Blood of the Liberals

Dates Covered: 1776 - 2000
ISBN: 0374251428
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Our Take

George Packer found himself the son of and grandson of two rather pivotal characters in the development and apparent downfall of American liberalism. As such, he was well-positioned to write Blood of the Liberals, a brilliant account and memoir that is painful to read, not least because of Packer's unflinching look at his family's political and personal weaknesses. Packer's father and grandfather live through what might be considered two triumphs adopted by liberalism: the New Deal and civil rights. Both also lived to see the ideals they espoused degenerate into wanton conservatism or overbearing radicalism, and they both suffered lonely, distant fates.

Packer's grandfather, George Huddleston, represented Birmingham, Alabama for twenty-two years in the beginning of the twentieth century. The distinguished gentleman had served in the curious times of the Socialist Eugene V. Debs, and started his congr6/30/2001essional career with a clarion call for individual rights and universal suffrage. Thanks to Jim Crowe laws, he noted, roughly ninety-five percent of Alabama was disenfranchised. "We have the Negro with us," he said, "we cannot kill him, we cannot deport him, we have got to make him a citizen. How are you going to do it so long as you deny him the right to vote?"

Unfortunately, Huddlestons rickety hold on his seat in the Deep South necessitated an almost immediate recant: "I am as much opposed to putting the Negro back in politics as any southern man could be ... The speech was taken down in part by a stenographer who reported it inaccurately." Huddleston struggled with the Jeffersonian problem of reconciling liberty and equality. After all, how can folks start on a level playing field if you don't boost some up and take others down? Jefferson had the idea that a society of farmers might solve this dilemma, because land was essentially free back in those days. The statesman also figured these farmers could be trusted to run the country: "State a moral case to a ploughman and a professor; the former will decide it just as well, and often better than the latter." That's a nice thought, but the industrial age and the free market soon felled that attractive, if not mighty, ideal.

Witnessing poverty about him and not an unfeeling man, Huddleston felt obliged to ease pains where he could: "I am conscious that an equal division of property is impracticable. But ... legislators cannot invent too many devices for subdividing property." Such left-leaning stances earned him the sobriquet of "Little Bolsheviki" from his more vocal constituents.

The burden of poverty during the early Depression kept him in Congress, but as the definition of "liberal" wavered during Roosevelt's presidency, Huddleston's grasp on his office became more tenuous. His youthful wife was in a variety of scandals, most of them involving wanton drinking. Huddleston himself lost his seat in 1936 after openly defying FDR and beaning his opponent in the head with a bottle of Worcestershire sauce in public, and died a bitter man.

Packer's father, Herb Packer, fared no better. A meritocrat and Jew, he managed to get into Yale at a time when Jews were particularly unwelcome. Herb had the utmost respect for reason and couched his defenses for liberalism as such. The poor guy wound up being an administrator at Stanford in the middle of radical student protests. As the students, the "most privileged generation in history", refused to listen to him talk and decided to forcibly occupy buildings instead, he went into conniptions.

Perhaps "conniptions" doesn't quite do it justice: the man had a stroke. As did President Woodrow Wilson, notes Packer. Wobbling at the end of his second term, himself a victim of his own high-mindedness in a country that was going to pot under President-Elect Warren G. Harding, Wilson broke down during a speech and never recovered. "Stroke," writes Packer, "seems to me the fate of a certain kind of liberal." In the case of Packer's father, the man fell victim to protesting students at Stanford and weak-willed administrators who capitulated to them. Herb Packer announced that knuckling under was the worst thing to do, and submitted that "Procedure is at the heart of all liberty." Such pronouncements gained him the disgust of the faculty, and he soon backpedaled much in the same fashion as his father-in-law did.

Packer's dinnertime mores are also under examination, because they reflect what was happening in the outside world. We hear of his family's ideological romance with presidential candidate Adlai Stevenson (when told "Every thinking person is on your side," the doomed Stevenson replied, "But I need a majority.") and the weeping in the house that accompanied the assassination of Martin Luther King, Jr.

As Packer's own development proceeds through the seventies and eighties, he spends time with the Peace Corps in Africa at a moment when Reagan is transforming the tone of the program. He later joins the Democratic Socialists, which turns out to be something between a waning social club and a geopolitical AA meeting. He also attends, of all things, a Promise Keepers' rally in Washington, which is a group of vaguely Christian men boasting "family values". Amid these episodes, and even as he ekes towards his present status as a writer from humble, construction worker beginnings, the consistent failure of liberalism across multiple generations baffles him.

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