Dwight Eisenhower never cited the Four Freedoms as President. But he never lost sight of them. Knowing what they had meant to his troops, Ike surely figured that just because Democratic politicians were giving up FDR’s words didn’t mean Americans had given up the promise they pronounced. He said to his press secretary in 1954: “This party of ours . . . will not appeal to the American people unless the American people believe that we have a liberal program.” And fed up with rich far-right Republicans trying to tell him what he should do, he wrote to his brother Edgar: “Should any political party attempt to abolish social security, unemployment insurance, and eliminate labor laws and farm programs, you would not hear of that party again in our political history.”1
To the dismay of the Right, the struggles of the late 1940s engendered not a conservative political consensus, but a liberal one—subject to Cold War and corporate imperatives and led by a Republican, but liberal nonetheless.
Eisenhower was a conservative. He didn’t like the New Deal, labor unions, or civil rights activism. He filled his cabinet with corporate executives and lawyers, refused to challenge Senator McCarthy, and—though he ended the Korean War in a stalemate—pursued the Cold War aggressively, which included not only bolstering or propping up anti-Communist dictators from Central America to Southeast Asia, but also secretly using the CIA to overthrow reformist leaders in Iran and Guatemala.2
But Eisenhower wanted a stable, prosperous, and strife-free America and he knew what that demanded. Calling himself a “Modern Republican,” he kept tax rates on corporations and the rich high, approved the largest public-works project in American history, the Interstate Highway System, signed bills making Social Security nearly universal and raising the minimum wage by 33 percent, established the Department of Health, Education and Welfare, and even warned against the power of the “military-industrial complex” in his Farewell Address. Furthermore, he appointed a Chief Justice, Earl Warren, who would lead the Supreme Court in 1954 to unanimously declare in Brown v. Board of Education that racial segregation in the nation’s public schools was unconstitutional—a historic decision that in 1957 would compel Eisenhower to federalize the Arkansas National Guard and send army troops into Little Rock to uphold the Constitution when Governor Orval Faubus tried to use the Guard to prevent the court-ordered desegregation of the city’s Central High School.3
Ike had won in 1952 because he was a war hero. And though voters returned Congress to Democratic control in 1954, he defeated Adlai Stevenson again in 1956 because for most Americans things were going well and promised to get even better.
Millions of veterans had used the GI Bill to get a college education or become skilled in a trade and to buy homes in one of the thousands of burgeoning new suburban developments. Stella Suberman, the wife of a veteran Air Corps bombardier and “GI Bill Boy,” would write, “America had put its faith in its veterans and its veterans did not intend to let America down.” And they didn’t. They created unprecedented economic growth and widely shared prosperity—indeed, more and more of them were on their way to securing “middle class living standards.”4
Americans were moving not just city to suburb, but also west. And while southern blacks were still heading north, industry—though profits were already soaring—was heading south to nonunion labor and lower wages and taxes. At the same time, the postwar “baby boom” was sending the U.S. population up from 140 million at war’s end to 180 million in 1960, and both the new medium of television and a growing network of highways were connecting Americans in new ways.5
Many a writer has presented the 1950s as a fearful time. However, while A-bombs and red scares took their tolls on public life and imagination, polls showed Americans actually fretted little about Communists either overseas or at home. And as the journalist and Office of War Information veteran James Reston would point out in 1960: “In the 15 years of the atomic age, [Americans] increased the population of the nation by more than 40,000,000, which is not the action of a frightened people.”6
In fact, America witnessed a new sort of democratic surge. The men and women who beat fascism and imperialism did not erect war memorials. Taking their cue from the New Deal and the war effort, they built communities. As Time reported in 1953: “there is a tremendous amount of building going on: new store buildings, clubhouses and public institutions, and dozens and dozens of modern schools.” But they were not just putting up buildings. They were joining groups like the American Legion, the Elks, the Lions, the Rotary Club, the League of Women Voters, and the PTA, and becoming congregants of their respective faiths’ churches and synagogues—and where such did not yet exist, they were creating them. A “civic generation,” they also turned out to vote in greater numbers than their parents did or children would.7
Moreover, Ike was right. Americans remained liberal in spirit. Polls indicated a growing majority believed that the federal government ought not only “to see to it that everybody who wants to work can find a job,” but also “help people get doctors and hospital care at low cost.” And while “right-to-work” laws effectively blocked labor organizing in Dixie and some states out west, unions grew elsewhere. By 1955, 35 percent of all workers, 18.5 million in all, had joined one, and all knew it was “the union” that brought them their rising incomes. When a walkout was called, solidarity prevailed—and despite a high level of strike activity, polls showed that 75 percent of Americans approved of unions.8
Still other polls revealed real progress in racial attitudes. Whereas in 1942 a majority of whites said that blacks were not as smart as whites, that they did not want black and white children in the same schools, and that having black neighbors would bother them, an ever-growing majority—outside of the South—now said otherwise on every question. Admittedly, attitude change was hardly enough. While America’s new suburban neighborhoods came to resemble the bomber crews of the war for their ethnic mix, they also did so because blacks were usually excluded. And yet black Americans were making significant strides in public life not just from big-league sports to popular music, but politically as well. In addition to winning the Brown decision, the NAACP and its allies secured “fair employment” laws in twenty-nine northern and western states.9
The South, however, remained another country. Encouraged by Brown, local civil rights groups, often led by black World War II veterans, fought on against Jim Crow. But Dixie’s rulers issued a “Southern Manifesto” calling for “massive resistance”; middle-class whites formed Citizens’ Councils just steps up from the KKK; and it seemed pretty clear that the Eisenhower administration did not intend to actually push school desegregation. As the Mississippi NAACP activist and war veteran Aaron Henry recalled, “It was plain that we could expect no help from local, state or federal authorities.” And still, he said: “[We] were in the fight . . . all the way. We had to hang on.”10
Thus the struggle continued and even won a promising victory in Montgomery, Alabama, when the black community, led by the young Reverend Martin Luther King, Jr., protested the arrest of Mrs. Rosa Parks in December 1955 for refusing to give up her bus seat to a white man by staging an arduous and ultimately successful yearlong bus boycott to secure the integration of the system.11
But the liberal spirit was not mobilized into a popular politics. There was no call to action. The Democrats failed to emulate FDR and liberal intellectuals continued to see labor as a “countervailing power” at best and the working class as a potentially dangerous force. Some even argued that the nation had transcended the contradictions and conflicts of the past by developing a “people’s capitalism” with a “mixed economy” and “welfare state,” a new politics of “pluralism,” and a “middle-class society.” And hoping that such developments would eventually weaken Dixie’s fierce opposition to racial equality, many retreated to a politics of “gradualism” on civil rights. Time said of American intellectuals: “the man of protest has . . . given way to the man of affirmation.”12
Organized labor did little better. The 1955 merger of the AFL and CIO may have enhanced its lobbying power, but it did not reinvigorate unionism as a social movement. Walter Reuther and A. Philip Randolph continued to call for progressive action and organizing the unorganized and the million-strong New York City labor movement was actually turning Gotham into a social-democratic city. But they were in the minority. The AFL-CIO remained committed to repealing Taft-Hartley, securing national health care, and promoting racial equality. However, headed by George Meany, an AFL bureaucrat who reportedly took pride in never having walked a picket line (not to mention having arranged for the federation to collaborate with the CIA against radical unionism overseas), it not only abandoned the CIO vision of industrial democracy, it also failed to require unions with race-exclusive policies to do away with them. Praising “private-enterprise” for what it was affording workers, Meany wrote: “We do not seek to recast American society . . . We seek an ever rising standard of living.”13
Meanwhile, discounting a generation’s phenomenal civic activism, and exaggerating the spread of “affluence,” a chorus of elitist social critics decried the “masses” for their “privatism,” “materialism,” and “conformism.” Even the radical sociologist C. Wright Mills referred to working people as “cheerful robots.” But as James Reston would rightly counter: “this generation . . . may be more concerned about its private interests than about the public interest, but if a man is offered a choice between a Cadillac and a swift kick in the pants, we should not be surprised if he doesn’t bend over.” Indeed, Reston asked, “What has it been asked to do that it has not done?”14
The liberal consensus did not roll on simply by inertia, however. On the right, the National Association of Manufacturers and U.S. Chamber of Commerce still campaigned against the New Deal, labor unions, and “freedom from want and fear,” and conservative activists readily found rich folk prepared to underwrite new endeavors such as the American Enterprise Institute “think tank,” the National Review magazine, and the even more reactionary and ever-paranoid John Birch Society. But those who actually led the nation wanted to sustain the “postwar settlement,” not wreck it.15
Like Eisenhower, the country’s foremost politicians and corporate executives—who, along with its military chiefs, C. Wright Mills dubbed the “power elite”—knew they still had to attend to Americans’ democratic impulses. So they, too, waged expensive new “PR” campaigns, the most notable conducted by the Advertising Council. And as the Council’s booklet People’s Capitalism stated, their goal was “to create a consensus that could become the possession of the average man.” However, in contrast to the Right, they did not bewail the state of American freedom. They celebrated it.16
The clearest statement of their vision appeared in What Is America? Based on the deliberations of a panel of “distinguished” business, academic, and labor figures—all white men—the book advanced a narrative in which Americans had triumphed over inequality, racism, concentrations of power, and crises due to their shared values of faith, freedom, individualism, hard work, brotherhood, dissent, and civic association.17
Much was exaggerated, glossed over, or denied in the telling. Corporations were praised for their contributions to “our economic performance.” Unions were valued, but labor’s historic struggles received no attention. And America was celebrated as a “classless society.” Jim Crow racism was reduced to a matter of discrimination that blacks could escape by simply moving away from it. McCarthyism was ignored. And though the Great Depression and selected New Deal programs were noted, neither the New Deal nor FDR was ever named. Moreover, while the story clearly incorporated the Four Freedoms, they, too, were never named. Most critically, however, Americans were portrayed as forever preferring to pursue their needs and aspirations individually or through business enterprise and “voluntary organizations”—not by mobilizing and harnessing the powers of democratic government.18
As the Ad Council’s continuing “roundtables” attest, the distinguished men were not unmindful of the nation’s problems—including the fact that more than 20 percent of all Americans still lived in poverty. But they insisted they could solve them by simply expanding the U.S. economy still further. And most Americans seemed to agree.19
• • •
The progressive Max Lerner, too, spoke of the United States in superlatives. But he urged his fellow citizens to remember “We have not come to the end of history.” And even as he did so, events and developments were causing tensions to flare, democratic impulses to quicken, and the governing elites to think again.20
The Cold War was not just going all the more global with the decolonization of Asia and Africa, but also coming closer to home by way of the Cuban Revolution, and even taking off into space with the Soviets launching Sputnik, the first orbiting satellite, in 1957. Still more troubling, the severest recession since the war struck that same year. Unemployment once again became a public issue; “ghetto life” got tougher as black joblessness soared to 16 percent (compared with a bad enough 5.8 percent for whites); and urban race relations grew tenser as competition for jobs increased—especially as businesses were seeking to “automate” production and starting to export jobs overseas. All of which, along with the Little Rock school desegregation battle, afforded rich material for Soviet propaganda directed at the nonwhite “Third World.”21
Taking advantage of the rising unemployment and falling industrial-union rolls, the Right and capital moved quickly against labor. Senate conservatives opened investigations into “labor racketeering” that exposed rampant corruption in the Teamsters and several other unions and led to passage of the Landrum-Griffin Act, subjecting unions to still greater government scrutiny. GOP legislators in six midwestern and western states placed “right-to-work” referenda on their states’ 1958 ballots. And executives sought to roll back workers’ gains of the previous ten years.22
The AFL-CIO, however, fought back. Rallying voters, it not only defeated the antiunion ballot initiatives in five of the six states, but also helped to give the Democrats huge wins in the 1958 midterm elections and to sizably increase the number of liberals in Congress (though still not enough to overcome the conservative coalition).23
Labor also battled capital directly and, while defeats were suffered, victories were won, including one in the steel industry in 1959 that saw 500,000 workers go out on strike, the largest union action ever in U.S. history. And public employees—whose postwar ranks included growing numbers of women and minorities—were organizing their own unions, demanding collective-bargaining rights, and winning breakthrough victories in New York City in 1958 and Wisconsin in 1959.24
Civil rights activism continued as well. Following the Montgomery victory in 1957, King and the Reverend Ralph Abernathy, a World War II veteran, launched the Southern Christian Leadership Conference (SCLC). And organized black pressure and the competition for northern black votes led a coalition of congressional Republicans and northern Democrats to push through a civil rights bill that, though watered down in the Senate, did give the federal government some muscle to enforce voting rights.25
Determined to sustain the postwar settlement, the governing elites responded. The Rockefeller Brothers Fund, the magazine mogul Henry Luce, and the Eisenhower administration organized high-profile panels to, respectively, consider the nation’s “Prospects,” reformulate the “National Purpose,” and propose “Goals for Americans.” Like the Ad Council’s roundtables, these, too, expressed tremendous pride in the nation’s accomplishments and great expectations of its future. However, attending more critically to its challenges and problems, they called for not only private and corporate but also public initiatives to address them. And yet they still insisted that the pursuit of the Cold War and the inclusion of the excluded in America’s promise required greater economic growth and development—not democratic mobilization or redistribution.26
But “the wind is beginning to change,” the historian Arthur Schlesinger, Jr., observed and, writing more impatiently, the former OWI director Archibald MacLeish argued that America’s purpose remained what it always was—“to set men free”—and the task was not to articulate it anew “but to exercise it.” Which is just what black collegians and their supporters were doing that very spring when, following the lead of four North Carolina A&T students in Greensboro, 50,000 of them staged lunch counter sit-ins across the South and the nation demanding not just service, but an end to segregation. Apparently anxious about what it all portended, the right-wing editors of The Freeman published a direct attack on the Four Freedoms in their April 1960 issue.27
• • •
Effectively setting the new decade’s public agenda, both major parties issued campaign platforms that summer more liberal than their previous ones. Priding itself the party of Lincoln, the GOP included a strong civil rights plank in its own. And recommitting themselves to not only Jefferson’s “Rights of Man” but also “the Economic Bill of Rights which Franklin Roosevelt wrote into our national conscience,” the Democrats declared they would act to create full employment; strengthen workers’ rights and protect consumers; improve the nation’s environment, public infrastructure, and cities; ensure decent housing, education, and health care; reform immigration; assure women’s equality; safeguard civil liberties; and—referring to the recent “peaceful demonstrations for first-class citizenship”—guarantee civil rights and actually end segregation.28
Admittedly, the parties’ nominees, World War II veterans all, were not as liberal as the platforms on which they ran. The Democratic presidential nominee, Senator John F. Kennedy (JFK) of Massachusetts, a son of the wealthy former America Firster and FDR antagonist Joseph P. Kennedy, voted with liberals in Congress, but he had not opposed McCarthy, was no champion of labor or civil rights, and, to signal southerners that he would not try to impose integration or abolish Taft-Hartley, had selected as his running mate Senator Lyndon Baines Johnson (LBJ) of Texas, a once-avid New Dealer who, while never an ardent segregationist, had turned into a big-business-friendly politician. And the GOP nominee, Vice President Richard Nixon, who was to lose in 1960 but come back to win in 1968, was an infamous red-baiter; though, oddly, his running mate, the former Massachusetts Senator Henry Cabot Lodge, Jr., had belonged to the progressive American Veterans Committee in the late 1940s. Nevertheless, not only did each man necessarily embrace his respective party’s platform, but all who would actually become President in the 1960s—Kennedy, Johnson, even Nixon—would be led by his fellow citizens to move in a more liberal direction while in the White House.29
The generation that had carried out the New Deal and the war effort was coming to see that history was not over and that renewed democratic public action was called for. Entering middle age and the middle class, most, absent a major crisis, were not likely to take to the streets to demand it. But many were already demonstrating a readiness to defend their achievements and their ability to pursue America’s promise. And there were others—believing in that promise no less, but still excluded from too much of it—who were ready to march.
Joined by sympathetic whites, southern blacks in particular would courageously, nonviolently, and ever more determinedly demand their rights as citizens. Some would be killed and many bloodied. And yet they would move the nation to finally bring an end to Jim Crow’s rule, while demonstrating that the making of American democracy was not over, encouraging others to act as well.30
Moreover, Americans of every color and creed had instilled a belief in America’s purpose and promise in their children. And many of those children would not only serve in the military or the new Peace Corps or VISTA, but also—inspired by both the civil rights movement and the struggles and achievements of their parents’ generation, as well as voices from it—rally around groups such as the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC), Students for a Democratic Society (SDS), and Berkeley’s Free Speech Movement and help push their parents to even more affirmatively answer the question posed by Yank’s editors in 1945: “If Franklin Roosevelt’s hopes and dreams are deep enough in the hearts and minds of the people, the people will make them come true.”31
As ever, the ranks of the once-young men and women of the 1930s and 1940s included conservatives and reactionaries high and low who would oppose and even resist the renewed “march of freedom.” Sadly, they were also to witness assassinations, riots, and movements that scorned their accomplishments. Even more tragically, they would allow the United States to descend into a war that would sorely divide the nation, limit democratic possibilities, and—after taking 58,000 American lives—end in defeat. And yet, in the course of the “long decade of the 1960s,” they would not only continue to expand the economy, but also once again harness the powers of democratic government to extend and deepen American freedom, equality, and democracy.
• • •
They would start in 1960 by electing JFK, a Democrat publicly committed to his party’s progressive platform agenda and the first Roman Catholic ever to serve as President. Moreover, it was most of all men and women of their own generation who, having set that agenda, organized the campaigns to pursue it and enacted so much of it.
Kennedy’s victory seemed to assure democratic action. As a candidate, JFK spoke more of “New Frontiers” than of the New Deal. But he celebrated the Four Freedoms, promised to act rapidly to fulfill his platform commitments, if necessary by way of executive orders, and appointed to his cabinet several former AVC members, including Orville Freeman at Agriculture, Stewart Udall at Interior, and Arthur Goldberg at Labor. In fact, hearing his inaugural address, one might have been reminded of FDR. Proclaiming “Let the word go forth from this time and place, to friend and foe alike, that the torch has been passed to a new generation of Americans,” the new President said: “Now the trumpet summons us again—not as a call to bear arms . . . but a call to bear the burden of a long twilight struggle . . . a struggle against the common enemies of man: tyranny, poverty, disease and war itself.”32
And yet, after telling Americans to “ask not what your country can do for you—ask what you can do for your country,” Kennedy didn’t ask very much of them. Worried about antagonizing business and a still conservative Congress—and apparently more determined to fight the Cold War from Cuba to Southeast Asia than to renew the New Deal—he failed to move quickly on his campaign promises. He also opted for an economic growth strategy that entailed seeking major tax cuts favoring corporations and the rich rather than greater spending on public works and job creation.33
Liberals and progressives, however, went to work. While AFL-CIO leaders lobbied the White House to act on the Democratic agenda, a cohort of prominent unionists, including Walter Reuther, set up Four Freedoms, Inc., to push for federal initiatives for the elderly and develop their own plans to build senior citizen housing. And the labor federation joined a coalition of ethnic and religious groups in calling for changes to America’s racist immigration law.34
Still others sought to renew “the movement” in the labor movement itself. Fed up with the AFL-CIO’s failure to ban race-exclusive unions, A. Philip Randolph led a new Negro American Labor Council to promote unionism in the black community and try to get all-white unions to recruit blacks. Concurrently, in 1962, César Chávez, a World War II navy veteran, organized thousands of California Mexican-American agricultural laborers into a new United Farm Workers (UFW) by addressing both pay and civil rights issues (though the UFW co-founder Dolores Huerta contended their success owed in good part to “the New Deal tradition among older Americans”); Leon Davis, a Polish-born Jew whose labor career began in 1932, and Moe Foner, a longtime progressive unionist and World War II army veteran, led New York’s multiracial Hospital and Healthcare Workers Local 1199 in a strike against the city’s private hospitals that pioneered the recognition of hospital employees’ rights; their fellow New Yorker Al Shanker led the city’s teachers’ union to win a precedent-setting contract; and Reuther and the UAW not only actively backed the civil rights movement, but also helped underwrite the early organizing efforts of both the new UFW and the “New Left” SDS that emerged out of the “old left” Student League for Industrial Democracy (SLID) and whose “founding” took place at the UAW’s Port Huron, Michigan, Franklin Delano Roosevelt Labor Center.35
Energized by the black collegians who sat in at lunch counters and formed the SNCC in 1960, and led by veterans of the fight for the “Double Victory,” civil rights activists went to work as well. Roy Wilkins, editor of the NAACP’s The Crisis in the 1930s and 1940s, now headed the NAACP itself. Whitney Young, Jr., a World War II combat veteran, directed the National Urban League (NUL). James Farmer, Jr., a 1942 co-founder of the Congress of Racial Equality, now led it. The youngest of the cohort, Martin Luther King, Jr., who had learned about not only the Social Gospel but also FDR’s “Freedom from want and fear” from his father, Reverend King, Sr., and the Morehouse College president Benjamin Mays during the war, still led the SCLC. And Ella Baker, whose progressive organizing career began with the WPA’s Worker Education Project in the 1930s, now mentored SNCC’s young activists. The NAACP and NUL intensified their political and business lobbying efforts and CORE, the SCLC, and SNCC staged Freedom Rides, demonstrations and marches, and voter-registration drives in which Americans young and old, black and white, male and female, put their lives on the line across the South to reveal to all how brutally oppressive segregation remained.36
At the same time, liberal and progressive women were placing the question of gender equality all the more directly on the political table. In January 1961, the Oregon Democrat Edith Green, who first worked as a lobbyist for the Oregon Education Association in the 1940s, introduced a House bill to guarantee “equal pay for equal work.” That same year, the director of the Labor Department’s Women’s Bureau, Esther Peterson, who became a union and consumer activist in the 1930s, persuaded JFK to set up the President’s Commission on the Status of Women with Eleanor Roosevelt as its chair. And the writer Betty Friedan, who started out as a left-wing labor journalist in the 1940s, would challenge women to reflect on their lives and status in her 1963 bestseller, The Feminine Mystique, and launch a new wave of feminist activism.37
Others, too, were raising their voices. In 1962, the biologist Rachel Carson, a veteran of the Roosevelt-era U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service, published Silent Spring. Warning of how chemical pesticides were endangering American lives, she incited a vicious barrage of attacks against her by the chemical industry but succeeded in revolutionizing public understanding of humanity’s impact on nature and turning the conservationist movement into the “environmental movement.” No less urgently, the ecologist Barry Commoner, a World War II navy veteran, mobilized scientists and public opinion against nuclear weapons tests. And the socialist Michael Harrington published The Other America, a small work that helped to make poverty a major national issue.38
Lobbied, pressed, and gaining little ground in Congress or the South, Kennedy began to act in 1962. He nominated the Labor Secretary, Arthur Goldberg, to the Supreme Court, an appointment that solidified the “Warren Court’s” liberal majority and led to landmark decisions on separation of church and state (Engel v. Vitale, 1962), “one person, one vote” (Reynolds v. Sims, 1964), and the rights of the accused (Miranda v. Arizona, 1966); issued executive orders granting 2 million federal employees collective-bargaining rights and integrating federal public housing; and called for enactment of a Consumer Bill of Rights: “the right to safety, the right to be informed, the right to choose, the right to be heard.” And in 1963, buoyed politically by his apparent success in handling the “October Missile Crisis,” he not only directed federal agencies to start drawing up plans for an antipoverty program, proposed changes to America’s immigration law, signed the Equal Pay Act, appointed a scientific advisory committee to investigate the use of chemical pesticides, and signed the Nuclear Test Ban Treaty. He also responded firmly to the intensifying racial violence down south—the worst of it that spring in Birmingham, Alabama, where white supremacists had set off bombs in the black community and police officers attacked a children’s march with fire hoses and dogs, film of which Americans saw on the television news that evening.39
On June 11, Kennedy announced to the nation that he was going to ask Congress “to act, to make a commitment it has not fully made in this century to the proposition that race has no place in American life or law”—the need for which was made all the more evident when the Mississippi NAACP leader Medgar Evers, a World War II combat veteran, was assassinated outside his home in Jackson that same night.40
One week later, the President sent Congress a bill to outlaw segregation and discrimination in public facilities and accommodations. The bill disappointed many for it contained no significant voting rights provisions or any serious initiatives to address black joblessness and poverty. But it was radical in its implications, and everyone expected strong opposition and a southern filibuster—which made civil rights activists wonder just how hard Kennedy would actually fight for it.
Determined to once again make a Democratic President do the right thing, and this time Congress, too, A. Philip Randolph, aided by the veteran organizer Bayard Rustin and Walter Reuther and the UAW, mobilized a grand coalition of rights, religious, and labor groups and that August staged the historic 250,000-strong March on Washington for Jobs and Freedom on the National Mall—at which King delivered his famous “I Have a Dream” speech.41
• • •
Kennedy was assassinated in Dallas on November 22, 1963. But the democratic swell did not subside and, stunningly, Lyndon Johnson set out not simply to realize JFK’s nascent initiatives, but also, as he put it, to “finish Franklin Roosevelt’s revolution.”42
Insisting he was always more liberal than Kennedy, Johnson explained his renewed progressivism by saying the presidency had “freed” him to once again act so. An ambitious man of humble beginnings who had moved expediently to the right in the late 1940s, LBJ had become a rich wheeler-dealer politician, indeed “Master of the Senate” in the 1950s. And yet this grandson of a Populist carried with him both a deep desire to help the poor, derived in part from experiences teaching Mexican-American students in rural Texas in the late 1920s, and a good idea of how he might do it based on his work as director of the WPA’s National Youth Administration in Texas and as a congressman before and after his wartime service in the navy.43
Entering the White House, Johnson wrapped himself in Roosevelt’s cloak. And he clearly had the promise of the Four Freedoms in mind when in the course of 1964 he declared “unconditional war on poverty”; proposed the Economic Opportunity Act with its Head Start, Neighborhood Youth Corps, and Job Corps programs; worked to secure a historic Civil Rights Act; told students at the University of Michigan that they were “appointed by history” to build a “Great Society”; and campaigned against the 1964 Republican presidential nominee, the conservative Arizona Senator Barry Goldwater. He spoke of it even at state dinners. In a toast to the visiting President of Italy, he said: “Mr. President, if we are to inspire others with our hopes, we must make doubly sure that in our own countries there is actually freedom from want and fear.”44
Labor and rights leaders now joined Johnson in trying to get Congress to pass the civil rights and antipoverty bills. The AFL-CIO’s George Meany not only agreed to LBJ’s request that they hold off on seeking repeal of the Taft-Hartley Act’s section 14(b), permitting state right-to-work laws, and concentrate first on winning enactment of those bills. He also committed the federation to lobbying aggressively for them. And while King, inspired by the GI Bill of Rights, now called for a Bill of Rights for the Disadvantaged, he and most other black leaders accepted an appeal by Johnson to temporarily cease mass demonstrations.45
But democratic activism from below did not cease. Looking to engage poor blacks directly in the struggle for their rights, the SNCC’s Robert Moses launched Mississippi “Freedom Summer,” a voter-education and -registration drive that—despite the brutal murder by Klansmen of three young activists, two white and one black—saw nine hundred, mostly white, northern college students join the project. And that fall thousands of University of California, Berkeley, students, led by Freedom Summer veteran Mario Savio, rose up in a “Free Speech Movement,” demanding freedom of speech and expression on campus.46
Conservatives and reactionaries reacted as they had since the 1920s to evidence of organized and organizing progressivism—they branded it as “un-American.” In a nationally televised speech that October endorsing Barry Goldwater for president, the actor turned right-wing political voice Ronald Reagan portrayed the New Deal legacy and projected Great Society initiatives as the “abandonment” of “the American Revolution” and as movements toward “totalitarianism.”47
The overwhelming majority of Americans, however, knew better and they made clear what they wanted at the polls in November. They gave Johnson the greatest presidential election triumph since FDR’s of 1936 and sent enough liberals to Congress to finally overcome the conservative coalition, shut down the southern filibuster, and move on the Democratic agenda. Johnson and his running mate, Senator Hubert Humphrey of Minnesota, not only garnered 61 percent of the vote and every state but Goldwater’s Arizona and five in the Deep South, their party also gained firmer control of the House (295–140) and Senate (68–32). And liberals and progressives now prevailed in both, among them many World War II veterans such as the senators Philip Hart (Michigan), Joseph Clark (Pennsylvania), Edmund Muskie (Maine), Paul Douglas (Illinois), Gaylord Nelson (Wisconsin), Claiborne Pell (Rhode Island), and the Republican Jacob Javits (New York)—the last four of whom were former AVC members.48
So empowered, Johnson called in his January 1965 State of the Union message for “eliminating every remaining obstacle to the right and the opportunity to vote”; a “program in education to ensure every child the fullest development”; new laws to protect the environment and new initiatives in urban and regional development; repeal of Taft-Hartley’s section 14(b) and extension of the minimum wage to “2 million unprotected workers”; health care coverage for the elderly; an immigration law “based on the work a man can do and not where he was born or how he spells his name”; and a National Foundation for the Arts. Almost all of which and more the new Eighty-ninth Congress would give him in the Voting Rights Act, the Elementary and Secondary Education Act, a new Social Security Act creating Medicare and Medicaid, the Water Quality and Clean Air acts, the Immigration Act, and acts establishing the Department of Housing and Urban Development and National Endowments for the Arts and Humanities.49
The democratic swell now turned into a new democratic surge. The AFL-CIO played a crucial role in securing Medicare and Medicaid and, looking forward to building labor and a more liberal south, began to push anew for the repeal of Section 14(b). And led by its newly elected president, Jerry Wurf, a staunch progressive who first began organizing workers during the war, the American Federation of State, County, and Municipal Employees (AFSCME) launched campaigns that, alongside those of the American Federation of Teachers and National Education Association, would unionize, and secure the bargaining rights of, 4 million public employees in thirty-six states by 1975.50
King took the civil rights struggle back to Alabama in early 1965 to fight for voting rights—a heroic fight that led Johnson to proclaim, “We shall overcome,” in a speech before the full Congress. Inspired by the War on Poverty’s New Deal–like code of “maximum feasible participation,” poor people gathered around the country to formulate plans to improve their communities. And yet for some the democratic surge acted as a painful reminder of promises so long deferred. Now, more than twenty years after their articulation, in some pockets of the country the wellspring of hope had gone dry. Blacks in the Watts ghetto of Los Angeles erupted in six days of rioting that August that left thirty-four dead and a thousand injured. But ever determined, A. Philip Randolph—whom Johnson had named as Honorary Chair of an upcoming 1966 White House conference, “To Fulfill These Rights”—responded to both the new possibilities and the new dangers by proposing a ten-year, $185 billion “Freedom Budget” that, endorsed by 150 prominent academic, labor, and foundation leaders, promised to create full employment, wipe out slums, and “Achieve ‘Freedom from Want’ for all Americans” by 1975.51
Meanwhile, paralleling efforts by congressional liberals to translate JFK’s call for a Consumer Bill of Rights into law, the attorney Ralph Nader published Unsafe at Any Speed: The Designed-In Dangers of the American Automobile, an indictment of the car industry’s pursuit of profits over safety that fueled the rise of a new consumer movement. Tony Mazzocchi, a Battle of the Bulge artillery veteran, took up the post of political director of the Oil, Chemical, and Atomic Workers and, informed by the work of Carson and Commoner, moved his union up to the front of the environmental struggle and fight for workplace health and safety. And heartened by the Civil Rights Act outlawing racial, religious, and gender discrimination, Betty Friedan and other feminists founded the National Organization for Women (NOW) in 1966 to achieve women’s “full participation in the mainstream of American society.”52
The Right, of course, fought back. Mentored by National Review editor William F. Buckley, Jr., conservative students organized Young Americans for Freedom in 1960. And while most corporate leaders still subscribed to the liberal consensus, and even backed LBJ’s reforms, rich conservatives had backed far-right Republicans in winning brief control of the GOP and nominating Goldwater in 1964. But as Ike could have told them, a generation had not forgotten the promise they had articulated and fought for.53
• • •
On February 23, 1966, Johnson received the National Freedom Award in a ceremony at New York’s Waldorf-Astoria Hotel. Accepting the honor, he spoke not of himself, but of Roosevelt and the Four Freedoms. And proudly noting not only the progress his generation had made in realizing FDR’s vision, but also its continuing commitment to advance it further both at home and overseas, he said: “Thus we address the spirit of Franklin Roosevelt, 25 years after his message to America and the world, with confidence and with an unflagging determination.”54
Securing rights, fighting poverty, enhancing the environment, and advancing education and the arts, Johnson had good reason to evoke Roosevelt’s spirit. And yet in critical ways he still stood closer to JFK than to FDR. As his further remarks in accepting the Freedom Award attest, he remained more committed to following the corporate and Cold War imperatives of the postwar settlement than to redeeming the progressive politics of the Age of Roosevelt. While he credited both the “free enterprise system” and “enlightened public policy” for the nation’s steady advance toward “liberation from want,” he made no reference to democratic mobilization and redistribution. And though in his January 1966 State of the Union message he had lamented how the Vietnam War was already limiting the War on Poverty, he proceeded that evening at the Waldorf—as four thousand antiwar protesters marched outside—to speak at length of his plans to intensify the fight in Southeast Asia.55
Johnson was seeking to complete Roosevelt’s revolution, and on race he was pushing well beyond it. But whereas FDR had mobilized Americans to redeem the nation’s promise by both enlisting their labors in the New Deal and empowering them to organize and fight the forces that opposed their pursuit of that promise, LBJ did neither. Ignoring how industry was moving out of the north to the right-to-work and low-tax South and to foreign countries, he rejected the idea of public-works and job-creation initiatives and instead insisted on programs of education and training that were supposed to prepare the poor to take advantage of the opportunities afforded by America’s fast-growing economy. He also refused to rally his fellow citizens against corporate power and practices. Asserting, “I never wanted to demagogue against business,” Johnson would signal in many ways that he thought FDR had seriously erred in calling business leaders economic royalists. To labor’s dismay, LBJ effectively left Dixie in the hands of the Right and capital by failing to exercise his presidential power and influence to counter corporate lobbying and kill a GOP-led Senate filibuster blocking a vote in 1965 to repeal Taft-Hartley’s section 14(b).56
Moreover, LBJ not only accepted the governing elites’ assumption that achieving the nation’s “goals” required simply more economic growth, not redistribution—at least not from capital and the rich to working people and the poor. He also championed Kennedy’s strategy of cutting taxes on corporations and the wealthy—even as he was planning to spend vast sums fighting both the War on Poverty and the War in Vietnam.57
But most tragically, whereas Roosevelt had recognized that to truly secure America’s promise he had to break isolationism’s hold on American thinking, LBJ did not see that to do so in the 1960s demanded loosening the Cold War’s grip. Having learned, like most of his generation, that tyranny and aggression must not be ignored, he, too, readily followed Ike and JFK in seeing all Third World struggles merely in terms of Soviet expansionism. And fearing the political consequences of “losing” Vietnam, he acted to prevent the defeat of the authoritarian and corrupt U.S.-created South Vietnamese state by the Communist North and revolutionary Viet Cong. Under Johnson, America’s involvement in the war steadily expanded—to the point of sending more than 500,000 troops to the country by 1968.
Johnson would go on to secure further initiatives like the Model Cities program, the 1968 Fair Housing Act, and an increase in the minimum wage—and to his credit the poverty rate would drop from 22 to 13 percent by decade’s end. But he placed the War in Vietnam above the War on Poverty.
Americans did mobilize, but not as LBJ might have envisioned. With hopes and expectations raised, but opportunities limited and oppression unrelenting, blacks rioted in ghettos across the nation in the summers of 1966, 1967, and 1968. And no longer urged by their President to build a Great Society, but called by their draft boards to fight a war that seemed to contradict America’s purpose of “setting men free,” college students turned out in growing numbers to march in opposition to it. The democratic surge continued, but increasingly moved in divergent, if not counter, currents.
• • •
The war not only financially constrained the fight against freedom from want and fear. It also split the nation and sundered the forces of the Left. While Meany and the AFL-CIO, despite the Taft-Hartley debacle, stayed loyal to Johnson, unions divided and Reuther, exasperated by Meany’s conservatism on a host of issues, actually led the UAW out of the labor federation. The civil rights movement divided, too. While the NAACP and NUL continued to work for racial integration, CORE, SNCC, and the new Black Panther Party militantly called for “Black Power.” And the mushrooming antiwar student movement, with SDS in the vanguard, not only became all the more radical, all the more hostile to Johnson and liberals generally, and all the more vocally “anti-American,” it also spawned a “counter-culture” of “hippies” and “Yippies” that spurned the achievements and ideals of the generation that had made America a “middle-class” nation. All of which antagonized middle-aged white working-class people, so many of whom were now bearing a greater tax burden and suffering the loss of industrial jobs and a real decline in their wages. As they sent their sons into the military while college men received deferments, they felt a sense of abandonment by an administration committed to fighting racism, poverty, and communism, but not corporate power and inequality.58
Nevertheless, the majority of Americans were neither turning right nor giving up the idea of harnessing the powers of democratic government to enhance American life. While urban riots and Black Power rhetoric angered them, most Americans continued to support the cause of equal rights and the fight against poverty. While bureaucrats and taxes irritated them, they still favored the idea of national health care. And while antiwar demonstrators aggravated them, they were coming to see the war as having been a costly mistake. In fact, in a certain way they were moving left. Not only were workers now staging strikes over both wages and shop-floor control on a scale not seen since the postwar 1940s, their fellow citizens were growing all the more suspicious of big corporations and backing demands for more strenuous federal regulation of business activities.59
But continuing losses in Vietnam, turmoil at home, and a serious challenge for the Democratic nomination by the antiwar Senator Eugene McCarthy of Minnesota, who had worked for military intelligence during World War II, were draining LBJ of energy and support. And on March 31, 1968, he announced he would not run for reelection.
The violence that had come to haunt his presidency did not cease, however. Less than a week later, King was assassinated in Memphis and riots broke out in dozens of cities, including the nation’s capital. Two months after that, JFK’s brother, Senator Robert F. Kennedy of New York, who had just won the California Democratic primary, was killed in Los Angeles. And that summer, rioting erupted once again, not only in ghettos around the country but also outside the Democratic National Convention in Chicago when police attacked crowds of young antiwar demonstrators. Angry battles broke out on the convention floor itself that would sorely hamper the chances of the Democratic presidential nominee, Vice President Hubert Humphrey, winning in November. Expressing his generation’s frustration and bewilderment, one World War II veteran and lifelong Democrat asked his son, “What is wrong with your generation?”60
• • •
Running again for president in 1968, Richard Nixon attacked both liberal Democrats and urban rioters and student protesters. However, he did not talk of reversing LBJ’s Great Society or, as Goldwater had, FDR’s New Deal. He knew better than to do so. Like Eisenhower, he was a conservative, but also like Ike, he knew that Americans, especially his own generation, remained committed to the promise of the Four Freedoms. He spoke directly to it. Interviewed for television by the British newsman David Frost, he said: “You remember Franklin Roosevelt’s four freedoms? . . . Freedom from fear and freedom from want. That was enough in the Thirties because to achieve that goal would have been magnificent. Now, most Americans have achieved it, and they find it isn’t enough. Now we must move to Freedoms to.”61
But Nixon also knew that Americans were worried about the state of the nation and the future of America—and he spoke to that as well. Accepting the GOP nomination, he said, “We see Americans dying on distant battlefields abroad” and “We see Americans hating each other; fighting each other; killing each other at home.” And he asked: “Did American boys die in Normandy, and Korea, and in Valley Forge for this?” Then, directing his words, a few borrowed directly from FDR, to “the forgotten Americans—the non-shouters; the non-demonstrators . . . [who] work in American factories . . . run American businesses . . . serve in government . . . provide most of the soldiers who died to keep us free”—the men and women he would later call “the Silent Majority”—he reassured them that “America is a great nation” and promised “a new policy for peace abroad [and] a new policy for peace and progress and justice at home.” Projecting “a day when we will again have freedom from fear in America and freedom from fear in the world,” he called a percentage of the country to a percentage of FDR’s famed promise.62
Nixon didn’t give any details of his plans. He didn’t have to. Americans were looking for a way out—a way out of riots, protests, and a war they never wanted—and he seemed to offer it. That November, the Democrats held on to the House and Senate, but he won the presidency.
President Nixon preached “law and order”—a veiled way of speaking to white racial fears—and held liberals accountable for the lawlessness and violence of the day. However, he was not looking to undo what remained of the liberal consensus, but rather, to win over anxious white working-class voters and make the GOP the majority party of that consensus. And knowing from private White House polls what most Americans wanted, he realized he had to do more than just talk about the Four Freedoms.63
Thus, Nixon cooperated with Congress not only to increase spending on the poor, but also—despite the opposition of business leaders, so many of whom had supported his candidacy—to raise taxes on corporations and the rich; create the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA), Occupational Safety and Health Administration (OSHA), and Consumer Products Safety Commission; and institute temporary wage-and-price controls to contain inflation and unemployment. In fact, he also proposed both a guaranteed-minimum-family-income program to replace welfare and a national health insurance program, though neither would be passed, for conservatives opposed them on principle and liberals for being too stingy.64
Moreover, while Nixon began to significantly revise the terms of the Cold War by opening up relations with China in 1971 (a feat, arguably, only an old red-baiter could pull off), his new policy for Vietnam entailed both intensifying the bombing of the North and pushing into Cambodia to try to cut off Vietcong supply lines in hopes of forcing the North to negotiate an acceptable peace. The latter incited massive antiwar demonstrations at home in the spring of 1970 and led to a nearly complete shutdown of America’s colleges after National Guardsmen killed four student protesters at Ohio’s Kent State University. Most Americans, however, did not protest. As much as they wanted out of the war, they longed for a “peace with honor.” It was not to be. The war that had cost Johnson his agenda ended in defeat. The peace treaty signed in 1973 was mere prelude. South Vietnam would fall to the Communists in 1975.
In 1972, Nixon defeated the liberal and antiwar Senator George McGovern of South Dakota in a landslide, winning 60.7 percent of the popular vote and every state but Massachusetts and the District of Columbia. McGovern, a World War II bomber pilot and former history professor, had led the Democrats to carry out reforms in the wake of 1968 that, while strengthening minority and women’s representation in the party, had reduced the power of labor. Meany and other AFL-CIO leaders walked out of the 1972 party convention, refusing to endorse him, and thereby enabled Nixon to portray his opponent as the dangerously radical “antiwar” candidate.65
Still, with Democrats holding on to Congress, and liberals gaining a few seats, Nixon’s victory actually registered no critical shift by Americans to the right. It did, however, show that a Republican could win states all across the conservative South, and offered sad testimony to liberal and progressive leaders’ declining ability to inspire and move their fellow citizens.
Nixon was to resign the presidency in August 1974 after congressional investigations revealed an ugly record of lies, cover-ups, and illegalities by him and his staff. A bungled 1972 break-in by GOP operatives at Democratic National Committee offices at Washington’s Watergate complex proved to be the tip of an iceberg. And with the Republicans in disrepute, the former Georgia governor Jimmy Carter, a veteran postwar naval officer, peanut farmer, and “Born-Again Christian,” would win the White House in 1976 by defeating Nixon’s successor, Gerald Ford. Carter’s victory, however, would not lead to a renewal of the fight for the Four Freedoms, but to its suppression.
• • •
A series of major crises struck the nation in the early 1970s—not only the traumas of military defeat and presidential resignation, but also a 1973 Arab oil embargo and energy crisis, intensifying industrial competition from Germany and Japan, and an eighteen-month-long recession that, starting in November 1973, would devastate American manufacturing, drive the unemployment rate up to 9.2 percent (a number not seen since 1941), drain municipal coffers (most unsettlingly, those of New York City), and begin to turn the industrial Northeast and Midwest into the “Rust Belt.” Intellectuals right and left wrote of it all as if the nation had simply run out of steam—some, as if it augured the “twilight” of capitalism and the West.66
In response, Americans grew ever more critical of corporate power and practices and ever more interested in social-democratic policies and programs. Yet even as, in Time magazine’s words, “Blue collar workers are gaining a renewed sense of identity, of collective power and class that used to be called solidarity,” the Democratic Party failed to engage them politically.67
Watergate would bolster the Democratic Party. But Democrats would not mobilize a broad, popular, and progressive democratic politics. Older leaders bore the scars of the late sixties and seemed incapable of inspiring. And younger party politicians and activists, whether they were advocating the “New Politics” of fiscal conservatism and “neoliberalism” or the “movement” and “identity” politics of race and gender, were eschewing the New Deal political tradition in favor of remaking the party as a coalition of middle- and upper-middle-class professionals, women, and people of color. Elected to the Senate from Colorado in 1974, Gary Hart, a rising star of the neoliberals, actually campaigned with a stump speech titled “The End of the New Deal” and spoke dismissively of labor.68
Labor was opening up all the more to women and minorities. Nonetheless, with the AFL-CIO still headed by George Meany, who remained perversely averse to organizing—“Why should we worry about organizing groups of people who do not want to be organized?”—unions continued to endure not only political and industrial defeats, but also, especially in manufacturing, dramatically declining membership rolls.69
While the Left and labor did not mobilize, business did. Corporate leaders were besieged from below—as Chase Manhattan Bank’s David Rockefeller observed: “It is scarcely an exaggeration to say that right now American business is facing its most public disfavor since the 1930s. We are assailed for demeaning the worker, deceiving the consumer, destroying the environment, and disillusioning the younger generation.” They felt betrayed by President Nixon and squeezed by global competition. The response: take up the struggle against the Four Freedoms anew. Some to simply halt the democratic surge; others to reverse the recent liberal and progressive advances; still others to undo the labors of a generation and truly bring an end to the Age of Roosevelt—but all to restore the power, prestige, and profits of capital.70
In a confidential 1971 memorandum to the Chamber of Commerce, the corporate attorney Lewis Powell, whom Nixon was soon to name to the Supreme Court, laid out the strategy business was to follow—a strategy recalling those of the Liberty League in the 1930s and NAM and the Chamber following World War II. Specifically, Powell called for organizing executives, mobilizing stockholders, and recruiting cadres of scholars to spread capital’s message in print, public lectures, and the media, monitoring academe and cultivating alliances with graduate schools of business, promoting corporate priorities in lobbying, public relations, and advertising campaigns, and counterattacking labor, environmental, and consumer rights activists in the courts.71
Business executives rallied to reshape public debate, opinion, and policy. They not only revitalized the Chamber, NAM, and their respective industrial associations; used the local chapters of those organizations to launch grassroots campaigns; and formed new “peak” organizations, the most impressive of which was the Business Roundtable, whose membership was limited to the CEOs of the nation’s top corporations, all personally committed to lobbying efforts. They also set up new political action committees (PACs) and increased their contributions to candidates of both parties—all of whom grew ever more dependent on such money. Plus, they enhanced the endowments of think tanks such as the American Enterprise Institute and newly established Heritage Foundation; sponsored right-wing “public intellectuals” to advance pro-business ideas and arguments; and underwrote a vast array of campaigns to promote “free enterprise” and assail the unions, regulations, and taxes that they insisted were deterring business investment, innovation, and economic growth and development.72
Their campaigns spoke of freedom, but they made no secret of their antidemocratic ambitions, not even the so-called liberals among them. The Trilateral Commission, organized by David Rockefeller as an association of prominent corporate, political, and even labor figures from Western Europe, Japan, and the United States, issued a 1975 report, The Crisis of Democracy, in which Democracy was found wanting. The co-author Samuel P. Huntington, a Harvard government professor, wrote that the “democratic surge” of America’s minorities, public-employee unions, women, students, public-interest groups, and “value-oriented intellectuals” had produced a “democratic distemper,” a “problem of governability,” indeed, an “excess of democracy.”73
Furthermore, not only did corporations continue to transfer industry and jobs south and, increasingly, overseas to Third World countries where unions were banned or state-controlled, they also endeavored to “decertify” existing unions—and where workers tried to organize them, managers illegally fired the “troublemakers” and defended themselves with teams of union-busting lawyers. By the mid-1970s, complaints to the National Labor Relations Board skyrocketed, union membership fell to just 25 percent of the labor force, private and public sectors combined, and the great wave of public-employee organizing began to ebb.74
Meanwhile, rich far-right folk such as Adolph Coors, the Koch family, and the Bradley and John M. Olin foundations funded efforts to mobilize Christian evangelicals around “culture war” questions such as abortion and school prayer, and white working people generally around issues of law and order and taxes—the last of which was especially appealing. As wages fell with middle-class standards of living, voting for someone who promised to lower your taxes seemed an immediate redress. And in the late 1970s the nation was to witness a spate of “tax revolts.”75
By decade’s end, capital and the Right would prevail. They would not do so simply by their own devices, however. Americans would continue to believe in the promise of the Four Freedoms, but as jobs were lost, as workers’ incomes stagnated or declined, and as the nation’s troubles piled up, more and more of them wondered if the Democrats still did. And they were right to do so.76
• • •
Celebrating the U.S. Bicentennial in 1976, the city of Evansville, Indiana, erected a Four Freedoms Monument composed of four tall columns, each intended to represent one of Franklin Roosevelt’s Four Freedoms. However, city leaders somehow saw fit to rename one of those freedoms. Apparently too closely tied to the New Deal and progressive struggles, Freedom from Want was replaced with “Freedom from Oppression.” Worse was to come. Not only would the new Democratic President, Jimmy Carter, never mention the Four Freedoms when speaking to his fellow citizens, he would pave the way to the White House for a conservative who was set upon radically rewriting them.77
To secure the 1976 Democratic nomination and victory in November, Jimmy Carter had run to his left—far enough left to encourage many an eager liberal, labor, and rights activist to believe a Carter presidency might enable them to revive the democratic surge of the 1960s. But such was not to happen. Carter did embrace his party’s new progressive platform. And notably, he not only spoke in his nomination acceptance speech of both the party’s tradition of liberal leadership from FDR to LBJ and its record of “progressive” legislation. He also pointed a finger at the “political and economic elite” who have “shaped decisions and never had to account for mistakes or to suffer from injustice.” However, as he was soon to show, campaign rhetoric aside, he was no liberal or progressive in the Roosevelt tradition.78
Democrats came together behind Carter in hopes of making the tax structure more progressive, creating a more effective consumer protection agency, establishing a national health care system, enacting a real full-employment bill, and strengthening labor’s ability to organize and defend itself against union-busting efforts. But one by one, the legislative initiatives to realize these goals would be killed off. Repeatedly, corporate executives would mobilize to block them. Repeatedly, Carter would give way or fail to fight. And repeatedly, congressional Democrats would fall apart in the face of corporate pressures and inducements. UAW president Douglas Fraser, a World War II army veteran whose union activism began in the 1930s, expressed the thoughts of most on the left when he quit the President’s Labor-Management Advisory Group following the filibustered defeat of the labor-law reform bill in July 1978. Essentially delivering the eulogy for the liberal consensus, Fraser explained in his resignation letter why he could no longer cooperate with the corporate elite: “I believe leaders of the business community . . . have chosen to wage a one-sided class war today in this country—a war against working people, the unemployed, the poor, the minorities, the very young and the very old, and even many in the middle class of our society.”79
Carter and the Democratic-controlled Congress didn’t just give way to the corporate elite’s ambitions. Deregulating much of the transportation industry and initiating the deregulation of finance and banking, they actually inaugurated what the political writer Michael Lind has termed the “Great Dismantling of the New Deal.”80
Even as crises were deepening or erupting anew, even as inequality was widening, and even as communities were rallying to try to save their plants and jobs, Carter was turning his back on the memory and legacy of FDR and the men and women of the 1930s and 1940s. In his January 1978 State of the Union message, he spoke of the crises confronted by Lincoln and Roosevelt, and the challenges faced by Truman, and noted how at such times it was “the task of leaders to call forth the vast and restless energies of our people to build the future.” But Carter did no such thing. Making no reference whatsoever to the corporate elite’s efforts to subdue democracy and break labor or even to how capital was shuttering factories and exporting jobs overseas, he told Americans: “We need patience and good will . . . Government cannot solve our problems, it can’t set our goals, it cannot define our vision. Government cannot eliminate poverty or provide a bountiful economy or reduce inflation or save our cities or cure illiteracy or provide energy. And government cannot mandate goodness.”81
Nine months later, as “stagflation”—high unemployment and high inflation—shook working people’s lives all the more, Carter made his neoliberal fundamentalism all the clearer. Speaking to the nation on the need to fight inflation and cut the government deficit (as opposed, essentially, to fighting unemployment), he stated, “We must face a time of national austerity.” He called for limiting prices and wages, and proclaimed the need to liberate capital by reducing government regulation—a line he continued to push in his January 1979 State of the Union address: “Let’s reduce government interference and give it a chance to work . . . We cannot afford to live beyond our means . . . The duty of our generation . . . is to renew our Nation’s faith . . . against the threats of selfishness, cynicism, and apathy.”82
Far from nothing to fear but fear itself, Carter told Americans to fear each other. In July 1979, in an address that would forever be known as “The Malaise Speech,” he acknowledged that Americans were looking for “more effective leadership and action.” But instead of affording it, he lectured them on what he asserted was a more critical threat than energy shortages and inflation: “I want to talk to you right now about a fundamental threat to American democracy . . . a crisis of confidence . . . threatening to destroy the social and political fabric of America.” In lieu of a call to action, rather than call forth Americans’ historic commitment to a freer, more equal, more democratic nation, Carter asked, “Whenever you have a chance, say something good about our country.” His call to action was as vacuous as it was ineffectual: “With God’s help and for the sake of our Nation, it is time for us to join hands in America. Let us commit ourselves together to a rebirth of the American spirit. Working together with our common faith we cannot fail.” Americans did not. Carter undoubtedly did.83
Forsaking what made those whom we have come to call the Greatest Generation and its greatest leader truly great, Carter not only failed to renew the nation’s spirit and redeem America’s promise, he also went on to lose the presidency to a figure of that generation—a figure who had never forgotten the fight for the Four Freedoms and, knowing what was at stake in the struggle, was determined to bury the progressive memory and legacy of it.
• • •
On June 6, 1984, President Ronald Reagan went to Normandy, France, to speak at events commemorating the fortieth anniversary of D-day. Addressing statesmen, dignitaries, and veterans of those landings and their families, he spoke eloquently and movingly, especially at Pointe du Hoc, where GIs of the 2nd Ranger Battalion had fought their way up a 100-foot cliff while deadly German fire hailed down upon them. He talked there of the struggle and of those who pursued it—and he spoke directly to those men: “You were young the day you took these cliffs. Yet, you risked everything here. Why? . . . We look at you, and somehow we know the answer. It was faith and belief [and] loyalty and love . . . You all knew that some things are worth dying for. One’s country is worth dying for, and democracy is worth dying for . . . All of you loved liberty.”84
A beautiful act of remembrance, Reagan’s visit to Normandy was at the same time a carefully staged political event. With his 1984 reelection campaign upcoming, Reagan and his advisors saw the trip, as the historian Douglas Brinkley has told it, as an opportunity to promote a “New Patriotism”—a new “political consensus . . . based on an unflinching devotion to all things American.” Reagan went some way in doing that and won reelection. He also expressed the long-felt yet understated admiration and affection for the generation that the men of Normandy represented and essentially “triggered the so-called Greatest Generation phenomenon.”85
But there was even more to it. Whenever Reagan spoke of that generation, his own generation, he was not so much trying to remind Americans of its great democratic struggles and achievements as to keep them from remembering too much of them.
He won the White House in 1980 because of Carter’s failures in addressing fuel shortages, stagflation, an armed takeover of the U.S. Embassy in Iran, and a Soviet invasion of Afghanistan. All of which, coming in the wake of the upheavals of the late 1960s, the Nixon-Watergate scandal, defeat in Vietnam, and a devastating mid-1970s recession, had incited talk of national “exhaustion” and “decline” and led Carter, even before the embassy takeover, to call on Americans to lower their expectations.86
Inviting Americans to join him in a “crusade” to restore the nation’s strength, pride, and values, Reagan pulled together a “New Right” Republican electoral alliance of corporate elites, Christian evangelicals, and a host of conservative special-interest groups and picked up the votes of millions of disenchanted Democrats—millions more simply did not vote—with a platform of lowering taxes, limiting government, deregulating business, reducing the power of unions, cutting welfare spending, and expanding the military.
Reagan intended, however, a far grander restoration. He wanted to do what the Right and conservative rich had been trying to do for decades—bring an end to what he called “the long, liberal experiment that began in the 1930’s.”87
A New Deal Democrat and World War II veteran who so admired FDR that he memorized key lines of his speeches, Reagan had moved right in reaction to the Cold War—so far right he took to not only praising “free enterprise” but also decrying New Deal “liberalism,” “big government,” and the “welfare state” as threats to American liberty and, even, defending “states’ rights.” But he realized most Americans had not.88
Indeed, Reagan recognized how they continued to not only revere Roosevelt, embrace the achievements of his presidency, and believe in the promise that FDR and so many of them had articulated and fought for, but also draw strength and encouragement from them. He saw it in the struggles and initiatives of the 1960s to secure equal rights for minorities and women, combat poverty, organize new unions, and regulate business to protect consumers, workers, and the environment. Moreover, while he had won the governorship of California in 1966 by damning student protesters, urban rioters, and the liberals who he contended abetted them, unsuccessful bids for the White House in 1968 and 1976 had taught him it was dangerous to attack Roosevelt and his legacy.89
By 1980, Reagan knew that whatever else he did he had to refashion American memory and imagination—especially regarding the generation he was to celebrate at Normandy. He still charged that liberalism endangered liberty but, harkening back nostalgically to an America that valued “family, work, neighborhood, and religion,” and making no reference to what his generation had progressively accomplished, he now targeted strictly “the Sixties.” He not only denied the advances made. He also insisted that the politics and programs of those years had brought on the nation’s problems and, as he used to say of the New Deal, betrayed America’s promise. No less audaciously, he hijacked the story of American democracy and harnessed to his cause figures venerated by the Left and working people. In his presidential nomination acceptance speech, he declared what pundits were to call the “Reagan Revolution” by quoting none other than Thomas Paine, Abraham Lincoln, and Franklin Roosevelt to proclaim: “We have it in our power to begin the world over again”; a “new birth of freedom”; and “this generation today has a rendezvous with destiny.”90
Reagan sustained that rhetoric as President even as he pursued policies that undermined the democratic labors of a generation and made the rich richer and working people poorer. He even occasionally referred to “the Four Freedoms.” And yet he never stated what they were—which reflected neither ignorance nor innocence but, as he was soon to reveal, a desire to reconstitute them. Speaking at a 1987 Independence Day celebration at the Jefferson Memorial sponsored by the U.S. Chamber of Commerce, Reagan announced plans to seek enactment of an “Economic Bill of Rights that guarantees four fundamental freedoms: The freedom to work. The freedom to enjoy the fruits of one’s labor. The freedom to own and control one’s property. The freedom to participate in a free market.”91
Reagan sought to erase or override the progressive memory and legacy of Roosevelt and the generation of the 1930s and 1940s right up to his last days in office. In his January 1989 Farewell Address, Reagan noted the “resurgence of national pride” that he believed his presidency had inspired. But warning that “it won’t last unless it’s grounded in thoughtfulness and knowledge,” he recalled his visit to Normandy and urged “more attention to American history.” Most of all, he said—clearly determined to not just echo the Right’s wartime call for a Fifth Freedom, but also expunge “Freedom from want” and “Freedom from fear” altogether—Americans needed to remember that “America is freedom—freedom of speech, freedom of religion, freedom of enterprise.”92
Reagan not only gave voice to American admiration and affection for those who fought the Second World War. He also gave them shape and direction. Those who were to celebrate the Greatest Generation made no mention of the Four Freedoms.
Even more critically, he initiated a conservative and corporate ascendancy that has succeeded in undoing so much of what that generation fought for and achieved.
But, of course, Reagan could not have done all of that—hell, he could not even have become President—if those whom he opposed had not already forgotten or forsaken what made the Greatest Generation and its greatest leader truly great: That they saved the United States from economic destruction and political tyranny and turned it into the strongest and most prosperous nation in history by making America freer, more equal, and more democratic than ever before. That they were, measured by their achievements, the most progressive generation in American history.