“Liberalism always finds itself beleaguered at a moment of radical polarization,” journalist and historian James Traub writes in his deft and thoughtful biography of Hubert Humphrey to be published next month. While the right wing has organized around the destruction of liberalism and the far left denounces liberals as gutless sellouts, Traub argues that studying the life of Humphrey—the late mayor of Minneapolis, senator, and vice president—is instructive, cautionary, and inspiring. His thesis is correct on all three counts.
Despite the powerful position of liberals in government, including President Joe Biden, Vice President Kamala Harris, and Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer, liberalism has descended to a cultural nadir. Unpopular and misunderstood among the authoritarian right and socialist left, liberals must defend themselves against the self-contradictory accusations that they are intent on “destroying America,” in the words of Donald Trump and his right-wing media acolytes and that they are cowardly guardians of the status quo who, to quote independent presidential candidate Cornel West, offer nothing but “self-righteousness against Donald Trump.”
Socialists, like West, are correct that liberalism is not revolution, but it is hardly an exercise in placekeeping or corporate custodianship. It is a balanced approach to governance that relies upon protecting individual rights, working within the framework of constitutional democracy to build multiracial coalitions for social progress, and balancing a robust free market with a compassionate, effective welfare and regulatory state as the best way to produce prosperity and have the greatest number of citizens share in its bounty. It is also the political philosophy (and methodology) most responsible for the triumphs of equality and justice in the 20th and 21st centuries. America’s profound advancements in women’s rights, civil rights, LGBTQ rights, and disability rights are the achievements of liberal officials in government and liberal movements on the outside. Social Security, Medicare, Medicaid, the Affordable Care Act, and other entitlement programs demonstrate that liberalism is also the key to unlocking communal benefits while preserving an economic engine of freedom and growth.
Both friends and foes of liberalism believed that Humphrey, nicknamed “The Happy Warrior,” was one of its most persuasive and successful champions. In 2012, Bill Clinton spoke at the unveiling of a statue of Humphrey in Minneapolis, crediting the late politician with showing that “public service is a worthy endeavor,” and the late Senator Paul Wellstone of Minnesota told the press when he ran for the U.S. Senate in 1990 that he aspired to become the “Hubert Humphrey senator” of his time. In his 2019 work, The Conservative Sensibility, George F. Will calls Humphrey “the leader of postwar liberalism.”
Despite his accolades and accomplishments, Humphrey no longer registers loudly in the American consideration of liberalism. Unlike the case with Ted Kennedy, his victories on behalf of liberty and justice in the United States Senate are not widely appreciated or remembered, in part because of the distance of time but also Humphrey’s being cleaved to Lyndon Johnson’s Vietnam War when he sought the presidency in 1968. Traub attempts to set the record straight in True Believer: Hubert Humphrey’s Quest for a More Just America.
Traub transports readers to Humphrey’s humble South Dakota origins with lyrical and heartfelt prose. The son of a pharmacist who rejected the piety of his neighbors, Humphrey inculcated permanent lessons from his father: belief in the common good as exercised through political involvement, hospitality to immigrants and the culturally despised, reverence for education and the life of the mind, and although he himself would become a churchgoing Lutheran, respect for secularism in government and public affairs.
A rich consistency of the Humphrey biography is that his life would begin and develop as an exemplification of the strengths of liberalism and eventually become an exercise to advance those same strengths. The Humphrey family believed in diligence, thrift, compassion, and solidarity. Even when it was risky, the Humphreys supported racial equality. During his brief term in the South Dakota state legislature, Hubert Humphrey Sr. took public positions in favor of civil rights.
Hubert, in early adulthood, never expected to enter politics. He married young, had children, and felt a duty to help his father run the pharmacy. Despite the practical limitations of his burgeoning life, Humphrey developed an obsession with politics and good governance. He earned a bachelor’s degree in political science from the University of Minnesota. When his interest transformed into commitment, he studied for his master’s degree in the same subject at Louisiana State University. He had every intention of earning a doctorate and devoting his life to advocacy and academia, but a mentor at LSU had the foresight to convince him to run for office.
Humphrey’s education in the South was twofold—the academic instruction in political science, but also a confrontation with the brutal reality of systemic racism. Observing how deeply oppressive Jim Crow made life in the former confederacy for Blacks affirmed Humphrey’s support for civil rights but injected it with a new sense of urgency.
Traub never states it directly, preferring to let the story speak for itself. Still, Humphrey’s life functions as an allegory for the value of taking seriously the theories and mechanisms of politics and government. America has now suffered through at least 45 years of Republican propaganda about how the government “is not the solution to the problem, but the problem,” to quote the most effective evangelist for anti-government philosophy, Ronald Reagan. It is an instructional balm to study a man who believed government was central to societal stability and improvement.
When Humphrey applied his intellectual acuity to the actual work of public policy and administration, he emerged as one of the most effective executors of the liberal tradition. His achievements are vast.
As mayor of Minneapolis, serving from 1945 to 1948, he did nothing less than transform the city. He appointed a new police chief. Together, they managed to bring down crime and restore confidence in the department, which residents had come to view as corrupt and ineffectual due to rising crime rates and many allegations of bribery. When he was elected, Minneapolis had a reputation as one of the most antisemitic cities in the country. Making a fulsome effort to integrate Jews into every aspect of communal life, Humphrey helped to morph Minneapolis into a haven for Jewish Americans. Simultaneously, he fought against racism by forming the Fair Employment Practice Committee, making Minneapolis one of the few cities in the 1940s to prohibit racial discrimination in hiring practices and treatment of labor. Humphrey’s Council on Human Relations organized cultural events to unite Jews and Gentiles, whites and blacks. His mayoral tenure was such a success that it attracted the attention of the Democratic Party. Humphrey made the courageous choice to take advantage of his newfound fame to fight the right wing and extremists on the left. As co-founder of the organization Americans for Democratic Action, Humphrey led a purge against communists within the Democratic Party, a move which may seem cringeworthy to some now but was done in recognition of the incompatibility of a belief in totalitarianism and liberalism as well as Moscow’s firm hand on its American footsoldiers.
It was Humphrey’s crusade for civil rights and the enfranchisement of Black Americans that most distinguished him. As early as 1948, he led the charge within the Democratic Party to adopt support for black freedom, equality, and opportunity in the official platform of the tumultuous Democratic National Convention that nominated Harry S. Truman, who ended segregation in the armed forces that summer. As keynote speaker, he gave what would become his famous “sunshine of human rights” speech, imploring the Democratic Party to “get out of the shadow of states’ rights and to walk forthrightly into the bright sunshine of human rights.” South Carolina Governor Strom Thurmond, then a Democrat, walked out in protest and would become the “Dixiecrat” presidential candidate that fall. When Humphrey became a senator in 1949, he was ferociously dedicated to the cause, and as Traub makes clear in his riveting account of the 1964 Civil Rights Act, any list of civil rights heroes that neglects Humphrey is incomplete. The transformative civil rights bill became a legal reality due to his mastery of legislation, bargaining, and negotiation.
It was a triumph before a fall.
Although Traub doesn’t state it directly, his chronicle of Humphrey’s life makes clear that his most significant misstep was accepting the vice presidential nomination in 1964. Humphrey’s election as Lyndon Johnson’s running mate that year ended a fourteen-month vacancy that had existed since President Kennedy’s assassination and Johnson’s swearing-in. Traub quotes Tom Hughes, a Humphrey advisor from 1955 to ’58 who later became the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace president, as expressing bafflement and disappointment at the “enhawkment of Hubert Humphey.”
Serving as “veep” to LBJ restrained Humphrey but, oddly, turned him into an aggressive advocate for the disastrous and unpopular war in Vietnam. Never relenting from his defense of Johnson’s failed and destructive foreign policy, Humphrey helped prolong an unnecessary war and, in the process, undermined his credibility with his natural allies on the left. His deference to Johnson also rendered him inert to protest the tragic contradiction of the Johnson administration—that is how the war weakened the liberal campaign to, in the words of Humphrey, “battle against social misery.”
Johnson himself later said, “The bitch of a war killed the lady I loved—the Great Society.” A reporter complimented Humphrey as the most persuasive spokesperson for the Great Society programs, likening him to a “people-to-people program all by himself.”
Even to this day, few historians and journalists acknowledge that in addition to 58,000 American military fatalities and millions of innocent Vietnamese, among the victims of the Vietnam War were poor Americans who never had the chance to benefit from a potential expansion of the welfare state. As Traub writes:
In that year’s [1966] budget, the White House cut funding for the War on Poverty from $2.5 billion to $1.6 billion—a modest figure in a $157 billion budget…In fact, for all the heroic rhetoric and epic legislation and the dazzling array of new agencies, Jonson’s War on Poverty never devoted large sums of money to the direct creation of jobs. Job training and “community action” were privileged over direct infusions of funds. Humphrey began to wonder if that was a mistake.
Humphrey knew Johnson well from the Senate and had no illusions about his cruelty. Still, Humphrey refused to distance himself from the ornery Texan even when the president personally disrespected him (cutting him out of meetings and giving backhanded compliments at press conferences). It is conventional wisdom that his obsequiousness cost him and the Democrats the White House in 1968, allowing the loathsome Richard Nixon to take the reins. Conventional wisdom is wrong.
Traub documents how skeptical liberals mostly returned to Humphrey after Labor Day in 1968. The deciding factor—rather than the reluctance of antiwar Bobby Kennedy and Eugene McCarthy primary voters—was the potency of Nixon’s race-baiting and fearmongering campaign among white southerners and blue-collar workers in the industrial Midwest. Playing on fears of crime, race, and chaos in an increasingly diverse polity, Nixon convinced the majority of the majority (white voters) that he was their federal guardian against the liberal scheme to destroy the cities and coddle a culture of chaos. Activists of the radical left certainly didn’t help matters by encouraging riots, adopting anarchist positions alongside groups like the Black Panthers and Students for a Democratic Society, and shouting, “Burn, baby, Burn!”
These forces and factors collided during the most humiliating moment of Humphrey’s career—the 1968 Democratic National Convention in Chicago, which should have been its apex, coming 20 years after his 1948 civil rights keynote in Philadelphia. The violence and chaos outside the International Ampitheatre on the South Side, and Chicago Mayor Richard J. Daley’s approval of police brutality in Grant Park and around the city, made Humphrey appear weak and the left poisonous. The devastating scene affirmed the reactionary mindset of industrial workers who supported either Nixon or segregationist George Wallace.
Traub makes the perceptive argument that Humphrey fell victim to another shift in American politics. “The sense that time has passed him by was not only ideological; Humphrey’s practice (emphasis his) of politics felt archaic,” Traub writes before quoting a memo from Frederick Dutton, a prominent California liberal who had spent time with Humphrey. “The projection of genuine human qualities, not legislation or other government programs and policies, seems to me now to be the cutting edge of what is emerging as influential and persuasive.” Traub wisely notes that Dutton was describing the “politics of personal authenticity” that have emerged as dominant in recent decades. Dutton worried that Humphrey and politicians like him spent too much time discussing government, public policy, and political philosophy and not enough time spinning personal yarns and trying to “connect” with voters at a relational level. Given that 1968 Nixon’s political facelift was so dramatic that he was known as “The New Nixon,” in contrast to his redbaiting 1950s and losses for the presidency in 1960 and California governor in 1962, it’s remarkable that Humphrey should lose to such a fabricated figure.
The politics of authenticity rely upon, whether sincere or not, “skepticism in the face of official optimism and bombast.” Skepticism has mutated into nihilism in much of American culture, as the painful lack of consideration of the current president’s achievements makes clear. For decades, politicians of both parties promised to lower the cost of prescription drugs. President Joe Biden’s administration finally did it by enabling Medicare to negotiate the price of medicine and enforcing a $2,000 out-of-pocket cap for prescription drug costs for those on Medicare. The reform doesn’t take effect until 2025, but the societal indifference to its passage makes one question if “projection” and “personal authenticity” are no longer merely necessary but definitive.
The pervasiveness of image-based politics is one of the many applicable insights that True Believer offers readers, especially those sweating democracy’s future.
While the racism of Nixon’s “Southern Strategy” and rhetoric is undeniable, this earlier iteration of Donald Trump’s demagoguery and anxiety over crime was legitimate. Crime itself remains, at least on the left, vexing for liberals torn between understandable angst about the “carceral state” and recognizing that a society that locks up toilet paper at Walgreens is deeply troubled. Traub makes a convincing case that Humphrey navigated an answer to the dichotomy between justice and mercy when running to return to the U.S. Senate from Minnesota in 1970 after his loss to Nixon.
He gave an address to the American Bar Association with the title, “Liberalism and ‘Law and Order’: Must There be a Conflict?”
“The answer, of course, was no,” Traub writes. He then posits that “Humphrey offered a new formulation of the ‘law and order and justice’ problem. To make the case that ‘root causes,’ such as poverty and urban blight, contributed to the crime rate, liberals must first gain credibility with working-class voters by showing they shared their concerns about the disorder and did not regard it as a symptom of racism.”
It’s hard to find a Democrat who supports defunding the police. From Al Sharpton to Joe Biden, they’re all about better policing. But the abolitionist call from 2020’s protests (born in the Minneapolis of Humphrey and George Floyd) is still a political burden for Democrats and one they’ll have to manage. Humphrey’s careful negotiation of two critical societal imperatives—effective law enforcement and opportunities for redemption—resonates in the present.
Mayor and governors who demand leniency in sentencing, no bail reforms, and talk like Chicago Mayor Brandon Johnson, who reacted to a mob of teenagers and young adults looting businesses and assaulting tourists by arguing that they are “starved of opportunities,” risk giving a boost to the authoritarian movement seeking power in the United States.
Despite his loyalty to Lyndon Johnson, Humphrey’s life was heroic. James Traub’s biographical treatment functions as a timely reminder of the efficacy of social liberalism, the necessity of responsive governance to socioeconomic crises, and, ultimately, the power of American democracy.
