THE PRESIDENTIAL ADMINISTRATION OF LYNDON JOHNSON IS remembered primarily for two matters: civil rights, considered a success, and the war in Vietnam, viewed almost universally as a disastrous mistake. Except for the Civil Rights Acts of 1964 and 1965, Johnson’s domestic program—the Great Society—has largely been ignored. Yet it was perhaps the most comprehensive and ambitious effort to change the political, social, and economic landscape of the United States in all of the country’s history. It established new policies and bureaucracies to deal not only with race relations but also federal aid to education, medical aid for the poor and elderly, immigration, environmental pollution and conservation, urban decay, and the federal role in arts and humanities. Those policies and bureaucracies have, for the most part, survived, but many of the issues with which they dealt remain unresolved. Indeed, they dominate today’s headlines and public forums. The cover of the May 2015 issue of TIME magazine featured a photograph of Baltimore police in riot gear chasing a black protester; the title was “America, 1968 (2015).” Currently, Democrats and Republicans are deadlocked over immigration reform, limits on carbon emissions, Obamacare, education reform, and the proper role of the federal government in the nation’s cultural life. For those who would understand the issues of today, it is imperative to begin with a reexamination—or, rather, examination—of Lyndon Johnson’s sweeping domestic program.
Volumes have been written on the mainsprings of other great American reform efforts, such as the Populist and Progressive movements and the New Deal, but next to nothing on the forces and factors responsible for the Great Society. Those few liberals who have chosen to write about the reforms of the 1960s have portrayed them as the culmination of JFK’s idealism, the fulfillment of the New Frontier, ignoring the fact that Kennedy’s program remained stalled in Congress at the time of his death and that Johnson’s vision transcended that of his predecessor. Vietnam has been an albatross that the historical LBJ has been unable to shed. Most academics of my generation were fervently committed to the antiwar movement and have never been willing to forgive the Texan for thrusting the republic more deeply into the Vietnam quagmire. For Franklin Delano Roosevelt, US participation in World War II enhanced his moral credibility and, in the process, the reputation of the New Deal. For LBJ, escalation of the conflict in Vietnam bankrupted him morally, casting a dark shadow over his domestic reform initiatives. Then, there is the enduring cultural and political power of Camelot. The Kennedys detested LBJ as a usurper, a man who through no merit of his own became president and reaped the harvest that JFK had sowed. Finally, some veterans of the civil rights movement see accolades heaped on Johnson as somehow diminishing Martin Luther King Jr. Thus, the extremely faint praise of LBJ in the motion picture Selma. Until Hillary Clinton in 2008, no Democratic presidential candidate had dared invoke Johnson’s name. Her husband’s Oval Office contained busts of every twentieth-century Democratic president except LBJ. For conservatives, the reform initiatives of the 1960s were and are anathema. During the 1980s, the Great Society became the perfect whipping boy for Ronald Reagan and the New Right, a classic example of the evils of “government overreach” and the “welfare state.” Those who have been willing to defend the Great Society, even to speak to its historical significance, have been few and far between indeed.
ON SEPTEMBER 7, 1964, LYNDON BAINES JOHNSON ROSE BEFORE A large audience gathered in Detroit’s Cadillac Square and delivered a speech as visionary and utopian as any ever given to the American people. “Man has never lived in a more exciting time,” the president declared. “The world is changing before your eyes.” The nation must rise to meet the challenges of the present and future, he said, or be relegated to history’s dustbin:
I remember the men who captured my native soil from the wilderness. They endured much so that others might have much. Their dream was for the children; mine too is for the child, even now struggling toward birth.
I want all the ages of man to yield him their promise, the child will find all knowledge open to him; the growing boy will shape his spirit in a house of God and his ways in the house of his family. The young man will find reward for his work and feel pride in the product of his skills.
The man will find leisure and occasion for the closeness of family, and an opportunity for the enrichment of life. The citizen will enrich the nation, sharing its rule, walking its streets, adding his views to its counsel, secure always from the unjust and the arbitrary power of his fellows.
The least among us will find contentment, and the best among us will find greatness, and all of us will respect the dignity of the one and admire the achievements of the other.
At the end of the journey, he will look back and say, “I have done all that a man could do, built all, shared all, experienced all.”1
Extravagant language, especially from a Texas politician with a reputation for ruthlessness and opportunism. Under normal circumstances, a man like Johnson would have been laughed off the national stage, the butt of jokes by political cartoonists and ridicule by cynical political commentators. But this was not the case. His Isaiah-like rhetoric was generally hailed as that of an authentic man of the people. In the wake of the martyrdom of John F. Kennedy and LBJ’s successful effort to push his predecessor’s domestic program through Congress and in revulsion at the extremist rhetoric of Barry Goldwater, the arch-conservative senator from Arizona, and George Wallace, the race-baiting governor of Alabama, the vast majority of Americans looked to Lyndon Johnson expectantly. The nation in 1964 was simultaneously confident and desperate enough to countenance talk of utopias. LBJ had given a name to his promise during his commencement address at the University of Michigan the previous spring—the Great Society.
ON THE AFTERNOON OF JFK’S ASSASSINATION, NOVEMBER 22, 1963, Johnson, newly sworn in as president, had flown back to Washington aboard Air Force One with his predecessor’s body on board. The former first family and staff needed time to move out of the White House, so LBJ retired to the Elms, his vice-presidential residence. Instead of sleeping, President Johnson spent most of his first few nights as chief executive sitting up with his aides, filling yellow legal pads with legislative proposals. What followed during the next four years was the passage of more than one thousand pieces of legislation that, coupled with the edicts of the liberal Warren Court, would transform the American political and social landscape. First up was the Kennedy tax cut that would generate the prosperity that would make social and economic change possible. Then came the 1964 Equal Accommodations Act, the 1965 Voting Rights Act, Medicare and Medicaid, federal aid to education, the Job Corps, Model Cities, the 1965 Immigration Act, clean air and clean water legislation, the creation of public television and radio, and the Fair Housing Act of 1968. Some of the Great Society programs were more successful than others, but no reasonable observer can question their impact on most aspects of life in America.
What is exceptional about the myriad pieces of legislation that Congress passed during the Johnson presidency is that they were enacted not during a period of great moral outrage by the middle class at malefactors of great wealth or at a time when Americans feared that the country was about to be overwhelmed by alien, immigrant cultures or in the midst of a crushing depression that threatened the very foundations of capitalism. There seemed to be no sweeping mandate for change. JFK had barely defeated Richard Nixon in the election of 1960.
The two obvious power sources for the Great Society were the civil rights movement and the Cold War. Prior to the Montgomery Bus Boycott of 1954 and the emergence of Martin Luther King’s Southern Christian Leadership Conference (SCLC), the black civil rights movement in the United States had been largely a matter of elites attempting to use constitutional law to achieve civil equality and nondiscrimination. In the 1950s, however, civil rights became a mass movement, first drawing in working-class blacks through their churches and then spreading to younger, secular African Americans by means of the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC) and the Congress of Racial Equality (CORE). The violence directed against blacks, especially children, during the 1963 protest marches in Birmingham seemed to dramatically alter racial perceptions.
In 1957 the United States was traumatized by the launching of Sputnik. The ability of the Soviet Union, America’s archrival, to place a payload in earth orbit before the United States could do so came as a huge shock to the nation. A great hue and cry went up for education and cultural reform. John F. Kennedy and other Democrats blasted the Eisenhower administration for its complacency and superficiality. If the United States was not to be overwhelmed by the communist superpowers in the struggle for hearts and minds in the developing world, they declared, it must prove the superiority of liberal capitalism to Marxism-Leninism. And that meant not just more quantity but more quality—in education, in the arts, in technology, in national purpose.
Sputnik and the ongoing competition with the Soviet Union were calls to arms for the members of the Greatest Generation. The men and women who had survived the Great Depression and defeated the Axis powers had grown uneasy with the relatively comfortable days of the Eisenhower era. As John F. Kennedy would remind them in his inaugural speech, there were still frontiers to conquer in the form of domestic poverty, space exploration, and disease eradication. And, of course, there was the ongoing crusade to make the world safe for democracy. In many ways the Great Society, both imagined and real, would be the supreme achievement of the Greatest Generation. How fitting that those who had saved capitalism and defeated Hitler and Hirohito should secure freedom at home and abroad and establish a society in which each individual could realize his or her potential.
Tools were at hand. The crisis of confidence spawned by Sputnik was a bit illusory. In the years before and after World War II, thousands of European intellectuals, refugees from fascist persecution and the devastation and destruction of the war, had fled to the United States and joined with American scientists and social engineers to create a critical mass, producing such breakthroughs as the Salk vaccine to eradicate polio, solid-fuel rocket propulsion, and social engineering models that promised to solve problems ranging from entrenched poverty to juvenile delinquency to institutionalized racism.
Then there was the New Left, the creation of the children of the Greatest Generation. In an issue devoted to the baby boomers, TIME magazine estimated that by the end of the 1960s one-quarter of the population would be twenty-four years old and younger. Many working-and lower-middle-class youths continued about their business as usual, but college students at elite institutions created the Free Speech Movement and then the Students for a Democratic Society (SDS). With the Port Huron Statement in 1962, the manifesto of the SDS, the New Left was born. Joining with left-leaning faculty and public intellectuals, Tom Hayden, a radical student leader at the University of Michigan and coauthor of the Port Huron manifesto, and his cohort denounced Jim Crow, the military-industrial complex, and New Deal liberalism. The New Left called on its followers to mobilize in behalf of full citizenship for African Americans, to force disarmament on the Great Powers, and dismantle the military-industrial complex. “Participatory democracy” was its remedy for the racism, economic exploitation, and institutional oppression that plagued America.
The final, obvious power source was Lyndon Johnson himself. As a constellation of ideas, as a vision of America, the Great Society had been taking shape in Johnson’s mind since he first heard on his parents’ Victrola in Johnson City, Texas, the Great Commoner William Jennings Bryan orating in behalf of the downtrodden masses. From his father’s fervent populism and his mother’s liberal Baptist faith, from his experiences of racism at the Welhausen Elementary School in Cotulla, from Franklin Roosevelt and the New Deal, from his love for the American political process, from his own messianic aspirations for himself came a reform vision of massive proportions and the will to realize it.
Reform leadership, FDR had insisted, must combine principled rhetoric and solid accomplishments. “Theodore Roosevelt,” Roosevelt commented to Ray Stannard Baker in 1935, “lacked Woodrow Wilson’s appeal to the fundamental and failed to stir, as Wilson did, the truly profound moral and social convictions.” But Wilson “failed where Theodore Roosevelt succeeded in stirring people to enthusiasm about individual events, even though these specific events may have been superficial in comparison with the fundamentals.” As a rhetorician determined to tap into the well-springs of American idealism, LBJ combined the best of both.2
In his effort to generate support for reform, Lyndon Johnson seized on Kennedy’s martyrdom with a vengeance. How could Congress reject the 1964 Civil Rights Act, Medicare, and the War on Poverty without turning its back on the fallen hero? He was determined, LBJ said, to protect and extend JFK’s legacy, and the country must follow his lead. In doing what Kennedy would have done, America would rediscover its national purpose. Though Johnson did not say it, he intended to interpret and if necessary manufacture JFK’s legacy. Ironically, it was Johnson who made Jack Kennedy the great liberal that he is remembered as being by many Americans today.
Fortunately for LBJ and his campaign to arouse the public’s conscience, the American people were in a God-fearing mood. The forces of conformity, so strong during the early postwar period, coupled with the anxieties of the Cold War, had led to a religious revival that was simultaneously intense and pervasive. Overall, church membership increased from 64.5 million (49 percent of the total population) in 1940 to 125 million (64 percent) in 1965. All religions and denominations gained, but leading the way were Roman Catholics, Baptists, and Southern Pentecostals. Americans, historian Richard Hofstadter has written, are prone “to fits of crusading” and “do not abide very quietly the evils of life.” They are, political commentator Seymour Martin Lipset observed, “particularly inclined to support movements for the elimination of evil.”3 LBJ both participated in these perceptions and inclinations and manipulated them to achieve his policy objectives: “From our Jewish and Christian heritage, we draw the image of the God of all mankind, who will judge his children not by their prayers and by their pretensions,” he told a group of newspaper editors, “but by their mercy to the poor and their understanding of the weak.”4 And these were hard-drinking, tough-minded journalists he was speaking to, not men and women of the cloth.
Though not initially significant, Vietnam would become another engine that drove the Great Society. The decisions to escalate the war made in the spring and summer of 1965 conflicted and depressed LBJ. Five days after approving General William Westmoreland’s request for two additional combat divisions to be sent to Vietnam, Johnson called in Joe Califano, his chief domestic policy adviser, and gave him his marching orders for 1966—a new department of transportation, model cities, fair housing, and new environmental initiatives. Guilt over the war led to a need to compensate; progress in the fight against poverty, racism, ill health, and ignorance might be offered in propitiation for the death and destruction being wrought in Southeast Asia.
But what programs, legislative strategies, and political philosophies were best suited to fulfill the promise of social and economic justice in America? Most reform-minded individuals were and are well intended. The problem was, as Lyndon Johnson and others observed, not a lack of willingness on the part of men and women of affairs to do good but the ability to recognize which actions and programs served the greater good and which did not. Both those political philosophers, activists, public intellectuals, and politicians who proclaimed an abiding faith in human nature and those who did not claimed to have virtue on their side—that is, a concern for the commonweal as a whole. But which ideologies, which social programs would best coerce the mob or restrain the plutocracy and conserve a maximum of freedom for the general polity?
Instinctively, LBJ and the architects of the Great Society drew on the past. The liberal initiatives of the 1960s were descendants of a reform movement that began with Populism and continued through the Progressive Era and the New Deal. The War on Poverty could trace its roots back to the early Progressive Era and the emergence of the Social Gospel as a force both in the nation’s religious and political life. In line with Progressivism, the reforms of the 1960s sought to restructure and reform the physical, social, and political milieu in ways that enhanced equality, opportunity, and quality in American life. The New Deal had promised to expand the rights guaranteed to all Americans beyond “negative” rights—freedom of speech, religion, association, and so forth—to include “positive” rights, such as the rights to a basic education, equality of opportunity, and a degree of social security. The Great Society moved not only to fulfill that promise—to expand the definition of citizenship—but also to extend the rights of full citizenship to those previously excluded.
IN THE WAKE OF HIS SWEEPING VICTORY OVER BARRY GOLDWATER IN the 1964 election, Johnson told Bill Moyers, the young Texan who would become one of LBJ’s most trusted aides, that the administration had at most twenty-two months in which to bring the Great Society to fruition. He had a mandate from the public and a liberal Congress, LBJ said, but the window of opportunity was small, and it would begin to close by the mid-term elections in 1966. Johnson ticked off some of the forces that would be arrayed against the administration. The conservative coalition—the amalgam of southern Democrats and Republicans that had blocked reform since the days of Harry Truman—was down, but not out. The racial violence in Birmingham and other segregationist strongholds that had erupted as Martin Luther King and the SCLC launched their protests and practiced nonviolent civil disobedience had roused the consciences of whites outside the former Confederacy, but racism ran deep in American society, and there was the very real possibility of a backlash.
The citizenry was still profoundly conflicted about the causes and cures for poverty. Polls continued to indicate that half of all Americans believed that poverty was the result of individual failings, and half that it was due to forces beyond the control of the individual. And, of course, there was the political calculus, the law of diminishing returns. In the process of persuading Congress and the nation to embrace equal accommodations, voting rights, federal aid to education, Medicare, a war on poverty, sweeping environmental legislation, immigration reform, urban renewal, and the myriad other initiatives the president had in mind, the administration would have to expend all of its political capital. When its account was empty, the window of reform would close. And the Vietnam War loomed ominously on the horizon. In addition to these perceived roadblocks, forces also lurked in the shadows, forces beyond even the Texan’s imagination, some of them offshoots of the engines driving reform in the 1960s, some unintended consequences of the Great Society programs themselves.
Indeed, in some areas the Great Society contained seeds of its own destruction. The administration seemed at times to be calling in artillery on its own position, pursuing policies that were antithetical to the moderate consensus it depended on.5 Community action—that is, participation by the poor and underprivileged in the political, social, and economic decisions that affected their lives—was front and center in the Port Huron Statement, the manifesto of the Students for a Democratic Society. Maximum feasible participation sounded harmless to LBJ, and Community Action Programs (CAPs)—the government-sponsored initiatives designed to institutionalize grassroots involvement in decision making—would be a lot less expensive than publicly financed works projects or a guaranteed income.
Very quickly, however, state and local authorities came to see the Community Action Programs as dangerously subversive, at worst a forum for criminals and at best a conduit through which the federal government and the inner-city poor could bypass the existing power structure. Johnson attempted to stem the tide, to rein in the Office of Economic Opportunity (OEO) as it set about sponsoring more than a thousand CAPs, but bureaucratic momentum proved too much for him. As a result, one of the lasting, if unintended, achievements of the Great Society was a vast network of local nonprofits that gave voice and opportunity to the nation’s urban poor. But, at the same time, the CAPs upset the delicate political equation that Johnson depended upon to keep momentum for reform going. Among other things, maximum feasible participation spawned the National Welfare Rights Organization (NWRO), which used the courts to challenge restrictive welfare regulations and maximize welfare rolls. At a time when Johnson was telling conservatives and liberals alike that the object of the Great Society was to get people off welfare and into the workforce, the number of Americans on welfare, thanks in part to the efforts of the OEO, doubled.
The Great Society was predicated philosophically and politically on consensus. In the Johnsonian world, enemies were abstract—disease, ignorance, racism—not concrete—economic royalists, segregationists, doctors, the “Upper Ten,” radical immigrants. Johnson as president abjured partisan politics, crossing the aisle repeatedly to secure votes for key legislation. To the dismay of the Democratic National Committee (DNC) and his personal political advisers, he virtually ignored party affiliation when making executive and judicial branch appointments. But rebellious youth, both conservative and liberal, decried consensus as the protector of an unjust status quo. The Free Speech Movement and the Students for a Democratic Society demanded that America’s youth be liberated from the societal norms and institutional controls that had characterized the 1950s. The Port Huron Statement denounced the military-industrial complex, domestic racism, exploitive capitalism, and the liberal establishment. Consensus itself was something to be feared, a mechanism to perpetuate an unjust status quo and stifle individualism.
The Great Society’s effort to address both quantity and quality-of-life issues produced a contradiction that would have profound consequences for minorities and women. A strong equity rationale ran through Great Society programs from the Civil Rights Acts of 1964, 1965, and 1968 to the Elementary and Secondary Education Act and the War on Poverty. But as many reformers were beginning to acknowledge, equity was not enough. Opportunity did not automatically translate into achievement. In his 1965 Howard University speech, LBJ seemed to be moving toward compensatory action. He cited the ravages of slavery and post–Civil War discrimination and called for “affirmative action” to level the playing field. But what Johnson and Kennedy before him had in mind was “soft” affirmative action—measures taken by federal, state, and local governments and private employers to ensure that all discrimination in hiring practices was eliminated.
Affirmative action, like so many other Great Society programs, took on a life of its own, however. By the time Johnson left office, representatives of disadvantaged groups were calling for hiring quotas and workforce configurations that mirrored local population percentages for race and gender. Conservatives and even some figures in the civil rights and women’s movements denounced “hard” affirmative action as a threat to the equity rationale that had played such a fundamental role in the struggle for minority rights and women’s liberation, but to no avail.
Yet another unforeseen and, as far as the coalition LBJ had crafted in support of the Great Society, subversive consequence of the reform program of the 1960s was the rising level of expectations and frustrations among northern blacks created by the successful campaign against Jim Crow. In 1961, the Urban League’s Whitney Young warned of an impending urban crisis. Blacks might very well end up with “a mouthful of rights and an empty stomach,” he declared.6 For the most part there was no legally mandated segregation in the North, and black voters were not systematically disenfranchised. But informal segregation and discrimination were pervasive. Generally speaking, black voters were nothing more than powerless pawns in the machinations of big-city machines. Public policy, market practices, and racial prejudice confined African Americans to deteriorating neighborhoods, separate and unequal schools, and menial jobs. The result was a series of urban uprisings that shook the republic to its foundations. The Watts riot, beginning just five days after the signing of the Voting Rights Act of 1965, marked a turning point in the history of the Great Society. As Lyndon Johnson and the architects of the Second Reconstruction (a name given to the civil rights movement of the 1950s and 1960s, the First Reconstruction referring to the postemancipation civil rights regime in the 1860s and 1870s) were soon to learn, they had built a political coalition to force equality of opportunity and access on the South with northern constituencies that were not themselves committed to those principles in their own backyard.
During the 1964 presidential campaign, LBJ, prodded by Goldwater’s charge that the Democratic administration was presiding over a massive breakdown of law and order in the United States, touted the War on Poverty as part of the War on Crime. In so doing he opened a Pandora’s box that threatened to overwhelm the entire Great Society. The commingling of the two wars offered conservatives a rare opportunity to attack the Johnson consensus. As the OEO and other agencies focused on the nation’s inner cities, ghetto violence only increased. By 1966, the mantra of the conservative coalition had become law and order. Critics of Johnson and the Great Society proved increasingly successful in selling the American public on three notions: first, that urban rioting and civil disorder grew out of the civil rights movement, successfully conflating nonviolent civil disobedience with looting and burning; second, that the Warren Court favored the rights of criminals over the rights of victims; and third, that the Great Society, in undermining individual initiative and self-reliance, was creating a comity composed of individuals with no self-discipline and a deep-seated sense of entitlement.7 Thus did the War on Crime become a war on the War on Poverty.
Still another irony that plagued the Johnson administration’s ambitious domestic programs was that, while Washington continually justified the Great Society as an effective response to the putative utopia of Marxism-Leninism, conservative Republicans and southern segregationists charged that many of the organizations and initiatives spawned by the Johnsonian vision were communist inspired and even controlled. Dixiecrats such as Georgia senator Richard Russell and Mississippi senator James Eastland, in an effort to stave off federally mandated civil rights programs, proclaimed that the civil rights movement was nothing less than a communist conspiracy. States’ righters had long argued that social planning, intrusive federal programs, and big government in general were heralds of a coming socialist state.8 Indeed, for decades not only segregationists but conservatives in general had been trying to persuade the American people that liberalism equaled socialism and that socialism equaled communism. As they had during the 1930s, Dixiecrats were willing to tolerate programs that benefited poor white southerners, but they fought tooth and nail against the various 1960s civil rights acts as well as Medicare and federal aid to education, both of which were civil rights bills in themselves. For obvious reasons, segregationists were determined to paint the civil rights movement red, and in this they found a potent ally in J. Edgar Hoover’s FBI.
Finally, the Vietnam War and the Great Society were inextricably intertwined, producing yet another brace of ironies. In the minds of many Cold War liberals—who were collectively the engine of reform in America from 1963 through 1965—the conflict in Vietnam was an extension of the effort to achieve social and economic justice abroad. For a year and a half following the Gulf of Tonkin incident, however, military considerations trumped nation building, and South Vietnam was treated to free-fire zones and indiscriminate sweeps by conventional military forces. Then, between late 1966 and early 1968, the White House presided over a shift in strategy in Vietnam from search-and-destroy to an emphasis on counterinsurgency and pacification, an approach more congenial to liberals. But it was too late. For many Americans, both hawks and doves, the 1968 communist Tet Offensive (a victory perceived as defeat) proved to be the last straw. Disillusionment with the war in Southeast Asia coupled with ongoing urban unrest eroded the consensus that LBJ had depended upon to enact the Great Society and fight the Second Indochina War.
Lyndon Johnson’s pessimism concerning the time allotted to the administration to achieve its domestic goals was more than warranted. Credibility gaps were everywhere—unfulfilled promises in Southeast Asia, unredeemed expectations in the nation’s ghettoes, and unmet pledges to restore law and order through antipoverty and civil rights initiatives. But as 1963 passed into 1964, these were clouds on the horizon. There was a window of opportunity; LBJ and his lieutenants were aching to take advantage of it.