Over the weekend I watched Broadway Melody of 1940 with my father. It stars Fred Astaire and George Murphy, and there’s the usual wacky plot where Astaire is stuck on Eleanor Powell but Murphy ends up as her dance partner through a case of mistaken identity (SUPER SURPRISING SPOILER ALERT: Astaire gets the girl in the end).
My father mentioned that George Murphy was elected senator from California in 1964, and how shocking it seemed at the time that an actor had been elected to such a high office. I later learned that after the election, Tom Lehrer wrote a song about George Murphy (which you can find online). It’s not one of Lehrer’s better efforts; the rhyme scheme telegraphs his weak-tea laugh lines, and the whole thing rests on (a) the fact that Murphy was an ex-actor and (b) his unfortunate remark that Mexicans made better farm laborers than Americans because they were “built close to the ground.”
Murphy made that comment during a debate over the Bracero program, which allowed Mexicans to be brought the U.S. as what today would be called guest workers. And it shows how things have changed, because in 1964 Republicans were solidly behind the Bracero program, while unions and Mexican-American organizations hated it because, in the words of a contemporary news article, it “create[d] a large surplus labor pool which misplaces and adversely affects American farm workers” (most of whom, in California, were Mexican-American) and tended to “depress laborers’ wages, aggravate severe unemployment and underemployment, and help create wretched living conditions.” President Lyndon Johnson, Governor Edmund “Pat” Brown, and even Tom Lehrer understood that, which is why LBJ ended the program. But those were the long-gone days when Democrats were interested in prosperity instead of power.