HUBERT HORATIO HUMPHREY

Amrine, Michael

HUBERT HORATIO HUMPHREY by MICHAEL AMRINE This is the seventh of a series of articles exploring Presidential possibilities for 1960. Mr. Amrine, Washington correspondent, novelist, and editor for...

...It is Humphrey's conviction that the American people cannot form an intelligent world view of disarmament unless they understand the technology of arms control...
...He has come a long way, too, during his dozen years in the Senate...
...a good education (Phi Beta Kappa...
...It's just my glands...
...It was aimed at destruction of the Communist Party, but its political purpose was to protect, presumably forever after, the name of every Senator who voted for it...
...One of Hubert Humphrey's most persistent themes is the need to relate American foreign policy to a lever of unusual strength in world society— the vast productive power of American agriculture...
...agree that he loved to manipulate people...
...The one who looked most like a President was Harding...
...a small-town background (make it the Middle West...
...Thirteen years after that letter to "Bucky," Hubert H. Humphrey, Jr., was a United States Senator...
...It has taken him years to acquire a sense of dignity, and sometimes he still behaves clownishly...
...It might well turn out that he could be right this year and President another year...
...There seems to be no doubt that some of his speeches are too long and that he speaks out on too many issues...
...He attacked McCarthy and his followers as a new kind of "know-nothing party...
...He doesn't have to describe the American dream, although he can do so in the best tradition of the Fourth of July," said one admirer...
...Sometimes, either through his sheer love of talking or through a desire to get attention for his ideas, the Senator "wears out his welcome...
...But the right to join other people in a political party is a basic American freedom...
...There is nothing amateurish in their mayoralty records: they were professionals from the day they started...
...But he is only forty-eight years old...
...In this, as in other fields of legislative activity, Humphrey has proved himself a brilliant politician with an extremely agile mind...
...Other Senators immediately understood the double mission of the proposed act...
...There is no one on the horizon who can match him in his courage and his commitment to a liberal democracy, along with experience, ability, and a remarkable growth in maturity...
...Humphrey and his followers won the day...
...He then dashed home in his car, collected his wife, Muriel, and his dinner jacket, and rushed back to a private club in town for a dinner given by Doris Fleeson and her husband, Dan Kimball, for Senator Clair Engle...
...I can't help it...
...Naturally you give him an eloquence that can sway a crowd— or even stampede a convention . . . But this scenario doesn't quite explain how a pharmacist, rolling pills and dishing up bowls of chili in his dad's drugstore in Huron, South Dakota, became in three years a teacher of political science, in another five years mayor of one of the larger American cities, then a U.S...
...Perhaps he was merely speaking for the record, but Humphrey told me he felt that passing the bill had saved several liberal Senators who might have been defeated, "certainly at least two...
...During the years following 1943, when he played so influential a role in welding together Minnesota's Democratic-Farmer-Labor Party, Humphrey had fought Communist infiltration into the fusion movement, driving the Communists and fellow travelers out of seats of power and influence in the fledgling party...
...He'll be back in time for the meeting...
...he is scheduled to be at the Democratic Advisory Committee meeting here tonight...
...He arrived very late, was called away from the table by an urgent telephone call, and again missed some of his meal...
...Humphrey has sudden inspirations about how to deal with some problem or clashing groups of persons, but he does not spend much time deciding precisely how everyone must be manipulated...
...Franklin D. Roosevelt, Edward R. Murrow, and a host of other panelists attending an Exchange of Persons conference...
...This still seems an accurate description of the man today, and while his enthusiasm has been moderated by maturity, he continues to believe that Americans and the democratic system can find a way to overcome almost any obstacle...
...He is not noticeably identified with the "big stick" and "positions of strength" school of foreign policy, but he is a consistent supporter of what he regards as "adequate appropriations for defense...
...Young Hubert and his brother Ralph, who still manages the family drugstore, grew up behind the counter...
...During his historic eight-hour talk in December, 1958, with another energetic, self-made, talkative, competitive politician, Nikita Khrushchev, Humphrey was especially impressed to find that the Russian leader "is interested in practically everything, as a good politician should be...
...Humphrey, to many observers, dashes from one event or one phase of thought to another without having a basic program in the back of his mind, much as Roosevelt was said to have done...
...In Doland the Humphreys had a rough time through the Twenties and Thirties and overcame their difficulties only through super-salesmanship...
...He is a strange combination of good sense, political erudition, imagination and enthusiasm...
...In Doland the entire town was his family, and in Huron he knew all the folks who were impoverished when the dust storms blew away their farms and their savings...
...Max Kampelman, a lawyer and close associate of Humphrey's with experience battling Communists in labor and in the DFL in Minnesota, conceived the basic idea that the Communists were really not a political party...
...He is rarely doctrinaire or rigid...
...The family made its own basic preparations in the way of laxatives and headache and sore throat remedies—one still fondly remembered in South Dakota as "Humphrey's Chest Oil...
...Humphrey has waged a running battle with the Atomic Energy Commission and the Pentagon over nuclear testing...
...Franklin Roosevelt often disappointed liberals because he never saw himself as a social reformer out to make over the economic system...
...One companion of twenty years' standing said, "I gave him hell about this—before, during, and after the whole business...
...Their uncompromising resolution was adopted...
...You just missed him," a secretary said...
...Hubert's father had been almost the only Democrat in Spink County, and after the bank failures, Dad Humphrey turned increasingly against The System—Wall Street, the bankers, and particularly that sinister tribe, the banker's bankers...
...He shows a real mastery over the vast masses of technical information that enshroud most problems ranging from farm parity to foreign policy...
...He kept appointments with Kirby Ramsdell, chief editorial writer of the Los Angeles Times, who wanted to interview him, and attorney Pat O'Connor, a prominent citizen of Minneapolis...
...I was never so angry with him...
...Some of the hotel managers made a great uproar, but discrimination in Minneapolis hotels began to decline...
...Then," Bohn writes, "he subsided into silence as if embarrassed...
...To the end of his time some practical politicians will fear that "practical politics" will never contain him completely, and idealists from time to time will have reason to cringe over some of his words or deeds...
...On at least one occasion the Foreign Relations Committee was on the verge of abolishing the Subcommittee...
...He is certainly not an abstract theoretical student of government, although he is keenly interested in methods of organization...
...You people," Humphrey said to a group of newsmen one day, "always write that I talk on every subject...
...What a hard day this will be for him...
...The depression had forced him out of college, and for years he had been trying, unsuccessfully, to adjust himself to the idea of operating a drugstore all his life...
...It was in his successful 1945 campaign that Humphrey began to develop what was to become an overriding interest in civil rights...
...To most of them Humphrey is spiritually in the tradition of the Middle Western liberalism that produced the La-Follettes, George W. Norris, William Allen White, and many others...
...He has tried to capture the public imagination by coining various phrases such as "Food for Freedom," and in recent months Humphrey has promoted a variety of projects which would implement his "Food for Peace" program...
...He rarely, if ever, moves ahead of middle-of-the-road liberalism...
...The statement condemned McCarthy's "assaults upon our democratic birthright...
...What can a guy mean by a statement like that...
...Perhaps sometimes he should be," insists a lifelong friend of Humphrey, "but he is never calculating...
...Hubert himself attended the university for a while, but had to give up and come home...
...The conservatives saw the measure as a temporary program for dumping overseas some of the wheat, cotton, and other commodities acquired by the Commodity Credit Corporation under the farm price support program...
...And they insist he has "learned and adapted and matured from experience...
...Amrine, Washington correspondent, novelist, and editor for the American Psychological Association, is the author of a newly published book, This is Hubert Humphrey...
...1 can't keep a tight schedule," Humphrey has said...
...Senate had lost hope in stemming the arms race...
...Do you think the law has done any good...
...But a ragged battalion of liberals vowed to fight it out on the floor...
...At forty-eight he is more than ever a man of boundless vitality whose love of action is matched only by his passion for talk...
...He puts firecrackers under everything...
...In a dramatic speech which captured national headlines, Humphrey sounded the rallying cry of the civil rights forces: "To those who say that this civil rights program is an infringement of states' rights, I say this: that 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...
...When Humphrey is campaigning today he can speak with clarity and understanding to a dirt farmer, a garage mechanic, or a floating laborer...
...What a man does and what he thinks are more important than how he looks...
...These remarks indicate how far he has come since his first days in the Senate when Rufus Jarman, in the Saturday Evening Post, summed him up as "brassy, bouncy, and irrepressible...
...He rarely seems to enjoy being alone, he never says he is looking forward to a quiet time in which to read and think over some report...
...I married her for her money," Humphrey smilingly says today...
...He was travelling as a tourist, on borrowed money, but he had badly needed a vacation from the long, hard depression years in the drugstore...
...He himself was not one of them...
...Muriel herself has no drive towards the limelight, and it is known that in her common-sense way she dreads what might happen to the Humphrey family if they did, indeed, come to live on Pennsylvania Avenue...
...In June, 1953, the sixth annual convention of Americans for Democratic Action adopted a strong statement on McCarthyism, and Humphrey, who had been largely silent in the Senate on McCarthy, played a leading part in seeing that the resolution was approved...
...Senate carry greater authority . . . Humphrey is a member of the select inner group that really runs the Senate . . ." Douglass Cater, in The Reporter, wrote, "The extemporaneous Humphrey reveals awesome mental faculties...
...The most common criticism made of Humphrey by friends and foes, by people who do not know him, and by some who have known him for years, is that he talks too much and over too wide a range of subjects...
...Someone ought to tell Ridder that this isn't a beauty contest.'" Humphrey considers himself a small businessman, and through the years he has had extraordinary success in negotiating with businessmen on public problems...
...Five hotels reserved rooms for the Mayor's guests and learned only just before the actors arrived that they were colored...
...He likes action...
...Humphrey's idea that Public Law 480 could be more than a temporary palliative for the farm surplus problem was steadily reinforced by his travels in Europe in 1957 and his year as a United States delegate to the United Nations in 1956, during which he established close communication with scores of delegates from Asia, Africa, and Latin America...
...The Roots of Humphrey's Dedication to Liberalism Until he left high school, Humphrey, who was born in Wallace, South Dakota, spent most of his life in the town of Doland, S. D.—population: 500...
...During the afternoon, he conferred hurriedly, always running late, with his staff experts on the Disarmament Subcommittee, of which he is chairman, a Government Operations Subcommittee, which he also heads, and the Senate Agriculture Committee, of which he is a member...
...What kind of President would he make...
...He first pointed out ADA's anti-Communist record, then went on to attack—without mentioning McCarthy by name—those who "pretend to be the leaders of anti-Communism and the saviors of our liberty . . . "At a moment when all our national wisdom should be employed in the quest for solutions to the awesome terrors of the hydrogen age, we find ourselves plunged into venomous and often irrelevant fratricidal conflicts that dishonor and debase our traditions...
...As he watched from the visitors' gallery the apparent aimlessness of a routine afternoon in the U.S...
...Humphrey Personifies Tradition of Mid-Western Liberalism Many liberals agree with Eleanor Roosevelt that he has a "spark of greatness," and with Reinhold Nie-buhr who said: "The Senator knows more about foreign policy than any of the other 'front runners...
...Among his critics you may hear that he talks too much or too glibly, that he is too ambitious, a one-man band, and not a team player...
...Bohn asked Humphrey what he thought when Mrs...
...It grew out of my frustration and anger over the way the Republicans were using the Communist issue...
...That night Hubert wrote home to Huron, to Muriel Buck, his fiancee: "Dear Bucky, This trip has impressed one thing on my mind...
...But his record on constitutional guarantees of freedom of speech and assembly for all dissident groups was unassailable...
...Some consider that he also has some of F.D.R.'s faults, such as seeming to agree with everyone who calls on him, and having a certain lofty detachment when it comes to tedious organization details...
...The dominant mood, generated by the professionals, including President Truman, was for compromise...
...Humphrey Keeps Alive the Hope for Disarmament No one man in high office in Washington, for example, has done so much as has Humphrey to keep alive the hope for disarmament...
...In recent years she has made countless appearances at "coffee hours," and at her campaign meetings she has emerged as an effective political speaker who not only extends greetings and felicitations, but who speaks on issues of the day...
...But she always took part in the Saturday night strategy discussions which were long a feature of the Humphrey circle...
...I did not become a United States Senator to make myself the nation's leading expert on the boll weevil," is the way Humphrey expresses his disdain for the kind of legislator who emphasizes one or two narrow specialties of peculiar concern to his own state and fails to do his homework on major national and international issues...
...It was the issue of civil rights that vaulted Humphrey into national prominence overnight—at the Democratic National Convention in Philadelphia in 1948...
...He has a paradoxically conciliatory and flexible attitude toward those with whom he disagrees...
...If Hollywood were inventing an ail-American candidate, said another, he would be like Humphrey of South Dakota and Minnesota: a big man with a good speaking voice and a fair-sized family (three boys and a girl...
...It is difficult for the all-out liberal to understand some of the things Humphrey favors to help business...
...On another occasion, Humphrey said, "It is not one of the things I am proudest of...
...Newsweek reported, "To the handful of top-ranking officials in Washington who make the real decisions of foreign policy, few voices in the U.S...
...I told him we could all excuse a departure from principle like voting for bills which unfairly hamper the development of oleomargarine as a competitor of butter...
...Maybe it does sound rather egotistical and beyond reason, but, Muriel, I do know others have succeeded...
...Senator, and now a candidate for President...
...From 6:45 to 7:45 he shook hands with the auxiliaries of the American Legion and the Veterans of Foreign Wars at a downtown reception...
...Humphrey was clocked a while ago on a more typical day by Rowland Evans, Jr., a Washington correspondent for the New York Herald Tribune...
...From the liberals' Left end you may hear that "he used to be a fighting liberal, but he has settled down, much like the rest of them...
...William E. Bohn, a veteran editor of the New Leader magazine, was amazed by three things in a recent interview with Humphrey: His candor, his silences, and his sense of humor...
...Many lifelong conservative Republicans in his home state think of him mainly as a man who works hard and gets things done for Minnesota...
...In 1951, Humphrey was the chief Congressional leader sponsoring emergency grain shipments to India...
...The conference lasted until 11:45...
...But Mayor Humphrey had one of his representatives ask hotels to "set aside some rooms for guests of the Mayor...
...More than most Senators he has fought for affirmative alternatives to many of our present foreign policies...
...I need to do more reading, more writing and more thinking if I ever want to fulfill my dream of being someone in this world...
...He is no radical, but rather accepts without apparent dissent the basic outlines of the moderate welfare state proposed by liberal Democrats...
...I like every subject...
...he has lived it...
...His enthusiasm is real and springs from true power...
...Humphrey liked the idea and introduced the bill—which was more extreme than anything McCarthy had ever proposed...
...He frequently points out that if the Russians had this great capacity they would not curse it, but count it as a blessing, and put it to dynamic use in their overseas political and economic operations...
...He has drive and knows how to push things through the federal bureaucracy...
...It requires a unified community program based upon recognition of the true ideals of democracy, wherein every person is accepted as a human being with dignity and worth, regardless of race, creed, or color...
...David Demarest Lloyd, writing in The Reporter, has said Humphrey is "personally bright, witty, and charming . . . has the common touch . . . the party's most accomplished extemporaneous speaker . . ." Rowland Evans, Jr., wrote in the Herald Tribune, "Humphrey's mind is endlessly flexible and absorbent, his knowledge of affairs is little short of staggering and his approach to the great unsolved political questions is on the whole original and imaginative...
...Maybe I seem foolish to have such vain hopes and plans, but, Bucky, I can see how some day, if you and I just apply ourselves and make up our minds to work for bigger things, how we can some day live here in Washington, and probably be in government politics or service...
...He loves spirited discussion and the extemporaneous play of ideas, but he would not enjoy that same play of ideas so much in a book...
...In the field of foreign affairs, Humphrey falls short of embracing the kind of program advanced by The Progressive, but few Senators come as close...
...He does not read long books for work or for play—few Senators ever do— but it does not seem as if his schedule is all that keeps him from books...
...Not at all, this is a restful day for the Senator—all that time on the plane...
...Some friends of Humphrey consider this the single blot on his liberal record...
...As a political strategist for Humphrey, he further reasoned that a bill that outlawed the Communist Party as such could go through Congress, and that it would be helpful to the harassed Democrats...
...He likes flying days—no telephones, no interruptions, a chance to read reports, write letters, catch up on his sleep...
...When Humphrey speaks of the American agricultural surplus, it is consistendy in a favorable light...
...Few wives of public men have played a more decisive part in their husband's lives than has Muriel Buck Humphrey...
...But it was the year that Harry Truman confounded the prophets and pollsters by thrashing Governor Thomas E. Dewey in one of the great political upsets of American history...
...We know your plans, you've got the Negro vote...
...Like most small-town retailers, the Humphreys accepted as normal a work day which ran from eight in the morning until ten at night...
...It was from this background that Humphrey came by bus in August, 1935, for his first look at Washington...
...This fund enabled Humphrey to make the break for the university, but not without the added push of Muriel's persuasion...
...When the Broadway musical Carmen Jones headed for Minneapolis, the Negro cast was refused room reservations by almost every hotel...
...He resigned himself to taking a speed-up course as a pharmacist and worked for several years behind the counter in the family drugstore...
...He must be in Washington...
...The elements are mixed in this man, as in all men...
...Many stories are told of Humphrey's personal interest in the intricate questions of eliminating overt and covert discrimination...
...McCarthyism was already on the wane by the summer of 1954, but it was still not a time when reasonable voices gained their proper audience, and many demagogues were using this issue to the great detriment of the country's prestige...
...The flow of customers to the store enabled him to meet all kinds of people, and he never knew what it was to be alone...
...for example, he is not identified with the forces seeking national health insurance...
...I can understand that because it is a matter of his survival as Senator from a dairy state...
...He said he thought the purpose of the bill—to take Communist-hunting out of headlines and committee circuses, and put it on the courts—was sound...
...Convention delegates, fearful of defeat in the Presidential race, were bitterly divided on the civil rights issue...
...He plans to continue fighting for greater, not less, food production, and for using our abundance with imagination and with humanity...
...Friends and foes of F.D.R...
...Today he takes more time for thought, perhaps pauses a moment in interviews before he answers a question, and his closest associates are pleased...
...However, both LaGuardia and Humphrey spent years of their lives studying government...
...Harry Humphrey, an old Washingtonian and a longtime government employe, who had made Humphrey's Washington trip possible...
...I set my aim at Congress...
...He provides action and information promptly when they ask for it...
...A year after they were married she had persuaded Humphrey to leave the drugstore and return to the university...
...Humphrey early recognized that a vitally important aspect of the pursuit of disarmament was simply prying factual information out of a reluctant Administration, and from the scientists, and assembling it in understandable form...
...Muriel had worked as a bookkeeper and had saved $600...
...He has been determined for years to be practical, and it is rather difficult, as it was with F.D.R., to try to blueprint at what point he will be practical and at what point he will be idealistic...
...He had achieved his great youthful ambition, but it was Muriel who had provided the crucial tugs and pushes which changed their lives forever...
...Humphrey has a great quality that helps him keep his balance—a well-developed sense of humor...
...Young Hubert was shaken by seeing his mother and father cry as they left the big house...
...To Uncle Harry, his nephew had long looked "like a comer," and this night he persuaded his young nephew that "others have done it, you can do it too, with hard work, study, and the right principles...
...Each day is a day unto itself and we live each day that way...
...Humphrey himself has shown not only a zealous concern for the special needs of his own Minnesota, but his major speeches and legislation have ranged over civil rights, social security, housing, agriculture, conservation, education, taxation, public health, labor-management relations, and foreign affairs in general, and disarmament, the Middle East, and foreign economic aid in particular...
...Designed to outlaw the Communist Party in the United States, it produced bitter disagreement and disappointment among his many liberal supporters...
...His political ideas and methods, and certain mercurial personal qualities, often remind people of F.D.R...
...The polls, the politicians, and the press are unanimous in their judgment that Humphrey's chances are slim this year...
...Bohn then stirred him up with a sentence from the article in the Saturday Evening Post in which Walter Ridder said of Humphrey, "He just doesn't look like a President...
...Sometimes a person who is favorably impressed by his energy and originality will say with a shake of the head, "But he isn't an administrator, and that's what you need in the White House...
...Quite early in his Senate career Humphrey learned to respond to what he considers "reasonable requests" from businessmen...
...The bill struck a tremendously responsive chord in Congress...
...William Jennings Bryan, Robert M. LaFollette, Sr., George W. Norris, sometimes Teddy Roosevelt—these were the household prophets of the Humphreys...
...But those who have watched him at close range for more than a decade—both his Senate colleagues and the hard-bitten Washington correspondents—have acquired a deep respect for his enormous capacity to master a vast variety of subjects and to discuss them ably, persuasively, sometimes brilliantly...
...One morning recently a visitor called to confer with Senator Hubert H. Humphrey in the Senate Office Building...
...a background near the soil . . . and an ability to get along with labor and with business...
...He'll be in the office tomorrow with seven new ideas...
...Senate, the twenty-four year old Humphrey indulged in some expansive fantasies...
...He takes businessmen's requests and inquiries under consideration as he would inquiries from any other constituents...
...Max Lerner, the New York Post columnist, puts it this way: "He has all along been one of the four major contenders among the Democrats . . . Of the four, he is the one who strikes me as having, to the highest degree, the requisite qualities to make a good President, perhaps a great one...
...Two years later he was a strong supporter of an Administration proposal to use Commodity Credit Corporation stocks for famine relief in Pakistan...
...I learned more about economics," he says, "from one South Dakota dust storm than I did in all my years in college...
...They also compare him to former American leaders...
...Like F.D.R., Humphrey has an unshakable faith in the free enterprise system— he has never worked to change it, but merely to patch it up, to guide it, to see that government steps in promptly when the system fails to work for the greatest good of the greatest number...
...He has probably gained more in the respect of his colleagues than any Senator I've known...
...He reads quite a bit, but swiftly and in a fragmentary, journalistic way— mostly reports, magazines and sometimes a topical book of the hour...
...At noon, the Senator moved onto the floor of the Senate and introduced four bills...
...Humphrey was their spokesman...
...Perhaps it is a little hard to define Humphrey as anything but a politician who may be on his way to becoming a statesman...
...With November elections approaching, it was obvious that this issue would also be used to the detriment of Democratic candidates for office, especially Senators up for re-election...
...Originally regarded as a fresh and talkative upstart, he is now so highly regarded by official Washington that even Vice President Nixon could say that the man from Minnesota "has a good mind, he's fast on his feet, a fine organizer, and a terrific worker...
...Like LaGuardia, Humphrey, as mayor of Minneapolis, loved to race around his city, and he took an interest in everything from hospitals to libraries to zoning laws...
...Sometimes, though rarely, he gives information he has not verified, or makes a hasty conclusion when swept along by his own oratory...
...Humphrey replied, "I felt deeply flattered, humble...
...Thus Humphrey grew up in an atmosphere of hard work, plain living, fancy salesmanship, underdog living, town-hall democracy, and of a political and social liberalism that sprang from the same soil as Populism and the Non-Partisan League...
...He has taken a plane to Minnesota to speak to 30,000 farmers this afternoon...
...At an April, 1954, ADA convention, Humphrey delivered a keynote speech...
...It is nearly twenty years since a newspaperman in Minneapolis wrote about the young man he had just met—a professor of political science who was running for mayor: "He seems to be a wonderful and meteoric young man . . . bouncy and gay, built on springs, with a clear-cut fierce face and a pleasant young grin...
...Humphrey persuaded his fellow Senators that even if little progress were made, the world should never be told that the U.S...
...Until late that night, young Hubert talked of his yearnings and his dreams with his uncle, Dr...
...Roosevelt made the remark that Humphrey had a "spark of greatness...
...His "Food for Peace" plan proposed last year was the latest in Humphrey's frequently successful attempts since 1954 to strengthen legislation which authorizes a program of overseas disposal of surplus food and fiber...
...One might suspect from the killing, endlessly varied schedule of a typical day that Humphrey spreads himself too thin...
...he was re-elected by a huge margin—far more than the possible benefits of the anti-Communist law could account for...
...As it turned out, the Senator was delayed by so many early morning telephone calls at home he arrived at the conference after the breakfast dishes had been cleared away, and ate nothing at all...
...As part of the liberal leadership, he conceives and supports legislation whose goal is to provide greater opportunities for a greater number of Americans—without disturbing the basic framework of what is known as our "free enterprise system...
...Humphrey then gobbled a sandwich and a glass of milk...
...but he did not see how he could get out from behind the counter...
...His admirers never compare him to anyone mediocre...
...But a few hours after this conversation, Humphrey stubbornly made a spirited broadcast appealing for a Fair Employment Practices Commission, and in time Minneapolis was the first American city to have one...
...From the Right you may hear that "he has slowed down some, but he is still liable to go off alone on a radical tangent—a dangerous man to have in the Presidency...
...Don't laugh at me...
...Public Law 480, the Agricultural Trade Development and Assistance Act, was passed by Congress in 1954 through the efforts of an unlikely coalition of Humphrey and his liberal friends, the ultra-conservative Farm Bureau Federation, and the Dixiecrats...
...This, indeed, was not a typical day for the bustling bundle of energy that is Senator Humphrey...
...They say he is an original, and not a copy of anyone else...
...it is not a popular issue...
...As Chairman of the Subcommittee on Disarmament of the Foreign Relations Committee, Humphrey has doggedly pursued the goal of genuine security through arms control, rather than the precarious security of stockpiling ever more lethal weapons...
...Hubert's father, Hubert Horatio Humphrey, Sr., was the village druggist and the unofficial mayor...
...the Southern delegates marched out to form the Dixiecrats and run their own candidate for President...
...His committee reports have been models of scholarship and fact-finding, and they have helped to pave the way, as in the case of suspension of nuclear tests, for an informed body of public opinion which would support new ideas...
...Worst of all, at an hour when we should be exalting the institutions of freedom, we are allowing them to be tarnished by this madness of know-nothingness...
...I do...
...Later he became the official mayor of Huron, S.D., population: about 8,000, where the Humphrey family moved in the depths of the depression...
...We are compelled to spend so much time challenging the big lie that we seem to have little chance to search for the basic truths that might help lead mankind out of the present world impasse...
...Humphrey was so outspoken that Negro friends warned him to slow down as a matter of political strategy...
...This tragic display of racial intolerance," he said in his opening radio speech "requires more than the superficial treatment of additional police...
...He would always be able to cite the record that he was so opposed to Communists he had voted to make them outlaws...
...Humphrey has also been compared to the late Fiorello LaGuardia, the great, fiery mayor of New York City...
...Hubert Humphrey traveled a long, uphill road from a South Dakota drug store to the United States Senate...
...Truman may not have had the presidential look, but he had the ability...
...Humphrey's record in the Senate can best be summarized by reporting that he consistently achieves a 100 per cent voting score on the roll calls prepared by Americans for Democratic Action, the nation's labor unions, and liberal farm organizations and cooperatives...
...Humphrey has, indeed, met a payroll—to recall the ancient Republican shibboleth—but he has also gone hungry—not for food, but for education...
...Here is how that day went...
...And the man who looked least like one was Lincoln...
...Humphrey rose at 6:45 a.m., his usual hour, helped one of his four children with homework, and hurried from his suburban home into town in his 1955 Cadillac to breakfast with Mrs...
...He is the American dream...
...He wasn't just pulled by the lure of political science," says a Huron resident who is close to the Humphrey family, "he was pushed by Muriel, to get him away from the drugstore...
...I asked Humphrey recently: "Do you now feel you were oversold on the danger...
...Humphrey's Record on Communism and McCarthyism The Minnesotan's devotion to civil rights extends to civil liberties, but there is one major blot on that latter record—his sponsorship of the "Communist Control Act...
...He got home late, but early enough to assure his normal five to six hours of sleep...
...He also made brief speeches in behalf of civil rights and in opposition to President Eisenhower's farm proposals...
...Civil Rights a Dominant Theme from the Beginning Two years after Hubert Humphrey completed his formal education at the University of Minnesota and Louisiana State University, he ran for mayor of Minneapolis, and two years after that, in 1945, at age thirty-four, he was elected mayor of one of the nation's largest cities by the greatest majority in Minneapolis history...
...The visitor demurred...
...At 5:30 p.m., he was scheduled to go to a television network studio to do a special program for the Institute of International Education, but he arrived half an hour late...
...Time and again he has forced proponents of continued testing to retract or correct misleading statements which tended to support their position...
...But always Bryan, Bryan, Bryan—the golden voice crying from the prairies, "You shall not crucify mankind . . ." Hubert's older brother completed three years of college but was financially unable to finish his education until years later...
...Humphrey's interests—and talents —cover virtually every field in which the President of the United States must lead...
...The Editors...
...His supporters believe he has the basic liberalism and human sympathy of Franklin D. Roosevelt...
...In the middle Twenties, Humphrey, Sr., lost his savings in a wave of bank failures and the Humphrey family had to sell their fine home and move to a much smaller one...
...This practice and the tradition of hard work inherited from his Norwegian mother seem to have ingrained permanently into Humphrey the idea that suppertime merely marks the beginning of the second half of a working day...
...The bills proposed setting up a Youth Conservation Corps, liberalizing the passport laws, enacting a "food for peace" program, and outlawing certain kinds of water pollution...
...Cecil Newman, editor of a Negro weekly, told him: "Soft-peddle FEPC, Hubert...
...Humphrey's silence ended immediately," Bohn recalls...
...Yes," was the answer...

Vol. 24 • September 1960 • No. 4


 
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