There are big anniversaries we all share, like the first man on the moon and 9/11. There are little ones I share with Pam: first kiss, birth of kids. Anniversaries, good and bad, are a chance to put ourselves back in that moment. “Oh, yeah. That’s how that felt.”
This month was the 75th anniversary of Hubert Humphrey’s speech to the Democratic National Convention in Philadelphia. It doesn’t get the attention it deserves, but it was one of the most important speeches in American history.
Humphrey was a small-town kid from Wallace, South Dakota, born above his father’s drugstore. Hubert Sr. sold medicines for people and animals. It was a hard scrabble life during the Dust Bowl. Hubert Jr. spent one year at the University of Minnesota, but money ran out and he came home to work with his dad.
Hubert traveled the dirt roads of South Dakota selling “Humphrey’s Chest Oil” for humans and “Bone Tone Veterinary” for hogs. His heart wasn’t in it, though, and when he was 27, Humphrey returned to the U of M to study political science.
He was drawn into the hot bed of politics that Minnesota was at the time. This was when the Democratic-Farmer-Labor Party was formed. In 1945, Humphrey was elected mayor of Minneapolis. Only 34 years old, he succeeded in reducing crime and growing business in the post-war booming city. He won a second term handily and began to garner national attention.
To say the political landscape was different from today would be a gross understatement. Growing from the ashes of the Civil War, the Democratic Party was the party of not-Lincoln. They were in power across the South, the former Confederacy. Republicans held sway in the North for most of a century.
By 1948, the Democratic Party was also the party of the New Deal and four-time elected Franklin Roosevelt. An uneasy truce existed over civil rights where Roosevelt accepted segregation through the South in return for support for his programs.
After World War II that became untenable. More than a million Black men and women fought for our country. Those who came back, many didn’t, returned to a country where they were second class citizens in the North and less than that in the Jim Crow South.
The movement for civil rights began to percolate, later to boil over. In 1948. the Democratic Party was split between those who thought the federal government should actively protect civil rights and Southerners who believed that states should be able to enforce traditional segregation. ”States’ rights” was the buzzword.
A battle went on behind the scenes about whether the party’s platform would include language from a Commission on Civil Rights. Including it would anger Southern Whites, who threatened to walk out. It was this cauldron into which Humphrey stepped. He was chosen to speak for the minority plank on civil rights. It was a speech he was warned not to give. But he did. From that:
“To those who say that we are rushing this issue of civil rights, I say to them we are 172 years late. To those who say this civil rights program is an infringement on states’ rights, I say this: the time has arrived in America to get out of the shadow of states’ rights and walk forthrightly into the bright sunshine of human rights!”
It was an early example of Humphrey’s oratorical flare, and the minority plank passed 651 to 582. The delegations from Mississippi and Alabama walked out. Southern Democrats were enraged enough to form the Dixiecrat Party to run Strom Thurmond for President. The realignment of the political parties was on.
The Solid South now means Republican. I have been a Republican and have many friends who are. We agree that their party plays with fire when it gives succor to racists. For our nation’s sake, they mustn’t become a dark hiding place for rats.
Back to 1948, Humphrey’s speech was like a starting shot. In the twenty years that followed, noteworthy progress was made on civil and voting rights. It is progress that is not guaranteed to be last. Two steps forward, one step back. Two steps back, one step forward. We are flawed and sinful people with the capacity for greatness. It’s complicated.
Here in southern Minnesota, we have had the “luxury” of blissful ignorance to race issues that have bedeviled much of our country. It’s been a century and a half since the native people were routed and put on to reservations of not their choice. Their primary offense was being in the way of white peoples’ plans for this continent. That story is buried in early chapters of Minnesota history books and mostly disregarded now.
In my lifetime, our overwhelming whiteness has been altered by a flow of Hispanic families. At first, they were migrant workers who came seasonally to work in fields. That shifted to all types of jobs in a couple generations. Now, the economy of southern Minnesota is absolutely dependent on these relatively new arrivals.
I still hear Hispanic people referred to as “those Mexicans.” in unfriendly tones. The good news is you can go to playgrounds around here and see kids with German and Guatemalan heritage playing together. It’s a reminder that kids don’t see skin color; they only learn that from us adults.
For large parts of our nation, there has been no “luxury” of ignorance in race matters. Half a million Africans were brought to the United States as slaves. This, despite that nettlesome Declaration of Independence that states, “All men are created equal.” Black men were understood to be something, but not the “men” that Thomas Jefferson wrote about in 1776. That seems as if it would take serious mental strain to conclude that. But tremendous wealth created with free labor eased that.
Progress would have been made without Humphrey’s speech on a hot summer day in Philadelphia 75 years ago, but likely slower. I never met Humphrey. My young adult years just missed him. There are pictures of him at the Orchid Inn in Sleepy Eye, so it was close.
My parents seldom talked politics. When you have cows, crops, and kids to raise, there’s not time to dawdle on that. I do remember them joking about how long-winded Humphrey was. In a lengthy career as a Senator and Vice President, he certainly had opportunities to be such.
I was with them at a café in Switzerland in January 1978. They had come to visit after I ended a college semester abroad. It was a great leap for two farm people who had not often been out of Brown County.
We were having breakfast, when someone who recognized us as Americans came over and asked if we had heard Hubert Humphrey died. We hadn’t. I was surprised that my parents became quite reverential. In that moment, the end of a significant life in our nation’s history, there was quiet respect.
