A Patriot's History of the United States: From Columbus's Great Discovery to the War on Terror (140 page)

Faced with King’s nonviolent movement on the one hand and the more radical racist initiatives on the other, on July 3, 1964, Congress passed the Civil Rights Act.
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The gist of the act was unmistakable in that no one could ever again legally deny black citizens access to the institutions of the United States without being liable to criminal and civil prosecution. Segregation in public accommodations, such as restaurants, hotels, theaters, and transportation, was prohibited. Also outlawed was discrimination based on race in employment, and to enforce this section, the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission (EEOC) was formed. Passage of these laws coincided with another King-led movement to register black voters in Southern states, which culminated in a march from Selma to Montgomery to demand the right to vote. At the bridge over the Alabama River, state troopers mounted on horses intercepted the marchers and plunged into them with clubs, as television cameras followed the action. Within a year, Congress had passed the Voting Rights Act, with a higher percentage of Republicans than Democrats voting for the bill. Among those voting against it were prominent Democratic senators, and a former member of the Klan, Robert Byrd of West Virginia. These two civil rights laws in fact only ensured enforcement of the Fourteenth and Fifteenth Amendments of a century earlier, and they worked: within a year black voter registration had leaped by 28 percent, and black majorities in many districts soon began to send representatives to Congress.
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Yet less than two weeks after the first of the civil rights acts had passed, the first large-scale race riots occurred, in Harlem. Further rioting followed in Rochester, Paterson, Philadelphia, and Chicago, with one of the worst episodes of violence occurring in August 1965 in Watts, California. There, following a police arrest (area black leaders had long complained that the Los Angeles Police Department was exceptionally racist and violent), the neighborhood broke up into a wave of burning, looting, and destruction, requiring National Guard troops and martial law to end the violence. Black activists, such as Stokely Carmichael and H. Rap Brown, blamed whites, and urged blacks to join the new Black Panther organization, whose unofficial motto was “Kill whitey.”

White liberals responded to the wave of looting by producing reports. A National Advisory Commission on Civil Disorders in 1968 flatly misrepresented the problem, claiming that the riots were directed at “white-owned businesses characterized in the Negro community as unfair.”
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Then, as in later riots,
all
businesses were targets, and since the majority were black-owned, the damage was overwhelmingly detrimental to blacks. Legitimate protest, guided and directed, reminded its participants that they were in for the long term and that change would take time, no matter what the cause. The inner-city riots, on the other hand, lacked any organization or direction, appealing to the impulse to get back at someone or get quick restitution through theft. Typically, liberal historians claimed the problem was not enough cash—“programs like Model Cities had never been given enough money to work.”
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In fact, welfare and other assistance between 1965 and 1970 represented the largest voluntary transfer of wealth in human history, with no appreciable effect—indeed, with horrible consequences. Radical black leaders, such as Malcolm X, predictably blamed “white oppression” and “white middlemen” for the conditions of the local economy, but after the riots the local consumers did not “evince any great interest in promoting black capitalism or in ‘buying black.’”
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Violence placed black leaders like King in a precarious position: having to fend off the radicals while turning up the heat on Washington. (King was booed when he appeared in Watts after the riots.)
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Separatists led by Stokely Carmichael demanded “Black Power!” and urged blacks to start their own businesses, schools, and militias. The Black Panthers protested a May 1967 gun-control law understanding that if only the police had guns, blacks would be helpless—and they organized community patrols to protect people from muggers as well as from mistreatment by police. Panther leaders fell far short of King, however, when it came to having either character or courage: Huey Newton went to prison for killing a police officer; Eldridge Cleaver left the country; and evidence surfaced revealing that other Panthers had executed their own members suspected of being informants. King might have been able to step into the chasm separating the radicals and the moderates if he had lived. But an assassin took King out of the picture in Memphis on April 4, 1968, where he had delivered his own eulogy: “I’ve been on the mountaintop.”
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A new storm of rioting ensued, including unrest in Washington, D.C. Predictably, the Johnson administration reacted by creating one of the largest bureaucracies since the New Deal and producing the first truly dependent class in American history.

Origins of Welfare Dependency

Lost in the violence, rioting, and assassinations was the simple fact that the Civil Rights Act had, in terms of the law, ended the last legal remnants of slavery and reconstruction. Yet Johnson immediately proposed a “legislative blitzkreig” that, in the process of the next two decades, would reenslave many poor and minorities into a web of government dependency.
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Relying on questionable statistics from best sellers, such as Michael Harrington’s
The Other America
, which maintained that millions of Americans languished in poverty, Johnson simplistically treated poverty as an enemy to be defeated. In his 1964 State of the Union message, he announced, “This administration today…declares unconditional war on poverty,” and he declared that only “total victory” would suffice.
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The United States, already a “rich society,” Johnson observed, had the opportunity to move “upward to the Great Society.”
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Johnson constructed a massive framework of new federal programs under the supervision of the Office of Economic Opportunity and the Department of Health, Education, and Welfare. Many of the programs seemed innocuous: the Job Corps presumably taught high school dropouts job skills; VISTA (Volunteers in Service to America) was little more than a domestic Peace Corps for impoverished areas; Head Start sought to prepare low-income children for schools by offering meals and other programs.

Without doubt, the most destructive of all the Great Society policies, however, involved a change in a New Deal program called Aid to Families with Dependent Children (AFDC). The original AFDC had been tightly restricted to widows, with the intention of giving taxpayer subsidies to once-married women who had lost the chief breadwinner in the family. In the 1960s, however, Johnson and Congress quietly changed AFDC qualifications to include any household where there was no male family head present, a shift that now made virtually any divorced or single mother of low income eligible for taxpayer money. The incentives of the program made it financially more lucrative
not
to be married than to be married. The message from Uncle Sam was, “If you are now married and poor, think about a divorce. If you’re not married now, don’t even think about getting married.”

Seen in the numbers, the changes from the previous decade were shocking. In 1950, 88 percent of white families and 78 percent of black families consisted of a husband and wife in a traditional marriage.
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These numbers had not changed since the Great Depression, but something happened after Great Society legislation: white percentages remained unchanged, but black families began to break up, beginning in 1967; then the percentage of intact black families began a steep slide. Within twelve years, the proportion was down to 59 percent, compared to about 85 percent of whites. During this fifteen-to twenty-year period, the percentage of black poor who lived in a single-female household shot up from under 30 percent to nearly 70 percent. White poor in single-female-household families increased by about half, but black poor in single-female households rose more than 200 percent, a fact that demonstrated the horrible incentives inserted into the war on poverty. Put another way, the war on poverty managed to destroy black marriages and family formation at a faster rate than the most brutal slaveholder had ever dreamed!
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Only a government bureaucrat could fail to see the simple logic of what had occurred. A couple living together, but not married, with the male employed, stood to make slightly more than twice as much than if they were married. Since the courts had ruled that the presence of a man in the house could not be used as a reason to deny a woman “benefits” (a term we shall qualify for now, given the long-term harms done by these programs), then it
seemed
to make economic sense for a man and a woman to refrain from marriage and, instead, live together and combine their incomes. Social changes accounted for most of the fact that divorces rose 30 percent from 1950 to 1970, then went off the charts, nearly doubling again by 1975, but one cannot discount the economic incentives against marriage.
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This was nothing less than a prescription for the utter destruction of traditional black families, and had it been proposed by the Imperial Wizard of the KKK eighty years earlier, such a program would have met with a quick and well-deserved fate. But embraced by liberal intellectuals and politicians, the war on poverty and AFDC, especially after the man-in-the-house rule was struck down in 1968, was the policy equivalent of smallpox on inner-city black families in the 1970s. The AFDC caseload rose 125 percent in just five years, from 1965 to 1970, then another 29 percent during the following five years, producing a wave of illegitimate children.

Why were blacks disproportionately affected by the Great Society policies? Minority communities—especially black—were disproportionately concentrated in urban areas, especially inner cities.
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Thus, federal welfare workers could much more easily identify needy blacks and enroll them in welfare programs than they could find, or enlist, rural whites in similar circumstances. It wasn’t that there weren’t poor whites, but rather that the whites were more diffused and thus difficult to reach. Policies designed for all poor overwhelmingly affected, or, more appropriately, infected, the black community.

Having unleashed a whirlwind of marriage destruction and illegitimacy, AFDC produced two other destructive side effects. First, because the single highest correlating factor in wealth accumulation is marriage, AFDC inadvertently attacked the most important institution that could assist people in getting out of poverty. A debate still rages about how this dynamic works, but there appear to be important social, sexual, and psychological reasons why men need to play a key role in the economic life of a family. But there is little reason to debate the data showing that married couples are more than the sum of their parts: they generate more wealth (if not income) than single people living together and obviously more than a single parent trying to raise a family.
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Divorced families have less than half the median income of intact families, and even more to the point, have less than half the income of stepfamilies.
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A second malignant result of AFDC’s no-father policy was that it left inner-city black boys with no male role models.
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After a few years at places like Cabrini Green, one of “the projects”—massive public housing facilities for low-income renters that had degenerated into pits of drugs and crime—a young man could literally look in any direction and not see an intact black family.
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Stepping up as role models, the gang leaders from Portland to Syracuse, from Kansas City to Palmdale, inducted thousands of impressionable young males into drug running, gun battles, and often death.
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No amount of jobs programs would fill the void produced by the Great Society’s perverted incentives that presumed as unnecessary the role of the father.
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Nor did the war on poverty have even the slightest long-run impact on reducing the number of poor. Indeed, prior to 1965, when Johnson had declared war on want, poverty rates nationally had consistently fallen, and sharply dropped after JFK’s tax cut took effect in 1963. After the Great Society programs were fully in place—1968 to 1969—progress against poverty ground to a halt, and the number of poor started to grow again. No matter which standards are used, one thing seems clear: by the mid-1970s, the Great Society antipoverty programs had not had any measurable impact on the percentage of poor in America as compared to the trends before the programs were enacted. It would not be the last “war” the Johnson administration would lose.

“We’re Not Going North and Drop Bombs”

Lyndon Johnson inherited not only the slain president’s dangerous policy programs but also his poor cabinet choices and advisers. On the one hand, LBJ did not want to see Vietnam detract in any way from his ambitious social programs. On the other hand, he knew he had a conflict to manage (he carefully avoided the reality of the phrase “a war to fight”), and at the urging of his (really Kennedy’s) advisers, he tried to deal with Vietnam quietly. This led to the most disastrous of wartime strategies.

Johnson first had to grapple with the unpleasant fact that he had inherited JFK’s cabinet, the “best and the brightest,” as David Halberstam would cynically call them. Both the circumstances of Kennedy’s death and the general low esteem in which many of the Kennedy inner circle held of LBJ personally made his task of eliciting loyalty from the staff all the more difficult. He appeared to get on well with Kennedy’s secretary of defense McNamara, whose facility—some would say alchemy—with numbers seemed to put him in a fog when it came to seeing the big picture. For such a man, throwing himself fully into the destruction of a communist system in North Vietnam would be difficult, if not impossible. McNamara’s mind-set—that numbers alone determine the outcome of undertakings, from making cars to conquering enemies—helps explain why neither he nor most of Johnson’s other advisers ever made a clear case to the American public as to why the United States needed to resist the expansionist North. They did not see much of a difference between the communists and the government in the South. Villagers’ heads impaled on stakes, courtesy of the Viet Cong, simply did not register with the bean counters.