Homegrown Democrat

by Garrison Keillor

  Barry told me I ought to go cover Kennedy’s speech and I rode over to the Minneapolis Auditorium on a chartered bus that was packed, girls sitting on laps, boys crushed together in the aisle. I crushed myself into them and stood pressed against a girl’s back, a solid mass of people swaying on the turns. I joined the crush streaming into the hall and climbed up under the rafters as the mighty Wurlitzer played “Happy Days Are Here Again” and sat through the prelims, all the little frogs getting their moment in the spotlight, and Senator Eugene McCarthy was introduced and then Hubert, who got a long ovation but not too long, and then Orville Freeman got behind the lectern and introduced John F. Kennedy and out he came, covered in glory, and the place almost came loose from its moorings. In that shining moment, standing, grinning, drenched in applause, the whistles and the cheers, he truly seemed to rise to meet our hopes for him. I sort of knew the rap against him—he had dodged the issue of McCarthyism, his father’s shady fortune had bought the nomination, the grandma of the Democratic Party, Eleanor Roosevelt, couldn’t stand him because he wasn’t Adlai Stevenson—but there in the flesh, he was thrilling to us Democrats, a plain people; he was the first politician with movie hero presence and he had the elegant dignity of someone who has always known who he is, unlike the herky-jerky Nixon of the mawkish Checkers speech and the weird marionette arms. Kennedy was classy, not overeager like so many politicians, who were tuned a half step sharp and didn’t know how to play the crowd. They could do Earnest and Hortatory with the three obligatory jokes at the beginning and some Keening and Baying at the end and the Hands High Touchdown pose, but he had more keys on his piano. He had black keys and they didn’t. There was playfulness in him; he didn’t just preach about freedom, he performed it. (Did the GIs die in the snowy forests of Belgium so we could be like Nixon, the prisoner of his own demons? I didn’t think so.)

  Kennedy was a new man, a man of our time, not one of the old jowly guys who peered at TV cameras as if they were bombs and read from prepared texts and struck the old ritual poses, kissed the symbolic baby, ate the ceremonial hot dog, waved the flag, decried godless communism, posed with other jowly guys. Kennedy was an improviser. He stood there and grinned and soaked up the applause and then joked about Ted Williams having announced his retirement from the Red Sox at the age of 42—Kennedy was 43—“It shows that perhaps experience isn’t enough.” Huge laugh—and he tipped his hat to Hubert as a worthy opponent (more applause) and went on to his speech. I remember he quoted Dante—politicians didn’t quote Dante then, any more than they’d pose in a little black beret with a cigarette dangling from their lower lip. Kennedy made you believe that at one time in his life he’d sat down and read the Inferno, that he lived in a house with books on the shelves and didn’t care if you knew it, that he might have enjoyed Italy and knew about more than politics. He shared our disdain for the dull-witted bullies of the world who lord it over the meek and lowly. He was a liberating man. I didn’t care that he was rich and Catholic. So what? It felt as if a great loosening was coming and a jazzier spirit was in the air. And we’d have a President for whom we felt admiration. So I was a Democrat. Republicans were those fraternity boys on University Avenue, the Dekes engaged in the manly pursuit of drunkenness and fart lighting, maintaining their antique Greek culture, the annual Pajama Parade and the Tunic Twirl where the frat houses sang their raccoon songs and Sno Week with the Lennon Sisters and the Glenn Miller Band on the bill, a bunch of glad-handers and blowhards, scions of car dealers, who devoted more attention to their hair than to what lay beneath it.

  I walked back to campus from his speech. At 18, I was deeply into my family’s history and I felt a connection between Kennedy and my family’s New England roots, which I was just then hugely proud of, having recently learned about them. The reference to Dante was, “We have all made mistakes. But Dante tells us that divine justice weighs the sins of the cold-blooded and the sins of the warm-hearted on different scales. Better the occasional faults of a party living in the spirit of charity than the consistent omissions of a party frozen in the ice of its own indifference.” To me this spoke volumes about the cold legalism of fundamentalist Christianity, which was its dark side—the bright side was the evangelical spirit and the gospel of Jesus Christ who came to free us from bondage—but then there was the cold literalist judgmental schismatic side and the gimlet-eyed bluenosed martinets who would expel you into outer darkness if you departed from orthodoxy by so much as a quarter inch. My New England ancestors were warm-hearted. Joseph Crandall was an associate of Roger Williams who founded the first Baptist church in America in Providence in 1639. Roger Williams had grown up in England when Puritans were burned at the stake and came to Massachusetts Bay Colony where he found the Puritans to be just as intolerant as the people who had incinerated them back in England. He founded Rhode Island as a haven for people of all beliefs, including Indians. Roger Williams made Indian languages the great scholarly enterprise of his life. And my ancestor was there with him. And then there was Prudence Crandall who opened a school for young women in Canterbury, Connecticut, in 1831. When she admitted a colored girl the following year, all of the decent white families pulled their children out, whereupon Prudence opened a school for young colored women, the first in the country, which was shut down by a mob. She was a Quaker. She married a Baptist clergyman named Calvin Philleo and they moved to Kansas and she kept on teaching and was a staunch advocate of equal rights for women until she died in 1890. Mark Twain once spoke admiringly of Prudence Crandall and I was as proud of her as I could be, my ancestor who stood up to a mob for what she knew to be right. Maybe the rest of us Keillors were just clerks and farmhands and parking lot attendants but at one time we stood for something. So did Kennedy.

  In the Great American Divide between the cold avengers and the sons of liberty, the paranoid and the happy entrepreneurs, the bullies and the defenders of justice, he was over on the side of the warm-hearted, and that was his mystique, no mystery about it.

  I remember I walked in silence across that high narrow bridge over the Mississippi gorge and up the empty street behind Walter Library and thought about Kennedy and the Crandalls and the University and my ambitions to be a writer, which seemed to be all tangled up together in a ball, and was overjoyed a few weeks later when he beat Nixon. And then his heroic inauguration, his good speech with some nobility in it, and the heroic performance by Robert Frost of “The Gift Outright”—what a good country to be able to sense the difference between Nixon and Kennedy, even by a narrow margin. He stood in the light and he was worthy of our ideals. I never met him or his wife or children. I never was fascinated by their Kennedyness, only by him as President. Under his sway, I signed up for the Don Fraser for Congress campaign in 1962, which knocked off a crusty old Republican in Minneapolis and was managed by Don’s wife Arvonne, a short peppery woman who personified for me the Democratic-Farmer-Labor party, open-hearted, perpetually hopeful, honest to a fault, and the mother of us all. I was in Eddy Hall on November 22, 1963, when I heard the President had been shot. I was an announcer at the University AM radio station, KUOM, and was sitting in the record library when the secretary, Bobbie, came in and told me. I walked to the United Press teletype in the hall closet and saw the first fragmentary bulletins, all caps, DALLAS, NOV. 22 (UPI)—THREE SHOTS WERE FIRED AT PRESIDENT KENNEDY’S MOTORCADE IN DOWNTOWN DALLAS.—I stood reading this in stunned silence, the teletype clacking away, and there was something about the President’s limp body being carried from the car, and the word fatally appeared, and I took the paper into the studio where an actor was reading Tolkien’s The Hobbit on a show called Your Novel—he glanced up in alarm and I handed him the bulletin and he said, in a rather grand voice, “I have just been handed a news bulletin—” and I went back to the record library and got a record of, I think, a Spanish Mass and we played the Benedictus. And then Tchaikovsky’s Pathétique. There was no need for us to read more news, everybody knew the news. Who killed him was never clear and e
ither one read the conspiracy literature or one did not. I didn’t. I never could bring myself to visit the assassination museum at the schoolbook depository in Dallas. Nothing I read later about Kennedy and his life essentially changed how I felt about him the night I walked back to campus from his speech in October 1960.

  One day in the Scholar Coffeehouse, a kid strummed a 12-string guitar and everyone sang, without prompting, Deep in my heart, I do believe that we shall overcome someday. With all our hearts. Underneath the thin patina of coolness, we were all church kids. We’d read the prophets, heard the gospel, were exalted by the thought of being soldiers for the Lord and setting the prisoners free. Kennedy didn’t live to see it, but it was done in his spirit.

  A couple years after he died, the Mississippi River rose in the spring and there were urgent flood warnings on the radio. One afternoon I put on warm clothes and took the bus to St. Paul and crossed the Wabasha Bridge to the West Side where people were at work filling sandbags and building dikes to save the low-lying houses. It was foggy, and then it began to rain. An army of hundreds of volunteers hard at work, men and women, drawn up in assembly lines, holding the sacks and filling them and passing them in a chain to the dike. It got dark. Nobody left. The Red Cross brought around sandwiches and coffee. We rested and went back to work. Trucks brought in more sand and bags. A couple of front loaders worked at anchoring the dikes with earthen banks. It felt like wartime. I worked until after midnight and lay down in the back of a truck under a tarp and slept until daybreak and got up stiff and cold and they brought us more sandwiches and coffee and I got back in the gang and worked until noon. Someone said the flood would crest that evening. Someone worried about the dike bursting. A man said, “When they go, they go slow, they don’t go sudden.” I wasn’t sure about that, but I stayed because everyone else stayed. I sort of collapsed in the afternoon and was going to go home but slept a couple hours on a tarp in somebody’s front yard and when I woke up, there was water in the street, people wading through it, some men with muddy overalls, pitched emotion in the air, though nobody said much. We had put so much into beating back the flood, and we kept working—shovel, fill, tie, and pass, shovel, fill, tie, and pass—and felt privileged to be there doing it. I could hear the river boiling by and slabs of ice heaved up on the dike and National Guardsmen patrolling and when people couldn’t stand up any longer, they sat down and ate baloney sandwiches and drank coffee. And got back up.

  I went home in the morning. It was so overwhelming, I sat on the bed and cried. For the relief of getting out of those mud-crusted clothes and standing under a hot shower, but also for what I’d seen, the spirit of all those workers caught up in the job of saving their neighbors’ houses. Forget all the jabber and gossip, all the theoretical balderdash and horsefeathers, here is reality: the river rises up in its power and majesty, and the people rise up in theirs, and while one can do only so much, you must do that much, and we did. None of the news reports captured the reality of that event, which was the spirit of the crowd, of which I was one. An experience that warms a Democrat’s heart, a scene from Grapes of Wrath, or the crossing of the Red Sea. The People, yes.

  By God, no matter what Republicans say, the people of this country really do care about each other. We are not a cold people. By God, when John F. Kennedy said, “Ask what you can do for your country,” he spoke to this country’s heart and conscience.

  My teachers Miss Story, Miss Melby, Mrs. Fleischman, Miss Hattendorf: those tireless encouragers and inspirers. They were children of the Depression who were impelled toward public service, a good career, and many of the women had grown up in large farm families and for them teaching was a shining ideal and also the path out of a hard life they knew too well, the life of serfs. The very word education was dazzling to them, and they marched off to earn their way through teachers’ college and put on starched collars and pick up pointers and point. How beautiful is the life of the mind to those who know about doing laundry by hand and pressing the clothes with a hot iron from a woodstove and hauling buckets of water for the baths. Miss Hattendorf grew up on a farm in Iowa; her German parents sent her and her sisters to board with a family in town so they could attend high school. When Miss Hattendorf was about to leave for the University of Chicago and it came time to say goodbye and get in the car and go to the train, she looked at her mother standing at the kitchen sink—“I wanted to hug her, but I couldn’t do it. She was a stranger to me. They wanted me and my sisters to get a good education and they made big sacrifices and that was one of them: they didn’t know us anymore and we didn’t know them.”

  There are many stories of sacrifice and idealism like hers—and one of the dark deeds of the Republican anarchists is their denigration of public service and their characterization of public servants as parasites, busybodies, incompetents. To the cheater, there is no such thing as honesty, and to Republicans the idea of serving the public good is counterfeit on the face of it—they never felt such an urge, therefore it must not exist. But John F. Kennedy knew it and gave voice to it.

  Chapter 6

  THE SPIRIT OF EQUALITY

  I often think of John Kennedy.

  After years in the U.S. Senate, he

  Became Chief Executive,

  Then like Thomas Becket of

  England found sudden serenity.

  JOHN F. KENNEDY made a big impression on me, but attending the University was what confirmed me as a Democrat, the thought that the taxpayers of Minnesota really had faith that knowledge and understanding ennoble us. An egalitarian spirit prevailed at the U that truly was noble. There was no rank, no hazing, no freshman beanies, we were all in the same boat. You were Mr. Keillor to your professor and he was Mr. Brown to you. You looked him in the eye. You said, “I don’t get this” and he explained it to you. That was his job. Yours was to pay attention. Money was no social asset whatsoever and if you went around in expensive clothes you were regarded with pity or scorn. A few goofball freshmen showed up in brand new suits for fall classes and they stood out in the crowd as if they wore red rubber noses and fright wigs. Everybody from the President to the deans and the faculty had their home addresses and phone numbers listed in the University directory, and if you were brave enough, you could ring up Dean McDiarmid or Vice President Willey and tell him your troubles. I did not but the phone numbers were there and I suppose somebody did. On my slender parking lot wages I was able to buy a season ticket to the concerts in Northrup and I saw Isaac Stern, Arthur Rubinstein, Andrés Segovia, the Royal Danish Ballet doing a Balanchine program, the great Swedish tenor Jussi Bjoerling, the Cleveland Orchestra, Glenn Gould—you could get a balcony seat for $1.50, about an hour’s wage. I couldn’t afford to see the Metropolitan Opera on their annual tour but one evening I did look up at a window on the side of Northrup and see a tall slender dark-haired woman standing naked in front of a full-length mirror for a whole minute, studying herself. A wardrobe lady sat nearby, smoking, reading a newspaper. The dark-haired woman turned, facing me, her hands on hips, one leg extended, looking over her shoulder at her rump, her delicate bush and maroon nipples, like a painting, NUDE DANCER STUDYING HERSELF.

  Robert Frost came to campus soon after Kennedy’s speech and drew a capacity crowd of 5,000 at Northrup Auditorium, the great stooped white-maned old bear reciting by heart “Stopping by Woods on a Snowy Evening” and the crowd hushed in the cathedral of poetry—“For Once, Then, Something” and “The Oven Bird” and “Fire and Ice” and the one about the lover’s quarrel with the world—that soft lyrical cranky uncle voice beloved since junior high, a godlike presence in our midst, and afterward a hundred of us acolytes gathered at the back door to view the great man up close. I was proud of him for drawing that huge crowd and performing so well. He eased his old body down the stairs, our grand paterfamilias, and mingled with us, chatted, answered a few questions—I remember clearly, nobody asked for his autograph—and then he climbed into a black Chrysler and was taken off to lunch with the faculty.
But we students were as important as anybody else and weren’t held behind ropes or shushed. That was how it was at the U. The field was wide open. At the Minnesota Daily and its literary arm, The Ivory Tower, you submitted your stuff and back came a polite note, “Sorry,” and that week they printed George Amabile’s poems instead of yours, but you sent more and of that second batch the editor accepted two and the next month they appeared, big glutinous symbolist things about owls on moonless nights flying to Arabia, all in lower-case, and you snatched ten copies out of a paper box and took them home to save to show your grandchildren you once were a writer. The publications weren’t in the grip of a gang, they were open to walk-ons.

  College. The only time in your life when you can be gloriously ridiculously full of yourself and get away with it. A luxury once reserved for the aristocracy, now extended to the children of postal workers. I was a middle-class kid from the West River Road where late at night fireflies sparkled in the field behind the dark houses with blue TV light flickering and the rich green moist lawns and the great harmonic of green and white houses and black asphalt and ten miles south on the Mississippi I found the University where I could imagine a larger life and hope to escape the downdraft of the suburbs and do what I loved to do, write, though it seemed presumptuous. I secretly imagined getting published in The New Yorker. I hung around the Daily offices, free of the petty miseries of high school, that small fixed universe. The University was freedom. A friend of mine dropped out sophomore year and married his girlfriend and they bought a little yellow rambler in Coon Rapids, the down payment a gift from her parents. He was a warehouse clerk and his wife got pregnant and woke up in a foul mood every morning and he went off to eight hours of an automaton job. What a waste of a perfectly good life. Women were the great tamers; they took you in hand and trained you to accept the leaden social life and waxen solemnity of marriage and instead of bumming around Europe you’d be spending two weeks with her parents at the lake. Women put their arms around you and cried that they loved you and wanted to make you happy and bwanngggg a trap-door popped open and you dropped down the chute into a job you despised and a frazzled marriage in a crackerjack house with a mortgage as big as Montana—I intended to escape that. I longed for my flesh to touch someone else’s flesh but I remained chaste. I sat in clouds of cigarette smoke in a classroom smelling of linseed-oiled floors and listened to James Wright lecture on Dickens and gazed at the lovely girls in horn-rim glasses. I liked strolling around campus at night with Gail who wrote for the paper or my classmate Mary, put my arm around her waist and hooked my little finger in her belt loop and she with her arm around the back of me, hooked together, talking about Chaucer, Shakespeare, Eliot, arms riding across each other’s butts, our hips moving in meter, which, we two being different heights, came out in 9/7 time, like an old Swedish step dance, and I would maybe recite Housman’s poem about being 20—“And take from seventy springs a score,/It only leaves me fifty more./And since to look at things in bloom/Fifty springs are little room,/About the woodlands I will go/To see the cherry hung with snow”—and wind up back at Murphy Hall and the Daily office.