Great Society

A New History

Amity Shlaes

• Publisher: Harper
• Year: 2019
• Print ISBN: 9780061706431
• eBook ISBN: 9780062199102
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: Women in Business
• Index: History

The New York Times bestselling author of The Forgotten Man and Coolidge offers a stunning revision of our last great period of idealism, the 1960s, with burning relevance for our contemporary challenges.

"Great Society is accurate history that reads like a novel, covering the high hopes and catastrophic missteps of our well-meaning leaders."  —Alan Greenspan

Today, a battle rages in our country. Many Americans are attracted to socialism and economic redistribution while opponents of those ideas argue for purer capitalism. In the 1960s, Americans sought the same goals many seek now: an end to poverty, higher standards of living for the middle class, a better environment and more access to health care and education. Then, too, we debated socialism and capitalism, public sector reform versus private sector advancement. Time and again, whether under John F. Kennedy, Lyndon Johnson, or Richard Nixon, the country chose the public sector. Yet the targets of our idealism proved elusive. What's more, Johnson's and Nixon's programs shackled millions of families in permanent government dependence. Ironically, Shlaes argues, the costs of entitlement commitments made a half century ago preclude the very reforms that Americans will need in coming decades.

In Great Society, Shlaes offers a powerful companion to her legendary history of the 1930s, The Forgotten Man, and shows that in fact there was scant difference between two presidents we consider opposites: Johnson and Nixon. Just as technocratic military planning by "the Best and the Brightest" made failure in Vietnam inevitable, so planning by a team of the domestic best and brightest guaranteed fiasco at home. At once history and biography, Great Society sketches moving portraits of the characters in this transformative period, from U.S. Presidents to the visionary UAW leader Walter Reuther, the founders of Intel, and Federal Reserve chairmen William McChesney Martin and Arthur Burns. Great Society casts new light on other figures too, from Ronald Reagan, then governor of California, to the socialist Michael Harrington and the protest movement leader Tom Hayden. Drawing on her classic economic expertise and deep historical knowledge, Shlaes upends the traditional narrative of the era, providing a damning indictment of the consequences of thoughtless idealism with striking relevance for today. Great Society captures a dramatic contest with lessons both dark and bright for our own time.

Great Society

3

Great Society

MAY 1964

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Guns: 8.3% of GDP

Butter: 4.7% of GDP

Dow Jones Industrial Average: 820

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In May 1964, administrators in Ann Arbor laid out academic regalia for a commencement speaker. The hat size for the mortarboard was a standard man’s: seven and three-eighths. The breadth of the gown was to suit a man whose chest spanned forty-one inches, average again. But the gown was unusually long, for the speaker stood six foot three and a half. Lyndon Johnson was coming to the University of Michigan.¹

When Air Force One took off from Andrews Air Force Base at 9:10 a.m. on Friday, May 22, the plane bore not only Michigan’s 1964 commencement speaker, the president, but both Michigan senators and members of the state’s congressional delegation. An equally impressive crowd of dignitaries awaited the presidential party at the Detroit airport: Henry Ford II; Governor George Romney; Detroit mayor Jerome Cavanagh; Detroit newspaper editors; the Reverend James Wadsworth of the local chapter of the NAACP; the Michigan leader of the AFL-CIO, Gus Scholle; and, of course, the UAW’s Walter Reuther and Mildred Jeffrey.² A crowd of thousands waited beyond the greeters. The year 1964 was an election year, after all. The president paused to give a message to the citizens of Motor City.³ It was Detroit in particular that was, Johnson said, “the herald of hope in America. Prosperity in America must begin here in Detroit.” Wages nationwide were up, and the economy was growing. More good would come. Johnson paid special attention to the labor leaders in these airport remarks. If labor and industry would stick by his side, the president said, “the sky is the limit, and the sky is bright today.”

The sky was bright. At the stadium in Ann Arbor, the waiting crowd roared its greeting. Both the crowd and the nation were certain that Johnson would offer more than Kennedy did on his visit to the same university in 1960. Everything about the Johnson trip was bigger—Texas scale. Whereas Kennedy had arrived exhausted from a debate with Richard Nixon and dropped remarks after midnight, Johnson spoke in warm daylight. Whereas Kennedy had stood before his audience at the Michigan Union, a campus building, now Johnson enjoyed the wide grandeur of the stadium. Back in 1960, Kennedy had been merely a candidate in a race he could still lose, throwing students a Reuther-prepared bone, the idea of the Peace Corps. Johnson was an incumbent with a majority in Congress who was already changing their world. The very fact that Johnson had accepted the invitation was a coup for Michigan. Everyone tried to count the attendance. The crowd numbered eighty thousand, the press guessed.⁴ But the university’s alumni magazine counted eighty-five thousand. The crowd was enough, in any case, for Michigan to claim “the world’s largest commencement.”

Reaching the dais, the president prepared to speak before a teleprompter. This address, unlike past graduation speeches, would be aired on television. When the cameras panned they showed what looked like a football game, with the crowd on the field, and without the hot dogs. In camera view with Johnson as he moved to the microphone was not only the university president but also Governor Romney. Dotted around were “peace officers,” the kind of guard that had accompanied the president since Kennedy’s assassination. The music, typical for Michigan, was perfect: “taps excellent, singing loud and clear,” as the recipient of an honorary degree noted. Finally, at 10:55, Johnson started speaking. He ended at 11:15, a full ten minutes more than officially allotted. Fourteen times, the crowd interrupted Johnson with applause.

And no wonder. For what Johnson offered went beyond mere agenda. Johnson offered a vision as fantastic as the vision of Port Huron, as transformative as that of Reuther. Johnson started with students: “I have come from the turmoil of your capital to the tranquillity of your campus to speak about the future of your country.” In the past, presidents had striven for abundance, Johnson noted. Now the country had abundance. The challenge of the next half century was proving “whether we have the wisdom to use that wealth to enrich and elevate our national life.” Some corners of the country were still poor. The Great Society, therefore, required, as Johnson had said before, an “end to poverty.”

Johnson spoke on civil rights. In the South a recent check had found that only 6.7 percent of eligible black citizens in Mississippi were registered to vote, while 70 percent of whites were registered.⁵ Indeed, a few of the Port Huron alumni were in Mississippi right now, preparing a massive vote drive they had given the name “Freedom Summer.” The time had come for the Great Society to put an end to racial injustice, Johnson said. America would strive for its goals on three stages: “in our cities, our countryside, and in our classrooms.” Once such goals were reached, there would be yet more to do. For the Great Society was no safe harbor; it was a constantly renewing challenge, Johnson said. Wealth and power were not enough. America needed to move “upward to the Great Society.”

“Great Society.” The name had been in the planning for months. Scholars had advised the Johnson entourage that the term had a past. Long ago an English socialist named Graham Wallas had written of a “Great Society,” by which Wallas had meant a new society in which isolated citizens of villages were now linked in a great network, connected by rails, roads, newspapers, and jurisdictions. The American commentator Walter Lippmann had written a book, The Good Society.⁶ Johnson’s entourage that spring had chosen “Great Society,” without regard for provenance. They liked the grandeur of “Great Society.” Horace Busby, on Johnson’s staff, had written a draft of a speech defining a Great Society as one that addressed technological challenges and opportunities for the country. But Johnson and the men sought to make the phrase something broader that could capture the aims of all constituents. “You could fit a lot of what we were trying to do within the curve of this phrase,” one of LBJ’s closest advisors, Jack Valenti, said later. The staff planned to unveil the Great Society in a big speech, which turned out to be the Michigan commencement address. That was appropriate, since Richard Goodwin, assigned to pull together various drafts for Michigan, would later conclude that it was Tom Hayden with his aspirations, hazy but great, who had inspired them all, “without even knowing it.” In the writing of the speech, Goodwin wanted to avoid “screaming and invective,” and sought rather language that reflected a discontent he sensed across society. Goodwin had looked at the letter Martin Luther King wrote from jail in Birmingham. Goodwin had perused the Port Huron Statement, too. Three abstract nouns in the statement jumped out at the speechwriter: “loneliness, estrangement, isolation.” In the meantime, the Johnson entourage socialized their president to “Great Society,” and he fell for the phrase. The White House didn’t want its new brand dribbled out. Yet even before the trip to Michigan, when others were present, Johnson hadn’t been able to help repeating “Great Society,” “fondling and caressing this new phrase,” Valenti noted.⁷

Even as he stepped off the stage at Michigan, Johnson could feel the truth: the speech wasn’t just a local triumph, it was a national triumph. On his way out the president stopped at a trailer to change out of his regalia, and found Walter Reuther, waiting to thank him. Back in Washington after Michigan, Johnson summoned Goodwin to the small study that served as the president’s second office, to thank him. “Come on in, Dick,” he said. “Sit down. Try some of this scotch.” Even the editor of Time, which had given its 1963 Man of the Year cover to Martin Luther King, not the new president, now contacted Johnson. “Henry Luce called me this morning,” Johnson told Goodwin. “Old Man Henry himself. He said he’d support me on the basis of the Great Society speech alone.” On June 8, Johnson, emboldened, delivered an encore at the commencement at Swarthmore College in Pennsylvania. At Swarthmore, Johnson spoke more bluntly than at Ann Arbor. He not only advanced his Great Society agenda, but made clear who would deliver on it. The country should suspend its “phantom fears.” A scaled-up government, the president told the students, was the answer to the problems of the 1960s. “The truth is, far from crushing the individual, government at its best liberates him from the enslaving forces of his environment.”

* * *

THE IDEA that the federal government could lift the country to new heights was relatively new. Until the 1930s, Washington had confined grand-scale domestic interventions to wartime. Woodrow Wilson, for example, had nationalized the railroads during World War I. Yet, as Johnson, in the early 1930s a congressional aide, had personally observed, that had changed with Franklin Roosevelt’s election to the presidency in 1932. The country was mired in the Great Depression. In 1933, Roosevelt led lawmakers in the passage of the New Deal, a vast peacetime program of legislation premised on the idea that the government could manage and cheer the economy back to recovery. Within his first hundred days as president, Roosevelt and Congress had put through great changes in banking law but also laws creating multiple other programs crafted to shore up the domestic economy. For the unemployed, Roosevelt had created a kind of domestic Peace Corps, the Civilian Conservation Corps, as well as the Public Works Administration, to put men and women to work constructing schools and municipal buildings. For the parts of the South where electricity had not yet arrived, FDR established the Tennessee Valley Authority, which had landed GE in so much trouble, and the Rural Electrification Administration. Roosevelt and his advisors crafted the National Recovery Administration to bring recovery in the industrial sector, and the Agricultural Adjustment Act to restore America’s farmers, then struggling.

The New Deal with which the young Johnson himself came into contact first was the agricultural New Deal. Crop prices had dropped violently, and farmers, unable to pay mortgages, were losing their farms. To Johnson, Roosevelt seemed like a savior. Other young men got the same impression. “There’s only one thing to do here, that’s fade away and go broke,” a man in rural Doland, South Dakota, told his son, Johnson’s future ally, Hubert Humphrey.⁸ Roosevelt’s new bank loans helped farmers keep their farms. This Agricultural Adjustment Administration sought to help them by raising commodity prices. The method Roosevelt, Congress, and the AAA settled on was curtailing supply, literally. Farmers received payment to plow over crops—in the end, millions of acres.⁹ It was Johnson who in South Texas cajoled the dubious farmers into signing the contracts, leading resistant mules to plow over rows of cotton.¹⁰ And it was Johnson who saw to it that the Texas farmers got their pay, their loans, or, eventually, electrification. Johnson would be especially proud of his own role in the electric New Deal, bringing electricity to the Hill Country of Texas.¹¹ What Johnson also observed was that when one program delivered subpar results, Roosevelt didn’t give up. The president simply added another program on top of it. In 1935, Roosevelt signed a public pension plan for seniors, Social Security, along with the Wagner Act for the unions.

Johnson’s job was to sell and get the benefits to the people. The tall young man had proved a whiz at this work. Later, statistics would show that as New Deal programs commenced, the Fourteenth District in Texas, where Johnson worked first, received more than its share of New Deal aid.¹² Commodity prices eventually rose, and Johnson attributed the successes to the New Deal. On the Hill, the aides maintained their own mock congress, the “Little Congress,” where they debated the same issues as the lawmakers. When Johnson won the election as head of the Little Congress in 1933, he promised his victory would “mark a New Deal for all the Little Congresses.” When Roosevelt signed another new program for employment into law, the National Youth Administration, Johnson was tapped to head the Texas office. Through the NYA post, Johnson had the power to create employment: “727 jobs have been made available to youths in this section,” commented the Marshall, Texas, News Messenger with satisfaction. When Johnson ran for Congress himself in 1936, Roosevelt endorsed him, and Johnson rode in on the longest coattails in history, for Roosevelt took forty-six of forty-eight states. “Roosevelt and Progress,” read a Johnson campaign advertisement. By the time Johnson ran for his third election, he was well known as a powerful Roosevelt lieutenant. The columnists Drew Pearson and Robert Allen reported in 1940 that when the president asked for advice on who could get something “done quick,” House Speaker Sam Rayburn suggested Johnson. “Sold,” Roosevelt replied. “That was my idea, too.”¹³

As the New Deal progressed, unemployment failed to retreat to normal levels. In January 1937, when unemployment was 12 percent, Roosevelt, rather than concede defeat, moved again to escalate and shift goals, turning, in fact, to poverty.¹⁴ Roosevelt, like Johnson in Michigan so much later, defined three areas for attention: the president warned that one-third of the nation was “ill-housed, ill-clad, and ill-nourished.” The New Deal reforms must continue in America until the country reached “our happy valley.” The Depression endured nearly to the end of Roosevelt’s second term, and unemployment rose in 1938. Many of the original actors in the New Deal saw the perversities—plowing cotton under—and rated Roosevelt’s great reforms more bureaucracy than progress. Some of Roosevelt’s old allies spoke up. One was the columnist Walter Lippmann, the one who gave his book the careful title The Good Society. Lippmann rated “great” as too ambitious.¹⁵ He argued that “no new social order can be designed.”

But the young lawmaker Lyndon Johnson did not mistrust the New Deal, as John Kennedy’s crowd later would. Johnson believed in the New Deal, without caring too much about its shortcomings. In any case the sheer political feat of the New Deal, not its economic performance, seemed the important thing to the striving Texas politician. Johnson carefully noted the chain of factors that made the Roosevelt tenure of the 1930s, two terms’ worth, even possible. The basis was political predominance. Unlike his successor, Harry Truman, who struggled against Republican majorities in Congress for part of his time in office, Roosevelt held secure Democratic majorities in both houses throughout his presidency. Roosevelt demonstrated that it was also key to have top advisors: Roosevelt had brought in what he called a Brain Trust, experts who heightened the reputation of New Deal programs. A sense of emergency was critical to the undertaking: many of the powers ceded to the New Dealers were rated permissible by the public or the courts only because of the emergency of the Great Depression. Another factor was timing: it was no accident that Roosevelt had dropped a veritable blitz of laws in those first hundred days, so many that the period later came to be written as a proper noun: “the Hundred Days.” An ambitious president had to move with alacrity right at the start, as FDR did, or he was lost. Time was the enemy. In 1936, Roosevelt had been reelected with “a mandate as clear as any that has ever been written,” including victory in forty-six of the forty-eight states, as Johnson later noted. But even with such a mandate, the second term was tougher. Finally, Johnson saw that the only way Roosevelt managed to take his revolution as far as he did was by locking in political constituencies. Early on, Roosevelt had given farmers the payments from the AAA, given senior citizens Social Security, given labor men like Reuther and Meany the Wagner Act. How the economy had performed before the 1936 election mattered less to that election because Roosevelt could turn out such blocs of voters.

From the moment he had been sworn into office, even in grief, Johnson had seen that he might elude the humiliations suffered by Harry Truman when Truman had sought to expand the New Deal. For Johnson in 1964 enjoyed some of Roosevelt’s advantages, including Democratic majorities in both houses of Congress. And Johnson also could count some advantages of his own. First, there was his long record in the Senate, which gave him unparalleled experience as the shepherd of legislation. Roosevelt, a mere governor with a famous name, had had nothing like that. There was also the aching advantage of tragedy: Kennedy’s death would make Congress eager to pass Kennedy’s tax law and Kennedy’s languishing civil rights bill. There was also a disadvantage: no national economic crisis on a scale of the Great Depression loomed in Johnson’s day. In fact, unemployment was heading down below 5 percent. The sense of urgency would have to be generated—by Johnson.

He made his wager. Johnson would indeed make his own New Deal a “fast deal,” as Thruston Morton had called it, giving Roosevelt a run for his money. If Johnson did move fast enough, he’d win a solid victory in November 1964 and then finish the job. Johnson’s Great Society would be law within two or three years, well before the nation tired of it, or him. Of course there would be collateral damage. When Johnson’s aides had expressed their trepidation, he intoxicated them with his bold reply. “Well,” the new president said, “what the hell’s the presidency for?”

* * *

EVEN IN the sunny June of 1964, outsiders could identify a few obstacles to Johnson’s do-or-die fast deal. The Federal Reserve chairman, William McChesney Martin, was warning Johnson that the Fed needed to raise the interest rate, currently 3.5 percent.¹⁶ A hike to more than 4 percent could impede grand plans. The Freedom Summer in Mississippi could become so violent that lawmakers would turn against Johnson’s plan to pass Kennedy’s legacy civil rights bill. Weeks before he was killed himself, Kennedy had learned that the South Vietnamese leader, Ngo Dinh Diem, had been assassinated. Now South Vietnam was in chaos, making it vulnerable to a belligerent North Vietnam. A few days after...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Dedication
• Epigraph
• Contents
• Introduction: The Clash
• New Frontier
• Great Society
• Abundant Society
• Acknowledgments
• Appendix of Graphic Data
• Bibliography
• Notes
• Index
• Photo Section
• About the Author
• Also by Amity Shlaes
• Copyright
• About the Publisher