Hang around long enough and old becomes new. Parallel political connections abound from an earlier year.
For example, there was the nomination of Vice President Kamala Harris as the Democratic standard-bearer last week at the party’s national convention in Chicago. It was 60 years ago, 1964, when another former vice president was named to lead Democrats, albeit in Atlantic City, N.J.
Vice President Lyndon Baines Johnson of Texas became president on Nov. 22, 1963, in Dallas following the assassination of President John F. Kennedy. Harris was born in 1964; she turns 60 in October.
It was also the year Johnson twisted the arms of congressional leaders, including Illinois Sen. Everett Dirksen, to eventually pass in 1965 the Voting Rights Act, which stopped states in the Deep South from blocking Black Americans exercising their constitutional right to vote. Sixty years since the “Freedom Riders” worked to register Black voters, there is a Black woman running for president.
In 1964, Johnson tapped a U.S. senator from Minnesota, Hubert Humphrey, to be his running mate against the Republican tandem of Arizona Sen. Barry Goldwater and his running mate, New York Congressman William Miller. Harris last week chose Minnesota Gov. Tim Walz to be her veep candidate.
The year 1964 was “the last innocent year in America,” according to the late Jon Margolis, who penned a book with the same title in 1999. Margolis, who died earlier this year at age 83, was a longtime political columnist for the Chicago Tribune until his retirement in 1995.
In his book, Margolis details Johnson’s fears of losing to Goldwater in the South because of the Texan’s support for the voting rights bill. His fears were unfounded. It also was the last time Illinoisans voted for a Democrat presidential candidate until 1992, when Arkansas Gov. Bill Clinton was elected president.
Nationally, Johnson and Humphrey crushed their opponents in the 1964 general election. The statewide turnout on Election Day, Nov. 3, in Illinois was a solid 84.97% of registered voters.
Lake County voters joined in the Johnson/Humphrey landslide. Johnson received 62,785 county votes, 51.9%; Goldwater, 58,840, 48,3%. Nationwide, Goldwater captured only his home state, along with five in the Deep South: Alabama, Georgia, Louisiana, Mississippi and South Carolina.
The outcome of the 1964 election saw LBJ’s victory bringing 44 new votes in the House and four in the Senate, who favored health insurance for people over 65, regardless of income or medical history. The next year, Johnson signed Medicare into law as part of Social Security. The future of Medicare is expected to be a campaign issue this election.
It was also the election where voters across Illinois encountered the so-called “Bedsheet Ballot” in their voting booths. The ballot was an orange piece of paper 33 inches long containing 236 candidates running for 177 seats in the Illinois House. The state’s political leaders couldn’t come up with a redistricting map that satisfied Democrats and Republicans, so voters were left to choose all state representatives running at large.
According to a Tribune account, popular or familiar political names were sought after as vote-getters. Other Democrats were aided by Johnson’s long-down-ballot coattails. Former U.S. Sen. Adlai Stevenson III, the son of a former governor and two-time Democratic presidential candidate, headed the Democrat ticket.
Democrats also slated a John A. Kennedy, a businessman from tony Winnetka, who was no relation to the president slain less than a year before. Republicans countered the Stevenson/Kennedy gambit by leading the GOP ticket with Earl D. Eisenhower, a younger brother of former President Dwight D. Eisenhower, and a retired public relations executive from west suburban La Grange Park.
In the end, Stevenson led the Democrats with more than 2.4 million votes, while Eisenhower garnered just under 2.2 million votes. As a result, Democrats had a 118-59 Democratic majority in the legislature’s lower chamber.
The long ballot predated a U.S. Supreme Court ruling on equal representation and voting rights laws. It also led to the inclusion of the provision in the 1970 state Constitution for picking a partisan commission tiebreaker by random drawing when redistricting cannot be determined through the legislative process.
The year 1964 was the beginning of the nation’s deep involvement in what became the Vietnam War, which eventually led to Johnson’s political downfall. Like President Joe Biden, Johnson withdrew from the 1968 election, leaving his vice president, Humphrey, the party’s nominee, with Sen. Edward Muskie of Maine his running mate following the turmoil of the Democratic convention at Chicago’s International Amphitheatre.
Still to be determined in this parallel universe of ’64 and ’24 is the outcome of the Nov. 5 election. Fresh from the Chicago convention, the Harris/Walz ticket has a running start.
Charles Selle is a former News-Sun reporter, political editor and editor.
sellenews@gmail.com
X: @sellenews
