Day: June 23, 2024

FBI Sparks Outrage Among Trump Supporters After Right-Wing Reporter’s Arrest For Role In Jan. 6 Capitol Riot  MSN

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Few Americans under age 65 will clearly recall the name Hubert Humphrey, who died in 1978 at age 66 after a landmark career as a U.S. senator, four tortured years as Lyndon B. Johnson’s vice president, and a 1968 presidential loss to Richard Nixon. Both Samuel Freedman and James Traub are long-distinguished journalists and authors who also qualify as senior citizens; three decades ago this writer reviewed both Freedman’s Small Victories: The Real World of a Teacher, Her Students & Their High School (1990) and Traub’s City on a Hill: Testing the American Dream at City College (1994).

These authors’ two recent books address the same person in decidedly different ways. Freedman’s Into the Bright Sunshine focuses on Humphrey’s life from childhood in small town South Dakota through his election as mayor of Minneapolis to his 1948 national emergence as an unlikely champion of black civil rights at that year’s Democratic National Convention. Traub covers that ground too in True Believer, but his is a full, traditional biography whose most gripping chapters detail Humphrey’s agonizing service under Johnson and how the president’s unbending embrace of the war in Vietnam ensured Humphrey’s 1968 loss to Nixon.

Humphrey’s economically pressed family lost their home when Hubert was 11, and only in 1938 as a married, 27-year-old University of Minnesota undergraduate did Humphrey find his adult footing thanks to a course titled American Constitutional Development, taught by a young political scientist Humphrey’s own age, Evron Kirkpatrick—later best known as the spouse of Ronald Reagan’s influential U.N. ambassador, Jeane. Kirkpatrick’s course, writes Traub, was “the catapult that launched Humphrey on his life path,” and the following year Humphrey moved his young family all the way to Baton Rouge, La., to begin a one-year master’s degree in political science at Louisiana State University.

Life in Louisiana’s rigidly segregated capital taught Humphrey multiple lessons. Witnessing blatant Southern racism “also opened my eyes to the prejudice of the North,” he later wrote, and classes with Rudolf Heberle, a refugee who had fled Germany after Nazi bureaucrats discovered his Jewish ancestry, led Humphrey to conclude that “minority persecution is the first sign of social disintegration.” Yet the centerpiece of what Freedman rightly calls “his pivotal year at LSU” was the writing of Humphrey’s master’s thesis. “The Political Philosophy of the New Deal” was such a fanboy paean to President Franklin Roosevelt that the author “found not a single fault with FDR and the New Deal, not even the president’s catastrophic attempt to pack the Supreme Court.”

Humphrey wanted to pursue a Ph.D. and was accepted by Princeton, yet his family’s strained finances forced him to return to Minneapolis and take up a series of Works Progress Administration posts, in which he excelled. A local politician suggested the novice 32 year old challenge the city’s do-nothing mayor, and although Humphrey declared his candidacy only three weeks before the 1943 election, he lost by just 6,000 votes. Establishing himself as a vibrant local voice, two years later Humphrey defeated the incumbent by over 30,000.

Freedman’s impressively original work includes detailed portrayals of how two significant figures in Minneapolis’s black and Jewish communities—newspaper publisher Cecil Newman and underemployed attorney Sam Scheiner—taught Humphrey about the pervasiveness of the city’s racist and anti-Semitic practices. In 1946, one year into Humphrey’s mayoralty, prominent journalist Carey McWilliams named Minneapolis “the capital of anti-Semitism in the United States,” and early in 1947 a local neo-Nazi tried to assassinate Humphrey—an attempt the mayor amazingly refused to publicize!

That same year Humphrey became one of the founding figures in the newly revamped Americans for Democratic Action (ADA), a liberal effort to counteract the communist sympathizers (and worse) clustered around former vice president Henry Wallace, who would mount a left-wing challenge to Roosevelt’s White House successor, Harry S. Truman. Testifying before Congress in June 1947, Humphrey proclaimed that “we profess a belief in justice and equality of opportunity, but we practice injustice and discrimination against the members of minority racial, religious, and nationality groups in every one of these United States. … This is a problem of national morality.”

Four months later, a Truman-appointed commission published a powerful indictment of American racism entitled, “To Secure These Rights.” But with public opinion polling showing that 82 percent of respondents opposed the commission’s recommendations, and only 9 percent in support, Truman distanced himself from its handiwork, leaving it to the young ADA to champion its provisions. Matters came to a head at the July 1948 DNC, where some 1,200 delegates—only 10 of them black—would renominate Truman for the presidency. Thirty-seven-year-old mayor Humphrey was the ADA’s spokesman for a platform plank that would embrace the commission’s conclusions in the face of Southern segregationist—and presidential—opposition. The Democratic party, Humphrey proclaimed, needed “to get out of the shadows of states’ rights and to walk forthrightly into the bright sunshine of human rights.” The ADA prevailed by a vote of 651 to 582.

Traub calls Humphrey’s oration “a ten-minute address that changed the world,” for, as Freedman explains, “what he said on that day set into motion the partisan realignment that defines American politics right up through the present.” Humphrey himself knew as much at that time, and a few months later he wrote in the New York Times that the convention had highlighted “the inevitable split over civil rights that exists in the Democratic party.”

By then, the president had been reelected, with black voters supplying the margins by which Truman carried the electorally decisive states of California, Illinois, and Ohio. That same evening, Humphrey defeated Republican Joseph Ball to become the first Democrat ever elected to the U.S. Senate from Minnesota.

Humphrey was unprepared for life in a new setting and new city where neither he nor his wife Muriel—who “was raising four children almost entirely on her own,” Traub notes—knew hardly anyone. Humphrey “plunged into Senate life without making an effort to understand the institution’s culture” and found himself rejected by most of his new colleagues. “Never in my life have I felt so unwanted as I did during those first few months in Washington,” Humphrey later wrote. “I was unhappy in the Senate, uncomfortable, awkward, unable to find a place.”

Salvation came in the form of one of his fellow Democratic freshmen, Texas moderate Lyndon Johnson, who went about making Humphrey his pet liberal. “Johnson did more to bring me into those more social relationships with the conservative members of the Democratic Party than any other person,” Humphrey explained in a late-life interview. By the time of his 1954 reelection, Humphrey was a “less adversarial” senator, Traub writes, thanks to “a change of temperament” that would make him “a creature of the institution in which he worked.”

Johnson led the Senate to pass a very modest Civil Rights Act in 1957, with Humphrey full well understanding how segregationist Democrats’ dominance of the chamber severely delimited the hopes of liberals like himself. Yet Humphrey ranged far afield as a senator, including a remarkable eight-and-a-half-hour conversation in the Kremlin with Soviet leader Nikita Khrushchev in November 1958, “the most thrilling and the most important event in Humphrey’s life” since the DNC a decade earlier, Traub notes.

Humphrey’s increasing prominence drew him into the 1960 presidential primaries, where he was trounced by his Massachusetts colleague John F. Kennedy, who “was a better candidate and ran a better campaign,” Traub observes. But Humphrey’s reward, as Johnson left the Senate to become vice president, was the chamber’s number two post, Democratic whip, an especially influential role given how in Montana’s dyspeptic Mike Mansfield, Johnson’s successor as majority leader, “Humphrey had a boss who didn’t believe in his own job,” Traub memorably writes. But only in the wake of Kennedy’s November 1963 assassination and Johnson’s ascension to the presidency would Humphrey tackle what would become “the supreme achievement of his legislative career.”

Kennedy finally had proposed a muscular civil rights bill five months before his murder, but Johnson immediately embraced that measure as his signature desire, with Humphrey assigned to shepherd it past the Senate’s daunting two-thirds filibuster threshold. Several superb books, including Clay Risen’s The Bill of the Century (2014), narrate that legislative struggle, but on June 9 cloture was invoked with a remarkable 71 votes in the affirmative. Four weeks later the Civil Rights Act of 1964 was signed into law. Capitol Hill’s leading weekly heralded Humphrey’s “masterful, day-in and day-out perseverance,” and Traub reports the whip lost 20 pounds during the three months the bill spent on the Senate floor.

Come the Democrats’ August convention, Johnson unsurprisingly named Humphrey as his vice-presidential running mate. A landslide November victory followed, but Humphrey’s ensuing four years were an endless travail of “humiliation and pathos” at the hands of a deeply insecure and often sadistic president. Humphrey was “thoroughly shut out of national security issues,” and Johnson “routinely belittled and ridiculed Humphrey” to multiple aides and officials, Traub reports. While “Humphrey was powerless to affect policy in Vietnam” as Johnson repeatedly intensified American military intervention from 1965 into 1967, Humphrey nonetheless “never flinched from his job of justifying the war” to audiences at home.

On March 31, 1968, Johnson astonished first Humphrey and then, a few hours later, the entire nation by announcing that he would not run for reelection that fall. Humphrey’s Minnesota colleague Eugene McCarthy and fellow New York senator Robert F. Kennedy had already mounted presidential challenges, and now Johnson was handing Humphrey what Traub rightly calls “a poisoned chalice” as the Democratic candidate tasked with defending the war.

Humphrey formally announced his candidacy on April 27, touting what he called “the politics of joy,” but the phrase sounded coldly archaic in a country that had just witnessed the murder of Martin Luther King Jr. and widespread ensuing riots. Kennedy caustically responded, “If you see a small black child starving to death in the Mississippi Delta, as I have, it is not the politics of joy,” and come June Robert Kennedy’s own assassination deepened the atmosphere of national disaster.

Humphrey won the Democratic nomination despite even his old ADA friends now viewing him “as a hapless Johnson puppet,” yet Johnson seemed ambivalent about whether he favored Humphrey or Republican nominee Richard Nixon. Humphrey was so “beaten down after four years as Johnson’s valet,” Traub writes, that “he was not the man he had been not only in 1948 but in 1964.” Indeed, he quotes a Humphrey aide recalling how the vice president bitterly remarked, “I’ve eaten so much of Johnson’s shit in this job that I’ve gotten to like the taste of it.”

In November, Nixon bested Humphrey in multiple crucial states—California, Illinois, Ohio, New Jersey, and Pennsylvania—as “the working class white voters who had constituted the core of FDR’s coalition” abandoned Humphrey for either Nixon or third-party racial conservative George Wallace. Two years later, Humphrey returned to the Senate for a final term, and in 1976 he surprisingly encouraged his Minnesota colleague Walter Mondale to join presidential nominee Jimmy Carter’s ticket: “Being vice president was the best thing that ever happened to me, regardless of how I was treated.”

Yet the stain of Vietnam was indelible, and shortly before his death Humphrey acknowledged that his greatest regret was indeed “the misjudgment of Vietnam. At the time I did what I thought was right. It was not because Johnson was forcing me,” but “working in the White House atmosphere, I became convinced that we were doing the right thing.”

Nonetheless, Hubert Humphrey indisputably changed first Minneapolis and then the United States for the better. Yet progress is not irreversible. In 2017, two years before Minneapolis would go back to its past by sending Ilhan Omar to Congress, Sam Scheiner’s daughter Susan Druskin quoted to Freedman her late father’s prescient warning about the enduring evil of anti-Semitism: “It will all be back. It never goes away. It goes below the surface of society and is dormant. The minute somebody permits it, it reemerges.” Oy vey.

True Believer: Hubert Humphrey’s Quest for a More Just America

by James Traub

Basic Books, 518 pp., $35

Into the Bright Sunshine: Young Hubert Humphrey and the Fight for Civil Rights

by Samuel G. Freedman

Oxford University Press, 488 pp., $34.95

David J. Garrow’s books include the Pulitzer Prize-winning Martin Luther King Jr. biography Bearing the Cross and Rising Star: The Making of Barack Obama.

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David Yamane is, by his own description, a “‘card-carrying liberal’ Asian American sociology professor from the San Francisco Bay Area who, for the first forty-two years of my life, never saw, touched, or fired a real gun.” The first time he saw a deer stand, he remarked to his companion that it seemed like a “weird spot for kids to build a fort.”

A lot has changed in less than 15 years. He now owns 13 firearms and has made a career out of studying American gun culture. He brings together his personal story and his academic work—not to mention the basic journalistic practice of getting out and talking to lots of people, from renowned trainers to everyday shooters—in the new book Gun Curious.

Things started to shift for Yamane when he separated from his first wife and moved into an apartment complex. While his children were visiting, he saw a neighbor pleading with her boyfriend not to take her car but was powerless to do anything beyond ask if everything was okay. The next morning, she knocked frantically at his front door, he hid his children before letting her in, and she said the man had “threatened her with a knife and taken her cell phone and car.” He urged her to call the police, but later found a report saying she’d stopped cooperating.

The experience was just one factor that eventually drove him to gun ownership. Another was a love of the reality show Top Shot, and yet another was a friend (eventually his second wife) who had carried a gun in the Coast Guard and set up some range time. Shooting a gun hooked him.

Part of Yamane’s experience is timeless—an enjoyment of shooting has always been a key ingredient of gun culture. But in other ways, Yamane is part of a profound shift in recent decades. As the country has urbanized, hunting and sport have declined as reasons for gun ownership, while self-protection has risen. Meanwhile, the ranks of gun owners have diversified, concealed-carry laws have loosened throughout the country, and sales have shifted from long guns to handguns. The new state of affairs is sometimes called Gun Culture 2.0, which also happens to be the name of Yamane’s blog.

Yamane’s sociological work explores that culture without pathologizing it. While most academics studying guns tend to treat these items’ owners—something like 40 percent of the adult population—as little more than an obstacle to progress, Yamane has adopted a motto of “guns are normal and normal people use guns.”

Yamane notes that, while gun violence is a crucial public-safety issue, there is much to be learned about the vast majority of gun owners who use guns for legitimate purposes. How are they seen by the broader society? Why do they own guns? How do they connect with their guns, and with each other through guns? How do they think about risk? In the answers to these questions lie a better understanding of American society—and, for those focused on policy issues, the path to making gun owners allies rather than obstacles.

Yamane points out some interesting aspects of the stigma gun owners face, and not just from his fellow lefty academics. Alcohol kills more Americans than guns, for example, but lawful gun owners face far more opprobrium these days than responsible drinkers.

In one study measuring attitudes on a warm/cool “feeling thermometer”—0 is ice-cold; 100 is toasty—non-gun-owners ranked gun owners a 49, similar to the 50 they gave atheists and the 53 they gave Muslims, two of the most stigmatized religious groups in the country. Members of the National Rifle Association, specifically, got a 42.

Yet humans’ attachment to projectile weaponry is hardly new or unusual, Yamane explains. It’s arguably a big part of what makes us human to begin with, as our unparalleled throwing ability contributed to our survival and evolution. Seen through this lens, guns are merely the continuation of hundreds of thousands of years of improvement in projectiles, tapping deep into human nature, and a healthy hobby for many of the people he meets. Yamane also makes abundantly clear that guns are a way for humans to connect with each other, by depicting many shooting events and training sessions throughout the country.

What about the risks? They are certainly real, even for those not likely to commit suicide or homicide, the dominant drivers of gun fatalities.

Yamane tells of the time, during his novice period, when he prepared his handgun for storage by racking the slide, removing the magazine, pointing the gun at the floor, and pulling the trigger to drop the hammer. Gun owners will see where this is headed: If you rack the slide before removing the magazine, you leave a round in the chamber. (Also: If you’re new to guns, get one that doesn’t require you to pull the trigger after unloading it.) It turns out that while fatal gun accidents are rare, with Yamane putting the number at 549 in 2021, routine screwups and emergency-room visits are not so uncommon.

But these risks must be balanced against the benefits, including the potential of armed self-defense, which is much debated as a statistical matter but certainly happens.

Yamane also writes in depth about trainers who try to minimize negative outcomes and stress the responsibilities that come with owning and carrying guns, as well as efforts within gun culture to prevent suicide. And he relates some thoughts from Aaron Haskins, a gun owner and risk-management professional, who puts self-defense as only the eighth most important way to reduce risk—well behind getting in shape and seeing a doctor—and chides those who live in unhealthy ways while carrying a “gun-shaped safety blanket.”

Gun Curious covers a lot of ground in not too much time, and it certainly won’t resolve this country’s long-fiery debate over gun ownership and gun control. But it will prove especially valuable to people like, well, David Yamane 15 years ago—those who have little familiarity with guns or everyday gun owners and would benefit from a richer understanding.

Gun Curious is an excellent overview of who gun owners are, how they think, and why they act the way they do. It acknowledges and discusses the downsides of guns without losing sight of how fundamentally normal guns are.

Gun Curious: A Liberal Professor’s Surprising Journey Inside America’s Gun Culture

by David Yamane

Exposit Books, 213 pp., $19.99 (paperback)

Robert VerBruggen is a fellow at the Manhattan Institute.

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