Humphrey For Tate

Looking for more information on my late first cousin once removed, former Philadelphia Mayor James H.J. Tate, I found this speech urging his re-election - against Republican challenger Arlen Specter - given by none other than then-Vice President Hubert H. Humphrey (below) on October 24, 1967, exactly two weeks before the Philadelphia mayoral election.

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For a former Mayor who believes, as I do, that the quality of life in America depends upon the vitality of our local governments - and particularly the governments of our major cities - it is always good to be back in Philadelphia.

Or at least it has always been so since that day in January, sixteen years ago when Joe Clark and the Clark team - Dick Dilworth, Jim Finnegan and Jim Tate among them - entered City Hall with brooms in hand and with the dream of rebuilding a great city. From that day on Philadelphia and Philadelphians have had the benefit of municipal leadership unsurpassed in the nation - a municipal leadership which has demonstrated a genius for having the right man in the right position at the right time.

In the early 1950s, Philadelphia's problem was to re-structure its government to create a first-rate civil service system with opportunity for all regardless of race, color or creed and to attract this nation's finest administrators. Joe Clark did that job.

With a firm basis in modern government, Philadelphia was ready to take on the task of urban renewal by the late 1950s. Commerce increased. Industry was encouraged to return to the city from the suburbs. A modern transportation system was built. That was Dick Dilworth's great contribution to Philadelphia. And now in the 1960s, when the attention of our entire nation is focused on the blight of poverty and despair in urban slums . . . when that despair has all too often broken out in violence . . . when Philadelphia's need, like that of all our other major cities.

Make no mistake about it: this is a troubled time. Every city in this nation requires political leadership of the highest quality. It requires a Mayor who knows, as Jim Tate knows that the citizens must have strict and impartial enforcement of the law. It requires a Mayor who understands~ as Jim Tate understands, that the ultimate solution is not a night stick but an open hand of opportunity . . . not unemployment relief but a job . . . not a jail cell but a decent house . . . not a bigger juvenile court but better schools.

That is the kind of leadership that Jim Tate has provided.

For although this is a troubled time, it is also a time of hope and a time for builders. It is a time of unprecedented prosperity. It gives us the chance and the means to open new doors of opportunity for millions of fellow Americans.

That is the kind of opportunity and the kind of challenge we Democrats have always welcomed.

It is certainly not a time for the timid and fainthearted - for those who are afraid to dare, to hope to dream, and to face difficult odds - whether those odds are in an election or in eliminating a city's slums.

Jim Tate has that kind of courage . He fights for the things he believes in and he believes in Philadelphia . As President of the National League of Cities he fights for the programs which America's cities need.

Jim Tate is a scrapper.

Jim Tate is a worker.

Jim Tate is my kind of Mayor - one who loves his city and never ceases to work for it.

Philadelphia is a leader in a great national struggle for a better America.

And Jim Tate has helped earn you that position of leadership. But as Election Day approaches in Philadelphia, as we look ahead to the next session of Congress , and as we look ahead to 1968, we are forced to ask whether or not that struggle is going to be allowed to continue. Is America, with its unprecedented prosperity, its know-how, its democratic traditions and free institutions, going to complete the task of guaranteeing the rights to life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness to every citizen?

When the 200th anniversary of our independence arrives in 1976, will we be able to say to the world, "Yes, Americans are free from poverty! Yes, all Americans are getting, the best education our wealth and knowledge can provide! Yes, every American , regardless of color or creed, regardless of birth or background, has a full opportunity to develop his human capabilities! Yes, this great nation is ready to use its power and its food , and its factories to help build a stable, peaceful, prosperous world for all mankind!"?

I am proud to say that the Johnson-Humphrey administration has been building tirelessly toward those goals. I am proud to say we have taken up the sacred trust passed on to us by Franklin Roosevelt, Harry Truman, and John Fitzgerald Kennedy, and I am proud to say we have done it under the banner of the Democratic Party.

But just as we finish putting into law the platform we put forth in the last election, the Republican opposition begins to learn lip service for it.

"Well , all right," they say - "that's what the people want, so let's say we are for it. But, take it easy, it is time for a pause?"

What they really wanted all along was a pause - in fact , they wanted to pause before we started.

That is why 80 per cent of them voted against the Model Cities appropriation in 1967.

That is why they voted against rent supplements in 1966 and 1967 - 97 percent the first time, 93 percent the second time.

That is why they voted against the War on Poverty in 1964 and in 1966 - 87 percent the first time, 88 percent the second.

You can go right down the list of progress programs -- food stamps, Medicare, civil rights, education, minimum wage . It's the same story - an almost unblemished record of foot-dragging and obstruction.

What this nation really has to ask itself - today, tomorrow and next year - is whether it wants the leadership of a party that has proven over the course of decades that it has faith in the future and knows how to build toward it . . . . or whether it wants a party that is content to stand still and look backward. Does America want Democratic Builders or Republican Stand-Patters?

And if anyone among us thinks it is possible to simply stand still in these times, he is sadly mistaken .

If you're not moving forward, you're falling behind.

Now there are occasionally good people who have been stranded in the wrong party by accident of birth. But at this critical moment in the history of America it is time to think of the team that can offer support in depth for the kind of future you want.

Jim Tate stands for that future , and he has a lot of friends -like Lyndon Baines Johnson and Hubert Humphrey and forward-looking Democrats - who are right there with him.

Philadelphia needs Jim Tate. America needs Jim Tate. He needs your help. I ask you to give that help.

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Mayor Tate won re-election, but I almost cried when I read Vice President Humphrey's speech.  As we all know, we did stop making progress going into the seventies, and so much progress has been reversed for the past forty years.  And the Republicans, when you get right down to it, haven't really changed much.  We never could answer "Yes" to those questions in 1976 that Humphrey rhetorically asked nine years earlier, and we won't be able to answer "Yes" to them in 2026 either. 😢

I Am a Tate

Some time ago I mentioned that James H.J. Tate (below), the mayor of Philadelphia in the 1960s, was my grandfather's cousin.  Allow me to elaborate.

My father told me when I was a kid that Mayor Tate was related to us, but he didn't specify how.  I grew up thinking he was a distant relative.  My father's immediate family settled in northern New Jersey in the fifties after moving there from Philadelphia, where the rest of the Maginnis family remained.  When I started researching my ancestors at the turn of the millennium at the local Mormon ward - yes, I live in New Jersey, not Utah, but the Mormon Church is everywhere now - I learned that my paternal grandfather's mother was a Tate, and only then did I take my father's insistence seriously.  After 9/11 happened, I got distracted from my family research.  

Then, while looking up my surname in the archives of my paternal grandfather's hometown paper in the New Jersey town where he moved his family to from the Philadelphia area, on Newspapers.com just a few weeks ago, I found the obituary from a Philadelphia newspaper for my great-grandmother Maginnis from 1967, which identified her as Mayor Tate's aunt!

If I had stuck with my family research at the Mormon ward - at a time when I didn't have the Internet - I would have found that out earlier.  But why didn't my father tell me before?  Come to think of it, why didn't my grandfather tell me before?

After serving as mayor of Philadelphia, Jim Tate retired to the seaside town of Longport, New Jersey, which is just across the short strait connecting Great Egg Harbor to the Atlantic Ocean from Ocean City, a seaside resort my father took me and my sister every summer during the seventies.  Former Mayor Tate lived in Longport until his death in 1983 - and my father never thought to take us to meet his father's cousin?

Jim Tate is generally regarded as one of the best mayors Philadelphia has ever had, as he was able to govern what is usually an ungovernable city.  He opened jobs on city-contract infrastructure projects to black construction workers during the civil rights era, and he was able to quell the 1964 race riot in Philadelphia.   A longtime city councilman, he loved Philadelphia, a city native Philadelphian Joe Queenan once called a tough city to love, and his service to the city brought about an uncharacteristic period of good governance for Pennsylvania's largest city. 

And no one in the family would tell me more than the fact that we were related to him somehow.  I feel cheated not knowing of Mayor Tate or knowing him when he was alive.

But now I know, and I and fact proud to say that he was and is my first cousin twice removed.  I'm also proud of my great-grandmother, Mary Marcella Tate Maginnis, who was a force in her own right.  Active in many charitable causes, she also served as president of the Alliance of Catholic Women, a now-defunct ladies auxiliary group of the Philadelphia Archdiocese that operated a shelter for girls and women that helped them find employment, promoted education through funding scholarships, and assisted poor families.  She and her nephew exemplified service in the City of Brotherly Love by living up to the city's name.

And she was clearly an influence on her oldest child, my grandfather, as he was known to give back to the community in Montclair, New Jersey by buying and rehabilitating apartment houses for affordable housing.  An electronic engineer by trade, he thought providing affordable housing was more rewarding than designing TV sets.

I have volunteered for the occasional arts group, and of course I gave money to help a friend in Spain get back on her feet.  Politically, I have supported Martin O'Malley, a former Maryland governor who, like Jim Tate, saw public service as noble and had effectively governed an ungovernable city (Baltimore in O'Malley's case), and I supported him in the interest of seeing a repeat of John F. Kennedy's rise to power - O'Malley wears his Irishness on his sleeve.  Though I know I can never live up to my ancestors' record of service, I still have their understanding of the greater good as well as a sense of Irish political identity. 

When I buy a product and hang on to it for as long as I can to avoid buying a replacement for as long as possible, my mother says I have my maternal grandmother's family in me, because that family would be just as miserly with the things they bought.  When I indulge myself in Irish identity politics or help a friend, I feel I have my paternal great-grandmother's family in me as well.  Therefore, as a descendant of my great-grandmother's family, I take pride in the words, "I am a Tate."