American Experiment
Page 333
[Bork]: Ronald Dworkin, “The Bork Nomination,” New York Review of Books, vol. 34, no. 13 (August 13, 1987), pp. 3-10; Dworkin, “From Bork to Kennedy,” ibid., vol. 34, no. 20 (December 17, 1987), pp. 36-42.
Realignment?: Waiting for Lefty
655 [Realignment and realigning eras]: V. O. Key, Jr., “A Theory of Critical Elections,” Journal of Politics, vol. 17, no. 1 (February 1955), pp. 3-18; Walter Dean Burnham, Critical Elections and the Mainsprings of American Politics (Norton, 1970); James L. Sundquist, Dynamics of the Party System: Alignment and Realignment of Political Parties in the United States (Brookings Institution, 1973); Bruce A. Campbell and Richard J. Trilling, eds., Realignment in American Politics: Toward a Theory (University of Texas Press, 1980); Kristi Andersen, The Creation of a Democratic Majority, 1928-1936 (University of Chicago Press, 1979); Stanley Kelley, Jr., “Democracy and the New Deal Party System,” Working Paper 10: Democratic Values (Project on the Federal Social Role of National Conference on Social Welfare, 1986); Dale Baum, The Civil War Party System: The Case of Massachusetts, 1848-1876 (University of North Carolina Press, 1984).
655 [A 1980s realignment?]: Nelson W. Polsby, “Did the 1984 Election Signal Major Party Realignment?,” Key Reporter, vol. 50, no. 3 (Spring 1985), pp. 1-4; Walter Dean Burnham, “The 1984 Elections and the Future of American Politics,” in Sandoz and Crabb, pp. 204-60; Kevin P. Phillips, “A G.O.P. Majority?,” New York Times, April 19, 1984, p. A19; Jerome M. Clubb, William U. Flanigan, and Nancy H. Zingale, Partisan Realignment: Voters, Parties, and Government in American History (Sage Publications,1980), pp. 273-98; Paul R. Abramson, John H. Aldrich, and David W. Rohde, Change and Continuity in the 1984 Elections (Congressional Quarterly Press, 1986), ch. 11; Martin P. Wallenberg, “The Hollow Realignment: Partisan Change in a Candidate-Centered Era,” Public Opinion Quarterly, vol. 51, no. 1 (Spring 1987), pp. 58-74; Robert S. McElvaine, The End of the Conservative Era: Liberalism After Reagan (uncorrected proofs: Arbor House, 1987), ch. 1; Public Opinion, vol. 8, no. 9 (October-November 1985). pp. 8-17, 21-40.
657 [“In a bind”]: Alexander P. Lamis, “Mississippi,” in Robert P. Steed, Laurence W. Moreland, and Tod A. Baker, eds., The 1984 Presidential Election in the South: Patients of Southern Party Politics (Praeger, 1986), pp. 45-73, Lott quoted at p. 50. [Realignment in the South]: Alexander P. Lamis, The Two-Party South (Oxford University Press, 1984); Harold W. Stanley, “The 1984 Presidential Election in the South: Race and Realignment,” in Steed, Moreland and Baker, 1984 Presidential Election, pp. 303- 35; Robert P. Steed, Laurence W. Moreland and Tod A. Baker, eds., Party Politics in the South (Praeger, 1980), part 2.
[White southern Republican identification]: Everett Carll Ladd, “Alignment and Realignment: Where Are All the Voters Going?,” The Ladd Report #3 (Norton, 1986), p. 8.
658 [Democrats and liberals, late 1980s]: Randall Rothenberg, The Neo-liberals: Creating the New American Politics (Simon and Schuster, 1984); Robert Kultner, The Life of the Party: Democratic Prospects in 1988 and Beyond (Viking, 1987), chs. 1, 5, and passim; Robert Lekachman, Visions and Nightmares: America After Reagan (Macmillan, 1987), ch. 6; McElvaine, esp. ch. 2; William Schneider. “The Democrats in ’88,” Atlantic, vol. 259, no. 4 (April 1987), pp. 37-59; see also Henry Fairlie, “Jackson’s Moment: What Jesse Can Teach the Democrats,” New Republic, vol. 190, no. 8 (February 27, 1984), pp. 11-14; Lucius J. Barker, “Black Americans and the Politics of Inclusion: The Significance of Jesse Jackson’s Presidential Campaigns,” paper prepared for presentation at the American Politics Workshop, Nankai University, China, November 19, 1988.
[“If American voters”]: Arthur M. Schlesinger. Jr., “For Democrats, Me-Too Reaganism Will Spell Disaster,” New York Times, July 6, 1986, sect. 4, p. 13. [“Pragmatic in all things”]: Schneider, p. 38.
[“Democratic Code word”]: ibid., p. 37.
659 [Democratic midterm conferences]: Leon D. Epstein, Political Parties in the American Mold (University of Wisconsin Press, 1986), pp. 213-14; New York Times, June 26, 1985, p. B8.
[Democratic Leadership Council]: see Schneider, pp. 44, 46; Kuttner, pp. 28-29, 203-4.
660 [The young in the 1980s]: McElvaine, ch. 8: Crocker Coulson, “Lost Generation: The Politics of Youth,” New Republic, vol. 195, no. 22 (December 1, 1986), pp. 21-22.
[McElvaine on babyboomers]: McElvaine, p. 210.
[“Springsteen Coalition”]: ibid., pp. 215-16, 228-31, quoted at p. 216.
661 [“Black Monday”]: Newsweek, vol. 110, no. 18 (November 2, 1987), pp. 14-53. [Voter alienation]: Walter Dean Burnham, “The Turnout Problem,” in A. James Reich- ley, ed., Elections American Style (Brookings Institution, 1987), pp. 97-133; Abramson, Aldrich, and Rohde, ch. 4 passim; Martin P. Wattenberg, The Decline of American Political Parties, 1952-1980 (Harvard University Press, 1984); Curtis B. Cans, “The Empty Ballot Box: Reflections on Nonvoters in America,” Public Opinion, vol. 1, no. 4 (September-October 1978), pp. 54-57; Frances Fox Piven and Richard A. Cloward, Why Americans Don’t Vote (Pantheon, 1988), esp. chs. 4, 7, Appendix A.
661 [1984 voting percentage]: Thomas E. Cronin, “The Presidential Election of 1984,” in Sandoz and Crabb, pp. 30-31.
661-2 [Movements, nonvoters, and their transforming potential]: Richard A. Cloward and Frances Fox Piven. “Toward a Class-Based Realignment of American Politics: A Movement Strategy,” Social Policy, vol. 13, no. 3 (Winter 1983), pp. 3-14; press report; Human Service Employees Registration & Voter Education Campaign, New York, N.Y., June 15, 1987.
A Rebirth of Leadership?
662 [Cuomo’s decision]: New York Times, February 20, 1987, pp. 1, B5; ibid., February 21, 1981, pp. 1, 6-7.
663 [“Extensive program of political education”]: Bibby, p. 110.
[Transactional and transforming leadership]: see James MacGregor Burns, Leadership (Harper, 1978).
[Demands for education reform]: National Commission on Excellence in Education, A Nation at Risk: The Imperative for Educational Reform (U.S. Government Printing Office, 1983); Allan Bloom, The Closing of the American Mind (Simon and Schuster, 1987); William J. Johnston, ed., Education on Trial: Strategies for the Future (ICS Press, 1985); Beatrice Gross and Ronald Gross, eds., The Great School Debate: Which Way for American Education? (Touchstone, 1985); and sources cited in ch. 14, supra, in section titled “Habits of Individualism.”
664 [Phi Beta Kappa and Rhodes scholar survey]: Bowen and Schuster, “The Changing Career Interests of the Nation’s Intellectual Elite,” The Key Reporter, vol. 51, no. 1 (Autumn 1985), pp. 1-4; see also Bowen and Schuster, American Professors: A National Resource Imperiled (Oxford University Press, 1986); Russell Jacoby, The Last Intellectuals: American Culture in the Age of Academe (Basic Books, 1987).
[“Less and less attractive”]: Bowen and Schuster, “Changing Career Interests,” p. 3. [“Working conditions for faculty”]: ibid., p. 4.
665 [“Heap or jumble”]: Bloom, p. 371.
[“Straight and short road”]: Alexis de Tocqueville, Democracy in America (Knopf, 1945), vol. 2, pp. 41, 42.
[“What lies between”]: ibid., vol. 2, p. 77.
[“Men are born”]: quoted in James MacGregor Burns, Uncommon Sense (Harper, 1972), p. 98. In this section I have borrowed concepts and phraseology from ibid., ch. 6.
[“Battle cry of freedom”]: Irwin Silber, ed., Songs of the Civil War (Columbia University Press, 1960), pp. 17-20, 26.
666 [“Basic choices available”]: Frankel, “The Relation of Theory to Practice: Some Standard Views,” in Herman D. Stein, ed., Social Theory and Social Invention (Press of Case Western Reserve University, 1968), pp. 3-21, quoted at p. 20.
[Lincoln on liberty]: quoted in The Public Papers and Addresses of Franklin D. Roosevelt, Samuel I. Rosenman, comp. (Random House, 1938-50), vol. 9, p. 484. [“Second Bill of Rights”]: Message to the Congress on the State of the Union, January 11, 1944, in ibid., vol. 13, pp. 32-44, quoted at p. 41.
667 [Judiciary and civil liberties]: M. Glenn Abernathy, Civil Liber
ties Under the Constitution, 2nd ed. (Dodd, Mead, 1972); Zechariah Chaffee. Jr., Free Speech in the United States (Harvard University Press, 1941); Schwartz, Burger Years, part 2; Kelly, Harbison, and Belz, pp. 722-27.
[Court and Louisiana creationism statute]: Edwards, Governor of Louisiana v. Auillard, 482 U.S. (1987).
668 [“Pastoral Letter”]: excerpts in New York Times, November 12, 1984, p. B10; see also Victor Ferkiss, “The Bishops’ Letter and the Future,” in R. Bruce Douglass, ed., The Deeper Meaning of Economic Life (Georgetown University Press, 1986), pp. 139-55; John Langan, The American Context of the U.S. Bishops’ Pastoral Letter on the Economy,” in ibid., pp. 1-19.
669 [American distribution of wealth]: Jim Hightower, “Where Greed, Unofficially Blessed by Reagan, Has Led,” New York Times, June 21, 1987, sect. 4, p. 25; see also Frank Levy, Dollars and Dreams: The Changing American Income Distribution (Russell Sage Foundation/Basic Books, 1987).
670 [Early fall 1988 poll on sense of economic well-being]: Everett C. Ladd, The Ladd 1988 Election Update, vol. 9 (October 1988), p. 5.
[August 1988 poll on Reagan Administration’s conservatism]: ibid.
[Voter turnout, 1988 election]: New York Times, November 10, 1988, p. B7 (table).
671 [Maccoby on James]: “A Symposium: Some Issues of Technology,” Daedalus, vol. 19, no. 1 (Winter 1980), pp. 3-24, quoted at p. 21.
[“Politics in the United States”]: Brinkley, “What Hart’s Fall Says About America,” New York Times, May 21, 1987, p. A31.
[“Makes the role of leadership”]: “Some Issues of Technology,” p. 21.
[Pendulum theory of politics]: McElvaine, pp. 4-10 and passim; Arthur M. Schlesinger, Jr., The Cycles of American History (Houghton Mifflin, 1986), esp. ch. 2.
672 [“The line it is drawn”]: “The times they are a-changin’,” recorded by Bob Dylan, words and music by Bob Dylan, copyright 1963, Columbia Records.
Memories of the Future: A Personal Epilogue
673 [“Memories of the Future”]: the name of a pulquería I saw as a boy on the outskirts of Mexico City.
[Williamstown and the Berkshires]: Robert R. R. Brooks, ed., Williamstown: The First Two Hundred Years, 1753-1953, and Twenty Years Later, 1953-1973, 2nd ed. (Williamstown Historical Commission, 1974); Arthur Latham Perry, Origins in Williamstown, 3rd ed. (privately printed, 1904); Bliss Perry, Colonel Benjamin Simonds, 1726-1807 (privately printed, 1944); Theodore M. Hammett, “The Revolutionary Ideology in Its Social Context: Berkshire County, Massachusetts, 1725-1785 (doctoral dissertation: Brandeis University, 1976).
[Thoreau in the Berkshires]: Thoreau, A Week on the Concord and Merrimack Rivers, Carl F. Hovde et al., eds. (Princeton University Press, 1980), pp. 180-90, quoted at pp. 184, 188.
[“A sort of sea-feeling”]: letter to Evert Duyckinck, December 13, 1850, in Jay Leyda, ed., The Melville Log (Harcourt, 1951), p. 401.
[Roosevelt in Williamstown]: Brooks, pp. 352-54, party chieftain quoted at p. 353.
[“To evolve a new order”]: New York Times, June 10, 1934, sect. 4, pp. 1, 6, quoted at p. 6.
[“Next frontier”]: Stevenson, “Liberalism,” address at Los Angeles, May 31, 1956, in Stevenson, The New America, Seymour E. Harris et al., eds. (Harper, 1957), pp. 256-61, quoted at p. 260.
[My views of JFK, 1960]: James MacGregor Burns, John Kennedy: A Political Profile (Harcourt, 1960).
[Jacqueline Kennedy on her husband]: letter of Jacqueline Kennedy (in Hyannisport) to the author, n.d. [late 1959]. 681 [“ Things fall apart”]: Yeats, “The Second Coming,” in The Collected Poems of W. B. Yeats (Macmillan, 1959), pp. 184-85.
Acknowledgments
IN THIS FINAL VOLUME of my trilogy in American political and intellectual history I have continued to stress the role of leadership—but of the second and third cadres of leadership, and not merely of a few notables at the top. This emphasis has centrally influenced my treatment of American presidents. I have given much attention to FDR and his four successors— Truman, Eisenhower, Kennedy in his third year in office, and Lyndon Johnson during his first two years in the White House—because these men in their diverse ways markedly influenced the course of history. I have played down the influence of LBJ in his last three years and of his four successors—Nixon, Ford, Carter, and Reagan during most of his two terms—because they appear to me as far more the victims than the makers of events.
Victims of events—but those events were not impersonal happenings like an ice age but the work of other men and women. The last three decades have brought extraordinary leadership from second-cadre figures such as Martin Luther King, Jr., and Robert F. Kennedy, as well as from third-cadre rank-and-file activists who influenced them. I regret that even three substantial volumes cannot do justice to all the leaders of causes and movements who variously stimulate, sustain, challenge, and obstruct presidents. And if, on the other hand, second-cadre officials in the White House fail their president, as happened most direly in the Nixon and Reagan administrations, presidents are brought down by events for which they must take responsibility.
This volume, even more than the first two, is the product of a collective effort. Two collaborators had indispensable roles. Stewart Burns, deeply immersed in the peace and environmental struggles of recent decades, served as chief co-author with me of Part III (chapters 8-10), critiqued major portions of the manuscript, and directly influenced the coverage of ideas and events elsewhere in the work. Milton Djuric shared much of the burden of research, cast a critical eye on successive drafts of the manuscript, and made important contributions in the realms of both ideas and facts, demonstrating throughout creativity and versatility, whether in conceptualizing, in drafting, in critiquing, or in editing.
Historians Alan Brinkley and David Burner reviewed the entire manuscript and made numerous suggestions for its improvement, as did two longtime friends and colleagues at Williams, historians Russell H. Bostert and Robert C. L. Scott. Physicist David A. Park, astronomer-physicist Jay M. Pasachoff, and musician and music critic Irwin Shainman counseled me expertly in their respective spheres of scholarship. I thank these critics for the time and thought they so generously gave to the manuscript. Others at Williams who gave invaluable help were Kurt Tauber and Rosemarie Tong, and two students, Nicholas King and David F. Wagner. My friends in the Faculty Secretarial Office were as cheerfully efficient as ever.
Deborah Burns, author, editor, and illustrator, provided the admirable endpapers for this volume as she did for the first two. My longtime friend and editor Ashbel Green supplied the solid and consistent counsel necessary for such a long-term writing project, while Melvin Rosenthal, also at Knopf, provided his special kind of meticulous editing. Jeffrey Trout thoroughly critiqued the manuscript on the basis of both his historical and his legal knowledge. Wendy Severinghaus reviewed the early chapters. Maurice Greenbaum continued to contribute in significant ways. My fellow author Joan Simpson Burns offered useful advice and criticism. Gisela Knight compiled the painstakingly comprehensive index.
I wish to thank the archivists and librarians at institutions where I conducted research: Baker Library of the Graduate School of Business Administration at Harvard; the Columbia University Oral History Program; Franklin D. Roosevelt Library; Jimmy Carter Library; John Fitzgerald Kennedy Library; House of Lords Records Office, London; Language Laboratory of the University of California at Berkeley; Library of Congress, Manuscripts Division; Louisiana State University Library; Lyndon Baines Johnson Library; the Martin Luther King, Jr., Library and Archives; the New York Historical Society; the New York Public Library; Research Library, University of California at Los Angeles; the Stanford University libraries; University of Kentucky Library; University of Oklahoma Western History Collections; and the Williams College Library, whose staff was invariably helpful and resourceful.
I conducted research and writing also at Bellagio under the Rockefeller Foundation; the Hoover Institution on War, Revolution, and Peace; and the University of California at Los Angeles
. I should state here, as I have done in a number of places in this work, that I have borrowed from earlier writings of mine in an effort to make some of my imperishable prose still more imperishable.
Any errors or deficiencies are solely my responsibility, and I would appreciate being informed of them at Williams College, Williamstown, MA 01267. I wish to thank those who sent in corrections for the second volume, The Workshop of Democracy. Those corrections are: (p. 189) the number of Populist newspapers was nearer several hundred than 100; (p. 218) General George Custer chased Crazy Horse’s warriors for about six weeks, not six months; (p. 231) Tom Watson’s position at the 1896 Populist convention should be identified as anti-fusionist; (p. 234) Dingell should be Dingley; (ch. 5) the Colored Farmers’ National Alliance should be mentioned as an important black organization that was parallel in its work and activities to the National Farmers’ Alliance, which in the South refused to admit black farmers to membership.
J.M.B.
INDEX
A | B | C | D | E
F | G | H | I | J
K | L | M | N | O
P | Q | R | S | T
U | V | W | Y | Z
Aaron, Daniel, 145
Abbott, Grace, 103
Abernathy, Ralph, 349, 351, 356, 362-3, 367, 369, 382
abolitionism, 646, 655
abortion issue, 439, 440, 447-9, 452, 458, 628, 654
Abrams, Gen. Creighton, 475
Abstract Expressionism, 621, 622
Abzug, Bella, 439, 452, 457-8
Acconci, Vito, 623
Acheson, Dean, 28, 37, 80, 229, 276, 285, 334-412, 593
as Secretary of State, 240, 243-4, 252, 253, 289, 342, 402, 468
Adam, Margie, 451
Adams, John, 626, 634
Addams, Jane, 10, 121
affirmative action, 651
Afghanistan, 529, 531, 626, 644