From Republican to hippie: my evolution, a party’s evolution

Photo: Norm Wheeler (middle, age 13), together with younger brother Jerry (left) and Michigan Governor George Romney, in Shelby in 1964.

By Norm Wheeler

Sun editor

I was raised in Shelby by Republicans. In the 1960s my father, Robert R. Wheeler, was the Republican chairman of Michigan’s Ninth Congressional District, stretching from Grand Haven to Traverse City up the shore of Lake Michigan. Republican activism ran in the family: my grandfather Neil Wheeler had been elected state representative in Lansing for one term (two years) in the 1930s. (I still have the chair he brought home from his stint in the Capitol Building.) So my father helped to elect his friend Sen. Robert Griffin, a member of the U.S. Congress from 1957-66. He was appointed to the Senate by Governor George Romney in 1966, and kept being reelected until 1977. He was later a Justice of the Michigan Supreme Court. Governor William G. Milliken was another of my father’s friends. So was Elly Peterson, chairwoman of the party from 1965-69, and candidate for the Senate against Phil Hart in 1964. That’s the year Gov. Romney visited Shelby and I shook his hand.

Guy Vander Jagt had supper at our house many times. He was our congressman from 1966-93. I watched him pace the shoreline in front of my grandpa’s cottage on Lake Michigan one day as he memorized his speech for that night’s Lincoln Day Dinner. As president of the local chapter of the Young Republicans, I walked the neighborhoods of Montague, Shelby, Hart, Pentwater, and Ludington passing out campaign leaflets in 1966 for Vander Jagt, and in 1968 for Nixon and our young state representative from Manistee, Dennis Cawthorne, another frequent guest and friend.

The Republican party of the 1960s tended to be fiscally conservative and socially progressive. Griffin voted in favor of the Civil Rights Acts of 1960 and 1964, the Voting Rights Act of 1965, and the 24th amendment to the constitution (no poll tax). Milliken always called himself a moderate, championed environmental issues, and helped pass Michigan’s bottle return bill, which took effect in 1978. Milliken supported Kerry against Bush in 2004, as well as Clinton against Trump in 2016, and Sen. Gary Peters against Terri Lynn Land in 2014. “Increasingly, the party is moving toward rigidity, and I don’t like that,” he said in 2008.

It was easy to be a Republican then and there. Oceana County was rural, most folks were asparagus and fruit farmers or related to one, there was a strong Dutch Calvinist ethos in all of West Michigan, and most everybody listened to Paul Harvey on the radio at noon every weekday. Life was ordered and predictable, a series of Norman Rockwell paintings, the epitome of Thornton Wilder’s play Our Town. People valued honesty, hard work, taking care of each other, self-discipline. People were proud when their kids went off to college and became scientists or journalists or doctors. And new residents in town were welcomed.

Or at least it was that way on the surface. Every summer the population of the county doubled when the Mexican migrant workers came to pick asparagus and fill the camps around the cherry farms. They picked the cherries, plums, peaches, pears, and apples, and then headed back to south Texas in November. Some of their children came to school with us in the spring and fall and played Little League with us in the summer, so we all had friends among them. But it was understood that we shouldn’t mix too much. Some of their families stuck around and became members of the community, but we weren’t supposed to date.

And we were banned from reading certain books at Shelby High School. My English teacher, Marty Fuce, told us that she was forbidden by the superintendent, Mr. Rottschafer, from teaching: The Catcher in the Rye, Othello, The Grapes of Wrath, or To Kill a Mockingbird. But we could read them on our own and write reports for extra credit. The way she praised my paper on The Catcher in the Rye taught me that I could be a good writer. (And Orwell’s 1984 taught me about the manipulation of language through propaganda and the subversion of truth. Remember doublespeak? War is Peace, Freedom is Slavery, Ignorance is Strength?)

While I was in high school the Vietnam War was cranking up. Several local boys were involved. Jim Martin was killed. He had been running up and down the football field for the Shelby Tigers just a couple of autumns before. Dave Kamhout used to play basketball with us at Henrys all the time. When he came home from ’Nam he was skinny and shaking, he couldn’t catch the ball or shoot it. He apologized. “It must have been pretty bad over there,” I offered in my profound innocence. “It was really bad,” he said. “I can’t talk about it.” When I came from Olivet College for my first visit back home in the fall of 1969, I went to the Friday night dance at the Shelby Pavilion to catch up with everyone. A guy I knew from Ferry stood pale and thin by the wall. He had been to ’Nam. He explained that his insides were in a colostomy bag under his sweatshirt. But he would recover, he said. My friend Fred Wenk also came back from there with a Purple Heart. 

At Olivet College in 1969, the specter of the war was ever present. On December 1 they had the first draft lottery. We were listening on the radio to the dates and the numbers being drawn in Paul Miller’s room in the dorm. When they picked his birthday, July 9, they picked number 1. Mine was 55. Everybody who kept a GPA of 2.0 would keep their 2-S student deferment and stay in college. But there were some guys who struggled to do that, so after the semester exams they were crying and begging professors to give them a break or they would be drafted and sent to Vietnam. The pressure on the professors was enormous. And the despair of the drafted was profound. I told my parents that I would go to Canada if I had to. By the time I graduated in 1973, they weren’t drafting anybody, and we were almost out of Vietnam.

My Republican philosophy, especially about the necessity of that war, had already started to change. When George Romney was running for president in 1967, he said he had come home from visiting Vietnam in 1965 “brainwashed” by the U.S. military about the progress of the war. Now he was against the war. That ruined his campaign. (If you watch Robert McNamara’s documentary The Fog of War, or the Ken Burns series The Vietnam War, you’ll see that what Romney said was just what was happening: Westmoreland and the military were lying to us.) Then the tumultuous year of 1968 happened. We sat stunned in front of the TV over and over: in January, the 26-day North Vietnamese Tet offensive sent thousands of American boys home in caskets; Martin Luther King was assassinated on April 4; Robert F. Kennedy’s assassination followed on June 6; and then in August the Democratic National Convention in Chicago was soaked in tear gas. As my friend Jim Crockett sings in his song Last Believer: 

“It was in the 1960s when I came of age.

Times they were a changin’, my life turned a page.

Detroit was burning, there was hatred all around.

One by one they shot my heroes down.”

Many young Republicans had turned into anti-war hippies by the spring of 1970 when the Kent State massacre happened on May 4. Everything stopped. We demonstrated on our college campuses. American public opinion tilted against the war, the Civil Rights Acts of 1964 and 1968 had been passed, but it had taken several years of marches and demonstrations and riots and deaths and our country being torn inside out and tipped upside down.

And now it’s 2020, and the political atmosphere and sense of doom feel just the same. The COVID-19 pandemic has killed more than 210,000 Americans. The president and first lady have tested positive. Demonstrations for Black Lives Matter against police brutality turn into riots, poisoned by radical rabble-rousers with guns. A reality-show, chaos-loving president compulsively lies and then calls the truths uncovered by diligent journalists “fake news.” Propagandists on Fox News and talk (hate) radio propagate terrifying conspiracy theories (ObamaCare death panels?!) and manipulate addicted viewers (like my Republican parents before they died) with hatred and fear, just like the Two Minute Hate in Orwell’s 1984. I think of the line from the W.B. Yeats poem The Second Coming: “The best lack all conviction, while the worst are full of passionate intensity.”

If you’ve read this far, I can hear you thinking, “OK, boomer.” And it’s true: I’m a baby boomer hippie, like so many others. But if you, dear reader, still hue to the conservative values of our now gone parents and grandparents, I finish with this plea: Please hang on to those values and get rid of this president. Biden is more like the Milliken and Griffin and Romney Republicans of our childhoods than Trump is or ever will be. It is a secret ballot, after all. It’s up to you …

Meanwhile Jim Crockett’s song keeps soothing my brain:

“I will be the last believer in a pure and simple way,

From a country way of living, til my dying day

I’ll be the last believer in the power of the dove,

I will be the last believer in love.”