Hubert Humphrey
Hubert Horatio Humphrey Jr. (May 27, 1911 – January 13, 1978) was an American politician and statesman who served as the 38th vice president of the United States from 1965 to 1969. He twice served in the United States Senate, representing Minnesota from 1949 to 1964 and 1971 to 1978. As a senator he was a major leader of modern liberalism in the United States. As President Lyndon B. Johnson's vice president, he supported the controversial Vietnam War. An intensely divided Democratic Party nominated him in the 1968 presidential election, which he lost to Republican nominee Richard Nixon.
For other people named Hubert Humphrey, see Hubert Humphrey (disambiguation).
Hubert Humphrey
Lyndon B. Johnson
Position established
George J. Mitchell (1987)
Mike Mansfield
January 13, 1978 (aged 66)
Waverly, Minnesota, U.S.
4, including Skip
Born in Wallace, South Dakota, Humphrey attended the University of Minnesota. In 1943, he became a professor of political science at Macalester College and ran a failed campaign for mayor of Minneapolis. He helped found the Minnesota Democratic–Farmer–Labor Party (DFL) in 1944; the next year he was elected mayor of Minneapolis, serving until 1948 and co-founding the liberal anti-communist group Americans for Democratic Action in 1947. In 1948, he was elected to the U.S. Senate and successfully advocated for the inclusion of a proposal to end racial segregation in the 1948 Democratic National Convention's party platform.[1]
Humphrey served three terms in the Senate from 1949 to 1964, and was the Senate Majority Whip for the last four years of his tenure. During this time, he was the lead author of the Civil Rights Act of 1964, introduced the first initiative to create the Peace Corps, and chaired the Select Committee on Disarmament. He unsuccessfully sought his party's presidential nomination in 1952 and 1960. After Lyndon B. Johnson acceded to the presidency, he chose Humphrey as his running mate, and the Democratic ticket won a landslide victory in the 1964 election.
In March 1968, Johnson made his surprise announcement that he would not seek reelection, and Humphrey launched his campaign for the presidency. Loyal to the Johnson administration's policies on the Vietnam War, he received opposition from many within his own party and avoided the primaries to focus on winning the delegates of non-primary states at the Democratic National Convention. His delegate strategy succeeded in clinching the nomination, and he chose Senator Edmund Muskie as his running mate. In the general election, he nearly matched Nixon's tally in the popular vote but lost the electoral vote by a wide margin. After the defeat, he returned to the Senate and served from 1971 until his death in 1978. He ran again in the 1972 Democratic primaries but lost to George McGovern and declined to be McGovern's running mate.[2] From 1977 to 1978, he served as Deputy President pro tempore of the United States Senate.
Marriage and early career
In 1934, Humphrey began dating Muriel Buck, a bookkeeper and graduate of local Huron College.[27] They were married from 1936 until Humphrey's death nearly 42 years later.[28] They had four children: Nancy Faye, Skip Humphrey, Robert Andrew, and Douglas Sannes.[29] Money was an issue that plagued the Humphreys consistently. One biographer noted, "For much of his life he was short of money to live on, and his relentless drive to attain the White House seemed at times like one long, losing struggle to raise enough campaign funds to get there."[30] To help boost his salary, Humphrey frequently took paid outside speaking engagements. Through most of his years as a U.S. senator and vice president, he lived in a middle-class suburban housing development in Chevy Chase, Maryland. In 1958, the Humphreys used their savings and his speaking fees to build a lakefront home in Waverly, Minnesota, about 40 miles west of Minneapolis.[31]
During World War II, Humphrey tried three times to join the armed forces but failed.[32] His first two attempts were to join the Navy, first as a commissioned officer and then as an enlisted man. He was rejected both times for color blindness.[33] He then tried to enlist in the Army in December 1944 but failed the physical exam because of a double hernia, color blindness, and calcification of the lungs.[33] Despite his attempts to join the military, one biographer would note that "all through his political life, Humphrey was dogged by the charge that he was a draft dodger" during the war.[34]
Humphrey led various wartime government agencies and worked as a college instructor. In 1942, he was the state director of new production training and reemployment and chief of the Minnesota war service program.[35] In 1943 he was the assistant director of the War Manpower Commission.[21] From 1943 to 1944, Humphrey was a professor of political science at Macalester College in Saint Paul, Minnesota, where he headed the university's recently created international debate department, which focused on the international politics of World War II and the creation of the United Nations.[36] After leaving Macalester in the spring of 1944, Humphrey worked as a news commentator for a Minneapolis radio station until 1945.[21]
In 1943, Humphrey made his first run for elective office, for mayor of Minneapolis. He lost, but his poorly funded campaign still captured over 47% of the vote.[23] In 1944, Humphrey was one of the key players in the merger of the Democratic and Farmer-Labor parties of Minnesota to form the Minnesota Democratic-Farmer-Labor Party (DFL).[37] He also worked on President Roosevelt's 1944 reelection campaign.[38] When Minnesota Communists tried to seize control of the new party in 1945, Humphrey became an engaged anticommunist and led the successful fight to oust the Communists from the DFL.[39]
Mayor of Minneapolis (1945–1948)
After the war, Humphrey again ran for mayor of Minneapolis; this time, he won the June 1945 general election with 61% of the vote.[23] As mayor, he helped ensure the appointment of a friend and previous neighbor, Edwin Ryan, as head of the police department, as he needed a "police chief whose integrity and loyalty would be above reproach."[40] Though they had differing views of labor unions, Ryan and Humphrey worked together to crack down on crime in Minneapolis. Humphrey told Ryan, "I want this town cleaned up and I mean I want it cleaned up now, not a year from now or a month from now, right now", and "You take care of the law enforcement. I'll take care of the politics."[41] Humphrey served as mayor from 1945 to 1948,[42] winning reelection in 1947 by the largest margin in the city's history to that time. Humphrey gained national fame by becoming one of the founders of the liberal anticommunist Americans for Democratic Action (ADA), and he served as chairman from 1949 to 1950.[43] He also reformed the Minneapolis police force.[44] The city had been named the "anti-Semitism capital" of the country,[45] and its small African-American population also faced discrimination. Humphrey's mayoralty is noted for his efforts to fight all forms of bigotry.[46] He formed the Council on Human Relations and established a municipal version of the Fair Employment Practice Committee, making Minneapolis one of only a few cities in the United States to prohibit racial discrimination in the workforce.[47] Humphrey and his publicists were proud that the Council on Human Relations brought together individuals of varying ideologies.[48] In 1960, Humphrey told journalist Theodore H. White, "I was mayor once, in Minneapolis ... a mayor is a fine job, it's the best job there is between being a governor and being the President."[49]
A 1993 survey of historians, political scientists and urban experts by Melvin G. Holli of the University of Illinois at Chicago ranked Humphrey as the 28th-best American big-city mayor to have served between 1820 and 1993.[50]