Yesterday was Hubert Humphrey’s 100th birthday. In some ways, I think, he was the person who was most singularly resposnible for the creation of the modern Democratic Party – the party that was able to make Barack Obama president. Humphrey accomplished this with his stunning success in inserting the “civil rights plank” into the Party platform at the 1948 Philadelphia Convention.
Humphrey was an amazing public speaker. At Philadelphia, challenging Truman, the then mayor from Minneapolis most famously said: “To those who say, my friends, to those who say, that we are rushing this issue of civil rights, I say to them we are 172 years (too) late! To those who say, 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 shadow of states’ rights and walk forthrightly into the bright sunshine of human rights!”
The 20-year trajectory from Philadelphia in 1948, when he challenged the status quo and the establishment, to Chicago in 1968, when he represented the failures of a status quo he helped create as Johnson’s Vice President, was one of the most remarkable in modern American politics. He could have – should have – been president. But his acquiescence to the Kennedy/Johnson adventure in Vietnam destroyed him and nearly destroyed the Democratic Party. I would venture that the only thing that subsequently saved the party was Nixon’s self-immolation a few years later.
All the Democratic presidents that have followed: Carter, Clinton, and now Obama, are ideological inheritors of Humphrey’s legacy. The picture (borrowed from wikipedia, where I know there are no copyright issues in reproduction) shows Humphrey with Carter and, on the right, Jerry Brown.
