(6 of 10)
Instant Sword. Young Hubert worked in the drugstore from the time he was eight, watched hard times take away the family's home in Doland, was forced to interrupt his political science education at the University of Minnesota for six years because of money problems, yet battled his way into Minneapolis' mayoralty at the age of 34. Thirty years ago, before they went through their first election, Muriel Buck Humphrey thought her young husband just might be President some day.
He erupted at the 1948 Democratic Convention. Having already achieved enactment of the country's first municipal fair-employment-practices law, he was determined to commit his party to a strong civil rights plank. He gave one of the best speeches of his career, won the debate, and thereby helped precipitate the Dixiecrat defection.
That year he also became the first Minnesota Democrat ever popularly elected to the U.S. Senate. He charged into the Capitol, flailing with an instant sword at all the accumulated evils of mankind. Says Senator Clinton Anderson of New Mexico: "He went too hard in the old days. He was certain that everyone opposed to him was absolutely wrong. Now he's got tolerance."
Style v. Substance. But the world has met him more than halfway. The health program he first proposed in 1949 now exists as Medicare. Nearly all of the civil rights legislation he introduced as a very junior Senator went on the books years later under other men's names. (One of the few significant laws bearing his name regulated habit-forming drugs.) He has seen passed into law several other of his ideas that seemed impossible of fulfillment a dozen years ago, notably the Peace Corps and the Job Corps. Certainly Humphrey mellowed as he became more sophisticated and knowledgeable. And with many of his early legislative goals realized, he has more to be mellow about. He has achieved a rapport with the business community, which has itself grown steadily more progressive and public-spirited in the past decade. In the South, with increasing integration and growing numbers of Negro voters, the views that passed as moderate a few years ago are considered conservative today. Louisiana's Hale Boggs, the House majority whip, confided to Humphrey recently: "I think we've changed a lot, and I think maybe you've changed a little."
Hubert Humphrey's change regarding the South and racial questions has been one of style, not substance. As an emissary from the national party, Humphrey last year was willing to treat with Georgia's segregationist Governor Lester Maddox, who is oscillating between loyalty to the party and defection to George Wallace. But in Washington, the Vice President advocated a full-scale Administration campaign for the open-housing bill that is now law. And Humphrey believes additional civil rights legislation may be necessary.