The heart of political activism: Five questions for Bob Haisman

This interview is the latest in a series at Daily Kos called Five Questions. We’ll put five questions to a wide variety of politically engaged people, both the renowned and some you’ve probably never heard of. 

Bob Haisman became a political activist in 1960 at age 15, working alongside his mother to elect John Kennedy, and he hasn’t stopped since. He’s actively worked in every Democratic presidential campaign since then and has recruited members for the local Democratic Party of Oak Park in suburban Chicago, registered voters, and traveled to Iowa, Wisconsin, Indiana, and Ohio to help spread the word about candidates on the eve of many presidential primaries.

Haisman has been involved in peace and justice advocacy work for more than 50 years, beginning with protests that eventually led to several arrests during the Vietnam era. He regularly volunteers at the local food pantry and local overnight homeless shelter and has served multiple terms on his church’s “Faith In Action” committee in each of the last four decades. Professionally, Haisman taught high school history and humanities for 30 years at Hinsdale South High School in suburban Chicago. He joined the local teachers’ union during his first week of teaching and went on to hold every local office, from negotiator to local president. Haisman then served on the Board of Directors of the Illinois Education Association/NEA and was elected IEA president in 1993 (with 71 percent of the vote in a three-candidate race) and again in 1996. He retired from teaching in 2000, but he never stopped being what he described as a “vaccine against cynicism” for his students.

SHER WATTS SPOONER: What inspired you to get involved in political activism?

BOB HAISMAN: My parents were involved in Dorothy Day’s Catholic Workers’ movement, so I learned from an early age about justice and activism. I walked picket lines with my father at least three separate times when his plant was on strike in the ‘50s and ‘60s. My mother was our Democratic precinct captain until she was in her 70s! I started helping her walk door to door when I was 7—carrying a thermos, an umbrella, and her extra candidate literature—during Adlai Stevenson’s first campaign against Eisenhower in 1952. I loved campaign work—it  was in my DNA!  Plus it was time with my mom. As I entered my teenage years, she gave me more and more responsibility. In 1960, my Mom and I campaigned for John Kennedy. We worked two precincts—because the neighboring precinct captain had died in June of 1960. My mom made every one of the “first contacts,” and I was the delivery boy. But I actually got to talk to folks when my mom was running behind. It was a different era—my mother “worked” people until she got their commitment to vote for Kennedy. She made a minimum of five contacts at every house in the precinct. My mother made sure everyone was registered to vote—everyone—even the small handful of Republicans who found their way to our west-side precinct. My father was “the closer.” He was a union man—a factory worker who never graduated from high school, who drank too much and as a result he slurred his words a lot. But he had the absolutely best three-minute, six-minute, and ten-minute talks on why every person needed to always vote Democratic, all three invoking the memory of FDR. I internalized them, but I so wish now that I would have had made tapes of my father’s legendary “FDR Talks.”

While the election of John Kennedy was a “Democratic thing,” it was also deeply significant to my whole family that a Catholic had been elected president. My dad celebrated Kennedy’s election with a number of “boiler-makers” with his cronies. My mom gave thanks for Kennedy’s election by saying the rosary (all day!) and by going to a special Mass at our parish church. So it is no wonder that the assassinations of John, Bobby, and Martin almost did us in.