Johnson won by a landslide with 61 percent of the popular vote, a higher percentage than FDR ever achieved. Goldwater, in addition to his home state of Arizona, carried only five states, all in the Deep South, where the Republicans also picked up seven House seats. Elsewhere the Democrats swept the board, increasing their majority in the House to 295 to 140 and in the Senate to 68 to 32. (They also gained hundreds of seats in state legislatures.) For the first time in a generation, Republicans and southern Democrats did not have enough power to hold back the electoral majority. The political mood of the electorate, combined with the legislative redistricting occurring as a result of Baker v. Carr and the growing registration of black voters, opened a rare window of liberal opportunity.
Johnson drove a truck through the window. In 1965 and 1966, the 89th Congress passed a flood of bills, mostly proposed by the president, which, combined with those passed between Kennedy’s death and the 1964 election, constituted by far the most important legislative accomplishment since Franklin Roosevelt’s first term in office. With the economy thriving and the Cold War no longer as scary as it had been a few years earlier, a great sense of national confidence and possibility underlay the extraordinarily ambitious program that Johnson succeeded in marshalling through Congress.
Medicare-Medicaid, which turned out to be one of the landmarks of the Great Society, grew out of the failure of Congress in the 1940s to pass the Wagner-Murray-Dingell bill to create a national health insurance program. The spread of employment-based insurance provided health security for millions but left uncovered people without jobs, employees of businesses that did not offer insurance, and retirees. Though companies sold individual insurance, many families could not afford it.
By the early 1950s, health reformers and unionists had abandoned the idea of a universal national health system, instead seeking targeted government programs aimed at those outside the private welfare state. In 1951, a bill proposed providing hospital insurance for the elderly through the Social Security system, what came to be dubbed Medicare. By the end of the decade, the idea had gained considerable support. Though Kennedy backed Medicare, opposition from Republicans, southern Democrats, and the American Medical Association kept the bill from emerging from the House Ways and Means Committee.
Johnson initially sought to make a federally coordinated attack on heart disease, cancer, and stroke the centerpiece of his health program, but after facing opposition in Congress and from the medical profession, which did not like a proposed system of government-financed research hospitals, he shifted his focus to Medicare. During the 1964 election, Goldwater’s opposition to the proposal had proved highly unpopular, sending a warning to other legislators, while the Democratic sweep eliminated many allies of the AMA. No longer confident that they could block federal health insurance entirely, AMA backers and Republicans offered several alternatives to Medicare.
In a surprise move, Ways and Means chairman Wilbur Mills incorporated these proposals into the administration-backed bill, ending up with a three-tiered program, far broader than proponents of any of the plans had envisioned. As finally passed by large majorities, the Medicare bill included hospital insurance for all the elderly covered by Social Security, financed by an increase in the payroll tax that employers and employees already paid; a voluntary insurance program for doctors’ fees for the elderly (Medicare Part B), financed by equal payments from subscribers and the federal government but run by insurance concerns; and health insurance for the indigent of any age (Medicaid), financed by federal and state contributions and run by the states. To blunt opposition from doctors, Mills made sure that the federal government would not get involved in direct service provision, would not set the rates for hospital or doctor services, and would not heavily regulate the industry. On July 30, 1965, Lyndon Johnson flew to Independence, Missouri, to ceremoniously sign the Medicare bill standing next to the eighty-one-year-old Harry Truman, handing him Medicare card number 1.
Medicare proved an enormously popular, well-administrated program, helping bring many of the elderly out of poverty and improving the health care they received. In its first year, over nineteen million Social Security recipients registered for the program. Medicaid varied in impact and quality from state to state, but at least in some areas it significantly improved medical access for the nonelderly poor. Ironically, given their opposition to its passage, the medical and insurance interests ended up benefiting from Medicare-Medicaid too, as the programs bolstered the income of doctors and increased the power of the insurance industry (while pushing up the cost of medical care).
Johnson hoped to pass other social legislation before again tackling civil rights, but events in the South upended his plan. The 1964 Civil Rights Act led to a rapid collapse of formal segregation in most of the country, as hotels, restaurants, theaters, gas stations, and other public accommodations abandoned Jim Crow. But in a half-dozen states in the Deep South, especially outside the big cities, local businesses, public officials, and judges openly defied the law, maintaining racial segregation while continuing to exclude all but a few African Americans from voting.
After the 1964 election, the SCLC decided to launch a high-profile campaign to break the remaining resistance to black suffrage, centering it on Selma, Alabama, where only a few hundred of the city’s fifteen thousand black residents had been able to register to vote. SCLC planned a rerun of Birmingham, a nonviolent confrontation that would bring national attention to the denial of rights in the South and lay the basis for federal action. Martin Luther King Jr. brought his newly enhanced prestige to the effort, having just become the youngest person ever to win the Nobel Peace Prize.
As SCLC had expected, sheriff’s deputies and state police met a series of demonstrations and voter registration efforts with violence, culminating in a brutal attack on marchers leaving Selma on a planned walk to the state capital in Montgomery. With national media increasingly focused on the Alabama campaign, King called for civil rights supporters from across the country to join another attempt to hold the march. Racist thugs killed one volunteer, a white minister from Boston, and a state trooper killed a black civil rights backer in a nearby town.
The violence forced Johnson’s hand. As the events in Alabama unfolded, he decided to seize the moment for a final push to guarantee the right to vote. In a speech to Congress he called Selma “a turning point in man’s unending search for freedom,” like Lexington, Concord, and Appomattox. Presenting a Voting Rights bill, he said of blacks seeking their rights, “Their cause must be our cause too,” adding—using the words of the by then universally known civil rights song—“And we shall overcome.”
Much of the country joined Johnson in his embrace of the civil rights movement. Marches in support of the Selma demonstrators were held in many northern and western cities. Whites and blacks, well known and obscure, headed to Selma, including celebrities, labor leaders, and clergy. For the Catholic Church, Selma marked the high point of its participation in the southern civil rights movement, with priests from fifty dioceses, nuns, and laypeople converging on Alabama. The march to Montgomery finally took place peacefully, under the protection of the Alabama National Guard, which Johnson federalized, though immediately after it a white protestor from Detroit was murdered by Ku Klux Klan members.
In the wake of Selma, the Voting Rights Act of 1965 passed both houses of Congress by better than four-to-one margins. The law targeted states and counties where fewer than 50 percent of eligible voters were registered or fewer than half had voted in the 1964 election. In those areas, literacy tests and discriminatory poll taxes would be suspended, even in state and local elections, and federal officials could take over the voter registration process. Government bodies that had denied citizens the right to vote could not change their election systems for ten years without federal approval, to prevent the introduction of procedures designed to limit minority rights.
The Civil Rights and Voting Right
s acts were the most important domestic achievements of liberalism since World War II. Together they effectively ended racial discrimination through the law and the denial of political rights on the basis of race, giving meaningful life to long-ignored provisions of the Constitution introduced in the Fourteenth and Fifteenth Amendments. Within months after the passage of the Voting Rights Act, federal officials registered nearly eight thousand African American voters in Selma. Within a year, the number of registered blacks in five states of the Deep South doubled. By 1969, 65 percent of adult southern African Americans were registered, a massive change from a decade earlier.
The civil rights movement, at least indirectly, helped change immigration policy too. Civil rights protest created a national consensus, except in the white South, around the notion of equal individual rights and equal treatment under the law regardless of race, ethnicity, or national origin. Immigration law, as it had developed over the previous century, embodied just the opposite, treating individuals differently and unequally depending on their race and country of origin.
When Truman vetoed the 1952 McCarran-Walter Act, an omnibus effort to revise immigration law and use it as an anticommunist weapon, he did so in part because it continued the national origins quota system, introduced in the 1920s, which rested on discredited ideas of scientific racism. Congress overrode his veto, but in practice the quota system proved increasingly dysfunctional. By 1960, two-thirds of immigrants entered the country under nonquota provisions. Many came from the Western Hemisphere (mainly Mexico and Canada), which was not covered by the quota system. Others came under programs established to admit anticommunist refugees, foreign spouses and children of citizens (mainly military families), and temporary agricultural workers.
In 1964, a coalition of liberal, labor, and religious groups successfully lobbied to end the Bracero program, appalled by the poor treatment of the migrant farmworkers it brought to the United States and concerned about the depressing effect of the influx of exploited workers on national labor standards. A reform coalition, dominated by Catholics and Jews, next pushed to end the quota system. The immigration reform effort never became a mass movement or the subject of much national discussion, but the civil rights movement and the results of the 1964 election opened up the possibility for action.
The proponents of the Immigration and Naturalization Act passed in 1965 neither desired nor anticipated a significant increase in immigration or a change in where it came from. While the new law eliminated the morally odious immigration quotas for individual countries, it imposed an overall annual cap on immigration from outside the Western Hemisphere and, for the first time, capped immigration from within the hemisphere (which ultimately contributed to the growth of illegal immigration from Mexico). The expectation was at most a very modest increase in the relatively low rate of immigration by historical standards that had prevailed since the beginning of the Great Depression. A modified preference system, which favored relatives of citizens and resident aliens and people with needed occupational skills, was expected to keep the distribution of entrants by country of origin roughly what it had been. However, both supporters and opponents of the bill grossly underestimated its impact, which over the coming decades proved to be massive, as the annual number of immigrants shot up and the distribution of where they came from radically altered.
As in the case of immigration reform, lobbying by relatively small advocacy groups, along with the interest of particular legislators, led to the passage during the Johnson years of a series of environmental laws, without a major popular mobilization. The context was a changing environmental consciousness, largely a reaction against efforts to engineer, control, and transform the environment for purposes of economic productivity and war-making capacity. A rising standard of living, the growth of leisure, and the prolongation of life underlay the new attitudes (ironically, all made possible by industrial and agricultural practices deeply damaging to the environment).
Concern about pesticides exemplified the links between war, economic development, and environmentalism. Chemical warfare research during World War II fostered the postwar insecticide industry. DDT—a powerful pesticide—began being sold right after the war. The availability of surplus military aircraft, which could be converted into crop sprayers, facilitated the adoption, with strong government encouragement, of chemical-intensive agricultural methods that made liberal use of herbicides, insecticides, and artificial fertilizers. Though the high cost of inputs for growing food and commodities this way drove out many small farmers, crop yields rose, the need for farm labor fell, and a cornucopia of produce filled tables across the country and abroad.
At first the environmental impact of the heavy use of insecticides and herbicides received little attention. But fears about the effects of radiation from atomic testing on human health, raised by well-respected scientists, led to greater awareness of invisible environmental dangers. In the early 1960s, with the near-simultaneous ban on atmospheric testing of atomic weapons and the publication of Rachel Carson’s Silent Spring, pesticides replaced radiation at the forefront of public anxiety about environmental poisons. The growing incidence of cancer—in part the result of longer life spans—heightened concern about the possible carcinogenic effects of man-made chemicals.
Carson’s book had a big impact on political leaders. John Kennedy appointed a presidential panel to study the use of pesticides; Connecticut senator Abraham Ribicoff held hearings on environmental pollution; and Stewart Udall, who served as secretary of the interior under both Kennedy and Johnson, converted his department from an advocate for western resource users into a broader agency concerned with recreation and environmental pollution as well. But even as the pesticide issue raised environmental awareness, with the well-being of powerful interests and, more broadly, a whole way of life resting on a chemical regime of land use, such expressions of government concern did not easily convert into action. DDT, which deeply damaged wildlife, continued to be used throughout the 1960s.
Other types of environmental degradation, like air pollution, proved more amenable to regulation. Large-scale industry and electrical generating plants dirtied the air, particularly in the Northeast and Midwest, as did vehicle emissions, which had their greatest impact in the West. As air pollution began choking the breath and watering the eyes of middle-class voters, they began pressing for government action. City and state government took the lead, starting with St. Louis, which began a smoke abatement program in 1940. Los Angeles began regulating air emissions in 1947. California established the first controls on motor vehicle emissions in 1960. Industry generally resisted regulation, but even Gary, Indiana, a steel production center where high school football games occasionally had to be halted when the charging of a coke oven or the tapping of a furnace made the air almost unbreathable, passed an air pollution ordinance in 1962.
The federal government began addressing air pollution with the toothless 1963 Clean Air Act. Johnson opposed an effort two years later for much stronger legislation that included mandatory controls on emissions, apparently reluctant to break with the auto industry and other industrial interests pressing for strictly voluntary measures. In the end a compromise was enacted, which gave the secretary of health, education, and welfare the discretionary power to establish emission standards. Secretary John Gardner moved quickly, requiring all new motor vehicles, starting in 1968, to be equipped with emission control devices. Meanwhile, in 1967, Congress authorized the federal government to set standards for air quality for industry in states that failed to do so on their own. Water quality standards and sewage treatment funding laws added to the growing array of environmental legislation.
The spread of automobile ownership, which caused so much air pollution, contributed a growing interest in protecting wilderness areas and preserving land for recreational use. Auto tourism, along with nature photography and television nature shows, created a growing constituency for wilderness preservation.
Hunters and fishermen also pressed for preserving natural habitats and keeping them open to the public. With cars making hunting areas readily accessible even to urbanites, hunting—once largely a rural and upper-class activity—developed a huge working-class following. During the 1950s and 1960s, some midwestern factories simply shut down on the opening day of hunting season, knowing that too few workers would show up for production to take place. Rapid suburbanization provided yet another impetus for preserving open land, as homeowners who had left the city to escape perceived overcrowding often found a lack of recreational areas and residential overdevelopment in their new neighborhoods. The success of conservationists, led by the Sierra Club and the Wilderness Society, in stopping the construction of the Echo Park Dam on the Colorado River, reversing decades of largely unopposed dam building, revealed the political potential of the increasingly well-organized environmental activists.
The fate of a bill to create a national wilderness preservation system reflected the changing public attitudes and resulting political calculations. The bill, first introduced in the Senate by Hubert Humphrey in 1956, faced repeated defeats in the face of opposition by the lumber, mining, oil and gas, and livestock industries and the major business associations. But in 1964 a version of the measure passed Congress with few members willing to go on record against it. The Land and Water Conservation Fund Act, the National Wild and Scenic Rivers Act, and the National Trails Act followed.
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