Grand Expectations: The United States, 1945-1974 (Oxford History of the United States Book 10)

by James T. Patterson

To highlight the role of elites in the support of McCarthy is to challenge the notion that he aroused great popular support. Polls, indeed, showed that he did not; only once, in 1954, did more than 50 percent of Americans say that they backed him. Still, office-holders knew that it paid off politically to be loudly and insistently against Communism, especially following the alarms that rang through American society in late 1949 and early 1950: the Soviets had the Bomb, the Reds had China, Hiss had lied, Fuchs was a spy. These were widely known, profoundly alarming events that were already promoting Red Scares—in unions, in schools and universities, in Hollywood, within the Truman administration itself—well before McCarthy made his headlines. It was in this highly charged Cold War atmosphere of fear and suspicion that McCarthy and his well-placed allies were able to run amok.

As Diana Trilling said many years later, "McCarthy not only deformed our political thinking, he . . . polluted our political rhetoric. [He] had a lasting effect in polarizing the intellectuals of this country and in entrenching anti-anti-communism as the position of choice among people of good will."112

But Truman had gone farther than that, asserting that his constitutional role as commander-in-chief justified executive action alone. Many later Presidents, notably Lyndon Johnson, followed in Truman's footsteps by committing the United States to fighting without securing congressional sanction.

Opinions such as these revealed a profound truth about Americans in the post-World War II era: they were not only patriotic but also eager—in the short run—to back decisive presidential actions in the field of foreign affairs. Later Presidents, indeed, came to understand that "police actions" and "surgical strikes" could greatly (though briefly) revive sagging ratings in the polls. This was emphatically not Truman's motive for going to war, but his firm and "presidential" resolve helped temporarily to raise his popular standing in the summer of 1950.

This they used to full advantage, raising havoc with North Korean supply lines. UN air superiority remained vital throughout the war, enabling the dropping of 635,000 tons of bombs (and 32,557 tons of napalm)—more than the 503,000 tons dropped in the Pacific theater during all of World War II.21 The bombing followed a consciously devised "scorched earth" policy that wiped out thousands of villages and deliberately destroyed irrigation necessary for the all-important rice economy of the peninsula. Thousands of Koreans suffered from starvation and slow death; many survivors cowered in caves. The number of civilian deaths—estimated at around 2 million—approximated 10 percent of the prewar population of the peninsula. The ratio of civilian deaths to total deaths in the Korean conflict was considerably higher than in World War II or Vietnam.22

The conflict in Korea also accelerated the process of globalization of the Cold War. When the fighting ended, the United States found itself ever more strongly committed to greater military support for NATO. It redoubled efforts to rebuild Japan as a bastion of capitalist anti-Communism in Asia.70 It had to protect Rhee, a tyrant, and to station troops in South Korea for decades ahead. It also found itself more engaged in the support of Chiang Kai-shek in Taiwan and in the camp of the French in Indochina. By January 1953 America was providing 40 percent of the French effort in that little-known but highly incendiary outpost of Southeast Asia.71

The emphasis on military expenditures boosted by the Korean War, while helpful to areas engaged in defense contracting, set public priorities that did little to promote government support for a healthy peacetime economy.

The Red Scare on Capitol Hill—and elsewhere in the United States during the Korean War—exposed a final legacy of the war: it deeply damaged the Truman administration. This damage was cumulative rather than dramatic, for the Korean conflict, unlike the later quagmire that was Vietnam, was not a "living room war." People could not turn on their television sets and witness the savagery of combat. There was little in the way of organized anti-war protest: Americans either wanted to win or get out. Some 5.7 million men served in the military during the war—about one-third the number in World War II—without much being said against the draft. But the frustrations of stalemate—and the continuing casualties—heightened the Red Scare and rendered Truman virtually powerless to control Congress or effectively to lead the country. Well before the 1952 elections it was clear that the Korean War had divided the nation and that the majority of the American people were ready for a change in leadership.

Rhetoric such as this tapped into the persisting undercurrent of regional, class, and ethnic resentments that raged beneath the surface of American society in the postwar era. Like McCarthy and his allies, the Chicago Tribune regularly assailed liberal eastern intellectuals, on one occasion carrying the headline HARVARD TELLS INDIANA HOW TO VOTE. Its columns regularly associated virile masculinity with anti-Communism and implied that Stevenson was something less than a "real man." The New York Daily News, a bitterly reactionary paper, referred to Adlai as "Adelaide" and said that he "trilled" his speeches in a "fruity" voice, using "teacup words" that were reminiscent of a "genteel spinster who can never forget that she got an A in elocution at Miss Smith's finishing school."37

The President also proved ready to accept a few moderately liberal ventures in the realm of social policy. "Should any political party attempt to abolish Social Security, unemployment insurance, and eliminate labor laws and farm programs," he warned his conservative brother Edgar, "you would not hear of that party again in our political history."82 He thereupon signed in 1954 a broadening of Social Security. He also sought to extend the minimum wage, which covered fewer than half of the wage workers in the United States. Both programs, of course, were financed primarily by employers and workers—not by federal funds that might increase federal deficits. But Eisenhower in no way threatened the welfare state begun in the New Deal years: social welfare expenditures during his presidency rose slowly but steadily as a percentage of GNP (from 7.6 percent in 1952 to 11.5 in 1961) and (especially after 1958) as a percentage of federal spending.

Because both of these coups were quickly and rather easily accomplished—and because some of the CIA's involvement remained secret—they did not attract great attention from the American press. This was unfortunate for several reasons. First, the coups exacerbated internal divisions in these countries, with disastrous long-range consequences for the people there. Second, the coups indicated the willingness of reporters at that time uncritically to accept obfuscatory CIA cover stories: it was not until the late 1950s, when a U-2 reconnaissance plane under control of the CIA was shot down over the Soviet Union, that significant numbers of reporters began to display a healthy distrust of self-serving government handouts.27 Third, it was obvious that the coups involved well-placed economic interests. A thorough public discussion of these interests would have been useful in exposing the material forces that helped to drive America's Cold War behavior. Fourth, the coups convinced the CIA and other government officials that covert actions were easily carried out. In the next few years it conducted other such actions in Japan, Indonesia, and the Belgian Congo. The bravado that such efforts engendered was to prove disastrous in later years.

Eisenhower was also afraid that high levels of defense spending would give too much power to military leaders and defense contractors. The result could be a "garrison state" that distorted priorities. "Every gun that is made," he said in 1953, "every warship launched, every rocket fired signifies, in the final sense, a theft from those who hunger and are not fed, those who are cold and not clothed."35 This did not mean that he believed in large-scale government social programs to relieve suffering; far from it, for those, too, would unbalance the budget. But he did worry that heavy spending for arms would feed what he later called the "military-industrial complex."

The whole world, many Americans seemed to think by 1957, was turning itself over to please the special, God-graced generation—and its children—that had triumphed over depression and fascism, that would sooner or later vanquish Communism, and that was destined to live happily ever after (well, almost) in a fairy tale of health, wealth, and happiness. Not everyone, of course, had these grand expectations. Poverty and discrimination still afflicted millions, especially blacks, Mexican-Americans, and Indians. Cold War concerns, including nuclear testing, remained unnerving. A recession hit the country in 1958, temporarily souring the atmosphere. By then a number of groups—blacks, some of the young, women here and there—were openly restless. Still, the mid-1950s seemed almost wonderful, especially in a material sense, to millions of upwardly mobile people.

A crash research program then paid off, especially in the lab of Dr. Jonas Salk of the University of Pittsburgh Medical School. Having developed a killed-virus vaccine against the disease, Salk (with government help) mounted a nationwide inoculation program in 1954–55. The testing operated amid relentless publicity and increasingly nervous popular anticipation. Finally, on April 12, 1955, the tenth anniversary of the death of FDR, a polio patient, Salk announced that the vaccine was effective. It was one of the most exciting days of the decade. People honked their horns, rang bells, fired off salutes, dropped work, closed schools, and thanked God for deliverance. Within a few years, by which time most American children had been inoculated, polio ceased to be a major concern. There were only 910 cases in 1962.

immigration to the United States remained insignificant in the 1950s, averaging only 250,000 a year during the decade. Ellis Island, the nation's preeminent immigration center, closed in 1955.49 Most "ethnic" Americans, moreover, continued to be white in skin color and of European background. In 1960 the most numerous groups of people with a foreign or mixed parentage had hardly changed since 1945. They continued to be German- and Italian-Americans (approximately 3.3 million each), followed by people with roots in Canada, Poland, Britain, Russia, and Eire. Mexican-Americans ranked next, well down the list, with 1.2 million. Asians remained an almost invisible group outside a few concentrated urban neighborhoods. The census in 1960 enumerated only 642,000 people (of a total population of 180.7 million) who had one or more parents from anywhere in all of Asia.

On Flag Day in 1954 Eisenhower signed legislation that added the phrase "one nation under God" to the Pledge of Allegiance as recited by millions of children in American schools. The new pledge, he said, would enrich a world in which there were so many people "deadened in mind and soul by a materialistic philosophy of life." The President then expressed one of his most fatuous (yet apparently popular) utterances: "Our government makes no sense unless it is founded on a deeply felt religious faith—and I don't care what it is." A year later Congress endorsed this approach by approving legislation that added the words "In God We Trust" to American currency.

Critics of affluent excess during the boom years of the mid-1950s tended sometimes to expect human beings to deny themselves material pleasures. Yet a culture in which rising numbers of people have the luxury of fairly secure food and shelter—increasingly the case in the United States in the post-World War II era—is one in which hopes for still greater comforts will expand. The majority of Americans, their basic needs more secure, developed ever-larger expectations about life. Some, concentrating on material gain, came to crave quick personal gratification. Others, however, began to imagine a better society in which the best of American ideals could be put into practice—this, too, the nation as a whole could afford. In this way, material progress helped in time to arouse not only quests for personal gratification but also rising awareness of the needs and rights of people. It would not be long before a rights-consciousness emerged that shook the surface calm of American culture.

those who focused on the debasement of American aesthetic life tended to exaggerate their case. The 1950s witnessed the rise to artistic prominence of a number of essayists and novelists—J. D. Salinger, Ralph Ellison, Saul Bellow, Bernard Malamud, James Baldwin, John Updike, Philip Roth—whose work received widespread critical acclaim and remained much admired in later years.5 It was equally unfair to dismiss the Art World as only faddish or strictly of "midcult" quality. Thanks in part to the flight of European artists and intellectuals to the United States during the 1930s and 1940s, New York City emerged after the war as a vibrant center for painters, sculptors, dramatists, actors, dancers, writers, musicians, and others in the arts. The New York School of abstract expressionist painting by Americans such as Jackson Pollock attracted international attention in the 1940s and early 1950s.

As post-modern critics were later to emphasize, "texts" (whether High Culture or popular entertainment) received distinctively personal "readings" from individuals.10 People are not easily programmed. That this is the case can be demonstrated by exploring the world of television, a dynamic force in the explosion of mass culture during the 1950s.

Millions of families dropped other activities to watch the early stars, such as the comedians Milton Berle, Arthur Godfrey, Lucille Ball, and Jackie Gleason. Water companies reported enormous increases in usage during commercial breaks. Families suspended talk during meals to watch the "tube," especially after the advent of TV Dinners in 1954. Ball, star of the immensely popular "I Love Lucy," captivated audiences in late 1952 as the date arrived for her (real-life) baby. When she featured the blessed event on January 19, 1953, some 44 million people tuned in to watch. The show received the highest TV rating (68 percent) of any in the 1950s. (A smaller number of viewers, some 29 million, watched Eisenhower's televised inauguration the next day.) By the 1960s polls reported that television was the favorite leisure activity of nearly 50 percent of the population and that TV sets were on for an average of more than three hours a day in American homes.13

T. S. Eliot described TV as a "medium of entertainment which permits millions of people to listen to the same joke at the same time, and yet remain lonesome."

MUCH OF THE HAND-WRINGING about "mass culture" in the 1950s came from the Left. From right-wing contemporaries came different laments: over the rise of sexual liberation, juvenile delinquency, and generational change.

decision of the Food and Drug Administration in May 1960 to approve the sale by prescription of Enovid, the first oral contraceptive for women.

By 1955 thirteen states had passed laws regulating the publication, distribution, and sale of comic books. Leading intellectuals,

the rise of rock 'n' roll was nonetheless one of the most shocking cultural phenomena of the mid- and late 1950s, especially to people over the age of twenty-five. Like jazz in the 1920s, the new music seemed to separate young Americans from their elders and to usher in the beginnings of a strange and powerful "youth culture." Rock 'n' roll gave millions of young people—especially "teenagers" (a noun that came into widespread use only in 1956)—a sense of common bond: only they could appreciate it.75

What the restless young still lacked in the 1950s was the greatly magnified sense of possibility—of open-ended entitlement—that was to give them greater energy and hope in the 1960s. Instead, they encountered still strong cultural norms that prescribed traditional roles for "growing up": "girls" were to become wives and homemakers, "boys" were to enter the armed services and then become breadwinners.

Exploiting federal funds for urban renewal, they declared downtown black neighborhoods to be "slums," tore them down, and put up commercial buildings or housing for whites in their place. African-Americans were displaced into dilapidated neighborhoods, increasingly in all-black public housing projects. Most of the 21,000 family units of public housing erected in Chicago during the 1950s were built in already black regions of the city, thereby greatly increasing the density of blacks in these areas.24

Discrimination in housing solidified an already widespread de facto segegration in northern schools. Whether this had totally bad results continued to be debated many years later, for some experts argued that all-black schools (with black faculties) offered reinforcement for African-American children that often did not exist in desegregated schools. Still, it was everywhere obvious that discriminatory housing patterns prevented black children from attending much-better-financed white schools. In short, African-American children were denied the basic right of equal opportunity. Many northern black schools, indeed, continued to be badly maintained institutions where faculty despaired of establishing elementary discipline and where little if any serious academic learning took place.

Asserting that slavery had eradicated African-American consciousness, Nathan Glazer and Daniel Moynihan concluded as late as 1963, "The Negro is only an American, and nothing else. He has no values and culture to guard and protect."26 It followed, other whites believed, that whites could ignore what blacks did and thought. This is what Ralph Ellison lamented in labeling his novel Invisible Man (1952) and what James Baldwin later meant by entitling a collection of his essays Nobody Knows My Name (1961). To be ignored was as bad as to be oppressed—maybe worse.

The politicians opposed to desegregation did their most effective work by conjuring up a range of imaginative ruses to evade implementation of Brown. States cut off aid to desegregated schools, provided tuition grants to students who attended "private" all-white institutions, denied licenses to teachers who tried to work at desegregated schools, and barred members of the NAACP from public employment. "Freedom of choice" laws authorized parents to send their children to schools of their own choosing. Many opted for all-white private schools, then intimidated black parents who tried to follow suit. "Pupil placement" laws were a favorite dodge. These enabled school officials to use the results of racially biased scholastic or psychological tests as grounds for assigning students to segregated schools.

Women played large roles in what followed in Montgomery and in other demonstrations to come. Jo Ann Robinson, a black English teacher, moved quickly. Hearing of Parks's arrest, she stayed up most of the night, with other members of the Women's Political Council of Montgomery, which she headed, to print protest leaflets, some 50,000 in all, to be distributed in the next few days.71 The contribution of women like Robinson did not suggest that they were angrier than men; the mounting impatience of involved black people knew no gender boundaries. But black women were often a little less susceptible to economic pressure and to violence than were black men.

A biographer-historian, Taylor Branch, describes this appeal: "His listeners responded to the passion beneath the ideas, to the bottomless joy and pain that turned the heat into rhythm and the rhythm into music. King was controlled. He never shouted. But he preached like someone who wanted to shout, and this gave him an electrifying hold over the congregation. Though still a boy to many of his older listeners, he had the commanding air of a burning sage."

After the year-long excitement of Montgomery, militant activism for civil rights actually abated.83 A great many black people, to be sure, had been inspired; they remained angry about discrimination and eager for change. But most white Americans had never paid much attention to the plight of minorities—whether they were Indians, Asians, Mexicans, or blacks—and for the remainder of the decade they did not much bestir themselves to improve race relations in the nation. Martin Luther King notwithstanding, they seemed more interested in enjoying the blessings of the Biggest Boom Yet. It was not until the 1960s, when a massive increase in civil rights activism arose, that they were forced to sit up and take notice.

Eisenhower, who deeply disliked the Kennedys, also doubted that the new administration would be able to change much. In his farewell address of January 17, 1961, he predicted instead that "an immense military establishment and a large arms industry"—a military-industrial complex—might continue to poison the wells of international relations and to dominate domestic policy. Urgently he warned the nation to be on guard.

The early 1960s witnessed publication of extraordinarily provocative and influential books that questioned conventional notions about American society and culture. In 1961 Jane Jacobs brought out Death and Life of Great American Cities, which skewered the grandiose pretensions of urban planners, and Joseph Heller published Catch-22, an unsubtle but hilarious and disturbing novel about the inanities of the military in World War II. It sold some 10 million copies over the next thirty years, appealing especially to opponents of the Vietnam War. Two seminal books appeared in 1962. Rachel Carson's Silent Spring sounded an eloquent warning against pesticides and environmental pollution. Widely acclaimed, it spurred an ecological movement that gathered considerable force by the late 1960s. Michael Harrington's The Other America greatly dramatized the problem of poverty in the United States, adding to pressures for governmental action.4 In 1963 James Baldwin's prophetic The Fire Next Time alerted Americans to the likelihood of violent racial confrontation. Betty Friedan's The Feminine Mystique also appeared in 1963. A huge seller, it helped to launch a renaissance of feminism.

Indeed, the sexual revolution assumed an unprecedentedly open and defiant tone, especially among women, increasing numbers of whom rebelled against the "feminine mystique" of deference and domesticity.19 Some flaunted mini-skirts, a new style that entered the United States from France in 1965, and challenged their elders by living openly in an unmarried state with men. The mid-1960s, one survey of sexual behavior concludes, represented "perhaps the greatest transformation in sexuality [the United States] had ever witnessed."

By this time the 1950s—then the Biggest Boom Yet—seemed almost dowdy to contemporaries who remembered them. Many of the industries that had boosted that boom, such as electronics, enjoyed even more fantastic growth in the 1960s. Well-placed business and professional people came to expect as a matter of course an amazingly comfortable world that featured high-speed air travel, credit card transactions, and generous expense accounts. Architects and builders flourished, not only by catering to the explosively growing suburbs but also by designing and constructing nests of high-rise buildings in the business centers of cities. It was in the 1960s, the most glittering of times, that piles of glass and steel literally reached for the sky in urban America.

What earlier generations had considered as privileges, many in this one came to perceive as entitlements. In personal life this meant rapid gratification; in policy matters it meant deliverance from evil. Anything, it seemed, was possible in this protean time in history. People talked confidently about winning "wars" against contemporary problems, ranging from poverty to cancer to unrest in Vietnam. Some thought that they could combat not only the age-old scourges of human life—Disease and Disability—but also two others: Discontent and Dissatisfaction.33

Four years later Walt Disney productions brought out The Love Bug, which became the top-grossing movie of the year, attracting far more people in that year than countercultural films such as Easy Rider and Alice's Restaurant. While attendance and sales figures do not tell the whole story, by any means, about popular tastes, they suggest an obvious continuity: millions of people still demanded non-threatening "family" entertainment. Sensational media accounts focusing on cultural "revolution" in the 1960s left a false impression of the decade: significant continuities were a feature of popular culture during the sixties.

A final, durable continuity: America remained one of the most religious cultures in the Western World. This religiosity assumed a large variety of forms. Religious leaders and church-goers continued to contribute to the civil rights movement. Norman Vincent Peale, still preaching the message of positive thinking, prospered as a much-admired figure. So did Billy Graham, whose evangelical crusades drew millions in the United States and elsewhere in the world. Although church-going in the United States fell a bit from its peak in the 1950s, it remained high. An estimated 43 percent of Americans regularly attended services in 1968, compared to approximately 10 to 15 percent in England and France.41

The tax cut especially revealed the limitations of Kennedy-style domestic policy. When finally approved in 1964 it marked a considerable change in federal tax policy. The top marginal tax rate on individuals was cut from 91 to 70 percent; the tax rate on the lowest bracket fell from 20 to 14 percent. Corporate tax rates dropped from 52 to 48 percent. The law was estimated to save taxpayers $9.1 billion dollars in 1964.23 Heller and others were delighted, crediting the law for the extraordinary economic growth and prosperity that characterized the mid-1960s. The tax cut, they reiterated, proved their contention that social science expertise could fine-tune public policy. In fact, however, the tax cut, as Galbraith and others had said, mainly assisted the well-off. Moreover, it probably had little to do with the great prosperity that arose by 1965. The American economy had already begun in 1962 to rebound from a largely cyclical downturn. Central to this recovery, aside from cyclical forces, were large and pre-existing developments, including the low cost of energy, such as oil; continuing technological innovation; the expansion of world trade; and heightened productivity. Certain sectors of the American economy further benefited from rapid increases in military spending during the Kennedy years. In many areas these increases boosted expansion more than did the tax cut.24

No one can be certain how Kennedy would have coped in 1964 or 1965 with the situation in Vietnam, which remained fluid and unpredictable. Perhaps he would have cut his losses. Kennedy did express greater doubts in private about escalating American involvement than he dared to state in public. On several occasions he reminded hawkish advisers that General MacArthur, no dove, had warned about the costs of America trying to fight a land war in Asia. It also seems possible that JFK would have reconsidered his course after the 1964 election. He told his friend Charles Bartlett in 1963, "We don't have a prayer of staying in Vietnam. We don't have a prayer of prevailing there. But I can't give up a piece of territory like that to the Communists and then get the people to reelect me."65 It may be that if Kennedy had lived to win a major mandate in the 1964 election, he would have dared to confront Cold War passions and to extricate the United States from Vietnam. The evidence for such a scenario, however, is sketchy.

troubling failures and misconceptions that plagued Kennedy and his advisers. Although he knew there was no missile gap, he eagerly increased defense spending and helped to escalate the arms race. Despite the Bay of Pigs debacle, he persisted in plans to harass and frighten Castro, thereby accentuating the provocative behavior of Khrushchev. Ignoring evidence to the contrary, he held fast to clichés—especially in public—such as the domino theory and the existence of a monolithic "international" Communism. He persisted in celebrating the capacity of the Special Forces and more broadly of military moves to solve deeper social and political problems. On many occasions, as in his policies concerning Vietnam, he proved poor at sorting out good information from bad and at developing long-range plans. Contrary to the claims of his acolytes, he did not grow very much on the job.

Johnson's belief in bread-and-butter liberalism as advanced by the New Deal reflected his regional interests. He insisted that federal aid was the key to breaking down the isolation and destitution of the South, by far the nation's most poverty-stricken region. He took care while President to direct as much federal money as possible to the South and West, thereby helping to bring the Sun Belt, as it became called, into the mainstream of the American economy. But Johnson's faith in the State as benefactor of socio-economic progress transcended regional particularism. In this belief, the essence of his political philosophy, he was very much in tune with liberals of his generation.

Government officials, meanwhile, were sharpening their analytical skills to produce the concept of a "poverty line." In 1964 this line was estimated to be around $3,130 for a family of four and a little more than $1,500 for a single individual.21 By that standard, 40.3 million people were "poor," around 21 percent of the population of 192 million.

he wanted to be the President who finished what FDR had started. Equally important, he shared the contemporary liberal view that the United States, a rich and resourceful country, could afford to do something. Johnson also believed unquestioningly in another liberal faith: that government had the skill to improve the lot of its citizens. What motivated Johnson to fight poverty, in short, was not the worsening of a social problem—higher percentages of Americans had been poor in the 1950s—but the belief that government could, and should, enter the battle. These optimistic expectations, not despair, lay at the heart of American liberalism in the sixties.

The poverty bill that Shriver and others fashioned in the spring of 1964 also included the idea of "community action." Those who coined the phrase did not define it with precision. Without much reflection they hoped that poverty programs would promote community development—another cherished American faith—and that local leaders would be involved at some level with formulating and carrying out the war. Only later, when the war against poverty got started, did it become clear that community action programs, or CAPs, would become the heart of the effort.25

Harrington employed the concept of a "culture of poverty" to dramatize the seriousness of the problem and to force politicians to act. Conservatives, however, made the most of the idea in subsequent debates over the nature of poverty. If poverty was rooted in the very culture of many low-income Americans, they said, then it was foolish for policy-makers to think they could do much about it.29 Liberal efforts, it followed, at best were a waste of the taxpayers' money. At worst they were counterproductive, for they would encourage "undeserving" people—"drunks," "deadbeats," "welfare mothers"—to rely on the government.

Johnson, Shriver, and the others who developed the war on poverty, however, were not radicals. They were optimists who reflected the confidence of contemporary American liberal thought. Unlike radicals, they thought that most poor people needed only a helping hand to rise in life. Unlike conservatives, they had great faith that government could and should extend that hand. Largely unaware of rising feelings of relative deprivation, they gave little thought to the idea (which was politically unrealistic) of redistributing wealth or income. They were not much concerned about inequality. They focused instead on programs to promote greater opportunity—a politically attractive goal—and pushed ahead impatiently for congressional action.

increases in federal spending for domestic purposes, while substantial by 1968, were hardly lavish. It was not until the supposedly more conservative 1970s and 1980s that public spending for domestic programs—especially health care and Social Security—exploded in size and created huge deficits.