Part 3 Chapter 19 Summary

Earlier Senate Democratic leaders had failed because they could not bridge the gap between ardent liberals and defiant conservatives and find ground for compromise. LBJ was determined to find a liberal with whom he could work and turned his attention to Hubert Horatio Humphrey of Minnesota.

Humphrey burst on the national political scene in 1948, delivering a fiery address to pull the Democratic convention in Philadelphia out of its defeatist doldrums. Democrats seemed resigned that their candidate, incumbent President Truman, would be defeated and party leaders wanted their platform's civil rights plank to be sufficiently bland so as not to antagonize the South. Humphrey was the thirty-seven-year-old mayor of Minneapolis who had secured passage of the nation's first effective Fair Employment Practices ordinance and worked to erase the city's reputation for anti-Semitism.

Humphrey's dedication to civil rights for blacks was firm and...