Don't Know Much About History, Anniversary Edition: Everything You Need to Know About American History but Never Learned (Don't Know Much About®) (72 page)

As crude a weapon as the cave man’s club, the chemical barrage has been hurled against the fabric of life.

In
Silent Spring
, biologist-writer Rachel Louise Carson warned of the dangers of the indiscriminate and persistent use of pesticides such as DDT. The book helped launch the United States environmental protection movement.

What was
The Feminine Mystique
?

Every so often a book comes along that really rattles America’s cage.
Uncle Tom’s Cabin
in 1850. Upton Sinclair’s
The Jungle
in 1906. In the 1940s and 1950s, John Hersey’s
Hiroshima
and the Kinsey studies,
Sexual Behavior in the Human Male
and
Sexual Behavior in the Human Female.
Silent Spring
in 1962. All these books delivered karate chops to the American perception of reality.

In 1963, it was a book that introduced America to what the author called “the problem without a name.” Betty Friedan (1921–2006), a summa cum laude Smith graduate and freelance writer who was living out the fifties suburban dream of house, husband, and family, dubbed this malady “the feminine mystique.”

The book reached millions of readers. Suddenly, in garden clubs, coffee klatches, and college sorority houses, talk turned away from man catching, mascara, and muffin recipes. Women were instead discussing the fact that society’s institutions—government, mass media and advertising, medicine and psychiatry, education and organized religion—were systematically barring them from becoming anything more than housewives and mothers.

Friedan’s book helped jump-start a stalled women’s rights movement. Lacking a motivating central cause and aggressive leadership since passage of the Nineteenth Amendment after World War I (see p. 334), organized feminism in the United States was practically nonexistent. In spite of forces that brought millions of women into the workforce—like the wartime factory jobs that made Rosie the Riveter an American heroine—women were expected to return to the kitchens after the menfolk came home from defending democracy. Although individuals like Eleanor Roosevelt, Amelia Earhart, Margaret Sanger, and Frances Perkins—the first woman cabinet officer and a key player in FDR’s New Deal—were proven achievers, most women were expected to docilely accept the task of managing house and family, or to hold a proper “woman’s job” like teaching, secretarial work, or, for the poorer classes, factory labor. In all these jobs, women were invisible. Once married, of course, the “ideal woman” stopped working. The idea of career as fulfillment was dismissed as nonsense, and that minority of pioneer “career women” was viewed practically as a class of social deviants. Overnight, Friedan made women question those assumptions.

The Feminine Mystique
had its shortcomings. It was essentially about a white, middle-class phenomenon. It failed to explore the problems of working-class, poor, and minority women, whose worries ran far deeper than personal discontent. It also ignored the fact that a substantial portion of American women were satisfied in the role that Friedan had indicted.

But the book was like shock treatment. It galvanized American women into action at the same moment that an increasingly aggressive civil rights movement was moving to the forefront of American consciousness. And it came just as the government was taking its first awkward steps toward addressing the issue of inequality of the sexes. In one of his first acts, President Kennedy had formed a Commission on the Status of Women, chaired by the extraordinary Eleanor Roosevelt, then in her seventies. In 1964, a more substantial boost came when women actually received federal protection from discrimination because the legislative tactics of one crusty conservative congressman backfired.

Howard W. Smith of Virginia, an eighty-one-year-old vestige of the Old South, was looking for ways to shoot down the 1964 Civil Rights Act with “killer amendments.” To the laughter of his House colleagues, Smith added “sex” to the list of “race, color, religion or national origin,” the categories that the bill had been designed to protect. Assuming that nobody would vote to protect equality of the sexes, Smith was twice struck by lightning. The bill not only passed, but now protected women as well as blacks. Women were soon bringing appeals to the Equal Employment Opportunities Commission, even though its director complained that the bill was “conceived out of wedlock” and wasn’t meant to prevent sex discrimination. That complaint came too late. Women filed more discrimination complaints with the EEOC than did any other single group. It was the foot in the door, and a new generation of activist women was ready to push the door harder.

In 1966, some 300 charter members formed the National Organization for Women (NOW) with Friedan as its first president. In the years ahead, NOW spearheaded a movement that would splinter and change as younger women grew more angry and defiant, radicalized by the same forces that were altering the civil rights and antiwar movements. But it is safe to say that no movement so fundamentally altered America’s social makeup as the feminist movement of the past three decades. The workplace. Marriage and family life. The way we have babies—or choose not to have them. Few corners of American life were left untouched by the basic shifts in attitude that feminism created.

Of course, the process is far from complete. The federal government, from the White House to Congress and the judiciary, is still largely male, middle-aged, white, and wealthy. The upper crust of American corporate management remains male-dominated. A considerable gap in salaries still exists between men and women. And it is still presumed impossible or at least unlikely for a woman to be elected president in this country, even though forceful leaders like Indira Gandhi, Golda Meir, Margaret Thatcher, and Corazón Aquino of the Philippines have shown they are capable of acting as effectively, and even as ruthlessly, as any man.

Forty years after Friedan gave a name to the problem, the greatest irony may be the new yearning created for a generation of younger women brought up to put careers first and families second. In a strange twist on the question plaguing Friedan’s generation, several researchers have written books that examine the deep dissatisfaction that many successful women in their thirties and forties feel as the new century begins. Both unmarried, childless women and career-bound mothers are looking at their designer business suits, corporate perks, and power offices with a new sense of unfulfilled promise. It is now their turn to wonder about that silent question, “Is this all?”

A
MERICAN
V
OICES

From
MARTIN LUTHER KING’S
“I Have a Dream” speech in Washington, D.C. (August 1963):

I say to you today, my friends, that in spite of the difficulties and frustrations of the moment I still have a dream. It is a dream deeply rooted in the American dream.

I have a dream that one day this nation will rise up and live out the true meaning of its creed: “We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal.”

I have a dream that one day on the red hills of Georgia the sons of former slaves and the sons of former slave-
owners will be able to sit down together at the table of brotherhood.

I have a dream that one day even the state of Mississippi, a desert state sweltering with the heat of injustice and oppression, will be transformed into an oasis of freedom and justice.

I have a dream that my four 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.

King’s most memorable speech was the culmination of the massive march on Washington, D.C., that drew a quarter of a million blacks and whites to the capital. In his biography of King,
Bearing the Cross,
author David J. Garrow calls the speech the “clarion call that conveyed the moral power of the movement’s cause to the millions who had watched the live national network coverage. Now, more than ever before . . . white America was confronted with the undeniable justice of blacks’ demands.” The march was followed by passage of the Civil Rights Act, signed into law by Lyndon Johnson in June 1964, and the awarding of the Nobel Peace Prize to Dr. King in October 1964.

A
MERICAN
V
OICES

MALCOLM X,
following the March on Washington:

Not long ago, the black man in America was fed a dose of another form of the weakening, lulling, and deluding effects of so-called “integration.”

It was that “Farce on Washington,” I call it. . . .

Yes, I was there. I observed that circus. Who ever heard of angry revolutionists all harmonizing “We Shall Overcome . . . Someday . . .” while tripping and swaying along arm-in-arm with the very people they were supposed to be angrily revolting against? Who ever heard of angry revolutionists swinging their bare feet together with their oppressor in lily-pad park pools, with gospels and guitars and “I Have A Dream” speeches?

If Martin Luther King Jr. gave J. Edgar Hoover bad dreams, Malcolm X (1925–65) was his worst nightmare. Born Malcolm Little, in Omaha, Nebraska, Malcolm had escaped a fire set by white men when he was four years old. His father was a follower of Marcus Garvey, a black separatist leader who worked to establish close political and economic ties to Africa. In 1931, Malcolm’s father was found dead after being run over by a streetcar. Malcolm believed white racists were responsible for his father’s death. When Malcolm was twelve years old, his mother was committed to a mental hospital, and he spent the rest of his childhood in foster homes.

In 1941, Malcolm moved to Boston and fell into street crime. He was arrested for burglary and sent to prison in 1946. While in prison, he joined the Nation of Islam, commonly called the Black Muslims, and took the name Malcolm X, renouncing his “slave name.” He quickly rose as a charismatic and forceful spokesman for the movement and became the Nation of Islam’s most effective minister. But in 1964, Malcolm X broke with the Nation of Islam. Soon afterward, he made a pilgrimage to the holy city of Mecca and underwent a radical change. In the form of Islam he discovered in Mecca, Malcolm X had a new vision of racial harmony, as he made clear in a letter to his followers that appeared in
The Autobiography of Malcolm X
(written with Alex Haley). “You may be shocked by these words coming from me,” he wrote. “But on the pilgrimage, what I have seen, and experienced, has forced me to
re-arrange
much of my thought-patterns previously held, and to
toss aside
some of my previous conclusions.”

Adopting the Muslim name El-Hajj Malik El-Shabazz, he returned to the United States to form the Organization for Afro-American Unity, and was clearly tilting toward a more conciliatory racial message. On February 21, 1965, Malcolm X was fatally shot while giving a speech in Harlem’s Audubon Ballroom. Three members of the Nation of Islam were convicted of the crime. But, as with other assassinations during that era, the truth behind Malcolm’s death remained buried in suspicious circumstances.

Who was right? The Warren Commission or Oliver Stone?

Americans probe this question as if we are searching for a missing tooth. We keep running our tongue over the empty space.

This question has inspired a cottage industry of conspiracy theorists and literally thousands of books. In the view of an American majority, none of them has yet to answer the question to full and verifiable satisfaction. Some innate paranoia in the American makeup finds it far more appealing to believe that Kennedy’s death was the result of some intricately constructed byzantine conspiracy. The list of possible suspects reads like an old-fashioned Chinese restaurant menu. Just choose one from Column A and one from Column B. The choices include a smorgasbord of unsavory characters with the motive and ability to kill Kennedy: teamsters and gangsters; Cubans, both pro- and anti-Castro; white supremacists; CIA renegades; KGB moles; and, of course, lone assassins. Then Oliver Stone’s movie
JFK
(1991) created an entire new generation of doubters, who also grew up with
The X-Files,
a show that elevated antigovernment conspiracy paranoia to televised art. A younger generation, completely distrustful of the “official explanation,” began to cite Stone’s film as source material in their term papers.

The conspiracy theories linger because many of the basic facts of the assassination remain shrouded in controversy and mythology. What is true is that JFK went to Texas in the fall of 1963 to shore up southern political support for his upcoming 1964 reelection bid. The Texas trip began well in San Antonio and Houston, where the president and the first lady were met by enthusiastic crowds. Everyone agreed that Dallas would be the tough town politically, and several advisers told Kennedy not to go. A few months before, the good folks of Dallas had spat on Adlai Stevenson, JFK’s UN ambassador. But even in Dallas on November 22, things went better than expected, and crowds cheered the passing motorcade. In the fateful limousine, Texas governor John Connally’s wife leaned over and told the president, “Well, you can’t say Dallas doesn’t love you.”

Then the car made its turn in front of the Texas School Book Depository, and three shots rang out. Kennedy and Governor Connally were hit. The limousine carrying them sped off to the hospital. The president died, and Lyndon B. Johnson (1908–73) took the oath of office aboard Air Force One as a shocked and bloodied Jackie Kennedy looked on. Within hours, following the murder of a Dallas policeman, Lee Harvey Oswald was in custody and under interrogation. But two days later, as Oswald was being moved to a safer jail, Jack Ruby, owner of a Dallas strip joint, jumped from the crowd of policemen and shot Oswald dead in full view of a disbelieving national television audience.