Terry Fox, Henry Wallace & the Democratic National Party
Book Review: The Fight for the Soul of the Democratic Party by John Nichols (Verso)
When Canadians were asked to choose their greatest fellow citizen in 2004, second place went to Terry Fox.
Fox, who was diagnosed with bone cancer in his late teens, had had his right leg amputated.
Despite this obvious setback, he decided to run across Canada (yes, the Canada that is the second biggest country in the world) to raise money for cancer research.
He completed 3000 miles of that journey before he died, aged 22, in 1981.
This was all well-before Blade Runner-style prosthetics and also before the time when cancer would begin to be seen as ‘possibly not an irreversible death sentence’.
Appropriately enough, Fox’s run, which saw him complete a marathon a day was dubbed ‘the Marathon of Hope’, and the sight of him stubbornly struggling down endless highways with his characteristically hopping gate drove Canadians wild. People would run out to the end of their laneways in the middle of nowhere just to greet and encourage him as he ran past.
You may be forgiven for wondering who could possibly beat this.
Only one person would ultimately prove to have a more enduring legacy in the Canadian soul than Terry Fox: Tommy Douglas.
You may know him as Kiefer Sutherland’s grandfather (true fact), but in Canada we know him as the father of public healthcare.
On a federal level, Tommy Douglas had a spotty electoral career, but he was successful in his home province of Saskatchewan, becoming leader of the Saskatchewan Co-operative Commonwealth Federation (CCF) in 1942. That turned out to be a good move, because the CCF came to power in Saskatchewan in 1944 and governed the province for twenty years.
This is where Saskatchewan is
Although he never became Prime Minister, Tommy Douglas fought for medical care for all Canadians for twenty years against considerable opposition, and he fought for it so tenaciously that eventually he won.
In some respects, Terry Fox could even be considered a Tommy Douglas success. Born in the late’50s, there was never a question that he would receive medical care (just like every other Canadian) and that was the baseline from which he tried to make things even better.
While he is never mentioned in John Nichols’ The Fight for the Soul of the Democratic Party, I couldn’t help thinking of Tommy Douglas while reading it.
The Fight for the Soul of the Democratic Party revolves, of course, not around a Canadian, but an American – Henry Agard Wallace, a once powerful, but now somewhat obscure Iowan who rose to become Vice-President under Franklin D. Roosevelt.
Like Tommy Douglas, Henry Wallace was from the mid-West, like Douglas he fought for the common man in tones that sometimes recall a fiery revivalist preacher, and like Douglas he was prominently involved in politics during the Second World War, becoming Vice-President in 1941.
However, the similarities end there, because while Tommy Douglas was still being voted greatest Canadian nearly twenty years after his death, few Americans are likely conversant with the ideas and achievements of Henry Wallace today.
This is a pity because Wallace thought big and thought bold. A committed anti-racist in a time of segregation, he argued for a Century of the Common Man that would build on Roosevelt’s New Deal and not only win the war against fascism in Europe, but win the peace to follow.
Wallace’s radical agenda was never implemented and Nichols argues in his book that this circumstance is pivotal to understanding the Democratic Party’s lack of direction today.
In straightforward prose, Nichols details how the Democratic National Convention of 1944 was rigged against Wallace, who would otherwise likely have been re-nominated for Vice-President and thus have become President upon Roosevelt’s expected death. Instead, the Vice-Presidency and later Presidency went to Harry Truman who purged New Dealers from his cabinet and bowed to the pressures of McCarthyism, which served to purge progressive, radical and socialist ideas from the American political landscape under cover of rooting out Communist spies.
Following Wallace’s defeat, the Democratic Party, Nichols argues, never fully recovered its vision, or as the book’s title would have it, its soul. Instead Democrats became weak, managerial politicians, presenting themselves merely as ‘better than Republicans’. Thanks to having jettisoned Wallace, Democrats spent much of the 1950s lagging behind Republicans on racial justice and liberal rights. Republican President Eisenhower, after all, was the one talking about the military-industrial-complex and appointing judicial activists like Earl Warren to the Supreme Court, ushering in the famous Warren Era of landmark decisions, such as Brown v Board of Education, Miranda v Arizona and Griswold v Connecticut.
In later decades, Nichols argues, the Democratic Party:
failed to get fully onboard with Dr. Martin Luther King’s economic programme and opposition to the Vietnam War
allowed George McGovern’s 1972 landslide defeat against Richard Nixon to disproportionately shake their principles
invented superdelegates to prevent party insurgencies
didn’t capitalize on Jesse Jackson’s runs for the Presidential nomination in 1984 and 1988
and then finally gave up on transformational politics completely, with Bill Clinton wandering the wilderness of neoliberalism and Obama ‘scrambling to the empty center’.
Despite charting this sobering descent, and perhaps unsurprisingly given the book’s title, it seems to take for granted that the Democratic Party is the natural vehicle for progress in America. This is very much a book addressed to the American Democratic Party and written by someone who obviously cares about the Democratic Party and its future (much like Thomas Frank’s Listen Liberal). This assumption slightly detracts from the book’s otherwise interesting analysis, if, like me, you neither belong to nor particularly care about the fate of the American Democratic Party. This tendency to apparently still be one of the faithful gets even more stretched in its insistence on seeing new-wave-Democrat politicians like Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez and Ro Khanna as the new hope for radical politics. While I agree that both show a strength of conviction, as an outsider viewing events from a distance, I’m not so sure about the strength of character that seems to be the central point of the book.
After all, at the time of writing both Khanna and Ocasio-Cortez had already endorsed centrist Joe Biden for President.
One could argue that this is merely part of the game of politics, that compromises need to be made, and that anything is better than voting for Donald Trump. However, given that this ‘better than the Republicans’ mindset is precisely what this book is arguing against, the satisfaction with current candidates’ pragmatism comes off a bit thin.
This, however, is a minor quibble with a book that raises important issues that go well beyond the context of the Democratic Party.
The prospect of a visionless bureaucracy bent on winning election by any margin however narrow and at whatever cost seems to mirror a wider society in which ‘success’, however hollow it is, has become the measure of all things.
Nichols speaks of a Democratic Party that classifies idealism as stupid, but this phobia of being seen as unsophisticated is something that cuts across the intellectual sphere in general.
Happy endings or imaginary better worlds are classified as ‘naïve’ and ‘unrealistic’, while people who pay a price for their causes ‘should have known better’ and ‘bring their problems on themselves’. Literature appears to produce an endless conveyor belt of authors obsessed with the narrow minutiae of their own lives, and academic success depends on ‘number of pages published’ and ‘dollars of funding received’ rather than the quality of research produced.
It would seem that not just the American Democratic Party but most of that edifice known as ‘the intelligentsia’ has lost its soul.
It was when I began thinking about this that I began to understand that the title of the book was carefully chosen and that Nichols is on to something. We do have a soul problem. In fact, ‘soul’ is probably exactly the term people like Henry Wallace and Tommy Douglas would have used, because, like MLK or Jesse Jackson, they wouldn’t have been afraid to admit the importance of having a soul or the tragedy (far worse than the slight embarrassment of being caught out as guileless or unworldly) of losing it.
It was also when I began thinking about the wider scale of the ideas presented in this book that I became convinced that Nichols may be right to see the turning point of the Democratic Party as long ago as 1944. I had been sceptical of this at first – it seemed like a bit of a stretch to put the defining moment in a modern party’s history that far back.
But when I remembered Tommy Douglas, it clicked into place for me.
Canada, while far from a utopia, has a different history than the United States does, and one of the major differences is a more well-developed healthcare and social services system, largely the brainchild of Tommy Douglas and pioneered by him starting in the 1940s.
It’s mind-blowing to consider that two generations ago, America nearly embarked on a similar path, that Henry Wallace nearly did become President and to think about how different the world might have been if he had. Or how different my own life as a Canadian might have been if Tommy Douglas had failed.
This book is a strong reminder that fighting for your convictions is worth it and that the many failures on the path of success are irrelevant when compared to the final prize; that success isn’t something you can ultimately control – but that you can control your own actions, and that perhaps to fail at something worth doing is better than to succeed at something that is not. All three men – Douglas, Fox and Wallace could chalk up both success and failures across their lives.
Canadians don’t remember Terry Fox as a man who achieved what he set out to achieve because Terry Fox didn’t run across Canada.
He died.
This is not a secret.
Terry Fox wasn’t running the Marathon of Success.
He was running the Marathon of Hope.
Canadians loved (and still love) Terry Fox not because he was some superficial ‘winner’, but because he kept going, despite so many difficulties, much like Henry Wallace stayed true to his beliefs, despite knowing he would be able to ‘get ahead’ better without them. Because of that, their lives each have a meaning that extends beyond their own mortality, an ability to reach beyond the grave and inspire people today. If that’s not soul, I don’t know what is.
This book is a long overdue look at what really matters in life, and definitely worth a read.