The Big Sort (15 page)

There is also a post-materialist geography in the United States. The
Washington Post
reported in early 2006 that "Democratic-leaning states increasingly are regulating energy use and emissions," typical post-materialist environmental issues.
⁷⁸
Judges in Massachusetts and New Jersey have okayed gay marriage, and the list of states funding stem cell research is largely colored blue. Meanwhile, school districts in West Texas offer courses in the Bible, Kansas fights over whether to teach evolution, and solidly red states vote wholesale to ban gay marriage. Fulton, Missouri, has forbidden high school theater students to stage
The Crucible
and
Grease,
while in my little neighborhood in Austin, the Netherlands of Texas, parents have helped their kids construct a "peace garden" at the elementary school.
⁷⁹

By 1966, an increasing number of Americans thought the game of government was unfair and the realm of public life dishonest. There was no economic reason for people to lose faith. Nineteen sixty-five had been an exceptionally prosperous year. Companies were making huge profits, the number of factory jobs hit a twenty-one-year high in the spring, and unemployment was down to 4.6 percent by the beginning of the summer. The nation was enjoying its longest peacetime economic expansion in history. And with Johnson's Great Society, government was providing more benefits and services than ever before.

Good times weren't enough, though. People who were doing well grew distrustful of government, as did those who were earning the least and working the most thankless jobs. In fact, those at the bottom of the economic ladder were more distrustful, even as government programs for the poor and for minorities greatly expanded. In polls taken in 1964, at the beginning of the Great Society, blacks were more trusting than whites, manual workers were more trusting than businesspeople, and poor people were more trusting than those who were better off. By 1970, all of these relationships had reversed.
⁸⁰
The "negative swings against government power and away from trust in government [were] particularly concentrated among just those elements in society that could have been expected to benefit from and support government the most," wrote Walter Dean Burnham.
⁸¹

There was no discernible pressure from political leaders or the press to lose faith in government, to quit the mainline churches, or to stow the bowling ball bag. Republicans were still hoping to pick up votes from blacks in 1965. In July, Republican congressional leaders chided Johnson for being "Lyndon-come-lately" in his support for new civil rights legislation. House Republicans opposed a buildup in troops in Vietnam, even as Senate Republicans supported Johnson. In April, newspaper publishers reported "widespread support" for Johnson's Vietnam policy, and "media coverage was quite supportive of official policy on Vietnam and shifted toward a more critical view only after the public grew unhappy."
⁸²

The political and journalistic elite was the last to know what was happening in the country. In late November 1965, the
New York Times's
David Broder wrote a story headlined "Victory Doubted by G.O.P. Leaders." The Republicans Broder had interviewed had concluded that "their party has no realistic prospect of regaining control of either house of Congress in the 1966 election."
⁸³
Yet in November of 1966, Republicans gained forty-seven seats in the House and three in the Senate. In one sense, Republicans were right: They hadn't gained control of either the House or the Senate. But the country had turned. Johnson's approval rating dropped to 44 percent in 1966. It had been 66 percent in 1965. "Suddenly, the Great Society had run its course," wrote political scientist James Sundquist.
⁸⁴

There were further dips in trust and party attachment in the late 1960s, then more after the Watergate scandal and Richard Nixon's impeachment in the early 1970s. The percentage of voters who called themselves independents peaked in the early 1970s, and then the parties came roaring back. But trust in government did not return. Over the past forty years, there have been ups and downs in Americans' attitudes toward public institutions, but trust in government has never come close to its pre-1965 highs. Even after the attacks on September 11, 2001, trust in government rebounded only to the levels during the Nixon administration.
⁸⁵

The dealignment of voters was almost entirely a white phenomenon. During the 1960s, black voters' affiliation with the Democratic Party solidified, just as whites grew increasingly independent, and Americans' attention increasingly shifted to race. In 1962, the most important issues to voters were the high cost of living, international tensions, and unemployment. In 1963, racial tensions rose to the top of the list and stayed there for a decade. Until the Watts riots in August 1965, a majority of northern whites said that Democrats were pushing integration "about right." By September 1966, the proportion who said that integration was proceeding "too fast" nearly doubled, jumping from 28 percent to 52 percent. Similarly, in 1965 street crime appeared just behind public education on the list of most important issues. Street crime had never before been of much concern. By 1968, 81 percent of Americans agreed that "law and order has broken down in this country."
⁸⁶

Ronald Reagan did not lead white men out of the Democratic Party with his 1980 campaign. Rather, the switch can be traced to 1964, when "men's support for the Democratic Party dropped precipitously from 51 percent to the high 30s throughout the seventies to a low of 28 percent in 1994." The gap in the party preferences of white men and women that became so pronounced in the 1990s and has continued into this century resulted from white men leaving the Democratic Party beginning in the mid-1960s.
⁸⁷

The collapse of social institutions, the dropping levels of trust, and the abandonment of political parties beginning in 1965 all contributed to a decline in partisan political behavior. White people continued to leave both the Republican and Democratic parties. Ambivalent, they split their vote. In 1960, 73 percent of voters cast a straight ticket, voting for the same party in all elections. By 1966, the percentage of straight-ticket voters had dropped to 50 percent, and by 1972 it was 42 percent. In 1904, only 2 percent of the country's congressional districts voted for a House candidate from one party and a presidential candidate from the other. By 1968, a third of the districts did so. Walter Dean Burnham wrote of a "secular trend toward the gradual disappearance of the political party in the United States."
⁸⁸
In
The Changing American Voter,
Norman Nie, Sidney Verba, and John Petrocik found signs that voters were becoming more ideological by the early 1970s.
^*
89
The parties were ideologically ambidextrous, and the low levels of polarization in Congress that emerged after World War II continued well into the mid-1970s. Party elites in Washington were content with a politics of compromise and tempered ideology.
⁹⁰
And, we know now, American communities were integrating politically. In the 1976 presidential election, Democrats and Republicans were more geographically blended than at any time since the end of World War II.

With few people's knowledge and with nobody's permission, a new kind of politics was forming. Society had shattered in the mid-1960s, and the forces that pulled it together again, piece by piece, created the world we know today. The new politics was molded by post-materialist realities. Tradition, economic class and occupation, religious denomination, civic structures, and party politics—the ways of life that had molded the country over the previous century—were losing significance. The new society was more about personal taste and worldview than public policy. It was as much or more concerned with self-expression and belief as with social class and economics. And it appeared suddenly, with a flash of anger and violence, in the coalfields of West Virginia in the summer of 1974.

T
HE
R
EVEREND
M
ARVIN
Horan left the high school up Campbells Creek in the tenth grade. "Back then, the big thing was going to work," Horan said, remembering 1955. Most kids left West Virginia for the upper Midwest in the 1950s. ("If you made it to Cleveland, you had a job," he recalled.) Horan "always wanted to be a truck driver," and that's what he's always been—except for the two years he spent in federal prison, sent up on a charge that in 1974 he conspired to dynamite an elementary school.

Marvin Horan was twenty-five years old and newly married when four women from the Campbells Creek community church came to call in 1964. "I was sitting at home one night watching television," he remembered. "Four women stopped, and they were talking with me about the church. And when these four women left, my whole life changed. It was a
miraculous
change. I have never been the same since that night, and that's been forty-one years. I have never had the same desires that I had prior to that experience. You cannot come in contact with the Creator and be the same. You just can't. It's impossible."

Horan was called to the ministry that night. To prepare for his work, he "acquired a small library" and began to study. He read for the next three years, until, he said, "I had come to the place where I could address a congregation and do it with some sense and reasoning behind it." Then, as is the way with the independent churches in rural West Virginia, he proclaimed himself a minister. He drove a truck six days a week and preached on Sundays. Reverend Horan led revivals and traveled the circuit among the small fundamentalist churches dotted up the creeks that carve through the southern mountains. In 1969, he was filling the pulpit of a church that was between ministers when he had what he called a "vision." He told the congregation he saw a time when he would be "preaching to thousands of people." He had the premonition again early in 1974, and then, in September of that year, the vision came to pass.

Marvin Horan became the leader of the nation's most violent conflict over school textbooks. In 1974, thousands of people in Kanawha County, West Virginia, believed that some of the new books adopted by the local school board were anti-American, antireligious, "trashy, filthy and one-sided."
¹
Objections to the books first voiced in the late spring escalated into meetings, and meetings evolved into mass rallies and marches by late summer. Soon after the children returned to their classrooms in the fall, Horan and others called on parents to keep their children out of school. Coal miners and truck drivers went out on strike in sympathy with the textbook protesters, and by the fall of 1974, most of Kanawha County's commercial life snapped closed. Ten thousand coal miners left their jobs. Parents kept children home, and dozens of schools were emptied. On the first Sunday in September, Horan spoke from the pulpit of his Two-Mile Mountain Mission church. He urged his congregation to continue the boycott of the Kanawha County schools, promising that they would prevail over the school board and the books. He also told his flock that he had received a "vision ... God has revealed to me a victory speech."
²

Ten years after the Kanawha County textbook controversy, Don J. Goode, a doctoral student at Michigan State University, contacted people who had been on both sides of the textbook war. Goode hoped to learn if opinions about school textbooks were "reflective of more general values."
³
He wanted to know if a stand in the textbook war could be considered a proxy for a larger constellation of beliefs—a worldview of society, religion, and politics. Goode convinced the former textbook combatants to answer several questionnaires. In the first, he asked participants what they thought of the nation's courts. The anti-textbook group strongly disagreed with the Supreme Court's decision to ban teacher-led school prayer. The pro-textbook group strongly agreed with this decision. The anti-textbook group thought that the courts gave criminals too many rights and failed to preserve traditional values and that judges too often "made" laws rather than interpreted those on the books. The pro-textbook group thought the opposite.

In another set of questions, Goode asked whether county services would improve if the people of Kanawha County could afford to pay more in taxes. The pro-textbook group strongly agreed that the county could make good use of increased revenues. The anti-textbook group strongly disagreed. The anti-textbook group, Goode concluded, simply "did not have confidence" in government.

Not surprisingly, Goode found a "wide schism" between the groups when he asked about education. The textbook opponents favored prayer in schools, discipline, and the teaching of "traditional Christian and American values." They also thought that extracurricular activities didn't provide "valuable learning experiences" and that schools shouldn't provide "special services (such as hot meals and daycare centers) that some families can't provide" for themselves. The textbook supporters were generally in favor of afterschool activities and the use of schools to provide social services; this group was significantly less enthusiastic about a curriculum that emphasized discipline, school prayer, and the teaching of Christian values.

Finally, Goode prepared a list of eighteen values—such as equality, self-respect, and national security—and asked that individuals rank them in order of importance. The two sides judged many of the values similarly. Both pro- and anti-textbook activists placed a "comfortable life" relatively low on the scale; both sides thought that health and "freedom" were important. The anti-textbook group ranked "national security" significantly higher than the pro-textbook group and "equality" (defined as "brotherhood, equal opportunity for all") significantly lower. The pro-textbook group ranked a "world of beauty in nature and the arts" significantly higher than the anti-textbook group.