Who Stole the American Dream?

by Hedrick Smith

—WILLIAM RUCKELSHAUS,

  first administrator of the EPA

  MANY OLDER AMERICANS have largely forgotten, and so many young Americans have never known, what American politics was like before the late 1970s. The dynamics of that earlier era offer important lessons for solutions to our current predicament.

  Unlike most Americans today, who feel ignored by the powers-that-be in Washington and politically powerless to alter that situation, millions of Americans in the 1960s and 1970s believed in the power of ordinary people. They believed that by acting together, they could shape the nation’s agenda and influence government policy. Average Americans felt confident that they counted politically. They acted on that confidence, and they generated a period of unprecedented citizen activism from the late 1950s through the early 1970s. It was the political as well as the economic heyday of the middle class.

  Ordinary Americans fought for change—and they won change—through the demands of the civil rights movement and the women’s movement for equal rights; through the environmental movement and its fight for clean air and water; through the push of the consumer movement for a better quality of life and more honesty in the marketplace; through the battle of the trade union movement for a solid middle-class standard of living; and through the peace movement and its mass protests to end the war in Vietnam.

  The gains didn’t come easily. But ordinary people could see over time that Congress and the White House, in Republican as well as Democratic administrations, did respond to popular pressures. They came to understand that by putting themselves physically on the line through direct citizen action, they could exercise real political clout in the halls of power.

  People could see, through a series of successes, that the middle class could have a clear impact on policy. They saw that they could enlarge the American Dream for average Americans.

  The Power of a “Gentle Army”

  One balmy August morning in 1963, in the pink-orange light of daybreak that silhouetted the Washington Monument, the buses rolled into the nation’s capital. Greyhounds and Trailways arrived from New York and Connecticut and Pennsylvania. More came from Ohio and Michigan and Illinois. Many had been traveling through the night, and now at their destination, the bus drivers parked along Constitution Avenue and disgorged throngs of ordinary people onto the massive green Washington Mall. People made their way on foot toward the Lincoln Memorial. The day was not yet hot, but the people moved slowly, quietly, talking among themselves expectantly.

  Soon, the pilgrimage was joined by civil rights activists who had driven from Alabama, Mississippi, and Tennessee. Others flew or took the train from Georgia, Virginia, or the Carolinas. There were Freedom Riders, black and white, who had been savagely bludgeoned by a white mob in Montgomery or whose Greyhound bus had been torched by a Molotov cocktail outside Anniston. There were college students such as John Lewis, whom I had seen beaten and burned with lit cigarettes while trying to desegregate lunch counters in Nashville; preachers such as Reverend Fred Shuttlesworth from Birmingham, who had been slammed against a church wall by a high-powered police fire hose, and youngsters who had braved nightsticks and snarling police dogs. There were doctors and lawyers and business proprietors who had used their homes or stores as collateral for bond to free thousands of civil rights marchers across the Old Confederacy. And there were professors, ministers, schoolteachers, and ordinary people from the nation’s heartland, moved by conscience to bear witness in the March on Washington.

  The powers-that-be were braced for the worst. They feared an emotional crowd worked into a volatile fever by its leaders or provoked into a wild rampage by racist troublemakers. But instead, on August 28, 1963, the huge middle-class throng, mostly Negroes but many whites, too, were peaceful, calm, and dignified. As Russell Baker wrote for The New York Times, “No one could remember an invading army quite as gentle as the 200,000 civil rights marchers who occupied Washington today.”

  Fresh from reporting in the Deep South, I was struck by the relaxed and cheerful mood. Parents played with children or lolled under the low trees. Others sauntered on the Mall or spread their blankets beneath the rising sun, fathers dozing off with newspapers folded over their eyes. The event had the sunny air of a mass picnic. But it was no picnic. This was history in the making, the largest peaceful demonstration for a social cause that Washington had ever seen. It was a festival of democracy—a mass celebration of people power and a citizens’ call for action by the government to mend the injustice of racist discrimination. As the Reverend Martin Luther King, Jr., said, to resounding cheers, this gentle but expectant crowd felt “the fierce urgency of now.”

  Few people in America knew better than King how to move a nation and how to shake the power structure out of its reluctance and inertia by dramatizing social and economic injustice. In nearly a decade since the Supreme Court’s 1954 decision ordered school desegregation, civil rights legislation had been bottled up in Congress. It was the power of ordinary middle-class Americans, the exercise of grassroots democracy, that broke the logjam. It was the lunch counter sit-ins, the brave Freedom Riders, and the students marching through cities like Birmingham that were altering the attitudes of a nation and the political climate in Washington, by exposing the ugly face of racism and the harsh wages of social and economic injustice in America.

  Martin Luther King, Jr., and the Power of the Street

  To highlight their cause, Martin Luther King, Jr., and his Southern Christian Leadership Conference had targeted Birmingham in 1963 because of the city’s mentality of massive resistance and the no-holds-barred enforcement of segregation by Birmingham’s public safety commissioner, Eugene (Bull) Connor.

  By then, most southern cities had begun desegregating, but Birmingham remained what King called “probably the most thoroughly segregated city” in America, with an “ugly record of police brutality.” There had been twenty-two unsolved bombings of Negro homes and churches. Jewish temples were floodlit and under guard at night. People, fearing informers, were cowed into silence. Veteran New York Times correspondent Harrison Salisbury had called Birmingham “a community of fear.” One of the first people I met in Birmingham was an outspoken lawyer named Chuck Morgan, who admitted his fear and showed me the loaded .38-caliber pistol that he carried in his briefcase for self-defense.

  King banked on the psychological leverage of people power to prick the conscience of hidden moderates in Birmingham by confronting the city’s police with an army of students, calling for the desegregation of department store facilities and for better job opportunities for qualified Negroes. Led by their pastors, teenagers would march through downtown Birmingham day after day, singing “We Shall Overcome” in the face of billy clubs, jet-stream fire hoses, and snarling police dogs. What segregationist diehards failed to grasp was that the images of cops brutally beating peaceful students—beamed nightly to the nation on TV—were King’s trump card, his direct channel of influence on political Washington.

  When the city got a local court injunction to stop the protests, King put on his coveralls and personally joined the march. And he got arrested. From jail, he chastised white moderates for defending law and order, which, he said, was tantamount to protecting the racist status quo. By his personal involvement, he had upped the ante to try to break the racist stone wall in Birmingham.

  Economic Leverage: A Citizen Boycott

  But the dynamics of citizen direct action were already having an effect. Even before he landed in jail, King and his lieutenant Andrew Young had opened a secret dialogue with white merchants and moderates through the Episcopal bishop of Alabama. Young understood that Bull Connor, who proudly flaunted that nickname to play up his tough-guy image, was only a front man for “the Big Mules,” the city’s white power structure.

  What would turn around the Big Mules, Young reasoned, was economic leverage—a black shopping boycott. “Money is color-blind,” Young reasoned. “It was simple. We had one hundred thousand people, the black population around Birmin
gham. Nobody was buying anything but food or medicine for ninety days. Businessmen understand that.” They also understood that daily images of snapping police dogs were ruining Birmingham’s reputation. In private, a deal slowly emerged. The merchants and a newly elected mayor, Albert Boutwell, agreed to meet all the Negro demands for desegregation and job promotions and to dismiss charges against the protesters.

  The March on Washington

  Now, with the Birmingham victory in hand but a long agenda ahead, Martin Luther King, Jr., and other leaders had brought their civil rights crusade to Washington. At the feet of Abraham Lincoln, they were leveraging the mass support their movement had generated, and they were reminding politicians that the people were now watching—impatient with government inaction.

  Martin Luther King’s soaring “dream” refrain echoes even now in people’s memories. But first, targeting fence-sitters in Congress, he called on the nation to live up to its highest ideals. “In a sense we’ve come to our nation’s capital to cash a check,” King declared. “When the architects of our republic wrote the magnificent words of the Constitution and the Declaration of Independence, they were signing a promissory note to which every American was to fall heir. This note was a promise that all men, yes, black men as well as white men, would be guaranteed the ‘Unalienable Rights of Life, Liberty, and the pursuit of Happiness.’ It is obvious today that America has defaulted on this promissory note…. Instead of honoring this sacred obligation, America has given the Negro people a bad check, a check which has come back marked ‘insufficient funds.’ But we refuse to believe that the bank of justice is bankrupt…. And so we’ve come to cash this check, a check that will give us upon demand the riches of freedom and the security of justice.”

  Then came those soaring, anguished cadences of King’s peroration: “I have a dream….” Again and again, he cried out: “I have a dream that one day this nation will rise up and live out the true meaning of its creed…. I have a dream that my four little children will one day live in a nation where they will not be judged by the color of their skin but by the content of their character.”

  Afterward, the march leaders met with President Kennedy and Vice President Johnson. John Lewis remembers Kennedy standing at the door of the Oval Office. “He was just beaming. He was so pleased everything turned out so well—there was no violence,” Lewis recalled. “He shook hands with each of us and said, ‘You did a good job…. You did a good job.’ And then to Dr. King, ‘You had a dream.’ There was so much optimism, so much hope. He just said, ‘We will work to get a civil rights bill passed.’ … That was the last time I saw President Kennedy alive.”

  It fell to Lyndon Johnson, a Texan, to make good on Kennedy’s promise, and the interplay between the new president and Martin Luther King, Jr., was a central part of that drama. After Kennedy’s assassination, King praised the new president but prodded him, too, voicing confidence that “President Johnson will follow the path charted by President Kennedy in civil rights.”

  When Johnson phoned to thank him, King suggested that a new civil rights law would be “one of the great tributes” to Kennedy’s memory. Johnson chose almost those exact words addressing Congress a few days later, and he persisted until Congress in June 1964 enacted a civil rights law banning segregation in public accommodations. At the bill signing, Johnson gave King one of the pens that he had used.

  Then later, in December 1964, King pressed Johnson once again. As King was returning home from receiving the Nobel Peace Prize in Stockholm, Johnson invited him to the White House. America, said King, needs a strong voting rights law. Johnson agreed but said he lacked the votes in Congress. But a month later, on January 18, 1965, Johnson phoned King and urged the civil rights leader to put public pressure on Congress—and on himself as president—to pass a voting rights bill. Without saying so explicitly, Johnson was challenging King to “make me do it!” King understood and responded with a new voting rights campaign, including the bloody march at Selma, Alabama, where the brutal clubbing of John Lewis and others provoked national outrage. Once again, the interaction of people power and presidential leadership achieved concrete results. It produced the Voting Rights Act of 1965—a change in law, in policy, and in expanding American democracy.

  Largest One-Day Protest Ever: Earth Day 1970—Twenty Million Strong

  Probably the broadest engagement of middle-class political power in modern American politics was the environmental movement. On Earth Day in 1970, in the largest one-day grassroots demonstration this country has ever seen, twenty million Americans staged street marches and held rallies and teach-ins to demonstrate their outrage at pollution. They took to the streets because they were disgusted by such incidents as the Santa Barbara oil spill in 1969, acid rain in the Midwest, the choking smog over Los Angeles, toxic waste in the rivers, and lead paint or asbestos in their own basements.

  In the late 1960s, the green movement took off, especially among younger, well-educated suburban voters. Millions joined the Sierra Club, the National Wildlife Federation, Natural Resources Defense Council, the League of Conservation Voters, the Environmental Defense Fund, and the National Audubon Society, among others. Rachel Carson had aroused Americans with her book Silent Spring in 1962, but it was the raw, in-your-face ugliness of pollution that fanned the flames of public anger and gave the issue urgency. In the late 1960s, when you stuck an arm into the Potomac River in Washington, it came out covered with green slime. The river wore a filthy floating coat of green algae. That typified the visible, palpable stain of pollution from coast to coast.

  “I remember when the Cuyahoga River burned, with flames that were eight stories high,” Robert Kennedy, Jr., told me. “I remember the Santa Barbara oil spill in 1969 that closed virtually all the beaches in Southern California. I remember when they declared Lake Erie dead. I remember that I couldn’t swim in the Hudson, or the Charles, or the Potomac when I was growing up.”

  “This Has Got to Stop”

  “There was anger at the state of the world, at the state of your own back yard, whether it be a water body or the air or your mountain range,” said William Baker of the Chesapeake Bay Foundation. “There was anger that we as a country had let it go so far. And there was a grass roots rebellion saying, ‘This has got to stop.’ ”

  So intense was the public interest in the environment and so fierce the political pressure from grassroots America that Nixon, who was far from a tree-hugging environmentalist, felt compelled to declare his fealty to environmental protection on New Year’s Day 1970. The coming decade, he declared, “absolutely must be the years when America pays its debt to the past by reclaiming the purity of its air, its waters, and our living environment.” Then, echoing a battle cry of the green movement, he trumpeted: “It is literally now or never.”

  Typically, Washington moves deliberately—which means slowly—on reforms. But on the environment, Congress and the Nixon White House moved with astonishing speed. During his first year, President Nixon set up a White House Council on Environmental Quality, naming environmentalist Russell Train as its chairman. Solid bipartisan majorities in Congress rushed through a flow of environmental legislation under Nixon: the Clean Air Act; the Clean Water Act; a bill establishing the Environmental Protection Agency; the Federal Insecticide, Fungicide, and Rodenticide Act; the Noise Pollution and Abatement Act; the Coastal Zone Management Act; the Marine Mammal Protection Act; the Endangered Species Act; and the Safe Drinking Water Act. More environmental legislation was passed under Gerald Ford after Nixon resigned in 1974.

  At the state level, too, there was a rush of action. It seemed as if no politician dared brook the anger of an aroused public. “It was a big issue,” observed William Ruckelshaus, Nixon’s first EPA chief. “It exploded on the country, and it forced a Republican administration and a president [who] had never thought about this very much, President Nixon. It forced him to deal with it because the public said, ‘This is intolerable. We’ve got to do something about it.’ ”<
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  In those early years of environmental enthusiasm, quite a lot was achieved. The results were visible. That early wave of government regulation did, in fact, reduce the most egregious pollution, like the green slime on the Potomac. Big industrial polluters and cities were taken to court and fined, until they changed their ways. The public thought the job was done. Voter interest subsided, and as it subsided, so did government action.

  Consumer Power: “Nader’s Raiders” vs. GM

  A similar surge of middle-class power and civic activism, with similar impact on Washington, came from the consumer movement. Although less militant and less well organized than the greens, public interest consumerism took off in the mid-1960s and had strong policy influence into the late 1970s.

  Eleven major new consumer organizations were formed in the 1960s, among them the Consumer Federation of America, Public Citizen, and Congress Watch. They attracted a strong following among well-educated yuppies, suburbanites, and upper-middle-class professionals who were wary of big business. With slogans calling for “Truth in Lending” and “Truth in Packaging,” consumer advocates demanded more aggressive action by federal watchdog agencies to protect the public from being unfairly exploited by unsafe products and unscrupulous lenders. Quality of life was key. People took U.S. economic growth for granted, and they wanted higher standards, better quality, and greater transparency from industry.

  More than any other single person, Ralph Nader put middle-class consumer activism on the political map. A public figure of no small ego, Nader knew how to work the press, the public, and politicians. His 1965 book, Unsafe at Any Speed, captured public attention with the charge that America’s Big Three carmakers were responsible for many automobile accidents because they were marketing cars that were mechanically and technically unsafe.