Into the Bright Sunshine by Samuel G. Freedman

Into the Bright Sunshine: Young Hubert Humphrey and the Fight for Civil Rights
By Samuel G. Freedman
Oxford University Press 2023

It’s only readers of a certain vintage who’ll have personal memories of former Minnesota senator and Vice President Hubert Humphrey, and for most of those readers, the memories will be bitter: they will rehearse the well-thumbed betrayal of Humphrey ceasing to be vigorously against the Vietnam War when Lyndon Johnson told him to be vigorously for it. They might remember a fading and watery-eyed candidate for president and maybe a surprisingly close contest, but they’re unlikely to remember the younger, more passionate man and his convictions – and for younger readers, Humphrey will be as invisible as all other 20th-century also-rans.

Columbia University journalism professor Samuel Freedman’s scrupulous and involving new book, Into the Bright Sunshine: Young Hubert Humphrey and the Fight for Civil Rights is an antidote to this kind of tunnel-vision hindsight; this is the story of Humphrey from the days when he was “skinny as a fence post and already balding” as an undergraduate at the University of Minnesota to his years perfecting a very effective brand of retail politics as a curiously firebrand Minneapolis mayor and senator in Minnesota’s Democratic-Farmer-Labor Party. Freedman is very skilled at filling all these stories with vibrantly-drawn supporting characters, particularly Humphrey’s wife and family, although readers might get a bit impatient at the sheer amounts of coverage some of these characters get, whether it be allies like Sammy Scheiner of Minnesota’s Jewish Anti-Defamation Council or Mississippi governor Fielding Wright, the representative of prosperous planter interests who wanted “a reservoir of quiescent, dependent cheap Black labor.” The portraits are well-done, but the spotlight belongs on the star.

It’s a deep-breath kind of spotlight, a much-needed assessment of the man and his lifelong passions. As Freedman observes, Humphrey’s politics were “personal and visceral,” and in these pages we get the full story of how tirelessly and evangelically he fought for social justice. “There was a reason that Humphrey resorted often to the language of religion,” Freedman writes, “– the words ‘sin’ and ‘guilt’ and ‘conscience’ recurred in his speeches and letters - when he advocated for the equal rights of Blacks and Jews.” 

That advocacy, Freedman rightly observes, has “abraded over time,” and Into the Bright Sunshine restores in wonderful detail the earliest stages of it, the fights that laid the groundwork for Humphrey’s pivotal role in orchestrating Johnson’s Civil Rights Act of 1964. “Against electoral logic, Humphrey had elevated the battle against discrimination, and in the interests of racial and religious minorities, to a prominent role in his campaign,” Freedman writes. “He was formulating his own answer to the question of what kind of country postwar America should be.”

Freedman’s book is elaborately sourced and annotated. His Acknowledgements section starts out silly and quickly becomes preposterous – he thanks 194 individuals and several entire historical societies, which will make almost any reader wonder if the poor little it-takes-a-village lost kitten managed to write any two consecutive sentences all by his lonesome. But the finished product speaks for itself: short of a full-dress volume to enhance or supplant Arnold Offner’s thoroughly excellent biography from 2018, this is the best insight into Humphrey’s true significance in the new century. 

Steve Donoghue is a founding editor of Open Letters Monthly. His book criticism has appeared in The Washington Post, The American Conservative, The Spectator, The Wall Street Journal, The National, and the Daily Star. He writes regularly for The Boston Globe, the Vineyard Gazette, and the Christian Science Monitor and is the Books editor of Georgia’s Big Canoe News.