Lecture 16: Liberalism Ascendant

Liberalism Ascendant

The administrations of John F. Kennedy and Lyndon Baines Johnson occurred during a period where liberalism appeared to be at its strongest.
However, this strength was also liberalism's greatest weakness, leading to a backlash from both conservatives and left-wing movements.
The New Deal coalition, which included Catholics, labor, northern African Americans, southern Democrats, intellectuals, and northern liberals, began to fray due to competing demands from various groups.
Kennedy and Johnson hoped the coalition would be strong enough to negotiate competing demands and resist conservative attacks, but this proved to be wrong.

The Assassination of Martin Luther King Jr.

In April 1968, Martin Luther King Jr. traveled to Memphis, Tennessee to support a black garbageman's strike.
On April 4, 1968, King was assassinated, leading to rioting in black communities throughout the nation.
The assassination captured a crushing disappointment of dashed dreams shared by many Americans.
The 1960s were marked by discord, including assassinations of prominent liberal leaders such as John F. Kennedy, Malcolm X, Robert F. Kennedy, and Martin Luther King Jr.
Liberalism's willingness to use the government to protect civil rights and expand economic opportunity also generated discord.
Social reformers advanced competing visions of social justice and shared prosperity.
Martin Luther King dreamed of using nonviolence to achieve racial equality, while more militant activists advocated armed self-defense.
Kennedy and Johnson launched wars against poverty, but their agendas were considered too timid by young radical activists.
Feminists, Chicano activists, and Native Americans mobilized to demand equal rights.
Conservative segments of the population hated liberalism, with southern segregationists organizing to prevent government attempts to dismantle Jim Crow.
White northerners increasingly resented taxpayer-supported programs for minorities.
The rise of hippie countercultural movements convinced many working and middle-class whites that liberalism was associated with lawlessness and the erosion of traditional values.
The political and cultural battles of the 1960s transformed the nation, leaving Americans divided over whether the nation had changed too much or not enough by 1970.

Focus Questions

What were the societal visions of the Kennedy and Johnson administrations?
How did they exemplify a new definition of liberalism?
What other movements emerged in the 1960s, and how were they influenced by the black freedom struggle?
What were the key goals of feminist reformers?
Who opposed them and why?
How did the liberal project of the 1960s help create a backlash and a resurgence of right-wing politics and electoral viability?

Heyday of American Liberalism

The 1960s was the heyday of American liberalism, thanks to presidential reform agendas and pivotal Supreme Court rulings.
Kennedy and Johnson viewed themselves as heirs to the New Deal legacy and wanted to follow in Harry Truman's footsteps.
They believed in the power of the federal government to reform American society but faced intense resistance from conservatives.
Kennedy was influenced by Michael Harrington's book, The Other America, which exposed the fact that nearly 20% of Americans lived in dire poverty during the most prosperous moment in American history.
Harrington documented the deteriorating schools, substandard housing, and dead-end jobs that created a vicious cycle of poverty.
He claimed that a culture of poverty filled with extramarital sex, illegitimate children, and broken families created a different kind of people who did not share the values of middle-class America.
Like Jacob Riis, Harrington succeeded in awakening the social consciousness of affluent liberals, including John Kennedy.
Kennedy seemed to promise a new era in American governance and connected with average Americans.
In his inaugural address, Kennedy said, "Let us begin anew."
While campaigning in West Virginia, Kennedy came face to face with appalling poverty and tried to talk about the lives of coal miners.
Kennedy's personal touch and charisma helped him connect with voters who educated him about the entrenched poverty that was endemic to many rural and industrial communities.

Kennedy's New Frontier

Kennedy narrowly beat Richard Nixon in the 1960 election, highlighting how fractured the country was.
Kennedy wanted to reinvigorate the liberal agenda through a legislative program called the New Frontier.
This program proposed reforms such as raising the minimum wage, investing in schools, and providing expanded health care for the elderly.
Kennedy wanted to cut taxes while also increasing government spending to stimulate the economy, reasoning that if incomes rose more than tax revenue, that more money would come into the federal coffers to pay for these programs.
Ultimately, that would just end up creating an immense amount of deficit spending.
Kennedy was the youngest elected president in American history, and his idealism inspired a lot of baby boomers.
Thousands joined the Peace Corps, an agency established by Kennedy that would send recent college graduates to work on humanitarian projects in developing nations.
Kennedy also raised unemployment and Social Security benefits and the minimum wage, but he had trouble implementing other parts of his program.
Kennedy was not a skilled lobbyist, and just over one-third of his proposals would become law.
Southerners objected to his growing support for civil rights and his push for integrated schools.
He also alienated a lot of conservatives in his party by using all this deficit spending to fund these programs that Kennedy had proposed.
Part of Kennedy's idealism and hopefulness that he brings to the Oval Office comes through his renewed emphasis on American ingenuity, engineering, inventiveness, and no better this was no better symbolized than the the space race with the Soviet Union.
In a famous 1962 speech, Kennedy announced that the United States would put a man on the moon by the end of the decade.

The Warren Court

Under the leadership of Chief Justice Earl Warren, the Supreme Court became an aggressive champion of individual rights and helped foster the liberal agenda.
Warren believed that the Constitution gave the government the power and the responsibility to protect the powerless against oppression by the majority.
The Warren Court rendered opinions on a wide range of social justice issues, bringing about a legal revolution that permanently altered American schools, politics, the criminal justice system, and cultural standards.
Northern liberals cheered these decisions, but conservatives viewed the Warren Court as an activist court.
The Warren Court moved ahead of Congress and public opinion in its decisions.
The Warren Court pushed decisions like Brown v. Board that paved the way for school desegregation.
Throughout the 1950s and 1960s, the Warren Court dismantled Jim Crow piece by piece, striking down segregated interstate buses, upholding the rights of civil rights protesters to hold sit-ins, and embracing federal laws to desegregate public places and guaranteeing the right to vote as constitutional.
The Warren Court also introduced the right to privacy, striking down state laws that outlawed the possession of pornographic materials, prohibited the use of contraception, and prevented interracial marriages.
The Warren Court redefined how the police arrested and interrogated suspected criminals, establishing Miranda rights.
The Warren Court championed freedom of speech and pushed back against the Red Scare era idea that infringed on civil liberties.
The Warren Court struck down laws that required Communist Party members to register with the government and struck down official school prayers, such as in Engel v. Vitale in 1962.
These decisions led to long-term backlash, particularly as religious conservatives and liberal Catholics saw this as an infringement of their First Amendment rights of religious freedom.

Kennedy's Assassination and Johnson's Ascension

John F. Kennedy was assassinated in November 1963, and Lyndon Johnson became president.
Johnson feared that if the country could not make opportunities available for all Americans, then the American experiment would be fundamentally threatened.
Kennedy's assassination sobered Johnson, and he vowed to take up the slain president's liberal agenda, saying, "Let us continue."
Johnson excelled at deals needed to move legislation through Congress.
Johnson knew that because he was not elected, millions of Americans considered him illegitimate, as he said, a pretender to the throne, and he saw the 1964 election as an opportunity to validate his presidency.
Johnson expected to lose a lot of southern votes for openly supporting federal civil rights legislation.
Segregationist governor of Alabama, George Wallace, ran a very strong primary opposition to Johnson in 1964, and he did well in a lot of Northern states, which was very shocking.
This was evidence that the president's civil right record might cost him votes in Northern White working class neighborhoods and even in some middle class suburbs.
At the Democratic Party's presidential nominating convention, two separate delegations from Mississippi appeared.
The Mississippi Freedom Democratic Party (MFDP) held a shadow primary to elect their own delegates, challenging the all-white Democratic Party's claim to represent the state.
Fannie Lou Hamer, one of the delegates of the MFDP, gave gripping testimony about being beaten, losing her job, and receiving a $9,000$ water bill for trying to register to vote.
Johnson called a news conference to interrupt Fannie Lou Hamer's story.
MFDP delegates walked off the floor.

Barry Goldwater and the 1964 Election

The Republican Party nominee in 1964 was Barry Goldwater, a very conservative Republican senator from Arizona.
Goldwater proposed dismantling most of the New Deal, including Social Security, and opposed federal civil rights laws.
Goldwater spoke for staunch conservatives who felt that government interference in the economy and society did more harm than good.
His extreme conservative views alarmed a lot of prominent moderate Republicans who ended up openly supporting Lyndon Johnson.
Democrats used Goldwater's most extreme statements during the election to make LBJ look almost moderate in comparison.
Johnson's candidacy was alarming to a lot of Republicans, especially Republicans more in the mold of Eisenhower.
In many ways, Goldwater is ahead of his time in the sense that he sees where the political headwinds are going with regards to the Republican movement in the country.
Goldwater's push to kind of deconstruct the administrative state gained him a lot of ardent followers in the nineteen sixties, including a young Ronald Reagan.
Goldwater said, "My aim is not to pass laws, but to repeal them."

The Great Society

Johnson won the election with over 61% of the popular vote, the largest percentage in American history.
The Democrats also widened their control of Congress, which gave Johnson a strong mandate to govern.
Johnson wanted to use federal power to create a more economically equal society and to attack entrenched forms of poverty.
He wanted to create what he called a Great Society, with social welfare reforms that would make all of the amenities of modern life, a decent standard of living, access to education, health care, clean water available to all Americans, that these were not privileges but rights.
Johnson shared FDR's desire to provide the deserving poor with a decent standard of living.
Johnson believed even more strongly than previous generations of liberal reformers in the ability of the government to improve the quality of life in America.
Under Johnson, the federal government would begin combating pollution, supporting the arts, planting trees and flowers along the nation's highways.
Johnson, in his own words, aspired to do more than put food in people's stomachs; he wanted to nurture their spirits.
The Great Society will be the culmination of the New Deal project.
These are all experiences of modern life that were made possible by Johnson's Great Society, like admiring the trees and landscaping along a national highway or reading a food label listing nutritional content in the supermarket or watching a documentary on PBS.
The great society reflected the liberal faith and the power of government to do good.
The supporters of the great society hoped to remove the causes of debilitating poverty by educational system, by providing health care to the aged, disabled, and indigent, by creating new cabinet level positions in housing and urban affairs to oversee the construction of and direct economic relief to struggling cities and people.
The Great Society also included a new Department of Transportation to manage the federal funds now pouring into highway construction and landscaping and beautification.
Johnson offered conservative industrialists tax breaks in returns for supporting his social welfare programs, arguing that his programs would create highly skilled workers who consumed more.
Johnson would push through over 65% of his proposals, a level of success only surpassed by FDR's 80% passage rate.
DPR was in a much less polarized society, which makes Johnson's ability to get these bills through even more remarkable.

Legislative Achievements and Compromises

Part of his great society push to eliminate poverty and discrimination will include pushing for things like federal aid to schools, providing government backed health care to senior citizens and the poor. To get these things through, he had to compromise.
Medicare, which is government funded health insurance for the elderly, reimbursed doctors and hospitals whatever they charged senior citizens instead of establishing government rates.
Johnson also agreed to let the states and not the federal government run Medicaid, which provided health services to the poor.
Johnson wanted to restore America's identity as the land of opportunity for immigrants, so the Immigration Act of 1965 eliminated the national origins quota system.
An unprecedented numbers of Koreans, Chinese, Filipinos, and Vietnamese will migrate to The United States from the nineteen sixties to the nineteen nineties.
Johnson is also the first president to make tackling environmental problems a pillar of his administration, and he's influenced by Rachel Carson's book Silent Spring.
Johnson talked about how Americans had always been proud of "America the beautiful," but polluted air, disappearing forests, and filthy rivers had tarnished that.
These ecological catastrophes would also help spawn an exploding grassroots environmental movement.
Part of the Great Society's environmental measures included pollution controls on cars, national standards for acceptable air and water pollution, and federally protected wilderness areas.

Rights Revolution

The rights revolution that is begun in the fifties and sixties and helped along by decisions made at the federal level at the within the Supreme Court will inspire various civil rights struggles in the nineteen sixties and nineteen seventies.
Even though these pieces of federal legislation are passed, like the Civil Rights Act and the Voting Rights Act, even though Supreme Court decisions are passed, like Brown v Board that expand civil rights. Most of these are on it's on How do you enforce them?
Grassroots organizers and average Americans had to make these pieces of policy real and tangible.
The black freedom struggle is also remarkably successful at pushing the federal government to do even more.
Other groups in The United States, other marginalized groups will see the success of this movement and will be inspired by it.
In the late 1960s, we'll see renewed civil rights movements within the Native American community, within the Latino community, a renewed second wave feminist movement, a renewed gay rights movement, and also a movement from students that will challenge the status quo of the affluent society of that conformity culture.

The New Left

The earliest of these movements influenced by the black freedom struggle are student driven movements on campuses across The United States.
These students will create the core of what will be called the new left, a core composed mostly of white middle class college students.
The new left attacked racial discrimination, poverty, and the war in Vietnam.
Students for a Democratic Society (SDS) was formed in 1960 at the University of Michigan.
SDS will urge his generate will will urge the generation coming of age in the early nineteen sixties to reject the materialism of the nineteen fifties, reject the conformity of the nineteen fifties, reject the anticommunism of the nineteen fifties.
One of SDS's leaders, Tom Hayden, urged students to fight against this culture of the 1950s in an influential manifesto called the Port Huron statement.
SDS will be very influential in opening up colleges to more diverse faculties and will be instrumental in pushing college campuses to wider standards of freedom of speech.
SDS will also, by the mid nineteen sixties and late nineteen sixties, be one of the most visible opponents of the draft, of Vietnam, and of the war itself.
The SDS will push the Democratic Party in a more leftist direction.

Young Americans for Freedom

Young conservatives on college campuses reacting to the new left, reacting to SDS, reacting to anti war protests, reacting to the hippie and counterculture movement that in guilt free sex will form their own coalition called the Young Americans for Freedom.
These folks were often more conservative than the moderates that dominated the Republican Party at that time.
YAF members would be some of the most ardent supporters of Barry Goldwater in 1964, and these conservative students would push for limited economic regulation, for states' rights, respect for law and order, staunch anticommunism, things that would become constitutive features of the Republican Party by the late nineteen sixties and nineteen seventies.
These movements, whether on the left or on the right, are challenges, existential challenges to the New Deal coalition.

Women's Liberation Movement

One of these movements that illustrates the growing fracture within the Democratic Party, but also within the civil rights movements themselves, is the women's liberation movement.
Women's liberation begins with an attack on the domestic ideal of the 1950s.
Betty Friedan published an influential book in 1963 called The Feminine Mystique, challenging the notion that women should focus solely on homemaking and child raising, arguing that women should be able to engage in the full range of meaningful activities available to men.
Fred Ann believed that women should be able to engage in the full range of meaningful activities available to men, and her analysis would resonate most strongly amongst white middle class women who felt imprisoned within their suburban lives.
Helen Gurley Brown was also a really influential feminist who also wrote a bestseller that would help ignite the women's movement of the nineteen sixties.
Brown wrote that marriage was overrated in her book Sex and the Single Girl, which advice book that counseled young women, single women, to explore their sexuality while they had while they had the chance.
Brown argued that women, if they use their sex appeal intelligently, they could by earning less than men and having fewer career opportunities.
Fordan, though, took the took a different path and took a more mainstream path.
She joined with other political activists that were frustrated with the government's failure to fully enforce the Civil Rights Act of 1964, which if you'll remember, barred discrimination and race, religion, ethnicity, or sex.
Ferdinand and other second wave feminists believe that the equal that was established as a result of the Civil Rights Act did not take complaints of sex discrimination seriously.
That failure would lead for Dan and others to create the National Organization for Women in 1966, which fought for equal rights for women in employment, education, and politics, all of them traditionally male domains, and also wanted to give women control over their own bodies through access to contraception and legal abortions.
Though NOW was a relatively small organization, it was instrumental in convincing Johnson to issue an executive order that would require government agencies and federal contractors to create affirmative action programs to hire and promote women and minority men.
A lot of the women in the second wave feminist movement began their activist careers within this within the black freedom struggle.
But these women within the black civil rights movement grew unhappy with gender discrimination, not just within the black civil rights movement, but also within things like the new left, SDS, where men were kind of the primary spokespeople of the organizations.
Women in these organizations were expected to perform all of the clerical chores and housework.
Black female SNCC workers staged a sit-in at a SNCC office in Atlanta to address discrimination within the civil rights movement.
White women in the new left would redirect their energies more towards a distinct women's movement, while black women were much more reluctant to abandon the civil rights movement because racial oppression affected them more severely than sexual discrimination.
There were more radical feminists steeped in new left ideology, nonviolent tactics, and they would adopt a grassroots approach that used things like consciousness raising awareness to heighten social and political issues that helped women understand the universality of their oppression.
They emphasized changing attitudes rather than lobbying for legislative changes and would do things like introducing the word MS into the American lexicon to replace miss or MRS, which a woman's identity to her marital status.
Just messages, both moderate and radical feminists would have trouble expanding their support beyond the white middle class.
A lot of working class women's a lot of working class women did not see this movement as speaking to their own concerns.
One of the reasons why NOW was founded in the first place is because of quotes like "Men are entitled to female secretaries," from the EEOC.
Demonstrators carry a photograph of an attractive naked young woman with lines dividing her body like cuts of beef to protest how beauty pageants dehumanized women at miss America pageants.
Discrimination faced that women faced within these organizations was seen as, for many women, for particularly white women, as reasons to leave.

Native American Activism

Native American activists drew inspiration from the integrationist and militant messages of the black freedom struggle and launched their own crusade to end ethnic discrimination.
After encouraging Native Americans to move off their reservations in the 1950s, the Bureau of Indian Affairs began terminating the rights of some Indian tribes to federal protection.
Native American activists wanted financial assistance and self-government on reservations.
In 1969, a group calling themselves Indians of all tribes took over the abandoned federal prison on Alcatraz Island, issuing the sarcastic Alcatraz proclamation that offered to purchase the island for $24 in glass beads and red cloth.
The proclamation described Alcatraz as the perfect site for an Indian reservation because it lacked running water, sanitation, schools, and resources.
Native Americans would stage nearly 70 other occupations, including the American Indian Movement's armed takeover of Wounded Knee in 1973.
These protests prompted President Richard Nixon to increase funds for social services on Indian reservations and to establish the office of Indian water rights.
The federal government ended the policy of termination, and Congress increased Native American self-rule on reservation lands.
Native American tribes also began suing the government successfully for past treaty violations.
The American Indian movement will begin to call for Native Americans to see themselves as one.
AIM tried to foster a Pan-Indian identity, taking pride in the indigenousness and being Native American.
That alongside these other things that are done, such as the Trail of Broken Treaties, which is a march on Washington DC to argue for the federal government to basically reparations for past wrongdoings, all of these things will lead to a significant changes in Native American life in the nineteen seventies.

Mexican American Activism

After World War II, the United States reversed its policy of prohibiting Mexican American or Mexicans from migrating to The United States, and actually encourages Mexicans to come to The United States as part of its Bracero program to work as migrant labor.
That experience, which was quite awful, will not lead Mexicans to go back to Mexico, but will lead instead to renewed demands for political and economic opportunities in the Southwest.
In the 1960s, Hispanics were the fastest growing minority group.
Migrant work was terrible. The life expectancy for a Mexican American migrant worker was around the age of 50, and the infant mortality rate for Mexican Americans was double the national average.
Cesar Chavez, who was the head of the United Farm Workers Union, used strikes and marches to secure better working and living conditions for Hispanic Americans.
Chavez appealed directly to consumers, convincing 17,000,000 Americans to stop buying nonunion picked grapes, which provoked a backlash.
By 1970, the economic toll of the boycott had forced grape growers to recognize the United Farm Workers and to raise wages.
Latino urban radicals in Texas, California, and Colorado embraced a competing vision that they called la raza or the race that emphasized racial identity over union organizing.
The Brown Berets modeled themselves after the Black Panthers and called themselves Chicanos, demanding an end to white discrimination.
In March 1968, '10 thousand high school students in East LA staged a blowout/walkout to protest the poor education they received in their mostly Hispanic schools.
Divisions within the Mexican American community over whether or not mass demonstrations and steady harassment from the police would be helpful or not, and the Chicano student movement declined over the course of the nineteen seventies.

LGBTQ Rights Movement

The rights revolution of the 1960s encompassed the gay and lesbian subcultures that had existed in the shadows of mainstream society throughout the 1950s.
Unlike African Americans, women, and other minority groups, gay Americans did not have a long history of organizing to defend their rights.
The civil rights movement and the hippie countercultural assault on sexual taboos inspired some gay people to come out of the closet and challenge the ways that American society ostracized them.
The true awakening of the gay rights movement came during the Stonewall riot on June 28, 1969, when patrons of the Stonewall Inn fought back during a New York City Police raid.
This defiance electrified the gay community, and the next morning, a huge crowd gathered outside the Stonewall Inn chanting "gay power."
Energized gay men and lesbians founded the radical gay liberation front in response to Stonewall while hundreds of smaller gay rights groups sprouted up throughout the country.
These organizations formed gay support groups on campuses, lobbied for anti-discrimination laws, and marched in gay pride.
Following the sit-in model of the civil rights movement, they staged kiss-ins in restaurants.
The increased visibility of the gay rights movement provoked a conservative response, especially amongst religious conservatives.
Fundamentalist churches opposed any legislation that granted gays legitimacy.

Conclusion

The liberal moment of the 1960s achieved a number of goals and ended a lot of entrenched forms of discrimination.
The new frontier and the great society expanded the New Deal's emphasis on economic security by including a renewed commitment to to protect minority rights and also to extend government responsibility to areas that it hadn't had the environment, health insurance for or health care for the elderly and for the impoverished, endowments for the arts.
But these programs were not administered evenly, and they did not benefit everyone equally.
Johnson, despite his efforts to make the great society a war on poverty, entrenched levels of inequality remained, particularly amongst the nation's minority groups.
A powerful backlash arose in the late 1960s in response to perceived overreaches of government, and a new empowered conservative movement would emerge from this backlash.