By September Chicago was ready to ask for its grant and there were rumors that Willis intended to use some of the funds in high-income neighborhoods. Keppel, while without authority to withhold at this stage, could defer disbursement. On September 28 the Chicago Tribune reported incorrectly that Illinois Superintendent of Public Instruction Ray Page had already approved the Chicago grant. Keppel was concerned that abuse by Willis might embarrass the Johnson administration politically.
He composed a letter to Page:
Preliminary investigation of certain of the complaints … indicates probable noncompliance with the act and the regulation, and brings into serious question the assurance of compliance made by the Chicago school authorities. … We believe that these … complaints can, with the full cooperation of the Chicago school authorities, be fully investigated in a relatively short time and they can and must be satisfactorily resolved before any new commitments are made of funds.
Gardner approved the letter. Keppel notified Cater, who covered HEW for the White House. He neither disapproved nor informed the President. The letter was hand-delivered to Page in Springfield with a copy to Willis in Chicago on October 1.
To say that outrage was expressed in the Land of Lincoln would be an understatement. Very loud and extremely angry voices filled the airwaves and gained big headlines in the Chicago press—Page, Willis, Congressman Roman Pucinski, Chicago’s representative on the House Education and Labor Committee, Senator Dirksen, and, by no means least, Mayor Daley. They delivered the same message: a band of children-hating power-hungry bureaucrats in Washington had conspired to destroy a sacred American principle—local control of the public schools.
The President was shocked. He ordered Califano to investigate, and a memorandum from the Department of Justice pointed out that an ambiguity in the law raised a question about the legality, to say nothing of the political wisdom, of Keppel’s letter.
On October 3 the President went to New York to sign the new immigration law and to greet the Pope. The mayor, with Mrs. Daley at his side, was waiting for him in Ambassador Goldberg’s luxurious apartment in the Waldorf Towers.
Daley battered Johnson with outrage and, though a devout Catholic, kept the Pope waiting ten minutes. The President offered no defense whatever. He said that he would look into the matter the moment he returned to Washington and that Califano was already lining up Gardner, Wilbur Cohen, Keppel, Katzenbach, and Cater. “Daley,” Califano wrote, “was critical to the success of the Great Society. A call to Daley was all that was needed to deliver the fourteen votes of the Illinois Democratic delegation. Johnson and others of us had made many calls to the Mayor and Daley had always come through.” The White House meeting, therefore, was a disaster for Keppel. Johnson raked him over the coals and Keppel soon resigned as Commissioner of Education, which he had intended to do anyway.
Johnson sent Cohen to Chicago with instructions to settle the issue immediately. He met with Frank Whiston, the chairman of the school board and a Willis supporter. Since Cohen caved in except for a few meaningless concessions, it took only an hour to reach agreement.
The Chicago disaster ended any hope of using Title VI of the Civil Rights Act to eliminate de facto school segregation for the time being. The city got its $32 million with no questions asked. Other segregated northern school districts received similar treatment. Big-city northern Democrats in the House, led by Pucinski, mounted a campaign against the Office of Education. In the South, Chicago was read as proof that civil rights enforcement could be beaten back with political power. As Orfield concluded, “An earlier hope that HEW would use the administrative discretion provided by the broad injunction of Title VI …to prohibit de facto segregation vanished in the first days of October, 1965.” Mayor Daley had passed his first test handsomely.5
In 1965 King considered four targets for his invasion of the North: Chicago, New York, Philadelphia, and Washington. Adam Clayton Powell, the boss of Harlem, wanted no outside meddling in his town and told King to stay out of New York. Black leadership was weak in Philadelphia and Washington would offend the White House. It had to be Chicago. Bayard Rustin, perhaps the wisest of King’s advisers, said, “You don’t know what you are talking about. You don’t know what Chicago is like. … You’re going to be wiped out.” The Reverend Arthur Brazier of the South Side Woodlawn Organization said, “King decided to come to Chicago because … Chicago was unique in that there was one man, one source of power. … This wasn’t the case in New York or any other city. He thought if Daley could be persuaded of the Tightness of open housing and integrated schools that things could be done.” King totally misread the mayor. Daley told one of his lieutenants in rage that King was a “dirty sonofabitch, a bastard, a prick. He said, ‘King came here to hurt Douglas [the senator was up for reelection in 1966] because Rockefeller gave him dough, that’s why he came here, to try to get Douglas beaten. He’s a rabble-rouser, a trouble-maker.’ ”
King was in and out of the city in the summer of 1965 but had no organization. A SCLC meeting with Chicago’s Coordinating Council of Community Organizations led to neither a strategy nor an agenda. In January 1966 King rented a $90-a-month cold apartment in the Lawndale ghetto. After the landlord learned who his tenant would be, an army of repairmen arrived to fix it up, much to the glee of the Chicago press. But King stayed in a hotel downtown to keep warm.
Activity finally began on July 10, 1966, with a rally in Soldier Field. King hoped to attract 100,000 people; in fact, 30,000 showed up. He then led a march of 5000 to tape his demands on the door of City Hall.
Tuesday, July 12, was brutally hot and the beaches were closed because the lake was polluted. Although it was illegal, children had long cooled off at fire hydrants by turning on the spray. The fire commissioner, with pressure dropping, ordered them sealed. In the near West Side ghetto at the corner of Roosevelt Road and Throop Street the kids turned the hydrants on and the police shut them off repeatedly. A large crowd gathered. The cops arrested a youngster and rocks began to fly. The officers used their clubs. King, preaching at nearby Shiloh Baptist Church, urged nonviolence to no avail. The water incident quickly turned into a riot: 10 people were injured, 24 were arrested, store windows were smashed, and looting was widespread.
Wednesday evening the riot spread a mile north with fires, stoning of firemen, and looting. There were 11 persons wounded, six of them officers, and there were 35 arrests. On Thursday evening, several miles west, Lawndale and Garfield Park exploded into a major riot which continued until Friday morning. Two persons were killed, one a pregnant fourteen-year-old, 30 were wounded, and 200 were arrested. Daley asked Governor Otto Kerner for the National Guard.
On Friday King went to the mayor’s office and they quickly reached an agreement—installation of sprayers on hydrants, access to parks and swimming pools, staying off the streets in riot areas, and an advisory committee on police-community relations. That evening 1500 troops moved into the West Side and stopped the violence. In all, 61 policemen were injured and 533 citizens were arrested.
Mike Royko wrote,
Now there was a program, and Daley liked it. Give them water. He had a whole lake outside the door. … City Hall … embarked on a crusade to make Chicago’s blacks the wettest in the country. Portable swimming pools were being trucked in. Sprinklers were attached to hydrants, and water was gushing everywhere. One cynical civil rights worker said, “I think they’re hoping we’ll all grow gills and swim away.”
King now turned to housing. On July 31 blacks marched against Halvorsen Realtors in all-white Gage Park. A huge white mob overcame the police, rained bricks, rocks, and bottles on the demonstrators, and overturned and burned cars. Thirty-one were injured.
On August 2, 500 demonstrators with heavy police protection marched through a tense white crowd to Parker 8c Finney Realtors in Belmont-Cragin. Almost two dozen whites were arrested.
Two days later 600 demonstrators protected by 1200 policemen started another walk to Halvorsen R
ealtors, surrounded by many thousands of white protestors. King was hit on the head by a rock. “I have never seen such hostility and hatred anywhere in my life,” he said, “even in Selma.” There were 30 injuries and 40 arrests. A revisit to Belmont-Cragin on August 7 was more of the same. The demonstrations received enormous coverage in the media, both in Chicago and nationally, fueling the white backlash.
These marches, Alan B. Anderson and George W. Pickering wrote, were designed to “dramatize the dual housing market, expose segregationist realtors, and force the mayor into negotiations of the movement’s demands for open housing.” But they “provoked or exposed a truly shocking depth of anger, hatred, and potential for violence.” With his city being torn apart, Daley agreed to a “summit” at the Episcopal Cathedral of St. James on August 17.
Ben W. Heineman, president of the Chicago 8c Northwestern Railroad and a notable civic leader, chaired the meetings, which went on for a week and a half. What King now called the Freedom Movement had hastily cobbled together nine housing demands, but the Chicago Real Estate Board paid them only lip service. Daley insisted that the demonstrations stop at once. King refused until he won something in return. On August 19 the mayor got an injunction against the marches. King threatened to stage a demonstration in Cicero on Sunday, August 28. An independent town, Cicero was beyond the reach of the court order and was notorious as the most bigoted and violent locality in the metropolitan area.
The city, the Freedom Movement, and the real estate interests eventually worked out an agreement in principle: Daley would ask for a state open housing law; the Real Estate Board would withdraw its opposition to open housing; the housing authority would try to spread public housing beyond the ghettoes; and so on. King called it “the first step in a thousand-mile journey.” But the militants overrode him; they rejected the agreement and insisted on the demonstration in Cicero.
It was a calamity. On September 4, 250 marchers chanting “Black Power!” marched into the town protected by 3000 National Guardsmen, Cook County sheriffs, and state and local police. They faced a raging mob of thousands that pelted them with rocks and bottles and shattered the march.
The consequence of this disaster was that the Freedom Movement was destroyed. King could not even get a vote to ratify the summit agreement. There was no open housing. The agreement, Royko wrote, “was an impressive document, chock full of noble vows and promises. It was also without legal standing and wasn’t worth the paper it was printed on.” Mayor Daley, who would be overwhelmingly reelected in 1967, had passed his second test. But Lyndon Johnson suffered a double defeat: Congress rejected his open housing bill, and Paul Douglas, one of his staunchest supporters on the Vietnam War in the Senate, went down to defeat.6
Lyndon Johnson despised the college students who demonstrated against the war and the draft and loathed the style of the counterculture. He was convinced that their leaders were engaged in an international Communist conspiracy and ordered Director Richard Helms of the Central Intelligence Agency to prove it. He also directed Secretary Rusk to study the dramatic surge in student turmoil around the world in the late sixties. Rusk created a Student Unrest Study Group which prepared a thoughtful report on more than 30 countries. It did not reach Rusk until January 17, 1969, three days before Johnson left the White House. It would have given him small comfort, as would the superficial CIA report.
“The Communist role in student unrest,” the State Department study read, “is considerably more often alleged than confirmed.” The dominant student New Left was “essentially anti-Communist.” Moscow and the Soviet satellites “actually opposed on doctrinal grounds certain major student uprisings, e.g., in France, Belgium, and West Berlin.”
If Marxism did not drive worldwide unrest, what did? The proximate causes, the report stated, were rooted in the university, where there was “a growing base of student cynicism with respect to the relevance of social institutions and to the apparent gap between promise and performance.”
Because of the revolution in communications, the ease of travel, and the evolution of society everywhere, student behavior never again will resemble what it was when education was reserved for the elite. The presence in the universities of thousands of lower-and-lower-middle-class students has resulted in an unprecedented demand for relevant instruction. Today’s students are a self-conscious group; they communicate effectively with each other outside of any institutional framework, read the same books and savor similar experiences. Increasingly, they have come to recognize what they take to be a community of interests. This view is likely to influence their future political conduct and to shape the demands they make of government.
The peace movement, which became a central feature of American life in the sixties, began a decade earlier in an uneasy coalition of internationalists and radical pacifists. They were deeply concerned about the warlike manner in which the Cold War was waged and by The Bomb. The lead organization, SANE, was soon joined by others, and somewhat later by Students for a Democratic Society, SDS.
SDS traced its orig.ns back to the Progressive era, to the Intercollegiate Socialist Society with such literary luminaries as Jack London, Upton Sinclair, and William English Walling. After World War II its parent, the League for Industrial Democracy, supported financially by the International Ladies’ Garment Workers’ Union, along with its appendage, now called the Student League for Industrial Democracy, began to attract a new group of radicals. In 1960 they changed their name to Students for a Democratic Society.
The timing seemed ideal, according to the questionable reasoning of Kirkpatrick Sale, because American universities were now a smoldering “volcano” and students would be “harbingers of a revived left.” He laid out four reasons for this development. First, America was moving into crisis with a tattered social fabric, an eroding economy, a corrupt and bureaucratized political system, and the Cold War. Related, second, was a “crisis of belief.” Americans no longer trusted their institutions. Young people, third, were moving into positions of power because of their numbers, education, and wealth, which led them to protest. Finally, students were now gathered in enormous numbers in universities, which provided the battlegrounds.
Those SDS members who were intellectuals were influenced by the Columbia sociologist C. Wright Mills, an idiosyncratic leftist from Texas who came to work on a motorcycle and was wholly out of sorts with the America of the fifties; Herbert Marcuse, who tried to marry Marx and Freud; and Paul Goodman, an anarchist who attacked the affluent society and stressed alienation among the young in a book prophetically called Growing Up Absurd. According to Todd Gitlin, one of the founders of SDS, members worshipped Marlon Brando as a motorcycling gangster in the film The Wild One (1953). “What are you rebelling against?” Brando, snarling, “Whadda ya got?” They quickly picked up the heavy pulse of rock ’n’ roll from Elvis Presley.
In July 1962 a disparate group of 59 students gathered for an SDS convention at the UAW camp in Port Huron, Michigan, an almost surreal event. Tom Hayden, who had been editor of the Michigan Daily, had composed a 60-page manifesto which the group, after much wrangling, adopted. The Port Huron Statement, despite its length, ambiguities, absurdities, and omissions, became a kind of Declaration of Independence for the youthful American New Left.
Four-fifths of the statement consisted of a denunciation of virtually every significant American institution. It pointed a big finger at two villains: militarism (the Cold War and The Bomb) and racism (with kudos to the civil rights movement). Much of the rest was a statement of Hay den’s “social goals and values.” He stressed individualism (“human independence”), community (“relationships should involve fraternity and honesty”), and a political system of small group participatory democracy. A “new left” would be the vehicle for reaching these goals, based on students in the universities. They would campaign with “reason, freedom, and love.”
Hayden wrote that his generation trusted only three people over 30: Norman Thomas, Wright Mills, and M
ichael Harrington. “Shortly thereafter,” Harrington wrote, “I forfeited that trust.” He was an official of the parent LID, and, as a devoted Socialist, abhorred Communism. The SDS delegates were certainly not Communists, but they held the U.S. primarily responsible for the Cold War, made a hero of Castro, and refused to throw an uninvited 17-year-old high school boy out of the Port Huron meeting because he represented a Communist youth organization. Harrington urged the delegates to clean up their act and they refused to heed his arguments. A typical left-wing donnybrook with LID followed. Gitlin wrote, “SDS won, more or less.”
In 1963 Gitlin became president of SDS. But it had only a dozen chapters and 1100 members among the 6 million college students in the U.S. It did not seem to be going anywhere. In 1965 it was given an opening when Lyndon Johnson made his military commitment in Vietnam. Although many individual members and several chapters became active in the peace movement, SDS itself maintained an uneasy ambivalence toward the war.7
In 1964 the University of California at Berkeley was, if not at the top, extremely close to it among the nation’s and the world’s institutions of higher learning. Its offerings were exceptionally broad in 15 schools and colleges and 72 departments, supplemented by 58 research organizations. Its faculty of 1467 was distinguished, including nine living Nobel Prize winners, 48 members of the National Academy of Sciences, and one winner of the Pulitzer Prize (poetry). When President Kennedy addressed 92,000 people in Memorial Stadium on March 23, 1962, he noted that his administration was graced with many Berkeley notables. “It is a disturbing fact to me, and it may be to some of you, that the New Frontier owes as much to Berkeley as it does to Harvard University.” The library system contained over 3 million volumes and many millions of other published and manuscript materials. A cosmopolitan mega-university, Berkeley had 26,000 students, a very large number of them enrolled in graduate and professional programs, who came from every state in the nation and 90 foreign countries.
Guns or Butter Page 59
