Here's Where It Gets Interesting - Hubert Humphrey and the Fight for Civil Rights with Samuel Freedman

Episode Date: August 18, 2023

Today, Sharon sits down with author, journalist, and educator, Samuel Freedman, to discuss a man who has arguably gotten too little credit in the Civil Rights Movement: former VP Hubert Humphrey. There would be no Civil Rights movement in the 1950s and 60s without the groundwork that was laid in the 1940s. The battles Humphrey faced overlap with many of the same battles being fought now: Against white supremacy, “America First” policies, and Christian Nationalism.  What inspired a very “vanilla guy” to care so deeply about these issues in the early 1900s, when it was not politically popular? What planted the seeds of his deep interior life and shaped the value system he had since childhood? In his book, “Into the Bright Sunshine,” Freedman shares unknown stories of what influenced Humphrey as an adolescent, and makes the case that Humphrey’s impact in the Civil Rights movement was pivotal in American history. Special thanks to our guest, Samuel Freedman, for joining us today. Host/Executive Producer: Sharon McMahon Guest: Samuel G. Freedman Audio Producer: Jenny Snyder Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information. To learn more about listener data and our privacy practices visit: https://www.audacyinc.com/privacy-policy Learn more about your ad choices. Visit https://podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Red One... We're coming at you. ...is the movie event of the holiday season. Santa Claus has been kidnapped? You're gonna help us find him. You can't trust this guy. He's on the list. Is that Naughty Lister? Naughty Lister?

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Let's save Christmas. There it is. Only in theaters November 15th. It's hockey season, and you can get anything you need delivered with Uber Eats. Well, almost, almost anything. So, no, you can't get an ice rink on Uber Eats. But iced tea, ice cream, or just plain old ice? Yes, we deliver those.

Goaltenders, no. But chicken tenders, yes. Because those are groceries, and we deliver those, friends. Welcome. Delighted to have you joining me today my guest is sam friedman and this was such a treat i think you're just gonna absolutely love this conversation we're talking about somebody maybe you've never heard of but without his efforts the civil rights movement of the 1950s and 60s would not have been possible. Hubert Humphrey. So let's dive in. I'm Sharon McMahon, and here's where it gets interesting. I am very excited to be chatting with Sam Friedman today.

Thank you so much for being here. It's an honor and a real pleasure to be with you, Sharon. Well, of course. You know, I saw your new book, Into the Bright Sunshine, on a release list, and I was like, that's interesting. What is that about? And then when I started reading about it, of course, I had to preorder it. Of course, I had to read it. It is about a person who has gotten, in my estimation, too little credit in the civil

rights movement, and of course, a Minnesotan. So first of all, let's talk about who was Hubert Humphrey. Yeah, I think people are divided into two camps these days about Hubert Humphrey. There are those of roughly my age and older, and I'm 67 now, whose memory of Humphrey is as this disgraced, reviled person towards the end of his career, the person who, as Lyndon Johnson's vice president, supported the Vietnam War, the person who narrowly lost the presidency to Richard Nixon, but also who got the nomination amid a Democratic convention in 1968 when the police rioted against anti-war protesters and journalists. And the person who ran against one of his own protege is George McGovern for the Democratic nomination in 1972, and just looked like frenetic and kind of pathetic and very much past his prime. And so that's the Humphrey who a lot of people, if they remember him at all, remember. And then there are many younger people

who were not alive at all when Humphrey, even as infants, when Humphrey was still alive. He died in 1978 and who don't have any recognition except maybe, you know, in a bar trivia contest that he had been LBJ's vice president. his name because it's on an airport in the Twin Cities. And they're like, I feel like I should know who that is. And they do a quick Google and they're like, okay, you know, that is literally the extent of their knowledge. I want to go back to the beginning though, because I found his, you know, younger years and this book really focuses on his younger career. I found his childhood really interesting. And I'm always focuses on his younger career. I found his childhood really interesting. And I'm always interested in what kind of circumstances make somebody who they are. I would love to hear you talk more about that. I'd love to talk about that. As you said, I deliberately wrote this book about the earlier Humphrey because I feel like actually the later

parts of his life are really well documented by writers. And the earlier part, when he's one of the most important leaders in the civil rights struggles of the 1940s, and those struggles in and of themselves don't get recognized enough. Often, we think that civil rights begins in the mid-50s with Brown versus the Board of Ed, and with Rosa Parks and Dr. King and the Montgomery bus boycott. But there's a great amount of really fervent, important activity in the 40s that Humphrey was one of the key people in. And yes, I had to look at his early life to make sense of that. A good friend of mine at Columbia Journalism School, where I teach, says that a book has to answer a question. One question has to drive your book.

answer a question. One question has to drive your book. And the question that drove mine was, what makes a very vanilla guy care so deeply about blacks and Jews? Because Hubert Humphrey on domestic issues gave everything he had to the battles against racism and antisemitism. And yet Humphrey grows up in this tiny little hamlet, Dolan, South Dakota, out in the eastern grasslands of the Dakotas, in a place that's overwhelmingly Scandinavian and Northern European Protestant, entirely white. What passes for a minority population out there is a community of French Canadian Catholics about 10 miles away, and they are considered so alien that periodically during Humphrey's childhood, the Ku Klux Klan will go and burn crosses outside of that town where the Catholics live. And yet Humphrey is able,

even from early in his life, to both begin to develop a great value system and also to see a wider world. Part of it is that Humphrey's father, who everyone calls HH, he's Hubert Humphrey Sr., but HH, although he's a complicated guy and is a bit of a fantasist and even a huckster in his business life running a drugstore, is very idealistic. He's a free-thinking, self-proclaimed agnostic in a very church-going town. He's a liberal Democrat in a Republican town. And he imbues Hubert as a kid with this idea of don't look down on anybody, be open to everybody. And that prepares Humphrey for this moment when he's 11 years old that to me has this mythological power. At that time in August of 1922, the first gravel road is being laid into place outside Doland.

And it's a big deal because prior to that, you could really only reliably get in and out by the railroad. and one of the crews that's building that road is a graveling team from Omaha, Nebraska, led by two brothers, Leslie and Otis Shipman, who are Black. And of course, it's a big notable deal that a group of Black men are working on this job outside of Doland, and Humphrey finds out about it probably from an item I found in the weekly newspaper. And inspired by what he's learned from his father already, he goes out to talk to these road workers and he befriends them and they befriend him. And Saturday night when they have their pay envelopes and go into town, Humphrey has his side hustle besides working for nothing at his dad's drugstore, selling out of town newspapers and the black road workers buy a whole bunch of extra newspapers so Hubert will make some money.

And then they take him to the pool hall with them. And Dolan is a dry town, so the pool hall is like as transgressive as things get. And they take him there and buy him, as he later recalls, these bottles of strawberry soda pop. And I don't think that that moment sets the course of Humphrey's life. That's not the way things go. But it says something about the deep interior life and the values this to me already has at 11 years old. And it says something that decades later, when he's working on his autobiography, he recalls this moment. biography, he recalls this moment. The other thing that comes out of his early childhood is that there's a minister who comes

to Dolan named Albert Hart, and Humphrey befriends his son, Julian Hart. And through the Harts, Humphrey gets exposed to a form of Protestant theology called the social gospel. And as opposed to fundamentalist Protestantism, which really put the emphasis on a few moral issues like temperance, you know, outlawing alcohol and also being against dancing and things like that, fundamentalism was mostly concerned with a pure life so you'd be in heaven in the hereafter. The social gospel said, we've got to create the kingdom of God, which was the term they used, the kingdom of God on earth. And the way we do that is by standing up for organized labor, by reaching out across racial lines, ultimately by doing interfaith work. And that really affects Humphrey also because it gives him something that's going to be really important later in his life, which is a

religious language that he can knowingly use on behalf of progressive causes. Humphrey, among other things, is a great example of the fact that religion isn't intrinsically a tool of conservative or reactionary ideas, that there is a whole lot in scripture that also can be totally honestly deployed on behalf of progressive stances. And so interesting too, because that type of religious faith is in such a noteworthy counterpoint to so many of the religious communities that he would have grown up with, many sects of Christianity really focus strongly on right belief, right thinking, believe the right things, and that is your ticket. believe the right things, and that is your ticket. Whereas other faiths, Judaism, for example, and other sects of Christianity focus on right actions, on doing the right things, rather than believing the checklist of right things.

That's absolutely correct. Humphrey, interestingly, although of course he was Christian his entire life, Methodist mostly, had a membership also with the Congregationalist Church in Minneapolis. But he drew a lot on the Hebrew Bible. He drew a lot on the social justice prophets, who were also the great inspiration for Martin Luther King and the Civil Rights Movement. And he would talk really knowledgeably about Amos and Hosea, Jeremiah, Isaiah, Ezekiel, and their teachings that don't give me empty rituals, God is saying through them. Give me, as you said, right action. Tend to the poor, take care of the widow, unfetter the prisoner. Those are the teachings, and Humphrey would cite them.

And just to jump ahead, when Humphrey is getting into politics in Minneapolis, the prevailing version of Protestantism in Minneapolis is not just concerned with right action, but actually is very involved in right-wing political activity. Two of the people Humphrey tangles with, one is Gerald L.K. Smith, who starts out as kind of a liberal populist and ends up stealthily being supported by big corporations and becoming very much a right-wing populist. And he would come repeatedly to Minneapolis to give speeches. These are a series of confrontations with Humphrey. And Gerald L.K. Smith believed that America should be a country of white Christians.

He was the founder of what he called the America First Party. He believed in Christian nationalism. That's a term we hear now, but it was very much in use in the 40s when Humphrey was battling against it. Gerald L.K. Smith believed there should be a social safety net, but only for white Protestants. He wasn't quite sure about Catholics, but Blacks should be sent back to Africa. Jews should be interned and ultimately sterilized. And there's a great moment, Sharon, when Gerald L.K. Smith comes to Minneapolis and wants to use the municipal auditorium to give a speech. And Humphrey, who's a private citizen, but already a politically active person, speaks against it. And what he says, which gets under JLK Smith's skin, such that Smith will get into confrontation after confrontation with Humphrey for years to come. At one point,

Humphrey says in this public hearing to Smith, you can't say you're a good Christian if you hate Jews because Jesus was a Jew. In the 1940s, that was not a widely accepted idea. And that was one of many times when Humphrey came in for an enormous amount of hate mail for the stances he took, and particularly for making a religious argument against intolerance. That's so interesting. I'm curious too, I want to get back to how he lands in Minnesota, but I'm curious about where does he find the courage to go out on the limbs that he goes out on? Because he really is in many ways blazing a trail in the upper Midwest, the likes of which many people had not seen before, certainly running counter to many of the prevailing ideas.

many of the prevailing ideas, it's not actually a very comfortable place for human to be putting themselves out there like that. It requires so much courage. Where did that come from? The transformational year of his life happens in the 1939-1940 academic year when he goes to grad school at, of all places, Louisiana State down in Baton Rouge. He goes there simply because he's newly married, he's a baby, he had to interrupt his college career for six years because of the Great Depression, and he needs the 400 bucks LSU is going to give him to be a graduate assistant. But when he goes there, which means leaving the North for the first time in his life, He spent virtually all of his life in either Minneapolis or South Dakota prior to that. He's plunged into a Jim Crow society

for the first time. And it just offends something basic in his being, not just the things we think about, the separate water fountains, the separate waiting rooms, the back of the bus. He recalls these very specific incidents of individual Black people being humiliated in public, like a Black pedestrian who's crossing a street too slow for white motorists' preference, and the white motorist gets out and starts reviling him with the N-word, and the Black man has no recourse but to just take the humiliation. Things like that really stay with Humphrey. And also when he's in Baton Rouge that year, he makes the first Jewish friends of his life, including a classmate and a debate teammate who has five uncles trapped in Europe under Nazi control, all of whom are going to be exterminated. And that's the beginning of

Humphrey really understanding something about Jewish experience here and abroad. And both of those things, the racial element and the Jewish element, are really confirmed in that year at LSU when Humphrey takes a year-long seminar with this amazing professor named Rudolf Eberle. And Eberle is a one-eighth Jewish anti-Nazi professor of sociology from Germany who had been kicked out of Germany, stripped of his position, left penniless, scrambling to find somewhere for his family to live and somewhere to work in the U.S., which is what leads him to end up at LSU. And Eberle's big academic work before he was kicked out of Germany was to address the question, how does a country that's been a democracy embrace dictatorship within just two or three or four years? How does

that happen? And when Humphrey has this class with Eberle at LSU, first of all, Eberle is talking about his research, which actually was ultimately published both in English and much later in German. Secondly, Eberle is talking about his family's experience. And thirdly, Eberle is drawing direct comparisons between the plight of Jews in Nazi Germany and the plight of blacks in Jim Crow. And this is the most direct answer to your question, words Humphrey get the bravery. At one point, Eberle challenges his 12 students. He says, if we were in Germany, maybe two of you would have stood up to the Nazis. And it's something else that Humphrey remembers decades later. It obviously

stayed with him and it challenged him. And I think he felt when he then went back to Minneapolis to really begin his career in public life, that he had to live up to that challenge. And the last part of it that I'll mention is as he gets to Minneapolis and initially is doing war mobilization work and then ultimately goes into politics, he is taught by a black newspaper publisher named Cecil Newman and by a white lawyer doing anti-defamation work named Sam Shiner. And they've been fighting lonely, almost one-man fights, Newman against the pervasive racism in Minneapolis, Shiner against the pervasive anti-Semitism. And they've been doing it without any allies who have real political power and

political will. And Humphrey learns from them. But what Humphrey gives to them is political agency, someone who can win elections, who knows how to put through ultimately legislation as mayor, who's going to advocate on behalf of the issues that they've been fighting these almost solitary battles on for literally decades. Yeah. This is the era of Father Coughlin and his incredible platform. If anybody's not familiar with him, he was a Catholic priest who was one of the most popular men in America who had this radio show that was terribly anti-Semitic and really had the ear of white Americans.

Tens of millions of people listened to him. And he was not just like, hey, Christianity's great, convert. It was not any kind of spreading love and peace and kindness message. It was the opposite. It was pure hatred for anybody who was not like him. His writings and his speaking is very, very disturbing. And that was, as they were heading into the 1940s, often the prevailing

sentiment among many white Christian Americans. No, you're absolutely right. I mean, Coughlin got to the point where he inspired a militia that tried to overthrow the government in the early 1940s. But you're right, there were a group of pro-Nazi raving bigots who had a big following in this country. And it's people like Coughlin and Gerald L.K. Smith, who I mentioned before, and Charles Lindbergh, who was from Minneapolis, who was the public face of the America First movement. who was the public face of the America First movement, they put a legitimate face on this kind of hatred. And when Gerald L.K. Smith came repeatedly to Minneapolis, his sponsors were Ernest Lundin, who was a senator who was very pro-Nazi and even gave speeches that were being covertly written by a Nazi agent. And after Lundin died, his widow, Norma Lundin, was Smith's great advocate and supporter in New York. So there was a big part of legitimate, upscale, educated society in Minneapolis and around the country that felt that it was totally acceptable to have a set of violently prejudiced beliefs and to use the idea of isolationism, that is America staying out of World War II,

as a way to give a very free hand for Nazi Germany to take over Western Europe for sure, and maybe the British Isles as well. Right. Yeah, we tend to think of the Klan or other hate groups as being these shadowy characters of like, it's some dudes drinking beer and they're wearing hoods and they probably don't have a job. We have this idea of only losers do those things. But to your point, these were all largely normal members of society who had all the jobs, who worked at the bank, who taught school, who worked at your grocery store. These were groups that normal upstanding citizens participated in. And that is the backdrop against which Hubert Humphrey is beginning his work. You're absolutely right. I mean, his battles weren't just against people like Gerald L.K.

Smith or the most prominent minister in Minneapolis, William Bell Riley, who is a follower, sort of theologically speaking, a descendant and a continuation of William Jennings Bryan. theologically speaking, a descendant and of continuation of William Jennings Bryan. And Riley was a great institution builder and erudite and well-dressed and refined and also happened to believe in the notorious forgery, the protocols of the elders of Zion that said Jews were trying to take over the world. And so when Humphrey comes in, he's taking on not just the great unwashed, he's also taking on kind of complacent centrist people and complacent liberals, and even a part of the otherwise liberal labor movement in Minneapolis that would run unions that wouldn't have black members, for instance. And so Humphrey is fighting this multi-front battle. And I'll just give you a couple of examples of that. When he's running for mayor in 1945 on his way to winning his first term, this is a period of time when the first newsreels of the death camps are being played in theaters. The first English language articles are appearing in mainstream newspapers. And yet at the same time, Jewish kids in the North Minneapolis neighborhood where they

lived are being beaten up by white Protestant gangs. They're being run off the road in their cars. They're being pushed through play glass windows. And the current mayor and the police chief say the same old, same old, this is just teenage stuff. This is just hooligans. This doesn't mean anything. And Humphrey is the one who comes in and says, this is a deep problem. This is a problem that has to be confronted head on. And he does the same thing with issues of racism in Minneapolis. And he actually, and Sharon, this is just kind of mind blowing when you think of when it's happening. When he's newly installed as mayor, not only is he pushing legislation like

to outlaw restrictive covenants and housing and to create a fair employment commission with real penalties if you violate the law, but he wants to make Minneapolis look at itself honestly. but he wants to make Minneapolis look at itself honestly. And he brings into this overwhelmingly white city, two black sociologists from an HBCU, from Fisk University in Nashville. And he has these sociologists undertake a study at Minneapolis using volunteers from the community to actually build both anecdotal evidence and a database, as we would call it now, to actually build both anecdotal evidence and a database, as we would call it now, of the extents of bigotry in Minneapolis. And what that forces the city to do is to confront its own entrenched discrimination.

And that gives Humphrey the leverage to demand change. It's hockey season, and you can get anything you need delivered with Uber Eats. Well, almost, almost anything. So, no, you can't get an ice rink on Uber Eats. But iced tea, ice cream, or just plain old ice? Yes, we deliver those. Goal tenders, no. But chicken tenders, yes. Because those are groceries, and we deliver those, too.

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soft microfiber cushions engineered for comfort, and a range of colors and finishes. Dyson OnTrack. Headphones remastered. Buy from DysonCanada.ca. With ANC on, performance may vary based on environmental conditions and usage. Accessories sold separately. How did Hubert Humphrey end up in Minnesota? Having grown up in a neighboring state, how did he land there and make a career there? Even though his family was already really suffering economically, his father and mother were committed enough to try and get their kids educated that Hubert and his brother Ralph and ultimately his sister Frances all had started college in the teeth of the depression.

And so he went to the U, as everyone calls it, the University of Minnesota, and started there and then had to leave one semester into his sophomore year because his family had lost their home. Now they lost their drugstore. They're moving to a different town in South Dakota to try to start over. And they needed, according to state law, a licensed pharmacist. And so Hubert was assigned to go and take a hurry up class at a pharmacy school in Denver and get a license so he could help them, which is what he did. And he always mourned what he thought was the end of his college career. He never thought he'd ever get back there. And in fact, Hubert's father, H.H., had political ambitions of his own, and he wanted to make Hubert work on behalf of his

desire to run for governor of South Dakota and run for the legislature. And it was really actually only because of two women, Hubert's chronologically younger, but influentially older sister, Frances, who had gone to George Washington University to put herself through college there and live with an uncle and who really got involved in civil rights activism before Humphrey even knew what it was. She is an inspiration and Muriel Buck was her maiden and Humphrey's girlfriend and then wife, they're the two who urge him to go back to college. And it's really Muriel who says to him, you know, you've got to break away from your father. If you stay and be the loyal son and run his store and help his political career, you're never going to

have your own dreams. And really inspired by the two of them, Humphrey at age 25 or 26, goes back to the University of Minnesota in 1937 to finish up the last couple of years of his academic career. It sounds like his proximity to the issues is one of the driving forces behind his later actions, behind his later activism. And it's such an important thing, I think, to realize what proximity does for somebody. That it's really hard to hate somebody when you're looking them in the eyeballs or you're eating dinner together. If he had just stayed in a small town, he might've grown up to be a good man, but if he had stayed where he was and had no proximity, chances are quite good he would not have become the person he was.

You know, I mostly agree with you, but the interesting thing is that you still need the compassion to go to proximity. Yes, absolutely. That's right, to not join the hate group. Right. Well, you know, in the South, Black people had an idiom that deals with that proximity. And it would say, in the South, the white man will be close, but not high. And in the North, the white man will get high, but not close. And what that meant in the South is that actually in these small towns, or even in a city like Baton Rouge, whites and Blacks often lived in adjoining neighborhoods, and they interacted with each other all the time. And it didn't make most Southern whites any more compassionate. So what Humphrey had just deep in his character was this empathy for the underdog and for the oppressed so that when he had proximity to Black people, when he had proximity to Jews, when he heard about what they endured and suffered, it deeply affected him. And I've always said Humphrey was a politician both from the neck up, but also from the neck down. The neck

up was this great mind he had for retaining information, for synthesizing information, for coming up with eloquent phrases, even if he often went on at too great a length. But the neck part of Humphrey could only go into action when something hit him in his heart and his gut. He couldn't passionately advocate for any position that he didn't really feel deep in his gut. But you're right, if he had stayed geographically in South Dakota, he might have been a New Deal-oriented Democrat of the sort that for a long time did continue to be part of political life in the Dakotas, but he would not have been the champion for racial and religious minorities. Those roles came out of his exposure. And things happen over and over and over again to underscore that point about him. and over again to underscore that point about him. How did he get involved in Twin Cities politics? He graduates from college.

He goes to Louisiana, comes back to Minnesota. Basically, he comes back to Minnesota. Ostensibly, he's going to work towards his PhD in poli-sci because LSU didn't have a PhD program in that field at that time. But he immediately, because again, he's a working father now with two kids, a third on the way, gets a job with the WPA, the Works Progress Administration, initially doing worker education, but quickly as the U.S. is heading into involvement in World War II, that job becomes war mobilization. And in basically working with building up morale on the

home front, Humphrey is suddenly giving speeches multiple times every day to all sorts of audiences around the entire state. And he's starting to make a name for himself. And he's also starting to formulate this ethos about what it means to fight for democracy and to understand that democracy is a fight not only abroad, but at home. And that really prepares the table for him to be recruited by a couple of people from the union movement in Minneapolis to run for mayor in 1943. And even though he's a relative unknown in terms of partisan politics at that point, he nearly beats a very conservative incumbent. And then when he runs again in 1945, he wins in a landslide. And what's important about that race is that's when he, much more than in

1943, runs as a candidate of civil rights. His platform planks really emphasize the fight against racism and the fight against anti-Semitism. And in one respect, it makes no political sense. the fight against anti-Semitism. And in one respect, it makes no political sense. Jews and blacks are maybe 3% of the Minneapolis population. But there's this moment in time, right at the end of the war, when a question is being asked, what kind of country are we going to be now? If we defeated fascism abroad, what do we do about intolerance at home? And that question was really first posed by black GIs who came up with a phrase they called Double V. Double V stood for double victory. And it meant we're going to fight for this country in which we're second class citizens, if we're even treated as human beings at all.

And we're going to leverage our sacrifice in defeating fascism to come back home and demand our equality at home. And Jewish GIs had the same feeling. And so there's this kind of incredible moment, Sharon, right after the war, when that question is pregnant. It's in political life, and it's also even in investigative journalism that's coming out and in popular culture. You know, Frank Sinatra makes this short film and sings a song, both titled The House I Live In, and it's basically an argument for an inclusive America. You know, he says all races and religions, that's America to me. There's a Superman radio series in which Superman takes on a thinly veiled version of the Ku Klux Klan called the Clan of the Fiery Cross after Klan members tried to kill a Chinese-American boy who's become the star pitcher on a Little League team and displaced a white Protestant kid as the star pitcher. And of course, Superman has to come to the rescue. I mean, that kind of messaging in the pop culture landscape also was part of why Humphrey was able to make this appeal.

So, you know, he's both driving this effort, but he's benefiting by Double V and he's benefiting by the house I live in with Sinatra and he's benefiting by Superman versus the Clan of the Fiery Cross. It's just one of these really pivotal moments in American history. How does he eventually get to be the vice president? We're skipping a few years here. But I also want people to read your book to find all of the intervening years. But how does he eventually go from being like, I'm the mayor of Minneapolis, I'm the vice president of the United States, to running for president, really being a player on the national stage? Well, the big two-word answer is civil rights. John F. Kennedy is assassinated in November of 1963. Lyndon Johnson becomes president. JFK had been pretty timid on the subject of civil rights, but he had put a civil rights bill into Congress, which no one expected him to be able to pass.

Lyndon Johnson decides, I'm going to take that bill and with the uncanny Johnson political toolbox, get it enacted. That becomes the Civil Rights Act of 1964. Humphrey is one of the floor managers for that bill in the Senate. He's one of the most important people to LBJ getting that bill through. And because Humphrey not only works on that bill, but has a great history on civil rights, which I'll get to in a moment, when Johnson has to choose a vice president, Johnson knows that there are still a lot of liberals who can't really believe, even now, that he's fully committed to civil rights. He's this southerner, you know. Right, he's from Texas.

He's a Texan. And the Kennedy family and the Kennedy political apparatus really has a lot of antipathy towards him. And one of the ways Johnson wants to assuage and reassure the liberal wing of the party is by having Hubert Humphrey as his vice president to say, here's someone who's been a liberal hero, especially on civil rights, for a long time. If this is who I choose to be my wingman, you can trust me. And in fact, before both Humphrey and Johnson are destroyed by their decision to escalate in Vietnam, Humphrey and Johnson on the inside and Martin Luther King and the freedom mass movement on the outside worked together to also pass the Voting Rights

Act and the Fair Housing Act. You have the beginnings of affirmative action with an eloquent speech Johnson gives at Howard University in 1965. But Humphrey's reputation for civil rights, even though it began in Minneapolis, really is pushed onto the national stage at the 1948 Democratic Convention. To go against Harry Truman's own wishes and endorse a civil rights plank that says, we're going to desegregate the army. We're going to end and outlaw lynching. We're going to outlaw the poll tax. We're going to have fair employment. And to extend those protections, by the way, not just along the lines of race, but along the lines of religion and national origin as well. So this was something that was really important to American Jews and American Catholics and Japanese Americans as well at this

time. And here's the thing that's hard to wrap our head around. There are 1,500 delegates at that convention, including the alternates. 17 are Black. Humphrey is not going to win by appealing to Black delegates. You're going to have to get a convention full of white people to go beyond what their president wants to endure a walkout of the Southern segregationists to vote for this. And astonishingly, Humphrey persuades them to do it with this speech that's still to this day considered one of the greatest pieces of political oratory in American history. And that's where his national reputation for civil rights is ensured. And also, along with it, this is where the utter loathing of him on the part of white supremacists also really takes root. You know, I said he had survived an assassination attempt in Minneapolis, but I've read all the hate mail he got after giving that speech.

And if you listen to the audio of the speech, which people can find on YouTube, you can hear the boos. audio of the speech, which people can find on YouTube, you can hear the boos. And that speaks again to that moral courage that he had to have to withstand that. Because most people, if you're standing on stage getting booed, your natural inclination is to get off the stage. Exactly. Right. And he was a human being. He was worried. Truman's people at the convention told Humphrey, in so many words, if you give that speech, your career is over. They called him to his face a pipsqueak. Truman is writing in his diary, calling Humphrey and the insurgents crackpots. So Humphrey had real trepidation at the same time and needed enforcement from Muriel, enforcement from a couple of the big

city political bosses in the party to go and do the thing that he knew was the right thing to do. But it came with a lot of risk. And again, Hubert Humphrey at this time is, politically speaking, a kid. He's 37 years old. He's been the mayor of a mid-sized city for three years. He's never held any other elected office. Because his college education was interrupted for so long by the Depression, he's less than 10 years from getting his bachelor's degree. He's a greenhorn. He's a neophyte. And here he is trying to outmaneuver and out-argue what the president of the United States wants. Right. Yes. Especially one who was sort of riding the popularity of post-World War II. This was not a president who would have been easy to oppose politically and get somewhere. No. No. Truman famously stubborn. Very quickly, tell us a little bit more about the process of researching this book. What did it take to put a history like this, a biography like this together?

Well, thank you for letting me geek out. First of all, this is a book that you couldn't put together with interviews. I interviewed a few people who were in their 80s and 90s, including former Vice President Mondale, who actually had been involved in Humphrey's political life in the 1940s. But most of my research was archival research, reading through the voluminous amount of Hubert Humphrey personal and family and political papers at the Minnesota Historical Society in St. Paul, spending a lot of time in the South Dakota State Archives, going down to Louisiana State to read the papers of Rudolph Everly and his wife, and also just trying to fill in gaps. I grew up in New Jersey. I grew up in the land of chemical plants and

strip malls. Listen to the song Springsteen wrote in Nebraska about driving the turnpike up and down. And that's where I grew up. And here I had to make sense of what it meant to have a crisis in the wheat crop in South Dakota in the 1920s. So I had to learn a lot. And I spent a lot of time with agronomists out there and literally walking in wheat fields with people and to understand about this Black Road crew with help of a great genealogist, Cynthia Meharry, tracing who these people were and where they had come from. But also I had to learn how you put down a gravel road. And I spent more time than you can shake a stick at talking to people at the South Dakota Highway Department about historical road building techniques. So it's a lot of everything, but this is like joyful work. This is sacred work.

I loved every day I did this work and I became more and more and more absorbed by the story of Humphrey and his allies and his enemies as I was doing it. And so at the end, it's drained you, but in a really wonderful way. But you also know you're going to miss it the day it's over. I love that. What do you hope that the reader, when they close into the bright sunshine, what do you hope the reader takes away? One thing is I hope that it'll mean that Humphrey gets his historical credit. He doesn't deserve a free pass on Vietnam. That was a terrible decision, as he later acknowledged. And he doesn't deserve a free pass for running too many times for president and being desperate

and kind of a caricature of himself at the end. But he deserves to have that considered alongside this valiant work he did on civil rights way before many other white people got on. And with Lyndon Johnson, we can hold two things in a dynamic relationship, Vietnam and the civil rights in great society. And I hope this book will let us understand that about Humphrey and to use the language of today, book will let us understand that about Humphrey and to use the language of today, what it means in a profound way to be an ally. The other couple of takeaways I hope people have are that there was this amazing movement for civil rights in the 1940s with Humphrey and Randolph and Walter White and Eleanor Roosevelt. And there was no civil rights movement of the 50s and 60s without what happened in the 40s. And finally, the battle Humphrey was fighting

was the battle of inclusive, interfaith, multiracial democracy against different forms of autocracy, against white supremacy, against Christian nationalism, against America firstism. And those were the exact terms being used then. And that's the same battle we're fighting now. And it doesn't mean that Humphrey didn't win that battle. It means when we make progress in this country, there's backlash. It happens all the time. It happened after Reconstruction. It happened after the Civil Rights Movement. And now it's happened after the Barack Obama presidency and the marriage equality decision by the Supreme Court. And so it means we have to be ready to fight these political and ideological battles in every generation. And people who are tempted to think it's never been this bad or it's hopeless

or how can we win? I hope we'll find inspiration in the story of what Humphrey and his allies had to fight against in their time, which was just as formidable, if not even more formidable. And Humphrey had this phrase, the politics of joy. It doesn't mean he was naive. It doesn't mean he was a fool. It meant that he understood that there was great joy in doing righteous work. And I hope that will be one of the other takeaways for readers today. I love that.

one of the other takeaways for readers today. I love that. Well, I absolutely loved chatting with you, Sam, and I absolutely loved reading more about somebody who I totally agree with you. He was human. He deserves criticism for some of his poor decisions. There's no human who doesn't, by the way. Right, exactly. But he also deserves way more credit than he's given. And I absolutely love the point you made that without people like him laying that gravel road, there is no civil rights movement of the 1950s and 60s. Exactly. Well, thank you for endorsing that. It's a beautiful metaphor too. Like he's 11, he meets these people on this gravel road, and they're building this road, and you had to study what the roads meant. And in many ways, that is exactly what he was doing in the 1940s.

I'm going to have to remember that. I hadn't put it that way myself. I'm going to steal what you said. But as the minister, I wrote my second book about him in his church, Reverend Dr. Johnny Ray Youngblood used to say, ain't nothing wrong with being a copycat as long as you copy in the right cat. True enough. Yeah, not in a plagiaristic way,

but I'll give you a footnote every time I say that. Oh, thank you. Great chatting with you, Sam. Oh my God, this was so good. This will hopefully not be the last time we meet. That'd be wonderful. You can find Sam Friedman's book, Into the Bright Sunshine, wherever you get your books. Check out bookshop.org if you want to support independent bookstores.

And you can also visit his website at samuelfriedman.com. Thanks for being here today. and samuelfriedman.com. Thanks for being here today. This show is researched and hosted by me, Sharon McMahon. Our executive producer is Heather Jackson. Our audio producer is Jenny Snyder. And if you enjoyed this episode,

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