Episode 279: Hubert Humphrey & Civil Rights

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Welcome to our new episode of This Is Democracy. This week, we are going to talk about a figure who played a major role in American history and the history of civil rights writ large, but a figure who's somewhat forgotten in many of our contemporary discussions. This is Hubert Humphrey, who was the mayor of Minneapolis and one of the most prominent members of the U.S. Senate for the second half of the 20th century. He was vice president and in 1968, a presidential candidate. We are fortunate today to be joined by a leading author and journalist and friend who has written a phenomenal book. It's a book that in some ways is a love letter to Hubert Humphrey and a wonderful explication of his life and a wonderful analysis of civil rights, of African American and Jewish relations in the United States. The author and friend and guest today is Samuel G. Friedman and his book that I highly recommend to all of our listeners, a book I will probably assign to my students in the spring, Into the Bright Sunshine, Young Hubert Humphrey and the Fight for Civil Rights. Sam is the author of many other books, including Upon This Rock, The Miracles of a Black Church, Jew versus Jew, The Struggle for the Soul of American Jewry. I believe his most recent book before this one, Breaking the Line, The Season in Black College Football that Transformed the Game and Changed the Course of Civil Rights. We'll see if UT can change the game this year, being number one in the country. Sam is a former columnist for the New York Times and he's a current professor of journalism at Columbia University. So, Professor Friedman, thank you for joining us.

The Old Days.

The old days. Are you referring to the days before you left our house for college?

Uh, no, definitely not.

Older days than those.

Maybe the days when you left your house.

Oh, okay, okay. Very good. What you would call ancient history, huh?

So, this is a cave painting then.

It's a cave! (Laughs) Exactly. All right, Zachary, let's hear it.

At times it's easy to miss the old days, when good men walked and spoke of true ideals, when all that they would ask for was a raise, perhaps a pair of presidential seals. At times it's easy to miss that sweet age, when only honest men were put in charge, when lies provoked a strong and public rage, and every single heart was twice as large. At times it can be easy to miss that place, where all was silent and all were at peace, where no one shouted or spit in our face, and we all drove fast cars on long-term lease. So it was never. Such a place t'was not. Each problem we face is an ancient rot.

What's your poem about, Zachary?

My poem is about the temptation to become nostalgic for the politicians and the politics of the past, about maybe the kind of truth or at least representation of what we'd like to see in our politics that we can often find in looking back, but also the danger of believing that politics was ever easy, simple, honest, or good.

Yeah, I think there's a point in that, right? It's an age-old struggle, isn’t it?

Yes.

I think one simple reason is that we're very focused on who becomes president, and Hubert Humphrey was never able to fulfill his dream of being elected president. He loses to Richard Nixon very narrowly in 1968. He runs a kind of a pathetic campaign as the establishment candidate against George McGovern, the peace candidate for the Democratic nomination in 1972. And by 76, Humphrey is so ill with the cancer that'll kill him that he decides not to make one more try. And so he's not on that list of presidents. And I think even to the people who remember him, he suffers in the historical collective consciousness because the recollections of him are about the reviled latter part of his public life, when he's Lyndon Johnson's vice president, and they both support the escalation in Vietnam. When he gets the Democratic nomination in 1968, without having competed in any primaries, the party establishment hands it to him, and he receives it literally simultaneous to the Chicago police force attack on unarmed journalists and anti-war demonstrators. And the aforementioned runs the establishment old guard candidate in 1972. And when people remember that part of Humphrey, none of that’s incorrect, and the critical analysis is right. And Humphrey himself said that supporting the Vietnam War was the biggest mistake of his life. But all this completely effaces this valiant part, earlier part of his political career, starting as mayor of Minneapolis, going through the Senate, and really his first one or two years as LBJ's vice president, when he was essential to the passage of these key, and in fact, landmark civil rights laws in 64 through 66.

Right. I mean, he's central to the story of civil rights in post-war America, though largely forgotten. Your book focuses almost exclusively on that, taking us really from Humphrey's birth in the early 20th century through 1948, through the Democratic Convention in 1948, which is really your crescendo, Humphrey's speech at the convention calling for civil rights. How does a young man like Humphrey, who's born in South Dakota, come to be a proponent of civil rights from a rural South Dakota background?

That's a really important question because Humphrey grew up in Dolan, South Dakota, population 500, very homogeneous, Protestant, Northern European, Scandinavian, German, very conservative Republican, very conservative theologically. And he has the advantage of a father who's an iconoclast. His father's also a little bit of a con artist in running his drug store, but that's another story. But HH, as the father was called, was a liberal Democrat in a town with hardly any. He was a self-proclaimed freethinker agnostic in a town where everybody went to church. And he brought up Humphrey imbuing those kids with stories of Woodrow Wilson's internationalism and the better parts of William Jennings Bryan's prairie populism. HH was also brave enough to be a supporter of Al Smith, the first Catholic nominated by a major party for the presidency. And so Humphrey saw an example of political independent thinking in his father. And his father even would talk about meeting people across the bounds of difference, whether it was economic class or race or religion. And he would always tell young Hubert, 'if you treat people like dogs, you shouldn't be surprised if you get bitten.' There's one amazing moment I write about in the book, almost mythological to me, when Humphrey is 11 years old and he meets black people for the first time, because there are no black people within the book. He goes out to introduce himself to the road workers. And they're only in town for a couple of weeks, but Humphrey always remembers this. Humphrey connected through his Methodist minister of his childhood to what was called the social gospel movement, which is a form of Protestant belief that, by the way, they're as fundamentalist as other Protestants.A lot of the social gospel Protestants believed that the Bible was the inerrant, Word of God, they believed in temperance, they believed in personal purity, but the big difference is, for them, the consummate act of a believing good Protestant was to create what they called the kingdom of God on earth, and making the kingdom of God on earth meant for them working with organized labor, crossing religious lines, crossing racial lines. Humphrey drew on that wellspring of social gospel theology throughout his entire life. So that’s another piece. And then the really formative, other two formative moments are, number one, The Dakotas fall into an economic depression almost a decade before the rest of the country. It hits them in the early 1920s when crop prices plummet and Humphrey’s family loses their home. Their store goes deeply into debt. And at that point, before there’s a new deal, Hubert Humphrey becomes a new dealer because that’s where he realizes that what he’s heard in church, which is that financial hardship is the result of bad morals or foolish decisions or falling for get rich quick schemes, he realizes, no, that when the banks are closing in their little town, they’re And people are losing their homes, and farmers are not even sending their crops to market because they’ll make less money than it costs to plant them. You need government to step in. So by the time FDR becomes president in 1932, Hubert Humphrey, then 21, is already prepared to be a new dealer. The final piece. In 1939, [he] goes to graduate school... and that place happens to be Louisiana State University. And going there means that he lives in a Jim Crow society for the first time. And because of these elements of his pre-existing personality... seeing Jim Crow in action just profoundly offends something in him. And it also very interestingly prepares him after grad school to go back to Minneapolis... which is actually at this time a flagrantly racist and anti-Semitic city. And suddenly he is able to see what's been hiding in plain sight all along during his college years, which is that this city, you could say up south, has plenty of racial problems of its own that need solving.

One of the strengths of your book, Sam, for me as a reader, were your vivid descriptions of what it was like for Hubert Humphrey to travel by bus to LSU for the first time, to cross the Mason-Dixon line, and then, as you say, to go home, to go back to Minneapolis.

Exactly. Because in the South, not only does he live in Jim Crow and sees it really intimately... What he remembers indelibly are these moments of personal degradation of individual Black men and women. That's what really haunts him. The other thing that's much less expected in Baton Rouge is that that's where he makes Jewish friends for the first time, and also falls under the influence of this amazing Professor Rudolf Eberle, who's an exiled anti-Nazi... whose whole project as a scholar was to explore, how is it that democratic societies become totalitarian? And Humphrey is very, very affected by Eberle's instruction... And all that means that when he goes back North, instead of doing what you might expect a Northern New Dealer to do, which is to say, phew, I'm so glad I'm out of the benighted South and back in the enlightened North again, Humphrey feels none of that moral superiority. He suddenly sees all the warts in Minneapolis.

I want to ask, what drew you to Humphrey in the first place?

The truth is that I didn't go searching for a book about Hubert Humphrey. A part of my brain for the last 25 years was looking for a book about America immediately after World War II, deciding what kind of country it wanted to be. Because having spent all this blood and treasure to defeat fascism, America had a huge unfinished agenda with the discrimination on its home front... And I very quickly realized a couple of things that the book could do. Number one, it could fill this biographical gap about Humphrey because if people knew about him, as I said earlier, it was only the later part. And number two, it could fill a historical gap in the civil rights movement historiography... because we Americans tend to situate the start of that mass movement in the mid-50s... But there was this incredible decade of civil rights activism in the 40s led by people who don’t get nearly their due these days, like A. Philip Randolph and Walter White... and really catalyzed by the sacrifice of the Black GIs who went off to war and had this phrase they called Double V, victory over fascism abroad and then victory over Jim Crow at home.

Another contribution that I think reflects you as a lifetime scholar is how much of it is about the Jewish American experience as well... Tell us about the connections in your mind between civil rights, African American communities, Jewish American communities.

I trace the origin story of the Black Jewish Alliance to the rise of Hitler in Germany and to the parallels that Black Americans and Jewish Americans saw between the persecution of Jews in Germany and the persecution of Blacks in the United States. There was a real awareness, a mutual awareness of this as being one battle... And in Minneapolis, a city that had a horrible track record of both anti-Semitism and racism, and very small, very numerically vulnerable Black and Jewish communities that collectively made up about 5% of the population... it became very natural that they should become political allies... some of this is enlightened self-interest. Blacks and Jews realize they need each other, they can help each other. But some of it, I think, bonds at a deeper level than just expediency.

Fascinating.

Zachary? You mentioned that the impetus for this book was to try and rewrite or at least capture the historical moment after World War II when Americans were faced with the decision about what a post-war United States would look like. How do you think this story about Minneapolis, about Hubert Humphrey, should change our view, our understanding of that immediate post-war period?

One way I hope it will change us is to realize that the civil rights activity of the 40s... culminates with Humphrey and A. Philip Randolph, kind of Mr. Inside and Mr. Outside, successfully pressuring the Democratic Party to explicitly endorse civil rights... which leads to the exile of the Southern segregationists, the so-called Dixiecrats... [and] Harry Truman desegregating the military... and then winning election in 1948 because of a surge in the Black vote... That’s an answer to that, up until that point, unresolved question of are we going to revert back and be complacent or are we going to realize that we can't have practices in this country that we just went to global war against in other countries. There’s also something heartbreaking and poignant about the fact that with the rise of the Cold War, this moment is going to end very, very quickly.

That context is really helpful... Truman does, as you say, in 1948, embrace a civil rights plank, the minority report in the Democratic Party, and he runs on that. He desegregates the armed forces. He’s also the president who recognizes the state of Israel.

Right. How does this happen? Well, Truman blows hot and cold... On civil rights, Johnson reminds me a lot more of Truman. They’re both from border states... they both had some kind of deep reservoir of personal decency that was offended... With Truman... what gets to his heart is a series of attacks on returning Black GIs... incidents of Black GIs in the uniform of their country being beaten, being killed, being denied service... and Truman cannot bear the idea of people who serve the country being assaulted this way. And that moves Truman immediately into way ahead of his past... civil rights proposals. Then it gets close to the 48th Convention, and it’s as if he forgets he ever said those things. And what he wants to revert to is what was also the worst element of FDR... who made this almost literal devil’s bargain with the South that basically said, I’ll give you Jim Crow, and you'll give me your votes and your support in Congress. And Truman, heading into the 48 election, is ready to go right back to that. And what Hubert Humphrey and A. Philip Randolph and others did was basically force Truman to own what had been his own civil rights program to begin with.

It's interesting how important these personal experiences are... It’s also interesting, Sam, how politics pushes against that at times. What you’re describing in the 1948 Democratic Convention is pretty similar to the 1964 Convention, where Johnson refuses to seat the Mississippi Free Democrats. How does Humphrey push through?

In 1948, Humphrey benefited from the interplay between insurgents within the party, literally inside the convention hall, and A. Philip Randolph outside. Randolph understood that desegregating the military was the lynchpin to civil rights... Humphrey had to convince a bunch of white Protestant delegates to give up some of their white Protestant privilege. And one of the ways he was able to do that is marshalling all the young liberal insurgents like himself and people like Paul Douglas from Illinois, Walter Ruther from the United Auto Workers, Eleanor Roosevelt... but there were also a group of not so liberal big city political bosses who knew how to count votes... these big city bosses had seen thousands upon thousands of blacks from the South come North in what we now call the Great Migration. And they knew if they didn’t embrace civil rights, they were going to lose their cities and lose the election.

Not because you’ve gained no ground, but to try to hold the ground you’ve already won and push forward a little bit. And that’s an important takeaway. And I think also Humphrey’s model of being, in a term that he borrowed from Al Smith, one of my other political heroes, a happy warrior, is an important model. Humphrey was ebullient. He was energetic. He frankly could be corny at times in that Midwestern small town way. And that’s the happy part. But the warrior part is that he knew that he was going to need with joy on his face and optimism in his heart to go back into these battles, and he knew that I think that the joy and the optimism would be assets in winning those battles.

How do we maintain optimism without becoming Pollyannish? What, what, what is the appropriate level of optimism? I’m often criticized for being too optimistic by my son, by Zachary, and by others. How do we find that right balance? Because empty hopefulness can become hopeless as well, right?

Right. You can't be Pollyanna. You can't be Panglossian about this. You have to know. That joy is accompanied by struggle, but that is part of the energy you have to struggle forward. A lot of people talked about Hubert Humphrey’s phrase, the politics of joy, at the time of the Democratic Convention. And it was both ironic, and fitting that that was brought up. Ironic, because when Humphrey used that phrase, it was right when he announced his candidacy in 1968, in the wake of the assassination of Martin Luther King, in the midst of the horrible Vietnam War, and it sounded totally tone deaf. It was one of the times when Humphrey badly misread the mood of the country. And yet his idea that politics should have a joyful element is maybe now being redeemed because coming out of a period of time that has felt so bleak for a lot of us, so at times such despair and real dangers to democracy, that the idea that there could be something positive and exalting about the work of protecting democracy is really appealing to people. And this goes to other examples we’ve seen of leadership of whether it was, um, Fiorello LaGuardia as mayor of New York during the depression, reading the funnies over the radio mic, or whether it was FDR’s great orations about nothing to fear but fear itself. These were people speaking into bleak times, but also saying that there was reason to see something positive on the horizon.

Certainly, I think the point of the poem was not that we’ve never had political heroes or that we’ve never had, um, a politics of joy that’s successful. The point was that, um, all of those political heroes and all of the politics of joy, um, required hard work and met with stiff opposition. I think the point of the poem was that, like, politics is always messy and always difficult. Um, it’s more about how we approached it.

I completely agree with you, Zachary, and we really have to resist this idea of romanticizing some imagined political past. If you’re talking about polarization, for instance, what about a period where there when one huge faction of the Democratic Party supported white supremacy and racial inequality as a matter of policy, not this is what they thought privately or the way they acted in individual encounters with black Americans. This is what they wanted policy to be. How could that coexist with the rest of, uh, of a New Deal coalition? They were, the Dixiecrats were so serious about that, that they broke from the Democratic Party. And another example, if we think back to the 2020 attempted coup, and what was the goal of getting Mike Pence to refuse to accept the results, the goal, which fortunately he did not do, the goal would have been to throw the election into the House of Representatives. We’ve seen that play before. We’ve seen that movie before. In 1948, that was the intent of the Dixiecrats. They felt if they could win several states in the South, then neither Harry Truman nor nor Thomas Dewey would get 270 votes for an electoral college majority. The choice then goes to the House of Representatives, and each state’s delegation gets one vote. And the Southern segregationists dominated the delegations of about a dozen states, and it was going to let them be the kingmakers. They were going to make more money. Harry Truman and Tom Dewey come to them on bent knee and promise to preserve Jim Crow in order to get the southern states votes. So, there was nothing so wonderful and sentimental and all Norman Rockwell-y about politics at that time.

Not at all. Not at all. And certainly someone who’s my hero, Franklin Roosevelt, as you alluded to before, refused to sign anti lynching legislation. So the compromises, the dirty compromises of politics have a long history, unfortunately. Sam, I wanted to close us out by asking you one final question. Um, and I think it speaks to our moment and it speaks to your scholarship and it’s something that I struggle with, I know Zachary struggles with, I know many of our listeners struggle with. Um, you’re someone who’s deeply concerned and committed to combating anti Semitism. It’s in your scholarship. It’s in your journalism. It’s how I first encountered your work, actually. Oh, thank you. Uh, and you’re someone obviously deeply committed to civil rights, telling the story of civil rights. How do you think about these issues today with this historical vision with, um, uh, the challenges we face. Um, what is it? How do you as someone concerned about anti Semitism and racism approach our current world?

Well, first of all, I’m almost 69, and so I’ve been through many periods before when there’s been a discourse out there saying that the Black Jewish Alliance is all over and that Jews on the whole are going to be turning much more conservative. And, this was trotted out during the first attempt to go after Affirmative Action with the Mario De Funes and, uh, and Alan Bakke court cases. And it came up again when Ronald Reagan was running against, um, Jimmy Carter, and the argument was Jimmy Carter had been too pro Palestinian. And it’s happened again now. But at the end of the day, in almost every presidential election, of, you know, going back into the 70s, except for the Carter Reagan one, what, the Jewish vote for the Democratic Party has been the most emphatically solid vote of white Americans. It's the closest to the way black Americans vote for the party. At the end of the day, they’re voting similarly, Black Americans and Jewish Americans. On the other hand, there are real tensions and the war in Gaza is exercising them, and especially having spent a lot of time around Black Church for one book and World VHBCUs for others. It's not a surprise to me at all that many, many Black Americans look at the West Bank and Gaza and see the Jim Crow South, and they’re not, you know, and they’re not against the existence of Israel. And they’re, as I said before, steeped in the Hebrew Bible. But there is a deep empathy for the Palestinian experience that, that they feel. And I, just at a personal level, just yearn for some resolution to the war because I have despaired just individually about the strains the war has put on not only the Black Jewish alliance, but on what I felt was a really important Black and Muslim American alliance in domestic politics. And all of these groups would be losers if they didn't. Those alliances get blasted apart.

Well, I think that’s the subject for another show, but I also deeply appreciate Sam, your reflecting on that and you’re displaying what I think is essential to being a serious historian and writer, which is to take the past on its own terms. But also think about the past in light of the present. That's not anachronistic. That's actually why every generation rewrites the history of what came before. Sam, thank you so much for being with us today.

Well, Jeremi and Zachary, thank you. It’s been such an honor to be with you and such a pleasure to talk about these issues that I care so much about.

I want to encourage all of our listeners to get a copy or two copies of Sam’s book, uh, into the bright sunshine young. Hubert Humphrey and the fight for civil rights. Zachary, thank you for your poem and your insights today. Thank you. And thank you most of all to our loyal listeners and our loyal subscribers to our substack for joining us for this week of This Is Democracy. This podcast is produced by the Liberal Arts ITS Development Studio and the College of Liberal Arts at the University of Texas at Austin. The music in this episode was written and recorded by Harris Codini. Stay tuned for a new episode every week. You can find This Is Democracy on Apple Podcasts. Spotify and Stitcher. See you next time.