The Fierce Urgency of Now

by Julian E. Zelizer

  The most direct threat to the housing provision came when the conservative West Virginian Arch Moore proposed an amendment to kill it. Faced with Moore’s proposal and the ongoing news reports about confrontations between African American protesters and white onlookers, legislative supporters of residential desegregation became even more open to compromise.46 To save the civil rights legislation from total defeat in the increasingly hostile environment, Mathias pushed for another compromise. His new amendment provided that real estate brokers could ignore antidiscrimination laws if they were directly instructed to do so by the homeowner, as long as they did not solicit the homeowner to place a racial condition on the sale. Though some liberals argued that this provision would make passage of the bill an “empty” victory, they recognized that the amendment could protect eighteen votes that might otherwise go to Moore. The political environment had changed so drastically since the year began that they realized this was the best they could probably get.

  The final iteration of the amendment, which exempted 60 percent of the nation’s housing stock from the regulations, was extremely controversial. Adam Clayton Powell Jr., who was still supporting the bill, said publicly that at this point it didn’t really matter whether it became a law or not. Mathias responded to criticism from liberals to his amendment by saying that even with this revision the legislation would result in twenty-three million new homes and large apartments becoming available to the almost twenty million African Americans living in the United States, in addition to the approximately one million new homes that would be constructed annually. Barely enough liberals agreed with Congressman Celler’s conclusion that “the all-or-nothing approach produces nothing except a slogan,” and the House passed the Mathias amendment by a vote of 180 to 179.47 The DSG’s leader, Richard Bolling, cast the tiebreaking vote.48 For Bolling and others in the DSG this compromise was a bitter pill to swallow, but swallow it they did.

  The Mathias amendment was crucial to picking off some of Moore’s support among Republicans; now even fewer of their constituents would be subject to the law.49 The Democratic leadership also won over moderate votes by accepting a “law and order” amendment that imposed more stringent penalties for individuals who attempted to instigate riots from across state lines. The Moore amendment was backed by southern Democrats, a sizable contingent of Republicans, and six of the freshman Democrats who had been part of Johnson’s reliable voting bloc on domestic policy, but it went down to defeat, 222 to 190. On August 13, the House passed the Civil Rights Act by 259 to 157. The bill received the support of 183 Democrats, including 169 from non-southern states and 14 southerners, and 76 Republicans.

  The prospects remained bleak in the Senate. Dirksen had been willing to negotiate a deal on the voting rights bill before the Senate even started debating the legislation, but now the Senate minority leader was publicly insisting on his opposition to the housing bill. No one thought he was bluffing; he had always opposed granting the federal government power over the housing market, and he had been quite disturbed by the racial violence in and around Chicago. Most of it had been white citizens lashing out against African Americans, but Dirksen, like a growing number of Republicans, blamed civil rights activists tied to the black power movement, who he said were stirring up trouble in Illinois by demanding too much and forcing dangerous confrontations on the streets.

  When Republicans and southern Democrats started a filibuster on September 8, Dirksen refused to endorse a vote for cloture. Senator Philip Hart told the press, “If Dirksen delivers the votes this year, we’ll have a good bill,” but Dirksen responded, “I don’t think you, you’re going to get cloture on any civil rights bill this year.”50 The president said there was a “great revulsion” developing against civil rights that would give the South control of Congress.51 Polls indicated that 52 percent of white Americans believed the administration was moving too fast on civil rights.52 The administration’s vote counters believed Dirksen would have enough votes to sustain a filibuster. Times had changed. The filibuster was once again a formidable weapon against civil rights.

  Johnson reached out to his friend Abe Fortas, whom he had recently appointed to the Supreme Court, to plead that the Court take up “law and order this session and tell these fellas that they’ve got to quit turning over cars and stuff.” Johnson frequently consulted Fortas despite the doctrine of separation of powers. Nor did he see any reason to hide his political motivations. He told his old friend that if the Court tackled these issues, it would be helpful to the Democratic Party; the rioting was shaping the mood of the electorate more than Vietnam or inflation; and “every white man just says by god he don’t want his car turned over and don’t want some Negro to [be] throwing a brick at him.”53

  On September 19, Senator Hart confirmed Dirksen’s prognosis and pronounced the civil rights bill dead. Martin Luther King warned that the action by the Senate “heralds darker days for this social era of discontent. The executioners of the 1966 civil rights bill have given valuable assistance to those forces in the Negro communities who counsel violence.”54 Johnson did not give up on the legislation, but he decided to hold off fighting for it until after the election. Mansfield warned that the “rioting, marches, shootings and inflammatory statements” would have to end before the bill could be passed.55

  Republicans were ramping up their attacks on the Democrats as the party responsible for urban rioting. They called on the federal government to establish law and order by cracking down on violence and crime. On September 20, one day after Hart’s declaration, Gerald Ford, at the Illinois State Fair, called Democrats the party “with the big riots in the streets” and asked voters, “How long are we going to abdicate law and order—the backbone of any civilization—in favor of a soft social theory that the man who heaves a brick through your window or tosses a firebomb into your car is simply the misunderstood and underprivileged product of a broken home?”56

  THE CONSERVATIVE CAMPAIGN

  The bitter conflict that had taken place over the civil rights bill in the spring and summer of 1966 was the backdrop for the midterm elections. The liberal majorities that had spearheaded the Great Society were fracturing under the strain of the backlash against residential integration in the North. The conservative coalition had experienced a boost in confidence; it had a wedge issue that was dividing liberals. Some reliable liberal Democrats were angry at Johnson for pushing them into political hot water right before the difficult midterm elections.

  The midterms offered an opportunity for the conservative coalition to reestablish itself as the dominant force in the House and the Senate, even if liberals were to remain a much bigger presence in the chambers than they had been at any time since the 1930s. Republicans—and conservative Democrats—used the campaign to develop and refine themes and strategies they could use in attacks on Johnson now and in the next presidential election.

  The Republicans were determined to capitalize on the underlying fragility of the liberal victories in 1964 by exploiting the tensions that had arisen over housing, the War on Poverty, civil rights, and other issues Johnson and the liberals had pushed. They targeted the freshman Democrats from the Midwest who had won seats in Republican districts in 1964. In Wisconsin, for instance, the Republican National Committee poured money into the campaign of William Steiger, a twenty-eight-year-old state legislator who was challenging the Democratic freshman John Race, a former union president, who had barely won the seat from a Republican incumbent in the Sixth District, which included Oshkosh and Sheboygan. Steiger, who was being promoted by Governor Warren Knowles as one of the most exciting new moderate voices in the Republican Party, had won in the primary over a right-wing candidate supported by the John Birch Society. He had co-authored the open-housing law in his state. The incumbent Democrat had been loyal to Johnson on most of his other major bills, including education and Medicare. In 1965, he voted 94 percent of the time with the administration. But the mood of his electora
te had changed over the year. Struggling as a Democrat to survive in a district where President Johnson had become highly unpopular, Race opposed the civil rights bill that was stuck in the Senate. Though Steiger had a more liberal record on residential desegregation, the polls indicated that backlash sentiment in his district and elsewhere would hit Democrats harder, because they would be associated with Johnson and his approach to the issue. Race, a fanatic poll watcher, voted with Johnson only 63 percent of the time in 1966.57

  In Iowa, Republicans made a strong play for five Democratic seats. One of them was in the Seventh District, where the husky farmer William Scherle challenged the Democratic freshman John Hansen. “Two years ago I was on the attack,” Hansen admitted. “Now I’ve got to defend my record.”58

  Besides targeting freshmen who were not conservative enough for their districts, Republicans across the country—in local, state, and national elections—tapped into national themes that seemed to be effective on the campaign trail: a critique of race relations viewed primarily as an issue of law and order, hawkish attacks on how the war in Vietnam was being conducted, and jeremiads on the terrible threat of inflation. The political center, at least rhetorically, had shifted back to the right, and candidates were willing to go where the ill-fated Goldwater had gone—but not as far.

  Some Democrats—and Republicans too—tried to capitalize on a white racial backlash against the civil rights movement and civil rights legislation. They did so in different ways.59 There were conservatives in both parties who directly played to feelings of racial hatred. They blamed urban unrest on the radicalization of the civil rights movement and Johnson’s liberal domestic policies.

  The Democratic primary for the Maryland governorship, which had started as a debate over government corruption, was transformed by the congressional battles over housing discrimination. The liberal representative Carlton Sickles, a forty-five-year-old lawyer who strongly supported the civil rights bill, lost to the Baltimore contractor George Mahoney, who promised to veto any open-housing bill that his state legislature passed. His slogan was “Your home is your castle—vote to protect it!”

  The notorious segregationist Lester Maddox was running against the Republican Bo Callaway for the governorship of Georgia. Callaway was the first Republican nominee for the governorship since 1876. Maddox, who had prevailed in the primaries over more racially moderate candidates, including the state senator Jimmy Carter, had made a name for himself following the passage of the Civil Rights Act of 1964 by brandishing an ax handle and chasing three African Americans away from his whites-only restaurant. When the Supreme Court rejected a challenge to the legislation, Maddox shut down his restaurant and hung a sign out front that read, “Lights Turned Out by LBJ.”60 His opposition to the Civil Rights Act launched his career.

  In other cases, moderate Republicans who favored civil rights argued that they could handle the issue better than their Democratic opponents. As Thomas Hauser, manager of Charles Percy’s campaign against Senator Douglas, admitted, racial unrest could provide “a general advantage to Republicans, if the people think the Democrats have not been able to deal with the problem effectively.”61

  In Illinois, just as Mayor Daley had predicted, many ethnic white residents were thinking of voting for the GOP as a result of the summer of violence and King’s presence in the city. Talk about law and order accelerated after an armed intruder killed Percy’s twenty-one-year-old daughter in their lakeside home. Though the murderer was never identified, the racial implications were clear when, drawing on the rhetoric of the realtor lobby in its campaign against open-housing legislation, anonymous Percy supporters circulated a leaflet throughout the Chicago area that proclaimed, “Your home is your castle—Let’s keep it that way!”62 Senator Douglas counseled President Johnson against visiting the state, because the “white backlash” was “very strong in the lower income people,”63 but Percy, who had reversed his earlier opposition to the housing bill, chose not to appeal to racist sentiment; he adamantly supported a compromise version of the housing bill. His defense of the civil rights accomplishments of the 1960s also represented a strong appeal to African American voters in the city.

  A majority of Republican candidates didn’t believe that opposing civil rights or even focusing on urban unrest was their best strategy. The GOP had invested so much in shaping the civil rights legislation of 1957, 1964, and 1965 that most Republican candidates did not want to break the promises made by these laws. Irrespective of strategic considerations, most Republicans were uninterested in stoking the flames of racial hatred and generally agreed with the premises of the civil rights movement. Though a racial backlash might have softened the Democratic electorate and exposed areas of weakness, most Republicans decided to steer their campaigns toward issues where they sensed there was much broader opposition to Democrats.

  A number of Republican candidates, including Percy, emphasized foreign policy, particularly the war in Vietnam. They blasted the administration for allegedly covering up its plans to escalate the number of ground troops to be sent there in 1967. They argued that Johnson was indecisive, a waffler, unable to commit to a full-scale war against communism, and fearful of the growing body of left-wing antiwar activists on college campuses.64 The president worried about polls from Virginia and North Carolina that indicated voters wanted the administration to go “all out” militarily to bring the Vietnam conflict to an end.65 A farmer in Piatt County, Illinois, who had voted for President Johnson in 1964 because he was the “lesser of two evils” was now reconsidering his decision; he asked, “Can’t Johnson do more and get it over with?”66

  For a majority of Republicans, the most popular campaign issues after the Vietnam War were inflation and the budget deficit. They had successfully used the rising cost of living in the 1952 presidential and congressional campaigns, when the GOP won the presidency for the first time in the post–New Deal era.67 Fiscal policy once again offered a compelling cudgel for them to wield against Democrats.

  Americans accorded great importance to balanced budgets; they traditionally compared the federal government’s fiscal books unfavorably with the budgets maintained in private homes.68 Conservatives argued that federal deficits were provoking inflation by injecting excessive amounts of federal money into the economy. There were in fact signs of higher prices in 1966 (though inflation remained low by historical standards). In March, the consumer price index rose by 0.5 percent, the biggest increase for any February since 1951 during the Korean War.69 Much of the retail price increase was occurring where Americans felt it most, at the supermarket, particularly for meat. Pork chops cost eighty-nine cents a pound in 1966 compared with sixty-five cents a pound one year earlier. The 13.5 percent increase in meat prices drove the 4.5 percent rise in food costs. Other rising costs included transportation, medical fees and hospital services, and household services.70

  Internal White House polls indicated that voters were worried. In California, 76 percent of those polled gave the president unfavorable performance ratings for keeping down the cost of living.71 Throughout the country, housewives organized boycotts at supermarkets to demand reductions in food prices. In Denver, thousands of housewives joined a “beans to bacon” boycott of the city’s supermarket chains. Lyndon Johnson said that in the 1950s it had been impossible for a politician to visit any home without being asked, “‘What do you think about McCarthy?’ . . . Now it is, ‘What do you think about inflation?’”72

  Despite the Republican arguments, there were hardly any economists who believed prices were rising primarily because of federal budget deficits. The evidence suggested that the early signs of inflation resulted from the Federal Reserve’s expansionary monetary policy, which had kept interest rates low in the early 1960s, and from higher consumer demand that had resulted from generally booming economic conditions.73

  In fact, the deficit in 1966 was not alarmingly high. It had been $1.4 billion in 1965, but it had been $7.1
billion in 1962, $4.8 billion in 1963, and $5.9 billion in 1964. In 1966, the deficit would rise, but only to $3.7 billion. The federal deficit had been considerably larger in the 1950s, when the Republican Dwight Eisenhower was president; it had reached $12.8 billion in 1959. In 1960, there was a $300 million surplus.

  Johnson could not rely on the traditional policy used to control inflation in times of war: mandatory wage and price controls. There was limited congressional support in the 1960s for reimposing such controls. The crisis wasn’t severe enough to generate solid majorities in the House or the Senate, and Johnson had made it difficult for himself by not asking Congress to declare war: he was doing everything possible to avoid triggering more controversy about Vietnam than already existed. In his first two years, Johnson had tried to persuade business and labor leaders to abide by voluntary price and wage agreements. By 1966 his appeals, though they had initially had some positive response, were not as effective.74

  Republicans were eager to focus public discussion on the deficit. Johnson understood the political implications of the voters’ uneasiness about federal deficits—they felt as they would feel if they had spent themselves into heavy debt—but he didn’t want to talk about the issue until after the midterms.

  An effective deficit reduction package that would contain inflation and not be paid for primarily by cuts in services to the poor required a combination of tax increases and spending cuts. Tax increases were essential because they were a progressive way to pull money out of circulation, as opposed to cutting welfare or raising interest rates, both of which were harder on middle- and lower-income people. When Johnson had surveyed legislators about their opinion on the subject, almost every one told him, “No and hell no.” Each legislator, he said, felt that his “whole future is in danger if he votes for [a] tax increase” because “the man after him at home is going to welcome him at the station and say here’s a man who went up there and voted to raise your taxes.” The president concluded, “Republicans and Democrats, liberals and conservatives, reactionaries, and ADA’ers [the liberal organization Americans for Democratic Action] are generally speaking scared to vote for a tax increase four months before an election.”75 So he had decided to wait.