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November 5, 2023 - May 17, 2025
federal aid to education, Medicare, voting rights, and immigration reform. The fourth and least heralded bill would replace the Chinese Exclusion Act of 1882 among others back to the nation’s first immigration law in 1790, all heavily restricting immigrants by race or nationality to the favored “stock” of northern Europe. Johnson’s reform sought to limit newcomers by number but not by origin, which promised slowly to absorb all the world’s faces and cultures under the Constitution.
he exhorted Americans not to become “a nation of onlookers,”
Johnson confronted the past with sweeping metaphors from warfare and sports. “You do not take a person who, for years, has been hobbled by chains, and liberate him, bring him up to the starting line of a race,” declared the President, “and then say, ‘you are free to compete with all the others,’ and still justly believe that you have been completely fair.”
immolation expresses merely the extreme degree of constructive hope for a people’s salvation above the nihilism of war. “To say something while experiencing this kind of pain,” Thich Nhat Hanh wrote, “is to say it with the utmost courage, frankness, determination, and sincerity.” This communication taxed even
“Unless a person comes to the place where he wants to die, he has been licked by life.”
Henceforth, aspiring immigrants from all nations would stand in one line for spaces within an overall yearly limit, which inexorably diversified American culture. The number of formerly proscribed Asian families grew sixteen-fold within the next ten years. Asians joined Latin Americans, Africans, and natives of the Middle East to become the vast majority of new immigrants, taking places formerly reserved for the few nations deemed the most Anglo-Saxon.
Johnson embraced this future. “America was built by a nation of strangers,” he said on Liberty Island. Its founding ideals, “fed from so many cultures and traditions and peoples,” shaped an outlook of unique experience. Americans “feel safer and stronger,” he asserted, “in a world as varied as the people who make it up.”
In Lowndes County, where nearly two-thirds of the eligible farmers were black, optimism rose until ballots arrived listing seventy “extra” Negroes nominated by whites. Under deadline, lacking telephones, the unpracticed movement voters failed to sift out the last-minute decoys. The Lowndes County ASCS committee remained white, and a New Deal structure designed to foster citizen participation in governance (like the community agencies newly created for the War on Poverty) devolved again into the hands of the largest landowners.
“There can be no gainsaying of the fact that we have taken a stand against a people seeking self-determination,” he said. “If one looks back over the history of this war, there are many things that turn out to be very ugly, and I am absolutely convinced that there is wrong on both sides.” King admitted personal indecision. “I don’t think President Johnson is a warmonger,” he said. “I think he is caught in a very difficult dilemma.”
Lawrence Spivak asked how new middle-class Negroes climbed above the report’s statistical trend toward family deterioration, and why others could not use the same ladder. “Some people are lucky and some aren’t,” replied Moynihan. “The world is that way. Some people got out of the South in time, some didn’t.” Jet reporter Simeon Booker protested that Moynihan could have focused on growing divorce in white families “to make it appear that they are the threat to the nation’s health.”
to sewers across sixty metropolitan areas. “If we become two people, the suburban affluent and urban poor, each filled with mistrust and fear for the other,” he warned, “if this is our desire and policy as a people, then we shall effectively cripple each generation to come.” News
King led a march five miles through East Side neighborhoods near the city steelworks and Trumbull Park, where novelist Alan Paton had recorded a year-long siege against the last pioneer black family in 1954.
The election of forty or more new Republicans to the House “will serve notice to the enemy in Vietnam,” he declared, “that the United States is not going to do what the French did ten years ago: cut and run.” Nixon branded Lyndon Johnson the first American President who had failed to unite his own party behind a war. “The division in the United States on Vietnam is primarily within the Democratic Party,” he told viewers.
He emerged for a press conference several days later to address the dismal 1966 tally of net loss to Republicans: forty-seven House members, three senators, eight governors, and 677 seats in state legislatures.
Wallace said, “My only interest is the restoration of local government.”
“For me,” said Reagan, “the vote reflects the great concern of the people with the size and cost of government.” His dubious but genial disclaimer of racial politics in California was more attractive than the bitter view of his vanquished opponent, who grumbled that Reagan won a 57 percent landslide with only 5 percent of the black vote and a quarter of Hispanics. “Whether we like it or not,” said the two-term incumbent Pat Brown, “the people want separation of the races.”
“All that I have said boils down to the conclusion that man’s survival is dependent upon man’s ability to solve the problems of racial injustice, poverty, and war.”
No longer could the movement expect to make progress on race in Grenada or Chicago while avoiding the violent propensity of “a sick nation that will brutalize unjustifiably millions of boys and girls, men and women, in Vietnam,” King told the assembly.
but observers in subsequent decades looked on the normally obscure midterm year as a fulcrum of more lasting change toward political dominance by the heirs of Goldwater. Political scientists Earl and Merle Black traced a “Great White Switch” in partisan voting patterns across the South. Nicholas Lemann, a student of the black exodus from the South into Chicago, identified a larger reaction of potent, cumulative effect. “The beginning of the modern rise of conservatism coincided exactly with the country’s beginning to realize the true magnitude and consequences of the black migration,” he wrote
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“I speak out against this war because I am disappointed in America,” he cried. “There can be no great disappointment where there is no great love.”
Vietnam had “broken and eviscerated” the historic momentum for justice since the bus boycott, he asserted. Moreover, circumstance compelled poor black soldiers to kill and die at nearly twice their proportion for a stated purpose to guarantee liberties in Southeast Asia that remained myths at home, fighting “in brutal solidarity” with white soldiers “for a nation that has been unable to seat them together in the same schools.”
By treating the Vietnamese more as subject “natives” than citizens, the American example long since undermined a democratic road to independence.
The call for segregated silence on Vietnam dashed any expectation that King’s freedom movement had validated the citizenship credentials of blacks by historic mediation between the powerful and dispossessed. It relegated him again to the back of the bus, conspicuous yet invisible. King felt cut off even from disagreement, in a void worse than his accustomed fare of veneration or disfiguring hostility, and he broke down more than once into tears.
He repeated a homily that most people were “dependent on more than half of the world” before breakfast every morning—soap from France, sponge from a Pacific Islander, coffee from South America. He said millions absorbed blessings without a thought that “we wouldn’t have a civil rights bill today if some three thousand children hadn’t packed up the jails in Birmingham, Alabama.”
“Violence is necessary. It is as American as cherry pie.”
“Power and violence are opposites,” she asserted. “Where the one rules absolutely, the other is absent…. Violence can destroy power; it is utterly incapable of creatingit.” Arendt debunked violence.
“Because,” Johnson answered rhetorically, “when a great ship cuts through the sea, the waters are always stirred and troubled.”
then pulled out a pistol and shot him point-blank in the head. After photographs and film of the random street execution circled the world on Thursday, the third day of the Tet offensive, poll measurements recorded the most decisive single drop in American support for the Vietnam War. As King’s movement believed, lasting power rose against the tide of violence.
Johnson knew, however, that this posture would expose the secret flaw that had haunted him and close advisers since the escalations more than three years ago. He was fighting not to lose.
