The Fierce Urgency of Now

by Julian E. Zelizer

  Nixon won the election by a narrow margin: 43.4 percent of the popular vote to 42.7 percent for Humphrey and 13.5 percent for Wallace. Nixon won 301 Electoral College votes to Humphrey’s 191 and Wallace’s 46. Wallace won almost ten million popular votes; he carried five southern states—Alabama, Arkansas, Georgia, Louisiana, and Mississippi—and got some working-class votes in the North and the Midwest. Overall, his appeal proved much weaker than he had expected; he did not do well with working-class and lower-middle-class voters in the North, who had generally benefited from Democratic programs ever since the New Deal and remained loyal to the Democratic Party. His tally suggested that the New Deal coalition was unbroken outside the Deep South. Democrats retained control of Congress, though the conservative coalition had grown slightly larger in both houses. In the Senate, Democrats controlled the chamber by a margin of 57 to 43, a loss of five seats for the majority. In the House, the party balance was 243 to 192.

  It was clear to all that the election awarded Nixon no mandate to dismantle the Great Society. He had criticized Johnson on Vietnam and law and order, but he had steered clear of criticizing domestic legislation and even suggested that he would strengthen certain Great Society programs. Wallace’s poor showing in the North gave Republicans pause about how unhappy northern Democrats really were with Johnson’s domestic programs. Humphrey might well have won had he sooner and more definitively distanced himself from Lyndon Johnson on Vietnam and more assiduously reminded voters of the benefits civil rights laws and Great Society programs had delivered to the nation.

  “Dick Nixon is going to be taking over a government one hell of a lot different than the one he left in January, 1961,” Joseph Califano said. “There were about 45 domestic social programs when the Eisenhower administration ended. Now there are no less than 435.”17 Robert Finch, the incoming secretary of health, education, and welfare, was a pragmatic Republican who had served as the lieutenant governor for Ronald Reagan in California and had helped the governor scale down his antigovernment objectives when dealing with a Democratic legislature. Finch announced right away that under his direction the Department of Health, Education, and Welfare would focus on rationalizing existing programs rather than on expanding or contracting them.18

  The New Deal had generated new expectations about what the federal government could do, and so did the Great Society. Johnson’s programs had energized conservatives, but they had also energized liberals, who were unhappy about Vietnam but proudly stood behind civil rights, Medicare, and federal education assistance. Liberals who came of age during the creation of the Great Society were everywhere in Washington after 1969, much to Nixon’s chagrin. They filled the federal bureaucracies and fought to make sure Great Society programs received sufficient budgetary support and ran effectively even with Nixon in the White House. A robust network of interest groups and activists lobbied to extend federal benefits to more Americans in need and to promote federal actions to protect consumers and the environment. Liberals went to the courts to fight for more expansive definitions of who had the right to receive benefits. A sizable contingent of the liberal Democrats who had entered Congress in the 1960s fought Nixon on those few occasions when he did attack Great Society programs, and they continued to push against the conservative coalition for liberal legislation in the House and the Senate.

  Johnson’s ability as president to get legislation passed has often been exaggerated and the depth of support for liberalism during his presidency overstated, but when grassroots activists and voters had created conditions that were favorable to producing bills on Capitol Hill, the president and his legislative allies had been able to enact profoundly significant laws within a short period of time. The programs themselves proved to be sustainable even after Johnson was gone. The pressure from civil rights activists and voters had been so intense in 1964 and 1965 that many Republicans and moderate Democrats had signed onto the bills, and conservatives had grasped that these bills had somehow been written not just into law but into the American social contract. The bipartisan imprimatur Johnson secured for his programs steeled them against future efforts to reverse them.

  During the worst moments of the budget battles in 1967 and 1968, Johnson had hoped that Congress would not impose the spending cuts after the deal was done. Although the budget deal had killed any chances he had for passing more legislation and had given momentum to Republicans in the 1968 election, the zeal for austerity was short-lived. In the end, legislators always have strong political incentives to spend once programs are in place. While many Americans don’t like government in principle, they often like the specific programs government delivers, and this was the case with much of the Great Society. People, constituents, voters, soon came to depend on the effective government programs Johnson and his allies had created. With Johnson out of the White House, Congress continued to push hard for spending on the programs that had quickly become popular with constituents all over the country.

  President Nixon, with a politically astute eye toward reelection in 1972, worked with Congress to spend more on domestic programs. He decided to fight the worsening inflationary spiral by instituting wage and price controls, rather than by cutting spending. To prevent future gold crises, he simply abrogated the entire international finance system that was based on the convertibility of gold into dollars at a fixed price.

  Federal spending increased throughout Nixon’s first term. He signed, for example, Social Security legislation that indexed benefits so they would rise automatically with inflation—he also raised benefits substantially—and centralized and federalized the existing state programs that provided federal assistance to the aged, blind, and disabled under a new program called Supplemental Security Income. The same legislation also expanded Medicare coverage to include two million more people.

  Nixon also signed legislation that bolstered the school lunch and food stamps programs, two of the most popular policies of the welfare state. He signed amendments that reauthorized the Elementary and Secondary Education Act at a cost of $24.6 billion over three years, increased funding for children who lived in public housing, and offered educational assistance to kids with disabilities. Federal expenditures for Americans living in poverty were increased by 50 percent between 1969 and 1973.19

  In a few instances, Nixon’s political interests led him to support new expansions of government that would probably have been impossible for a liberal Democratic president to accomplish. In 1969, the Department of Labor under Secretary George Shultz launched the “Philadelphia Plan,” which required unions that received over $500,000 in federal funds in the City of Brotherly Love to hire a certain percentage of African American workers. The plan had originally been put into place by the Department of Labor in 1967, but it had been dismantled when the comptroller general deemed that the existing structure was not legal on the basis that it violated the Civil Rights Act of 1964. The plan was revised, and Shultz brought it back in 1969; the following year it was extended to all federal contracting.20 There is substantial evidence that Nixon’s motivation for supporting this first affirmative action plan was to divide Democrats by pitting white working-class Americans against African Americans over jobs. He and some of his advisers assumed white workers would associate this program with Johnson’s civil rights laws rather than blame Nixon, especially because the plan was the quiet result of administrative changes rather than loud, public congressional debates. Whatever Nixon’s intentions, affirmative action was born.

  In 1969, an oil spill in the Pacific Ocean off Santa Barbara, California, brought Nixon under bipartisan pressure to take action. Environmental concerns had become a priority for a growing segment of voters, among them moderate suburbanites who had been a part of Nixon’s electoral support. He saw the oil spill as an opportunity to improve his reelection chances by expanding the role of the federal government in protecting the environment. Johnson had worked with Congress on clean air and clean water legislation, but Nixon
now moved to establish the Environmental Protection Agency to develop and enforce regulations to preserve the environment. He never devoted many resources to the agency, but in future years it became a powerful force. Nixon also signed a bill intended to appeal to working-class voters; the bill established the Occupational Safety and Health Administration to enforce stricter workplace safety standards.

  In the few instances when Nixon directly attacked the Great Society, he lost. In 1970, he proposed revising the Voting Rights Act to eliminate the preclearance and triggering provisions southerners had always disliked—the provisions in the legislation that required states with low levels of registered African American voters to clear any changes in their election rules with the Department of Justice. The elimination of the triggering provisions would make the law apply to the entire nation instead of only to the South. While in principle liberals would have been happy to expand the scope of the law, they believed that in practice requiring the Department of Justice to cover the entire country would strain its resources for addressing problems in places where they were most significant. Without the preclearance requirement, the burden of proof for showing that voting plans would be racially discriminatory would fall on the federal government rather than on the local voting units seeking to gain approval for new plans. Liberals in Congress led by Emanuel Celler warned that the changes would threaten the law. Nixon backed down and ended up signing a five-year extension of the Voting Rights Act without any major changes to the law.

  When Johnson died of a heart attack on January 22, 1973, just two days after Nixon’s second inauguration, the Great Society was still in good health. Any intention Nixon might have had, after his landslide reelection victory in 1972, to make a hard shift to the right was thwarted by the Watergate scandal, which brought him down from what had been the summit of his political power. His resignation in August 1974 left his successor, Gerald Ford, in a weak position from which to accomplish anything during his brief time in the White House.

  By then, Great Society programs had become even more securely entrenched politically. Legislators could see that their constituents accepted desegregation and voting rights for African Americans as normal aspects of daily life. They saw that growing numbers of their constituents enjoyed and depended on Great Society benefits. By the time the nation elected the conservative Republican Ronald Reagan and a majority Republican Senate in 1980, the Great Society was so firmly established that any conservatives wanting to attack it would face a monumental challenge.

  PERSISTENT POLICIES

  Over the next four and a half decades, conservatism was resurgent. In the wake of the determined expansion of the federal government through the Great Society and frustration over the Vietnam War, public debate and the range of political options shifted back to the right, and conservatives won support for income tax cuts and economic deregulation. For all their victories, however, conservatives in the age of Reagan never succeeded in reversing the gains of the Great Society. The programs Lyndon Johnson initiated and Congress enacted into law proved to be more enduring than the political coalition that built them.

  When Johnson delivered his Great Society speech in May 1964 at the University of Michigan, he had called on the nation to do more than simply move toward being a rich and powerful society. Rather, he posed the challenge to move “upward to the Great Society.” In many respects, Congress met the challenge.

  For almost a decade after 1964, War on Poverty programs reduced the incidence and severity of poverty in America. Though conditions have deteriorated for the poor since the 1980s, the programs remain part of the fabric of benefits upon which the disadvantaged depend.21 According to one of the best studies that we have on poverty, conducted by economists at Columbia University, poverty declined from 26 percent to 16 percent between 1967 and 2012, a significant drop that largely resulted from the government programs created in the 1960s.22 By the end of the twentieth century, almost thirty million preschoolers had benefited from Head Start. Over forty-seven million Americans counted on food stamps in 2013.

  Medicare and Medicaid guaranteed health-care coverage to the elderly and the medically indigent. The historian Michael Katz writes, “Medicare and Medicaid improved health care dramatically. In 1963, one of every five Americans who lived below the poverty line never had been examined by a physician, and poor people used medical facilities far less than others. By 1970, the proportion never examined had dipped to 8 percent, and the proportion visiting a physician annually was about the same as for everyone else.”23 Medicaid vastly expanded over the 1980s to include pregnant women, children, and other categories of people who had had only limited access to care. During the heyday of conservative politics, Medicaid expanded the number of beneficiaries to thirty-six million people by 1996, a substantial increase from the period between 1973 and 1989 when the average was twenty to twenty-three million.24 By 2011, close to one-third of all Americans, not just the elderly, were covered by Medicare or Medicaid.25 The programs were a massive federal intervention into health-care markets. Hospital administrators and physicians, who had once derided the Medicare program as “socialized medicine,” came to depend on the federal dollars that came from it. States relied on Medicaid funds to keep hospitals open, health-care workers employed, and poor patients cared for. When the possibility of program cuts came up in Congress, the various segments of the health-care industry were the first in line to protest any moves toward retrenchment.

  Civil rights legislation secured rights African Americans had been deprived of since the end of Reconstruction. The laws eliminated segregation in public facilities and dramatically increased the number of African American voters. “It used to be Southern politics was just ‘nigger’ politics—a question of which candidate could ‘outnigger’ the other,” the civil rights activist and congressman Andrew Young said in 1976. “Then you registered 10% to 15% in the community, and folks would start saying ‘Nigra.’ Later you got 35% to 40% registered, and it was amazing how quick they learned how to say ‘Nee-grow.’ And now that we’ve got 50%, 60%, 70% of the black votes registered in the South, everybody’s proud to be associated with their black brothers and sisters.”26 The civil rights legislation of 1964 was also a stepping-stone for women on the path to gender equality.

  Civil rights laws also worked in conjunction with the health-care and education programs that were established in this period. Because local institutions could not receive federal money if they were segregated, hospitals and schools hastened to end segregation. Six months after Medicare was put in place, there were no more segregated hospitals in the South.27

  Education reforms resulted in vastly greater educational opportunities for millions of Americans. Higher education grants and loans made it possible for more young Americans to enter colleges and universities. Funds for educational institutions were also a tool the federal government used to speed up the desegregation of schools and to pressure local districts to implement other reforms.28

  The programs were far from perfect. Local school districts notoriously used federal funds for purposes other than helping poor children. Medicare played a significant role in the growth of health-care expenditures during the latter half of the twentieth century; federal funding gave hospitals a strong incentive to increase their costs. Civil rights laws did not end racism in American society. None of the programs could counteract the bad effects of spiraling inflation and high unemployment on the economy in the 1970s. African American families continued to suffer from horrible economic devastation, and African American men were incarcerated and jobless at shockingly high rates.

  Imperfect as they were, the programs were important contributions to American society. Taken in their totality, they constituted nothing short of a dramatic transformation of American government that provided a new foundation of security for all Americans. The Great Society improved the lives of millions of citizens by creating a robust social safety net, and it affirmed the principl
e that intervention by the federal government was a good way, perhaps the best way, to guarantee rights, to help the disadvantaged, and to improve the quality of life for all Americans.

  During the mid-1980s, at the height of Ronald Reagan’s power, shortly after his landslide reelection victory over the Democrat Walter Mondale, the budget bureau spokesman Edwin Dale admitted, “I wouldn’t quarrel that Medicare’s been a success. In fact, much of the social safety net was accomplished during the Great Society, and whatever gets trimmed, the safety net will remain intact.”29 Many conservatives were shocked when President George W. Bush worked with Democrats in 2001 to expand the role of the federal government in education and allied with the Republican Congress in 2003 to add prescription drug benefits to Medicare. Even George W. Bush was governing in Lyndon Johnson’s shadow.

  So embedded are Great Society policies in the nation’s fabric that many citizens can no longer conceive of life without them. When one senior citizen, a Tea Party conservative, confronted the South Carolina Republican congressman Robert Inglis in a 2009 town hall meeting about President Obama’s health-care proposal, which included cuts to Medicare, he warned, “Keep your government hands off my Medicare!”

  In a way, the statement made sense. It perfectly captured the changes that have been produced by the Great Society. Within a few months, Johnson’s legislation produced a vast policy infrastructure that no ideological onslaught could displace. In 2009, a conservative could oppose a new proposal for universal government-sponsored health insurance with a defense of what Lyndon Johnson and Congress had built. Grassroots activists and voters had given Johnson a tremendous opportunity in 1964 and 1965 to remake domestic policy. He took advantage of that moment, fully aware it would not last very long, and Americans in the twenty-first century are still living with the domestic policies born out of that transformative moment.