GEORGE McGOVERN: A JEFFERSONIAN FOR OUR TIME

...Five per cent of the American people control ninety per cent of our productive national wealth...

...Less than two per cent of the population now owns approximately eighty per cent of the nation's personally-held corporate stock, ninety per cent of the personally-held corporate bonds, and nearly one hundred per cent of the personally-held municipal bonds...

...McGovern used the Democratic Party he rebuilt in South Dakota to help himself get elected—no doubt of that...

...McGovern has been, in sum, the same kind of quiet, rational reformer as Thomas Jefferson, who, as Malone has written, "did not strike his contemporaries as epoch-making or deeply stirring...

...To a college audience he suggested that Senators be drafted, too, and if not fit for combat, assigned then to less taxing chores, "like clearing mine fields...

...Abhorrence of military dictatorships accounts for McGovern's proposal to cut off foreign aid to Greece and Pakistan, "which suppress, with varying degrees of brutality, the aspirations of their own people...

...As a high school debater he upheld government ownership of the railroads...

...His plans for an open government can be perceived as an application of the open ways of Jacksonian democracy to the modern Federal bureaucracy...

...so did ten million adults...

...Last October he said, concerning "the tens of thousands of tormented young men in this country who could not participate in this war on grounds of conscience," that he would grant them a general amnesty...

...But his humanistic dedication has dominated his career, and in the fullness of it he has become wary of his own ambitiousness...

...He wrote that the first bill he advanced in the Virginia House of Burgesses would have allowed owners of slaves to free them...

...Anson quotes McGovern: "1972 may be the last turnaround we will have...

...The thrust of George McGovern's record is toward a people again proud, an independent citizenry working and living in civil liberty, peace, and personal freedom...

...In the obverse of the same concern for reconciliation, McGovern would restore the capacity of the Veterans Administration hospitals and provide a new "GI Bill" of educational benefits for Vietnam veterans, "placed at a disadvantage at eighteen or twenty years of age and forced to bear the brunt of the sentiment against the Vietnam war...

...There are few signs of a tendency toward radical change, even radical change that we need...

...In an essay published this past summer, he has consolidated social purpose, the in-escapability of one's own self-interest, and an acceptance of the limits of a lifework into his model, which he clearly means for himself as well as for others, of "the responsible agent who seeks realistically and without delusions of purity to achieve a world more fit for human habitation...

...As Jefferson's biographer, Dumas Malone, points out, the great Virginian well knew that large colonial-period land grants were the basis of the ruling class of his time, and he had proposed to the convention of 1776 that men who did not own fifty acres of land should get free grants up to that amount: "He wanted land for the landless," "a society of small farmers...

...Jefferson wanted the Bill of Rights to prohibit standing armies, to provide "freedom from a permanent military...

...Ronnie Dugger is publisher and editor at large of The Texas Observer...

...He won a state college oratory contest with a speech advocating world government...

...Norton, and he currently is working on a study of the Johnson Administration...

...In September, 1963, truly then "a voice in the wilderness," McGovern said: "The failure of our Vietnam policy should be a signal to every one of us in this chamber to re-examine the roots of that policy...

...Last year McGovern advocated an excess profits tax on windfall profits, but this year, in a Wall Street Journal advertisement, he denied he had, nor did he discuss the subject in his New York policy speech...

...Subconsciously we realize we have this star-system politics in which the issues are composed like scripts for the actors, and the citizens are the fans in the theater of the media...

...In 1964, with Senator Barry Goldwater running for President, the only Senate prophets on Vietnam were Wayne Morse and Ernest Gruening...

...The son of a preacher, the accepted conscience of a closely-woven moral, rural culture, yes, but more, as Anson, with McGovern's cooperation, tells...

...McGovern cranked out leaflets for Wallace on a mimeograph machine...

...The Government, McGovern says, asks a $400 contribution from each citizen for the military budget and a $12 contribution for elementary and secondary education: we spend $21,600 to kill a Vietcong soldier, and $44 Federal dollars a year to educate each of our primary school children...

...He told the lions in his soothing lion-tamer's way that he would tax capital gains at the higher rates applied to ordinary income, and tax all property at its appreciated value when it is passed on by inheritance or gift...

...McGovern sees amnesty—one of the subjects on which he has been driven back into a defensive posture—in Lincolnian terms...

...I still think he was essentially right...

...Even in dealing with crime during the justified contemporary demands for law and order, he is compassionate...

...Under McGovern, there might be some real movement in the Government toward the serious structural reform of the economic power system...

...Despite Jefferson's benighted private views on race and his ownership of substantial numbers of slaves, he was enlightened on slavery for his time and place...

...To stop the "industrial carnage" in plants, shops, mines, and mills, McGovern's proposals would provide 8,000 industrial safety inspectors and 4,000 hygienists, with workers' access to inspectors' reports guaranteed as a matter of right...

...When he was roving around in Southern France in 1787, he wrote his friend Lafayette from Nice, "You must ferret the people out of their hovels as I have done, look into their kettles, eat their bread, loll on their beds under pretence of resting yourself, but in fact, to find if they are soft...

...He wants to provide prescription drugs, prescribed under their generic names, under Medicare, and to establish regional networks of medical delivery systems, featuring life-saving vehicles designed and equipped for emergency medical treatment while carrying stricken people to hospitals...

...I can...

...In 1948, at age twenty-six, McGovern's developing political philosophy found expression in his commitment, in the early stages, to Henry Wallace's campaign for President...

...At the point when 15,000 young Americans had died in the war under President Nixon, McGovern said, "their blood is on his hands...

...foreign policy was needlessly exacerbating tensions with the Soviet Union and that we were wrong in our support of Chiang, the French in Indochina, and Bao Dai...

...Tens of millions of workers who give their working lives to private employers have no private pension rights at all...

...For the failure in Vietnam will not remain confined to Vietnam...

...Yet last August, McGovern, supposedly a lamb venturing into the New York den of the lions of the stock market, the security analysts, soft-talked them even as he was for the first time doubling the fist of his tax reform to close the most important loophole of them all, capital gains...

...McGovern proposes interest subsidies for agricultural loans, housing loans (with a ceiling on the value of the property), and education loans...

...Just before the first rejection of the McGovern-Hat-field amendment to end the war, McGovern said to his august colleagues: "Every Senator in this chamber is partly responsible for sending 50,000 young Americans to an early grave...

...And I will...

...and knowing it, to defeat its views...

...With something spiritually akin to Jefferson's aversion to government intrusion on "the right of personal freedom," McGovern, while restraining his majority at Miami, did approve the platform plank adopted there which includes a sentence-and-a-half that encap-sules the cultural revolution of the 1960s: "Americans should be free to make their own choice of lifestyles and private habits without being subject to discrimination or prosecution...

...It was a source of Jefferson's fundamental optimism that, as he said, "There is no such thing in this country as what would be called wealth in Europe," and that if every individual participated in the governing, "the government will be safe...

...The Nixon Administration can't find the money to feed our people...

...Running through his domestic programs there is a steady concern that their lot not be too hard or their meat too scarce...

...The thoroughness of his concern with the people is clinched, in my mind, by his not having overlooked a certain gaping hiatus in the provision of social justice...

...But McGovern is a serious man: Issues come first with him, and he believes in what he stands for...

...McGovern also favors graduating the corporate income tax...

...Jefferson was a humanitarian—not just an English liberal and an American revolutionary—but also in many respects a plain liberal in the modern sense...

...Now that the election is only days away, it becomes more urgent than ever to pay careful attention to what these beliefs are...

...Jefferson—a foremost instigator of the Bill of Rights in his letters from France, the nemesis of the Alien and Sedition Acts, and the most eloquent early American champion of civil liberties, tolerating error where reason is left free to combat it, sworn to eternal hostility against every form of tyranny over the mind of man, following truth wherever it may lead—Jefferson would be proud of McGovern on dissent and civil liberties and proud of the way in which he refused to give ground in the face of bitter witch hunts all through his public career...

...If McGovern has it in his mind to open up a fundamental inquiry into the structures of private economic power in America, he has been circumspect about it so far...

...As President, he says, he would initiate, by order or legislation, Presidential press conferences at least twice a month and press conferences with Cabinet members at least once a month, and Cabinet meetings open to the press except for national security...

...McGovern is supposed to be a bland fellow, but he is not...

...But thinking of McGovern as President, what President is he most like...

...I liked what Wallace had to say about foreign policy...

...In two sentences of this oration the young McGovern prefigured the course of his own life: "The practical men have had inning after inning in which they have constantly piled up a higher and higher score on the side of war and chaos at home and abroad...

...Jefferson's chief title to fame was as a legislator, "sitting on endless committees and doing a vast amount of paper work . . . the draftsman of state papers and legislative bills and legal statutes...

...McGovern, like William Fulbright, voted for the Gulf of Tonkin resolution after having been assured that it would not result in escalating the war, only to find out that he had been misled...

...Personally, however, I believe I detect in McGovern deeper resonances with, and one instructive contrast to, his other Presidential hero, Thomas Jefferson...

...McGovern suggests regulating pot much as we regulate alcohol, while educating to discourage its use...

...Education, Jefferson said, should enable the young "to know ambition under every disguise it may assume...

...He would have the Federal Government offer savings bonds, the dollar value of which would increase quarterly with the consumer price index...

...For the heroin-user he suggests the California plan of civil commitment to a therapeutic institution...

...For welfare recipients able to work, McGovern proposes a major new program to provide them with government "public service jobs...

...He is interested, as he told the security analysts in New York City, in "the question of income supplements for working people who, in spite of their labor, still have trouble making ends meet...

...He wants a law passed to prohibit large non-farm corporations from engaging in farming either directly or indirectly...

...He would use revenue-sharing, for instance, to establish "minimum standards of public services" in local areas •—services such as sewage systems and housing...

...In McGovern's partisanship for the independent yeoman farmer, again he is Jeffersonian...

...Nor are these the first times he has compromised...

...I wasn't happy with the direction the Democratic Party was taking in those times...

...Anson says McGovern's faith persists in "the ultimate practicability of some form of world government...

...troops might have to return to Cambodia, McGovern struck back: "I'm fed up to the ears with old men dreaming up wars for young men to die in...

...His friend Lafayette, he told James Madison, was a fine fellow, but "his foible is, a canine appetite for popularity and fame...

...I believe," he said, "we should follow the wise precedents set by President Lincoln's extension of amnesty to those who were actually fighting against their country in 1862, when the Civil War was still going on...

...This got nowhere, and the McGovern Democrats' platform this year tells us the result after almost a century of "fighting the trusts" by statute: "The Democratic Party deplores the increasing concentration of economic power in fewer and fewer hands...

...Nothing more conclusively certifies McGovern as a comparable person of earnest good faith and high vision than his record in behalf of progressive legislation...

...Looking back on his first Presidential attempt in 1968, he said there is "a certain amount of pride in wanting to get known...

...He proposes to replace the patterns of government guarantees "to the builder and the banker" with a housing allowance for the individual...

...McGovern would expand Social Security to cover 3,000,000 persons who would otherwise be on welfare and provide a new monthly Social Security minimum payment of $150...

...The militarism and monopolies Jefferson wanted prohibited in the Bill of Rights would surely be fought from the White House with all the ingenuity and power the President could command...

...Jefferson also urged, in letters from France, that the Bill of Rights stipulate "restriction of monopolies," "freedom from monopolies...

...His AFL-CIO voting record is 93.4 per cent "right," but he has conceded that under political pressures he cast a vote contrary to his conscience opposing the repeal of 14-B of Taft-Hartley...

...With health and other public services, a new agency on rural housing, and job-expanding programs for rural areas, he hopes to attract people out of the slums into the countryside...

...In a memorandum to himself before his 1962 campaign (quoted by Anson), he made a pact with himself that it would be "the highest and most educfational], inspiring, friendly, and Xtian [Christian] . . . and no concern over outcome except high-mindedness and inspire as many South Dakotans as possible...

...He sides with the family farmer even to the point of leaving unreconciled, at least until recently, a conflict between advocating ninety per cent of parity for farm prices and condemning high food prices...

...Never was so much false arithmetic employed on any subject, as...

...Jefferson distrusted ambition so much that he said, "An honest man can feel no pleasure in the exercise of power over his fellow citizens...

...But he still advocates a string of other major tax reforms, from abolishing the oil depletion allowance and the other major oil-tax loopholes to breaking up real estate investment shelters...

...He would tax money made from investments the same as money made by work, and he would curb the hoarding of wealth in family dynasties, much as Jefferson, in the Virginia of the 1770s, helped abolish the system of inherited privilege that was based on primogeniture and entails...

...Johnson had already plotted substantial escalation while pledging the contrary, McGovern sounded off against the war again six days before Lyndon Johnson was sworn in, and nothing President Johnson could say or do shut him up again...

...For a comparison of McGovern after Miami, that contains also the torturing American reactions to an idealist reaching for the Presidency, look back to the chastened Stevenson of 1956...

...His moral imagination had been troubled by his learning of an American steel mill in India that was making 300 per cent profit while paying its workers twelve cents a day...

...Nothing has led him to express that moral rage more frequently than Vietnam...

...In the Senator's intention that the United States give war-recovery aid to all the countries of Indochina, including North Vietnam, Lincoln's will to reconciliation fuses with Wilson's will toward one world...

...That, and not some abstract principle of political organization, is what requires checks and balances, the distribution of powers in government...

...His wife, he told Life, sometimes chides him for his ego, and he allowed that he does like to get credit for what he does...

...For a comparison with the earlier styles of reformers one's mind does turn to Adlai Stevenson in 1952, after whom the McGoverns named their son Steven that year...

...Preserving neighborhoods and building new ones inside and outside the city are among his goals for Federal funding...

...Like the late Senator Estes Kefauver, and every contemporary Senate liberal, he has avoided the subject of how actually to control this power, while discussing it endlessly with only apparent ferocity...

...John Kenneth Galbraith has written of McGovern: "Many people are now alive as a result of his efforts to make food surpluses available to the starving...

...The thwarting, by assassination, of Lincoln's will to national reconciliation is graven in the history of the country since 1865...

...McGovern says, "Four million children went to bed hungry again tonight...

...As one of the first few Senators to oppose the Vietnam war on the Senate floor—in 1963—McGovern reminds one of Lincoln's principled and at the time politically self-devastating opposition to the Mexican War in 1848...

...McGovern wants to abolish the draft, and the McGovernized Democrats' national platform advocates doing that...

...He is dedicated to improving the quality of life through a strong conservation program, more effective Federal support of education, urban mass transit, and a variety of measures designed to protect the consumer...

...McGovern's dedication and red-tape ripping helped feed many hungry people in Northeast Brazil and Peru, and many other peoples...

...His economic specialists figure that while his programs would cause a total loss of two and a half million defense and military jobs, this would be more than offset by new civilian and government jobs created by the programs for a net gain of more than a million jobs...

...Less than one per cent of all manufacturers have eighty-eight per cent of the profits...

...We face a choice," he says, "between population stacked up in polluted, congested, crime-infested, and job-poor cities, or a population spread out across the country, with room to live and breathe...

...He continues to appear to rely, for remedies, on the existing antitrust laws...

...Such responsible agency requires breaking through the constraints of narrow self-interest to human goals, the willingness to seek and exercise power in areas of intense conflict, and a continuous realism about one's own motives and the limited possibilities of political action...

...It is my own expectation, subject, of course, to the events which we shall see, that if McGovern is elected, he will be the best President we have had since Jefferson, who, in my opinion, was the best of them all...

...Pension contributions, which are, after all, deferred wages, are just as legitimate subjects for minimum wage legislation as ordinary wages are...

...In the same spirit, McGovern favors closing tax loopholes for non-farmers owning farm land and a $20,000 payment limitation on farm support programs...

...You will feel a sublime pleasure in the course of this investigation, and a sublimer one hereafter, when you shall be able to apply your knowledge to the softening of their beds, or the throwing a morsel of meat into their kettle of vegetables...

...The street criminal is almost always the product of poverty and alienation," he says, yet "those who rail against such crime are the first to rail against the expenditure of public funds to alleviate poverty and frustration," a cynicism that is "a crime itself...

...He suggests automatic cost-of-living increases for government pensions and welfare checks...

...It is a source of McGovern's fundamental alarm that our wealth is now so fantastic and so selfishly concentrated, the whole mass can be corrupted by it...

...we stand derelict before history if we fail to make the examination...

...But even if this did not take place, the climate outside the Government for such reform would improve...

...As long as men continue to scoff at idealism, at spirituality, at such ideas as international cooperation through the United World Government, and continue to advance the notion of expediency and material gain, just so long will we continue to reap the tragic harvest of so-called practical men...

...But by withdrawing from Asia and bringing home about sixty per cent of our troops in Europe, he would save $30 billion a year and reduce our military manpower about 650,000 to a level of 1,735,000...

...For a time in 1960 he pushed himself with President Kennedy to be Secretary of Agriculture...

...Holt, Rinehart and Winston...

...McGovern does not follow Jefferson in the latter's revulsion against the cities, but sees the revival of small family farms as a way of relieving some of the plagues of city life...

...My best perception of McGovern, my best intuition of his private political self, is reinforced by Robert Sam Anson's biography of the South Dakotan (McGovern: A Biography...

...His answer was that, if regulation cannot be made to work, he was open to government management...

...Senator who ended up a Marxist...

...After one campaign swing he told his staff that running for President is a great privilege, win or lose, because of the chance to talk to and listen to the people, to deal with them "in every nook and cranny...

...His book on universities will be published in 1973 by W.W...

...But he also quotes McGovern: "I felt then, as I do now, that U.S...

...to persuade nations that it is to their interest to go to war," Jefferson wrote in Notes on Virginia...

...Another, a Senator Pettigrew, was a populist U.S...

...The trap we have fallen into there will haunt us in every corner of this revolutionary world...

...he asked...

...He favors the Kennedy national health insurance bill...

...By 1964 the program was providing school lunches for one out of every five children in India...

...Why...

...When Senator John Stennis suggested that U.S...

...His tax reform program, frankly aiming for a redistribution of wealth, would begin the work of reconstituting a government that "will be safe...

...One, Governor Peter Norbeck, pushed a state coal mine, state grain elevators, and a state cement factory, which is still in operation...

...During his four years as Representative, McGovern spoke often for the use of food surpluses to feed the hungry abroad, and President Kennedy made him director of the Food for Peace program...

...No saint, McGovern is a man, a democratic politician of the best kind, but still contained within the terms imposed by that profession, seeking change by acquiring power through decisions by majority votes...

...On this subject one can well judge whether a person has or does not have an imagination that is morally sufficient to the times...

...He would have the Federal Government pay a third of public school costs, thus making it possible for localities to reduce property taxes that hit modest-income people hard...

...He favors, in fact, one hundred per cent of parity, but late in September was reportedly considering a system of direct payments that would raise farm income without raising food prices...

...He sometimes calls himself a populist and, as biographer Anson has it, McGovern likes to be compared to two South Dakotans of that breed...

...he is actuated by moral rage which commits him to the changes he yearns for...

...Against tides of emotion, McGovern stands for busing as one means of providing quality, integrated education...

...Because," he answered, "American values insist that maximum financial return is of greater concern than human welfare...

...But those who put their momentary frustrations with his minor compromises ahead of their imagination of the actual burden he bears to change the country by winning power if he can, should refer again to his whole career and see again the work that he has done...

...McGovern is certainly no Marxist, but Anson quotes him, "I think I feel more at home when I read the populists than any other group...

...We believe official policy can encourage diversity...

...He tried to exclude slavery from the Western Territory, and his 1778 bill barred the further importation of slaves into Virginia...

...In the years that followed, during which he gave new life to the Democratic Party of South Dakota and then was elected to Congress in 1956 and 1958, McGovern acquired his special ability, so easily undervalued, to advocate progressive ideas in undramatic, persuasive ways...

...McGovern introduced Robert Kennedy in April, 1968, as a man who had "the absolute personal honesty of Woodrow Wilson," one of the two American Presidents who are McGovern's heroes, and there is a distinctly Wilsonian influence in McGovern's brief membership, while a freshman Congressman in the mid-1950s, in the United World Federalists...

...McGovern contrasts President Nixon's veto of the $1.8 billion health, education, and welfare appropriation with his advocacy of $4 billion more for the Pentagon in 1973...

...The corruption of "the whole mass" has begun to appear with the growing pollution of the people's elections by the influences of the only people who can finance the campaigns, those same, the very rich...

...How can you speak for them, he asks, if you don't know "what's on their minds...

...Anson points out that during the Ninetieth Congress that immediately preceded his bid for re-election to the Senate in 1968, his liberal rating as measured by the Congressional Quarterly plummeted to below forty per cent...

...Agribusiness conglomerates would have to get out of farming within five years...

...If we continue on this present course . . . under the kind of leadership we've had in recent years, it's an open question whether this country can survive...

...Perhaps it would have been better for his image if he had been a total purist...

...he would dedicate a fourth of the government's contracts with private interests to small businesses, and he even wants the Government to provide money to small business for research that can have only private, commercial applications...

...McGovern has denounced the housing programs of the recent past...

...In a letter to his hometown newspaper, McGovern saw Wallace pitted against "the powerful forces of fear, militarism, nationalism, and greed," despite all the "charges of 'crackpot' and 'Communist.' " But as a delegate to the Progressive Party convention, McGovern was shaken and put off by the Communist influence there...

...He proposes that all candidates in primaries and general elections stand ready for public debates, answer questions from the public daily, and disclose their sources of income, total assets and liabilities, and campaign contributions and contributors...

...As Jefferson saw things, the chief enemy of good government is personal ambition...

...I recommend," McGovern says, "that future minimum wage legislation should include requirements for minimum employer contributions to pension funds...

...If the money a long war costs was spent instead, Jefferson continued, "in making roads, opening rivers, building ports, improving the arts, and finding employment for their idle poor, it would render them much stronger, much wealthier and happier...

...because the corrupting [of] the whole mass [of the people] will exceed any private resources of wealth...

...McGovern is ambitious, too...

...He rarely had a continental audience, and only the passage of slow time could reveal the full significance of proposals rejected when he made them, and of words more famous now than they were then...

...It is in this area of taxes that we can best see the rending pressures he has come under to yield enough on the issues to get enough campaign money from the rich to get elected to reform the laws that make them so rich...

...They work for their employers for ten, twenty, thirty years and are turned out when they get old with nothing but a wrist watch and a "Come back and see us sometime...

...For a family of four with no other income and unable to work, he would establish an annual minimum of about $4,000...

...Shortly thereafter, acting, apparently, on what Anson calls "certain conversations" with Vice President Humphrey that tipped him off that Mr...

...his biographer reports that the young man did not vote in the 1948 election...

...The -resulting style is that of a new kind of leader of a democracy's revolution in values, an idealism couched in the culture's best traditional values, a calm but cold moral anger, and patience with the anger and ego of others...

...All these things could be done, as even most of his critics now tacitly concede, with the $30 billion he would cut from military spending and the $22 billion (at the least) that his tax reforms would yield...

...He has made some compromises—apparently dropping the excess profits tax, pulling back from $1,000 —subject to income taxes—for everybody, paying courting calls on Lyndon Johnson and Richard Daley, competing with President Nixon in hawkishness on behalf of Israel (but at least not condoning, as Nixon did, Israel's attacks on villages said to be harboring terrorists...

...He would have pushers punished...

...He sees his campaigning as "listening to the people...

...This chamber reeks of blood . . . young boys without legs, or arms, or genitals, or faces, or hopes...

...We tend to skim or skip another speech or news release from a Presidential candidate anyway, and for pretty good reasons: the weltering of political information in Washington, the intricate webbings of detail in legislation, the unlikelihood that one more politician's one more idea will become law, the possibility it is just the candidate's name on some staff work...

...In McGovern one descries the same interest—perhaps also, for the same reasons of respect for people's privacy, similarly covert—in the real lives people are leading...

...I asked him in 1971, in the presence of about a hundred others, what he proposes to do about monopoly-type businesses like railroads that cannot be competitive and have taken over the agencies supposed to regulate them...

...McGovern's seventy-page white paper and his proposed, sharply reduced Pentagon budget still would give the United States enough firepower to destroy the Soviet Union and China simultaneously twenty times over...

...To turn war industries back to peacetime life with a minimum dislocation of workers, he would earmark one-eighth of each military producer's profits to provide income support for their dislocated workers during reconversion and retraining, with any unspent portions refundable to the businesses concerned...

...The positions he has advocated in the last year or so do enclose surprises, perhaps because they were not closely examined on the assumption that he was a minor Presidential contender...