[[link removed]]

THE JOYFUL WARRIOR AND THE HAPPY WARRIOR  
[[link removed]]


 

Harold Meyerson
August 21, 2024
The American Prospect
[[link removed]]


*
[[link removed]]
*
[[link removed]]
*
*
[[link removed]]

_ The new and improved Democrats sound like some very old and very
good Democrats of long ago. _

Former first lady Michelle Obama speaks during the Democratic
National Convention Tuesday night in Chicago., Morry Gash/AP Photo

 

In the midst of his affable, affectionate, and amusing convention talk
(and it was a measure of its success that it came across as a talk,
not a speech) about his wife, first gentleman Doug Emhoff referred to
Kamala Harris as a “joyful warrior.” That rang a bell, a
hundred-year-old bell at that.

One hundred years ago this summer, at the Democrats’ 1924 convention
in a sweltering Madison Square Garden, the party’s 1920
vice-presidential candidate walked across the stage to place in
nomination for the party’s presidential candidate the governor of
New York: Al Smith. The moment was historic, for two distinct reasons.

To begin, it marked the first public appearance of that 1920
vice-presidential nominee, who’d been stricken with polio in 1921
and hadn’t been seen in public since. It was generally assumed that
Franklin Roosevelt’s political career was finished, though he was
only 42 years old. Roosevelt couldn’t walk—he never could after
1921—but with his legs in braces so they wouldn’t bend, with the
help of his son and the canes he leaned on, he remained erect while he
propelled himself across the stage to the podium, simulating walking
as the upper half of his body pulled his lower half along. It marked
Roosevelt’s reappearance on the political stage, which he was never
to leave for the rest of his life.

Second, the man Roosevelt proceeded to nominate broke a fundamental
rule of American politics: Al Smith was a Catholic, whereas every
president of the United States had been a Protestant. Worse yet,
Smith’s nomination came at the very peak of the nation’s
anti-Catholic, antisemitic, xenophobic backlash, just a few months
after the Congress had enacted a law that banned virtually all
immigration from Poland, Russia, and Italy, which since the 1880s had
been sending Catholics and Jews to America in the millions.

Most delegates at the convention came either from the political
machines of heavily Catholic and Jewish cities, or from the
evangelical Protestant South. With the nomination requiring the votes
of two-thirds of the delegates, and with the convention split down the
middle between Smith’s supporters and his Protestant opponents, it
took two weeks and 103 ballots before exhausted delegates settled on
an obscure compromise candidate, John W. Davis. Smith was to win the
nomination four years later, but after a campaign in which his train
often traversed landscapes lit up by burning crosses placed there by
the Klan, Smith lost decisively to Herbert Hoover.

But back in Madison Square Garden in 1924, Roosevelt ended his speech
by placing in nomination “the happy warrior of the political
battlefield, Alfred Emanuel Smith!”

I doubt that Emhoff was consciously echoing Roosevelt in calling his
wife a “joyful warrior,” but the echoes are there whether Emhoff
meant to or not. As Smith was a groundbreaking candidate for president
due to his faith, so Harris is a groundbreaking candidate due to her
gender and race. Both were children of immigrants from the kind of
countries that xenophobes of their times intensely disliked; both
could boast distinguish political careers characterized by policies
that helped working-class families (though Smith was to turn into a
conservative a decade later).

And the party that convened in Chicago this week still cites Smith’s
nominator as its greatest leader, even if the most Rooseveltian
speaker to address this week’s convention thus far was Bernie
Sanders, who thundered from the podium last night against the hold
that the billionaires and the oligarchs exert over our politics.
Sanders reminded Democrats rightly fearful of Donald Trump’s threats
to democracy that great wealth poses a serious and chronic threat to
democracy, too, if less blatant than Trump’s.

As to the threats Trump poses, no one has ever taken him down so
effectively as Michelle Obama did last night, turning the Donald’s
bigoted pronouncements right back against him. “Who’s going to
tell him that the job he’s currently seeking might just be one of
those ‘Black jobs’?” she asked. Countering his (and J.D.
Vance’s) habit of labeling their Black political opponents as
beneficiaries of ostensibly unfair racial preferences, she skewered
Trump by noting that most Americans do not benefit from “the
affirmative action of generational wealth.”

Tuesday also continued the Democrats’ wresting the mantle of the
freedom party from the Republicans, who have been hailing themselves
as the champions of freedom for many decades. For Republicans,
“freedom” has meant the freedom of wealthy businessmen to maximize
their profits free from such impediments as regulation and
taxes—free, that is, from the public policies of democratically
elected governments. The Republican bans on abortion, however, have
highlighted how they deny fundamental freedoms to women and girls,
even as they accord more rarified freedoms to the very rich. Democrats
have seized upon this obvious discrepancy to champion not just
reproductive freedoms, but the freedom of children to attend school
without fear of attack from some AR-15-toting maniac, the freedom of
seniors and the sick to be able to afford medications, the freedom of
workers to join unions and make a living wage. In this, they are
following the lead of that Democrat who willed himself across the
convention stage a century ago. In his 1944 State of the Union
address, Franklin Roosevelt declared that “Necessitous men are not
free men,” and expanded the party’s concept of freedom to include
freedom from want and freedom from fear. These 2024 Democrats, these
newly reinvigorated apostles of real freedoms, have a distinguished
pedigree.

_Harold Meyerson is editor at large of The American Prospect._

Used with the permission © The American Prospect, Prospect.org
[[link removed]], 2024. All rights reserved. 

Read the original article at Prospect.org:
[link removed]…
[[link removed]]

Support the American Prospect [[link removed]].

Click here [[link removed]] to support the Prospect's
brand of independent impact journalism

*
[[link removed]]
*
[[link removed]]
*
*
[[link removed]]

 

 

 

INTERPRET THE WORLD AND CHANGE IT

 

 

Submit via web
[[link removed]]

Submit via email
Frequently asked questions
[[link removed]]
Manage subscription
[[link removed]]
Visit xxxxxx.org
[[link removed]]

Twitter [[link removed]]

Facebook [[link removed]]

 




[link removed]

To unsubscribe, click the following link:
[link removed]