Grand Expectations: The United States, 1945-1974 (87 page)

This was an extraordinary promise. By then, however, the Moynihan Report, published and widely discussed, was embroiling the administration in furious controversy. Moynihan had intended his findings to provide a "case for national action." His statistics on rising family break-up among blacks were accurate and worthy of debate. But the report linked the problems of Negro families to the heritage of slavery, thereby implying that the problems were both historical and cultural and that blacks, emasculated by slavery, could not take charge of their fate. Moynihan also used phrases such as "tangle of pathology" to describe the travail of the contemporary black family. When black militants (and white radicals) got wind of the report, they responded with outrage.
⁷⁰
CORE leader James Farmer called it a "massive academic cop out for the white conscience." He added, "We are sick to death of being analyzed, mesmerized, bought, sold, and slobbered over, while the same evils that are the ingredients of our oppression go unattended.
⁷¹

That most white liberals in 1965 listened in embarrassed silence to the rage of activists such as Farmer showed how far the nation had moved since the late 1950s. At that earlier time few black leaders would have presumed to speak out so insultingly about white liberal allies, and few whites would have listened if they had. By mid-1965, however, black activists in the civil rights movement had acquired great moral standing among American liberals. Progressively minded whites for the most part dared not challenge them. Farmer's reaction especially indicated the intensity with which militant blacks in 1965 distrusted white liberals. The gulf between the two camps consigned the Moynihan Report to virtual oblivion and defeated whatever hopes Johnson might have had in mid-1965—or thereafter—to go beyond voting rights and seriously address the socio-economic problems of blacks in American cities. Liberalism would focus, as in the past, on expanding opportunity, not on fighting social inequality.

Notwithstanding these developments, which upset Johnson and his inner circle, there was no denying that the Voting Rights Act of 1965, like the Civil Rights Act of 1964, was a great achievement: these were the most significant of the many Great Society laws that expanded rights-consciousness in America. If most of the credit for the voting law belonged to civil rights activists, Johnson and fellow liberals deserved some praise as well. The goal of the act, after all, was to guarantee long-disfranchised black Americans the rights to register and to vote. This end the law accomplished brilliantly, thanks in large part to vigorous and unyielding federal oversight in the years ahead. By 1967 more than 50 percent of voting-age blacks had the franchise in the six most discriminatory southern states. In 1968 there were blacks in the Mississippi delegation to the Democratic National Convention. By the mid-1970s southern blacks began to win electoral office, even in Congress. The increase in black registration was so remarkable that southern white politicians, Wallace included, began by then to soften their racist rhetoric in order to capture some of the black vote. The voting rights act largely wiped out a blight on American democracy and transformed the nature of southern politics in the United States.
⁷²

A
MERICAN LIBERALS
understandably hailed the accomplishments of Johnson and the congressional session of 1965. "It is the Congress of accomplished hopes," Speaker McCormack said. "It is the Congress of realized dreams."
⁷³
No other President cared so much as Johnson did about domestic policies or about civil rights, and none since FDR in the 1930s had come close to securing so many laws, many of them long awaited by reformers. It was a high tide of American liberalism in the postwar era.

By mid-1965, however, there were signs that the tide was about to ebb. Nothing exposed this more clearly than a riot that broke out in Watts, a predominantly black area of Los Angeles, only five days after signing of the voting rights act on August 6. Although Watts seemed to be a less squalid area than many black urban neighborhoods, it contained severe socio-economic problems: three-quarters of the adult black males living there were unemployed. The riot started following an altercation between police and a black man who resisted arrest for drunken driving.
⁷⁴
Such fracases were nothing new in the history of relations between police and minorities of color (including Mexican-Americans). But urban blacks, like blacks in the South, had grown proud and angry. Charging police brutality, they rallied to the man's side. What followed was five days of rioting, sniping, looting, and burning, mostly against white-owned stores and buildings. The disturbance, ending only after 13,900 National Guardsmen came in to restore order, killed thirty-four people and injured more than 1,000, the vast majority of them blacks.
⁷⁵
Damage to property was estimated at more than $35 million. Some 4,000 people were arrested. Although conservatives claimed that only a handful of "riffraff' had caused the trouble, it was obvious that the uprising commanded wide support in Watts. Some 30,000 people had participated in the rioting, and 60,000 more had stood by in support. Their hopes and expectations whetted, they had lashed out at the white world. When King walked the streets preaching non-violence, they ignored him. Clearly, the civil rights acts of 1964 and 1965 were not softening the social and economic grievances of the black masses. Maybe no liberal legislation could.
⁷⁶

A
LTHOUGH THE
W
ATTS RIOT
of 1965 was an extreme response, it appears in retrospect as an ominous omen of the future. One domestic crisis after another in the next few years, including even bloodier racial confrontations in the cities, shattered the optimism of social engineers and threw liberals back on the defensive. By late 1965 Johnson himself seemed close to despair. "What do they want?" he asked of his critics. "I'm giving them boom times and more good legislation than anybody else did, and what do they do—attack and sneer. Could FDR do better? Could anybody do better? What do they want?"
⁷⁷
From this perspective, the first twenty months of the Johnson years stand as a shining but relatively brief era in the postwar history of American liberalism.

The rather sudden ebbing of liberal hopes caused many scholars—and contemporaries—to blame Johnson. They have a point. LBJ, unable to contain his ego, indeed wanted to outdo FDR—and every other President in history. He measured accomplishment in largely quantitative terms: the more big programs passed, the better. Some of these programs, such as OEO, were hurried into law without much research to sustain them and without much aforethought about potentially divisive political consequences. Other programs, such as aid to education, relied overoptimistically on injections of federal spending to cope with complicated social problems that, like poverty, needed more thoughtful study than they received. Getting things done quickly was not the same as getting them done well.

Many of the subsequent problems with Great Society programs stemmed from three common characteristics. One was the tendency of Johnson and his advisers to rely on highly partisan majorities. When the programs encountered difficulties down the road, Republicans and others felt free to say, "I told you so," and to denounce them at will. The civil rights acts stood as exceptions to this tendency. Thanks to the moral power of the civil rights movement—and to the overreaction of racists in the Deep South—these aroused bipartisan congressional support in the North in 1964 and 1965. Northerners of both parties, having targeted the South as the Enemy, had a stake in what they had accomplished. (After all, the acts did not much affect the North.) The goals were clear and just, the enforcement strong, the laws of lasting significance.

Second, Johnson had little stomach for taking on well-entrenched political interests. In part because he was fearful of conservatives, including corporate interests, he refused to consider creation of large-scale public employment programs, such as the WPA, that might have provided work and raised the income of the poor. Labor unions, too, feared such programs—because they threatened to endanger the jobs of the working poor. Respectful of lobbyists for the National Education Association, Johnson permitted local school administrators overwide leeway in their spending of federal money. Aware of the power of the American Medical Association, he approved health care legislation that (among other things) benefited hospitals, physicians, and insurance companies. He refused to raise taxes to pay for any of these programs.

The Great Society programs were for these reasons quintessentially liberal, not radical. Except in the area of race relations—a major exception—they made no serious effort to challenge the power of established groups, including large corporations. In no way did they seriously confront socio-economic inequality or seek to redistribute wealth. The essence of Great Society liberalism was that government had the tools and the resources to help people help themselves. It sought to advance equality of opportunity, not to establish greater equality of social condition.
⁷⁸

Oversell was a third characteristic of Johnson and the Great Society. As LBJ jetted about the country to publicize and to sign the landmark acts of his administration, he (and others) offered soaring descriptions of what he had done. The OEO could end poverty in ten years. Aid to education would provide the "only valid passport from poverty." Medicare would advance the "healing miracle of modern medicine." Voting rights were the "most powerful instrument ever devised by men for breaking down injustice." Some of these programs indeed helped people, and many others—immigration reform, governmental support of the arts and the humanities, environmental legislation—reflected noble intentions. But the Great Society did not do nearly as much to improve the economic standing of people as did the extraordinary growth of the economy. When this stopped—in the 1970s—the flaws in LBJ's programs seemed glaring. Hyperbole about the Great Society aroused unrealistic popular expectations about government that later came to haunt American liberalism.

These were indeed problems with the presidential leadership of Lyndon Johnson and more broadly with the liberal political philosophy that he embraced. Still, it is a little unfair to harp on them. Johnson, who had an acute sense of what was possible in American politics, was correct in maintaining that he had to move quickly in 1965 if he hoped to advance the liberal agenda. After all, conservatives and interest groups had blocked it for a generation. And getting things done naturally entailed reliance on his heavily Democratic majorities. Outside of civil rights, where Republicans like Dirksen could be brought around, the GOP was neither necessary for legislative majorities in 1965 nor in much of a mood to help.

It is easy to criticize Johnson for failing to challenge interest groups or to promote redistribution of political and economic power in the country. But it is even easier to see why he did not. Interest groups had become so powerful in American politics, especially in Congress, that little significant legislation could be passed without their acquiescence. This was in part because the groups controlled major political and economic resources that could threaten a member of Congress with political defeat. It was also because other groups—the poor, minorities—remained politically very weak. Many of these people could not or did not vote, let alone find the time or money to play major roles in politics.

It was not just resources that bolstered interest groups. The groups also drew on—and deliberately aroused—substantial ideological support from politically active Americans who distrusted the State. A school aid act that contained tough federal guidelines on the spending of money would probably have incited opposition not only from teachers and school administrators—the interests, in this case—but also from thousands of parents and others who believed that education should remain a primarily local responsibility. The federal government must not "dictate" to the schools. Organized interests, for another example, led the opposition to greater State involvement in medicine, but they also had popular backing, at least among the politically influential middle classes. Many of these Americans—people who could afford doctors—believed strongly in the preservation of traditional fee-for-service medicine against the "threat" of State intervention.

The fate of the OEO revealed clearly what could happen if a government program became perceived as dangerous to well-organized interests. Although militants gained control of only a few of the community action programs, their activities raised such a storm of protest in 1965 among urban officials, most of them Democratic, that Johnson had to dispatch Vice-President Humphrey on urgent missions of mediation. Democratic powers such as Mayor Richard Daley of Chicago, however, were not to be placated unless the administration promised them control of the money. Johnson, who needed their support, quickly acquiesced, as did Democrats in Congress. Starting in 1966 Congress began amending expansive notions of "maximum feasible participation" of the poor out of existence. Direction of anti-poverty programs was returned to the alliance of urban politicians and social workers that had traditionally been in charge, but not before the war on poverty had divided the Democratic party.

Critics who lambasted Johnson for not trying hard to seek equality of social condition were also somewhat unfair. Notwithstanding rhetoric such as he employed in his speech at Howard, he did not pretend to favor the redistribution that this would have entailed. He had been elected as a liberal—as an advocate of deeply rooted American ideas about the virtues of equality of opportunity—not as a champion of major structural change in American life. Liberals, indeed, understood clearly how little political support there was in the nation for such an effort, which at the least would have called for higher taxation of the middle and upper classes. To demand equality of condition, many Americans continued to believe, was to burden the nation with taxes, regulation, and bureaucracy, to threaten prosperity, and to damage the entrepreneurial vitality and individualism that were at the heart of the American dream.