by Joshua Zeitz
These divisions were only beginning to emerge in 1966, but some politicians on the right already understood how to exploit them. Chief among them was Ronald Reagan.
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When Reagan first signaled his intention to run for California’s governorship in 1966, most political observers regarded his candidacy with mild bemusement. Though a drab, even gruff character, the Democratic incumbent, Pat Brown, was a liberal giant. He originally defeated California’s powerful U.S. senator, William Knowland, in a hotly contested gubernatorial election in 1958 and four years later trounced the former vice president Richard Nixon, who bitterly told the press, “You won’t have Nixon to kick around anymore, because, gentlemen, this is my last press conference.” (It was a bizarre and ungracious performance. In its aftermath, ABC television aired a special segment titled “The Political Obituary of Richard M. Nixon.” “Barring a miracle,” Time magazine announced, “Richard Nixon can never hope to be elected to any political office again.”) During his eight years in office, Brown stewarded the construction of a thousand miles of state highways, massive irrigation projects that watered the Southern California desert, funding for new hospitals and clinics, a school building initiative to accommodate millions of baby-boomer children who would come of age in the following decade, and an unparalleled higher education construction program that created one of the world’s most formidable public university systems, whose campuses offered the children of California’s growing middle class a top-flight college education, tuition-free. Ronald Reagan, a former actor whose glory days were already well behind him, claimed no experience in public office and was a political carbon copy of Barry Goldwater, the conservative ideologue whom LBJ humiliated just two years before. When asked what kind of chief executive he would be, Reagan flashed his winning grin and replied, “I don’t know, I’ve never played a governor before.” He was easy to dismiss, as when the political satirist Tom Lehrer recorded a song about George Murphy, the song-and-dance man whom Californians sent to the U.S. Senate in 1964. “Hollywood’s often tried to mix / Show business with politics,” Lehrer crooned, “From Helen Gahagan / To Ronald Reagan?”
Yet Reagan had been an avid student of politics since his tenure as president of the Screen Actors Guild in the late 1940s, when he walked in lockstep with other AFL and CIO officials in championing Harry Truman’s Fair Deal. In 1948, he played a leading role in labor’s drive to secure a victory for Truman in California and supported Hubert Humphrey in his successful bid for a seat in the U.S. Senate. In 1950, Reagan even backed Helen Gahagan Douglas, the left-wing actress turned congresswoman with whom he would later be lumped together in Lehrer’s song, in her bitter, unsuccessful Senate campaign against Richard Nixon.
If Reagan had always been politically engaged, his ideology evolved over the following decade. He clashed with communist union infiltrators in the 1940s and 1950s and when his movie career fell into a steep decline—later Reagan features include such unmemorable flicks as Law and Order and Castle Queen of Montana—eagerly accepted an invitation to host General Electric’s television hour. GE was then on the vanguard of the incipient conservative revival. It indoctrinated employees with company book clubs (the reading list invariably featured watered-down works by conservative economists and theorists) and cemented its public standing with its popular Sunday night television show. In need of the money, Reagan was happy to play the part, which came with a whopping salary of $125,000 per year, later raised to $150,000. The former trade union president became a company spokesman.
Part of his job was to tour GE plants and deliver political speeches to the employee base. He was a popular draw and used his celebrity to excite opposition to John Kennedy’s proposed Medicare bill. “If you and I don’t do this,” he implored his audience, “then you and I may well spend our sunset years telling our children’s children what it was once like in America when men were free.” (“How much are they paying you for this shit?” asked one liberal skeptic during a routine plant visit.) Toward the latter part of his GE contract, Reagan returned to the presidency of SAG and proved a tough negotiator with the studios, even as he warned GE workers about the perils of their own union and perfected the contours of what later became known simply as “the Speech.” Designed originally for internal GE audiences, Reagan retooled the presentation in 1964 to raise money for Barry Goldwater. “The Speech” signaled his full conversion from New Deal partisan to New Right crusader. Two years earlier, he switched his party registration, but it hardly mattered. He had not supported a Democratic presidential candidate since 1948.
Though Reagan’s gubernatorial candidacy seemed improbable at first blush, political observers understood the high stakes involved. “California is the most populous state in the Union,” remarked the conservative San Diego Union, “and a Republican victory in November would most certainly signal the beginning of the end of the political extravagances of the Great Society.” Johnson was eager to forestall that possibility. “We’ve just got to go after him,” he privately confided to Brown. “And . . . put him right where he belongs: with Goldwater around his neck.”
“I spent all day Sunday reviewing Mr. Reagan’s record,” the governor assured LBJ. “And this fellow is part of the kook crowd in the United States. He’s to the right of Goldwater!”
“No question about that,” Johnson agreed. “He’s got a better television personality and he’s more effective. But he’s more dangerous.”
As was often the case, Johnson proved an apt political seer. On the hustings, Reagan took care to distance himself from the same extremists whom Barry Goldwater had, to devastating consequences, refused to renounce. When Brown’s campaign issued attack literature tying the candidate to the John Birch Society, Reagan just shrugged. “If anyone chooses to vote for me, they are buying my views. I am not buying theirs,” he insisted. He avoided Goldwater’s angry dogmatism and reassured moderate residents when he acknowledged that “as the state grows, we must have growth in government services.” He did not propose to shut down entire agencies, only that “there should be some proportionality.” He assured voters that he “never advocated selling the Post Office or abolishing Social Security. Nor do I believe in some conspiracy theory that all who favored increased government planning and control are engaged in a devious plot.” When he decried the state of affairs in Watts—still a raw memory among Californians just one year after the riots—he allowed that “ninety-nine percent of the people there are fine, responsible citizens and had no part in the trouble. We’re talking about a one percent minority.” With deft preparation—his staff typed out hundreds of index cards with issue-specific one-liners and ripostes, each of which the candidate committed to memory with his actor’s discipline—Reagan sidestepped every land mine that Goldwater had tripped. “I disagree with almost everything he says,” groused one of Brown’s aides. “But dammit, I can’t help but feel that he is basically a nice guy.”
Nice guy or not, Reagan proved adroit at channeling backlash against seemingly unrelated conditions that troubled many white Americans. He blamed the riots in Watts on the “philosophy that in any situation the public should turn to government for the answer.” He decried the “small minority of beatniks, radicals, and filthy-speech advocates” who “brought shame” to the University of California at Berkeley, one of the flagships of the state’s higher education system—a system that should have been a crowning proof point for Pat Brown but that Reagan forced him to wear like an albatross around his neck. His audiences listened with rapt attention as he described an antiwar program at Berkeley, where two movie screens pictured “the nude torsos of men and women . . . from time to time, in suggestive positions and movements. . . . Three rock bands played simultaneously. . . . The smell of marijuana was thick through the hall. There were signs that some of those present had taken dope. . . . There were intimations of other happenings which cannot be mentioned.” For millions of white middle-class and work
ing-class voters who regarded campus unrest with disgust and disbelief—after all, had any generation of Americans ever known such privilege as the UC students who attended some of the finest colleges in the land, free of cost?—Reagan offered an identifiable cause (liberalism) and cure. “I’d like to harness their youthful energy with a strap,” he said of juvenile delinquents. It was a line bound to draw approving nods from the crowd.
On no issue did Reagan hit home harder than on open housing. In 1963, at Brown’s urging, the legislature passed a state law barring racial, ethnic, and religious discrimination in housing sales and rentals. Brown called it “one of the great victories of my career [and] the beginning of our struggle to attack the problem of the ghettos.” The following year, even as Johnson carried California with 59 percent of the vote to Goldwater’s 41 percent, voters passed Proposition 14, a provision that voided the open housing law. (In subsequent years, both the California Supreme Court and the U.S. Supreme Court would rule the proposition unconstitutional.) It was a canary in a coal mine, and running for reelection in 1966, Brown now had to answer for Lyndon Johnson’s proposed federal open housing law—a law that would reimpose the same restrictions that Californians had recently rejected by a lopsided margin. “I have never believed that majority rule has the right to impose on an individual as to what he does with his property,” Reagan argued. “This has nothing to do with discrimination. It has to do with our freedom, our basic freedom.” It was a theme that he hammered with relentless consistency and to great effect, deploying phrases like “basic freedom” and “basic individual rights” with almost mechanic precision.
On September 14, less than eight weeks before the election, Senate liberals in Washington, D.C., failed to achieve cloture on a southern filibuster of the president’s federal open housing legislation—a bill that he had already stripped down by exempting 60 percent of the country’s housing units. It was the first major Great Society initiative to die in Congress. The defeat only strengthened Reagan’s hand in California.
Pat Brown did little to help himself—he ran a hapless campaign—but in the end it probably mattered little. Reagan trounced the once-popular incumbent, winning 58 percent of the vote to Brown’s 42 percent. Nationally, in the midterm races, Democrats lost forty-seven seats in the U.S. House and three in the Senate—including Paul Douglas, whom Illinois voters punished for his support for open housing—and saw reactionary candidates win several key gubernatorial elections. Some observers understood backlash as primarily a function of growing racial animosity on the part of working-class white voters. In a Gallup poll, 52 percent of white respondents agreed that LBJ was moving too fast on civil rights; only 10 percent thought he was not moving fast enough. These results represented a sharp erosion in support for the black freedom movement since 1962. “Go . . . into any home, any bar, any barber shop and you will find people are not talking about Vietnam or rising prices or prosperity,” a Chicago congressman observed on the eve of the election. “They are talking about Martin Luther King and how they are moving in on us and what’s going to happen to our neighborhoods.” Reagan understood how to channel racial animosity into anger with Lyndon Johnson. “Now the wraps are off the Great Society,” he remarked in the wake of his victory, decrying the “welfare state” and “unprecedented federalization of American life.” Voters who had tolerated an expanded role for the federal government could be converted to opposition if they perceived the government as a threat to the privileges they enjoyed as homeowners and working-class or middle-class workers.
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Working-class and middle-class white voters were not the only constituency that began to sour on the Great Society. By 1966, a small but influential group of public intellectuals had begun to question the efficacy of government programs designed to remedy social and economic problems like poverty. Though some of these critics made a swift and unambiguous migration to the conservative camp—Norman Podhoretz, the editor of Commentary, figured prominently in this group—others insisted that they remained committed liberals or, as the sociologist Daniel Bell wryly labeled himself, “skeptical Whig[s].” Eventually, the term “neoconservative” took root. Alongside onetime anticommunist liberals like James Q. Wilson, Nathan Glazer, Seymour Martin Lipset, and Irving Kristol, prominent essayists and social scientists openly challenged many of the tenets of Great Society liberalism, though in the pages of Commentary and the Public Interest—a journal devoted to public scholarship—they disagreed among themselves as much as they jousted with conventional liberal Democrats. Among this group, none was more influential or connected to the wiring of official Washington than Daniel Patrick Moynihan, an early participant in the Johnson administration’s interagency poverty task force and assistant secretary of labor from 1963 to 1965.
A tall and voluble Irish Catholic who had affected an aristocratic accent ever since his postgraduate studies in England (and who later earned a Ph.D. in international relations to match the patrician drawl), Moynihan enjoyed a close friendship with Harry McPherson but was otherwise a second-tier member of both the New Frontier and the Great Society crowds. The Department of Labor was comparatively small, and his role—as assistant secretary for policy, planning, and research—was toothless: he was the in-house intellectual, given free rein to write reports and issue memorandums. Unlike most early architects of the Johnson administration’s antipoverty agenda, Moynihan was skeptical of opportunity theory and believed that what poor people needed was not compensatory programs like education and job training but actual jobs. “The only way out of poverty for a man is employment,” he urged. By 1965, his focus turned to the one group of Americans who had fallen most precipitously out of the labor market: black men, whose rate of unemployment was more than twice that of white men. In a series of sharp memorandums, he urged corrective measures to boost workforce participation, including the institution of twice-daily mail delivery (the U.S. Postal Service traditionally employed many black mailmen) and a loosening of military tests that excluded a disproportionate number of black men from the armed services. “The single most important and dramatic instance of the exclusion of Negro Americans from employment opportunities is that of the Armed Forces,” he told McPherson. “Above all things the down-and-out Negro boy needs to be inducted into the male American society.”
Moynihan was sharply critical of Aid to Families with Dependent Children, a program that grew at a rapid clip during the 1960s through no effort of Lyndon Johnson (indeed, the president kept wary watch as the rolls expanded). He believed that the program created a powerful disincentive to marriage by restricting eligibility to single-parent households—almost always headed by women. It “rotted the poor,” he claimed. Rather than “pension the Negroes off,” he urged a dramatic volte-face in the administration’s poverty agenda. “Nothing would be more terrible, if it should come to pass. We have created an entire subculture of dependency, alienation, and despair. We have already done as much to whole sections of Appalachia, as I understand it, and also to the Indian reservations. It is in truth the way that we cope with this kind of problem. As against giving the men proper jobs and a respectable place in their community and family.”
In 1965, Moynihan set about the task of writing a report on the relationship between family structure and unemployment in poor black communities. He read widely, beginning with the renowned black historian W. E. B. DuBois, who six decades earlier observed many of the same trends—high rates of joblessness, single-parent households, absentee fathers—and E. Franklin Frazier, one of the nation’s leading sociologists (and arguably the most prominent African American in his field), both of whom attributed the dissolution of black families to the social and psychological trauma of slavery. He also consulted the work of Horace Cayton, St. Clair Drake, and Allison Davis, black scholars who wrote about the traumatic aftershocks of urbanization on formerly rural African Americans. Like DuBois before him, Frazier devoted particular focus to charting rates of �
�illegitimacy” in poor black communities.
Of equal inspiration were two celebrated studies—Slavery, by the white historian Stanley Elkins, and Dark Ghetto, by Kenneth Clark, a black psychologist who first achieved public acclaim when the Supreme Court cited his earlier work to buttress its decision in the case of Brown v. Board of Education. Elkins drew heavily on studies by the child psychiatrist Bruno Bettelheim, who had argued that Nazi concentration camps deeply scarred their prisoners emotionally, reducing them to a docile, childlike state. Relying on plantation records kept by white slaveholders and oral histories of ex-slaves that the Works Progress Administration conducted in the 1930s, Elkins arrived at similar conclusions about the lasting effects of slavery on black Americans. Though he broke with a historiographical legacy of apologia and portrayed American chattel slavery as singularly brutal, he also concluded that this very inhumanity infantilized its subjects and destroyed the psyche of black American men. In a similar vein, Clark concluded that slavery had so degraded black men as to establish a “Negro Matriarchy,” further perpetuated by the “continued post-slavery relegation of the Negro male to menial and subservient status.” These scars carried over into the urban North, where black migrants crowded into the “dark ghetto”—an “institutionalized pathology; it is chronic, self-perpetuating pathology.”
An engaging synthesizer but not an original scholar, Moynihan wove these themes into a powerful but inevitably controversial and flawed report. He argued that the “fundamental problem” in poor black communities was “that of family structure. . . . A middle-class group has managed to save itself, but for vast numbers of the unskilled, poorly educated city working class the fabric of conventional social relationships has all but disintegrated.” Slavery and Jim Crow had destroyed black families—in particular, centuries of discrimination had broken the psyche of black men—and created a self-perpetuating cycle of joblessness, broken homes, and poverty. A close read of the report leaves no doubt that Moynihan strongly advocated a massive federal program to ensure that black Americans realized “equal results,” not just equal rights. He intended to bolster not a conservative argument against intervention but rather a liberal argument for income maintenance and jobs programs. But in focusing so intently on black family structure and borrowing liberally from works of psychology, sociology, and psychohistory, he furnished conservative intellectuals with an arsenal of powerful rhetoric that they would later use to argue against the efficacy of antipoverty programs. The report’s most provocative and memorable line identified a “tangle of pathology” that rendered working-class black communities damaged and in need of intervention. At the “center of the tangle of pathology,” he wrote, “is the weakness of the family structure. Once or twice removed, it will be found to be the principal source of most of the aberrant, inadequate, or anti-social behavior that did not establish, but now serves to perpetuate the cycle of poverty and deprivation.”