King and His Times 

This year, even more than usual, the welkin rings with inflated praise of Martin Luther King Jr. I understand, I guess. When I was young I regarded him as a hero, so I have some sympathy with those who still do.

King spoke for people who were not so much oppressed as humiliated; and though the two things ought not to be confused, humiliation is sometimes harder to bear than oppression and breeds more bitter feelings. This helps explain what Norman Podhoretz once called, during King’s lifetime, “the almost insane touchiness of many Negroes.”

King himself never struck me as “touchy.” He seemed above petty feelings, even those that would have been quite understandable. And nobody should belittle his courage. He faced the real risk of violent death daily. And not all the countless death threats he received were empty, as events proved.

All the same, I can’t agree with those who celebrate his “eloquence.” Early on it came to seem — to me, at least — platitudinous bombast. In this he was typically American. Most of the oratory we celebrate is sorry stuff. The rhetoric of Franklin Roosevelt, Douglas MacArthur, and John Kennedy is embarrassing to read now. “The only thing we have to fear is fear itself.” “Old soldiers never die; they just fade away.” “Ask not what your country can do for you; ask what you can do for your country.” What, if anything, do these things really mean? There is a fatal whiff of the self-consciously “memorable” about them.

Likewise King’s saying that his children should be judged “not by the color of their skin, but by the content of their character.” Race is more than skin color; and who else ever used a phrase like “content of their character”? King was straining for alliteration at the expense of meaning.

Oddly enough, his sentence has been most often appropriated by neoconservatives who would have opposed him if he had lived to our day. They insist, implausibly, that King was an apostle of color-blind individualism who would have opposed the collectivist swerve the black civil rights movement took after his death.

As his biographers have made clear, King subscribed to the facile Marxism that was fashionable in the 1960s. He saw racial conflict in terms of “class struggle.” His solution to every social problem was a stronger centralized state. It’s quite probable that he would have become even more collectivist if he had lived longer. That was his mental habit to the end, and he showed no signs of changing.

The essential banality of King’s mind was noticed even by younger black leaders, who derisively nicknamed him “de Lawd,” after the character in the old play Green Pastures. It’s startling that King seemed so old-fashioned so early; he was only 38 when he was murdered. Yet he already seemed passé. He was past the peak of his influence; his leadership was waning, his following dwindling.

That was one reason his assassination was not only shocking, but rather surprising. It seemed odd that anyone could still hate him enough to kill him. By 1968 he’d become a rather quaint figure.

Like Lincoln and the Kennedys, King owes his posthumous reputation and symbolic stature to his assassination. If he’d lived longer, he’d have been overtaken by personal scandal or sheer overfamiliarity. A shocking death saved him from fading into the oblivion of the spent force.

King’s assassination inspired inevitable parallels with the Kennedys. But so did later revelations about his boundless lechery and his plagiarized doctoral thesis, inconvenient as these were to liberal mythology. All three men had been prematurely canonized as heroic martyrs. We can now see their actual mediocrity. Their most famous words have become trite, branding them men of another time, of no permanent interest.

The current encomia of King are giving today’s young people a thoroughly false impression. If America had a man of the future in 1968, it was not King, but an older white man: the former movie actor Ronald Reagan, who had become governor of California and was already being hailed as presidential material.

It was the anti-Communist Reagan, not the pro-Communist King, who really caught the temper of his time. And for some inscrutable reason, he survived an attempt on his life.

Joseph Sobran