Penguin History of the United States of America

by Hugh Brogan

  President Gerald Ford, loyal to the stern tradition of Herbert Hoover, adopted a severely deflationary policy. Americans (headed by the federal government) must abandon extravagance and learn to live within their means. Ford relentlessly vetoed what seemed to him to be the wasteful proposals of Congress (which the Democrats still controlled) and when the city of New York, finding itself on the brink of bankruptcy, appealed to the President for help, he turned it down fiat, FORD TO CITY: ‘DROP DEAD’, said the headline in the New York Daily News, and the President could reflect that he had added substantially to the odds against his re-election.2 Otherwise he achieved nothing. When he left office, unemployment stood at nearly 8 per cent, and the budget deficit was at a destabilizing and record-breaking $66.4 billion.

  Given this Republican record, it was reasonable to expect a crushing Democratic victory in 1976. As if inflation and the memory of Watergate were not bad enough, the glittering edifice of Kissinger’s foreign policy had collapsed: in 1975 the communists finally conquered Laos, Cambodia and South Vietnam. The last Americans in Saigon fled ignominiously, leaving behind all too many of their collaborators. The victors renamed Saigon ‘Ho Chi Minh City’ and set up a regime quite as oppressive as those in other communist countries; in Cambodia the Khmer Rouge went much further and, under their morally and intellectually perverted leader Pol Pot, began to massacre their countrymen by the million. Ford did, and probably could do, nothing to help, but America was shamed. In the same year, at Helsinki, agreements were signed with the Soviet Union by which, for the first time, the West recognized Russian hegemony in Eastern Europe as legitimate; the fact that by the same instrument the Russian communists pledged themselves to respect human rights in the Soviet Union did not impress the critics; the undertaking, they complained, was mere words (in this they were eventually proved wrong). So Ford lost to Jimmy Carter, but only by a small margin after all: he took 48 per cent of the popular vote to Carter’s 50 per cent, and the winning margin in the electoral college was only 57.

  Democrats (especially northerners) might attribute this rather dismal result solely to Carter’s lacklustre campaign; in reality it was a warning that the geography of American politics had shifted profoundly. The old Rooseveltian coalition of organized labour, ethnic minorities, liberals and blacks delivered for Carter magnificently, and the total Democratic vote was no more than two million short of Lyndon Johnson’s record-setting tally of 1964; but Carter won only because he reclaimed the South, where blacks voted for him because he was a Democrat and, his record showed, wholly committed to civil rights, and whites (but not a majority of them) because he was one of their own: he was the first President elected from the Deep South since the Civil War. Outside the South, the Democrats only carried two states west of the Mississippi – Missouri and Hawaii.3 Yet California, Texas and Florida were the fastest growing of all the states. The question arose whether the Democrats could ever again win with a candidate from the North-East at the head of their ticket, and whether Jimmy Carter would be adroit and impressive enough in office to ensure his re-election in 1980 by rebuilding his party’s strength outside its heartland in the Frostbelt.

  ‘Frostbelt’ was a new term, the counterpart of ‘the Sunbelt’ – that newly powerful region which, by some reckonings, stretched round the southern border of the United States from Virginia to California. The Sunbelt abounded in exuberant self-confidence and new money; it also included the country’s greatest oil-producing areas. Reconciling its views with those of the oil-consuming Frostbelt (or Rustbelt, as it was sometimes even more unkindly called, in allusion to its decaying heavy industry) would tax any president, and a Democratic one most of all.

  Carter certainly recognized that the times required a new politics, and he supposed that he could supply it. He had demonstrated, by his success in winning the nomination, that even within the Democratic party there was a feeling that the New Deal tradition was of shrinking relevance to modern America. The great bureaucratic state which was one of the legacies of the New Deal, the Second World War and the Cold War had to many eyes become too large, inefficient and corrupt. Carter gloried in being an outsider to Washington and campaigned against its folly and wickedness as demonstrated by Vietnam and Watergate. He promised ‘compassion and competence’ in government, as a way of getting round the perpetual struggle between liberal Democrats, who supported activist policies, the welfare state and high taxes, and Republicans, still decrying ‘big government’ and wasteful expenditure, and wanting tax cuts. Before becoming a peanut farmer, and then a politician, Carter had served six years in the navy as an engineer. This training largely determined his outlook: he believed that government, like engineering, was a process of problem-solving, and that problems yielded most readily to those who worked hard and mastered all details (so he tended to immerse himself in one thing at a time, however many other urgent matters were in need of his attention). He looked always for comprehensive solutions, which is fine in principle but not often sensible when you have a country as large and diverse as America to govern and a body as incalculable as Congress to manage: Carter needed to learn the arts of negotiation and compromise, and how to settle for half a loaf (in some respects he learned the lesson very well). His entire political career before 1976 had been passed in Georgia, and that was not helpful: it took him a long time to learn, if he ever did, that the presidency and Congress were much more complex and recalcitrant organisms than the Georgian governorship and legislature, and that the little knot of faithful Georgians who had helped him get to the White House were inadequate assistants when it came to governing the country. But in other ways his Georgian background was the best thing about Carter. He had been a leader in the new generation of white Southern politicians who had recognized the victory of the civil rights revolution and had insisted that the fact must be accepted generously and finally. His profound religious faith was that of a Southern Baptist, and his spontaneous friendliness was Southern too. He had a slightly corny, hayseed side to him: he once presented the prime minister of Israel with a sign reading ‘Shalom, Y’all’. In the spirit of Jefferson he was ostentatiously determined to strip the presidency of ostentation. Ignoring Speaker O’Neill’s wise view that ‘most people prefer a little pomp in their presidents’,4 he insisted on carrying his own luggage and cut down the number of renditions of the presidential anthem, ‘Hail to the Chief’. After his inauguration at the Capitol, instead of driving to the White House in an armoured limousine, he and his family walked the whole way down Pennsylvania Avenue. He had promised reform, if not a revolution; he was going to clean up Washington and demolish the ‘Imperial Presidency’ (a phrase recently made popular by the historian and liberal activist, Arthur M. Schlesinger Jr). But his unreadiness for the task was perhaps symbolized by the fact that when after his walk he reached the White House and wanted to set to work, he realized that he did not know the way to the Oval Office.

  ‘Poor bastard,’ said a leading Democrat four years later. ‘He used up all his luck getting here. We’ve had our victories and defeats, but we’ve not had a single piece of good luck.’ Fair enough, though it has to be remembered that master politicians to some extent make their luck, as Ronald Reagan was to demonstrate. Carter, or any President elected in 1976 – perhaps especially any Democratic President – was bound to have a hard time, so many and so difficult were the problems pressing in upon him. But it is hard to feel that he tackled them in the best way possible. He was over-impressed by such matters as the rise in oil prices, the federal budget deficit and the cost of the welfare state (which automatically increased its expenditure when unemployment rose). He made much of the idea that America had entered ‘an age of limits’ and should modify its behaviour accordingly – by turning down its central heating and wearing woolly garments indoors, for instance. This merely made him ridiculous. So, like many other presidents, he turned with relief to foreign policy, where he had a comparatively free hand.

  In several negotiations he showed h
imself as masterly as Henry Kissinger. Trouble had long been brewing in Panama, where the treaty giving the United States the right to build and manage the Canal, and ceding sovereignty over the Canal Zone,5 was now intolerable to Panamanian opinion. Simple-minded nationalism in the United States took the view that what had been paid for belonged immutably to the purchaser, that the Panama Canal was a monument to the glory of the United States, and that it would not be safe if control were relinquished – suppose a Soviet ally got hold of it? This opinion was strongly held by congressional conservatives of both parties. But Carter knew that the alternative to a settlement was probably bloody conflict, which might destroy the Canal, damage American prestige and be as disruptive politically as the war in Vietnam; so he negotiated treaties with Panama which provided for restoration of Panamanian sovereignty in 2000, joint management until then, and the guarantee of US interests thereafter; he then persuaded the necessary two-thirds majority of the Senate to ratify them. It was a really notable diplomatic achievement, and saved America much trouble. But Carter’s finest hour came in 1978 when he holed up in the presidential retreat, Camp David in the hills of Maryland, and talked the president of Egypt, Anwar Sadat, and the prime minister of Israel, Menachem Begin, into making the agreements which soon led to peace between their countries. It was an extraordinary feat, testifying to Carter’s intelligence, persistence, honest purpose and goodwill.

  These triumphs did little for what should have been his central political concern – the strengthening of his party; but throughout his presidency Carter showed a curious antipathy to party politics, and even to the Democratic party which, after his final defeat, he dismissed as ‘an albatross around my neck’. Here again his Southern background probably misled him. The Democratic party of the Solid South in his boyhood could inspire only limited respect, if any; the Southern tradition with which he identified himself was that of Populism, which had been a revolt against the old parties; yet though he may not have realized it, he was perhaps even more influenced by Progressivism, which had always been deeply critical of the party system itself. Carter never seems to have acknowledged that he needed the Democrats at least as much as they needed him. If anything, his diplomacy weakened them: both in 1978 and 1980, senators who had voted for the Panama treaties went down to defeat – targeted by well-organized and well-financed opponents of Carter’s policy.

  But foreign policy issues are seldom the central ones in American elections. Inflation was much more damaging to the governing party. Everyone agreed that it ought to be tackled, but there was no consensus on what caused it and what would cure it. Liberals wanted government action to push down prices, conservatives wanted to put a ceiling on wages. New economic theorists abounded, agreeing on nothing except the worthlessness of John Maynard Keynes: monetarists wanted to do something about the money-supply, supply-siders wanted to cut back government regulation and expenditure. Workers, particularly those on the West Coast, who watched an immigration rate rising towards the half-million annual mark,6 began to fear for their jobs and their high wages. Most ominously of all, from a politician’s point of view, inflation was inexorably pushing citizens into higher and higher tax-brackets, since neither the state nor the federal bureaucracies could move fast enough to correct this ‘bracket creep’. In 1978, in California (where everything started nowadays) a great tax-revolt began. In an age of inflation it was inevitable that the price of real estate should go up. The state of California largely financed itself out of property taxes (since the federal government pre-empted income tax) and accordingly, as many citizens got richer on paper, their tax bills got larger in real life (but at any one moment most of them were not going to realize their notional capital gains by selling their residences, and those who did had to buy replacements, also at inflated prices). So in a referendum Proposition 13 was passed, by a two-to-one margin, which, among other things, cut property taxes by 57 per cent and ordained that in future the state legislature might only increase taxes if it could muster a two-thirds majority. The idea swept the country: it was like the anti-Stamp movement all over again. Property taxes, income taxes, sales taxes were all slashed, and voices were raised to demand that the federal government do likewise, if necessary by constitutional amendment. The state governments lost billions in revenue, and had to cut back expenditure. It was a bad moment for the Democrats, who had been the big-spending party since Franklin Roosevelt became President.

  Nor was taxation the only difficulty; perhaps it was not even the most important.7 For the social turbulence which began in the 1960s had not died away, only changed its character. There was no longer a war, so there was no anti-war movement; there was no longer a single civil rights movement, for most of what the NAACP and the SCLC had hoped to achieve before 1960 had been accomplished: the continuing campaign for full racial equality was now largely to be waged in normal politics, as was shown when northern cities began to elect black mayors8 and the number of African-American officeholders soared nationally. But there was still a huge range of issues (a new one seemed to be discovered every year) on which the young, the black, women and radicals wanted action, so agitation was unceasing, was indeed becoming a tradition, even institutionalized in such bodies as the National Organization of Women (founded in 1966). There were still victories aplenty. In 1978 the President of the Mormon church had a vision which at last allowed African-Americans to become Mormon ministers. Laws against the practice of homosexuality melted away, and San Francisco became famous as a city where gays lived in large numbers and made their presence felt politically. But on the other side, as conservatives saw that the challenge was not going to evaporate, the forces of resistance mustered for a long fight; and they began to gain support from a great many ordinary Americans – especially white ethnic men, members of the lower-middle or working class, the backbone of the Democrats – who were beginning to feel threatened by the new activism which seemed to be taking over their party, and who believed that change had gone far enough, that it threatened to become unfair. Their anxiety was sharpened by the effects of inflation in weakening the economy, destroying jobs, and threatening the comfortable way of life that so many had come to take for granted since 1945.

  Various episodes epitomized what was happening.

  A legacy of the civil rights movement was a vogue for what was known as ‘affirmative action’. It was correctly believed that African-Americans had for generations been economically, socially and educationally discriminated against; accordingly, many states adopted a principle of quotas, by which a fixed proportion of university places and of contracts between government and business should go to minority applicants. The intention was good enough; unfortunately it had the logical consequence that white businesses were sometimes denied contracts for which they were the underbidders, and some white applicants were denied university places for which they were better qualified, academically, than their black competitors. This seemed unfair: whites in the 1970s did not see why they should individually be made to pay for the collective sins of their ancestors. The matter came to a head in the case of Regents of the University of California v. Bakke, which the US Supreme Court decided in 1978. Allan Bakke was a Vietnam veteran who worked for the National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA) near San Francisco. In 1972 he applied for admission to the medical school at Davis, California, and was turned down because there was not room for him if the school was to stick to its quota of sixteen reserved places for blacks and Mexican-Americans. In a carefully written majority opinion (Thurgood Marshall voted in the minority) Justice Powell found for Bakke; the medical school had not shown enough flexibility in administering its policy, ‘it denied [Bakke] admission and may have deprived him altogether of a medical education’. Powell and the court, in this and later decisions, actually endorsed affirmative action, but the damage was done: in the decades that followed, the Bakke decision was used far and wide as a justification for attacking affirmative action; eventually a law school in Texas in effect rese
gregated itself. Two rights seemed to have made a wrong, and the Constitution was no help. The courts were scarcely to blame for admitting as much, but the failure of state legislators and university administrators (not to mention the federal government) to work out a generally applicable, practical and democratic solution to the problem made a depressing coda to the great movement of black liberation.

  Sexual liberation was another legacy of the mid-twentieth century. Traditionally (and particularly since the early nineteenth century) the United States had been a society where the public and conventional attitude to sexual conduct was stupendously prudish, and all churches, whether Protestant or Catholic, had supported recurrent campaigns to repress any hints at other codes of conduct (Hollywood, for example, though living off sex, was forced to banish all frank or realistic depiction or discussion of it from the movies); but every town of any size had a red-light district where sporting houses and other facilities for illicit entertainment throve, usually under the protection of a corrupt police force. But in their conduct, as the famous Kinsey reports made very clear just after the Second World War,9 the American people increasingly defied these ancient arrangements. The divorce rate was rising, the number of births outside marriage was soaring, more and more Catholics were ignoring their Church’s ban on contraceptive devices. Perhaps the most spectacular example of what was happening occurred in 1969 in New York, when the cops raided the Stonewall Inn, a homosexual bar. To them it was no more than a routine exercise in intimidation and extortion, but the young customers had had enough; they fought back, and for two days the Stonewall riots raged in Greenwich Village. They ended in a gay victory, and suddenly the closet doors banged open right across America. It was an extraordinary inversion of the situation twenty years earlier, at the time of the first Kinsey report, when homosexual conduct was regarded as a sin if not a crime, punished (when discovered) by dismissal, abuse, violent attack or prison. A gay political movement suddenly emerged (the universal adoption of what had previously been a purely slang word was in itself astonishing). The gains it made were soon incontestable, and led to organized demands for more. Perhaps its biggest achievement was to convince most of the young men newly discovering their homosexuality that there was nothing wrong in being gay; instead of agonizing, they could go clubbing. But reaction was not long in announcing itself. The saddest and oddest incident was the double murder in 1978 of the Mayor of San Francisco, George Moscone, who had courted the gay vote, and of Harvey Milk, an avowedly homosexual city councillor.10 Yet something more significant had happened the previous year, when in a referendum the citizens of Miami threw out an ordinance banning discrimination in employment and housing on account of people’s ‘affectional or sexual preference’. The religious fundamentalists, whose leaders during this period were taking an ever-greater interest in politics, rejoiced at this victory over ‘child molesters and religious heretics’, and were to keep up their campaign for the next twenty years, with intermittent success; but the tide was against them. Nevertheless, homosexuals had been served notice that attitudes inculcated for generations cannot be changed overnight; and already, though they did not know it, the AIDS epidemic was preparing. They were in for a long, grievous struggle.