Hubert Humphrey Was an Isolationist — Until He Went to the Segregated South

Several days after Nazi Germany launched its blitzkrieg against Poland on September 1, 1939, plunging all of Western Europe into conflict, a recent college graduate named Hubert Humphrey rode the Illinois Central railroad south from Chicago, toward the dividing line carved by America’s unending civil war. He was bound for Louisiana State University, where he would begin studies toward a master’s degree in government. Nine hours into the trip, as the train pulled into Cairo, Illinois, the last major station before entering the former Confederacy at the Tennessee state line, Humphrey received his first glimpse of life across that border.

By well-honed ritual, a conductor moved through the Pullman coaches, ordering any Black passengers to grab their belongings and move into a different car, right behind the locomotive. This one was known as the “Jim Crow car,” and it complied with the state laws throughout the South that mandated “separate cars.” While Humphrey and the other white passengers on the Illinois Central could remain in their cushioned seats, or stroll to the dining or parlor cars for refreshment, comforted as the stifling summer heat outdoors was cooled by air circulated from melting ice blocks, the forced migration into the Jim Crow car commenced.

Depending on the precise coach being used on this trip, the Black people might be crammed in alongside baggage or spare parts or crew bunks or prisoners in the custody of a local sheriff. Instead of enjoying chilled air, the Black ticket-holders inhaled smoke and cinders that blew back from the locomotive’s stack. Nearly a full day after Humphrey had departed Chicago, he descended onto the platform in Hammond, Louisiana, from which he would catch a bus the final 50 miles to Baton Rouge, the state capital and LSU’s home. As he entered the handsome edifice of the Hammond station, with its Queen Anne Revival architecture and octagonal observation tower, Humphrey received one more jolt of racial reality: separate waiting rooms for White and Colored.

At the age of 28, a product of childhood in South Dakota and college at the University of Minnesota, Humphrey had never before witnessed official segregation in action. Consumed with marriage, fatherhood and catching up on an education interrupted for six years by the Great Depression, Humphrey had remained oblivious to the entrenched racism and anti-Semitism that pervaded both Minneapolis and the university campus. His political identity was the standard-issue, class-based, FDR-style liberalism that comported both with his family’s own economic collapse — losing both their home and their family drugstore during an agricultural crisis in the Dakotas that presaged the Depression — and his undergraduate studies with political scientists who fervently supported the New Deal. The one time when Humphrey had publicly addressed the European war, he delivered a campus speech endorsing isolationism.

The southbound trip on the Illinois Central, with its terminus in the kingdom of Jim Crow, began the most transformational year in the life of the man who would become an unabashed liberal, Lyndon Johnson’s loyal vice president and the Democratic presidential candidate who lost to Richard Nixon. The political leader he would become in later decades — a champion of civil rights, a fighter against anti-Semitism, and an interventionist in world affairs — took form during the 10 months he lived in Baton Rouge and studied at LSU. What he absorbed there was far more than the required coursework for his master’s degree. Humphrey learned most importantly from the Black and Jewish people he came to know intimately, and from the exiled anti-Nazi professor who imbued him with firsthand lessons of how a democracy can mutate into a dictatorship.

In the spring of 1939, when Humphrey was just completing his bachelor’s degree in political science at the University of Minnesota, his mentor, Evron Kirkpatrick, told him that there was a graduate assistantship available paying several hundred dollars a year for any Yankee willing to move south to LSU. Though Humphrey was weighing other grad-school offers, he said yes for the simple reason that he needed the money.

He found an affordable apartment for his young family in a two-story frame house at the edge of downtown Baton Rouge. Compared to his parochial past, the city was strikingly diverse. Baton Rouge alone had more Black residents than all of Minnesota or South Dakota — the only states where Humphrey had previously lived. Black people formed one-third of Baton Rouge’s total population, compared to barely 1 percent of Minneapolis’.

Every weekday when Humphrey walked or rode the main drag of Highland Road two miles from his apartment to LSU, he traversed the Black neighborhood set between downtown and the campus, known alternatively as South Baton Rouge or The Bottoms.

Shotgun houses heated by fireplaces and lit by kerosene lamps lined the gravel streets. A 1940 survey determined that 90 percent of households lacked hot water and three-quarters had no indoor toilet. South Baton Rouge’s children were restricted to all-Black scouting troops. Typical of Franklin Roosevelt’s compromises with segregationist Southern Democrats to keep them within the New Deal coalition, Black farmers outside of town received virtually no loans from the New Deal’s Farm Credit Administration or hook-ups from its Rural Electrification Administration. Even the lines for adults receiving surplus flour, lard and beans from the federal government were segregated by race.

“I was dismayed by what I saw,” Humphrey wrote years later in his memoir, The Education of a Public Man. “[T]he white, neatly painted houses of the whites, the unpainted shacks of the blacks; the stately homes on manicured lawns in the white section, the open sewage ditches in black neighborhoods.”

When Humphrey got to campus, he entered a domain in which Black people were meant to be ever-present yet magically invisible. Black carpenters and bricklayers, living in segregated rooming houses, had helped to build the campus. Black laborers cut the grass, cleaned the toilets, emptied the garbage cans, harvested the college farm’s crops, cooked the cafeteria meals. Yet a Black face almost never appeared in the pages of the Gumbo yearbook or the Daily Reveille newspaper. The several dozen Black spectators allowed to attend LSU football games — mostly as a reward for cleaning the stadium — were confined to rickety wooden bleachers behind the goal line.

Given the deliberate and scrupulous erasure of Black people from LSU, it required not flagrant bigotry but mere passivity for a white student to accept segregation as something like natural law. Humphrey’s eyes were already too open for such obliviousness. What he perceived repeatedly was a kind of paralysis that the Jim Crow system and its constantly looming threat of arrest or attack imposed on Black people.

One day Humphrey and one of his professors, Charles Hyneman, were running an errand near the campus when they spotted a Black motorist frozen in place at a street corner — unable to move forward because of a white pedestrian in the crosswalk, yet simultaneously blocked from behind by a white driver furiously leaning on his horn. “You black sonofabitch, get out of my way,” the idled driver shouted. Another time in the lobby of the State Capitol, Humphrey and Hyneman watched the silent torment of Black men and women fearful of walking into any elevator already carrying a white person.

At home after classes, Humphrey received more insight from the Black housekeeper named Maggie whom he and his wife Muriel managed to hire on their tight budget. Humphrey never knew or could not later remember Maggie’s full name — a failure that reveals something about the limits of his ethical education in Baton Rouge. But he did listen to what she said, especially on the subject of bill collectors. When white bill collectors came around Black neighborhoods dunning for unpaid debts, Maggie explained, “Negro families … would protect their own [so] the bill collectors could never find them.” From that one example, Humphrey began to form a larger insight about Black resistance to “the white intruder, so to speak … the white police and the white politician and the white establishment.”

After Humphrey’s landmark speech at the 1948 convention — a clarion call for the Democrats to “ get out of the shadow of states’ rights and to walk forthrightly into the bright sunshine of human rights” — he received a trove of hate mail from Southerners. Typically, they accused him of supporting equal rights for Black people only because Minneapolis had so few of them. And surely, the missives went, he knew nothing of the South.

To the contrary, Humphrey replied to one of his critics, he had spent a year living and working there. “Frankly, my heart went out to the people of the Southland,” he continued. “Never in my life have I seen such poverty — such lack of spirit. This not only applied to the colored folks, but it applied to the white people as well. I am sure that you want to see such conditions erased.”

Just as significantly for Humphrey, LSU was where he first got to know Jews. There had been just one Jewish family in Humphrey’s South Dakota hometown of Doland during his boyhood, and in college Hubert’s friends and professors had all been one or another flavor of Christian. But when Humphrey joined the LSU debate team, he met a law student named Alvin Rubin, the child of a Lithuanian immigrant who had reached America in 1906. Rubin knew full well the impact of intolerance. As the Nazis’ Soviet allies seized half of Poland in 1939, five of Rubin’s uncles remained stranded in Lithuania — a logical next target for Hitler or Stalin.

Rubin was aware enough of his difference from the LSU mainstream to create a club called the International, Inter-religious, Inter-racial Kosher Salami Cooperative, so named for the packages he got from his mother. The members included Chinese and Panamanian students, which was as close to racial integration as LSU was prepared to permit circa 1940. It’s not clear that Humphrey was a member of the club — though I consider it highly likely — but there is no doubt that his friendship with Rubin forced him to reckon with the visceral toll of Nazism. (Rubin, in turn, shared Humphrey’s strong feelings about racial equality. Appointed to a federal judgeship in 1966, during the Johnson-Humphrey administration, he handed down several decisions affirming civil rights in his judicial district in Louisiana.)

The moral dimension of Humphrey’s education about fascism deepened in a two-semester course drily entitled Sociology 211-212, Seminar in Social Theory, and taught by the recently arrived Dr. Rudolf Heberle, an exile by choice from the German Reich.

During the summer of 1932, as a lecturer at the University of Kiel, Hebrle traversed the German province of Schleswig-Holstein, interviewing “farmers, county directors, pastors, schoolteachers, and politicians, mainly to get background knowledge, but also to find out what the grievances and problems were that had caused the radicalization of the political climate,” as he later wrote. In the midst of Heberle’s research, Germany went back to the polls, and Schleswig-Holstein became the only German state to award a majority of its votes to the National Socialists. By early the next year, Adolph Hitler was chancellor.

Alarmed by Heberle’s efforts to write a book based on his field work, Kiel University’s dean and rector convened an inquest into Heberle, in which the sociologist was accused of having an “underlying Marxist attitude” and advocating for Germans to breed with “mongoloids.” Most damaging of all, when Heberle was required to produce “evidence of Aryan” ancestry, the family genealogy revealed a Jewish great-grandfather named Oppenheim. It mattered not that, well before the Nazis came to power, Oppenheim had his children baptized as Christians.

University administrators denied Heberle the promotion and the Reich’s education minister ordered him to look for another job. By the end of 1937, he was broke and jobless, a political pariah, receiving letters from America that “it was a little too late to arrive in a good department — they already had all their refugees,” as a later biographer quoted Heberle. Even more disturbing in its way, his oldest child, 13-year-old Juergen, was styling himself as what Heberle’s wife Franziska called “a little Nazi.”

Then, on April 3, 1938, a telegram arrived with a plan for escape: the Rockefeller Foundation and Louisiana State University would jointly pay for a one-year appointment in the sociology department with the possibility of extension.

As much as the Heberles appreciated their American haven, they privately despaired not only for their former country but for their adopted one. “I would like to know what my friends there, who last year thought fascism was quite outrageous, think now,” Franziska Heberle wrote to relatives. “We haven’t delved into politics here yet, but sometimes I think: Brüning era. [Brunig was last chancellor of Weimar Republic.] I still find it strange that we now have such a placid life. The contrast to our last years in Germany is unfathomable. They’ll develop their own problems here with time.” Specifically, Heberle saw in the Southern planter class an American equivalent to the German burghers who thought they could harness Nazism to their own conservative ends, only to wind up as Hitler’s junior partners.

Rudolf Heberle had his own way of making the same point in his Seminar in Social Theory. The course consisted of only a dozen students, including Humphrey. Each week Heberle delivered one daytime lecture in the classroom and held an evening discussion section, often at his home. In those settings, beyond discoursing on theory, Heberle finally gave public voice to the prescient research he had conducted back in Schleswig-Holstein on the rise of Nazism. Very much contrary to the stereotype of Herr Doktor Professor, imperious and remote, Heberle also spoke candidly of his own family’s experience of persecution and dispossession.

The Nazis’ regime of murderous extremism came to power, in Heberle’s analysis, not by a coup from the armed fringe but thanks to “mass support … from middle layers of society.” Reasonable people were entirely capable of acting in mortally unreasonable ways and rationalizing away their actions. Heberle had seen it in his field work. Across class lines, amid the depredations of the worldwide depression of the early 1930s, the Nazis “offered a psychic outlet for the repressed ambitions and emotions of rural youth” and “lent prestige and authority to persons of mediocre or subordinate positions.”

The story that Heberle was telling, too late now to save Germany, was a story that Humphrey understood from intimate experience. He had seen the farms of the Dakotas eviscerated by falling prices abroad and then literally picked clean by stem-rust fungus and grasshoppers and dust storms. His own family had lost its home and store. Whether in the form of the Ku Klux Klan burning a cross outside his hometown or a Farmers Union rally denouncing government itself, he had witnessed the appeal of terror and insurrection when the center could no longer hold. Heberle was warning Humphrey, in so many words, where such impulses led.

Heberle considered Humphrey “the most intelligent student he had ever encountered,” as one of the professor’s sons later recalled. For his part, Humphrey learned from Heberle “the dangers of dictatorship and the tragedy of totalitarian rule,” as Humphrey put it in a laudatory letter decades later to the professor. On a campus gripped by willful innocence, in the form of pep rallies for the football team and peace rallies against intervention, Heberle “opened our eyes to the real world of 1940.” In his exile, Heberle embodied one example, albeit far from the worst, of what happened when hatred was permitted to triumph. And in his seminar, Heberle enduringly transformed Humphrey into an internationalist and an interventionist. (Ironically enough, Heberle disagreed with Humphrey’s support of American involvement in the Vietnam War.)

More than anything else from Heberle’s course, Humphrey remembered a particular conversation around the seminar table, a moral challenge, really. It occurred one night when the professor drew his gaze across the dozen students and flatly stated, “Out of this group, there wouldn’t be over two of you that would have resisted Hitler.”

Possessed of a master’s degree in government, Humphrey boarded the Illinois Central once again in the summer of 1940. On the train’s northbound route, the Jim Crow car filled with former sharecroppers and housekeepers bound for the imagined freedom and factory jobs available in Chicago. Such people had been streaming into the city for nearly 25 years by now, increasing its Black population by more than 200,000, part of the Great Migration from the rural South to the urban North. After the train crossed the Ohio River — or as Chicago’s Black newspaper, the Defender, called it, “the River Styx” — the Black passengers could move into regular coaches, which in Illinois and the rest of the North were allowed to be integrated.

Humphrey’s trip required transferring in Chicago to another train aiming toward Minnesota and the Dakotas, places that liked to think of themselves as distant from matters of racial conflict. Yet Humphrey could not unknow what he now knew. Far from being grateful to have left behind Jim Crow, Humphrey returned to Minneapolis with a new critique of Northern complacency on the subject of race and a commitment to the battle for equality that would animate so much of his political career. “No one, I thought, could view black life in Louisiana without shock and outrage,” he later recalled in his memoir. “Yet its importance to me was not only what I saw there and what my reaction was to southern segregation. It also opened my eyes to the prejudice of the North.”