RaleighDevil
Well-known member
He was right on Viet Nam and the military-industrial complex. He refused to equate the Wallace insurgency with racism. Interesting portrait.
http://www.theamericanconservative.com/articles/come-home-america-2/
As for acid, amnesty, and abortion, McGovern’s positions now seem positively temperate: he favored decriminalizing marijuana; he argued against “the intrusion of the federal government” into abortion law, which should be left to the states; and, as he told me, “I could not favor amnesty as long as the war was in progress, but once it was over, I’d grant amnesty both to those who planned the war and those who refused to participate. I think that’s a somewhat conservative position.”
In the home stretch of the ’72 campaign, McGovern was groping toward truths that exist far beyond the cattle pens of Left and Right. “Government has become so vast and impersonal that its interests diverge more and more from the interests of ordinary citizens,” he said two days before the election. “For a generation and more, the government has sought to meet our needs by multiplying its bureaucracy. Washington has taken too much in taxes from Main Street, and Main Street has received too little in return. It is not necessary to centralize power in order to solve our problems.” Charging that Nixon “uncritically clings to bloated bureaucracies, both civilian and military,” McGovern promised to “decentralize our system.”...
Unlike the bilious Ed Muskie, who dismissed George Wallace’s Florida primary victory as a triumph of racism, McGovern credited Wallace’s appeal to “a sense of powerlessness in the face of big government, big corporations, and big labor unions.” He asked Wallace for his endorsement, though as he recalls with a smile, “He said, ‘Sena-tah, if I endorsed you I’d lose about half of my following and you’d lose half of yours.’” Well, maybe, guv-nah—but just think of the coalescent possibilities of the remaining halves.
“It is not prejudice to fear for your family’s safety or to resent tax inequities. … It is time to recognize this and to stop labeling people ‘racist’ or ‘militant,’ to stop putting people in different camps, to stop inciting one American against another,” said McGovern, who called the Wallace vote “an angry cry from the guts of ordinary Americans against a system which doesn’t seem to give a damn about what is really bothering people in this country today.” Yet McGovern defended busing, in which children were uprooted, sent away from neighborhoods, and a pitiless war was waged upon working-class urban Catholics.
Look: George McGovern was a liberal Democrat. He voted for social-welfare programs of every shape and size; his philosophy then and now was a product, he says, of the Social Gospel movement, which translates Christianity into an interventionist welfare state.
But at its not-frequent-enough best, McGovernism combined New Left participatory democracy with the small-town populism of the Upper Midwest. In a couple of April 1972 speeches, he seemed to second Barry Goldwater’s 1968 remark to aide Karl Hess that “When the histories are written, I’ll bet that the Old Right and the New Left are put down as having a lot in common and that the people in the middle will be the enemy.”...
Candidate McGovern called for a U.S. withdrawal from Vietnam and South Korea and a partial pullout of troops from Europe. In his acceptance speech, which with exquisitely bad planning was delivered at 3:00 a.m. eastern time, or primetime in Guam, McGovern declared, “This is also the time to turn away from excessive preoccupation overseas to rebuilding our own nation.” Close your eyes and you can hear McGovern’s prairie drawl backing Merle Haggard’s latest release: “Let’s get out of Iraq and get back on the track/And let’s rebuild America first.”
“Come home, America,” McGovern pled in that 1972 campaign. “Come home from the wilderness of needless war and excessive militarism.”
“Come home, America,” the most moving, the most resonant, the truest political slogan in the history of our Republic, was suggested by Eleanor McGovern after she saw the phrase in a speech by Martin Luther King. Because it echoed the peaceful dreams of the old Middle American isolationists and because it drew a sharp contrast between the vision of the Founders and the condition of modern America, McGovern was roasted for the slogan by the Vital Centurions.
http://www.theamericanconservative.com/articles/come-home-america-2/
As for acid, amnesty, and abortion, McGovern’s positions now seem positively temperate: he favored decriminalizing marijuana; he argued against “the intrusion of the federal government” into abortion law, which should be left to the states; and, as he told me, “I could not favor amnesty as long as the war was in progress, but once it was over, I’d grant amnesty both to those who planned the war and those who refused to participate. I think that’s a somewhat conservative position.”
In the home stretch of the ’72 campaign, McGovern was groping toward truths that exist far beyond the cattle pens of Left and Right. “Government has become so vast and impersonal that its interests diverge more and more from the interests of ordinary citizens,” he said two days before the election. “For a generation and more, the government has sought to meet our needs by multiplying its bureaucracy. Washington has taken too much in taxes from Main Street, and Main Street has received too little in return. It is not necessary to centralize power in order to solve our problems.” Charging that Nixon “uncritically clings to bloated bureaucracies, both civilian and military,” McGovern promised to “decentralize our system.”...
Unlike the bilious Ed Muskie, who dismissed George Wallace’s Florida primary victory as a triumph of racism, McGovern credited Wallace’s appeal to “a sense of powerlessness in the face of big government, big corporations, and big labor unions.” He asked Wallace for his endorsement, though as he recalls with a smile, “He said, ‘Sena-tah, if I endorsed you I’d lose about half of my following and you’d lose half of yours.’” Well, maybe, guv-nah—but just think of the coalescent possibilities of the remaining halves.
“It is not prejudice to fear for your family’s safety or to resent tax inequities. … It is time to recognize this and to stop labeling people ‘racist’ or ‘militant,’ to stop putting people in different camps, to stop inciting one American against another,” said McGovern, who called the Wallace vote “an angry cry from the guts of ordinary Americans against a system which doesn’t seem to give a damn about what is really bothering people in this country today.” Yet McGovern defended busing, in which children were uprooted, sent away from neighborhoods, and a pitiless war was waged upon working-class urban Catholics.
Look: George McGovern was a liberal Democrat. He voted for social-welfare programs of every shape and size; his philosophy then and now was a product, he says, of the Social Gospel movement, which translates Christianity into an interventionist welfare state.
But at its not-frequent-enough best, McGovernism combined New Left participatory democracy with the small-town populism of the Upper Midwest. In a couple of April 1972 speeches, he seemed to second Barry Goldwater’s 1968 remark to aide Karl Hess that “When the histories are written, I’ll bet that the Old Right and the New Left are put down as having a lot in common and that the people in the middle will be the enemy.”...
Candidate McGovern called for a U.S. withdrawal from Vietnam and South Korea and a partial pullout of troops from Europe. In his acceptance speech, which with exquisitely bad planning was delivered at 3:00 a.m. eastern time, or primetime in Guam, McGovern declared, “This is also the time to turn away from excessive preoccupation overseas to rebuilding our own nation.” Close your eyes and you can hear McGovern’s prairie drawl backing Merle Haggard’s latest release: “Let’s get out of Iraq and get back on the track/And let’s rebuild America first.”
“Come home, America,” McGovern pled in that 1972 campaign. “Come home from the wilderness of needless war and excessive militarism.”
“Come home, America,” the most moving, the most resonant, the truest political slogan in the history of our Republic, was suggested by Eleanor McGovern after she saw the phrase in a speech by Martin Luther King. Because it echoed the peaceful dreams of the old Middle American isolationists and because it drew a sharp contrast between the vision of the Founders and the condition of modern America, McGovern was roasted for the slogan by the Vital Centurions.
