Who Stole the American Dream? (7 page)

When the city got a local court injunction to stop the protests, King put on his coveralls and personally joined the march. And he got arrested. From jail, he chastised white moderates for defending law and order, which, he said, was tantamount to protecting the racist status quo.
By his personal involvement, he had upped the ante to try to break the racist stone wall in Birmingham.

But the dynamics of citizen direct action were already having an effect. Even before he landed in jail, King and his lieutenant Andrew Young had opened a secret dialogue with white merchants and moderates through the Episcopal bishop of Alabama. Young understood that Bull Connor, who proudly flaunted that nickname to play up his tough-guy image, was only a front man for “the Big Mules,” the city’s white power structure.

What would turn around the Big Mules, Young reasoned, was economic leverage—a black shopping boycott. “
Money is color-blind,”
Young reasoned. “It was simple. We had one hundred thousand people, the black population around Birmingham. Nobody was buying anything but food or medicine for ninety days. Businessmen understand that.” They also understood that daily images of snapping police dogs were ruining Birmingham’s reputation. In private,
a deal slowly emerged. The merchants and a newly elected mayor, Albert Boutwell, agreed to meet all the Negro demands for desegregation and job promotions and to dismiss charges against the protesters.

Now, with the Birmingham victory in hand but a long agenda ahead, Martin Luther King, Jr., and other leaders had brought their civil rights crusade to Washington. At the feet of Abraham Lincoln, they were leveraging the mass support their movement had generated, and they were reminding politicians that the people were now watching—impatient with government inaction.

Martin Luther King’s soaring “dream” refrain echoes even now in people’s memories. But first, targeting fence-sitters in Congress, he called on the nation to live up to its highest ideals. “In a sense we’ve come to our nation’s capital to cash a check,” King declared. “When the architects of our republic wrote the magnificent words of the Constitution and the Declaration of Independence, they were signing a
promissory note to which every American was to fall heir. This note was a promise that all men, yes, black men as well as white men, would be guaranteed the ‘Unalienable Rights of Life, Liberty, and the pursuit of Happiness.’ It is obvious today that America has defaulted on this promissory note…. Instead of honoring this sacred obligation, America has given the Negro people a bad check, a check which has come back marked ‘insufficient funds.’ But we refuse to believe that the bank of justice is bankrupt…. And so we’ve come to cash this check, a check that will give us upon demand the riches of freedom and the security of justice.”

Then came those soaring, anguished cadences of King’s peroration: “I have a dream….” Again and again, he cried out: “I have a dream that one day this nation will rise up and live out the true meaning of its creed…. I have a dream that my four little 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.”

Afterward, the march leaders met with President Kennedy and Vice President Johnson. John Lewis remembers Kennedy standing at the door of the Oval Office. “He was just beaming. He was so pleased everything turned out so well—there was no violence,” Lewis recalled. “
He shook hands with each of us and said, ‘You did a good job…. You did a good job.’ And then to Dr. King, ‘You had a dream.’ There was so much optimism, so much hope. He just said, ‘We will work to get a civil rights bill passed.’ … That was the last time I saw President Kennedy alive.”

It fell to Lyndon Johnson, a Texan, to make good on Kennedy’s promise, and the interplay between the new president and Martin Luther King, Jr., was a central part of that drama. After Kennedy’s assassination, King praised the new president but prodded him, too, voicing confidence that “President Johnson will follow the path charted by President Kennedy in civil rights.”

When Johnson phoned to thank him, King suggested that a new civil rights law would be “one of the great tributes” to Kennedy’s memory. Johnson chose almost those exact words addressing Congress a few days later, and he persisted until Congress in June 1964 enacted a civil rights law banning segregation in public accommodations. At the bill signing, Johnson gave King one of the pens that he had used.

Then later, in December 1964, King pressed Johnson once again. As King was returning home from receiving the Nobel Peace Prize in Stockholm, Johnson invited him to the White House. America, said King, needs a strong voting rights law. Johnson agreed but said he lacked the votes in Congress. But a month later, on January 18, 1965, Johnson phoned King and urged the civil rights leader to put public pressure on Congress—and on himself as president—to pass
a voting rights bill. Without saying so explicitly,
Johnson was challenging King to “make me do it!” King understood and responded with a new voting rights campaign, including the
bloody march at Selma, Alabama, where the brutal clubbing of John Lewis and others provoked national outrage. Once again, the interaction of people power and presidential leadership achieved concrete results. It produced the Voting Rights Act of 1965—a change in law, in policy, and in expanding American democracy.

Probably the broadest engagement of middle-class political power in modern American politics was the environmental movement. On Earth Day in 1970, in the largest one-day grassroots demonstration this country has ever seen,
twenty million Americans staged street marches and held rallies and teach-ins to demonstrate their outrage at pollution. They took to the streets because they were disgusted by such incidents as the Santa Barbara oil spill in 1969, acid rain in the Midwest, the choking smog over Los Angeles, toxic waste in the rivers, and lead paint or asbestos in their own basements.

In the late 1960s, the green movement took off, especially among younger, well-educated suburban voters. Millions joined the Sierra Club, the National Wildlife Federation, Natural Resources Defense Council, the League of Conservation Voters, the Environmental Defense Fund, and the National Audubon Society, among others. Rachel Carson had aroused Americans with her book
Silent Spring
in 1962, but it was the raw, in-your-face ugliness of pollution that fanned the flames of public anger and gave the issue urgency. In the late 1960s, when you stuck an arm into the Potomac River in Washington, it came out covered with green slime. The river wore a filthy floating coat of green algae. That typified the visible, palpable stain of pollution from coast to coast.

“
I remember when the Cuyahoga River burned, with flames that
were eight stories high,” Robert Kennedy, Jr., told me. “I remember the Santa Barbara oil spill in 1969 that closed virtually all the beaches in Southern California. I remember when they declared Lake Erie dead. I remember that I couldn’t swim in the Hudson, or the Charles, or the Potomac when I was growing up.”

“
There was anger at the state of the world, at the state of your own back yard, whether it be a water body or the air or your mountain range,” said William Baker of the Chesapeake Bay Foundation. “There was anger that we as a country had let it go so far. And there was a grass roots rebellion saying, ‘This has got to stop.’ ”

So intense was the public interest in the environment and so fierce the political pressure from grassroots America that Nixon, who was far from a tree-hugging environmentalist, felt compelled to declare his fealty to environmental protection on New Year’s Day 1970. The coming decade, he declared, “absolutely must be the years when America pays its debt to the past by reclaiming the purity of its air, its waters, and our living environment.” Then, echoing a battle cry of the green movement, he trumpeted: “It is literally
now or never.”

Typically, Washington moves deliberately—which means slowly—on reforms. But on the environment, Congress and
the Nixon White House moved with astonishing speed. During his first year, President Nixon set up a White House Council on Environmental Quality, naming environmentalist Russell Train as its chairman. Solid bipartisan majorities in Congress rushed through a flow of environmental legislation under Nixon: the Clean Air Act; the Clean Water Act; a bill establishing the Environmental Protection Agency; the Federal Insecticide, Fungicide, and Rodenticide Act; the Noise Pollution and Abatement Act; the Coastal Zone Management Act; the Marine Mammal Protection Act; the Endangered Species Act; and the Safe Drinking Water Act. More environmental legislation was passed under Gerald Ford after Nixon resigned in 1974.

At the state level, too, there was a rush of action. It seemed as if no politician dared brook the anger of an aroused public. “It was a big issue,” observed William Ruckelshaus, Nixon’s first EPA chief. “
It exploded on the country, and it forced a Republican administration and a president [who] had never thought about this very much, President Nixon. It forced him to deal with it because the public said, ‘This is intolerable. We’ve got to do something about it.’ ”

In those early years of environmental enthusiasm, quite a lot was achieved. The results were visible. That early wave of government regulation did, in fact, reduce the most egregious pollution, like the green slime on the Potomac. Big industrial polluters and cities were taken to court and fined, until they changed their ways. The public thought the job was done. Voter interest subsided, and as it subsided, so did government action.

A similar surge of middle-class power and civic activism, with similar impact on Washington, came from the consumer movement. Although less militant and less well organized than the greens, public interest consumerism took off in the mid-1960s and had strong policy influence into the late 1970s.

Eleven
major new consumer organizations were formed in the 1960s, among them the Consumer Federation of America, Public Citizen, and Congress Watch. They attracted a strong following among well-educated yuppies, suburbanites, and upper-middle-class professionals who were wary of big business. With slogans calling for “Truth in Lending” and “Truth in Packaging,” consumer advocates demanded more aggressive action by federal watchdog agencies to protect the public from being unfairly exploited by unsafe products and unscrupulous lenders. Quality of life was key. People took U.S. economic growth for granted, and they wanted higher standards, better quality, and greater transparency from industry.

More than any other single person, Ralph Nader put middle-class
consumer activism on the political map. A public figure of no small ego, Nader knew how to work the press, the public, and politicians. His 1965 book,
Unsafe at Any Speed
, captured public attention with the charge that America’s Big Three carmakers were responsible for many automobile accidents because they were marketing cars that were mechanically and technically unsafe.

Nader’s network ranged widely. His Center for the Study of Responsive Law, whose staff proudly called themselves “Nader’s Raiders,” grew from just five people in 1967 to two hundred in 1971. In one decade, the center generated a score of popular books that exposed the failure of federal agencies to adequately protect the consuming public. Nader pressed for a more sharply adversarial relationship between government agencies and the business sectors they monitored. His Health Research Group kept tabs on the Food and Drug Administration’s oversight of the pharmaceutical industry. His Aviation Consumer Action Project critiqued the Federal Aviation Administration and the Civil Aeronautics Board. His Center for Auto Safety kept score on the National Transportation Safety Board and the Highway Safety Administration. His Congress Watch checked on where Capitol Hill was falling down on oversight. By the mid-1970s, the Nader network, funded by public donations and Nader’s speaking fees, employed seventy-five full-time lawyers, researchers, and lobbyists, plus a few hundred college interns.

Nader’s slashing personal attacks on industry and government agencies made him a celebrity consumer advocate with political impact. By 1974,
U.S. News & World Report
put Nader on its cover with Nixon and Henry Kissinger, ranking him fourth in its national survey headlined “Who Runs America.” Nader was seen by the public as more influential than the big-time corporate CEOs he was hounding. His favorite target was General Motors, and ironically, GM’s retaliatory harassment of Nader fueled his popular appeal and his political clout. In 1966,
Nader filed a lawsuit charging GM with hiring a private detective to shadow him and trying to entrap him with sex lures. GM had to pay a cash settlement of $425,000, which Nader spent on more investigations of GM.

Nader had significant policy impact. His campaign against U.S. automakers led to congressional imposition of auto safety standards in the National Traffic and Motor Vehicle Safety Act of 1966. That law was a political earthquake that broke congressional resistance and paved the way for expanded regulatory laws in other sectors, such as fair packaging and labeling, control of hazardous substances, meat inspection, and gas pipeline and mine safety. Occasionally, the Senate would pass a bill without a single negative vote.

Politicians had gotten the consumer message: If business did not voluntarily clean up its own act, a highly vocal and influential part of the middle class wanted the government to step in. “Consumerism,” wrote political historian David Vogel, “was a beneficiary of rising public expectations about the capacity of government to improve the quality of life in American society.” The movement was also riding the tide of citizen activism that reached into all corners of American society.