by Jill Lepore
Considerable empirical evidence in fact supported Bell’s theory of consensus. At the University of Michigan, political scientists had been conducting interviews with voters every four years since 1948. They’d asked voters questions: “Would you say that either one of the parties is more conservative or more liberal than the other?” Between 1948 and 1960, many voters could not answer that one. Others answered badly. The researchers had asked a follow-up: “What do people have in mind when they say that the Republicans (Democrats) are more conservative (liberal) than the Democrats (Republicans)?” Voters found this kind of question difficult to answer, too. The bottom 37 percent of respondents “could supply no meaning for the liberal-conservative distinction” and only the top 17 percent gave what the interviewers deemed “best answers.” Everyone else fell somewhere in between, but the researchers were pretty sure that a whole bunch of them were just guessing.11 Ideologically minded politicians and intellectuals talked about liberalism and conservatism, for sure, but to ordinary voters these terms had virtually no meaning.
Elaborating on these findings, which were published in 1960 in a landmark study called The American Voter, the political scientist Philip Converse produced an influential essay, “The Nature of Mass Belief Systems in Mass Publics,” in which he divided the American electorate into political elites and the mass public. Political elites are exceptionally well informed, follow politics closely, and adhere to a set of political beliefs so coherent—or, as Converse termed, so “constrained”—as to constitute an ideology. But the mass public has only a scant knowledge of politics, resulting in a very loose and unconstrained attachment to any single set of political beliefs. Converse argued that the Michigan voter interviews revealed that political elites know “what-goes-with-what” (laissez-faire with free enterprise, for example) and “what parties stand for” (Democrats favor labor; Republicans, business), but much of the mass public does not. Political elites vote in a more partisan fashion than the mass public: the more a voter knows about politics, the more likely he is to vote in an ideologically consistent way, not just following a party but following a set of constraints dictated by a political ideology. What makes a voter a moderate, Converse concluded, is not knowing very much about politics. In the 1950s, there were a lot of moderates.12
What no one could quite see, in 1960, was the gathering strength of two developments that would shape American politics for the next half century. Between 1968 and 1972, both economic inequality and political polarization, which had been declining for decades, began to rise. The fundamental problems of the Industrial Revolution had not, alas, been solved. Nor had the problems of mass democracy. Even as social scientists were announcing the end of ideology, a new age of ideology was beginning.
By 1974, when Richard Nixon announced his resignation from the presidency, sitting before blue drapes in the Oval Office, fifteen years after his debate with Nikita Khrushchev in the canary-yellow kitchen in Moscow, liberalism had begun its long decline, and conservatism its long ascent. And the country was on the way to becoming nearly as divided, and as unequal, as it had been before the Civil War.
I.
GALBRAITH WASN’T HAPPY about the affluent society. He found it complacent and smug, and too willing to accept poverty as inevitable. The prosperous society, he thought, was a purposeless one. He called for higher taxes to build better hospitals and schools and roads to repair the public sector. Americans shrugged, and turned on their televisions. But beneath the cheerful gurgle of the percolating electric coffeepot could be heard a muffled thrum of despair. It began with a fear of the perils of prosperity: laziness, tastelessness, and purposelessness. “We’ve grown unbelievably prosperous and we maunder along in a stupor of fat,” the historian Eric Goldman complained. One journalist called the 1950s “the age of the slob.” It was also the age of the snob. Dwight Macdonald memorably lamented the rise of packed, boxed, and price-tagged, middlebrow mass culture—“masscult,” he dubbed it, as if it were a soft drink—especially in the form of trashy paperback novels and ticky-tacky TV shows produced for the sprawling and suburban middle class by corporations, arbitrated not by taste but by sales and ratings. Art is the creation of individuals in communities, Macdonald argued; middlebrow culture is a product manufactured and packaged for the masses. “Masscult is bad in a new way,” Macdonald wrote. “It doesn’t even have the theoretical possibility of being good.”13
After Nixon came back from Moscow, the Eisenhower administration announced a new resolve: to discover a national purpose. “The year 1960 was a time when Americans stopped taking their national purpose for granted and started doing something about it,” Life reported. Eisenhower appointed ten eminent men—politicians and editors, business and labor leaders, and the presidents of universities and charities—to a Commission on National Goals, and asked the commission to identify a set of ten-year objectives for the United States. A striking measure of the artificial nature of the era’s liberal consensus: every member of the commission was a white man over the age of forty-five.14 Yet the goals the commission would set would be steered, above all, by black college students, who, beginning in 1960, and without a blue-ribbon committee of eminent men, made civil rights the nation’s purpose.
Students from North Carolina A&T College staged a sit-in at a lunch counter in a Woolworth’s in Greensboro. On Monday, February 1, 1960, two days before Eisenhower named the members of his Commission on National Goals, four freshmen from North Carolina A&T in Greensboro, North Carolina, refused to give up their seats at a lunch counter in a segregated diner inside a Woolworth’s store. Theirs wasn’t the first sit-in—over the past three years alone, there’d been sit-ins in sixteen cities—but it was the first to capture national attention. That night, those four students called NAACP lawyer Floyd McKissick, who helped spread the word. They went back to Woolworth’s the next day, with friends; more came the day after that. They sat in shifts, at vinyl-and-chrome stools. They set up a command center and kept track of plans being laid in Durham and Raleigh to stage sit-ins of solidarity. By the end of the week, more than four hundred students were involved in the Greensboro sit-in alone. The movement spread to Tennessee, and then across the South, to Georgia, West Virginia, Texas, and Arkansas. It reached forty more cities in March. Within months, fifty thousand students had joined. Hundreds were arrested in Nashville. In South Carolina, police attacked the demonstrators with teargas and fire hoses, arresting nearly four hundred. Even students who’d doubted the philosophy of nonviolent protest began to see its power, as photographers captured images of thuggish whites pouring milk and squeezing ketchup onto the heads of college students sitting quietly at a lunch counter, or of angry, armored policemen beating them with clubs or dragging them down sidewalks. The students’ protest even earned the admiration of some hardened pro-segregation southern newspaper editors, including the editor of the Richmond News Leader:
Here were the colored students, in coats, white shirts, ties, and one of them was reading Goethe and one was taking notes from a biology text. And here, on the sidewalk outside, was a gang of white boys come to heckle, a ragtail rabble, slack-jawed, black-jacketed, grinning fit to kill, and some of them, God save the mark, were waving the proud and honored flag of the Southern States in the last war fought by gentlemen. Eheu! it gives one pause.
Ella Baker, acting director of the SCLC, arranged to invite the student leaders to an organizing meeting on Easter weekend, in April. Baker, born in Virginia in 1903, had been a longtime organizer for the NAACP, as a field secretary beginning in 1938 and as a director of branches across the South in the 1940s, working on, among many other projects, the campaign to win equal pay for black teachers. She’d agreed to join the SCLC in 1958, to head an Atlanta-based voter registration drive known as the Crusade for Citizenship, but she’d been frustrated by southern preachers’ relative inattention to voting rights, and she found Martin Luther King Jr. “too self-centered and cautious.” In 1960, when SCLC tried to convince Baker to persuade
the students to join as a junior chapter, Baker, in a stirring speech, refused, and instead urged the students to start their own organization. “She didn’t say, ‘Don’t let Martin Luther King tell you what to do,’” Julian Bond later recalled, “but you got the real feeling that that’s what she meant.” Distancing themselves from both the NAACP and the SCLC, which many students found altogether too conservative, they founded the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC). They raised an army; their weapon was nonviolent direct action. Baker left the SCLC to join them.15
Later in 1960, when Eisenhower’s ten distinguished commissioners delivered their report, they wrote that “Discrimination on the basis of race must be recognized as morally wrong, economically wasteful, and in many respects dangerous”; called for federal action to support voting rights; urged the denial of federal funds to employers who discriminate on the basis of race; and insisted upon the urgency of ending segregation in education.16 Although the final report wasn’t published until after the November election, its key findings were released earlier, and more than one observer remarked that the report, while prepared for the Republican White House, aligned very well with the campaign promises made by Democratic presidential candidate John F. Kennedy. “If there were not abundant evidence Senator Kennedy has been fully occupied with other things lately,” said CBS’s Howard K. Smith, “one would swear he wrote the document.”17
Before that fall, the presidential prospects for Kennedy, the dashing Irish Catholic from Boston, had not seemed especially good. Liberals distrusted him because of his silence on McCarthyism, and few had much confidence in him. Kennedy, forty-three, was both young and inexperienced. Lyndon Johnson called him “the boy.”
Kennedy prevailed, in part, because he was the first packaged, market-tested president, liberalism for mass consumption. Weighing the possible party nominees and its platform, the Democratic National Committee, uncertain how to handle the question of civil rights, turned to a new field, called “data science,” a term coined in 1960, to predict the consequences of different approaches to the issue by undertaking the computational simulation of elections. To that end, the DNC in 1959 hired Simulmatics Corporation, a company founded by Ithiel de Sola Pool, a political scientist from MIT. Pool and his team collected old punch cards from the archives of George Gallup and pollster Elmo Roper, the raw data from more than sixty polls conducted during the campaigns of 1952, 1954, 1956, 1958, and 1960, and fed them into a UNIVAC. Using high-speed computation and “a simulation model developed out of historical data,” Pool aimed to both advance and accelerate the measurement of public opinion and the forecasting of elections. “This kind of research could not have been conducted ten years ago,” Pool and his colleagues reported.
Pool sorted voters into 480 possible types, explaining, “A single voter type might be ‘Eastern, metropolitan, lower-income, white, Catholic, female Democrats.’ Another might be, ‘Border state, rural, upper-income, white, Protestant, male Independents.’” He sorted issues into fifty-two clusters: “Most of these were political issues, such as foreign aid, attitudes toward the United Nations, and McCarthyism,” he explained. “Other so-called ‘issue clusters’ included such familiar indicators of public opinion as ‘Which party is better suited for people like you?’”18
Simulmatics’s work, which continued through the 1960s, marked the advent of a new industry whose implications for American democracy alarmed at least one of his colleagues, the political scientist and novelist Eugene Burdick. Famous for the 1958 best seller he coauthored with William Lederer, The Ugly American, and the 1962 novel Fail-Safe (written with Harvey Wheeler and made into a film directed by Sidney Lumet), Burdick published a novel called The 480, about the work done by Simulmatics, a fictional exposé of what he described as “a benign underworld in American politics”:
It is not the underworld of cigar-chewing pot-bellied officials who mysteriously run “the machine.” Such men are still around, but their power is waning. They are becoming obsolete though they have not yet learned that fact. The new underworld is made up of innocent and well-intentioned people who work with slide rules and calculating machines and computers which can retain an almost infinite number of bits of information as well as sort, categorize, and reproduce this information at the press of a button. Most of these people are highly educated, many of them are Ph.D.s, and none that I have met have malignant political designs on the American public. They may, however, radically reconstruct the American political system, build a new politics, and even modify revered and venerable American institutions—facts of which they are blissfully innocent. They are technicians and artists; all of them want, desperately, to be scientists.19
The premise of Simulmatics’s work, as Burdick saw all too clearly, was that, if voters didn’t profess ideologies, if they had no idea of the meaning of the words “liberal” and “conservative,” they could nevertheless be sorted into ideological piles, based on their identities—race, ethnicity, hometown, religion, age, and income. Simulmatics’s first commission, completed just before the Democratic National Convention, in the summer of 1960, was to conduct a study on “the Negro vote in the North” (so few black people were able to vote in the South that there was no point in simulating their votes, Pool concluded). Pool reported discovering that, between 1954 and 1956, “A small but significant shift to the Republicans occurred among Northern Negroes, which cost the Democrats about 1 per cent of the total votes in 8 key states.” The DNC, undoubtedly influenced by the viscerally powerful student sit-ins, absorbed Simulmatics’s report, and decided to add civil rights paragraphs to the party’s platform at its convention in Los Angeles in July.20
Civil rights had not been among Kennedy’s priorities as a member of the Senate. But the protests and the predictions altered his course. Needing to win both black votes in the North and white votes in the South, Kennedy decided to run as a civil rights candidate, to woo those northerners, and chose Lyndon Johnson for his running mate, hoping that the Texan could handle the southerners.
The DNC found Simulmatics’s initial report sufficiently illuminating that, after the convention, it commissioned Pool to prepare three more reports: on Kennedy’s image, on Nixon’s image, and on foreign policy as a campaign issue. Simulmatics also ran simulations on different ways Kennedy might talk about his Catholicism. He ought to employ “frankness and directness rather than avoidance,” Simulmatics advised.21 Kennedy therefore gave a frank and direct speech in Houston on September 12, 1960: “I believe in an America where the separation of church and state is absolute—where no Catholic prelate would tell the President (should he be Catholic) how to act, and no Protestant minister would tell his parishioners for whom to vote.”22
Meanwhile, Nixon, without much help from Eisenhower, who snubbed him, won the Republican nomination. Campaigns, Inc., ran his campaign in California. “The great need is to go on the offensive—and to attack,” according to the firm’s Plan of Campaign, which advised Nixon to forget “the liberal Democrats who wouldn’t vote for Nixon if he received the joint personal endorsement of Jesus Christ and Karl Marx via a séance with Eleanor Roosevelt.” In the spirit of going on the offensive, Nixon agreed to debate Kennedy on television, in a series of exchanges. “I would like to propose that we transform our circus-atmosphere presidential campaign into a great debate conducted in full view of all the people,” Adlai Stevenson had urged in 1959. But it was Kennedy—a man one notable columnist called “Stevenson with balls”—who made it happen.23
On September 26, 1960, Nixon and Kennedy met in a bare CBS television studio in Chicago, without an audience; the event was broadcast live by CBS, NBC, and ABC. By now, nearly nine in ten American households had a television set. Nixon was sick; he’d been in the hospital for twelve days. He was in pain. And he was unprepared. A skilled debater who’d enjoyed nothing but political gain from his appearances on television, and, most lately, from the Kitchen Debate, he’d barely been briefed for his appearance with Kennedy.24
The rules were the result of strenuous negotiating. The very scheduling required Congress to temporarily suspend an FCC regulation that required giving equal time to all presidential candidates (there were hundreds). Much negotiation involved seemingly little things. Nixon wanted no reaction shots; he wanted viewers to see only the fellow who was talking, not the other guy. But Kennedy wanted them, and Kennedy prevailed, with this concession: he agreed to Nixon’s stipulation that neither man be shown wiping the sweat from his face. Then there were bigger things. Each candidate made an eight-minute opening statement and a three-minute closing statement. The networks wanted Nixon and Kennedy to question each other; both men refused and instead insisted on taking questions from a panel of reporters, one from each network, a format that is more generally known as a parallel press conference. ABC refused to call what happened that night a “debate,” billing it instead as a “joint appearance.” Everyone else called it a debate, sixty-six million Americans watched Nixon scowl, and the misnomer stuck.25
On October 19, two days before the last of the candidates’ four scheduled debates, Martin Luther King Jr. was arrested in Atlanta during a lunch counter sit-in. He’d waited a long time before joining the sit-ins. But now he was in, and he was sentenced to four months of hard labor. Kennedy called King’s wife, Coretta Scott King. His brother Robert intervened, and got King out of jail. Nixon, who had a much stronger record on civil rights than Kennedy, did nothing. He later came to believe that this lost him the election, one of the closest elections in American history, Kennedy winning by a hairsbreadth, 34,221,000 to 34,108, 000.