by Joshua Zeitz
It drew the immediately opposition of Republican legislators, including Senate minority leader Everett Dirksen and House minority leader Gerald Ford, local community groups, and the real estate lobby. Throughout the spring and summer, congressmen received constituent mail by the bagful, demanding in livid terms the rejection of the open housing provision.
“As a citizen and a taxpayer I was very upset to hear about ‘Title IV’ of the so-called civil rights Bill S. 3296,” a resident of Illinois wrote to Senator Paul Douglas, a liberal who was running for a fourth term that year. “This is not Civil Rights. This takes away a person’s rights. We too are people and need someone to protect us.”
Another voter complained that his family “designed and built our own home and I would hate to think of being forced to sell my lovely home to anyone just because they had the money.”
“Do you or any of your friends live next door to a negro—why should we have them pushed down our throats?” another angry constituent demanded.
Douglas’s home state was ground zero of the open housing battle that summer, as Martin Luther King Jr. led protests throughout the “bungalow belt” in Chicago’s working-class white neighborhoods and the nearby blue-collar suburb of Cicero. Polish, Italian, and Irish residents who had once been staunch Democratic voters now erupted in fury against peaceful black marchers. They pelted protesters with rocks, beat them with clubs and fists, and, in unknowing emulation of urban rioters whom they decried, set the occasional object on fire. Cries of “White Power! White Power!” rang out in an angry rebuke of the “black power” mantra that many young, radical civil rights activists had adopted a year earlier. “Polish Power!” “Burn them like Jews!” “We want Martin Luther Coon!” “Roses are red, violets are black, King would look good with a knife in his back.” King, who had moved his family into a rancid apartment in Chicago’s black ghetto to signal his commitment to northern civil rights activism, was aghast at the ugly reception accorded his peaceful marchers. “I think the people of Mississippi ought to come to Chicago to learn how to hate,” he mournfully remarked.
Weeks before the start of the fall campaign, an Illinois resident and “staunch Democrat” informed Douglas that he could not “help but wholeheartedly agree with Barry Goldwater. . . . I feel Mr. Johnson is much responsible for the present riot by his constant encouragement for the Negro to take any measure to assert himself and DEMAND his rights—Rights, and respect are earned!” The situation in Illinois was not an aberration. Back in Washington, Harry McPherson sat down for an off-the-record conversation with Bob Novak, one of the country’s leading political columnists. “We mostly talked about civil rights,” he reported to Moyers. “He is convinced that the white backlash is growing as a response to the riots and the fair housing legislation. I acknowledged that there was a lot of this but I thought it coexisted in people’s minds with a sense that there was a real emergency that could only be solved by helping the Negro become a part of our society. He said that this might be so, but negative reactions were spreading to the white middle-class from the white lower-class and this presented the gravest danger to progress the civil rights movement has yet faced.” White House officials who had been so pleasantly surprised at the relative ease with which southern states accepted the desegregation of hospitals and movie theaters did not anticipate how inviolate many white ethnic residents of northern cities and suburbs regarded their neighborhood boundaries. Weeks later, a correspondent for Time told McPherson that the “backlash” issue had overtaken Vietnam as the top consideration for white voters in Indiana and Ohio. Their warnings would soon prove prescient.
By early fall, conservatives in both parties perceived an opening and grasped it. George Smathers, a Democratic senator from Florida and LBJ confidant, openly asked why “when a colored boy rapes a white girl, he gets off easier.” Congressman William Colmer, a Democrat from Mississippi, lamented that the “Social Security widow in my district” would now be forced to rent a room to a black man. Gerald Ford more subtly insisted that “respect for law and order is basic to the achievement of common goals within our nation” and blamed Title VI for sowing the seeds of rebellion. “Since its inception,” he declared, “it has created confusion and bitterness. It has divided the country and fostered discord and animosity when calmness and a unified approach to civil rights problems are desperately needed.” In an editorial for U.S. News & World Report that August, the former vice president Richard Nixon taught his fellow Republicans how to fuse anxieties over housing, urban riots, crime, and civil disorder with more nuance but no less precision. “Who is responsible for the breakdown of law and order in this country?” he asked rhetorically. He laid the blame squarely with well-meaning but sorely misguided “public officials, educators, clergymen, and civil rights leaders” who had incited African Americans with inflated expectations and expansive rights consciousness. Quoting his political opponents wildly out of context, he pointed to Vice President Hubert Humphrey, who claimed he could “lead a mighty good revolt,” the “junior senator from New York” (Robert Kennedy), who argued that “there is no point in telling Negroes to obey the law,” and “the professor”—a catchall for the academic elites who populated LBJ’s domestic policy task forces—who, in raising a cry against “de facto segregation,” unknowingly gave young people license to riot and revolt. Perhaps to the professor “it may be crystal clear where civil disobedience may begin and where it must end. But the boundaries have become fluid to his students.”
Practiced as he was at the art of rhetorical provocation, Nixon did not choose the metaphor of professor and student without meticulous calculation. It was a symbol bound to resonate with millions of men and women who instinctively knew the protests overwhelming America’s college and university campuses had something to do with their broader tangle of concerns, even if they could not say precisely why or how.
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Back in September 1964, roughly a thousand students who had participated in Freedom Summer in Mississippi returned to colleges and universities throughout the country. They were battle tested and with eyes wide open, and they formed the spark that set off waves of campus demonstrations that began at the University of California at Berkeley, where police attempted to block civil rights activists from canvassing on campus.
One such Freedom Summer veteran was Mario Savio, the unofficial leader of the Berkeley Free Speech Movement, who told his fellow collegians, “Last summer I went to Mississippi to join the struggle there for civil rights. This fall I am engaged in another phase of the same struggle, this time in Berkeley. In Mississippi an autocratic and powerful minority rules, through organized violence, to suppress the vast majority. In California, the privileged minority manipulates the university bureaucracy to suppress the students’ political expression.” Savio encouraged his peers to perceive a real parallel between political repression in the South—the familiar images of police dogs, water hoses, and tobacco-chewing sheriffs—and the university administration’s restrictive policies governing political advocacy on campus grounds. More viscerally, he tapped into an undercurrent of resentment about the everyday realities of student life.
Fueled by a massive influx of federal research dollars, universities in the 1960s grew to unprecedented size: Prior to World War II, no American higher education institution had a student population over fifteen thousand, but by 1970 more than fifty campuses were that large. Undergraduates at these schools were increasingly likely to take mass courses in which the professor was a distant pinpoint in the well of a lecture hall and a graduate teaching assistant, scarcely older than they, provided their only human interaction with an instructor. Young people raised in nurturing middle-class homes were now assigned IBM punch cards. “They always seem to be wanting to make me into a number,” complained one undergraduate. “I won’t let them. I have a name and am important enough to be known by it. . . . I’ll join any movement that comes along to help me.”
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Further contributing to student resentment was the thick web of in loco parentis rules that regarded college administrators as proxy mothers and fathers. At the University of Illinois, undergraduates faced a weeknight curfew of 10:30 p.m. and a weekend curfew of 1:00 a.m. At the University of Massachusetts, women who broke curfew by five minutes lost privileges for the ensuing Friday night; ten minutes cost them Saturday night; fifteen minutes bought them a hearing before the women’s judiciary committee. At Barnard College, a man could visit a woman’s dorm room at set hours, but three of the couple’s four legs had to be touching the ground at all times. Earlier generations of college students accommodated themselves to in loco parentis rules, which had governed college campuses in one way or another since the inception of modern American higher education in the late nineteenth century, but not the baby boomers. Having been raised according to the child-centered, “progressive” model preferred by middle-class parents and suburban schools in the early postwar era, many college students came to regard in loco parentis as a special form of oppression. The black freedom struggle and the Vietnam War gave them a way to understand this feeling of oppression. “If there is any one reason for increased student protest,” recalled a journalist at the University of Utah, “it would probably be the civil rights movement. The movement . . . convinced many of them that nonviolent demonstrations could be an effective device on the campus. It also served to make them more sensitive of their own civil rights.” “The American university campus has become a ghetto,” claimed an activist at the University of Florida. “Like all ghettos, it has its managers (the administrators), its Uncle Toms (the intimidated, status-berserk faculty), its raw natural resources processed for outside exploitation and consumption (the students).”
At Berkeley, as on other campuses, the initial spark was administrative overreach: students were barred from exercising their right to canvass on university property (in the case of Berkeley, authorities prohibited political advocacy at the heavily trafficked intersection of Bancroft Way and Telegraph Avenue). Student activists understandably chafed at the suggestion that they leave their First Amendment rights at the college gates. They also perceived parallels between their personal and political marginalization and that of oppressed minorities at home and abroad.
Many if not most protesters were deeply sincere in their beliefs. But they also situated their own experiences within a broader spectrum of political repression and fought both for civil rights and for an end to in loco parentis, for draft resistance and for free speech on campus, against the Vietnam War and against the culture of benign neglect to which faculty and administrators subjected them. When they complained, as did one activist, that “Michigan State is the Mississippi of American universities,” they risked incurring the perfectly valid charge that they were a favored cohort appropriating the legitimate struggle of less privileged people. They also invited unfavorable comparisons to less privileged people in their own backyards.
Twenty-seven million young men came of draft age between 1964 and 1973—the peak years of American military engagement in Southeast Asia. Of that total, 2.5 million men served in the Vietnam War. Roughly 25 percent of all enlisted men who served in Vietnam were from poor families, 55 percent from working-class families, and 20 percent from the ranks of the middle class. In an era when half of all Americans claimed at least some postsecondary education, only 20 percent of Vietnam War servicemen had been to college, while a staggering 19 percent had not completed twelfth grade. “When I was in high school, I knew I wasn’t going to college,” remembered a typical recruit. “It was really out of the question. Even graduating from high school was a big thing in my family.”
Among enlisted men who fought in Vietnam, roughly one-third were drafted, one-third joined entirely out of choice, and one-third were “draft-motivated” enlistees who expected to be swept up by the Selective Service and volunteered in hopes of choosing the branch and location of their service. Many recruits who joined of their own volition had few other options. Unemployment rates for young men hovered around 12.5 percent in the late 1960s (over double that figure for young black men), and even in places where unemployment was low, companies were reluctant to hire and train young working-class men, for fear they would soon be drafted. “You try to get a job,” explained one such unemployed man, “and the first thing they ask you is if you fulfilled your military service.”
By contrast, middle-class boomers enjoyed a host of options in avoiding the draft. The government extended deferments to students enrolled in college or graduate school, but only to those who were full-time students. “I was in school,” recalled one working-class man. “But I was only carrying a course load of nine credits. You had to have 12 or 15 back then [to earn a deferment]. But I was working two jobs and didn’t have time for another three credits.” The Selective Service snatched him up.
Potential conscripts could also avoid the draft if they furnished military authorities with proof of psychiatric or medical ineligibility, but as a general rule few working-class families enjoyed regular access to private physicians who could furnish or fabricate evidence of long-term treatment for a qualifying disability. “Most poor and working-class kids who had physical problems had to rely on army doctors to pronounce them unfit for military service,” explained a Detroit-based attorney who offered free draft counseling to local men. “Yes, there were doctors there, but their goal was to process as many people as possible. Day in and day out, people who had legitimate ailments under the written regulations put forth by the Selective Service System were approved for military service.” Even something so simple as orthodontic braces were grounds for ineligibility, but few working-class men could afford to pay $2,000 for elective dental work.
Because of the built-in bias in the draft system, Vietnam split Americans by class and geography. Three affluent towns in Massachusetts—Milton, Lexington, and Wellesley—lost 11 young men in the war out of a total population of roughly 100,000. Nearby Dorchester, a working-class enclave with a comparable population, saw 42 of its sons die in Southeast Asia. A study conducted in Illinois found that young men from working-class neighborhoods were four times as likely to be killed in the war as men from middle-class neighborhoods, while in New York, Newsday studied the backgrounds of four hundred Long Island men who died in Vietnam and concluded that they “were overwhelmingly white, working-class men. Their parents were typically blue collar or clerical workers, mailmen, factory workers, building tradesmen, and so on.” Where a man lived, who his parents were, and how he grew up mattered enormously. It was a reality that concerned some of Johnson’s aides, including Harry McPherson, who early on proposed a compulsory national service system that would require all men of fighting age to enlist in either the military, the Peace Corps, VISTA, or the Job Corps. The idea went nowhere. Not until Richard Nixon ended the deferment system in 1971 would it become more difficult for privileged families to opt their sons out of the war, but within a year Nixon had pulled out all but twenty-four thousand men, rendering the issue almost moot.
Counterintuitively, public polls data consistently revealed very little daylight between working-class and middle-class voters on the issue of Vietnam. Bob Novak confided to Harry McPherson that “most people in the middle, classifiable neither as doves or hawks, are in despair over a solution.” Yet even as opposition to the war increased, the parents of soldiers, marines, and airmen found it difficult to identify with, much less embrace, middle-class college protesters. “Here were these kids,” a working-class father would later say, “rich kids who could go to college, who didn’t have to fight, they are telling you your son died in vain. It makes you feel your whole life is shit, just nothing.” A firefighter whose son died in the war told an interviewer, “I’m bitter. You bet your goddamn dollar I’m bitter. It’s people like us who give up our sons for the country. . . . The college types, the professors, they go to Washington and tell the government what to do. . . . But their sons
don’t end up in the swamps over there. No sir. They’re deferred, because they’re in school. . . . Ralph had no choice. He didn’t want to die. He wanted to live. They just took him—to ‘defend democracy,’ that’s what they kept on saying. Hell, I wonder.” Ralph’s mother confessed that “my husband and I can’t help but thinking that our son gave his life for nothing.” Yet they despised the “peace crowd. . . . I told [my husband] I thought they wanted the war to end, so no more Ralphs will die, but he says no, they never stop and think about Ralph and his kind of people, and I’m inclined to agree. . . . I’m against this war, too—the way a mother is, whose sons are in the army, who has lost a son fighting it. The world hears those demonstrators making their noise. The world doesn’t hear me, and it doesn’t hear a single person I know.”