R

R. Bearden, Evening Meal (1967)

THE GREAT SOCIETY
4/4/00

The Lovin’Spoonful,

Summer in the City

(1966)

II. Consolidating the New Deal in Postwar America
A. Stabilizing the Economy
B. Protecting the White, Middle-Class

III. Toward a Great Society
        A. Race
                 Civil Rights Act of 1964
                24th Amendment
                Voting Rights Act of 1965
        B. Poverty
                Health: Medicare & Medicaid
                Relief: Food Stamps, AFDC
                Housing: Public Housing
                Education
                Worker Training: Equal Opportunity Act, Community Action Program

For many years now, politicians have grown leery of the "L" word. If they can avoid doing so, they simply don't say it. The "L" word evokes images of an overbuilt state run amuck -- burying innocent people in red tape, taxing hard-working people into the poor house, and spending all that ill-gotten government gain on worthless welfare queens.

The years immediately following the New Deal produced a similar aversion to the "L" word, so much so that many liberals feared that conservatives would try to dismantle the New Deal: destroy the unions, abolish social security, revoke agricultural price supports, and leave the country without any protection from depression.

But, apart from occasional backsliding, the most important trend of the postwar years, especially the years after the fall of McCarthy in 1954, was the emergence of a broad, middle-of-the-road liberalism shared by a majority of Republicans and Democrats alike -- one in which the government played an active role in regulating the economy through Keynesian fiscal policies, accepted the existence of labor unions, continued agricultural price supports, and expanded social welfare.

My job in the final weeks of this course is to explain to you what liberalism came to mean in the postwar world, why support for it was so widespread in those years, and why, finally, such a tremendous backlash built up against it that today politicians avoid saying the "L" word if they can possibly avoid doing so.

[For succinct discussion of postwar liberalism see "The Ideology of Liberal Consensus," by Godfrey Hodgson, a British writer, in A History of Our Time, edited by William Chafe and Harvard Sitkoff.]

Basically, this postwar liberalism can be reduced to two fundamental beliefs: 1) First -- and this goes back to the classical roots of liberalism in the 18th century -- the good society is one in which there is individual freedom, for individual freedom brings prosperity for all. In America the classic liberal document is the Bill of Rights, which limits the right of the state to interfere with individual liberty.

- Implicit in this view of liberalism is the conviction that for liberty to be maximized state power must be minimized.

- Also implicit in this view of liberalism is the conviction that capitalism works and that out of the abundance it produces social problems can be solved and class conflict eliminated. Under this theory, there is no need to redistribute income -- to slice the economic pie more evenly -- for a better life for all can be accomplished simply by waiting for economic growth to create a bigger pie, so that each person's slice can get bigger. Another way of putting it is to say that a rising tide raises all boats. From the ratification of the Bill of Rights, through the 19th century, most Americans -- with the obvious exception of slave owners -- were liberals, by this definition.

2) By the 1890s, however, it had become clear that 18th & 19thc minimal-government liberalism needed modification in the context of an industrializing society. In other words, some form of centralized governmental power must exist to protect basic human liberty. The Great Depression reinforced this view. With the economic concentration brought by modern industrialization, only a strong central government could protect consumers from distant business leaders.

The key legacy of the New Deal, then, was this: selfish individualism can lead to economic catastrophe for all; therefore the government has a responsibility to look out for the general welfare, even when that means restricting individual liberty by imposing maximum hours laws and sending the NLRB into a factory to supervise union elections.

These two ideas – the importance of individual liberty and the importance of a central government strong enough to protect the weak from the strong – are obviously in some tension with one another. But, they coexisted fairly harmoniously in the postwar world. How?

- (1) DEATH OF LEFT AND RIGHT: First, because both the left and the right wings of American politics suffered mortal wounds in the decade immediately following the end of World War II. Whereas, as late as 1945, it was still possible for those on the Left to raise questions about the viability of capitalism as a force for human betterment, within three years the heating up of the Cold War made such questioning politically impossible. By the Election of 1948 (in which the left wing of the Democratic Party defected to form the Progressive Party under Henry Wallace only to go down in flames) and especially with the advent of McCarthyism hardly anyone dared voice such doubts about the viability of capitalism.

But McCarthy went too far. By 1954, the Army-McCarthy Hearings had brought not only himself but also other right-wing conservatives into disrepute. As a consequence, by 1955 both the far-left and the far-right in American politics had been forced underground. The following decade would therefore be the decade of middle-of-the-road liberalism in American politics.

(2) COLD WAR: The second reason for this broad-based acceptance of liberalism was the fact that the Cold War tended to force all Americans into one, undifferentiated, anti-Communist camp. The seriousness of the evil that the country believed it faced, made dissent seem, somehow, un-American. This is not to say that there were no dissenters, only that the range of their effective protest was strictly circumscribed. Blacks could legitimately ask for basic human freedoms -- [they could point to an international arena in which people of color were the majority and were fighting for freedom from South Asia to Africa]; they could not effectively demand more than that.

(3) PROSPERITY: And third, liberalism flourished because the prosperity of the postwar period tended to blur political differences in this country. As long as there seemed to be enough for everyone to rise out of poverty, what difference did anyone's particular political views matter? During the Great Depression over one-third of the country lived in poverty, and the country was rent by bitter debates over how to eradicate it. By the end of the 1960s only 11% did so, and the prospect of abolishing poverty seemed within easy reach.

World War II and the Cold War consolidated the liberal gains of the New Deal in two ways.

A. STABILIZING THE ECONOMY: First, it produced a liberal consensus on the need to regulate the economy. Corporate leaders found that basic governmental regulation, like minimum wage and maximum hour legislation, social security taxes, and labor legislation increased economic stability by making strikes less likely. Moreover, political and business leaders came to accept Keynesian principles of economic controls as essential to stabilizing the economy (and a much more palatable way of stabilizing the economy than direct regulation of business could be).

B. MIDDLE-CLASS BENEFITS: [white welfare] – Secondly, a liberal consensus emerged on the value of granting public benefits to consumers – especially white, middle-class consumers who were the country’s most reliable spenders: GI Bill of Rights; government grants to home builders; government-insured mortgages; tax right-offs on mortgage payments; publicly funded highways to ease transportation from suburbs; social security so that middle class not burdened by care of elderly (note the poorest Americans, those not covered by social security – farm workers and domestic servants). These were all benefits that were much harder, if not impossible, for blacks to claim.

By the time John F. Kennedy reached the White House in 1960, the New Deal legacy seemed pretty secure. What else did liberals need to do? Not much in Kennedy's view. [In fact, if you look at the Kennedy-Nixon debates of 1960, you will be struck by the fact that they are not disagreeing about anything of substance.] The President needed to make sure that economic growth continued. He needed to be sure that the Russians didn't get ahead of us in the race to build more and more missiles. But there were really only two remaining BIG problems: (1) RACE and (2) POVERTY. [film clips]

A. Race: Most Americans viewed race as a southern problem. But as civil rights workers were clubbed and even killed by southerners determined to preserve white power, pressure built on the President to do something. This pressure presented JFK with a dilemma. Though he was appalled by the violent efforts of southern officials like "Bull" Connor to preserve segregation, he was reluctant to tinker with the basic governmental structure -- the basic division between federal and state power. According to the Civil Rights Cases of 1883, lunch counters, hotels, and churches were private organizations that the federal government could not touch. Similarly the laws governing voting -- so long as they did not refer explicitly to race -- were immune to federal control. According to the 10th Amendment, any power that the Constitution did not grant explicitly to the federal government must be reserved to the states.

For the President to intervene in southern racial disturbances, Congress would have to grant him greater authority than he then had.

- Civil Rights Act of 1964: Kennedy's first effort to enlarge his own power was through the submission of a new Civil Rights Act to Congress in 1963, but he was assassinated before the bill made its way through Congress. The Civil Rights Bill was finally passed in the spring of 1964 -- in part as a tribute to the fallen leader, and in part through the exceptional arm-twisting of LBJ. The act provided for the desegregation of all public accommodations and banned discrimination in employment on the basis of race and sex. The drafters relied on the "interstate commerce" clause for authority (fearing that if they relied on the 14th Amendment the Court would strike the law down).

- Voting Rights Act of 1965: Congress gave the President the power to protect the voting rights of African Americans by authorizing the chief executive to send federal marshals to supervise elections wherever voting rights were at risk.

- Affirmative Action – 1965: Began in 1961 when JFK set up his Committee on Equal Employment Opportunity and called for govt. contractors to take "affirmative action" and "affirmative steps" to insure that applicants were employed without regard to race, national origins, or creed. The term entered political debates much more prominently after passage of the Civil Rights Act of 1964, when the EEOC had to decide how to enforce the act’s provisions. In 1965 Johnson issued an executive order demanding that government contractors take affirmative action in hiring to assure that employees were not discriminated against. [See Hugh Graham, The Civil Rights Era].

Changing the federal law to extend basic civil rights to African Americans and other minority groups was relatively easily accomplished compared to the final goal of liberals in the postwar world: the goal of eliminating poverty.

B. Poverty: Liberals had long assumed that economic growth, by itself, would lift the poor out of poverty. But this process was taking longer than politicians thought it should.

The tax cut did spur the economy to greater growth, but it did not eliminate poverty. By the time Lyndon Baines Johnson reached the presidency, he was convinced that more drastic measures would be needed to eliminate poverty in America. In the summer of 1965 Johnson gave a commencement address at Howard University in which he said that the time had come to fight not just for equality of right but equality in fact. Basing his remarks on a report done by a little-known intellectual named Daniel Patrick Moynihan about the grave problems of urban blacks – the high rates of joblessness (three times the national average) & the high rates of illegitimacy (twice the national average) – the President called for a war on poverty. Johnson believed that what he was doing was simply building on the New Deal program of his mentor and idol FDR. And in many ways he was. But the context had changed. In the 1930s the country rallied around FDR’s war on poverty much more readily than it did in the 1960s, because in the 1930s poverty threatened vast numbers of whites, even middle-class whites. By the mid 1960s, poverty had become, disproportionately, a black problem. That single fact created huge problems for Johnson that he did not fully understand at the time.

It is important to note that Johnson believed that poverty could be eliminated without having to resort to income redistribution -- he did not support the Robin Hood approach of taking from the rich to give to the poor. He believed, as most postwar liberals did, that the continuing growth of the economy would provide the funds needed to pay for all of the programs he envisioned for what he called the Great Society.

HEALTH: Medicare - an entitlement for the elderly -- anyone over 65 would be eligible. Medicaid - for the poor, anyone below a given income level would be eligible.

RELIEF: Food Stamps - a way of getting around the fear that assistance would be frittered away unwisely, of guaranteeing that poor kids would get the food they needed; also a way of supporting American farmers. But note that local control leads to different implementation in different regions. Southern political leaders approve food stamps only n seasons when workers are not needed to do farm work.

WELFARE: AFDC - In 1950 Congress changed ADC to AFDC when it expanded grants to dependent children to include grants to their mothers. In the early 1960s Congress expanded AFDC to AFDC-UP to allow for grants to families in which there were two unemployed parents whose unemployment benefits had run out. Congress offered matching grants to any state that undertook this broader benefit. Congress hoped to cut back on the desertion rate of unemployed fathers. Since the program was not mandatory, most poor, rural states, especially in the South did not take advantage of it -- these states continued to restrict benefits to single mothers and to impose morals tests on them -- until the 1970s when a federal court finally held that they could no longer do so.

But the biggest change that took place with respect to AFDC is that there was a big jump in the proportion of the eligible population that came to be covered. For example, in NYC - which had always been reasonably generous - less than one third of those eligible got welfare -- principally because of the red-tape associated with getting benefits. By 1975 - through the work of Welfare Rights Organizations and reform minded legal service organizations -- 90% were covered.

HOUSING: Housing Act of 1961 offered 5 billion dollars to cities to preserve open spaces, build mass transit, and subsidize public housing. Because of the way the money was spent – on densely built, high rise buildings without adequate public services and parks, not on scatter-site housing in suburban areas -- they quickly became warehouses for the most desperately poor, unemployed inner-city African Americans.

EDUCATION: Elementary and Education Act of 1965 extended 12 billion dollars of federal funds (note that education is becoming federalized). Probably the best program of the War on Poverty was Head Start, the pre-school program for inner-city kids aimed at getting them ready for school. Studies showed that Head Start really worked. If it could have been universalized (like the pre-school program in France) it could have made a lasting difference in helping the poorest kids succeed in school. But it died in the 1970s with all of the other anti-poverty programs.

WORKER TRAINING: OEO, CAP -- It is important to remember that people were as divided then as they are today about the causes of poverty. What's the proper approach? -- to get people out of poverty by giving them enough money so that they won't be poor anymore? or, to get poverty out of people by providing them with the kind of job training programs that will allow them to work their way out of poverty? Johnson, in the end, believed that the key to the "war on poverty" was to help the poor help themselves, by training them to be more successful. As Johnson liked to characterized his Great Society approach - he wanted to offer a "hand up, not a hand out."

The centerpiece of this "hand up" was the Office of Economic Opportunity, which created an array of new educational, housing, and employment programs. But the OEO was controversial from the start, in part because of its commitment to the idea of community action. Community action was the idea of involving members of poor communities themselves in the planning and administration of the programs designed to help them, to promote what some people called "maximum feasible participation." --

Inevitably, the work programs, poorly funded and under political attack, bred disillusionment among the people they were supposed to be helping. By the early 1970s these programs were gone. As Lemann points out in The Promised Land, the inner city blacks who were helped most by Great Society programs were those who had enough education to win jobs in the growing governmental sector. When these people started making middle-class wages, they moved out of the inner cities, leaving behind those with the most serious problems. Those who stayed behind were so alienated that they formed the corps of the urban uprisings that swept the country, from Watts in 1965 to most of the big cities in the country by 1968.

One of the most frequent criticisms of the Great Society was that it demonstrated that the powerlessness of the government to cure the problems of the ghetto. Lemann rejects this claim. On p. 219, he faults the federal government for spending on programs that could not work, while short-changing programs that might have helped: better policing, education/training (Head Start), quality child care. QUESTION: Did the Great Society fail because it was never really tried?

IV. Immigration Act of 1965: In the meantime, the Immigration Act of 1965 opened the door to a new wave of immigrants from Latin America and Asia.

QUESTION: What motivated this change? Need for skilled workers? Discomfort over discriminatory roots of 1924 Act?

Immigration Act was principally intended to benefit those groups that had been most discriminated against by the Immigration Act of 1924: Southern and Eastern Europeans. Ironically, by 1965 there were not many immigrants from Poland, Yugoslavia, or Italy. Those who took advantage of the new legislation came disproportionately from Latin America, the Caribbean, and Asia. Those from Latin America and the Caribbean were able to take advantage of the new provision favoring kinship ties, since these groups were already well established in the U.S. No one expected an influx from Asia, but the provision favoring those with special skills allowed highly trained Asians to immigrate in large numbers. For example, between 1940-60 only about 400 Indians moved to the US each year. By the 1980s that number had risen to 25,000 per year [Waldinger, 45]

Immigrants who entered the United States after 1965 tended to have much better skills or much lower expectations than the children of African-American migrants like Ruby Daniels. Ruby Daniels’ children expected to do better than their parents. A significant number were able to move into the governmental sector in the 1970s and 1980s, but those who did not succeed in school often sank into alienation and despair, especially when the opportunities at the steel mills and International Harvester disappeared,

The new immigrants demonstrated, especially in cities like New York, that opportunities could still be created – in the service sector, garment industry and small groceries, for instance. But it is very difficult for people whose expectations have been raised to lower them. The same thing happened in the Depression when men who lost their jobs couldn’t bring themselves to take lower paying jobs in the service sector. These jobs went to women, whose expectations were much lower.

See Roger Waldinger, Still the Promised City? African-Americans and New Immigrants in Postindustrial New York (1996).