TRUE BELIEVER: Hubert Humphrey’s Quest for a More Just America, by James Traub
ILLIBERAL AMERICA: A History, by Steven Hahn
The most successful progressive movements in American history tend to have a middlebrow quality. They are often started by intellectuals and political radicals, but they win converts — and victories — by appealing to conventional values like religious faith and patriotism.
The suffragists of the late 1800s often wore red, white and blue sashes. The early labor movement and civil rights movement both flew American flags. The gay rights movement demanded access to two conservative institutions: the military and marriage. As the historian Nelson Lichtenstein has written, “All of America’s great reform movements, from the crusade against slavery onward, have defined themselves as champions of a moral and patriotic nationalism, which they counterpoised to the parochial and selfish elites who stood athwart their vision of a virtuous society.”
Hubert Horatio Humphrey Jr. had an almost ideal background to lead such a movement. He was born in 1911 in South Dakota to a mother who was a fervent Lutheran and a father who was a freethinking Populist. When Hubert was 11, the family lost its home to foreclosure. From the beginning of his political career, he identified with the underdog and saw politics as a means to deliver justice. Yet, growing up in a Republican town reading the New Testament, he was steeped in the conservative mores of American life.
For Humphrey, these two sets of values did not need to conflict with each other. Each could strengthen the other. And political movements could succeed by treating skeptics not as enemies but as fellow citizens who might be persuaded to change their minds. “Dialogue and conversation,” Humphrey wrote, “meant having something to say but drawing out others; being passionately concerned with the people and the issues but tempering that passion with respect for those who thought differently.”
James Traub, a veteran journalist, has written a brisk, engaging biography of Humphrey with an urgent underlying message for today’s liberals. “Humphrey never lost his faith in politics, in compromise and, above all, in the fundamental goodness of America,” Traub writes. The opposite approach — denunciations of America, harsh judgments of its masses and insistences on purity — undermined the left in Humphrey’s day and threatens to do so again today.
The distinction is especially important when the American right drifts toward authoritarianism, as it periodically has. As Steven Hahn, a historian at New York University, explains in “Illiberal America,” these phases have been more common than many people realize. Hahn chronicles hundreds of years in American life, lingering over peaks of authoritarianism, from the burned effigies of Pope’s Day celebrations in the colonial era to the xenophobia of Donald Trump three centuries later.
Hahn argues that American illiberalism is not a mere reaction to a dominant tradition of freedom and individual rights but a philosophy that has long competed for primacy. He asks us to imagine liberalism as “a current that was often entangled with illiberalisms from which it could rarely free itself.”
This country’s liberal tradition is certainly strong. It explains the democratic radicalism of the American Revolution, the relative openness of the U.S. immigration system in the early 19th century and the inclusiveness of the nation’s public education system in the early 20th century.
But our illiberal tradition is also long, encompassing slavery, the ethnic cleansing of Native peoples, anti-Catholicism, antisemitism, anti-Mormonism and Jim Crow. “Hate, anger, revenge, retribution are among the oldest of ideas,” as President Biden recently put it in his State of the Union address. The common strands of American illiberalism, in Hahn’s telling, include elite rule, ethnocentrism, assigned hierarchies and restricted political participation. His book makes an important case for vigilance in the face of extremism and warns against telling the history of the United States as one of inevitable progress.
The figure at the intersection of Hahn’s and Traub’s books is George Wallace, the segregationist Alabama governor who ran for president in the 1960s and ’70s. Humphrey turned himself into a national figure by setting himself against politicians like Wallace at the 1948 Democratic National Convention. Humphrey, then the 37-year-old mayor of Minneapolis, led the effort to add a civil rights plank to the party platform.
His goal was gloriously idealistic, but his methods were ruthlessly pragmatic. He focused his efforts not on the progressive delegates who were already on his side but on the Northern moderates who would determine the outcome, explaining that Black voters could swing upcoming elections. The civil rights plank passed narrowly, and Harry Truman won an upset presidential victory a few months later, thanks in part to Black residents in Ohio and Illinois.
Wallace spent the ensuing years defending segregation by claiming to protect individual liberty against the overreach of a bullying federal government. In reality, Hahn writes, this was a call for authoritarianism at the state level; Wallace was an illiberal wolf in liberal sheep’s clothing.
By the late 1960s, Wallace had become the country’s pre-eminent illiberal, competing for support in a fracturing party with Humphrey, the pre-eminent liberal. Humphrey became the foremost champion of civil rights in the Senate, after winning a seat in 1948. He managed both the 1964 and 1965 civil rights bills (the latter as vice president to Lyndon Johnson), and helped pass them by portraying civil rights as common decency and its opponents as extremists out of step with American ideals. He compromised when necessary, but as little as possible. Humphrey, Traub makes clear, preferred partial victories to glorious defeats.
The tragedy of Humphrey’s career is that he drifted from realpolitik at the apex of his influence. In 1968, Humphrey ran as the Democratic presidential nominee against Wallace, now an independent, and the Republican candidate Richard Nixon. The growing unpopularity of the Vietnam War meant the presidential campaign would always have been difficult for Humphrey. Yet Vietnam was not Humphrey’s biggest problem, because many Americans still supported some version of the war. His biggest problem was the sense that the country was coming apart, with assassinations, rising crime and antiwar protests.
Traub suggests that Humphrey would have had a better chance at victory, if only he had followed his usual approach of framing progressive ideals in ways that the middle could endorse. Several aides warned Humphrey that voters saw him as part of an out-of-touch, permissive liberalism and urged him to take seriously the worries about law and order. They believed that he could do so without pandering to racism. As one Humphrey adviser noted, both Black and white voters were unhappy about crime.
But Humphrey made limited attempts to heed their advice. He preferred to talk about social justice and expansions of Johnson’s Great Society agenda. Nixon, who made crime central to his campaign, won the election.
Humphrey, an irrepressible optimist, ran for the Senate two years later, and he made clear that he understood his 1968 errors. In 1970, he again tried to appeal to the political center. He expressed sympathy for protesters frustrated with the war as well as Americans turned off by flag burning. He talked more forcibly about law and order, decrying both “Black extremists with guns and white extremists with sheets and guns,” and earned his seat.
This pragmatic approach can often feel unsatisfying to liberals. Rather than denouncing all Americans who are sometimes drawn to illiberal views, it seeks to respect them and win some of them over. But that respect is crucial to coalition building, as Humphrey knew. “We must create a climate of identity of interest between the needs, the hopes and fears of the minorities,” he said, “and the needs and hopes and fears of the majority.”
TRUE BELIEVER: Hubert Humphrey’s Quest for a More Just America | By James Traub | Basic Books | 518 pp. | $35
ILLIBERAL AMERICA: A History | By Steven Hahn | Norton | 447 pp. | $35
