Hubert Humphrey

Hubert Humphrey grew up above his father's drugstore in Doland, South Dakota, mixing prescriptions and stocking shelves through Depression years the family business barely survived. He left the University of Minnesota after two years when the store needed him, finished a compressed pharmacy license in six months at a Denver college, and worked the counter alongside his father until 1937. He returned to Minnesota at 26, finished his political science degree in three years, added a master's from Louisiana State University, and started a doctorate he never completed, drawn more to Minneapolis politics than to a dissertation. He married Muriel Buck in 1936, a marriage that lasted the rest of his life.

Humphrey won the Minneapolis mayor's office in 1945 and built the country's first municipal fair employment ordinance and a police department retrained against corruption. At the 1948 Democratic convention he told delegates the party had 'the opportunity to walk into the bright sunshine of human rights' instead of hiding behind states' rights, and his civil rights plank passed over Southern objections that sent Dixiecrats walking out under Strom Thurmond. Minnesota sent him to the Senate that fall, its first Democrat since before the Civil War — he became majority whip and wrote the floor strategy behind the Civil Rights Act of 1964, then in 1965 became Lyndon Johnson's vice president. He defended an escalating Vietnam War he had privately doubted, ran for president in 1968, and lost to Richard Nixon by roughly 500,000 votes out of 73 million cast.

The vice presidency cost him the reputation the 1948 speech had built. Johnson made loyalty on Vietnam the price of real influence, and Humphrey, who had argued privately against escalation, spent three years publicly defending a war that alienated the same liberal and student coalitions that had once called him their conscience, and hecklers followed his 1968 campaign chanting about a war he had not started but had carried in public. He had also lost the 1960 Democratic primary to John F. Kennedy after West Virginia turned his own Depression-era poverty into a liability against Kennedy money. He returned to the Senate in 1971 and kept working after the bladder cancer diagnosed in 1976, dying of it in office at 66.

Humphrey died still a sitting senator, and the Senate voted to let his body lie in the Rotunda, an honor given few members. Congress later renamed a wing of the Department of Health and Human Services building for him, and the University of Minnesota named its public policy school after him. His standing has held up better than the 1968 defeat once suggested: historians now credit the 1948 convention speech as the moment national Democratic politics committed to civil rights before the party's own Southern wing was ready, a stance that cost Humphrey votes for the rest of his career and, in most retrospectives, was worth it.

Hubert Humphrey's life against the full span of the corpus.

• Minneapolis Fair Employment Practice ordinance law
  Passed as mayor — one of the country's first municipal fair-hiring laws 1947
• 1948 Democratic National Convention civil rights speech speech
  Triggered the Dixiecrat walkout under Strom Thurmond 1948
• First Peace Corps bill law
  Introduced in Congress four years before the program was created 1957
• Civil Rights Act of 1964 law
  Floor-managed the bill through the Senate as majority whip 1964
• Humphrey-Hawkins Full Employment Act law
  Co-sponsored — signed into law months after his death 1978

• May 27, 1911 aged 0 Born in Wallace, South Dakota
• 1937 aged ~26 Becomes a licensed pharmacist and leaves the family drugstore for graduate study
• June 1945 aged 34 Elected mayor of Minneapolis
• July 14, 1948 aged 37 Delivers his civil rights speech at the Democratic National Convention Southern delegates walked out and formed the Dixiecrat party.
• November 1948 aged 37 Elected to the US Senate from Minnesota
• January 20, 1965 aged 53 Sworn in as vice president under Lyndon Johnson
• November 5, 1968 aged 57 Loses the presidential election to Richard Nixon
• January 13, 1978 aged 66 Dies in office as a US senator Bladder cancer, diagnosed in 1976.

• Lyndon B. Johnson 1908–1973
  36th President who signed the Civil Rights Act and launched the Great Society programs. running mate
• Richard Nixon 1913–1994
  37th President whose foreign policy achievements were overshadowed by the Watergate scandal. defeated by
• Strom Thurmond 1902–2003
  Long-serving South Carolina senator who ran as a segregationist Dixiecrat and later joined the Republican Party. opposed
• Martin Luther King Jr. 1929–1968
  Baptist minister and civil rights leader whose nonviolent activism ended legal segregation in America. ally in civil rights
• George McGovern 1922–2012
  South Dakota senator and 1972 presidential nominee who led opposition to the Vietnam War. political ally