Politics of my Life – Part I

Not me but could have been - University of Michigan circa 1966

My nineteen-year-old granddaughter Maya, who is a sophomore in college, broke my heart when she said she didn’t remember anyone but Trump since she became aware of politics. I assumed she remembered some of Obama’s presidency, but she claims her earliest actual memories were of Trump coming down the golden escalator and of watching in disbelief in her “pants suit” when he defeated Hillary Clinton. Perhaps the trauma of these events overrode happy times under Obama. From then on, even during Biden’s presidency, all she remembered was Trump and the pandemic.

 Age 3 in her Obama shirt  

                       Age 10 in our pants suits pre-election

Maya’s political declaration made me think about what I remembered over a long lifetime of politics. I am part of the generation that hid under desks in elementary school to practice what to do if the evil Soviet Union dropped an atomic bomb on Detroit. But here’s the thing. While the Cold War raged, it was highly unlikely that a bomb would fall on my school or hostile forces would shoot me at home as I tried to reach the safety of my parents’ room. These terrors largely existed in my imagination.

My first political memory was wanting an “I Like Ike” pin in the 1952 election. We had just moved to the suburbs of Detroit, I was seven-years-old, and all the other kids had them. But my parents were devoted Democrats in the FDR tradition. They refused to let me have one and I refused to wear a Stevenson pin. It was hard enough trying to fit into a new school and make new friends.

I do remember the Army-McCarthy hearings when I was eight. My mother used to do her ironing while watching them on television. She would become angry and slam the iron down hard. I liked to help her by ironing my father’s handkerchiefs, so I became a McCarthy hater as she explained how evil he was. That was my indoctrination into being a liberal Democrat.

Eisenhower’s presidency was largely boring. He was old and liked to play golf a lot. Mamie had weird bangs. In 1955 when he had a heart attack, I wasn’t worried, although I should have been since Nixon was the Vice President. Because of my parents’ hatred for all Republicans, I was unaware that many of the good things he did. But I vividly remember him sending federal troops to Little Rock, Arkansas in 1957 to enforce integration of a high school there.

I was pretty aware of and outraged by the civil rights struggle in the south. I remember seeing the use of fire hoses and dogs against protesters on television as well as the non-violent civil disobedience that included Rosa Parks and the Montgomery bus boycott and students my age being arrested for sit-ins at segregated lunch counters. Yet, as a sheltered white suburban girl in a suburb that was mainly Jewish and Catholic, I was an observer of “good trouble” through the newspaper and television nightly news. Participating would come later.

Ruby Bridges, escorted to  a formally whites-only school by federal marshals, Louisiana, November 14, 1960

In 1962, junior year, my high school was integrated by annexing a black neighborhood in Royal Oak. Looking at my yearbook from that year, there were a few black students in each homeroom, but almost none in any of the activities. By my senior year, they were on sports teams and in choir, where I actually interacted with a few of them. Still, they mainly sat together at lunch, apart from the rest of us. It must have been so hard for them.

The first time I remember being excited about politics was JFK’s election in 1960 when I was a freshman in high school. He and Jackie identified themselves with the 1960 musical Camelot, which I adored. He was only 43 when elected, the youngest elected President. I remember being concerned during the Bay of Pigs fiasco, Kennedy’s attempt to overthrow Castro in 1961, and the Cuban missile crisis stand-off in October 1962, during which we worried about nuclear war with Russia. But I had faith in Kennedy and remained optimistic.

Starting college in 1963, I was struggling with being away from home for the first time when the bottom fell out of my faith in our government. When Kennedy was assassinated on November 22 of freshman year, my Spanish teacher heard some commotion in the hall, left to investigate, and returned saying, “The President is dead. Everybody, get out of here.” I ran back to my dorm crying, passing many other hysterical students. No one attempted to comfort us and, since it was almost Thanksgiving, most people went home.

On that ride home, my father dealt with my upset in his usual manner – a lecture. While JFK’s death was pretty bad, it was nothing compared to FDR’s. After all, he had been president for 12 years and had gotten them through the Depression and WWII. Kennedy had only been president for three years. True, it was very sad but nothing compared with Roosevelt’s death. Nice talk, Dad.

I remember spending days on end watching everything on our small television. Endless replays of the assassination, Jackie’s blood-stained dress standing next to Lyndon Johnson on Air Force One while he took the oath of office, and watching Jack Ruby assassinate Lee Harvey Oswald on live TV. The funeral was heart breaking. Images of John-John’s salute and Jackie holding the hands of her very young children were burned into my brain. JFK’s assassination ended my political euphoria and I returned to college a much more cynical person. While President Johnson had a very admirable domestic agenda, including the passage of the Civil Rights Act in 1964 and the Voting Rights Act in 1965, none of that mattered to me because of his escalation of the draft and the war in Vietnam.

The University of Michigan was a hotbed of political resistance in that era. Students for a Democratic Society (SDS) had been founded there in 1960, and gradually shifted its focus from racial discrimination and economic inequality to opposing our growing involvement in Vietnam. I remember going to teach-ins run by professors in opposition to the war and the draft. On April 17, 1965, I went on a bus organized by SDS to a march on Washington attended by 25,000 people. I have no memory of who I went with or who spoke or sang at the rally, but I never told my parents I had done this. It was easy to hide my rebellious act because we only spoke on Sunday evening for three minutes (it was a long-distance call and rates went up after the first three minutes). At that point, my parents thought fighting this war was just and answering the call to service was patriotic. I had been radicalized and our generation gap was huge.

Protest in Washington

By the time LBJ announced he would not be running in for re-election in March of 1968, I was elated. I had graduated, was living in Chicago, and engaged to marry Fred in August. Of course, that year was a total disaster. Martin Luther King was assassinated on April 4, which we learned of in a racially mixed crowd in a laundromat. We were already supporting Eugene McCarthy, who was running to end the war. Robert Kennedy also entered the race but was assassinated on June 6. We felt betrayed when McCarthy was ignored by the Democratic party. Their convention, which occurred just after we returned from our honeymoon, turned into a police riot with protestors shouting, “the whole world is watching” while being beaten, and resulted in the nomination of Hubert Humphrey. I’m sure I sadly cast my first vote for him because the alternative was Richard Nixon, who won in a landslide.