There is Power in a Union

by Philip Dray

  George Meany, of course, suffered no such attack of conscience. In his speeches, many ghostwritten by Lovestone, he continued to vow that the AFL-CIO would stand behind President Johnson and the war. It was Meany, or most likely his muse, who unknowingly coined one of the era’s most notorious refrains when, at a 1967 federation convention, he asserted that the labor movement’s support of the war “spoke for the vast, silent majority in the nation.” This phrase—the “silent majority”—was recycled in 1970 by Johnson’s successor, Richard Nixon, who like Meany defended the war as necessary and insisted it enjoyed the backing of most ordinary Americans, those who did not criticize their country, protest, burn draft cards, or occupy college administration buildings. These “silent” Americans, writes Philip Foner, were those “children of the Depression” who

  had had no chance to get a college education, yet they saw draft-deferred college students … wasting their time in demonstrations…. Their sons and relatives were fighting and dying in Vietnam, and they were told it was all for nothing…. They had been taught in school and church to venerate the flag, yet they saw youthful demonstrators spitting at and burning it. In short, the world they believed in was disintegrating before their eyes.46

  “The silent majority” would eventually be understood to refer to those who not only stood behind the war but working-class white people generally, especially those alarmed by the sudden changes that seemed to have overtaken society—the loosening of sexual mores, outlandish styles of dress and public behavior, the widespread use of drugs, and the rise of black militancy. The era’s most televised domestic crisis, and a depressing counterpart to the nonviolent civil rights movement in the South, was the eruption of lethal race riots in many Northern U.S. cities—Harlem and Bedford-Stuyvesant in 1964; the Watts riots in Los Angeles in August 1965; Chicago and Cleveland in 1966; Newark in 1967. The violence in Watts lasted four days, killed thirty-four people, and injured one thousand, with damages estimated at $50 million. By 1967 Cincinnati, Buffalo, Boston, Atlanta, Dayton, and even unlikely places such as Waterloo, Iowa, had been struck by similar outbreaks, attended by looting and mass arrests. Americans who tuned to nightly television news in late July saw the city of Detroit descend into what looked like an urban war zone, with National Guard tanks and armored personnel carriers rumbling through the streets; whole blocks were reduced to smoldering rubble, as police reported thirty-six deaths and twenty-five hundred arrests. So vivid a breakdown in public order spawned soul-searching editorials and sermons across the country, while government panels formed to try to make sense of the chaos.

  At times conservative reaction became manifest. Pro-war unionists had their say in May 1967 at a “Support the Boys” labor march in New York City, led by members of the International Longshoremen’s Association. The dockworkers, joined by rank and file from the Teamsters and the Maritime Union, as well as members of the John Birch Society and the American Legion, streamed down New York’s Fifth Avenue shoving and arguing with young antiwar protestors. They chanted “Burn Hanoi, not our flag!” and hoisted a sign that read DROP THE H-BOMB ON HANOI.

  While to the antiwar movement the “Support the Boys” march was out of step with reality, even harebrained, the hand-wringing of labor moderates like Walter Reuther, as well as the continued sniping among union officials over the war, had come to feel equally pointless. At times George Meany’s tether to the real world seemed to have slipped entirely. Angered by a labor peace gathering in Chicago in May 1967 that demanded the AFL-CIO drop its backing of the war, Meany made the absurd allegation that the meeting had been planned in Hanoi and its resolutions printed earlier in a Communist newspaper. Emil Mazey responded by calling Meany “a senile old man” and questioned his fitness to “lead the American labor movement.”47 But Mazey then also turned his criticism on the antiwar crowd, denouncing the tactics of overt confrontation on display at a Pentagon demonstration in October 1967, which ended with protestors being driven from the building by troops using tear gas.

  By now the young people had run out of patience. They saw, according to Philip Foner, “no distinction among labor leaders…. Mazey, Victor Reuther [and others] were no different than Meany. The fact that these leaders had broken with Meany over Vietnam and had begun to mobilize against the Meany-Lovestone forces made not the slightest difference…. Many among them … had long since written off the labor movement as a meaningful ally.”48 As Robert Kennedy concluded before a dinner hosted by the Americans for Democratic Action that year, “Labor has been in the forefront of many a great battle. But youth looks with other eyes, and their view is very different: they think of labor as grown sleek and bureaucratic with power, sometimes frankly discriminatory, occasionally even corrupt and exploitative; a force not for change but for the status quo.”49 The students hardly noticed or cared when in December of that year, at an AFL-CIO conclave in Miami, the executive council reaffirmed its support of the war and the convention’s honored guest, a beaming President Johnson, strode to the podium amid a clamorous ovation.

  THE CIVIL RIGHTS MOVEMENT had by 1967 attained many of its initial objectives, at least formally, in terms of federal legislation guaranteeing equal treatment in public accommodations (the Civil Rights Act of 1964) and voting rights (the Voting Rights Act of 1965). In doing so, however, it had lost some of the faith of younger activists who, worn down by the years of foot soldiering in the most resistant pockets of the Deep South, had grown cynical about the pace of actual change. Many of the black students who’d led the original Southern movement had chafed at the Mississippi Freedom Summer, which in 1964 brought one thousand Northern white college students into the state to teach in rural schools and serve in voter registration drives, but had then become dominated by news of the investigation into the June 21, 1964, Ku Klux Klan/police murders of an integrated team of civil rights workers, James Chaney, Andrew Goodman, and Mickey Schwerner. Later that summer at the Democratic National Convention in Atlantic City, a faction of black and white Mississippi delegates excluded by the state’s racist power structure, the Mississippi Freedom Democratic Party (MFDP), demanded to be seated instead of the all-white delegation, leading party authorities at the direction of President Johnson to shut down the attempt. After all that they had accomplished in bringing expanded voter’s rights to wayward Mississippi, MFDP members and their supporters felt betrayed by the collusion of party bigwigs and even some otherwise supportive moderates in keeping their delegates out. Walter Reuther and Hubert Humphrey had been among those running interference on the president’s behalf. The weary activists returned to Mississippi embittered by the experience.

  Martin Luther King Jr. perceived, as did the younger activists, that America’s racial problems were linked to intractable challenges that no federal legislation could necessarily touch, and he shared their frustration. His ideas about possible solutions were programmatic, including the determination to tackle head-on the poverty that was to blame for urban race riots. His Southern Christian Leadership Conference’s (SCLC) Operation Breadbasket, begun in Atlanta in 1962 and then launched more fully in 1966 in Cleveland and Chicago (where the SCLC also had led marches for open housing), sought to address the core economic tensions that created such violence by using consumer boycotts to demand equal hiring and investment in black neighborhoods by businesses that profited there. “As long as people are devoid of jobs they will find themselves in moments of despair that could lead to continuation of these disorders,” King stated in summer 1967.50 But despite some breakthroughs—in Chicago a successful rent strike and an agreement by two national grocery chains to begin stocking products made by black-owned firms; in Cleveland a product boycott—not much had really been won for all the exertion and trouble, and violent white reaction had greeted some of the Chicago efforts.

  Veteran civil rights leaders like King and his SCLC colleagues knew better than to allow their forces to bog down in protracted local campaigns that produced minimal results. By early 1968 a variation on Br
eadbasket had evolved that sought a far greater and more immediate national impact—a Poor People’s Campaign that would bring an encampment of representative poor from various parts of the South and urban North to Washington. Putting the nation’s highest decision-makers under siege, the campaign would dispatch movement spokesmen to Congress and federal agencies urging immediate action on economic issues, while participants trained in nonviolent protest methods staged demonstrations. The campaign, slated for late spring or early summer 1968, engaged members of labor’s peace wing in its planning phase, as unemployment, job discrimination, and the wasteful use of resources in the war were all issues the Poor People’s Campaign intended to address.

  The preparations for the crusade, however, soon became fraught with disagreement over tactics and objectives, as well as more pragmatic questions about funding. Historically, efforts to amass the jobless, the needy, or the resentful in Washington—from Coxey’s Army in 1894 to the Bonus March of stipend-seeking First World War veterans in 1932—had not ended well,51 and many people—white officials as well as some blacks—worried that the Poor People’s Campaign could not help but appear provocative. The prospect of an “army” of the poor and dispossessed descending on the capital, at a time when urban violence had begun to feel endemic, seemed to many irresponsible and dangerous, creating a situation that even Dr. King, for all his good works and intentions, would not be able to manage.

  Expressions of racial frustration such as Black Power and riots offered convincing evidence that King had lost the ability to control the movement he had done so much to create, even as he reinvented himself as a crusader for the jobless and the working poor. The dominant images of the civil rights movement were of orderly nonviolence—sit-ins, peaceful picketing, the inspiring tableaux of thousands assembled at the 1963 March on Washington. But these had given way to far different pictures—graphic scenes of bloodied American citizens in U.S. cities and soldiers, fearful of snipers, crouching for cover behind burned-out vehicles. King himself remained resolute, but many moderate whites who had been receptive to his message of nonviolent healing were frightened by the riots and the younger, newly minted black spokesmen of outrage; they could follow King no longer, especially now that he had turned his persuasive voice to the harder issues of economic racism and, increasingly, to criticism of Vietnam.

  King’s first major address on the war came on April 4, 1967, at New York’s Riverside Church, where he asserted that it lacked moral and strategic validity, evaporating resources needed at home to rectify social and economic crises, and that it sent predominantly poor and minority young men to fight and die. He asked for an end to the bombing, an immediate cease-fire leading to peace negotiations, and the setting of a fixed date for a U.S. military exit. In some of the address’s strongest language, he termed the United States “the greatest purveyor of violence in the world today” and compared the use of sophisticated weapons on the peasants of Vietnam to the Nazis’ methods of testing “new medicines and new tortures” in European concentration camps. “If America’s soul becomes poisoned,” he warned, “part of the autopsy must read ‘Vietnam.’ ”52 He endorsed the need to channel the moral fervor of the civil rights cause into the antiwar movement, and even proposed a “Vietnam Summer,” inspired by the civil rights Freedom Summer of 1964, in which young activists would enter American communities to awaken public awareness about the war’s detrimental impact.

  King did not single-handedly move the moral indignation of the civil rights cause to the antiwar front—that groundwork had to a great extent been accomplished by former civil rights workers from SDS and SNCC—but his public pronouncement, his coming out against the war, could not help but seem a national turning point. And as he was at least two years ahead of the mainstream media and the general public in souring on Vietnam, he paid a considerable price for his courage. Indeed, so shocked were many at what he had said, the initial response was a stunned silence, even fellow civil rights leaders refusing at first to comment upon his words. Baseball legend Jackie Robinson stated that he respectfully disagreed with Dr. King. The Jewish War Veterans of the United States of America took him to task for comparing the U.S. military to the Nazis. Civil rights colleague Whitney Young of the Urban League worried that King had drifted out of his proper sphere of advocacy.

  An especially hurtful blow came from popular black columnist Carl Rowan, who assailed King in the pages of Reader’s Digest, a periodical with a readership of several million. Accusing him of having developed an inflated idea of his own influence, the writer scolded King for having abandoned the humble methods and philosophy of social change that had characterized his Montgomery Bus Boycott and other civil rights victories. And Rowan went further, suggesting that communistic influence had led to King’s “tragic decision” to oppose the war. In these failings, the columnist alleged, King had done himself and the nation a double disservice by forfeiting his rapport with the White House and weakening the moral authority of the fight for equal rights.

  King replied by reminding Rowan that in America speaking out even in unpopular terms did not signify disloyalty, and he branded the allegation about Communism as tired red-baiting. King was right on these points, of course, no matter what one thought of his views on Vietnam, but Rowan’s harshly worded chastisement had struck a nerve.53

  By February 1968 King and the SCLC had refined plans for the Poor People’s Campaign. Approximately three thousand demonstrators would come to Washington from the cities of the East and Midwest as well as rural areas of Mississippi and West Virginia, and there take up residence in a “shanty town”—actual sharecroppers’ shacks from Mississippi transported and set up on the Mall. From there they would initiate a ninety-day effort of advocacy before Congress as well as agencies such as the Department of Housing and Urban Development. Were the powers-that-be to give the campaign’s “economic bill of rights” short shrift, a plea would go out for more protestors to come to Washington. “Waves of the nation’s poor and disinherited” would join the encampment already in place, and remain there “until America responds” with needed programs of assistance for the indigent and unemployed, for those without homes or equal opportunity.54

  While critics continued to scorn these plans, the campaign gained some much-needed legitimacy in early spring 1968 when the Kerner Commission, a board of inquiry appointed by President Johnson in reaction to the 1967 riots and headed by Governor Otto Kerner of Illinois, released its findings.55 The commission explained the recent upheaval as the result of the migration of blacks to large cities and the accompanying exodus of whites, compounded by the discrimination blacks encountered in work and housing. This had created ghetto slums of little opportunity, isolated from and at odds with the larger municipality in which they were situated, neighborhoods that were tinderboxes liable to be sparked into violence by the slightest provocation, such as hostile encounters with white police. The panel, which found the riots to have been spontaneous outbursts, not organized or controlled by any person or group, called for special training for police who worked in inner-city areas, the recruitment of more black journalists (the media was slighted for having exaggerated the violence in certain areas, such as the claims about “black snipers”), the development of more affordable housing, and job programs for the hardcore unemployed. It suggested the immediate creation of 2 million jobs by the federal government and the private sector, the establishment of a guaranteed minimum income, and a larger federal contribution to state welfare budgets. The Kerner report’s most quoted admonition warned that “our nation is moving toward two societies, one white, one black, separate but unequal.”56

  The Poor People’s Campaign was centered on demands not radically different from those agreed upon by the Kerner Commission (King at one point offered to call off the campaign if the government agreed to honor the Kerner recommendations), although the SCLC’s program remained unpopular for being confrontational. One very practical criticism was that, even if the crusade made its ca
se admirably and without trouble, Congress was unlikely to now craft additional civil rights laws, having just done so; the view from Washington was that the attainments of the civil rights era had been rewarded with major legislation, and that it must be given time to prove its effect.

  WHILE PLANS FOR the Poor People’s Campaign went forward, two developments—one national in scope, another highly localized—engaged King’s attention. From the antiwar front had emerged a Dump Johnson movement, coordinated by gadfly New York congressman Allard K. Lowenstein, to remove the erstwhile leader of the Great Society, now an obstinate war president, from office. The movement’s candidate was Senator Eugene McCarthy of Minnesota, whose entry into the Democratic primaries at first appeared as quixotic as the Dump Johnson campaign itself; then, at the end of January 1968, the Vietcong and North Vietnamese army launched the Tet Offensive, an assault on the cities of South Vietnam that was so effective it saw enemy soldiers briefly occupy the U.S. embassy in Saigon. Although the offensive was repelled, its daring and magnitude served to newly worry many Americans about the war’s being winnable. McCarthy’s campaign quickly gained ground, and in March he won an impressive 42.2 percent of the vote against Johnson’s 49.4 in the New Hampshire primary.

  Robert Kennedy had been reluctant to join the primary race, believing the president held an insurmountable lead, but in opinion surveys of New Hampshire voters he had scored almost as high as Johnson without having even been on the ballot. On March 12, noting “a deep division within the party [which] clearly indicates that a sizable group of Democrats are concerned about the direction in which the country is going,” Kennedy formally announced his candidacy.57 The entry of the popular younger man was a setback for the less prominent McCarthy, although it excited expectations that the sitting president might actually be unseated by his own party, that Johnson could indeed be “dumped.” Labor unions took sides, some leaders, such as Walter Reuther and George Meany, staying loyal to Johnson; Meany screened for his close AFL-CIO colleagues a film of the president vowing the war would not reduce his commitments to labor’s social and democratic objectives, and on March 29 warned that the Dump Johnson movement would wind up electing a Republican president. But then came Johnson’s stunning announcement of March 31, when he declared on live television that he would not seek, and would not accept, the nomination of his party for another term as president, an apparent admission that he had led the nation into a cul-de-sac in Vietnam and hadn’t the wherewithal to extricate it. Meany, as surprised as the entire nation, reacted swiftly, throwing the AFL-CIO’s support behind Vice President Humphrey as a successor to Johnson without even consulting the federation’s executive council.