American Empire

by Joshua Freeman

  The high point of environmental action came on April 22, 1970, “Earth Day,” when twenty million people took part in rallies, tree plantings, and parades on streets shut to automotive traffic. More a self-congratulatory celebration than a political movement, Earth Day won support from the Nixon administration and many major corporations. But significant legal and administrative changes came too. In 1970 alone, Nixon signed the National Environmental Policy Act, which required environmental assessments of proposed federal projects, the Water Pollution Control Act, and amendments strengthening the Clean Air Act, and created the Environmental Protection Agency by merging various federal units into one body.

  National transportation policy began changing too, in part as a result of environmental concerns. Early in his presidency, Nixon supported the decision of his interior secretary, Walter Hickel, to cancel a proposed Cross-Florida Barge Canal, citing environmental concerns, an unusual rejection of the Promethean pork barrelism that had come to dominate public works policy. Not long after, Congress killed the supersonic aircraft program. The Nixon administration also agreed to cancel interstate highway extensions in New Orleans and Boston that would have destroyed the neighborhoods they passed through. In 1973 the president supported the congressional decision to allow money in the Highway Trust Fund to be used for mass transportation projects, rather than be restricted to road building. Highway planners found themselves having to hold extensive consultations with impacted communities and take into consideration the effect of proposed projects on the environment and the quality of life, not just traffic flow, as heightened environmental consciousness converged with the democratization of everyday life.

  The implication of the early environmental movement that changes in individual behavior could solve problems of pollution and resource exhaustion—cartoonist Walt Kelly’s Earth Day poster declared, “We have met the enemy and he is us”—made environmentalism into something of a mom-and-apple-pie issue. Business and organized labor had little trouble with measures that called for federally funded efforts to limit pollution from nonindustrial sources. But once proposals began being offered that required industrial concerns and energy producers to reduce the pollution they created at their own expense, business opposition flared. Unlike many federal regulations, which targeted specific industries or practices, environmental measures affected business broadly, an expansion of government control that many businessmen found deeply disturbing.

  Business found an effective counter to demands for environmental measures in arguing that they would limit economic growth and lead to the loss of jobs. Many unions allied with employers, regarding ecology as “economic pornography,” in labor journalist John Herling’s phrase, an idea that threatened jobs and stable labor/management relations. Some environmentalists did believe in checking growth. For those who already had comfortable lives, it would mean little. But for the less prosperous, with the redistribution of wealth outside mainstream discourse, limited growth would mean limited opportunity.

  Once posed as an issue of growth versus pollution reduction, support for environmentalism diminished. Before the end of his first term, Nixon all but abandoned his support for the environmental movement, with the White House no longer portraying it as a benign endeavor for the general good but as an example of liberal protest gone amok. Meanwhile, business lobbyists fought an effective trench war over specific standards and regulations issued by federal environmental agencies. But if slowed, the movement toward greater environmental regulation continued, along with widespread public concern.

  A somewhat parallel trajectory occurred in regulating workplace safety. In 1970 the AFL-CIO, a few of its affiliated unions, and reformer Ralph Nader pressed for the passage of legislation protecting worker health and safety. With the Nixon administration supporting the passage of some such law, in part to woo blue-collar voters, business abandoned its outright opposition, working instead to dilute whatever passed. The compromise Occupational Safety and Health Act created the Occupational Safety and Health Administration (OSHA) to establish workplace health and safety standards and enforce them through worksite inspections.

  Like Title VII of the 1964 Civil Rights Act, which banned racial or sexual discrimination in employment, the worker safety act extended the notion of individual rights into the workplace, with the law stating as its purpose “to assure as far as possible every working man and woman in the Nation safe and healthful working conditions.” That proved easier said than done. OSHA moved very slowly in issuing standards for safety and health, an immense challenge given the thousands of chemicals and safety hazards in workplaces, made more difficult by weak technical capacity and business lobbying and lawsuits. Enforcement proved even harder. Individual worker complaints often led to reprisals (even though illegal). With literally millions of workplaces, no effective monitoring system could be erected. So OSHA generally acted only after accidents occurred, when violations were exceptionally egregious, or when a union aggressively pursued health and safety issues. Within the nondemocratic sphere of the workplace, a rights-based approach to improving workers’ lives functioned effectively only when workers already had organized themselves or when things went terribly bad.

  The individual rights approach to eliminating workplace discrimination also proved problematic. The EEOC, soon after being set up by the 1964 Civil Rights Act, found itself swamped by complaints: its first year of operation, nine thousand cases were filed; by 1975, it had seventy-seven thousand. Quickly, it fell far behind in addressing them. Congress undermined the effectiveness of its own creation by cutting EEOC funding. With the resolution of individual cases prolonged and difficult, class action lawsuits emerged as a more effective means to force equal treatment, especially once the federal courts allowed the use of statistical evidence to prove patterns of discrimination. Between 1965 and 1972, more than twelve hundred class action suits alleging illegal employment discrimination were filed.

  Such legal action began to weaken systematic discrimination, especially when economic pressures were pushing employers in the same direction. In the South, the textile industry (the region’s largest), which traditionally paid low wages to an all-white and heavily female production force, found itself facing a labor shortage as better-paid industries grew, siphoning off workers. A few companies experimented on their own with hiring black workers. But it took lawsuits and sustained federal pressure to force others to desegregate. By the early 1970s, significant hiring of African Americans had occurred. For many black families, a textile job meant the possibility to buy a car or a home, to give a child a better education, and to transform the fabric of everyday life.

  The federal government found a second lever to pry open jobs to excluded groups by requiring hiring targets on federally funded projects. During the Eisenhower and Kennedy administrations, a White House committee had tried to force federal contractors and the federal government itself to hire on a nondiscriminatory basis, but it failed to break long-established patterns of racially discriminatory hiring. Under Johnson, government officials began asking companies in the construction industry seeking federally funded contracts to specify how many nonwhite workers they would try to hire in specific crafts. Many companies preferred this to general injunctions to end discrimination, since it gave them a better sense of what would and would not be acceptable to enforcement agencies. Federal officials also pressed to open up apprenticeship programs to African Americans.

  The use of targets as part of what came to be called “affirmative action” to overcome past patterns of discrimination raised complex political and legal issues. The federal government had occasionally employed racial targets in hiring before World War II, as had a few private companies being pressured by civil rights groups. But after the war, as some states and cities began passing fair employment laws, race-based remedies were challenged as violations of bans on discrimination in hiring, as the rights of individual white workers were seen as in conflict w
ith the effort to overcome historic discrimination against black workers by giving them preference as a group. As the Johnson administration drew to a close, the comptroller general used this argument to block a proposed plan to desegregate the Philadelphia construction industry by requiring federally funded contractors to submit detailed targets for nonwhite hiring, claiming it violated the 1964 Civil Rights Act.

  The Nixon administration included some strong civil rights advocates, like Secretary of Housing and Urban Development George Romney, who wanted to link federal aid for communities to their willingness to racially integrate through the construction of low-income housing. Nixon rejected Romney’s plan, which he called “forced integration of suburbs,” and made episodic gestures toward racist white southern Republicans. But in the end he supported the continuation and even expansion of federal civil rights efforts. In 1970 he signed an extension of the 1965 Voting Rights Act that applied provisions originally restricted to use in the South to the whole country. (The extension also lowered the voting age to eighteen, reflecting the widely shared view that men who were old enough to fight in Vietnam were old enough to vote.) And Nixon revived the Philadelphia Plan for construction industry desegregation.

  Nixon backed the Philadelphia Plan in part because he believed that increased economic opportunities would be a more effective and less disruptive route to black advancement than educational or residential desegregation. (For the same reason, he promoted black entrepreneurship, “Black Capitalism,” a conservative form of Black Power.) But he had other motives too. Nixon had become increasingly concerned by rising construction costs, which contributed to overall inflation and had become the subject of a growing pushback by major corporations. By breaking the hold over construction jobs by craft unions, many of which excluded or largely excluded nonwhites, Nixon hoped to check labor costs. In doing so, he relished the opportunity to drive a wedge between civil rights groups, which supported affirmative action, and the elements of the labor movement that opposed it, playing two of his political opponents against one another.

  The Philadelphia Plan proved moderately successful in opening up construction jobs to black workers, but Nixon’s support for it proved short-lived. In 1970 he began wooing white blue-collar voters and their union leaders, seeing them as a base of support for his unpopular Vietnam policies and a bloc that the Republicans might win over in the 1972 election. His administration moved away from specific hiring goals and timetables in construction contracting to voluntary agreements to increase training opportunities for black workers. But by then, affirmative action had gained legitimacy within the federal government, with various agencies requiring affirmative action plans as part of contracting procedures in industries other than construction.

  Affirmative action got a boost in 1971 when the Supreme Court upheld the use of results-oriented targets in employment practices in Griggs v. Duke Power Co. The Court agreed with the Nixon administration that civil rights laws did not require all government policies to be race blind. Affirmative action, initially deployed to upgrade economic opportunities for African Americans, began to be used to assist other groups as well, particularly Hispanics, Native Americans, and Asians. It became entrenched in the academic world when Nixon maintained the requirement, begun under Johnson, that colleges and universities receiving federal aid draft affirmative action plans for recruiting female and minority students and employees. By the time Nixon left office, affirmative action had become woven into the everyday practices of myriad public and private institutions, even as it came under attack from those who saw it as an infringement on the rights and opportunities of whites.

  Like affirmative action, bilingual education ballooned as a result of a combination of partisan politics, bureaucratic initiative, ethnic mobilization, and court decisions. In 1967, Senator Ralph Yarborough, a Texas Democrat seeking to curry Mexican American votes, introduced a measure for federal funding of bilingual education programs, which went into law but received scant money from the Johnson administration. Seeking to do something for Hispanic voters, the Nixon administration modestly raised funding for bilingual education. More importantly, it repositioned it as a civil rights issue. In 1970, the Department of Health, Education and Welfare issued a regulation applying to all school districts receiving federal funds that had more than 5 percent “National Origin–Minority Group Children.” If inability to speak or understand English excluded these children from “effective participation” in schooling, a district had to take “affirmative steps to rectify the language deficiency.” Under pressure from Washington, with backing from Mexican American lobbying groups, this generally meant bilingual programs, in which basic subject matter was taught in languages other than English, even though no research existed to demonstrate their educational efficacy. A 1974 Supreme Court ruling, upholding this regulation, led to a large-scale expansion of bilingual education. In just a few years, a real problem—school districts that dealt with non-English-speaking students by sticking them in classes conducted in a language they did not understand—had been identified and addressed with little public discussion, using what would become a highly controversial solution. Nixon, motivated in part, but only in part, by political considerations, did not hesitate to vastly expand the role of the federal government in shaping local educational practices in the name of civil rights.

  War and Détente

  Richard Nixon took office at a time when the global power of the United States was in relative decline. During the previous two decades, the extreme economic dominance that the United States held as a result of World War II had greatly diminished, as Europe, Japan, and the Soviet Union recovered from the enormous damage they suffered during the war. Germany and Japan, in particular, rebuilt their industrial capacity, adopted advanced technology, and established social arrangements that made them formidable competitors to the United States. In 1971, West Germany sold more manufactured goods outside its borders than did the United States. That year, for the first time since 1893, the United States imported more goods and services than it exported.

  Over time, the overhead costs of maintaining international hegemony and contesting the Soviet Union took their toll. The expense of a large overseas military force, the cost of the war in Vietnam, and the skewing of domestic investment toward defense industries contributed to rising inflation, decreasing competitiveness, and international pressure on the dollar. And no letup was in sight; the Soviet Union, through massive military investments, had all but caught up to the United States in its nuclear arsenal. For the first time since the beginning of the atomic age, the United States no longer had vast superiority in nuclear war-fighting capacity.

  Nixon believed that the country’s foreign policy needed to be rethought in the light of the changed international distribution of power. Better informed about world politics than most presidents, in some respects he served as his own secretary of state, though his pompous, self-promoting national security adviser, Henry Kissinger (who also served as secretary of state in his second administration), did much of the legwork and received much of the credit for his foreign policy. Nixon and Kissinger recognized that it no longer made sense to structure foreign policy around the assumption of a bipolar world of U.S.- and Soviet-led blocs struggling for supremacy. Within the capitalist world, the Western European countries, as their economic power grew, began asserting greater autonomy from the United States, evident, among other ways, in their refusal to provide military or in many cases even political support for the American effort in Vietnam. Within the communist world, China had long been asserting its independence from the Soviet Union—in 1969 the countries had serious military clashes along their border—but only with the Nixon administration did the United States make the Sino-Soviet split central to its diplomatic conduct. Rather than a bifurcated global polity, the Nixon administration saw a world dominated by a group of big powers: the United States, the Soviet Union, China, Western Europe, and Japan. Nixon and Kis
singer, much like George Kennan two decades earlier, believed that the United States could ensure its national security and promote its interests by establishing, through diplomacy, a balance of power among them. That would entail dropping ideological combat to improve relations with the Soviet Union. It also meant taking a much bolder step that Nixon had been contemplating during his years out of office—establishing a relationship with China, which the United States had treated as a pariah since 1949. Improved relations with the two communist giants would allow the United States to play them off against one another and, Kissinger and Nixon believed, provide leverage to pressure them to cooperate with the United States on a whole range of issues.

  What in retrospect appeared as a grand strategy did not emerge whole cloth but developed in response to specific challenges the Nixon administration faced, especially the war in Vietnam. Nixon took office determined not to suffer the fate of his predecessor by allowing the war to dominate or destroy his administration. He believed that he could quickly wind it down, in a matter of months or a year.

  Nixon’s desire to end the war did not mean that he had any intention to unilaterally withdraw from Vietnam or agree to a settlement that did not leave the incumbent South Vietnamese government in place. A communist victory, he believed, would be a domestic political disaster and undermine the credibility of the country with its allies and enemies. Credibility, rather than any geostrategic calculus or claims about democracy and freedom, dominated the justification of the war under Nixon, as the reasons for it became ever more abstract. Nixon thought he could square the circle, win the war, or at least not lose it, while lowering its profile and drain on resources.