American Empire

by Joshua Freeman

  Barry Goldwater became the rallying point for conservatives. Largely behind the scenes, a group of experienced political operatives worked to secure him the 1964 Republican presidential nomination, quietly lining up delegates from nonprimary states (only sixteen states held primaries that year). In the primaries that were held, Goldwater won the bulk of the delegates. His chief liberal opponent for the nomination, Nelson Rockefeller, hurt his chances by divorcing his longtime wife and soon after marrying a considerably younger woman, who allowed her husband custody of their children, behavior seen as morally unacceptable by many voters. Goldwater’s success in winning the Republican nomination and his determination not to compromise his principles—in accepting his nomination he proclaimed that “extremism in the defense of liberty is no vice”—set up one of the most ideologically sharp presidential elections in American history, as the Arizona conservative challenged an incumbent president, Lyndon Johnson, who not only accepted Kennedy-style liberalism but vastly expanded it.

  LBJ

  Lyndon Baines Johnson spent much of his life trying to become president but fearing that his southernness would doom him to failure. Since the Civil War, only one southerner had reached the White House, Woodrow Wilson, and he had built his career in the North, as president of Princeton University and governor of New Jersey. Johnson’s roots lay south of the South, in the Texas Hill Country, where he was born in a small town to a poor family. After attending teachers’ college he taught impoverished Mexican American students before embarking on his life’s work, politics.

  Johnson was a large man—in his physical stature, his energy, drive, and ambition, his vision for the country, his insecurities and contradictions. He entered politics as a New Dealer and in 1937 won a seat in the House of Representatives running as an adamant supporter of FDR. Johnson sincerely embraced reform but not at the expense of furthering his personal ambitions. Even while projecting himself as a defender of the little man, he maintained close ties with Texas business interests, particularly in the oil, gas, and construction industries. After World War II, in tune with the times, he moved in a conservative direction, opposing most of Truman’s Fair Deal, supporting Taft-Hartley, embracing anticommunism, and voting against civil rights legislation. In 1948 he was elected to the Senate, becoming majority leader in 1955.

  In the late 1950s, Johnson tacked back in a liberal direction, especially on civil rights. After falling short in his long-shot bid for the 1960 Democratic nomination for president, he accepted Kennedy’s offer of the vice presidential slot. He hated the job, finding himself with little influence in the administration, shunted off on a series of overseas trips largely designed to keep him busy and away from the action. When assassination handed him the presidency, he seized it with manic energy and a sense of entitlement, immediately planning how to get Kennedy’s stalled legislation passed and how to get elected to the White House in his own right in 1964. With deeper ties than Kennedy to New Deal liberalism, Johnson believed he had the opportunity to fulfill the unrealized ambitions of Roosevelt and his followers.

  Johnson’s first success came with Kennedy’s tax bill, which Congress passed in February 1964. Over a period of two years it reduced the top nominal tax rate for individuals from 91 percent, a level that still reflected the tax policy adopted during World War II, to 70 percent, while the bottom rate fell from 20 to 14 percent. Corporate taxes were cut even more sharply. This unprecedented reduction had the effect that Keynesian economists predicted: output and employment rose sharply, driven by increased spending by consumers with more disposable income. The increase in economic activity generated enough additional taxes to make up for most of the decline in government revenue resulting from the drop in tax rates. This seemingly ideal situation, in which stimulation through fiscal policy did not lead to major deficits, cemented moderate Keynesianism as the orthodoxy among economists and policymakers.

  The civil rights bill, which Kennedy had submitted to Congress in the wake of the Birmingham demonstrations, presented a much greater challenge. The bill limited the use of literacy tests to block voter registration; forbade discrimination by race, color, religion, or national origin in hiring, union membership, and access to public accommodations (including hotels, restaurants, stores, and theaters); established a Commission on Equal Employment Opportunity; empowered the attorney general to bring suit against public officials who maintained segregated schools (relieving civil rights organizations and black parents of the cost of enforcing Brown v. Board of Education); and required the federal government to withhold funds to local programs, including schools, that practiced discrimination.

  Johnson had reservations about a federal desegregation law, but after Kennedy’s death he told a joint session of Congress that “no memorial or oration could more eloquently honor” him than the “earliest possible passage” of his civil rights bill. It ended up taking seven months. The key to its passage was the support it received from Republicans, who, proportionate to their numbers, provided stronger backing than Democrats. In the House, an alliance of northern Democrats and Republicans overcame the effort by the chair of the Rules Committee, Virginian Howard Smith, to bottle up the bill in his committee. Undaunted, in the floor debate Smith tried a maneuver he had used years earlier in fighting the Fair Employment Practices Committee, introducing an amendment to expand the outlawed bases for discrimination in hiring or union membership to include sex.

  Smith apparently hoped his amendment would split the backers of the bill, leading to its defeat, but his position was not entirely disingenuous. He had long backed the Equal Rights Amendment (ERA) to the Constitution, first proposed in 1923, which would have declared that “equality of rights under the law shall not be denied or abridged by the United States or by any State on account of sex.” The ERA had won backing from the two major political parties but always fell short of passage. In the early 1960s, though, support for granting women greater equality was growing.

  The ERA was one of two strategies during the decades after World War II for improving the status of women. Some feminists opposed it, fearing that it would wipe out laws protecting women in the workplace. As an alternative, they sought measures to guarantee women equal job opportunities and equal pay for work of comparable difficulty as men’s work; grant working mothers maternity leave and childcare; prevent discrimination against nonwhite women; and provide an expanded package of social insurance. The centerpiece of the “Women’s Status Bill” that embodied their ideas, first introduced to Congress in 1947, was the call for a presidential commission on the status of women, modeled on the commission Truman had appointed to report to him about civil rights, which could put women’s rights on the national political agenda.

  Congressional support for both ERA and the Women’s Status Bill ebbed during the 1950s, but supporters of economic rights for women continued to press their case. Many backed Kennedy’s presidential bid, only to see him appoint very few women to high positions. Unlike the previous three presidents, he included not a single woman in his cabinet. But when Esther Peterson, whom he appointed to head the Department of Labor’s Women’s Bureau, revived the idea of a President’s Commission on the Status of Women, Kennedy agreed, appointing Eleanor Roosevelt to head the group.

  In 1963, Congress passed the Equal Pay Act, which forbade pay differences between men and women doing identical jobs. Practically, the law had little effect, since men and women rarely did the same work and the measure did not cover domestic or farm labor, heavily female occupations. Still, as an ideological statement it represented a major departure, the first federal law to prohibit discrimination on the basis of sex. The publication the same year of Betty Friedan’s The Feminine Mystique brought increased public discussion of the unhappiness many women felt with their social situation.

  Howard Smith’s proposal to add a ban on discrimination on the basis of sex to the civil rights bill thus came at a moment of growing debate over women
’s rights. A group of congresswomen led by Republican Martha Griffiths pulled together a coalition of women’s rights backers and southern Democrats (many of whom opposed the civil rights bill itself ) to pass his amendment. Smith won the battle—in the process helping to push forward a momentous shift in the legal and social status of women—but then lost what for him was the war, as the House proceeded to pass the amended bill by more than a two-to-one margin. In the Senate, opponents of the bill launched a filibuster, but its backers lined up seventy-one votes to end debate, finally breaking the hold that Senate rules gave southern leaders over the body. On July 2, 1964, Johnson signed the act into law.

  While Johnson had inherited the tax and civil rights bills, Kennedy’s idea for an antipoverty program had not yet been fleshed out when he died. During the late 1950s and early 1960s, the problem of poverty received sustained attention from academics, journalists, and policymakers for the first time since the depths of the Depression. In part, this stemmed from a concern with juvenile delinquency in the cities, which some social scientists attributed to the social environment of impoverished neighborhoods, increasingly inhabited by African American migrants from the South and, in New York, newcomers from Puerto Rico. Poverty, once thought of as largely a problem of exploitation at the workplace, increasingly had come to be seen as an issue of economic and social marginalization, of exclusion from work. Though liberals continued to believe that economic growth would solve most social problems, they acknowledged that well over a decade of economic expansion had not eliminated poverty, even if in absolute terms the poor were better off materially than they had been in earlier eras.

  Lyndon Johnson believed that the plight of the poor could be and should be ameliorated, without taking anything away from those better off. Expansive in his outlook and his sense of the still-untapped possibilities for the United States, Johnson had no interest in alienating the bulk of the electorate that was not poor or blaming the rich and powerful for the ills of the country (as Roosevelt and Truman occasionally had done). While some labor liberals and civil rights leaders stressed the need for creating new, well-paying jobs in cities like Detroit and Newark, which experienced deindustrialization long before their plight received national attention following outbreaks of violence, most antipoverty experts and Johnson administration officials instead looked for ways to enable the poor to better succeed in the existing labor market.

  The social scientists, social workers, foundation officials, and government experts who established the intellectual framework for the Kennedy-Johnson antipoverty program recognized that in some cases structural impediments kept the poor poor, like racial discrimination and underdeveloped social and physical infrastructure, a problem in some rural areas, like Appalachia, and decaying inner cities. Beyond that, it had become fashionable to believe that the poor were trapped by a “culture of poverty.” Studies by anthropologist Oscar Lewis of poor families in Mexico and other countries popularized the notion that a self-reinforcing and self-reproducing complex of problems, including broken homes, poor health, low educational achievement, minimal job skills, low income, apathy, and fatalism kept generation after generation in poverty. Only by breaking the cycle and attacking the whole complex of problems could conditions be created for the poor to help themselves and escape their fate.

  In his 1964 State of the Union address, Johnson declared “unconditional war on poverty in America.” But rather than “unconditional war,” in practice he launched a much more limited effort. Johnson asked for nearly a billion dollars for the first year of his program, far more than Kennedy envisioned, but at its peak the antipoverty program spent annually the equivalent of only about $50 to $70 for each poor person in the country.

  Johnson made the Community Action Program the core of the antipoverty effort. CAP called for the creation and funding of local antipoverty agencies, with “maximum feasible participation” by residents of impoverished areas as a first step toward having the poor solve their own problems. Other antipoverty programs included the Job Corps, a revival of sorts of the New Deal Civilian Conservation Corps, with rural camps for young people to work on conservation projects; the Neighborhood Youth Corps, its urban, nonresidential equivalent; other job training and work-study programs; loan programs for poor city residents and farmers; and VISTA, a domestic version of the Peace Corps. To coordinate the whole effort, Johnson called for a new Office of Economic Opportunity. Congress, under heavy lobbying from the administration (but with little pressure from the poor themselves), passed the program with only a few changes.

  With the passage of the tax, civil rights, and antipoverty acts, Johnson had put into place the main elements of Kennedy’s program of growth liberalism: an increase in private-sector spending power to stimulate the economy and an attack on structural impediments preventing the poor from benefiting from the resulting economic expansion. But by then, Johnson had begun laying out a vision that went beyond the vistas of Kennedy’s domestic program, embracing expansive state action not simply to encourage growth but to improve the quality of life. In a May 1964 speech, Johnson sounded much like John Kenneth Galbraith, Arthur Schlesinger Jr., and other liberal critics of growth alone. Speaking at the University of Michigan commencement, the president called for a move “upward to the Great Society . . . where men are more concerned with the quality of their goals than the quantity of their goods.” Johnson wanted a commitment to urban renewal, investment in housing and transportation, measures to protect the environment, improvements in education, and an end to poverty and racial discrimination. Johnson speechwriter Richard Goodwin later said that one of his influences in writing the Great Society speech had been the SDS’s Port Huron Statement, whose principal author, Tom Hayden, had adopted some of the cadences and tone that John Kennedy had used in his inaugural address, a measure of how much mainstream liberalism and movements to its left had penetrated one another by the mid-1960s.

  Liberalism Triumphant

  To lay the basis for achieving his ambitious goals and assuage the chronic self-doubt that shadowed his massive ego, Johnson wanted an overwhelming victory in the 1964 election. He was acutely aware that the ongoing civil rights revolution was shifting the national political terrain. By the time of the 1964 election, nearly 40 percent of southern African Americans were registered to vote as a result of efforts by the civil rights movement and more aggressive federal law enforcement, potentially a big boost for liberal Democrats. But Johnson feared that many white Democrats would desert the party because of its legislative support of black rights.

  In the Democratic primaries, Alabama governor George Wallace, who had gained a national reputation as a die-hard segregationist, demonstrated the danger. In a hastily put together campaign, Wallace hammered away at what he claimed the Civil Rights Act would mean for northerners—a threat to union-negotiated seniority systems, the imposition of racial hiring quotas, the denial of the right of homeowners to sell their property to whom they pleased, “chaos” for local schools—while attacking the Supreme Court for its school prayer decision and the State Department for abandoning Eastern Europe to communism. In Wisconsin, attracting voters across the economic spectrum, he won over a third of the vote; in Indiana, 30 percent; in Maryland, nearly half.

  Johnson’s concern about losing white voters led to a bitter clash with southern civil rights activists at the Democratic convention, held in Atlantic City in late August. In Mississippi, where African Americans were excluded from the process of selecting Democratic convention delegates, SNCC and other civil rights groups, bolstered by Freedom Summer volunteers, founded the Mississippi Freedom Democratic Party (MFDP). After a grassroots organizing effort, which drew many poor blacks into the political process for the first time, the MFDP went to the Democratic convention demanding that its multiracial (though largely black) delegation be seated instead of the all-white “regulars.”

  Johnson saw the MFDP as a threat to what he hoped would be an un
ruffled coronation. Using FBI surveillance of civil rights leaders to plan his strategy, his forces refused to oust the regulars and rejected a compromise that both delegations be seated. Instead, they proposed that two of the sixty-four MFDP delegates be named at-large delegates, while all the regulars be seated if they pledged loyalty to the Democratic ticket. (Many southern Democrats were toying with supporting Goldwater.) In addition, the party would promise to eliminate all racial discrimination in the delegate selection process before its next convention. Many national civil rights leaders saw the proposed deal as a step forward, recommending that it be accepted, but the MFDP delegates rejected it. They and their supporters left the convention embittered. (Ironically, while most of the Mississippi regulars in the end supported Goldwater—who voted against the Civil Rights Act—the MFDP campaigned for Johnson.)

  Once the campaign began in earnest, the Johnson forces succeeded in marginalizing Goldwater as outside the national mainstream. On foreign policy, they portrayed the senator, who had publicly mused about allowing NATO field commanders control over tactical nuclear weapons and repeatedly called for giving no quarter in the battle against communism, as trigger-happy and irresponsible. Just four years earlier Kennedy had made statements nearly as bellicose, but the Cold War was losing much of its ideological and emotional power. In contrast to Goldwater’s tough military talk, Johnson portrayed himself as the peace candidate, even as his administration was secretly planning a major escalation of the war in Vietnam. On domestic policy, Johnson turned the campaign into a referendum on the welfare state, portraying Goldwater as a man who would undo the work of Roosevelt and his successors. Here, Johnson was on more solid ground, since Goldwater did oppose the expanded functions the state had taken on during the previous three decades, calling for selling the TVA, dismantling the Rural Electrification Administration, ending farm subsidies, and making the Social Security system voluntary. Many moderate Republicans, long accommodated to federal regulatory and welfare functions, defected to the Johnson camp.