The Rise of a Prairie Statesman: The Life and Times of George McGovern 0691142998, 9780691142999

Citation preview

THE LIFE AND TIMES OF

GeOrge

McGOvern

THE RISE OF A PRAIRIE STATESMAN

Thomas J. Knock PRINCETON UNIVERSITY PRESS Princeton and Oxford

Copyright © 2016 by Princeton University Press Published by Princeton University Press, 41 William Street, Princeton, New Jersey 08540 In the United Kingdom: Princeton University Press, 6 Oxford Street, Woodstock, Oxfordshire OX20 1TR press.princeton.edu Jacket photograph: George McGovern, 1956, courtesy of Dakota Wesleyan University Archive All Rights Reserved Library of Congress Cataloging-­in-­Publication Data The rise of a prairie statesman : the life and times of George McGovern / Thomas J. Knock. pages cm.—­(Politics and society in twentieth-­century America) Includes bibliographical references and index. ISBN 978–­0-­691–­14299–­9 (hardcover : alk. paper) 1. McGovern, George S. (George Stanley), 1922–­2012. 2. Legislators—­United States—­Biography. 3. Presidential candidates—­United States—­Biography. 4. United States. Congress. Senate—­ Biography. 5. United States—­Politics and government—­1945–­1989. 6. United States—­Politics and government—­1989–­I. Title. E840.8.M34K58 2016 973.923092—­dc23 [B] 2015019637 British Library Cataloging-­in-­Publication Data is available This book has been composed in Palatino and Franklin Gothic Printed on acid-­free paper. ∞ Printed in the United States of America 10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1

For Betty Jane Mori and George D. Sellers

CONTENTS Prologue 1 Yours, for Fixing Up This World

ix 1

2 A Boy Never Gets over His Boyhood

11

3 A Clasping of Hands Meant Everything

29

4 The Best B-­24 Pilot in the World

48

5 I Would Have to Call Him a Progressive Agrarian

77

6 America Was Born in Revolution against the Established Order

101

7 The Confused and Fear-­Ridden Temper of the Times

124

8 What a Loss to History!

146

9 Washington, DC

176

1 0

The Apostle of Agriculture, Education, and Peace

203

1 1

The Quest for the Senate

231

1 2

Food for Peace

256

1 3

We Are Determining the Priorities of Our National Life

286

1 4

The Right Song for the Wrong Season

315

1 5

The Cup of Peril Is Full

347

1 6

But There Are Still People with Hope

379

1 7

The Kind of Man the Future Must Have

412



Epilogue: Come Home, America

425

Acknowledgments

431



A Note on Sources

435

Abbreviations

437

Notes

439

Index

501

PROLOGUE On an evening during the twilight summer of his administration, President Bill Clinton for the last time presided over an annual White House event he had always found gratifying. Into the East Room he and First Lady Hillary Rodham Clinton welcomed some two hundred guests to recall the achievements of fourteen special Americans who were about to receive the nation’s highest civilian honor, the Medal of Freedom. The fourteen included Daniel Patrick Moynihan, retiring senator from New York and presidential adviser since the Kennedy era; Mathilde Krim, pioneering AIDS activist and researcher; Jesse Jackson, the dynamic civil rights leader; John Kenneth Galbraith, one the twentieth century’s most influential economists; Marian Wright Edelman, indefatigable champion of underprivileged children; General Wesley Clarke, lately commander of United Nations forces in the Kosovo conflict; and George McGovern. “Day in and day out,” Mrs. Clinton said, the individuals being celebrated “have widened our horizons and opened our minds and hearts.” The president added that he and his wife had played a role in the selections: “Some of them reflect, now that we’ve been . . . involved in public life for nearly three decades, a lot of personal experiences that we have had, and we’ve had a lot of good times talking about who should be here today.”1 Clinton no doubt was thinking of the former Democratic standard bearer in whose presidential campaign he and the First Lady had worked twenty-­eight years earlier. But memories of 1972 were not the real reason that the current ambassador to the UN Food ix

Prologue and ­Agricultural Organization was among those being honored that night in August 2000. “War hero, Senator, diplomat, George McGovern embodies national service,” the Medal of Freedom citation read. It also acknowledged the Distinguished Flying Cross that his brave exploits had earned him during World War II, his “stalwart voice for peace in Viet­nam,” and his unwavering “commitment to bring food to the hungry.” Invoking the telling phrase, “the power of his example, the courage of his convictions,” the commendation concluded: “George McGovern is one of the greatest humanitarians of our time, and the world will benefit from his legacy for generations to come.”2 In all respects, the words were fitting and unexaggerated. But, of course, no formal tribute, no matter how felicitous, could adequately convey the fullness or assess the legacy of a career of the historical significance of George McGovern’s. This is the first of a two-­volume study of the life and times of George McGovern. My aim is to tell a story that, as yet, has gone untold—­about a politician and statesman who never became president of the United States, but whose life and career nonetheless remain as compelling and enlightening as those of any Cold War president. Indeed, Bill Clinton ventured in October 2006, at the dedication of the George and Eleanor McGovern Library at Dakota Wesleyan University, in Mitchell, South Dakota: “In the storied history of American politics, I believe that no other presidential candidate ever had such enduring impact in defeat.” Clinton was right on the mark for several reasons—­for the candidate’s principled stand against the Vietnam War and, more broadly, for his wide-­ranging critique of Cold War foreign policy; and for the role he played in the course of postwar American liberalism and the history of the Democratic Party.3 Just after winning the presidential nomination, McGovern received a letter from Ray Allen Billington, one of his PhD mentors at Northwestern University and one of the great historians of the American frontier. “You are, to me, a new FDR, a new Adlai Stevenson,” Billington wrote. “Men with such vision come along only once each generation, and find their places in history, as they deserve to.”4 His identification of his former student with Roosevelt and Stevenson is instructive, for McGovern was steeped in the progressive tradition that they personified and was an unusually courageous politician as well. Whereas his candidacy owed to his opposition to the Vietnam War, his position constituted an all-­embracing rethinking of American internationalism—­a critical treatise on the original notion of the “American Century” itself. Unlike any other Democratic presidential aspirant before or since, George x

Prologue McGovern actually asked his fellow citizens to think critically about their country—­in particular, about American military and economic interventionism in the Third World in the name of anticommunism and about the amassing of a nuclear arsenal of such size as to threaten human existence. Yet he was no less interested in domestic affairs than he was in foreign policy, and he always stressed the connections between the two. Thus McGovern’s critique held implications for the political economy and perhaps also for the soul of the United States. While millions of Americans did not have enough to eat or a decent place to live, the Cold War, he argued, had squandered untold treasure that might have been far better spent on programs for education and social reform. The historic potentiality of the United States was indivisible; it could not fulfill its promise around the globe if it did not fulfill its promise at home. Many factors of biography, naturally, shaped McGovern’s outlook on the world: a spare boyhood in the prairie town of Mitchell during the Great Depression and his upbringing in his father’s religious household; his participation in the parapolitical activity of high school and college debate; his incredible experiences flying thirty-­five combat missions as a B-­24 bomber pilot during World War II; his graduate studies in American history, at Northwestern, under the tutelage of two of the nation’s great historians; his controversial involvement in the 1948 presidential campaign of Henry Wallace at the dawn of the Cold War and McCarthyism; and his astonishing success in bringing the Democratic Party of South Dakota back to life, notwithstanding the state’s conservative Republicanism, and then winning election to Congress in 1956 and 1958. McGovern’s first endeavor in high-­ level foreign policy came as director of Food for Peace for President Kennedy. In this capacity, he traveled constantly for almost two years to underdeveloped countries, overseeing the allotment of millions of tons of surplus American food and fiber in order to engineer, among other projects, a vast expansion of the overseas school lunch program. By the end of his directorship, Food for Peace, with its emphasis on humanitarian goals, had become the most successful foreign aid program since the Marshall Plan. Thereon, the things that McGovern saw firsthand exerted a profound influence on his thinking about the role the United States could play in world affairs. Then, in 1962, he achieved a long-­standing ambition when he won a seat in the US Senate. His first speech in that chamber, “Our Castro Fixation vs. the Alliance for Progress,” signaled the critical p ­ erspective xi

Prologue for which he would become famous. History might honor Fidel, the senator submitted audaciously, because his revolution at least had “forced every government of the hemisphere to take a new and more searching look at the crying needs of the great masses of human beings.”5 In the face of the perils of the Cold War, McGovern believed that the United States must have a defense force second to none, yet he voiced serious concerns about runaway defense budgets and the dangers of the arms race that the administration seemed to have embarked upon. Even before Kennedy’s assassination, McGovern began to worry about the country’s deepening involvement in Vietnam. American resources were being used “to suppress the very liberties we went in to defend,” he said in September 1963. “The trap we have fallen into there will haunt us in every corner of the globe.” (Decades later Senator Bob Dole would remark, “I guess George knew something the rest of us didn’t.”) From 1965 onward, McGovern would stand out as one of the two or three most important leaders of the antiwar movement within the liberal establishment, which had conceived the war. By 1966–­67, he was warning that, if the fighting in Southeast Asia did not soon abate, the “dreams of a Great Society and a peaceful world will turn to ashes.” At that point, he could not have predicted the Tet Offensive in Vietnam and Lyndon Johnson’s demise; the murders of Martin Luther King and his dear friend, Robert F. Kennedy; and certainly not the subsequent “Draft McGovern” movement that would thrust him into the vortex of the political upheaval of 1968—­setting in motion his dramatic first bid for the leadership of his party and his emergence from the Chicago convention as a major force in American politics and one of the three most likely Democratic nominees in 1972.6 These, then, are but a few of the highlights that this first volume explores. It ends with the election of 1968, the turning point in the history of both the Vietnam War and contemporary American politics as well as in McGovern’s career. (He was reelected to the Senate that year by a near-­landslide.) Already his life had composed, as none other than Lyndon Johnson once allowed, “a dramatic and inspiring story of what America is,” not to mention a compelling alternative understanding of the American Century.7 In most respects he was then well along in establishing his historical legacy—­a legacy that, perhaps to some, is still unclaimed. Nonetheless, it is there, in its intrinsic and tangible qualities alike, as we shall see herein.

xii

THE RISE OF A PRAIRIE STATESMAN

1

YOURS, FOR FIXING UP THIS WORLD

Although their grandson would grow up to become a United States senator and run for president, Thomas Henry McGovern and Mary Love McGovern lived on the edge of poverty practically all their lives. In 1849, when he was five, Thomas and his parents had immigrated to America from Ireland, fleeing the Great Potato Famine that would force more than a million others to leave their homeland as well. The McGoverns were farm people. They made their way to Illinois and eventually settled in Knox County. Their small farm never prospered. In 1865, shortly after his father’s death, Thomas enlisted in the Union Army and served as a bugler. Upon mustering out he resolved to quit farming and went to work in a slaughterhouse. The following year he met and married Mary Love, whose own family had emigrated from Scotland. Mary would bear six children within twelve years. Joseph, their first and the father of the future Democratic standard-­bearer, was born in April 1868, during the time of president Andrew Johnson’s impeachment trial.1 Meanwhile the McGoverns had moved to Pennsylvania and back again to Illinois so Thomas could take jobs mining coal, a trade that was hardly more healthful or profitable than the one he had left. Indeed, for most people who sold their labor in order to live, the decades between the Civil War and the turn of the century were arguably the worst of times in American history. Although the United States grew into the mightiest agricultural and industrial machine on earth during that era, chronic downturns and “panics” plagued the economy, climaxing in the country’s first great depression, in 1893. Throughout the West and 1

Chapter 1 the South, farmers were in revolt over plummeting commodity prices and ruinous transportation costs. Drastic wage cuts and massive unemployment sparked hundreds of strikes and widespread violence. Moreover, apart from everything else, the United States was then far and away the most dangerous workplace in the world. In the final two decades of the nineteenth century, for the lack of safety regulations, 700,000 workers were killed in on-­the-­job accidents, while literally millions suffered serious injury. Thomas McGovern was among the latter. Mishaps in the mines laid him up with broken legs, cracked ribs, and shattered ankles, throwing him out of work for months at a time and making the family’s lot all the more desperate.2 Even when he was able-­bodied Thomas rarely made more than $500 a year—­not nearly enough to feed, let alone clothe, a family of five, then seven, then eight. It was essential, therefore, that the eldest son be taken out of school to go to work. And so, Joseph McGovern, at the age of nine years, began his career as a “breaker boy.” At dawn, Joseph often had to be carried to the mines, asleep in his father’s arms. He would then trudge into the breaker with his fellows, tying on a bandana to cover his mouth and nose. Inside the breaker, a kind of processing plant, the coal rumbled down through long chutes; beside them sat the boys, their small, bare hands plucking out jagged pieces of rock and other debris mixed in with the coal. Here the twelve-­hour day held for all, regardless of age. The scene was not uncommon. From the sweatshop to the factory, one in five of America’s children thus contributed to the nation’s industrial achievements.3 “Their faces are peculiarly aged in expression,” a contemporary journalist once observed of the youngsters of Pittsburgh’s steel mills, “and their eyes gleam with premature knowledge, which is the result of daily struggle not for life, but for existence.”4 The reporter might well have been describing Joe McGovern. But it was not the toil in the breaker alone that so transformed the boy’s mien. When he was thirteen, his mother died, less than a year after giving birth to his youngest sibling, George, after whom he would name his own first son. Mary’s death at the age of thirty-­five threw the family into dire crisis. Thomas did not know what to do. He began to drink heavily, and Joe had to take on the additional responsibility for looking after his brothers and sisters. The three youngest—­Tommy, Anna, and the baby—­were sent to live in Des Moines with their aunt, Kate McGovern King. Tommy and Anna’s stay was temporary. Little George would remain, although his father would never allow Mrs. King to adopt him formally.5 2

Yours, for Fixing Up This World For Joe, having to give up his baby brother was a source of enduring sadness; he was determined to keep the rest of the family intact. To that end, within a couple of years, he discovered an unexpected way of breadwinning. Now and then on Sundays and after work in summer, Joe played sandlot baseball, the recreation of choice among late nineteenth-­century working-­class youth. Football, in contrast, was then the province of the wealthy eastern elite—­those whose credo was “the survival of the fittest,” and the more violent the competition, the better to demonstrate their superiority. The sons of immigrants, however, defied hardship and peril every day and felt no need to build “character” through athletic rites that sporadically proved fatal. For them, baseball’s tamer form of mayhem was far more appealing. And Joe McGovern, his friends told him all the time, was really good at it. The constant physical exertions and dangers inside the breaker had nurtured a powerful body and a keen eye, and they enhanced his natural talent for the game. Almost miraculously, the sport lifted him out of the mines and into a paying job at second base on a minor league team in Des Moines, which eventually became a farm team for the St. Louis Cardinals.6 Throughout his late teens and early twenties, Joe traveled all over Iowa and the Middle West with his teammates and continued to send money home. Family oral history posits that he also became something of an archetypal hell-­raiser, indulging in off-­the-­field enticements generally associated with itinerant, young bush leaguers. But whatever the extent of Joe’s companionship with those other professionals­­­—hard-­ drinking gamblers, fast women, and the like—­his quest to break into the majors came to an end. Sometime in 1891 or 1892, he forswore the glory and temptations of the diamond to seek the grace of God (not entirely unlike his famous contemporary, Billy Sunday, who also had played professional baseball and raised lots of hell before heeding the call).7 Joe’s religious conversion owed mainly to a young female acquaintance, Anna Faulds, of Pilot Rock, Iowa. The exact circumstances of their meeting remain unclear, but Anna apparently convinced her rough-­ hewn friend that he might lead a better life by following the compass of the Good Book. Before long they were married and, together, Joe and Anna aimed to propagate the word of one of the eighteenth century’s leading religious lights, John Wesley. Their means of ascent lay eastward. In the fall of 1893, they enrolled at Houghton Wesleyan Methodist Seminary, in the village of Houghton, New York, nestled in the Genesee River valley south of Rochester.8 3

Chapter 1 The founder of the institution, Willard J. Houghton, was a visionary lay preacher. In 1851 he had been “reclaimed” during a Methodist revival meeting at the local schoolhouse. That year, a 120-­mile-­long spur channel of the Erie Canal, running parallel along the unnavigable Genesee, reached Houghton Creek. Although the waterway to Rochester became the tiny hamlet’s lifeline, it was attended by horse racing, saloons, and other “evils of this world,” as Houghton called them. To counter such elements, he began to organize Sunday schools all up and down the valley. Then, one day in 1882, he was seized by the idea of building a seminary to train and send forth into the valley and beyond “young men and young ladies in whose minds are instilled the principles of sobriety and morality.” In fulfilling his mission, the Reverend became famous throughout the region—­as an inspirational speaker, as a fund raiser so scrupulous in his record keeping that he entered into the ledger donations as small as five cents, and as an indefatigable letter writer who signed his correspondence, “Yours, for fixing up this world.”9 Everything about Houghton Seminary befitted Joe and Anna’s motivations, not the least the Methodist precepts of living, especially as they pertained to the influences that once had caused the breaker-­ boy-­turned-­athlete to go astray. In the preceding century, the followers of John Wesley had resolved to govern their personal and religious lives by strict “rule and method” (hence the name, “methodist,” a term of derision aimed at Wesley’s original adherents at Oxford University). Over the decades, the list of forbidden social activities was extended to dancing, drinking, gambling, smoking, attending the theater (later, the movies), and (as in many respectable communities back in Iowa) the frequenting of pool halls. The McGoverns did not find any of these proscriptions unreasonable. As for intellection, although Houghton was by today’s standards more of a high school than a college in the early years, its ten faculty members offered a sound curriculum. Anna and Joe started off with the basics of “classical preparatory”—­arithmetic, botany, grammar, history, and spelling—­to make up for certain deficiencies in their education. Their religious studies included courses titled “Bible Training,” “Discipline,” “Evidences of Christianity,” “Holiness,” “Natural Theology,” and “Plan of Salvation.” The fee for the preparatory year was twelve dollars; for the commercial and business program, eighteen dollars; tuition for Bible classes was free to those who pledged to enter Christian service.10

4

Yours, for Fixing Up This World The ultimate goal of most of the eighty or so students who enrolled in the seminary each year was to equip themselves for field preaching and other kinds of evangelistic endeavor. When Houghton was established, the concept of individual responsibility and repentance in seeking God’s grace—­with some assistance from circuit-­riding preachers—­ had long since become commonplace. Near the end of 1895, Joseph was ordained a minister of the faith, and he and Anna were ready to carry on the Wesleyan tradition of helping plain-­speaking, everyday folks open their hearts to Jesus. Like all aspiring pilgrims, the most important decision the couple now faced was where they should go to undertake their life’s work. The majority of Willard Houghton’s spiritual offspring tended to favor posts east of the Alleghenies. A few stalwarts, however, shipped out to distant provinces—­to Africa, India, South America, or the Philippines.11 The McGoverns fixed upon a destination across the inland ocean, one they well knew would present hardships only slightly less daunting than those they might have encountered overseas. ***** “Tell me the landscape in which you live,” José Ortega y Gasset once observed, “and I will tell you who you are.”12 If Ortega had had in mind that vast expanse of plains and prairie bestriding the Missouri River valley that once was called Dakota Territory, then never was a philosopher’s insight into the relationship between geography and human experience more applicable. If nothing else, there was the fact of the river, “a great vein running through the heart of the Dakotas,” as a contemporary writer put it.13 Although surveyors would carve the territory horizontally into two states in 1889, the more apt halving (according to inhabitants then and now) would have been roughly vertical, following the Missouri’s southeasterly course as it meanders down from northern Montana. As John Steinbeck wrote in Travels with Charlie, “Here is where the map should fold. Here is the boundary between east and west.” For on the river’s near side lay “eastern landscape, eastern grass, with the look and smell of eastern America”; across the other, it was “pure west with brown grass and water scorings and small outcrops.”14 Indeed, East River, as it is known, is pretty much an extension of Iowa and Minnesota’s tall-­grass plains and prairie hills; they surround South Dakota’s richest farmland—­the Dakota Basin, 250 miles long and fifty to seventy-­five miles wide and amply watered by not only the Missouri

5

Chapter 1 but also the James, “the longest unnavigable river in the world,” according to a historical marker. West River embraces the northern reaches of the Great Plains, an area tedious in its flatness and infinite, treeless ranges of buffalo grass. Here, cattle grazing predominates. Excepting the Black Hills, semiarid West River receives barely sixteen inches of rain annually, whereas East River averages twenty-­four. John Steinbeck may have exaggerated when he said, “The two sides of the river might well be a thousand miles apart,” but, for most people, the differences determined a fundamental reality: Depending on which side of the river one lived, it was said, one either herded or plowed.15 Yet in the early days it was precious metal that drew the first wave of white migration—up to twenty thousand prospectors, with pan and pickax in their gear, who, in the Black Hills Gold Rush of 1875–77, braved the elements and the wrath of the Sioux whose domain they transgressed. Until then, agrarian settlers had yet to venture farther than forty miles beyond the Minnesota border. But the discovery of gold precipitated a series of events that changed everything—the final phase of the Plains Indian Wars, the reduction the buffalo herds, and the coming of railroads. From Chicago, Minneapolis, and St. Paul, three companies now began to construct their steel-ribbon highways far into the territory and set in motion another kind of rush. By 1885, 1,500 miles of track were enough, along with the self-binding reaper, to have helped the population surge to 248,000 (up from 81,000 just five years before) in the southern half of East River alone. Thus the Great Dakota Land Boom had begun. By 1890, an additional thousand miles of rails had been laid, and land entries, through the Homestead Act and purchases, totaled over twenty-four million acres, while the US Census put the population at 328,000 for the entire state (with 182,000 for North Dakota).16 A good portion of this influx emanated from the Old World—mainly Germany, Russia, and Scandinavia. These immigrants often left their homelands in groups, as distinct ethnic colonies; they would make a lasting impact on the social character of the counties they occupied. They were the last true pioneer generation, whose collective flight and struggles would be immortalized in the novels of O. E. Rolvaag and Willa Cather. Most of the newcomers, however, were like Joe and Anna McGovern—native born, and the majority of them from the surrounding states.17 Nevertheless, a common experience bound all Dakota settlers together in their search for a new beginning: a life inexorably ruled by the conditions of the countryside and the dome above it. 6

Yours, for Fixing Up This World There were, for example, practically no trees when they arrived to stake their claims. Hence—for lumber, windbreaks, and beautification alike—they became devoted arborists. During a single week in May 1885, a dealer in central East River sold 200,000 small trees for planting. Meanwhile, a tent or wagon sufficed for shelter until a family could rive strips of prairie to build a sod house, itself a temporary dwelling. After that, the main task was to break open the earth with plow and ox and put in wheat, East River’s first big cash crop. Their ordeal did not end there. Settlers of the northern plains and prairie had to contend with a disheartening variety of natural calamities, most of them relating to the region’s extremes in climate, with temperatures varying as much as 140 degrees in the same year. In general, winter was more so the rancher’s bane than the farmer’s. Massive snows destroyed whole herds of cattle on the open range in the late nineteenth century. (They would do so in modern times as well. In January 1949, four days of intense snowfall kept hundreds of families isolated for weeks and killed thousands of cattle.) In “the hard winter” of 1880–81, accumulations exceeded eleven feet, blockading the eastern portion of South Dakota from the outside world from October to March. The spring thaw only compounded the disaster when unprecedented flooding carried away town after town perched along the banks of the Big Sioux and the Missouri. Five years later cattlemen again lost upwards of 90 percent of their stock in unrelenting subzero temperatures. The Blizzard State’s most infamous weather disaster, however, occurred on January 12, 1888, and Joe and Anna McGovern heard the story over and over from survivors. It was called forlornly the “schoolchildren’s storm.” It struck without warning in the middle of the afternoon and, though most of the teachers and students rode it out in their rickety schoolhouses, too many children had tried to get home on foot and ended up freezing in the wind-driven snow. In all, more than five hundred Dakotans froze to death on that day.18 For the farmers, who would become the Reverend McGovern’s main constituency, spring and summer visited yet the greatest scourges, and these often approached biblical proportions. Gigantic swarms of locusts, for instance, descended upon South Dakota, usually at harvest time, throughout the 1870s and continued to do so intermittently into the 1930s, until the introduction of pesticides. Overspreading the horizon in immense dark clouds that concealed the sun, millions of hoppers would cascade down upon the fields of wheat and corn. Sometimes they might feast for days, leaving behind but a fraction of an entire 7

Chapter 1 year’s crop. But there were other reasons why Dakotans lived by the words, “Never turn your back on the sky.” For hail, too, could blow in from out of nowhere and, like innumerable miniature wrecking balls, flatten miles of ripening grain within minutes. (On occasion the stones were not so small; in one hailstorm, in July 1892, they measured six inches in diameter and put out the eyes of sixteen horses.) Finally, as if the plagues of Egypt were not enough, there were prairie fires. Fed by drought, dry grass, and high winds, a blaze could turn into a terrifying conflagration, sweeping over the countryside and consuming everything in its path—barns and farmhouses along with crops and grasslands. The worst of them, in 1889, 1909, and 1947, covered enormous stretches, over 400 square miles (a quarter of a million acres) before burning out.19 If any people needed reassurance that God was on their side, then, it was surely these folks, and, in the wake of the land boom and statehood, missionaries flocked in to minister to them. A dozen denominations already had set up churches when, in the spring of 1896, Joe and Anna McGovern entrained westward from New York. After stop-offs in Iowa to visit family, they proceeded by horse-drawn wagon to their objective, Richland, an obscure settlement of some thirty souls in South Dakota’s southeast corner. As they surveyed the emptiness of the landscape around them, Joe and Anna must have had thoughts akin to those of a Methodist minister who, in a later era, found himself unloading his belongings in Faith, South Dakota. “I can see where it got its name,” he sighed. “You would have to have faith to settle here.” And so, not far from a site where Lewis and Clark once encamped nine decades earlier, the young couple from Houghton Seminary erected their first house of worship.20 Richland Wesleyan Methodist Church was a modest, wooden-frame structure, two stories high and replete with a steeple that could be seen for a mile or so rising out of the prairie. To communities of so few people, so isolated and deprived of so many things, such a gathering place was an indispensable comfort. To them, missionaries like the McGoverns seemed to have alighted from Heaven. But Joe and Anna’s lives were no less precarious, or less subject to random adversity meted out by the elements, than those who worked the land upon which they all depended. The relationship was reciprocal: the parson and his wife tended to the farmers’ spiritual welfare while the farmers requited with offerings from their harvests, a welcome supplement to the meager stipend from the Methodist missionary fund.21 8

Yours, for Fixing Up This World The couple did not remain at Richland for the long haul. Joseph became what in those days was called “a building minister.” His assignment was literally to build churches and then move on to another such project after a while, and he was highly successful at it. His was not a flamboyant personality, but he possessed a certain kind of motivational charisma. Granite-like in his conviction in the work that he was about, he was able to get people to contribute money, material, and their labor; because of his own frugality and willingness to put his own broad back to the job of raising a church, his parishioners tended to redouble their exertions. The McGoverns would found several such ministries, none of them ever larger than fifteen to twenty families.22 Then, early in the new century, life improved somewhat. Joe and Anna were able to put down roots when they graduated to a choicer post far to the north, in Aberdeen, a metropolis by Middle Border standards and one large enough to boast of a public library and a visit by William Jennings Bryan during the campaign of 1896. For Joe, this assignment was fortuitous for another reason: it allayed the recurring sadness he still felt over the abandonment of Little George so many years ago. For by now George McGovern King Jr. (he had taken his aunt and uncle’s name) had grown to manhood, married, and had three children. He had also established a flourishing lightning rod and X-ray machine company in Des Moines, with branches in Winnipeg and, auspiciously, Aberdeen. George’s frequent business trips there rekindled the fraternal bond, and Joe took great pride in his brother’s success. Occasionally George would bring his children along to see their uncle and hear a sermon. These reunions meant a lot to Joe, partly because Anna was unable to bear children, and he enjoyed involving George’s in prayer meetings. George and Joe also managed to make their peace with their father, who had since remarried, sired seven more children before being widowed again, and now resided at a soldier’s home in Milwaukee.23 Joseph McGovern, it seemed, had finally achieved a measure of contentment. It did not stay long. In March 1913, the old man expired. Then, in June, George, thirty-two years old, suddenly collapsed during a fishing trip and slipped into a diabetic coma. He died within the week. Losing his brother twice—this time to premature death—was something Joe had never counted on, and he did not accept it easily. Yet an even greater blow was near at hand. In 1916, Anna was diagnosed with cancer and died the following winter. She was the woman who had turned his life around and who, for a quarter of a century, had withstood all the trials 9

Chapter 1 of a preacher’s wife on the Plains and lived by Willard J. Houghton’s injunction about “fixing up this world.” What would have happened to him, Joe wondered many times, what sort of blighted life might he have led if he had never met her? Now, at the age of forty-nine, Joseph McGovern suddenly found himself alone, widowed, and childless, in Aberdeen, South Dakota. For months afterward, he often could be seen kneeling in prayer at Anna’s gravesite in the churchyard. No one could understand better than he the meaning of the passage from the Bible he was often obliged to quote to console others, “The Lord giveth and the Lord taketh away.”

10

2

A BOY NEVER GETS OVER HIS BOYHOOD

But the Lord did giveth again. One Sunday, a year or so after Anna’s death, the Reverend McGovern noticed a woman sitting in a forward pew of Aberdeen Wesleyan Methodist as he delivered his sermon. Frances McLean had recently arrived from Calgary, Canada, to visit her sister, who had herself made the thousand-­mile journey to Aberdeen to keep house for their two bachelor uncles. A statuesque figure peaked with flowing auburn hair, Frances was beautiful, and Joseph was immediately drawn to her. Twenty-­seven and single, she had already decided to stay on and help look after her uncles. The next Sunday she returned to church and made the pastor’s acquaintance. Presently she joined the choir as a soloist. Before long Joseph made opportunities to see her outside of church, and parishioners noticed he was emerging from his bereavement. The courtship was mainly the object of cheerful tidings. They were married in 1918. Frances and Joseph had four children. Olive, their first, was born in Aberdeen. During Frances’s second pregnancy, they were reassigned to the Methodist parsonage in Avon (population 600), not far from Richland; there, on July 19, 1922, a son was born. In honor of Joseph’s brother, the infant was christened George Stanley McGovern. Two-­and-­ a-­half years later Frances gave birth to a girl, Mildred, and, in another two years, to a boy, Lawrence. Three years later the family relocated to Mitchell, a community in the southeastern quadrant, seventy miles west of Sioux Falls and destined to become the family’s permanent home.1 11

Chapter 2 Although much of it remained constant, the pattern of Joseph McGovern’s life had taken a radical turn for a man advancing past middle age. Frances was twenty-­two years his junior, and he was almost sixty by the time all the children were born. A difference in age of this sort is not necessarily a decisive factor in spousal and parental relationships, but it was in their case. When he remarried, Joseph had already lived virtually a lifetime marked by seemingly unrelieved adversity. And there was the correlative depressive impact of his environment—­of years of isolation in remote frontier settlements, of interminable winters, hard times, and heartbreak—­which one authority on South Dakota has referred to as “the numbing effects thereof on the primitive prairie psychology.” All of these circumstances had made of Joseph McGovern a man the camera rarely caught smiling. As he set about to build his last and most substantial church and to provide for his brood, he was tired out. To his children, he was as much grandfather as father, and hardly the kind who played on the floor with them. He was, rather, a disciplinarian, and he expected them to set the standard of behavior for others. Except in the case of Larry (the youngest, mischievous, and Joseph’s favorite), punishments for breaches of conduct could be harsh and unjust. Once, when Larry took his brother’s collection of Indian-­head pennies to buy some candy, it was George his father chastised for not having kept the prized coins out of reach. In another incident, a joke that George made about a neighbor’s apple pie earned him a severe whipping for which Joseph felt deep remorse. A certain formality would always characterize his relationship with his children.2 This much could be said of his relationship with Frances as well. Never did the kids hear their parents address each other by their first names; instead, it was “Mr. McGovern” and “Mrs. McGovern.” Joseph looked upon her as a kind of mother-­child who had to be taken care of, and he was master of the household and its superintendent. He made all the financial decisions, did the bill paying and the grocery shopping, and often prepared the meals. For her part, Frances was the devoted caretaker of the children. She made a fair amount of their clothes, taught them all to read before they reached school age, and saw to it that they learned to play the piano. Her children adored her. “I was always proud,” McGovern once wrote, “to have my friends know that this elegant woman was my mother.”3 As for the children, they divided up as pairs—­Olive and George as one, Mildred and Larry as the other. All of them, except Larry, tended toward the quiet and shy side. As a little boy, George was downright 12

A Boy Never Gets over His Boyhood bashful, a handicap he would not overcome until he was in his teens. Yet at every stage of his development, he evinced a maturity beyond his years, which siblings and playmates apparently discerned. He and Olive were best friends. Of the two, she was more outgoing, the more gifted pianist, and the slightly better student. Olive also possessed a strong-­willed personality, which manifested in various family situations, and she attended to her younger brother’s education almost like a third parent (as many big sisters are inclined to do). For George, she was a protector and an important early role model he readily looked up to. At the same time, he would become her guide and instructor, too. For instance, when they were nine or ten, he overheard Olive taunting another girl who was overweight and severely chided her for the unkindness. The reprimand forever impressed her. As he began to show other signs of character, she became his greatest patron and fiercest defender.4 George and Mildred were close also. The shyest of the four, Mildred was struck with her brother’s concern for others and his passion for knowledge. His standing among peers was such that, as she explained, “if he thought something was right, the rest of us thought it was, too.” Her regard for him knew no bounds. One day as the two of them were doing homework, their mother asked what they wanted to be when they grew up. Thirteen at the time, George said he “wanted to learn as much as he could about as many subjects as he could, and that he wanted to get into some work where he could help the largest number of people.” Mildred recalled “thinking then that maybe someday he would be president.”5 Olive would grow up to become a high school music teacher, while Mildred would become a highly skilled registered nurse. That both girls would go on to college and have careers outside the home was not the norm for women of their generation. Yet neither considered it extraordinary. In part owing to the obstacles he had faced in getting an education, Joseph McGovern was determined that his sons and daughters alike would attend college. “It was just one more step,” according to Mildred. “We almost grew up thinking that was just something you did—­just like cod liver oil at some stages of your life.”6 For George, starting school was far worse than cod liver oil. Indeed, because he was so painfully shy, the first grade was a nightmare. Even though he was already a good reader, he refused to take part in oral reading exercises. All he wanted was “to go unnoticed and to remain silent.” His teacher began to interpret his reticence and stammering as 13

Chapter 2 a lack of intelligence. By year’s end she had doubts about promoting him. Frances occasionally visited his classroom and realized there was a problem. But she also knew that her little boy read well at home. Although she shrank from confrontation of any sort, she could not help pressing his case with the teacher, who agreed to promote him “on condition.” In the second grade George had a more sensitive instructor who persuaded him to read aloud for her after school. In the third grade, he encountered Grace Cooley. A dedicated traveler who enthralled students with stories of her summer journeys to foreign lands, she was the first person outside of home to have a real influence on his life. Miss Cooley detected the brightness in George and knew how to use positive reinforcement to draw him out. He, in turn, wanted to please her. Fortified by her praise for his love of books and budding writing skills, he began to develop self-­confidence. Never again would he have serious problems in school. Indeed, thereafter his teachers seemed drawn to him and frequently singled him out for special attention—­according to his daughter Susan, not only because he was among the smartest in the class, but because he was such a handsome boy as well.7 By the time he moved on to Mitchell’s middle school, he had become a voracious reader. The town’s Carnegie Library, a two-­story Greco-­ Roman building crowned by a modest dome and constructed of tan and purple quartzite from Sioux Falls in 1909, fascinated George. The rotunda inside featured an octagonal balcony with ornamental wrought iron railings and fluted supporting columns and a distinctive staircase all lavishly made of honey-­blond oak, as were the outsized window frames and reading tables. Here George first encountered the works of Zane Grey and Mark Twain as well as those of Willa Cather, Hamlin Garland, and O. E. Rolvaag, the three greatest chroniclers of the Middle Border. George was a fixture in the reading room, and he carried books home every week. Often he would read all through the night, until day broke through his bedroom curtains.8 Had they known about it, Frances and Joseph would have only mildly scolded their son for such zeal, for they were teachers at heart. But whereas both parents assisted in the children’s academic pursuits, Joseph mainly saw to their religious education. Every morning before they packed off to school, for example, he led them in the reading of Scripture. “It only lasted five or ten minutes,” Mildred remembered, “but of course it seemed like five or ten hours to us.” Sundays were filled with formal worship and religious instruction. In all of this, the 14

A Boy Never Gets over His Boyhood children came to appreciate at least one side to their father’s disposition. Despite the sternness and the emphasis on the struggle between good and evil, he was a little more liberal than most conservative ministers. Seldom did he inveigh about Hell’s fire to his parishioners, and he eschewed a literal interpretation of the Bible. His sermons leaned instead toward the dignified lecture on the meaning of character and faith and on the importance of service and Christian values in one’s daily life. To one degree or another, all four of the children absorbed the lessons. George himself would never fully embrace the conservatism of Wesleyan Methodism. Its prohibitions—­against activities like dancing and moviegoing in which his friends partook—­made no sense to him. Yet he esteemed his father’s philosophical approach to religion (and his restrained style), and a lot of the spiritual curriculum would stay with him. As a politician, he would quote readily from hundreds of favorite passages from Scripture when they were germane to a debate. And he would keep framed in his study the quotation from St. Mark that his father always kept framed in his: “For whosoever will save his life shall lose it; but whosoever shall lose his life for my sake and the gospel’s, the same shall save it.”9 ***** In their home at the corner of Fifth and Sanborn, a few blocks from the Methodist church, the McGoverns’ day-­to-­day life was more somber than most. Yet lightness, even merriment, gained entry. Olive and George showed talent for the piano, and Frances regularly led everyone in song. Joseph sang around the house, with or without accompaniment. For entertainment, the children played records, and they all listened to popular radio programs on WNAX Yankton. Happy Jack and His Old Timers and the young Dakota bandleader, Lawrence Welk, were favorites, whereas baseball broadcasts seemed to transport Joseph to another world. (Since he never encouraged the boys to go out for athletics, the Reverend’s enthusiasm for the play-­by-­plays mystified the children.)10 The lot of the preacher’s family yielded other forms of amusement. Every summer, for instance, the local Methodist community set aside routine and shuttled up to the Holiness Campgrounds located on the heights above the James River outside of town. For two weeks they stayed in tents on wooden platforms and welcomed diverse traveling evangelists and musicians and quartets. Frequently, the intensity of the 15

Chapter 2 revivals frightened some folks into stepping to the altar to be “saved,” but the holy rolling just as often took on a vaudevillian temper. The well-­treed environs of the campgrounds, not incidentally, also afforded the older girls and boys (including George) chances for romantic dalliances. But George’s most memorable experience at Holiness Camp, at the age of twelve, involved a startling revelation about his father. One day George and some friends were tossing a baseball when they noticed a field mouse crouching beside one of the tents several yards away. Just then, Joseph happened by and whispered, “Let me see that ball.” Suddenly, as the boys looked on, the sixty-­six-­year-­old assumed the stance of a seasoned athlete, did a wind-­up, and let the ball fly, scoring a dead hit on the hapless rodent from ten yards. “How’d you do it, Dad?” George asked as his pals went running to spread word of the feat. Joseph knew the time for confession had come. Thus the son at last learned about the father’s checkered history—­that he once was but a step away from playing for the St. Louis Cardinals and probably only a step away from moral ruination. That was why—­despite his love of the major league radio broadcasts, he explained—­he had always discouraged his sons from getting caught up in sports. He did not want them to fall prey to the temptations that had polluted his own youth. Far better, he went on, to cultivate an appreciation for literature and music, to read, to study, to excel at academics or debate—­although in a couple of years he would allow George to join the high school track team.11 The disclosure did not alter their relationship fundamentally, but it was an important little moment of truth. For Joseph, it was an opportunity to unburden himself, and to justify to George at least some of his behavior. (Perhaps he even savored his son’s admiration for his proficiency; the boy could not help boasting to his friends, “My Dad used to be a professional baseball player!”) As for George, he was sensitive enough to realize it was not easy for the man he so deeply respected to admit to weakness, let alone that he used to gamble, drink, and maybe even cavort with women unlike his mother. Indeed, he was far better able to accept the Reverend’s flaws than the latter was. And so George discovered that his father was a more interesting person than he had ever given him credit for. Even so, because intimate moments like this were rare and Joseph demanded so much of his eldest son (though not of Larry), he and George would never be truly close. Yet the future presidential candidate’s early years were not unhappy. To be sure, he grew up in a troubled era and the family lived frugally. 16

A Boy Never Gets over His Boyhood Cash income from the church averaged about $100 a month, and they could not have made do without the bushels of potatoes and the occasional chicken that parishioners brought by, or without the money from the Reverend’s sideline enterprise of buying and repairing broken-­ down houses to turn around at a profit. Groceries were bought on the basis of what was on sale, Larry’s and Mildred’s wardrobe consisted mainly of the clothing George and Olive had outgrown, and the furniture never changed through the years. Still the McGoverns never went hungry and they had electricity when two-­thirds of the state’s population did not; their two-­story, whitewa