Into the Bright Sunshine: Young Hubert Humphrey and the Fight for Civil Rights by Samuel G. Freedman (review)

Reviewed by: Into the Bright Sunshine: Young Hubert Humphrey and the Fight for Civil Rights by Samuel G. Freedman Zachary Clary Samuel G. Freedman, Into the Bright Sunshine: Young Hubert Humphrey and the Fight for Civil Rights. New York: Oxford University Press, 2023. 488 pp. 34. 95 (cloth). Hubert H. Humphrey has become something of a bit player in the grand political drama of the American mid-twentieth century. He was the dutiful vice president forced to kowtow to Lyndon Johnson on Vietnam, the ineffective establishment Democrat who managed to lose the White House to Richard Nixon in 1968. In Samuel G. Freedman's Into the Bright Sunshine: Young Hubert Humphrey and the Fight for Civil Rights, however, Humphrey is not the vanquished progressive of 1968. Instead, he is the leading man of 1948 who staked his career on the controversial issue of civil rights and forced his party to come along with him. He is the ambitious mayor of Minneapolis, Minnesota who meaningfully challenged the racism and antisemitism that pervaded his city and persuaded President Harry Truman not to abandon the promises he made to Black America, all in the span of just four years. Hubert Humphrey is, as Freedman illuminates, the man who stood "at the podium at the 1948 Democratic National Convention, in isolation, and sold racial equality to delegates who considered it snake oil" a whole six years before Brown v. Board. (357) By expressing his convictions, Freedman argues, Humphrey "set into motion the partisan realignment that defines American politics right up through the present. " (xv) Into the Bright Sunshine, then, is a refreshing historical narrative that rejects the cynical lens of hindsight and opts instead to explore how the dutiful son of a South Dakota pharmacist came to exemplify "the politics of joy" at a crucial moment in American history. (x) This monograph, to borrow the title of Humphrey's 1976 memoir, adroitly details the "education of a public man" as he moved through each phase of his life: his hardscrabble and racially homogenous childhood on the Dust Bowl plains, his eye-opening education at the University of Minnesota and Louisiana State University (LSU), and his meteoric ascent in both Minneapolis politics and the national Democratic Party. Freedman should be commended for his careful exploration of Humphrey's racial education. "Graduate studies in Jim Crow" at LSU, in particular, exposed Humphrey to the cruel realities of America's inegalitarian society for the first time and forced him to confront the segregationist "doctrine that shaped every aspect of daily life in the South. " (147, 145) It End Page 237 was returning to Minneapolis for a PhD that he never finished, however, that converted Humphrey's discomfort with oppression into a desire to do something about it in the political arena. Infatuated with Franklin Roosevelt's New Deal from a young age, Hubert Humphrey understood politics through the lens of class disparity. But Black businessman Cecil Newman and Jewish community leader Samuel Scheiner, the author argues in one of the monograph's most compelling arcs, injected racial politics into Humphrey's liberal sensibilities. These three men, whose lives Freedman skillfully weaves together, stood in the vanguard of a local battle for human rights that included not only Black Americans but also, as the author is correct to point out, Jewish Americans and other historically marginalized communities. For Newman and Scheiner, Humphrey was much more than another self-serving politician who promised change and never delivered. Instead, as the author argues, "he was the vessel in which to pour their passion for a more just America and the voice to amplify that passion insistently enough to affect a nation. " (211) Relying on the moral guidance of his diverse political allies and his family, Humphrey elevated "the fight against bigotry of all racial and religious kinds to the top of his political agenda" and refused to back down. (266–267) In just a few years, Freedman shows, "Humphrey had transformed Minneapolis into the national model of enlightened progress. " (274) Insofar as this study shows Humphrey's motivations and efforts as a reform mayor, it is successful. Humphrey's Minneapolis was, as Freedman argues, "virtually the only city in America. . .