Pivotal Tuesdays

by Margaret O'Mara

30. Kathryn Cramer Brownell, Showbiz Politics: Hollywood in American Politics, 1928–1980 (Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 2014).

  31. Ritchie, Electing F.D.R., 137–40, 143–44.

  32. John A. Simpson quoted in Arthur Krock, “Republicans Facing Hard Fight in Iowa,” New York Times, 5 October 1932, 3; “Los Angeles Republican Club for Roosevelt; Poll Shows 70% of Members Back Governor,” New York Times, 29 August 1932, 1; “Progressives Start a Roosevelt League,” New York Times, 26 September 1932, 1; “Hoover or Roosevelt Which?” Chicago Defender, 22 October 1932, 14; “Roosevelt or Hoover?—Roosevelt,” Afro-American, 29 October 1932, 6; Dr. Clarence True Wilson, Executive Secretary of the Methodist Board of Temperance, Prohibition and Public Morals, quoted in “Dr. Wilson to Cast Vote for Thomas,” New York Times, 4 September 1932, 13.

  33. Hoover, “The Success of Recovery,” 22 October 1932; Hoover, Memoirs, 3: 255; Kennedy, Freedom from Fear, 102.

  34. “The Roosevelt Campaign,” New York Times, 6 November 1932, E1; Anne O’Hare McCormick, “The Two Men at the Big Moment,” New York Times, 6 November 1932, M1.

  35. Hoover, Memoirs, 3: 343. The African American electorate would become a solid Democratic constituency starting with the 1936 election. See Nancy Weiss, Farewell to the Party of Lincoln: Back Politics in the Age of F.D.R. (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1983).

  36. In addition to the works cited in this chapter, some of the important contributions to this literature on the New Deal and its legacies include two classics: Richard Hofstadter, The Age of Reform (New York: Vintage, 1960) and William E. Leuchtenburg, Franklin D. Roosevelt and the New Deal: 1932–1940 (New York: Harper & Row, 1963), and recent reinterpretations and elaborations including Alan Brinkley, The End of Reform: New Deal Liberalism in Recession and War (New York: Vintage, 1996); Jennifer Klein, For All These Rights: Business, Labor, and the Shaping of America’s Public-Private Welfare State (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 2004); Jason Scott Smith, Building New Deal Liberalism: The Political Economy of Public Works, 1933–1956 (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2006); Ira Katznelson, Fear Itself: The New Deal and the Origins of Our Time (New York: Liveright, 2013). The New Deal has been commemorated as a fundamental shift in the compact between citizen and state: see, e.g., Steve Fraser and Gary Gerstle, eds., The Rise and Fall of the New Deal Order (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1989) and a temporary departure from a laissez faire norm, Jefferson Cowie and Nick Salvatore, “The Long Exception: Rethinking the Place of the New Deal in American History,” International Labor and Working-Class History 74 (2010): 1–32.

  37. Hoover, Memoirs, vol. 3; Gary Dean Best, Herbert Hoover: The Postpresidential Years, 1933–1964 (Stanford, Calif.: Hoover Institution Press, 1983). Kim Philips-Fein traces the conservative mobilization in Invisible Hands: The Businessmen’s Crusade Against the New Deal (New York: Norton, 2008).

  Chapter 5. The Fracturing of America

  1. Gerry Studds quoted in Lewis Chester, Godfrey Hodgson, and Bruce Page, An American Melodrama: The Presidential Campaign of 1968 (New York: Viking, 1969), 93.

  2. Douglas Brinkley, Cronkite (New York: HarperPerennial, 2013), 340–87; James T. Patterson, Grand Expectations: The United States, 1945–1974 (New York: Oxford University Press, 1996), 678–81.

  3. Public Papers of the Presidents of the United States: Lyndon B. Johnson, 1968–69 (Washington, D.C.: GPO, 1970), 1: 469–76. Bruce Schulman notes: “LBJ, never a brilliant public speaker, looked terrible on the tube—his wordy, folksy style looked forced, phony.” Schulman, Lyndon B. Johnson and American Liberalism: A Brief Biography with Documents (Boston: Bedford Books of St. Martin’s, 1995), 155.

  4. Barry Goldwater, “Peace Through Strength,” Address to American Legion, Dallas, Texas, 23 September 1964, reprinted in Leonard Schlup and James Manley, The Political Principles of Senator Barry M. Goldwater as Revealed in His Speeches and Writings: A Source Book (Lewiston, N.Y.: Edwin Mellen, 2011), 233–38.

  5. Among other things, Rockefeller had advanced a strongly pro-civil rights plank in the 1960 Republican Platform. Rick Perlstein, Before the Storm: Barry Goldwater and the Unmaking of the American Consensus (New York: Nation Books, 2009), 79–90.

  6. Lisa McGirr, Suburban Warriors: The Origins of the New American Right (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 2001); Jonathan M. Schoenwald, A Time for Choosing: The Rise of Modern American Conservatism (New York: Oxford University Press, 2002). Other scholars have traced the role of race in the emergent conservative movement, in both South and North; see Kevin Kruse, White Flight: Atlanta and the Making of Modern Conservatism (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 2005); Matthew D. Lassiter, The Silent Majority: Suburban Politics in the Sunbelt South (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 2006); Thomas J. Sugrue, Sweet Land of Liberty: The Forgotten Struggle for Civil Rights in the North (New York: Random House, 2008); Joseph Crespino, In Search of Another Country: Mississippi and the Conservative Counterrevolution (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 2009).

  7. This came to a head at the 1964 Democratic Convention, where a group of black Mississippians who had been prevented from voting in their state’s primary demanded to be seated instead of the all-white delegation from the Mississippi Democratic Party; Johnson and his vice president, Hubert Humphrey, kept the white delegation in and kept the white South from bolting. See Patterson, Grand Expectations, 550–57; Charles M. Payne, I’ve Got the Light of Freedom: The Organizing Tradition and the Mississippi Freedom Struggle (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2007), chap. 12.

  8. Richard Hofstadter, “Goldwater and Pseudo-Conservative Politics,” in The Paranoid Style in American Politics, and Other Essays (New York: Vintage, 1965, 2008), 133. This great postwar prosperity did not treat all Americans equally, and institutionalized racial discrimination limited opportunities for many people of color. See Thomas J. Sugrue, The Origins of the Urban Crisis: Race and Inequality in Postwar Detroit (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1996); Arnold Hirsch, Making the Second Ghetto: Race and Housing in Chicago, 1940–1960 (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1983).

  9. Kim Philips-Fein, Invisible Hands: The Making of the Conservative Movement from the New Deal to Reagan (New York: Norton, 2009).

  10. Johnson quoted in Schulman, Lyndon B. Johnson and American Liberalism, 88.

  11. Carey McWilliams, California: The Great Exception (California: University of California Press, 1949, 1998), 24.

  12. Quoted in Rick Perlstein, Nixonland: The Rise of a President and the Fracturing of America (New York: Scribner, 2008), 61.

  13. Matthew Dallek, The Right Moment: Ronald Reagan’s First Victory and the Decisive Turning Point in American Politics (New York: Free Press, 2000), 180, 187.

  14. Remarks at University of Michigan, 22 May 1964, Public Papers: Johnson, 1963–64, 1: 704–7.

  15. Quoted in “Great Society,” New York Times, 10 January 1965, E1.

  16. Schulman, Lyndon B. Johnson and American Liberalism, 88–98.

  17. Public Papers Johnson, 1966 (Washington, D.C.: GPO, 1967), 1: 3–12.

  18. “Excerpts from Fulbright’s Speech on Vietnam War,” New York Times, 29 April 1966, 32.

  19. Patterson, Grand Expectations, 598–99; Selective Service System, “Inductions (by year) from World War I Through the End of the Draft (1973),” www.sss.gov/induct.htm (accessed 2 July 2013).

  20. “Man of the Year: The Inheritor,” Time, 6 January 1967.

  21. The disproportionate recruitment of poor minority men was in fact the result of policy intentionally designed to steer unemployed minority youth into military service. Part of the broader Great Society agenda, the “Project 100,000” program (brainchild of assistant secretary of labor Daniel P. Moynihan) lowered recruitment standards in order to “rehabilitate” 100,000 young men per year by enlisting them in the armed forces. See Myra MacPherson, Long Time Passing: Vietnam and the Haunted Generation (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2002
), 559.

  22. Quoted in Sam Washington, “Should We Stay in Asia?” Chicago Defender, 1 April 1967, 1; King quoted in Robert B. Semple, Jr., “Dr. King Scores Poverty Budget,” New York Times, 16 December 1966, 33. Only 12 percent of the Vietnam-era military ever saw combat, but these soldiers were disproportionately poorer and less well educated; see Cynthia Gimbel and Alan Booth, “Who Fought in Vietnam?” Social Forces 74, 4 (June 1996): 1137–57.

  23. Raymond Daniell, “U.S. Assailed on Vietnam Policy Before 17,000 at a Garden Rally,” New York Times, 9 June 1965; John Herbers, “Vote Drive Is Set by Peace Groups; Vietnam Issue to Be Raised in Congressional Races,” New York Times, 25 February 1966, A3.

  24. A key figure in the “Dump Johnson” movement was liberal activist Allard Lowenstein; see William H. Chafe, Never Stop Running: Allard Lowenstein and the Struggle to Save American Liberalism (New York: Basic Books, 1993), 262–75. Lippmann quoted in Perlstein, Nixonland, 174.

  25. Lyndon B. Johnson, Phone Conversation with Senator Richard B. Russell, 27 May 1964 (WH6405.10), Presidential Recordings Program, Miller Center, University of Virginia; Johnson quoted in Chester et al., American Melodrama, 26.

  26. Doris Kearns, Lyndon Johnson and the American Dream (New York: Signet, 1976), 345–49.

  27. “NUL Chief Rips Poverty Program,” Chicago Daily Defender, 15 December 1966, 16; Sam Washington, “Residents Hit ‘Ineffective’ Poverty Program,” Daily Defender, 8 December 1966, 4.

  28. Brian T. Baxter, “Urban Unrest,” Letter to the Editor, New York Times, 17 August 1966, 30.

  29. U.S. Kerner Commission, Report of the National Advisory Commission on Civil Disorders, (Washington, D.C.: GPO, 1968); Taylor Branch, At Canaan’s Edge: America in the King Years, 1965–68 (New York: Simon and Schuster, 2006), 293–323; Gerald Horne, Fire This Time: The Watts Uprising and the 1960s (New York: Da Capo, 1997).

  30. Stokely Carmichael, “Definitions of Black Power,” Detroit, 31 July 1966, reprinted in To Redeem a Nation: A History and Anthology of the Civil Rights Movement, ed. Thomas R. West (New York: Brandywine Press, 1993), 245–246.

  31. Chester et al., An American Melodrama, 68–77.

  32. Ibid., 74, 76.

  33. Ibid., 80.

  34. “Crusade of the Ballot Children.” Time, 22 March 1968, 31; Chester et al., An American Melodrama, 79–80, 98.

  35. Quoted in Steven M. Gillon, The Kennedy Assassination—24 Hours After: Lyndon B. Johnson’s Pivotal First Day as President (New York: Basic Books, 2009), 31. Regarding the 1960 convention, see Robert A. Caro, The Passage of Power: The Years of Lyndon Johnson, vol. 4 (New York: Vintage, 2013), 109–43. The feud was of a magnitude deserving book-length study: Jeff Shesol, Mutual Contempt: Lyndon Johnson, Robert Kennedy, and the Feud That Defined a Decade (New York: Norton, 1997).

  36. Chester et al., An American Melodrama, 105–13.

  37. Both quoted in “Reaction to Bobby,” Time, 5 April 1968, 81.

  38. H. Rupert Theobald and Patricia V. Robbins, eds., The State of Wisconsin Blue Book, 1970 (Madison: Wisconsin Legislative Reference Bureau, 1970), 822–823.

  39. “The New Context of ’68,” Time, 22 March 1968, 29; Chafe, Never Stop Running, 282–90; “Gene’s Bind,” Time, 29 March, 24.

  40. James Reston, “Washington: Pray Silence for Hubert Horatio Humphrey,” New York Times, 5 April 1968, 46; Roy Reed, “Humphrey Is Silent on Entering Race, But Support Grows,” New York Times, 3 April 1968, 1. Also see Stewart Alsop, “Hubert Horatio Humphrey,” Saturday Evening Post, 24 August 1968, 21–25.

  41. Chester et al., An American Melodrama, 80.

  42. Ibid., 127.

  43. Thomas B. Congdon, Jr., “Kennedy Among the People,” Saturday Evening Post, 13 July 1968, 64. Leonard J. Moore, Citizen Klansmen: The Ku Klux Klan in Indiana, 1921–1928 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1997). Also see MacLean, Behind the Mask of Chivalry.

  44. Quoted in Shesol, Mutual Contempt, 447. Also see Ray E. Boomhower, Robert F. Kennedy and the 1968 Indiana Primary (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2008).

  45. David Halberstam, The Unfinished Odyssey of Robert Kennedy (New York: Random House, 1968); Thurston Clarke, The Last Campaign: Robert F. Kennedy and 82 Days That Inspired America (New York: Henry Holt, 2008).

  46. “Getting Snappish,” Time, 31 May 1968, 13; Chester et al., An American Melodrama, 149.

  47. William A. Emerson, Jr., “From the Editor,” Saturday Evening Post, 13 July 1968, 3.

  Chapter 6. Improbable Victories

  1. Quoted in Lewis Chester, Godfrey Hodgson, and Bruce Page, An American Melodrama: The Presidential Campaign of 1968 (New York: Viking, 1969, 183.

  2. Gallup Organization, Gallup Poll #736, Field Date 21–26 October 1966, http://brain.gallup.com/documents/questionnaire.aspx?STUDY=AIPO0736 (accessed 8 July 2013); Matthew D. Lassiter, The Silent Majority: Suburban Politics in the Sunbelt South (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 2006), 228–29; as Lassiter observes, “demographics played a much more important role than demagoguery in the emergence of a two-party system in the American South” (228). Also see Earl Black and Merle Black, The Vital South: How Presidents Are Elected (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1992). Cold War spending was critical to the new economic geography; see Bruce J. Schulman, From Cotton Belt to Sunbelt: Federal Policy, Economic Development, and the Transformation of the South, 1938–1980 (Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 1994).

  3. On Thurmond and his legacies, see Joseph Crespino, Strom Thurmond’s America (New York: Hill and Wang, 2012). On Wallace, see Dan T. Carter, The Politics of Rage: George Wallace, the Origins of the New Conservatism, and the Transformation of American Politics (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 2000) as well as the classic biography by Marshall Frady, Wallace (New York: World, 1968).

  4. On the longer history of populism, see Michael Kazin, The Populist Persuasion: An American History (Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 1998).

  5. Cathy Kunzinger Urwin, “‘Noblesse Oblige’ and Practical Politics: Winthrop Rockefeller and the Civil Rights Movement,” Arkansas Historical Quarterly 54, 1 (April 1995): 30–52; “Goldwater Returns,” in Black and Black, The Vital South, 147, cited in Lassiter, The Silent Majority, 229.

  6. Chester et al., An American Melodrama, 188. For additional discussion of Kirk and the emergence of the coded racial language of homeownership, see Thomas Byrne Edsall and Mary D. Edsall, Chain Reaction: The Impact of Race, Rights, and Taxes on American Politics (New York: Norton, 1991). Since the New Deal, federal policies supporting home ownership had turned homes into vehicles for building personal economic security as well as potent symbols of citizenship. Yet the entire system of residential real estate was profoundly discriminatory in terms of both race and gender, ensuring that postwar suburban neighborhoods remained, by and large, lily-white enclaves of male breadwinners and female housewives. Civil rights presented a threat to this order, and the movement of black families into these neighborhoods was seen by many homeowners as something with potentially devastating effects on home values as well as on neighborhood security. This was a nationwide phenomenon, not merely a southern one. See Thomas J. Sugrue, The Origins of the Urban Crisis: Race and Inequality in Postwar Detroit (Princeton N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1996); Robert Self, American Babylon: Race and the Struggle for Postwar Oakland (Princeton N.J.: Princeton University Press, 2003); Kevin Kruse, White Flight?: Atlanta and the Making of Modern Conservatism (Princeton N.J.: Princeton University Press, 2005); Sugrue, Sweet Land of Liberty: The Forgotten Struggle for Civil Rights in the North (New York: Random House, 2008).

  7. A. F. Mahan, “Political Highway Now Beckoning to Romney,” Los Angeles Times, 4 February 1962, F2.

  8. Kennedy quoted in Rick Perlstein, Nixonland: The Rise of a President and the Fracturing of America (New York: Scribner, 2008), 173; Romney-Johnson polling from Theodore H. White, The Making of the President 1968 (New York: Atheneum, 1969), 47. Also see George T. Harris, Romney’s
Way: A Man and an Idea (Englewood Cliffs, N.J.: Prentice-Hall, 1968). Among other things, Romney won 15 percent of the black vote in Michigan in 1964 (while Goldwater won a mere 2 percent), and increased his share to 30 percent in 1966 (White, The Making of the President 1968, 42).

  9. White, The Making of the President 1968, 41.

  10. Romney, Interview with Lou Gordon, Detroit, 31 August 1967, cited in Rick Perlstein, “What Mitt Romney Learned from His Dad,” Rolling Stone, 17 January 2012. Also see Perlstein, Nixonland, 173–75; Chester et al., An American Melodrama, 100–102. Romney’s campaign, and the attention and financial support it garnered, also foreclosed the possibilities for other moderate Republicans to get into the race; arguably, some of these men (like New York Mayor John Lindsay) might have been stronger and more resilient candidates.

  11. Quoted in Chester et al., An American Melodrama, 236.

  12. Richard M. Nixon has been chronicled, analyzed, and psychoanalyzed more than possibly any other American president. In addition to the work already cited, notable works on Nixon include Elizabeth Drew, Richard M. Nixon (New York: Times Books, 2007); David Greenberg, Nixon’s Shadow: The History of an Image (New York: Norton, 2003); Melvin Small, The Presidency of Richard Nixon (Lawrence: University Press of Kansas, 1999).

  13. Perlstein, Nixonland, 203. Further discussion of Nixon’s comeback can be found in White, The Making of the President 1968, 47–70.

  14. Joe McGinniss, The Selling of the President (New York: Trident Press, 1969), 66.

  15. Chester et al., An American Melodrama, 256.

  16. “Bailey Hits Nixon as ‘Old Slasher’ of ’50’s,” Los Angeles Times, 10 February 1968, B10; Safire quoted in White, The Making of the President 1968, 58.

  17. Thurmond and Reagan quoted in Perlstein, Nixonland, 257; also see 263. Hayes quoted in Chester et al., An American Melodrama, 16.

  18. White, The Making of the President 1968, 160–61.

  19. Chester et al., An American Melodrama, 379–401; White, The Making of the President 1968, 261–99.