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

by James T. Patterson

When she ran into him later, she told him, "Senator Humphrey, I been praying about you . . . you're a good man, and you know what's right. The trouble is, you're afraid to do what you know is right."77 No exchange better captured the gulf that by then was polarizing black militants and white liberals in America.

SOME OF THE RESULTS of the election of 1964 signaled deep danger ahead for the Democratic party. Thanks mainly to Johnson's ardent support of the civil rights act, many southern whites showed that they wanted nothing more to do with him. Largely for this reason he lost the states of Mississippi, Alabama, South Carolina, Louisiana, and Georgia in November, as well as Goldwater's Arizona. He won narrowly in Florida. A majority of white voters in Arkansas, Tennessee, North Carolina, and Virginia rejected the President.86 The growth from 1964 on of the GOP in the South and the Southwest turned out to be one of the most important long-range trends in postwar American politics. Thereafter Republicans were highly competitive in presidential elections in these areas. There were many causes behind the decline of the Democratic party in the South and Southwest, but chief among them, as Johnson himself recognized, was his open endorsement of civil rights in 1964. "I think," he told Califano when he signed the civil rights act, "we delivered the South to the Republican party for your lifetime and mine."87 In

Medicare and Medicaid considerably changed the nature of health care in the United States. Growing rapidly in the next few years, they reached one-fifth of the population by 1976.38 Medicare helped a number of elderly people to receive health services that might otherwise have driven them into poverty. Medicaid enabled many eligible poor people to go to doctors for the first time in their lives. By 1968 it was estimated that low-income Americans consulted physicians more often than did higher-income people (5.6 visits per year as opposed to 4.9 visits).39 Changes such as these gladdened the hearts of reformers and helped to sustain liberal support for the programs in later years.

Medicare and Medicaid, indeed, fell well short of national health insurance. They helped only the elderly and certain categories of the poor. Most Americans, including the working poor, had to contribute to employer-subsidized group insurance plans, to pay for private insurance on their own, or to do without. Those who lost their jobs often forfeited whatever coverage they may have had. And millions of people did do without. No other industrialized Western nation had higher percentages of its people—still about 15 percent in the early 1990s—without medical insurance.

As it happened, the passage of Medicare and Medicaid in 1965 represented the only major governmental changes in the American health care system during the next three decades. Americans continued to live with a medical system that led the world in its training of physicians and in technological wizardry but that was also bureaucratically complicated and far from comprehensive. This was not the intention of Johnson and fellow liberals, who did well to secure legislation that reformers had been seeking for years. In 1965 they probably accomplished all that was politically possible.

Notwithstanding these developments, which upset Johnson and his inner circle, there was no denying that the Voting Rights Act of 1965, like the Civil Rights Act of 1964, was a great achievement: these were the most significant of the many Great Society laws that expanded rights-consciousness in America. If most of the credit for the voting law belonged to civil rights activists, Johnson and fellow liberals deserved some praise as well. The goal of the act, after all, was to guarantee long-disfranchised black Americans the rights to register and to vote. This end the law accomplished brilliantly, thanks in large part to vigorous and unyielding federal oversight in the years ahead. By 1967 more than 50 percent of voting-age blacks had the franchise in the six most discriminatory southern states. In 1968 there were blacks in the Mississippi delegation to the Democratic National Convention. By the mid-1970s southern blacks began to win electoral office, even in Congress. The increase in black registration was so remarkable that southern white politicians, Wallace included, began by then to soften their racist rhetoric in order to capture some of the black vote.

The rather sudden ebbing of liberal hopes caused many scholars—and contemporaries—to blame Johnson. They have a point. LBJ, unable to contain his ego, indeed wanted to outdo FDR—and every other President in history. He measured accomplishment in largely quantitative terms: the more big programs passed, the better. Some of these programs, such as OEO, were hurried into law without much research to sustain them and without much aforethought about potentially divisive political consequences. Other programs, such as aid to education, relied overoptimistically on injections of federal spending to cope with complicated social problems that, like poverty, needed more thoughtful study than they received. Getting things done quickly was not the same as getting them done well.

The Great Society programs were for these reasons quintessentially liberal, not radical. Except in the area of race relations—a major exception—they made no serious effort to challenge the power of established groups, including large corporations. In no way did they seriously confront socio-economic inequality or seek to redistribute wealth. The essence of Great Society liberalism was that government had the tools and the resources to help people help themselves. It sought to advance equality of opportunity, not to establish greater equality of social condition.78

Liberals, indeed, understood clearly how little political support there was in the nation for such an effort, which at the least would have called for higher taxation of the middle and upper classes. To demand equality of condition, many Americans continued to believe, was to burden the nation with taxes, regulation, and bureaucracy, to threaten prosperity, and to damage the entrepreneurial vitality and individualism that were at the heart of the American dream.

Nothing did more than the conflict in Vietnam to alter the course of post-World War II American society and politics or to unleash the emotions that polarized the nation after 1965.

As the Gulf of Tonkin Resolution indicated—it was very popular with the public—virtually all political leaders agreed with them in 1964–65. Preventing the spread of Communism, after all, remained the guiding star of American policy. Presidents Truman, Eisenhower, and Kennedy had followed it, as had their partisan opponents. All three Presidents had affirmed American support of South Vietnam and enunciated versions of the domino theory as a rationale. It was Johnson's fate to become President at a time when South Vietnam, following the assassination of Diem, was faltering badly. It was difficult for him to temporize, as his predecessors (in varying degrees) had done.

What stands out about American involvement in Southeast Asia, especially in retrospect, is the extent to which a truly enormous military commitment—both of bombs and of troops—failed to stop, let alone defeat, a much less industrialized adversary. Short of obliterating much of the North by dropping nuclear bombs on civilian centers—an option not considered at high levels—it is hard to see how greater military engagement could have achieved the goals of the United States.

What really mattered to him, as it had mattered so often to Americans in the postwar era, was the credibility of his country's commitment in its larger battle against Communism in the world. To show weakness on one part of the globe was to risk disaster on other parts. Rusk put this point clearly. "The integrity of the U.S. commitment," he said in 1965, "is the principal pillar of peace throughout the world. If that commitment becomes unreliable, the communist world would certainly draw conclusions that would lead to our ruin and almost certainly to a catastrophic war. "43

It ignored contradictory evidence at the time, including a fact known to most of the policy-makers themselves: thanks in part to bitter Sino-Soviet rivalry, there was no such thing in the 1960s as a worldwide Communist conspiracy.

American combat soldiers in Vietnam were unprecedentedly young—an average of 19, as opposed to 27 in both World War II and Korea. For men so youthful, combat experience in Vietnam was especially terrifying.

The number of Americans aged 18 to 24 rose from 16.5 million in 1960 to 24.7 million in 1970, a jump of almost 50 percent. By then approximately one-third of this age group (or 7.9 million) was studying at least part-time at institutions of higher education. The explosive leap in the numbers of college-educated young people, one of the most salient demographic trends of the decade, promoted increasing amounts of talk by the mid-1960s about "youth culture," "youth rebellion," and "generation gap."

As Bob Dylan had prophesied in his song "The Times They Are a-Changin'," many young people thought they had the potential to transform American life. Rarely before had two such interrelated and powerful trends—demographic and ideological—occurred at the same time. Reinforcing each other, they underlay much of the turmoil that distinguished the 1960s from the 1950s.70

"Eve of Destruction," a popular song by P. F. Sloan, captured the anxiety that many of these young people felt in 1965.

For these reasons the Vietnam-era army (unlike the armies that had fought in World War II or Korea) consisted disproportionately of the poor, minority groups, and the working classes. They were getting drafted and killed while others—many of them university students who were loudest against the war—stayed safely at home.

By late 1967 Johnson felt fully comfortable only with a handful of aides, such as Rusk and Rostow, who joined him for the Tuesday noon luncheons where they picked bombing targets. He dominated them, virtually demanding sycophancy. The deft and solicitous legislative conductor who had orchestrated the Great Society had become a frightened and high-strung maestro who shuddered at the sound of a dissonant note.

These important decisions pointed to a key trend that was to accelerate in coming years: the tendency of people to join groups in defense of their rights and seek legal redress in order to advance them. More and more, Americans turned to litigation.

César Chávez,

Newly troubling to reformers, however, was the rise of well-articulated doubts about the capacity of government to remedy social problems. These doubts seemed especially strong among a number of once liberal intellectuals and policy-makers who subjected Great Society programs—aid to education, Medicare and Medicaid, above all the war on poverty—to close examination after 1965.

Few Americans—or members of Congress—read The Public Interest. Still, the rapid rise of the "neo-cons" to intellectual respectability was revealing. And their complaints, especially about the "dead hand of bureaucracy," epitomized a new mood of doubt. After all, the government had obviously oversold its expertise. The war on poverty was at best a skirmish. Worse, the "best and brightest" of liberals had blundered badly in Vietnam. For these reasons conservatives successfully took the offensive in public debate. Liberals, so confident and optimistic just a few years earlier, seemed tired and unsure of themselves. This sudden and largely unexpected development was one of the most lasting legacies of the mid-1960s.

Violence was rising especially rapidly at the time in black central city areas, in part because of demographic changes: the coming of age of the baby boom generation and the peaking of south-to-north migrations. For these reasons the ghettos by the mid-1960s were home for an unprecedentedly huge population of young men, increasing percentages of whom came from broken homes without strong discipline. Young men, moreover, are always the group most susceptible to crime and violence.69 The decline in the number of manufacturing jobs in many of these areas further exacerbated racial tensions.

Many of these angry whites could hardly be called "conservative" in a traditional sense. They included millions of struggling, often class-conscious people who raged with almost equal fervor at what they perceived as the special privileges of corporate elites, Establishment priests and ministers, wealthy medical practitioners, liberal school boards, permissive bureaucrats and judges, and "experts" in general. They displayed a mounting unease with much that was "modern," including the teaching of Darwinian theories in the schools, and with much that "know-it-all" social engineers told them to believe. They were disturbed by feminists, sexual liberation, radicals, and anti-war demonstrators, and they were outraged by the "idolatrous" and "criminal-coddling" Warren Court. Many perceived a conspiracy that was masterminded by an eastern Establishment. Threatened by the insouciance of the younger generation, they especially resented the contempt that they received from more secular Americans. By 1966 they were beginning to take part in politics as never before, especially in the South and the Southwest, where population growth was explosive. Reagan was but the best-known of the anti-liberal office-holders who actively politicized their concerns and benefited from what became identified in the 1970s as a new and powerful Religious Right.

the hippies and "dropouts" attracted considerable media attention while they held the stage, especially between 1967 and 1970.82 And the rise of a self-conscious acid-rock culture beguiled larger numbers of people, most of them young. The apparent rejection by many young people of conventional middle-class styles of life, the assault to the senses of acid rock, and the open use of drugs offered a noisy and discordant counterpoint to a mainstream culture that, thanks in part to divisions widened by the war, seemed increasingly cacophonous by 1967.

These statistics were indeed troubling for those Americans—the vast majority—who imagined that the two-parent nuclear family anchored national stability. Contemporary reports indicated that illegitimacy rates began to rise rapidly after 1963. The rates among blacks were around 23 percent in 1963, compared to around 2 percent among whites, and jumped to 36 percent in 1970, compared to 3 percent among whites.84 Divorce rates also increased (after declines from 1946 through 1958), from 9.2 per 1,000 married couples in 1960 to 11.2 in 1968.85 The trends seemed relentless, threatening the stability of neighborhoods, disrupting the schools, and setting loose a tidal wave of laments about social "crises" that crested in later years.86

The sources of this surge in welfare dependency, while related in part to the rise in family break-up, were rooted especially in the rights-consciousness of the era. The incidence of poverty, which declined throughout the 1960s, was not the primary cause. Rather, the rolls grew because much higher percentages of eligible people demanded to be helped.

Opponents of welfare, moreover, focused on far more than costs. Indeed, they expressed visceral feelings on the subject, complaining indignantly about "leeches," "cheaters," and "welfare bums." Cherishing the work ethic, they grew irate when they thought about blacks and other "loafers" on the dole.

By the mid-1960s, however, relatively few AFDC mothers were widows; most were younger women whose marriages had collapsed or who had had children out of wedlock. They did not seem "deserving" at all. Working-class people, many of them poor, seemed especially upset by welfare. Many, to be sure, had themselves gone on relief during the 1930s or when tragedy, such as the loss of a major breadwinner, had hit their families. But they had tried to manage stoically, enduring the intrusions of social workers and the restrictions on possessions—no telephones, no linoleum—that the stringently run system had required. As soon as they had been able to find work, they did so; the young had often left school in their early teens to support their families. "Welfare helped us, and it was right and just that it did," one New Yorker remembered. But "then we could shift for ourselves."93

Whites like this angrily rejected the argument that black people deserved special consideration because of their long history of being oppressed. Many did not consider themselves to be prejudiced. They insisted that they supported the right of all people to equal opportunity, still a most hallowed American political ideal. But they hotly resented being dismissed as "racists" by privileged integrationists—"limousine liberals"—who lived in lily-white suburbs. And they drew a firm line against special treatment to protect or advance minority groups as groups.98 Liberal-dominated agencies such as the EEOC, they complained, were moving toward "reverse discrimination." One white man asked, "Who will pay the Jews for two thousand years of slavery? Who will compensate the Italians for all the ditches they dug?" Another exclaimed, "What happened four hundred years ago, all those whites who whipped them and beat them, are we responsible for it? I don't even have anything to do with slavery. What's past is past."

Many whites had responded enthusiastically in 1963 to the March on Washington, which had dramatized the goals of the civil rights bill then under consideration. By 1968, however, the black agenda focused much more directly on poverty and racial discrimination in the North. Whites were much less supportive of demands such as these, especially amid the backlash following rioting in the cities. Reflecting such feelings, Congress did nothing.

The appeal of Wallace in 1968, however, transcended regional lines, important though those were. It rested also on his evocation of backlash in many working-class areas of the North. Wallace was an energetic, aggressive, caustic, sneering, often snarling campaigner. Eschewing openly racist oratory, he called for "law and order" in the streets and denounced welfare mothers who he said were "breeding children as a cash crop." He gleefully assailed hippies, leftists, and radical feminists, some of whom picketed the Miss America pageant in Atlantic City just after the Democratic convention, dumped what they called objects of female "enslavement"—girdles, bras, high-heeled shoes, false lashes, and hair curlers—into a "freedom trash can," and earned the label forever after of "bra-burners."47 Wallace took special pleasure in attacking anti-war demonstrators, often with thinly veiled references to violent retribution that excited many of his followers. "If any demonstrator ever lays down in front of my car," he proclaimed, "it'll be the last car he'll ever lay down in front of." He also set forth an economic program designed to appeal to blue-collar working folk. It included support for a federal job-training program, safeguards for collective bargaining, a higher minimum wage, and better protection for people who lost their jobs or could not afford adequate medical care.

On domestic matters Nixon echoed Wallace, but in a more genteel fashion, by catering to the contemporary backlash. (Humphrey mocked Nixon as a "perfumed, deodorized" version of Wallace.) This meant celebrating "law and order," denouncing Great Society programs, rapping the liberal decisions of the Supreme Court, and deriding hippies and protestors. He lambasted the "busing" of children, then being applied in places as a means of desegregating the schools. Much of his campaign, like his choice of Agnew, reflected what pundits later called a Southern Strategy, which aimed to corral the backlash white vote in the South (and elsewhere). "Working Americans," he declared, "have become the forgotten Americans. In a time when the national rostrums and forums are given over to shouters and protestors and demonstrators, they have become the silent Americans. Yet they have a legitimate grievance that should be rectified and a just cause that should prevail."57 Only

After 1968 the Democratic party became less and less a purposeful political organization when it came to presidential politics and more and more a loose coalition of free-wheeling individuals.

In June 1969 homosexuals at the Stonewall Inn in Greenwich Village, tired of harassment by police, fought back and set off five days of confrontations. Their activism did much to arouse group consciousness among the gay population. In 1973 the National Organization for Women, which had previously disdained lesbians (Friedan referred to them as the "lavender menace") endorsed gay rights.4 In 1974 the American Psychiatric Association removed homo-sexuality from its list of psychological disorders.

After 1970, however, many American institutions—corporations, unions, universities, others—were required to set aside what in effect were quotas, a process that engaged the federal government as never before in a wide variety of personnel decisions taken in the private sector. This dramatic and rapid transformation of congressional intent took place as a result of executive decisions—especially Nixon's—and court interpretations. Affirmative action of this sort never had the support of democratically elected representatives.

It was ironic that such far-reaching definitions of affirmative action took root in a Republican administration.43 IT WAS ALMOST AS IRONIC that a movement to protect and sustain the environment enjoyed special legislative successes during the Nixon years. This movement had been building steadily for some time, especially since the publication in 1962 of Rachel Carson's eloquent Silent Spring.

For all these reasons advocates of environmentalism, like many other crusaders for social change, did not achieve their high expectations. But they had hardly failed. On the contrary, the environmental movement, rooted as it was in the fertile soil of postwar affluence and concern for the quality of life, not only survived the counter-attacks of the mid-1970s and 1980s but also enjoyed considerable success in some ways—notably in improving the quality of air and water in the United States. Although embattled, it stood out as a legacy of the reform spirit of the 1960s.

The Milliken decision was pivotal in the postwar history of race relations, for it badly hurt whatever hopes reformers still maintained of overturning de facto segregation of the schools and of slowing a dynamic that was accelerating in many American urban areas: "white flight" of familes to suburbs.69 Flight in turn eroded urban tax bases, further damaging schools and other services in the cities. A "white noose" was tightening around places like Detroit. Justice Thurgood Marshall, appalled by the Court's decision, declared, "Unless our children begin to learn together, there is little hope that our people will ever learn to live together. . . . In the short run it may seem to be the easier course to allow our great metropolitan areas to be divided up into two cities—one white, the other black—but it is a course, I predict, our people will ultimately reject. I dissent."

In Chile, Nixon and Kissinger encouraged covert American action to keep a Marxist, Salvador Allende, from gaining power. When Allende nonetheless won a democratic election in the fall of 1970, they continued to authorize the CIA to destabilize his regime, which was overthrown in 1973. Allende was assassinated in the uprising. Although there was no direct evidence linking the United States with the coup, Nixon and Kissinger rejoiced over it. American actions in Chile—as in Vietnam, Angola, Iran, and other places where Communism seemed to threaten—remained as uncompromising and ideological in the Nixon years as they had been since 1945.

Lon Nol fell from power in Cambodia in April 1975, replaced by a brutal Khmer Rouge regime led by Pol Pot. The Khmer Rouge killed an estimated 2 million people during the next three years, at which point the North Vietnamese went to war and chased them into hiding. Thieu, overwhelmed by a North Vietnamese military offensive, was forced to resign on April 21, 1975. As his loyalists scrambled desperately to climb aboard United States helicopters, Hanoi ran up its flag in Saigon on May 1 and renamed the capital Ho Chi Minh City. South Vietnam was a state no more.

the squalid business of Watergate had significant partisan results, at least in the short run. Democrats scored major triumphs in the 1974 elections and sent Jimmy Carter to the White House in 1976. Conservatives in the GOP, leaping into the vacuum left by Nixon and his centrist allies, gradually established control of the party and blocked whatever hopes may have remained for serious consideration of such unresolved issues as welfare reform and health insurance. In 1980 they elected Reagan to the presidency. But policy-making from 1974 through 1976 did not differ much from what it would likely have been with Nixon in command. President Ford, after pardoning his predecessor, avoided new frontiers. Instead, he struggled much of the time to deal with already existing problems: tensions over court-mandated busing and affirmative action, highly emotional debates over abortion, and above all the stagnation of the economy.

Watergate, they believed, proved—yet again—the deviousness and arrogance of government officials who claimed to serve the public interest. First, Lyndon Johnson and exaggerated claims about a Great Society. Then lies upon lies about Vietnam. Now, Watergate and many more lies.

CRITICAL FEELINGS SUCH AS THESE remained powerful in the United States after 1974. Together with abiding popular resentments about other domestic issues—busing, affirmative action, abortion, crime, welfare dependency—they sharpened social divisions and stymied liberal reformers. Conservatives maintained the initiative in Washington for much of the next two decades. While grand expectations about "rights" at home, as well as grand designs for America's role in the world, did not disappear after 1974—these were lasting legacies of the postwar era—many people seemed anxious and contentious. This was not because they were worse off absolutely—most people managed as well or a little better economically, especially in the mid- and late 1980s—but because their very high expectations became frustrated. The United States, so powerful for much of the postwar period, seemed adrift, unable to reconcile the races (or the classes or the sexes) at home or to perform as effectively on the world stage. A woman exclaimed, "Sometimes you get the feeling nothing has gone right since John Kennedy died. We've had the Vietnam War, all the rioting. . . . Before then you were used to America winning everything, but now you sometimes think our day may be over.

many features of American life in the post-World War II years persisted after 1974. As before, the United States remained one of the most stable societies in the world. Most Americans still held strongly to long-established values, including commitment to the Constitution, respect for the law, belief in the necessity of equal opportunity, and confidence in the utility of hard work. No Western culture was more religious. Not even the travail of Vietnam dimmed the certainty of Americans that Communism must be contained and the Cold War carried on, in Asia as well as elsewhere. These were among the many attitudes and values that flourished from 1945 to 1974 and that remained alive and well thereafter.

many goals of postwar American liberalism, notably the dismantling of Jim Crow and the rise of federal standards in social policy, especially for the disabled and the elderly, were far closer to realization in 1974 than they had been in 1945, and they endured thereafter in a political culture that, while more conservative than it had been in the mid-1960s, continued to support social programs. These standards were considerably more generous than people in the 1940s and 1950s might have imagined possible. Backlash did not kill everything.