How a speech by a young Midwest mayor changed American politics

For a few days next July, Milwaukee will be the focus of the 2024 presidential race. The Republican Party is hosting its national convention.

Many political scientists and commentators question whether contracts the discussions they do a lot to influence voters. But this was not always so.

Seventy-five years ago, a Midwest mayor gave a stirring speech that arguably led to a political realignment that continues today. At the 1948 Democratic Convention in Philadelphia, Hubert Humphrey—then mayor of Minneapolis—urged his party to take up the cause of civil rights during President Harry Truman's presidential campaign.

“The time has come to step out of the shadow of states' rights and walk directly into the bright sun of human rights.” said Humphrey.

The speech led to a temporary split in the Democratic Party and set the stage for the party to lead legislative efforts in the Civil Rights Movement.

Samuel G. Freedman, professor of journalism at Columbia University, explores this story in his new book, “In the bright sunshine: Young Young Hubert Humphrey and the Fight for Civil Rights.”

During an interview on Wisconsin Public Radio's “The Morning Show,” Friedman said the 1948 convention speech was met with a mixture of cheers and hostility.

“We should not think from the perspective of 2023 that Hubert Humphrey was facing some safe, pale, middle of the road. He was out there walking the plank, and the Southern reaction to that was a sign that the party was going to split on this issue, which it did,” Friedman said. “Humphrey knew he was taking a big risk here.”

Freedman also spoke on “The Morning Show” about the significance of Humphrey's speech, why it matters today and what politicians can learn from Humphrey's stance.

The following has been edited for clarity and brevity.

Kate Archer Kent: Your book focuses on the struggle for racial and democratic equality in the 1940s. Why is it important to explore this period now?

Samuel Freedman: One of the main reasons is that when people think about the Civil Rights Movement and often write about it, there's this assumption that it starts in the mid-1950s with the Supreme Court's Brown v. Board of Education decision that prohibited the school desegregation, Rosa Parks and (Martin Luther King, Jr.), and the 1955 Montgomery bus boycott.

But you really couldn't have had the civil rights milestones of the 1950s and all the subsequent struggles and achievements if you hadn't had that fiery decade of activism in the 1940s, much of which is really inextricably linked to World War II both in the sense of defeating fascism abroad and after addressing the unfinished agenda of inequality in America itself.

KAK: Hubert Humphrey was elected mayor of Minneapolis in 1945. He set the stage for us. What was the racial climate like in the Midwest at the time?

SF: Minneapolis was notorious nationally as a hotbed of anti-Semitism and racism. It was a city that was very welcoming to pro-Nazi sentiment in the form of groups like the Silver Shirts and individuals like Gerald LK Smith, founder of the America First Party. It was a place where black people could work, but only in fairly menial occupations, where if they tried to leave the ghetto on the north side of Minneapolis, there were many instances where their homes would be besieged by terrorists.

CIS: Southern Democrats opposed civil rights legislation, opposed anti-lynching laws. Can you explain the Democratic Party's dynamics on civil rights issues in the 1940s?

SF: The New Deal coalition assembled by Franklin Roosevelt had some of the expected ingredients. It had university-educated intellectuals. It had Jews and Catholics from the big cities who were from immigrant families. He had organized work. But then it had this one wing that seems completely contradictory, which was the segregationist Democratic Party in the South.

But because the Civil War was associated with the Republican Party and Abraham Lincoln, as were emancipation and Reconstruction, white defenders of the South all flocked to the Democratic Party. And FDR made this calculation—which I would say is literally a devil's deal—that he would appease and appease the segregationist wing of the party because he felt he needed the votes from those Southern states to win in the Electoral College to is elected to the White House.

And he needed the support of these very senior, high-ranking Southern senators and representatives in Congress to move the New Deal legislation through Congress. And what FDR offered in return were certain New Deal programs, like Social Security, that were written to exclude farm and domestic workers, the 90 percent of working Blacks in the South. … Harry Truman is willing to operate on the same playbook, even though it contradicts some of his own civil rights recommendations.

KAK: You write about Andrew Biemiller, who represented Wisconsin in the House of Representatives. What role did Bimmiller play in the Civil Rights Movement of the 1940s, and what influence did Bimmiller have on Humphrey?

SF: If Humphrey hasn't gotten enough credit for what he did for civil rights in the 1940s, then Andrew Biemiller is even more obscure to almost everyone. He was a member of Congress from Milwaukee. He was also a labor activist. Early in his career, he was part of the Progressive movement, the La Follette movement in Wisconsin, and served in the state legislature.

The really important thing that Biemiller is doing is at the 1948 Democratic Convention, the big issue will be civil rights, and the rebel liberals within the party, including Humphrey, have to figure out how they can get that done. matter before the whole Assembly. And one of the ways that Southerners hold a lot of power in Congress and in the Democratic Party is that many of them became very expert in these inglorious rules of parliamentary procedure that the party used. It wasn't Robert's Rules of Order. It was a variant of it that was even less common.

Andy Biemiller, when he was in Congress, decided to learn these rules inside and out. He learned it from Sam Rayburn, (the leader of the House Democratic Caucus and later speaker of the House). And so when the insurgents try to pass their civil rights plank in 1948 against Truman's opposition, with Southerners threatening to secede, they lose at the committee level, they lose at the platform committee.

In order to get it before the delegates of the entire convention, Andy Biemiller knows exactly how to play the rules to give Hubert Humphrey a chance to speak. And when Biemiller goes and presents all the backup numbers of sponsors and so forth to Sam Rayburn that allow Humphrey to speak, Rayburn is just disgusted.

He says, “The fat is on fire now,” which is a cliché that means a big flame will break out. But that's what Biemiller was able to do—give Humphrey the opportunity to deliver the speech that would become so famous and so influential.

KAK: Fast forward to today, former President Donald Trump is the pioneer for the Republican nomination next year despite facing numerous criminal charges. Trump was endorsed by neo-nazi and white supremacist groups. What could the GOP learn from the Democratic Party of the 1940s in dealing with extremist elements in its ranks?

SF: Unfortunately, the GOP seems to be refusing to learn the lesson of the Democrats in the 40's. Democrats were willing at their electoral risk to oust a wing of the party that held an ideology that was toxic in light of the movement for racial and religious equality in this country. At the urging of people like Hubert Humphrey, they kicked out a wing of the party. And although Adlai Stevenson and John Kennedy tried to bring the South back, when Lyndon Johnson becomes president, there is a permanent disconnect.

These people in the White supremacist South are becoming part of the Republican Party today. And today's Republican Party has apparently refused to reckon with that. He refused to quarantine and expel racists, anti-Semites, neo-Nazis, you name it.

It's all about pragmatism: Can we muster enough electoral votes to win the White House, even with a minority of the popular vote? Or can we just stage a coup and take power that way? And if white supremacists and neo-nazis and Christian nationalists are allies (Republicans) in this, then that's all they care about.