Lyndon B. Johnson’s presidency was a tragedy. Elected in 1964 in the greatest Democratic landslide since Franklin D. Roosevelt’s 1936 re-election, LBJ had a mandate to renew the New Deal. The Johnson Administration achieved genuine progress with civil rights and voting rights measures and the outlining of a war on poverty—only to squander the opportunity by pursuing a disastrous war in Vietnam. Yet, by every measure, the great tragedy of LBJ’s tenure was found in the experience of his Vice President, Hubert Humphrey.
Into the Bright Sunshine: Young Hubert Humphrey and the Fight for Civil Rights
By Samuel G. Freedman
Oxford University Press
504 pages
Publication date: July 14, 2023
One of the great American liberals of the post-World War II era, Humphrey charted a course—as Minneapolis’s mayor in the mid-1940s and then as a U.S. Senator—that made him a hero to millions of supporters of economic, social, and racial justice. His reputation was established by a 1948 speech to the Democratic National Convention in Philadelphia, where he called on his party—which was still deferring to its Southern segregationist wing—to “get out of the shadow of states’ rights and walk forthrightly into the bright sunshine of human rights.” Later, as a Senatorial champion of civil rights and a pioneering advocate for Medicare, Humphrey solidified his image as a liberal reformer. He traveled to Sweden with United Automobile Workers leader Walter Reuther to exchange ideas with European socialists, and, as chair of the Select Committee on Disarmament, Humphrey introduced a bill to establish a National Peace Agency in the thick of the Cold War.
Yet, after he joined Johnson’s ticket in 1964, Humphrey fell in line as a defender of the administration’s bloody escalation in Southeast Asia—squandering his reputation to such an extent that Hunter S. Thompson would eventually dismiss the Minnesotan as “a treacherous, gutless old ward heeler” so desperate for political advancement that he campaigned “like a rat in heat.” The unflattering image stuck, as Humphrey’s 1968 and 1972 presidential bids failed, and he eventually died in 1978 at age sixty-six.
What makes the end of his career so heartbreaking is that it began brilliantly—with Humphrey distinguishing himself as an outspoken and effective foe of racism and antisemitism in America.
Samuel Freedman, a longtime reporter and columnist for The New York Times, explores this deeper context with Into the Bright Sunshine: Young Hubert Humphrey and the Fight for Civil Rights. Masterfully researched and reported, Freedman’s book recalls the political climate in Minneapolis in the 1940s, when Humphrey scored his first electoral victories as a man of principle and courage. It introduces us to the figures who shaped Humphrey’s consciousness—especially Cecil Newman, the Black newspaper editor whose influence on Humphrey was such that, in the afterglow of the 1948 convention speech, the young politician would tell Newman, “You know the Philadelphia victory was ours—not mine.”
Freedman does a brilliant job of putting the speech into perspective, reminding readers that the address “preceded the Supreme Court decision in Brown v. Board of Education and the Montgomery bus boycott led by the Reverend Martin Luther King Jr., the two events commonly and incorrectly understood as the beginnings of the civil rights movement” and “anticipated the wave of civil rights legislation that Lyndon Johnson would push through Congress in the 1960s, addressing the unfinished business of emancipation.”
Nothing can change the fact that both Johnson and Humphrey were ruined politically by the war in Vietnam. What is striking about Freedman’s agile telling of the tale of Humphrey’s emergence as a national figure is that, because this book is so compelling and ennobling of the Minnesotan, the reader is left with an even deeper sense of loss—and with the aching question of what might have been.