The American Promise Lecture Notes

Chapter 28 - Reform, Rebellion, and Reaction

1960 - 1974
I.

Liberalism at High Tide

A. The Unrealized Promise of Kennedys New Frontier

1. Road to the PresidencyJohn F. Kennedys record in Congress was

unremarkable, but with a powerful political machine, his familys fortune, and a
handsome and dynamic appearance, Kennedy won the Democratic presidential
nomination in 1960; he defeated his Republican opponent, Vice President
Richard M. Nixon, in an excruciatingly close election; African Americans offset
the fact that 52 percent of white votes went for Nixon.
2. Idealism versus PragmatismAlthough his administration projected energy,
idealism, and glamour, Kennedy was a cautious, pragmatic politician; at his
inauguration, he called on Americans to serve the common good; though
Kennedys idealism inspired many, he failed to redeem campaign promises to
expand the welfare state.
3. Attack on Poverty and Growing the EconomyMoved by the desperate
conditions he saw when he campaigned in Appalachia in 1960, Kennedy helped
push poverty onto the national agenda; won support for a $2 billion urban
renewal program, legislation that offered incentives to businesses to locate in
depressed areas, and established a training program for the unemployed;
Kennedy promised to make economic growth a key objective; economic advisers
argued that infusing money into the economy by reducing taxes would increase
demand, boost production, and decrease unemployment; Congress passed
Kennedys tax cut bill in 1964, ushering in the greatest economic boom since
World War II; some liberal critics of the tax cut pointed out that it favored the
wealthy and that economic growth alone would not eliminate poverty.

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4. AssassinationKennedys initiatives had not reached fruition when he fell
victim to an assassins bullet on November 22, 1963; the murder of the president
touched Americans as had no other event since the end of World War II;
President Lyndon B. Johnson appointed a commission headed by Chief Justice
Earl Warren, which concluded in September 1964 that Lee Harvey Oswald,
acting alone, assassinated Kennedy, and that Jack Ruby, who killed Oswald two
days later, had also acted alone.
5. Kennedys Domestic RecordDebate continued over how to assess
Kennedys domestic record, which had been unremarkable in his first two years,
but had suggested an important shift in 1963 with his proposals on taxes, civil
rights, and poverty.

B. Johnson Fulfills the Kennedy

1. A Different PresidentLyndon B. Johnson assumed the presidency with a
wealth of political experience and fierce ambition; his coarse wit, extreme vanity,
and Texas accent repulsed those who preferred the sophisticated Kennedy style;
Johnson excelled behind the scenes, where he could entice or threaten
legislators into support of his objectives.
2. Civil Rights Act of 1964Goal was to fulfill Kennedys vision for America,
and Johnson secured the passage of Kennedys proposed tax cut and the Civil
Rights Act of 1964, the strongest such measure since Reconstruction; required
every ounce of Johnsons political skill to pull votes from Republicans to
counterbalance recalcitrant Southern Democrats.
3. The Economic Opportunity ActFast on the heels of the Civil Rights Act
came a response to Johnsons call for an unconditional war on poverty; the
Economic Opportunity Act of 1964 authorized ten programs under a newly
created Office of Economic Opportunity, allocating $800 million for the first year;
new programs included Head Start and the Job Corps.
4. The Community Action ProgramThe most novel part of the law, the
Community Action Program (CAP), required maximum feasible participation of
the poor themselves in antipoverty programs; spurred organizing by the poor in
order to take control of their neighborhoods.

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C. Policymaking for a Great Society

1. The Election of 1964Johnson projected stability and security in the midst of
a booming economy; easily won the election of 1964 with a record-breaking
landslide of 61 percent of the popular vote; Goldwaters campaign did arouse
considerable grassroots support from the right, however.
2. The Great SocietyJohnson wanted to usher in the Great Society;
ambitious legislative goals; Johnson found success due to the large Democratic
majorities in Congress, his own political skills, and pressure from the black
freedom struggle.
3. The War on PovertyEconomic Opportunity Act of 1964 was Johnsons first
step in the War on Poverty; Congress doubled the programs funding in 1965;
direct aid included a new food stamp program and rent supplements; eased
restrictions on welfare recipients who received benefits from Aid to Families with
Dependent Children.
4. EducationJohnson saw federal support for public education as a natural
extension of the New Deal; the Elementary and Secondary Education Act and the
Higher Education Act of 1965 endeavored to equip the poor with the skills
necessary to find jobs.
5. Health CareFederal involvement in health care marked an even more
significant watershed; pared down Trumans proposal for universal health care
and instead focused on the elderly, who constituted a large portion of the nations
poor; Medicare provided the elderly with medical insurance, while Medicaid
authorized federal grants to supplement state-paid medical care for poor people;
together covered nearly 30 percent of the population.

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6. Expanding LiberalismGreat Society programs fulfilled New Deal and Fair
Deal promises but also broke with tradition by expanding liberalism to address
the rights and needs of racial minorities; the Civil Rights Act of 1964 made
discrimination illegal in employment, education, and public accommodations; the
Voting Rights Act of 1965 banned literacy tests and ensured federal intervention
to protect black voting rights; the Immigration and Nationality Act of 1965
abolished quotas for immigrants from regions outside northern and western
Europe.
7. Backlash and Last GaspsThe flood of reform legislation dwindled after
1966, when midterm elections trimmed the Democrats majorities in Congress
and a backlash against government programs arose; despite this backlash and
an antiwar movement that crippled his leadership, in 1968 Johnson pried out of
Congress a civil rights law that banned discrimination in housing and jury service,
and the National Housing Act of 1968, which authorized an enormous increase in
construction of low-income housing for the poor.

D. Assessing the Great Society

1. Unequal Results in War on PovertyMeasured by statistics, the reduction in
poverty in the 1960s was considerable; number of poor people fell from more
than 20 percent in 1959 to around 13 percent in 1968; but certain groups fared
much better than others; large numbers of the aged and members of maleheaded families rose out of poverty; but African Americans escaped poverty at a
slower rate than whites and the plight of female-headed families actually
worsened.
2. Criticism from the Right and the LeftConservative critics charged that
Great Society programs discouraged initiative by giving the poor handouts;
liberal critics argued that the emphasis on training and education unjustly placed
the responsibility for poverty on the poor themselves and not on the structure of
the economy.
3. Who Prospered?Government funds allotted for medical care, urban
renewal, and housing greatly benefited physicians, construction contractors, real
estate developers and investors, and moderate-income families as well.

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4. No Redistribution of IncomeGreat Society programs did invest more
heavily in the public sector, but they were funded from economic growth rather
than from new taxes on the rich or middle class; no significant redistribution of
income.

E. The Judicial Revolution

1. The Warren CourtA key element of liberalisms ascendancy in the 1960s
emerged in the Supreme Court under Chief Justice Earl Warren, who presided
from 1953 to 1969; in contrast to the Progressive era and the New Deal, when
federal courts blocked reform, the Supreme Court in the 1960s expanded the
Constitutions promise of equality and individual rights, made decisions
supporting an activist government to prevent injustice, and provided new
protections to disadvantaged groups and accused criminals.
2. Major DecisionsFollowing Brown, the Court defended the rights of civil
rights activists, struck down state laws banning interracial marriage, and
established one person, one vote in electoral districts.
3. Reforming the Criminal Justice SystemThe Warren Court ensured the
right to public counsel when the accused could not afford to hire lawyers; also
tightened police procedures to conform to rights guaranteed to the accused under
the Fourteenth Amendment; critics accused the justices of obstructing law
enforcement and letting criminals go free.
4. Ruling on ReligionDecisions on religion provoked even greater outrage; the
Court ruled that requiring prayer and Bible reading in school violated the First
Amendment.

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II. The Second Reconstruction

A. The Flowering of the Black Freedom Struggle

1. The Significance of MontgomeryThe Montgomery bus boycott of 1955
1956 gave racial issues national visibility, produced a leader in Martin Luther King
Jr., and demonstrated the effectiveness of mass organization.
2. The Sit-InsMassive direct action began in February 1960, when four African
American students in Greensboro requested service at the whites-only lunch
counter at a Woolworths store; within days, similar sit-ins spread across thirtyone southern cities.
3. The Founding of SNCCElla Baker organized a meeting of student activists
in April 1960; she supported their decision to form a new organization, the
Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC); embraced civil
disobedience and nonviolence; rejected top-down leadership.
4. The Freedom RidesIn May 1961, the Congress of Racial Equality (CORE)
organized Freedom Rides to integrate interstate transportation in the South; the
Riders were beaten in Anniston, Birmingham, and Montgomery, Alabama before
being jailed in Mississippi; more than four hundred blacks and whites
participated.
5. Violence in Mississippi and AlabamaIn June 1963, a white man shot
Mississippi NAACP leader Medgar Evers in front of his house in Jackson;
violence also met Kings 1963 campaign in Birmingham, Alabama, to integrate
public facilities and open jobs to African Americans; police attacked
demonstrators with dogs and fire hoses; brutality was broadcast around the world
on television.
6. The March on Washington for Jobs and FreedomThe largest
demonstration drew 250,000 blacks and whites to the nations capital in August
1963, where King put his indelible stamp on the day, delivering his I have a
dream speech; euphoria of the March on Washington quickly faded as activists
returned to continued violence in the South.

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7. Freedom SummerIn 1964, the Mississippi Freedom Summer Project
mobilized more than a thousand northern black and white college students to
conduct voter education classes and a voter registration drive; by the end of the
summer, only twelve hundred new voters had been allowed to register; several
activists were killed by southern whites.
8. The Selma MarchIn March 1965, Alabama troopers used such fierce force
to turn back a march from Selma to the state capitol in Montgomery that the
incident became known as Bloody Sunday; forced President Johnson to call up
the Alabama National Guard to protect the marchers.

B. The Response in Washington

1. Lack of InitiativeBoth the Kennedy and the Johnson administrations were
reluctant to alienate southern voters and congressmen; tended to move only
when civil rights activists gave them no choice.
2. The Civil Rights BillIn June 1963, Kennedy finally made good on his
promise to seek strong antidiscrimination legislation; Civil Rights Act of 1964
guaranteed access for all Americans to public accommodations, public
education, employment, and voting, thus sounding the death knell for the Souths
system of segregation and discrimination.
3. The Voting Rights ActIn August 1965, Johnson signed the Voting Rights
Act, which empowered the federal government to intervene directly to enable
African Americans to register and vote, transforming southern politics.
4. Affirmative ActionJohnson issued an executive order in 1965 that required
employers with government contracts to take affirmative action to ensure equal
opportunity.
5. Combating Neighborhood SegregationCivil Rights Act of 1968 banned
racial discrimination in housing and jury selection and authorized federal
intervention when states failed to protect civil rights workers from violence.

C. Black Power and Urban Rebellions

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1. Nationwide ProtestBy 1966, black protest extended from the South to the
entire nation; protestors demanded not just legal equality but also economic
justice; no longer held nonviolence as its basic principle; developments not
entirely new, but the black freedom struggle began to appear more threatening to
whites.
2. Unrealized PromiseIn part, the new emphases resulted from a combination
of heightened activism and unrealized promise; integration and legal equality did
little to improve the material conditions of blacks.
3. Violence in the CitiesBlack rage at oppressive conditions erupted in waves
of riots from 1964 to 1968; worst looting and damage occurred in Watts in August
1965; Newark and Detroit in July 1967; and Washington, D.C., in April 1968;
whites saw the riots as criminal activity.
4. Malcolm XMalcolm X resisted an emphasis on integration and passive
resistance; drew on a long tradition of black nationalism and posed a powerful
new challenge to the ethos of nonviolence; ideas especially resonated with
younger activists.
5. Black Power MovementSNCC chairman Stokely Carmichael gave a name
to these new principles: black power; quickly became the rallying cry in SNCC
and CORE; Carmichael rejected integration and assimilation because both
implied white superiority; encouraged blacks to develop their own schools,
communities, and organizations; according to black power advocates,
nonviolence only brought more beatings and killings; after police killed an
unarmed black teenager in San Francisco in 1966, Huey Newton and Bobby
Seale organized the Black Panther Party for Self-Defense and armed its
members for self-defense against police brutality.
6. Media Attention and White BacklashThe press paid considerable attention
to black radicals, and the civil rights movement encountered a severe white
backlash; most whites believed blacks were pressing for too much too quickly.
7. King Expands the Scope of StruggleMartin Luther King Jr. agreed with
black power advocates on the need for a radical reconstruction of society;
mounted drives for better jobs, schools, and housing; yet he clung to the ideals of
nonviolence and integration; on April 4, 1968, King was assassinated while in
Memphis to support striking sanitation workers.
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8. Lack of Widespread SupportAlthough black power organizations made
headlines, they failed to capture the massive support that African Americans
gave King and other earlier leaders; harassed by police and the FBI; still, Black
Power advocates emphasis on racial pride and critique of American institutions
resonated loudly.

III. A Multitude of Movements

A. Native American Protest
1. Red PowerNative American activism took on fresh militancy and goals in the
1960s; termination and relocation programs had the unintended effect of
strengthening Indian identity across tribal lines and fostering a determination to
preserve traditional culture.
2. Occupying AlcatrazIn 1969, Native Americans seized Alcatraz Island;
claimed the right of first discovery and held the land for nineteen months.
3. American Indian MovementIn Minneapolis in 1968, two Chippewa, Dennis
Banks and George Mitchell, founded the American Indian Movement (AIM) to
attack problems in cities, where about 300,000 Indians lived; sought to protect
Indians from police harassment, secure antipoverty funds, and establish survival
schools to teach Indian history and values.
4. The Trail of Broken TreatiesAIM leaders helped organize the Trail of
Broken Treaties caravan to the nations capitol, where some of the activists took
over the Bureau of Indian Affairs to express their outrage at the bureaus policies;
a much longer siege occurred on the Lakota Sioux reservation in South Dakota in
1973; conflicts between AIM militants and older tribal leaders led AIM to take over
the village of Wounded Knee.
5. VictoriesAlthough these occupations failed to achieve their specific goals,
the wave of Indian protest produced the end of relocation and termination
policies; greater tribal sovereignty and control over community services;
enhanced health, education, and other services; and protection of Indian religious
practices.

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B. Latino Struggles for Justice

1. Latino Population GrowthLatinos, or Hispanic Americans, made up the
fastest-growing minority group in the 1960s; encompassed people of Mexican,
Puerto Rican, Caribbean, and other Latin American origins.
2. Chicano PoliticsLatino organizing dated back to 1929 but, in the 1960s,
young Mexican Americans, like African Americans and Native Americans,
increasingly rejected traditional polices in favor of direct action; adopted the term
Chicano.
3. United Farm WorkersChicano protest drew national attention to California,
where Cesar Chavez and Dolores Huerta organized a movement to improve the
wretched conditions of migrant agricultural workers; in 1962, they founded the
United Farm Workers (UFW), believing that a labor union was the key to
progress; UFW strikes gained widespread support, and a national boycott of
California grapes helped the union win a wage increase for the workers in 1970.
4. Brown PowerChicanos mobilized elsewhere to end discrimination in
employment and education, gain political power, and combat police brutality; with
blacks and Native Americans, Chicanos continued to be overrepresented among
the poor but gradually won more political offices, more effective enforcement of
antidiscrimination legislation, and greater respect for their culture.

C. Student Rebellion, the New Left, and the

Counterculture
1. Worldwide Youth ProtestAlthough materially and legally more secure than
their African American, Indian, and Latino counterparts, white youth joined them
in expressing dissent, supporting the black freedom struggle and launching
student protests, the antiwar movement, and the new feminist and environmental
movements; student movements also arose in Mexico, Germany, Turkey,
Czechoslovakia, Japan, and other nations across the globe.

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2. Students for a Democratic SocietyThe central organization of the white
student protest was Students for a Democratic Society (SDS), formed in 1960;
aimed to mobilize a New Left around the goals of civil rights, peace, and
universal economic security.
3. The Free Speech MovementThe first large-scale white student protest
arose at the University of California, Berkeley, in 1964; university officials banned
student organizations from setting up tables to recruit support for various causes;
members of the free speech movement occupied the administration building;
more than seven hundred were arrested before the board of regents overturned
the restrictions.
4. Challenges to the Collegiate EnvironmentAcross the country, students
won curricular reforms such as black studies and womens studies programs,
more financial aid for poor and minority students, independence from
paternalistic rules, and a larger voice in campus decision making.
5. The CountercultureDrew on the ideas of the Beats of the 1950s; rejected
many mainstream values, such as materialism, order, and sexual control; rock
and folk music, which during the 1960s often carried insurgent political and social
messages, defined both the counterculture and the political left; Woodstock
Music Festival of 1969 epitomized the centrality of music to the youth rebellion;
hippies faded away in the 1970s, but many elements of the counterculturefrom
rock music to jeans and long hairfiltered into the mainstream.

D. Gay Men and Lesbians Organize

1. Beginning to OrganizeMore permissive sexual norms did not include
tolerance of homosexuality, so many gay men and lesbians kept their sexuality
hidden; but the 1950s saw the beginning of gay and lesbian organization.
2. Stonewall RiotsIn 1969, a routine police raid at The Stonewall Inn, a
Greenwich Village gay bar, sparked resistance that ignited a larger movement;
energized by the defiance shown in the Stonewall riots, gay men and lesbians
launched new organizations; the National Gay and Lesbian Task Force was
founded in 1973 to provide sustained professional and national attention to gay
issues.

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3. A Difficult StruggleThe gay rights movement struggled longer and harder
to win the recognition that other social movements achieved; but by the mid1970s, gay men and lesbians had established a movement through which to
claim equal rights and express pride in their sexual identities.

IV. The New Wave of Feminism

A. A Multifaceted Movement Emerges

1. Work and EducationBeginning in the 1940s, more and more women took
jobs, which awakened women to the inferior conditions of their employment;
democratization of higher education brought more women to college classes and
promoted ambition.
2. Policy InitiativesPolicy initiatives in the early 1960s reflected these larger
transformations and the efforts of small bands of womens rights activists in the
1940s and 1950s; Esther Peterson persuaded Kennedy to create the Presidents
Commission on the Status of Women (PCSW) in 1961; investigated
discrimination in the workplace; Equal Pay Act of 1963 made it illegal to pay
women less than men for the same work.
3. National Organization for WomenThe black freedom struggle boosted a
new womens movement by creating a moral climate sensitive to injustice and by
providing precedents and strategies that feminists followed; in 1966, Betty
Friedan and others founded the National Organization for Women (NOW), a civil
rights organization for women.
4. Womens LiberationSimultaneously, a more radical feminism grew among
civil rights and New Left activists; the womens liberation movement gained
further public attention when dozens of women picketed the Miss America beauty
pageant in 1968, protesting against being forced to compete for male approval
[and] enslaved by ludicrous beauty standards.

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5. Calls for Total Social TransformationRadical feminists differed from
feminists in NOW and other more mainstream groups in that they emphasized
ending womens subordination in the family and other personal relationships;
NOW focused on equal treatment for women in the public sphere; groups such as
NOW wanted to integrate women into existing institutions, while radical groups
insisted that women would never achieve justice until economic, political, and
social institutions were totally transformed.
5. A Multifaceted MovementNew feminisms leadership and constituency
were predominantly white and middle class; black feminists, American Indian
feminists, Mexican American feminists, Asian American feminists, and poor
feminists formed and worked through their own feminist groups; included the
National Black Feminist Organization, the National Coalition of Labor Union
Women, and the National Welfare Rights Organization.

B.

Feminist Gains Spark a Countermovement

1. The Equal Rights AmendmentDuring the 1970s, feminist activism

produced the most sweeping changes in laws and policies affecting women since
they had won the right to vote in 1920; Congress passed an Equal Rights
Amendment that would outlaw different treatment of men and women under
federal law.
2. Phyllis Schlafly and Defeating RatificationConservative activist Phyllis
Schlafly mobilized thousands of women at the grassroots level who feared that
the ERA would devalue their own God-given roles as wives and mothers; the
ERA fell short of ratification by three states.
3. Abortion RightsFeminists also pressured state legislatures to end
restrictions on abortion; Roe v. Wade in 1973 spurred even more opposition than
the ERA; foes pressured Congress to prohibit abortion coverage under Medicaid.
4. Title IX and Other GainsNotwithstanding resistance, feminists won many
gains; Title IX of the Education Amendments Act of 1972 banned sex
discrimination in all aspects of education; at the state and local levels, radical
feminists won passage of laws forcing police departments and the legal system to
treat rape victims more justly and humanely

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V. Liberal Reform in the Nixon Administration

A. Extending the Welfare State and Regulating the

Economy
1. Nixons Liberal PoliciesReflected a number of factors, including the
Democrats control of Congress and Nixons desire to preserve support from
moderates in his party and increase Republican ranks by attracting some
traditional Democrats.
2. Growing GovernmentUnder Nixon, government assistance programs grew;
included the new Pell grants for low-income students to attend college, subsidies
for low-income housing, food stamp programs, and Social Security benefits.
3. Manipulating the MarketNixon also acted contrary to his antigovernment
rhetoric when economic crises and energy shortages induced him to increase the
federal governments power in the marketplace; faced with stagflation and a trade
imbalance, Nixon abandoned the gold standard; imposed a surcharge on imports
and froze wages and prices; these policies only worked in the short term; allowed
Nixon an easy reelection in 1972, but by 1974, the nation faced the most severe
economic crisis since the depression of the 1930s.
4. The Energy CrisisIn fall of 1973, the nation faced its first energy crisis; Arab
nations, furious at the nations support of Israel during the Yom Kippur War, cut
off oil shipments to the United States; Nixon authorized temporary emergency
measures allocating petroleum and establishing a national 55-mile-per-hour
speed limit to save gasoline; eased the energy crisis, but the nation had not come
to grips with its dependence on foreign oil.

B. Responding to Environmental Concerns

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1. Beyond ConservationThe new environmentalists dramatically broadened
the agenda of the conservationists; focused on the ravaging effects of industrial
development on human life and health.
2. Silent SpringIn 1962, biologist Rachel Carson drew national attention to
environmental concerns with her bestseller Silent Spring; described the harmful
effects of toxic chemicals, particularly the pesticide DDT.
3. Government RegulationResponding to these concerns, the federal
government staked out a broad role in environmental regulation in the 1960s and
1970s; Nixon created the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) and signed the
Occupational Safety and Health Act (OSHA) and the Clean Air Act of 1970.

C. Expanding Social Justice

1. Exploiting ProtestNixons 1968 campaign exploited hostility to black protest
and new civil rights policies to woo white Southerners and northern workers away
from the Democratic Party; yet his administration had to answer to the courts and
Congress; Nixon was reluctant to use federal power to compel integration of
southern schools, but the Supreme Court overruled efforts to delay court-ordered
desegregation and compelled the administration to enforce the law.
2. Affirmative Action and Expanding RightsNixon also began to implement
affirmative action among federal contractors and unions; awarded more
government contracts and loans to minority businesses; Congress extended the
Voting Rights Act and strengthened the Civil Rights Act of 1964.
3. Womens RightsWomen as well as minority groups benefited from the
implementation of affirmative action and the strengthened Equal Employment
Opportunity Commission (EEOC); several measures of the Nixon administration
specifically attacked sex discrimination.
4. Native American JusticeNixon gave more public support for justice for
Native Americans than for any other protest group; did not bow to radical
demands but did sign measures recognizing claims and restoring tribal lands.

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