THE DU PAGE DEMOCRAT SALUTES THE MEMORY OF TRUMAN KIRKPATRICK

It will be ten years this November that Truman Kirkpatrick, the founder of the DuPage Democrat and Lombard (DuPage) Democratic Club, passed away. He left behind his immediate family and also left behind his extended family of thousands of people that he touched while working for the ideals of peace, human rights, racial equality, civil liberties and good government. His accomplishments and the accomplishments of many other of that time are the foundation for what we know today as the Democratic Party of DuPage County.

His ideals evolved and expanded from those of church and family. He had been a non-partisan poll watcher in 1932, even before he was old enough to vote and always understood reform could be accomplished through political activism. He became active in the Democratic Party of DuPage County in 1958 recognizing it as the party closest to his own ideals by becoming precinct committeeman and forming the 19th Precinct Democratic Club. In 1960 he became president of the Lombard Democratic Club (today known as the DuPage Democratic Club) and shortly thereafter founded a newsletter called the Lombard Democrat which soon after was renamed the DuPage Democrat. For more than 30 years, he provided a forum for diverse views and introduced hundreds, of special guests who offered insight into the issues which affect our lives and the political process. Political activists from around the country sought his council.

His service to the Democratic Party includes Democratic precinct committeeman for 40 years and treasurer for the Democratic Party of DuPage for 33 years. He also served as 2nd Vice-Chair and Election Judge Coordinator in York Township for 30 years. His name appeared on the ballot representing the party on eight differ­ent occasions for, township trustee, state legislator or county clerk. He was active in almost every Democratic National Convention since 1960 as a delegate, candidate for delegate or journalist.

Truman received the "Bill Redmond Award" and the "Daniel T. Smyth Award" for his contribution to the Democratic Party. He was "Guest of Honor" at both the St. Patrick's Day Dinner of York Township and "A Tribute to Truman" held by the Democratic Party of DuPage.

Truman was well known around the state as “Mr. DuPage Democrat.”

Please read the speech he delivered at the "Tribute to Truman" event that follows. It is as timely today as it was 14 years ago.

THE ESSENCE OF "MR. DUPAGE DEMOCRAT"

Truman Kirkpatrick, who was "Guest of Honor" at a dinner by the DuPage County Democratic Party on October 29, 1993, delivered the following speech:

“I appreciate all the kind words said about me, but I hope nobody will think that I am a miracle worker, so talented and forceful that no ordinary mortal could emulate me. On the contrary, my main claim to fame is — being there! I kept at it. With the exception of the speaker's table, I have probably been an active Democrat longer than anyone in this room. My chief accomplishment is to have lived a little longer than the average, and that was because of good genes and good luck, and for that I deserve no credit.

We really need people who will stick around. I would wager that not more than half the people here tonight were active even five years ago.

When I joined the York Township Democratic Organization in 1958, one of the people I met was Claudius Worland. He was a loyal Democrat who worked at the post office and thus fell under the Hatch Act which compelled him to stay out of politics. He reached the age of 65 and the postal service retired him. He immediately reported to Democratic Headquarters, and he worked his precinct, election after election, for another 16 years. Finally, at age 81, he was unable to climb the steps to the voters' doorbells, and he retired again. A couple of months later I attended his funeral. The moral of this story is: don't quit too soon. There may be lots of things waiting for you to make happen.

The committee asked me if I would accept being named as guest of honor, and I said, ‘Yes, if you will let me make a speech.’ That was O.K. with them, so here goes.

This affair is called "Tribute to Truman," but has been mainly about me and not so much about the man who was president of the United States half a century ago. Harry S. Truman deserves to be honored.

This is the man, who went about deliv­ering peppery political speeches and when the crowds would shout, "Give 'em hell, Harry!" he would shout right back, "I don't give them hell; I just tell the truth and they think it's hell."

This is not only the author of the motto "The Buck Stops Here," the man who said "If you can't stand the heat, you should get out of the kitchen," the man who once said, "The Republican Party either corrupts its lib­erals or it expels them." He was a man given to salty, earthy speeches, which offended some members of high society. For example, when Joe McCarthy and Richard Nixon were claiming there were Communists under every bed, Harry Truman said, "Richard Nixon is a no good lying bastard. He can lie out of both sides of his mouth at the same time, and if he ever caught himself telling the truth, he'd lie just to keep his hand in."

Harry Truman ordered, for the first time, the racial integration of the armed forces.

Harry Truman was elected to the Senate with the support of the corrupt Pendergast machine, and then refused to honor the improper government contract deals that the Pederasts’ wanted. He became the leader of a Senate committee investigating crooked contracts for war supplies, and cleaned up the scandals of his day so well that he was chosen vice-president in 1944.

Harry Truman was laughed at and sneered at by columnists and commenta­tors in a way similar to the Clinton-bashing that we see today. At the end of his first term in 1948, Truman was faced with an organized revolt from both ends of the political spectrum. On the left, Henry Wallace walked out of the Democratic Party and formed the Progressive Party. And on the right, Strom Thurmond led the united Dixiecrats out of the Democratic Party and ran for president on the States' Rights ticket. That made four Democratic parties, and on the Republican side there was the formidable Tom Dewey. There was no chance whatever for Truman, the papers said. But he won. The Wallace progres­sives came back into the Democratic fold, and the Dixiecrats gradually drifted into the Republican Party, where they are now.

One of the greatest threats to the American political system came in 1951 in the Korean War. The battle had turned in favor of the American forces, and General Douglas MacArthur, the supreme comman­der, decided that the defeated communists should be chased into China, followed by the bombardment of Chinese cities. In effect, MacArthur wanted to start World War III, right then, with him leading the charge. Truman reminded MacArthur that he, Truman, was the commander-in-chief under the Constitution, but MacArthur was not lis­tening. As Samuel Gallu tells it in his book of Truman quotes, ‘Give 'Em Hell’, Harry Truman reacted as he believed he had to.

“MacArthur, despite repeated instructions to talk to me first, talked to everyone but me... Well, here I was, the president of the United States, trying to negotiate a cease-fire with the enemy, while one of my subordinates was calling for an all-out attack on them, I could not allow this insubordination to continue. Had I done so, I would have surrendered civilian control of your government to the military, and I was not about to that.”

Truman checked it out with General Marshall and General Bradley, and then issued the order: “FIRE THE SON OF A BITCH!” and MacArthur, whose prestige had been higher than Eisenhower's, faded away like General Stockdale on the stage with Ross Perot.

Because of my unusual first name, Truman, I am in a good position to see how well former president Truman is doing in the public's view, because people I meet for the first time sometimes make comments on my name. "Truman?" said a bank official to me in 1948. "You poor guy! It must be ter­rible to have to bear that name." But as the years roll by, the name gets better and better. Especially when the people have had a chance to see some of the clowns who fol­lowed him into the White House, President Truman's standing is going up. He is on the way to being recognized as one of our great presidents. We can properly honor and praise Truman, Harry S.

Back to the present.

My son Daniel sent me a birthday card. On the outside, it said: "Some people as they get OLDER tend to become extreme­ly FORGETFUL, UNPREDICTABLE and have trouble differentiating between REALITY and FANTASY. We have a name for these unfortunate people." Then you open up the card, and on the inside it says; REPUBLICANS!

At a Democratic banquet some time ago, a well-oiled customer said to me: "I'm a Democrat; I've been a Democrat all my life; and my pappy was a Democrat and HIS pappy was a Democrat:' And I replied to him: "My grandfather, my namesake, the first Truman Kirkpatrick, was a state legislator in Indiana a hundred years ago, and he was a Republican, but that was in the days when the Republican Party was the party of freedom and the Democratic Party was the party of slavery, and now that the parties have both reversed themselves, so did I.

It is good to participate in politics. As John F. Kennedy said, "That's where the action is." And it is good to participate in party politics and not just the candidacies of individuals. The League of Women Voters is wrong to confine its attention to individuals. I believe that the slogan "I vote for the man and not for the party," is immoral.

Boss Tweed, the most famous corrupt politician in American history, once said: "You can vote for anyone you like—if you let me pick the candidates.'' Think about that. Anyone who stays out of parties and primaries may well come up to the gener­al election with all the important issues already decided — by others.

But why should we choose the Democratic and not the Republican Party? There is a difference.

It is no accident that most blacks are Democrats. And most Jews are Democrats. And most Poles, and Italians, and Irish, are Democrats. And most Catholics are Democrats, and most poor people, and most union mem­bers, and most artists and intellectuals.

Every group that feels that it has been, or is being discriminated against, tradi­tionally looks to the Democratic Party for help and protection and fair treatment.

And this is no accident, because the Democratic Party, with many sad excep­tions, has, in the main, chosen one of the two main ways to get and to hold political power. It has won power by upholding the rights of everyone, by championing equal­ity and justice and fairness and concern for the general welfare, identifying with the common people. By so doing, the Democratic Party has won the support of the majority of the voters and has thus gained and held political power.

It is no accident that most lawyers are Republicans. And most doctors are Republicans, and most oil men, and most ranchers, and most business owners and manufacturers. Publishers and TV station owners are very likely to be Republicans.

Every group which recognizes that it has more than the average of the good things of life is unerringly attracted to the Republican Party.

And this is no accident, because the Republican Party, with many honorable exceptions, has in the main chosen the other of the two main methods of gaining and holding political power, namely, to form a coalition of the most powerful and privileged individuals and groups in soci­ety, and to act politically so as to protect their privileges—deliberately identifying their party with wealth, power, exclusiveness, and ostentation.

This second method of seeking political power also works well. Any election cam­paign is easier for a Republican than for a Democrat, because Republican candidates usually have most of the available money. And that, too, is not an accident.

You might think that the Republican method is doomed to failure because its base of support is inevitably smaller than the Democratic base. In the long run that is true. But if there is enough money for thousands of TV spots, you, can fool a lot of the people a lot of the time.

The first reason to support Democratic candidates is that it is in your self interest. But there is a second reason to support the Democratic cause, and it is the opposite of self-interest. You should support the Democratic Party and its electoral efforts if you have feelings of generosity, of com­passion, or if you have the desire to help people to make this a good country where people treat each other decently.

That is why I became a Democrat. It was not because I have been discriminated against — I have not — but because I believe in the principles of fairness and equality and human­ity. And I am convinced that the Democratic Party is the best means of expressing these beliefs on the political scene.

How can you stand continuing to cam­paign for the Democrats when you lose all the time? I am sometimes asked.

Simple, I don't lose all the time.

Consider the election of 1984. Reagan was running against Mondale, and the great Paul Simon was running against the incumbent Republican Senator, Chuck Percy. In DuPage County, Paul Simon lost by 100,000. But Mondale lost by a margin of 150,000. This means that there were 50,000 voters in DuPage County who split their ballots and voted for Reagan and then for the Democrat, Paul Simon.

If those 50,000 swing voters had stayed with Reagan, in DuPage County alone, Percy would have stayed in the Senate and Paul would have been no place.

Part of that switch from Reagan to Simon was due to the fact that we had a great candidate who richly deserved to win and who campaigned well, but part of it was due to the Democratic doorbell ringers in DuPage County. I was one of those doorbell ringers. I passed out literature about Paul to hun­dreds of voters, answered their objection to Paul, and tried to convert them. I will never know quantitatively how much effect I had, but there was some effect. My candidate won and I helped him do it. That is a victo­ry for me any way you look at it—a Democratic victory, and it happened in DuPage County, and I helped do it. And Paul justified my confidence in him.

We all need to try our best to get our Party to nominate its best candidates and to keep out crooks and stupid people as well as we can. If we get a glorious candi­date, some of the glory rubs off on every­one who worked for that candidate. That's the way it was with Paul and me. I was lucky to have the privilege of working to put him into the Senate. I would have pre­ferred to elect him President. Maybe there will still be a chance to do that.”

Finally, I want to finish with some words in honor of Dan Smyth, who died just five years ago to the day and almost to the hour. Dan was our leader and also our teacher. He combined principle and politics and he was our inspiration. If honors are to be bestowed on anyone; Dan ought to share some of them.

Longtime members of the York Township Democratic Organization will remember a revealing episode dating from the successful 1968 campaign of Republican Richard Ogilvie to become Governor of Illinois. Some years before this, when Ogilvie was serving as Sheriff of Cook County, he had employed a deputy named Richard Cain. Cain had crime syndicate connections engaged in criminal acts, and by 1968 was serving time in prison.

Shortly before the 1968 election, someone came to the York Township Democratic headquarters and presented the group with a hundred thousand, or so, copies of a savage piece of negative cam­paign literature called "Myth of Ogilvie, Mark of Cain." The folder alleged that Ogilvie was deeply involved in Cain's ille­gal activities. The leaflet was unsigned.

What should DuPage Democrats do? Should we distribute this piece of negative campaigning? Dan Smyth took the floor. He said we should have nothing to with the scurrilous (by 1968 standards) docu­ment. And he gave two reasons. First, he said, we should reject it on principle. We should not lower politics into the gutter. It is unworthy for us to stoop to seeking vic­tory by underhanded tactics. And second, to distribute a mud-slinging piece of liter­ature like that would be tactically unwise, and would likely cause as much resent­ment against the Democrats, by circulating it, as against Ogilvie. The rest of us, who were present, were convinced by Dan's stand, and we dumped the whole lot.

Some of the events In Dan's career are summarized in a long obituary of him that I wrote for the November 1988 issue of the DuPage Democrat, to which I refer you. 1 will quote the final paragraph of that arti­cle, and with that I will close.

"Dan Smyth is survived by a wife, five children, and 25 grandchildren. That ought to be enough to keep the line going. And with regard to Dan's political inheritors, he has been equally energetic in producing 25 and more political or ideological offspring. All through the ranks of the Democratic Party of DuPage County are people whose original inspiration came from Dan Smyth. And col­lectively, we will all see to it that Dan's vision of a progressive political future for all of us will not perish from the earth."

Thank you.

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