When Public Office Was a Lesson in the Chemistry of Change

It is almost, almost impossible now to conjure what it must have been like, in that age not too long past, when to take up a career in politics was to arm yourself with a shining lance of noble service, and not a toilet plunger.

To talk to a man who lived and labored in such a time, when public service was not a sucker’s game or a sniggery late-night comic’s joke, but a calling, and a damn fine one--well, it’s like having a chat with an American history book, or just maybe, if time indeed loops back upon itself, with a man from some conceivable future America.

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A small book for schoolchildren, “Californians Then and Now,” stamped as property of the Los Angeles City Schools, was published in 1966, just after the Watts riots, when ethnic sensitivity was newly abroad in the land.

By 1966, the man profiled in Chapter 4, Augustus F. Hawkins, had already held public office for more than 30 years, initially in Sacramento as California’s first black assemblyman and a man who came within two votes of being elected speaker, and then in Washington D.C., as the first black congressman from west of the Mississippi.

Gus Hawkins is 92 now; he lives not in the city where he grew up, the city that sent him to Congress, but in Washington, the place where he served for so long, the place his wife prefers.

Hawkins was a young man on his way up, studying at UCLA “as a stopgap until I could go to the Berkeley school of engineering.” But it was the Depression, and Berkeley got delayed and delayed until, well, politics happened.

It was 1934, and the nation was in a bad way when there arose in California a movement called EPIC, End Poverty in California. EPIC was headed by the radical writer Upton Sinclair, who was running for governor.

EPIC was later characterized as “the high tide of radicalism in the nation,” and at the time as the creature of “maggot-like hordes,” railed the Los Angeles Times. The hordes were millions of middle-class, working-class and unemployed, and when Sinclair looked like a real threat to win, Republicans and Democrats drew together with moneyed interests to stop him.

In the midst of this, Gus Hawkins was drafted to run for the Assembly. To this day, he says wistfully, “I think I would have made a better engineer than a politician.”

He never forgot the Hungry ‘30s, when one in three Californians was out of a job. His was a meat-and-potatoes liberal agenda; he dogged Congress after Congress, president after president, to raise the minimum wage. He was behind the fair employment practice provision of the landmark 1964 Civil Rights Act. He pushed more and better education; after he retired in 1990, he set up the nonprofit National Council on Educating Black Children. And most notably, he and former Vice President Hubert Humphrey wrote the Humphrey-Hawkins Act of 1978, meant to guarantee full employment, but eventually diluted and even ignored by successive presidents.

Much of the energy of the 1960s and ‘70s seems to have dissipated, not least the appetite for politics as a catalyst of change. Hawkins can remember when the public--just voters and citizens--filled the old Elks Auditorium every Friday afternoon to talk policy and politics. Every Sunday afternoon, they were back, at the Los Angeles Forum at 12th and Central.

“It’s been my experience that when people are doing reasonably well, they couldn’t care less about wasting any time in civic activity--they’re too busy making up for the past, or looking for entertainment, taking care of themselves.” And in the meantime, on his old Capitol Hill stomping grounds, “Everybody’s investigating someone else and not getting their work done.”

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By 1990 he would be the senior member of the Congressional Black Caucus, but in 1935, he was just a freshman assemblyman driving to Sacramento, seeing along the way signs that reminded him that black and white still mattered in the Golden State: “No Negroes Admitted Here.”

“We’ve always had racism. It was more legal in the old days than now. At least now you have the opportunity to fight it legally that once you did not,” and yet the old hatreds may simply be better dressed--”perhaps even greater now, and I don’t know what the explanation is.”

Something in him still regrets that lost engineering degree. If it were his to do again, “I doubt I would run for public office. My nature is along the line of being more of a scholar, going into mathematics and science.” The most important type of math in public office these days is fund-raising. “It always griped me to have to go out and raise money for running for office . . . and it’s becoming prohibitive for the right type of person to run for public office.”

The Californian of then and now supplies his own modest resume: “I don’t think things would have been any different if I had gone in another direction; someone would have done what I’ve attempted to do.”

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Patt Morrison’s e-mail address is patt.morrison@latimes.com