American Empire

by Joshua Freeman

  The environmental movement and legislation of the Johnson years did not represent a fundamental move away from the ideological and political consensus around a growth economy. At most, it was a gingerly step back from a Promethean view of man’s relationship to nature. Even many environmentalists did not see an inherent conflict between growth and efforts to protect the environment. Like so much of the Great Society, the environmental bills Johnson signed rested on a belief that reform could be effected without harming established interests or taking away from the haves.

  In 1964 and 1965, Congress also passed a series of laws deepening federal involvement with education, culture, and the arts. The Elementary and Secondary Education Act circumvented the disputes over aid to parochial schools that had blocked earlier efforts to provide substantial federal school funding by coming up with an indirect mechanism to send money to both public and private schools. Johnson conceived of the bill as an antipoverty measure, but as enacted and implemented only about half the spending went to poor children, with the rest serving as a general federal subsidy to school systems that in the past had been almost completely funded by state and local government or by private individuals. Some targeted aid for poor students came through Project Head Start, a preschool program that proved highly effective, and Upward Bound, a college preparation program for poor teenagers. The Higher Education Act funded a loan guarantee program, scholarships, work-study programs, college libraries, and academic programs. The Kennedy administration idea for a National Arts Foundation found realization with legislation setting up the National Endowment for the Arts, the most important federal engagement with culture since the New Deal. Congress added on a National Endowment for the Humanities in response to pleas from academics who were not eligible for funding from the National Science Foundation. Yet another Johnson proposal led to the creation of the Corporation for Public Broadcasting, charged with creating national public television and radio systems.

  The Limits of Liberalism

  Even as postwar liberalism achieved its greatest accomplishments, countervailing tendencies were undermining its electoral and ideological viability. The problems first became evident around issues involving labor and race.

  Organized labor played a central role in the Great Society. Unions enthusiastically endorsed Johnson in 1964 and lobbied hard for his legislative program. Labor officials even helped draft some Great Society proposals and in several instances left their posts to take positions in the Johnson administration. But in a measure of the limits of Great Society liberalism, labor failed to achieve its own top legislative priority, the repeal of section 14(b) of the Taft-Hartley Act, which allowed states to outlaw the union shop.

  By 1965, nineteen states had so-called right-to-work laws. That year Johnson agreed to a request from the AFL-CIO to propose the repeal of 14(b), packaging it with improvements in the minimum wage and unemployment insurance. With the president leaving labor to do most of the lobbying on its own, the bill won slim majorities in both houses but fell far short of the votes needed to end a Republican Senate filibuster. While a political consensus had emerged for new federally guaranteed rights and new federal functions, no similar consensus backed an increase in the power of workers through self-organization. The point was driven home the next year when Congress raised the minimum wage and extended its coverage to over eight million additional workers. For the first time, the Fair Labor Standards Act, passed during the New Deal, covered a majority of female and minority workers. While organized labor supported the effort, it highlighted the expanding role of government in protecting exploited groups at a time when union membership seemed to have plateaued.

  The fault lines within the coalition that made the flood of Great Society measures possible became even more evident around issues of race and civil rights. The wave of riots that broke out in northern cities in the mid-1960s made it clear that race had become an urgent national problem, not just a southern one. In the short term, the riots gave new impetus to Great Society reforms, but in the longer run they undermined the political basis for liberalism itself.

  The first major racial disturbance took place in Harlem in July 1964. As was to be typical in the riots that followed, an incident involving the police set it off, in this case the killing of a black teenager by an off-duty white policeman. Protests led to rioting and looting in Harlem and parts of Brooklyn that lasted for five days.

  Though the rioting had no explicit political agenda, it came against a background of frustration with poverty and racial discrimination, pervasive in black communities of the North. Nonviolent efforts to create greater job opportunities for African Americans and to integrate schools had yielded few successes. With expectations, frustrations, and a sense of assertiveness growing in northern black communities as the civil rights movement in the South reached its peak, the anarchic protest of the Harlem riot proved infectious. In the weeks following it, disturbances broke out in Rochester, several northern New Jersey cities, a suburb of Chicago, and Philadelphia.

  The following summer, urban disturbances reached a scale unseen since World War II. Just five days after the passage of the Voting Rights Act, an aggressive arrest of a drunk driver in South Central Los Angeles escalated into a confrontation between a gathering crowd and the police, notorious for their racism and lack of respect toward local residents. When the police tried to calm things down by leaving the area, local teens and young men began attacking white newspapermen and passing motorists. Renewed police presence led to new clashes, which soon involved arson and gunfire from both sides. Though dubbed the Watts Riot, the disturbance encompassed an area equivalent to the size of the city of San Francisco. By one estimate, some thirty-five thousand adults participated. To suppress it, sixteen thousand National Guard troops were deployed. By the time the clashes ended after a week of chaos, thirty-four people had been killed, a thousand injured, and four thousand arrested.

  The scale, ferocity, and open antiwhite hatred evident in the Los Angeles riot took whites across the nation by surprise. As in New York, long-standing anger about racial inequality, a lack of good jobs, and police conduct set the background for the conflagration. So did recent political events. In 1963, California passed a law forbidding racial discrimination in the sale or rental of private dwellings. Its enforcement would have had a radical effect on California cities, especially Los Angeles, a city of extreme and increasing segregation. To undo the law, the California Real Estate Association put forth Proposition 14, which in 1964 won approval by a two-to-one vote (though the California Supreme Court later declared it unconstitutional). To black Californians, the vote demonstrated widespread racism among whites. Nationally, it illustrated that northern whites could simultaneously support an end to formal segregation of public facilities, mostly a southern issue, and oppose desegregation of housing in their own communities.

  Lyndon Johnson immediately understood that the Watts uprising would foster a white backlash against the civil rights movement and his Great Society. He tried to distance himself from the Los Angeles events, delaying the announcement of a planned national urban policy so that it would not be seen as a concession to rioters. But in the months that followed he paid greater attention to the cities. In 1964, Congress had begun funding urban mass transit projects. Now Johnson wanted a more extensive federal urban role. To coordinate the effort, Congress approved the creation of the Department of Housing and Urban Development. Johnson appointed Robert Weaver to head it, making him the first black cabinet officer in the country’s history. Johnson also embraced a proposal to demonstrate, using federal funds, the efficacy of integrated urban planning and redevelopment. In a measure of how Watts had changed the political terrain, when Johnson signed the Demonstration Cities and Metropolitan Development Act he insisted on calling it the “Model Cities” act, as opponents had associated the program with demonstrations by African Americans. The complex initiative, with insufficient funds spread thinly among
projects sometimes picked for political purposes, ended up having little impact on the lives of city dwellers.

  Civil rights efforts suffered defeats on a number of fronts. The rejection of Johnson’s proposal to grant home rule to the District of Columbia, which had a majority black population, represented a rare loss for the administration during the 89th Congress. Meanwhile, the passage of California’s Proposition 14 marked the beginning of a new phase of northern white resistance to residential integration. In 1966, Martin Luther King Jr. and the SCLC joined forces with a coalition of civil rights groups in Chicago to press for school and housing desegregation, a major foray for the southern-based black movement out of its home territory. The effort failed miserably. The Chicago black community did not rally to the effort to the extent that the SCLC had anticipated. Mayor Richard J. Daley adeptly made some concessions while resisting any wholesale policy changes. When King led marches against housing discrimination through several Chicago neighborhoods, white crowds taunted, stoned, threatened, insulted, and assaulted the demonstrators in as terrifying a demonstration of racial hatred as anything seen in the South. Unlike in past southern struggles, the ugly display of white racism brought neither a national mobilization nor federal action. Daley, not King, proved to have greater influence in Washington when he succeeded in stopping Johnson administration pressure to desegregate his city’s schools.

  The press for residential and school desegregation fractured the institutions of the urban North. Local Democrats in various parts of the country split over so-called open housing laws. The Catholic Church found itself deeply divided. Much of its top leadership and many activist clergy and nuns embraced the civil rights struggle, while many urban parishioners and their priests fought against neighborhood change, racial integration, and social activism. When in 1965 Baltimore’s Cardinal Lawrence Shehan testified in favor of a proposed municipal law banning housing discrimination by race, hundreds of people attending the hearing booed him, a startling act of disrespect for a leader of the church. A new round of urban riots in 1966 and the shifting rhetoric of black leaders, especially the adoption of the slogan “Black Power” by members of SNCC and other groups, further eroded white support for government action against discrimination. In Congress, the Republican leadership, which had collaborated with the Johnson administration on civil rights legislation in 1964 and 1965, refused to back a new civil rights proposal that included a ban on racial discrimination in the sale or rental of housing, leading to its failure.

  Johnson administration policies contributed to growing urban political conflict. With southern whites leaving the Democratic Party as a result of the civil rights thrust, the national party found itself more dependent on winning the key northern states, which in turn meant carrying their major cities, where the African American population had swollen with migration from the South. But most governments in those cities still acted primarily as the representatives of longer-established white groups. To circumvent them in trying to benefit the urban black population and more solidly incorporate it into the Democratic Party, many Great Society programs did not operate through existing government entities but rather through private agencies or newly formed groups, like those running the Community Action Programs. The federal government even provided resources for aggrieved urban residents to challenge municipal and state authorities over housing, welfare, and other local issues through the creation of Legal Services, which provided legal counsel to poor people unable to afford representation.

  Mayors and other local officials, many of them Democratic loyalists, jostled with community activists to win control over the antipoverty agencies and new federal programs. They complained bitterly to the Johnson administration when protestors, aided and encouraged by federally funded programs, picketed city offices, sat down in them, or sued local agencies. The administration soon began giving more control over federally funded programs to local elected officials, but by then many of the urban Democratic parties, already weakened by their failure to respond to shifting demography, lay in shambles.

  Approval for key Johnson administration policies plummeted. In September 1966, a public opinion poll found 52 percent of respondents saying that the administration was “pushing racial integration too fast.” That same month, only 41 percent of those polled approved of the War on Poverty, down from 60 percent the prior October. While domestic issues had the most immediate political impact, the administration also faced growing opposition to its escalation of the war in Vietnam.

  Liberal Democrats got routed in the 1966 elections. The Democrats lost three Senate seats and forty-seven House seats, more than they had gained two years earlier. Once again, an alliance of Republicans and conservative (mostly southern) Democrats would have enough votes to block liberal legislation. But the liberal Democratic defeat extended far beyond Congress. Nationwide, the Democrats lost 677 seats in state legislatures and eight governorships. In Georgia, Arkansas, and Maryland, segregationists captured the Democratic gubernatorial nominations, in the latter two states then to be beaten by Republicans with more liberal stands on civil rights.

  Perhaps the greatest upset took place in California, where Pat Brown, a genial, liberal political pro, was running for a third term as governor. He first won the job in 1958, defeating right-wing antilabor senator William Knowland. Four years later he kept it by defeating Richard Nixon, who was attempting a comeback after his loss to Kennedy. In 1966 he faced actor Ronald Reagan, running for public office for the first time. Reagan, a onetime New Deal Democrat who over the years had moved to the right, came to national attention as a political figure in 1964 with a speech supporting Barry Goldwater, which used populist language to counterpoise individual freedom to government action. Running for governor two years later, he benefited from a widespread white conservative response to the Berkeley protests and the Watts Riot, winning many white working-class voters away from the Democratic Party, especially in Los Angeles. He beat Brown by a million votes.

  Organized labor suffered particularly harsh defeats in the 1966 election. The AFL-CIO had decided to make a major push that year in the hopes of winning enough new liberal seats to be able to get the repeal of 14(b) through the next Congress. Instead, they found their longtime political allies going down to defeat. In Michigan, G. Mennen Williams, the former governor and close ally of the UAW, lost his bid for a Senate seat. In Illinois, another labor favorite, longtime liberal senator Paul Douglas, lost to a liberal Republican, not even garnering support of a majority of UAW voters. In California, Reagan won the votes of a substantial number of union members.

  Postmortems revealed how out of touch labor leaders had become with elements of their base. Many white unionists had grown increasingly opposed to civil rights efforts, especially any moves against housing discrimination. These voters tended to be scared and repelled by urban riots, with the drop-off in the blue-collar Democratic vote particularly sharp in areas near where disturbances had taken place. Many union voters, especially those under forty, had little interest in the issues their leaders concentrated on, like 14(b) repeal and improvements in the minimum wage and workmen’s compensation. Instead they cared the most about taxes, crime, zoning, and stopping residential integration, which they feared, usually correctly, would drive down the value of their property, issues of particular concern to the growing number of unionists living in the suburbs.

  By 1966, an intensification of politics of all kinds, right, left, and center, had taken place. Liberal legislation would continue to be passed for another decade, liberal Court decisions would continue to come out, and liberal politicians would continue to wield power. But the zenith of postwar liberalism already had been passed, as challenges from its left and right took their toll. The Vietnam War, which soon came to dominate American life, would shatter liberalism altogether.

  CHAPTER 9

  * * *

  Apocalypse Now

  They began reading the names shortly after 10
a.m. on November 10, 1982, in the Washington Cathedral. First came Gerald L. Aadland, from Sisseton, South Dakota. Next James Downing Aalund, of Houston. Then Daniel Lawrence Aamold, of Moorhead, Minnesota. It took more than two days to read the names of all 57,939 Americans killed or missing in the Vietnam War.

  The candlelight ceremony was part of four days of events saluting the 2.7 million Americans who had served in Vietnam, held in conjunction with the dedication of the Vietnam Veterans Memorial on the Washington Mall. Thousands of veterans converged on the capital, many wearing field jackets or camouflage hats but few in full uniform, in keeping with the decidedly unofficial nature of the commemorations. The memorial, though on federal land, had been paid for by private contributions, many from the veterans themselves. A parade of vets down Constitution Avenue attracted a crowd of 150,000, a large gathering but smaller than the huge antiwar demonstrations that had been held during the 1960s. One columnist noted that the marchers, with beards and ponytails and ragtag outfits, looked much like the demonstrators of a decade and a half earlier. Even retired general William C. Westmoreland, who had commanded the military effort in Vietnam at its height, avoided the spit and polish of a dress uniform, wearing civilian clothes as he led the delegation from Alabama.

  The opening of the Vietnam Veterans Memorial transformed the place of the Vietnam War in national memory and political discourse. When the last American troops left Vietnam in early 1973, silence settled in. After years of bitter debate over the war, few people seemed to have much interest in coming to a reckoning with what had occurred. An unglamorous war that ended, shockingly, in a defeat of the United States seemed best forgotten.