Nation: Death of an American Original

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Hubert went to the University of Minnesota, but he had to come home after his sophomore year. The Great Depression had struck, and his father needed him to help at the drugstore. For six years Hubert dispensed prescriptions and vaccinated hogs. Hard times confirmed him in the fundamentalist liberal faith from which he would rarely deviate in the years ahead. But even the darkest periods were usually sunny for Hubert. He met a hometown girl, Muriel Buck, at a dance, and she began eating lunch at the Humphrey drugstore. The pair were married and eventually had four children. Always quietly supportive, Muriel gamely campaigned for her husband, but she did not share his round-the-clock devotion to politics. She liked to cook, sews her own clothes and concentrate on family affairs. She tried in vain to keep her husband from running for President every four years.

In 1937 Hubert returned to the University of Minnesota, where he majored in political science and graduated Phi Beta Kappa. When World War II broke out, he tried repeatedly to enlist, but was turned down because of a double hernia and lung calcification. (During the crucial West Virginia presidential primary in 1960, he was unjustly accused of being a draft dodger by John Kennedy's supporters.) He served as Minnesota state director of war-production training, and in 1943 ran for mayor of Minneapolis. He lost, largely because the liberal vote was split between the Democratic Party and the Farmer-Labor Party. After the election Humphrey brought the two together in a merger that has dominated Minnesota politics ever since. Later he pushed out the Communists, who had become influential in the new Democratic-Farmer-Labor Party, thereby earning the enduring enmity of the far left.

With the D.F.L. Party behind him, Humphrey had no trouble getting elected mayor of Minneapolis in 1945 at the age of 34. Brash and boisterous, he proceeded to clean up the city's brothels, its police force, and its image in general. Said a Minneapolis newspaper: "He puts firecrackers under everything." Humphrey agreed: "I got the people all steamed up."

That was nothing compared to the fire he kindled as a delegate to the 1948 Democratic National Convention. He became an overnight liberal celebrity when he made a public demand for a strong civil rights plank in the party platform. "The time has arrived," he told the convention, "for the Democratic Party to get out of the shadow of states' rights and walk forthrightly into the bright sunshine of human rights." The plank was adopted, provoking the creation of the Dixiecrat Party, which threatened to cut deeply into the Democrats' normally heavy Southern vote. Defeat seemed assured for the Democratic nominee, Harry Truman. But Truman won, and so did Humphrey, who was running for the U.S. Senate.

As soon as he arrived in Washington in 1949, Humphrey started tossing firecrackers again. In his maiden speech he announced that he had come to shake things up. "What the people want is for the Senate to function," he declared. "Sometimes I think we become so cozy —we feel so secure in our six-year term —that we forget that the people want things done." He spoke on every subject at every opportunity. "I can't help it," he explained. "It's glands."