Birds on the Brain

Despite a strong pro-labor voting record, McGovern’s opposition to the war helped alienate him from hawkish union leaders, particularly AFL-CIO president George Meany. Although McGovern declined to be the standard-bearer for the anti-war Dump Johnson campaign, he briefly jumped into the 1968 race after Bobby Kennedy’s assassination in June, representing Kennedy’s delegates at the disastrous Chicago convention. He wound up far behind Hubert Humphrey and Eugene McCarthy in the delegate count, and immediately endorsed Humphrey. Unlike McCarthy: the Minnesota senator and some of his supporters in the party’s liberal anti-war wing arguably helped elect Nixon, by withholding support from Humphrey until Johnson announced he would stop his bombing campaign on the eve of the election, and even then, support was grudging. That disrespect for Humphrey worsened the split between big labor and the New Left that was already weakening the Democratic Party. Center right Democrats got their revenge by abandoning McGovern in 1972….

Of course, Meany and his allies were also enraged at McGovern’s role in rules changes that opened the party up to the young and diverse forces that had been shut out of Chicago ’68. When Meany arrived in Miami for the 1972 convention he famously sneered at New York’s delegates: ”What kind of delegation is this? They’ve got six open fags and only three AFL-CIO people on that delegation!” (In fact, there were more labor delegates than there had been in 1968, according to labor historian Jefferson Cowie; they just weren’t Meany’s guys.) He later described the ’72 convention delegates as “people who looked like Jacks, acted like Jills and had the odors of Johns.” …

In the end, the stubborn Meany managed to withhold the AFL-CIO’s endorsement from a candidate who had a 93.5 percent voting record on the Federation’s scorecard. As Bruce Miroff recounts in “The Liberal Moment: The McGovern Insurgency and the Identity Crisis of the Democratic Party,” Meany worked hard to prevent even state and local affiliates from helping McGovern. While nominally neutral, he went golfing with Nixon, and in an appearance on “Face the Nation” weeks before the election he called McGovern “an apologist for the Communist world.” It was probably overkill; McGovern never really recovered from the Eagleton disaster or labor’s mutiny….

How crucial were Democrats in helping Nixon shellack McGovern in 1972? Did Eagleton’s claim that the South Dakota Methodist supported amnesty for draft resisters, abortion and the legalization of pot (in fact he favored some kind of amnesty for resisters but not deserters, was tepid on abortion rights and only favored lesser sentencing for marijuana) smear McGovern effectively even before Nixon could get to him? It’s hard to say. Much of the country was in full revolt against what was perceived as the excesses of the 1960s, and McGovern’s centrist Democratic detractors reflected that. Certainly some people genuinely believed McGovern was too liberal to be elected, and they were well within their rights to back an alternative candidate during the tough primary. But the party’s inability to come together after a brutal fight in 1968 and again in 1972 helped confirm the national image of Democrats as fractious and incompetent, if nothing else. (That’s why the party’s ability to reunite after the bruising 2008 primary battle was crucial, and wasn’t necessarily a given.)

McGovern tried to be a bridge between those warring factions, endorsing Humphrey in 1968 while trying to make room in the party for the new energy (and concerns) of younger, more diverse and more radical activists. It was a supremely worthy cause, even if he failed. And while the anti-war left bears some blame for abandoning Humphrey and helping elect Nixon in 1968, nothing that any lefty individual or institution did to hurt Humphrey comes close to what Meany did to destroy McGovern. Tragically, McGovern’s defeat helped accelerate the big-business backlash that unraveled unionism.