Thank You for Being Late

by Thomas L. Friedman

  As I mentioned, I grew up in St. Louis Park, a middle-class suburb of the Twin Cities. My dad was a printing salesman. We had a two-bedroom, one-bath house. And I felt like the luckiest kid in the world. And I was. I was growing up middle-class in America at the height of the middle class, back when being in the middle class meant real security. It meant you could put a roof over your family’s head and food on the table. It meant you could send your kids to a good public school and take them to a doctor if they got sick. It meant you could take a vacation once in a while—although our vacation was always driving to New York to visit my uncle Irwin, my aunt Hinda, and my cousin Chuck. It meant you could count on your pension, and your Social Security, being there for you when you got older so you could have a comfortable retirement. And it meant you could take a chance on yourself. It meant that, if I worked hard and played by the rules, a kid like me could have a chance to do anything I wanted. Including being a comedy writer and a senator. In that order.

  What resonated with me most about Franken’s observation was his point that we had the economic security and psychological sense of being anchored in a community. As he put it, “you could bet on yourself—and you didn’t worry that if I became a comedian, it was not as safe as the careers of other Harvard grads. I felt like it was ridiculous to believe that you could not make a living somehow.”

  I didn’t become a comedian like Al, but I did start taking Arabic as a freshman at the University of Minnesota, and that got a lot of laughs from friends and family. There weren’t a lot of Jewish kids studying Arabic at the university back then. My parents’ friends used to ask them, “How in the world is Tommy going to get a job studying Arabic?” It beat the heck out of me, but it also never occurred to me that something wouldn’t come out of it, so not to worry. No one was warning me that if I didn’t get a STEM—science, technology, engineering, and math—education I would never feed myself again.

  The leadership of the Minnesota business community was a big driver of the Minnesota way: they understood that government is there to compromise, make decisions, and support the private sector, and the private sector is there to create jobs and contribute to the public good, noted Lawrence Jacobs, director of the Center for the Study of Politics and Governance at the University of Minnesota’s Humphrey School of Public Affairs. “In Minnesota the business community historically has been a real partner in building the state and keeping the two parties close to the center.”

  The roots of this run deep, as explained by a December 22, 2007, article in The New York Times entitled “Emerald City of Giving Does Exist.” In the mid-1970s, it noted, Minnesota’s leading businesses formed

  the Five Percent Club—in which Minneapolis–St. Paul corporations agreed to set aside 5 percent of their pretax income for philanthropy. Believe it or not—and it is a little hard to believe, given the modern emphasis on maximizing profits and pleasing Wall Street—the club still exists. Now known as the Keystone Club, it has 214 members, and 134 of them donate at the 5 percent level …

  The Guthrie Theater, the city’s fine regional theater, recently moved into a sparkling new building by the river—one of five major arts organizations that have recently built new buildings or major additions. All of them were built, in no small part, with corporate contributions.

  So it was no wonder that two years after I graduated from high school, the August 13, 1973, cover of Time magazine was devoted to a picture of a smiling Minnesota governor Wendell Anderson holding up a northern pike. The headline read, “The Good Life in Minnesota.” At a time when the rest of the country was going through the agonies of Watergate, high inflation, and the Vietnam War, Minnesota was singled out as a “state that works.” I remember that cover well. My dad had just died, and I had been accepted as a transfer student to Brandeis, where I would relocate a few weeks later, never again living permanently in Minnesota. But the state would also never leave me. Whether I lived in Boston, London, Oxford, Beirut, Jerusalem, or Washington, when people asked me, “Where do you live?” I always answered, “I live here, but I am from Minnesota.”

  Our Political Forefathers

  As we explained earlier, Minnesota wasn’t always so nice, and so politically and economically inclusive—especially to blacks and Jews and other minorities. It is important to understand that it became more inclusive not simply because the economy improved after World War II, but because of some courageous political choices, by a unique generation of moderate Republican and Democratic-Farmer-Labor Minnesota politicians, namely Hubert H. Humphrey (a mayor of Minneapolis, senator, and vice president), Walter Mondale (a senator and vice president), Don Fraser (a congressman and mayor of Minneapolis), Eugene McCarthy (a senator), Arne Carlson (a Republican speaker of the state legislature and a governor) and Bill Frenzel (my congressman from St. Louis Park when I grew up and also a Republican), among others.

  According to the St. Louis Park Historical Society website, in March 1936, “a lunatic fringe group called the Silver Shirts descended on Minneapolis, preaching anti-Semitism and paranoia to what they claimed were 6,000 followers in the state.” The legendary CBS News editorialist Eric Sevareid, then a young reporter from Minneapolis, using his real name, Arnold, “was a journalist for the Minneapolis Journal and published a six-part expose of this group starting on September 11, 1936. The organization was led by William Dudley Pelley of Asheville, North Carolina, who chose to blame all of his problems on communists and Jews … Some of their most ridiculous ideas include: President Roosevelt’s real name was Rosenvelt, a Jew.” Blacks suffered a similar and often worse fate, the Historical Society website noted. “In July 1947, the Governor’s Interracial Commission of Minnesota issued ‘The Negro and His Home in Minnesota.’ Polling revealed that 63 percent would not sell their property to a black person, even if offered a higher price.”

  In the late 1940s and early 1950s, things started to change. Hubert Humphrey was a hero in our house in large part for the way he took on anti-Semitism when he became mayor and appointed a task force to eradicate it in city government. “The task force confirmed the allegations, and also shone light on discrimination against Blacks and American Indians. Humphrey turned the task force into a permanent Mayor’s Council on Human Relations,” the Historical Society reported. “Ordinances were passed in the next two years that outlawed anti-Semitic and racist practices in housing and employment.”

  We think of Hubert Humphrey today as a great civil rights crusader in the realm of black-white relations, but he got his start combating anti-Semitism among whites, explained Lawrence Jacobs: “One of the things that defined Minnesota was that the civil rights movement started here—but it was not about blacks. It was about Jews. Before Humphrey gave his famous speech calling for equality for blacks at the 1948 Democratic convention, he fought anti-Semitism in Minneapolis. The St. Louis Park you grew up in would never have been possible in the Minnesota of the 1930s and 1940s … You grew up in a period when it was possible to grow up and live life based on merit—and be Jewish,” but that was not true in the 1930s and 1940s, when there were barriers all over America and in Minnesota to Jews. “Before Humphrey declared war on racism,” Jacobs added, “he declared war on anti-Semitism, and that allowed this group of people in St. Louis Park to be unleashed on merit so their creativity and inspiration had space to grow.”

  Humphrey’s transition from fighting anti-Semitism to fighting racism generally was defined by his speech to the 1948 Democratic Convention in the Philadelphia Convention Hall on July 14, 1948. The writer Thomas J. Collins described the scene in a retrospective fifty years later for the Hubert-Humphrey.com historical website: “Sweating through his plain black suit, his thin black hair matted to his head, Humphrey looked over the crowd that included national party leaders who advised him not to speak but desperately wanted him to—and those who threatened to walk out of the hall if he did. During the next eight minutes, Minnesota’s happy warrior would for the first time engage a national political party in the c
ivil rights battle that continues in fits and starts today.” Making his case in that speech, Humphrey famously declared: “My friends, to those who say that we are rushing this issue of civil rights, I say to them we are one hundred seventy-two years late. To those who say that this civil rights program is an infringement on states’ rights, I say this: the time has arrived in America for the Democratic Party to get out of the shadow of states’ rights and to walk forthrightly into the bright sunshine of human rights.”

  It is hard to recall now what radical fightin’ words those were. Several dozen southern delegates stormed out of the convention, led by South Carolina’s governor, Strom Thurmond. The southerners would eventually back Senator Richard B. Russell of Georgia as a protest candidate against Harry Truman, and Thurmond himself would run for president on the Dixiecrat ticket. These events marked the beginning of the end of the Democratic Party as a coalition of southern conservatives and northern liberals—ultimately setting the stage for the Civil Rights Act of 1964.

  Humphrey was a dyed-in-the-wool progressive, and he helped to infect a generation of Democratic politicians, and even many Republicans, in Minnesota. Growing up, my two congressmen in St. Louis Park, which was part of the Third Congressional District—the most Jewish, Democratic, and liberal district in the state—were both liberal Republicans: Clark MacGregor, who served from 1961 to 1971, and Bill Frenzel, who served from 1971 to 1991.

  I interviewed Frenzel in 2014, shortly before he died at age eighty-six, about the evolution of Minnesota politics as I was growing up there in the 1950s and 1960s. He epitomized a now-extinct species—the liberal Republican. Frenzel was first elected during my junior year of high school, in 1970. Wherever I traveled in the world, I always referred to him as “my congressman.” Sitting in the cafeteria at the Brookings Institution in Washington, where he was scholar in residence, Frenzel mused about those early days:

  We call them the kinder and gentler days. I was born in St. Paul and came back from the Korean War and worked for a family company in Minneapolis. I didn’t know whether I was a Republican or a Democrat. My family was upper middle class and doing just fine, but politics was not a big deal in the family. A lot of my father’s friends were un-Rooseveltian, but my father never let me pick that up. FDR came to Minnesota once and my father took me down there, and my father was cheering and I was cheering. I was on my father’s shoulders, and I said: “Why is everyone cheering? I thought we didn’t like this guy,” and he said, “No, son, you only get one of these at a time.”

  Frenzel recalled that when he went to the legislature,

  there was a fair amount of camaraderie. It was the farms versus the central cities, and we suburbanites had a lot in common in supporting the central cities, and we worked a lot together. Hubert [Humphrey] was doing his thing from the Senate. He was also nice. If you met him on the street, he was nice to you. Everything about it was different from today. You tried to cooperate, and if you couldn’t, you voted against. In the Minnesota legislature we probably had half a dozen party line votes out of five hundred or six hundred in the first term I was there. This was 1963 to 1969. It was just the way you expected to do business. You were expected to be able to make a deal. Our family business was transportation and distribution. If you needed a contract, you should not do business with that guy—you just needed a handshake. We were personally conservative, but in general [we were] liberal. Minnesotans paid their bills, saved their money, taught their children to save, but they also wanted to take care of their neighbors and build a good community. Today [Minnesota] is not like it was—but it is still better than anywhere else. The politics has gone sour, but the people have not.

  When did politics start to change? I asked Frenzel:

  It started to change when Reagan came in and challenged Democrats who controlled the House. Then the name-calling started. Then the House Bank scandal emerged. That got into campaigns that were really personal. Over the years, campaigns got progressively nastier. When I started in politics my mentors said, “For Heaven’s sake, never mention your opponent’s name,” and now you begin by telling everyone what a skunk your opponent is … My campaign was run by guys in my kitchen. Now you hired a guy from Baltimore or L.A., and he didn’t have to live in your district and didn’t care about the wreckage he created. When the Republicans took the House of Representatives in 1994, they did not know how to be a majority, and Democrats did not know how to be a minority. When I was in the House, Republicans knew “their place.” We had never been a majority, and it looked like we never would be, so we had no choice but to try to work hard and compromise, and we had to decide whether it was half a loaf or a third of a loaf—and so we made those deals.

  It helped, though, Frenzel added, that “I had a tolerant constituency. It was also a consistent constituency. Things did not change.” Most of the households in his district were consistent two-earner families, fairly well-to-do, he added, “who had moved to the suburbs and put their kids through good schools and knew why they were there and wanted to stay there. They wanted a congressman to be handsome, brave, and true and they wanted me to pay attention to them. I never felt that other than a lunatic fringe of the left and right that people were really pushing me. The principal thing for people was: were you paying attention to them. I don’t think people thought that I was a Republican or Democrat or cared much.”

  Indeed, my mom, who was a dyed-in-the-wool liberal, always voted for Frenzel. When he would run for reelection, Frenzel said he used to buy “a big highway sign that just said: ‘Frenzel for Congress.’ It didn’t say Republican.”

  After retiring, Frenzel, not surprisingly, served as a special adviser to a Democratic president, Bill Clinton, to help win passage of the North American Free Trade Agreement.

  Walter Mondale, who was a Minnesota senator when I was growing up—1964 to 1976—told me a similar tale from the other side of the aisle:

  I grew up in a small town on the Iowa border. My dad was a minister in several different churches. Every five years we would move. My mom was a musician and taught almost every young person to play piano and ran the choir in Elmore. My family and parents always expected us to be involved in the community and to be for things. Dad was an old Farmer-Labor guy. And Hubert’s dad was a big social activist and his mom was, too. Don Fraser—the same thing. We took Minnesota, which had been an isolationist state—and Minneapolis was one time called “the capital of anti-Semitism”—and we changed all that. We changed the political culture.

  In terms of state politics, added Mondale,

  It was an optimistic time. We were all going to make something out of our lives. Education would get us there and it was available to everyone. The GI Bill gave everybody a chance to go to the university or beyond to get professional training. All over the state people became professionals. There was an equality of income and opportunity. Things just kept getting better as we went along, and as we went along you could see it was working. People were getting ahead and the economy was getting better. You could get an education, and you could see it and feel it. And Minnesota had this bipartisanship. We had progressive Republicans. We used to fight over which party did the most for the University of Minnesota, and [the Republican leader] Arne Carlson and the Republicans would never cede that to us. And the university loved it, of course, and would encourage the competition. It was not to slash and burn. And if someone showed up with that kind of politics, they would get turned down right away.

  Speaking of those golden years after World War II and up to the mid-1970s, Mondale concluded:

  We all just expected things to just keep getting better … The GI Bill babies were making a new life for themselves and then a lot of us spread our wings and went to Washington and we took a lot of Minnesota with us … I often think about the fact that racial tensions, so central to many states, were not as strong in Minnesota. Oregon and Washington were like us. It allowed us to be very progressive on civil rights early. And they used to criticize Hubert and
say that he did not know what he was talking about because ours was an all-white state.

  But Minnesota was not all white, Mondale added, and

  we always worked on making the community work, and getting the minimum wages up and spending on early childhood education. Nationally, [we need] to reclaim this momentum … I am depressed about how this paralysis has changed all that. Today, instead of community, you have this great sorting, and people are divided out … That is hurting us. I have seen big money in these campaigns and nobody knows where it is coming from. Does the [Supreme] Court have any idea what that Citizens United case has done to the public life of this nation? Money—you needed a little bit, but it wasn’t important. Now it is everything.

  What a blessing it was to come of age politically under the tutelage of such politicians. The experience shaped the political outlook of many of my friends, including Michael Sandel. Sandel is now a renowned political philosopher at Harvard, where his courses attract as many as a thousand students a semester. The titles of his books—including Democracy’s Discontent, Public Philosophy, Justice: What’s the Right Thing to Do?, and What Money Can’t Buy—reflect a persisting concern with the fate of democracy, community, and civic virtue in our time. I asked him to reflect on how Minnesota helped to shape the civic sensibilities that inform his writing and teaching. He explained:

  Although we barely perceived it at the time, the civic idealism of our Minnesota upbringing shaped our view of what it means to be a citizen. The Minnesota we knew as young boys was a place that cultivated a democratic sensibility, though not in an explicit, heavy-handed way. Civic sensibilities were imparted through well-supported local and municipal institutions—strong public schools, public libraries, public parks, and recreational facilities. We imbibed our civic education from the landscape of everyday life. Without quite realizing it, we imbibed the conviction that politics and civic activism can make the world a better place … These were stable middle-class communities that nurtured the belief that politics can be about the common good. The Democratic Party in Minnesota was called the DFL—the Democratic-Farmer-Labor Party. It grew out of a progressive-era alliance between farmers and workers that pushed for agrarian reform, strong unions, social security, and public ownership of railroads and utilities. This progressive tradition still infused Minnesota politics when we were growing up. It encouraged us to care about the wider world. Its representative figures—Hubert Humphrey, Orville Freeman, Walter Mondale—were remarkable politicians, full of optimism and idealism. Today, we think of Humphrey, tragically, as the establishment politician he became as Lyndon Johnson’s vice president during the Vietnam War. But he began his career as a bold proponent of civil rights.