To Angelenos, Kenny Hahn Was a Beacon of Big-City Liberalism, Public Service

No matter how many parks, public buildings or manhole covers ultimately bear the memorial inscription “Supervisor Kenneth Hahn,” everyone who ever encountered Los Angeles’ best-loved and most influential local politician will continue to remember him as “Kenny.”

There is nothing false or forced about such intimacy. For when Hahn died Sunday at the age of 77, he was a man heavy not so much with years or honors as with respect and regard. And if much about the career of this unapologetic and tireless advocate of activist government now seems charmingly anachronistic, that sentiment is an indictment of the crabbed poverty of our current politics, rather than of his lifelong conviction that good government is synonymous with the common good.

Though a proud and partisan Democrat, Hahn was an instinctual practitioner of what historian Arthur Schlesinger Jr. once identified as the animating principle of the New Deal--”the politics of remedy.” He believed in solutions, not ideology. And the problems he thought worth resolving were the everyday hardships of the ordinary Angelenos, among whom he was born and lived all his life.

The liberal tradition in American democracy--to which Hahn comfortably belonged--has long encompassed two complex and different experiences. One is cool, patrician, landed and intellectual--inspirational and programmatic. Its strengths and limitations were best described in James Madison’s famous assessment of his great friend and mentor, Thomas Jefferson: “He believes all men are equal not because he feels it in his heart, but because he reasons it must be so.”

The other liberal tendency is sweaty, populist, most often urban and responsive to experience--pragmatic and improvisational. Franklin D. Roosevelt--one of the rare public men who embodied both these impulses--summed up this more recently felt approach in his strategy for the New Deal: “We’re going to try something. And if that doesn’t work, we’re going to try something else.”

The archetypal representative of this vigorous new big-city liberalism was another, decidedly unaristocratic, 20th century New York politician, “Big Tim” Sullivan. Though proudly Irish American and up to his bowler’s brim in both vice and Tammany Hall’s corrupt machinations, he took up the cause of the Jewish immigrants then flooding into his lower Eastside ward, helping to pry open the door of New York’s Democratic machine and ensuring the newcomers’ entry.

“Big Tim,” other bemused Tammany loyalists said, “was as comfortable talking in some shul with his hat on as he was genuflecting bareheaded at Mass the next day.” He also never forgot his personal debt to the Jewish socialist woman whose instruction had been the one inspiring light of his passing brush with formal education. As a state legislator, he broke with Tammany’s leadership and cast the decisive votes against child labor and in favor of women’s suffrage.

There was nothing of Sullivan’s raffishness in the firmly Protestant Hahn, a devout member of the Church of Christ, a loyal husband, the proud father of two children who followed him into public service--all the commonly decent attributes of a life now trivialized as “family values,” lived out within a few miles of the Flower Street house where he was born.

What Hahn and Sullivan did share were deep, personal roots in urban America’s fertile but unsteady soil, and a conviction that its people’s problems have an undeniable claim on our common conscience.

As our tiresome “cultural wars” continue to set one moral stereotype against another, it is worth recalling that Kenny Hahn’s visceral egalitarianism was the product of a muscular evangelical social tradition extending back to those revolutionary English Parliamentarians who held that “the poorest he hath a life to lead as the greatest he.”

In the case of Hahn, who was born and grew up among Los Angeles’ discriminated-against Nisei and African American people, loyalty to that moral tradition meant that his focus on problem-solving politics never excluded taking risks on behalf of those who had been wronged.

He successfully fought an unpopular battle to win monetary compensation for Japanese American county employees who had lost their jobs because of the World War II internment. He was the only California elected official to personally greet the then-controversial Martin Luther King Jr., when--fresh from the streets of Birmingham--King visited Los Angeles.

A few years later, after the Watts riots, Hahn took up one of the McCone Commission’s most concrete proposals and led the fight to build the first public hospital in South Los Angeles. When King was murdered, Hahn was instrumental in renaming the facility for him.

Kenny Hahn was white; most of the people who returned him to office again and again for nearly half a century were black. In an era in which the assumptions of identity politics have become a nearly unassailable orthodoxy, Hahn’s unself-conscious representation of his mainly African American constituents’ interests and aspirations is both a rebuke and a sign of hope: political inclusiveness is not social incoherence; pluralism is not tribalism.

Those are lessons that Los Angeles’ battered, dispirited civic democracy badly needs to hear, and Kenny Hahn taught them with an authority born not of theory, but of concrete acts of public service that made ordinary people’s lives easier and more just.