Blood of the Liberals, though officially a memoir is also a political history of the liberal point of view and its progression from the time of Thomas Jefferson to the present day.  Divided into three parts, we see the liberal viewpoint through the eyes of three members of Packer's family - his maternal grandfather, George Huddleston, his father, Herbert L. Packer, and George Packer himself.

Packer takes us through the career of his grandfather, a liberal Democrat from Birmingham, Alabama.  As a representative in Congress, Huddleston fought hard for the rights of every individual to own a piece of land and run his affairs without interference from the federal government, often losing the battle.  He felt those rights belonged to all races, but he quickly learned to keep the thoughts quiet in Klan-conscious Birmingham.  When it came to the New Deal in the 1930s, Huddleston was against it because he felt it was too much government interference.  But starving people can't feed themselves with ideals, and they voted Huddleston out of office.  He never ran again.

The second part of the book takes us through the life of his father.  Herbert Packer was born to Jewish parents, about whom he never spoke or wrote.  Packer knows nothing about his paternal grandparents except what they looked like in the few pictures he has.  He has little information about his father's childhood.

Herbert Packer was an intellectual.  He believed that the mind should solve all mankind's problems if they were just analyzed properly.  He felt that the real power was in the mind, and the mind should be unfettered and allowed to study and analyze every bit of information to get at the truth.  He earned a law degree from Yale, and finally took a teaching position at Stanford University in California, across the country from his New York home.  He went to liberal Stanford during the turbulent 1960s, the most stressful time to be a college professor.

Blood of the Liberals is an interesting look at liberalism and its ups and downs.  It is also a sensitive look at a family of liberals, and how the wins and losses affected family life.  Even though I don't like politics in general, I found this book to be very interesting and enlightening.