It was an education. I visited a retired trucker who lived in a trailer, who told me, “I’d vote for Teddy Kennedy if he were running, but since he ain’t, I’m voting for George C. Wallace.” I could not imagine how he got from one to another. I stopped at another household down the street and was invited in. The family gathered in the living room, three daughters and a wife around their patriarch, settled like Archie Bunker in his easy chair. When I asked who they were supporting for president, the mother said, “Four votes for Shirley Chisholm and one for George Wallace.” Talk about divided households.
Neither of my parents was an ideologue. They believed in science, evolution and America. They supported open housing and abortion rights. They believed in God and urged their children to try to leave the world a little better than they found it. Both belonged to a now extinct species of “liberal Republicans,” though my mother switched her allegiances when Nixon topped the ticket. While we had plenty of political arguments over the dinner table, we watched the nightly news together, read newspapers, talked about current events and history, and tried to understand and forgive our differences.
McGovern won the Oregon primary, but lost the Washington delegation because of Scoop Jackson’s well-oiled machine, which steamrolled over our anti-Jackson delegate slate. I was bitter about it for a time, but McGovern did go on to win the nomination. He was crushed in the general election. Humphrey won Washington in ’68, but Nixon did in ’72. McGovern won only Pacific and Grays Harbor counties in the state. At a Democratic downtown fundraiser I attended that fall, Jackson refused to even say McGovern’s name.
I learned the way I could best engage in politics was to write about it. In late 1972 I helped start the newspaper at my school, The Evergreen State College, and ran the editorial section, wrote columns, later became editor. I had a nightly national news segment on our radio station, KAOS-FM, during the height of Watergate. The ’60s era seemed to come to a climax with Nixon’s resignation in August of 1974. Washington promised to clean itself up, Roe had become law and the war nearly ended. Journalism, it seemed, had made a real impact.
Benjamin Franklin said the Constitution’s authors had created a “Republic, if you can keep it.” So much work must go into simply having a semblance of democracy, let alone “keeping” it while also trying to make progress toward a more perfect union and a more just society. Some challenges are new, others seem everlasting. If the arc of moral justice bends toward justice, as Dr. King said, it requires generations of people pulling it in that direction.
I learned that every tug makes a difference.
