In the 1930s the New Deal coalition demonstrated that the government could promote the welfare of the people, thus establishing the liberal consensus. At the same time, the expansion of rights to women and Black and Brown Americans, as well as to other minorities, set in motion the undermining of democracy that is still under way.
Since the 1980s, political figures eager to get rid of that liberal consensus have gained power by denigrating it. Ignoring the fact that expanding equality was entirely consistent with the principles the Founders had put in the Declaration of Independence, they have suggested that doing so rejected America’s historical ideals. And although the liberal consensus bolstered economic prosperity and shared it more widely than ever before, they claimed it stunted economic growth.
The demands of Black and Brown Americans for inclusion in the nation’s political system after World War II forced the nation to grapple with the true meaning of democracy. President Dwight Eisenhower pushed the passage of the Civil Rights Act of 1957 primarily to protect the voting rights that were, theoretically, already established. And once James Meredith had pushed him into backing desegregation, President John F. Kennedy advocated a stronger civil rights bill. Just five days after Kennedy’s murder, his successor, Lyndon B. Johnson, told Congress: “No memorial oration or eulogy could more eloquently honor President Kennedy’s memory than the earliest possible passage of the civil rights bill for which he fought so long.”[1]
Although southern white men passionately defended their right to rule over their Black neighbors through state legislation, LBJ, for all his love of his native state of Texas, wanted none of that. “We have talked long enough in this country about equal rights. We have talked for one hundred years or more. It is time now to write the next chapter, and to write it in the books of law,” he said.[2]
Congress considered a civil rights bill in early 1964, while Black and white Americans demonstrated their support for civil rights by integrating formerly segregated spaces. On June 18, when Black and white people jumped into a whites-only swimming pool at the Monson Motor Lodge in St. Augustine, Florida, the hotel’s owner, James Brock, poured acid into the pool. The water diluted the acid enough that the swimmers were not injured, but local law enforcement officers arrested them. News crews covered the incident. For a number of Americans, seeing a white man pour acid into a swimming pool to drive out Black people was the last straw.[3]
The next day, Republican Everett Dirksen of Illinois, the Senate minority leader, managed to deliver enough Republican votes to Majority Leader Mike Mansfield of Montana to break a Senate filibuster. Arizona senator Barry Goldwater, who said, “I am unalterably opposed to discrimination or segregation on the basis of race, color or creed, or on any other basis,” voted against ending the filibuster, saying he believed it was “a grave threat to the very essence of our basic system of government, namely, that of a constitutional republic in which 50 sovereign states have reserved to themselves and to the people those powers not specifically granted to the central or Federal Government.”[4]
The Senate passed the bill on June 19 and sent their version back to the House two days before three voting rights workers, Black Mississippian James Chaney and white, Jewish New Yorkers Andrew Goodman and Michael Schwerner, disappeared near Philadelphia, Mississippi. As rage over the three missing men grew, Johnson pressured the House to pass the bill.[5]
It did. Johnson signed the Civil Rights Act of 1964 into law on July 2.
Just before he wrote his name, Johnson addressed the American people on television “to talk to you about what that law means to every American.”
Keenly aware of the bill’s timing, he noted: “One hundred and eighty-eight years ago this week, a small band of valiant men began a long struggle for freedom. They pledged their lives, their fortunes, and their sacred honor not only to found a nation, but to forge an ideal of freedom—not only for political independence, but for personal liberty; not only to eliminate foreign rule, but to establish the rule of justice in the affairs of men.”[6]
That was a triumph, but “those who founded our country knew that freedom would be secure only if each generation fought to renew and enlarge its meaning. . . . Americans of every race and color have died in battle to protect our freedom. Americans of every race and color have worked to build a nation of widening opportunities. Now our generation of Americans has been called on to continue the unending search for justice within our own borders.”
Johnson celebrated that the bill had bipartisan support of more than two thirds of the lawmakers in Congress and that it enjoyed the support of “the great majority of the American people.”
He emphasized that the law “does not restrict the freedom of any American, so long as he respects the rights of others.” He took on the old trope that Black Americans wanted “special treatment” and said that the law simply made sure those people the Founders had declared were created equal would now “also be equal in the polling booths, in the classrooms, in the factories, and in hotels, restaurants, movie theaters, and other places that provide service to the public.”
“Its purpose is not to punish. Its purpose is not to divide, but to end divisions—divisions which have lasted all too long. Its purpose is national, not regional. Its purpose is to promote a more abiding commitment to freedom, a more constant pursuit of justice, and a deeper respect for human dignity.”
Most Americans wanted to do what was right, he said, and it was time for them to assert their power. “My fellow citizens,” he said, “we have come now to a time of testing. We must not fail.”
Johnson had a vision of a “Great Society” that would eliminate poverty and racial injustice once and for all. While FDR’s New Deal had used the federal government to address the greatest economic crisis in U.S. history, leveling the playing field between workers and employers to enable workingmen to support their families, the country was enjoying record growth in 1964. Far from simply saving the country, LBJ could afford to direct it toward greater things.
In May 1964, Johnson outlined his plan in a graduation speech at the University of Michigan, and the administration immediately turned to addressing issues of civil rights and poverty. After Congress passed the Civil Rights Act, it passed the Economic Opportunity Act of 1964, which created an Office of Economic Opportunity to oversee a whole series of antipoverty programs, and the Food Stamp Act, which helped people who didn’t make a lot of money buy food.[7]
Republicans ran Barry Goldwater against Johnson for president in 1964, calling for rolling back business regulation and civil rights to the years before the New Deal. But voters who quite liked the new system gave Democrats such a strong majority in Congress that Johnson and the Democrats were able to pass eighty-four new laws to put the Great Society into place.
They cemented civil rights with the 1965 Voting Rights Act protecting minority voting, created jobs in Appalachia, and established job-training and community-development programs. The Elementary and Secondary Education Act of 1965 gave federal aid to public schools and established the Head Start program to provide comprehensive early education for low-income children. The Higher Education Act of 1965 increased federal investment in universities and provided scholarships and low-interest loans to students.
The Social Security Amendments of 1965 created Medicare, which provided health insurance for Americans over age sixty-five, and Medicaid, which helped cover health care costs for those with limited incomes. Congress advanced the war on poverty by increasing welfare payments and subsidizing rent for low-income families.
But the government did not simply address poverty. Congress took on the rights of consumers with new protective legislation that required cigarettes and other dangerous products to carry warning labels, required products to carry labels identifying the manufacturer, and required lenders to disclose the full cost of finance charges in loans. Congress also passed legislation protecting the environment, including the Water Quality Act of 1965, which established federal standards for water quality.
Congress also endorsed LBJ’s aspirations for beauty and purpose with the National Foundation on the Arts and Humanities Act of 1965. This law created both the National Endowment for the Arts and the National Endowment for the Humanities to make sure the era’s emphasis on science didn’t endanger the humanities. In 1967 it would also establish the Corporation for Public Broadcasting, followed in 1969 by National Public Radio.[8]
“For better or worse,” Johnson had told the University of Michigan graduates in 1964, “your generation has been appointed by history to . . . lead America toward a new age. . . . You can help build a society where the demands of morality, and the needs of the spirit, can be realized in the life of the Nation.”[9] He urged them to make equality a reality and to end poverty.
“There are those timid souls who say this battle cannot be won; that we are condemned to a soulless wealth,” he said, but he disagreed. “We have the power to shape the civilization that we want. But we need your will, your labor, your hearts, if we are to build that kind of society.”
The Great Society programs changed America. Forty million Americans were poor in 1960, but by 1969 that number had fallen to twenty-four million. That prosperity was shared by white and nonwhite people more fully than ever before. Black school attendance increased by four years; twice as many Black people found work in professional, technical, and clerical occupations; the Black unemployment rate fell 34 percent, and median Black family income rose 53 percent. In 1960, 55 percent of Black Americans lived below the poverty line; by 1968, the number was 27 percent. In the decade after 1965, infant mortality fell by one third thanks to new medical and nutritional programs. In 1960, 20 percent of Americans had no indoor plumbing; by 1970, that number had fallen to 11 percent.
Women’s lives, too, became more integrated into the United States. In 1950, women made up about one third of the total labor force; by 1980, they made up more than 40 percent, growing at a rate dramatically faster than that of men. In 1965, the Supreme Court defended their equality by recognizing the constitutional right of married people to use contraception; in 1973, it similarly protected the right to abortion.[10]
Opponents of the Great Society programs picked up forty-seven seats in the House and three seats in the Senate in the 1966 midterm elections, and U.S. News & World Report wrote that “the big bash” was over.[11]
But the nation seemed poised to embrace its multicultural history. The big hit of 1971 was the sitcom All in the Family, in which Archie Bunker, a working-class white man from Queens, New York, fought with his feminist daughter and hippie son-in-law, who supported the liberal consensus. The African American series Sanford and Son debuted in 1972 and was so popular it drove its competition, The Brady Bunch, off the air in 1974. That year, Chico and the Man introduced a Latino veteran trying to help an alcoholic Anglo-American widower adapt to the Hispanic neighborhood that had surrounded his garage. Popular culture seemed more accepting of differences, more willing to believe in redemption.
That openness meant those opposing the liberal consensus seemed out of step, people who would be left behind. The Archie Bunker types seemed to be a dying breed, and modern Americans could afford to be charitable toward them, just as they had been toward the Confederates whose ideology the modern Archie Bunkers shared.
That charity extended even toward President Richard M. Nixon, who had begun the process of unwinding the liberal consensus by turning Americans against one another for political power and who had eventually used the power of the government to try to keep himself in office. When Republicans demanded Nixon resign on August 9, 1974, or face impeachment and conviction, his replacement, Gerald Ford, pardoned him to try to bring the country back together and avoid a “prolonged and divisive debate over the propriety of exposing to further punishment and degradation a man who has already paid the unprecedented penalty of relinquishing the highest elective office of the United States.”[12]
Finally, it seemed that, with the post–World War II revision of liberalism to include the defense of civil rights and welfare legislation, the U.S. was on track to be the multicultural democracy the Declaration of Independence had hinted it could become. But it turned out that while those who embraced the new America were laughing at Archie Bunker, those who distrusted it saw him as a spokesman. Then, in 1980, Ronald Reagan echoed the divisive rhetoric Nixon had used and ran for the presidency by warning voters that government couldn’t provide solutions to the problems of the day. Instead, he said, government was the problem.
He won with 50.7 percent of the vote.