January 5, 2017
My American history prof used to insist that Americans are not an ideology driven people. He had seen the US communists and US fascists of the 1930s and knew that we swing from one end of the political spectrum to the other. Let me give a little history lesson from my own lifetime. This was my business.
By the late 1950s civil rights for Negroes was the main domestic issue and most white Americans had come to believe in some sort of negro equality. Most of us, however, were gradualists. It seems never to have occurred to white America that rights are rights, not something that the haves could slowly bestow on the have nots. I revere Ike Eisenhower above all Americans of the 20th century but have to admit that he was very much a man of his time. He did insist on a level playing field and it was he, not Truman, who actually saw that the military was integrated. That said, I never had a conversation with Ike of course, but from what I saw of him he too was a gradualist and would not have approved of the poverty (IE. largely negro betterment) programs of President Johnson. He did firmly believe that the poor and disadvantaged be able by hard work to improve their situation but he did not favor federal interference. When he sent troops into Little Rock it was not primarily in support of negro rights but because as chief executive he was determined to uphold the decision of the Warren court, whether he personally believed that decision to be right or a federal overstep.
It was the southerner, LBJ, who set the federal government to correcting the evils of a hundred years of southern discrimination and intimidation. I recall listening to his speech after the murder of the three civil rights workers. I was, and still am, moved. When quoting the song he said that “We shall overcome.” This very establishment white man with the one word, “we”, identified himself and his presidency with civil rights in a way that had not been done before, even by JFK. You could hear it in his voice: he was pissed and had turned his back on gradualism.
It was easy for someone on a ranch out west or a farm in the Midwest to think “Why doesn’t the negro pull himself up by the bootstraps,” ignoring the fact that the poor black Appalachian farmer had no boots. The white rancher or farmer had not had to live without hope until he’d just given up believing that things could actually change. LBJ’s answer was the poverty programs which did not say negro but stressed Appalachian, leaving people to picture poor white Arkansas hillbillies with outhouses. But the programs that were developed, like Headstart and affirmative action, government backed loans, and poverty relief, mostly benefited Negroes. Now the playing field became more level. A college education became possible. So did moving from the ghettos for the urban poor. If there remained a lot of darkness there were boots for those willing to pull on the straps. It may be remembered that our country was rich and socially liberal. I used to half joke that even our conservatives were liberal. The GOP senate leader Everett Dirksen helped LBJ get the Civil Rights legislation passed.
The seventies showed the downside however. Although the results were generally positive (less discrimination in housing and employment, advanced education, access to middle management positions), to some Negros of a revolutionary mind change was never fast enough while many in the Black community were too exhausted and themselves too poorly educated to imagine that their children could get into a college. Now we had groups like the Black Panthers, who in their own way were as racist as the Klan, promoting Black English and a sort of reverse separation of the races. Others scammed the system. The image of the welfare mother is not entirely a myth. I recall slightly knowing a young white woman who thought herself too much a poet to have to get a job. I also remember hippie white mothers begging on the NYC subways with an infant in arms because they thought that society owed them a living. How I would like to go back today and tell those young women that the only reason they didn’t have to work was because their dads did and their taxes had made the government wealthy. I would also remind their “self reliant” dust bowl and depression era dads that they themselves had benefited from the government work and aid programs of the New Deal without which many would have starved.
There was a naive hope that poverty programs could most fairly be applied through existing neighborhood institutions. Storefront churches blossomed and the pastors benefited. Even well meaning main stream clergy – who would once have helped the poor by using the resources of their parish and collections from their parishioners – now became experts in manipulating the system – sometimes for people like the “poet” referenced above – who weren’t trying very hard to help themselves.
Finally people got angry that their taxes were being wasted. Ronald Reagan turned against the excesses because too many people weren’t even trying to pull themselves up by their bootstraps, relying on government handouts instead as though they had a right to sustenance at some imagined ever-flowing fountain in Washington. The country had gone from outright segregation and inequality, to Ike’s belief in self improvement on a playing field made level by the federal government, through a welfare state mentality only made possible by the bloated post war coffers of the US government, and then back to conservatism again. But today the pendulum has swung as far right as Calvin Coolidge and a mockery has been made of Reagan’s readjustment. Republican policy is not Ike and Reagan’s vision of prosperity for all who are willing to work for it, but riches for banks and corporate paper pushers who export jobs even though it again means few opportunities for the poor white, the black, and our Hispanic citizens, as well as the hungry immigrants who, like our great grandparents, still flock with hope to the “shining city on a hill.”
