Kirjahaku

Hubert Humphrey was the consummate liberal politician of the second half of the twentieth century, evolving from charismatic mayor of Minneapolis to crusading US senator to compliant vice president under the overpowering Lyndon B Johnson -- to defeated presidential hopeful. Here is the most complete and authoritative biography of Humphrey ever written. Based on over two hundred interviews and access to his papers at the Minnesota Historical Society, it presents a portrait of a vivacious, complex man, the leading orator and most productive legislator of his age. The book opens with an account of what may have been Humphrey's finest hour, the 1948 Democratic National Convention, when the brash, young mayor of Minneapolis challenged Southern conservatives and committed his party to the civil rights laws that reshaped twentieth-century America. Here too is the story of Humphrey's failure to weather the contending passions and ambitions of the sixties, and of the humiliating bargain he made with Lyndon Johnson in accepting the vice-presidency in 1964.The author's dramatic account of this relationship highlights Johnson's ruthlessness and Humphrey's inability to see the catastrophic political consequences of his blind loyalty to the president. In Carl Solberg's vivid retelling, Humphrey's compassion and ambition, successes and ultimate failures, are placed in historical context and provide a vital source for the understanding of our times.

“Dirtier than the dogs of Constantinople.” “Waves of human scum thrown upon our beaches by other countries.” Such was the vitriolic abuse directed against immigrant groups in Chile and Argentina early in the twentieth century. Yet only twenty-five years earlier, immigrants had encountered a warm welcome. This dramatic change in attitudes during the quarter century preceding World War I is the subject of Carl Solberg’s study. He examines in detail the responses of native-born writers and politicians to immigration, pointing out both the similarities and the significant differences between the situations in Argentina and Chile.As attitudes toward immigration became increasingly nationalistic, the European was no longer pictured as a thrifty, industrious farmer or as an intellectual of superior taste and learning. Instead, the newcomer commonly was regarded as a subversive element, out to destroy traditional creole social and cultural values. Cultural phenomena as diverse as the emergence of the tango and the supposed corruption of the Spanish language were attributed to the demoralizing effects of immigration.Drawing his material primarily from writers of the pre–World War I period, Solberg documents the rise of certain forms of nationalism in Argentina and Chile by examining the contemporary press, journals, literature, and drama. The conclusions that emerge from this study also have obvious application to the situation in other countries struggling with the problems of assimilating minority groups.