These Truths

by Jill Lepore

  The next night, a twenty-six-year-old minister named Martin Luther King Jr. was drafted to lead a citywide protest that would begin the following Monday, December 5. Born in Atlanta in 1929, the son of a minister and NAACP leader, King had been inspired by American evangelical Christianity, by the liberal theologian Reinhold Niebuhr, and by anticolonialism abroad, particularly by the rhetoric and tactics of nonviolence practiced by Mahatma Gandhi. King had wide-set eyes, short hair, and a pencil mustache. Ordained in 1948, he’d attended a theological seminary in Pennsylvania and then completed a doctoral degree at Boston University in 1955 before becoming pastor at the Dexter Avenue Baptist Church in Montgomery. Lean and quiet as a young man, he’d grown sturdier, and more stirring as he mastered the ancient art of preaching.

  On the fifth, with less than half an hour to pull together a speech for a mass meeting to be held at Montgomery’s Holt Street Baptist Church, he found himself with a few moments to spare when, on his ride to the church, traffic all but stopped. Cars snaked through the city. More than five thousand people had turned up, thousands more than the church could fit. King climbed to the pulpit. The crowd, while attentive, remained hushed until he found his rhythm. “As you know, my friends,” King said, his deep voice beginning to thrum, “there comes a time when people get tired of being trampled over by the iron feet of oppression.” Pressed into benches, people began stomping their feet and calling out, “Yes!”

  “I want it to be known throughout Montgomery and throughout this nation that we are Christian people,” King said as the crowd punctuated his pauses with cries. “The only weapon we have in our hands this evening is the weapon of protest.” Joining a tradition of American oratory that dated back to the day Frederick Douglass concluded that he could make a better argument against slavery if he decided the Constitution was on his side instead of against him, King called this protest an American protest. “If we were incarcerated behind the iron curtains of a communistic nation—we couldn’t do this,” he said, pausing for the thunder of assent. “If we were trapped in the dungeon of a totalitarian regime—we couldn’t do this.” It was as if the roof might fall. “But the great glory of American democracy,” his voice swelled, “is the right to protest for right.”

  Parks had been arrested on a Thursday; by Monday, 90 percent of the city’s blacks were boycotting the buses.140 Over 381 days, blacks in Montgomery, led by Parks and King, boycotted the city’s buses. King, indicted for violating the state’s antiboycott law, said, “If we are arrested every day, if we are exploited every day, if we are trampled over every day, don’t ever let anyone pull you so low as to hate them.” On November 13, 1956, the Supreme Court ruled that the Montgomery bus law was unconstitutional.141

  Early the next year, King founded the Southern Christian Leadership Conference (SCLC). If the civil rights struggle of the 1950s was aided by the Cold War, it was fueled by a spirit of prophetic Christianity. A political movement and a legal argument, civil rights was also a religious revival. “If you will protest courageously, and yet with dignity and Christian love,” King promised his followers, “when the history books are written in future generations, the historians will have to pause and say, ‘There lived a great people—a black people—who injected new meaning and dignity into the veins of civilization.’” The historians have obliged: under King’s leadership, and by the courage of those who followed him, and those who’d paved the way for him, a commitment to civil rights became not only postwar liberalism’s core commitment but the nation’s creed.142

  But blood would be shed. Justice William O. Douglas always blamed Eisenhower for the years of violence that followed the court’s ruling in Brown, a decision the president, who did not ask Congress for a stronger civil rights bill, never publicly endorsed. Eisenhower, Douglas said, was a national hero, worshipped and adored. “If he had gone to the nation on television and radio telling people to obey the law and fall into line, the cause of desegregation would have been accelerated,” Douglas said. Instead, “Ike’s ominous silence on our 1954 decision gave courage to the racists who decided to resist the decision, ward by ward, precinct by precinct, town by town, and county by county.”143

  Orval Faubus, Democratic governor of Arkansas, wasn’t personally opposed to integration; he sent his own son to an integrated college outside of town. But the sentiment of his constituents—who were nearly all white, in a state where blacks were regularly blocked from voting—led him to consider opposition to school desegregation a political opportunity too good to miss. He sought an injunction against desegregation of the schools, and the state court agreed to grant it. Thurgood Marshall got a federal district court to nullify the state injunction, but on September 2, 1957, Faubus went on television to announce that he was sending 250 National Guardsmen to Central High School in Little Rock. If any black children tried to get into the school, Faubus warned, “blood will run in the streets.”

  Elizabeth Eckford was turned away from Central High School in Little Rock, Arkansas, in 1957, by order of the state’s governor, Orval Faubus. The next day, before any black children had even arrived, a white mob attacked a group of black newspaper reporters and photographers. Alex Wilson said, as he was knocked to the ground, “I fought for my country, and I’m not running from you.” On September 4, when fifteen-year-old Elizabeth Eckford tried to walk to the school, the white students cried, “Lynch her! Lynch her!” Television coverage of black students confronted by armed soldiers and a white mob wielding sticks and stones and worse stunned Americans across the country. The state of Arkansas had authorized armed resistance to federal law.144

  While Eisenhower dithered over how to handle the crisis in Little Rock, Congress debated the 1957 Civil Rights Act, the first civil rights legislation since Reconstruction. It established a Civil Rights Commission to hear complaints but granted it no authority to do anything about them. It was like “handing a policeman a gun without bullets,” said one Justice Department official. Eleanor Roosevelt, as distinctive and influential as an ex–First Lady as she’d been when in the White House, called the law “mere fakery.” One senator said it was about as substantial as “soup made from the shadow of a crow which had starved to death.” Longtime advocates of civil rights, including Richard Nixon, argued for stronger legislation, to no avail. But the 1957 Civil Rights Act set a precedent, and it was galling enough to segregationists that Strom Thurmond, who filibustered against it for more than twenty-four hours, set a new record. The bill was made possible by the wrangling of Lyndon Johnson. True to his Texas constituency, if not to his principles, Johnson had voted against every civil rights bill that had faced him in his career in the House and Senate, from 1937 to 1957. But he’d never been a segregationist, he’d publicly supported the court’s decision in Brown v. Board, and he believed the time had come for the Democratic Party to change direction. Johnson was also eyeing a bid for the presidency, and he needed to be seen as a national politician, not a southern Democrat. He courted and counted votes better than any other Senate majority leader ever had, and the bill passed.145

  “Mob rule cannot be allowed to overrule the decisions of our courts,” Eisenhower said on television, and ordered a thousand paratroopers from the 101st Airborne Division to Arkansas, the same division that had dropped from the sky over Normandy on D-Day. On September 25, 1957, U.S. federal troops escorted nine black teenagers to high school. Americans watching on television reeled. They reeled again when, on October 4, 1957, the USSR launched a satellite into orbit. Anyone with a shortwave radio, anywhere in the world, could listen to it, as it made its orbit: it emitted a steady beep, beep, beep, like the ticking of a heart. In the United States, a nation already on edge at the specter of armed paratroopers escorting children into a school, Sputnik also created a political panic: the next obvious step was putting a nuclear weapon in a missile head and firing it by rocket. In both the race to space and the arms race, the Soviets had pulled ahead.

  The Cold War would keep overshadowing the civil
rights movement, and also propelling it forward. The battle to end segregation in education was far from over. Faubus—who’d earned the nickname “that sputtering sputnik from the Ozarks”—decided to shut down Little Rock’s high schools rather than integrate them. He declared, “The federal government has no authority to require any state to operate public schools.”146

  On the cover of Life, MIT scientists attempt to calculate the orbit of the Soviet satellite Sputnik while the magazine promises to explain “Why Reds Got It First.” Two weeks after Sputnik was launched, Eisenhower met with the nation’s top scientific advisers, asking them “to tell him where scientific research belonged in the structure of the federal government.” That meeting led, in 1958, to the creation of the National Aeronautics and Space Agency. NASA would establish operations in Florida and Texas, and fund research in universities across the former Cotton Belt, the science-and-technology, business-friendly New South, the Sun Belt.147 That meeting also led to the creation of the Advanced Research Projects Agency as a branch of the Department of Defense. It would be based in the Pentagon. One day, it would build what became the Internet. In February 1958, after Sputnik, and one month after Eisenhower announced ARPA, the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists’ Science and Security Board moved the atomic Doomsday Clock to two minutes before midnight.

  The hands of time seemed, at once, to be moving both forward and backward. Thurgood Marshall looked back at the late 1950s in dismay. “I had thought, we’d all thought, that once we got the Brown case, the thing was going to be over,” he said bitterly. “You see, we were always looking for that one case to end it all. And that case hasn’t come up yet.”148

  That case did not come. Equality was never going to be a matter of a single case, or even of a long march, but, instead, of an abiding political hope.

  Fourteen

  RIGHTS AND WRONGS

  Vice President Richard Nixon and Soviet premier Nikita Khrushchev debated the merits of capitalism and communism in a model American kitchen on display in Moscow in 1959.

  NIKITA KHRUSHCHEV, STOUT AND SWAGGERING BENEATH a wide-brimmed white hat, looked like a circus barker; Richard Nixon was dressed like an undertaker. “KNOCK THEM DEAD IN RUSSIA,” Nixon’s television adviser had cabled him. “THIS IS MOST IMPORTANT TRIP OF YOUR LIFE.”1

  Nixon, forty-six, went to Moscow in the summer of 1959 eyeing a presidential bid as the unsteady leader of a faltering party. The Republicans had been badly drubbed in the 1958 midterm elections, losing forty-eight seats in the House and thirteen in the Senate, and Democrats had won both Senate seats in the new state of Alaska. Nixon, keen to take advantage of the spotlight of a televised meeting with the Soviet premier, wanted to deliver to Americans shaken by Sputnik a technological triumph, or, at the very least, a little machine-made political magic.

  Nixon had traveled to Moscow to open an exhibition. The United States and the USSR, unable to launch rockets without risking mutually assured destruction, had agreed to stage a proxy battle of the merits of capitalism and communism. At the Soviet Exhibition of Science, Technology, and Culture, held at the New York Coliseum, the Russians put a space satellite on display alongside a gallery that housed a model Soviet apartment, its kitchen outfitted with a samovar. Its counterpart, the American National Exhibition, mounted inside a ten-acre pavilion in Moscow’s Sokolniki Park, answered with electric coffeepots, offering visitors a tour of American consumer goods, especially home appliances of the sort that manufacturers pledged would spare women the drudgery of housework. One American family man, exactly capturing the spirit of the thing, wrote Eisenhower that he had a better idea: “Why don’t you let a typical American family make up an exhibit?” He said he’d be happy to bring to Moscow everything anyone in the Soviet Union needed to understand “typical, living, honest to goodness, truthful and democratic loving Americans”: striped toothpaste, a Dairy Queen cone, frozen pink lemonade, a GI insurance policy, his set of golf clubs, the family’s 1959 Ford station wagon, and “Two plump daughters, ages 10 and 11 complete with hula hoops, Brownie and Girl Scout outfits, and a Monopoly set and polio shots.”2 The president did not take him up on the offer.

  In Moscow, a grinning, dark-suited Nixon cut the ribbon to open the American exhibit alongside beaming, stripe-tied Khrushchev. Inside, they sparred over the rewards of capitalism and communism while touring galleries stocked with vacuum cleaners and dishwashers, robots and cake mixes, garbage disposals and frozen dinners, a showcase meant to display the American way of life—abundance, convenience, and choice. The bottles of Pepsi were free.

  Stopping at a makeshift television stage, the two men fell into an argument, Khrushchev toying with Nixon like a bear playing with a fish.

  “You must not be afraid of ideas,” the vice president scolded the premier.

  Khrushchev laughed. “The time has passed when ideas scared us.” Nixon pointed out that color television and the video recording of their meeting—American inventions—would lead to great advantages in communication, and that even Khrushchev might learn something from American ingenuity. “Because after all,” Nixon said with a stiff smile, “you don’t know everything.”

  “You know absolutely nothing about communism,” Khrushchev shot back. “Nothing except fear of it.”

  Awkwardly, they wandered the exhibit hall.

  “I want to show you this kitchen,” Nixon said, excitedly ushering the premier to a canary-yellow, appliance-filled room and calling his attention to a washing machine and a television.

  “Do your people also have a machine that opens their mouth and chews for them?” Khrushchev prodded.

  Nixon dodged and parried. Still, he stood his ground.

  The press dubbed it the Kitchen Debate and declared it a draw, but American photographers captured Nixon standing tall and fighting back, poking a finger in Khrushchev’s chest, and the visit was a triumph.3 For the United States, it was, in any event, a triumphant time: at the height of the Cold War, more Americans were earning more, and buying more, than ever before.

  The Affluent Society, the economist John Kenneth Galbraith called it in 1958. “The fundamental political problems of the industrial revolution have been solved,” the sociologist Seymour Martin Lipset wrote confidently in Political Man in 1960. For most of human history, the overwhelming majority of people have suffered from want. Industrialism had promised to end that suffering but turned out to produce vast fortunes only for the few, crushing the many under its wheels. Progressives and New Dealers had tried to lift those wheels. They’d legislated all manner of remedies and forms of mitigation, from a graduated federal income tax to maximum-hour and minimum-wage laws, from Social Security to the G.I. Bill. Since 1940, inequalities of wealth and income had been dwindling.4 Even while checked by the Constitution, the growing power of the state, exercised most dramatically in huge fiscal expenditures, especially military, and funded by a progressive income tax, made possible unprecedented economic growth and a wide distribution of goods and opportunities. By 1960, two out of three Americans owned their own homes. They filled those homes with machines: dishwashers, vacuum cleaners, electric mixers and blenders, refrigerators and freezers, record players, radios, and televisions, the engines of their own abundance. So high a standard of living, so widely distributed, had never been seen before. “Nearly all, throughout history, have been very poor,” Galbraith wrote. “The exception, almost insignificant in the whole span of human existence, has been the last few generations in the comparatively small corner of the world populated by Europeans. Here, and especially in the United States, there has been great and quite unprecedented affluence.”5

  The economy a juggernaut, the triumph of liberalism and of Keynesian economics seemed, to many American intellectuals, all but complete. “The remarkable capacity of the United States economy in 1960,” one economic historian concluded, “represents the crossing of a great divide in the history of humanity.”6 Not only had the problems of industrialism been solved, many social scientists b
elieved, but so had the problems of mass democracy, with the emergence of a broad and moderate political consensus, as seen on television. Notwithstanding the ongoing struggle over civil rights, Americans fundamentally agreed with one another about their system of government, and most also agreed on an underlying theory of politics. In The End of Ideology: On the Exhaustion of Political Ideas in the Fifties, sociologist Daniel Bell argued that socialism and communism had bloomed and withered; ideology, itself, was over. “For ideology, which once was a road to action, has come to be a dead end.” Political debates lay ahead, tinkering around the edges, repairs to the appliance of government, and certainly, in Asia and Africa, new ideologies had emerged. But in the West, Bell insisted, the big ideas of the Left had been exhausted, replaced by a consensus: “the acceptance of a Welfare State; the desirability of decentralized power; a system of mixed economy and of political pluralism.”7

  Some younger Americans, Left and Right, found Bell’s argument ridiculous. “It’s like an old man proclaiming the end of sex,” said one. “Because he doesn’t feel it anymore, he thinks it has disappeared.”8 Others suggested that Bell had failed to notice a rising tide of conservatism.9 But Bell hadn’t ignored conservatism; he’d discounted it. In 1955, he’d edited a collection of essays called The New American Right. Joseph McCarthy, to Bell’s contributors, was a man without ideas. “The puzzling thing about McCarthy,” Dwight Macdonald wrote, “was that he had no ideology.” As for the writings of economists like Friedrich Hayek, Bell dismissed them as nonsense. “Few serious conservatives,” wrote Bell, “believe that the Welfare State is the ‘road to serfdom.’”10