Liberal Rights - 50 Years Ago Today

Yes, children: a political platform that today would get the authors thrown into Guantanamo for commie treason was considered mainstream in 1960.

From The Nation:

Fifty years ago today, at the Democratic National Convention in Los Angeles, John Fitzgerald Kennedy accepted his party’s nomination for president.

Fifty years ago today, at the Democratic National Convention in Los Angeles, John Fitzgerald Kennedy declared that the Democratic Party sought power for the purpose of promoting "the civil and economic rights essential to the human dignity of all men."

It was a significant departure for the Democrats, and Kennedy made it by echoing the most radical promise of the most radical of the country’s founders.

“Let me say first that I accept the nomination of the Democratic Party,” began Kennedy. “I accept it without reservation and with only one obligation, the obligation to devote every effort of my mind and spirit to lead our Party back to victory and our Nation to greatness.”

“I am grateful, too,” he continued, “that you have provided us with such a strong platform to stand on and to run on. Pledges which are made so eloquently are made to be kept. ‘The Rights of Man’ -- the civil and economic rights essential to the human dignity of all men -- are indeed our goal and are indeed our first principle. This is a Platform on which I can run with enthusiasm and with conviction.”

The platform Kennedy referenced borrowed from the language of Tom Paine -- via Tom Jefferson -- in order to propose a significant break with the party’s past on the issue of segregation.

After adopting a serious civil rights plank in 1948, at the behest of Minneapolis Mayor Hubert Humphrey (the man Kennedy beat for the party’s nod in 1960), the Democrats had backtracked toward more cautious language and positioning as its presidential nominee in 1952 and 1956, Adlai Stevenson, sought to retain the support of southern segregationists.

Pressured by the March on the Conventions Movement of labor leader A. Philip Randolph, veteran organizer Bayard Rustin and anti-poverty campaigner Michael Harrington, a trio of socialist stalwarts with whom the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. had aligned, the convention adopted a platform that embraced the student sit-down demonstrations at segregated lunch counters, made a serious commitment to voting rights and abandoned deference to the false construct of “state’s rights.”

The platform closed with a statement of principles that placed Democrats – including their young nominee, whose own record on civil rights had been a tad less than inspired -- firmly on the side of the movement to end “Jim Crow."

This new position distinguished the Democratic Party from its own compromised positions of the past and the compromised position that the Republican Party of Richard Nixon (as opposed to Abraham Lincoln) would adopt in that critical year of national transition.

Here is what the Democrats declared fifty years ago:

SNIP

Kennedy would not govern quite so boldly as the platform promised. It would take a March on Washington -- organized by the same folks who marched on the convention -- to prod him. And, even then, it would the assassinated president's successor, Lyndon Johnson, who would begin to deliver on the pledges of the 1960 platform.

But the statement itself proved to be both an effective call to action and a remarkably accurate outline of the left wing of the possible -- one that today's cautious Democrats would do well to revisit.

Read the whole thing.