Antifa and Black Lives Matter activists wouldn’t dream of yanking down LBJ statues. That’s because the progressive narrative on LBJ is even more positive than it is on FDR, at least as far as race is concerned. LBJ was the “flawed giant,” in the title of a biography by historian Robert Dallek. Marshall Frady in the New York Review of Books affectionately calls him “the big guy” and revels in his “brawling, uncontainable aliveness,” his “galumphing conviviality.”9
The story that Dallek and other progressives tell about LBJ goes like this. He used to be a sort of a racist, given his dirt-poor, Texas hill country background. LBJ’s story, however, is a triumphant account of how a redneck white country boy underwent a moral transformation. To paraphrase Obama, the arc of his life bent toward justice. When he got the power, he used it for good.
According to the left-wing journalist Bill Moyers, LBJ once told him that as a consequence of supporting civil rights laws, “we just delivered the South to the Republican Party for a long time to come.”10 This seems so altruistic on the part of a famously cynical man as to almost inspire wonder. And as progressives tell it, the political transformation of the Democratic Party was no less altruistic and wondrous.
That’s because in miniature the progressive narrative about LBJ mirrors the progressive narrative of the Democratic Party. As the narrative goes, civil rights was no less of a political risk for a party previously wedded to white supremacy than it was for LBJ. Yet the Democrats were up to the challenge and came out better for it. For LBJ as for the Democrats, an unfortunate start led to a happy ending.
This account of LBJ is unbelievable and fantastic, by which I mean it cannot be believed and is the product of fantasy. Biographer Robert Caro found in LBJ “a hunger for power in its most naked form, for power not to improve the lives of others, but to manipulate and dominate them, to bend them to his will.” Is it really plausible that this sort of man, whom historian Doris Kearns Goodwin termed “the greatest political bargainer of them all,” a man who once said he thought about the subject of politics for eighteen hours a day, would bargain away his party’s interests and get nothing in return “for a long time to come”?11
If such strange behavior was indeed the result of a wrenching transformation, there is no plausible evidence for it, not from Dallek, not from Goodwin, not even from biographer Robert Caro, who seems to have followed LBJ’s life virtually day by day for decades and wrote a four-volume biography of him. LBJ told no one of his great conversion; he never wrote about it or made a speech about it, so if it happened he kept it entirely to himself.
Here is a man who, according to a memo filed by FBI agent William Branigan, seems to have been in the Ku Klux Klan. This memo was only revealed in recent months, with the release of the JFK Files. Progressive media—even progressive historians—have largely ignored it, trying to pretend it does not exist. Branigan cites a source with direct knowledge, even though he does not name his source. As one blogger notes, no one with even a cursory knowledge of LBJ’s background can regard his involvement with the KKK to be a shock or a surprise.12
So how does a Klansman change his spots and become a moral idealist without telling anyone? Moreover, it seems difficult to credit moral idealism to a manifestly dishonest man. Here my exhibit is LBJ’s 1965 address at Howard University, which progressives celebrate because in it LBJ makes a bold defense of affirmative action. “You do not take a man who, for years, has been hobbled by chains, liberate him, bring him to the starting line of a race saying ‘You are free to compete with all the others’ and still believe you have been fair . . . We seek not just freedom but opportunity. We seek not just legal equity but human ability; not just equality as a right and a theory, but equality as a fact and equality as a result.”13
Impressive stuff, as far as it goes. But how far does it really go? The merits of LBJ’s argument have been debated ever since by the left and the right. But what typically goes unnoticed is LBJ’s telling silence on why blacks were for so long hobbled by chains and who it was that hobbled them. Let’s recall that here we have a longtime Southern segregationist giving an account of the sins of segregation in the third person as if he were a mere observer, not a participant.
Even so, Dallek’s only comment about LBJ’s Howard address is that, in retrospect, it seems “excessively hopeful,” as if LBJ’s only problem was an excess of moral idealism.14 The progressive historian Ira Katznelson, one of the few to notice LBJ’s sly omission of his own role in the events he was describing, nevertheless downplays its significance by noting of LBJ, “His personal record and sense of pride were at odds with the quality of his history.” In short, he lied.
Katznelson adds that LBJ “missed the chance to come to terms with the most dismal, even exploitative, aspects of the New Deal.” This, he frets, must have been “particularly agonizing” for him.15 I don’t know whether to regard this as naïve or sneaky on Katznelson’s part. Surely Katznelson is smart enough to know LBJ had not the slightest intention of fessing up that he was a member of the racist group that hobbled blacks. If he had, his audience would have immediately recognized that the very dude who poisoned the waters was now hypocritically pretending to show up as the water commissioner.
Finally, by every account, LBJ was a nasty, bullying, crude, selfish, mean-spirited and personally and sexually abusive individual. These are not qualities that we associate with a moral exemplar undergoing a crisis of conscience. There was the time he gave dictation to a female secretary while urinating in a corner washbasin. In the account of a Senate aide, on another occasion, while sitting next to a woman in his car with his wife Lady Bird on his other side, “Johnson made a point of placing one of his hands under the woman’s skirt and was having a big time, right there in front of Lady Bird.”16
There is much, much more in this vein in Caro’s biography. I don’t need to go into LBJ’s serial infidelities, even in the Oval Office, his chronic boasting about the women he had conquered, the name that he gave to his penis, his boasting about its size and so on. Suffice to say that Johnson would not survive five minutes of scrutiny by the #MeToo movement. LBJ, like JFK and Bill Clinton, reflects the priapic aggression of the prototypical plantation boss.
Yet even more than the other two, he liked to lord over people, not just women but everyone. As Caro shows on page after page, LBJ derived pleasure from degrading and humiliating others. He was known to converse with aides in his office bathroom while emptying his bowels, which Marshall Frady interprets as a sign of his “Rabelasian earthiness” but which less charitably reveals an ugly demonstration of his power over subordinates.
LBJ was a pervert in every sense of the word; if I can pursue the excremental theme, he was into this shit. As LBJ himself put it, he wanted the type of person working for him “who will kiss my ass in Macy’s window and stand up and say, ‘Boy, wasn’t that sweet!’ ”17 Surely many Democratic plantation bosses of the nineteenth century could have said pretty much the same thing.
These traits do not describe the “old” LBJ, prior to some moral transformation. This is who LBJ was the whole time. And the same is true of LBJ’s racism. We can see this in LBJ’s use of the term “nigger” or “uppity nigger.” LBJ didn’t just use these terms in the early days, when, under the tutelage of his segregationist mentor Richard Russell, he upheld segregation and the poll tax and fought to undermine antilynching laws. No, LBJ showed a special fondness for them when he was Senate leader, vice president and president—in other words, the very time he was supposedly undergoing his moral transformation.
In the mid-sixties, LBJ nominated African American lawyer Thurgood Marshall to the Supreme Court. When an aide suggested to LBJ that there were other qualified black jurists he could have chosen, suggesting as an alternative possibility Judge A. Leon Higginbotham, LBJ responded, “The only two people who ever heard of Judge Higginbotham are you and his momma. When I appoint a nigger to the court, I
want everyone to know he’s a nigger.”18
This was in 1965, one year after LBJ helped secure the passage of the Civil Rights Act. The man he called a nigger was the nation’s most prominent African American attorney, who had argued the landmark 1954 Brown v. Board of Education case. Yet progressive historian Robert Dallek, who recounts this episode, interprets it in a way to minimize LBJ’s culpability. “Johnson’s pejorative language was partly his way of intimidating a new staff member or of showing how tough and demanding he was.”19
Yet for LBJ this kind of talk was a consistent pattern. The same year, LBJ told his aide Joseph Califano that the black riots in the Watts area of Los Angeles showed how blacks could not control themselves. Pretty soon, Johnson warned, “Negroes will end up pissing in the aisles of the Senate and making fools of themselves, the way . . . they had after the Civil War and during Reconstruction.”20 The very fact that LBJ continued to embrace this view of Reconstruction—once promoted by the progressive racists of the Dunning School and popularized by Thomas Dixon in The Clansman and Birth of a Nation—suggests that contrary to progressive rumor, LBJ’s racism was never rehabilitated.
Biographer Robert Caro describes an incident involving Robert Parker, LBJ’s chauffeur. Parker recalled an occasion when Senator Johnson asked him whether he would prefer to be called “boy,” “nigger” or “chief.” Parker asked to be called by his name. Johnson erupted, “Let me tell you one thing, nigger. As long as you’re black, and you’re going to be black till the day you die, no one’s gonna call you by your goddamn name. So no matter what you are called, nigger, you just let it roll off your back like water and you’ll make it. Just pretend you’re a goddamn piece of furniture.”21
Historian Doris Kearns Goodwin, in the otherwise positive biography Lyndon Johnson and the American Dream, cites LBJ telling Senator Richard Russell during the debate over the Civil Rights Act of 1957, “These Negroes, they’re getting pretty uppity these days and that’s a problem for us since they’ve got something they never had before, the political pull to back up their uppityness. Now we’ve got to do something about this, we’re got to give them a little something, just enough to quiet them down, not enough to make a difference.”22
This admission is telling not merely because of its use of the insulting reference to the “uppityness” of blacks but also because it shows that LBJ’s support for civil rights legislation wasn’t the result of some moral awakening on LBJ’s part; rather, it was part of a strategy. This notion is confirmed by what LBJ allegedly told two governors regarding the Civil Rights Act of 1964: “I’ll have them niggers voting Democratic for two hundred years.”23
Some progressives—notably the “fact-checking” site Snopes—have questioned this quotation, which appears in Ronald Kessler’s Inside the White House but not in any other source.24 Kessler attributes it to Air Force One steward Robert MacMillan, who claims to have heard LBJ say this. And as we can see the quotation is consistent with several others whose veracity is undoubted. My conclusion is that LBJ remained the vile bigoted Democrat he always was, and the notion that he underwent some sort of enlightened conversion is pure humbug.
LBJ’S SHREWD CALCULATION
It is time to reinterpret LBJ’s “conversion,” and to do this, we must try to imagine the political landscape that LBJ saw before him, a landscape very different from the one that FDR encountered a generation earlier. Two big things were changing and fast. First, white racism was declining precipitously all over the country, but especially in the South. Second, blacks were getting up and moving out of the rural South, and many of them were voting for the first time. Both these things were a big problem for the Democratic Party.
Let’s take them in sequence. As innumerable surveys confirm, white racism—at least white racism of the old sort, which is to say old-fashioned hatred of blacks, holding them to be inferior beings and sanctioning violence and degrading treatment of them—plummeted through the late 1940s, 1950s and 1960s.25 So sweeping is the change that many survey questions routinely asked prior to World War II—Are blacks entitled to the same legal rights as whites? Would you consider voting for a black candidate for political office?—are no longer even asked because white support for these things is now nearly universal. Harry Truman saw the change happening even in the late 1940s, and this—not some moral evolution to a higher state of being—was the sea change in American public opinion that pressured him to desegregate the military. LBJ also knew this because he could see it, even in the Texas backcountry.
Now it is tempting to believe that racism declined in America because of the moral suasion of the civil rights movement, but to believe this is to put the cart before the horse, as most progressive accounts predictably do. The reason they do this is so that they can credit LBJ and progressive activism with the civil rights laws, and then credit those laws not only with creating legal equality but also with combating racism. In reality, however, the steep decline in racism preceded the civil rights movement. The civil rights movement didn’t cause it; it caused the civil rights movement.
Think about why Martin Luther King Jr. encountered so little intellectual resistance to his challenges to segregation. Fifty years earlier, he would have. This is not to deny that local officials, like Birmingham sheriff Bull Connor, unleashed dogs and hoses on civil rights protesters. King himself served time as a political prisoner in the Birmingham jail, an experience that strikes a chord with me. But by this time the intellectual fight had been won. The local segregationist establishment, not King, was on the defensive. That’s because popular opinion in America had shifted dramatically between the time FDR died in 1945 and the 1960s.
So what caused the shift? The obvious answer is: Adolf Hitler. In the end, the horrific crimes of Hitler overthrew the doctrine of white supremacy. Once American troops entered the concentration camps, once people saw those ghostly emaciated figures emerge out of the camps, they could no longer subscribe to theories of Nordic superiority they might once have held. Those doctrines were now permanently discredited.
The progressive historian George Fredrickson points out in Racism: A Short History that the very word “racism” came into common use only in the 1930s “when a new word was required to describe the theories on which the Nazis based their persecution of the Jews.”26 This shows how closely linked racism and Nazism were in the popular mind and helps confirm that it was the Nazis who, against their intentions of course, finally put white supremacy into the grave.
We can imagine that LBJ watched with horror the decline of racism in America, not simply because he was a nasty bigot himself—and bigotry loves company—but also because white supremacy had been the central political doctrine of the Democratic Party for at least a century. Once the Republicans ended slavery the Democrats turned swiftly to white supremacy, which became the glue, both in the North and the South, that held the party together.
With racism dwindling fast, LBJ knew his party would lose voters whose allegiance to the Democrats had been based on the party’s support for racist policies. This was a serious problem. From the Democrats’ point of view, it meant that if racism could not be revived—and there was no way after Nazism to revive it—then the party would need new voters, and lots of them, in order to compensate for the loss of white racist voters who were regrettably losing their prejudices.
Where to look? There was only one place: black voters. And blacks in the 1950s and 1960s were voting in greater numbers than ever before. For the first half of the twentieth century, the Democrats had through racial intimidation and other means largely suppressed the black vote in the South, where the vast majority of blacks lived. But starting around World War I, a great migration occurred in which blacks over the next several decades literally got up and moved.
As Isabel Wilkerson writes in The Warmth of Other Suns, some six million blacks—nearly half of the entire black population of the rural South—left the farms, plant
ations and cotton fields of that region and moved to cities like New York, Detroit, Chicago, Los Angeles, Philadelphia. Some moved to smaller cities like Milwaukee and Oakland. The great migration was, as Wilkerson puts it, “an unrecognized immigration within this country.”27
Here in the cities, blacks could vote and did vote, so for the first time in American politics, the black vote became significant, particularly so by the late 1940s and 1950s. The black vote was especially important in swing states like Illinois, New York and Pennsylvania. Fully aware of this, Republicans offered the most sweeping and forceful endorsement of civil rights for blacks to appear in any party platform since the nineteenth century. The party of Lincoln was making a bid for these new black voters.
Again, this was a major problem for LBJ and the Democrats. LBJ knew that in order to make up for the racist vote, the Democrats must win not just some black votes, not just a majority of black votes, but virtually all the black votes. The Democrats needed blacks to be just as uniformly loyal to the Democratic Party as white racists had previously been. LBJ had to figure a way for blacks to vote for Democratic candidates automatically, habitually, regardless of the qualities or qualifications of the Democrat on the ticket.
PLANTATION CONFESSIONS
But how to achieve this? After all, Democrats had been segregating, degrading and abusing blacks for a long time. LBJ knew this as well as anyone because he had been one of the abusers. How then to convince blacks, who were now voting, to vote en masse for a party that had enslaved them, segregated them, terrorized them and was still the party of bigotry in the 1960s?
LBJ realized that the Democrats could no longer whip the blacks into submission, as in the past. The Democrats needed a new relationship with blacks and on different terms than before. However reluctant LBJ may have been to admit it—we see that reluctance in his statements to fellow Democratic bigots in the Senate—he was also a realist. If he wanted virtually unanimous black support for the Democrats, he knew he couldn’t just beat it out of them; he would have to woo them for the first time in the party’s history. He would have to make it worthwhile for them to stay on the Democratic plantation.
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