Citation: Society, March-April 1994 v31 n3 p86(2) ----------------------------------------------------------------- Title: Hubert H. Humphrey: The Politics of Joy._(book reviews) Authors: Gillon, Stephen M. ----------------------------------------------------------------- Subjects: Books_Reviews People: Garrettson, Charles L., III Rev Grade: D Reference #: A15298320 ================================================================= Full Text COPYRIGHT Transaction Publishers 1994 Hubert H. Humphrey is one of the most important and fascinating political figures in modern American politics. Though he failed to win the White House, he had an enormous impact on his times. His rise to national prominence in 1948 signaled the emergence of a new, vital-center liberalism that would set the agenda of the Democratic Party for the next twenty years. His defeat in the 1968 presidential elections was a turning point in the competition between the two political parties. Humphrey's ebullient personality, his energy and his passion, make him an ideal subject for biography. But with Humphrey you get much more, because his career serves as a powerful metaphor for the fate of postwar liberalism. By the early 1950s, Humphrey was perhaps the most eloquent and forceful proponent of the new tempered liberalism that had emerged after the Second World War. Like other liberals of his generation, Humphrey came out of the experience of the Depression and the world war with a philosophy of government that differed from that of earlier progressives. At the heart of his thinking was renewed confidence in capitalism, fear of international communism, and faith in the ability of American institutions to redress social inequality - especially if based on race. Humphrey struggled over the next twenty years, as a senator and vice president, to match the ideals of this new approach with political realities. To a remarkable degree, he and his generation, succeeded. The United States experienced unprecedented prosperity in the postwar period. Every major economic indicator revealed the impressive gains: the number of business increased sevenfold; average family income (in real dollars) more than doubled; the GNP increased by more than 100 percent. American leadership in world affairs rebuilt Europe and Japan, restrained the expansionist designs of the Soviet Union, and provided billions of dollars in aid to developing countries. During the 1960s, the most important civil rights legislation since the Civil War was passed under the auspices of the liberals. The Civil Rights Act of 1964 and the Voting Rights Act of 1965 swept away any laws that sanctioned political discrimination against blacks. The Housing Act of 1968 removed the last legal obstacle to black citizens' dream of moving to a better neighborhood. Ironically, it was just at the moment of its greatest success that liberalism began to unravel. Five days after Lyndon Johnson signed the Voting Rights Act into law, the Watts section of Los Angeles exploded in violence. On college campuses across the country, young people took to the streets denouncing a political system that had provided them with extraordinary economic benefits. The Democratic Party, which had sided with those left outside the system since the days of Franklin D. Roosevelt, found itself branded as the party of the establishment, its powerful message of economic populism muted in the face of new social issues. What does Humphrey's career reveal about the unraveling of liberalism? This is the question Charles L. Garrettson III attempts to address in his book Hubert H. Humphrey: The Politics of Joy. The book begins with Humphrey's upbringing in Doland, South Dakota. It was here that young Hubert was exposed to the values that would define his later political philosophy: a sense of mission, equalitarianism, and community. If Doland instilled the values, the Democratic Party, under the stewardship of Franklin Roosevelt, offered the best vehicle for putting those ideals into practice. As mayor and especially in his eloquent address in support of civil rights before the 1948 Democratic Convention, Humphrey acted on his deep-seated idealism. Once in the Senate, however, Humphrey learned a painful lesson: unrestrained idealism can alienate potential allies, anger opponents, and make reform less likely. The junior senator learned the lesson when he violated the institution's informal rules of decorum by criticizing the powerful Harry Byrd. "Thus," the author writes, "in one brief, yet extremely poignant incident, the ~radical' had recognized the need to go from twister - something that is sensational and dramatic, yet, short lived - to something more steady and lasting, not to say productive - like a trade wind." This experience taught Humphrey the importance of consensus - of building coalitions in favor of legislation. The book skips to Humphrey's role in the passage of the 1964 civil rights act. For his biographer, Humphrey's role in passing this legislation represented the best example of the merging of idealism and realism that was so central to Humphrey's political success. Having establish all this as background, the author launches into a sustained defense of Humphrey's Vietnam policy and his 1968 presidential campaign. Garrettson suggests the vice president had been right about Vietnam all along. Like his mentor, Edward Lansdale, Humphrey understood that the United States had to win the "hearts and minds" of the Vietnamese people. The author cites favorably Humphrey's advice that Johnson seek "a New Deal for Vietnam" including a G.I. bill for the South Vietnamese army, land reform, a college loan program, and an Asian version of the WPA. While transplanting the New Deal to Vietnam, Humphrey warned Johnson against "creating the impression that we are the prisoners of events in Vietnam." He urged the president to make clear to the American people why we were fighting in Southeast Asia. "In hindsight," the author concludes, "the impressiveness of such an assessment must be admitted. . . ." Well, not really. Humphrey's analysis offered little that was new and certainly nothing that suggested a resolution to the war. The author is certainly correct in pointing out that Humphrey was unfairly attacked by his self-righteous liberal colleagues - many of whom had supported the war at one time. But he goes too far in suggesting that Humphrey had an enlightened view of the war. Like other administration officials, Humphrey viewed Vietnam through the prism of containment, underestimated the determination of the North Vietnamese, and overestimated the ability of the United States to create a stable South Vietnamese society. The same arrogance and ethnocentrism that informed American policy infused Humphrey's thinking about the war. Garrettson is so determined to justify Humphrey's actions, and to criticize his detractors, that he never takes the time to explain why Vietnam was so painful for Humphrey and the generation of liberals who came to prominence in the 1960s. Despite the strident claims of those on all sides of the war, few people fully understood the nature of the war or predicted the enormous cost in lives and resources that would be associated with it. For Humphrey especially, the war clashed with his own memories of European appeasement of Hitler before the Second World War and his personal struggle with communists in the Democratic-Farmer-Labor Party. But by 1968, Humphrey, like most liberals, was angry that the war was stealing valuable resources from domestic programs, frustrated that the war was shattering their once powerful coalition, and worried that nothing the military did in Vietnam seemed to work. It was a difficult time for American liberals, especially for the few left in the Johnson administration. Humphrey agonized over the war. But you would never know that by reading Garrettson's account. His Humphrey is a static figure who early on develops a position on the war somewhere between hawk and dove and never waivers in his conviction. In reality, Humphrey's views on the war evolved. By 1968, his position was not much different from that of the peace forces: both favored a unilateral bombing halt. Humphrey had reached agreement with the peace forces on a compromise plank for the convention, but, at the last minute, Johnson intervened and vetoed his efforts. It was Humphrey's unwillingness to offend Lyndon Johnson, not his commitment to any strategic doctrine, that prevented him from calling for a bombing halt until late in the campaign. Garrettson takes aim at critics who have suggested that Humphrey "sold out" or lost touch with his liberal roots during the 1968 presidential campaign. "The issue," Garrettson writes, "is whether it was Humphrey who ~failed to keep up with the times' in 1968, or was it rather liberalism in general - and the Democratic Party in particular - when it refused to support him in that year, and then again in 1972? The surprising rise and equally surprising endurance of Ronald Reagan in the post-Vietnam era is only fairly cited as further testimony in support of choosing the latter." The left, both young and old, mistreated Humphrey during the 1968 campaign and the emergence of a powerful conservative coalition would suggest that American liberalism was much weaker without Hubert Humphrey. Yet, as so often in this book, the author is more interested in assessing blame than he is in offering nuanced explanations. Neither the "old" liberalism of Hubert Humphrey nor the "new" liberalism of George McGovern had anticipated the forces that would shape presidential politics for the immediate future. The defections of many working class whites, the decline in voter turnout, the growing politicization of American business, the emergences of divisive social issues - abortion, gay rights, busing - created a new political universe in the 1970s and 1980s. The advocates of the "new politics" were certainly misguided in their attempt of building a coalition among the poor and the young, but neither Humphrey nor anyone else offered an effective strategy for bridging the differences with the party. In the end, Humphrey was not the caricature that critics have tried to paint. But neither was he the one-dimensional figure that Garrettson has developed in this disappointing book. =================================================================