Today, nearly 75 years later, this unassuming tableau—which would have been a new, even puzzling image for readers at the time—resonates like a thunderous slam-dunk.

To understand the significance of this long-forgotten image, it’s important to recall that after Franklin Delano Roosevelt was elected president of the United States in the early 1930s, he used a small wheelchair to get around his office and home. But the leader of the free world, who had contracted polio as a young man, took great pains to conceal the fact that he couldn’t walk unaided. He refused to be photographed or filmed while in a wheelchair so as to “quiet the feelings of revulsion, pity, and embarrassment that his body provoked in others,” as his biographer James Tobin wrote in The Man He Became: How FDR Defied Polio to Win the Presidency.

FDR’s stance echoed the tenor of the times. People with disabilities were stigmatized and usually kept hidden from view. Many American cities passed so-called “ugly laws,” including Chicago, which banned people who were “diseased, maimed, mutilated, or in any way deformed, so as to be an unsightly or disgusting object.” (This shameful law was not repealed until 1974.)

People with severe spinal-cord injuries, known as paraplegics, were rarely seen in public. Paralyzed veterans who fought in World War I could expect to live for approximately 18 months after their injury. But World War II proved to be a game-changer in preserving the lives of paraplegics. Medics deployed new-fangled sulfa drugs on battlefield wounds, and surgeons expeditiously treated the injured servicemen. Military aircraft transported them back to U.S. hospitals much faster than ocean liners had, and the advent of penicillin effectively staunched infections.

Bob Rynearson (standing, referee) and pioneering wheelchair basketball players practice inside the gymnasium at Birmingham Hospital in Van Nuys, California, circa 1946. Courtesy of the Rynearson family.

An estimated 2,500 paralyzed veterans returned home from the Pacific and European theaters. Doctors believed that, despite frequent aftercare complications, these veterans would probably experience a lengthy lifespan, perhaps even approaching their non-disabled counterparts.

That was the positive news. The downside was, they were re-entering a barrier-plagued society that was unprepared for them. There were no handicap parking spaces or curb cutouts at street corners; ramps leading to the entrances of public buildings were unheard of.

Unanswerable questions buzzed in their brains. Would they ever be able to walk unaided again? What employer would want to hire them? And, was it physically possible to have sex and father children?

To aid their rehabilitation, the Veterans Administration opened separate paraplegia wards in hospitals around the country, so that the paraplegics could recover a sense of equilibrium, physically and mentally. But even as these veterans pursued higher education, job training, and physical rehab, a key element was missing.

Many of these young men had grown up playing sports, whether for their school teams or in the service. They missed the special camaraderie of competition, not to mention the strenuous workout. VA staff, most of whom were non-disabled, wondered how they could create enjoyable and meaningful recreation options for wheelchair users.

The wheelchairs themselves were part of the problem. To that point in time, “wheelchair design” was an oxymoron. Wheelchairs were wooden behemoths that weighed over 100 pounds and resembled La-Z-Boys on wheels; they were bulky sitting chairs for permanent immobility. The most common catchphrases used to describe paraplegics emphasized their apparent helplessness: they were said to be “confined to a wheelchair” or “wheelchair bound.”

Just before the war, an engineer named Herbert Everest, who had been paralyzed in a mining accident, brought wheelchairs out of the dark ages. He teamed with co-designer Harry Jennings, inside the latter’s garage in Santa Monica, to fashion a lightweight, foldable wheelchair made of chromium-plated steel tubing. They shifted the two large wheels to the rear so that users could easily and comfortably propel the chair, and they placed two small casters in the front to provide stability and pivoting capability. A backing and seat crafted from synthetic leather allowed the 24-inch-wide chairs to be folded like an accordion to a width of 10 inches. Each chair weighed about 50 pounds.

Their invention changed lives immediately. With some practice, paralyzed vets could wheel their E&Js from the hospital ward to their cars, open the doors, hoist themselves into the front seats, fold up their chairs and stash them behind the seat, and drive off using adaptive, hand-controlled equipment. They now had mobility—and the ability to look for work, live independently outside the hospital, and as it turned out, play competitive sports.

In early 1946, at the Birmingham VA hospital in Van Nuys, California, assistant athletic director Bob Rynearson noticed how the paralyzed veterans liked to roll their chairs onto the gym floor and take turns awkwardly lofting a leather basketball toward the net. What most resonated with Rynearson were the gleeful, totally unselfconscious expressions on the men’s faces as they traded good-natured jibes and hoots.

A thought struck Rynearson: why not use basketball, that most indigenous of American sports, to help the veterans with their rehabilitation?

At first blush, wheelchairs and basketball seemed a particularly odd combination. Height is important in hoops, and no one seated in a wheelchair can boast about that. Basketball also demands constant motion—running, dribbling, rebounding, passing—and it was difficult to imagine how paraplegics could simultaneously control the trajectories of their chairs, avoid collisions with nine other players, and maintain their balance. Oh, and somehow muscle the ball up to the rim and score, too.

But Rynearson noticed that the smooth, flat surface of the basketball court was far superior for rolling wheels than grassy fields, and that the court was large enough to accommodate 10 athletes. Basketball can also be played year-round, and the upper-body contortions required for passing, rebounding, and shooting the ball produce a sweat-filled workout in the chest, arms, neck, shoulder, and core muscles, precisely those areas of the body that paraplegics most need to strengthen.

Rynearson configured a set of 10 rules that closely mimicked two-legged basketball. His most perceptive insight was that the wheelchair, which he called the “means of ambulation,” should be considered the natural and integral extension of the player’s body. Incidental contact between opponents’ chairs was tolerated, but deliberately ramming an opponent’s chair resulted in a personal foul. The veterans themselves persuaded him not to lower the rims from their standard height and not to shorten the distance from the free-throw line.

Above all else, Rynearson made sure that the experience was gratifying for the veterans. “It was just fun getting out there to play basketball,” recalled Birmingham patient Ed Santillanes, who was injured near the Rhine River with the 65th Infantry Division when the jeep he was driving on patrol hit a roadside mine. “The hardest thing was trying to dribble while you’re in a wheelchair. You didn’t just put the ball in your lap and take off like a bat out of hell.”

On November 25, 1946, Rynearson arranged for the paralyzed veterans to play their first game. Their opponent? A squad of able-bodied doctors from the hospital who used wheelchairs for the occasion. The veterans took advantage of their hard-won experience with their E&Js to easily defeat the doctors, 16-6.

“Call it the most unusual basketball game ever played—or the first time in the United States that paraplegics have entered competitive sports in wheelchairs—or simply say it was an action-packed, fast-moving and exciting contest,” the facility’s in-house newsletter breathlessly reported. Coverage of the new sport elsewhere followed. The stories, though typically upbeat and encouraging, oftentimes brimmed with ignorance and condescension, with headlines like “Legless Five Wins Game” and “Crippled Vets Love Sports.”

Nevertheless, like a well-orchestrated fast break, wheelchair basketball quickly spread to paraplegia wards around the country.

In early 1948, Rynearson’s Birmingham squad combined sports highlights and advocacy for disability rights in one epic road trip. They scheduled a slate of wheelchair basketball games in eight cities and, before thousands of disbelieving spectators in some of the nation’s largest sports arenas, faced off against other paralyzed veterans as well as able-bodied teams in borrowed wheelchairs.

When they played the McGuire VA hospital team in Richmond, Virginia, they detoured to Washington, D.C., and rolled their E&Js through the marbled hallways of the Capitol. Their goal: to lobby Congress for legislation that would enable paralyzed veterans to purchase wheelchair-accessible homes, equipped with widened doorways, ramps instead of stairs, and bathrooms and fixtures to accommodate their disability. (President Harry Truman signed Public Law 702 on June 19, 1948.)

Their message to anyone who would listen was consistent and succinct. They wanted no sympathy or special treatment. They simply wanted the opportunity to take their place in society. “With continued evidence of what a disabled man can accomplish, not only will many be given renewed hope and confidence, but the public, business and industry will be made to realize that the disabled—with a little help and understanding—can be useful, valuable and self-sustaining citizens,” said Fred Smead, an early leader of the nonprofit advocacy group Paralyzed Veterans of America (PVA).

On March 10, 1948, days after the Birmingham team concluded their barnstorming trip, paralyzed veterans from Cushing and Halloran VA hospitals (in Massachusetts and Staten Island, respectively) wheeled their E&Js onto the court of Madison Square Garden.

Hyped by nightlife columnist (and soon-to-be TV personality) Ed Sullivan, some 15,561 spectators watched as the players warmed up.

The wary crowd was alarmed at first as the veterans wheeled up and down the court and, occasionally, fell from their chairs after mid-court collisions. But their unease quickly turned to relief and then amazement as the men hoisted themselves back into their chairs and returned to the fray with a mighty yell. The fans cheered on both teams, but were thrilled to see the local lads from Halloran cruise to an entertaining 20-11 victory over Cushing.

The game’s leading scorer was Jack Gerhardt with eight points. A paratrooper with the 82nd Airborne Division, Gerhardt was wounded in France in 1944. He rehabbed at Halloran hospital and soon established himself as one of the nation’s top wheelchair basketball players. “He can go like hell in that chair,” said one of Gerhardt’s teammates.

A few days after the game at Madison Square Garden, Gerhardt appeared on the cover of Newsweek. Striking an athletic pose in his polished, state-of-the-art E&J chair, he also subtly boosted the fortunes of his compatriots; the three letters emblazoned on his navy-and-white singlet stand for the nonprofit advocacy group Paralyzed Veterans of America (PVA).

The cover image, far from being innocuous, told the story of a group of men who took a second chance at life and upended the stereotype of disabled people as weak and powerless.

Later that year, the National Wheelchair Basketball Association was formed, complete with an annual tournament, and the pool of players soon expanded to include post-polios and amputees (and, later, women and youth with disabilities). Also in 1948, in England, Dr. Ludwig Guttmann unveiled the first edition of the event that would become the Paralympics.

These paralyzed World War II veterans did not just help reduce the stigma of disability; they were among the first people to be applauded for their condition, the first to be considered as something other than freaks or damaged goods. If paraplegics could play basketball—basketball!—they could, if given the tools and the opportunity, do anything and everything non-disabled veterans could do: drive a car, hold down a job, buy a home, get married, and raise children.

By firing the opening salvo in what has become a protracted fight for disability rights for U.S. citizens, the paralyzed veterans championed the principles that continue to resonate today within the disability community: accessibility, inclusion, acceptance, and respect.

The post The <i>Newsweek</i> Cover that Helped Change the Image of Americans with Disabilities appeared first on Zócalo Public Square.

During her first trip on the train, Kimura had ridden with the windows closed and the shades down, by order of the military. This time, as a parolee and not a prisoner, she was allowed to gaze at the world beyond.

Kimura, just 28 years old, was headed to Chicago with urgent matters on her mind. Her government jailors, the War Relocation Authority (WRA), had just issued a “work leave” policy, an official permission slip for her to live “normally” on the outside, but only if she could find—and hold—full-time employment. She needed a job to remain free, and the strangeness of her predicament weighed on her.

Later in life, Kimura (not her real name) described having a “marked feeling of self-consciousness” as she rode the train, which was packed with American G.I.s riding to and from military bases. The soldiers turned out to be open and friendly, but the experience still jarred. “I thought everybody was looking at me,” Kimura told an interviewer. She braced herself for “some sort of unpleasantness.” That train ride was her route out of formal wartime imprisonment, but Kimura’s war wasn’t over—and wouldn’t end for some time.

The story of the incarceration of people of Japanese heritage is a familiar one. After the Pearl Harbor bombing in 1941, U.S. officials stoked a racial hysteria in which Japanese Americans were defined as an internal enemy loyal to Japan, and thus a wartime national security risk. Government agents rounded up Japanese Americans and shipped them to prisons in California, Idaho, Utah, Wyoming, Colorado, Arizona, and Arkansas, and if we include those detained as “leaders,” then the captivity geography extends to even more states. Japanese American families lived in crowded, spartan, temporary quarters that they sometimes had to finish building themselves, so hastily and poorly planned was the forced evacuation. They spent much of the war as captives.

But what happened to the prisoners next—when people like Kimura had to forge new lives in unseen, far-flung corners of the country—is also an important American war story, and one many of us haven’t heard. These smaller stories—of train rides, job searches, and apartment hunting in new cities—complicate narratives of war and national identity.

The WRA called Kimura a “resettler,” but she was a refugee, really. President Roosevelt’s Executive Order 9066, signed in February 1942, had empowered the military to remove Japanese Americans from much of the West Coast and even part of Arizona. It remained in effect until the end of the war—so by law, work leave applicants like Kimura could not go home. They could go East, though, so WRA officials pointed work-seekers to Chicago—a place where jobs were plentiful, and Japanese Americans might ride out the war in urban anonymity, under “a cloak of indifference,” as a WRA study put it.

In January 1943, the WRA opened its first “field office” in Chicago. At least 20,000 Japanese Americans migrated there between 1943 and 1950. Kimura was part of a Nisei vanguard, a wave of young, single migrants, first men and eventually young women, who would test the waters and lay the financial groundwork to bring parents, grandparents, and younger siblings along.

Kimura left Manzanar at the same time as about a dozen others, and she had mixed feelings: She was scared and worried about leaving her family, but she was eager, even excited, to see what a big city could offer. Stories of anti-Japanese violence circulated in every camp, and while no one would have called an American city “safe,” Chicago was at least “a safer bet,” according to Shotaro Frank Miyamoto, a Japanese American from Seattle who was forcibly relocated to the Puyallup camp, and later became a scholar of the Chicago resettlement.

Once they survived the train trip, Japanese Americans had to navigate the city. They had to report directly to the WRA’s Chicago office, register, and start searching for a job and a place to live. When they found both, they had to relay that information back to the office; if they ever changed jobs or residences, they had to report that, too. The WRA had the right to call anyone back to camp, at any point, for what it deemed “sufficient reason,” a security phrase just as nebulous and arbitrary as the rationale for incarceration. Chicago’s new Japanese American residents were not in captivity but they were still in custody.

It was not easy to rebuild community in such circumstances, and despite WRA assurances about Chicago’s friendliness, Japanese Americans described a mixed reception. They could rely on Japanese American mutual aid groups and some white allies, but relocating was often frightening and frustrating.

Chicago was a big, noisy place, made even bigger by the bustle of war. It was a hard place to make home, especially because the WRA directed Japanese American refugees to disperse once they got off the train. WRA director Dillon S. Myer warned against the creation of a “Little Tokyo” in the city. He envisioned a postwar multiculturalism where races mingled at work and at play, but his racial liberalism was myopic, and ignorant of the trauma of forced removal.

West Coast Japanese Americans had to figure out the Midwestern city’s racial maps, informal borders, and unwritten rules on their own. When they knocked on a door of a building with a “for rent” sign, some got flat-out refusals—“no Japs!”—while others encountered clumsy dodges: the apartment was already taken, and the landlord had merely forgotten to remove the sign. Sometimes refugees found acceptance, based on a racial stereotype that they would be compliant, quiet, and clean tenants. There is some evidence that white Chicagoans of German origin—with memories of their own vilification during World War I—were willing to rent to refugees, to broker a wartime racial accord even if only as landlord and tenant.

Chicago resettlement ad. Courtesy of the Chicago Japanese American Yearbook, 1948.

Resettlers could live only where rents were low and tolerance high. Like many young Nisei, Kimura landed first in a Chicago hostel, one of the few in the city run by religious groups who offered early housing assistance to refugees. Hostels were filled to capacity with migrants, so Kimura quickly left to room with a girlfriend elsewhere in the city. When her siblings applied to leave Manzanar too, she searched for a larger apartment that might also accommodate her parents and other relatives, whom she thought would follow. Each inquiry with a potential landlord felt like an audition. Kimura described the hunt as “the hardest thing I ever did in my life,” a remarkable statement from someone who had just left a concentration camp. After several refusals, which “might be racial discrimination, but I wasn’t sure,” she found a run-down building that lacked every basic amenity, but had enough flats to accommodate her family. As Kimura later described it, “our return to normal life was in cramped quarters and it was hard.” When she compared notes with other resettler families, she realized they all had suffered in the same way.

Despite the counsel to disperse, in the end, Kimura and other resettlers did exactly what so many racial and ethnic groups in the U.S. had done before them: They huddled and leaned on each other. They bought apartment buildings, grocery stores, restaurants, dry cleaners, beauty parlors, and flower shops. Told to scatter by the WRA, they instead formed their own urban villages in different parts of Chicago. The agency was uneasy about this racial concentration, but it nevertheless cheered Japanese American entrepreneurialism. The Chicago field office was set up only to launch Japanese Americans, not to sustain them.

Indeed, the WRA was more concerned about Japanese Americans’ long-term financial dependency than their threat to national security. WRA documents from the period maintain an almost singular focus on getting detainees back to self-sufficiency. Myer called the Japanese American incarceration “the problem of caring,” a bizarre phrase which belies the cruelty of the policy but reveals much about a growing realization that putting people in wartime custody might foster postwar dependency. How long would it take Japanese Americans to resume, in Myer’s words, a “useful American life with all possible speed”? Was the government now obligated to “care” for a population it had removed from its sources of income and wealth? The work leave policy seemed a good solution, for it both compelled and enabled Japanese Americans to fund their own recovery—the American way—and it reassured the cities receiving refugees that they “would not become public charges” in peacetime.

But there were inconsistencies and inequalities in the approach. The WRA admonished young workers like Kimura to keep the first job they found instead of shopping the market for higher pay, a free-market right celebrated as fundamentally American during wartime. Initially praised as “industrious and intelligent workers,” Japanese Americans were later accused by Chicago’s WRA director of being ungrateful and lazy when they defied unfair conditions or quit to take a better job. Some employers even began to call them “60-day Japs” to lament their labor mobility.

Japanese Americans in Chicago, even under constant watch, were able to build a Midwestern, urban Asian American community—absent before the war, made by its malice. When World War II ended, however, their recovery continued to be encumbered by the race-based mass detention and relocations they had endured: burdens no other Americans shared. For Japanese Americans, peace was not a date, it was a process. Indeed, it wasn’t really clear when hostilities ended and peace began. Did the war end when they left camp for a job? When formal evacuation orders lifted in 1944? On VJ-Day in 1945? Or when the final WRA camp closed in 1946? Some Japanese Americans who settled in Chicago said the war didn’t feel “over” to them until they were able to buy their first homes in the suburbs, in the early 60s.

Novelist and literary scholar Viet Thanh Nguyen notes that “all wars are fought twice, the first time on the battlefield, the second time in memory.” As we mark the 75th anniversary of World War II’s end this year, we have another chance to remember not only the war but the postwar stories of Americans like Kaye Kimura—stories that lay bare how some of World War II’s citizens sacrificed and lost, not for their country but at the hands of it.

The post How Japanese Americans Built a ‘Useful American Life with All Possible Speed’ in 1940s Chicago appeared first on Zócalo Public Square.

For some, a bureaucratic state was the answer. As was argued first by the Socialist Party of America in the early 20th century, the state could equalize wealth inequalities. Later, with the Depression, a great number of Americans came to believe that such a state could mitigate the social problems of the country’s volatile economic order.

A differing view came most prominently from steel-tycoon-turned-philanthropist Andrew Carnegie. At the turn of the century, Carnegie argued that industrialists such as himself, not state bureaucrats, were best suited for playing the intertwined roles of wealth redistributor and addressor of societal problems caused by industrialization. If the state provided for citizens’ basic needs, Carnegie feared workers would be disincentivized from improving their work ethic and striving. And he imagined that those who made the wealth would know best how to allocate it on behalf of the public. In an 1889 essay titled “The Gospel of Wealth,” Carnegie argued that philanthropy, rather than the state, was best suited to tame the problems originating from modern industrial life.

This national debate came to a head in the late 1920s and early 1930s, under President Herbert Hoover.

Within months of Hoover’s entering White House, the stock market crash of 1929 introduced Americans to what would become one of the most dire economic traumas in U.S. history. But at first, Hoover did not appreciate the magnitude of the economic crisis that would define his presidency. He focused instead on the country’s general social problems, including its modern economic life and the migration of many people from rural communities to urban settings. In addressing such problems, Hoover was rather sympathetic to Andrew Carnegie’s preference for mobilizing philanthropy.

Hoover invited Rockefeller Foundation President Max Mason to meet with him in Washington, D.C. The Rockefeller Foundation had recently taken over the funding of the social sciences from its auxiliary organization, the Laura Spelman Memorial Foundation. President Hoover wanted to see if the Foundation would be willing to fund a project larger in size and scope than anyone had conceived of previously.

Mason, in his diary of October 2, 1929, wrote that Hoover had told him that he had appointed a committee of five individuals from the Social Science Research Council (SSRC), the Russell Sage Foundation, the University of Chicago, and the University of North Carolina to report on a possible study of trends and problems in the social field. “He expected this committee to determine what problems could be successfully attacked and to propose means of attacking them.” As Hoover explained to Mason, the SSRC could organize and manage the holistic survey of national trends and the Foundation could fund it.

Another president might have asked the U.S. Congress to fund such a nationwide investigation, rather than approaching a private foundation such as the Rockefeller Foundation. But, throughout his presidency, Herbert Hoover would remain hesitant to call upon the state to address social ills. Hoover “stewed in anxieties about the dole and endlessly lashed the Congress and the country with lectures about preserving the nation’s moral fiber, not to mention the integrity of the federal budget, by avoiding direct federal payments for unemployment relief,” the historian David M. Kenney would write in Freedom from Fear.

The project that Hoover proposed was eventually released in 1933 as Recent Social Trends in the United States: Report of the President’s Research Committee on Social Trends. This two-volume manuscript would become the first comprehensive, policy-oriented study of a national problem utilizing U.S. social researchers across the country. The research committee for Recent Social Trends met for three years and surveyed social changes throughout the country. Sociologist Howard Odum, the assistant director of research on the project, would later write: “[a]t no time in the history of the United States…had there been attempted a comprehensive, well integrated, and coordinated campaign in which the social sciences jointly attacked the emerging social problems of the nation.”

In response to Hoover’s insistence on limiting the role of the state in taming modern economic life, the American public subsequently elected his antidote, Franklin D. Roosevelt. Roosevelt, who had endorsed pensions and government-sponsored unemployment insurance, would lead the expansion of the federal government in an effort to curb the national trauma of the Great Depression. His long tenure, from 1933 until his death in 1945, pushed the debate about how to redistribute wealth and recalibrate inequities decidedly in favor of a strong bureaucratic state.

Arriving in theaters a year after President Roosevelt’s death, It’s a Wonderful Life did not echo the national sentiment at the time in favor of a strong state. But neither did it embrace Carnegie’s proposed social role for philanthropy. Rather, the movie provided a third option for taming the volatile and problematic nature of modern economic life: a charitable private sector.

It’s a Wonderful Life tells the life story of George Bailey, an uncelebrated local hero who begrudgingly assumes responsibility for his father’s building and loan company in a small town.

Following in his father’s footsteps (though betraying higher business acumen than his dad), George Bailey builds the building and loan into an institution capable of helping working-class community members build and buy their own decent homes and to provide for their own families. In practice, Bailey brings empathy to his market relationships as a banker; and in doing so, he sacrifices profits and individual opportunity in order to serve his community. In effect, the movie’s narrative arc underscores how Bailey plays a central role in making his town stronger, happier, and more stable economically.

It’s a Wonderful Life thus proposes that market relationships can take on the compassionate perspectives of their participants—and thus tame the negative consequences of modern economic life.

In 1946, this was a rather avant-garde proposition. At the time of its release, after all, many Americans imagined that a robust state, and to a lesser degree charitable giving, could be the key players capable of controlling the negative consequences of modern industrial life. Today, Americans still consider these to be the two main avenues for addressing modern economic inequities. And yet, Americans also have come to embrace a third option proposed by It’s a Wonderful Life. We see this option in Americans’ comfort with (and advocacy of) various forms of more empathetic market relationships from fair trade and impact investing to microlending and benefit corporations.

This is to say that a visible number of Americans today are trying to address the negative consequences of modern economic life by redefining their market relationships to be a bit more humane, empathetic, and driven less singularly by profit. And yet, compared to Bailey and his community in It’s a Wonderful Life, Americans are less certain that charitable relationships in the market will substantively transform economic life in the United States. Because unlike the fictional characters in this 1946 movie, Americans are rooted in actual American life.

And in actuality, Americans remain torn as to whether the market needs to be tamed, and if it does, what exactly could tame it. The answer might be Andrew Carnegie and Herbert Hoover’s vision for private giving. Or Franklin D. Roosevelt’s strong bureaucratic state. Or perhaps—as It’s a Wonderful Life and a growing number of contemporary Americans are suggesting—a more charitable private sector.

The post Frank Capra’s Formula for Taming American Capitalism appeared first on Zócalo Public Square.

It is one of the great ironies of 20th-century American history: Hubert Humphrey, the foremost proponent of civil rights among American politicians, had little contact with African Americans until age 28.

Humphrey’s distance from people who would benefit from his legislative prowess was a result of biography and history. He was born in 1911 in the tiny prairie hamlet of Wallace, South Dakota, which had no African Americans. In 1919, he moved with his family 50 miles southwest to slightly larger Doland, where he encountered only a few African-American highway workers with whom he traded the newspapers he hawked for rides on their mule-pulled wagons, a practice his mother, Christine Sannes Humphrey, disapproved of.

But young Hubert’s pharmacist father, Hubert Sr., strongly encouraged his son toward a more liberal outlook by reading nightly to him and his three siblings from the works of Thomas Paine, Thomas Jefferson, and Woodrow Wilson. Demonstrating a strong commitment to democracy and social justice, Humphrey made his pharmacy into a meeting house for townspeople to debate local and national issues.

Still, even during young Hubert’s undergraduate years at the University of Minnesota—in a state where African Americans then made up less than .05 percent of the population—he recalled having only one serious conversation with an African-American student.

This changed when Humphrey, who graduated Phi Beta Kappa and won the University of Minnesota’s Forensic Medal for his debate skills, sought his Master’s degree in 1939 at Louisiana State University in Baton Rouge. He chose LSU because the chairman of its political science department was a friend of his Minnesota mentor, and offered him a paid fellowship.

Nearly half of Baton Rouge’s population was African-American, and strict segregation was the order of the day. Humphrey’s sensibilities were jarred when he saw “WHITE” and “COLORED” signs at every public facility. We don’t know if Humphrey made any African-American friends in Baton Rouge; he makes no mention of friends other than Russell Long, the son of Louisiana’s populist governor Huey Long, who was a campus politician and later a colleague of Humphrey in the U.S. Senate. And he spent much of his time on campus, engaged in his research.

But he couldn’t help but notice that wealthy whites lived in stately mansions, middle-class whites resided in neatly painted homes, and African Americans lived in unpainted shacks near open sewage ditches.

He realized, as he recalled in his autobiography, The Education of a Public Man, that he was a “conventional northern liberal,” and that he had thought of blacks only as a group and had not been aware of institutionalized white paternalism. He also recognized that his classmates, living in a city with African Americans, weren’t any more connected; they avoided most blacks. The one exception was an LSU classmate who told Humphrey he loved his “mammy,” an African-American employee of his parents who had brought him up and done more for him than his own mother.

Humphrey’s Louisiana experience convinced him that no one could view black life in Louisiana—Southern segregation—without “shock and outrage.” But it also opened his eyes to prejudice in the North that he had not recognized. His “abstract commitment” to civil rights became one of “flesh and blood,” he recalled in his autobiography.

It was hardly a full awakening to racism. Humphrey wrote his Master’s thesis on “The Political Philosophy of the New Deal,” in which he heaped praise on President Franklin Roosevelt’s willingness to use the federal government to undertake bold experiments intended to stabilize society, preserve capitalism, and establish basic economic security for everyone, especially those most in need. But Humphrey said nothing about the New Deal’s failure to advance civil rights or race relations significantly.

Returning to the University of Minnesota to pursue a doctorate in 1940, the always cash-strapped Humphrey took a Works Progress Administration job directing its Twin Cities Worker Education Program. He traveled the state and soon began speaking out against the deplorable working conditions of lumberjacks, miners, and factory workers—as well as against racial and religious discrimination. He was in favor of establishing a federal committee to ensure fair employment practices, which FDR created in 1941. This work led several public and labor union officials to urge him to run for mayor of Minneapolis.

On his second try, in 1945, Humphrey won. His coalition included strong support from African-American and Jewish communities (though they comprised just 1 and 5 percent of the city’s population, respectively), as well as from organized labor, which provided campaign funds and volunteers. In addition, key members of the business community—including John Cowles, owner and publisher of three major Minneapolis newspapers, including the Star Journal, the Morning Tribune, and the Times—backed Humphrey in the belief he would work to rid the city of its organized crime units.

Humphrey soon forged an urban New Deal that brought significant reform to a corrupt police force, improved labor-management relations, and regulated housing sales and rental practices. He also succeeded in shutting down many illicit business operations run by organized crime.

Above all Humphrey sought to root out discrimination in Minneapolis, which journalist Carey McWilliams had labeled the “capital of anti-Semitism in America.” He established a Mayor’s Council on Human Relations that organized a major self-survey drawn by Fisk University sociologists; the effort sent 600 volunteers to survey businesses, labor unions, and realtors about racial attitudes and discriminatory practices. This was a groundbreaking idea, advanced by an African American university that was a premier educator of teachers in 1947.

He ultimately convinced the city council to urge real estate developers needing its approval not to put restrictive covenants in deeds—which was one way neighborhoods were segregated by race and ethnicity.

Humphrey gained his most significant breakthrough in January 1947 when he persuaded the city council to pass a fair employment practices ordinance that outlawed discriminatory practices in hiring, firing, promotion, and compensation of employees, and established a commission to enforce its ruling with fines or jail sentences. (This was the nation’s first municipal fair employment practices commission.)

Similarly, Humphrey sought to desegregate bowling alleys, one of America’s most popular after-work facilities at the time. He succeeded in Minneapolis. In 1948, he had the Minneapolis and St. Paul Committee on Fair Play in Bowling sponsor a nondiscriminatory “All American Bowling Tournament.” But, despite a lobbying campaign, he was unable to persuade the American Bowling Congress to induce the owners of the nation’s 75,000 bowling alleys to open their lanes to all players.

Later in 1948, Humphrey, then an aspiring candidate for the U.S. Senate and a speaker at the Democrats’ national convention, stepped dramatically onto the national political stage. His address, delivered despite threats from the White House that he would hurt the party and his own career, called on Democrats to “get out of the shadow of states’ rights and walk forthrightly into the bright sunshine of human rights.” This speech galvanized the convention to adopt the first civil rights platform in the Democrats’ history; it called for equal employment opportunity, equal treatment in the military, protection of voting rights, and safety from lynching.

These advances had political costs. Humphrey’s speech caused some Southern Democrats to bolt the convention and form the Dixiecrat Party. But it also energized President Harry Truman’s campaign—in part by drawing African-American voters in big cities in crucial states—and was greatly responsible for his stunning upset victory over the Republican nominee, New York Governor Thomas Dewey. Humphrey also won his election to the Senate over incumbent Republican Joseph Ball by campaigning on civil rights and “health care for all.”

Humphrey’s 1948 efforts had put civil rights on the nation’s agenda and it would stay there for decades. The senator would keep pushing, despite suffering many bitter verbal attacks from Southern Democrats. Through the middle of the 20th century, he would be the nation’s political leader in advancing the historic civil rights acts of 1957, 1964, 1965, and 1968. These laws were intended to assure every American the right to full and fair participation and equal treatment in every aspect of life, including voting, employment, home ownership, schooling, and military service.

He would lose the presidential election in 1968—the campaign for which he may be best remembered—but he then returned to the U.S. Senate in the 1970s to continue advancing legislation for rights. He became the leading voice of American liberalism and, as Vice President Walter Mondale said upon his death in 1978, “the country’s conscience.”

The post How the South Made Hubert Humphrey Care About Race appeared first on Zócalo Public Square.

Coincidentally, this February 19 marks the 75th anniversary of FDR’s Executive Order 9066 setting up the camps. The Franklin D. Roosevelt Library in upstate New York is devoting an entire exhibit to FDR’s internment decision and its impact on the lives of internees for the first time in the library’s illustrious history.

The exhibit, “Images of Internment: The Incarceration of Japanese Americans In World War II,” will be ready for public viewing February 19, and will run through Dec. 31, 2017. In the meantime, it is worth reflecting on President Roosevelt’s role in and his reasons for setting up the internment camps. Trump, after all, described Roosevelt as a revered leader who was nonetheless responsible for setting up the internment camps. The then-presidential candidate suggested that if one of America’s greatest presidents could take such a step to defend lives, then Trump reasonably could crack down on Muslim Americans for the sake of security if he were to win the White House.

The internment decision represents one of the great paradoxes of FDR’s three-plus terms as president. Roosevelt was not just an architect of the New Deal but also a champion of human rights and individual liberties here at home and around the world as the crisis of World War II encroached on the United States.

Faced with the growing power of fascist militarism, Roosevelt declared in his 1941 Four Freedoms address that “the mighty action that we are calling for cannot be based on a disregard of all the things worth fighting for.” Indeed, he then cited “the preservation of civil liberties for all” as one of these fundamental democratic values that was worthy of national sacrifice.

The puzzle of his presidency is how a man so responsible for defending freedom against the totalitarian menace—whose wartime addresses stirred millions of people to defend the cause of liberty—could simultaneously authorize and implement one of the greatest civil liberties abuses in American history.

In the wake of the attack on Pearl Harbor, the political pressures on Roosevelt to take drastic action against Japanese Americans on the West Coast metastasized. Popular fears of imminent air raids, widespread espionage and land invasion combined with entrenched anti-Japanese racism, especially in California, Oregon, and Washington state, into a combustible mix in the uncertainty that defined the days following the bombing of Pearl Harbor.

Railing against any American officials who had the temerity to defend Japanese Americans as loyal citizens, the Los Angeles Times denounced all people of Japanese origin as “snakes” who posed imminent dangers to communities on the Pacific coast. Anti-Japanese voices grew louder as concerns soared that cities—Los Angeles, San Francisco, Seattle—would come under enemy attack. Los Angeles Mayor Fletcher Bowron warned residents that, “Right here in our own city are those who may spring to action at an appointed time in accordance with a prearranged plan wherein each of our little Japanese friends will know his part in the event of any possible attempted invasion or air raid … We cannot run the risk of another Pearl Harbor episode in Southern California.”

A group of Army officers, fearing that invasion was imminent and under pressure from nativists in the Western United States, pressed the White House to remove and incarcerate Japanese nationals and Japanese Americans on the West Coast. Roosevelt was kept abreast of the fast-moving debate about the fate of Japanese Americans on the West Coast, and the voices in support of internment proved far louder and politically and militarily more potent than the arguments made by interment’s opponents.

A member of the Senate Committee on Military Affairs, Harley Kilgore (D-WV), sent Roosevelt letters from Americans protesting the ongoing presence of Japanese people within the United States as a grave threat. “I am enclosing herewith a few samples of the types of protests which I am receiving from persons very distant from the Pacific Coast with reference to the dangers of Japanese and other inhabitants of that vicinity,” Kilgore wrote the president. “It is my sincere belief that the Pacific coast should be declared a military area which will give authority to put [residents] … under military law, permitting their removal, regardless of their citizenship rights, to internal and less dangerous areas.”

The most vigorous dissent to incarcerating Japanese Americans came from Attorney General Francis Biddle and Assistant to the Attorney General, James H. Rowe, Jr. But even as they argued admirably against evacuation and incarceration, the Justice Department’s leaders conveyed to the president some sense of the popular racism, war hysteria, and economic motivations that would ultimately overwhelm the debate and set in motion FDR’s executive order. Biddle wrote Roosevelt:

“A great many of the West Coast people distrust the Japanese, various special interests would welcome their removal from good farm land and the elimination of their competition, some of the local California radio and press have demanded evacuation, the West Coast congressional delegation are asking the same thing and finally Walter Lippman and Westbrook Pegler recently have taken up the evacuation cry on the ground that attack on the West Coast and widespread sabotage is imminent.”

When Biddle and other Justice Department officials were assured by the Army that the military and not Justice would be responsible for implementing and running the camps, they withdrew their opposition to Roosevelt’s executive order. That order, numbered 9066 and signed on February 19, 1942, did not explicitly mention the Japanese, but there was no question that it targeted people of Japanese ancestry for removal rather than people of German and Italian origins.

The decision was hardly motivated by legitimate threats to the national security of the United States. Almost all historians have concluded that there was no evidence in the early 1940s—and that no evidence has emerged in the seven-plus decades since—showing that Japanese nationals and Japanese Americans were acting as spies or that they were part of a larger plot aiding the Emperor’s war effort. The notion that national security considerations justified the camps is simply contradicted by the voluminous historical evidence to the contrary..

“There is no evidence that [the Japanese government] had any success” recruiting spies in the United States to advance its war aims, historian Greg Robinson, author of By Order of the President: FDR and the Internment of Japanese Americans, has pointed out. “The American occupation authorities in Japan after the war who studied captured Japanese documents found no evidence of any giant spy rings among American citizens of Japanese ancestry.”

Roosevelt, a product of his times, regarded the Japanese with the racist suspicion shared by countless of his fellow Americans. A close student of public opinion, and attuned to the military, political, and popular pressures to incarcerate Japanese Americans and suspend their rights as citizens, he issued the executive order without much apparent forethought or agonizing about the fraught moral questions and human costs of his action. Roosevelt subscribed to decades of anti-Japanese racism that pervaded early 20th century American culture. Just as the nation’s 19th century political leaders could speak eloquently for democracy and sing the praises of individual freedom while also defending the institution of slavery, Roosevelt gave hope to the world’s victims of fascist militarism and rallied millions of Americans to defend democracy while simultaneously authorizing the complete suspension of rights of an entire group of people based on their race. One historian has rightly called the internment camps “the most tragic act of his administration.”

During the 1980s, a committee established by the U.S. Congress to investigate the history of the internment camps concluded that they amounted to “a grave injustice” born out of “racial prejudice, war hysteria, and the failure of political leadership.” The most glaring abdication was the failure of Franklin Roosevelt to defend the rights and liberties of tens of thousands of his fellow citizens as he was pulled along by the tides of hysteria and racism 75 years ago this February.

The post Franklin D. Roosevelt’s Act of Infamy Against Japanese Americans appeared first on Zócalo Public Square.

If you answered “both,” you’d be correct. We don’t tend to think of FDR as a conservative today, and at certain points he would have rejected the label, but in 1936 that was how he wanted to be understood. He was three years into his first term and it was far from clear there would be a second. The mandate from his 1932 landslide victory seemed exhausted. Americans were seven years into the catastrophe of the Great Depression, which had destroyed whole industries and spread economic pain across the country.

Most of all, Roosevelt faced withering criticism for his signature agenda, the New Deal. While his predecessor, Herbert Hoover, had resisted using the powers of government to battle the Depression, Roosevelt argued that the economy had changed in ways that required bigger government. The railroad, the telegraph, the automobile, and the modern corporation had pulled the American people into a tighter web, so economic pain could more easily spread.

Roosevelt had used his 1932 presidential campaign to dramatize his cause of remaking government for the new economic challenges. During the Democratic National Convention, he departed from the usual tradition in which a candidate was notified by telegraph of his nomination after the convention is finished. He instead telegraphed party leaders, after hearing of his nomination, with the request that they hold the convention in session while he flew from New York to Chicago—a very rare thing at the time—in order to accept the nomination in person. When Roosevelt finally appeared before the delegates, he told them, “Let it also be symbolic that . . . I broke traditions.” He was committed to bringing about a new political order.

When Roosevelt was elected in a landslide, he set about creating program after program that rewrote rules for American manufacturing, limited production on American farms, and changed the structures of the credit system. The New Deal was astounding in its scope, promising to rework basic structures of the American economy.

But well before the 1936 re-election campaign, Roosevelt was met with resistance. Many businessmen became concerned about the way that the New Deal was infringing on their power and profits. “It must have now become clear to every thinking man,” Irénée du Pont, of the DuPont Company, wrote to a friend, “that the so-called ‘New Deal,’ advocated by the Administration is nothing more or less than the Socialistic doctrine called by another name.” To battle this threat, du Pont enlisted his family and friends in a campaign to bring down first Roosevelt and then the entire New Deal. Their strategy was what they hoped would be a grassroots campaign, conducted through a new organization called the American Liberty League.

Yet the businessmen realized that they could not just use the League to advocate for the protection of private property. That would turn off the common man in a time of deep economic depression. So as they cast about for an organizing principle, the League’s secretary, W.H. Stayton, suggested that they come up with what he called “a moral or an emotional purpose,” rather than merely the defense of property rights.

Stayton thought he knew one that would work. Not many issues, he wrote in a memo to the other leaders, “could command more support or evoke more enthusiasm among our people than the simple issue of the ‘Constitution.’” With all Roosevelt’s changes to the structure of government and the economy, Stayton suggested, he was threatening the Constitution. “The public ignorance concerning it is dense and inexcusable,” he wrote, “but nevertheless, there is a mighty—though vague—affection for it. The people, I believe, need merely to be lead and instructed, and this affection will become almost worship and can be converted into an irresistible movement.”

Stayton flatly acknowledged that his devotion to the Constitution was a ruse. He wanted to change it in various ways, starting with the elimination of the Sixteenth Amendment, which authorized an income tax that hurt the rich more than others. But for the purposes of the 1936 election, Stayton suggested, the League needed to act as though “the Constitution is perfect.” “We do not seek to change it,” he said, “or to add to it or to subtract from it; we seek to rescue it from those who misunderstand it, misuse it and mistreat it.”

Roosevelt immediately saw the problem that the League posed to his program. So he faced a choice. He could continue to advocate for a new political order, as he had in the 1932 election, but that would leave him open to the claims that he was subverting the Constitution and departing from the ideals of the Founders. Or he could do something else.

Roosevelt decided to make what we would today call “a pivot.” During the 1936 State of the Union in January, the president abandoned his call for a new political order and rhetorically remade himself into a conservative who defended the Constitution from usurpation by the rich.

In a combative address, he charged his political opponents with appropriating “the livery of great national constitutional ideals” to obscure their selfish political goals. He claimed that the Founders were against entrenched privilege and so would have supported him in his policies. And from that point forward, in address after address, Roosevelt wrapped himself in founding ideals to defeat his opponents.

At no point was the change in message more obvious than during the 1936 Democratic National Convention, held in Philadelphia. The location gave Roosevelt the opportunity to claim the symbolic covering of the founding era. Unlike his address four years earlier, where he first promised a new political order, he now said that his purpose was primarily conservative. They had gathered at the University of Pennsylvania football stadium, he explained, “to reaffirm the faith of our fathers, to pledge ourselves to restore to the people a wider freedom, to give to 1936 as the founders gave to 1776—an American way of life.”

That pledge turned out to be extremely powerful, even though it was totally at odds with his earlier rhetorical strategies. As Roosevelt rode around the stadium after the address, with the crowd of 80,000 going wild, many observers concluded that the election was, for all intents and purposes, over. Roosevelt won the most sweeping victory since James Monroe’s unopposed election in 1820. He won every state but two. And he carried so many allies with him into Congress that the Democratic U.S. senators, all 75 of them, were unable to fit into their side of the Senate chamber.

The problem is that neither Roosevelt nor his business opponents really sought to restore the government to the way it was understood by the Founders. The Depression had created new challenges unknown in the late 18th century. It would be impossible to go back. But the 1936 election demonstrated the power of rhetoric invoking the Constitution as it was originally understood, or at least as politicians claimed it was to be originally understood.

From that point forward, both Democrats and Republicans have gestured to the founding moment to criticize their opponents and to justify their policies, especially when they are in trouble. The Founders and the Constitution have become a political football that each side needs to score points. And it is that rhetorical pattern that is, in many ways, the most significant legacy of the election of 1936.

The post 1936, When “The Dictator” FDR Was Bent on Constitutional Destruction appeared first on Zócalo Public Square.

This debate is not a new one in American history. Even before the Cold War fears of nuclear warfare, back in the 1930s and 1940s, a similar debate erupted about a different set of security fears and what was then called “home defense.”

During the Roosevelt years, liberal democracies everywhere felt threatened by the rise of the twin absolutist ideologies that were gaining ground across the globe: fascism and communism. News of atrocities committed in the name of these isms—in Ethiopia, China, Spain, the Soviet Union—frightened Americans. Many Americans wanted to join the fight against fascism overseas, while plenty of others embraced isolationism. But all feared the possibility of aerial bombings, chemical and biological weapons, and a panic that could install a dictator in the White House.

Fear-drenched messages resounded nationwide. Radio dramas such as Archibald MacLeish’s “Air Raid” featured sounds of children screaming as bombs whizzed through the air. Americans read about new “super-bombers” that soon could fly non-stop across the Atlantic and bomb U.S. cities. Theories about how we could be attacked also seeped into the culture: What if the Nazis set up bases in Iceland or Bermuda?

In January 1939, FDR said the world “has grown so small and weapons of attack so swift [that] the distant points from which attacks may be launched are completely different from what they were 20 years ago.” By the spring of 1940, as Hitler’s Wehrmacht rolled across the French countryside, FDR declared that, in essence, isolation was a prescription for national suicide.

“Civilian Defense in Detroit.”

New Deal liberals, previously consumed with trying to expand the safety net to curb capitalism’s sharp edges, began to grapple with citizens’ obligations to democracy in times of crisis: How should civilians work with government to keep themselves and their communities safe from enemy attacks? Should Americans be militarized to prepare for war? Should individual liberties be abridged in the name of protecting America in its hour of need? How should “home defense” help keep civilians calm and maintain their morale? Finally, should home defense improve people’s lives by combatting malnutrition, poverty, joblessness, and despair?

In May 1941, President Franklin Roosevelt issued an executive order establishing the Office of Civilian Defense (OCD)—the precursor to today’s Department of Homeland Security.

There were two competing, bold, drastically distinct liberal visions for what home defense should mean in the lives of Americans. The debate set Eleanor Roosevelt’s social defense vision against New York Mayor Fiorello La Guardia’s brand of national security liberalism. Eleanor Roosevelt was the OCD’s assistant director, the first First Lady to have an official role in an administration; La Guardia was its director while also serving as mayor.

The two of them argued over the classic trade-off between “guns” and “butter.” For La Guardia, the need was to militarize society, whereas Mrs. Roosevelt endorsed “guns” but not at the cost of sacrificing a continued focus on social programs. La Guardia and his supporters were willing to trample on civil liberties, while social defense liberals like the First Lady made more of an effort to defend individual rights and even made a stab at protecting Japanese-Americans from the racist hysteria sweeping the nation after Pearl Harbor.

The First Lady adopted a broad conception of home defense. Her vision featured a government-led and citizen-powered movement to make Americans “as much interested today in seeing [citizens] well-housed, well-clothed, and well-fed, obtaining needed medical care and recreation” as in military security. She insisted that the country had to live its values. In wartime, she argued, “every place in this country must be made a better place in which to live, and therefore more worth defending.”

Eleanor Roosevelt, center, acting as assistant director of civilian defense, at a 1941 conference on “women’s activities in civilian defense.”

To Mrs. Roosevelt, World War II was not only a struggle to defeat fascism militarily. It also required a wartime New Deal to secure a better future by mounting a national effort to attack Americans’ unmet human needs.

The First Lady was charged with overseeing volunteer participation in home defense. She helped recruit more than ten million volunteers, including an estimated three million who performed some type of social defense role. Citizens working through their government fed women and children, provided medical and child care, trained defense plant workers, led salvage campaigns, improved transit systems, planted victory gardens, and helped women learn about nutritious diets. Her campaign helped make it acceptable for liberals to champion big government both in terms of military affairs and social democratic experimentation—a government devoted to both guns and butter.

La Guardia, whose New Deal partnership with FDR had modernized and humanized the nation’s most populous city, embodied the “guns” and anti-civil liberties side of the debate. He worried about social disorder. Watching Rotterdam, Paris, and London being bombed from his perch in City Hall, La Guardia thought that American cities could eventually meet the same fate. Incensed that the administration hadn’t yet established a home defense agency, the mayor lobbied the White House until FDR signed the executive order in May 1941 and tapped La Guardia to be his home defense chief.

La Guardia brandished a new form of national security liberalism that prioritized military over social defense (and individual rights) in times of crisis. Under his vision, a government-civilian partnership would militarize civilians’ lives. He proposed requiring big city workers to volunteer as firefighters and learn how to handle a chemical weapons attack. He recommended distributing gas masks to 50 million civilians, putting a mobile water pump on every city block, and establishing five volunteer fire brigades for every city brigade. A fourth military branch composed of civilians would prepare cities to endure air raids.

La Guardia relied on fear to sell his message. He could come off like Orson Welles (creator of “War of the Worlds”) on steroids. If the public was fearful, he reasoned, it would be inspired to mobilize in its own self-defense.

While he did aid FDR in sowing a war mindset and alerting Americans to the Nazi peril, he also dispensed with civic niceties and civil liberties. In contrast to Eleanor Roosevelt’s reaction to Pearl Harbor, La Guardia asked citizens to spy on other citizens, shuttered Japanese-American clubs and restaurants, called his media critics “Japs” and “friends of Japs,” and ordered Japanese-Americans confined to their homes until the government could determine “their status.”

America’s leading urban reformer pushed liberalism in a novel direction, as he fought to use the federal government to militarize civilians in order to maximize their safety. Ultimately, social defense took a backseat to military security during the Cold War. Harry Truman, Dwight Eisenhower, and John Kennedy launched a range of domestic reforms aimed at strengthening the home front socially and economically, yet military security—loyalty oaths, nuclear arsenals, evacuation drills—typically took priority over social defense. The kind of far-reaching wartime New Deal envisioned by Eleanor Roosevelt was never enacted during the Cold War. Even Lyndon Johnson’s “Great Society” was cut short partly due to the demand for “guns” during the Vietnam War.

The trade-offs are evident even today. Liberals argue with conservatives and among themselves about the proper balance between individual freedom and national security. Equally controversial, social reforms to improve life at home are locked in conflict with steps to keep us physically safe. This is not just a question of resources. It boils down to how we see ourselves as citizens of our democracy. Some liberals, for example, argue that “nation-building right here at home,” as President Obama suggested in 2012, is as important as cracking down on suspected terrorist threats or planting democracy in the Middle East.

All of these debates are traceable to the struggle among liberals to alert citizens to the war on “two fronts”—at home and abroad—during the Roosevelt years. As long as America has enemies overseas and threats from within, the fight over the best balance between guns and butter and between military security and civil liberties will remain central to America’s national identity—an enduring legacy of the campaign by liberals such as Eleanor Roosevelt and Fiorello La Guardia in World War II to liberate Americans from the grip of fear.

The post The New Deal Origins of Homeland Security appeared first on Zócalo Public Square.

Such predictability was not always the case. In fact, three-quarters of a century ago, the City of Brotherly Love played host to a very different convention—one whose outcome was so unexpected it became known as the “Miracle in Philadelphia.”

This was before the age of modern primaries, when the convention was less of an award ceremony, and more the actual contest. When the 1940 Republican National Convention opened, just 300 of the 1,000 delegates were pledged to a candidate. The contenders included such heavyweights as former President Herbert Hoover (attempting a comeback), Manhattan district attorney Thomas E. Dewey, the governor of South Dakota, and three U.S. senators, among them Michigan’s Arthur H. Vandenberg and Ohio’s Robert A. Taft.

And then there was Wendell L. Willkie, the boisterous head of the New York City-based Commonwealth & Southern Corporation, the nation’s largest energy holding company. Willkie’s previous foray into the political realm was as a delegate at the 1924 and 1932 National Conventions—as a Democrat.

But when President Franklin D. Roosevelt proposed the Tennessee Valley Authority to compete with private utilities, Willkie soured on the Democrats and became a leading spokesman for the business sector against New Deal policies. Willkie nonetheless described himself as a “liberal” with an ironclad commitment to civil rights and individual liberties. He said that if elected he planned to desegregate the government, the armed forces, and Washington, D.C.

Still, it was quite a leap to go from Democratic National Convention delegate to Republican presidential candidate. Willkie had not even bothered to mount a formal campaign, having declared his “availability” for nomination just 48 days before the convention’s first gavel fell. He had no campaign funds and no campaign manager or hired spokesman. A Gallup poll six weeks prior to the convention reflected Willkie’s minimal efforts, showing 67 percent support among Republican voters for Dewey, 14 percent for Vandenberg, 12 percent for Taft, and 3 percent for Willkie.

Yet it was Willkie who, to the astonishment of everyone except himself, somehow managed to walk away with the nomination. How did an industrialist from Indiana—sometimes known as the “Barefoot Wall Street Lawyer” for the folksy Indiana ways he brought to the big city—manage to best his far better-known, better-connected and better-moneyed rivals?

The answer is both simple and complex. Only a month earlier, Hitler’s Nazi troops had stormed through Belgium, Luxembourg, the Netherlands, and France. More than 350,000 British and French troops, in full retreat, had staged a daring escape across the English Channel from Dunkirk. On the first evening of the convention, at a special session at Philadelphia’s Independence Hall broadcast via radio coast to coast, Republican National Chairman John Hamilton of Kansas addressed the country’s mounting fears. “The world is witnessing a terrible demonstration of how quickly the hard-earned rights of man can be destroyed,” Hamilton declared. “Individual liberty and opportunity are gone in much of the world; the rights of man, slowly built up over a thousand years, have vanished.” His speech concluded with a descendent of Benjamin Franklin ringing the Liberty Bell.

For the 1940 Republican presidential hopefuls, this state of affairs created a problem. All of the leading candidates were well-known isolationists, while Roosevelt, who was seeking an unprecedented third term, had been engaged globally for almost two terms. Indeed, the official Republican platform issued that week declared the party “firmly opposed to involving this nation in foreign war.” But it added, “The zero hour is here. America must prepare if it wants to defend our shores, our homes, our lives, and our most cherished ideals.”

Taft, son of President William Howard Taft, was the conservative leader of the U.S. Senate and the Republican establishment’s pick. Vandenberg, a longtime member of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, was leader of the Senate’s isolationist block and an early frontrunner, subsequently knocked out by Dewey in the primaries. Dewey, the impeccably dressed, 38-year-old, gang-busting U.S. Attorney had narrowly lost the New York governor’s race in 1938. But he won nine out of 10 presidential primaries and came to the convention as the strong favorite.

Willkie, 48, was the sole internationalist—and the only contender with experience running a large organization. In 1929 he was hired as corporate counsel at Commonwealth & Southern and quickly rose through the ranks. Four years later, in the midst of the Great Depression and with the company on the verge of bankruptcy, he was made president. Willkie rebuilt the company, increasing business assets to more than $1 billion, employing 25,000 workers and bringing electricity for the first time to millions of people in 10 states.

In the run-up to the convention, as global tensions mounted, Willkie captured the imagination of the public and the media. U.S. News, Time, Life, Look, Fortune, and The Saturday Evening Post ran feature stories, and 10,000 “Willkie for President” clubs sprang up across the nation. By convention week, a Gallup poll suggested that Willkie had carved a big chunk out of Dewey’s lead. Dewey was still far ahead, at 47 percent. But Willkie was now in second position, at 29 percent, with the other contenders relegated to single digits.

As was the norm—before convention rule changes that went into effect in 1972—most delegates of both parties were either uncommitted or committed to a “Favorite Son” candidate from their state. All the 1940 candidates thought that if they could hold off Dewey on the first ballot they had a chance. But Willkie had momentum. During the convention, the Willkie for President clubs inundated the convention with more than a million pro-Willkie telegrams and letters, which were dumped at the delegates’ feet, while the balconies were stacked with supporters screaming, “We want Willkie! We want Willkie!”

Where did such enthusiastic support come from for this non-establishment candidate? Initially the clubs did emerge from the establishment, spurred by Republican strategist and Willkie supporter Oren Root. But that was just the beginning. The clubs—fueled by the barrage of national publicity and Willkie’s homespun personality—resonated with the public and spread rapidly and spontaneously across the nation, culminating in this moment of frenzied support.

On the first ballot, Dewey took the lead, with 360 of the 501 votes required to win. Taft, known as “Mr. Republican” and favored by uncommitted party-insider delegates, trailed with 189 votes, while Willkie started in third place with 105. But Dewey made a tactical error in not holding reserve votes for the second ballot, which would have helped create the impression of momentum. Instead he dropped to 338 while both Taft and Willkie gained ground. By the end of the fourth ballot Dewey’s support had collapsed to 250. Taft gained momentum with 254, while Willkie surged forward with 306. The relentless chanting from the balcony continued: “We want Willkie! We want Willkie!”

On the crucial sixth ballot, state delegations stampeded to Willkie. The darkest dark horse since the days of Abraham Lincoln and James Garfield won the prize. Afterwards in his small hotel room, the nominee laughingly told the press, “I guess the first thing I’ll have to do is change my registration from Democrat to Republican.”

George Gallup called Willkie’s charge to the nomination “the most astonishing” in the brief history of polling. Journalist H.L. Mencken wrote, “I am convinced that the nomination of Willkie was managed by the Holy Ghost in person.”

The campaign was almost as exciting. Roosevelt later said that despite his victory—amassing 27 million votes to Willkie’s 22 million, the most secured by any Republican presidential candidate to date—the “liberal” Republican known for carrying his own bags hit him with the toughest fight of his political career. Roosevelt so respected Willkie that soon after his inauguration he sent his former political foe traveling throughout Europe and Asia as his personal diplomatic representative during World War II. Willkie’s resulting book, One World, was a bestseller. In 1944, Willkie briefly mounted a fresh campaign for president, but dropped out after he was defeated by party conservatives in the Wisconsin primary. He died soon after, at age 52, from a series of heart attacks.

Though Willkie never realized his presidential dream, his spectacular performance at the 1940 convention stands as one of the all-time greatest presidential convention upsets. And Willkie’s strong showing against FDR in the general election ensured him—and his ideas—a seat at the table. In 2016, when many American voters across the ideological spectrum have again demonstrated their frustrations with the limitations of political insiders, history reminds us that our democratic institutions can, indeed, accommodate the demands of sudden popular change.

 
In “Beyond the Circus,” writers take us off the 2016 campaign trail and give us glimpses of this election season’s politically important places.

The post Before Donald Trump, Wendell L. Willkie Upended the GOP Primary in 1940 appeared first on Zócalo Public Square.

Great Depression? Not here, at least not as reported by the local press. Hollywood was where Jean Harlow, Clark Gable, Carole Lombard, Douglas Fairbanks, Gary Cooper, Lana Turner, Errol Flynn, and Ginger Rogers frolicked at the Coconut Grove. Hollywood was where Busby Berkeley made extravaganza movies with long-legged showgirls sashaying down curving, white staircases with hats the size of chandeliers balanced on their heads.

So who gave that Depression much thought? In Los Angeles, veterans of World War I did; veterans all over America did.

With 25 percent unemployment nationwide, many vets and their families were homeless, riding the rails or huddled in Hoovervilles. They sold apples on street corners and scrounged for food. They were hungry, and it didn’t make sense–because in 1924 Congress had passed the Adjusted Service Certificate Act, under which World War veterans were awarded a bonus for their wartime service.

Many desperate veterans needed the money, but the bonuses weren’t due to be paid out until 1945. In early 1932, U.S. Representative Wright Patman of Texas introduced a bill to pay the veterans’ bonuses immediately, but President Hoover threatened a veto. Hoover, a Quaker, believed that the soul’s salvation depended on hard work and self-sacrifice, and, as he put it, “paying an enormous sum of money to a vast majority of those who were able to take care of themselves would break down the barriers of self-reliance and self-support of our people.” The bonus bill stalled in the Senate, although the biggest banks, thanks to bailouts, did all right.

That spring, a small group of destitute veterans from Oregon, impatient with Congress, began a march across the country to lobby peacefully for payment of their wartime bonuses. They called themselves the Bonus Expeditionary Force, the BEF. News of the event rocketed through the country. More than 22,000 veterans, many with their families, joined them.

In Hollywood, a sometime actor, Royal Robertson, a disabled veteran with a steel brace to support his neck, made the rounds of the Veterans of Foreign Wars posts to promote a dramatic plan to lead a delegation of fellow vets to Washington. He knew nothing moved Tinseltown like high drama and called his plan a “hero’s journey.” All the veterans who were now out-of-work bit actors, cameramen, writers, electricians, and best boys ate it up. Robertson became their leader.

On the morning of June 10, more than a thousand Los Angeles veterans gathered at the corner of Washington and Hill and eventually assembled into a ragged parade line. Four Los Angeles motorcycle cops pulled out in front to escort them. Robertson, behind the wheel of a car, led the parade. A drum and bugle corps set the cadence, stepping out smartly, and the parade moved out onto Hill Street. Behind them came a Disabled American Veteran color guard, two ambulances, a commissary truck, and an old hearse festooned with picks, shovels, spare tires, and cans of gasoline.

Fourteen men marched in step with a large American flag stretched between them, spread open so that donations could be thrown upon it. Behind the flag bearers, 200 men marched in close formation. A caravan of 104 sputtering cars and trucks farting exhaust fumes brought up the rear.

Thousands of Angelenos clogged the sidewalks along the parade route; they cheered and applauded, shouting, “Good luck!” and “Go get ’em!” and “Godspeed!” The marchers, ballsy, full of hell, strutted along, gave thumbs-up, waved their American flags. Confetti and ticker tape showered down from high windows.

Mayor John C. Porter, standing on City Hall steps with a bunch of cronies, waved them on and shouted, “Good luck! Do us proud!”

The L.A. heroes were on their way.

My father was one of those marchers. Two weeks after he left, my mother and a friend hitchhiked across the country to join their men in Washington. They all were there six weeks later, when an ill-advised President Hoover, convinced that the bonus marchers were communists out to overthrow the government, ordered General Douglas MacArthur to use U.S. Army troops to evict the veterans. On the afternoon of July 28, the troops assembled at the Ellipse. Thousands of Bonus Marchers, many with their families, jammed Pennsylvania Avenue to watch what they thought would be a grand parade, never suspecting that the U.S. Army would attack American veterans.

MacArthur personally led the assault. At his side were his aides, Majors George Patton and Dwight Eisenhower. At MacArthur’s order, 200 mounted cavalry soldiers charged into the crowd with swinging sabers. Then they launched tear gas canisters. Five Whippet tanks followed close behind to keep the crowd at bay. Four hundred armed infantrymen and machine gunners brought up the rear.

The veterans, lost in clouds of tear gas, ran. The attack ended that night, after the Army torched the veterans’ camps along with all their possessions. Two veterans were killed, and dozens were injured. Also dead were two children, from tear gas inhalation.

During the weeks that followed, the L.A. heroes limped home. Some, including my parents, moved in with family. Some slept on the beach, picked oranges, and scrounged for jobs. That fall, after newsreels showed the attack of the veterans in graphic detail, shocked American voters ousted Hoover and elected Franklin Delano Roosevelt in a landslide.

My parents stayed with my grandmother in Hermosa Beach until 1936, when a new bonus bill finally passed. They moved to Glendale in 1940, where I grew up. They never forgave President Hoover and the Republican Party for the Great Depression, nor did they forgive Douglas MacArthur, who had swaggered in his bemedaled uniform as he led the attack against American veterans. And, one April day in 1945, I came home from school to find them at the kitchen table, holding hands, both of them in tears. FDR was dead, an era ended.

Georgia Lowe is the author of The Bonus, a novel based on her parents’ experience as Bonus Marchers.

Buy the book: Skylight Books, Amazon, Powell’s, Lucky Dime Press.

*Photo courtesy of Georgia Lowe.

The post When Hoover Tear-Gassed My Dad appeared first on Zócalo Public Square.