A Rage for Justice: The Passion and Politics of Phillip Burton.

The era of big government may or may not actually be over, but during the past year alone, Keynesian liberalism has certainly become the stuff of histories. Three notable, often brilliant accounts of postwar liberalism appeared in 1995. Two--Nelson Lichtenstein's biography of Walter Reuther and Kevin Boyle's The UAW and The Heyday of American Liberalism, 1945-1968--deal with the United Auto Workers, the anchor tenant in the house of '40s, '50s and '60s liberalism. The third, John Jacobs's marvelous biography of San Francisco Congressman Phillip Burton, is both a riveting and scholarly account of liberalism's fiercest and most able proponent on Capitol Hill during the late '60s and '70s.

Like Lyndon Johnson, Burton was above all a virtuoso at legislating--to the invariable benefit, in his case, of working people, the poor, and the environment. As Jacobs documents, Burton was a major force behind the enactment of OSHA, SSI, mine safety laws, and a vast enlargement of the national park system. Just as important, it was Burton more than anyone who transformed Congress from a semi-feudal network of unaccountable committee chairmen to a body where party caucuses actually could control the general direction of legislation.

And as with any history of Johnson's career, Jacobs's recounting of Burton dwells lovingly (and necessarily) on legislative machinations. Rube Goldberg had nothing on Burton when it came to cobbling together vast improbable machines. Burton consistently traded votes with conservative Southern members who wanted agricultural subsidies in return for their support of his agenda; he maintained a bloc of supporters whose votes could be moved around when the occasion demanded. (He once boasted he could get "110 votes to have dog shit declared the national food.")

Burton bills were exquisite political constructions. "Is there any state other than Kansas that did not end up with a park?" Bob Dole complained about one of Burton's masterpieces. Once, while talking with one of his proteges, California Congressman George Miller, Burton allowed that he regarded the GGNRA--the Golden Gate National Recreation Area--as "a thing of beauty." Miller responded that the park had many lovely features. "Not the place," said Burton, appalled. "The bill."

Jacobs's biography is particularly instructive in light of Newt Gingrich's ascent. Like Gingrich, Burton was no centrist; and like Gingrich, he was nonetheless able to build a cadre of congressmen committed to moving his agenda. Using the resources of the Democratic Study Group and the assets of a number of progressive unions, Burton cultivated congressional candidates across the country, and when he ran for Majority Leader in 1976, he received the support of 90 percent of Democratic freshmen. The Burtonistas had the clout to change the rules governing the selection of committee chairmen, but they came up literally one vote short in Burton's bid for the leadership position.

The same passions that fueled Burton's ascent ultimately undermined it. Burton was frequently all rage, spurred by his hatred of wealth and privilege to work harder and become more expert than his colleagues on all matters legislative. But the rage wasn't easily channeled, and as Jacobs tells it, one disastrous evening in 1972 it flashed out at Tip O'Neill, whom a drunken Burton challenged to a brawl in the middle of the Beverly Hills Hotel. The outburst convinced the future Speaker that Burton couldn't be trusted with a visible leadership position. Four years later, O'Neill's behind-the-scenes work against Burton's candidacy was a major factor in blocking Burton's rise. Burton continued with a famously productive career after his defeat, but the loss plainly gnawed at him. His Olympian bad habits--the drinking and other forms of voracious consumption--grew worse, and he died of a ruptured artery in 1982, at age 56.

Clearly, Jacobs has no aspirations to play a psycho-historian in this volume, but he's been obliged to plumb the sources of Burton's rage, which he reasonably locates in Burton's anger at his largely absent father. At the conclusion of his successful battle to create a large-scale Redwood National Park, Burton was asked by one environmental activist why he had fought so hard for the legislation--after all, Burton was notoriously allergic to anything outdoors. Uncharacteristically, he summoned up one of the few moments of his childhood when all of his family had been together: "Once when I was a kid, my parents took me to see the redwoods," Burton said. "I've never forgotten that." In a book mercifully devoid of psychological speculation, this scene stands out as the Rosebud moment.

Burton's proteges include many of the most effective liberals in American politics--most notably, former California Assembly Speaker and now San Francisco Mayor Willie Brown Jr., and Los Angeles Congressman Henry Waxman. Jacobs offers a wonderful account of Burton's cultivation of up-and-coming liberals in the Young Democrats and the California club movement of the '50s and early '60s. It is a measure of the crisis of American liberalism that while Burton left behind him an impressive array of individual politicos, the organizations where he nurtured them have all but vanished.

Burton also was an emblematic figure in the redefinition of the Democrats' core constituencies. When he first rose to power as an Assemblyman in the San Francisco of the '50s, he had a largely white working class constituency. A pioneering crusader for black, Asian, and gay rights, Burton saw his base, and that of his party, transformed over the next quarter century; he himself played no small role in transforming it. At one point in the early '80s, he welcomed Boston Globe writer Martin Nolan to his San Francisco office, noting, "You're the first straight, white male to walk into this office in months." Two years after Burton's death, Jeanne Kirkpatrick coined the phrase "San Francisco Democrats" as a code-word to describe how the party had estranged itself from Middle America.

But while Burton worked feverishly to bring new groups into the Democrats' orbit, it's hard to find anyone in American public life who also delivered more for angry white men. It was Burton who won major changes in safety regulations in the mines, and it was Burton who came up with unprecedented job-and-income security provisions for loggers whose livelihoods were threatened by the expansion of the Redwood National Park. Burton's was a liberalism of class as well as race, of the '30s as well as of the '60s. In the downsizing '90s, the Democrats need his spirit as much as they do his smarts.