THE GREAT SOCIETY OFFERED PROTECTIONS FOR THE ENVIRONMENT, consumers, and workers as well as ethnic minorities and the poor.
During the Progressive Era, the conservation movement had had two goals: John Muir’s drive to preserve the beauty of nature, its forests, mountains, lakes, and rivers, by withholding them permanently from the grasp of developers, and the promotion of sustainable economic development through state and federal regulation of grazing, timber cutting, and mining. Theodore Roosevelt, the first great conservation president, was, like the movement of which he was a part, willing to limit individual freedom for the good of the nation. Political insurgents from the western states, most of them members of Roosevelt’s own party, resented the meddling of easterners and experts—what Republican Representative Herschel Hogg of Telluride, Colorado, called the “goggle-eyed, bandy-legged dudes from the East and sad-eyed, absent-minded professors and bugologists.”1 The westerners declared that conservation would doom economic development and threaten civilization.
On March 4, 1907, Roosevelt staged his famous end run around anti-conservationists who were trying to block him. His chief forester, Gifford Pinchot, had been steadily enlarging the federal forest preserves to the annoyance of timber companies and land speculators. Western congressmen tacked onto an appropriations bill an amendment forbidding Pinchot from carrying on his work in certain states. Roosevelt felt he couldn’t veto the bill, but he held it for the full ten days allowable under the Constitution while proclaiming twenty-one new areas, totaling nearly sixteen million acres, as preserves. In the end, however, Pinchot; President Woodrow Wilson, who shared some of his arch-opponents’ concern for natural preservation; and others were unable to build a sense of shared public urgency about conservation that would overwhelm opponents; the fate of grazing lands did not alarm most Americans in the way that the fear of eating poisoned beef did (thus the Pure Food and Drug Act and Meat Inspection Act of 1906). Instead of conjuring up a broad national-interest-based political coalition, the conservation movement became largely a battle with different producer interests vying for favor. Roosevelt’s heavy-handed use of federal authority had only activated latent fears about centralized power and threats to property rights.2
Like other aspects of the Great Society, environmental protection had its roots in the Kennedy administration. In 1961 JFK had named Arizona congressman Stewart Udall as secretary of the interior. He was the first Arizonan to be selected for the cabinet. Before completing his college studies, Udall had worked for two years as a Mormon missionary. After serving in World War II, he practiced law in Tucson with his brother, Morris. Beginning in 1954, Udall served his first of three terms as a United States congressman. He was a member of the “conservation bloc” on the Committee on Interior and Insular Affairs. Udall and Kennedy had become friends in the 1950s, and the Arizonan played a key role in delivering his state to the Democrats in the 1960 presidential election. Instead of running Interior as a loose-knit group of bureaus and agencies that promoted resource development and protected western interests, he envisioned its mission as serving national environmental needs. He readily admitted that as a congressman he was “pro-dam.” As he later observed, “I voted for the upper Colorado project that flooded Glen Canyon. I instinctively identified my values more with the Sierra Club than with dam building, except that I was from Arizona, and so you had to be for water. You couldn’t go to Congress and be against dams.”3
Udall and the environmentalists of the 1960s went beyond the narrowly gauged conservation movement that had characterized environmentalism since the Progressive Era. In line with the liberal philosophy being espoused by Arthur Schlesinger Jr. and John Kenneth Galbraith, Kennedy and Udall insisted that the goal was not simply to conserve pockets of beauty, wildlife, and natural resources but also to preserve and enhance the “quality of life” in cities and towns as well as mountains, forests, lakes, and deserts. In his book The Quiet Crisis, Udall articulated his philosophy: “America today stands poised on a pinnacle of wealth and power, yet we live in a shrinking open space, and in an overall environment that is diminished daily by pollution and noise and blight. This, in brief, is the quiet conservation crisis of the 1960s.”4
The Kennedy administration had sponsored a White House conference on the environment in 1962 and pushed through Congress legislation creating the Cape Cod National Seashore, but it was not until publication of Rachel Carson’s Silent Spring (1962) that nationwide support began to build in behalf of the new environmentalism. A marine biologist with the US Fish and Wildlife Service, Carson had written a celebrated series of nature essays collected and published in 1951 as The Sea Around Us. As the economy exploded in the years after World War II, Carson had become increasingly disturbed by the pollution of the nation’s rivers, lakes, and underground aquifers by DDT and other pesticides. Because it was used to eliminate malaria-carrying mosquitoes and insects that destroyed food and fiber crops, DDT had been hailed as a wonder chemical and used indiscriminately. In Silent Spring Carson demonstrated through massive research that indiscriminate use of toxic chemicals was poisoning the nation’s water supply and food sources, thus threatening the health of human beings and animals alike. A number of magazines, pressured by their food advertisers, refused to serialize Silent Spring. Finally, The New Yorker agreed to publish her findings. Though pesticide manufacturers mounted a massive campaign to discredit Carson as an hysteric, Silent Spring became the text of the burgeoning environmental movement.
Nature, Carson argued, did not exist to be exploited by humans; rather, humankind was part of nature and had an obligation to live in harmony with it, enhancing the quality of the natural habitat as human beings were enhanced by it. She and her disciples did not call for the elimination of pesticides, merely their regulation. She claimed that private companies and public agencies did not have the right to contaminate the environment with toxic substances without the knowledge of the public. Like Upton Sinclair’s The Jungle, a turn-of-the-century exposé of the brutal exploitation of labor and grossly unsanitary conditions in the meatpacking industry, Carson’s Silent Spring sparked a public demand for regulatory legislation.
Environmentalists were initially pessimistic about LBJ and the environment. They remembered him as the oil senator from Texas. But once again, reformers were pleasantly surprised. In truth, Johnson’s background revealed a man who since the early days of his political career had devoted himself to soil conservation, water preservation and control, and publicly owned power. Many New Dealers—and Johnson was one to the core—believed that the Great Depression had been triggered by an imbalance between the income of rural areas and the earning power of city dwellers. The solution, then, lay in a determined effort to improve the lot of agricultural areas with soil and range conservation, multipurpose river development, rural electrification, and recreational opportunities. Policymakers, of which LBJ was one, believed that if a region’s natural resources were both owned by the people closest to them and fairly distributed, the economic balance between city and farm could be restored.5
The Hill Country of Central Texas, the rural heart of Johnson’s district, was beautiful but daunting, with rocky outcrops, thin soil, persistent drought, and intermittent flooding. As the congressman from 1937 through 1948 representing the Tenth Congressional District, Johnson entrenched himself politically by serving the interests of his rural constituents, by making political allies of the land and water. “All our rich topsoil was wasting away,” he later recalled in an interview: “And so we started to do something about it. We had to dig some wells, we had to terrace our land. We had to remove some of the small cedars and trees. . . . We built six dams on our river. We brought the floods under control. We provided our people with cheap power. . . . That all resulted from the power of the government to bring the greatest good to the greatest number.”6
Congressman Johnson was at the forefront of a movement to have the state of Texas create an independent agency, the Lower Colorado River Authority (LCRA), to develop a comprehensive plan to dam the Colorado River, which bisected the Hill Country from northwest to southeast, creating lakes and reservoirs that would provide a reliable source of water to local farmers. Following their construction, the dams not only did that but also made available a source of cheap power to the population of Central Texas through their hydroelectric generators. With the support of the Roosevelt administration, Johnson worked to ensure that his constituents could buy power from the publicly controlled LCRA rather than the privately owned Texas Power and Light.7
Udall admired JFK, whom he considered a “modern president,” and worried whether LBJ would extend his legacy. The secretary of the interior regarded Johnson as a superb politician, but “ruthless,” and he had opposed him in the 1960 primaries. But Johnson could boast strong ties with Arizona politicians such as Carl Hayden and former Senate Majority Leader Earnest McFarland; he had supported the Central Arizona Project and the Bridge Canyon Dam when he was senator. The two men never became close personally, but Udall came to view Johnson as an environmentalist in the fullest sense of the word.8
Between 1963 and 1968, President Johnson signed into law approximately three hundred conservation, beautification, and environmental measures—more than during the preceding 187 years combined. He convened nine task forces focusing directly on the environment. The breadth of the legislation and scope of the task forces were impressive—everything from land policy to pollution control to consumer and worker protection. Congress was an active participant, sometimes leading, more often following. JFK had favored federal funding for sewage treatment plants, air pollution control, national park expansion, wilderness preservation, and expanded recreational facilities. But he was unable to garner much congressional support.9
In environmentalism, consumer and worker protection, and beautification, LBJ saw an opportunity to get behind those quality-of-life issues that Richard Goodwin and Bill Moyers, Schlesinger and Galbraith, the New Left, and the American intelligentsia in general seemed to think were so important. Here, truly, was a bridge from the interest-based Old Politics to the cause-based New Politics, from the Old Left, which focused on issues of economic justice, to the New Left, which homed in on quality-of-life issues. In his speech at the University of Michigan, LBJ had claimed that the Great Society was “a place where the city of man serves not only the needs of the body and the demands of commerce but the desire for beauty and the hunger for community. . . . It is a place where men are more concerned with the quality of their goals than the quantity of their goods.”10
FIRST ON THE ADMINISTRATION’S ENVIRONMENTAL LIST WAS POLLUTION control. “You’ll recall this Rachel Carson book, Silent Spring,” Secretary of Agriculture Orville Freeman prompted his boss in mid-1964. “I think it’s very important politically that we be doing something about this because we’ve got to use pesticides in agriculture and in our forests . . . we’ve just got to go ahead and do the right thing.” (That is, regulate their content and use.)11 Throughout his first year and a half in office, LBJ invoked the memory of Theodore Roosevelt and promised to take up where the Rough Rider had left off. “There is no excuse for a river flowing red with blood from slaughterhouses. There is no excuse for paper mills pouring tons of sulphuric acid into the lakes and the streams of the people of this country. There is no excuse—and we should call a spade a spade—for chemical companies and oil refineries using our major rivers as pipelines for toxic wastes.”12
Under the Water Quality Act of 1965, all states were required to enforce water-quality standards for interstate lakes and rivers within their borders. The following year, Senator Edmund Muskie (D-ME) pushed through Congress the Clean Waters Restoration Act. The measure authorized more than $3.5 billion to finance a cleanup of the nation’s rivers, streams, and lakes and to block further pollution through the dumping of sewage or toxic industrial waste. From that point on, LBJ tended to take violation of his environmental standards personally. White House staffer Lee White recalled that when the president received a series of complaints that waste was being allowed to contaminate drinking water in a particular locale, he called up Udall. “I don’t know what the hell you guys are doing but that dirty-water program just ain’t working. I’ve got all kinds of complaints.” Udall replied, “Mr. President, that may be the case, but the truth of the matter is that that program is in the Health Service, in the Department of Health, Education and Welfare.” Incredulous, the president exclaimed, “What’s it doing there?” “That’s where it’s always been,” Udall answered. Johnson said, “Well, I think that’s outrageous. When I think of dirty water, I think of you.” He then turned to White and Califano, who had also been present during the conversation, and ordered them to use the president’s reorganization authority and get the clean water program transferred from HEW to Interior.13
It was a natural step for environmentalists to move from concern about water purity to a focus on clean air. President Johnson’s Task Force on Environmental Pollution, established in 1964, documented the damage being done to the environment by toxic emissions from coal-burning factories and auto exhaust systems. The nation was shocked to learn that air pollutants created “acid rain” that fell back to earth, tainting food crops and further corrupting the water supply. On Thanksgiving Day, 1965, New York City experienced an ecological catastrophe: an air inversion that concentrated almost two pounds of soot per person in the atmosphere. Eighty died and hundreds were hospitalized. In the wake of the Third National Conference on Air Pollution in 1966, Congress passed the Air Quality Act of 1967, which set progressively stricter standards for industrial and automobile emissions. The polluting industries had invested billions of dollars in lobbying for crippling amendments. As a result, standards were to be set jointly by industry and government. In 1969 Congress passed the National Environmental Policy Act requiring, among other things, that federal agencies file environmental impact statements for all federally funded projects. The following year the House and Senate established the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA). These were but the first shots in the ongoing battle to protect the public and nature from air and waterborne pollutants.
On another environmental front, Udall joined with Lady Bird Johnson to launch a preservation and beautification movement that would protect wilderness areas and make inhabited areas as visually attractive as possible. In 1889 John Muir had formed the Sierra Club in an effort to save the giant redwoods of California’s Yosemite Valley. During the years that followed, that organization and other wilderness preservation groups made some headway, but they were no match for the lumber companies and mining interests, which insisted on the unrestricted right of private enterprise to exploit the public domain. From the time LBJ had been director of the National Youth Administration in Texas, Lady Bird Johnson had taken an intense interest in preserving portions of the environment in their natural state and cleaning up the American landscape. During the 1930s, she had cofounded a movement to establish a system of roadside parks. She, along with her husband and Stewart Udall, helped persuade Congress to pass the Wilderness Act of 1964, a legislative initiative the Sierra Club and the Wilderness Society had been touting for ten years. The measure set aside nine million acres of national forest as wilderness areas, protecting them from timber cutting and strictly regulating public access. The following year, the Wild and Scenic Rivers Act extended federal protection over portions of eight of America’s most spectacular waterways. Mrs. Johnson was gratified by these successes, but she was determined to do something about inhabited areas as well.
At the first lady’s behest, the president convened in 1964 the Task Force on the Preservation of Natural Beauty. The national beautification movement focused first on Washington, DC. Determined to convert the nation’s capital into a model community, Mrs. Johnson worked through the National Park Service and private donors to beautify Pennsylvania Avenue and create a system of parks throughout the city. She and LBJ subsequently championed the Highway Beautification Act of 1965 in the face of stiff opposition from the Outdoor Advertising Association. Beautification was good business, LBJ declared. Tourism in Europe was booming, but it was declining in the United States. “Yet a few men are coming in and insisting that we keep these dirty little old signs up in these dirty little old towns,” he proclaimed to an environmentalist group, “and that this is going to affect free enterprise.”14 The highway bill cleared the Senate but stalled in the House. LBJ sent word to the Hill that he considered a vote against highway beautification “a matter of personal honor” for him and his wife. The day that the measure came up for a vote, October 7, Lady Bird was to host a previously scheduled White House dinner. LBJ sent word that no member of Congress would be welcome at the executive mansion unless and until the highway bill was voted through.15 As finally passed, the compromise law banned or restricted outdoor billboards outside commercial and industrial sectors and required the fencing of unsightly junkyards adjacent to highways.16
Critics of the administration dismissed leaders of the beautification movement as dilettante elitists, “the daffodil and dogwood” set. Rats, open sewage, and unsafe buildings were more of a problem than green space, advocates for inner-city dwellers argued. Mrs. Johnson responded by persuading University of Chicago historian and Democratic activist Walter Johnson to head the Neighborhoods and Special Projects Committee, a body whose goal was to clean up and beautify the mostly black, poorer neighborhoods of Washington, DC. Compared to racism, war, poverty, and social injustice, the beautification movement paled, but it was an authentic aspect of the larger environmental movement and important in part because it involved members of the American aristocracy.
That portion of the environmental crusade that sought to protect human beings and the natural habitat from polluting industries reinforced and was reinforced by the consumer protection movement. Congress’s enactment of a bill imposing the first federal standards on automobile emissions marked a victory for both groups. In 1965 Ralph Nader, a muckraking young lawyer who would become the guru of consumer advocacy, published Unsafe at Any Speed, an attack on giant automobile companies such as General Motors, which allegedly placed design and cost considerations above safety. He played a key role in securing passage in 1966 of the Fair Packaging and Labeling Act and the Automobile Safety Act. Near the close of Johnson’s term, Congress enacted the landmark Occupational Health and Safety Act (OSHA), which imposed new federal safety standards on the American workplace.
The speed with which the modern environmental movement took hold in America was breathtaking. On April 22, 1970, environmentalists gathered to celebrate Earth Day. The staff of Environmental Action issued a manifesto declaring that on that day “a generation dedicated itself to reclaiming the planet. . . . A new kind of movement was born—a bizarre alliance that spans the ideological spectrum from campus militants to Middle Americans.” Across the country as many as twenty million Americans gathered to celebrate Earth Day, purportedly “the largest, cleanest, most peaceful demonstration in America’s history.”17
In a way, the Great Society as a whole was an environmental movement in the sense of scientific engineering of the social and natural milieus. Medicare, federal aid to education, the War on Poverty and its various programs, public broadcasting, the national endowments for the arts and humanities, as well as the wilderness acts and the clean air and water measures were designed to improve America’s social, economic, political, and cultural environments. Speaking for the Kennedy and Johnson administrations, Stewart Udall had declared: “No longer is peripheral action—the ‘saving’ of a forest, a park, and a refuge for wildlife—isolated from the mainstream. The total environment is now the concern, and the new conservation makes man, himself, its subject. The quality of life is now the perspective and repose of the new conservation.”18
IN THE LATE FALL OF 1965, THE “FABULOUS EIGHTY-NINTH,” AS THE press labeled the sitting session of Congress, adjourned. Its record of achievement was unparalleled: Medicare; Medicaid; voting rights; federal aid to education; the National Endowment for the Humanities (NEH) and National Endowment for the Arts (NEA); a massive battery of antipoverty programs; highway beautification; a heart, cancer, and stroke bill that pumped new funds into the National Institutes of Health for research; area redevelopment; and a new department of Housing and Urban Development. LBJ was intensely proud of what he and Congress had done; he desperately wanted to be compared to his hero, FDR.
It was not to be. “The President has been lucky,” Senate Majority Leader Mike Mansfield told reporters. “Don’t overlook that. If Clarence Cannon were still alive, he’d have plenty of headaches with his appropriation bills. But the House Appropriations Committee is headed by George Mahon of Texas who is a close friend of the President’s.”19 Others pointed out that every measure that Congress had passed had had the support of a majority of Americans. The one item that did not—repeal of section 14b of the Taft-Hartley Act, the so-called right-to-work proviso—was voted down in both houses. The Republican National Committee estimated that the cumulative cost of the top fifty Great Society bills would be $112 billion. “Think of it!—$112 billion!” exclaimed National Committee chair Ray C. Bliss. “This spending program dwarfs into utter insignificance all past spending programs, by all nations, all over the world.”20 Columnists who were willing to give LBJ the credit he felt he deserved for the legislative achievements of 1965 were careful to couple their praise with a critique of the Johnson foreign policies that portrayed them as aimless and reactive.21
Unfortunately, LBJ did not take these blows gracefully. He could not believe that he was not getting credit for resolving some of the great issues of the twentieth century, resolving them in favor of the poor, oppressed, and disadvantaged without polarizing the nation and stoking the flames of class warfare. In the fall of 1965, he agreed to give an interview to political historian William Leuchtenburg, an admirer of Schlesinger. LBJ picked up on Leuchtenburg’s condescension immediately. “Mr. President, this has been a remarkable Congress,” Leuchtenburg said. “It is even arguable whether this isn’t the most significant Congress ever.”22 LBJ responded, “No, it isn’t. It’s not arguable.” He then launched into a two-hour tirade against the press, liberals, and the inflated reputations of both FDR and JFK. Roosevelt, he declared, “was like the fellow who cut cordwood and sold it all at Christmas and then spent it all on firecrackers. . . . Social Security and the Wagner Act were all that really amounted to much, and none of it compares to my education act.” Johnson was aware that his guest was the author of an admiring account of the New Deal. “No man knew less about Congress than John Kennedy,” LBJ followed up. Every press story he read was full of lies. “We treat those columnists as whores,” he shouted to Leuchtenburg. “Anytime an editor wants to screw ’em, they’ll get down on the floor and do it for three dollars.”23
Johnson subsequently ordered his staff to put together a series of White House dinners that turned into tributes to LBJ and the Great Society. “A moment ago I left the White House at the conclusion of another of the President’s great circuses,” Orville Freeman recorded in his diary, “where the business community is beguiled, seduced, enraptured and then coaxed into thunderous applause about the great God LBJ. . . . At my table a Mexican-American who started as a shoeshine boy made his statement of dedication to America and of course LBJ. Then two Negros also spoke. . . . There wasn’t a single critical note in the crowd. What does it mean? I really don’t know. On the one hand I feel a sense of purpose and direction, consensus, mobilization, and it’s good. . . . The troublesome thing is, it is kind of enshrined in a kind of hero worship, exhibitionism.”24
And, as usual, there was the impulse in LBJ to try harder. On the phone with Congressmen Gerald Ford and Hale Boggs, the House minority and majority leaders, respectively, on the verge of adjournment in late October 1965, LBJ burst out, “Oh hell, do you want me to tell you all what you didn’t do? Twenty three major items that you all just ignored me.” He ticked off Home Rule for Washington, DC, 14b (Taft-Hartley’s right-to-work amendment), firearms control, truth in packaging and lending, amending the Fair Labor Standards Act, reforming the Electoral College, and amending the Water Resources Act.25 There would be no rest for either Congress or the man in the White House.