Hubert Humphrey and Civil Rights: Samuel G. Freedman
September 7th, 2023
“Even though Humphrey adored FDR, he also could identify the big moral gap in the New Deal coalition and in the New Deal programs.”
Samuel G. Freedman is an award-winning professor of journalism at Columbia University and author of Into the Bright Sunshine: Young Hubert Humphrey and the Fight for Civil Rights. We dive into Humphrey’s activism in the proto civil rights movement and his role to include civil rights in Democratic Party platform in 1948.
Hubert Humphrey was a coalition builder. After his decisive win for mayor of Minneapolis, he put together a civil rights and human rights agenda that put Minneapolis on the national map as an example of what was best in America. He also engaged in deep work to change public attitudes. Humphrey understood as mayor that electing people to the council is crucial to passing laws. Pay attention to every race on the ballot!
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Credits:
Host: Mila Atmos
Guest: Samuel G. Freedman
Executive Producer: Mila Atmos
Producers: Zack Travis
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Samuel G Freedman Transcript
Mila Atmos: [00:00:04] Welcome to Future Hindsight, a podcast that takes big ideas about civic life and democracy and turns them into action items for you and me. I'm Mila Atmos. We love to celebrate and showcase citizen changemakers to inspire you, our listeners. Today we're inspired by a citizen changemaker of our past. Hubert Humphrey is best known for being Lyndon B Johnson's vice president, but we don't talk much about his ardent fight for civil rights. In fact, he was the key person in holding Truman's feet to the fire to embrace civil rights in his 1948 re-election campaign platform. Here are his words at the Democratic National Convention.
Hubert Humphrey: [00:00:54] My friends, to those who say that we are rushing this issue of civil rights, I say to them, we are 172 years late. [Cheering] To those who say, to those who say that this civil rights program is an infringement on states rights, I say this: The time has arrived in America for the Democratic Party to get out of the shadows of states' rights and to walk forthrightly into the bright sunshine of human rights! [Cheering] People. People, human beings. This is the issue of the 20th century. People of all kinds, all sorts of people. And these people are looking to America for leadership and they're looking to America for precept and example.
Mila Atmos: [00:01:56] We're always on the lookout to sharpen our practice of democracy. So we're joined by Sam Freedman to dive into Humphrey's example to inform our civic action.
Samuel G. Freedman is an award-winning professor of journalism at Columbia University, columnist. And author of nine acclaimed books. His most recent is Into the Bright Sunshine: Young Hubert Humphrey and the Fight for Civil Rights.
Welcome, Sam. Thank you for joining us.
Samuel Freedman: [00:02:24] Thank you so much for having me. It's a real honor to be with you.
Mila Atmos: [00:02:29] I just mentioned in the intro that Hubert Humphrey is probably most remembered as VP under LBJ, but that is very far from a complete picture. Remind us who he was.
Samuel Freedman: [00:02:41] Well, Hubert Humphrey had a very long career in public life, starting as mayor of Minneapolis, then multiple terms in the US Senate, then becoming Lyndon Johnson's vice president from 1964 to 68, and then running and narrowly losing to Richard Nixon for the presidency in 1968. Humphrey returned to the Senate in 1970 and died while in office in early 1978.
Mila Atmos: [00:03:10] So why did you write this particular book about Humphrey and his early years and the way he grew up, his early embrace of civil rights, and running for mayor of Minneapolis?
Samuel Freedman: [00:03:25] There are two different reasons I wanted to write this book. One is that I felt that there is a chapter in civil rights history in general that's often overlooked by historians. We tend to tell the civil rights story with its starting in the mid 1950s with the Brown versus Board of Education decision outlawing school segregation in 1954, and with Dr. Martin Luther King leading the Montgomery bus boycott in 1955. But there was an immense amount of civil rights activity of real consequence throughout the 1940s. And the other reason I wanted to write the book, besides filling that gap, was to address the misapprehension about Hubert Humphrey. Because for a lot of us, if we know about Humphrey at all, we think of the later Humphrey, whose liberal reputation was damaged, a self-inflicted wound by his support of the Vietnam War; who lost to Richard Nixon for the presidency in 1968; who looked frenetic and kind of pathetic in 1972, running and failing to get the Democratic Party's nomination against George McGovern; and that Humphrey was an object of scorn and of ridicule. And that's the image that has tended to last. Whereas this incredible, idealistic, principled, brave, valiant Humphrey of the earlier part of his career, someone who was inextricably bound up with the civil rights activity of the 1940s, and then of course, beyond that as well. That Humphrey is unknown. And I wanted to fill that gap and also plug in that Humphrey, along with as many allies in the proto civil rights movement, what I sometimes call the lowercase civil rights movement of the 1940s, before we get to the proper noun civil rights movement of the 50s and 60s.
Mila Atmos: [00:05:15] Well, it's a very compelling story and it really shows us how idealistic Hubert Humphrey was. He was elected mayor of Minneapolis in 1945, and it was at the war's end, at the end of World War II. And there were real questions at that time, which is something I didn't know until I read your book, about what American democracy stood for. America just fought a war against fascists in Europe, against the Nazis in Germany, but also fascists all around. And yet the army was still segregated and Jewish and Black citizens were harassed, beaten, or even killed here at home in the United States. So when we think about that time, it's actually a surprise that there was a question of whether civil rights were a core pillar of democracy. And I feel like I should add here, the way that people thought about civil rights at the time is that they understood it to be anti lynching, anti poll-taxes and anti segregation, and in favor of equal employment opportunities. So with that backdrop, how did Humphrey win the mayoral election in 1945?
Samuel Freedman: [00:06:25] Well, you frame it so well, Mila, and I want to just add a couple of points to it. The war against fascism, which was a war against different forms of racial and religious supremacy, implicitly and explicitly raised the question of what are we going to do about these toxins on the American home front? The black soldiers who went to war had a great phrase for it. They called it Double V, meaning one victory over fascism abroad and then the victory over Jim Crow at home. And the Jewish GIs who fought in that war didn't have a single phrase as evocative as Double V, but they absolutely had the same idea that if we're fighting to stop Hitler from killing all of our people in Europe, what are we going to do about the elements of anti-Semitism in the United States? And the question that was posed by Black GIs and Jewish GIs was adopted by some of their allies on the home front. And it was a very pressing question, and it informed a lot of the civil rights activity and human rights activity of the 1940s. The other thing that's vital to understand, leading into Humphrey's emergence into public life, is that liberalism of the FDR era, of the New Deal era was all about economic inequality and about issues of economic class. And it's not that those issues don't matter. They very much do matter. But particularly on the matter of American racism, Franklin Roosevelt deliberately dodged that issue, even though actually his own wife, First Lady Eleanor Roosevelt, was a tremendous civil rights advocate and always would be. But Roosevelt, that is Franklin, made this calculation that he needed the votes of the southern wing of the Democratic Party, which at that point was totally devoted to Jim Crow and segregation. He needed their votes on Election Day to get the electoral votes
to become president. He needed the votes of their senators and representatives in Congress to get his New Deal programs through, and in return for all those votes, FDR let certain New Deal programs be written in such a way to effectively exclude most Blacks in the South and let programs be administered by local authorities in the South who administered them to totally racially unequal way. And that was the devil's bargain that Hubert Humphrey, among others, found absolutely intolerable. Even though Humphrey adored FDR, he also could identify the big moral gap in the New Deal Coalition and in the New Deal programs. And the first place where Humphrey really tests this out is in Minneapolis now. It may seem odd in a couple of ways to listeners today to think of Minneapolis being this testing ground for civil rights and human rights. First of all, you know, in spite of the murder of George Floyd. Minneapolis is still perceived to be a very Blue city. It votes overwhelmingly liberally in elections. But it was not always that way by any means. And number two, Minneapolis even now, but certainly even more back in the 1940s, was the city in which the black and Jewish populations were extremely small, maybe cumulatively 3% of the entire city's population. So these were populations that were easy to oppress because they didn't have a critical mass politically. They didn't have politicians who represented their interests. They didn't have enough votes to elect their own politicians. And Minneapolis was a city that actually at that time was notorious for its amount of anti-Semitism and for its racism as well. But a lot of the liberals in Minneapolis would excuse it away, partly because they adopted that New Deal economic class view of what liberalism is and ignored, addressing issues of racial and religious bigotry head on. And also because there was a complacency in the mainstream in Minneapolis that said only the real great unwashed, only the benighted handful of people in this fair city would support these various groups, including pro-Nazi groups like the Silver Shirts that were campaigning publicly for different forms of racial and religious oppression. And so there was a sense of excusing it away. And Humphrey took all of that on, head on, when he ran for mayor. He did something that had never been done in Minneapolis, which was to run a campaign for mayor on the basis of a civil rights and human rights agenda, even though numerically it seemed really illogical. But he was able to put together a coalition, something he excelled at with those Black and Jewish votes. Also with a large number of votes from returning war veterans who understood that idea of Double V and supported it, and also with some of the young intellectual people around the University of Minnesota. And somehow he was able to cobble together the votes to win a fairly decisive election as mayor and then to begin putting together a civil rights and human
rights agenda that put Minneapolis on the national map as an example, not of what was worst in America, but what was best.
Mila Atmos: [00:11:55] Yeah, that was very impressive what he tried to do. I mean, he was only a mayor for three years, but he was really committed to changing the culture of bigotry in Minneapolis. And he really wanted to mainstream civil rights in American politics as the American way, and model it in the city. So how did he set out to achieve that and what was most successful in his tenure as mayor?
Samuel Freedman: [00:12:19] Humphrey understood a couple of really key elements to pushing through a civil rights agenda. He knew that you needed both changes of hearts and minds, but also pragmatic legislation. You can't have one without the other. And in fact, when he went about trying to change hearts and minds, he did it in a fairly bold way. He brought in to this almost entirely white city, two Black sociologists from an HBCU, Fisk University in Nashville, to lead a self-survey, as they called it, to get all these volunteers, many of them young women homemakers, to go around and do surveys of the population of Minneapolis of different subsets like religious leaders, educators, corporate leaders, labor leaders, and to actually compile a database of how entrenched racism and anti-Semitism and also biases against Japanese Americans and Indigenous populations were. And to prove to Minneapolis it had a problem. When this survey was done, you couldn't deny that this was a city with a problem. And Humphrey used that reality, that epiphany, that revelation as leverage to build a citizens committee, a volunteer committee, to basically circumvent a city council which wasn't interested in legislation on these matters and build up public opinion to pass laws, the most important of which was one of the most hard hitting laws against employment discrimination in the entire United States. Decades later, when Humphrey was vice president, he and Lyndon Johnson would create the Equal Employment Opportunities Commission, that just did on a national level what Humphrey had done in Minneapolis in the mid-1940s. Humphrey was also in the process of pushing through a law banning restrictive covenants in housing -- that is language in real estate deals that would say you can't sell to a Jew or to a Black or to a Japanese American or to a Catholic and so forth. And he was in the process of getting that law passed through when the Supreme Court ended up outlawing it nationally anyway. But it was the combination of both of those elements: changing attitudes, but also changing laws that really typified his agenda. And the other thing he was very adroit with is Humphrey took people who might
have been antagonists on other issues, people from labor and people from corporate offices, people from different religious streams, brought them all together in these citizens committees that he had and basically said, "Let's work together on the one thing we agree about, which is the civil rights and human rights agenda. Let's put aside for the moment how much we disagree on on other issues." And that was a very effective strategy because it enabled him, again, to get a critical mass of public support for laws that no one would have ever thought Minneapolis would enact and that, in fact, hardly any cities in the country were willing to enact.
Mila Atmos: [00:15:34] Yeah, he was a real coalition builder. He talked to everybody. He left no stone unturned and he was willing to cobble together even. Small strains of agreement just to get everybody to the table and start a conversation. That was really impressive.
Samuel Freedman: [00:15:53] Exactly.
Mila Atmos: [00:15:56] We're taking a short break to share about one of my favorite fellow democracy group podcasts, Democracy Works. And when we come back, we'll talk about Hubert Humphrey's faith and how it informed and fueled his activism for civil rights. But first.
What does it mean to live in a democracy? It's a big question and one that the Democracy Works podcast has spent the past three years examining over more than 150 episodes. Tune in to Democracy Works for conversations on big picture topics like neoliberalism and conspiracy theories, as well as deep dives on issues like gerrymandering and ranked choice voting. Some of the show's previous guests include Anne Applebaum, Jonathan Haidt, and even Wynton Marsalis. Democracy Works is produced by the McCourtney Institute for Democracy at Penn State and WPSU, Central Pennsylvania's NPR station. Search for Democracy Works in your podcast app and subscribe to receive new episodes every Monday morning.
And now let's return to my conversation with Sam Freedman.
Mila Atmos: [00:17:09] One thing that also struck me was his unabated enthusiasm. It was the kind of thing where he just was, you know, an Energizer bunny for civil rights
and for people. He just cared so much. And I think it was really informed by what you call his muscular Christianity. And I thought that was also very interesting in light of the fact that churches then, as now, are often places where you learn to hate other people. And so tell us a little bit about his Christianity, the belief that there was nothing weak about being good and that there are people like him, practicing Christianity in the way that he did.
Samuel Freedman: [00:17:54] You're so right to identify his religious life as a big part of what informed his public life and muscular Christianity was one part of it. Muscular Christianity was an idea that was actually involved in forming things like the Y and YWCAs. And it was an idea that being Christian wasn't being physically weak or being a whimpering nerd. And actually it's become a somewhat problematic concept over the years because it's also been adopted by a lot of right wing Christianity over the years as well. The most important thing Humphrey was exposed to was a movement called the Social Gospel and Protestant religion. And Humphrey grew up as a Methodist. Protestant religion in the early 20th century, when he was coming of age, was very much about trying to be individually pure, to be sexually chaste, except when having children, not to dance, not to drink. And the goal of this was that you would go to heaven in the afterlife. And it was not interested particularly in the problems of this world, except to some extent getting involved in the prohibition of alcohol, because that was considered a sin. And the social gospel Protestants said we should be equally worried about life on Earth as we are about getting into heaven. We have to make, and this was their term, the kingdom of God on Earth. They felt that you needed to make lived life in this world more godly by making it more ethical, more principled, more just. And that's what Humphrey was very, very affected by. And the social gospel Protestants were very involved in labor rights and union rights and interracial relationships. And they really created an alternative form of being Protestant to the fundamentalist and evangelical forms of Protestantism that, at a minimum, were very involved in the afterlife and also often carried very, very deep, sordid strains of nativism and racism and white supremacy as part of their sense of who a good Christian was. And so Humphrey is really informed by the social gospel and the other religious movement that affects him is by the time you get into the World War II years and immediately after, there's a movement towards interfaith collaboration that hasn't happened before. And a lot of it is a result of this idea that the different religious groups in America have to collaborate for this fight against Nazism. And it was sort of convenient that Nazism was a secular, in
effect, a de facto religion, but its own kind of form of paganism, we might say. And so this concept we now hear called the Judeo-Christian tradition. That was no tradition. That was something that was invented during World War II for morale purposes, and to create a unified fighting force of young men and women who had come from these different and sometimes adversarial religious backgrounds and groups on the homefront, like the National Conference of Christians and Jews, were very involved in bringing liberal Protestants, liberal Jews, liberal Catholics, Black Protestants together to work on social issues and just to work even on getting to know one another. And Humphrey was very, very absorbed in that work during the 1940s as well. So those two movements, the social gospel and and the interfaith movement are formative for him. And what it adds up to is that he is able in a way that I think we need to learn from today, or relearn, to address political issues with the language of faith. And he does not abdicate faith to people who were politically conservative or reactionary or extremist. He understands that in Scripture there's a tremendous amount of support for social justice as well. And he talks often in those terms and particularly drew a lot on the social justice prophets of what Christians would call the Old Testament, what Jews would call the the Tanakh. So these prophets like Isaiah and Micah and Amos and Ezekiel, Jeremiah, Isaiah, the same prophets who Martin Luther King quotes from so often in his sermons. These are prophets who Humphrey is citing in some of his speeches, and also when he's talking about why the United States has to address racism and address anti- Semitism, he uses the language of sin. He says this is a sin that we've got to deal with. He's using explicitly religious language, this understanding of atonement as part of a moral process. And it just is tremendously effective because he feels it deeply.
Mila Atmos: [00:23:11] Yeah. You really feel when you quote him in the book that he's really speaking from the heart and it's very touching. And it's so powerful precisely because it is coming from the heart. So he championed civil rights in his tenure as mayor, which seems from today's point of view, really early. But as we heard in his speech, and also from what we just discussed, that it was 172 years late. It seems a little unusual. How did he come to give that speech at the Democratic Party convention and how did it change the trajectory of the party, the Democratic Party?
Samuel Freedman: [00:23:50] Well, heading into the 1948 convention, everyone knew in the Democratic Party that civil rights was going to be the most important and the most and the most volatile issue. And you basically had kind of four camps around that issue.
One was Harry Truman, the incumbent president, who was going to be nominated to run for election again to a full term in 1948. Truman, although he had some real sympathies for civil rights, had decided he wanted to dodge the issue as FDR had dodged it. He wanted a platform plank to run on that would be vague and equivocal and fuzzy, and that would allow the southern segregationist wing of the party to say, "okay, this allows us to keep practicing what we call states rights," which means the right of Southern states to have a completely segregated society. And that was Truman's desire. Just kick that particular can down the road. Then a second camp at the convention were the Southern segregationists who were saying, if there's any language on civil rights in this platform, we're going to walk out of the convention and we're going to form our own party, and we're going to try to win some of the southern states instead of the Democrats winning them. And their hope -- And this is eerily relevant to what we saw in 2020 in this country -- their hope was that neither Truman nor his Republican opponent, Tom Dewey, would get a majority of electoral votes and the election would be decided in the House of Representatives, and the Democrats and Republicans would have to go on bent knee to the segregationist Dixiecrats and offer to sanctify segregation in order to get those Dixiecrat votes to become president. Then the third camp was the mass movement being led by the great labor and civil rights leader, A. Philip Randolph, who in the run up to the convention and then literally outside the convention hall, is leading a protest movement calling for Black American men of draft age to refuse to register for the draft, or to refuse to serve in the military, until Harry Truman desegregates it. And then the last of the four camps is Humphrey and this group of liberals who say no matter what Truman doesn't want, no matter what threats the Dixiecrats are making, we are going to move forward with a real civil rights plank for the first time for this party. And as you said earlier, it included elements like fair employment practices, laws with teeth in them, desegregating the military, outlawing the poll tax, outlawing lynching, and also extending these guarantees not only on the basis of race, but also religion and creed. So it very much also touched on anti-Semitism and what was still a fair amount of anti-Catholicism in this country. Humphrey -- because he's a great public speaker and because he's begun to get this national reputation based on his work in Minneapolis -- is given the task of making a speech to all of the delegates to try to persuade them to vote against what Harry Truman himself wants in the platform. And it's also really important, and I think very fortifying for your listeners who are thinking about what's my role in public life, to think about who Hubert Humphrey was at that time. This guy is just 37 years old. He's only been in public office
for three years in his entire life because his college education was interrupted for six years by the Great Depression. He's less than a decade from getting his bachelor's degree, and here he is addressing the convention, addressing 70 million people on radio or television at an early, early point in his career, and doing it when explicitly Truman's floor leaders at the convention have said to him, "If you give this speech, your career is over." Truman, in his diary, refers to Humphrey and Humphrey's allies as crackpots. So this is a gigantic risk. Humphrey is on a mission, and in one way, it's a mission to bring about civil rights movement and progress. But he's also worried about whether, politically speaking, it's a suicide mission.
Mila Atmos: [00:28:20] That's right. Well. It's clear that Truman wanted to keep the Dixiecrats in the coalition to win in 1948. But following Humphrey's speech and his electoral victory. It's clear that Democrats don't need southern segregationist voters and that civil rights is, in fact, a winning issue. So when we think about being more divided today than ever today, this is actually an example that shows us that we aren't; that we were very much divided then, too. So it seems to me that the answer today is the same answer as it was then, is to lean more into civil rights. So what are the forgotten lessons of Humphrey's fight for civil rights from those early days?
Samuel Freedman: [00:29:05] You're absolutely right about the lessons. I think one one of the lessons also is that we can't ever take progress for granted, that on the one hand, we should never give in to that pessimistic, cynical view that no progress has been made. If you look at what the condition of life was for American Blacks and American Jews heading into 1948, it was far worse in every demonstrable and measurable way than it is now. So we have to understand that progress has been made, including the laws that Humphrey and Johnson and Martin Luther King collaborated to see enacted in the mid 1960s. On the other hand, the lesson is that no victory is a permanent victory and that victories for progress, whether it was reconstruction, whether it was allowing mass immigration from Eastern and Southern Europe, whether it was Brown versus Board of Ed and the first wave of civil rights activity in the 50s. All of these times of progress lead to backlash. There's always a pushback, and that means that the next battle still has to be fought. And that's the battle that we're in now. And also our understanding of human rights continues to expand. The idea of gay rights was nowhere on the political map in 1948. I think there are certainly as many queer Americans percentage wise, then as now. But they were closeted. They
lived in in terror of all sorts of discrimination and physical attack and so on. Well, now we're in a period when gay rights and even specifically trans rights are very much the cutting edge. Now, we're in a moment when we're fighting to keep an accurate telling of American history taught in schools, when we're making sure books aren't banned. And again, these were battles we thought were forever won, some of them, but they're not forever won. And I think Humphrey's example, as you say, is to fight them with vigor, with passion, to understand that these are fights that require both idealism, but also pragmatism, that you have to try to win hearts and minds, but you also have to figure out what legislatively you want to enact and how you can build a coalition to enact it. For instance, the progress we saw on marriage equality is a good example of how you accomplish that. There is work done state by state by state, some of it on hearts and minds, some of it passing state laws, some of it taking cases to state supreme courts. And eventually it created a critical mass that the Supreme Court at that time couldn't ignore. Now, it doesn't mean that we're not going to have to fight that battle again with the current court, but I think it's a good example of Humphrey-ism, if we want to use that term, being enacted in our present day.
Mila Atmos: [00:31:58] So yeah, that's a perfect example because like you said, they did that work, the marriage equality work very similarly to the kind of work he did in Minneapolis, which is to change hearts and minds locally and then try and make it generalize over the country overall. Like you said, right now, feels like hope is really thin in American politics. And we have to be in this in the long haul. And I wanted to mention here that when Hubert Humphrey was mayor, the America First Party was newly formed and its founder, Gerald L.K. Smith, was a thorn in Humphrey's side in Minneapolis. I think he would not be surprised that today we are living through a resurgence of open nativism. And when it comes to the nativism, what do you think Humphrey would do today?
Samuel Freedman: [00:32:50] Well, I certainly know what side Humphrey would be on, and he certainly would recognize, you know, in the persons of people like Donald Trump and Ron DeSantis, the modern reincarnations of Gerald L.K. Smith. I think that what Humphrey would be doing would be the types of things he always did, appealing to the better angels of American society. He would be thinking of what's a practical political program and who can I get to to support this program? And something else he lived out and understood is that I think a lot of times people -- and I'm probably as guilty of this as
anyone who are active on the progressive side of politics -- we get very motivated by presidential races or maybe a Senate or gubernatorial races. We're very attracted to the top of the ballot. And of course, there are these exhilarating, galvanizing moments of electing a black American for the first time of coming together to make sure Donald Trump doesn't return to office in 2020. But we tend to forget about the rest of the ballot all too often. And Humphrey came out of very local politics. He started with his father being, you know, a town councilman in a town of 500 people in the Dakotas. And when Hubert Humphrey first won for mayor in 1945 on his ticket was an African American woman named Nellie Stone, who was running for the seat on the library board in Minneapolis. And that wasn't seen as, "oh, this is nothing." It was celebrated as a breakthrough. She was the first Black person ever elected to citywide office in Minneapolis. And what Humphrey understood as mayor is that you also had to elect people to the council that you can't just, as mayor, snap your fingers and make things happen. And I think we all need to remember if we're trying to hold on to the gains we've made and push further into additional gains, especially when we're looking at school boards getting taken over, for instance, that's where we have to be involved. Early in my newspaper reporting career, I'm talking 40 years ago now, covered education in the suburbs of Chicago. And it was routine that when Board of Ed elections happened, no more than 20% of the eligible voters came out. Sometimes it would be less than ten. And when you have that little involvement, then you're setting up the conditions in which a mobilized, radical extremist minority can take over your local school board, which is what we're seeing. And the answer to it is get the more enlightened and certainly majority part of the community to vote in these elections. We've had a hard lesson in what happens when, to use the Black idiom, when we sleep it. When we sleep a school board election or we sleep a state legislature election, we end up with book bannings, we end up with gerrymandering, and on and on and on. And it's much harder to undo the damage once it's done. So I think the lesson, and Humphrey very much lived this out, is pay attention to every race on the ballot. And also these are races where someone who hasn't been particularly politically active before can have an effect, can run for an office or can run a campaign or can leaflet and do the retail politics that particularly at these very local levels, matters tremendously.
Mila Atmos: [00:36:19] Oh, yeah, 100%. I mean, one of the things that I think surprised me was to read that the low voter turnout then is the same as it is today. Specifically, I'm thinking about here the mayoral election in New York City, which also had something
like 21% turnout. And of course, when it comes to school boards, always the turnout is really thin. If you don't have kids in school, I think you're not that interested. Right. But the reality is that actually, most parents in school have a majoritarian view, which is to say they're not pro book banning by and large, you know. They don't have often the capacity, the bandwidth if they're working two jobs or if the election is at a time that's not convenient for them to show up and cast a vote.
Samuel Freedman: [00:37:06] Right. I mean, these things even have material consequences. Why do people move to certain suburbs? They move there because the quality of the public school system, if people feel like the public schools have been hijacked and turned into a right wing censorship and indoctrination project, they're not going to want to move there. That's going to affect everybody's property values in town. So it's the same thing if you're in a place where you feel like your child who's gay or biracial or, you know, whatever it is that is now on the outs with the far right, won't feel at home in school, won't be able to take a book out from the library about his or her or their life. You're not going to move there. You may even leave there. I know just from my own circle of friends, people I know in states like Texas and Florida with school- aged kids who are seriously considering pulling up stakes for that reason. And when it happens on a large scale, it has material effects. It has material effects. When businesses don't want to go into what they see as a hostile political climate in a city or a county or a state. And so even if we're not the people whose kids are in school, if we care about the vitality and the prosperity of the communities we live in, then it behooves us to vote in these local races and not just, you know, the marquee race for president.
Mila Atmos: [00:38:30] Right. Right. Since we're talking about civil rights and equality, what are two things an everyday person could be doing to advance equality in our society today, especially in light of having the Dobbs decision overturning women's rights to abortion and the failure of the John Lewis Voting Rights Act. Right. And and things that really sound like they should pass, you know, things that seem common sense to most Americans.
Samuel Freedman: [00:39:03] I agree. I mean, I hate to sound like the proverbial broken record, but it is about the importance of electing officials and mobilizing and organizing and both bringing pressure from the outside and having elected officials on the inside. There's no substitute for it. It's good when the court rules our way, like in
marriage equality. But you can't always count on having a Supreme Court that's going to issue a ruling the way you'd like it ruled. You don't have control. Once people are on the court, they're there for life. What you do have control over is your state legislator who's on your local school board, who's the senator, who's the representative from your district. And particularly when the political balance in Congress is so nearly equal, flipping a couple of seats does make a gigantic difference. And so that cries out for involvement. And there's also absolutely a role for mass movements, too, because one thing when Hubert Humphrey carried the day and got the Democratic Party to endorse civil rights in 1948, he understood that it involved him being Mr. Inside and A. Philip Randolph with his protest movement being Mr. Outside. They each needed the other. And after Humphrey won on that issue, he exchanged letters with some of Philip Randolph's close associates in Randolph's union, the Brotherhood of Sleeping Car Porters. Each of them saying to the other, I couldn't have done it without you, that you needed the threat of draft resistance and you needed the persuasion on the inside. And it's been that way on really every issue that we've made progress on. I think you've seen, particularly at the voting booth, a mass movement in response to the Dobbs ruling and to stripping away a constitutional right to abortion that had been there for 50 years. There's been a righteous backlash against that ruling, and that's people getting mobilized and also acting on their mobilization. And it needs to be true on a variety of issues like book bans. They're harder to undo once they happen. We need to be out in front defending free inquiry, defending the rights of librarians and teachers before books are being taken away and curricula are being written by political commissars.
Mila Atmos: [00:41:34] Well said. So reading your book, I felt like Hubert Humphrey was a uniquely courageous person and really was unafraid to to state that inequality, bigotry, lack of access to opportunity were simply incompatible with democracy. So having just published this book and looked at our history, as you're thinking about the future, what makes you hopeful?
Samuel Freedman: [00:42:04] We've been through tougher times before. This moment feels bleak. I feel that bleakness myself. But my hope is that we have all these examples in American history of idealists who put it on the line and figured out pragmatic ways to enact their idealism. We did have reconstruction. We did have open immigration to people who nativists considered, you know, less than fully human. We did have the triumphs in the 1940s and 50s and 60s of civil rights. We did elect Barack
Obama. We did have marriage equality enacted by the court. You have to draw strength from the fact that we've had wins and we can have more wins and that helps give us the gasoline in the tank that we need because cynicism and despair are the friends of our political enemies. What they want is for us to feel hopeless. What they want is for us to feel that nothing matters. And when we get up off the floor, then we set ourselves up to have our own victory. I mean, that's why the Women's March in January 2017 was so important to the politics of this country at a moment when a lot of us felt absolutely laid low and didn't know what country we were living in, didn't recognize what America now seemed to be. Instead of giving in to paralysis, we got up en masse thanks to the women who formed that march and said, "We are not dead yet."
Mila Atmos: [00:43:50] Hear. Hear. Thank you very much, Sam, for joining us on Future Hindsight. Thank you so much for your time and for writing this beautiful book about Hubert Humphrey.
Samuel Freedman: [00:44:00] Thank you so much for having me. It was a real pleasure.
Mila Atmos: [00:44:04] Samuel G. Freedman is an award-winning professor of journalism at Columbia University, a columnist, and author of Into the Bright Sunshine: Young Hubert Humphrey and the Fight for Civil Rights.
Next week on Future Hindsight, we're joined by Yoni Landau. He's the CEO of Movement Labs and the founder of Contest Every Race.
Yoni Landau: [00:44:29] What we're trying to do is make it easy for someone to have an impactful volunteer experience. That's the important thing for the general public to know about Movement Labs, is we're trying to structure experiences that will maximize how you can contribute to stopping fascism.
Mila Atmos: [00:44:47] That's next time on Future Hindsight.
And before I go, first of all, thanks for listening. You must really like the show if you're still here. We have an ask of you. Could you rate us or leave a review on Apple Podcasts? It seems like a small thing, but it can make a huge difference for an
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This episode was produced by Zack Travis and me. Until next time, stay engaged. The Democracy Group: [00:45:25] This podcast is part of the Democracy Group.