CHAPTER 8

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The Democratic Revolution

On December 2, 1964, Mario Savio, an undergraduate philosophy major, who had grown up in a working-class family in Queens, New York, spoke to a crowd of over a thousand students and their supporters protesting a ban on political activity on the University of California–Berkeley campus. Just before the protestors sat down inside the main campus administration building, Savio told them, “There is a time when the operation of the machine becomes so odious, makes you so sick at heart, that you can’t take part; you can’t even passively take part, and you’ve got to put your bodies upon the gears and upon the wheels, upon the levers, upon all the apparatus, and you’ve got to make it stop.”

The next day, on orders from liberal Democratic governor Edmund Brown, police moved into the building and carted off 773 demonstrators, the largest mass arrest in California history. The sit-down and the language Savio used to encourage it reflected a new sensibility that would propel a democratic revolution for years to come.

During the mid-1960s, political change took place with rapidity and on a scale unseen in the United States since the New Deal. Post–New Deal liberalism reached its high-water mark with a flood of federal legislation and a series of Supreme Court decisions that bolstered democratic rights and expanded the role of government in promoting social well-being. Civil rights and student activists energized, criticized, transformed, and undermined liberalism, as politics came to mean more than the sum of discrete issues like civil rights or foreign policy. Increasingly, people began to question the very nature of authority in the institutions that shaped their lives, from local and national government to colleges and universities, churches, and even their own families. A swelling movement for greater democracy pressed liberalism to expand its ambitions, abandon its anticommunist boundaries, and open up hierarchical structures to popular participation.

By the end of 1966, liberalism had reached its apogee. Even as it faced swelling challenges from its left, it came under growing pressure from its right, as conservatives built popular movements and political infrastructure dedicated to ending liberal dominance. As cultural and political divisions within the country grew, to many the nation seemed to be fragmenting. Like most revolutions, the democratic revolution of the 1960s turned out to be a disorderly, exhilarating, frightening affair.

Rebellious Youth

It was far from coincidental that one of the first nationally publicized, militant challenges to a major liberal institution in the name of democracy took place on a college campus. The pressure on liberalism to reinvigorate itself in part stemmed from a generational divide particularly evident in the academy. And what happened on college campuses mattered more during the 1960s than ever before, because higher education played a more significant role in American life than ever before.

After World War II, the federal government fostered the massive expansion of higher education through investment in research and development, the GI Bill, and the National Defense Education Act. A growing demand for trained professionals in science, engineering, and management, and rising family income, which allowed young people to delay entering the workforce, led more and more students to stay in school for longer and longer. In 1946, two million enrolled in higher education programs; in 1960, three and a half million. When the baby boom generation came of age, enrollments exploded, nearing eight million by 1970. In 1946, one out of eight eighteen- to twenty-four-year-olds was attending college or graduate school; in 1960, nearly one out of four; in 1970, nearly one out of three.

The schools they attended varied immensely, from elite private institutions to huge state universities to modest junior colleges. By the mid-1960s, there were twice as many public colleges and universities as private ones. California provided the model. Under its 1960 master plan, the state built an enormous three-tier system to provide free higher education to its residents. The top tier, the research-oriented University of California, took in the highest-achieving high school graduates and offered the most advanced degrees. State colleges provided four-year programs to less qualified students. Community colleges offered two-year degrees.

Standardized tests helped determine which students got admitted to which schools. When California adopted its master plan, it initiated a standardized admission test. The trend spread as more and more colleges required applicants to take the Scholastic Aptitude Test (SAT) or the American College Testing (ACT) exam. The military gave a boost to such testing when it adopted a standardized exam to decide which college students would get draft deferments.

Standardized testing facilitated a push by social and educational leaders to create more opportunities for outsiders to win places in elite institutions. The resiliency of the white, male, Protestant leadership of the country lay in part in its willingness to open its ranks, a bit, to smart young men from families of modest means. Top colleges and universities provided an arena for selecting, socializing, and training such men, who then were recruited for important positions in government and business. The increasing number of students reaching top schools on the basis of grades and test scores rather than social pedigree began changing the culture at many of the nation’s most celebrated educational institutions, where students in the past generally had placed little value on academic enterprise, saving their time and energy for social activities, athletics, and dissipation.

As colleges and universities became more linked to the ongoing administration of society, they became poles for cultural and political dissidence. An expanding economy freed college students from fears about their future well-being. Many became drawn to intellectuals and artists who took to task or at least opted out of what looked to them like a hegemonic, corporate, Cold War cultural consensus. Academics like Norman O. Brown, Herbert Marcuse, and Paul Goodman gained followers through their attacks on psychological and sexual repression, which they believed were integral to the dominant culture. European existentialists cut against the grain of Cold War patriotism and demands for social and political conformity with their concern for immediate experience, individual moral commitment, and the need to act against falsehood (themes strongly echoed in Savio’s speech).

“Beat” writers—Allen Ginsberg, Jack Kerouac, William Burroughs, Gary Snyder, and Gregory Corso among the best-known—made deviating from conventional mores alluring. Their work burst with Whitmanesque celebrations of America, but of a raucous, down-and-out, drug-using, hard-drinking, sexually exuberant, rebellious America. The Beat sensibility soon permeated bohemian neighborhoods like Greenwich Village and the Lower East Side in New York and North Beach in San Francisco. It could be found, too, in the student quarters near large college campuses, in places like Berkeley; Madison, Wisconsin; Austin, Texas; and Minneapolis’s Dinkytown. With the middle class deserting cities for suburban living, cheap, run-down apartments were easy to find, providing a material and geographic base for an emerging culture of dissent. But the Beat influence went beyond enclaves of hipness and student life. Ginsberg’s 1955 poem Howl, initially deemed obscene by government authorities, sold 100,000 copies during its first decade in print, while Kerouac’s novel On the Road was a 1957 best seller. By the beginning of the 1960s, cultural iconoclasm had begun penetrating some of the mainstream taste-making industries, including advertising, which experimented with selling products by identifying them with authenticity and nonconformity.

Only a minority of students got heavily involved with intellectual and literary dissent, but many identified with a broader youth culture that had been emerging since World War II. At various times in the history of the United States, youth had been prized and celebrated, but generally young people did not think of themselves nor did others think of them as a distinct social formation. In the decade after World War II, that began to change. Adolescents and young adults, coming of age during a period of extended economic growth, chafed under the cultural norms and expectations of an older generation shaped by the Great Depression and World War II. Writer Joan Didion, who attended Berkeley in the early 1950s, recalled that “we were the last generation to identify with adults.” During the 1940s, the term “teenager” began to be used, with its underlying assumption of a shared set of experiences among those of a particular age, cutting across other social divisions. In reality, multiple overlapping youth subcultures were emerging, reflecting differences in race, gender, class, and region. Still, a commercial mass culture, aimed at teenagers and young adults, helped create a conscious sense of a distinct generation, with a sensibility different from and in some ways at odds with that of its elders. With young people having more free time (because fewer worked) and more money than in the past, companies designed and marketed clothes, music, and other goods specifically for them.

Comic books set the pattern. Introduced in the 1930s, they were inexpensive enough that children and teenagers could buy them on their own. By the early 1950s, they had grown immensely popular. Estimates of sales ranged from nearly seventy million books a month or higher, with surveys reporting over 90 percent of under-eighteen-year-olds reading them. While some comics upheld adult notions of morality, patriotism, and proper behavior, others provided children and adolescents with an alternative to prevailing pieties and values. Horror and crime comics reveled in the macabre. Scantily clad women, with and without superpowers, exuded dangerous sexuality. Some comic books even disseminated dissenting political views, depicting government authorities as corrupt and the Korean War as a pointless bloodletting.

Parents, cultural arbiters, and government officials fretted about the irreverence of comic books and their creation of an imaginative world they neither understood nor liked. Well-publicized charges that comics promoted juvenile delinquency led to a series of government investigations. To protect themselves, in 1954 comic book publishers adopted a system of self-censorship, which led to much more bland content and declining sales, as the medium stopped serving, at least for a while, as a promoter of a youth culture at odds with adult values.

By then, rock and roll had begun taking over that role. Rock and roll defined itself as youth music, engaged with the particular experiences and sentiments of adolescents and celebrating a rejection of the adult world. Musicians like Chuck Berry embodied the amalgam of blues, rhythm and blues, and country music that produced rock and roll. A black man nearing thirty when he had his first hit, Berry appealed to a mostly white teenage audience, carefully crafting his songs to speak to the experience of high school dances, hot rod cars, and teenage infatuation.

Berry achieved modest commercial success, but the best-selling musicians of the late 1950s and early 1960s were white. Some made their fortunes doing cover versions of black records, toning them down and desexualizing them. Others, like Elvis Presley, developed styles that drew on black musical genres but did not simply ape them. The racial promiscuousness of rock and roll, along with its general exuberance and open sexuality, gave it a rebellious aura. By the mid-1950s, the demand by white southern high school and college students for records by black artists had grown to the point that record stores serving the white community began to stock them. In the early 1960s, racially integrated rhythm and blues shows toured the South, attracting large crowds of blacks and whites and generating considerable tension. Rock and roll was creating a new cultural universe, in which whites imitated blacks and middle-class teenagers made proletarian clothing, especially blue jeans, an international fashion.

Parents and government authorities tried to hold back the tide of youth culture. Schools instituted dress codes. Prosecutors went after radio disc jockeys for taking payoffs from record companies. Southern officials banned interracial concerts, and segregationists physically assaulted black performers. As in the case of comic books, the cultural counterattack had some short-term success. Bland white pop music dominated record sales and the airwaves in the early 1960s. But it was only a temporary reprieve before British rock groups, led by the Beatles, and black artists from Detroit’s Motown label took over the top of the charts in 1964.

As youthful cultural rebelliousness grew, so did student political activism, most noticeably on the left. Campus leftism fell to a nadir in the early and mid-1950s, as the adult left lost its allure and anticommunist crusading made students fearful of speaking up. It began to revive in the late 1950s, as anticommunist repression diminished. At Berkeley, the country’s most politically active campus, left-leaning students and their more moderate allies captured the student government (only to be maneuvered out of office by the college administration); protested compulsory participation in ROTC (a common requirement at state universities); and demonstrated against the House Committee on Un-American Activities when it held hearings in San Francisco in 1960 (marking an end to the fear and deference the committee long had commanded). In February 1962, several thousand students picketed the White House to protest nuclear testing and the civil defense program, the largest demonstration held there in nearly a decade.

In many ways, the campus activists were not that different from a new breed of adult activists who began popping up in the late 1950s and early 1960s. In New York City, “reform Democrats” opposed the backroom dealmaking of established party leaders. The National Committee for a Sane Nuclear Policy and Women Strike for Peace opposed nuclear testing and the arms race. The Fair Play for Cuba Committee tried to stop American intervention in Cuba. The 1962 publication of Rachel Carson’s Silent Spring, documenting the effects of pesticides on the environment, sparked protests against industrial pollution and the loss of open space and wilderness.

Though they addressed different issues, these groups had common traits. With the exception of the Fair Play for Cuba Committee, which had a number of prominent black members, all were primarily white and middle class. Women played a major role in many of them, especially those concerned with peace and the environment. Their members, like their student equivalents, had great faith in reason and discussion and optimism about the ability of the country to right moral and political wrongs. Confident about their own abilities and standing, they believed it their right and duty to intervene with the government and challenge established powers and policies. Though some of the activists had or once had ties to left-wing groups, they generally played down ideology, focusing on specific issues. Reminiscent in some ways of Progressive Era reform, the new liberal activism was a decidedly polite affair, with the young and old alike generally careful to wear suits and ties and skirts or dresses to picket lines and demonstrations.

Liberal activism soon became more militant, though, especially on campuses, as a result of the civil rights movement. The sight of young southern blacks placing their lives on the line in sit-ins, Freedom Rides, and voter registration drives electrified many northern students. In 1960, thousands of them picketed chain stores that refused to desegregate their southern branches. Some headed south to report on or join the civil rights effort, returning to their campuses transformed by the experience.

In 1964, Mississippi civil rights groups decided to bring northern white students to spend the summer working on a voter registration drive and help run “Freedom Schools,” calculating that their presence would bring national publicity and perhaps federal protection to the effort, knowing from bitter experience how little ripple occurred when local blacks were the victims of violence. Before the bulk of the nearly nine hundred “Freedom Summer” volunteers even got to Mississippi, segregationist terror took a heavy toll. Fires and bombs damaged or destroyed churches and civil rights headquarters associated with the project, while unprovoked violence against blacks increased. On June 21, three project members, James Chaney, an African American from Meridian, Mississippi, Andrew Goodman, a white student from New York City, and Michael Schwerner, another white New Yorker and the oldest of the group at twenty-four, on their way back from investigating a church burning, were arrested by a deputy sheriff in Philadelphia, Mississippi, and then released on a deserted road into a Ku Klux Klan ambush. Klan members killed all three and hid their bodies. The disappearance of the civil rights workers, two of them northern whites, brought massive national attention to the Mississippi struggle and increased federal involvement. Still, it took the FBI six weeks to find the bodies, while the reign of terror continued.

The sensibility and political approach of the civil rights movement, especially SNCC, profoundly influenced the emerging student movement. Students absorbed from it the notion of direct action as a form of political pressure and moral witness against perceived wrongs. They also adopted from SNCC a belief in participatory democracy as a social goal and a way of running their own organizations, seeking to develop modes for meaningful involvement of ordinary people in self-governance.

Well into the mid-1960s, programmatically the student movement remained within the parameters of liberalism. The 1962 “Port Huron Statement,” issued by one of the new campus groups, Students for a Democratic Society (SDS), put forth a sweeping indictment of American society for racism, inequality, complacency, and bureaucracy. But its suggested remedies—federal initiatives in the areas of civil rights, poverty, housing, and economic development and a realignment of the Democratic Party into a national party of liberalism—went only a bit beyond Fair Deal–New Frontier liberalism.

In its sensibility, though, the emerging student movement represented a challenge to liberalism and even a break with it. The impatience of student activists, black and white, with the gap between the official rhetoric and lived reality gave an urgency to their politics at odds with the unhurried confidence of early 1960s liberalism that America was fundamentally good and was on the inevitable and irreversible road to fulfilling its promises. The desire to breathe mass participation into the idea of democracy and to apply it to everyday situations in schools, workplaces, and communities cut against the faith in expertise, democracy through pluralist representation, and distrust of popular mobilization that characterized post–New Deal liberalism. Also, consistent with taking democracy at face value, the student movement rejected the anticommunism that had become central to postwar liberalism, refusing to exclude groups or individuals on the basis of their political associations. Early SDS leader Al Haber’s comment that he hoped his group would be a “radical liberal force” captured the ideological tension that gave energy to what was becoming known as the New Left.

The Free Speech Movement (FSM) at Berkeley brought the New Left to national attention. More students from the San Francisco Bay Area participated in the Freedom Summer than from any other part of the country except New York, including Mario Savio. But Berkeley administrators seemed indifferent to the changing student mood. Most colleges tightly controlled all student activities and enforced rules that many students found antiquated and ridiculous. At Harvard (then still all male), undergraduates had to wear ties to all meals, a requirement some breakfasters met by wearing their cravats over undershirts. At Radcliffe, its sister school, students could not wear pants to class and could leave their dorms in the evening only by signing out to a specific destination. Almost every college had strict “parietal” rules regulating visits by members of the opposite sex to dorm rooms. At Berkeley, the administration clamped down on political as well as personal behavior, blocking appearances by controversial speakers and allowing student groups to raise funds and distribute literature concerning off-campus issues only at tables in a small area on the edge of the campus. When in the fall of 1964 the university closed down that area too, students began pressing for greater political rights.

On October 1, university police arrested a former student for soliciting funds for CORE on campus. When they tried to take him away, hundreds of students sat down, surrounding the police car in which he had been placed. The standoff lasted thirty-two hours and led to the formation of FSM. The new organization tapped a well of student discontent. Berkeley was the prototypical large liberal university—bureaucratic, closely linked to the business, government, and military establishments (the first H-bomb had been built at a Berkeley-run weapons lab), and generally more concerned with research than with teaching. Students complained about large classes, a lack of contact with faculty, and a new computerized registration system that for many symbolized the impersonality of the university. And they resented being treated like children.

The failure to resolve issues between FSM and the university administration culminated in the December 2 sit-down. Many of the protestors shared Savio’s view that the university and the larger society were impersonal and unjust; that it was a moral obligation as well as an existential act to oppose such a society; and that by nonviolent direct action, social change could be effected. And it was. Within three weeks of the arrests of the protestors, after a student strike and much turmoil, the university board of regents adopted new rules regulating on-campus political activity similar to those proposed by FSM. The national student movement remained small—in December 1964, SDS had only forty-one chapters and twenty-five hundred members—but it had made a dramatic entrance onto the national political stage.

The New Right

At the same time that civil rights and student activists were taking liberal leaders and institutions to task for not living up to their professed beliefs, liberalism also came under attack from the right, from a conservative movement that mushroomed in the early 1960s. Though small in itself, the “New Right,” like the New Left, had growing intellectual and political influence. At its forefront stood a charismatic senator from Arizona, Barry Goldwater.

The 1950s had been a difficult time for conservatives. The success of anticommunism as an ideology meant that it provided them with only a limited boost, since liberals and centrists embraced it with equal fervor. The fall of Joe McCarthy tainted conservatism with an image of recklessness and indecency. The death of Robert Taft in 1953 and the control of the national Republican Party by moderates like Thomas Dewey and Dwight Eisenhower thwarted any full-scale effort to reverse the New Deal. The attack on union rights proved a dud, resulting in big defeats for the Republicans in 1958.

Goldwater was the exception to the rule. A member of the Senate committee investigating labor racketeering, he had launched an investigation of the UAW (which turned up no corruption), then won reelection after portraying an effort by the union to defeat him as undue interference in his state’s affairs by an outside force. Emerging as a bright star on the conservative horizon, he helped revive the movement by repackaging old themes in attractive new ways.

The breakthrough came with The Conscience of a Conservative, a short book prepared as part of Goldwater’s unsuccessful bid for the 1960 Republican presidential nomination. Ghostwritten by former McCarthy speechwriter L. Brent Bozell, it portrayed the central political issue of the day as the threat to individual freedom from an unrestrained federal government that unduly interfered in the daily lives of its citizens, hampered business through excessive regulation, and stepped on states’ rights. Goldwater had a different notion of freedom than the civil rights movement, which also was making freedom its central demand. For Goldwater, freedom meant not interfering with free-market capitalism, maximizing the social and economic liberty of individuals, and restraining government, including federal interference in southern racial practices. In The Conscience of a Conservative, Goldwater said almost nothing about communist subversion at home—a break with a long-standing right-wing obsession. He did take a hard line toward the Soviet bloc; American policy, he argued, should be built around the idea “that we would rather die than lose our freedom.” But most of his book focused on proposals for radically reducing federal spending, limiting union power, and leaving economic and social regulation to the marketplace. By November 1960, half a million copies of The Conscience of a Conservative had been sold, with sales especially strong at college bookstores. Eventually sales exceeded three million.

Goldwater failed to gain the nomination in 1960, but the election established conditions for a conservative revival. With Eisenhower leaving office, Republicans no longer felt constrained about attacking entrenched programs of the New Deal that the president had supported. Conservative activists who felt betrayed by an agreement Nixon worked out with Nelson Rockefeller that gave the party’s 1960 platform some decidedly liberal planks began working, with backing from conservative business interests, to make sure that next time around there would be a conservative presidential candidate running on a conservative platform. Meanwhile, the hyperbolic Cold War rhetoric of the incoming Kennedy administration helped legitimate far-right anticommunism. In 1958, Robert Welch, a right-wing businessman who had been chair of the National Association of Manufacturers’ education committee, founded the John Birch Society in reaction to the internationalism and domestic moderation of the Eisenhower administration. Though liberals and moderates derided Welch’s charges of communist conspiracies penetrating the government and American society, his emotional tenor and dire warnings did not lie all that far from Kennedy’s portrayal of the “hour of maximum danger.” By the early 1960s, the Birch Society claimed sixty thousand members, with considerable influence beyond its ranks through its publications and connections within the Republican Party.

The activists drawn to the emerging New Right in some respects resembled their liberal and left-wing counterparts. The young conservatives who in 1960 founded the Young Americans for Freedom (YAF) had a similar combination of earnest engagement with politics, rebelliousness against established positions and institutions, and disdain for compromise. But on many specific issues they took a diametrically opposite position, supporting loyalty oaths for recipients of federal fellowships and student loans; seeking a continuation of nuclear testing; supporting “right-to-work” laws; pressing for the reduction of welfare programs; and promoting a vigorous anticommunist foreign policy. Many YAF supporters had a strong libertarian streak. The novels of Ayn Rand served a similar role for young conservatives as the works of Albert Camus did for New Leftists; both writers laid out notions of freedom and morality that, while differing from one another, demanded individual self-scrutiny and uncompromising action. But among young conservatives, and even more so their elders, there also were “traditionalists” who adhered to religious-based social values, sought moral and legal limits on individual behavior, and feared what they saw as the nihilism and spiritual emptiness of Rand’s hyperindividualism.

Grassroots conservatism found many adherents among upwardly mobile professionals, small business owners, and their wives living in socially homogeneous, growing suburban areas in the South and West. Like the liberal reformers, this new breed of conservatives refused to defer to established authorities, having great confidence in their own judgment and right to shape society. Like their liberal counterparts, they tended to be highly literate, influenced by books and journals like National Review, a conservative magazine founded by William F. Buckley in 1955; FBI director J. Edgar Hoover’s anticommunist tract Masters of Deceit; and more extreme literature put out by hard-right groups.

Growth in the western part of the country helped propel the right’s resurgence. Western conservatives resented the control Washington had over their region as a landholder and regulator of natural resources, while downplaying the benefits they received from its subsidies. In Orange County, California, the epicenter of the New Right, newcomers flooding in from small towns in the Midwest, upper South, and Southwest brought with them conservative social values and conservative forms of Protestantism. The region’s military-industrial complex contributed to its prosperity and its deep anticommunism. Many beneficiaries of the booming local economy attributed their success to individual initiative and ability, reinforcing their free-market ideology, overlooking the massive government spending that sustained the area and the West more generally.

Dismay with changes wrought by liberal hegemony fueled the New Right. The 1962 Supreme Court decision in the case of Engel v. Vitale sparked as much or more controversy than Brown. A decade earlier, at the height of the anticommunist fervor, the New York State Board of Regents had written a nondenominational prayer that some school districts used to start each day. Ruling on a challenge to that practice, the Court, with only one dissenting vote, decided that having the government compose a prayer to be recited as part of a religious program carried out by a government body violated the First Amendment prohibition of government-established religion. The next year the Court extended its ruling by declaring the recitation of the Lord’s Prayer or the reading of Bible verses in classrooms to be unconstitutional, even if children were allowed to excuse themselves from the exercise.

Seemingly overnight, a practice that had been part of the routine of public schools in much of the country since their founding—brief prayer to begin the day—had been banished. Many Jewish and mainstream Protestant leaders supported the Court decisions, but the Catholic Church and many southern Protestant ministers vehemently denounced them. Popular opposition to the rulings, though widespread, proved insufficient to push through proposed constitutional amendments to allow school prayer. But outrage at court-ordered secularization brought new adherents to the conservative movement.

The civil rights movement created other openings for conservatives and the Republican Party. As the Kennedy administration began to more actively support civil rights, southern segregationists again questioned their ties to the national Democratic Party. The embrace of states’ rights by non-southern conservatives like Goldwater created the potential for a political realignment. To capitalize, the Republican National Committee launched a southern organizing drive, which it called Operation Dixie, the same name the CIO had used for its largely unsuccessful southern organizing effort a decade and a half earlier. The South, once seen by labor liberals as the key to expanding the New Deal and organized labor, now came to be seen by conservatives as the key to undoing them. In the North, too, some white voters moved in a conservative direction in reaction to the civil rights movement, especially the use of government power to enforce nondiscriminatory practices in home sales, hiring, and school placement.

Barry Goldwater became the rallying point for conservatives. Largely behind the scenes, a group of experienced political operatives worked to secure him the 1964 Republican presidential nomination, quietly lining up delegates from nonprimary states (only sixteen states held primaries that year). In the primaries that were held, Goldwater won the bulk of the delegates. His chief liberal opponent for the nomination, Nelson Rockefeller, hurt his chances by divorcing his longtime wife and soon after marrying a considerably younger woman, who allowed her husband custody of their children, behavior seen as morally unacceptable by many voters. Goldwater’s success in winning the Republican nomination and his determination not to compromise his principles—in accepting his nomination he proclaimed that “extremism in the defense of liberty is no vice”—set up one of the most ideologically sharp presidential elections in American history, as the Arizona conservative challenged an incumbent president, Lyndon Johnson, who not only accepted Kennedy-style liberalism but vastly expanded it.

LBJ

Lyndon Baines Johnson spent much of his life trying to become president but fearing that his southernness would doom him to failure. Since the Civil War, only one southerner had reached the White House, Woodrow Wilson, and he had built his career in the North, as president of Princeton University and governor of New Jersey. Johnson’s roots lay south of the South, in the Texas Hill Country, where he was born in a small town to a poor family. After attending teachers’ college he taught impoverished Mexican American students before embarking on his life’s work, politics.

Johnson was a large man—in his physical stature, his energy, drive, and ambition, his vision for the country, his insecurities and contradictions. He entered politics as a New Dealer and in 1937 won a seat in the House of Representatives running as an adamant supporter of FDR. Johnson sincerely embraced reform but not at the expense of furthering his personal ambitions. Even while projecting himself as a defender of the little man, he maintained close ties with Texas business interests, particularly in the oil, gas, and construction industries. After World War II, in tune with the times, he moved in a conservative direction, opposing most of Truman’s Fair Deal, supporting Taft-Hartley, embracing anticommunism, and voting against civil rights legislation. In 1948 he was elected to the Senate, becoming majority leader in 1955.

In the late 1950s, Johnson tacked back in a liberal direction, especially on civil rights. After falling short in his long-shot bid for the 1960 Democratic nomination for president, he accepted Kennedy’s offer of the vice presidential slot. He hated the job, finding himself with little influence in the administration, shunted off on a series of overseas trips largely designed to keep him busy and away from the action. When assassination handed him the presidency, he seized it with manic energy and a sense of entitlement, immediately planning how to get Kennedy’s stalled legislation passed and how to get elected to the White House in his own right in 1964. With deeper ties than Kennedy to New Deal liberalism, Johnson believed he had the opportunity to fulfill the unrealized ambitions of Roosevelt and his followers.

Johnson’s first success came with Kennedy’s tax bill, which Congress passed in February 1964. Over a period of two years it reduced the top nominal tax rate for individuals from 91 percent, a level that still reflected the tax policy adopted during World War II, to 70 percent, while the bottom rate fell from 20 to 14 percent. Corporate taxes were cut even more sharply. This unprecedented reduction had the effect that Keynesian economists predicted: output and employment rose sharply, driven by increased spending by consumers with more disposable income. The increase in economic activity generated enough additional taxes to make up for most of the decline in government revenue resulting from the drop in tax rates. This seemingly ideal situation, in which stimulation through fiscal policy did not lead to major deficits, cemented moderate Keynesianism as the orthodoxy among economists and policymakers.

The civil rights bill, which Kennedy had submitted to Congress in the wake of the Birmingham demonstrations, presented a much greater challenge. The bill limited the use of literacy tests to block voter registration; forbade discrimination by race, color, religion, or national origin in hiring, union membership, and access to public accommodations (including hotels, restaurants, stores, and theaters); established a Commission on Equal Employment Opportunity; empowered the attorney general to bring suit against public officials who maintained segregated schools (relieving civil rights organizations and black parents of the cost of enforcing Brown v. Board of Education); and required the federal government to withhold funds to local programs, including schools, that practiced discrimination.

Johnson had reservations about a federal desegregation law, but after Kennedy’s death he told a joint session of Congress that “no memorial or oration could more eloquently honor” him than the “earliest possible passage” of his civil rights bill. It ended up taking seven months. The key to its passage was the support it received from Republicans, who, proportionate to their numbers, provided stronger backing than Democrats. In the House, an alliance of northern Democrats and Republicans overcame the effort by the chair of the Rules Committee, Virginian Howard Smith, to bottle up the bill in his committee. Undaunted, in the floor debate Smith tried a maneuver he had used years earlier in fighting the Fair Employment Practices Committee, introducing an amendment to expand the outlawed bases for discrimination in hiring or union membership to include sex.

Smith apparently hoped his amendment would split the backers of the bill, leading to its defeat, but his position was not entirely disingenuous. He had long backed the Equal Rights Amendment (ERA) to the Constitution, first proposed in 1923, which would have declared that “equality of rights under the law shall not be denied or abridged by the United States or by any State on account of sex.” The ERA had won backing from the two major political parties but always fell short of passage. In the early 1960s, though, support for granting women greater equality was growing.

The ERA was one of two strategies during the decades after World War II for improving the status of women. Some feminists opposed it, fearing that it would wipe out laws protecting women in the workplace. As an alternative, they sought measures to guarantee women equal job opportunities and equal pay for work of comparable difficulty as men’s work; grant working mothers maternity leave and childcare; prevent discrimination against nonwhite women; and provide an expanded package of social insurance. The centerpiece of the “Women’s Status Bill” that embodied their ideas, first introduced to Congress in 1947, was the call for a presidential commission on the status of women, modeled on the commission Truman had appointed to report to him about civil rights, which could put women’s rights on the national political agenda.

Congressional support for both ERA and the Women’s Status Bill ebbed during the 1950s, but supporters of economic rights for women continued to press their case. Many backed Kennedy’s presidential bid, only to see him appoint very few women to high positions. Unlike the previous three presidents, he included not a single woman in his cabinet. But when Esther Peterson, whom he appointed to head the Department of Labor’s Women’s Bureau, revived the idea of a President’s Commission on the Status of Women, Kennedy agreed, appointing Eleanor Roosevelt to head the group.

In 1963, Congress passed the Equal Pay Act, which forbade pay differences between men and women doing identical jobs. Practically, the law had little effect, since men and women rarely did the same work and the measure did not cover domestic or farm labor, heavily female occupations. Still, as an ideological statement it represented a major departure, the first federal law to prohibit discrimination on the basis of sex. The publication the same year of Betty Friedan’s The Feminine Mystique brought increased public discussion of the unhappiness many women felt with their social situation.

Howard Smith’s proposal to add a ban on discrimination on the basis of sex to the civil rights bill thus came at a moment of growing debate over women’s rights. A group of congresswomen led by Republican Martha Griffiths pulled together a coalition of women’s rights backers and southern Democrats (many of whom opposed the civil rights bill itself ) to pass his amendment. Smith won the battle—in the process helping to push forward a momentous shift in the legal and social status of women—but then lost what for him was the war, as the House proceeded to pass the amended bill by more than a two-to-one margin. In the Senate, opponents of the bill launched a filibuster, but its backers lined up seventy-one votes to end debate, finally breaking the hold that Senate rules gave southern leaders over the body. On July 2, 1964, Johnson signed the act into law.

While Johnson had inherited the tax and civil rights bills, Kennedy’s idea for an antipoverty program had not yet been fleshed out when he died. During the late 1950s and early 1960s, the problem of poverty received sustained attention from academics, journalists, and policymakers for the first time since the depths of the Depression. In part, this stemmed from a concern with juvenile delinquency in the cities, which some social scientists attributed to the social environment of impoverished neighborhoods, increasingly inhabited by African American migrants from the South and, in New York, newcomers from Puerto Rico. Poverty, once thought of as largely a problem of exploitation at the workplace, increasingly had come to be seen as an issue of economic and social marginalization, of exclusion from work. Though liberals continued to believe that economic growth would solve most social problems, they acknowledged that well over a decade of economic expansion had not eliminated poverty, even if in absolute terms the poor were better off materially than they had been in earlier eras.

Lyndon Johnson believed that the plight of the poor could be and should be ameliorated, without taking anything away from those better off. Expansive in his outlook and his sense of the still-untapped possibilities for the United States, Johnson had no interest in alienating the bulk of the electorate that was not poor or blaming the rich and powerful for the ills of the country (as Roosevelt and Truman occasionally had done). While some labor liberals and civil rights leaders stressed the need for creating new, well-paying jobs in cities like Detroit and Newark, which experienced deindustrialization long before their plight received national attention following outbreaks of violence, most antipoverty experts and Johnson administration officials instead looked for ways to enable the poor to better succeed in the existing labor market.

The social scientists, social workers, foundation officials, and government experts who established the intellectual framework for the Kennedy-Johnson antipoverty program recognized that in some cases structural impediments kept the poor poor, like racial discrimination and underdeveloped social and physical infrastructure, a problem in some rural areas, like Appalachia, and decaying inner cities. Beyond that, it had become fashionable to believe that the poor were trapped by a “culture of poverty.” Studies by anthropologist Oscar Lewis of poor families in Mexico and other countries popularized the notion that a self-reinforcing and self-reproducing complex of problems, including broken homes, poor health, low educational achievement, minimal job skills, low income, apathy, and fatalism kept generation after generation in poverty. Only by breaking the cycle and attacking the whole complex of problems could conditions be created for the poor to help themselves and escape their fate.

In his 1964 State of the Union address, Johnson declared “unconditional war on poverty in America.” But rather than “unconditional war,” in practice he launched a much more limited effort. Johnson asked for nearly a billion dollars for the first year of his program, far more than Kennedy envisioned, but at its peak the antipoverty program spent annually the equivalent of only about $50 to $70 for each poor person in the country.

Johnson made the Community Action Program the core of the antipoverty effort. CAP called for the creation and funding of local antipoverty agencies, with “maximum feasible participation” by residents of impoverished areas as a first step toward having the poor solve their own problems. Other antipoverty programs included the Job Corps, a revival of sorts of the New Deal Civilian Conservation Corps, with rural camps for young people to work on conservation projects; the Neighborhood Youth Corps, its urban, nonresidential equivalent; other job training and work-study programs; loan programs for poor city residents and farmers; and VISTA, a domestic version of the Peace Corps. To coordinate the whole effort, Johnson called for a new Office of Economic Opportunity. Congress, under heavy lobbying from the administration (but with little pressure from the poor themselves), passed the program with only a few changes.

With the passage of the tax, civil rights, and antipoverty acts, Johnson had put into place the main elements of Kennedy’s program of growth liberalism: an increase in private-sector spending power to stimulate the economy and an attack on structural impediments preventing the poor from benefiting from the resulting economic expansion. But by then, Johnson had begun laying out a vision that went beyond the vistas of Kennedy’s domestic program, embracing expansive state action not simply to encourage growth but to improve the quality of life. In a May 1964 speech, Johnson sounded much like John Kenneth Galbraith, Arthur Schlesinger Jr., and other liberal critics of growth alone. Speaking at the University of Michigan commencement, the president called for a move “upward to the Great Society . . . where men are more concerned with the quality of their goals than the quantity of their goods.” Johnson wanted a commitment to urban renewal, investment in housing and transportation, measures to protect the environment, improvements in education, and an end to poverty and racial discrimination. Johnson speechwriter Richard Goodwin later said that one of his influences in writing the Great Society speech had been the SDS’s Port Huron Statement, whose principal author, Tom Hayden, had adopted some of the cadences and tone that John Kennedy had used in his inaugural address, a measure of how much mainstream liberalism and movements to its left had penetrated one another by the mid-1960s.

Liberalism Triumphant

To lay the basis for achieving his ambitious goals and assuage the chronic self-doubt that shadowed his massive ego, Johnson wanted an overwhelming victory in the 1964 election. He was acutely aware that the ongoing civil rights revolution was shifting the national political terrain. By the time of the 1964 election, nearly 40 percent of southern African Americans were registered to vote as a result of efforts by the civil rights movement and more aggressive federal law enforcement, potentially a big boost for liberal Democrats. But Johnson feared that many white Democrats would desert the party because of its legislative support of black rights.

In the Democratic primaries, Alabama governor George Wallace, who had gained a national reputation as a die-hard segregationist, demonstrated the danger. In a hastily put together campaign, Wallace hammered away at what he claimed the Civil Rights Act would mean for northerners—a threat to union-negotiated seniority systems, the imposition of racial hiring quotas, the denial of the right of homeowners to sell their property to whom they pleased, “chaos” for local schools—while attacking the Supreme Court for its school prayer decision and the State Department for abandoning Eastern Europe to communism. In Wisconsin, attracting voters across the economic spectrum, he won over a third of the vote; in Indiana, 30 percent; in Maryland, nearly half.

Johnson’s concern about losing white voters led to a bitter clash with southern civil rights activists at the Democratic convention, held in Atlantic City in late August. In Mississippi, where African Americans were excluded from the process of selecting Democratic convention delegates, SNCC and other civil rights groups, bolstered by Freedom Summer volunteers, founded the Mississippi Freedom Democratic Party (MFDP). After a grassroots organizing effort, which drew many poor blacks into the political process for the first time, the MFDP went to the Democratic convention demanding that its multiracial (though largely black) delegation be seated instead of the all-white “regulars.”

Johnson saw the MFDP as a threat to what he hoped would be an unruffled coronation. Using FBI surveillance of civil rights leaders to plan his strategy, his forces refused to oust the regulars and rejected a compromise that both delegations be seated. Instead, they proposed that two of the sixty-four MFDP delegates be named at-large delegates, while all the regulars be seated if they pledged loyalty to the Democratic ticket. (Many southern Democrats were toying with supporting Goldwater.) In addition, the party would promise to eliminate all racial discrimination in the delegate selection process before its next convention. Many national civil rights leaders saw the proposed deal as a step forward, recommending that it be accepted, but the MFDP delegates rejected it. They and their supporters left the convention embittered. (Ironically, while most of the Mississippi regulars in the end supported Goldwater—who voted against the Civil Rights Act—the MFDP campaigned for Johnson.)

Once the campaign began in earnest, the Johnson forces succeeded in marginalizing Goldwater as outside the national mainstream. On foreign policy, they portrayed the senator, who had publicly mused about allowing NATO field commanders control over tactical nuclear weapons and repeatedly called for giving no quarter in the battle against communism, as trigger-happy and irresponsible. Just four years earlier Kennedy had made statements nearly as bellicose, but the Cold War was losing much of its ideological and emotional power. In contrast to Goldwater’s tough military talk, Johnson portrayed himself as the peace candidate, even as his administration was secretly planning a major escalation of the war in Vietnam. On domestic policy, Johnson turned the campaign into a referendum on the welfare state, portraying Goldwater as a man who would undo the work of Roosevelt and his successors. Here, Johnson was on more solid ground, since Goldwater did oppose the expanded functions the state had taken on during the previous three decades, calling for selling the TVA, dismantling the Rural Electrification Administration, ending farm subsidies, and making the Social Security system voluntary. Many moderate Republicans, long accommodated to federal regulatory and welfare functions, defected to the Johnson camp.

Johnson won by a landslide with 61 percent of the popular vote, a higher percentage than FDR ever achieved. Goldwater, in addition to his home state of Arizona, carried only five states, all in the Deep South, where the Republicans also picked up seven House seats. Elsewhere the Democrats swept the board, increasing their majority in the House to 295 to 140 and in the Senate to 68 to 32. (They also gained hundreds of seats in state legislatures.) For the first time in a generation, Republicans and southern Democrats did not have enough power to hold back the electoral majority. The political mood of the electorate, combined with the legislative redistricting occurring as a result of Baker v. Carr and the growing registration of black voters, opened a rare window of liberal opportunity.

Johnson drove a truck through the window. In 1965 and 1966, the 89th Congress passed a flood of bills, mostly proposed by the president, which, combined with those passed between Kennedy’s death and the 1964 election, constituted by far the most important legislative accomplishment since Franklin Roosevelt’s first term in office. With the economy thriving and the Cold War no longer as scary as it had been a few years earlier, a great sense of national confidence and possibility underlay the extraordinarily ambitious program that Johnson succeeded in marshalling through Congress.

Medicare-Medicaid, which turned out to be one of the landmarks of the Great Society, grew out of the failure of Congress in the 1940s to pass the Wagner-Murray-Dingell bill to create a national health insurance program. The spread of employment-based insurance provided health security for millions but left uncovered people without jobs, employees of businesses that did not offer insurance, and retirees. Though companies sold individual insurance, many families could not afford it.

By the early 1950s, health reformers and unionists had abandoned the idea of a universal national health system, instead seeking targeted government programs aimed at those outside the private welfare state. In 1951, a bill proposed providing hospital insurance for the elderly through the Social Security system, what came to be dubbed Medicare. By the end of the decade, the idea had gained considerable support. Though Kennedy backed Medicare, opposition from Republicans, southern Democrats, and the American Medical Association kept the bill from emerging from the House Ways and Means Committee.

Johnson initially sought to make a federally coordinated attack on heart disease, cancer, and stroke the centerpiece of his health program, but after facing opposition in Congress and from the medical profession, which did not like a proposed system of government-financed research hospitals, he shifted his focus to Medicare. During the 1964 election, Goldwater’s opposition to the proposal had proved highly unpopular, sending a warning to other legislators, while the Democratic sweep eliminated many allies of the AMA. No longer confident that they could block federal health insurance entirely, AMA backers and Republicans offered several alternatives to Medicare.

In a surprise move, Ways and Means chairman Wilbur Mills incorporated these proposals into the administration-backed bill, ending up with a three-tiered program, far broader than proponents of any of the plans had envisioned. As finally passed by large majorities, the Medicare bill included hospital insurance for all the elderly covered by Social Security, financed by an increase in the payroll tax that employers and employees already paid; a voluntary insurance program for doctors’ fees for the elderly (Medicare Part B), financed by equal payments from subscribers and the federal government but run by insurance concerns; and health insurance for the indigent of any age (Medicaid), financed by federal and state contributions and run by the states. To blunt opposition from doctors, Mills made sure that the federal government would not get involved in direct service provision, would not set the rates for hospital or doctor services, and would not heavily regulate the industry. On July 30, 1965, Lyndon Johnson flew to Independence, Missouri, to ceremoniously sign the Medicare bill standing next to the eighty-one-year-old Harry Truman, handing him Medicare card number 1.

Medicare proved an enormously popular, well-administrated program, helping bring many of the elderly out of poverty and improving the health care they received. In its first year, over nineteen million Social Security recipients registered for the program. Medicaid varied in impact and quality from state to state, but at least in some areas it significantly improved medical access for the nonelderly poor. Ironically, given their opposition to its passage, the medical and insurance interests ended up benefiting from Medicare-Medicaid too, as the programs bolstered the income of doctors and increased the power of the insurance industry (while pushing up the cost of medical care).

Johnson hoped to pass other social legislation before again tackling civil rights, but events in the South upended his plan. The 1964 Civil Rights Act led to a rapid collapse of formal segregation in most of the country, as hotels, restaurants, theaters, gas stations, and other public accommodations abandoned Jim Crow. But in a half-dozen states in the Deep South, especially outside the big cities, local businesses, public officials, and judges openly defied the law, maintaining racial segregation while continuing to exclude all but a few African Americans from voting.

After the 1964 election, the SCLC decided to launch a high-profile campaign to break the remaining resistance to black suffrage, centering it on Selma, Alabama, where only a few hundred of the city’s fifteen thousand black residents had been able to register to vote. SCLC planned a rerun of Birmingham, a nonviolent confrontation that would bring national attention to the denial of rights in the South and lay the basis for federal action. Martin Luther King Jr. brought his newly enhanced prestige to the effort, having just become the youngest person ever to win the Nobel Peace Prize.

As SCLC had expected, sheriff’s deputies and state police met a series of demonstrations and voter registration efforts with violence, culminating in a brutal attack on marchers leaving Selma on a planned walk to the state capital in Montgomery. With national media increasingly focused on the Alabama campaign, King called for civil rights supporters from across the country to join another attempt to hold the march. Racist thugs killed one volunteer, a white minister from Boston, and a state trooper killed a black civil rights backer in a nearby town.

The violence forced Johnson’s hand. As the events in Alabama unfolded, he decided to seize the moment for a final push to guarantee the right to vote. In a speech to Congress he called Selma “a turning point in man’s unending search for freedom,” like Lexington, Concord, and Appomattox. Presenting a Voting Rights bill, he said of blacks seeking their rights, “Their cause must be our cause too,” adding—using the words of the by then universally known civil rights song—“And we shall overcome.”

Much of the country joined Johnson in his embrace of the civil rights movement. Marches in support of the Selma demonstrators were held in many northern and western cities. Whites and blacks, well known and obscure, headed to Selma, including celebrities, labor leaders, and clergy. For the Catholic Church, Selma marked the high point of its participation in the southern civil rights movement, with priests from fifty dioceses, nuns, and laypeople converging on Alabama. The march to Montgomery finally took place peacefully, under the protection of the Alabama National Guard, which Johnson federalized, though immediately after it a white protestor from Detroit was murdered by Ku Klux Klan members.

In the wake of Selma, the Voting Rights Act of 1965 passed both houses of Congress by better than four-to-one margins. The law targeted states and counties where fewer than 50 percent of eligible voters were registered or fewer than half had voted in the 1964 election. In those areas, literacy tests and discriminatory poll taxes would be suspended, even in state and local elections, and federal officials could take over the voter registration process. Government bodies that had denied citizens the right to vote could not change their election systems for ten years without federal approval, to prevent the introduction of procedures designed to limit minority rights.

The Civil Rights and Voting Rights acts were the most important domestic achievements of liberalism since World War II. Together they effectively ended racial discrimination through the law and the denial of political rights on the basis of race, giving meaningful life to long-ignored provisions of the Constitution introduced in the Fourteenth and Fifteenth Amendments. Within months after the passage of the Voting Rights Act, federal officials registered nearly eight thousand African American voters in Selma. Within a year, the number of registered blacks in five states of the Deep South doubled. By 1969, 65 percent of adult southern African Americans were registered, a massive change from a decade earlier.

The civil rights movement, at least indirectly, helped change immigration policy too. Civil rights protest created a national consensus, except in the white South, around the notion of equal individual rights and equal treatment under the law regardless of race, ethnicity, or national origin. Immigration law, as it had developed over the previous century, embodied just the opposite, treating individuals differently and unequally depending on their race and country of origin.

When Truman vetoed the 1952 McCarran-Walter Act, an omnibus effort to revise immigration law and use it as an anticommunist weapon, he did so in part because it continued the national origins quota system, introduced in the 1920s, which rested on discredited ideas of scientific racism. Congress overrode his veto, but in practice the quota system proved increasingly dysfunctional. By 1960, two-thirds of immigrants entered the country under nonquota provisions. Many came from the Western Hemisphere (mainly Mexico and Canada), which was not covered by the quota system. Others came under programs established to admit anticommunist refugees, foreign spouses and children of citizens (mainly military families), and temporary agricultural workers.

In 1964, a coalition of liberal, labor, and religious groups successfully lobbied to end the Bracero program, appalled by the poor treatment of the migrant farmworkers it brought to the United States and concerned about the depressing effect of the influx of exploited workers on national labor standards. A reform coalition, dominated by Catholics and Jews, next pushed to end the quota system. The immigration reform effort never became a mass movement or the subject of much national discussion, but the civil rights movement and the results of the 1964 election opened up the possibility for action.

The proponents of the Immigration and Naturalization Act passed in 1965 neither desired nor anticipated a significant increase in immigration or a change in where it came from. While the new law eliminated the morally odious immigration quotas for individual countries, it imposed an overall annual cap on immigration from outside the Western Hemisphere and, for the first time, capped immigration from within the hemisphere (which ultimately contributed to the growth of illegal immigration from Mexico). The expectation was at most a very modest increase in the relatively low rate of immigration by historical standards that had prevailed since the beginning of the Great Depression. A modified preference system, which favored relatives of citizens and resident aliens and people with needed occupational skills, was expected to keep the distribution of entrants by country of origin roughly what it had been. However, both supporters and opponents of the bill grossly underestimated its impact, which over the coming decades proved to be massive, as the annual number of immigrants shot up and the distribution of where they came from radically altered.

As in the case of immigration reform, lobbying by relatively small advocacy groups, along with the interest of particular legislators, led to the passage during the Johnson years of a series of environmental laws, without a major popular mobilization. The context was a changing environmental consciousness, largely a reaction against efforts to engineer, control, and transform the environment for purposes of economic productivity and war-making capacity. A rising standard of living, the growth of leisure, and the prolongation of life underlay the new attitudes (ironically, all made possible by industrial and agricultural practices deeply damaging to the environment).

Concern about pesticides exemplified the links between war, economic development, and environmentalism. Chemical warfare research during World War II fostered the postwar insecticide industry. DDT—a powerful pesticide—began being sold right after the war. The availability of surplus military aircraft, which could be converted into crop sprayers, facilitated the adoption, with strong government encouragement, of chemical-intensive agricultural methods that made liberal use of herbicides, insecticides, and artificial fertilizers. Though the high cost of inputs for growing food and commodities this way drove out many small farmers, crop yields rose, the need for farm labor fell, and a cornucopia of produce filled tables across the country and abroad.

At first the environmental impact of the heavy use of insecticides and herbicides received little attention. But fears about the effects of radiation from atomic testing on human health, raised by well-respected scientists, led to greater awareness of invisible environmental dangers. In the early 1960s, with the near-simultaneous ban on atmospheric testing of atomic weapons and the publication of Rachel Carson’s Silent Spring, pesticides replaced radiation at the forefront of public anxiety about environmental poisons. The growing incidence of cancer—in part the result of longer life spans—heightened concern about the possible carcinogenic effects of man-made chemicals.

Carson’s book had a big impact on political leaders. John Kennedy appointed a presidential panel to study the use of pesticides; Connecticut senator Abraham Ribicoff held hearings on environmental pollution; and Stewart Udall, who served as secretary of the interior under both Kennedy and Johnson, converted his department from an advocate for western resource users into a broader agency concerned with recreation and environmental pollution as well. But even as the pesticide issue raised environmental awareness, with the well-being of powerful interests and, more broadly, a whole way of life resting on a chemical regime of land use, such expressions of government concern did not easily convert into action. DDT, which deeply damaged wildlife, continued to be used throughout the 1960s.

Other types of environmental degradation, like air pollution, proved more amenable to regulation. Large-scale industry and electrical generating plants dirtied the air, particularly in the Northeast and Midwest, as did vehicle emissions, which had their greatest impact in the West. As air pollution began choking the breath and watering the eyes of middle-class voters, they began pressing for government action. City and state government took the lead, starting with St. Louis, which began a smoke abatement program in 1940. Los Angeles began regulating air emissions in 1947. California established the first controls on motor vehicle emissions in 1960. Industry generally resisted regulation, but even Gary, Indiana, a steel production center where high school football games occasionally had to be halted when the charging of a coke oven or the tapping of a furnace made the air almost unbreathable, passed an air pollution ordinance in 1962.

The federal government began addressing air pollution with the toothless 1963 Clean Air Act. Johnson opposed an effort two years later for much stronger legislation that included mandatory controls on emissions, apparently reluctant to break with the auto industry and other industrial interests pressing for strictly voluntary measures. In the end a compromise was enacted, which gave the secretary of health, education, and welfare the discretionary power to establish emission standards. Secretary John Gardner moved quickly, requiring all new motor vehicles, starting in 1968, to be equipped with emission control devices. Meanwhile, in 1967, Congress authorized the federal government to set standards for air quality for industry in states that failed to do so on their own. Water quality standards and sewage treatment funding laws added to the growing array of environmental legislation.

The spread of automobile ownership, which caused so much air pollution, contributed a growing interest in protecting wilderness areas and preserving land for recreational use. Auto tourism, along with nature photography and television nature shows, created a growing constituency for wilderness preservation. Hunters and fishermen also pressed for preserving natural habitats and keeping them open to the public. With cars making hunting areas readily accessible even to urbanites, hunting—once largely a rural and upper-class activity—developed a huge working-class following. During the 1950s and 1960s, some midwestern factories simply shut down on the opening day of hunting season, knowing that too few workers would show up for production to take place. Rapid suburbanization provided yet another impetus for preserving open land, as homeowners who had left the city to escape perceived overcrowding often found a lack of recreational areas and residential overdevelopment in their new neighborhoods. The success of conservationists, led by the Sierra Club and the Wilderness Society, in stopping the construction of the Echo Park Dam on the Colorado River, reversing decades of largely unopposed dam building, revealed the political potential of the increasingly well-organized environmental activists.

The fate of a bill to create a national wilderness preservation system reflected the changing public attitudes and resulting political calculations. The bill, first introduced in the Senate by Hubert Humphrey in 1956, faced repeated defeats in the face of opposition by the lumber, mining, oil and gas, and livestock industries and the major business associations. But in 1964 a version of the measure passed Congress with few members willing to go on record against it. The Land and Water Conservation Fund Act, the National Wild and Scenic Rivers Act, and the National Trails Act followed.

The environmental movement and legislation of the Johnson years did not represent a fundamental move away from the ideological and political consensus around a growth economy. At most, it was a gingerly step back from a Promethean view of man’s relationship to nature. Even many environmentalists did not see an inherent conflict between growth and efforts to protect the environment. Like so much of the Great Society, the environmental bills Johnson signed rested on a belief that reform could be effected without harming established interests or taking away from the haves.

In 1964 and 1965, Congress also passed a series of laws deepening federal involvement with education, culture, and the arts. The Elementary and Secondary Education Act circumvented the disputes over aid to parochial schools that had blocked earlier efforts to provide substantial federal school funding by coming up with an indirect mechanism to send money to both public and private schools. Johnson conceived of the bill as an antipoverty measure, but as enacted and implemented only about half the spending went to poor children, with the rest serving as a general federal subsidy to school systems that in the past had been almost completely funded by state and local government or by private individuals. Some targeted aid for poor students came through Project Head Start, a preschool program that proved highly effective, and Upward Bound, a college preparation program for poor teenagers. The Higher Education Act funded a loan guarantee program, scholarships, work-study programs, college libraries, and academic programs. The Kennedy administration idea for a National Arts Foundation found realization with legislation setting up the National Endowment for the Arts, the most important federal engagement with culture since the New Deal. Congress added on a National Endowment for the Humanities in response to pleas from academics who were not eligible for funding from the National Science Foundation. Yet another Johnson proposal led to the creation of the Corporation for Public Broadcasting, charged with creating national public television and radio systems.

The Limits of Liberalism

Even as postwar liberalism achieved its greatest accomplishments, countervailing tendencies were undermining its electoral and ideological viability. The problems first became evident around issues involving labor and race.

Organized labor played a central role in the Great Society. Unions enthusiastically endorsed Johnson in 1964 and lobbied hard for his legislative program. Labor officials even helped draft some Great Society proposals and in several instances left their posts to take positions in the Johnson administration. But in a measure of the limits of Great Society liberalism, labor failed to achieve its own top legislative priority, the repeal of section 14(b) of the Taft-Hartley Act, which allowed states to outlaw the union shop.

By 1965, nineteen states had so-called right-to-work laws. That year Johnson agreed to a request from the AFL-CIO to propose the repeal of 14(b), packaging it with improvements in the minimum wage and unemployment insurance. With the president leaving labor to do most of the lobbying on its own, the bill won slim majorities in both houses but fell far short of the votes needed to end a Republican Senate filibuster. While a political consensus had emerged for new federally guaranteed rights and new federal functions, no similar consensus backed an increase in the power of workers through self-organization. The point was driven home the next year when Congress raised the minimum wage and extended its coverage to over eight million additional workers. For the first time, the Fair Labor Standards Act, passed during the New Deal, covered a majority of female and minority workers. While organized labor supported the effort, it highlighted the expanding role of government in protecting exploited groups at a time when union membership seemed to have plateaued.

The fault lines within the coalition that made the flood of Great Society measures possible became even more evident around issues of race and civil rights. The wave of riots that broke out in northern cities in the mid-1960s made it clear that race had become an urgent national problem, not just a southern one. In the short term, the riots gave new impetus to Great Society reforms, but in the longer run they undermined the political basis for liberalism itself.

The first major racial disturbance took place in Harlem in July 1964. As was to be typical in the riots that followed, an incident involving the police set it off, in this case the killing of a black teenager by an off-duty white policeman. Protests led to rioting and looting in Harlem and parts of Brooklyn that lasted for five days.

Though the rioting had no explicit political agenda, it came against a background of frustration with poverty and racial discrimination, pervasive in black communities of the North. Nonviolent efforts to create greater job opportunities for African Americans and to integrate schools had yielded few successes. With expectations, frustrations, and a sense of assertiveness growing in northern black communities as the civil rights movement in the South reached its peak, the anarchic protest of the Harlem riot proved infectious. In the weeks following it, disturbances broke out in Rochester, several northern New Jersey cities, a suburb of Chicago, and Philadelphia.

The following summer, urban disturbances reached a scale unseen since World War II. Just five days after the passage of the Voting Rights Act, an aggressive arrest of a drunk driver in South Central Los Angeles escalated into a confrontation between a gathering crowd and the police, notorious for their racism and lack of respect toward local residents. When the police tried to calm things down by leaving the area, local teens and young men began attacking white newspapermen and passing motorists. Renewed police presence led to new clashes, which soon involved arson and gunfire from both sides. Though dubbed the Watts Riot, the disturbance encompassed an area equivalent to the size of the city of San Francisco. By one estimate, some thirty-five thousand adults participated. To suppress it, sixteen thousand National Guard troops were deployed. By the time the clashes ended after a week of chaos, thirty-four people had been killed, a thousand injured, and four thousand arrested.

The scale, ferocity, and open antiwhite hatred evident in the Los Angeles riot took whites across the nation by surprise. As in New York, long-standing anger about racial inequality, a lack of good jobs, and police conduct set the background for the conflagration. So did recent political events. In 1963, California passed a law forbidding racial discrimination in the sale or rental of private dwellings. Its enforcement would have had a radical effect on California cities, especially Los Angeles, a city of extreme and increasing segregation. To undo the law, the California Real Estate Association put forth Proposition 14, which in 1964 won approval by a two-to-one vote (though the California Supreme Court later declared it unconstitutional). To black Californians, the vote demonstrated widespread racism among whites. Nationally, it illustrated that northern whites could simultaneously support an end to formal segregation of public facilities, mostly a southern issue, and oppose desegregation of housing in their own communities.

Lyndon Johnson immediately understood that the Watts uprising would foster a white backlash against the civil rights movement and his Great Society. He tried to distance himself from the Los Angeles events, delaying the announcement of a planned national urban policy so that it would not be seen as a concession to rioters. But in the months that followed he paid greater attention to the cities. In 1964, Congress had begun funding urban mass transit projects. Now Johnson wanted a more extensive federal urban role. To coordinate the effort, Congress approved the creation of the Department of Housing and Urban Development. Johnson appointed Robert Weaver to head it, making him the first black cabinet officer in the country’s history. Johnson also embraced a proposal to demonstrate, using federal funds, the efficacy of integrated urban planning and redevelopment. In a measure of how Watts had changed the political terrain, when Johnson signed the Demonstration Cities and Metropolitan Development Act he insisted on calling it the “Model Cities” act, as opponents had associated the program with demonstrations by African Americans. The complex initiative, with insufficient funds spread thinly among projects sometimes picked for political purposes, ended up having little impact on the lives of city dwellers.

Civil rights efforts suffered defeats on a number of fronts. The rejection of Johnson’s proposal to grant home rule to the District of Columbia, which had a majority black population, represented a rare loss for the administration during the 89th Congress. Meanwhile, the passage of California’s Proposition 14 marked the beginning of a new phase of northern white resistance to residential integration. In 1966, Martin Luther King Jr. and the SCLC joined forces with a coalition of civil rights groups in Chicago to press for school and housing desegregation, a major foray for the southern-based black movement out of its home territory. The effort failed miserably. The Chicago black community did not rally to the effort to the extent that the SCLC had anticipated. Mayor Richard J. Daley adeptly made some concessions while resisting any wholesale policy changes. When King led marches against housing discrimination through several Chicago neighborhoods, white crowds taunted, stoned, threatened, insulted, and assaulted the demonstrators in as terrifying a demonstration of racial hatred as anything seen in the South. Unlike in past southern struggles, the ugly display of white racism brought neither a national mobilization nor federal action. Daley, not King, proved to have greater influence in Washington when he succeeded in stopping Johnson administration pressure to desegregate his city’s schools.

The press for residential and school desegregation fractured the institutions of the urban North. Local Democrats in various parts of the country split over so-called open housing laws. The Catholic Church found itself deeply divided. Much of its top leadership and many activist clergy and nuns embraced the civil rights struggle, while many urban parishioners and their priests fought against neighborhood change, racial integration, and social activism. When in 1965 Baltimore’s Cardinal Lawrence Shehan testified in favor of a proposed municipal law banning housing discrimination by race, hundreds of people attending the hearing booed him, a startling act of disrespect for a leader of the church. A new round of urban riots in 1966 and the shifting rhetoric of black leaders, especially the adoption of the slogan “Black Power” by members of SNCC and other groups, further eroded white support for government action against discrimination. In Congress, the Republican leadership, which had collaborated with the Johnson administration on civil rights legislation in 1964 and 1965, refused to back a new civil rights proposal that included a ban on racial discrimination in the sale or rental of housing, leading to its failure.

Johnson administration policies contributed to growing urban political conflict. With southern whites leaving the Democratic Party as a result of the civil rights thrust, the national party found itself more dependent on winning the key northern states, which in turn meant carrying their major cities, where the African American population had swollen with migration from the South. But most governments in those cities still acted primarily as the representatives of longer-established white groups. To circumvent them in trying to benefit the urban black population and more solidly incorporate it into the Democratic Party, many Great Society programs did not operate through existing government entities but rather through private agencies or newly formed groups, like those running the Community Action Programs. The federal government even provided resources for aggrieved urban residents to challenge municipal and state authorities over housing, welfare, and other local issues through the creation of Legal Services, which provided legal counsel to poor people unable to afford representation.

Mayors and other local officials, many of them Democratic loyalists, jostled with community activists to win control over the antipoverty agencies and new federal programs. They complained bitterly to the Johnson administration when protestors, aided and encouraged by federally funded programs, picketed city offices, sat down in them, or sued local agencies. The administration soon began giving more control over federally funded programs to local elected officials, but by then many of the urban Democratic parties, already weakened by their failure to respond to shifting demography, lay in shambles.

Approval for key Johnson administration policies plummeted. In September 1966, a public opinion poll found 52 percent of respondents saying that the administration was “pushing racial integration too fast.” That same month, only 41 percent of those polled approved of the War on Poverty, down from 60 percent the prior October. While domestic issues had the most immediate political impact, the administration also faced growing opposition to its escalation of the war in Vietnam.

Liberal Democrats got routed in the 1966 elections. The Democrats lost three Senate seats and forty-seven House seats, more than they had gained two years earlier. Once again, an alliance of Republicans and conservative (mostly southern) Democrats would have enough votes to block liberal legislation. But the liberal Democratic defeat extended far beyond Congress. Nationwide, the Democrats lost 677 seats in state legislatures and eight governorships. In Georgia, Arkansas, and Maryland, segregationists captured the Democratic gubernatorial nominations, in the latter two states then to be beaten by Republicans with more liberal stands on civil rights.

Perhaps the greatest upset took place in California, where Pat Brown, a genial, liberal political pro, was running for a third term as governor. He first won the job in 1958, defeating right-wing antilabor senator William Knowland. Four years later he kept it by defeating Richard Nixon, who was attempting a comeback after his loss to Kennedy. In 1966 he faced actor Ronald Reagan, running for public office for the first time. Reagan, a onetime New Deal Democrat who over the years had moved to the right, came to national attention as a political figure in 1964 with a speech supporting Barry Goldwater, which used populist language to counterpoise individual freedom to government action. Running for governor two years later, he benefited from a widespread white conservative response to the Berkeley protests and the Watts Riot, winning many white working-class voters away from the Democratic Party, especially in Los Angeles. He beat Brown by a million votes.

Organized labor suffered particularly harsh defeats in the 1966 election. The AFL-CIO had decided to make a major push that year in the hopes of winning enough new liberal seats to be able to get the repeal of 14(b) through the next Congress. Instead, they found their longtime political allies going down to defeat. In Michigan, G. Mennen Williams, the former governor and close ally of the UAW, lost his bid for a Senate seat. In Illinois, another labor favorite, longtime liberal senator Paul Douglas, lost to a liberal Republican, not even garnering support of a majority of UAW voters. In California, Reagan won the votes of a substantial number of union members.

Postmortems revealed how out of touch labor leaders had become with elements of their base. Many white unionists had grown increasingly opposed to civil rights efforts, especially any moves against housing discrimination. These voters tended to be scared and repelled by urban riots, with the drop-off in the blue-collar Democratic vote particularly sharp in areas near where disturbances had taken place. Many union voters, especially those under forty, had little interest in the issues their leaders concentrated on, like 14(b) repeal and improvements in the minimum wage and workmen’s compensation. Instead they cared the most about taxes, crime, zoning, and stopping residential integration, which they feared, usually correctly, would drive down the value of their property, issues of particular concern to the growing number of unionists living in the suburbs.

By 1966, an intensification of politics of all kinds, right, left, and center, had taken place. Liberal legislation would continue to be passed for another decade, liberal Court decisions would continue to come out, and liberal politicians would continue to wield power. But the zenith of postwar liberalism already had been passed, as challenges from its left and right took their toll. The Vietnam War, which soon came to dominate American life, would shatter liberalism altogether.