Conservatives on Facebook are forever referring to me as a Harvard liberal, which I suppose is literally true, given that Im both a liberal and a Harvard graduate, but of course they mean to imply that Harvard made me a liberal. In fact, the man who made me a liberal was born 104 years ago today, in 1910, the Year of the Comet, in the most Republican county in America, Owsley County, Kentucky, at Pebworth. My great uncle Earle Angel was for all practical purposes my adopted father, and my earliest source of political wisdom. He never used the word liberal, that I recall, but was my embodiment of one. He was an ardent supporter of FDR, voting for him four times, the last time, he told me, with an absentee ballot filled out on the hood of a Jeep in Belgium. He was the greatest man I ever knew, a crack shot at 80 and an astute observer of politics until his death in 2005 at the age of 95. His service in World War II, during which he fought in the Battle of the Bulge left him with a deep distrust of the military, a love for peace that never left him, and frostbitten feet that bothered him the rest of his life. After FDRs death, he was a great fan of Harry Truman, and of racial integration before his time; he was an integrationist at the same time everyone else in Heidelberg was voting for George Wallace for President. He did not buy into the Eisenhower cult; in his view, the military was run by idiots, and the higher the rank, the bigger the idiot. He loved Bert Combs and told me about the political rally for Happy Chandler during the primary in 1955 in Breathitt County in which Combs supporters turned loose a flock of geese, long before John Ed Pearce wrote about it in his book. It was a private joke; Chandler had been accused of shooting a lame goose earlier. As Earle put it, Chandler, who won that election, cordoned off Breathitt County from any state funds for his four year term. The principles he taught, that government ought to help the underdog, a deep distrust of the military and those in power, a desire for racial harmony and justice, and the idea that peace is something to be sought at all cost, always informed my ideas, and do so today. He was a carpenter and a contractor, and ultimately worked for the state highway department, and was the embodiment of a working class Democrat, something nearly extinct today. He could never understand why poor people wanted to vote Republican, and neither do I. The Earle in William Earle Treadways name comes from Earle, and so do many of the political stories that I tell him to this day. I miss Earle every day, and know that no one would have been more pleased than him to see Barack Obama elected President in 2008. RIP Earle Angel (1910-2005)
Posted on: Wed, 24 Dec 2014 23:03:06 +0000
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