The Liberal Flame

(See Cover)

Milwaukee was muffled in the stillness of a 14-in. snowfall when the Hiawatha slid into the Milwaukee Road Depot one morning last week. In the parlor car someone roused the Senator from the exhausted sleep that had seized him as soon as he had boarded the train in Chicago one hour and 15 minutes earlier. Groggily, he shrugged into his overcoat, smiled wanly while his wife scolded him for having left his galoshes behind. Then, spotting a cluster of photographers on the platform outside, his eyes took on a ballpoint gleam, and he headed for the vestibule with a big hello-everybody smile on his face. On the train steps he paused, scooped up a snowball and threw it at the photographers. Hubert Horatio Humphrey, 48, was off and running as only he can run, down the tortuous course of the 1960 presidential primary elections. And he was in crucial Wisconsin, where the voters next April 5 will rule upon his race for the Democratic presidential nomination.

The Humphrey pace would have put a less eupeptic man in the hospital. In the previous four days he had flown from Washington to New York to Ketchikan, Alaska, and back to Seattle, Chicago, and then trained into Milwaukee. At every stop there were speeches, dinners, press conferences, strategy meetings. He was almost always in motion (in Ketchikan, it included dancing with the local ladies). In the four days sleep was something to be snatched on planes and trains, fatigue was countered with vitamin pills and the sheer momentum of Hubert Humphrey's astonishing vitality. At times the strain showed on Humphrey's face, but energy invariably won the day. After a quick shower and a change in Milwaukee's Pfister Hotel, he was refreshed and ready to go again.

"Madison Square Garden." At General Electric's X-ray division, he lunched with company officials. When the 3:30 afternoon whistle blew at the giant International Harvester plant, Humphrey was waiting at the gate to greet the workers and shake scores of hands as the men headed for home. Hurrying back across town in the dusk, he stopped off at a press conference to explain his candidacy ("The Democrats need someone to meet Nixon head on"), then paused in his hotel room long enough to mull over the script of the address he was to make on television that night. Later, he slipped upstairs to join 40 of his top campaign workers, who were just sitting down to dinner. Humphrey had no time to eat, left his followers with a fast pep talk. "Wisconsin, as you know, has been selected by the communications media as the battleground," he said. "This is the Madison Square Garden of politics."

In a police car Humphrey whizzed to the television studio for his speech--the opening round of his official Wisconsin campaign. As he talked, he made clear his special role in the 1960 campaign: of all the leading candidates and contenders, he is the only one unashamedly setting himself out in the fine old-fashioned role of the poor boy* who values above mother's milk the purest, hundred-proof liberalism, bottled 25 years ago in the bond of the New Deal. Says he: "Liberals are waiting for a leader--one who stands out from the rest. My job is to go to the convention keeping my flame alive."

Loud & Clear. Hubert Humphrey's liberalism differs from the cerebral variety of Adlai Stevenson, for example, more because of what Humphrey is than what he says. Humphrey, a scrappy, up-from-the-precinct politician, is generally charming, garrulous, out-giving, and he responds chemically to the presence of other human beings. At times he seems to draw strength from people: often when he appears before an audience looking completely worn and tired, he appears to undergo a physical change. Energy seems to flow into him from his listeners; his eyes sparkle and his color heightens.

People, in turn, are attracted to Humphrey. His friends are many and their loyalty is lifelong. Some of the crustiest Republican conservatives and bourbon Democrats in the Senate--men whose political views are diametrically opposed to everything Humphrey stands for--are his cordial personal friends. It is said that if the Senate held a popularity contest--with the voting in rigid secrecy, to be sure --Humphrey would be one of the top favorites.

On his feet, Humphrey is a formidable campaigner, a visceral infighter. He can be scathingly sarcastic or savagely critical. His keen sense of humor (which he frequently directs at himself) is justly celebrated around Washington and on the hustings. His memory is prodigious, approaches total recall; when he came home from pharmacy school as a young man, word got around that Hubert had memorized all the drugs, their Latin derivations and dosages, listed in the Pharmacopoeia, the bible of druggists. Humphrey's father quizzed him to see if it was true. It was.

But he is best known as a torrential talker. His lifelong talkathon has made history and legend: he will talk all night on any subject, at any length (the longer the better), to any audience, on any occasion. His formal speeches have been clocked at a breathless 250 words per minute--every word clearly and distinctly enunciated. He can drown out any competition merely by raising his rasping voice an octave. (His younger sister Frances remembers him as a South Dakota newsboy: "When he stood out there on Main Street in front of the drugstore, holding an armload of St. Paul Dispatches, you could hear him all over town.") His 8 1/2-hour filibuster with Soviet Premier Nikita Khrushchev left the interpreters reeling; Humphrey has talked about it ever since. Once, as a graduate student at the University of Minnesota, he appeared on a radio program with Classmate Malcolm Moos (now President Eisenhower's speechwriter) to debate the relative merits of Franklin Roosevelt and Wendell Willkie. Humphrey reluctantly surrendered the microphone only after he had spoken for 28 minutes of the 30-minute program.

Sunny & Secure. Though the story of Hubert Humphrey, the poor boy, has had currency for years, and it is certainly true that he has known the bony pluck of poverty in his time, a lot of the story is pure hokum. Today the Senator has an income of some $30,000 a year, two homes, two automobiles, and Italian-style cuffs on the sleeves of his stylish suits. Nor was he born poor: his boyhood in Doland, S.Dak. (pop. 550) was as sunny and secure as any American boy could ask for. With his older brother Ralph and two younger sisters, Hubert grew up in a spacious, white frame house, with an Airedale named Rex, a rabbit hutch in the backyard, a cook in the kitchen, and a green model T Ford in the garage. Mother Christine Sannes Humphrey saw to it that her children attended the Methodist Sunday school and listened to Harry Emerson Fosdick on the radio. Father Hubert Sr. read to the kids each night, but instead of Peter Rabbit, their bedtime stories were the political theories of Jefferson and Paine, basic economics and the National Geographic. By the time he was ten, young Hubert was able--and boundlessly willing--to discuss the merits of Woodrow Wilson's Fourteen Points.

Father Humphrey was the local druggist and a person of consequence; he and the Methodist minister (who had been to Harvard) were the town's acknowledged intellectuals. The Humphrey drugstore was a frequent forum for political debate, and the local thinkers always gathered in the Humphrey parlor on Sunday nights, after the Epworth League meeting, for homemade cinnamon rolls and coffee and discussion of the topics of the day. Young Hubert was always a fascinated listener and frequently a precocious participant. "I can never remember going to bed before midnight since I was twelve years old, except when I was sick," he recalls. "There was always talk, talk, talk."

Father Humphrey gave Hubert his passion for politics. Humphrey Sr. was a messianic Democrat in the Republican heartland (he was converted after hearing William Jennings Bryan speak). A minor politician, he was mayor of Doland, served two years in the state legislature in Pierre, and, in 1928, as a delegate to the Democratic Convention in Houston, he helped nominate Al Smith.

Hubert also inherited his father's vast hunger for learning. Always a quick study, he could memorize his homework with a reading, and his A record in high school was marred by only one B, in Latin. In high school, too, he was into everything: he played baseball, basketball, football, ran the half-mile, sang second tenor in the operetta, blew the baritone horn in the school band, played piano. He was a Life Scout, captain of the debating team (his coaching methods were successful enough to propel his kid sister into the state declamation championship), and, inevitably, he was class valedictorian. A talent for leadership, too, was early manifest : at the frequent reunions of his mother's multitudinous Norwegian family*--there were eleven aunts and uncles, almost 60 first cousins--it was invariably young Hubert who organized the younger element into social activity.

Drought and Depression. By the time Hubert went off to the University of Minnesota in 1929. Doland was feeling the pangs of prolonged drought and imminent depression. Both local banks failed, and Father Humphrey was forced to sell the family home to pay his debts. Bankrupt farmers bartered chickens for their drugs. In Minneapolis, Hubert soaked up the intellectual sunshine, earned his board with a 15-c--an-hour clerking job in a campus drugstore, and slept with ten other students in an icy attic. But after his sophomore year he went home. His father could no longer afford to keep two sons in college (Brother Ralph, a senior, was allowed to finish out the year).

It was a time of withering despair in South Dakota, and there was worse to come. Father Humphrey moved the drugstore to Huron, a larger town (pop. 11,000) in the midst of once-prosperous farmland, in the hope of finding a larger clientele. Hubert gave up his dreams of a college education, traveled over the countryside helping his father vaccinate hogs, crammed through a six-month pharmacy course in Denver (his pharmacist's license still hangs over the counter in the Humphrey drugstore). Somehow the Humphreys and their drugstore survived. Then on Armistice Day. 1932, the first dust storm hit Huron. Humphrey was hunting pheasants at the time, remembers it vividly: "The sun was blacked out and all you could see was a little shining disk. I didn't know what it was; it looked like a terrible smoke cloud. Debris -- thistles and tumbleweeds -- came before the storm. I thought it was the end of the world. Then a terrible, fine silt engulfed every thing." The same month Franklin Roosevelt was elected President of the U.S. The two events, the storm and the election, are linked inseparably in Hubert Humphrey's mind.

A Gospel & a Prophet. In Huron, disaster piled on disaster. The dust was followed by tornadoes of grasshoppers that ate the paint off the houses; the wells ran dry and the trees died. Another winter of the Great Depression settled on the world, and Hubert Humphrey listened on his radio to the hopeful words from Washington. His fundamentalist liberalism, inherited from his father, found a gospel in the New Deal, a prophet in Roosevelt. Humphrey longed to get into politics.

As the nation crept back from depression's bottom, business improved at the drugstore, and Humphrey found time for simple pleasures. At a dance in the Elks' Hall, he met Muriel Buck, a pretty Huron College student. Muriel began eating her lunch at the drugstore ("I could throw a wicked sandwich together," says Humphrey), and after two years Hubert proposed. In the evenings, in their three-room bungalow, Hubert told Muriel of his restlessness, of his desire to finish his education and to get into the political swim. Finally, at his wife's urging and with his father's blessing, Hubert pulled up stakes, went back to the University of Minnesota and plunged into political science and scientific campus politicking. "My whole world," he recalls with obvious pleasure, "opened up then."

Into the New Deal. After graduation (magna cum laude, Phi Beta Kappa), Humphrey got his master's degree at Louisiana State University (his thesis: The Philosophy of the New Deal), then raced right back to Minnesota and into the New Deal itself. His first job was as an instructor in the WPA's adult education classes. It was a job that paid later political dividends: 30,000 diplomas were mailed to students in every corner of Minnesota, with Hubert Humphrey's signature on every one. He was as talkative as ever, picked up extra money to help support his wife and baby daughter (today there are four young Humphreys) with speeches on the radio and the luncheon-club circuit. His name began to get around.

During the war Humphrey was Minnesota's director of war-production training (his draft board rejected him for active service because of a double hernia and lung calcification). By 1943 he could no longer resist the beckoning finger of active politics. That year, to the delight of his father, he ran for mayor of Minneapolis--and very nearly won. His campaign was waged with the help of a band of loyal friends, mostly rank amateurs, with a minimum of funds, and with a fervor unmatched in Minnesota since the flaming, stump-jumping days of Ignatius Donnelly and the Populists.

Candidate Humphrey ran himself ragged, and by the time the campaign ended he had spotted the reason why he lost the election by a scant 5,000 votes. With the exception of the 19305, Minnesota had been virtually the private preserve of the Republican Party for generations, and now the liberal vote was split between the Democrats and the Farmer-Labor Party. Solution: a merger. Humphrey took a trip to Washington, came back with a merger plan and a pat on the back from Democratic National Chairman Frank Walker. After seven months of negotiation, the merger was arranged, and Hubert Humphrey was riding high on the D.F.L. machine, which swept him into public office in 1945 and has managed to keep him there ever since.

At 34, Humphrey became the mayor of Minneapolis on his second try, with a plurality of 31,000. It was largely a ceremonial office, tightly tethered by legal strings--he was expected to be a "limited" mayor. Within the statutory limitations, he struck out in all directions. He cleaned up the police force, suppressed racketeering, closed down the brothels, rode the night streets in a prowl car, made love to the electorate in a news letter, radio broadcasts, an open forum every week at city hall. His reforms sometimes produced occupational hazards: one night a mysterious bullet narrowly missed him as he entered his home. (After that Mayor Humphrey got some police protection.) Even the opposition conceded that he was a good mayor. Says Humphrey: "I got the people all steamed up."

Not Since 1858. Having steamed up Minneapolis, Humphrey was ready to take on the whole state. Minnesota's incumbent Senator, Republican Joe Ball, was up for reelection, and a tempting thought crossed Humphrey's mind. He considered it well, then spat on his hands. After all, old William Green had indulgently introduced him as "the next Senator from Minnesota" at a recent A.F.L. convention. The fact that Minnesota had not elected a Democrat to the Senate for 90 years discouraged him not at all. That fall he drove 31,000 miles through the Minnesota birch lands, mountains and lake country, attended 500 meetings, lost 19 Ibs., and beat Joe Ball by 243,693 votes.

Humphrey had arrived. If Washington entertained any doubts about it, the junior Senator from Minnesota soon dispelled them. He arrived in the capital talking, and before his freshman year was over had challenged the veracity of Virginia's prestigious Harry Byrd--right on the Senate floor. Official Washington dismissed him as a brash, flippant, pushy chatterbox. It took years to live those first impressions down. "Maybe it would have been better," Humphrey admits, "if I had sat back and waited a little."

With experience Humphrey came of age politically. His brashness cooled, he studied the rules, and eventually his likable personality began to register. One of his first important breakthroughs was to reach an accord with the Senate's Southern leadership. As a fire-breathing partisan of civil liberties, Humphrey was the natural enemy of the Southern bloc until, at the invitation of Louisiana's Russell Long (a Chevy Chase neighbor and an old acquaintance from his L.S.U. days), he actually sat down to lunch with a group of leading Southern Senators. To everyone's surprise, it turned out to be a completely cordial meeting. "We got to know each other as humans," Humphrey explains.

A convenient working agreement was born. Humphrey cultivated the friendship of Majority Leader Lyndon Johnson, is proud of the fact that one eminent Southerner (Georgia's late Walter George) endorsed him when he ran for re-election in 1954, has been a willing bridge between the Senate's conservatives and liberals. For this role, he has been rewarded with choice committee assignments (currently the Foreign Relations and Agriculture committees), and has won top standing as a Senate leader.

Riding the Winds. As he has matured, Humphrey has driven himself harder and harder. His punishing pace sometimes makes him snappish; when he is tired he chivies his hardworking, poorly paid Washington staff for wasting paper clips. (He also feeds them vitamin pills to increase their stamina.) Fatigue invariably makes his lengthy speeches longer, causes his aides to shake their heads in despair. Humphrey's colleague and presidential supporter, Minnesota Senator Eugene McCarthy, believes that people ride the wind of Humphrey's speeches in three phases. At first they respond to the updraft of his wit and flourish, generally like what he says. Then, as they hear some more, they conclude that he is wordy and shallow. But if they stick around for the last zephyr, they usually conclude that Humphrey knows what he is talking about, and that, though windy, he is genuinely sincere. "Getting people into the third phase," explains McCarthy, "is the difficult task."

Through the years Humphrey's fingerprints have been on nearly every major piece of legislation that has passed through the Senate. In his two terms he has sponsored a total of 1,044 bills and joint resolutions--a phenomenal performance. (Sighs one of his Senate friends, "He never seems to think what would happen if all the bills he introduces passed.") Yet, curiously, no bill is identified with his name--he cannot point with pride to a Humphrey Labor bill or a Humphrey Plan.

Willing Splashes. Even as he swings into intense campaigning Humphrey refuses to take a hard stand on any given list of issues. "To do that now," he says enigmatically, "would be to prove that I'm totally incompetent to handle the job." In his speeches he splashes willingly in such missile-age issues as the ban on atomic testing (he's for extending it voluntarily), the missile gap (he's for closing it) and disarmament (he is for that too--"negotiating from strength"). But his heart belongs to his favorite New and Fair Deal staples. Among them:

LABOR REFORM: Although he voted for it, Humphrey now backs away from the Landrum-Griffin labor reform bill, says it violates "honest labor's right to organize and be heard . . . and it ought to be changed."

ECONOMIC GROWTH: "Deliberate tight-money policies have taken momentum out of the few booms we've had and helped bring about two serious recessions." One momentum builder: "Raise the minimum wage to $1.25."

FARM PROGRAMS: "I have never wavered one inch on the issue of fair-price supports for farmers--of parity for agriculture [or] in my support of farm cooperatives and the REA program and in sound resources development."

CIVIL RIGHTS: "I favor a law creating federal registrars of voters where voting rights are systematically being denied."

TAXES: A balanced budget in times of prosperity, unless national security is threatened. Expanded economic growth would broaden the tax base enough so that increased taxes might not be necessary.

THE PRESIDENCY: "If you think Andy Jackson had an inauguration party, just wait until I get there."

The Practical Politician. Ultra-liberals of the Wayne Morse school sometimes say that Humphrey's flame is waning; that he has compromised his basic liberal principles in his eagerness to get ahead. Humphrey denies this vehemently, claims he has merely learned to be practical. "If the argument is over whether we should get 50,000 housing units or make a stand on 100,000 units and get nothing, then I'm for 50,000 units." To Morse, Humphrey's vote for the Landrum-Griffin labor reform bill was nothing less than heresy. But Humphrey has a retort proper: "You don't legislate in a vacuum. I was convinced that if we did not pass that labor bill we would have got a worse one next year." As a pragmatic politician, says Humphrey, "you've got to make small adjustments."

When he casts aside his senatorial toga and puts on his campaign hat, though, Candidate Humphrey forgets about the small adjustments, lets fly with his old fervor. In Ketchikan last fortnight, he found such an occasion. "Fortunately we bought Alaska from the Russians." he cried. "We all know what Russia would be doing now if she owned it. She would be developing the vast potential of the Yukon. Unfortunately, the Administration looks on the Yukon as just another stream. This country needs to get a vision of what America needs."

The Changed Situation. Such liberal pyrotechnics brought the crowd to its feet in a roar of applause. But will it win votes? Ed Viehman, Minnesota's capable, cocky new Republican state chairman, says no emphatically. As proof, he reels off the achievements of the resurgent Republican Party in Humphrey's own front yard: the G.O.P. now controls the Minnesota state senate, Republican P. Kenneth Peterson is mayor of Minneapolis, D.F.L. strength has gradually drained away for the past year, Humphrey's own plurality was cut 81,119 votes in 1954. Governor Orville Freeman is under steady Republican drumfire for raising personal property taxes and for calling out the militia in the recent strike at the Wilson & Co. packing plant in Albert Lea. He faces his toughest fight in his campaign for an unprecedented fourth term as Governor this year. "These guys are right out of the halls of theory." growls Viehman. "We need to get these daydreamers out of politics and get back to the rules of arithmetic. D.F.L. people are raised on the theory that voters should be treated like economic invalids. That's depression talk, not prosperity talk."

Depression talk, Humphrey agrees, is not easy to put over in 1960. "Liberalism on the national scene must be dramatized to catch hold," he says. "When people have enough, as they do now, they tend to accept the status quo. To articulate the need for economic growth, for example, you may have to be overdramatic as an advocate to stir up the people. If you don't do that, you don't get your message through." Humphrey is prepared to go forth into Wisconsin with all the sound and fury at his command and stir up the people. The election results, on April 5, will tell whether Hubert Humphrey's flame of Democratic liberalism is still a bright beacon light or just an old-fashioned candle guttering in a big wind.

* A sound claim for whatever it may be worth; Democratic Contenders Jack Kennedy, Lyndon Johnson, Adlai Stevenson and Stuart Symington are all millionaires.

* Humphrey's mother was born in Kristiansand, Norway, near the home of Steven Rockefeller's bride (TIME, Aug. 31).

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