CHAPTER 8

PROGRESSIVISM REDUX: THE CHALLENGES OF SOCIAL ENGINEERING

THE WAR ON POVERTY REMAINED AT THE VERY CORE OF THE GREAT Society. It was perceived to be the key to social justice, putting an end to class animosities, providing substance to the civil rights movement, quelling urban unrest, and demonstrating to the world that capitalism was superior to communism. In February 1965, LBJ proudly reviewed the status of the War on Poverty for Congress. Through the Community Action Program, Neighborhood Youth Corps, Volunteers in Service to America, Aid to Families with Dependent Children, Job Corps, and various extracurricular education programs, Sargent Shriver and the Office of Economic Opportunity were getting help to millions of poor Americans. Specifically, local antipoverty programs were already under way in forty-four states, and fifty-three Job Corps centers, many of them at converted military bases, were processing six thousand applications a day. Some twenty-five thousand welfare families were receiving employment training, and ninety thousand adults were enrolled in adult education programs. Neighborhood Youth Corps were operating in forty-nine cities and eleven rural communities, and some four million Americans were receiving benefits under AFDC.¹ In March, LBJ submitted a $1.5 billion request to Congress to continue and expand these programs. One of the most significant increases was for Operation Head Start, a preschool program primarily for inner-city children designed to compensate for cultural disadvantages and to get them up to speed for the first grade.

But as the House and Senate took up the administration’s 1965 poverty bill, the war was receiving mixed reviews. Complaints came pouring in from the poor that bureaucratic red tape was preventing mass access to OEO and other programs. “The pipeline is getting clogged up,” Senator Abraham Ribicoff (D-CT), a supporter of the poverty program, told LBJ. “And we are going to have indigestion in the country . . . you have oversold the program. Everybody says President Johnson says it is great and everybody thinks it is great—and it is, but the trouble is this is going to start kicking back in everybody’s teeth within the next year. . . . And that is dealing with a damned clean State [Connecticut].”²

The most controversial component of the War on Poverty was the Community Action Program (CAP). Title II of the Economic Opportunity Act established Community Acton Programs that were to provide “services, assistance, and other activities of sufficient scope and size to give promise of progress toward elimination of poverty or a cause or causes of poverty through developing employment opportunities, improving human performance, motivation, and productivity, or bettering the conditions under which people live, learn, and work.” Under the act, $315 million was available to enable state and local agencies to work with private nonprofits to carry out a coordinated attack on local poverty problems.³ The fundamental notion driving the CAP was that the poor and powerless, by participating in decisions affecting their local communities, would benefit not only materially but psychologically.

“Maximum feasible participation,” which became something of a catch-phrase in the OEO after it was established, had its roots initially in the New England townships that served as stable political bases through the War for Independence and the early days of the Republic. Later, in the late nineteenth century, the aggrieved farmers of the South and Midwest who established the Populist Party came to see in the cooperative movement a vehicle to achieve social and economic justice. During the Progressive Era and the New Deal, collective bargaining was inextricably linked to the republican ideal of “industrial democracy.” There could be no more “political democracy” in contemporary America, Progressive attorney Louis Brandeis declared in 1915, without an “industrial democracy” that gave workers actual participation in the governance of the firms for which they worked.⁴

During the Kennedy administration, New Frontiersmen came to see local action as an antidote to juvenile delinquency, a mechanism that would eradicate the conditions that were producing delinquency. “The people of the other America do not, by far and large, belong to unions, to fraternal organizations, or to political parties,” Michael Harrington wrote in 1962. “They are without lobbies of their own; they put forward no legislative program.” Because they had no voice, the government would have to step forward itself and empower them.⁵ The idea of participatory democracy also found clear expression in the Port Huron Statement issued in 1962 by the SDS. Authentic democracy required more than economic security and social equality; it required a politics of maximum citizen participation. In part, it was this call for participatory democracy that separated the New Left from the Old Left.⁶

LBJ and the architects of the Great Society have been, with some justification, portrayed as advocates of big government, seeing the federal bureaucracy as the ultimate backstop for social and economic justice in America. There is no doubt that the 1964 and 1965 civil rights acts, Medicare, the Elementary and Secondary Education Act, and other measures and programs greatly enhanced the power of the federal government. But there is also much evidence that LBJ had doubts that the Great Society could be built and sustained solely from the top down. Johnson had been an enthusiastic and effective state director of the Texas National Youth Administration (NYA). The NYA, headed by the militant southern liberal Aubrey Williams, was both more idealistic and less bureaucratic than most other New Deal agencies. Its programs were administered from state offices and under state relief administrations that were encouraged to develop innovative grassroots reforms.⁷ Johnson, Busby, and other 1960s reformers believed that in the South the assertion of federal power was necessary to eliminate discrimination, but once African Americans, specifically, and the poor, in general, were empowered, then states and localities could become the “laboratories of democracy” that Progressives had envisioned.

In truth, however, LBJ accepted community action almost by default. He had given the poverty task force a mere six weeks to come up with a workable plan. He made it clear that he did not want either increased welfare payments, income subsidies, or an expensive new jobs program. Many of the personnel Shriver staffed OEO with had worked for the Kennedy administration’s President’s Commission on Juvenile Delinquency (PCJD). They had already embraced community action and maximum feasible participation, and they naturally put it forward as a principal component of the War on Poverty. But as time would quickly tell, maximum feasible participation meant different things to different people. Johnson saw the CAPs as mechanisms enabling the poor to work cooperatively with state and local bureaucracies and political machines. Others saw community action as a means to challenge those bureaucracies and party organizations. Sargent Shriver would later acknowledge a deeper purpose—“to change institutions as well as people,” to challenge “hostile or uncaring or exploitive institutions” in an attempt to make them responsive to the peculiar needs of the “whole community.”⁸

For many black activists, the call for maximum feasible participation was the most compelling aspect of the Economic Opportunity Act. The notion of Community Action Programs resonated with a black community that had a long history of self-help organizations—from participant-owned insurance companies to literary societies, from black churches to civil rights organizations. All of these had emphasized the importance of self-improvement in service to community betterment. Not only radicals but established civil rights organizations such as the NAACP and the Urban League were swept up in the growing enthusiasm for community action by the poor. In the first year of the War on Poverty, over one thousand CAPs across the country received federal funding; by 1968, four-fifths of them were being run by private, nonprofit organizations directly funded by OEO.⁹

Samples of undertakings by OEO-funded CAPs were summer day camps for poor children in Detroit, fencing classes for underprivileged kids in Harlem, and a university-run health center in Boston. Hardly revolutionary. But in August 1965, Philadelphia’s poor used OEO funds to travel to Harrisburg to demonstrate against Governor William Scranton’s planned veto of several welfare measures. And members of the East New York–Brownsville antipoverty council had hardly been elected before they were talking about demanding improved public services from the city—better garbage collection and rigorous housing inspection.¹⁰

Mayors and governors complained with increasing shrillness about Shriver’s willingness to give control of poverty funds to private organizations that circumvented local political machines. Welfare had long constituted the base of political power for big-city organizations, and they were loath to give it up. Leading the charge was the powerful mayor of Chicago, Richard Daley, and Adam Clayton Powell, who’s HARY-YOU project in Harlem was one of the major relief projects in New York City. “What in the hell are you people doing?” Daley asked Bill Moyers. “Does the president know he’s putting money in the hands of subversives? To poor people that aren’t a part of the organization?”¹¹ Southern governors joined northern mayors in clamoring for control. Their motives, Shriver and his staff suspected, were not the purest. Initially, OEO stuck to its guns, insisting that the poor could constitute a majority on local CAP boards and that segregationists be removed from positions of power in the poverty program in Louisiana and other southern states. The ever-tanned and energetic Shriver came under increasing attack as a result. In an effort to appease critics, he agreed to give up the Peace Corps to concentrate on poverty, but the assault continued.

Abe Ribicoff, an increasingly influential voice in matters of poverty and urban unrest, argued to LBJ that for the War on Poverty to work,

            you have to have the political establishment, you have to have labor, you have to have industry, and you have to have civil rights and the poor. Now setting up what they [OEO] are doing now, setting up a new power base with the poor is absolutely dynamite because it has to lead to anarchy when the vicious men who have never been able to achieve power, seek power through the poor. Now you have to start with smart mayors and work all of them in together.¹²

LBJ agreed. “I am against subsidizing any private organization,” the president told Bill Moyers in August 1964. “I would prefer Dick Daley do it than the Urban League. . . . I just think it makes us wide open and I don’t want anybody to get any grants.”¹³ The problem was that “the poor” and many urban civil rights leaders sided with Shriver and the OEO radicals. Labor was split, with George Meany of the AFL-CIO backing the establishment, and Walter Reuther and the United Auto Workers (UAW) working to set up local nonprofits outside the existing political order. Meanwhile, representatives of the National Governors Conference lobbied to have amendments attached to the Economic Opportunity Act of 1965 providing for a gubernatorial veto of all poverty program decisions in their respective states.¹⁴

If LBJ was ambivalent about community action, he was totally committed to the Job Corps, a reincarnation in his mind of the New Deal’s Civilian Conservation Corps. But by 1965 it, too, was being attacked by both liberals and conservatives. Many Great Society officials saw the Job Corps as the answer to the culture of poverty. It would, recalled Christopher Weeks, special assistant to Shriver, remove the poorest youth, aged sixteen to twenty-one, from their home environments—“ghetto tenements and rural shacks”—and send them to “a clean, healthful center where massive injections of remedial education and job training would turn them into law-abiding, tax-paying good neighbors.”¹⁵ Though envisioned as a program for men, Congress added women, stipulating that one-third of the openings would be reserved for them. At its height the Job Corps included six large (1,000 to 3,000) urban centers for men, at least eighty rural centers for men (100 to 250 per unit), and seventeen for women (300 to 1,000 per unit). All offered health care and counseling as well as education and training. From the outset, OEO officially denied that the corps was intended primarily for African Americans, but they were simply trying to avoid the ire of segregationist legislators during congressional consideration of OEO. Of those remaining in the corps six months, nearly two-thirds were African American, while just a quarter were white. Very quickly both civil rights supporters and civil rights opponents came to see the corps as a program to help inner-city blacks. In the wake of Watts and other urban uprisings, conservatives denounced the Job Corps as a federal program to reward black criminals. When a riot erupted at the Job Corps Center at Camp Breckenridge in Kentucky over discriminatory hiring practices at the facility, conservatives denounced the camps as no more than breeding grounds for urban revolutionaries.¹⁶

The Job Corps, indeed, the entire War on Poverty, was designed to reinforce the traditional family model with an employed father and a homemaking mother. Women received “intensive training in home and family life and the development of values, attitudes, and skills that would contribute to stable family relationships and a good child-rearing environment,” the Job Corps announced. There was no vocational training that would allow women to compete for jobs in the larger workforce, thus stigmatizing and penalizing single mothers. Female trainees who became pregnant were summarily dismissed.¹⁷

Inevitably, the War on Poverty had to address the thorny issue of birth control. Economists and demographers estimated that over a generation, one million poor women practicing contraception meant 500,000 less poor children. Under existing Department of Health, Education, and Welfare guidelines, the agency could provide federal funds for family planning but only if states requested and administered such aid. HEW chief Anthony Celebrezze, a Catholic, insisted that federal activity in the area of birth control ought to go no further. Shriver, also a Catholic, violently disagreed. He, along with Harry McPherson and Bill Moyers, believed that the federal government through the OEO ought to undertake an aggressive campaign of sex education and provide free contraceptives not only to married poor women but also to the unmarried as well. Indeed, it was unmarried women and women not living with the fathers of their children who were responsible, biologically, for the population explosion. “If the purpose of our policy is to slow down the making of babies in conditions of squalor and intellectual degradation,” McPherson observed to Moyers, “the choice seems clear.”¹⁸

Johnson was leery. The subject was a minefield. As McPherson pointed out, the great mass of Catholics would prove acquiescent, but if the Vatican chose to make an issue of the matter, there would be trouble, particularly if it allied with white religious fundamentalists who would see federal birth control programs as attempts to subsidize immorality. Finally, there would be those within the black power movement who would cry genocide. Nevertheless, the OEO proceeded to make grants to private nonprofits to distribute information and contraceptives among both inner-city and rural poor regardless of color or marital status.¹⁹

In late July, the president took time off from lobbying for the poverty bill to secure longtime friend and confidant Abe Fortas’s appointment to the Supreme Court. LBJ had never forgotten the political disaster that had followed on the heels of FDR’s infamous court-packing plan. He knew how ground-breaking and controversial were the Great Society programs that had been created and were being contemplated, and he wanted to ensure that the liberal majority on the Warren Court remained intact. Moreover, he could depend upon Fortas to keep him abreast of the changing mood of the court as it responded to personalities and changing circumstances.

Fortas had always insisted that he did not want to leave his lucrative law practice for a seat on the court, but LBJ and Lady Bird suspected otherwise. Ever since LBJ had become president, Fortas, egged on by his wife and fellow attorney Carol Agger, had deflected talk of an appointment to the court. She wanted him to wait five or six years until the couple had ensured their financial security and Abe could enjoy the ermine of the bench in his declining years. But as Fortas biographer Laura Kalman observes, he “was a pragmatist who knew that history could be managed only up to a point. The opportunity had arisen now, and it might not occur again.”²⁰ Thereupon LBJ and Fortas entered into an elaborate charade in which it was made to appear that the former dragged the latter onto the court almost against his will. On July 19, Fortas wrote the president a letter declining his offer of a seat on the highest court in the land. On July 28, LBJ summoned his friend to the White House and told him that in minutes he was going to address a press conference announcing that he was sending an additional fifty thousand troops to Vietnam and that he was nominating Fortas for the vacant position on the Supreme Court.²¹ Faced with a fait accompli, he dutifully and gratefully accepted.

During Fortas’s confirmation hearings in August, some senators expressed worry that his close relationship with the president might compromise his judicial independence. “There are two things that have been vastly exaggerated with respect to me,” the nominee declared with some disingenuousness. “One is the extent to which I am a Presidential adviser and the other is the extent to which I am a proficient violinist. I am a very poor violinist but very enthusiastic, and my relationship with the President has been exaggerated out of all connection with reality.” Despite the fact that members of the John Birch Society and other right-wing groups flooded Washington with telegrams urging rejection of the nomination on the grounds that Fortas was a Jew, a liberal, and even, possibly, a Communist, he was approved unanimously.²²

As the debate in Congress over the 1965 poverty bill raged during the summer and early fall, LBJ stepped up the pressure, calling congressmen and -women and senators, urging labor leaders and civil rights organizations to enter the fray, and subtly threatening conservatives with the specter of urban revolution if new appropriations for OEO were not forthcoming.²³ The latter threat was not hollow. The uprising in Watts and an earlier less destructive riot in Harlem, with its potential to create a massive white backlash, frightened and depressed Johnson and Shriver. They saw the legislation increasing funding for the poverty program for 1966 as a crucial safety valve. The president demanded that Congressman Charles Halleck support his effort to force the poverty bill out of the hands of Howard Smith, the Rules Committee chairman.

But many Republicans were less than enthusiastic because they believed that in aiding the poor the War on Poverty was just enabling people who were bound to vote Democratic.²⁴ “That’s a good bill,” the president told Halleck, “and there’s no reason you ought to keep a majority from voting on it. If you can beat it, go on and beat it, but you ought to give me a fair shake.”²⁵ The president then turned to southern conservatives, many of whom saw the Job Corps as just another liberal scheme to promote racial integration. “I’m going to take tax-eaters and make tax-payers out of them . . . and I’m going to stop those damn riots,” he told Congressman George Mahon (D-TX). “I got them [civil rights leaders] to agree today . . . no more demonstrations and they’re asking please, put these people to work . . . and I’m going to put 150,000 of them [to work] in 90 days.”²⁶

Finally, after five weeks, the bill reached the floor. Johnson proceeded to enlist the help of labor leaders, including Meany of the AFL-CIO and Reuther of the UAW. In conversation with the latter, Johnson argued that not only the poverty bill but the remainder of the Great Society agenda was on the line. “They’re going to beat our poverty bill, and we can stand that, we can survive it,” he told Reuther. “But one thing we can’t survive is just getting beat this time of the year, because it’s like Roosevelt’s Supreme Court. They’re going to say ‘the king’s dead.’ If Johnson can’t pass a little $900 million poverty bill, he damn sure can’t pass anything else. And that’s what’s bad. . . . It’s going to de-nut him [the president].”²⁷

On October 9, Congress passed the Economic Opportunity Act Amendments of 1965—without a gubernatorial veto of Community Action Programs. It was a very close thing. The vote in the Senate was 44 to 43.²⁸ By the end of 1965, the OEO was alive and well, and it was only 20 percent of what had become nearly a $20 billion War on Poverty that included Social Security, direct relief, Food Stamps, HEW aid to slum schools, federal expenditures for public housing, and area redevelopment.²⁹

NOT ONLY HAD THE WHITE HOUSE LOBBIED INTENSELY FOR PASSAGE of the 1965 EOA amendments bill, it had also focused poverty programs on south Los Angeles in an effort to convince future potential rioters that there was hope. On August 26, LBJ announced that the federal government was going to immediately spend between $200 million and $300 million in Watts on, among other things, a special employment program, pilot child care centers, a small-business center to foster black-owned enterprises in the ghetto, a vigorous back-to-school program, construction of low-income housing, and an expanded surplus food distribution program.³⁰ But Abe Ribicoff, Walter Reuther, and others advised the president that special programs beyond OEO and AFDC were needed to address the complex problems facing the nation’s cities—problems such as mass transit that would bring the poor to available jobs, slum clearance programs that would do more than simply replace tenements with middle-class housing that the poor could not afford.

“There is no imagination to pull together as I see it what you do with schools, what you do with parks, what you do with roads, what you do with housing, what you do with urban renewal,” Ribicoff observed to LBJ; “all it has been up until now is a method to eliminate the poor and to substitute it with a middle-class and a lot of men to make a lot of money on big office buildings and big markets and big real estate developments. Now this has been a tragedy because . . . we have not helped the poor or the Negro but we have hurt him by forcing him to go into more and more crowded areas as we have destroyed the hovels in which he has lived.”³¹

Independently, Walter Reuther attempted to sell the White House on a “pilot cities” program in which business, labor, and the federal government would cooperate “to carve out significant portions of decayed areas of center cities and rebuild them with rehabilitation, new housing, new commercial buildings, new workers, professional people, Negroes, Whites, etc.”³² LBJ was sympathetic despite his dislike of Reuther.³³ It was no accident, he commented to journalist Al Friendly, that Watts simultaneously demonstrated the highest population density, the highest disease rate, the highest unemployment rate, and the highest rate of narcotic use in the country. “If we don’t face up to the problems [that we have now] ultimately [we will] not only have to face up to the ones we got now, but we face up to a bunch we have created that flow from failure to face up to the ones we got.”³⁴ Standing in the LBJ Ranch swimming pool at the beginning of August, Johnson declared to his new domestic adviser, Joseph Califano, “I want to rebuild American cities. . . . I want a bill that makes it possible for anybody to buy a house anywhere they can afford to.”³⁵ The upshot was a proposal for a new cabinet-level department—Housing and Urban Development (HUD).

Johnson’s vision of a new Department of Housing and Urban Development went far beyond what the Kennedy administration had in mind when it proposed and Congress rejected a housing and urban affairs bill. HUD would be an institution of both the Old Politics and the New. It would simultaneously solve the malaise created by mass society—anonymity, powerlessness, and isolation—and ease racial tensions in inner-city ghettoes by promoting employment and raising living standards. At the signing ceremony for HUD on September 9, 1965, LBJ exclaimed, “It is not enough for us to erect towers of stone and glass, or to lay out vast suburbs of order and conformity. We must seek and we must find the ways to preserve and to perpetuate in the city the individuality, the human dignity . . . the devotion to individual responsibility that has been part of the American character and the strength of the American system.”³⁶ HUD would be an instrument in service to the New Individualism, a new America produced by a society committed to both negative and positive rights.

Although the president was required to name a cabinet secretary for HUD no later than November 1, he agonized for more than three months before announcing his choice. Since his accession to the presidency, LBJ had made noises about naming the first black Supreme Court Justice [he did—Thurgood Marshall in 1967] and the first black cabinet member. Nearly everyone anticipated that Johnson would choose Robert Weaver, the administrator of the Housing and Home Finance Agency and a Negro, to head HUD.

But as LBJ confided to Roy Wilkins, he had serious misgivings. He was aware of the tremendous symbolic importance of appointing a black cabinet officer. He knew “how many little Negro boys in Podunk, Mississippi” would be uplifted by it. “Now I am very anxious, in the limited time the Good Lord is going to give me, to just not talk but to do and to do by example and to put the coon skins on the wall and not just talk and promise and then make big speeches,” he told Wilkins. Moreover, he liked Weaver, he said; he was a fair, intelligent if unimaginative man. But would racism in Congress and within the urban power structures prevent Weaver from getting the job done? “I rather think that a white man can do a hell of a lot more for the Negro than the Negroes can for themselves in these cities,” he observed to Wilkins.³⁷ “In my judgment you are liable to get yourself in the same shape you did after the reconstruction and it will take you another hundred years to get back,” the president confided to Katzenbach. “I doubt that this fella can make the grade and he will be a flop and he will be exhibit number one.”³⁸

LBJ had other reasons for delaying. He wanted to use Weaver’s potential appointment to compel civil rights leaders to follow the path he had chosen, and he wanted to impress upon Weaver the importance of his appointment and the debt he would owe to the president for it. In his conversation with Wilkins, he indirectly chided the leadership of the traditional civil rights organizations for not anticipating urban unrest and doing more to prevent it, for fostering demonstrations that contributed to the white backlash, and for not getting out and registering black voters.³⁹ Significantly, Wilkins told LBJ that he and the blacks that he knew would abide by whatever decision regarding the HUD secretaryship he made. “I can criticize you and will,” he told LBJ, “but I still believe in your heart.”⁴⁰ All the while LBJ kept Weaver and the black community in suspense, however, he had been running interference for his appointment with Richard Russell, Russell Long, and other southern senators. When LBJ finally sent Weaver’s name up in January, the Senate took a mere four days to give its unanimous consent.⁴¹

THE FIRST WEEK IN OCTOBER 1965, THE NATION WAS ONCE AGAIN reminded that racism was alive and well in the South. In August, in Lowndes County, Alabama, Thomas A. Coleman, a highway engineer and unpaid deputy sheriff, had emptied his shotgun into two civil rights workers, Jonathan M. Daniels, a twenty-six-year-old white Episcopal seminarian, and Richard Morrisroe, a Catholic priest of the same age, killing the former and gravely wounding the latter. Coleman’s trial took place in the slave-built, white-washed courthouse in Haynesville. Circuit Judge T. Werth Thagard refused to allow Alabama Attorney General Richmond Flowers to direct the prosecution, and he refused to delay the trial until Morrisroe was well enough to testify. The clerk of the court was Coleman’s cousin; the local football field had been named for his father. The local prosecutor, Arthur E. “Bubba” Gamble, dominated the proceedings. Joyce Bailey, a thin, nineteen-year-old Negro, took the stand and described the scene at the Cash Store, which a mixed group was trying to integrate. She recounted Coleman’s order to Daniels—“Get off this property, or I’ll blow your goddamn heads off, you sons of bitches.” Gamble joined the jury and spectators in prolonged laughter. She described the blast as it hit Daniels—“He caught his stomach and then he fell back.” With Father Morrisroe, she started running. After he was shot down, she testified, “I was still running.” More laughter from the gallery, and then somebody yelled, “Run, you niggers.” More laughter. Coleman was duly acquitted.⁴²

The White House was as repelled as most of the rest of the nation. Reedy and his cohorts mulled over various options, including reviving the Force Acts (Reconstruction-era measures empowering the president to use federal troops to protect citizens in the exercise of their constitutional rights), federal legislation to reform the jury system, and a sub-rosa campaign to convince southern officials that if they did not put a halt to these courtroom farces, the civil rights movement would be driven underground “where it is likely to act like the Viet Cong.” But in the end there was nothing in the short run that the administration could do.⁴³ In November, however, the Justice Department did intervene on the side of Charles Morgan Jr., a Birmingham lawyer who had been run out of Alabama for his liberal heresies; he had filed suit in federal court charging discriminatory jury selection in Haynesville.⁴⁴

In his Howard speech the previous June, LBJ had called for the convening of a White House Conference, “To Ensure These Rights,” to be held in the spring of 1966. In November, some two hundred civil rights leaders gathered at the Washington Hilton to plan for the meeting. By this point, the black backlash against the Moynihan report was in full swing. If Negroes had a family problem, declared Bayard Rustin, “it is not because they are Negro but because they are so disproportionately a part of the unemployed, the underemployed and the ill-paid.” Honorary chairman A. Philip Randolph, seventy-six, the courtly president of the Brotherhood of Sleeping Car Porters, called for a $100 billion “freedom budget” to be spent on eradicating ghettoes.⁴⁵ Moynihan, among others, agreed. “Pat’s answer was rather simple,” Harry McPherson recalled, “a family allowance plan. He took the position that all the remedial programs in the world were for naught unless there was an income base in the family. You could build on that; they would stay home and you’d have an interacting family. . . . This was a Catholic middle-class view.”⁴⁶ Given LBJ’s commitment to consensus, his determination to sell antipoverty and civil rights to conservatives as well as liberals, and the mounting costs of the war in Southeast Asia, such an approach, which could cost $11 billion to $12 billion a year, was an impossibility.

TO SIMULTANEOUSLY FINANCE THE WAR IN SOUTHEAST ASIA AND THE Great Society, it was imperative, LBJ believed, to hold down prices and wages in order to prevent runaway inflation. Beginning in August 1964, the Johnson administration had worked to persuade labor and management to adhere to an unofficial guideline of 3.2 percent in wage and price increases annually. The first great challenge to this standard, which corresponded to the estimated annual growth rate in productivity, came from the steel industry.⁴⁷

The United Steel Workers, headed by newly elected I. W. Abel, and the steel industry, represented by R. Conrad Cooper, had negotiated throughout the summer, but to no avail. The union demanded wage increases of approximately 5 percent, with steel offering half that amount. If it was forced to go above that offer, industry spokesmen said, prices would increase well above 3.2 percent. Abel had been elected on a promise to achieve the same wage increase recently won by the can and aluminum workers, and he would not budge. Cooper, banking on White House intervention, also remained adamant.

On August 17, LBJ summoned Abel to the White House to try a little persuasion. “I made commitments to the members who elected me,” Abel told the president defensively. “You’re starting to sound just like Dick Russell,” Johnson retorted, cunningly. “He sat on that very couch talking to me about my civil rights bill in 1964. I asked him not to filibuster. ‘We’ve got to make a stand somewhere,’ he said. He sounded just like you.’” Smiling, LBJ softened and told Able an anecdote. “I told Dick Russell the story about the Negro boy in bed with the white gal, whose husband arrived home unexpectedly. ‘Hide! Hide,’ she whispered. ‘He’ll kill you and then he’ll kill me.’” The president described how the black youth hid in the closet. “At this point,” Joe Califano, who was at the meeting, recalled, “Johnson bolted from his rocker, stood upright, arms stiff at his side, legs straight, tight together, back and shoulders ramrod straight. He described the enraged husband charging through the bedroom shouting that he knew someone was there, banging doors open. Finally he came to the closet where the culprit was hiding. ‘What the hell are you doing here?’ this little white gal’s husband shouts, fire in his eyes. ‘Everybody’s gotta stand somewhere, boss,’ this Negro boy answers.” Everybody laughed. Johnson leaned into Abel and said softly, slowly, “Everybody’s gotta stand somewhere,” he repeated. Just “like that Negro boy he wanted to keep down, Russell stuck himself in a closet with nowhere to go on civil rights. Mr. Abel, I know you gotta stand somewhere. But you gotta stand where you can move around a little, not just pinned in the linen closet.”⁴⁸

Initially, Johnson tried to leave it to Willard Wirtz and John Conner, his secretaries of labor and commerce, respectively, to work out a deal, but he found them too closely tied to the positions of their constituents. When the two closeted themselves with Abel, Cooper, and their lawyers in a suite in the Executive Office Building next to the White House, the best they could come up with was an eight-day postponement of the strike deadline. LBJ then brought former governor LeRoy Collins of Florida, successful negotiator of civil rights disputes; Senator Wayne Morse (D-OR), whose domestic expertise centered on labor-management conflict resolution; and former labor lawyer Arthur Goldberg into the picture. Following an extended breakfast meeting on August 30, all three expressed pessimism that the 3.2 percent guideline could be adhered to.⁴⁹ Johnson then decided to jump into the fray himself. The stakes were too high. He appealed typically to both parties’ patriotism. A strike would end the nation’s fifty-five-month economic expansion. Price rises on steel would percolate throughout the economy, providing justification for price increases on thousands of consumer items. A recently conducted Harris poll indicated that 87 percent of America’s housewives were worried about inflation.⁵⁰ Negotiators pushed LBJ to permit selective price increases that would allow a better wage offer to the union. “No price increase,” he told Califano. “None. Zero,” making a circle with his thumb and forefinger.⁵¹

Observers remarked on the enthusiasm, confidence, almost joy with which LBJ intervened in the steel dispute. He continued to pop in on union and industry negotiators while at the same time sending Clark Clifford, counsel to Republic Steel, to tell company executives that there would be no guideline-busting settlement and Goldberg to union leaders to tell them the same thing.⁵² On September 3, a gleeful Johnson flanked by Abel and Cooper, both of whom were obviously less than gleeful, appeared at a press conference to announce that a settlement had been reached and that it was well within the administration’s 3.2 percent guideline. Commentary in the press and the public were generally laudatory. “‘Masterful’ is the word for the way you brought the steel crisis to a successful solution,” economist Walter Heller wrote him. “You struck a key blow for continued cost-price stability and the country’s economic health.”⁵³

In reality, LBJ’s ostentatious intrusion into the steel dispute ended his honeymoon with the business community. “Business people are generally scared stiff by the tactics that have been followed in the aluminum, copper, and now the steel situation where individual companies have been singled out and expressions used that indicate that the administration leaders might look upon them as profiteers or unpatriotic,” Secretary of Commerce Connor reported to LBJ. His boss was not impressed: “Allright for them to call their President a son of a bitch but if he replies, he ought to go to jail. Is that the meat of it?”⁵⁴

In the midst of the steel brouhaha, conservative economist Milton Friedman wrote an article for the National Review entitled “Social Responsibility: A Subversive Doctrine.” A businessperson’s first and overriding obligation must be to his or her stockholders, Friedman proclaimed. To introduce other factors into the decision-making process would be to subvert the free-market system. It was his experience, Friedman wrote, that “the appeal to ‘social’ responsibility or ‘voluntary’ restraint has always occurred when the governmental agency which is responsible for the area of policy in question has been unable or unwilling to discharge its own responsibility.” Here was an attack on the whole notion of Johnsonian corporatism, the concept of business-labor-government cooperation to bring stability and predictability to the marketplace.⁵⁵

Executives and business academics chastised LBJ for undermining the very system he was trying to save. George Shultz, dean of the Graduate School of Business at the University of Chicago and a prominent labor arbitrator, warned that “it undermines private collective bargaining to have the President and government come in so strongly.” Lawrence Harvey, president of California’s Harvey Aluminum, agreed: “Soon there will be no more unions, in effect, and no more collective bargaining. The government will control the terms of every contract.”⁵⁶ A Washington cynic looked up Johnson’s favorite biblical quotation, “Come now, and let us reason together” (Isaiah 1:18), and found that the passage continued: “If ye be willing and obedient, ye shall eat of the good of the land; but if ye refuse and rebel, ye shall be devoured with the sword.”⁵⁷

In the end, LBJ’s attempts to limit price-wage increases without mandatory controls proved futile. In January 1966, John V. Lindsay, the newly elected liberal Republican mayor of New York, agreed to give transit workers a 6.3 percent pay raise. In the summer, steel defied LBJ by increasing prices. A subsequent settlement between the International Machinists and Aerospace Workers (IMA) and the country’s airlines gave the union a 4.9 percent raise and in the words of the IMA president “destroy[ed] all existing wage and price guidelines now in existence.”⁵⁸

Nevertheless, the Great Society marked a watershed in the history of labor-management relations in the United States. Some of the change had to do with intent, some with long-term trends, and some with unintended consequences of collateral legislation. In the years following World War II, even as union membership grew, organized labor came under attack from both the Right and the Left. There was the Taft-Hartley Bill of 1947 whose section 14b permitted right-to-work laws, measures outlawing agreements between unions and employers making union membership a condition of employment. States where unions were weakest, principally in the South and West, proved most likely to pass such laws. But even in the industrial states of the Northeast and Midwest, unions faced a business community that had begun to mobilize against union bargaining clout. At the same time, critics on the left denounced unions for selling out to big business. In 1952 sociologist Daniel Bell labeled modern trade unionism “the capitalism of the proletariat,” arguing that unions as a market-shaping interest group were inevitably winning out over organized labor as an ideological force. By the early 1960s, Bell’s was no longer a voice crying in the wilderness. A generation of intellectuals, jurists, journalists, academics, and politicians had come to see the unions as little more than a self-aggrandizing interest group, no longer a force for progressive change.⁵⁹

Union critics on the left were overstating the case. During the Johnson administration, both the AFL-CIO’s more conservative wing under George Meany and the CIO, which included the powerful Auto Workers Union headed by left-leaning Walter Reuther, proved to be consistent supporters of Great Society legislation, although southern unions continued to discriminate and northern unions would man their seniority systems as bastions against affirmative action. While he readily appealed to the social consciences of labor union members, LBJ had no problem with modern unionism. He was a thoroughgoing corporatist, and in his view consensus within organized labor was a positive thing. But in the view of most businessmen and some unionists, LBJ’s ostentatious and ongoing intervention into labor-management disputes—indeed, corporatism itself—was undermining the whole concept of collective bargaining. What Johnson did was nothing new for Democratic administrations, which beginning with that of Franklin Roosevelt had politicized collective bargaining, putting unionists, capitalists, and government labor relations experts in the Oval Office, the halls of Congress, and the chambers of the Supreme Court. Employers decried this development and worked to reprivatize industrial relations, thus taking the “labor question” out of the realm of politics and returning it to the far more favorable terrain of the firm-centered welfare state.⁶⁰ But what really delivered the coup de grace to collective bargaining was the “rights revolution.”

Title VII of the 1964 Civil Rights Act, which prohibited discrimination in hiring or firing because of race, sex, or national origin, would come to equal the Wagner Act, which created the National Labor Relations Board (NLRB) to enforce fairness in collective bargaining in importance in the world of work. Within just a few years of its creation, the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission would become an even more high-profile agency than the NLRB, and the judicial interpretation of Title VII became every bit as significant and controversial as any Supreme Court labor law ruling. Title VII opened the floodgates to a host of new laws that were classified as civil rights initiatives but were actually central to the expansion of work rights in the factory, office, mine, and salesroom. In 1968 came the Age Discrimination in Employment Act, in 1969 the Mine Safety Act, in 1970 the Occupational Safety and Health Act, in 1973 the Rehabilitation Act, and in 1974 the Employee Retirement Income Security Act.⁶¹ Labor’s reliance on collective bargaining came to seem far less potent and universal than the rights discourse generated by the state’s conception of substantive justice and equal protection under the law.⁶² In brief, more and more workers sought redress of their grievances in court rather than in the union hall.

But as the glorious Eighty-Ninth Congress neared its end and one Great Society coonskin after another was nailed to the wall, the growing alienation of business and labor was not yet apparent. Increasingly, LBJ permitted himself the luxury of comparing achievements of the Great Society with those of the New Deal and himself with FDR. As was the case with the New Deal, there was to be something for everyone, even the venomous and ungrateful intellectuals and artists who were then criticizing Johnson for everything from his Vietnam policy to his haircut. Unlike the New Deal’s efforts in this area—the Federal Writers’ Project, the Federal Theater project, and others—the Great Society’s programs were designed to be permanent.

During his brief appearance at the White House Festival of Arts in June 1965, LBJ had observed that it was the role of the federal government “as representative of all the people” to stimulate and nurture the creative arts.⁶³ Indeed, the previous March the president had submitted to Congress legislation creating a National Foundation on the Arts and a National Foundation on the Humanities. The proposals had sped through the Senate and bogged down briefly in the House. A little presidential prodding, however, freed the bills from the conservative coalition’s embrace. On September 29, LBJ signed the new measures and promised that a National Theater, a National Opera, and a National Ballet would follow. The legislation created two 24-member bodies, a National Council on the Arts/Humanities to select projects worthy of funding, and a National Endowment on the Arts/Humanities to administer the grants awarded. Thus was launched the first comprehensive and sustained effort by the federal government to materially support artists, historians, musicians, writers, critics, philosophers, sculptors, painters, and dancers.⁶⁴ As chairman of the Arts Council, the White House selected Roger Stevens, playwright, art impresario, and, not coincidentally, an intimate of the Kennedys.⁶⁵