One Man's Day

Hubert Humphrey experienced some of the most depressing and some of the most exhilarating moments of his political life--all within one day and in the same state, Georgia.

In his deepest drive so far into Dixie, Humphrey showed up for a morning speech in the small (pop. 16,000) south Georgia cotton town of Moultrie. As he stood up to speak to a small audience assembled in Moultrie's main square, he was greeted by a chorus of boos. "Communist!" came the cry, and "Go back where you belong!" Finally, Humphrey turned to Georgia's Governor Carl Sanders, who had introduced him and was now sitting near by. "Governor," said Humphrey, "you'd better do something about this." Sanders, who has his own political problems, sat silent. Finally, the hoots and howls died down; Humphrey rushed nervously through a brief speech, got out of Moultrie as fast as he could.

The Peanut Lovers. Half an hour later, Humphrey showed up 28 miles away in Tifton (pop. 10,000), displayed a giant Georgia goober, deadpanned: "I want to tell you that Lyndon Johnson and Hubert Humphrey like peanuts enough to make the peanut economy worth more than just peanuts." Then he laced into Goldwater and tried to convince his segregationist Southern audience that Barry is some sort of secret integrationist.

He held up a pamphlet produced by the District of Columbia G.O.P. committee, which quoted Goldwater (accurately) as having said: "I believe it is both wise and just for Negro children to attend the same schools as whites and that to deny them this opportunity carries with it strong implications of inferiority." Now, Hubert cried: "I'm not much for a fellow who's for civil rights in the District of Columbia and whistles Dixie with you . . . The views I state in Georgia are the same views I state in Minnesota. I will not speak out of both sides of my mouth."

By the time Hubert got through speaking out of one side of his mouth, some of his audience had lost interest and wandered away. But nothing daunted, something gained. An hour and a half later, Humphrey arrived in Athens, home of the University of Georgia.

There, the son of a South Dakota druggist toured the university school of pharmacy, donned a white pharmacist's jacket to pose for pictures, and scrawled on a prescription pad thrust into his hand by an autograph-hunting student the words "Vote Democratic."

"Corrupted Version." That night, in a speech before university students, Humphrey really put on a show of oratorical fine arts. Now he was the student of political history, invoking the names of political philosophers from centuries past; now, his voice laden with emotion, he was the perfect partisan. Cried he: "Senator Goldwater, a self-styled conservative, has stumbled upon and seized and given currency to a corrupted version of conservatism whose acceptance defies history and the accepted conservative philosophy. A man who says 'My aim is not to pass laws but to repeal them'--that is not the language of a conservative. It is the language of nihilism. Nihilism is the politics of catastrophe." When he left Georgia, Hubert Humphrey's ears still rang with the sound of a standing ovation at a Deep Dixie center of learning.

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