Unflagging Democrats

Ida Kinney sits on the sofa in her small house on Daubert Street in Pacoima and greets two visitors with a smile. She stretches out her chocolate brown hand gnarled by rheumatoid arthritis, assembly-line work at Lockheed and the hard soil of her grandparents’ Arkansas farm.

At 93, Kinney can bear witness to how some things have changed over the years and how others have remained the same.

She can declare how the hatred, fear, despair and oppression that her family endured in Lewisville, Ark., compelled them to move to Santa Monica in 1922. She can attest to her mother’s divided loyalty as she cooked, cleaned and tended to the children of the rich while her own children went without.

And she can testify to how hard it was to persuade her black friends to switch from the “Party of Lincoln” and follow a brash Democrat named Franklin D. Roosevelt who promised to lift them out of the depths of economic depression.

“My mother didn’t want me to work for Roosevelt because he was a Democrat,” said Kinney, who was 25 when FDR sought the presidency in 1932. “Democrats were against the slaves. Republicans freed the slaves.”

As the Democratic National Convention unfolds this week in Los Angeles, Kinney and other longtime Democrats shared memories of past presidential campaigns and reasons for their enduring affiliation with the Democratic Party.

For Kinney, it is an allegiance that began at a community meeting in Santa Monica in 1932. Roosevelt’s representatives had come to pitch his plan for federal relief programs for laborers, farmers and the jobless struggling through the Great Depression.

The stock market crash of 1929, bank failures, factory closures and rampant unemployment left Americans--especially blacks who were among the poorest of the poor--searching for an economic savior.

Nevertheless, black voters were reluctant to cast ballots for a Democrat, Kinney recalls. African Americans who had migrated north and west from the Deep South found it easier to escape the reality than to let go of the memories of lynchings, cross burnings, beatings, rapes and some Southern Democrats who often turned a blind eye to their suffering.

“It was hard campaigning for Roosevelt,” she said, “because most blacks in California were Republicans.”

Still, Kinney persuaded several dyed-in-the-wool Republicans within the black community to vote for FDR, arguing that his New Deal would get the country moving again.

When Roosevelt began his inaugural address on March 4, 1933, declaring to the nation that “The only thing we have to fear is fear itself,” Kinney knew she had backed the right man.

“It was the New Deal, honey,” Kinney said. “That’s what took him into office. The banks were closed. All the people were out of work. People were shaky. Roosevelt’s promise was to put the working people back to work, and he did.”

Each time Roosevelt stood for reelection, Kinney was out in the community pounding the pavement and speaking out at neighborhood meetings.

“Of the two parties, the Democratic Party has pushed the hardest toward equal rights for all,” she said. “You can’t turn me away from justice.”

RFK’s Compassion Moved New Immigrant

The black-and-white television news footage of Atty. Gen. Robert F. Kennedy’s trip to Appalachia in August 1964 brought the reality of the mountain people’s hunger, illiteracy and dependency directly into Roberta Gillis’ living room.

“When I saw him caressing little hungry, dirty, barefooted children--which reminded me of my own childhood in an orphanage--I saw a sincere love and care on his face,” Gillis said. “Things like that had a profound effect on me. I cannot talk about Bobby Kennedy without starting to cry.”

Gillis, a 63-year-old retiree from Santa Clarita, said she first became fully aware of the Democratic Party after she immigrated in 1962 to New York City from the former Yugoslavia.

Homeless, hungry and unable to understand English, Gillis learned to read by matching the words with the photographs in the New York Daily News. She followed the attorney general, President John F. Kennedy and the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. in the paper as they waged an epic battle over civil rights.

As she sewed clothes in sweatshops and worked on factory assembly lines, Gillis clung to the belief that Democrats were fighting for the working poor, uneducated and voiceless.

“Bobby Kennedy was my hero,” she said. “A month after his assassination, I became a U.S. citizen and legally changed my name to Roberta in honor of Bobby Kennedy.”

Today, Gillis continues to be involved in Democratic politics. She was a delegate to the 1996 Democratic National Convention in Chicago and is now president of the Democratic Club of Santa Clarita.

FDR’s Groundbreaking Programs Held Hope

From Roosevelt and Truman to Kennedy and Johnson to Clinton and Gore, 101-year-old Sylvia Harmatz has seen them all occupy the Oval Office.

Sitting in a lawn chair on the grounds of the Los Angeles Jewish Home for the Aging in Reseda, Harmatz recalled raising Dollars for Democrats in 1935.

“I worked for Roosevelt when he was running for his second term,” she remembered. “I would knock on doors and ask people to make a donation to the Democratic Party.”

If the person at the door wasn’t a Democrat, Harmatz had a ready line: “You don’t have to apologize. You can still make a donation--and change your registration.”

Harmatz was willing to walk precincts for FDR because she believed his plan to blend private profit with government protections would prevent the nation’s economic collapse.

“He was very compassionate, maybe because of his disability,” said Harmatz, who relies on a walker to move about. “I think when you are in pain, you feel what the other guy is feeling too.”

On April 12, 1945, the day Roosevelt succumbed to a cerebral hemorrhage in Warm Springs, Ga., Harmatz was heartbroken.

“The day he died, I cried my eyes out,” she said, looking off into some distant place where only she can go. “It was just like it was someone near and dear to my family.”

When Vice President Harry S. Truman assumed the presidency after FDR’s death, Ed Haber enthusiastically backed the nation’s new leader.

“Truman made it in spite of the fact that he did not have a college education,” said Haber, 97, sitting in a recliner in his room at the Jewish Home for the Aging. “He was feisty. And he stood up for what he believed in.”

But Haber admires the country’s 33rd president for a far deeper reason.

Minutes after new Prime Minister David Ben-Gurion declared independence for Israel on May 14, 1948, Truman granted immediate recognition to the fledgling Jewish state.

Truman’s support of the Jewish state was attributed to his understanding of the horrors of the Nazi death camps and displaced Jews during World War II, as well as his personal religious beliefs that the Jews’ return to Israel represented a return to the Promised Land.

“Even though he may not have had anything to do with [the independence movement] directly, at the time he was serving our country, Israel was recognized as a state,” Haber said.

He Voted for FDR Over Moving to Africa

In 1936, Edward L. Kussman was a 25-year-old truck driver from East Los Angeles looking for a way out.

Kussman took to going to Communist Party meetings, where members seemed sympathetic to his struggle as the son of a black mother and a white father trying to make it in a segregated society.

“We were considered radicals at the time,” said Kussman, now an 89-year-old retired contractor living in Pacoima, referring to African Americans with Communist Party ties. “We were looking for anybody who was seemingly willing to give minorities an opportunity to get a job.”

When FDR launched his campaign for a second term, Kussman decided to cast his lot with Roosevelt, whom he considered the most favorable candidate at the time.

“It was either him or go back to Africa with Marcus Garvey,” Kussman said, referring to the leader of the Pan-African movement of the 1920s who preached self-reliance and self-determination for those of African descent.

Today, Kussman remains active in community affairs. He is a past president of the San Fernando Valley Branch of the NAACP and immediate past president of the Pacoima Chamber of Commerce.

As a foot soldier in the fight for freedom, justice and equality, Kussman has endured racism, intolerance, rejection and cynicism, yet continues to press on.

“Today, people have the privilege to speak up in ways that they didn’t have before,” he said. “If you don’t say you resent it, they won’t know.”