Several weeks ago, I flew into Washington, DC, much as I had done for the first time back in March, 1963. Flying over government buildings and monuments, I felt the same emotions overcome me as they had when John F. Kennedy was president. But now the reality seemed to be seriously tainted.

Long before going to Washington as a fifteen-year-old, I had been concerned about problems facing the United States and the world. When I thought of solutions, my mind immediately looked to DC for answers to our domestic problems and the United Nations to hopefully play a key role in solving international issues.

When in Washington, it wasn’t just seeing the White House, the Capitol and the Supreme Court. It was walking by the Department of Justice (where JFK’s brother, Robert was Attorney-General), the Department of Health, Education & Welfare, the Department of Labor, the Department of Agriculture, even the Department of Commerce and the FBI. When I returned to Washington for college in 1965, the Great Society was being enacted and that lead to more departments aimed helping us solve a problem such as Housing & Urban Development, Transportation and Education. Not too many years after that, even Republican Richard Nixon presided over the creation of the Environmental Protection Agency and expansion of the Office of Economic Opportunity (War on Poverty).

Two rhetorical questions were always present for me:

1. Wasn’t it obvious that our country had lots of problems, most having to do with poverty and racial strife?
2. Since we are a country, don’t the solutions naturally come from our seat of government in Washington, DC?

I thought that in 1963 and still believe it. But as I flew into Reagan¹ National Airport, I could not understand how hundreds of Republican members of Congress see the same views as I, yet they look at the city with disdain. They neither seem to care about the problems we have (witness wanting to cut $800 billion from Medicare to provide tax relief for the wealthy) nor do they see their jobs as Members of Congress as being central to solving the problems (witness their love of shoving responsibility from DC to inept state governments). How could you be elected to a job where you could do so much for your country, so much for your district or state, and instead you want to destroy what is helping the disenfranchised and you want to take the word “hope” out of our vocabulary?

Through the years I have taken students to Washington, DC. We have always looked at it as an opportunity to learn about what the federal government does and what it could do to improve quality of life. We have tried to challenge students with questions that require critical thinking. Hopefully they could become part of the solutions to our many problems, and in reflection, it seems that quite a few of them have.

I worry that school trips to Washington, DC now focus more on the military and a conventional definition of patriotism. That is disconcerting because if students do not first experience Washington, DC without a sense of hope and commitment to positive change, then we are indeed in deep trouble.

Because Republicans focus almost exclusively on individual liberties (except for the ones they don’t like such as a woman’s right to choose) at the expense of promoting the common good, they have been tearing apart our social and economic safety nets. The legislation and court rulings that they have undone can be repaired in time. But the damage that they have done to a sense of hope and vision as to how we solve our national problems is more insidious. Maybe we must go back a few decades and take a page from Rev. Jesse Jackson, Sr. and “keep hope alive.”

¹ How can you name an airport after a president who broke the Air Traffic Controllers Union?

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I recently had two experiences which crystallized why I think that so many Americans, particularly younger ones, do not understand the importance of the federal government to a progressive agenda.

Our non-profit was working with a group of high school students. We visited a homeless shelter in St. Louis, hopefully in a way that was not intrusive to the residents. As we were leaving, we asked the public information official who had given us the tour what suggestions for solving homelessness in America she might give to Senator Claire McCaskill, if she had an opportunity to speak directly to the senator.

The official thought for a moment and then said that she would tell Senator McCaskill that homelessness is a serious problem and more people need to care about it. I found the answer to be disappointing because caring without a strategy can only get us so far. American history has shown us that charity can only put a dent in solving safety net issues. Local governments do not have the resources and states have neither the money nor in many cases, the inclination.

Following the tour, we returned to the school and I mentioned to the students that I was somewhat disappointed in the shelter official’s response. I asked them what suggestions for solving the homelessness problem would they have for Senator McCaskill.

Having looked at other charities over the course of the year, they were convinced that the answer meant government involvement. But then when we pressed the issue, they said that local government would be best because those officials would best know the community. When we cited that St. Louis is poor and would probably not have the money to successfully address the issue, they then said that homelessness would best be solved by the state of Missouri.

Knowing how resistant the state of Missouri has been in recent decades to being part of a solid social safety net for the less fortunate of its citizens, I was initially disappointed and even frustrated. Didn’t these students know that the programs that have come closest to addressing the needs of those in poverty have come from the federal government? The ability to think with compassion and to provide resources has historically been much greater in Washington, DC than Jefferson City, MO.

But as I thought about it, why should these students know it? When in their lives have they experienced a national government in Washington that is fundamentally committed to promoting economic as well as legal justice? Perhaps a few were born in the waning days of the Clinton Administration so their only real experience with a Democrat in the White House has been Barack Obama.

They know that Obama fought for racial, gender and ethnic tolerance. They know that he accepted climate change, that he was not bellicose in foreign affairs. But they know little about his economic policies. If they began to research what steps he had taken to improve the economy, they would find that his legacy is largely framed by big bailouts; first for Wall Street and then for the automobile industry. While the auto bailout saved and even increased blue-collar jobs, the Wall Street measures basically made the rich wealthier, kept the middle class stagnant, and put those in poverty at a further distance than ever from top earners.

They did not hear Barack Obama proposing the creation of a huge safety net as FDR did in the New Deal. They did not hear him calling for the expansion of that net as LBJ did with the Great Society. They did hear Obama advocate affordable medical care for all Americans, but they knew that the final product was riddled with inadequacies.

In short, they had no idea what progressive government would look like.

It’s not just the students. A teacher has to be close to seventy years old to have lived through the Great Society with awareness. Educators don’t like for history or social studies teachers to be challenged with the question of “how can teach about something that you never experienced?” Obviously, all teachers, all human beings are limited by how much they have personally experienced or witnessed in life. But why is it that so many teachers and students are acquainted with the story of the Star-Spangled Banner than they are of the fight for workers’ rights?

We have a myopic view of the world that those who are not progressives are happy to see us have. What students can’t imagine is hard for them to desire or advocate.

How do we solve this? The easiest, but highly unlikely way, would be for America to elect another Bill Clinton or Barack Obama and once in office, have them turn from moderate to progressive. Better would be to elect the likes of Bernie Sanders or Elizabeth Warner (although about twenty years younger for both). In the absence of that, all who are progressive need to do all that they can to expose students and teachers to the New Deal and the Great Society. And don’t do it in a boring way. Make it fun and meaningful. It’s a tough chore, but our backs are against the wall and we have to act with that knowledge in mind.

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Mike Mansfield was a legislative giant, yet his two favorite words might have been “Yep” and “Nope.”  He could be a Sunday-morning news show host’s worst nightmare, because the brevity and directness of his answers meant that the host would have to prepare more like 50 questions rather than 15, for what in reality was a 22-minute program.  Asked if he agreed with a policy or with the words of another public official, he would simply say “Yep” if he did and “Nope” if he didn’t.  He had his reasons, but preferred to reveal them without embellishment and only when the interrogator showed that he too had some understanding of the issue.

He became one of the giants of the mid-20^th century as a gentle yet strong senator, born in New York City, who as a young boy moved out to Big Sky country (Montana).  Mike Mansfield served as Senate Majority Leader from 1961 – 1977, longer than anyone else in American history.  It was not an easy task to succeed Lyndon Johnson, the savvy but bloviating leader from Texas, who had gone on to the Vice-Presidency and then the Presidency after John F. Kennedy was assassinated.

Think of what Congress accomplished during Mansfield’s sixteen years as leader of the Senate.  Three important Civil Rights bills passed Congress, one in 1964, covering public accommodations, a second in 1965, strengthening voting rights, and a third one in 1968, enacting fair housing rules.  This was after a century in which Congress essentially stood by while a few presidents exercised what power they could to advance civil rights, and the Supreme Court came to acknowledge that the “equal protection” clause of the 14^th Amendment applied to African-Americans as well as whites.  In 1964, Mansfield cleverly convinced Republican Minority Leader Everett Dirksen of Illinois to ally members of his side of the aisle with northern Democrats to stifle the filibuster of Southern Democrats; the kind of individuals who would have felt right at home with Virginia Governor Bob McDonnell’s recent declaration of April as Confederate History Month without any mention of slavery.

Mansfield also helped Johnson shepherd through the monumental Great Society, which while important and lasting in many ways, was cut off at the knees when Johnson turned his attention and resources to the war in Vietnam. Before Johnson was sidetracked, Congress, under the leadership of Mansfield in the Senate and John McCormack in the House, established the War on Poverty, the Elementary and Secondary Education Act, the Higher Education Act, the Bilingual Education Act, Medicare, Medicaid, the National Endowment for the Arts, the National Endowment for the Humanities, the Corporation for Public Broadcasting, National Public Radio, the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration, the Truth-in-Lending Act, and the National Environmental Policy Act.  The significance of these accomplishments shines even brighter as we see that today’s Congress took fifteen months to pass a watered-down health insurance reform act.

Mansfield also collaborated with Johnson to ratify the Nuclear Test Ban Treaty of 1963.  But the Vietnam War caused a schism between them.  As Joel Connelly of the Seattle Post-Intelligencer said in a 2001 eulogy of Mansfield, who had died at the age of 98:

After a 1962 trip to Southeast Asia, Mansfield warned that the United States was nearing “the point at which the conflict in Vietnam could become of greater concern and greater responsibility to the United States than it is to the government and people of South Vietnam.”

He privately told Kennedy it was wrong to send U.S. “advisers” and that America should pull out entirely if the South Vietnamese government was unable to stand on its own feet.

“I got angry with Mike for disagreeing with our policy so completely,” JFK later told aide Kenny O’Donnell, “and I got angry with myself because I found myself agreeing with him.”

During the Nixon era, Mansfield was the initiator of the Senate Select Watergate Committee that investigated Nixon’s role in the cover-up of the famous break-in and other related transgressions.

Mansfield retired from the Senate in 1977 to “pass the torch to a new generation” and to enjoy Big Sky Country.  But public service beckoned again; for eleven years he served as U.S. ambassador to Japan, retiring from this position in 1989 at the age of 85.

Perhaps Mansfield was best described by former Minnesota senator and presidential candidate Eugene McCarthy, a man not given to sentimentalism or embellishment, when he said that Mansfield was an example that “a man of gentle exterior can be framed in steel.”

So a message to all of us: let’s keep our eyes out for leaders like Mike Mansfield; they’re hard to find and quite valuable.

photo credit: Corbis

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