TRUE BELIEVER

A welcome resurrection of the life of an often-forgotten but significant political figure.

Veteran journalist Traub, author of What Was Liberalism? and The Freedom Agenda, delivers a memorable, admiring portrait of Hubert Humphrey (1911-1978). Son of a small-town South Dakota pharmacist, Humphrey graduated high school as the class valedictorian. After dropping out of college during the Depression, he returned a few years later to complete three years of classwork in two years. He also worked in a drug store to support himself and his family, and he graduated Phi Beta Kappa and summa cum laude from the University of Minnesota. In graduate school, thesis advisers extolled his intelligence, enthusiasm, and charisma and suggested that politics would be a better fit than academia. He became a rising force in the Democratic Party, and in 1945, he “became the youngest person ever elected as mayor of Minneapolis.” He made headlines during the 1948 Democratic National Convention, fighting successfully to substitute a strong civil rights plank for the usual platitudes. President Harry Truman tried to discourage this approach; southerners hated it and formed the Dixiecrat Party, which, pundits agreed, guaranteed Truman’s defeat. Traub agrees with most scholars that Humphrey’s effort helped in the north more than it hurt in the south. Elected senator by a landslide in 1948, he proposed many liberal reforms. Working with his mentor Lyndon Johnson, he was able to pass some of them. Yearning for the presidency, Humphrey worked hard to become vice president as a means of obtaining the funds, nationwide organization, and visibility necessary for a campaign. Assuming the vice presidency in 1964, he was marginalized, exerting little influence over the U.S.’s disastrous involvement in Vietnam. Concluding this highly readable biography, Traub suggests that it was not rising conservatism but the antiwar movement that assured Humphrey’s defeat in 1968.

An astute analysis of one of the last New Dealers.