Eugene McCarthy: The Rise and Fall of Postwar American Liberalism - Hardcover

Sandbrook, Dominic

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 1400041058 ISBN 13: 9781400041053

Publisher: Knopf, 2004

Synopsis

Eugene McCarthy was one of the most fascinating political figures of the postwar era: a committed liberal anti-Communist who broke with his party’s leadership over Vietnam and ultimately helped take down the political giant Lyndon B. Johnson. His presidential candidacy in 1968 seized the hearts and fired the imaginations of countless young liberals; it also presaged the declining fortunes of liberalism and the rise of conservatism over the past three decades.

Dominic Sandbrook traces Eugene McCarthy’s rise to prominence and his subsequent failures, and makes clear how his story embodies the larger history of American liberalism over the last half century. We see McCarthy elected from Minnesota to the House and then to the Senate, part of a new liberal movement that combined New Deal domestic policies and fierce Cold War hawkishness, a consensus that produced huge electoral victories until it was shattered by the war in Vietnam.

As the situation in Vietnam escalated, many liberals, like McCarthy, found themselves increasingly estranged from the anti-Communism that they had supported for nearly two decades. Sandbrook recounts McCarthy’s growing opposition to President Johnson and his policies, which culminated in McCarthy’s stunning near-victory in the New Hampshire presidential primary and Johnson’s subsequent withdrawal from the race. McCarthy went on to lose the nomination to Hubert Humphrey at the infamous 1968 Democratic National Convention in Chicago, which secured his downfall and led to Richard Nixon’s election, but he had pulled off one of the greatest electoral upsets in American history, one that helped shape the political landscape for decades.

These were tumultuous times in American politics, and Sandbrook vividly captures the drama and historical significance of the period through his intimate portrait of a singularly interesting man at the center of it all.

About this title

About the Author

Dominic Sandbrook studied history and modern languages at Oxford University. He has a master’s degree from the University of St. Andrews and a doctorate from Cambridge University. He taught American history at the University of Sheffield from 2001 to 2004, when he resigned to write full-time.

From the Inside Flap

Eugene McCarthy was one of the most fascinating political figures of the postwar era: a committed liberal anti-Communist who broke with his party’s leadership over Vietnam and ultimately helped take down the political giant Lyndon B. Johnson. His presidential candidacy in 1968 seized the hearts and fired the imaginations of countless young liberals; it also presaged the declining fortunes of liberalism and the rise of conservatism over the past three decades.<br><br>Dominic Sandbrook traces Eugene McCarthy’s rise to prominence and his subsequent failures, and makes clear how his story embodies the larger history of American liberalism over the last half century. We see McCarthy elected from Minnesota to the House and then to the Senate, part of a new liberal movement that combined New Deal domestic policies and fierce Cold War hawkishness, a consensus that produced huge electoral victories until it was shattered by the war in Vietnam.<br><br>As the situation in Vietnam escalated, many liberals, like McCarthy, found themselves increasingly estranged from the anti-Communism that they had supported for nearly two decades. Sandbrook recounts McCarthy’s growing opposition to President Johnson and his policies, which culminated in McCarthy’s stunning near-victory in the New Hampshire presidential primary and Johnson’s subsequent withdrawal from the race. McCarthy went on to lose the nomination to Hubert Humphrey at the infamous 1968 Democratic National Convention in Chicago, which secured his downfall and led to Richard Nixon’s election, but he had pulled off one of the greatest electoral upsets in American history, one that helped shape the political landscape for decades.<br><br>These were tumultuous times in American politics, and Sandbrook vividly captures the drama and historical significance of the period through his intimate portrait of a singularly interesting man at the center of it all.

Reviews

Eugene McCarthy's place in history as a cynosure of the antiâ€"Vietnam War movement is universally acknowledged. Yet McCarthy remains an enigmatic figure to supporters and opponents alike. Sandbrook's biography attempts to take the measure of the 1968 Democratic presidential candidate as a man and as a politicianâ€"and McCarthy (b. 1916) fares badly in both categories. Sandbrook, a British scholar of American history, argues that as a politician McCarthy, who served for two decades in the House and the Senate, achieved far less than contemporaries such as John F. Kennedy, Johnson or Humphrey, despite his superior intelligence and natural charisma. Specifically, Sandbrook contends that McCarthy brought no new ideas into the political arena, never won his party's presidential nomination and gave his name to no major bills. Given the rarified sphere that McCarthy occupied, and the scope and depth of the accomplishments of those to whom he is compared, it is arguable that Sandbrook's view is too harsh. But the comments by contemporaries of McCarthy's personal qualities are often damning indeed. Sandbrook quotes from a variety of McCarthy's fellow politicians, friends, family and the press to present the picture of a man who, for all his gifts, was, in the words of historian Arthur Schlesinger Jr. "indolent, frivolous, cynical," or as described by Gilbert Harrison, a friend and former editor of the New Republic, "lazy," "unresponsive" and "insensitive." McCarthy's reported response to the assassination of his 1968 campaign opponent Robert Kennedy was a callous "[h]e brought it on himself." Sandbrook's biography will command attention and spark discussion about this controversial career and McCarthy's role in the end of the New Deal liberal consensus.--e brought it on himself." Sandbrook's biography will command attention and spark discussion about this controversial career and McCarthy's role in the end of the New Deal liberal consensus.
Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.

As the nation's current Democratic presidential candidates raced the icy roads of New Hampshire, journalists remembered another harsh New Hampshire winter, when the junior senator from Minnesota and his "Clean for Gene" troops lost a primary but did well enough (42.4 percent) to convince Lyndon Johnson not to run for reelection. For Sandbrook, a U.S. history lecturer at the University of Sheffield, Gene McCarthy's political career "reflected the rise and fall of the liberal consensus between the 1940s and the 1960s." McCarthy's liberalism grew from his deeply felt Catholicism, which led him to reject unrestrained modern capitalism's cruelties as well as Communism's godlessness. (McCarthy in fact got his political start driving "Reds" out of the Minnesota Farmer-Labor Party.) In the U.S. House and then the Senate in the 1940s and 1950s, McCarthy was a man of his time: firmly anti-Communist, a pragmatic, ambitious "rising star popular with the southern party barons." His 1968 challenge to LBJ manifested the collapse of the faith that had held liberalism together for a generation. Enlightening political biography; includes notes and a detailed bibliography. Mary Carroll
Copyright © American Library Association. All rights reserved

Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.

Chapter One
The Watkins Wonder

Eugene Joseph McCarthy was born in the small town of Watkins, Minnesota, on 29 March 1916. Although he was half German by blood, McCarthy always presented himself as an Irishman, relishing his frequent trips to Ireland and long conversations about Irish literature over a glass of whisky. His mother's parents were in fact German Catholics, while his father's family was Irish. His paternal grandparents, Michael McCarthy and Mary Harbinson, hailed from County Cork and County Antrim respectively; they had met in Quebec and moved to Minnesota in the 1870s. There was said to be much of the elder Michael McCarthy in his grandson. "He was always real interested in politics, and in reading the newspapers and finding out what was going on," recalled Eugene's elder sister Mildred. Eugene noted that his grandfather was said to have been "especially learned about and agitated by the British treatment of the Irish over the centuries." Eugene's father, also named Michael, was born in 1875, one of eleven children. Eugene's mother, Anna Baden, was the daughter of a Bavarian miller and blacksmith who had moved to Minnesota during the great surge of German Catholic immigration after the revolutions of 1848.

Eugene was Anna's third child. He had two older sisters, Mildred and Marian, and when he was two his mother gave birth to another son, Austin. Anna was forty when Eugene was born, and took responsibility for the four McCarthy children, since their father, a cattle buyer, was often away for months at a time. "Mother was the one who really raised us," explained her second son, Austin. She rarely raised her voice to her family, and was devoutly religious, walking every day to Mass whatever the weather and also leading the children in prayers at home. Eugene's mother, like her elder son, rarely showed anger or open emotion. He later wrote a poem entitled "Mother," celebrating her qualities "of tolerance, of strength, of gentleness / Of quiet voice, certainty, security." Not only did Eugene inherit Anna's reserve and patience, he also absorbed her religious passion. His mother dearly hoped that he would become a priest, and his wife, Abigail, later wrote that Anna had viewed the appearance of a girlfriend as a threat to her cherished dream. He may even have been his mother's favorite; his sister Marian remembered that "if she was sick or there was a crisis, she always wanted Gene to be with her."

Eugene's father, Michael, was a very different character. He had been born in central Minnesota in 1875, into "a wilderness of meager hopes," and had endured an austere childhood. A staunch Republican, he had been the Watkins postmaster until displaced by Woodrow Wilson and the Democrats in 1913, and by the time Eugene was born he was a cattle trader, buying cattle in Minnesota and the Dakotas and shipping them to the stockyards in South St. Paul. Michael always regretted his son's choice of a political career; on one occasion, he complained, "Gene is a good boy, but he's in the wrong party." Eugene was evidently in awe of his father, and he recorded his precepts in a series of poems with titles like "Wisdom" and "Integrity." Michael was hot-tempered, gruff and caustic, "a strong Irishman and quite domineering," in the words of one Watkins neighbor. "Dad would flare up and shake you by the back of the neck when he got mad," recalled his second son, Austin. If Eugene did not inherit his father's temper, he certainly inherited his sense of humor. Michael McCarthy's wit was famous in the family: it was dry, bitter, unsentimental and even cruel. He was, his son later wrote, "doubtful of politicians," "suspicious of doctors" and "slow to take pride in sons or daughters." While the children admired him, Eugene's wife, Abigail, wrote that Michael "seemed to look on any show of tenderness and emotional dependence as weakness . . . his appraisal of his fellow men was almost universally sour and he had the habit of limning them unforgettably with biting, homely witticisms." He belonged, she concluded, "to that generation of men for whom the Depression was the last defeat." As later events were to demonstrate, Eugene's own personality owed as much to his father's hard-bitten cynicism as it did to his mother's gentle reserve.

In 1968 a reporter visited Watkins and noted that it had changed little since McCarthy's childhood. It lay seventy miles west of the Twin Cities, across a flat, sullen landscape "deserted except for silos, cylindrical wire corncribs, fishing huts scattered across a frozen lake, black-and-white cows brooding or loping over a glassy coat of snow." Then, suddenly, he saw "a little huddle of buildings dominated by the spire of a redstone church." It was a railroad village, established during the building of the Soo Line across Meeker County in the 1880s, and had been named after a Soo railroad official. By 1930 its population had grown to 512 people, most of them connected with the railroad or dairy farming. "Its stability and growth," Eugene wrote in 1939, "is due to the character of its citizenship which is largely of German extraction with the exception of a scattering of Americans of Swedish and Irish descent. These citizens are thrifty, strongly attached to the soil and progressive in thought and action." All but a tiny minority were Catholics. Watkins and the surrounding area actually contained the highest concentration of German speakers in the state, many of whom had moved to the area even before the building of the railroad. Social life was based on the church and the local beer taverns, and the children studied German for several years at the parochial school. Visiting baseball teams from villages to the north often spoke German, and as Abigail McCarthy reported, "at church the people prayed in German and the sermons were often in German." Watkins, she thought, "seemed almost transplanted from rural Germany to rural Meeker County, Minnesota."

The German Catholics of Watkins attracted little attention from other groups in the state. They were middle-class farmers who kept to themselves and provoked no great nativist animosity. "I don't have to recall how my grandmother was maid to the Saltonstalls as Kennedy did," McCarthy remarked decades afterward. In the early 1930s, however, the Depression hit the farmers of central Minnesota very hard. Farmers rushed to form cooperatives and sometimes violently resisted attempts by businessmen to close down the creameries on which they depended. By convention, the Watkins Germans were mostly Democrats, partly because they disliked the nativism of the Republican Party, and partly because they opposed Prohibition, which they cheerfully ignored after it was enacted in the county in 1915.

While Eugene was growing up, however, the county was gripped by an atmosphere of increasing fear, agitation and class consciousness, exemplified by the popularity in the county of agricultural cooperatives and of A. C. Townley's Non-Partisan League, which paved the way for the success of the radical Minnesota Farmer-Labor Party in the 1930s. The sense of despair and hardship had a powerful impact on the young McCarthy. In 1961 he recalled watching Minnesota farm auctions with his father: "hardworking and honest" neighbors forced to sell all they had for shatteringly low returns. "The experience helped to teach me that we must look first to the needs of the people, and that when these needs are great, we should survey our private and public resources and then determine a policy and work out a program of action," he explained. "Our society cannot operate well if each person and each family is left alone against the world." Michael McCarthy gave up handmade shoes and tailored suits and spent eight weeks at a time on the road, making only $150 a month. His son later wrote of "the spring of no hope . . . the winter of despair," and

. . . the cries of women
gone mad on the prairie
being taken away in spring wagons
because, they said, the grass
did not turn green in May.

The Depression notwithstanding, Eugene McCarthy had a happy childhood. Watkins was a quiet town of small, neat stucco houses, proud of its church, its school, its baseball field and its hockey rink. He later wrote fondly about its rituals and seasons, attributing its contented character to four factors: nature, the church, baseball, and the railroad, the Great Soo Line, which sliced through the town and passed right next to Watkins' principal landmark, a bustling grain elevator. Growing up, Eugene and Austin fought and played together, and Eugene, who was older, taller and more aggressive, usually won. He played at emulating his father, selling toy horses to imaginary farms; he wrestled with his little brother and the other local boys; he flew kites and competed hard at baseball and hockey. He adored sport, not least because he was an excellent athlete. Indeed, while he was playing baseball in the Great Soo League, rumor had it that "Mac," as the locals called him, was even scouted by the Chicago White Sox, though an offer never materialized. Eugene thought his childhood was "disconcertingly normal" for a politician who later came to pride himself on defying common conventions. His poems about life in Watkins are gentle, nostalgic celebrations of spring days fishing, running and playing. He was, however, slightly unusual in two respects: he was extremely bright, and he was very well behaved, a "very clean-cut boy, didn't drink, didn't smoke," according to one neighbor. Unlike many of his peers, he loved reading: his favorite books were conventional children's classics such as Tom Sawyer, The Last of the Mohicans, Ivanhoe and Kim. His maternal ...

Edition details

• Publisher: Knopf
• Publication date: 2004
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 1400041058
• ISBN 13: 9781400041053
• Binding: Hardcover
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 416