Albert Gore, Sr.: A Political Life by Anthony J. Badger (review)

Anthony J. Badger’s well-researched study is an examination of both Albert Gore Sr.’s political career and a modernizing and changing South. Gore “first went to Congress when the four pillars of conservative control of the South” were still in place: “the one-party system, African American disenfranchisement, segregation,” and rural dominance of state legislatures (p. 2). Badger argues that, during Gore’s thirty-two-year political career, these impediments to liberalism were largely eliminated.

Gore was born in the South when it “was a poor, rigidly segregated region in which African Americans were economically dependent and politically powerless” (p. 274). By the time he left the Senate in 1970, it “was a booming biracial democracy” (p. 274). Gore symbolized “the ‘new generation of Southerners’” who Franklin D. Roosevelt predicted would eventually take over the economic destiny of that region (p. 3). In particular, Gore passionately believed that the application of New Deal programs, such as the Tennessee Valley Authority (TVA), along with social welfare programs, unionization, and farm programs, could revolutionize the South and transform both its economy and its culture. In his career as a congressman and a senator, “he fought in Washington for federal programs that would benefit lower-income voters” such as the New Deal, the Fair Deal, and the Great Society, which brought higher wages and health and education benefits to the South (p. 274). His championing of atomic energy, public works such as the TVA, and the interstate highway system made him one of the architects of a new South.

Gore stood out as one of the few southern lawmakers who supported civil rights, but his record was mixed. Like most “Southern white racial moderate[s],” he believed that economic advancement would also bring racial progress and was “committed to gradualism” (p. 3). After 1958, Gore was typical of southern moderates in that he was ill-equipped to deal with a more assertive civil rights movement that would not settle for the hollow promises of gradualism.

Gore was ambitious, “thoughtful, serious, and independent,” but he was also “arrogant, self-righteous, and willfully stubborn”; it was these latter qualities that often alienated his colleagues and contributed to his failure to garner the Democratic Party nomination for either president or vice president (p. 275).

Badger examines Gore’s relationship with Lyndon B. Johnson, who was a major influence throughout Gore’s political career. Gore was generally a strong supporter of Johnson as Senate leader and president, but, despite having so much in common politically and personally, the two men hated each other and considered each other to be rivals. The most divisive issue between the two men was the war in Vietnam. Despite being a hardliner and a committed Cold Warrior, Gore also advocated nuclear disarmament, and he was an early critic of the growing war in Vietnam. His opposition to the war not only angered Johnson but also ultimately helped seal Gore’s fate in a conservative pro-war South.

By the mid-1960s, the liberal Gore was increasingly out of touch with a changing, conservative South. For the first time, he faced a serious challenge from his Republican opponent in the 1964 election. In the election in 1970, Gore ran a poor campaign and lost. He had never developed much of a grassroots campaign organization, and the people he had relied on were now dead or old and resisted younger ideas. His opponent, William Brock, successfully painted Gore as out of touch with Tennessee, particularly on the issues of race, the Vietnam War, and school prayer.

More important, Badger argues that “Gore never lost his faith” in the federal government as a vehicle for change, but ultimately the South did, and that was probably the biggest reason Gore lost (p. 275).