Stanley K. Schultz, Professor of History
William P. Tishler, Producer
 

Lecture 27
 

The Almost Great Society: The 1960s

Novelist Ralph Ellison, author of Invisible Man, once called Lyndon Baines Johnson "The greatest American president ever for the poor and the Negroes" and this is certainly the way that Johnson wanted to be remembered. This lecture focuses on the two domestic agendas Ellison had in mind: civil rights and the War on Poverty. We will look at President Johnson's philosophies and political methods, explore how civil rights protestors convinced him to act in the interest of African-Americans, and discuss the consequences of the civil rights legislation that Congress passed during his administration.

Some questions to keep in mind:

1. Compare and contrast the views of LBJ and Eisenhower toward the role of the President and the relationship between the President and Congress.
2. What were the primary goals of the civil rights movement in the years leading up to 1965? Did members of the movement meet their goals during Johnson's administration?
3. How did LBJ's "Great Society" differ from FDR's New Deal? How were they similar?

The death of JFK in November 1963, brought an entirely different man into the White House. No genteel, East-coast patrician, Johnson came from the hill country of Texas and lived up to that image; he was large, boisterous, arrogant, and driven. Johnson was a loyal Democrat who had risen through the party ranks to become a polished professional negotiator. Observers dubbed his ability to manipulate his colleagues into supporting his legislation the "Johnson Treatment," which meant that he got right in his opponents' faces and used humor, statistics, whatever it took to "hypnotize" them into agreeing with his positions. As President, Johnson followed the legislative process very closely, down to the smallest detail. Due to his legislative skill and experience, Johnson was able to pass many of the bills that had proved unsuccessful for earlier Democrats and turned much of the modern liberal agenda into law.

Civil Rights Legislation Under Johnson

One of the first pieces of legislation that Johnson pushed through Congress was the Civil Rights Act of 1964. It had three main parts:

1. The law barred discrimination on the basis of race in public accommodations in the United States - This included gas stations, restaurants, hotels, movie theaters, and airline terminals. The law made an exception for accommodations that served less than five people, an exception that came to be called "Mrs. Murphy's Boarding House."
2. It authorized the Justice Department to bring suit against states that discriminated against women and minorities.
3. It guaranteed equal opportunities in the work place - It was now unlawful for a firm of more than 25 to discriminate on the basis of "race, national origin, religion, or sex." This last provision became a point of debate in the 1970s as women fought to pass the Equal Rights Amendment. Many opponents of the ERA argued that non-discrimination in the workplace on the basis of sex was already part of the 1964 law, which made a constitutional amendment redundant and unnecessary.

The Civil Rights Act of 1964 was a huge step for the civil rights movement, but champions of racial equality still had work to do. By the middle of the 1960s, in fact, the focus of the struggle began to shift away from integration toward the political empowerment of African-Americans.

Voting Rights Act of 1965

Violence in Selma, Alabama, highlighted the need for urgent action in the area of voting rights. Selma's county had 15,000 eligible black voters, yet only 335 had been able to register. In 1965, nonviolent protesters descended on Selma to march from that city to the state capitol in Montgomery. Governor George Wallace, who, in his 1963 inaugural address, had promised "Segregation forever!" sent in state troopers and violence ensued. One civil rights worker was murdered by an extremist. In response to this violence, Congress passed the Voting Rights Act of 1965, which eliminated various barriers to registration--such as literacy tests--that White southerners had traditionally used to restrict African-American voting. President Johnson, ever the opportunist, publicly advertised the fact that he would sign the bill in the same room where, a century before, President Lincoln had signed a document to free slaves conscripted into the Confederate Army.

A New Direction in the Fight for Civil Rights

After passage of the Civil Rights Bill in 1964 and Voting Rights Bill in 1965, some leaders claimed victory for the civil rights movement. There was almost universal agreement up to that point on the cornerstones of the civil rights movement:

1. The goal was integration.
2. The means should be nonviolent.

After 1964, however, many civil rights advocates doubted that they truly had achieved the goal of full civil rights for African-Americans. More and more people began to disagree with integration and nonviolence. Malcolm X, for example, criticized Reverend Martin Luther King's appeals to follow Christian practice and to "turn the other cheek," and stated that Islam had allowed African-Americans "to stand on our own feet and solve our problems ourselves instead of depending on white people to solve them for us." From 1964 to 1968, many black leaders increasingly repudiated integration in favor of black separatism and non-violent resistance in favor of self-defense. As the decade went on, a definite rift began to form in the civil rights movement.

Stokely Carmichael (picture) was one of the leaders of the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC), which had begun as a non-violent, integrationist organization, instrumental in the sit-ins and Freedom Rides of the early 1960s. In 1964 and 1965, however, Carmichael and SNCC repudiated integration and passive resistance and called, instead, for the exclusion of whites from African-American civil rights organizations. Said Carmichael:

"I am not going to beg the white man for anything I deserve. I'm going to take it."

"Black Power" gradually became a new focus in the civil rights movement. In short, champions of Black Power asserted:

1. Blacks should do things for themselves rather than rely on the charity of White politicians.
2. Blacks should defend themselves and fight back if necessary.
3. Blacks should develop and emphasize pride in their own culture.

The Black Power movement called for, and helped institute black political parties, black-owned businesses and black cooperatives, and independent schools for blacks.

As Carmichael told increasingly sympathetic members of CORE,

"We don't need white liberals. We have to make integration irrelevant."

This thinking disturbed more conservative members of CORE as well as the NAACP, which had always emphasized the need for white allies in the movement.

The "Long Hot Summers"

By the mid 1960s, racial tensions had gone beyond sit-ins and Freedom Rides. A series of major riots--or rebellions, depending on your point of view--erupted during the latter part of the decade, including:

• 1964--Riots in Harlem and Bedford-Stuyvesant, New York City
• 1965--Riots in the Watts section of Los Angeles. Malcolm X killed in New York.
• 1967--Several dozen riots, including ones in Newark and Detroit.
• 1968--Martin Luther King, Jr. killed on April 4 and race riots--which King abhorred--broke out around the country.

In response, President Johnson appointed the National Advisory Commission on Civil Disorders, also known as the Kerner Commission. The Kerner Commission found that the country was divided, along racial and socio-economic lines, into two societies: 40% of non-whites lived below the federal government's poverty line, black men were twice as likely to be unemployed as whites and three times as likely to be in low-skill jobs. The commission viewed this poverty as the cause of crime and civil unrest, concluding :

"chronic poverty is a breeder of chronic chaos."

The President, for the most part, ignored the findings of the commission, although he did push for the Civil Rights Act of 1968, the last significant piece of civil rights legislation of the era. The Civil Rights Act of 1968:

1. Barred discrimination in the sale or rental of housing (affecting 80% of the nation's total housing units).
2. Made it a federal crime to cross state lines to incite a riot.

The second point demonstrated an appeal to the emerging white backlash against the violent tactics of some black demonstrators. So, although, the Johnson administration made great progress in the realm of civil rights, it also paid homage to white conservatives by the end of the decade.

The "War on Poverty"

The advancement of civil rights for African-Americans was only one item on Johnson's ambitious domestic agenda. The second item was the "War on Poverty." In 1963, shortly before he was assassinated, President Kennedy had asked his economic advisors to draw up some proposals to address the problem of American poverty. Johnson took up this charge after he succeeded Kennedy as President. In Johnson's first State of the Union address on June 8, 1964, he called for an unconditional war to defeat poverty. He expanded and revised the proposals given to Kennedy and developed the Economic Opportunity Act of 1964. The act included a variety of initiatives:

1. Head Start
2. Job Corps
3. Work-Study program for university students
4. VISTA (Volunteers in Service to America) - a domestic version of the Peace Corps
5. Neighborhood Youth Corps
6. Basic education and adult job training
7. CAPS (Community Action Programs) - CAPS turned out to be the most controversial part of the package, as it proposed the "maximum feasible participation" by poor people themselves to determine what would help them the most. CAPS was a radical departure from how government had run most social reform programs in the past.

The Economic Opportunity Act was bold legislation, but it received only about $1 billion to divide among the various programs and remained critically under funded. By 1966, Congress appropriated $4 billion for the programs.

Tax Cuts

In February 1964, LBJ shepherded another Kennedy plan through Congress: a $10 billion tax cut. This policy was largely a success. Over the next several quarters, consumer spending rose $45 billion, the GNP soared, and the federal government actually increased its revenue. As a result, most top policy makers accepted the tenets of Keynesian economics.

The Great Society

Following the tradition of using catchphrases to describe major domestic programs started by Franklin D. Roosevelt, President Johnson announced his "Great Society" during the presidential campaign of 1964. He described the Great Society as

"A place where men are more concerned with the quality of their lives than the quantity of their goods."

The Great Society had three central themes:

• Abundance and liberty for all.
• An end to poverty.
• An end to racial injustice.

When the votes were counted, Johnson crushed Goldwater in the 1964 election. Johnson and his running mate, Hubert Humphrey of Minnesota, received 61% of the popular vote and won every state except Goldwater's home state of Arizona, and five states in the Deep South. LBJ's overwhelming victory also helped bring many liberal candidates into the eighty-ninth Congress. Historians often refer to this Congress as the "Fabulous Eighty-Ninth" for its great number of legislative successes. The "Fabulous Eighty-Ninth" accomplished the following:

1. Achieved the goals of the Fair Deal.
2. Achieved the goals of the New Frontier.
3. Introduced Medicare programs.
4. Passed the Elementary and Secondary Education Act.
5. Legislated a Housing and Urban Development program.
6. Ratified the highway beautification act, a pet project of Lady Bird Johnson, the First Lady.
7. Installed clean air and water regulations.
8. Ended the immigration quota system of the 1920s.
9. Set forth new city planning programs.

The Fabulous Eighty-Ninth Congress passed so much progressive legislation between 1965 and 1967 that it reminded many Americans of the germinal days of the early New Deal. Said Speaker of the House, John W. McCormack:

"It was a Congress of accomplished hopes, a Congress of realized dreams."

"If only it hadn't been for Vietnam..."

Had the United States not become involved in Vietnam, historians today would likely remember President Johnson for his leadership in passing civil rights legislation and for his declaration of a "War on Poverty." The Vietnam War, however, proved to be Johnson's downfall. The history and domestic impact of this war are fascinating and extraordinarily important. So important, in fact, we'll take them up in Lecture 28: "The Asian Connection."

Lecture 27	Related Web Links
Content	Presentation	Audience	Link	Info
		College	"The Unfinished War [on poverty]," by Nicholas Lemann
		College	LBJ in the Oval Office
		College	Stokely Carmichael Speaks on Freedom and White America
		College	Cuban Missile Crisis: Note from Khrushchev to John F. Kennedy

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