Rebirth of a Realist

Rebirth of a Realist


CHAPTER TWO rebirth of a realist..www.erols.com/suttonbear
REALISM . . . Webster’s third new dictionary
Preoccupation with fact or reality; objective procedure not influenced by idealism, speculation or sentimentalism: disposition to think and act objectively and unemotionally and to reject what is impractical.
REALIST. . . . An adherent or advocate of realism.
Letter from Hubert H. Humphrey (Senator and US Vice president 1964, Presidential Candidate 1968) to Henry A Wallace 4/12/1945
[The handwritten postscript:]
"5:05 P.M. I’ve just heard of the death of our great President. May God bless this nation and world. I scarcely know what to say. It is as if one of my own family had passed away. If ever we needed men of courage—stouthearted men, it is now. I simply can’t conceal my emotions. How I wish you were at the helm. I know Mr. Truman will rise to the heights of statesmanship so all-important in this hour. But, we need you as you have never been needed before. HHH"
Reply from Secretary of Commerce to Hubert H. Humphrey April 21, 1945,
"With you, I share the faith that President Truman will rise to the heights of statesmanship which the present hour requires. He has gotten off to an unusually fine start."
Henry A. Wallace
(University of Iowa Library)
The month of attempted merry making in California did not leave me very merry. Day after day, I was surrounded with people all striving to re-capture their youth. It was a national plague. I came back to New Jersey to find some of my friends going to political meetings instead of our favorite bars. I was bewildered by the sudden change that seemed to come over everyone. I still heard the echo’s of the High School band playing Anchors Aweigh when I left for the Navy, and I had a clear memory of the emotion that I felt snapping my final salute to the ensign flying aft when I left the ship for the last time. I was still so full of patriotism that any of John Wayne’s hero characters would be slackers by comparison. I hated to hear my own father refer to the President of The United States as the world’s worst mass murderer, and war criminal for dropping the atomic bomb on the women and children of Hiroshima and Nagasaki.
Facing political reality for the first time, I was actually dragged kicking and screaming into the 1948 Henry Wallace presidential campaign by my other self. I fought hard against getting involved in the distasteful machinations of politics. The pushing and shoving of one huge ego against another and the constant bickering and posturing of staff people tested my commitment.
I actually contributed very little to the campaign in my home state of New Jersey. My efforts consisted of handing out literature and making a few speeches, mainly to Black community groups, but what the Navaho Council chief started, Henry Wallace finished. The metamorphosis was now complete.
CHAPTER THREE
"Working for peace and the general welfare is the essence of all true education and all true religion. It is the Sermon on the Mount in action."
Henry Wallace, Commencement Address, Connecticut Colledge1943
All through my teens and into adulthood my President was Franklin Delano Roosevelt. My family loved him and I loved him. He brought my worlds together. He ended the anti Bolshevik madness that threatened the lives of so many Russian émigrés when in the face of media criticism he recognized the Soviet Union. There was also the warm relationship with the Soviet Union during the war that made my parent’s family feel safe, and like full-fledged Americans for the first time since coming here from Byelorussia. It all ended abruptly when F.D.R. died. No person can be a leader with the international stature of FDR without making some enemies. He had his detractors. They were mostly men of his own economic class who wanted America and the world to revert to the pre-war absurdity of divine right. They felt that Roosevelt, born into wealth, was a traitor to their breed. Off the wall, right wing extremists railed, that Roosevelt was creating a "Welfare State." In 1933, America surely needed welfare,
and it was the conservative right that created that need.
The extreme left knew that Roosevelt’s main purpose was to save the system and they wanted to change it. They claimed that Roosevelt was in the same leaky boat as Winston Churchill and drifting America into England’s war.
My parents had not fully recovered from the trauma they suffered during the anti-Red madness that engulfed America following World War 1. My father’s greatest fear was that another ship like the Buford, which sailed out of New York harbor in 1919 with its cargo of 249
Deported, men and women accused of being red spies, with no evidence to prove the case, would sail again. It was a new kind of senseless lynching in America. Roosevelt did not stop the lynching of Blacks in the south or completely end the media induced anti-Communist hate that threatened to split America during the depression, but he did create a positive aura of a growing democracy that smothered much of the hate.
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I tried to ignore the daily headlines in the summer of 1946. I suppose that is when I started planning my escape to California. The shrill media became more depressing day by day. Each day they seemed to tell us how America was deteriorating. The department of labor statistics showed that living costs had risen 18 percent since June of 1946; Millions of Americans could not find adequate housing. The "Communist menace" was rising again. Left politicians were calling for price controls while the conservative politicians, supported by greedy businessmen claimed that would open the door to dreaded Socialism.
The one thing that brought the most dismay to my family and recreated our mistrust of the government was the Taft-Hartley bill, passed by the 80th congress in the fall of 1946. That bill threatened to roll back all the gains for the American worker that my parents fought so hard to achieve.
1947 was not the best year of my life, nor was it the best year for American workers. In fact, it signifies the spot on the chart when America went off course and sailed into the economic, thick fog that we still find ourselves in today. Michael Quill, then president of the transportation workers called President Truman, "The number one strikebreaker for the American bankers and railroads." He then went so far as to accuse the president of treason. Phillip Murray, president of the CIO called the anti labor laws of the 80th congress and the Truman administration, " The first step toward fascism in the United States."
Truman himself called the 80th congress a, "Do nothing session by a do nothing congress." Senator Taft leader of the conservative Republican members of that congress said that Truman wanted to, "fix wages, fix prices, expand government spending, increase Federal taxes, socialize and nationalize medicine, and generally regiment the life of every family, as well as agriculture, labor and industry."
The air was not being let out of the balloon for the American workers; the balloon was exploding in their face. The Roosevelt created dream of a semi-controlled, or as Henry Wallace phrased it, " a Progressive Capitalism" that American labor leaders clung to, was turning into a nightmare for labor."

I am sure that if Hubert H. Hunphrey were alive today he would be saying the same thing. OH how we need an FDR or a Henry Wallace today.