A strong step in rehabilitating Humphrey’s image as a practical politician and civil rights activist.
A vigorous history of Hubert Humphrey’s many contributions to liberal politics, especially with respect to civil rights.
As Columbia journalism professor Freedman notes, Humphrey’s star has long been descending, and few remember him today. Humphrey himself remarked that the cause was simple: “I think the misjudgment of Vietnam.” Despite misgivings, Humphrey supported Lyndon Johnson’s conduct of the war, and he threw his lot in with Johnson’s efforts to secure civil rights—and especially voting rights—for Black Americans and other minority members. In this welcome rehabilitation, the author clearly shows how Humphrey had long been a strong advocate of civil rights, and as a graduate student in Louisiana, the Minnesotan had ample opportunity to study the corrosive effects of racism firsthand. As mayor of Minneapolis, he pushed through reforms to end anti-Black and anti-Jewish covenants and other mechanisms of discrimination. At the 1948 Democratic convention, he argued for a civil rights platform in the face of a party dominated by Southern Democrats. Moreover, though he fought that faction, Humphrey observed that no part of the country was immune to racism, and unlike many others, “he recognized the Northern brand of Jim Crow.” Humphrey delivered a smashing victory to Harry Truman that, by securing more than 75% of the Black vote, meant that the Democrats could win nationally without the Southern electorate. The Dixiecrats repaid the favor by stalling bills that Humphrey, a freshman in the Senate, had introduced to outlaw lynching and create a Civil Rights Commission. He made good on his own views by hiring the first Black American to serve on a senatorial staff. Still, even after decades in politics, when Humphrey returned to the Senate following his time as vice president, his full employment bill “had been rattling around Congress for three years already and was still stuck in committee,” precisely because Humphrey was so weakened politically.
A strong step in rehabilitating Humphrey’s image as a practical politician and civil rights activist.Pub Date: July 14, 2023
ISBN: 9780197535196
Page Count: 504
Publisher: Oxford Univ.
Review Posted Online: May 9, 2023
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 1, 2023
Dogged original research and superb narrative skills come together in this gripping account of pitiless evil.
Greed, depravity, and serial murder in 1920s Oklahoma.
During that time, enrolled members of the Osage Indian nation were among the wealthiest people per capita in the world. The rich oil fields beneath their reservation brought millions of dollars into the tribe annually, distributed to tribal members holding "headrights" that could not be bought or sold but only inherited. This vast wealth attracted the attention of unscrupulous whites who found ways to divert it to themselves by marrying Osage women or by having Osage declared legally incompetent so the whites could fleece them through the administration of their estates. For some, however, these deceptive tactics were not enough, and a plague of violent death—by shooting, poison, orchestrated automobile accident, and bombing—began to decimate the Osage in what they came to call the "Reign of Terror." Corrupt and incompetent law enforcement and judicial systems ensured that the perpetrators were never found or punished until the young J. Edgar Hoover saw cracking these cases as a means of burnishing the reputation of the newly professionalized FBI. Bestselling New Yorkerstaff writer Grann (The Devil and Sherlock Holmes: Tales of Murder, Madness, and Obsession, 2010, etc.) follows Special Agent Tom White and his assistants as they track the killers of one extended Osage family through a closed local culture of greed, bigotry, and lies in pursuit of protection for the survivors and justice for the dead. But he doesn't stop there; relying almost entirely on primary and unpublished sources, the author goes on to expose a web of conspiracy and corruption that extended far wider than even the FBI ever suspected. This page-turner surges forward with the pacing of a true-crime thriller, elevated by Grann's crisp and evocative prose and enhanced by dozens of period photographs.
Dogged original research and superb narrative skills come together in this gripping account of pitiless evil.Pub Date: April 18, 2017
ISBN: 978-0-385-53424-6
Page Count: 352
Publisher: Doubleday
Review Posted Online: Feb. 1, 2017
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 15, 2017
BOOK TO SCREEN
BOOK TO SCREEN
BOOK TO SCREEN
For Howard Zinn, long-time civil rights and anti-war activist, history and ideology have a lot in common. Since he thinks that everything is in someone's interest, the historian—Zinn posits—has to figure out whose interests he or she is defining/defending/reconstructing (hence one of his previous books, The Politics of History). Zinn has no doubts about where he stands in this "people's history": "it is a history disrespectful of governments and respectful of people's movements of resistance." So what we get here, instead of the usual survey of wars, presidents, and institutions, is a survey of the usual rebellions, strikes, and protest movements. Zinn starts out by depicting the arrival of Columbus in North America from the standpoint of the Indians (which amounts to their standpoint as constructed from the observations of the Europeans); and, after easily establishing the cultural disharmony that ensued, he goes on to the importation of slaves into the colonies. Add the laborers and indentured servants that followed, plus women and later immigrants, and you have Zinn's amorphous constituency. To hear Zinn tell it, all anyone did in America at any time was to oppress or be oppressed; and so he obscures as much as his hated mainstream historical foes do—only in Zinn's case there is that absurd presumption that virtually everything that came to pass was the work of ruling-class planning: this amounts to one great indictment for conspiracy. Despite surface similarities, this is not a social history, since we get no sense of the fabric of life. Instead of negating the one-sided histories he detests, Zinn has merely reversed the image; the distortion remains.
Pub Date: Jan. 1, 1979
ISBN: 0061965588
Page Count: 772
Publisher: Harper & Row
Review Posted Online: May 26, 2012
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 1979
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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