Title | Julander, Rod OH10_203 |
Creator | Weber State University, Stewart Library: Oral History Program |
Contributors | Julander, Rod, Interviewee;Buchanan, Patricia, Interviewer; Gallagher, Stacie, Technician |
Description | The Weber State College/University Student Projects have been created by students working with several different professors on the Weber State campus. The topics are varied and based on the student's interest or task for a specific assignment. These oral history assignments were created to help Weber State students learn the value and importance of recording public history and to benefit the expansion of the Weber State oral history collections. |
Biographical/Historical Note | The following is an oral history interview with Dr. Rod Julander. The interviewwas conducted on July 2, 1980, by Patricia Buchanan, in the location of 5548 South2425 West, Roy, Utah. Dr. Rod discusses his experience in Utah politics and theDemocratic Party in Utah. |
Subject | Politics and government--Utah; Political science |
Digital Publisher | Stewart Library, Weber State University, Ogden, Utah, USA |
Date | 1980 |
Date Digital | 2015 |
Temporal Coverage | 1980 |
Medium | Oral History |
Spatial Coverage | Weber County, Utah, United States, http://sws.geonames.org/5784440; Box Elder County, Utah, United States, http://sws.geonames.org/5771875 |
Type | Text |
Conversion Specifications | Original copy scanned using AABBYY Fine Reader 10 for optical character recognition. Digitally reformatted using Adobe Acrobat Xl Pro. |
Language | eng |
Rights | Materials may be used for non-profit and educational purposes, please credit University Archives, Stewart Library; Weber State University. |
Source | Julander, Rod OH10_203; Weber State University, Stewart Library, University Archives |
OCR Text | Show Oral History Program Dr. Rod Julander Interviewed by Patricia Buchanan 02 July 1980 i Oral History Program Weber State University Stewart Library Ogden, Utah Dr. Rod Julander Interviewed by Patricia Buchanan 02 July 1980 Copyright © 2014 by Weber State University, Stewart Library ii Mission Statement The Oral History Program of the Stewart Library was created to preserve the institutional history of Weber State University and the Davis, Ogden and Weber County communities. By conducting carefully researched, recorded, and transcribed interviews, the Oral History Program creates archival oral histories intended for the widest possible use. Interviews are conducted with the goal of eliciting from each participant a full and accurate account of events. The interviews are transcribed, edited for accuracy and clarity, and reviewed by the interviewees (as available), who are encouraged to augment or correct their spoken words. The reviewed and corrected transcripts are indexed, printed, and bound with photographs and illustrative materials as available. Archival copies are placed in University Archives. The Stewart Library also houses the original recording so researchers can gain a sense of the interviewee's voice and intonations. Project Description The Weber State College/University Student Projects have been created by students working with several different professors on the Weber State campus. The topics are varied and based on the student's interest or task for a specific assignment. These oral history assignments were created to help Weber State students learn the value and importance of recording public history and to benefit the expansion of the Weber State oral history collections. ____________________________________ Oral history is a method of collecting historical information through recorded interviews between a narrator with firsthand knowledge of historically significant events and a well-informed interviewer, with the goal of preserving substantive additions to the historical record. Because it is primary material, oral history is not intended to present the final, verified, or complete narrative of events. It is a spoken account. It reflects personal opinion offered by the interviewee in response to questioning, and as such it is partisan, deeply involved, and irreplaceable. ____________________________________ Rights Management All literary rights in the manuscript, including the right to publish, are reserved to the Stewart Library of Weber State University. No part of the manuscript may be published without the written permission of the University Librarian. Requests for permission to publish should be addressed to the Administration Office, Stewart Library, Weber State University, Ogden, Utah, 84408. The request should include identification of the specific item and identification of the user. It is recommended that this oral history be cited as follows: Julander, Rod Dr., an oral history by Patricia Buchanan, 02 July 1980, WSU Stewart Library Oral History Program, University Archives, Stewart Library, Weber State University, Ogden, UT. iii Abstract: The following is an oral history interview with Dr. Rod Julander. The interview was conducted on July 2, 1980, by Patricia Buchanan, in the location of 5548 South 2425 West, Roy, Utah. Dr. Rod discusses his experience in Utah politics and the Democratic Party in Utah. PB: Rod, can you tell me something about your early background and some of the things you remember about growing up in Weber County? RJ: Yes, my early political background? PB: Yes. RJ: I moved into Weber County when I was in the seventh grade, both of my parents are native Utahans, but we had traveled and lived in Arkansas and Iowa my first years. My mother’s family had been very active politically, in the Republican Party in the Brigham City area of Box Elder County. I have a great grandfather who was a state legislator and rather prominent, and other relatives down to the present time who are prominent in Republican politics. I started out as a Republican. I can remember in the election of Wilkey and Roosevelt, my first political recollections and I can remember getting into a big argument with a friend who suggested that Franklin Roosevelt was a nice person. I knew better and let him know so. Then I went through a period of my father disliking Harry Truman to a great extent. So, between anti-labor and anti-democratic I had quite a propagandized childhood. I can remember years later, after I had learned about Roosevelt and Truman--I was talking to my father about Truman. I was saying some nice things about him and he said "don't tell me anything good about him, I enjoy hating 1 him too much". That's the kind of family I grew up in. I was, other than just talking politics, and listening to my parents, was very political all through high school and college. I did nothing political, until I accidently got into the field of political science. I had never attended a mass meeting or done anything but vote, and most of that was Republican. PB: How did you get into Political Science? RJ: As an undergraduate, I was in Philosophy. For a minor, I had minor work in English, Anthropology, and History. When I had to pick a minor for my graduate studies, I thought it just as well be History. So, I went to the History Department. I was commuting, so I had to go up when I could get there, which was not the office hours of the Dean, or Chairman of the History Department, so I knocked on his door. I could see him in there and he didn't answer, so I knocked again, still no answer. He totally ignored me. I thought, well maybe, he can't hear too well so I opened the door and called out his name, and he just came unglued! He screamed, he stomped, he turned red in the face and told me to get out of here and don't come back until it was an office hour. He just became livid, so I closed the door and thought wow, there is no way that I can study History, and then I had decided to write my Master’s thesis on the "Political Philosophy of Ralph B. Perry’s Theory of Democracy." So, I thought well, Political Science would be a good area to go along with that, so I went down and took my first Political Science class as a graduate student. I never had to do any of the preliminary work or anything. It was quite handy for me and I got excited about it and switched majors very quickly, and that's when I became interested in the electoral process. I know a lot of people who are in political science, academically, who don't like to become involved in electoral politics. 2 To me, being a political scientist and not involved, is like being a chemist and never going into the laboratory. I decided that I ought to see what was going on. I attended a mass meeting as a Republican, and managed to get myself elected to the State Republican Convention. I took ten people with me to that mass meeting, my wife and I and eight neighbors and ten other people showed up and on the first vote, it was a tie of ten to ten. I didn't even pick up one extra vote. One of the people that I took with me ran against me for state delegate, at the insistence of an official of the L.D.S. Church. He was in charge of the welfare program and he was kind of running things, patriarchal fashion. In fact, there was so little separation of church and state, that everyone was calling each other brother and sister at the meeting. The chairman of this meeting wasn't doing anything. This church leader was, so when one of the people I brought with me happened to be a counselor in the Mormon Bishopric, he came over for the specific purpose of voting for me. He wasn't interested in politics. Well, I did kind of a cute thing, when I saw that there was a couple of people there that didn't like me too well-we had a little property dispute, so I knew I was going to have some problems getting elected, so, I called my friend over in the corner and between us we nominated all of our opposition for other positions. Chairperson, vice chair, committee people and all of those. So, when it came time to elect the state delegate, they didn't have anyone to run against me. That's why this old welfare leader picked one of my friends to run against me. He demanded that he run, so he voted, and he and his wife voted for me. So, we tied, and we voted again, and I won on the second ballot. They were so mad at me slipping in and winning that one that they wouldn't tell me what the vote was. They just said you won, go on-get out of here. That was the 1960 election. I got looking around at the 3 Republicans, there were two problems that I had, one was the caliber of people, but caliber isn't the right word, more the philosophy of the Republicans running, Wallace Bennett, George Dewey Clyde for the Governor, and Richard Nixon for President. It was just impossible to see supporting any of those people at the top of the ticket. As I looked at the extreme conservatism of the Utah people running, I felt pretty much lonesome, but I looked at two or three other people running and asked if I could help in their campaign and they said, "Sure, I'll be in touch," or one of them said, "Yeah, go work with the young people", and that was the end of that, so, I was quite disenchanted, that was at a time, the Republican party, was definitely an 'Old Man's' party. I was twentyfive when I started teaching at Weber, and that was the first year I was involved and they would pat you on the head and in essence say, comeback when you are dry behind the ears, as it were. Wow, so I was quite upset. I did nothing. I was a delegate, but I did not work in any campaigns to speak of. So, I felt somewhat uncomfortable in that election. They wouldn't use me and I felt like they were waiting for old people and I wasn't ready to wait, so in the election of 1962, I was moved into Ogden, and a good friend of mine, who was also a student of mine, I helped him manipulate the Young Democrats election, that year. He had just come off of an L.D.S. mission, so we rounded up a bunch of his friends and he went down and without anybody knowing, we all went down and joined the Young Democrats, and took over and elected him president. He entered the political scene with a big bang, and he suggested that I switch parties with him. I was a bit reluctant to do so, so readily, but I was then approached by some of the leaders of the Democratic Party and told that indeed, they would use me in a political campaign. So, I decided what the heck. So then, in ‘62, I attended the Democratic mass 4 meeting and I got into the Democratic Party. And, the first thing they did was to hire me to be the campaign manager for the whole county party that year. Well, so my very first campaign that I was involved in, I was the campaign manager for the county and my friend, Stewart Campbell, who was responsible, in great measure, for getting me to switch parties, was the campaign manager for Blaine Petersen, Congressman. We were going around all day, acting as if we knew what we were doing, and then at night we would sit down and panic with each other-what do we do tomorrow? And try to figure out how one ran a campaign. It was the first campaign for both of us, but we managed to survive. Petersen was defeated, by a small margin, but all of the county elected officials were victors. In those days we would-before I mention that, I just might mention one thing about my family— my mother, I didn't ever have the courage to tell her I had switched parties. So, she finally read it in the newspaper. Her only comment was, "What can I tell my friends?” as if I had committed a crime or something, and she never did tell her father. He was ill, and they were afraid it would kill him, so, they never did tell my father--No, I mean my grandfather. I have one Aunt who is a Democrat in my whole family on either side, so I was a great disappointment for both sides of my family, pretty much, in those days. PB: How did they campaign in Weber County during the 60's? RJ: The main thing we did was to run a very effective canvas. The reason we could do that was because we still had the flower fund in 1960. Every county employee, donated-I don't remember, if it was 1 1/2 or 2% of their salary to the flower fund to send flowers to ill people or people who had died, and of course, if nobody had died, and the other hundreds and thousands of dollars, we would spend running a canvas, and in those 5 days we could run a good canvas for about three thousand dollars. We had lots of money and that's why Republicans were never elected in those days in Weber County. The legislature was gerrymandered, we split the county lines East and West. In those days each county was allowed to apportion themselves and so, since Weber County was controlled by Democrats- Democrats controlled the appropriate apportionment process, pretty much. They tried to make it bipartisan but we usually managed to get it sliced from East to West, and thus cut into the Republican Districts of the East bench without ever giving them any elected officials. The other part was that we had the finances to run a good campaign from all of the county employees. We would have people go door to door to every door. We would pay them to go to every door in Weber County and ask them what their political affiliation was. In the 60's the early 60's, people weren't embarrassed to tell you what political party they belonged to. It wasn't a matter of secrecy, but not only that, they belonged to a party. They didn't as they are today, there was not nearly as many as there are today, who claim to be independents. Later on, in running canvases, we would ask them what political party they belonged to and then, if they said they were independent, as over half of them did, we would say who are you going to vote for in the election and name the Republican and the Democrat, and maybe we would throw out two offices and if they were going to vote for one of those two, we would put them as a weak Democrat and if they were going to vote for both then we would put them as a strong Democrat. We could figure out their party that way. In the first part of the 60's we managed pretty well to identify themselves, to get their phone numbers and their voting districts. Then on Election Day we would have one person in each voting district in the county who just sat there all day long and whenever 6 anyone came in to vote they would have a list of all the registered voters who had indicated that they were Democratic or, leaned Democratic. As they would come in to vote we would mark their names off, then from the central office, their name would start to be marked off about noon. We would call that voting precinct, talk to the person and then on another list they would name off the people who had not yet voted. We, in the central office would mark, on our list, who had not yet voted and we would get on to the phones. We would have thirty telephones going, all afternoon. You haven't voted-would you like to vote? At two o'clock we would check again. If they hadn't voted we would call them back and at four o'clock and at six o'clock. Along with that, we did some driving to the polls, but not too much of that, and we did some babysitting, but not too much. None of those efforts have been too effective in Weber County. Mostly it has been simply badgering them into getting to the polls. It's also been true over the years, that whenever the Democratic Party has run a good canvas as we call it, this get out the vote effort, when we have run a good canvas we have carried most of the elections. When we have run a bad canvas or none, then we have lost an occasional seat or two. So, that's really been the key to success. That first year that I was campaign manager, quite by accident, we got a candidate that I thought was about totally incompetent. He had run against George Frost. George Frost was very popular and a very effective commissioner. Well, he ran against George Frost, which gives you an idea of the mentality of this fellow, it wasn't a very bright thing to do, however, he was defeated soundly in the convention. Frost in the middle of the election got another job which he took, so he had to withdraw as a candidate. Well, state law then required that we pick up as our candidate the second place person. So, this guy came down and said "Well 7 okay, I'm your candidate". I had already accepted money-they paid you two hundred dollars a month to run the campaign and I had already accepted the job, so there I wasstuck with electing somebody who I thought was totally unfit for office. So, I said, well, we are going to have a political rally tonight. Why don't you just give a little speech? He said, "What will I say"? I said, "Just say I'm happy to be here, onward and upward, gung-ho Democrats, you know, the same old garbage". He said, "Oh, write it out for me", so I wrote him out a little speech, and it was so bad! "H—E—L—L—O, I-A-M H-AP-P-Y T-O B-E H-E-R-E--Just terrible, terrible!! PB: Can you give me his name? RJ: No, because he's running again this year! Well, so I sent him out to Ron Clare to go door to door, I figured he wouldn't do too much harm that way. Nobody would see him, and we went ahead and elected him. I was so embarrassed at having participated in that, that two years later, I helped find a candidate and helped defeat him. We defeated him in the convention. I think in the convention that year, we got 85% of the vote and this candidate got 15%. It was quite an interesting experience for my first time out. Where we still do the canvases, generally now, they are done by telephone, because it is just so expensive. We would run a canvas of Weber County for three thousand dollars and pay people to do it. The last one we ran for Ted Moss was 85,000, with not very many paid employees doing the canvas. Most was done by volunteers, and we did not have the poll sitters in very many of the polls in the 60's and earlier, the early 60's and earlier, we also would have one person from the party sitting in on the election to make sure that nobody cheated, a watcher, now we never have watchers, or maybe a dozen watchers, or people who volunteer, simply because nobody will do this kind of 8 work free anymore, and there just isn't the manpower. The cost of the canvases has diluted it considerably. Other costs of a campaign have grown immensely. The first congressional campaign that I was involved in, in 1962, Blaine Petersen spent approximately $15,000 dollars and his opponent spent approximately the same. The election was very close. In 1970, another very close election, Gunn McKay, spent an excess of $75,000 dollars and his opponent spent about that much, I'm not as familiar with that cost. Television has meant a great deal of difference in the Congressional races, but the costs have gone up similarly fast, and embraces, the lower races, the House of Representatives and the Senate. The first time I ran for the House of Representatives I spent about three hundred dollars, the second time, I ran for the Senate and for just the primary election and I spent over a thousand dollars for just the primary and that was a difference of about six years, so inflation has hit politics worse than any other area I suppose, and not just all television, all kinds of expenses have gone up enormously in that period of time. PB: Rod, when did you, personally, first get involved in running for office? RJ: Ah-ha! This tape is going to sound like everything in my life was an accident. In 1968, Governor Rampton was anxious to make sure that there were candidates in every race and winning, of course, as much as possible. Well, it came the day before the dead line, I had no intention of running. I lived in one small part of Riverdale, up on the hill near Washington Terrace. It isn't even a full block. I think they followed a telephone line or a power line along there and there may be two dozen houses in Riverdale that are up on Washington Terrace. That's where I lived, so I had no connection with Riverdale, no connection with Roy, and even less West of there. The Republican who was in office 9 had been raised in Hooper, was a city councilman in Roy, and on the Stake High Council of the Mormon Church in Riverdale, so he was well known and besides that he was in business. His name, Fowler, was on big neon signs every time you drove through Roy. They owned Fowler's Burger Bar there. So, I did not have any great illusion’s that it was a good time to run, apparently, no one else did either, because no one had filed. So, the governor's administrative assistant called and said, "Well, Rod, if you'll just file, well, then we can substitute." If you pass the deadline without anybody filing well, you are dead. You cannot add a candidate in. He said, "You go ahead and file, because we're short of time, and we'll find a candidate after that and replace you". I said, "Okay, I can do that for the party". That was pretty naive, wasn't it? Two, three, four, five weeks went on, six weeks, and finally I called the governor and said, "Hey Gov, when are you going to find a candidate"? He said, "Oh, we've found one Julander", and so I was a candidate. I did not have a great deal of money. I went door to door throughout Roy and much of Riverdale. Hooper, I paid very little attention to, and got beat there, disastrously bad. But, then I got beat almost everywhere, so, it was really a very poor election. It demonstrated to me one thing though, I always tell my students that a person should never run their own campaign because you get so close to it, you can't see what's going on. Well, by the time Election Day rolled around, I had developed the illusion that perhaps I was going to win after all, and I got slaughtered, as in my more rational moments knew I would. That was the end of that, but I kind of got the bug. So, I ran for the senate, No, I did not run for the senate initially. I was appointed to the senate in 1972. Another accident-by the way! I had been promised the job of liquor commissioner by Governor Rampton. I had, had experiences in different parts of 10 government. Especially the electoral process and I wanted the administrative experiences. It is one of the fields I teach, and a significant administrative experience, so, when the position of liquor commissioner became open I talked to the Governor about it and he said fine. Well, one of the other commissioners, Norma Thomas, torpedoed me on that particular job. She did not want me to be there-why, I'm not sure. My friend, Stewart Campbell, by this time was a liquor representative. He was selling booze. So she went to the Governor, or had somebody go to the Governor and say, “Well, this Stewart Campbell is bragging that he'll get all kinds of favors when Julander is a liquor commissioner.” Well Rampton was so frightened of that-he was so scared, that he pulled off and he said, "I'm sorry Rod, but you can't be liquor commissioner, would you like to be head of Public Relations for the highway department?" Well, I didn't want to be that, so I thought I'd rather have him owe me than pay me with that so he said,"Do you know anybody that might be good in that job?" Well, I immediately thought of Monte Baily, who was at that time the state senator from my district. He was a teacher, but wanted to get out of education, and so the Governor thought he was alright as a Senator and he gave him the job and I convinced the Governor to appoint me to the spot in the State Senate. So, all I served was one budget session, twenty day session, and the main consideration of course was the budget. We did some 'housekeeping' legislation on top of that, and that's about all. I can remember the only bill that I introduced, this majority leader, Democrat came and asked me if I would like to introduce a bill, and I said, "Sure", and so he handed it to me and the whole content of the bill, the new part of the law was "And Truck". They had passed a law taxing the contents of trucks and in revising the law to tax the contents, they forgot to tax the 11 trucks along with it. So, for one year people could have gotten away without paying the taxes on their trucks, property taxes, so, in order to solve that they allowed me to introduce this bill, "And Truck". Other than that my importance in the Senate was not all that glorious. The thing that impressed me most about the Senate, was not only my impotence as a freshman senator, and the really lack of power of most of the people in the Senate, and the concentration of power in the hands of a very few people. One thing that particularity disturbed me, was when the budget was put together, the subcommittees of the appropriations committee met to deal with appropriations of each general subject matter. I was on Government Operations which was the least important of all of them. When we each got our recommendations put together, the budget committee cut out of that to get it down to meet the budget for the anticipated revenue. One of the things they cut out was money for Ballet West. Senator Merrill Jenkins was an employee of The First Security Bank, and the day the appropriations bill came up, he went to lunch with George Eccles. In the meantime, I was told by at least three Senators, that I could not amend the appropriations bill. All it would do was just open up a bag of worms and everyone would want to amend it for their pet projects. It was a general rule that no Senator offered an amendment to the Appropriations Bill. We came back from lunch, and Merrill walked around to each group of Senators--you go to lunch and come back at 1:30 P.M., and then from 1:30-2:00 P.M. is when the politicking goes on, and the session starts again at two. We were standing around chatting and Merrill came up to our group and different groups and just smiled and joked and said, "Oh, the man wants Ballet West money put back in". Everybody says Ha, Ha, Ha, and that was all there was. Well, at two o'clock the appropriations bill came up, and a Senator from 12 Utah County, Rose, moved to amend the appropriations bill. It frustrated me somewhat that George Eccles, the bank president, could amend the bill, but I couldn't as a member of the State Senate. It was kind of frustrating, but it was an interesting experience. I was defeated in the primary election the next time after that. My opponent, Darrell Renstrom, got 4 1/2% of the eligible vote in the district, and I got 4 1/4%. A very small voter turnout that year decided who was going to continue on as the State Senator. PB: What campaigns were you involved in, in the 1970's? What were they like? RJ: I helped Ted Moss in 1964 and 1970. I did not help him in 1976. I helped Rampton in a couple of elections and then I helped some County Commission and some other candidates. The Senate campaign is really the one to look at the difference in, because I was involved in one way or the other in three of those, but not as much in '76'. In 1964, for Ted Moss, we had over 400 volunteers in Weber County. Young people, primarily, high school and college kids that were willing to donate their time and work and become involved politically. In 1970, WOOPS, it was the 1970 campaign that had the 400 volunteers. Let’s just start the Moss thing over right here-okay? In the 1964 campaign we had generally the active party people involved, more women than men, but primarily housewives, and older people, that is beyond college age. They worked their own voting districts, went door to door, and were committed to the Democrats and the party. By 1970, these people had pretty well dropped out, they hated the young kids, I can remember one woman walking out of the convention saying why we let this crud be at our convention, meaning anyone that was twenty-two to twenty-four years old or younger, and especially the ones that had long hair. Well, that one year we had about 13 400 volunteers, the most massive organization ever in the history of Weber County, I think. We had more titles than you can imagine trying to give everybody a title to do, and we had some of the most interesting positions you can imagine. We had one man and one woman whose campaign position was the campaign 'flirt'. The guy would go to the high schools and flirt with the girls, and the girl would flirt with the guys, and they would get people to volunteer then. One side benefit from that was, the guy who was our flirt got carried away and went out and flirted with the meter maid and sweet talked her so well that anyone that had a Moss sticker and parked close to our headquarters was not given a parking ticket. About everyday he'd go out and thank her and sweet talk her a little more just to keep her on our side. We had so many kids with long hair; we had our headquarters there on Twenty-Fifth Street, in a building that had a small store front and then it had a rather large basement. And so, we put all of the long hairs in the basement out of sight, and the black guys, and all of the ones who might have a problem with Weber County residents. They were the hard workers though, and they really did a fantastic job. Towards the end of the campaign they did get some money and pay some of them, but much of that was a volunteer effort. Directly under me, I was the Weber County Chairman, directly under me was a Chicano, and under him were in the office, in the basement, was the basement crew doing the telephoning and the stamp licking and all of that. Under him was a black kid and a kid with a pony tail. We did have, that's where we had our phone bank, so in the afternoons before the school was out, pardon me in the mornings before school was out or early afternoons, we would try to get some of the party people down and we'd get, oh, fifteen or twenty of the regular party people, which is a way drop from what it had been. One of the women who 14 worked there once a week tells the story of, she was sitting telephoning. Her daughter, her daughter’s boyfriend was the black supervisor there. They didn't make that too public. In 1970 that was still kind of taboo, but at any rate one woman turned to this mother and said how do you feel about working for a black person? She said, “Oh, it doesn't bother me, my daughter takes orders from one all the time.” PB: Really? RJ: During the 1970 campaign, Cal Gould’s' wife was the office manager. She would come in every morning, and when I came in she would jump all over me, and say "Oh Rod, we found wine bottles all over in the garbage can again today!" I'd say, "Terrible, terrible, terrible, I'll take care of it", and every night I'd buy wine for all of the workers that were still campaigning. It was kind of a fun campaign. There was a lot of activity and a lot of interest. In 1976, I did not become involved in the Moss campaign for a couple of reasons. One of the reasons that Moss lost was that they could not recruit people to work in the campaign. In that six years, they dropped from 400 volunteers down to 30 or 40. I don't know for sure, I was not that involved, Dolly Plum, the State Coordinator for Moss asked me to become involved. I went down a couple of times but it just didn't gel. The greatest difference that I can see from the early mid-sixties into the middle of the seventies is the change in the volunteer status. They have even developed a concept now, called the paid volunteer. That has to be some kind of contradiction. That is the only way, today, that you can get people to do political campaigning. I think there are two reasons for this. One, lack of interest, people are just turned off of politics, more and more, and also have more and more other things in their lives. Two, from about 1966, 67, 68, someplace in there, people began to have less and less commitment to a 15 political party. Even today, those that call themselves Democrats, don't have the party commitment that you saw in the 1960's. That's probably been dying since the 1930's on but it made a drastic drop in the late sixties. In the 1968, 1970 campaigns, there were people who were working very hard, donating a lot of time to one Democratic candidate and one other Republican candidate, or signing ads for a Republican, while on the campaign staff for a Democrat. The Coordinator for the McGovern campaign in Weber County, Roseann Kump Hahn, Kump at that time, now her name is Hahn, signed an ad for the Weber County Commission candidate. She did this at the same time that she was the County Coordinator for the McGovern people. They immediately called me from Salt Lake at that point and screamed and yelled and wanted me to take over, because they had to get rid of her. I said, "No way, you are not going to get rid of her", so we patched it over by telling everybody that she did it out of ignorance. We patched it over that way, but still there is a great deal of that kind of commitment. The people who are committed, are committed to issues, or they are committed to a particular organization. As we see more and more people drop out of party politics, the vacuum is taken up, make that filled, by people who are special interest advocates. We have come to what I call "caucus politics." Now at State conventions and County conventions, now, more than ten years ago a candidate must satisfy the representatives or delegates who are representatives, of the various caucus groups, the U.P.E.A., U.E.A., Labor groups, the black groups, Chicano groups, women’s groups, youth groups, and all these different people now have control of the convention. People who go to the convention are far more committed to a group, than they are to the Party, or an issue, or a candidate. I 16 think this is very unfortunate, and it is more indicative of the dying states of political parties in America. PB: Thank you, Mr. Julander. 17 |
Format | application/pdf |
ARK | ark:/87278/s6wd8k16 |
Setname | wsu_stu_oh |
ID | 111602 |
Reference URL | https://digital.weber.edu/ark:/87278/s6wd8k16 |