These Truths

by Jill Lepore

  To mark the one hundredth anniversary of the Emancipation Proclamation, Bayard Rustin had been charged with planning a March on Washington, scheduled for August 1963. The Kennedy administration, worried about violence, had arranged for military troops to be kept on alert. The District of Columbia had canceled two Washington Senators baseball games. Some 300,000—the largest crowd ever gathered between the Lincoln Memorial and the Washington Monument—assembled on a cloudless summer’s day, “this sweltering summer of the Negro’s legitimate discontent,” King called it. They came by bus and train and subway. One young man roller-skated all the way from Chicago, wearing a sash that read “Freedom.” But Rustin had organized the march flawlessly and, by the time it was over, there would be only four march-related arrests; all the arrested were white.45

  SNCC chairman John Lewis, earnest and only twenty-three, approached the microphone on the makeshift stage on the steps of the Lincoln Memorial. He said he supported the proposed civil rights bill but with great reservations, because there was so much that the federal government had failed to do at every turn. The crowd stirred each time he spoke his speech’s refrain: “What did the federal government do?”

  Television stations that had cut away from earlier speeches resumed coverage when Martin Luther King rose to the stage. It was the first time most Americans had seen King deliver an entire speech. It was the first time that President Kennedy had ever seen King deliver an entire speech.46

  He began by welcoming “the greatest demonstration for freedom in the history of the nation,” honoring Lincoln and the Emancipation Proclamation, and condemning “the manacles of segregation and the chain of discrimination” that still shackled blacks one hundred years later. He spoke slowly and solemnly and formally. The Declaration of Independence and the Constitution were promissory notes, he said, a promise that all men would be guaranteed their rights. “It is obvious today that America has defaulted on this promissory note.” It was stock stuff, delivered sternly, and loaded with sorrow. He cautioned the movement about the dangers of the “marvelous new militancy,” the loss of the support of whites. He listed grievances. Ten minutes into the speech, his voice rising, he said, “We are not satisfied and will not be satisfied until justice rolls down like waters and righteousness like a mighty stream.” He looked down at the cumbersome next lines of his speech—“And so today, let us go back to our communities as members of the international association for the advancement of creative dissatisfaction”—and left them unsaid. Instead, he began to preach. Mahalia Jackson, behind him on the platform, called out “Tell ’em about the dream, Martin.” He paused, for an instant. “I still have a dream,” he said. “It is a dream deeply rooted in the American dream. I have a dream that one day this nation will rise up and live out the true meaning of its creed: ‘We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal.’” He found his rhythm, and the depth of his voice, and the spirit of Scripture. “I have a dream today,” he said, shaking his head. “I have a dream that one day every valley shall be exalted.” The crowd rose, and bowed their heads, and wept. “Let freedom ring!” he cried.47 It was as if every bell in every tower in every city and town and village had rung: a toll of justice.

  III.

  THREE MONTHS LATER, Kennedy was assassinated in Dallas. Less than five years after that, King himself would be shot and killed in Memphis. By then, the dreams of American liberals had been felled in a hail of bullets and a trail of napalm bombs that rained down on the world from the streets of Newark and Detroit to the rice paddies of South Vietnam.

  The long arc of American liberalism that began with the inauguration of FDR in 1933 reached its peak, and began its decline, during the administration of LBJ. Roosevelt pursued a New Deal; Truman promised a Fair Deal; Johnson talked about a Better Deal until he decided that made him sound like a footnote. He aimed for nothing less than a Great Society. A great society was more than an affluent society; it was also a good society, “a place where men are more concerned with the quality of their goals than the quantity of their goods.” Said the president, “The Great Society rests on abundance and liberty for all. It demands an end to poverty and racial injustice, to which we are totally committed in our time.”48

  The day after Kennedy’s assassination, Johnson met with Walter Heller, chairman of the Council of Economic Advisers, and told him that, contrary to his reputation as a conservative, he was not one. “If you look at my record, you would know I’m a Roosevelt New Dealer. As a matter of fact, to tell the truth, John F. Kennedy was a little too conservative to suit my taste.” In his first address to Congress, on November 27, 1963, he urged action on civil rights. “We have talked long enough in this country about equal rights,” he said. “We have talked for one hundred years or more. It is time now to write the next chapter, and to write it in the books of law.” Johnson always said his slogan was “He gets things done.” He wanted to further Kennedy’s agenda, and he had his own agenda, an “unconditional war on poverty,” which he announced in his first State of the Union address, in January 1964.49

  Johnson once told reporters, “When I was young, poverty was so common that we didn’t know it had a name.” But, as Galbraith had pointed out in The Affluent Society, poverty hadn’t been eradicated; it had only been forgotten. “Few things are more evident in modern social history than the decline of interest in inequality as an economic issue,” Galbraith wrote. “Inequality has ceased to preoccupy men’s minds.” Some of the poor were far away from the cities and the suburbs: one-fourth of those who lived below the “poverty line” worked on farms. In the Kennedy administration, the War on Poverty had its origins in January 1963, after Kennedy read a long essay by Dwight Macdonald in The New Yorker, “Our Invisible Poor.” No piece of prose did more to make plain the atrocity of poverty in an age of affluence. Prosperity, Macdonald argued, had left the nation both blinded to the plight of the poor and indifferent to their suffering. “There is a monotony about the injustices suffered by the poor that perhaps accounts for the lack of interest the rest of society shows in them,” Macdonald wrote, in a scathing indictment of the attitude of the American middle class toward those less well off. “Everything seems to go wrong with them. They never win. It’s just boring.”50

  Johnson, here touching down in the presidential helicopter in rural Appalachia, made a Poverty Tour in 1964 to see what Dwight Macdonald called “our invisible poor.” Heller had given Kennedy a copy of Macdonald’s article. In February 1963, the entire text of the article had been entered into the Congressional Record. Johnson, leveraging the nation’s sympathy for the martyred president, pressed Congress for legislation. The next year, he signed the Economic Opportunity Act and the Food Stamp Act. He believed poverty would be eradicated within a decade.

  He had more ambitions, too. Wrangling congressmen like cattle, as ever, he secured passage of the Civil Rights Act, which outlawed discrimination based on race, color, religion, sex, or national origin; gave the attorney general power to enforce desegregation; allowed for civil rights cases to move from state to federal courts; and expanded the Civil Rights Commission. “No memorial oration or eulogy could more eloquently honor President Kennedy’s memory than the earliest possible passage of the civil rights bill for which he fought so long,” Johnson said, in a canny piece of political rhetoric.51

  Both Martin Luther King and Malcolm X went to Washington to watch the congressional debates over the civil rights bill, a rare bringing together of the two men. Malcolm X had fallen out with the leadership of the Nation of Islam. He’d mocked the August 1963 March on Washington but, disobeying the explicit orders of Elijah Muhammad, had attended anyway. In December, he’d answered reporters who asked him to comment on Kennedy’s assassination—despite specific instructions from Muhammad not to speak on the subject. He said Kennedy’s assassination sounded to him like “chickens coming home to roost.” In the ensuing controversy, Muhammad had ordered Malcolm X to withdraw from all public activity, but in Apri
l 1964, having advocated that black men arm themselves, he delivered in Cleveland a speech called “The Ballot or the Bullet,” in which he argued that revolution required elections.52 That vantage had brought him to the halls of Congress.

  The congressional debates that Malcolm X and Martin Luther King watched revealed fractures within both parties, with Democrats challenged by their southern flank and Republicans by their Right flank. “I’m not anti-Democrat,” Malcolm X said. “I’m not anti-Republican. I’m not anti-anything. I’m just questioning their sincerity.” The point is, he said, the time had come to vote.53 The debates also revealed the worst of American political chicanery. Southern Democrats filibustered for fifty-four days. Strom Thurmond said that the “so-called Civil Rights Proposals, which the President has sent to Capitol Hill for enactment into law, are unconstitutional, unnecessary, unwise and extend beyond the realm of reason.”54 A segregationist from Virginia, Howard Smith, introduced an amendment adding the word “sex” into the bill, a proposal so ridiculous that he was certain it would spell the legislation’s defeat. But after Maine Republican Margaret Chase Smith’s spirited defense of the amendment, it passed—a momentous if ironic achievement in the battle for equality for women.55

  Meanwhile, George Wallace, running for the 1964 Democratic nomination, did surprisingly well in early primaries. On the campaign trail, he heard from white voters whose expressions of deep-rooted racial animosity were part of a backlash that would only gain force. At a Wallace rally in Milwaukee, a man named Bronko Gruber said, about the city’s blacks, “They beat up old ladies 83-years-old, rape our womenfolk. They mug people. They won’t work. They are on relief. How long can we tolerate this? Did I go to Guadalcanal and come back to something like this?”56

  Wallace’s bid for the nomination was ended, not by Johnson’s popularity, but by the entry into the race of a conservative Republican. Barry Goldwater, a far right conservative Republican from Arizona, voted against the civil rights bill, making clear that he did so on constitutional grounds alone. “If my vote is misconstrued,” he said, “let it be, and let me suffer its consequences.”57 Supporters of the bill eventually broke the filibuster, and on July 2, 1964, Johnson signed the Civil Rights Act into law. Eleven days later, the Republican National Convention met in the Cow Palace, in Daly City, California, and nominated Goldwater as its candidate for president.

  In 1960, Goldwater had published a ghostwritten manifesto, The Conscience of a Conservative, that had become a best seller. His positions, at the time, occupied the very margin of American political discourse. He called for the abolition of the graduated income tax and recommended that the federal government abandon most of its functions, closing departments and diminishing staffs at a rate of 10 percent a year. Goldwater also opposed the Supreme Court’s decision in Brown v. Board, insisting on states’ rights, a position that aligned him with southern Democrats and also with John Birchers, whose goals included impeaching Earl Warren and withdrawing the United States from the United Nations. Their leader, Robert Welch, had gone so far as to suggest that Eisenhower might be a communist agent; some Birchers believed Sputnik was a hoax. Birchers especially hated Kennedy. Right-wing radio commentator Tom Anderson said in Jackson, Mississippi, “Our menace is not the Big Red Army from without, but the Big Pink Enemy within. Our menace is the KKK—Kennedy, Kennedy, and Kennedy.”58

  Conspiracy theorists who believed Eisenhower was a communist looked like an easy target, and some Kennedy advisers, including Arthur Schlesinger Jr., had urged him to tie the Republican Party to the John Birch Society. In 1961, Kennedy began talking about the “right wing” of the GOP. Daniel Bell, in The New American Right, had argued that the “right wing” was fighting nothing so much as modernity itself. Moderate Republicans, too, had energetically attacked Goldwater. New York governor Nelson Rockefeller warned that a “lunatic fringe” might “subvert the Republican party itself.”59 A matchup between Kennedy and Goldwater would have been interesting. Kennedy, who’d had much success debating Nixon in 1960, had apparently agreed to debate Goldwater if he won the Republican nomination in 1964. Goldwater later said that he and Kennedy had planned to cross the country together, debating at every whistle-stop, “without Madison Avenue, without any makeup or phoniness, just the two of us traveling around on the same airplane.”60

  But Johnson had no reason to agree to debate Goldwater, whose chances of winning the nomination seemed remote. Rockefeller, vying with Goldwater for the nomination, painted him as a Nazi. (In fact, Goldwater had Jewish ancestry.) Liberals said much the same. “We see dangerous signs of Hitlerism in the Goldwater campaign,” said Martin Luther King. At the Republican National Convention, Margaret Chase Smith, who sought the nomination herself—the first woman to run for a major-party nomination—refused to release her delegates to Goldwater, in order to prevent him from gaining a unanimous vote.61

  Richard Nixon did not share Smith’s principles. He’d run unsuccessfully for governor of California in 1962 and, having lost two elections in two years, he was in no position to seek the presidential nomination himself. Nevertheless, he set up a clandestine campaign, headquartered in a boiler room in Portland, Oregon. He considered his options. He toyed with running. He toyed with joining the moderate GOP’s stop Goldwater campaign. And he toyed with supporting Michigan governor George Romney. When he finally concluded that he had no chance of beating Goldwater, he threw his support behind him. Accepting the party’s nomination, Goldwater defended himself against the charge of extremism in language that lost him what little support he might have hoped to enjoy from party moderates. “Extremism in the defense of liberty is no vice,” Goldwater said. And “moderation in the pursuit of justice is no virtue.” Rockefeller and Romney refused to campaign for Goldwater. Nixon, with his eye on 1968, exerted himself tirelessly: he gave 156 speeches on behalf of the party’s nominee.62

  Johnson was tickled. “In Your Heart, You Know He’s Right” was Goldwater’s slogan, to which Johnson’s campaign answered, “In Your Guts, You Know He’s Nuts” or, alluding to Goldwater’s enthusiasm for deploying nuclear weapons, “In Your Heart, You Know He Might.” Goldwater had campaigned for a constitutional amendment to guarantee Bible reading and prayer in public schools, but Johnson, who had broad support among evangelical Christians, made sure Goldwater had little success with that constituency. Days before the election, Billy Graham’s followers urged him to throw his support behind Goldwater, sending him more than a million telegrams and tens of thousands of letters. Johnson pounced. “Billy, you stay out of politics,” he told Graham in a phone call, and then invited him to stay the weekend at the White House—far from his mail.63

  In November, Goldwater lost to Johnson by more than sixteen million votes, winning only his home state of Arizona and five states in the Deep South. So catastrophic was the loss that GOP leaders attempted to purge conservatives from leadership positions with the party. That meant purging conservative women.

  Goldwater’s nomination had been crucially supported by Phyllis Schlafly, a former Kitchen Kabineter who was president of the National Federation of Republican Women. Born in Missouri in 1924, Schlafly would become one of the most influential women in the history of American politics. During the Second World War, she’d worked as a gunner, test-firing rifles in a munitions plant, to put herself through college, after which she’d earned a graduate degree in political science from Radcliffe. A devout Catholic, she had been an ardent supporter of McCarthy; her husband was president of the World Anti-Communist League. In 1952, she’d run for Congress under the slogan “A Woman’s Place Is in the House.”64

  In 1963, Schlafly had nominated Goldwater as the speaker at a celebration of the twenty-fifth anniversary of the federation of Republican women’s clubs. During that celebration, she’d also taken a straw poll: out of 293 federation delegates, 262 chose Goldwater as the party’s nominee. Conservative women had flocked to the Goldwater campaign’s “Crusade for Law and Morality” and to Mothers for Moral
America, a fake grassroots organization that recruited Nancy Reagan to its board. But while conservative women had supported Goldwater, the mainstream of the Republican Party had not. The 1964 presidential election was the first in which as many women voted as men. They also voted differently than men. Overall, across parties, women were even more likely to vote against Goldwater than were men. Goldwater Republican women, it seemed, were out of touch not only with the party but with the country.

  After Goldwater’s ignominious defeat, Elly Peterson, a Michigan party chairman and Romney supporter, set herself the task of keeping Schlafly from the presidency of the National Federation of Republican Women at its next election. This proved difficult, Peterson said, because “the nut fringe is beautifully organized.” Schlafly was narrowly defeated, but she contested the results, and police had to remove women from the convention floor when they began attacking one another. The “dame game,” Time said, had become altogether unladylike.65

  Schlafly was not so easily defeated. She would never have called herself a feminist, but she believed women should be helping to lead the GOP. “Many men in the Party frankly want to keep the women doing the menial work, while the selection of candidates and the policy decisions are taken care of by the men in the smoke-filled rooms,” she complained. The book she wrote about her ouster includes an illustration of a woman standing at a door labeled Republican Party Headquarters, by a sign that reads “Conservatives and Women Please Use Servants’ Entrance.” Three months after she was kept from the presidency of the women’s arm of the GOP, she began writing a monthly newsletter, waging her own crusade for law and morality.66 It would take her years, but, in the end, she would retake the Republican Party.