of struggling blacks, and (2) the coming white-collar pro-corporate types for whom Jimmy Carter (a current saint) is John the Baptist to both Reagan and Clinton.
All in all, it's a fascinating look at how we, as Democrats, made the journey from FDR to Clinton, seen through the career of the last surviving faithful New Deal politician. He was screwed by Johnson (my term, not Perlstein's) but in many respects, the shifting Humphrey reputation is a mirror in which we read ourselves.
I'll close with one of Perlstein's observations:
In 1976 [Humphrey] joined Representative Augustus Hawkins, a Democrat from the Watts section of Los Angeles, to introduce a bill requiring the government, especially the Federal Reserve, to keep unemployment below 3 percent — and if that failed, to provide emergency government jobs to the unemployed.And the Fed's been theirs ever since.
It sounds heretical now. ... “Government cannot eliminate poverty or provide a bountiful economy or reduce inflation or save our cities or cure illiteracy or provide energy,” President Carter said in his 1978 State of the Union address, a generation before Bill Clinton said almost the same thing, cementing the Democrats’ ambivalent retreat from New Deal-based government activism.
Mr. Carter saw to it that only a toothless Humphrey-Hawkins law passed — one that made fighting inflation the government’s implicit policy goal while the toll of high unemployment was given much lower priority.
We're now back to a time of New Deal opportunity, when economic concerns can unite a progressive coalition across race and cultural boundaries. As Perlstein says:
With unemployment once again at 9 percent, inflation minimal, corporate profits at record levels even in the face of criminal perfidy by bankers, the trade deficit at $48.2 billion and racial resentment running as high as ever, shouldn’t we perhaps spare a thought, on Hubert Humphrey’s 100th birthday, for his road not taken?The "road not taken" is shockingly, once more an option. Shall we take it? After all, a progressive coalition that unites economic interests is how Cairo came to Wisconsin.
GP
