One of the earliest and greatest works of Russian literature is a novel written by Ivan Turgenev that explores the complex, often conflict-prone relationship between the generations. The story is as old as humanity. In it, a man finds that his son, gone to school and now returned, has developed tastes and beliefs at odds with his own. What was once a familiar child has returned a stranger at war with everything his father stands for.
In the context of Russian history, Turgenev’s Fathers and Sons was a literary take on the growing division between moderate 19th-century Russian liberals – the fathers – and the Nihilists – the sons – who believed only radical change premised on the violent rejection of the status quo could achieve meaningful and positive social change. The sons thus sought to establish their independence by defining their identity as one at odds with the perceived failures of their fathers. Art is a mirror, and today, no less than yesterday, we see these themes play out daily in our own politics.
Take for instance the seeming disconnect between Mitt Romney and his father, George Romney Sr. While ostensibly similar – like father like son as the saying goes – the similarity is only skin deep. True, they are both wealthy, Mormon, Republican, CEO ex-governors, but the life experience and history of father and son are radically different. George Romney was a refugee from a Mormon colony in Mexico who crossed the border under duress when the Mexican revolution brought violence to young George’s doorstep. As he would later say about himself, George Romney was one of the first displaced persons of the 20th century and, like all refugees, subsisted for a time on public relief. If he were alive today, George might well sympathize with the Syrians, Iraqis and Palestinians driven from their home by revolution and war.
What followed that flight from Mexico were years spent scratching out an existence in the American West as George’s father tried his hand, unsuccessfully, at carpentry and potato farming. Eventually George’s father found a modicum of success in the home-building trade in Salt Lake City, but not before young George himself spent hours of backbreaking labor in local farm fields surrounding the various towns his family attempted and failed to achieve the American dream in. But even this success was temporary for the Romneys, like millions of other Americans, were ruined by the Great Depression.
Throughout it all, George worked hard at school, excelled at sports and eventually spent his missionary years – as all young male Mormons must – spreading the word far from home. Unlike his son Mitt, who spent his roughing it in 60’s Paris, George’s mission took him to the industrial slums of Scotland where, in his own words, the poverty and despair shocked him into a temporary crisis of faith. As in school, however, George excelled at missionary work due to his talent for organizational work.
He returned to the States just prior to the Depression and eventually landed a job as a salesman with Alcoa in Los Angeles, which he used as a stepping-stone into the world of corporate lobbying. He attended a series of colleges, but never graduated – apparently valuing the knowledge gained through active experience more than that gained through passive book learning. Through his efforts he became known and was selected to fill a vacancy with the Automobile Manufacturer’s Association in Detroit, Mich. When Pearl Harbor was attacked, he was well placed to help organize motor city for the war effort and worked with government, corporate and union officials to ensure bickering interests wouldn’t derail the production of war material for Uncle Sam.
Working for everyone
While in Detroit, he dealt with everyone and everything – becoming, in essence, the automobile industry’s representative to wartime America. When race riots threatened production, he sought solutions and lobbied the Federal Housing Administration to provide assistance to black workers working at Ford plants. He worked with labor leaders Walther and Victor Reuther to ensure Detroit’s workforce was housed, fed and ready to provide what our fighting men in Europe and the Pacific needed. The enemy, in other words, wasn’t workers – but fascism.
And produce they did. By war’s end, George Romney’s patriotism and industrial statesmanship helped produce nearly a quarter of all U.S. war production. If the American economy won the war, then it was in no small part due to George Romney’s talent and leadership in this most critical of wartime industries. The tanks and planes pouring out of Detroit factories made the difference on countless fronts all over the world, and George Romney, by then Mr. Detroit, had a hand in making every one of them.
Little wonder, then, that after the war his rising stature catapulted him to further success. George Romney became an executive at an appliance firm and spent a year as a roving assistant to the CEO where he worked in every part of the company, learning the business from the ground up. When a strike threatened production, Romney helped head it off by convincing workers that he, too, was one of them by truthfully stating who he was. “I am no college man,” he said. “I’ve laid floors, I’ve done lathing. I’ve thinned beets and shocked wheat.” He, like them, knew what it was to work for a living and because of that they trusted him even as he understood them. As during the war, they were partners, not adversaries.
From there George Romney became the head of the struggling American Motor Corporation – one of the small fry automakers constantly on guard from being gobbled up by corporate raiders or the big three. He successfully turned around the company and, once again working with labor leaders, instituted reforms such as profit-sharing that are commonplace today. Though he became wealthy through stock options, he felt his salary was excessive and returned a portion of it to the company he headed.
All the while George Romney remained a passionate member of his faith – the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter Day Saints. He gave 23 percent of his income away in tithes to his church and other charitable endeavors. He spoke out in favor of improved race relations and an end to discrimination, raised his children and eventually ran for and won election to the governor’s office on a centrist campaign that decried both the influence of big labor and big business. Though he was a member of a church that did not allow blacks to become leaders, he nonetheless vigorously supported the civil rights movement and worked to end racial inequality while in office.
Getting political
Indeed, his experience and background led him to conclude that blacks were as capable and equal as whites. For a man who worked with laborers and needed to keep Detroit’s wartime factories humming, it was obvious to him that discrimination was not just inefficient, but evil – a position that got him in trouble with his own church. He met with Dr. King and led a Detroit solidarity march after violence in Alabama erupted during the Selma to Montgomery marches there in 1965. As in much else in his life, George led the march from the front – and received 30 percent of the black vote when he ran for re-election, unheard of for a Republican both then and now. Even as the GOP was turning toward its odious Southern strategy and allowing Dixiecrat racists to join the party’s ranks, George Romney held fast to his pragmatic, liberal Republicanism that saw equal opportunity for everyone as not just an American value, but one ordained by the just and loving God he believed in.
Romney ran for president twice, first as a half-hearted effort to thwart Barry Goldwater from winning the GOP nomination in 1964, and then more seriously in 1968. George Romney was open with his faith and his wealth in these campaigns – inviting reporters to investigate every aspect of his life. His interest in and concern for the poor and disadvantaged continued on the campaign trail, and he even he went on a 17-city tour of American inner city ghettos that his advisers thought was politically foolish. He didn’t ridicule or attack left-wing militants he found residing there, but sought to engage them, going so far as to meet hippies in San Francisco’s Haight-Ashbury district. Clearly, his Mormon missionary work in the slums of urban Scotland gave him the training to speak with and see the point of view of all kinds of people, including those most ideologically opposed to him.
On foreign policy, his support for American intervention in Vietnam turned to outright opposition when, after a visit to that country, George said he was subjected to immense of pro-war “brainwashing” by U.S. military and diplomatic officials there. For a man like George Romney, long used to dealing with business chicanery, labor schemes and political duplicity, smelling out BS was apparently second nature by then. The remark unfortunately sunk him with hawkish conservatives who turned, en masse, to Nixon, while Norman Rockefeller, the establishment’s preferred candidate, stood poised to sweep George aside.
Bowing to the inevitable, George Romney ended his second campaign for the presidency in February of 1968 – leaving the field to Nixon, Rockefeller and history. As one presidential historian noted, George Romney Sr. was not cut out for the White House because he was simply too honest and decent to make him an effective campaigner. George’s earnest pragmatism, which allowed him to climb his way out of poverty and to the very heights of American business and politics, simply wasn’t enough to win the White House. Indeed, it handicapped him in such a way that one political observer said watching George Romney run for the presidency was like “watching a duck make love to a football.”
The difference between father and son
The same could be said of George’s son, Mitt. Unlike his father, however, Mitt has abandoned the centrist, pragmatic, liberal Republicanism that propelled his father to the Michigan governor’s office. Whereas his father was too honest and decent for the job, media outlets today consistently rank Mitt’s campaign for the White House as one of the most dishonest of recent memory.
Where George ran on his achievements as governor, Mitt runs from his – refusing to admit his administration was instrumental in bringing significant health care reform to the state of Massachusetts. George assiduously fought for and won the votes of minorities – Mitt has done nothing but alienate them to the point where scientific polls report 0 percent of African Americans supporting George Romney’s son. Where George Romney reconsidered hawkish intervention after discovering the facts, Mitt has doubled down on the idea that American might makes right no matter what.
Perhaps most important, whereas George was a man who could sympathize with working people due to his own hardscrabble background, Mitt thinks the working poor are parasites who have the temerity to think they deserve food, shelter, health care and education.
In considering these two men, father and son, one cannot help but come to the conclusion that they are opposites in almost every way. Even their careers differ. Whereas George Romney helped make actual products – stuff that won wars – Mitt Romney specialized in producing paper, the proceeds of which he then hid in offshore tax shelters. George Romney is a man most Democrats today could vote for. Mitt Romney is so polarizing that many in his own party despise him. How could two men, father and son, become so different?
The difference between the two in many ways reflects their differing life experiences – and which is reflected in the changed attitudes of their party as a whole on a raft of issues. Romney’s conservatism was pragmatic and realistic – he had values, but they were couched in the reality and diversity of the world as he found it. Men from poverty, like George Romney, don’t expect the world to cater to them because of who and what they are. Rubbing elbows with those who are different necessarily breeds acceptance that the world is complex and platitudes often deceiving. What matters is what works, not what makes one feel good.
Mitt’s conservatism is the conservatism of those who, like him, were born into unearned wealth and power. Privilege of this sort brings its own handicaps in the inability to comprehend the realities of daily life for those less well off than you. Having not struggled to the top, one can’t hope to understand the motivations and circumstances of those on the bottom.
People work to please you; you don’t work to please them. Entitlement and a sense of superiority over the vast majority of one’s fellow human beings quickly gets instilled as one’s operating ethos. As a result, the social distance between rich and poor becomes so large that, to the entitled rich who did not earn their wealth, the poor seem not only different, but alien and threatening as well.
The poor’s cry for a fair shake, intuitively understood by George Romney, becomes grasping, angry envy to his son – a man simply incapable of understanding what it means to have to work for a living. For Mitt, work is a lifestyle choice while, for his father work was a survival strategy – and therein rests all the difference between two men, father and son, who would have and would be president and the two brands of conservatism they represent. Which one would you vote for?