Remembering John F. Kennedy in 1960: When American politicians were...different
This year's Democrat and Republican campaigns could have taken more cues from JFK's 1960 race in West Virginia.
This is a rare example of me trying to break out of my “Berlin Stories” bubble to recall one of my “past lives,” as a history-curriculum writer and publisher in the United States — specifically in West Virginia, where I grew up. (Mountainous, rural, and with lots of forests, West Virginia lies in the heart of Appalachia — or “Hillbilly” country, as some folks know it.) The following column was first drafted in July 2024, and ‘pitched’ (unsuccessfully) to the London-based Guardian daily newspaper.
BERLIN (5. November, 2024) — Today, Americans are voting for the U.S. president and administration scheduled to take office in January 2025. During this long campaign, both US Democrats and Republicans might have done well to learn lessons of political authenticity from the successful campaign of John F. Kennedy, in 1960.
Specifically, future political campaigners might take a look at JFK’s work in West Virginia, where he won the very high-stakes Democratic primary that May, despite traveling in what was widely understood to be “hostile territory” (because of his social class, as well as his Catholicism).
Serious researchers might begin with T.H. White’s “The Making of the President, 1960,” a handy resource document for any student of political history wanting to: A) understand the roots of socio-economic problems in West Virginia or Appalachia, generally; and B) learn something of how JFK successfully “mined” the state’s blue-collar population for votes (if you’ll forgive the pun) and didn’t just buy them, as local lore has had it. (While polls had given him a 50-50 chance of winning in West Virginia, he took the state by a landslide.)
Books and a good number of still-living witnesses affirm that Kennedy’s relationship to West Virginia voters was one of mutual regard. He was able to communicate his understanding of their reality there in ways that later politicians could only try to emulate. Hidden in the mountains of West Virginia is a nice cache of stories about Kennedy’s exchanges with its working-class citizens. While shaking hands in the southern coal region, for example, one miner approached the future president with something of a challenge:
“Mr. Kennedy,” the man said. “I heard you’ve never worked a day in your life!”
Kennedy had to admit it. Yes, there is some truth to that, he said.
Well, sir, said the miner, I can tell you: You haven’t missed a goddamned thing!
Such face-to-face encounters with West Virginians revealed the Massachusetts senator as a man who could escape his “handlers” and work outside of his comfort zone. His exchanges with real, genuine West Virginians included conversations with workers at factory gates, and even going underground to discuss issues face-to-face with coal miners in their everyday workplace. Kennedy’s campaign in the Democratic primary that year was remarkable enough to draw the attention of French philosopher Jean-Paul Sartre:
“Kennedy’s supreme political cleverness was to temporarily, but totally and sincerely, renounce politics and to transform himself internationally for others and for himself into a man of exigency…. The West Virginian did not choose the political Kennedy…but the one whom he had seen with his own eyes…. West Virginians required that the future president put ethical action in the place of politics.” — From Sarte’s Morality and History.
Kennedy wasn’t merely out to win or “buy” votes. His biographers tell us that JFK was deeply and personally moved by the people he met in West Virginia — and by seeing the cruel, institutional poverty there. The New England senator saw school children eating sandwiches of nothing more than bread and government-surplus lard. (Can you imagine? he asked one staffer. Kids who never get to drink milk…?)
Kennedy subsequently took a “deep dive” into the issue of hunger in Appalachia. He spotted severe flaws in the US Department of Agriculture’s distribution of surplus food. Once in the White House, he immediately rebooted the food-stamp program, starting with McDowell County, West Virginia. As a result, “working poor” people were freed from accepting government cheese and lard after standing in “handout” lines. Instead, social-welfare recipients were able to use food-stamps to buy food in local stores, “like other people.” (Conservative Republicans opposed the Kennedy-Johnson anti-poverty programs from the start, earning the term “heartless” from Kennedy and his circle.)
Kennedy knew it was the government’s responsibility to fill the wide humanitarian gaps left by the region’s single largest private industry — coal-, gas- and oil-production. As T.H. White tells us, many parts of West Virginia were captive coal-production colonies, with citizens trapped in a state of “low wages, of bitterness, of violence and union combat” — all despite their labor’s contribution to record-high carbon-based fuel production. In the decade before 1960, West Virginia coal miners “blew and threw” as much as 173 million tons/year. McDowell County alone produced “more coal than it ever mined before,” Kennedy told his listeners there. And yet, he said, “there are more people receiving surplus-food packages in McDowell County than in any other county of the United States.”
How was it that the workers in this region were producing the lion’s share of carbon energy for American power plants (and private corporate wealth for the “owner-class”), while also suffering from the highest rates of poverty and unemployment? JFK’s own research gave him part of the answer: New technology.
“Automation did it,” he said.
Machines widened company margins by cutting costs on labor, creating a tighter labor market. Savvy political candidates might note how information technologies are doing same thing to us today….
It was clear to Kennedy’s best staff — all of them were thinkers — that West Virginia’s coal communities had been dying since 1950, when new machines began pulling immense amounts of coal from the ground. Machines, of course, widened company margins by cutting costs on labor — by hiring fewer, already-low-wage coal workers, creating a tighter labor market there.
A truly savvy political candidate might note how the same thing is happening in the United States and elsewhere today: The evolution of our 1990s Internet-based “tech boom” has now forced down-sizing, work over-loads and pay-cuts for hundreds of thousands, if not millions of US “knowledge workers.”
During the past year or more, these changes have been especially visible to those of us working in media production — in book- and newspaper-publishing; but also TV-broadcast and film-making. More “intelligence workers” (geistige Arbeiter in German) face the same challenges in their American schools, hospitals, universities and public libraries. Also in different fields of government, in bureaus big-and-national to the small-and-local — all filled with people who once took for granted a general and common understanding of their work as being “in service to the public interest” and therefore more-or-less immune from budget-cuts, political grand-standing, etc.
So, when John F. Kennedy saw how “automation” was killing jobs in West Virginia, he made a bold proposal: To convene “a national conference of representatives of our basic industries, of labor unions, of working-class people and the government…so that new machinery means better life, rather than people (being thrown) out of work.” No doubt, people hearing this — rightly or wrongly — believed that such a meeting — such a congress, if you will — was, at least, possible from this political candidate seeking their votes.
Despite gains by the subsequent “War against Poverty,” West Virginians continued to be victimized by the boom-and-bust fossil-fuel industry. Then, as now, mining companies preferred to invest in machines — over people, jobs, pay-raises, benefits, or community- and environmental health, either short- or long-term. For decades before 1960 and since, such policies have shaped Appalachia’s political and social landscape. Kennedy and his biographers noted all this then, with a narrative savvy that seems missing or obscured by today’s “new normal” of political hyperbole.
JFK had a very good — even intimate — sense of the harder story of worker- and resource-exploitation in Appalachia, and he parlayed that sense into policy proposals that served everyone well — likely also empowering him to talk face-to-face with all kinds of West Virginians — rich and poor, black and white — about it.
So, toward “remembering where we come from,” as more than one politician suggests today, I recommend some reading about how John F. Kennedy earned the respect and support from otherwise-distant and diverse rural people, at all levels of society.