The Fierce Urgency of Now

by Julian E. Zelizer

  The war in Vietnam was escalating. Operation Rolling Thunder, a massive bombing campaign against the North Vietnamese, was under way starting in March 1965. Johnson had also authorized a surge of U.S. ground troops that month. Even as advisers kept pushing Johnson to withdraw—Vice President Humphrey argued that the election victory had created the first opportunity to “face the Vietnam problem without being preoccupied with the political repercussions from the Republican right”126—the president refused to change course; he was still and always terrified of becoming the Democrat who lost Vietnam to the communists. On July 28, one day after the House passed his Medicare and Medicaid programs, and with voting rights legislation seemingly safe, Johnson had announced a major escalation of the war in Vietnam.127

  But for the time being, these problems were inchoate, and Johnson was on the crest of a wave of legislative victories. His vision of a second New Deal was coming true.

  CHAPTER SEVEN

  CONGRESSIONAL CONSERVATISM REVIVED

  On January 12, 1966, President Johnson, looking confident and commanding, strode to the rostrum of the House of Representatives to deliver his third State of the Union address. His approval rating was 59 percent, and the Gallup poll had reported that for the third year in a row Americans rated him the “Most Admired Man” in the world, ahead of Martin Luther King and Pope Paul VI. Before members of Congress and a national television audience, Johnson brushed off conservative critics who had argued that the increasing cost of the conflict in Vietnam necessitated cuts in nonmilitary spending. He insisted that the American economy could pay for guns and butter. “This nation is mighty enough,” the president said, “its society is healthy enough, its people are strong enough, to pursue our goals in the rest of the world while still building a Great Society here at home.” Johnson reminded Congress and the nation that the economy was still booming. “Workers are making more money than ever—with after-tax income in the past 5 years up 33 percent; in the last year alone, up 8 percent. More people are working than ever before in our history—an increase last year of 21/2 million jobs.”

  Responding to conservative opponents, Johnson said, “There are men who cry out, ‘We must sacrifice.’ Well, let us. ‘Who will they sacrifice? Are they going to sacrifice the children who seek the learning, the sick who need medical care, or the families who dwell in squalor now brightened by the hope of home? Will they sacrifice opportunity for the distressed, the beauty of our land, the hope of our poor?’” The president announced a record-high peacetime budget of $112.8 billion, far beyond the budget he and Harry Byrd had agreed to in the year he took over the presidency, including $58.3 billion for defense, and he presented a list of major initiatives he hoped Congress would tackle in the coming year. He did not ask for an income tax increase, but he did propose restoring certain excise taxes and speeding up the schedule for withholding taxes.

  Johnson persisted in Vietnam despite growing public criticism of his war strategy. There were more than 200,000 American combat troops in Southeast Asia; the costs of the war were escalating rapidly; Johnson was carefully hiding these costs from Congress and relying on supplementary budget requests to obtain the money he needed.

  Beneath the confidence Johnson projected, he was feeling a great deal of political anxiety. He knew that the good legislative times he had enjoyed over the past year could not last much longer. The midterm elections were just around the corner, and every politician recognized that midterm elections rarely went well for the party that controlled the White House. The sizable liberal majorities that had been producing huge results would not be as large after November. With the exception of the 1934 elections, when Democrats increased the size of their majorities in the House and the Senate, the president’s party had shrunk in midterms ever since the contemporary two-party system had been solidified in 1860. The only question was how deep the losses would be, and a clue to the answer was that losses were usually worst after huge landslide victories. In 1938, Democrats lost a net of seventy seats in the House and seven seats in the Senate after FDR’s reelection in 1936; in 1958, Republicans lost forty-eight seats in the House and thirteen in the Senate after Dwight Eisenhower’s 1956 landslide.

  Johnson agreed with the analysis of his legislative liaison Henry Hall Wilson: “It is clear that new programs will be more difficult to pass this year than they were last year and that the differences are: a) the war, b) election year, and c) the feeling among many members that enough was done last year.”1 Johnson himself warned the civil rights leader Roy Wilkins, “Our legislation is over . . . because second session everybody is looking, running for reelection.”2

  But these gloomy predictions didn’t hold him back; he was a politician who loved to take big risks in the pursuit of legislative breakthroughs. The election of 1964 had been good to him. For the time being, he had favorable Democratic majorities in the Eighty-ninth Congress; he believed he could squeeze more out of it. He sent a number of proposals to the Hill, many of which would pass in some form over the coming year. In 1966, Congress created the Department of Transportation, which centralized policy that had been chaotically dispersed among thirty-five different agencies. Though it was severely watered down from Johnson’s original plan, the Model Cities Program provided about $900 million to help cities design plans for revitalizing their infrastructures. The Endangered Species Preservation Act empowered the secretary of interior to protect fish and wildlife that were threatened by development. The National Traffic and Motor Vehicle Safety Act aimed to reduce highway deaths by requiring the construction of safer vehicles and encouraging the use of seat belts.

  Understanding that the liberal moment was fleeting, Johnson had decided to take a huge gamble on passing one more major piece of civil rights legislation—a bill that would prohibit racial discrimination in the sale or rental of homes. He knew that his proposal would upset northern white Democratic constituents who had been supportive of liberalism since the 1930s. He also knew that the debate over housing discrimination would test the endurance of the legislative coalition upon which he had depended and arouse the fierce opposition of the conservative coalition that had been lying low for almost a year. Despite the risks, Johnson was determined to pass legislation to end discrimination in housing.

  RACE IN THE HOME FRONT

  The effects of the 1964 Civil Rights Act and the 1965 Voting Rights Act had been swift and impressive. The Justice Department, frustrated by how slowly schools were desegregated in the South after the Supreme Court’s Brown v. Board of Education decision in 1954, had hastened the desegregation of public accommodations by filing lawsuits or merely threatening legal action against establishments that refused to comply. Despite the bitter and violent clashes that preceded the passage of the 1964 law, its implementation proceeded relatively peacefully and without massive resistance, although there were still stories of violent defiance by individual citizens and of businesses that found ways to evade the laws.3 Largely as a result of voter registration drives and the voting rights legislation, the percentage of African Americans registered to vote in southern states rose from about 41 percent in 1964 to 52.6 percent in 1966 to 60.3 percent in 1968. The changes in the Deep South were the most impressive: the percentage of African Americans registered to vote in Mississippi reached 59.8 percent in 1967; the figure had been 6.7 percent just three years earlier.4

  But there was much racial injustice that Congress had not yet addressed. When rioting broke out in the Watts neighborhood of Los Angeles in the summer of 1965, people with divergent attitudes and interests joined a national debate about the causes and cures for racial discrimination and its effects in urban America.

  The riots began on August 11 in the wake of what might have been a routine traffic stop on a hot and smoggy evening in an African American neighborhood of clean streets lined with beautiful plush green trees and handsome single-family homes. In a city where tensions over police brutality had been mounting for years, a lou
d argument between the people in the car and the police drew a crowd, and as the traffic stop grew more heated and the interactions became tense, the crowd threw bottles and rocks at the police. After police arrested the people in the car, rioting broke out and spread quickly through the neighborhood. An estimated five thousand African Americans filled the twenty-block area that the police sealed off. There were rumors that the police had beaten a pregnant woman. One African American merchant said that a group of young men ran into his store, looted most of the goods, and set the building on fire. Another resident hid in his apartment and peeked out his window at young men making Molotov cocktails. The comedian and civil rights activist Dick Gregory, who was there trying to calm people down, was shot. One fourteen-year-old African American girl who was trying to escape from the melee was killed in a traffic accident. A five-year-old boy was killed by sniper fire. Some police cars were stopped and officers dragged out into the street. Stones barraged ambulances.5 After six days of riots, thirty-four people had been killed and hundreds seriously injured; more than three thousand people were arrested; the infrastructure of many communities was devastated. The entire nation was shocked at the eruption of violence.

  In private, Lyndon Johnson criticized the Watts rioters for acting like irresponsible and unappreciative children, but he also expressed sensitivity to the social and economic causes of the riots. He saw them as the result of too many people forced to live in a terrible environment. Of the African Americans in Watts, he said, “They got really absolutely nothing to live for. Forty percent of them are unemployed. These youngsters, they live with rats and they’ve got no place to sleep . . . broken homes and illegitimate families and all the narcotics are circulating around them.”6

  Civil rights leaders had been urging the federal government to address the problems of inner-city African Americans for as long as there had been a civil rights movement. They had targeted segregation and voting rights in 1964 and 1965 because it seemed possible they could get legislation on these issues, but they always believed that racial equality required a solution for the unemployment, housing discrimination, poverty, and inadequate transportation services that afflicted African Americans particularly in urban areas. In response to conservatives’ calls for law and order to prevent more riots like Watts, civil rights proponents argued that the focus should be on improving the living conditions of the people who lived in such places.

  In January 1966, Martin Luther King rented a third-floor walk-up apartment in the Chicago slums, where he planned to live temporarily to publicize the racial discrimination in the North that might breed further violence. He announced that the Southern Christian Leadership Conference planned to make Chicago an “Open City,” a place with integrated schools, improved mass transit systems, jobs for African Americans, and open occupancy laws. King said he had “never seen—even in Mississippi and Alabama—mobs as hostile and hate-filled as I’ve seen in Chicago.”7 Though King helped to stimulate national interest in urban issues, factions within the civil rights movement had already spent years fighting to improve conditions in metropolitan areas. The National Committee Against Discrimination in Housing, a network of activists founded in 1950, had asserted that “the Great Society could never become a reality until fair housing was effected.”8 They had been able to win support for fair housing laws in fifteen states, though most of the regulations were weakly enforced and ineffective.9

  Homeownership had become a central aspiration for millions of middle- and working-class American citizens. Since FDR had persuaded Congress to pass a number of housing programs as part of the New Deal and GI benefits had provided economic assistance to World War II veterans, the percentage of Americans living in homes they owned or homes owned by their families increased from 30 percent in 1930 to 60 percent in 1960.10

  City, state, and local officials in the North had responded to the huge influx of African Americans from the South in the 1930s and 1940s by erecting barriers against residential integration. Poverty and housing discrimination confined African Americans to some of the most blighted areas of the country. Even before the riots of the mid-1960s, the living conditions of African Americans in the inner cities were dire.11 The riots were a culmination, not a cause, of years of decay. Major cities could be mapped by the color of their neighborhoods. Although a small number of African Americans made it into the suburbs, those neighborhoods too were segregated by race. While some African Americans preferred to live in nonwhite communities, as opponents of civil rights loved to point out, most data indicated that a clear majority of them wanted to reside in racially integrated neighborhoods.12 Their hope was to live in neighborhoods that had good schools for their children, safe streets, plentiful jobs, and all the well-advertised privileges of the American dream, but by 1966 African Americans suffered from the worst rates of residential isolation of any racial or ethnic group in U.S. history.13 Without access to housing in the wealthier outposts of the cities or suburbs, African Americans could not obtain a first-rate public education, were denied the residential advantages that helped many white children to thrive, and were very often remote from the quality industrial jobs upon which non-skilled workers depended. Trade unions, usually informally organized around ethnic groups, were unwilling to accept African American members.

  Various public policies supported systematic residential segregation, even though that was not always the explicit intention of the officials who designed the policies. In some cities, local government officials used federal money that had been distributed through the Department of Housing and Urban Development to raze African American ghettos—and also the homes of working-class Jews, Irish, Italians, and Hispanics—usually for the stated purpose of highway construction but also to make room for better housing the evicted residents couldn’t afford. Sometimes neighborhoods were “upgraded” with such improvements as Dodger Stadium, which the city of Los Angeles built for its baseball team. In the process, African American and Chicano communities were destroyed, and the public housing units built to replace flattened homes, in Los Angeles and in other cities where similar “gentrification” took place, were generally substandard constructions in other blighted inner-city areas.

  Between the 1920s and the 1940s, restrictive covenants and deeds—explicit contracts that homeowners would not sell their property to people of another race—had prevented African Americans from purchasing homes in desirable locations. Realtors and buyers who tried to circumvent such restrictions were confronted with intimidation, protest, and sometimes physical violence.14 The Supreme Court declared restrictive covenants unconstitutional in 1948, but the Federal Housing Administration (FHA) incorporated other racially discriminatory mechanisms into its programs. Through redlining, the FHA rated neighborhoods based on their assessed value. Banks would lend funds to purchase homes located only in the “best” areas on the federal maps, while the FHA and the Veterans Administration would back loans only in the highly rated neighborhoods, which were primarily white. Neither the banks nor the government would provide loans to people who wanted to move into any neighborhood where there was even a sprinkling of African Americans, as those areas were deemed to be economically risky. As a result of simple racism and the restrictive covenants that gave it quasi-legal contractual support, even if an African American was willing to live with constant racial harassment, he couldn’t move his family into an all-white neighborhood, because no one would sell or rent him a home there. If he wanted to move into a decent neighborhood that had been even slightly integrated, he couldn’t get a loan because of redlining.15 Suburban communities used zoning laws and land use regulations to exclude affordable housing. While some African Americans were able to move into these prosperous areas, one open-housing activist in Cleveland explained that “the peppering of white suburbia, if it’s going to come at all . . . has to come from federal leverage.”16 But federal leverage worked to the opposite effect.

  Local neighborhood associations mobilized oppos
ition against anyone who wanted to let African American families move in. They lobbied local officials and pressured realtors to protect the color line. In some cases, they were willing to act violently against property owners who even contemplated selling or renting to an African American. Real estate agents “steered” African Americans away from properties in white neighborhoods.

  Another technique predicated on discrimination was blockbusting. Shady real estate agents and building developers would sell African Americans a house in a white neighborhood with the explicit purpose of generating fear among homeowners. Some agents paid African Americans to stroll through white neighborhoods, or gave money to young African American children to knock on doors and hand out pamphlets, to frighten residents into selling their homes at bargain-basement prices. Once the white residents had fled, the real estate developers who purchased the homes sold them at marked-up prices to middle-class African Americans desperate to leave the segregated ghetto.17 Blockbusting seemed a particularly egregious form of discrimination, but it existed at the edge of a national landscape in which government, bankers, realtors, and sellers all participated and in which racial segregation was taken for granted.

  Early in 1965, Lyndon Johnson had persuaded Congress to pass legislation that empowered local Public Housing Agencies, which the states had been authorized to establish by federal legislation—the United States Housing Act of 1937—to select poor families from a waiting list and place them in private housing; the federal government would pay the difference between the market rate rent and what the tenants could afford. The legislation, though extremely modest, had been highly controversial because of its potential for creating integrated housing, and Congress blocked operating funds for the program.18