American Public Policy: Federal Domestic Policy Achievements and Failures, 1901 to 2022 2022003560, 2022003561, 9781032276144, 9781032276137, 9781003293538

Table of contents :
Cover
Endorsements
Half Title
Title Page
Copyright Page
Dedication
Contents
About the Author
Photos
Acknowledgments
Note
Introduction
Notes
Part 1: The Early Years of the Twentieth Century
Chapter 1: The Progressive Era Begins: 1901-1912
America at The Beginning of the Twentieth Century
The Era by the Numbers
Society Under Stress
Exposing Corruption and Greed
Bank Panic of 1907
Supremacy of Jim Crow
Tenement Houses, Working Conditions, and Immigrants
The National Government
The Presidency
The Executive Branch
The Congress
Leadership in the Senate
Leadership in the House
The Judiciary
Key Policies Enacted
Conservation and Protection of Public Lands
Significance of these Policies
Trust-Busting
Significance of these Policies
Pure Food and Drugs
Significance of these Policies
Sixteenth Amendment: Federal Income Tax
Significance of this Policy
Seventeenth Amendment: Popular Election of Senators
Significance of this Policy
The Court Weighs In
Affirming State Power to Regulate Working Conditions
Significance of this Ruling
Policies Delayed or Denied
Protecting Children in the Workplace
Worker Rights and Contracts
Woman's Suffrage
Notes
Chapter 2: Success and Backlash of Progressive Policy: 1913-1920
America During This Era
The Era by the Numbers
Society Under Stress
Entering the Great War
Working Conditions and Labor Strikes
The Red Scare
The Influenza Pandemic
East St. Louis and the "Red Summer"
The National Government
The Presidency
The Executive Branch
The Congress
Leadership in the Senate
Leadership in the House
The Judiciary
Key Policies Enacted
Federal Reserve System
Significance of this Policy
Prohibition
Significance of these Policies
Nineteenth Amendment: Woman Suffrage
Significance of this Policy
Protecting Children in the Labor Market
Policies Delayed or Denied
Anti-Lynching Legislation
Reversal of Child Labor Protections
Failure to Plan Demobilization
Notes
Chapter 3: The Return to "Normalcy" and the Onset of the Depression: 1921-1932
America During This Era
The Era by the Numbers
Society Under Stress
Depression in Agriculture
The 1927 Mississippi Flooding
Racial Violence
The "Invisible Empire" and 100 Percent Americanism
Labor Relations
The Great Depression Begins
The National Government
The Presidency
The Executive Branch
The Congress
Leadership in the Senate
Leadership in the House
The Judiciary
Key Policies Enacted
Problems with Prohibition
Immigration Reform
Significance of this Policy
Ill-Fated Protective Tariff
Significance of this Policy
Maternity and Infant Protection
Significance of this Policy
Outlawing "Yellow Dog" Contracts and Federal Court Labor Injunctions
Constitutional Amendment
Policies Delayed or Denied
Child Labor
Anti-Lynching Legislation
Assistance to Farmers
Triumph of Freedom of Contract
Failure to Combat the Depression
Notes
Chapter 4: The New Deal: 1933-1941
America During This Era
The Era by the Numbers
Society Under Stress
The Grinding Desperation of Poverty
The Clash in the Workplace
Turn to Radical Voices
Race, Politics, and Southern Separation
Rise of Anti-Semitism
The National Government
The Presidency
The Executive Branch
The Congress
Leadership in the Senate
Leadership in the House
The Judiciary
Key Policies Enacted
Stabilizing the Banking and Financial System
Significance of these Policies
Electricity, Flood Control, and Economic Support for the Tennessee Valley and Rural America
Significance of these Policies
Protecting the Working Family and Union Democracy
Significance of this Policy
Assistance for the Elderly: Social Security
Significance of this Policy
Establishing a Federal Minimum Wage and Prohibiting Child Labor
Significance of this Policy
Policies Delayed or Denied
The Court Weighs In
Failure of Anti-lynching Legislation
Notes
Part II: The War Years, Post-War and Modern America
Chapter 5: War, Recovery, and Readjustment: 1941-1952
America During This Era
The Era by the Numbers
Society Under Stress
Labor Unrest and Adjustment to the Post-war Economy
McCarthyism and "Soft on Communism"
Racial Unrest
The Detroit and Harlem Race Riots
The Right to Vote and Double V
The National Government
The Presidency
The Executive Branch
The Congress
Leadership in the Senate
Leadership in the House
The Judiciary
Key Policies Enacted
Protecting the Returning Veteran
Significance of this Policy
Hospital Construction
Significance of this Policy
Migrant Workers, Immigrants, and Refugees
The Braceros Program
Chinese Immigration
The Displaced Persons Act (1948)
Immigrants and National Security
Significance of these Policies
Fighting Racial Discrimination Through Executive Orders and Court Decisions
Preventing Racial Discrimination in Federal Job Training Programs
Desegregating the Armed Services
Ending the White Primary
Desegregating Interstate Buses
Prohibiting Restrictive Covenants
Constitutional Amendment: Limiting the President's Term of Office
Revamping Labor-Management Relations
Significance of this Policy
Public Housing, Slum Clearance, Redlining and Discrimination
Significance of this Policy
The Court Weighs In
Policies Delayed or Denied
Failure to Eliminate the Poll Tax
National Health Insurance
Executive Order to Seize Steel Industry and Court Rebuff
Notes
Chapter 6: America at Midcentury: 1953-1960
America During This Era
The Era by the Numbers
Society Under Stress
McCarthy and "Soft on Communism," Part 2
Organized Crime and Union Corruption
Racial Tensions
The National Government
The Presidency
The Executive Branch
The Congress
Leadership in the Senate
Leadership in the House
The Judiciary
Key Policies Enacted
Immigrants and Refugees
Operation Wetback
Refugee Relief
Significance of these Policies
Racial Justice
Significance of these Policies
Ribbons of Highway
Significance of these Policies
Protecting the Elderly and Those with Disabilities
Significance of these Policies
Federal Aid to Education
Significance of this Policy
Policies Denied or Delayed
Medical Insurance for the Elderly Poor
Watered Down Civil Rights Protections
Notes
Chapter 7: The New Frontier and Great Society: 1961-1968
America During This Era
The Era by the Numbers
Society Under Stress
Poverty, Urban and Rural
The Kennedy Assassination and Public Trust
Cuba, Vietnam, and Discontent
Racial Tensions and Struggle
1968
The National Government
The Presidency
The Executive Branch
The Congress
Leadership in the Senate
Leadership in the House
The Judiciary
Key Policies Enacted
Constitutional Amendments
Protecting the Rights of Minorities
The Civil Rights Act (1964)
Significance of these Policies
The Voting Rights Act (1965)
Significance of this Policy
Health Care Assistance for Seniors and the Indigent
Significance of these Policies
The "War on Poverty"
Food Stamps
Head Start
Significance of these Policies
Immigration Reform
Significance of this Policy
Federal Education Assistance
Significance of these Policies
Protecting the Wilderness and Environment
Significance of these Policies
The Court Weighs In
Expanded Rights of Persons Accused of Crimes
Prayer and Bible Reading in Public Schools
The Right to Privacy
Freedom of the Press
Interracial Marriages
Redistricting and Equal Representation
Notes
Chapter 8: Watergate, Distrust, and Malaise: 1969-1980
America During This Era
The Era by the Numbers
Society Under Stress
The Vietnam War
Environmental Consciousness
Oil Crisis and Economic Turmoil
The Rise of Feminism, Native American Consciousness, Hispanic and Gay Activism
The National Government
The Presidency
The Executive Branch
The Congress
Leadership in the Senate
Leadership in the House
The Judiciary
Key Policies Enacted
Guaranteeing Eighteen-year-olds the Right to Vote
The Decade of the Environment
Significance of these Policies
Educational Equality for Women
Significance of this Policy
Campaign Financing
Significance of these Policies
The Supreme Court Weighs In
The Right to Have an Abortion
Executive Privilege and Wrongdoing
Desegregation of Public Schools and Busing
Inequality in Public School Financing and the Right to Education
Affirmative Action
Policies Denied or Delayed
Universal Childcare
The Equal Rights Amendment
Abolishing the Electoral College
Full Voting Participation in Congress for District of Columbia
Notes
Part III: Polarization, Growing Inequality, and Difficult Choices
Chapter 9: Conservative Dominance: 1981-1992
America During This Era
Turmoil in the World
The Era by the Numbers
Society Under Stress
Rustbelt America
Police Brutality and Urban Unrest
AIDS Epidemic
Environmental Backlash
The National Government
The Presidency
The Executive Branch
The Congress
Leadership in the Senate
Leadership in the House
The Judiciary
Key Policies Enacted
Tax Policy and Budget Cuts
Domestic Budget Cuts
Significance of these Policies
Making Social Security Solvent
Significance of this Policy
Attempts to Balance the Budget
Significance of these Policies
Tax Reform
Significance of this Policy
Immigration Reform and Refugees
Significance of these Policies
Civil Rights for the Disabled
Significance of this Policy
Clean Air Amendments
Significance of this Policy
North American Free Trade
The Court Weighs In
Abortion Restrictions
Policies Delayed or Denied
Global Warming
Permanent Storage of Nuclear Waste
Notes
Chapter 10: Coming Into the Twenty-first Century: 1993-2000
America During This Era
The Era by the Numbers
Society Under Stress
Growing Wealth Gap
Dot.com Boom and Bust
Homegrown Militias, Terrorism, and Hate Crimes
The National Government
The Presidency
The Congress
Contract with America
Leadership in the Senate
Leadership in the House
The Judiciary
Key Polices Enacted
Key Policies Enacted
Medical Leave for Families
Significance of this Policy
Gays in the Military and Same-sex Marriages
Gays in the Military
Significance of this Policy
Same-sex Marriages
Significance of this Policy
Welfare Reform
Significance of this Policy
Banking and Investments
Significance of this Policy
The Court Weighs In
Term Limits for Members of Congress
Equal Protection and Homosexuals
Racial Gerrymandering
Florida Recount of Presidential Ballots
Policies Delayed or Denied
Universal Health Care
Public Education Goals
Presidential Line-Item Veto
Climate Change
Notes
Chapter 11: Vulnerable America: 2001-2008
America During This Era
The Era by the Numbers
Society Under Stress
9/11 and Its Aftermath
Growing Economic Inequality and the Great Recession
The Opioid Crisis
Cultural Fractures and Polarization
Corporate Collapses
Mass Shootings
Katrina and Federal, State, and Local Unpreparedness
The National Government
The Presidency
The Executive Branch
The Congress
Leadership in the Senate
Leadership in the House
The Judiciary
Key Policies Enacted
Key Policies Enacted
Reducing Taxes, Increasing the Deficit, Growing the Income Gap
Significance of these Policies
9/11 and National Security
Significance of these Policies
No Child Left Behind
Significance of this Policy
Prescription Drugs
Significance of this Policy
Securities Legislation
Significance of this Policy
Campaign Finance Reform
Significance of these Policies
Energy Policy
Significance of these Policies
Averting an Economic Meltdown
Significance of this Policy
The Court Weighs In
Affirmative Action and College Admissions
Guns and the Second Amendment
Carbon Dioxide and Global Warming
Policies Delayed or Denied
Gun Control
Environment Rollback
Immigration Reform
Notes
Chapter 12: Polarized America: 2009-2016
America During This Era
The Era by the Numbers
Society under Stress
Widening Inequality
Economic Downfall
The Continued Resurgence of Hate Groups and Racist Agitation
Gun Violence
Conservative Backlash—the Tea Party
The National Government
The Presidency
The Congress
Leadership in the Senate
Leadership in the House
The Judiciary
Key Policies Enacted
Addressing the Financial Meltdown
The Recovery Act
Significance of this Policy
Automobile Industry Rescue
Significance of this Policy
Universal Health Care
The Content of the Affordable Care Act
Significance of this Policy
Reforming Wall Street Practices
Significance of this Policy
Protecting the Environment and Conservation
Deepwater Horizon Oil Spill
Automobile Fuel Economy
"War on Coal"
The Court Weighs In
Dismantling Campaign Finance Reform
Removing Voting Rights Protections
Defense of Marriage Act and Same-sex Marriage
Policies Delayed or Denied
Immigration Reform
Climate Change
Gun Control
Overdose from Deadly Drugs
Notes
Chapter 13: Democracy Challenged: 2017-2022
America During This Era
The Era by the Numbers
Income, Wealth, and Growing Inequality
Minimum Wage, Poverty and Access to Health Care
Society Under Stress
Threats to Democratic Values and Institutions
Above All, Defying the Will of the People and Attacking the Legitimacy of Elections
Crippling the Institutions of Government
Mainstream Media as the "Enemy of the People"
Social Media, Lies, Disinformation, and Conspiracies
Defiance of Authority
Immigrants, Xenophobia, and Border Walls
Struggles of the White Working Class
State of Black Economic Progress
The Ugly Specter of Mass Shootings, Hate Crimes, Police Actions, and Racism
The Majority/Minority America, the Culture Wars, and Christian Nationalism
Coronavirus Pandemic
The Polarization of the Political Parties
The National Government
The Presidency
The Executive Branch
The Congress
Leadership in the Senate
Leadership in the House
The Judiciary
Key Policies Enacted
Tax Reform
Significance of this Policy
Financial Bailout During the Pandemic, CARES, and Stimulus
Significance of these Policies
The Court Weighs In
Presidential Assertion of Absolute Authority
Title VII and Discrimination Based on Sexual Orientation
Gerrymandering
Native American Lands
Policies Delayed or Denied
The Pandemic
Failed Repeal of Obamacare
Immigration Reform
Environment and Climate Change
Climate Change
Rebuilding the Infrastructure
Mass Shootings, Gun Restrictions
Notes
Chapter 14: The Arduous Road Ahead
Stresses On Society
Key Policies Enacted and Key Policies Denied
Battling Against the Pandemic
Fixing the Crumbling Infrastructure
Build Back Better
The Policy Challenges Facing The United States
Education
Health Care
Inequality
Election Reform
Who Can Vote?
The Integrity of the Election Systems
Campaign Financing
The Electoral College
Immigration Reform
Climate Mitigation
Assuring the Solvency of Social Security
The Federal Budget
Gun Violence
Confronting Domestic Terrorism
What Holds US Back?
The Chasm
How We Compare
The Downward Trend
The Way Ahead
Notes
Appendix A: Stresses on Society
Chronologically and By Category
Chronologically
1901-1912: The Progressive Era Begins
1913-1920: Progressive Policy: Success and Backlash
1921-1932: The Return to "Normalcy" and the Onset of the Depression
1933-1941: The New Deal
1941-1952: War, Recovery, and Readjustment
1953-1960: America at Mid-Century
1961-1968: New Frontier and Great Society
1969-1980: Watergate, Distrust, and Malaise
1981-1992: Conservative Dominance
1993-2000: Coming into the Twenty-First Century
2001-2008: Vulnerable America
2009-2016: Polarized America
2017-2020: Democracy Challenged
By Category
Financial and Economic Problems
Racial Strife, Race Relations
Poverty and Inequality
Labor Relations
Social Agitation
War and Foreign Terrorism
Natural Disasters
Health Concerns
Immigration, Nativism
Social Disruption, Hate Groups, Domestic Terrorism
Environmental Consciousness
Loss of Trust In Government, Polarization
Cultural Strains
Appendix B: Key Policies, 1900-2021
Chronologically and By Category
Chronologically
1901-1912: The Progressive Era Begins
1913-1920: Progressive Policy: Success and Backlash
1921-1932: The Return to "Normalcy" and the Onset of the Depression
1933-1941: The New Deal
1941-1952: War, Recovery, and Readjustment
1953-1960: America at Mid-Century
1961-1968: New Frontier and Great Society
1969-1980: Watergate, Distrust, and Malaise
1981-1992: Conservative Dominance
1993-2000: Coming into the Twenty-First Century
2001-2008: Vulnerable America
2009-2016: Polarized America
2017-2020: Democracy Challenged
2021: The Arduous Road Ahead
By Category
Conservation and Environmental Protection
Energy Policy
Food and Drugs Safety
Monopolies, Anti-Trust
Labor Relations, Working Conditions
Taxation, Finance, Trade, and Banking System
The Right to Vote
Campaigns and Elections
Social Welfare
Health Care
Civil Rights for All
Prohibition and Repeal
Presidential Authority
Immigration Reform
Federal Budgeting
Economic Recovery
Economic Regulation
Combatting Racial Discrimination
Housing
Protecting the Military Veteran
Education Assistance
Transportation and Infrastructure
Arts and Culture
Protection of Rights and Freedoms
National Security
Appendix C: Policies Delayed or Denied
Chronologically and By Category
Chronologically
1901-1912: The Progressive Era Begins
1913-1920: Progressive Policy: Success and Backlash
1921-1932: The Return to "Normalcy" and the Onset of the Depression
1933-1941: The New Deal
1941-1952: War, Recovery, and Readjustment
1953-1960: America at Mid-Century
1961-1968: New Frontier and Great Society
1969-1980: Watergate, Distrust, and Malaise
1981-1992: Conservative Dominance
1993-2000: Coming into the Twenty-First Century
2001-2008: Vulnerable America
2009-2016: Polarized America
2017-2020: Democracy Challenged
By Category
Workers' Rights and Contracts
Voting Rights
Social Welfare
Equal Rights
Racial Strife and Justice
War Demobilization
Combatting Economic Collapse
Health Care
Global Warming and Climate Change
Energy Policy
Presidential Power
Public Education
Gun Control
Immigration Reform
Health
Infrastructure and Transportation
Index

Citation preview

Praise for American Public Policy “Dennis Johnson has written a brilliant policy history that will withstand the test of time: sweeping in scope, honest in its findings, and an essential primer for marking gains and losses as new policies arrive and old policies seek renewal. It will be the key reference work for decades to come.” Paul C. Light, New York University “Professor Dennis Johnson has written an outstanding historical analysis of over ninety national landmark domestic policies crafted by the president and enacted by Congress and over sixty Supreme Court decisions from the beginning of the twentieth century through Biden’s first year in office. It provides a unique and definitive overview of the most significant domestic policies, how they were formulated and implemented, and whether they were successful or not. This should be required reading for anyone studying American public policy.” James A. Thurber, American University “American Public Policy is essential for political scientists, historians, and policy wonks. It has everything a student of public policy is looking for—broad coverage yet incredible detail, historical context with modern relevance, and much more. This book represents one of the most comprehensive accounts of public policy there is. It tracks policy development—including the societal circumstances that bring about policy change—as well as what the policies meant. While attention to what went right with public policy is important, the attention to policy failures sets this book apart; it fits the adage that we learn more from our failures than our successes. In short, Dennis Johnson has delivered another outstanding volume.” David Dulio, Oakland University “Dennis Johnson’s American Public Policy is a sweeping retelling of the high points—and low points—of our country’s efforts to make policies that embody the American dream. This is an engaging book that should be read by those with no familiarity with policy history and for those who thought they knew it all. Johnson reminds us that our government has often stood in its own way of achieving justice for all—the long road to real child labor laws, states denying funds to public schools trying to integrate—making the case that the American story is as messy now as it has always been.” Robin Kolodny, Temple University

American Public Policy

This is a sweeping narrative of American domestic public policy—its triumphs, struggles, and failures over the past 120 years. In a larger sense, it is a reflection on how the United States has grown and matured, faced challenges and opportunities, and how its federal leaders and policymakers have responded or failed to confront pressing problems. Moreover, American Public Policy addresses the hurdles and challenges that still lie ahead. Four critical questions are posed and answered. First, what were the most significant adversities endured by the American people? Second, what were the landmark domestic policies crafted by the president, enacted by Congress, or issued in Supreme Court decisions? Third, what did they fail to do? Finally, how well have federal policymakers met the key challenges facing America: income inequality, racism, financial crises, terrorist attacks, climate change, gun violence, and other pressures? And what do we still need to do? This book reaches out to students of public policy, American government, US history, and contemporary affairs, as well as to citizens, journalists, and policy practitioners. Dennis W. Johnson is Professor Emeritus and former Associate Dean at the Graduate School of Political Management, George Washington University. Among his many books is a com­ panion study on public policy history, The Laws that Shaped America (Routledge, 2009).

American Public Policy

Federal Domestic Policy Achievements and Failures, 1901 to 2022

Dennis W. Johnson

Cover image: Bill Chizek/Getty Images First published 2023 by Routledge 605 Third Avenue, New York, NY 10158 and by Routledge 4 Park Square, Milton Park, Abingdon, Oxon, OX14 4RN Routledge is an imprint of the Taylor & Francis Group, an informa business © 2023 Dennis W. Johnson The right of Dennis W. Johnson to be identified as author of this work has been asserted in accordance with sections 77 and 78 of the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988. All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reprinted or reproduced or utilised in any form or by any electronic, mechanical, or other means, now known or hereafter invented, including photocopying and recording, or in any information storage or retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publishers. Trademark notice: Product or corporate names may be trademarks or registered trademarks, and are used only for identification and explanation without intent to infringe. Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Names: Johnson, Dennis W., author. Title: American public policy / Dennis W. Johnson. Description: Federal domestic policy achievements and. | New York, NY : Routledge, 2022. | Includes bibliographical references and index. | Identifiers: LCCN 2022003560 (print) | LCCN 2022003561 (ebook) | ISBN 9781032276144 (hardback) | ISBN 9781032276137 (paperback) | ISBN 9781003293538 (ebook) Subjects: LCSH: United States‐‐Politics and government‐‐20th century. | United States‐‐Politics and government‐‐1989Classification: LCC JK271 .J614 2022 (print) | LCC JK271 (ebook) | DDC 320.973‐‐dc23/eng/ 20220516 LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2022003560 LC ebook record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2022003561 ISBN: 978-1-032-27614-4 (hbk) ISBN: 978-1-032-27613-7 (pbk) ISBN: 978-1-003-29353-8 (ebk) DOI: 10.4324/9781003293538 Typeset in Goudy by MPS Limited, Dehradun

For Pat, with all my love.

Contents

About the Author Photos Acknowledgments Introduction

xi xii xiv 1

PART I

The Early Years of the Twentieth Century

9

1 The Progressive Era Begins: 1901–1912

11

2 Success and Backlash of Progressive Policy: 1913–1920

39

3 The Return to “Normalcy” and the Onset of the Depression: 1921–1932

68

4 The New Deal: 1933–1941

99

PART II

The War Years, Post-War and Modern America

139

5 War, Recovery, and Readjustment: 1941–1952

141

6 America at Midcentury: 1953–1960

178

7 The New Frontier and Great Society: 1961–1968

209

8 Watergate, Distrust, and Malaise: 1969–1980

252

PART III

Polarization, Growing Inequality, and Difficult Choices 9 Conservative Dominance: 1981–1992 10 Coming Into the Twenty-first Century: 1993–2000

285 287 320

x Contents

11 Vulnerable America: 2001–2008

349

12 Polarized America: 2009–2016

388

13 Democracy Challenged: 2017–2022

424

14 The Arduous Road Ahead

465

Appendix A: Stresses on Society Appendix B: Key Policies, 1900–2021 Appendix C: Policies Delayed or Denied Index

492 497 506 510

About the Author

Dennis W. Johnson is Professor Emeritus, Graduate School of Political Management, George Washington University. He has written six books (with several second and third editions) and edited four others. Most relevant to this current book is The Laws That Shaped America (Routledge, 2009), which focused on fifteen laws—from the Northwest Ordinance (1789) to the Voting Rights Act (1965) and the National Environmental Policy Act (1970)—which were foundational in the shaping of American life. Over the course of thirty-five years of teaching, writing, and research, Johnson has focused on American government and domestic public policy. Author photo: © JoAnne Capecelatro He has been the Director of the Masters in Legislative Affairs program and Associate Dean of the Graduate School of Political Management at GWU. Throughout the years, he has taught both graduate and undergraduate courses on public policy, executive–legislative relations, federal budget-making policy, energy and environmental policy, the presidency, and American national government.

Photos

1.1 1.2 2.1 2.2 2.3 2.4 3.1 3.2 3.3 4.1 4.2 4.3 4.4 5.1 5.2 5.3 6.1 6.2 6.3 7.1 7.2 7.3 7.4 8.1 8.2 9.1 9.2 9.3 10.1 10.2 10.3 11.1 11.2 11.3 12.1 12.2

Joseph G. Cannon Albert J. Beveridge Wayne B. Wheeler Carrie Chapman Catt Ida B. Wells Leonidas C. Dyer Ku Klux Klan march in Washington, DC Robert M. LaFollette George W. Norris and Fiorello H. La Guardia Francis E. Townsend Robert F. Wagner Frances C. Perkins Walter F. White Robert A. Taft, Sr. Patrick A. McCarran A. Philip Randolph William J. Brennan Earl Warren Richard B. Russell, Jr. Fannie Lou Hamer Barry Goldwater Hubert H. Humphrey, Jr. Birch E. Bayh, Jr. Ralph Nader Patsy M.T. Mink Thomas P. (Tip) O’Neill W. Philip (Phil) Gramm James E. Hansen Newt Gingrich Ruth Bader Ginsburg Robert J. (Bob) Dole John G. Roberts, Jr. Edward M. (Ted) Kennedy John S. McCain, III A. Mitch McConnell, Jr. Nancy P. Pelosi

19 29 53 55 58 60 74 77 87 105 122 124 129 152 160 162 188 191 194 215 216 217 220 265 269 294 303 312 327 330 336 361 366 370 394 396

Photos xiii

12.3 13.1 13.2 14.1

Sonia M. Sotomayor Christopher C. Krebs Anthony S. Fauci John R. Lewis

397 428 438 475

Acknowledgments

I would like to thank once again my colleagues at the Graduate School of Political Management, George Washington University, for their encouragement, support, and interest in the history of American domestic policy. I especially thank Lara Brown, Todd Belt, Casey Burgat, Michael Cornfield, Matt Dallek, Steve Billet, and our former dean, Chris Arterton. Many thanks also to the several anonymous readers who gave me both excellent suggestions and comments, as well as encouragement in pursuing this expansive topic. Several earlier studies have examined the most important legislative achievements throughout American history. Each year since 1945, the Congressional Quarterly Almanac and the yearly wrap-up in the Congressional Quarterly Weekly examine the most important legislative accomplishments of the year. Social scientist Paul C. Light identified fifty categories of the greatest legislative achievements from World War II to the beginning of the twenty-first century. Political scientist David R. Mayhew selected more than 300 pieces of legislation enacted between 1946 and 2002. Congressional scholar Stephen W. Stathis drew up a comprehensive list of more than 1,200 pieces of landmark legislation, looking at each of the two-year congressional sessions. An encyclopedia of major congressional legislation, 262 enactments in all, was prepared under the editorship of Brian K. Landsberg. The National Archives and Records Administration in recent years has published the one hundred most significant laws, treaties, speeches, and other writings in American history. Historian Ballard C. Campbell has chronicled the growth of American federal government since the 1890s. Political scientists Joshua D. Clinton and John S. Lapinski examined legislative achievement during the course of this time, and finally, in an earlier work, I have focused on fifteen pieces of landmark legislation from colonial times to the end of the Bush II years.1 Of course, hundreds—perhaps thousands—of historical studies, biographies and autobiographies, and documents previously have tackled in greater detail the unfolding of American public policy during this time. I am indebted to the many scholars who have come before me. My special thanks to Routledge senior editor Jennifer Knerr, editorial assistant Jacqueline Dorsey, production editor Sarahjayne Smith, and copy editor Sarah Webb. And, as always, special thanks to my wife Pat for putting up with the late nights and missed weekends, and for reading the entire manuscript, offering many helpful suggestions and incisive comments, improving my work immeasurably. Dennis W. Johnson Denver, Colorado

Acknowledgments

xv

Note 1 Congressional Quarterly Almanac Online Edition, https://library.cqpress.com/cqalmanac/; Paul C. Light, Government’s Greatest Achievements: From Civil Rights to Homeland Defense (Washington, DC: Brookings Institution, 2002); David R. Mayhew, Divided We Govern: Party Control, Lawmaking, and Investigations, 1946–2002, 2nd. ed. (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2005); Stephen W. Stathis, Landmark Legislation 1774–2012: Major U.S. Acts and Treaties, 2nd ed. (Washington, DC: CQ Press, 2014); Brian K. Landsberg, ed. in chief, Major Acts of Congress, 3 vols. (New York: Macmillan Reference, 2004); Ballard C. Campbell, The Growth of American Government: Governance from the Cleveland Administration to the Present (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2015); Joshua D. Clinton and John S. Lapinski, “Measuring Legislative Achievement, 1877–1994,” American Journal of Political Science 50 (1) (January 2006): 232–49; Dennis W. Johnson, The Laws That Shaped America: Fifteen Acts of Congress and Their Lasting Impact (New York: Routledge, 2009). See also, Indiana University Center on Congress, “Notable Members of Congress and the Laws They Sponsored,” Indiana University website, http://congress. indiana.edu/learn_about/notable_members/notable_main.htm.

Introduction

THIS IS A SWEEPING NARRATIVE OF AMERICAN DOMESTIC PUBLIC POLICY—its triumphs, struggles, and failures, over the past 120 years. In a larger sense, it is a reflection on how the United States has grown and matured, faced challenges and opportunities, and how its federal leaders and policymakers have responded or failed to address pressing problems. With the end of the Trump era, for all its turmoil and dysfunction, and the beginning of the Biden administration, it is all the more important to examine what policymakers have done, what they have not accomplished, and critically, what still lies ahead. This work takes a long view of history, from the beginning of the twentieth century to the present, from 1901 to 2021, and divides this time into thirteen eras. These eras fairly closely parallel the beginning and end of presidential administrations and defined policy eras. Further, this study concentrates on domestic, rather than international, policy: on problems at home rather than the broader ramifications overseas; and it focuses on national, rather than state or subnational, policy. This study embraces a fundamental premise: that representative government, at its best, can be a positive force in addressing society’s needs. National policymakers can respond to crises and to long-standing problems with resources and programs that mitigate or even resolve the stresses and fissures in society. But over the years, that premise has been debated, contested, and fought against. In his inaugural address in 1981, Ronald Reagan declared, “Government is not a solution to our problem; government is the problem.” Many nodded in agreement; problems were ignored, federal programs and resources were choked off. Forty years later, in March 2021, Joe Biden lamented that “We lost faith in whether our government and our democracy can deliver on really hard things for the American people.”1 With broad strokes we will survey American policies, the landmark and consequential, and the failures. I pose and attempt to answer three fundamental questions. First, during each of these thirteen eras, what were the most significant adversities endured by the American people? I refer to these as the “stresses on society.” Second, during this same period of time, what were the most important domestic policies crafted by the president, enacted by Congress, or issued in Supreme Court decisions? Third, during these eras, what did federal policymakers fail to do? That is, what did policymakers almost achieve, but in the end were stymied by a determined minority of legislators, the veto pen of a president, by the Supreme Court, or by the failure of states to ratify a constitutional amendment? Then there is the final, overarching fourth question: how well have federal policymakers met the challenges, the stresses on society, during these eras? For example, how did they deal with income inequality, racism, financial crises, terrorist attacks, climate change, gun violence, and other adversities? Did they quickly meet the challenges, address the problems only decades afterward, or not deal with them at all? In simple terms, how well have we done and what do we still need to do? DOI: 10.4324/9781003293538-1

2 Introduction

Before going any further, let’s address several key questions. What are the societal stresses found in this study? Some of the stresses have been long-lasting and recurrent (such as poverty and inequality); others have been unique (organized crime and union corruption in the 1950s). Many of the stresses arose from financial or economic uncertainties (the bank panic of 1907, the financial hardships in agriculture during the 1920s, the Great Depression of the 1930s, the oil crisis and economic turmoil of the 1970s, the financial meltdown of 2007–2008, and the economic challenges associated with the COVID pandemic of 2020–2021). Another category of stress, and one that occurs repeatedly throughout this history, is racial strife and injustice (from the indignities and terror of the Jim Crow era, the blatant racial and commonplace discrimination throughout the early to mid-twentieth century, to the resistance to federal relief in the 1960s, to the recurrent racial tensions today). Some of the stresses have resulted from natural disasters (Mississippi River flooding of 1927 or Hurricane Katrina in 2005) or health concerns (the influenza pandemic of 1919–1920, the AIDS crisis of the 1980s, the opioid crisis of the 2000s, and the COVID pandemic of 2020–2021). Through a close reading of American history, I have identified fifty-six societal stresses. A complete list of stresses on society is found in Appendix A. What is federal domestic public policy and what is a landmark policy? Federal domestic public policy means the decisions (or non-decisions) made by the national government, through laws enacted, administrative regulations, executive decisions, programs established, and court decisions.2 A landmark policy is one of great significance, having an immediate or lasting impact on American life and society. Most of the landmark domestic policies found in this study were generated through laws enacted by Congress, often at the urging of the president, but sometimes in opposition to executive branch wishes. Domestic policy also came from actions taken unilaterally by the president, through executive orders and other pronouncements. Moreover, landmark decisions handed down by the Supreme Court have affected public policy by giving definitive interpretations of laws and the Constitution. Some of the policies reflect a growing complexity of the federal government and its institution, such as the enactment of the federal income tax or the creation of the Federal Reserve System. Many of the laws and public policies focus on the growing exigencies of the national economy: federal aid to farmers and ranchers, creation of the Interstate highway system, and laws and regulations affecting the financial and banking systems. A number of major policies have affected health and well-being, such as Social Security and its 1965 amendments, Medicare/Medicaid; the Americans with Disabilities Act; and the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act (Obamacare). Some of the policies have impacted the essential democratic values of the country, such as the Nineteenth Amendment guaranteeing women the right to vote, the Civil Rights and Voting Rights Acts of the mid-1960s, and, in a much different direction, the Supreme Court decisions opening the way for unlimited campaign spending in federal elections. Several pieces of landmark legislation have protected the environment, such as the raft of legislation enacted during the 1970s, while other policies have been thwarted, such as the failure to enact comprehensive climate change legislation or President Trump’s systematic attempts to dismantle environmental protections through regulations and executive orders. This study also focuses on the influence of business, corporations, labor organizations, the press, citizen groups, public opinion, individuals, and the personalities and opinions of policymakers. We will look at the rise of the corporate lobbyists and influence peddlers in Washington, and advocacy organizations. In many ways outside influences were instrumental in promoting, or more commonly in defeating, legislation and policy decisions. Early twentieth-century investigative journalists, the so-called muckrakers, pointed out the corruption, venality, and collusion of US senators, and helped push for the Seventeenth

Introduction 3

Amendment, to assure their popular election, rather than their selection through state legislatures. For well over fifty years, women pushed for the right to vote, making theirs probably the longest sustained lobbying campaign, culminating in the Nineteenth Amendment. The AntiSaloon League and the Women’s Christian Temperance Union used their political clout to pressure Congress and the nation to enact the prohibition of alcohol sales. A wide variety of big business concerns and the National Association of Manufacturers were vocal critics of many New Deal policies, including the Wagner Act giving workers the right to form unions and the most significant and far-reaching domestic policy, Social Security. The American Legion almost single-handedly wrote the legislation that would become the GI Bill; and the American Medical Association waged a furious campaign against President Truman’s proposed national health legislation and against Medicare two decades later. More recently, pharmaceutical companies went all-in to push for Part D of Medicare, providing drugs for seniors and assuring healthy profits for themselves. External circumstances led to some of the policies studied here: World War I brought on restrictions on free speech and ushered in the Red Scare. Over the decades, immigration policy had restricted those who could be admitted—from the outright ban on Chinese labor in the latter part of the nineteenth century, the imposition of quotas following World War I, restrictive legislation during the Cold War, to the Trump administration attempts to curtail the admission of Muslims and build a border wall with Mexico. The 9/11 terrorist attacks were the catalyst for a whole new level of domestic laws to protect Americans and to give law enforcement and security forces added powers. Altogether, this study examines over ninety landmark federal laws and executive actions and over sixty Supreme Court decisions from the beginning of the twentieth century until the end of 2020. These landmark policies are listed and categorized in Appendix B. What were the policies that were denied or delayed? One of the important features of this study is the recognition of what policymakers have failed to do. These are the policies that were on the national agenda, but in the end were denied or delayed. I have identified forty-two major policy failures spanning this 120-year period. The number is somewhat inflated because several of the policy failures were repeated over and over again during successive eras. We, of course, have to be careful not to read history backwards, assuming that what seems obvious and beneficial in today’s world and our value system should have been apparent to policymakers decades ago. Rather, the policies highlighted here were delayed or denied in each of the eras studied; they had been argued for, fought over, and spent much time in the public arena. For one reason or another, however, the public outcry or the legislative support was not enough to overcome the opposition. Why, for example, did it take so long to give women the right to vote? How and why was the outrage over African American lynchings successfully muffled by a determined bloc of southern lawmakers in the 1910s, 1920s, 1930s, and even the 1940s? Why was it such a struggle to get child labor legislation passed in the 1910s and 1920s and why was it negated by the Supreme Court and rebuffed by the states and not ultimately achieved until the late 1930s? And looking at recent times, why have some of the twenty-firstcentury sessions of Congress been so polarized and unproductive? The failure to enact important changes in immigration policy has plagued federal policymakers during the 2000s, 2010s, and today. The same could be said about tackling climate change, with still-born or half-hearted policies obstructed during the 1990s and throughout the first two decades of the twenty-first century. What caused these delays and denials? Very often policies failed because of concerted opposition from organizations, groups, and interests. For example, attempts to enact anti-lynching laws failed throughout the early decades of the twentieth century because of raw and vigorous opposition from southern lawmakers. The same could be said for other attempts toward racial

4 Introduction

justice before mid-century: stopped cold, or not even placed on the agenda, because of the inevitable and intractable opposition they would face. The opposition from southern lawmakers reflected the stark social reality: the majority of white southerners would not tolerate reform or change in the entrenched racial hierarchy. Such reforms ultimately had to come from the Supreme Court beginning in the 1940s and executive orders from President Truman. Child labor laws were enacted by Congress, but were blunted by the Supreme Court, then by concerted opposition from industries that relied on child labor, such as textile mills, and then rejected by state legislatures when posed as a constitutional amendment. Ultimately, child labor found protection, but the fight had to be waged over many decades. In recent times, climate change mitigation policies have been blocked by pressure (and money) from fossil fuel industries, the think tanks and advocacy groups they have funded, and their allies in Congress, denying that there is a problem, denying that climate change comes from human activity, refusing to accept overwhelming scientific evidence, and using the oldfashioned tactics of foot-dragging, obfuscation, and delay. In all, American international leadership in climate change and environmental progress has been seriously damaged. Solutions to the multi-layered issues of immigration policy have been crippled by ideological gridlock, the stirring up of partisan fears, racial and ethnic discrimination, and the appeals to simplistic build-the-wall solutions. We are left with young DACA immigrants in legal limbo, parentless children wrapped in Mylar blankets in detention cages, and more than ten million undocumented persons waiting for ICE officials to knock on the door. This same holds with even greater force with any attempts to regulate guns, ammunition, and access to firearms. Despite strong majorities of public opinion in favor of some gun restrictions, lawmakers have been hobbled by the stridency of the gun lobby, the visceral opposition from constituent groups, and their defenders in Congress. We now see automatic weapons, slung over the shoulders of “patriots” as they patrol public events, roam the corridors of statehouses, bars, restaurants, even churches. The deaths of twenty elementary school children and six adults in Newtown, the slaughter of fifty-eight outdoor concertgoers in Las Vegas, the mass murder of fifty at a nightclub in Orlando, or countless other deadly shootings are met with outrage, cries for action, thoughts and prayers, and but no effective federal protection. Appendix C lists and categorizes those forty-two policies that were delayed or denied. We return to the original question: how well have federal policymakers met the challenges of our times? In some ways, federal policies have been remarkably adept at addressing problems; usually, however, it has taken session after session in Congress, sometimes decades, to resolve (or even address) the problem; in other cases, lawmakers have utterly failed. Some of the stresses have been immediate and profound (9/11 terrorist attacks; the 2008 financial meltdown); other stresses crept up on us (the loss of industrial jobs and the Rustbelt economy, growing inequality and decline of the middle class). At times, policymakers have faced the long-term crises head on (the Johnson administration’s “War on Poverty”), but more often than not, such stresses have been ignored (global warming and climate change). Some landmark federal policies were developed at just the right moment. The GI Bill of 1944, for example, was enacted at least a year before the cessation of fighting during World War II and provided returning White veterans with much-needed education, housing, and job training opportunities. Spurred on by sensational and gruesome journalistic accounts of the health and safety conditions in meatpacking plants, the Meat Inspection Act of 1906 was quickly enacted. Other federal policies had agonizingly long gestation periods. National health care, first espoused in the early 1940s by lawmakers and then championed by Harry Truman in 1949, faltered in the 1990s, finally becoming law with the Affordable Care Act (ACA) of 2010. But probably more than any other landmark policy, it has been subjected to continual attack after

Introduction 5

its passage. There have been at least seventy Republican attempts to scuttle or modify the law; and the ACA has been challenged many times in federal court and three times in the Supreme Court. Still, it survives. For nearly a hundred years, the Fifteenth Amendment, guaranteeing former male slaves the right to vote, had been ignored, and the rights of black Americans to vote had been stripped away throughout the South. Not until 1965, through the Voting Rights Act, was the fundamental right to vote secured for black and later Hispanic citizens. The law was renewed every five years, but then in a sweeping Supreme Court decision, it was determined that past discrimination was, in a word, a thing of the past. Soon, however, Republican-dominated state legislatures began using whatever tools they could find—gerrymandering, voter identification, voter suppression—to dampen minority voting. With equal foot-dragging, it was not until 1964 that the first major civil rights act was signed into law. Progress in addressing racial injustices was halting, full of violence and defiance, adamantly opposed by southern lawmakers and their white constituents. Racial injustices, perhaps not as severe in other parts of the country, were nonetheless pervasive and only halfheartedly alleviated. Much of the progress in racial justice, during the 1940s and up until the 1960s, relied on federal courts and their limited ability to right widespread wrongs. Some of the most successful policy decisions have come in the field of environmental protection during the heady days of the 1970s. Environmentalism was on everyone’s mind; it was a new, exciting field of policymaking, and lawmakers were clamoring for attention, eager to display their environmental chops. But then came the pushback during the Reagan administration and setbacks in many arenas of environmental protection, culminating in the Trump administration’s persistent use of executive orders and regulatory decoupling to weakened environmental protections. Several of the landmark policies were rushed through Congress, with cursory, if any, committee hearings, with the ink barely dry on the legislative proposal, with no time for lawmakers to deliberate or to think through the consequences. The Emergency Banking Act of 1933, the Patriot Act of 2001, the Troubled Assets Relief Program (TARP) of 2008, and the Coronavirus Aid, Relief, and Economic Security (CARES) Act of 2020 all come to mind. Just in the past few years, we have seen extraordinary amounts of federal money spent to boost the economy during periods of enormous stress. During the Great Recession of 2007–2008, TARP ($700 billion) was enacted in late 2008, then came the American Recovery and Reinvestment (Recovery) Act of 2009 ($831 billion). During the COVID pandemic came the CARES Act of 2020 ($2.2 trillion), the COVID relief act ($900 billion) in late 2020, along with a third relief measure ($1.9 trillion) during the early months of the Biden administration in 2021. We also have seen the Federal Reserve making significant fiscal and monetary adjustments during these two crises to soften the economic blows. Sometimes the policymaking has not been pretty, with last-minute deals, hundreds of amendments meant to kill or water down legislation, and filibusters by determined opponents. Opponents to the Civil Rights Act of 1964 introduced amendment after amendment to weaken the legislation, followed by a marathon filibuster by a platoon of eighteen southern senators lasting seventy-five days. In 2003, there were parliamentary shenanigans in the House, with Republican leadership holding the final vote (which is supposed to be decided within fifteen minutes) open for hours so that reluctant lawmakers at 4:00 in the morning would be cajoled into accepting a $400 billion-plus Medicare Part D drug plan backed by Big Pharma and the Bush II administration. The Affordable Care Act of 2010 squeezed by thanks to parliamentary legerdemain and the sheer will of the House and Senate Democratic leadership. There have been moments of high drama: Senator Claire Engle of California, just weeks away from his death, was carried into the Senate to provide a critical filibuster-breaking vote

6 Introduction

during the drama over the 1964 Civil Rights Act; a frail, ninety-two-year-old Senator Robert Byrd of West Virginia, who had missed over 40 percent of his votes that year because of illness, nevertheless was wheeled into the Senate on an icy Christmas Eve in 2009 to provide the critical vote on Obamacare. (Ironically, a young Senator Byrd in 1964 had just completed his fourteen-hour speech against the Civil Rights bill; it was followed by the vote, including Engle’s, that broke the filibuster). All eyes were on Senator John McCain of Arizona as he provided the decisive vote on a Republican attempt to repeal Obamacare, going against President Trump, Mitch McConnell, and his own party, with a thumbs down vote at 1:30 in the morning in July 2017. For many key decisions, we have to turn to the Supreme Court, rather than to Congress or the president. The Supreme Court has addressed some of the most sensitive questions which lawmakers were incapable of resolving: striking down segregation in public schools, establishing the right of same-sex couples to marry, or determining that the Second Amendment protects the individual’s right to own firearms. As the new decade of the 2020 s unfolds, fundamental challenges loom: overcoming the COVID crisis and recovering from the economic damage; tackling the growing problems of climate change; crafting a workable and just immigration policy; addressing growing inequality, with the side problems of opioid addiction; ensuring health care for the wide swath of citizens who fall through the cracks; and defending the basic norms of democratic participation. On the horizon are the enormous challenges brought about by increased and persistent federal deficits and unprecedented borrowing to bail the country out of the COVID crisis. Just as critical are the ticking financial timebombs of Social Security and Medicare/Medicaid funding and solvency. All of these major policy issues have their fervent advocates and fierce opponents, with a deeply divided and polarized country, and the inability of lawmakers to cooperate. Even seemingly non-partisan issues like major infrastructure projects have been mired in political turmoil. ALTOGETHER, THIS 120-YEAR HISTORY IS DIVIDED INTO THIRTEEN ERAS WITH A CONCLUDING LOOK AHEAD. Each chapter begins with a short historical and political narrative on America during the decade, the challenges and stresses of everyday society, and the presidency, Congress, and the Supreme Court. The major portion of each chapter analyzes key domestic policy decisions. Most typically, these will be the laws enacted by Congress, but they will also include key Supreme Court decisions, and executive actions made by the president. The final section will focus on policies delayed or denied: the issues that were openly discussed, debated, and fought for, but were ultimately thwarted by the courts, the legislative branch or the executive branch. Part 1 of this book focuses on the early years of the twentieth century. Chapter 1 takes us from 1901–1912, through the Theodore Roosevelt and William Howard Taft administrations, examining the major domestic policy enactments during this period. Chapter 2 examines the Woodrow Wilson administration and the successes and the backlash against the Progressive Era, from 1913–1920. Chapter 3 looks at the return to “normalcy,” conservative policymaking, and the onset of the Great Depression, from 1921–1932. Chapter 4 focuses on the Depression years, the Franklin Roosevelt years, and the New Deal from 1933–1941. Part 2 of this study concentrates on war time, post-war and modern America, from 1941 through 1980. Chapter 5 focuses on World War II, the recovery and readjustment in American life, 1941–1952. Chapter 6 centers on America at mid-century, 1953–1960. Then Chapter 7 examines John Kennedy’s New Frontier and the extraordinary burst of public policy emanating from Lyndon Johnson’s Great Society programs, from 1961–1968. Chapter 8 considers the period 1969–1980, with the Richard Nixon, Gerald Ford, and Jimmy Carter administrations, with the Watergate scandal, growing distrust of government, and domestic malaise.

Introduction 7

Part 3 of this work—polarization, growing inequality, and difficult choices—takes us from 1981 to the present. Chapter 9, covering 1981–1992, focuses on the Ronald Reagan and George H.W. Bush years and conservative dominance. Chapter 10, coming into the twentyfirst century, centers on the Bill Clinton administration and the resurgence of Republican power in the Congress. Chapter 11, from 2001–2008, labeled Vulnerable America, focuses on the impact of the 9/11 attacks and the increasing divisions in American society. Chapter 12, covering 2009–2016, focuses on the policy successes of the Obama administration during its first two years, and the gridlock and polarization that followed. Chapter 13 covers 2017 through 2022 and examines the turmoil of the Trump presidency, a dysfunctional Congress, the Roberts court, and a deeply polarized public. The concluding Chapter 14 looks at the beginning of the Biden administration, its accomplishments during the first eighteen months and the challenges that lie ahead for the executive branch, Congress, and the courts. We also measure where the United States stands in its domestic policy choices in comparison with other industrialized nations. Students, scholars, and citizens concerned with the politics, public policy, and history of the United States will find much to consider going forward.

Notes 1 Reagan and Biden quoted in Mimi Abramovitz, “Government is the Solution, Not the Problem,” New York Times, March 21, 2021. 2 For example, Christopher M. Weible, “Introduction,” in Paul A. Sabatier and Christopher M. Weible, Theories of the Policy Process, 3rd ed. (Boulder: Westview Press, 2014), 4; Thomas A. Birkland, An Introduction to the Policy Process, 3rd ed. (Armonk, NY: M.E. Sharpe, 2010), 9.

Part 1

The Early Years of the Twentieth Century

Chapter 1

The Progressive Era Begins: 1901–1912

The problem of the twentieth century is the problem of the color-line. (W.E.B. Du Bois, 1903)1 It would not stretch matters to say that the Pure Food and Drug Act of 1906 … stands as the most consequential regulatory statute in the history of the United States. (Daniel P. Carpenter, 2004)2

AMERICA AT THE BEGINNING OF THE TWENTIETH CENTURY It was the turn of the century, a time for a new beginning, renewed optimism, and hope for a better America. The Washington Post editorialized on January 1, 1901, that during the past one hundred years, the world had made “remarkable advances” that have “gone far beyond the wildest dreams”: “In everything that contributes to human comfort, happiness, luxury, and convenience, we have progressed to an extent that would not have been imaginable a century ago. We have sanitation, surgery, drainage, plumbing—every product of science and accessory of luxury.”3

The Era by the Numbers The population of the United States (states and territories) in 1900 was 76.1 million, a 21 percent growth over the population in 1890. The continental United States was nearly filled out, and by 1900, there were forty-five states. In 1907, the forty-sixth state, Oklahoma, was admitted to the Union; in 1912, New Mexico and Arizona were added. Three regions of the country—Northeast (21 million), North Central (26.3 million), and South (24.5 million)—were the most populous; the West had just 4.1 million residents. The South, still suffering from the aftermath of the Civil War and Reconstruction, was the “American anomaly: a poor, agricultural region in the midst of an urbanizing industrial nation.”4 Between 1900 and 1915, some 15 million immigrants entered the United States; most were from Europe, but unlike earlier immigrants, the majority of these newly arrived did not speak English as their native tongue.5 New York City was by far the largest city, with 3.4 million inhabitants; Chicago was second (1.7 million); Philadelphia was third (1.3 million); and St. Louis was fourth (575,000).6 New York was truly the city of immigrants: one estimate found that three-quarters of New Yorkers were either recent immigrants or first-generation Americans. Many immigrants—men and women alike—sought work and homes in the bustling industrial cities, encountering crowded tenements, poor, even dangerous, working conditions and great economic disparity. Immigration was not simply a northeastern, urban phenomenon. In 1900, the largest percentages of foreign born, more than 50 percent, were found in North Dakota and Minnesota, DOI: 10.4324/9781003293538-3

12

The Early Years of the Twentieth Century

drawing immigrant farmers from Germany, Norway, Sweden, and the Netherlands. Lumber mills and mining in the Upper Mississippi Valley drew immigrants from Sweden, Poland, Finland, and Italy; mill towns throughout New England, New Jersey and New York drew immigrants from Greece, Hungary, French Canada, and British Cornwall.7 A 1905 Census of Manufactures, conducted by the US Census Bureau, found that the average weekly earnings for all workers in the manufacturing sector were $10.06 ($297 in 2020 dollars), with men earning $11.16 ($330), women $6.17 ($182), and children $3.46 ($102). Women made up 17.9 percent of the manufacturing work force, while children counted for 2.7 percent. Still, the vast majority of workers were laboring for ten to twelve hours a day, often six days a week.8 In 1900, Olds Motor Works became the first American automobile manufacturer to mass produce gasoline-powered cars; the following year, the company introduced the Oldsmobile, selling 600 during its first year of operation. In 1903, Henry Ford founded the Ford Motor Company, and the first Model A car was delivered on July 23 of that year. By 1910, Ford had introduced the assembly line, which reduced the chassis assembly time for its second model, the Model T, from 12.5 hours to 1.5 hours.9 In 1903, there were 32,920 private automobiles registered with state transportation bureaus; by 1912, that number had mushroomed to 901,596.10 Another major milestone during this era was the first air flight achieved by the Wright brothers in Kitty Hawk, North Carolina, in 1903. In 1906 the inventor Lee De Forest, building on the pioneering work of Nikola Tesla, Guglielmo Marconi, and others, developed a system for wireless communication; De Forest called it the “radio.”11 Electricity found its first widespread commercial application beyond the light bulb: the electric toaster was perfected by Albert L. Marsh, an Illinois inventor, who created the durable heating element. The revolution in plastics came with the invention of Bakelite in 1907 by the Belgian chemist Leo Baekeland. In 1902, Willis Carrier installed the first commercial air conditioning system in the Sackett-Wilhelms Lithography and Publishing Company building in New York City.12 By the first years of the twentieth century, the United States “could boast of having the largest, most innovative, most productive economy in the industrialized world.”13 One-third of the world’s good were manufactured in the United States. It was also ushering in the era of big corporate America. In January 1901, negotiations were completed for the creation of the United States Steel Corporation. The new corporation was capitalized with $1.4 billion, the largest business enterprise to that time ever launched, and became America’s first billion-dollar corporation. During its first year, US Steel produced 67 percent of all steel made in America.14

Society Under Stress Exposing Corruption and Greed Roosevelt labeled them “muckrakers”—reform-minded investigative journalists who took on the powerful and corrupt, and brought to the public’s attention the victims of abuse. During this time, muckraking journalism flourished. David Graham Phillips exposed and sensationalized the corrupt practices in the US Senate, helping to generate public demands for popular election and the Seventeenth Amendment. Ida Tarbell focused on the excesses of the Standard Oil Company, and her exposé helped lead to the breakup of the corporation. Ray Stannard Baker reported on the deplorable conditions of coal mines and striking workers; Lincoln Steffens wrote about corruption of big city politics; and Jacob Riis wrote about slum conditions in big cities. The investigative journalism of Samuel Hopkins Adams (on patent medicine), Upton Sinclair (on the meatpacking industry), and John Spargo (on child labor) helped spur

The Progressive Era Begins: 1901–1912 13

public awareness and reform legislation.15 Much of the investigative work first appeared in McClures, Cosmopolitan, The American Magazine, and other popular magazines. Bank Panic of 1907 Between 1814 and 1914, the United States experienced thirteen banking crises. The Banking Panic of 1907 was one of the worst, and except for the Great Depression, was the most damaging in the twentieth century. In addition, this was the first worldwide financial crisis of the twentieth century.16 The calamity was different from earlier ones: it was caused by New York City trust companies, state-chartered intermediaries that competed with banks for deposits. Trust companies required a mere 5 percent reserve (compared with a 25 percent reserve requirement for national banks). This made trust companies which had extended credit to their limit especially vulnerable to sudden demands from depositors. Such was the case for three weeks in October 1907. Augustus Heinze, a native New Yorker who had made a fortune in western mining, returned to New York and with his stockbroker brother Otto tried, but failed, to corner the market on the stock of United Copper Company. This led to a run on the banks associated with the speculators, starting with a Heinze-owned bank in Butte, Montana. Eventually the run spread to Knickerbocker Trust, the third largest trust company in New York, and the panic among depositors spread. Interest rates soared and regional banks withdrew their reserves from New York banks. The financial crisis was stanched partly by banker J.P. Morgan who put in his own money and convinced other New York bankers to do the same. This was Morgan’s second time bailing out the financial industry: in 1895 he saved the federal treasury by organizing Wall Street financiers to back federal debt. The Panic of 1907 exposed the regulatory weakness of banks. It was evident that there had to be a federal solution to assure that banks had short-term liquidity. The answer came six years later when Congress passed the Owen-Carter Act (Federal Reserve Act) in 1913, establishing the Federal Reserve System. The Panic of 1907 had echoes in the financial crisis of 2007–2009: both of the crises started with New York financial institutions, and both heavily impacted the US economy and the economy of the world.17 Supremacy of Jim Crow By the end of the first decade of the twentieth century, southern state governments had accomplished what they began in 1890, the wholesale and systematic disenfranchisement of African American voters. Following the Mississippi Plan of 1890, the White power structure in the South passed laws, manipulated state constitutions, and reconfigured state procedures in order to evade the requirements of the Fifteenth Amendment. When Virginia adopted a new constitution in 1901–1902, future US senator Carter Glass acknowledged that discrimination against blacks was its purpose: That, exactly, is what this Convention was elected for—to discriminate to the very extremity of permissible action under the limitations of the Federal Constitution, with a view to the elimination of every Negro voter who can be gotten rid of, legally, without materially impairing the numerical strength of the White electorate.18 In 1911, Baltimore became the first city in the United States to enact a law aimed at segregating Black and White citizens. In an ordinance for “preserving peace, preventing conflict and ill feeling between the White and colored races” there would be separate blocks for white and black residences, churches, and schools.19 In explaining the ordinance, Baltimore mayor Barry

14

The Early Years of the Twentieth Century

Mahool stated, “Blacks should be quarantined in isolated slums in order to reduce the incidence of civil disturbance, to prevent the spread of communicable disease into the nearby White neighborhoods, and to protect property values among the White majority.”20 Similar ordinances soon cropped up in several cities; the Louisville, Kentucky, ordinance, however, was ruled unconstitutional by the Supreme Court in 1917.21 Throughout the South, however, such laws were not necessary: it was understood clearly by whites and blacks where people could live and where and under what circumstances they could intermingle with others. Roosevelt, just a month into his presidency, invited African American leader Booker T. Washington to the White House for dinner. Historian John Hope Franklin observed that “Negroes all over the country were delighted at this signal recognition of their leader.”22 But as historian Deborah Davis noted, this unprecedented event—having a Black man to dinner at the White House with Roosevelt—“provoked inflammatory newspaper articles, political cartoons, fire-and-brimstone speeches, even vulgar songs.”23 Senator Benjamin R. (Pitchfork Ben) Tillman (Democrat—South Carolina) was incensed: “The action of President Roosevelt in entertaining that nigger will necessitate our killing a thousand niggers in the South before they will learn their place again.”24 The threats, intimidation, and language coming from southern white politicians were raw and visceral. During his hunting trip to Mississippi in 1902 (the episode that launched the famous Teddy bear), Roosevelt was chastised by Mississippi politician James K. Vardaman, the “White Chief,” so called because of his flamboyant creamy white suits, hat, and boots, but also for his virulent and inflammatory racist attitudes. When Vardaman found out that Roosevelt had accepted the governor’s invitation to hunt bear, he smeared Roosevelt as the “coonflavored miscegenist from the White House”25 and a “bronco-busting nigger lover.” Vardaman had once declared, “If it is necessary every Negro in the state will be lynched; it will be done to maintain White supremacy.” Vardaman later ran unopposed for governor. One of his campaign banners declared: “A Vote for Vardaman is a Vote for White Supremacy, the Safety of the Home, and the Protection of Our Women and Children.”26 Campaign slogans embracing “White supremacy” and “White power” were commonplace among white office seekers. This was a new era of race baiting and raw hatred toward African Americans. In 1901, some 100 blacks were lynched, and by the beginning of America’s involvement in World War I, more than 1,100 blacks would die at the hands of vigilante mobs. And it wasn’t just in the South. “The South was far ahead of the rest of the country,” wrote John Hope Franklin, “but several Northern states, notably those in the Midwest, adhered to this ancient barbaric ritual of total disregard for the law.”27 This era generated an “epidemic” of racial unrest. In August 1904, Statesboro, Georgia, two black men were accused and found guilty of murder, a white mob seized them, strung them up, and burned their bodies while they were still alive. For two days in 1906, Atlanta, Georgia, endured a race riot, with dozens of blacks killed, many more injured, with considerable property damage. There were also episodes of racial unrest in Springfield, Ohio (1904 and 1906) and Springfield, Illinois (1908). Franklin noted that the “rioting in the North was as vicious and almost as prevalent as it was in the South.”28 Tensions between whites and blacks in Brownsville, Texas ran high. Around midnight on August 13–14, 1906, rifle shots were fired, with one white man killed and another wounded. Black soldiers from three companies of the Army’s Twenty-fifth Regiment, based at nearby Fort Brown, became the immediate suspects. But the military commanders at the base asserted that the black soldiers were all in their barracks at the time of the incident. When accused of the incident, none of the black soldiers admitted to the shooting. “Dastardly Outrage by Negro Soldiers” read the headline on the next day’s Brownsville Herald. President Roosevelt issued dishonorable discharges to all of the 167 soldiers in the three black companies, without a hearing or a trial. They were stripped of their rights, which were

The Progressive Era Begins: 1901–1912 15

not restored until 1972, following the publication of a book arguing their innocence and an Army investigation. In 1974, President Richard Nixon signed legislation that compensated the survivors and widows of the soldiers.29 In a significant way, slavery had returned to the South. As journalist Douglas A. Blackmon observed in his aptly title book, Slavery by Another Name, the South’s judicial system by 1900 had been “wholly reconfigured to make one of its primary purposes the coercion of African Americans to comply with the social customs and labor demands of Whites.” African American workers and indigents were caught up in wave of arrests “almost always under the thinnest chimera of probable cause or judicial process.” Crimes such as talking to a white woman, vagrancy, riding freight cars, or changing employers without permission landed at least 100,000 African Americans in labor camps, shunted off to cotton and sugar plantations, their services sold to corporations with no questions asked about how they would be treated or what work they would perform. Southern governments reaped the equivalent of tens of millions of dollars from the “sale” of this neo-slavery of African Americans.30 Some black leaders were frustrated with African American leadership, or the lack thereof. W.E.B. Du Bois objected to what he considered to be the accommodations and submissive attitudes of Booker T. Washington, who at the time was the nation’s most visible African American leader.31 Du Bois insisted on more. In the summer of 1905, twenty-nine prominent African Americans, led by Du Bois, met in secret at Fort Erie, Ontario (near Niagara Falls) to draw up a manifesto for full civil rights and recognition of human brotherhood. While establishing some thirty branch offices over the next five years, the Niagara Movement, as it was called, was unable to sustain itself or provide steady leadership. Following the 1908 Springfield, Illinois race riots, a group of white activists issued a call for a meeting to discuss racial justice. Sixty people, including nine African Americans, signed the call and released it publicly on the anniversary of Lincoln’s birthday in early 1909. Thus was born the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP), which quickly established a national office in New York City. By 1919, there were 19,000 members of the organization in more than 300 local branches.32 Tenement Houses, Working Conditions, and Immigrants Jacob Riis, a Danish-born journalist, wrote about the squalid conditions of tenement houses in New York, the dangerous working conditions in sweatshops, the exploitation of children and immigrant labor, and the venality of rich and corrupt merchants, factory owners, and local politicians. Along with his visceral images and sharp analysis of the underbelly of urban life, Riis enhanced his argument with vivid photographs of slum conditions and everyday life in New York’s tenements. The reality of lax safety regulations, the indifference of factory owners, and the complacency of local political officials became evident in an historic tragedy in New York’s garment district. On March 5, 1911, fire swept through the eighth, ninth, and tenth floors of the Asch Building in lower Manhattan, lower Manhattan. Workers for the Triangle Shirtwaist Company, mostly young immigrant women, were trapped. The exit doors were locked by management to prevent theft; and when they could be opened, they opened up the wrong way. The only fire escape collapsed during the attempted rescue; there were no sprinkler systems. Firefighting ladders were too short to reach the victims. The lucky ones on the top floor escaped to the roof and to adjoining buildings. But in all, 146 workers died; 58 of whom had jumped to their deaths; 36 perished in the elevator shaft. When asked why the women workers did not have fire protection, a Tammany Hall leader bluntly retorted, “They ain’t got no votes.”33 On a cold, rainy April 5, 1911, nearly a half million persons marched silently through the Washington Square Arch in protest.

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The Early Years of the Twentieth Century

The Triangle Shirtwaist fire was the worst industrial tragedy in New York for over ninety years. But, as journalist David von Drehle observed, Death was an almost routine workplace hazard in those days. By one estimate, one hundred or more Americans died on the job every day in the booming industrial years around 1911. … Yet workplace safety was scarcely regulated, and workers’ compensation was considered newfangled or even socialist.34 Prompted by the tragedy, the executive secretary of the New York Consumers League, Frances Perkins, who later became secretary of labor under Franklin Roosevelt, and New York governor Al Smith fought for and obtained new safety standards for the state that became a model for the rest of the country. The Triangle Shirtwaist fire not only prompted state and city labor safety reforms but also renewed efforts for woman suffrage in New York and nationwide.

THE NATIONAL GOVERNMENT

The Presidency At the beginning of the twentieth century, William McKinley was finishing his first term, waiting to be sworn in for a second on March 4, 1901. But in early September of that year, McKinley was assassinated by a self-proclaimed anarchist at the Pan-American Exposition in Buffalo, New York. Theodore Roosevelt became the third vice president in American history to take the place of an assassinated president. The prevailing political conservatism of the past forty years was about to end. The youngest president in American history, at forty-two, Roosevelt and his progressive Republican allies would now have their say.35 One of Roosevelt’s first executive actions was to threatened federal government intervention in a crippling coal strike. During the winter of 1902, there was a significant shortage of coal. Anthracite coal miners, led by John Mitchell, were fighting for a living wage, but coal operators would not budge. A strike went on throughout the spring, summer, and early autumn. As conditions worsened and coal was in perilously short supply, Roosevelt called union and management together for a White House conference, symbolically putting them on equal footing. It was an extraordinary gesture, part of what later would be called Roosevelt’s “square deal.” But management rejected the offer to talk. When Roosevelt threatened to use the US Army to mine the coal, the coal owners backed down. Miners got a raise, but not recognition of their union. As historian George Mowry noted, “For the first time in American history the federal government had officially acknowledged that at times justice might lie with labor in its disputes with capital.”36 Roosevelt ushered in popular rhetoric—the “bully pulpit”—as a fundamental part of his political leadership. Rather than working directly with his own political party or through the press, Roosevelt went directly to the people, urging them to put pressure on lawmakers to advance his policies.37 Roosevelt served out the term of office and was elected to a full term in 1904, with Indiana senator Charles W. Fairbanks elected as vice president. Roosevelt swept every region except the solid Democratic South; no northern, midwestern, mountain, or western state voted for Alton B. Parker, the Democratic candidate from New York. In a statement that he would later deeply regret, Roosevelt announced that he would serve out his elected term of office, but would not seek re-election in 1908. His hand-picked successor was his friend, loyal supporter, and secretary of war, William Howard Taft. Taft was also

The Progressive Era Begins: 1901–1912 17

Roosevelt’s chief cheerleader during the 1904 presidential election, and while Roosevelt was frequently absent from the nation’s capital, Taft (not Fairbanks) played the role of “acting president.”38 Roosevelt was confident that Taft would carry out his policies and his legacy. Roosevelt stepped down from the presidency at the youthful age of fifty. (Ronald Reagan was sworn in during his sixty-ninth year, Donald Trump, his seventieth year; Joseph Biden in his seventy-eighth year.) The quiet, more judicious Taft certainly was no Roosevelt. Where Roosevelt believed he could do anything that was not expressly forbidden by the Constitution, Taft believed the presidency could do only those things expressly authorized by the founding document. Roosevelt was youthful, ebullient, quick-witted, surrounded by a rambunctious family; he was the famous Rough Rider with his pince-nez spectacles, known by all as Teddy. Taft, while just a year older than Roosevelt, was reserved, more at home as a lawyer than a politician, uncomfortable expressing himself to the press and public, and cautious on public policy reforms. “The major reason for his reluctance originated in his intense dislike of conflict,” observed Taft biographer Donald F. Anderson.39 Back when a 300-pound man was indeed a rarity, Taft was teased for his weight and ridiculed for his love of golf, a rich man’s game. Moreover, Taft now had to deal with the growing rift in Republican ranks between his base of old-line conservatism and the impatient and growing ranks of progressives. It was a difficult balancing act. Taft got into trouble when he fired Roosevelt’s key adviser on forestry, Gifford Pinchot. More trouble came with he supported the Payne-Aldrich Tariff Act of 1909, blithely calling it “the best tariff bill that had ever been passed.” Progressive Republicans were furious, saying that the legislation (and Taft’s support of it) violated the principles of openness, fairness, and justice.40 Out of this fight came a new organization, the National Progressive Republican League, championed by Senator Robert M. La Follette (Republican—Wisconsin). The policy demands from the progressives (at times called the “Insurgents”) were for direct election of senators; initiative, referendum, and recall mechanisms by states; direct election of delegates to national nominating conventions; and direct primaries for nomination of elective officers. Conservative Republicans (the “Stalwarts”) resisted these demands, and were determined to renominate Taft for president in 1912.41 The election year of 1912 saw the breakdown of the Republican Party. Roosevelt, deeply disappointed by Taft’s policies and approaches, jumped into the race, directly challenging Taft for the presidential nomination. La Follette also joined the fight but was overshadowed by Roosevelt. When Taft party regulars at the nominating convention pushed aside challenges from progressives, Roosevelt and his allies bolted, fracturing the Republican Party, setting up a third-party challenge, the Progressives (or Bull Moose) Party. On the Democratic side, House Speaker J. Beauchamp (Champ) Clark from Missouri was in a pitched battle against T. Woodrow Wilson, who just two years earlier had been elected governor of New Jersey. It was a bitter fight for the Democratic nomination, requiring two-thirds of the delegates to declare a victor, with Wilson finally winning on the forty-sixth ballot. Clark cried foul. By the tenth ballot, Clark held a majority, and was supported by William Jennings Bryan, but then Bryan threw his support to Wilson on the fourteenth ballot. For two years now, Roosevelt had been preaching a “New Nationalism,” his version of progressive ideas and policies, with a strong president leading the way. Wilson countered with his “New Freedom,” a pledge, crafted by the “People’s Attorney” Louis D. Brandeis, to fight against corporate greed, child labor, and overcrowded cities.42 With the Republicans split, Wilson won the presidency with just 41 percent of the popular vote; Taft, the sitting president, came in third. Added to the mix was Socialist Party candidate Eugene Debs, running for the fourth time, who picked up 6 percent of the popular vote.

18

The Early Years of the Twentieth Century

The Executive Branch During this era, the federal government was small. In 1901, the federal budget expenditures were $525 million; by 1912, the budget had climbed to $690 million, but with a $3 million surplus.43 There were the original cabinet agencies (State, War, Treasury, Attorney General, and Post Office); during the nineteenth century were added the Department of the Interior (1849), Justice Department (1870), and Department of Agriculture (1889). In 1903 the Department of Commerce and Labor was created, then split into two separate agencies. Just hours before he would leave office, on March 4, 1913, a reluctant President Taft signed legislation creating a separate Department of Labor. One agency created during this time, in 1908, was the Bureau of Investigations, staffed with ten investigators. In 1935, this federal security agency would be renamed the Federal Bureau of Investigation. In 1901, there was a total of 230,056 employees in the executive branch, with the great majority (136,192) in the Post Office. There were another 44,524 in the military. The federal legislative branch had 5,690 employees while the judiciary had 2,730.44

The Congress During this era, from the Fifty-seventh (1901–1903) to the Sixty-second (1911–1913) Congress, Republicans dominated in both the House (except in the Sixty-second session) and the Senate. Thanks to population changes and the admission of three more states, the size of both chambers increased. The Senate went from 90 members in 1901 to 96 in 1912; the House increased dramatically, from 357 to 394 members. All members of Congress were white men and the first woman, Jeannette P. Rankin (Republican—Montana) would not be elected until 1916. Senators were chosen by their respective state legislatures, not directly by the people; not until 1913 did the Seventeenth Amendment go into effect, requiring direct popular election of senators. Leadership in the Senate George H. Haynes, writing in 1938, observed that the “most effective leadership in the Senate has at times been exercised by men who owed their power to the holding of no office provided by the Constitution or by their party organization, but to their own personal capacity to lead.”45 For Haynes, Nelson W. Aldrich (Republican—Rhode Island) was such a leader. He served in the Senate from 1881 to 1911, and “this dominant personality was its real leader.”46 Aldrich was a member of the “Senate Four,” leading Republicans who also included William Allison (Iowa), Orville H. Platt (Connecticut), and John C. Spooner (Wisconsin).47 Robert La Follette served in the Senate from 1906 to 1925, not in a leadership capacity, but as a strong advocate for progressive reforms, particularly in the field of railroad rates and union–labor relations. Albert J. Beveridge (Republican—Indiana) was a leading progressive voice, serving from 1899 to 1911, and progressive William E. Borah (Republican—Idaho) began his thirtythree-year tenure in the Senate in 1907. Henry Cabot Lodge (Republican—Massachusetts), a senator since 1893, would make his mark as Republican leader especially in foreign affairs during the following decade.48 Leadership in the House The most significant congressional event during this decade, and indeed, one of the most important in the history of the House of Representatives, was the revolt against Speaker Joseph

The Progressive Era Begins: 1901–1912 19

G. Cannon (Republican—Illinois).49 At the time, Cannon had served longer than any other member of the House, forty-six years, though not consecutively. He was elected speaker of the House in 1903. Cannon detested reform, ruled with an iron fist, rewarding those faithful to him, and punishing those who were disloyal. Cannon and his followers were called the “Stalwarts”; those in his own party chafing under his autocratic rule were called the “Insurgents.” After two failed attempts, forty-two Insurgent Republicans, led by progressive George W. Norris (Republican—Nebraska), along with the entire delegation of 142 Democrats, stripped Cannon of his dictatorial powers in March 1910. Norris introduced a resolution to remove Cannon from membership on the Rules Committee and to deny him the power to assign committee seats. After lengthy parliamentary maneuvering and rough-andtumble debate, Cannon lost his iron grip on the House. As Alice Longworth—Roosevelt’s daughter and wife of a future speaker Nicholas Longworth—quipped: “Uncle Joe, who so recently had been regarded with fear, respect, and even some degree of affection, was greeted with jeers and catcalls.”50 Democrats regained the majority in the House following the 1910 elections and Champ Clark took Cannon’s place as speaker.

Photo 1.1 Joseph G. Cannon (1836–1926), Illinois congressman, controversial and powerful speaker of the House. Source: Library of Congress Archives.

During this era, seniority was becoming an important factor for the assigning of committee memberships and other privileges. By the beginning of the twentieth century, elected members were staying longer than the one or two sessions that were common during the nineteenth century.

The Judiciary Melville Weston Fuller served as chief justice of the United States from 1888 until his death in July 1910. During this era under review, there were two prominent associate justices: John Marshall Harlan served for over thirty-three years (1877–1911) until his death in October 1911; Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr. began his twenty-nine-year service on the Supreme Court in December 1902, and remained on the court until 1932. Another central public figure, Charles Evans Hughes (associate justice, 1910–1916; chief justice, 1930–1941) joined the Court in October 1910. Edward Douglass White succeeded Fuller as chief justice in 1910, and served until his death in 1921.

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The Early Years of the Twentieth Century

KEY POLICIES ENACTED Under the administrations of Roosevelt and Taft, through legislative action in Congress, and through the decisions of the Fuller Court, a number of key policy actions were made. Roosevelt in 1904 proclaimed a “Square Deal” program, a “just balance” between competing sides, whether they were labor/management, consumer/producer, or conservatives/progressives.51 In 1902, the Chinese Exclusion Act of 1882 was up for renewal. Anticipating the presidential election of 1904, Roosevelt favored the continued exclusion of Chinese immigrants; the House and Senate were pleased to go along. Secretary of State John M. Hay told Roosevelt that “Congress has done its work so well, that even Confucius could not become an American.”52 Unlike earlier versions of this immigration law, it did not have a ten-year time limit and the Chinese exclusions did not end until World War II. In addition, the Bureau of Immigration and Naturalization was created in 1906, and the Immigration Act (1907) limited the number of laborers who could be admitted and broadened the classes of aliens who could be excluded. Trademarks were given protection through the Trademark Act (1905) and the National Bureau of Standards was established in 1901. Further, in 1903, Congress passed the Elkins Act, which sought to eliminate rebates on freight charges and regulate shipping by railroads. In 1906, the Fifty-ninth Congress passed several significant pieces of legislation, involving railroads, food and drugs regulation, and meat inspection (see below). The Railway Rate Regulation Act (Hepburn Act) gave the Interstate Commerce Commission (ICC) the power to fix railroad rates and other regulatory powers over the rail system.53 Later in 1909, Congress passed the Mann-Elkins Act, which added telephone, telegraph, and cable companies to the jurisdiction of the ICC. All federal criminal and penal laws in the United States were codified in the Criminal Code Revision of 1909, and the Publicity Act (1910) focused on federal elections, requiring all political committees to report on campaigning financing for House and Senate candidates. Moreover, several consequential Supreme Court decisions were made, shaping and limiting federal policy. However, the underlying stresses in society were only partially addressed by federal lawmakers or the Supreme Court. The sensational investigation of corrupt practices in the Senate prompted the adoption of the Seventeenth Amendment, bringing about the direct election of senators. The Panic of 1907 would eventually lead to the creation of the Federal Reserve System, but not during this era. What did come was the realization that tariffs could not be relied upon as the chief source of federal income, and that what was needed was a federal income tax, ratified through the Seventeenth Amendment. Landmark laws regulating food and drugs were enacted, following the dedicated efforts of government scientists and muckraking reporting. Child labor reform found advocates in Congress and among reform groups, but was ultimately thwarted. The unsettling conditions in tenement housing, the working conditions and treatment of recent immigrants would be addressed, if at all, at the local or state level, with nothing coming from the federal government. Jim Crow restrictions would remain thoroughly in place, with no relief through federal legislation or through the courts. Even the most horrific displays of white terrorism—the lynching of black men—by vigilante groups, abetted by local police and tolerated by the good people of the South, found their protectors in Washington. Any attempt to interfere with southern oppression would have been swiftly and forcefully rejected in the halls of Congress. The South would take care of its own.

Conservation and Protection of Public Lands Some of the most important accomplishments of the Roosevelt administration came in the area of protecting natural resources. In June 1902, Congress enacted the National

The Progressive Era Begins: 1901–1912 21

Reclamation Act, or as it is commonly called, the Newlands Act. One of the major difficulties facing the western states was the lack of rainfall and unpredictable water supply. Senator Francis G. Newlands (Democrat—Nevada) authored legislation which encouraged western settlement by selling public lands to farmers and ranchers, while at the same time providing them with inexpensive water at a favorable price. The federal government would construct dams to tame rivers and make sure that a reliable flow of water would be available for agriculture and ranching. But as populations grew and western agriculture became more prevalent, critics pointed to the devastation caused by western reclamation. “Cadillac Desert” is how environmental journalist Marc Reisner later described the devastating combination of precious and scarce water supplies, greed and power, and billions of dollars of taxpayer money used to divert and exploit this vital resource.54 Congress created the Reclamation Service, which later became the Bureau of Reclamation (BOR) within the Department of the Interior. The BOR was responsible for some of the biggest public works projects in history: the Hoover Dam (originally called the Boulder Dam) (1936) between Nevada and Arizona, the Shasta Dam (1945) in California, and the Grand Coulee Dam (1942) in Washington, each of which was the largest concrete structure at the time it was erected. During the twentieth century, some 75,000 public and private dams were built, chiefly under the auspices of the BOR. Dam construction shrunk dramatically beginning in the 1970s, with critics pointing to the environmental and ecological destruction that was fostered by damming up rivers.55 Through the efforts of Gifford Pinchot, chief forester of the US Forest Service, and with the enthusiastic backing of his friend Theodore Roosevelt, conservation became a major public policy initiative. The management of forest reserves was moved out of the Department of the Interior to the Department of Agriculture in 1905, and the US Forest Service was created.56 In 1905, forest reserves covered 56 million acres and 60 locations; by the time Pinchot was fired by Taft in 1910, public forest reserves amounted to 172 million acres and 150 national forests.57 Pinchot was a keen observer and practitioner of retail politics, and he roamed the halls of Congress for years to push for protection of public lands and forests, often against formidable opposition. The Forest Service’s guiding principle was the “greatest good for the greatest amount of people over the long run.” In that sense, Pinchot was advocating what we now call “sustainability,” and his efforts were critical in shaping current understanding of conservation, environmental education, and even the notion of “public lands.”58 The Antiquities Act of 1906 was designed to prevent looting of Native American archeological sites. This became the first federal law to protect archeological sites on public lands and was the culmination of twenty-five years of lobbying and negotiations between Congress and the archeological community. The Antiquities Act itself was a measure of simplicity and directness. Only four paragraphs long, under 500 words, written by archeologist Edgar Lee Hewett, it easily passed in Congress. The Act gave the president powers to unilaterally designate national monuments out of properties that were currently owned by the federal government, and to ban looting and unauthorized excavations, along with mining, homesteading, grazing, and logging that might otherwise be allowed on federal lands. Using the authority of the Antiquities Act, Roosevelt created eighteen protected sites, including the Grand Canyon in Arizona (becoming a national park in 1919) and Mount Olympic National Reserve in Washington state (becoming a national park in 1938). Since its enactment, eighteen presidents, from Theodore Roosevelt to Joe Biden, have designated 175 national monuments under the authority of the Antiquities Act.59

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The Early Years of the Twentieth Century

Significance of these Policies Historian H.W. Brands summed up Roosevelt’s accomplishments: “More than any president before him—and than most after—Roosevelt recognized that natural resources were a wasting asset if not husbanded carefully.”60 The conservation policies and practices during this era set the foundation for all future efforts to preserve America’s natural treasures. During the Trump administration, there were rollbacks of important federal protections, but they were soon reversed during Biden’s first year in office.

Trust-Busting The Supreme Court’s Knight decision in 1895 gave corporations a green light to enter into mergers and trusts. Between 1889 and 1904 there was a wave of mergers, where hundreds of competitors were swooped up into a small number of corporations. Created during this time were the National Biscuit Company (1890), International Harvester (1902), American Tobacco Company (1890), and American Smelting and Refining (1888); the biggest of all the consolidations was the creation of the US Steel Corporation (1901).61 One of the most ferocious battles came next, pitting railroad titans James J. Hill against Edward H. Harriman. Hill, who headed the Great Northern Railroad and was the largest shareholder in Northern Pacific, was fighting against Harriman, head of Union Pacific and Southern Pacific. But the fight also involved Big Oil against Big Steel, with John D. Rockefeller competing against J.P. Morgan. The central question was this: who would control the lucrative railroad market in Chicago, the epicenter of rail transportation? The struggle and speculation led to panicky trading on Wall Street with wild fluctuations in the stock market. Northern Securities Company, a $400 million holding company established in 1901 by Hill and Harriman, financier Morgan, and oilman Rockefeller, held majority control over three major railroads and several smaller lines. In February 1902, Roosevelt’s attorney general Philander C. Knox announced that the federal government would force the breakup of Northern Securities Company. In secret the administration prepared its evidence, then brought suit to force the breakup of the holding company. The government used the Sherman AntiTrust Act, arguing that the holding company constituted a restraint of trade in violation of that law. One historian noted that “For the first time since its passage the Sherman Anti-Trust Law was to be sincerely and energetically enforced.”62 Roosevelt did not consider all trusts to be bad, but concentrated his ire on those run by “bad men with evil motives.”63 Roosevelt observed in his Autobiography that “Of all forms of tyranny the least attractive and the most vulgar is the tyranny of mere wealth, the tyranny of a plutocracy.”64 In Northern Securities Company v. United States (1904),65 the Supreme Court, in a five-tofour ruling, upheld the Roosevelt administration’s action. The suit against Northern Securities and the decision by the Supreme Court brought considerable popular acclaim to Roosevelt, who in his presidential campaign in 1904 gladly accepted the label as the “Great Trust Buster.” Two of the best know anti-trust suits, those against US Steel and the American Tobacco Company, were started under the Roosevelt administration. Yet the more conservative Taft went even further than the progressive Roosevelt: there were more anti-trust suits brought, ninety-nine in all, by the Taft administration than by his predecessor. However, by 1911, Taft, pressured by conservative business interests within his own party, backed away from further aggressive trust-busting measures.66

The Progressive Era Begins: 1901–1912 23

Significance of these Policies This era of industrial consolidation was unique in the twentieth century. The actions of Roosevelt, upheld by the highest court, and those of Taft showed the continued accretion of power in the executive branch. While later presidents have clashed with corporations (for example, Truman and the steel seizure case), “Trust-busting” is much more of an early twentieth-century phenomenon than a contemporary one. Yet, we are entering into a new era when powerful social media firms, like Facebook, Twitter, and Google, are increasingly coming under federal scrutiny.

Pure Food and Drugs During the latter years of the nineteenth century, the Woman’s Christian Temperance Union under Frances Willard pressed for food and drug reforms.67 So too, did federal legislators. Between 1879 and 1905 there were 190 measures introduced in Congress to protect consumers and over 100 of these measures concentrated on food and drugs. In an 1886 speech, Wisconsin congressman Robert La Follette decried additives and substitutes added to food: “It is made to look like something it is not; to taste and smell like something it is not; to sell something it is not; and so to deceive the purchaser.”68 The only comprehensive food and drug bill to pass in one of the chambers was the Paddock bill, which was approved by the Senate in 1892. In the area of food quality, just one measure was enacted into law, the Meat Inspection Act of 1891, and it did not affect American consumers.69 Several of the states had laws regulating food and drugs; but the laws were far from uniform and enforcement depended on the whims of state bureaucracies. What was needed was federal, uniform legislation to handle three major issues: the adulteration of food, the misbranding of food, and false advertising. Finally, in 1906, Congress passed, and Roosevelt signed into law, the Pure Food and Drug Act. Historian Thomas A. Bailey wrote that the enactment was a result of “a long evolutionary process in which the education of public opinion was the prime moving force.”70 Much of that education came from Dr. Harvey Wiley, the chief chemist for the US Department of Agriculture, and his staff who began systematically to investigate food adulteration.71 The idea of federal regulation and oversight was catching on, but still had a long way to go. In December 1902, the House of Representatives passed a pure food and drug bill, the first such measure since the Paddock bill. But it would take another three and a half frustrating years before Wiley and his allies could convince both branches of Congress to act. Much of the work came from Wiley’s tireless efforts on Capitol Hill, his frequent speeches, and efforts to publicize the problems of adulterated food and drugs. The popular press helped as well. Samuel Hopkins Adams, journalist and muckraker, joined the staff of Collier’s magazine in 1905, and wrote a scathing and sensational eleven-part series called “The Great American Fraud,” on the dangers of patent medicine and advertising fraud.72 One of the arguments against federal involvement was a common American complaint: that the government was simply meddling, trying to tell people what to eat, what to drink, and what to consume. Harvey Wiley, testifying before Congress in March 1902, rebutted that argument: “Legislation has no right telling a man what he should eat.” “I am of the opinion,” he continued, “that it is entirely sufficient to place upon a food label the nature of any substance that has been added … and leave to the consumer himself and his physician the determination of whether or not that substance is injurious to him.”73 Wiley received from Congress a research grant of $5,000 to study the effect of preservatives, not on animals, but directly on humans. He chose a dozen or so young men—“young, robust

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fellows”—from a group of volunteers to be his guinea pigs. In the basement of the Bureau of Chemistry building in Washington, they would eat only food given to them by the scientific team. Researchers were testing the effects of additives like borax, copper sulfate, potassium sulfate, saccharin, sulfuric acid, and formaldehyde. Daily, the young men would have their bodily excretions analyzed. So taxing was the regimen that several volunteers were forced to quit the program on the advice of attending physicians. The recruits, mostly medical students and low-paid Agriculture Department science workers, came up with their own slogan: “Only the brave can eat the fare.”74 All the men signed a release absolving the federal government of any responsibility. The young men soon caught the public’s attention and were dubbed “The Poison Squad.” Hundreds of newspaper articles and magazine stories reported on their findings, pointing to the dangers of certain substances. Even a 1903 vaudeville ditty celebrated the “Poison Squad”: O, they may get over it, but they’ll never be the same. That kind of bill of fare would drive most men insane.75 Finally, on June 30, 1906, Congress approved the Pure Food and Drug Act, which required that all foods be accurately labeled, prohibited the sale of misbranded or adulterated foods, and provided punishment for those involved in manufacturing, selling, transporting misbranded or poisonous foods, drugs, medicines, and liquors.76 The patent medicine industry fought tooth and nail against the bill. On the same day, Congress passed the Meat Inspection Act (1906), which authorized the Agriculture Department to enforce sanitary regulations and conduct inspections of slaughterhouses and meat that would be shipped across interstate lines. The Poison Squad, Samuel Hopkins Adams, and Wiley all made news and awakened citizens to the dangers of adulterated drugs. But the bombshell came from journalist Upton Sinclair’s exposé of the meatpacking industry, which both horrified and infuriated readers. In The Jungle, a fictional account of slaughterhouse workers in Chicago, Sinclair graphically described the horrid working conditions, the mistreatment of animals, the rotting carcasses, the rats and vermin, and the rampant disease—human and animal alike. Some people became physically sick when reading the book. Within weeks of the publication of The Jungle, the consumption of meat fell by one half.77 As Sinclair later quipped, “I aimed at the public’s heart, and by accident I hit it in the stomach.”78 Roosevelt read Sinclair’s novel and invited the author to the White House for lunch on April 4, 1906. At the same time, a Department of Agriculture team of investigators was on its way to Chicago to check out Sinclair’s claims. When he heard this, Sinclair objected: this was the agency responsible in the first place, how could it possibly police itself?79 Roosevelt agreed, then sent to Chicago two independent investigators, Commissioner of Labor Charles R. Neill and Assistant Secretary of the Treasury James Bronson Reynolds, acting as special agents for the president. The pressure was on: Congress had to do something. And to help light the fire, Roosevelt released the Neill-Reynolds preliminary report on June 2. The report confirmed the horrors described in The Jungle: floors were slimy, buildings badly lit, bathrooms were “indescribably filthy,” meat was thrown in heaps on the dirty floor, women worked ten-hour days in 38-degree temperatures. In his message to Congress accompanying the Neill-Reynolds Report, Roosevelt said: The conditions in the Chicago stockyards shown even by this two-week investigation are “revolting.” Those conditions should be “radically changed. Under existing law it is wholly impossible to secure satisfactory results.”80 On May 22, 1906, Senator Beveridge introduced a White House-backed bill in the Senate. In just three days, the bill was agreed upon, without a dissenting voice. As the New York Tribune reported, “the drastic meat inspection bill which so suddenly and unexpectedly passed”

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in the US Senate “involves an extension of the functions of the federal government which would have even made believers in centralization a few years ago gasp.”81 The bill was “universally supported by public opinion.” But the legislation hit a road bump in the House, where it faced the chairman of the Agriculture Committee, James W. Wadsworth (Republican—New York), a wealthy cattleman, who refused to bring the measure up for a vote and clogged the bill with a series of amendments favorable to the beef industry. Public outrage demanded that the House bring forward a reasonable bill. In the end, through a conference committee, Congress crafted a comprehensive meat inspection bill. Beveridge boasted that “In the history of reforms which have been enacted into law, there has never been a battle which has been won so quickly and never a proposed reform so successful in the first contest.”82 In his analysis of the Meat Inspection Act, historian Gabriel Kolko, however, argued that the legislation was a triumph of conservative big business interests, helping companies like Swift and Armour eliminate competition and protect the large meat packing companies’ access to foreign markets. He cited this law as the “crowning example” of big business helping make laws to foster their own interests.83 “It is business control over politics, rather than political regulation of the economy that is the significant phenomenon of the Progressive Era.”84 For historian Robert H. Wiebe the pure-food and meat inspection laws were part of the Progressive period’s “bureaucratic reform,” the “easy years” of Progressivism, up until 1907.85 Significance of these Policies The Pure Food and Drug Act has been lauded as one of the most significant pieces of regulatory legislation; through it, the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) was created. In 1938, the federal government was given further authority through the Federal Food, Drug, and Cosmetic Act. It was not until 1962, however, through the Kefauver-Harris Drug Amendment,86 that drug manufacturers had to prove to the FDA the effectiveness of their products before advertising them. The FDA that year was able to keep the drug Thalidomide, with its devastating side effects, out of the United States, and during the 2020–2022 COVID pandemic, the FDA was a key federal agency in approving safe and effective vaccinations. The Meat Inspection Act has been expanded several times to include other forms of meat products. The Wholesome Meat Act and Wholesome Poultry Act (1967) set minimum standards for inspection of meat and poultry.

Sixteenth Amendment: Federal Income Tax The issue of a federal income tax was a thorny one for Republicans: Old Guard conservatives wanted nothing to do with it; more progressive Republicans were less hostile. In his sixth year of office, Roosevelt urged Congress to consider an income tax, but the issue was too divisive for Congress to act. Under Roosevelt’s administration, there would be no income tax, and no inheritance tax, and Roosevelt would not push the issue.87 The question of a federal income tax came up during the 1908 presidential campaign. Taft was against an income tax, and even mocked the idea that there should be a constitutional amendment to permit such a tax. Democrats, licking their wounds after successive presidential defeats in 1896, 1900, and 1904, turned back to William Jennings Bryan as their 1908 standard bearer. Bryan made his position on the income tax clear in the 1894 debates on the WilsonGorman bill: “There is no more just tax on the statute books than the income tax, nor can any tax be proposed which is more equitable.”88 At its presidential nominating convention in Denver, the Democratic Party’s platform included a call for a constitutional amendment for a federal income tax.

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Taft easily defeated Bryan, whose presidential loss was his third and most painful. In his augural address given on March 4, 1909, Taft advocated tariff reform and a graduated inheritance tax. But factions within his own party would gum up Taft’s plans. The House Ways and Means Committee, chaired by Sereno E. Payne (Republican—New York) called for an increase in some individual tariffs, including the very politically unpopular higher tariff on tea and coffee. Hardliners, led by Senator Aldrich of Rhode Island, insisted on no inheritance tax, and dug in for eleven protracted weeks of debate. This energized Democrats and progressive Republicans, championed by Senator Borah of Idaho, calling for tariff reforms and an income tax amendment. It looked like the Democrats and progressive Republicans might have the upper hand. And it also seemed to many that a federal income tax was all but inevitable. Since 1895, there had been thirty-three resolutions calling for a constitutional amendment to authorize an income tax.89 Taft and his ally Senator Aldrich concocted a scheme to introduce a joint resolution calling for a constitutional amendment for federal income tax. They reasoned that such action would be easily rejected by Congress and would blunt the momentum of progressive Democrats and a growing number of Republicans. But to their chagrin, the resolution passed in March 1909, and just a month before Taft left office in 1913, the Sixteenth Amendment to the Constitution was ratified by the requisite number of states. As tax scholar Sheldon D. Pollack pointed out, “the adoption of the modern income tax was the unintended consequence of a strategic blunder by the conservative leadership of the Republican Party.”90 Several months later, the Congress enacted a modest income tax under the authority of the new constitutional amendment. With war raging in Europe, Congress passed warrelated tax measures in 1914 and 1916. The 1916 measure generated a budget surplus, but needing even more funds, in 1917, Congress approved larger taxes, generating $2.5 billion for the war effort.91 Significance of this Policy Income tax has become the central vehicle for raising funds for federal expenditures. During the 1920s, few people paid income taxes, but over the years, as the needs of the federal government increased, so too have the demands for tax revenue. Who should pay, at what rate, and how progressive or regressive should such taxes be? These are perennial questions central to tax policy. The Reagan tax cuts of the 1980s, the Bush II tax cuts, and the Trump cuts most recently have seen the tax burden shift away from the wealthy, and spending requirements met by increased borrowing from ourselves and from international sources.

Seventeenth Amendment: Popular Election of Senators As part of the constitutional convention compromise in 1787, each state, regardless of population, was allocated two senators, who would be chosen by the members of the respective state legislatures, not directly by the people.92 As early as the 1820s, there was agitation to change the method of selecting senators. House members, chosen directly by the people, began offering direct election constitutional amendments during the 1820s, and by the end of the nineteenth century there had been a steady stream of resolutions attempting to do the same. The Senate was often derided as a “millionaires club” (little has changed), and at times, state legislatures had been deadlocked on their choice, refusing to send any one for lengthy periods of time. Historian David E. Kyvig noted that

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in no fewer than forty-five instances in twenty states between 1891 and 1905, legislatures, unable to reach agreement on candidates, delayed filling [Senate] seats. Fourteen seats remained empty for at least one entire congressional session. In the worst case, Delaware had only one senator in place during three Congresses and none at all from 1901 until 1903.93 The Senate was also viewed by many as a corrupt institution. Newspapers and magazines railed against the Senate selection process, and the Democratic Party beginning in 1900 called for direct election of Senators as a part of its presidential platforms. In 1894, the House of Representatives approved a constitutional resolution, and it was later repeated in three subsequent sessions. Of course, it takes two legislative branches to tango, and the senators, knowing they had a good deal without needing to bow and scrape to the public, opposed any such constitutional provision.94 The Seattle Post-Intelligencer in 1897 summed up the feeling of many, noting that the US Senate “ranks lower in popular estimation today than it has at any time in the history of the country.”95 In 1903, thirteen state legislatures proposed constitutional amendments for direct election, with four states in 1904, thirteen in 1907, and six in 1911.96 Oregon was the first state to conduct direct election for its US Senators in 1907, followed shortly by Nebraska. By 1912, twenty-nine states followed Oregon’s lead in having some form of popular referendum, with the state legislatures choosing senate nominees from those who won primaries or general elections. The Senate’s fragile reputation plummeted even further when publisher William Randolph Hearst, who owned Cosmopolitan magazine, commissioned a popular novelist to investigate the US Senate and write a nine-part exposé in his magazine, titled “Treason of the Senate.” David Graham Phillips started out with a bang in his first article in March 1906: “Treason is a strong word, but not too strong to characterize the situation in which the Senate is the eager, resourceful, and indefatigable agent of interests as hostile to the American people as any invading army could be.”97 The articles were sensational, full of innuendo, distortions, and hyperbole, but were effective in drawing popular attention to the problem of corruption and unresponsiveness of senators. Just a few months after adopting the Sixteenth Amendment, Congress in May 1912 approved a constitutional amendment to have members of the Senate directly elected by the people in their respective states. Nine months later, on April 8, 1913, the necessary number of states ratified the new Seventeenth Amendment, and it went into force during the 1914 Senate elections. Significance of this Policy Did the Amendment live up to its expectations? According to political scientists Wendy J. Schiller and Charles Stewart III, writing on the one hundredth anniversary of its ratification, “The Seventeen Amendment was supposed to reduce the influence of wealthy elites, reduce the role of money in determining Senate election outcomes, and give incumbent senators the incentive to represent their constituents responsively.” But the amendment “has failed to achieve such admirable goals.”98

The Court Weighs In Affirming State Power to Regulate Working Conditions A unanimous Supreme Court in Muller v. Oregon (1908) upheld a 1903 Oregon law that restricted the working hours for women to no more than ten hours a day. Hans Curt Muller,

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the owner of the Grand Laundry in Portland, ordered Emma Gotcher, a union activist and wife of the leader of the Shirtwaist and Laundry Workers Union, to work longer than the ten-hour maximum set by state law. Muller’s attorney argued that women, just like men, should be free to work without state interference and make their own bargains for employment. This argument followed the precedent set by the Supreme Court in Lochner v. New York (1905), which ruled unconstitutional a New York law that set hourly limits on bakery workers (all men), under the proposition that the law was a violation of contract between the workers and their employer (see the discussion, below). Reformer Florence Kelley of the National Consumers’ Union and Josephine Goldmark advocated for additional protection for women in the workplace and convinced the attorney general of Oregon to retain attorney Louis D. Brandeis (Goldmark’s brother-in-law) to make the constitutional argument in favor of the Oregon law. The Brandeis argument became known as the “Brandeis Brief,” a 118-page argument that, for the first time in Supreme Court history, introduced extra-legal data to support its position.99 Significance of this Ruling This was one of the most important court decisions of this era, affirming the state’s power to set maximum working hours, and health and safety standards.

POLICIES DELAYED OR DENIED

Protecting Children in the Workplace Between 1885 and 1889, ten states had passed minimum age laws and six states set maximum working hours for children.100 By 1900, most laws protecting children were enacted in the North. In that year, just twenty-eight states had some form of restrictions on child labor in manufacturing and ten more restricted their labor in mining. Yet, in the South, the practice of using children in the labor force was widespread. Alabama, Georgia, North Carolina, and South Carolina, particularly, had few if any state restrictions, and those that they had were voluntary and unenforceable by law.101 During the latter years of the nineteenth century, labor activists, especially the American Federation of Labor’s Samuel Gompers, Mary Harris (Mother) Jones, and social welfare advocates like Florence Kelley campaigned against child labor. In the early part of the century, popular magazines began posting more and more articles about the abuses and practices of child labor. An Alabama clergyman, Edgar Gardner Murphy, became an important proponent of legislation to curb child labor. In 1904, he founded the National Child Labor Committee (NCLC), which became the dominant lobbying force to outlaw child labor.102 Murphy did not urge a federal law, rather he sought relief through the individual states. The NCLC created model legislation, which called for a minimum working age of fourteen for manufacturing jobs and sixteen for mining, and an eight-hour working day. In 1903, the redoubtable Mother Jones—once labeled the “most dangerous woman in America”—helped highlight the plight of silk textile workers in Philadelphia. About 100,000 workers were on strike, among them 16,000 children, demanding that the workweek be reduced from 60 to 55 hours. Jones led some 100 young workers on a march from Philadelphia to New York; many of the children were disfigured, with fingers cut off and hands maimed. Not stopping in New York City, she and her retinue marched on to Oyster Bay, New York, President Roosevelt’s family home. Roosevelt refused to meet with them and washed his hands

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of any federal responsibility. If there would be child labor reform, he reasoned, it would have to come from the states, not from the federal government.103 In his widely read book The Bitter Cry of Children (1906), John Spargo estimated that some 2.25 million children under fifteen were in the labor force.104 More and more, newspapers and magazines wrote articles on the plight of children; organizations like the General Federation of Women’s Clubs with a membership of 400,000, called for child protection legislation. Every woman, its labor committee extolled, should be a “committee of one” to use “all possible influence against anything which dwarfs the minds and bodies of the children.”105 Sensing the shift in public mood, Roosevelt, in his annual message to Congress in December 1904, authorized the Bureau of Labor to investigate the conditions of child labor nationwide. But Congress failed to act; Roosevelt repeated his request the following year. During the first decade of the twentieth century, several states had attempted to regulate child labor, but the wide variety of working circumstances—from mines, to agriculture, to sweatshops, in-home piece-work, even street vending—made it difficult to enact forceful legislation. One of the tools used against child labor was compulsory school attendance laws. While just two states outside the South had failed to enact such laws, Kentucky was the only southern or border state with a compulsory school attendance law.106 Southern mill owners and corporations rallied against “outside agitators,” like the NCLC. Opponents of reform either denied there was a problem or touted the virtues of keeping rowdy ten-year-olds off the streets.107 Undoubtedly, someone in Congress would propose federal restrictions on child labor. Senator Beveridge was horrified at the realities of child labor, and also worried that another legislator, perhaps Henry Cabot Lodge, or maybe a Democrat, would jump in first with reform legislation. It was rumored that the Hearst newspapers were about to run an exposé on child labor abuses. The time was ripe for a federal action.

Photo 1.2 Albert J. Beveridge (1862–1927), Indiana senator and historian, authored progressive measures for food safety and protection against child labor. Source: Library of Congress Photo Archives.

Beveridge, along with Representative Herbert Parsons (Republican—New York), introduced the first federal legislation in December 1906. The Indiana senator knew that his bill could not prevent child labor in manufacturing or mining (that is, intrastate commerce), only the states could do that. But, following up on the precedent by the Meat Inspection Act, which used the commerce clause as its constitutional underpinning, the Beveridge legislation would not ban

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child labor, but prevent goods produced by child labor from crossing state lines. In Beveridge’s view, a national law was needed: under the existing “clumsy, ineffectual tangle of state statutes” the most progressive of states were at the unfair economic advantage against the lesser enlightened states.108 But opposition quickly surfaced. The principal labor organization, the American Federation of Labor, was lukewarm, southern manufacturing interests which depended heavily on child labor were opposed, the NCLC was divided with many thinking the legislation didn’t directly confront the problem, northern industrialists were leery of setting a precedent that would let the federal government further regulate business interests. Most disappointing was Roosevelt’s failure to endorse the legislation. For the president, the federal government only had jurisdiction over the District of Columbia: perhaps that is where a federal child labor law should be directed, and then used as a model for states to follow. The Beveridge legislation languished in the Senate, was stalled in the House, and never came to a vote. Beveridge was bitterly disappointed, decrying “the cruel, inhuman and greedy interests that are fattening off the blood of American children—the cotton mills of the South, the anthracite interests in Pennsylvania, the silk mills of the East, the sweatshops and railroads that carry their products.”109 Congress did, however, approve legislation to authorize the Secretary of Commerce and Labor to investigate the working conditions for women and child workers. In 1908, it agreed to a child labor law for the District of Columbia, which prohibited children under the age of fourteen from working in factories, businesses, restaurants, and other establishments. And in 1912, President Taft signed legislation creating the Children’s Bureau, the first agency within the US government to focus on a variety of issues, including child labor, affecting children and families. The agency, headed by Julia Clifford Lathrop, then the highest-ranking woman in the federal government, had no administrative or legal authority, but it was instrumental in collecting data on the problems of labor and children.110 During the next decade child labor reforms were enacted, but ultimately stymied by the Supreme Court.

Worker Rights and Contracts While the Oregon law restricting the workday for women was upheld in Muller v. Oregon, the Supreme Court also handed down during this first decade several significant decisions concerning anti-trust, freedom of contract, “yellow dog” contracts, and protective labor laws. In each, the labor movement and individual workers were on the losing end. When the D.E. Loewe hat-making company in Danbury, Connecticut, declared that it would be an “open shop” (that is, workers would not be compelled to join a union), the United Hatters of North America (UHU) retaliated by calling on retailers throughout the country to boycott Loewe products. The United Hatters was the principal union for seventy out of the eighty-two hat-making firms in the United States. Loewe sued the UHU for violating the conditions of the Sherman Anti-Trust Act. The Supreme Court upheld Loewe’s contentions, ruling unanimously in Loewe v. Lawlor111 that the secondary boycott by the union violated the Sherman Anti-Trust Act. In 1895, the New York legislature passed the Bakeshop Act, which regulated health conditions and mandated that bakery workers could not work more than ten hours a day or sixty hours a week. Joseph Lochner, who owned a bakery in Utica, claimed that the law was unconstitutional, and through a series of appeals his case ended up in the Supreme Court. In a five-to-four decision, Lochner v. New York (1905),112 written by Associate Justice Rufus Peckham, the Court held the New York law unconstitutional because it was not a legitimate exercise of the state’s police power. The state had violated the Fourteenth Amendment Due Process clause, which contained

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the right of “freedom of contract.” The law, in the majority’s view, was “unreasonable, unnecessary, and arbitrary with the right of liberty of the individual to contract.” Workers and employers were free to set the conditions and wages; if workers (or employers) didn’t like the terms, then they were free to go elsewhere, and the state should not interfere. In one of the most famous dissents in Supreme Court history, Associate Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr., wrote that the eight-hour working day for minors or the prohibition of sales of stock on margins are other examples of state power to protect. “A constitution is not intended to embody a particular economic theory, whether of paternalism and the organic relation of the citizen to the State or of laissez faire.” And in probably the most memorable line, Holmes argued that “The Fourteenth Amendment does not enact Mr. Herbert Spencer’s Social Statics.”113 It does not, in other words, endorse Social Darwinism or the “survival of the fittest.” Constitutional law historians, even justices, have roundly criticized the majority opinion. Former associate justice, John Paul Stevens, noted in 2011 that “The case is famous because there is virtually universal agreement among judges and scholars that it was incorrectly decided. More important, it is the case in which Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes wrote the most influential dissenting opinion the Court’s history.”114 One of the tools that employers held over the heads of workers was the so-called “yellow dog” contract. The phrase “yellow dog” had been around since at least the 1830s, and meant a cowardly mongrel dog, a symbol of something utterly worthless. A yellow dog contract, from the worker’s point of view, was particularly worthless: if a laborer wanted to work, he couldn’t join a union; if he already belonged to one, he’d be fired. In 1898, Congress passed the Erdman Act, which outlawed yellow-dog contracts in the railroad industry. But in 1906, the Supreme Court in 1908, in Adair v. United States, Justice Harlan, together with five other justices, ruled that the Erdman Act was unconstitutional. Harkening back to the Lochner decision, Harlan noted that “the employer and the employee have equality of right, and any legislation that disturbs that equality is an arbitrary interference with the liberty of contract which no government can legally justify in a free land.”115 Nine years later, the Supreme Court explicitly backed the constitutionality of yellow-dog contracts in Hitchman Coal and Coke Company v. Mitchell.116 It was not until 1932 that the yellow-dog contract (and its companion, the labor injunction) was outlawed, through the Norris-La Guardia Act.

Woman’s Suffrage The effort to secure women’s right to vote was probably the most lengthy policy battle in American history. It was a long, exasperating journey, filled with both small triumphs and many setbacks. The fight reached back to antebellum days, when women played a prominent role in the emerging abolitionist movement. From the battles fought (often against allies and men) in the abolitionist movement, women leaders honed their skills and sharpened their political resolve. In 1848, at Seneca Falls, New York, a small group of reformers argued for not just the right to vote, but also reform of social conditions that placed burdens on them: divorce laws, wages paid, working conditions, limited access to education. This led to the first national women’s convention in Worcester, Massachusetts, in October 1850. Some of the leading reform figures were present: Lucretia Mott, Angelina Grimké, Paulina Wright Davis, Ernestine Rose, and Abby Kelley Foster. There were other leaders there as well: Sojourner Truth and Antoinette Brown, along with several abolitionist men, including William Lloyd Garrison and Frederick Douglass. The gathering drew considerable attention from the press, much of it none too flattering. The New York Herald called the meeting a “motley gathering of fanatical radicals, old grannies, male and female, of fugitive slaves and fugitive lunatics, called the Woman’s Rights Convention.”117

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Other women leaders soon emerged: Lucy Stone, the first woman in Massachusetts to earn a college degree and a spellbinding orator; Susan B. Anthony, headmistress of Canajoharie Academy in upstate New York, who became a long-standing advocate for women after the Civil War; and Elizabeth Cady Stanton, one of the co-founders of the Seneca Falls conference. Soon after the Civil War, the fight turned to the proposed Fifteenth Amendment and the right to vote. Who should be the next to receive the vote—men who were former slaves or women? There were three camps of reformers: those like Senator Charles Sumner (Republican—Massachusetts) and other abolitionists who wanted the right to vote limited to black men; a second group, led by Lucy Stone and others, wanted women to be included in the Fifteenth, but if that didn’t happen, then soon thereafter protected through a Sixteenth Amendment. The final group, represented by Susan Anthony and Elizabeth Stanton, consisted of the hardliners: if women could not be included in the Fifteenth, then that proposed amendment should be scuttled altogether.118 The women reformers were shunted aside. The Fifteenth Amendment was enacted by Congress, giving the right to vote to men who were former slaves. The first attempts in Congress to pass a constitutional amendment for woman suffrage came in 1869, when Representative George W. Julian (Republican—Indiana) submitted a proposal for a Sixteenth Amendment. It went nowhere. A select committee on woman’s suffrage was created in 1882, but it was nearly five years before that committee took any action. In January 1887, the Senate took a vote on woman’s suffrage; it was roundly defeated. Many in Congress felt that if women wanted the vote, then they should go to their respective states, one by one, convince state lawmakers, and leave Congress alone. After all, the state of Colorado had permitted full woman suffrage in 1893, and even earlier, women gained the right to vote in the territories of Wyoming in 1869, Utah in 1870, and Washington in 1883. However, it was rough going in many of the states. Who would be against woman suffrage? Organized anti-suffrage efforts emerged just as Congress considered George Julian’s call for a constitutional amendment in 1869. Madeleine Dahlgren, Eleanor E. Sherman, and Almira L. Phelps presented a petition, signed by 15,000, to Congress protesting against woman’s suffrage. That same year 200 women signed a petition objecting to a Massachusetts suffrage proposal. By 1911, a group called the National Association Opposed to Woman Suffrage was created, under the leadership of Josephine Dodge and Minnie Bronson, based in New York City. Anti-suffragists wrapped themselves in the mantle of defenders of the home, domesticity, women’s honor, and the dignity and purity of women. The Antis were successful: between 1898 and 1909, woman suffrage efforts were defeated 164 times in state legislatures.119 By the first decade of the twentieth century, many of the pioneer suffragists had died or were in advanced age. The oldest, Lucretia Mott, died at the age of eighty-seven in 1880; Sojourner Truth died at the age of eighty-six in 1883. Elizabeth Cady Stanton, at the age of seventy wrote, along with twenty-six other women, Part I of The Woman’s Bible (1895), a controversial, best-selling book that pointed out the prejudices and demeaning statements of male biblical writers. Blasphemy, conservatives cried out. Stanton died in 1902 at the age of eighty-six. With a new, young president, there was some hope that Theodore Roosevelt would aid the suffrage cause. Shortly after he had won the full term election for presidency in 1904, Susan B. Anthony, along with Ida Husted Harper, and Harriet Taylor Upton met with Roosevelt at the White House. Anthony, now eighty-four and in increasingly frail health, pleaded with the president:

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Mr. Roosevelt, this is my principal request—it is almost the last request I shall ever make of anybody. Before you leave the presidential chair, recommend Congress to submit to the legislatures a constitutional amendment which will enfranchise women, and thus take your place in history with Lincoln, the great emancipator. I beg of you not to close your term of office without doing this.120 But Roosevelt was unmoved and sent no recommendation or message to Congress. Two years later, in the last days of her life, there was a generous outpouring of letters and telegrams marking Anthony’s eighty-sixth birthday. Her only reply was, “When will the men do something besides extend congratulations? I would rather have President Roosevelt say one word to Congress in favor of amending the Constitution to give women the suffrage than to praise me endlessly!”121 Four years later, Roosevelt was running as the Progressive Party candidate, whose base included pro-suffrage reformers. The party’s platform supported equal suffrage for men and women (but without any mention of how it would be achieved). No matter whether this was a cold calculation to gain western votes or a genuine change in policy, supporting woman’s suffrage was an important step. By contrast, both the Democratic and Republican parties were silent on the subject. Progress had come ever so slowly: by 1912, just nine states—all west of the Mississippi—would grant full suffrage to women.122 It would be another decade, with bitter debate, mass organization, civil disobedience, America’s involvement in the Great War, and a change of heart by President Woodrow Wilson to finally bring about woman suffrage.

Notes 1 W.E.B. DuBois, The Souls of Black Folk: Essays and Sketches (Chicago: A.C. McClurg & Co., 1903), ii. 2 Daniel P. Carpenter, “Pure Food and Drug Act (1906),” in Brian K. Landsberg, ed. in chief, Major Acts of Congress, vol. 3 (New York: MacMillan Reference USA, 2004), 147. 3 Editorial, “The Twentieth Century,” Washington Post, January 1, 1901. 4 David R. Goldfield, “The South,” in Stanley I. Kutler, editor in chief, Encyclopedia of the United States in the Twentieth Century, vol. I (New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1996), 63. 5 “Immigrants in the Progressive Era, 1900–1929” Library of Congress, http://www.loc.gov/teachers/ classroommaterials/presentationsandactivities/presentations/timeline/progress/immigrnt/ (accessed June 2, 2017). 6 Jon C. Teaford, “City and Suburb,” in Kutler, editor in chief, Encyclopedia of the United States in the Twentieth Century, vol. I, 452. 7 Rudolph J. Vecoli, “Ethnicity and Immigration,” in Kutler, editor in chief, Encyclopedia of the United States in the Twentieth Century, vol. I, 167. 8 Department of Commerce and Labor, Bureau of the Census, Census of Manufactures, 1905: Earnings of Wage-Earners, Bulletin 93 (Washington, D.C.: Government Printing Office, 1908), 11, https:// babel.hathitrust.org/cgi/pt?id=nnc1.cu56779232;view=1up;seq=5 (accessed June 19, 2017). 9 From the Ford Motor Company website, https://corporate.ford.com/history.html (accessed June 19, 2017). 10 Department of Transportation, Federal Highway Administration, “State Motor Vehicle Registrations, by Years, 1900–1995” (April 1997), https://www.fhwa.dot.gov/ohim/summary95/mv200.pdf (accessed June 19, 2017). The Model A was introduced in 1927 after production on the Model T was halted. 11 The first full radio broadcast of a Metropolitan Opera performance was Engelbert Humperdinck’s Hänsel und Gretel, on Christmas Day, 1931. Mimis Chrysomallis, “The Met: A Broadcasting Milestone,” Primephonic https://www.primephonic.com/news/264 (accessed July 2, 2017). 12 Technology firsts from “The Decades that Invented the Future,” Part 1: 1900–1910, Wired (October 18, 2012), https://www.wired.com/2012/10/12-decades-of-geek-part-1/ (accessed June 20, 2017). 13 Glenn Porter, “Industrialization and the Rise of Big Business,” in Calhoun, ed., The Gilded Age, 9. 14 US Steel Corporation website, “History of US Steel,” https://ussteel.com (accessed January 26, 2016).

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15 David Graham Phillips, The Treason of the Senate (New York: Quadrangle Books, 2004, 1906); Ida Tarbell, The History of Standard Oil Company: The Oil War of 1872 (New York: McClure, Philips & Co., 1905); Ray Stannard Baker articles in McClure’s magazine; Lincoln Steffens, The Shame of the Cities (New York: Maereon, 1904); Jacob Riis, How the Other Half Lives (New York: Seven Treasures Publications, 2009, 1890); Samuel Hopkins Adams, The Great American Fraud (New York: P.F. Collier, 1905); Upton Sinclair, The Jungle (New York: Millennium Publishing, 2014, 1906); John Spargo, The Bitter Cry of Children (New York: MacMillan, 1906). On the muckrakers, generally, see Aileen Gallagher, The Muckrakers: American Journalism During the Age of Reform (New York: Rosen Publishing Group, 2006); Fred J. Cook, The Muckrakers (Garden City, NY: Doubleday, 1972). 16 Robert F. Bruner and Sean D. Carr, The Panic of 1907: Lessons Learned From the Market’s Perfect Storm (Hoboken: John Wiley & Sons, 2007), xi; Jon R. Moen and Ellis W. Tallman, “The Panic of 1907,” Federal Reserve History, https://www.federalreservehistory.org/essays/panic_of_1907#footnote1 (accessed October 10, 2017). 17 Moen and Tallman, “The Panic of 1907.” 18 Glass quoted in Alexander Keyssar, The Right to Vote: The Contested History of Democracy in the United States (New York: Basic Books, 2000), 112. On his role in the rewrite of the Virginia Constitution, see Harold Wilson, “The Role of Carter Glass in the Disenfranchisement of the Virginia Negro,” The Historian 32 (1) (November 1969): 69–82. 19 Ordinance 692, City of Baltimore, Md. (May 15, 1911), Garrett Power, “Apartheid Baltimore Style: The Residential Segregation Ordinances of 1910–1913,” Maryland Law Review 42 (1983): 289–329, at 289, 20 Quoted in Valerie Strauss, “From Ferguson to Baltimore: The Consequences of GovernmentSponsored Segregation,” Washington Post, May 3, 2015. 21 Buchanan v. Warley, 245 US 60 (1917), https://supreme.justia.com/cases/federal/us/245/60/. 22 John Hope Franklin, From Slavery to Freedom: A History of Negro Americans, 5th ed. (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1980), 309. 23 Ron Chernow, Grant (New York: Penguin, 2017), 684; Deborah Davis, Guest of Honor: Booker T. Washington, Theodore Roosevelt, and the White House Dinner That Shocked a Nation (New York: Atria Books, 2012), 1. 24 Tillman quote from “The Night Teddy Roosevelt Invited Booker T. Washington to Dinner,” The Journal of Blacks in Higher Education 35 (Spring 2002): 24–25. 25 Ray Hill, “The White Chief: James K. Vardaman of Mississippi,” The Knoxville (Tenn.) Focus, March 10, 2013, http://knoxfocus.com/2013/03/the-white-chief-james-k-vardaman-of-mississippi/ (accessed June 21, 2017). 26 Trent A. Watts, One Homogeneous People: Narratives of White Southern Identity, 1890–1920 (Knoxville: University of Tennessee Press, 2010), 1, 14. 27 Franklin, From Slavery to Freedom, 313–14. 28 Ibid., 315. On the Atlanta riots, see Gregory Mixon, The Atlanta Race: Race, Class, and Violence in a New South City (Gainesville: University of Florida Press, 2005) and David F. Godshalk, Veiled Visions: The 1906 Atlanta Race Riot and the Reshaping of American Race Relations (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2005). 29 On the Brownsville Affair, John D. Weaver, The Senator and the Sharecropper’s Son: Exoneration of the Brownsville Soldiers (College Station: Texas A & M University Press, 1997); Sam Roberts, “William Baker, Who Rights an Army Racial Wrong From 1906, Dies at 86,” Washington Post, October 8, 2018. 30 Douglas A. Blackmon, Slavery by Another Name: The Re-Enslavement of Black Americans from the Civil War to World War II (New York: Anchor, 2008), 3–8. 31 Du Bois, The Souls of Black Folk, 50–59, in William A. Link and Susannah J. Link, eds., The Gilded Age and Progressive Era: A Documentary Reader (New York: Wiley-Blackwell, 2012), 212–16. 32 “Oldest and Boldest,” NAACP website, http://www.naacp.org/oldest-and-boldest/, n.d. (accessed July 7, 2017). 33 Inez Haynes Irwin, Angels and Amazons (Garden City, NY: Doubleday, Doran & Co., 1934), 319, cited in Dennis W. Johnson, The Laws That Shaped America: Fifteen Acts of Congress and Their Lasting Impact (New York: Routledge, 2009), 124. On the Triangle Shirtwaist fire, see David Von Drehle, Triangle: The Fire That Changed America (New York: Atlantic Monthly Press, 2003). 34 Von Drehle, Triangle, 3. Also, Richard A. Greenwald, The Triangle Fire, the Protocols of Peace, and Industrial Democracy in Progressive Era New York (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 2006) and Arthur F. McEvoy, “The Triangle Shirtwaist Factory Fire of 1911: Social Change, Industrial Accidents, and the Evolution of Common-Sense Causality,” Law & Social Inquiry 20 (2) (Spring 1995): 621–51.

The Progressive Era Begins: 1901–1912 35 35 George E. Mowry, Theodore Roosevelt and the Progressive Movement (New York: Hill and Wang, 1960, 1947), 13. Andrew Johnson became president after the assassination of Abraham Lincoln in 1865; Chester A. Arthur became president following the assassination of James A. Garfield in 1881. 36 Ibid., 19. 37 Sidney M. Milkis and Michael Nelson, The American Presidency: Origins and Development, 1776–2018, 8th ed. (Los Angeles: Sage Publications, 2020), 267. 38 Doris Kearns Goodwin, The Bully Pulpit: Theodore Roosevelt, William Howard Taft, and the Golden Age of Journalism (New York: Simon & Schuster, 2013), xiii. 39 Donald F. Anderson, William Howard Taft: A Conservative’s Conception of the Presidency (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1973), 85. 40 Lewis L. Gould, America in the Progressive Era 1890–1914 (Harlow, UK: Pearson Education, 2001), 54–55. 41 Sidney M. Milkis, Theodore Roosevelt, the Progressive Party, and the Transformation of America (Lawrence: University Press of Kansas, 2009), 41–45. 42 Gould, America in the Progressive Era 1890–1914, 65–66. On the 1912 election, see James Chace, 1912: Wilson, Roosevelt, Taft and Debs—The Election That Changed the Country (New York: Simon and Schuster, 2004) and Lewis L. Gould, Four Hats in the Ring: The 1912 Election and the Birth of Modern American Politics (Lawrence: University Press of Kansas, 2008). 43 Executive Office of the President, Office of Management and Budget, “Summary of Receipts, Outlays, and Surpluses and Deficits, 1789–2001,” n.d., https://www.whitehouse.gov/omb/budget/ Historicals (accessed July 10, 2017). 44 Historical Statistics of the United States, Millennial Edition On Line, Susan B. Carter, et al., eds. (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2006), Table Ea894-903: Federal Government Employees, by Government Branch and Location Relative to the Capital, 1816–1992, 5–127–28. 45 George H. Haynes, The Senate of the United States: Its History and Practice, vol. 1 (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1938), 489–90. 46 Ibid., 490. 47 William C. Widenour, “Henry Cabot Lodge: The Astute Parliamentarian,” in Richard A. Baker and Roger H. Davidson, eds., First Among Equals: Outstanding Senate Leaders of the Twentieth Century (Washington, DC: Congressional Quarterly, 1991), 38–62. 48 Ibid. 49 On Cannon and the revolt against him: Eric D. Lawrence, Forrest Maltzman, and Paul J. Wahlbeck, “The Politics of Speaker Cannon’s Committee Assignments,” American Journal of Political Science 45 (3) (July 2001): 551–62; Susan M. Miller and Peverill Squire, “Who Rebelled? An Analysis of the Motivation of the Republicans Who Voted Against Speaker Cannon,” American Politics Research 41 (3) (2012): 387–416; Charles O. Jones, “‘Joseph G. Cannon and Howard W. Smith’: An Essay on the Limits of Leadership in the House of Representatives,” Journal of Politics 30 (3) (August 1968): 617–46. 50 Robert V. Remini, The House: A History of the House of Representatives (Washington, DC: Smithsonian Books, 2006), 274–75. 51 Milkis and Nelson, The American Presidency: 271. 52 Quoted in Michael McGerr, A Fierce Discontent: The Rise and Fall of the Progressive Movement in America, 1870–1920 (New York: Free Press, 2003), 212. 53 On the Hepburn Act, see Gabriel Kolko, Railroads and Regulation, 1877–1916 (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1965), Chapter VII; Milkis and Nelson, The American Presidency, 267–68, 270. 54 Marc Reisner, Cadillac Desert: The American West and Its Disappearing Water, rev. ed., with a postscript by Lawrie Mott (New York: Penguin Books, 1993) and David Owen, Where the Water Goes: Life and Death Along the Colorado River (New York: Riverhead Books, 2018). 55 Kyle A. Loring, “National Reclamation Act of 1902,” in Landsberg, editor in chief, Major Acts of Congress, vol. 3, 51–55. 56 Char Miller, Gifford Pinchot and the Making of Modern American Environmentalism (Washington, DC: Island Press, 2004); M. Nelson McGreary, Gifford Pinchot: Forester-Politician (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1960). 57 Taft fired Pinchot for insubordination, when Pinchot went public with his criticism of Taftappointed Secretary of the Interior Richard A. Ballinger and of Taft as well. Ballinger had been accused of cover-up of criminal activity in some coal dealings in Alaska; his accuser, Louis Glavis, chief of the Portland office of the General Land Office (which Ballinger previously headed) went

36

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60 61 62 63 64 65 66 67 68 69

70 71

72 73 74 75 76 77 78 79 80

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The Early Years of the Twentieth Century public. Pinchot backed Glavis, calling him a “patriot,” and Taft fired him. After five months of congressional investigations, Ballinger was cleared of any wrongdoing. Miller, Gifford Pinchot and the Making of Modern American Environmentalism, 208–11. Kevin Dennehy, “First Forester: The Enduring Conservation Legacy of Gifford Pinchot,” Yale University School of Forestry and Environmental Studies, September 21, 2016, interview with Char Miller, http://environment.yale.edu/news/article/first-forester-the-conservation-legacy-of-giffordpinchot/ (accessed July 7, 2017). “Monuments Protected by the Antiquities Act,” National Park Conservation Association, January 13, 2017, https://www.npca.org/resources/2658-monuments-protected-under-the-antiquities-act#sm. 0000m7nzk71268fkjr0u1qrnymr7y (accessed June 27, 2017). See also, “Antiquities Act of 1906–2006,” National Park Service (2006), https://www.nps.gov/archeology/sites/antiquities/ monumentslist.htm (accessed June 27, 2017). Kris Hirst, “A Visionary Act,” Archeology, March 20, 2006, http://archive.archaeology.org/online/features/act1906/ (accessed June 27, 2017). H.W. Brands, T.R.: The Last Romantic (New York: Basic Books, 1997), 624. Alan Dawley, Struggles for Justice: Social Responsibility and the Liberal State (Cambridge: The Belknap Press, 1991), 144; Brands, T.R., 435. Mowry, Theodore Roosevelt and the Progressive Movement, 18. Brands, T.R., 438. Quoted in Ibid., 439. 193 US 1 (1904); https://www.law.cornell.edu/supremecourt/text/193/197 (accessed January 12, 2016). “William Howard Taft: Domestic Affairs,” Miller Center, University of Virginia, n.d., https:// millercenter.org/president/taft/domestic-affairs (accessed July 10, 2017). Lorine Swainston Goodwin, The Pure Food, Drink, and Drug Crusaders, 1879–1914 (Jefferson: McFarland, 1999), 89. Quoted in Debra Blum, The Poison Squad: One Chemist’s Single-Minded Crusade for Food Safety at the Turn of the Twentieth Century (New York: Penguin, 2018), 3. Dennis R. Johnson, “The History of the 1906 Pure Food and Drugs Act and the Meat Inspection Act,” Food Drug Cosmetic Law Journal 37 (1982), 6. Senator Algernon S. Paddock (Republican—Nebraska) introduced his legislation in 1892. Harold Schultz, Food Law Handbook (Westport: Avi Publishing, 1981), 12. Paddock had worked closely with Dr. Harvey W. Wiley. Thomas A. Bailey, “Congressional Opposition to Pure Food Legislation, 1879–1906,” American Journal of Sociology 36 (1) (July 1930): 52–64, at 52. Bailey counts 190 legislative measures; Johnson notes over 100 measures regarding food and drugs. Bailey, “Congressional Opposition to Pure Food Legislation, 1879–1906,” 52. Oscar F. Anderson, The Health of a Nation: Harvey W. Wiley and the Fight for Pure Food (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1958) and Young, Pure Food; John P. Swan, “Food and Drug Administration,” in George T. Kurian, ed., A Historical Guide to the US Government (New York: Oxford University Press, 1998), 248–54. Samuel Hopkins Adams, “The Great American Fraud,” Colliers, October 7, 1905, reprinted in https://www.gutenberg.org/files/44325/44325-h/44325-h.htm (accessed June 23, 2017). Young, Pure Food, 151. Ibid., 152–53. Cited in Ron Schaumberg, “Taming ‘The Jungle,’” New York Times Upfront, May 14, 2001, 18. Stephen W. Stathis, Landmark Legislation, 1774–2002 (Washington, DC: CQ Press, 2003), 156. Courtney I. P. Thomas, In Food We Trust: The Politics of Purity in American Food Regulation (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 2014), 19. Upton Sinclair, “What Life Means to Me,” Cosmopolitan, October 1906, 41, cited in Young, Pure Food, 229. Goodwin, The Bully Pulpit, 461–63. “Conditions in the Stockyards Described by the Neill-Reynolds Report,” and “President Roosevelt’s Message on Chicago Packing House Conditions,” Chicago Daily Tribune, June 5, 1906, 4–5; Theodore Roosevelt, “June 4, 1906: Message Regarding Meatpacking Plants,” Miller Center, University of Virginia, https://millercenter.org/the-presidency/presidential-speeches/june-4-1906message-regarding-meatpacking-plants (accessed June 27, 2017). “Meat Inspection,” New York Tribune, May 27, 1906, 6. Quoted in Goodwin, The Bully Pulpit, 464.

The Progressive Era Begins: 1901–1912 37 83 Gabriel Kolko, The Triumph of Conservatism: A Reinterpretation of American History, 1900–1916 (New York: Macmillan, 1963), 285. 84 Ibid., 3, cited in Young, Pure Food, 280. 85 Robert H. Wiebe, Businessmen and Reform: A Study of the Progressive Movement (Chicago: Ivan R. Dee, 1988), and Wiebe, The Search for Order, 1877–1920 (New York: Hill and Wang, 1967). 86 The official title was the Drug Efficacy Amendment, sponsored by Senator Estes Kefauver (Democrat—Tennessee) and Oren Harris (Democrat—Arkansas). 87 Sheldon D. Pollack, “Origins of the Modern Income Tax, 1894–1913,” The Tax Lawyer 66 (2) (Winter 2013): 295–330, at 310–11. 88 William Jennings Bryan, Speeches of William Jennings Bryan (New York: Funk and Wagnalls, 1911), 164, online at https://babel.hathitrust.org/ 89 Pollack, “Origins of the Modern Income Tax, 1894–1913,” 316. 90 Ibid., 296. The Sixteenth Amendment reads “The Congress shall have power to lay and collect taxes on incomes, from whatever source derived, without apportionment among the several States, and without regard to any census or enumeration.” The October 1913 income tax law was the Revenue Act of 1913 (Underwood-Simmons Act). 91 The Emergency Revenue Act (1914) raised alcohol and special excise taxes in anticipation of loss of revenues from tariffs; the Revenue Act of 1916 increased taxes more; the War Revenue Act of 1917 and War Revenue Act of 1918 (1919) added substantially to the tax revenues. Dennis Ippolito, Deficits, Debt, and the New Politics of Tax Policy (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2012), 28–30. 92 For examination of the history of the direct election movement, see David Schleicher, “The Seventeenth Amendment and Federalism in the Age of National Political Parties,” Yale University Law School Faculty Scholarship Series, Paper 4962 (2014), http://digitalcommons.law.yale.edu/fss_ papers/4962 (accessed August 21, 2017). 93 David E. Kyvig, “Redesigning Congress: The Seventeenth and Twentieth Amendments to the Constitution,” in Julian Zelizer, ed., The American Congress: The Building of Democracy (Boston: Houghton, Mifflin, Harcourt, 2004), 358. 94 Kyvig, “Redesigning Congress,” 356–62. 95 Quoted in Ibid., 358. 96 Fred P. Graham, “The Role of States in Proposing Constitutional Amendments,” American Bar Association Journal 49 (12) (December 1963): 1175–83, at 1180–81. 97 The series was later published in book form: David Graham Phillips, Treason of the Senate, edited with an introduction by George E. Mowry and Judson A. Grenier (Chicago: Quadrangle Books, 1964, 1906). 98 Wendy J. Schiller and Charles Stewart III, “The 100th Anniversary of the Seventeenth Century: A Promise Unfulfilled?, Brookings Institution, Issues in Governance 59 (May 2013), https://www.brookings. edu/wp-content/uploads/2016/06/Schiller_17th-Amendment_v7.pdf (accessed August 18, 2017). 99 Muller v. Oregon, 208 US 412 (1908), https://supreme.justia.com/cases/federal/us/208/412/case.html; decision by Justice David Brewer. Lochner v. New York, 198 US 45 (1905), https://supreme.justia. com/cases/federal/us/198/45/case.html; Nancy S. Erickson, "Muller v. Oregon Reconsidered: The Origins of a Sex-Based Doctrine of Liberty of Contract,” Labor History 30 (1989): 228–50 and Vivien Hart, Bound by Our Constitution: Women, Workers, and the Minimum Wage (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1994); Robert D. Johnston, The Radical Middle Class: Populist Democracy and the Question of Capitalism in Progressive Era Portland, Oregon (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2006), ch. 2. The full Brandeis brief in Muller can be found at “Brandeis Brief,” Louis D. Brandeis School of Law Library, University of Louisville, https://louisville.edu/law/library/special-collections/ the-louis-d.-brandeis-collection/the-brandeis-brief-in-its-entirety (accessed July 3, 2017). 100 Michael Schuman, “History of Child Labor in the United States. Part 2: The Reform Movement,” Monthly Labor Review (January 2017). 101 John Braeman, “Albert J. Beveridge and the First National Child Labor Bill,” Indiana Magazine of History LX (1) (March 1964): 1–36 at 9. 102 For an overview, William G. Whittaker, Child Labor in America: History, Policy, and Legislative Issues, Congressional Research Service (CRS) Report RL31501 (November 27, 2006) and Schuman, “History of Child Labor in the United States. Part 2: The Reform Movement.” Also, Walter I. Trattner, Crusade for the Children: A History of the National Child Labor Committee and Child Labor Reform in America (Chicago: Quadrangle Books, 1970). 103 “Mother Jones,” AFL-CIO website, n.d., https://aflcio.org/about/history/labor-history-people/motherjones (accessed February 23, 2018).

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104 John Spargo, The Bitter Cry of Children (New York: MacMillan, 1906), 140–90. 105 Braeman, “Albert J. Beveridge and the First National Child Labor Bill,” 15. 106 Goldfield, “The South,” in Kutler, editor in chief, Encyclopedia of the United States in the Twentieth Century, vol. I, 64. 107 Schuman, “History of Child Labor in the United States. Part 2: The Reform Movement,” 8–9. 108 Braeman, “Albert J. Beveridge and the First National Child Labor Bill,” 18. See also, Logan Everett Sawyer III, “Constitutional Principle, Partisan Calculation, and the Beveridge Child Labor Bill,” Law and History Review 31 (2) (May 2013): 325–53. 109 Braeman, “Albert J. Beveridge and the First National Child Labor Bill,” 25–26. 110 Schuman, “History of Child Labor in the United States,” 12. 111 208 US 274 (1908); https://www.law.cornell.edu/supremecourt/text/208/274 (accessed January 12, 2016). This case is popularly called the Danbury Hatters case. 112 Lochner v. New York, 198 US 45 (1905), online version, https://supreme.justia.com/cases/federal/us/ 198/45/case.html (accessed July 12, 2017). 113 Herbert Spencer, English sociologist and philosopher, championed laissez-faire economics, minimal state involvement, and Social Darwinism. He later coined the phrase, the “survival of the fittest.” 114 John Paul Stevens, Five Chiefs: A Supreme Court Memoir (Boston: Little, Brown, 2011), 25. 115 Adair v. United States, 208 US 161 (1908), 174, https://supreme.justia.com/cases/federal/us/208/161/ case.html. Justices McKenna and Holmes dissented, separately; Justice Moody did not participate in the decision. 116 Hitchman Coal and Coke Company v. Mitchell, 245 US 229 (1917), https://supreme.justia.com/cases/ federal/us/245/229/ (accessed July 12, 2017). 117 Quoted in Andrea Moore Kerr, Lucy Stone: Speaking Out for Equality (New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press, 1992), 60; Johnson, The Laws that Shaped America, 108–12. 118 Garth E. Pauley, “W.E.B. Du Bois on Woman Suffrage: A Critical Analysis of His Crisis Writings,” Journal of Black Studies 30 (3) (January 2000): 388; Johnson, The Laws that Shaped America, 112–14. 119 Jane Jerome Camhi, Women Against Women: American Anti-Suffragism, 1880–1920 (New York: Carlson Publishing, 1994), 57, in Johnson, Laws that Shaped America, 121. 120 Ida Husted Harper, The Life and Work of Susan B. Anthony, vol. 3 (New York: Arno and the New York Times, 1969, 1908), 1376, in Johnson, Laws that Shaped America, 118. 121 Harper, The Life and Work of Susan B. Anthony, ch. 70. 122 Wyoming (1869 as territory; 1890 as state); Colorado (1893); Utah (territory, 1879; rescinded 1887; 1896 as state); Idaho (1896); Washington (territory, 1883; 1910 as state); California (1911); Arizona (1912); Oregon (1912); and Kansas (1912). Victoria Bissell Brown, “Did Woodrow Wilson’s Gender Politics Matter?” in John Milton Cooper, Jr., ed., Reconsidering Woodrow Wilson: Progressivism, Internationalism, War, and Peace (Washington, DC: Woodrow Wilson Center Press, 2008), 133–34.

Chapter 2

Success and Backlash of Progressive Policy: 1913–1920

There has been a change of government. It began two years ago, when the House of Representatives became Democratic by a decisive majority. It has now been completed. The Senate about to assemble will also be Democratic. The offices of President and Vice President have been put into the hands of Democrats. What does the change mean? (Woodrow Wilson, 1913, announcing his New Freedom agenda)1

This era, with Woodrow Wilson as president and Democrats in control of Congress, brought fundamental changes in public policy. It was the culmination of the progressive era, with major reforms in the banking and financial system, in the regulation of labor and industry, the creation of the national park system and the Coast Guard, an eight-hour day for railroad workers, and federal assistance for the building of state highways. The great influx of refugees from southern Europe brought new federal restrictions on immigrations, and the war brought restrictions on free speech and the fear of the Red Scare. The Constitution was amended twice, with the Eighteenth Amendment prohibiting the sales of alcoholic beverages and the Nineteenth Amendment giving women the right to vote. But it was also the era where significant policy changes were scuttled or sidetracked. Racial tension was high, fueled in part by the beginning of the great diaspora of African Americans leaving the oppressive South to find jobs and the glimmer freedom in the North and other parts of the country. Tensions boiled over in East St. Louis, Illinois, bringing with them the murder of scores of black people, the burning of homes—a full-scale race riot the likes of which had never been witnessed in the United States, and whose death toll would not be surpassed until the Los Angeles riots some fifty years afterwards. Lynchings were rampant, alarming many federal lawmakers; but anti-lynching legislation was blocked by persistent southern opposition in Congress. Child labor, another stain on the fabric of American society, finally was addressed by Congress, but legislation banning child labor was soon found to be unconstitutional by the Supreme Court. AMERICA DURING THIS ERA

The Era by the Numbers By 1912, the continental United States had filled out with forty-eight states, and the population of the country, 92.2 million, had increased by 21 percent over the 1900 census. New York, once again, was the largest state with 9.1 million residents, followed by Pennsylvania (7.6 million), and Illinois (5.6 million). The cities of New York (4.7 million), Chicago (2.1 million), Philadelphia (1.5 million), and St. Louis (0.6 million) were, as they were in 1900, the most populous.2 DOI: 10.4324/9781003293538-4

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Big city growth, especially in New York, was fueled by the influx of immigrants. This was the era of the great southern European diaspora, with an extraordinary number of individuals— nearly all of them speaking a native tongue other than English—emigrating from Italy, the former Ottoman Empire, and other parts of Eastern Europe. This southern European migration represented a significant shift in immigrant demographics. From 1901 to 1920, 41 percent of immigrants came from northwestern European countries; 44 percent of immigrants came from southeastern European countries, while just 4 percent came from Latin American and 4 percent from Asia. By contrast, during the period 1861–1900, 68 percent of immigrants came from northwestern Europe, while just 22 percent had come from southeastern Europe.3 In 1910, the United States was the richest nation on earth, with per capita income just behind New Zealand and Australia. At the time, the average wage in the new and burgeoning automobile industry was $2.34 a day. Henry Ford had increased the minimum wage for all of his 26,000 employees to an extraordinary $5.00 a day, “even the boy who sweeps up the floor,” noted the New York Times. Further, Ford pledged $10 million in profit-sharing with his employees; however, boys and women would not be eligible for those monies. Ford was harshly criticized by other industrialists who were not willing or able to match his strategy and largesse, but they learned a lesson: higher wages produced higher demand, which eventually produced higher profits. Some 10,000 job seekers besieged the Detroit, hoping to secure work at one of the Ford plants.4 A $5 a day wage was far beyond what other workers could attain, particularly women. For working women in the District of Columbia, for example, the average weekly wage in 1913 was $7.13 for those in industrial jobs, about 60 cents higher than women working in retail or other jobs. Many of these jobs required 60–70 hours of work each week. Some states set minimum wages; in New Jersey that year it was $9 per week.5 This was also the era of inventions, technological improvements, and production. By the end of December 1915, the one millionth Model T automobile, selling for as little as $310, rolled off Ford Motor Company’s assembly line in Detroit. The demand for automobiles was surging and so was the cry for better roads, bridges, and other infrastructure. In 1913, construction began on US 30, the Lincoln Highway, the first coast-to-coast paved road in the country. The telephone became increasingly commonplace, and the first transcontinental telephone lines opened, from New York City to San Francisco in January 1915. The largest and most daunting of public works projects was completed when the Panama Canal officially opened in August 1914, three decades after a French company had tried, but failed, to tackle the immense task of cutting a passage between the Pacific and Atlantic oceans. Brillo pads and crossword puzzles were invented in 1913. That same year, hunter and fisherman Leon Leonwood Bean began his mail order clothing business in Freeport, Maine, selling waterproof hunting boots. Sonar was developed in 1916, and hair dryers and kiss-proof lipstick found eager customers in 1920. The first commercial radio station, KDKA in Pittsburgh, began operating; and the Radio Corporation of America (RCA) was formed that year. The Great War brought improvements in killing machines, with the invention of the submachine gun, improvements in tanks, airplanes, and submarines.6 Culturally, this was an era of transition and discovery. It saw the beginning of the Christian Fundamentalist movement, when 6,000 ministers, evangelists, and theologians assembled in Philadelphia in May 1919 to form a new fervent organization, commanded by God, to bring Americans back to the “fundamentals” of their faith. Contrary to stereotypes, the Fundamentalist movement was centered in the North and West, not the rural South. The Philadelphia gathering was also all White; even though conservative Latinos and African American churches and denominations may have shared the same back-to-the-Bible prophetic theology, they were excluded.7 In the 1920s and 1930s, fundamentalist preachers quickly saw the benefit of radio, the new mass communications tool to reach new audiences.

Success and Backlash of Progressive Policy: 1913–1920 41

At the other end of the cultural spectrum was the New York City Armory Show of February 1913, a landmark in artistic expression, shocking many who visited the exhibits, ushering in the period of Modernism in the visual arts, and introducing Americans to the new concept of “avant-garde” to describe paintings and sculpture. The Original Dixieland Jass Band were the first musicians to make jazz recordings, bringing the New Orleans jazz craze to New York and the world in 1917, with their big hit “Tiger Rag.” This era brought us Tin Pan Alley, the Ziegfeld Follies, and was the heyday of Vaudeville. The first blockbuster silent film, The Birth of a Nation, premiered in 1915, glorified the old South, vilified Reconstruction and emancipated slaves, and glamorized the Ku Klux Klan. It became the highest grossing film, not surpassed until Gone with the Wind (another glorification of the Old South) premiered two decades later. Baseball, the national past-time, suffered its most scandalous moment when eight members of the Chicago White Sox were charged with throwing the 1919 World Series against the Cincinnati Reds. Though later acquitted in court, all eight players were banned from baseball for life by Kenesaw Mountain Landis, the first commissioner of baseball.

Society Under Stress Entering the Great War Since the beginning of the war in Europe in 1914, Wilson had pledged neutrality, and as the campaign for his second term approached, voters were reassured and reminded that “he kept us out of war.” But the German submarine sinking of the Lusitania on May 7, 1915, marked a dramatic turning point. Some 1,200 persons perished on board the Lusitania, including 128 Americans. The war, far off and foreign, now became personal for many. When the Germans resumed unrestricted submarine warfare in February 1917, the United States quickly severed diplomatic relations. British intelligence services intercepted a secret military plan calling for an alliance between Mexico and Germany in the event of the United States entering the war against Germany. When that plan, discovered in the infamous telegram from German Foreign Minister Arthur Zimmermann,8 was made public, it caused an outrage, moving the United States ever closer to war. On April 2, 1917, Wilson asked Congress for a declaration of war against Germany and its allies; not until a year later did the United States have a large number of troops on the European front lines. Over the course of the next nineteen months, some five million men were either drafted or volunteered, with a total of two million serving overseas. Over 100,000 American men perished, with more than half of them succumbing to disease. Working Conditions and Labor Strikes This era saw an outburst of labor unrest and strikes, reaching a boiling point following the armistice in November 1918. One of the most violent and protracted labor strikes in American history occurred in 1913–1914 at the Colorado Fuel and Iron Corporation, a Rockefellerowned mine, in Ludlow, Colorado. Fed up with the hazards of noxious gases, collapsing mine shafts, and other dangerous working conditions, along with the grip of company stores and company housing that drained workers’ meager incomes, the 11,000 miners, mostly foreignborn Serbs, Greeks, and Italians, began an ultimately unsuccessful seven-month effort to have the United Mine Workers union recognized as their bargaining agent. A full-scale miners’ war erupted on April 20, 1914 when Colorado National Guardsmen, with massive firepower, and striking miners battled each other, resulting in the death of twenty individuals.9 In 1917 alone, there were over 4,000 strikes in the United States, with workers looking for higher wages and better working conditions. But many workers and unions put off their

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demands as American became involved in the Great War. Following the armistice in November 1918 and into 1919, the precarious labor–management truce was broken. Hundreds of thousands of American workers refused to work: steelworkers, coalminers, even Boston police. In 1919, a total of 1,117 of Boston’s 1,544 policemen went on strike, leaving the city helpless to face widespread looting and civil disobedience. Massachusetts governor Calvin Coolidge stepped in, calling out the National Guard to restore order. Coolidge’s defiance of the police made him a prominent national figure. In February 1919, for six days, the city of Seattle, Washington was paralyzed by the first major general strike in American history. Thousands of workers, coming from the ranks of more than one hundred separate labor unions, banded together to support longshoremen who were striking for higher wages and other demands.10 One of the most bitter encounters, with considerable economic and social impact, was the 1919 strike by some 350,000 steelworkers against the US Steel Corporation. For the workers, it was a disaster. Altogether, twenty-six workers were killed, and the strikers gained no concessions from steel management. In a steel company advertisement in the Pittsburgh Chronicle, a cartoon version of Uncle Sam shouted out to workers, in eight different languages: “The Strike Has Failed. Go Back To Work!” “The end of the steel strike is in sight. Failure was written across it before it was a day old.”11 Thousands of strikebreakers were called in, federal troops, private security forces, and state and local law enforcement were used to intimidate workers and break up rallies and strike actions. The Red Scare Striking workers in Seattle, in Pennsylvania steel mills, and other places were quickly branded as communist sympathizers, or Bolsheviks, adding fuel to the fire of the “Red Scare” that was quickly enveloping the country. George Creel and the federal government propaganda unit he headed, the Committee on Public Information, urged citizens to embrace “100 percent Americanism.” Ethnic tensions were rife and German Americans were the targets of vigilantes and other socalled American patriots. The foreigner—the radical, the communist sympathizer, the socialist, the anarchist—was to be reported, hunted down, and brought to justice. Congress reinforced this attitude by enacting the Espionage and Sedition Acts of 1917 and 1918. The Espionage Act made it a crime for anyone to convey information that would harm the efforts of the American war effort or to aid the enemy. Largely through the efforts of Wilson’s attorney general, A. Mitchell Palmer, Congress extended the Espionage Act of 1917 to cover a broad range of written and spoken communication: forbidding, for example, “disloyal, profane, scurrilous or abusive language” about the American flag, the armed forces, the federal government, or speech “that caused others to view the American government or its institutions with contempt.”12 In April 1919, federal authorities uncovered plots to mail bombs to prominent American businessmen and officials, such as banker J.P. Morgan, Supreme Court justice Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr., and oil tycoon John D. Rockefeller. Two months later, bombs went off simultaneously in eight cities. One of the targets was the home of A. Mitchell Palmer, where one of the bomb plotters was killed during the explosion. Mitchell then called for the rounding up and expulsion of foreigners and agitators. The Palmer Raids, as they were called, began in November 1919. The first mass deportation came before dawn on December 21, 1919, when 249 persons, handcuffed and shackled, were removed from Ellis Island, packed into a decrepit troopship and sent across the Atlantic Ocean. This was America’s “first mass deportation of political dissidents in the twentieth century.” On hand to witness the mass expulsion was Representative Albert Johnson (Republican—Washington), the chairman of the House Committee on Immigration and Naturalization, as well as “an outspoken anti-Semite, a Ku Klux Klan favorite,

Success and Backlash of Progressive Policy: 1913–1920 43

and an ardent opponent of immigration.”13 Accompanying Johnson and others from the congressional delegation was twenty-four-year-old Justice Department official, J. Edgar Hoover. On January 2, 1920, Justice Department and local law enforcement officials conducted raids in thirty-three cities in twenty-three states, taking more than 5,000 presumed radicals into custody. About 600 of those persons were deported because of their membership in the Communist Party. Mitchell had warned against a Bolshevik inspired clash on May 1—May Day—1920 but it never materialized. But on September 16, Wall Street was rocked with explosions, when a horse-drawn cart carrying dynamite exploded at noontime in front of the Morgan Bank, while streams of workers were going out for lunch. Hundreds were wounded and thirty-nine died. There was no doubt in the minds of many that anarchists and Bolsheviks were responsible, but ultimately, no one was indicted. There would not be similar numbers of deaths in a mass explosion until the 1993 Alfred P. Murrah federal building bombing in Oklahoma City where 168 persons were killed and 500 more were injured.14 The Influenza Pandemic In what has been described as the deadliest pandemic in history, an estimated one-third of the world’s population was infected and over 50 million people died from a virulent strain of influenza. By contrast, World War I claimed some 16 million victims (many of whom died from the flu, rather than battle wounds). While given the name “Spanish” flu, it may have had its source in China, or as others speculated, in mid-America.15 In the United States, an estimated 650,000–675,000 people lost their lives, from the beginning of the outbreak in August 1918 through the spring of 1919. Altogether, one-quarter of the US population was affected. Communities throughout the country were left to try to contain the outbreak, often closing schools, churches, shops, theatres, dance halls, even saloons. The public health reaction to the influenza was sporadic, more successful in some US cities than others. Some local public health officials and politicians took the threat of influenza seriously; others ignored the threats, with devastating results. On September 28, 1918, Philadelphia was about to have the largest parade in its history, a parade to promote the sale of war bonds. With military planes flying overhead, 200,000 people crammed onto the streets of center city. Well over one hundred citizens had contracted a mysterious disease in the preceding twenty-four hours, but the parade just had to go on. Philadelphia’s public health commissioner Wilmer Krusen ignored the advice of medical professionals who urged him to cancel the parade. Within three days, every bed in the city’s thirty-one hospitals was filled; the flu had struck with a vengeance. Within a week, 45,000 Philadelphians were infected; within six weeks, 12,000 had died. The influenza outbreak was more devastating in Philadelphia than in any other city in the United States. (In 1793, Philadelphia was also the epicenter of disease: some 10 percent of the city’s population died of yellow fever.) By contrast, city officials in St. Louis decided to cancel a similar war bonds parade. Still people died in St. Louis, but the number was limited to 700 individuals.16 The flu even invaded the White House: President Wilson contracted it, so did several staffers and assistants. The federal government was not in a position to offer much assistance, even after the pandemic had run its course. According to historian George Dehner, “Influenza research attracted little government funding, at least in the 1920s and 1930s, and little attention within state-run entities.”17 It was still many years away until the federal government had even a basic institutional response to public health crises. The Malaria Control in War Areas (MCWA) was created in 1942 to control malaria around US military bases. In 1946, the Communicable Disease Center (CDC), the forerunner of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, was established in the old offices of MCWA.18

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East St. Louis and the “Red Summer” Across the Mississippi River from St. Louis, the fourth largest city in the United States, was the gritty meatpacking town of East St. Louis, Illinois, with a 1910 population of 58,547 residents, including 12,000 African Americans. The town was a hub for blacks determined to escape the poverty and oppression of the South. By 1917 the African American population of East St. Louis had tripled during the first decade of the twentieth century. The influx of black workers meant more competition for blue collar jobs; and that meant trouble. Racial hostility, festering for years just below the surface, exploded during the late spring and early summer of that year.19 On July 1, 1917, white assailants drove through a black neighborhood, firing guns indiscriminately. Two plain clothes officers came to investigate, driving a Ford Model T police car that looked similar to the vehicle used by the perpetrators, and were fired upon by some of the 150 armed black men who were seeking revenge. White citizens retaliated the next day, showing no mercy, and in the end the official death toll was forty-eight, including thirty-eight African American men, women, and children. Historians, however, believe that the East St. Louis death toll was probably between 100 and perhaps even 200 African Americans killed. Sociologist Gunnar Myrdal described it as “mass lynching” and “massacre.”20 Blacks were “hunted down like wild animals,” stated a Los Angeles Times editorial three days later.21 “Soldiers Wink at the Murder of Negroes,” “Illinois Guards Smile as Southern Whites Burn and Kill”—were the headlines of the African American newspaper, the Topeka, Kansas, Plaindealer, July 6, 1917. Many of the bodies, including those of small children and babies, were set ablaze in their shacks or thrown into the Mississippi River. Three hundred homes were destroyed, and thousands of African Americans fled the city; many of them crossed the Mississippi River to find refuge in St. Louis. East St. Louis was not alone.22 In late September 1918, outside of Elaine, Arkansas, hundreds of black sharecroppers attended a meeting at the Progressive Farmers and Household Union, demanding better payment for their cotton crops. Here was a dangerous combination of threats to white supremacy and to the exploitive system of capitalism found throughout the area. It led to a deadly showdown. A mob of white men, numbering between 500 and 1,000, joined by 500 US troops stationed nearby, slaughtered somewhere between 100 and 237 African Americans; five whites died in the melee. The Arkansas Gazette in 1925 stated that the soldiers “committed one murder after another with all the calm deliberation in the world, either too heartless to realize the enormity of their crimes, or too drunk on moonshine to give a continental darn.” Twelve black men were tried for murder, but after missteps, threats, and intimidation, and a US Supreme Court decision, five African American men were convicted of second-degree murder and sentenced to time served.23 Then came the summer of 1919, marked as the “Red Summer,” for the ensuing violence, looting, burning, and hundreds of deaths. Historian David R. Krugler stated that between late 1918 and late 1919, there were ten major race riots, including episodes in Houston, Chester (Pennsylvania), Gary (Indiana), Washington, D.C., Knoxville (Tennessee), Omaha, and Chicago, dozens of minor race-inspired incidents, and nearly 100 lynchings.24 In Chicago alone, over a two-week period, thirty-eight people were killed, 500 injured, and over a 1,000 African American families lost their homes, burned to the ground during the riots.25 Out of this chaos and repression came a core of resistance; African Americans refused to surrender. They fought back, forming self-defense forces, urging their case through the black press, and pushed their case through the courts. It was the beginning of a new chapter in combatting African American struggles.26 In addition, ethnic Mexicans were also targeted and harassed. By 1918, noted historian Monica Muñoz Martinez, “the murder of ethnic Mexicans had become commonplace on the

Success and Backlash of Progressive Policy: 1913–1920 45

Texas-Mexico border, a violence systematically justified by vigilantes and state authorities alike.”27 Between 1848 and 1928, in Texas alone, 232 Mexicans were lynched by vigilante groups.

THE NATIONAL GOVERNMENT

The Presidency Woodrow Wilson served as president during this entire time, most effectively during his first term (1913–1917); during the latter years of his second term, Wilson was mostly bedridden, incapacitated by a massive stroke, suffered in October 1919. After his stroke, much of his public life was handled by his wife Edith, especially issues that personally interested her, and his assistant, Joseph P. Tumulty.28 But at the beginning of his service as president, Wilson was determined to carry out progressive reforms. One of Wilson’s important first expressions of presidential power was to break tradition and return to a practice found in the earliest days of the Republic: Wilson would personally address Congress, delivering, on April 8, 1913, his message on the need for tariff reform. Wilson reminded Congress and the nation of what his administration’s priorities would be. As historian H.W. Brands observed, this was “one of the hallmarks of the Wilson presidency, and one of his lasting contributions to American governance. Ever since Wilson, a president’s ability to take his message to Congress, and through Congress to the American people, has been one of his most potent tools.”29 On taking office, Wilson called Congress into special session to consider tariff reform. He then kept Congress in continuous session for a year and a half to consider his New Freedom program. This marathon session was unprecedented in American history. So many of the newly elected Democratic legislators—with no prior experience in Congress and no sense of institutional prerogatives—went along with Wilson, enacting his New Freedoms into law.30 Political scientists Sidney M. Milkis and Michael Nelson observed that Wilson “turned his fractious party into a disciplined body that provided near-unanimous support for each of his most important measures.”31 Wilson’s best years were between 1913 and 1917, when his most important progressive reforms were enacted.32 He ran for re-election in 1916, defeating former New York governor and US Supreme Court justice Charles Evans Hughes by just 600,000 votes, with solid support from the South, mountain states, and the West. A Wilson victory was not assured until California, with its thirteen electoral votes, went in his favor, but by just 3,773 votes. The conduct of the war was another matter. At the beginning of American entry into World War I in April 1917, and during 1918, Wilson was considered by historian Robert E. Ferrell, as “a complete misfit as commander in chief, so far as the nation’s war economy and the mobilization of the war department to conduct a fighting war on the western front in France were concerned.”33 During the post-war years, Wilson became more aloof, rigid in his thinking, and incapable of compromise. He frustrated many of his allies and was despised by his critics. Indeed, in his annual message to Congress in December 1918, Wilson even repudiated the progressive ideals and approach to post-war reconstruction. As historian W. Barksdale Maynard wrote, “Indeed, hatred of Woodrow Wilson seemed bottomless as a postwar conservative mood took over nationwide.” And as he stepped down from office in March 1921, “he was called generally the most hated outgoing president since Andrew Johnson.”34 Wilson’s progressivism did not extend to civil rights. While coming to the presidency from academia and then the governorship of New Jersey, Wilson’s formative years were spent in the South. As historian Gary Gerstle noted, Wilson “never regarded Blacks as his equals” and he “rarely talked about the rights of Blacks.”35

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Except for some racial integration of federal institutions, Washington, DC was a highly segregated town. One of Wilson’s first actions, on the suggestion of his postmaster general Albert S. Burleson from Texas, was to have his cabinet secretaries re-segregate federal buildings, deny blacks promotions and jobs in the federal government, put up barriers between black and white workers, segregate dining facilities, and make sure that no white employees worked under the direction of an African American. Wilson was convinced that segregation of the races was in the best interests of both blacks and whites.36 In the spring of 1913, a group of white supremacist federal employees, under the banner of the National Democratic Fair Play Association, pressed for further rights for white federal workers. They stoked racial prejudice of how dangerous it would be for white female employees to work side by side with black men.37 Anger from African American leaders was deep and many progressive leaders in the North and Midwest rose in “fervent protest.” W.E.B. Du Bois objected that “public segregation of civil servants, necessarily involving personal insult and humiliation, has for the first time in history been made the policy of the United States government.”38 Booker T. Washington summed up the disappointment of District of Columbia African Americans in a letter in August 1913: “I have recently spent several days in Washington, and I have never seen the colored people so discouraged and bitter as they are at the present time.”39 D.W. Griffin’s silent film Birth of a Nation appeared in 1915; it was America’s first blockbuster, a three-hour homage mythologizing the Old South, presenting ugly racial stereotypes of African Americans, portraying them as a threat to democracy and white womanhood. Based on two best-selling books, The Leopard’s Spots (1902) and The Clansmen (1905), by Thomas F. Dixon, Jr. (a former classmate of Wilson’s), the silent film immediately drew protest, indignation, even riots in some northern cities. Dixon, a relentless promoter, managed twice to get his film viewed at the White House for Wilson and his cabinet and their families and for members of Congress and the justices of the Supreme Court.40 The Executive Branch At the beginning of this era, the federal government was still quite small. The federal agencies had grown to seven, with the addition of the Departments of Labor and Commerce. During this time, as seen below, the five-member Federal Trade Commission (1913) and the Coast Guard (1915) were established. The most significant addition to the federal government was the creation of the Federal Reserve System, with its Board of Governors housed in Washington, DC. A year before the United States entered the war, federal spending in 1917 was $1.954 billion, and the federal government was virtually debt free, with debt accounting for just 2.7 percent of the economy. The war brought enormous expenditures and debt, and by 1920 the federal budget had increased to $6.358 billion. By decades end, in 1930, the federal budget had decreased to $3.320 billion and indebtedness had been quickly whittled down.41 The war had its effect, too, on Washington, DC, which grew from a city of 331,069 to 1910 to a population of 437,571 by the 1920 census.42

The Congress With the addition of the states of New Mexico and Arizona in 1912, the House of Representatives expanded to 435 members; in 1929, the House made permanent the number of seats at 435.43 Following the 1910 census, the average House district had 210,328; by contrast, the average district size was 761,169 following the 2020 census.44 The Senate expanded to ninety-six members, where it would remain until the addition of Alaska and Hawaii fifty years later.

Success and Backlash of Progressive Policy: 1913–1920 47

Democrats dominated in both the House and the Senate for most of this era. The congressional elections of 1910 brought a new crop of Democratic senators, ten in all, who were mostly progressives who would challenge the dominant conservative southern Democratic for power and policy choices. Following the 1912 election, Democrats recaptured the majority in the Senate for the first time in twenty years. By the Sixty-third Congress (1913–1915), Democrats were firmly in control of both chambers, with 290 House members (127 Republicans; 8 others) and 51 Senators (44 Republicans; 1 other). Democrats held the advantage again in the next Congress (with the help of third-party legislators). Because of the strict seniority system, southern Democrats had a hammerlock on the House, holding twenty-eight of fifty-nine committee chairs in 1917, with the Texas delegation holding considerable sway.45 But in November 5, 1918, just days before the armistice ending hostilities in Europe, and while the United States was in the midst of the Spanish flu pandemic, Democrats suffered huge losses in the House and lost six members in the Senate, handing over control to the Republicans in both chambers. During the 1919–1920 Congress, Republicans were in the majority once more, and with the election of Ohio senator Warren G. Harding as president, the 1920s would soon become dominated by Republicans in both the White House and Congress. Leadership in the Senate Assisting Wilson in the Senate was its first elected majority leader, John Worth Kern, a progressive Democrat from Indiana, who served in the US Senate from 1911 to 1917.46 After just two years in the Senate, he was elected floor leader. Wilson was able to assert control over the legislative agenda, and Kern was there to help push Wilson’s policies. Kern pushed Wilson’s massive legislative program through the Senate “virtually intact.”47 Three progressive senators, all Republicans, served during this time. William Borah (Idaho), served during this entire period, as did Robert La Follette (Wisconsin). George Norris (Nebraska) was elected to the Senate in 1913 and served there for the next thirty years. Also important during the post-war negotiations for a League of Nations was Henry Cabot Lodge, a Republican from Massachusetts, who was elected to Congress in 1882, was chosen senator in 1893, and was re-elected five times, serving as Republican leader from 1918 until his death in 1924.48 Leadership in the House When the Democrats reclaimed the majority in the House, James Beauchamp (Champ) Clark (Missouri) was chosen speaker of the House after Joe Cannon was displaced. Clark served as speaker from April 1911 until March 1919. He was also a Democratic candidate for the 1912 presidential nomination, losing out, in a bitter battle, to Woodrow Wilson. Clark was defeated for re-election in the 1920 Republican landslide that wiped out the Democrats’ majority in the House. Oscar W. Underwood (Democrat—Alabama) was House majority leader from 1911 to 1915, then joined the Senate in 1915, and became minority leader from 1920 to 1925. No other legislator has held that distinction of being a leader in both chambers. Underwood also ran for his party’s nomination for president in 1912 and 1924. Underwood was replaced as House majority leader by Claude Kitchin (Democrat—North Carolina).

The Judiciary When Chief Justice Fuller died in July 1910, President Taft nominated Associate Justice Edward D. White, from Louisiana, as his replacement. White, who first joined the Court in 1894, served as chief justice for a decade until his death in 1921.49 During this time,

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1910–1921, the Court was relatively undistinguished and its members decidedly conservative. However, there were several outstanding members of the Court, particularly Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr., who began service in 1902; Charles Evans Hughes, who served from 1910 until 1916, when he stepped down from the Court to challenge Wilson for the presidency, and Louis D. Brandeis, who was confirmed in June 1916, then served until 1939.

KEY POLICIES ENACTED One of the central policy issues in the 1912 presidential election was the reach of corporations and trusts and the role of the federal government. All three major presidential candidates—Wilson, Roosevelt, and Taft—argued that the Supreme Court had been too lenient on large corporations and that the anti-trust laws had to be strengthened.50 In his Inaugural Address, on March 4, 1913, Wilson followed through and called for more vigorous enforcement policy against trusts. Congress responded, and in 1914, Wilson signed into law two significant pieces of legislation: the establishment of the five-member bipartisan Federal Trade Commission (FTC) and the Clayton AntiTrust Act. The FTC, which began its work in March 1915, was empowered to, among other things, deliver cease-and-desist orders to corporations to curb unfair trade practices.51 The Clayton Act, authored by Representative Henry D. Clayton (Democrat—Alabama), went beyond the Sherman Anti-Trust Act to include prohibitions against anti-competitive price discrimination, expanded powers for private parties to sue and obtain damages, and a prohibition against anti-competitive mergers. Further, Clayton gave an exemption permitting unions to organize, prompting American Federation of Labor president Samuel Gompers to proclaim the Act as the “Magna Carta of labor.” But the Supreme Court in 1921 ruled that, despite the language, there was nothing that exempted unions from antitrust action under the Act.52 In addition, there was major tariff reform, with a sharp reduction in import duties; workmen’s compensation for federal employees; the Federal Farm Loan Act (1916); the creation of the US Coast Guard (1915); and the Adamson Eight-Hour Act (1916) for railroad workers. The first modest federal income taxes authorized under the Sixteenth Amendment were enacted in 1913. The Revenue Act of 1916 increased individual tax rates from 1 percent to 2 percent at the low end, to 15 percent at the highest, and introduced the federal estate tax. With the United States now at war, the Revenue Act of 1918 expanded the income tax, especially at the highest levels of income. At its center were steeply progressive tax rates, focused on corporate incomes and those of wealthy individuals. Only about 5 percent of Americans paid income taxes in 1918 (up from 1 percent in 1913). Nevertheless, the income tax funded one-third of the American expenses for World War I. The war-time emergency also gave legitimacy to the new tax system, opening up “new opportunities for proponents of expanded government programs” once the war was over.53 Conservation was given a boost by the establishment of the National Park Service (1916), which was housed in the Department of the Interior. National parks and forests were operating long before this time, but there was continuing controversy over the use and operation of the land, whether for timber and resource extraction, recreation, or tourism. One of the biggest controversies involved the building of a dam in the Hetch Hetchy Valley of Yosemite National Park. For the first time, Congress, through the Raker Act (1913), allowed a single city, San Francisco, to appropriate water from a national park for its exclusive use. John Muir, the Sierra Club, and many conservationists bitterly opposed this action.54 In 1917, Congress passed the first widely restrictive immigration law, which required new arrivals, sixteen years of age and older, to demonstrate basic reading comprehension, no matter what language it might be in. Exempted from this requirement were grandparents, parents, spouses, and

Success and Backlash of Progressive Policy: 1913–1920 49

unmarried or widowed daughters of US citizens or those legally residing on the United States. The law also excluded anyone born in the “Asiatic Barred Zone,” excluding Japanese (who were already limited through the 1907 Gentlemen’s Agreement) and Filipinos (who were American citizens). Chinese were already barred through the Chinese Exclusion Act.55 After the Food and Drug Act was enacted in 1906, the federal government responded to a looming opium crisis. In 1909, Congress passed the Opium Exclusion Act, which banned the importation of opium for smoking, then sent a delegation to the first-ever global conferences on reducing opium in Shanghai in 1909 and The Hague in 1912. In 1914, over the objections of drug manufacturers, Congress enacted the Harrison Narcotics Tax Act, the first crackdown on narcotics during this century.56 With the automobile becoming far more common and the need for suitable paved roads more and more compelling, Congress enacted the Federal Aid Road Act in 1916. It was spurred on by the demands of farmers for suitable roads, the increase in automobile traffic, and the lobbying efforts of the newly created American Association of State Highway Officials (AASHO). This was the first piece of federal legislation to give federal monies to states to assist in the building of highways.57 During this period, two amendments to the Constitution were ratified: the Eighteenth Amendment (prohibition of alcohol sales); and the Nineteenth Amendment (woman suffrage). The Seventeenth Amendment (direct election of senators) was ratified in April 1913 and was first employed during special elections in November of that year. Thus, a flurry of constitutional amendments—four in all, affecting taxation, popular elections, alcohol sales, and woman’s suffrage—were proposed and ratified during the first and second decades of the twentieth century. Not since the first Congress, when the first ten amendments, the Bill of Rights, were adopted, or when the three Civil War era amendments were ratified, had Congress and the states been so busy with changes to the fundamental law. Still, lawmakers failed to address several of the key stresses boiling up during this era. Regulation of working conditions and the protection of workers were not addressed. While Congress enacted child labor protections, they were soon reversed by the Supreme Court. The influenza outbreak, the most devastating killer in American history until the 2020–2022 pandemic, had to be handled locally, with no national guidelines and no federal assistance. It would take two more decades before a modest federal mechanism would be in place to avert such a public health catastrophe. Racial injustices saw no federal response, no assistance to prevent housing, education, or employment discrimination—all remedies that would have to wait another half century to even be approached. Even the most horrific display of white terrorism, the lynching of African Americans, though condemned throughout much of the land and denounced in the halls of Congress, was not outlawed by federal action. Southern lawmakers insisted these incidents were local issues, demanding local justice.

Federal Reserve System The United States had experienced rough economic times in recent decades: deflation during the 1870s and 1880s, a pronounced depression during the 1890s, and the deeply partisan fight surrounding the free coinage of silver. One of the basic weaknesses was the national banking system. As historian Arthur S. Link observed, the national banking structure, established in 1863 and 1864, and altered somewhat in 1900, “was about as badly adapted to the financial needs of a great industrial and commercial nation as any system could be.”58 Banks were nominally under the supervision of the Comptroller of the Currency, but there was little to coordinate the banks and money supply during a financial crisis. “The provisions for mobilizing the banking reserved of the country were entirely inadequate in periods of crisis; the money

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supply bore no necessary relation to the needs of business and industry.”59 By this time, all major European countries had already established central banks, but the United States was the clear exception with no such institution. During the first decade of the new century, the threat was the unprecedented bank panic of 1907. Lawmakers realized that the financial well-being of the country could not depend on the deep pockets and persuasive abilities of J.P. Morgan and his Wall Street colleagues. In quick response to the 1907 financial crisis, Congress passed the Aldrich-Vreeland Act in 1908, providing an emergency currency and creating a National Monetary Commission to study the problems of financial instability, examine banking systems throughout the world, and report back to Congress.60 Yet this was only a stopgap effort. In the Fall of 1910, a small group of financiers met in secret on Jekyll Island, Georgia, at J.P. Morgan’s private retreat to work on a plan to reform the banking and financial system. The Jekyll Island Club was dubbed “the richest, most exclusive, and least accessible” club in the world by Munsey’s Magazine in 1904. The six financiers, including Paul Warburg, a partner at the investment firm of Kuhn, Loeb & Company, worked in secret for eight straight days and nights debating and finally drafting a report on how to reform the banking and financial system of the United States. So secret were their comings and goings and deliberations, that they referred to each other only by their first names and were subsequently dubbed the “First Name Club.” Out of their deliberations came the makings of the Federal Reserve System.61 The First Name Club, under the guidance of Warburg, drafted legislation to create a National Reserve Association. Under the direction of Rhode Island senator Nelson W. Aldrich (one of the six), the Commission generated a number of monographs and presented a final report to Congress in 1912 recommending the reorganization of the national banking system. Even though the First Name Club’s existence still was secret and wouldn’t be revealed for years to come, the idea of a National Reserve Association, with its network of private banks throughout the country, “landed with a thud.”62 During the 1912 presidential campaign, there was both progressive talk and populist fever that would hardly approve of a bankers’ secret plan. “Aldrich and his fellow plotters,” observed journalist Roger Lowenstein in 2015, “were partly to blame, for they ignored a crucial tenet of progressivism—accountability to the public.”63 Hearings were soon held in the House Banking and Currency Committee, headed by Arsène Pujo (Democrat—Louisiana) to investigate the Money Trust (J.P. Morgan and other powerful New York bankers) and its influence on America’s finances. The Pujo committee discovered that eighteen financial institutions controlled capital resources equivalent to two-thirds of the nation’s gross national product. A separate committee, headed by congressional newcomer Carter Glass (Democrat—Virginia) would be responsible for drafting legislation that would be an alternative to the Republican’s Aldrich Plan for a central bank. Carter Glass, with a hawk-nose, alert eyes, standing just five foot-four inches tall, weighing barely over hundred pounds was a “gentlemanly but irascible little man.”64 His formal education ended at the age of thirteen, but he read avidly when he worked for his father’s newspaper in Lynchburg. He held to conservative politics and social mores, and, as seen in his comment in Chapter 1 about African American voting, carried typical white views of blacks and their humble place in southern society (FDR later called Glass an “Unreconstructed Rebel”). The complexities and nuances of banking and finance were completely foreign to him. Glass, when assigned to the Banking and Currency Committee, commented that “I really don’t know anything about banking, but I guess I can learn.”65 He then read voraciously on banking and financial matters. Glass, an eight-term congressman, later became secretary of the Treasury (1918–1920), and then was a four-term senator from Virginia (1920–1946). He was best known as the co-author of the Glass-Steagall Act of 1933, prohibiting commercial banks from participating in the investment banking business.

Success and Backlash of Progressive Policy: 1913–1920 51

While Glass learned on the job, he was assisted by Washington and Lee University economics professor and journalist, H. Parker Willis, who was an expert on banking. Glass and Willis sketched out a banking system, a series of Reserve Banks, perhaps fifteen or twenty, privately owned, spread across the country. The Reserve Banks would be able to issue notes, a new form of money that replaced the National Bank Notes based on government bonds. The Reserve Banks would also hold government deposits and would guarantee bank deposits. There was no central bank holding all this together in Glass’s plan, and the central feature was regionalization: southern, western, or Midwestern bankers wouldn’t have to rely on New York for their capital needs.66 The fight for a central bank system was a complex one, pitting those, like Glass, who feared centralized control and federal institutions, with still powerful individuals like Secretary of State William Jennings Bryan who abhorred the power of eastern financial institutions and insisted on central government control, along with small town bankers, businessmen, and farmers who resented the control and power of New York institutions. Robert L. Owen (Democrat—Oklahoma), chairman of the Senate Banking Committee, shared many of the views of Bryan and believed that government, not private banks, should control the circulation of money. He also resented being left out of early deliberations on the banking issue, and his own legislative draft conflicted in fundamental ways with that of Glass and Wall Street banking and financial interests which favored the Aldrich plan. Much to their displeasure, members of Congress could not escape the stifling heat and humidity of Washington during the summer of 1913; Wilson insisted that they remain and tackle the banking issue. There was much back and forth: Glass and Willis insisted on showing their drafts to as few people as possible; “Colonel” Edward M. House in the White House gave Warburg a copy of the Glass draft and the financier ripped into it, with a thirteen-page rebuttal. Samuel Untermyer, a corporate lawyer who headed the Money Trust investigation for Congressman Pujo, not so subtly pushed his own agenda and muscled his way into the legislative drafting process. Senator Owen decided to write his own bill, in competition with Glass.67 In essence, Owen’s bill wanted the government in charge; Glass favored private banking. For good measure, Wilson’s secretary of the Treasury, William G. McAdoo, Jr. threw in his own plan. With Wilson pushing for legislation, with some concessions made to Bryan and Owen, Glass and Owen introduced identical legislation in the House and Senate on July 26, 1913. Opposition was fierce: the American Banking Association bitterly opposed the legislation; some financiers shouted that it was a socialist plot. The banking community was far from united, as the interests of the big city bank clashed with those of country and small town banks. Agricultural interests were suspicious; members of the House Banking Committee felt they were being left out of the loop. But in the end, the House, with a heavy Democratic majority, approved the legislation, while it became a nail-biter in the Senate. In a Senate committee, the final vote came down to James A. Reed (Democrat—Missouri) who broke the stalemate by siding with the bill, and got a reward for his state: Missouri became the only state with two Federal Reserve banks, in Kansas City and St. Louis. Richmond, Virginia, too, became the site of a federal reserve bank. Richmond is a state capital, but was a fairly small city and hardly a banking center. Having Virginian Carter Glass spearheading the banking effort certainly did not hurt. (Oklahoma City, capital city of Senator Owen’s state, was not so honored.)68 On December 23, 1913, Wilson signed the Federal Reserve Act. The Federal Reserve System provided for the establishment of between eight and twelve Reserve Banks throughout the country. Such banks would be capitalized by member banks within each region, with the member banks appointing the board of directors of each Reserve Bank. The entire system was overseen by a central Federal Reserve Board, based in Washington, DC, and whose members would be appointed by the president. Among its responsibilities, the Federal Reserve was given

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the authority to print Federal Reserve notes and to adjust the discount rate—the interest rate that the Fed banks charge their member banks. The law required each Federal Reserve bank to maintain a gold reserve of 40 percent of the notes that it had issued. Eleven months after the passage of the Federal Reserve Act, the twelve reserve banks opened for business on November 16, 1914.69 In 1927, the Federal Reserve system was made permanent through the McFadden Act; originally, it held just a twenty-year charter. In March 1933, the entire banking system of the United States was closed down by presidential order, a “banking holiday,” that lasted an entire week—an attempt to staunch the outflow of money and runs on banks. The banking crisis had been coming on for three years, with thousands of banks going out of business.70 The Banking Act of 1933 (the Glass-Steagall Act) provided the first federally guaranteed system of protecting bank deposits, through the creation of the Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation (FDIC). Several important pieces of legislation, including the Banking Act of 1935 and the Employment Act of 1946, modified the original mission and direction of the Federal Reserve Act. Significance of this Policy Over the years, the Federal Reserve legislation had changed, particularly in the 1930s and later in the 1970s. As banking historian Allan H. Meltzer noted, the founders of the Federal Reserve system did not contemplate or design the system we have today.71 The Owen-Glass legislation, however, remained, in the estimation of historian Arthur S. Link, the “crowning achievement” of the first Wilson administration.72

Prohibition Founded in 1833 in Oberlin, Ohio, the Anti-Saloon League (ASL) became one of the most powerful lobbying and pressure groups in US history. Along with the ASL was the other major force pushing for prohibition and cultural change: the Woman’s Christian Temperance Union (WCTU), headed by the redoubtable Frances Willard. Willard, who died in 1898, was considered the “queen of the temperance movement,” and after Queen Victoria, probably the most recognized woman in the English-speaking world.73 In the 1890s, Willard was able to cobble together a coalition of the Prohibition Party, the Knights of Labor, and the Farmers’ Alliance, and the WTCU was one of the first organizations to have a professional lobbyist in Washington promoting its causes.74 By 1913, the ASL had shifted tactics away from the local and state level to push for a national prohibition of alcohol. The ASL publicly advocated for such a constitutional amendment in November 1913, and a month later, some 4,000 Leaguers marched through the streets of Washington, DC, demanding action. According to historian David E. Kyvig, “The crusade to abolish the use of alcoholic beverages through an amendment to the Constitution hit the United States like a whirlwind.”75 Wayne B. Wheeler was the main advocate for the dry movement, becoming general counsel of the ASL in 1916. By the congressional election of 1916, the ASL boasted that it had effectively gained control of both the House and the Senate.76 Indeed, Wheeler was a force to be reckoned with, probably the most effective individual lobbyist to date in the history of Congress. Under him, the ASL conducted “the most extensive publicity campaign an American social movement had ever assembled.”77 His former publicist, the Reverend Justin Steuart, in an unauthorized biography written in 1928, said this about Wheeler: “[He] controlled six Congresses, dictated to two presidents of the United States … and was recognized by friend and foe alike as the most masterful and powerful single individual in the United States.”78

Success and Backlash of Progressive Policy: 1913–1920 53

Photo 2.1 Wayne B. Wheeler (1869–1927), leader of the Anti-Saloon League and major lobbyist for prohibition. Source: Library of Congress Archives.

Perhaps a bit of hyperbole, but Wheeler was indeed the persuasive and forceful advocate for the dry movement. “Kaiserism abroad and booze at home must go!” Wheeler cried out.79 The war against Germany fit nicely into the prohibition narrative. Most breweries were owned by German families—among them, Yuengling, Schlitz, Pabst, Blatz, Leinenkugel, and AnheuserBusch—easy and convenient targets for the prohibition forces. By 1915, there were some 1,345 breweries operating in the United States.80 In December 1917, Congress passed legislation authorizing a constitutional amendment;81 just thirteen months later, the required two-thirds of the states ratified the amendment. The quick process of ratification was aided by universal malapportionment of state legislatures nationwide: rural areas which overwhelmingly were “dry” dominated over big city areas which were “wet.”82 In June 1919, Congressman Andrew J. Volstead (Republican—Minnesota) introduced the enabling legislation, the National Prohibition Act (written by Wheeler), which in 12,000 words defined “prohibition” as the manufacturing, selling, and transporting of illegal alcoholic beverages, those beverages with more than 0.5 percent alcohol. Volstead, a taciturn, publicityshy lawmaker was in his ninth term as a congressman and served as the chairman of the House Judiciary Committee. While other members of Congress joined in the enabling legislation, it was Volstead’s name that became the focal point of praise, scorn, and derision throughout the prohibition era. Thousands of letters and postcards streamed into his office. Many praised Volstead, but others were incensed. On a penny postcard, written from Philadelphia, one “W. Penn” scrawled in block letters an objection to prohibition. Addressed to “Vollstead, Prohibition Lunatic,” the card implored: You will go to hell soon, you damned loafer. You prostituted the Constitution of the US You are bribed by the Coca Cola slopmakers. Wait till next election. No more crooked work. We want men in Congress. No puppets. Beware you old loafer.83 The Volstead Act went into effect on January 17, 1920. The first recorded violation came less than an hour later.

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Significance of these Policies Prohibition, that great experiment, was a failure, on many counts. As Daniel Okrent summarized, prohibition encouraged criminality and institutionalized hypocrisy. It deprived the government of revenue, stripped the gears of the political system, and imposed profound limitations on individual rights. It fostered a culture of bribery, blackmail, and official corruption. It also maimed and murdered, its excesses apparent in deaths by poison, by the brutality of illtrained, improperly supervised enforcement officers, and by unfortunate proximity to mob gun battles.84

Nineteenth Amendment: Woman Suffrage It had been a long, frustrating time for advocates of woman suffrage. Carrie Chapman Catt, leader of the principal woman’s organization fighting for the vote, bitterly recounted those battles: 56 referendum campaigns, 480 campaigns to urge state legislatures to submit suffrage amendments to voters, 47 campaigns to include woman suffrage in state constitutions, 277 fights to have state parties include woman suffrage in their platforms, 30 platform fights during presidential elections, and 19 campaigns in each of the Congresses, spanning thirty-eight years.85 The principal woman suffrage organization was the National American Woman Suffrage Association (NAWSA), which had been founded by Susan B. Anthony, Elizabeth Cady Stanton, and Lucy Stone in 1890. But with advancing age of its leadership and worn-out tactics, the NAWSA had atrophied by the time Catt succeeded Anthony as its president in 1900. Catt spent four frustrating years criss-crossing the country trying to rebuild the organization with new members and raise much-needed money. Exhausted and in ill-health, Catt was replaced by long-time Anthony lieutenant Dr. Anna Howard Shaw in 1904. Shaw, a physician and ordained Methodist minister, served as president for nine years, but there was a growing sense from younger suffragists that the movement had lost steam and focus with the mounting losses in state after state. In 1907, Stanton’s daughter, Harriot Stanton Blatch organized the Woman’s Political Union. Blatch had earlier moved to England, became involved in socialist politics there, and experienced the more militant tactics used by British women in their fight for suffrage. In 1910, the Women’s Political Union held its first suffragist parade in New York City, with 3,000 marchers. Other women were fighting for better wages and against deplorable working conditions. In 1909, thousands of women were on strike in the garment industry, particularly in Chicago, New York, Philadelphia, and Lowell, Massachusetts. Following the tragedy of the New York City Shirtwaist fire in April 1911, nearly a half million persons marched silently to mourn the deaths of the 146 women, and to add another voice to the growing movement of women’s rights. The day before his presidential inauguration in March 1913, Woodrow Wilson and his entourage slipped into Washington’s Union Station, anticipating a crowd of well-wishers. But hardly anyone was there to greet him. “Where are the people?” Wilson wondered. “On the avenue, watching the suffragist parade,” came the answer. Indeed, some half a million people—the largest crowd assembled in Washington history to that time—had lined up to cheer the 5,000 marching for woman’s right to vote. Special trains brought suffragists to Washington from all around the country; one New York contingent, under the direction of “General” Rosalie Jones, marched for fourteen days, tramping the 250 miles from New York to Washington. The parade and celebration were marred by ruffians who jeered, hurled insults, and spat upon the marchers. Over 200 people were treated for wounds at a local hospital, but adding insult to injury, local officials and police did little to protect the marchers.86

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Wilson tried to avoid the “woman’s issue” during the 1912 presidential campaign, stating that it was not a national issue but a matter to be settled by the individual states. Despite the massive parade the day before, there was nothing in Wilson’s March 1913 inaugural address about suffrage, and when visited four days after by a contingent of women led by twenty-eightyear-old Alice Paul, Wilson was noncommittal. This would be the first of six such meetings between the president and suffragist leaders during his first term, along with nine meetings during his second.87 The suffragists were persistent; Wilson was evasive, sympathetic to their cause, but insisting on a state, rather than federal, solution. The year 1915 turned out to be a difficult one for suffragists: they lost ballot issues in Massachusetts, New York, Pennsylvania, and New Jersey (Wilson volunteered that he would vote in favor of suffrage in his home state). Alice Paul, the young Quaker activist who had orchestrated the 1913 march on Washington, grew tired of Shaw’s deliberate leadership. Paul established the National Woman’s Party (NWP) and vowed to turn up the political heat against Wilson and the Democratic Party. The NWP pledged to campaign against Wilson in every state that now allowed women to vote. Later would come massive resistance, NWP members chained to the fence of the White House, hunger strikes, and headline-grabbing militant action designed to shame the president and Congress. This was too much for Catt, who reclaimed the presidency of the NAWSA in 1915. She forced Paul out of the NAWSA and vowed to fight her “to the last ditch.” Catt and other national suffragist leaders were tired of the state-by-state approach, with so many battles lost and so much time and energy devoted; now was the time to focus on a federal constitutional amendment. Catt outlined her strategy in “The Winning Plan,” which called for NAWSA headquarters to be moved to Washington and for anti-suffrage federal legislators to be identified and targeted for defeat.

Photo 2.2 Carrie Chapman Catt (1859–1947), a leader of the woman suffrage movement. Source: George Grantham Bain Collection via Library of Congress Archives.

With the presidential election looming, the Democratic Party’s platform, written primarily by Wilson, recommended woman suffrage, but only through the states. Wilson’s Republican opponent, Charles Evans Hughes, met with NAWSA leaders, pledged his support for a constitutional amendment, but didn’t want his position made public until after he had secured his party’s nomination. Wilson did agree to attend the annual NAWSA convention,

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and before 4,000 cheering delegates he announced, “I have not come to fight against anybody but with somebody.”88 Historian Victoria Bissell Brown observed that Wilson’s ultimate position on woman suffrage after 1915 was about method, timing, and tactics; it [was] about deference to the racial and gender politics of the South and the direction of the Democratic Party; and it is about war and protest and the rage Wilson felt at suffragists who were unwilling to keep the home fires burning and his loyalty to those suffragists who were.89 The Democratic Party, with its power base in the South, was a particular problem. Opposition to woman suffrage was especially strong among southern lawmakers in Congress. The overriding issues, as usual, were race and power. Giving women the right to vote meant giving black women the right to vote. An editorial in the Clarion-Ledger in Jackson, Mississippi, claimed that white women in Mississippi were wild and crazy about getting the vote, and warned that they forgot that woman suffrage “would make their cooks and washerwomen voters.”90 Mississippi senators John Sharp Williams and James Vardaman even proposed an amendment to the woman suffrage legislation that gave the vote only to white women. Giving black women the right to vote would expose the ugly history of decades-long disenfranchisement of black males throughout the South, in direct conflict with mandate of the Fifteenth Amendment. With the United States declaring war on Germany in April 1917, NAWSA decided to make a concerted effort to appeal to Congress. NAWSA let Congress know that its members supported the war effort and offered its services to the country; at the same time, hundreds of thousands of letters and telegrams poured into Congress urging woman suffrage. State suffrage measures were winning in Indiana, Michigan, Nebraska, Rhode Island, and Ohio; and the biggest prize of all, New York, saw a decisive win in November 1917. In early 1918, the House of Representatives brought up the constitutional amendment proposal. The day before the vote, Wilson unexpectedly announced his support for the amendment. But that might not be enough: two-thirds (274) of the representatives were needed for a constitutional amendment. After hours of hemming and hawing, lively and bitter debates, the House mustered up 274 votes, just enough to send the measure to the Senate. Wilson personally lobbied a number of wavering senators, but the suffrage resolution failed. Twenty-one Democratic senators, mostly from the South, and ten Republicans, voted against, leaving the measure three votes short of the two-thirds needed. During a lame duck session, in 1919, the Senate once more failed to support the resolution, coming up one vote short. But the November 1918 congressional elections now brought Republicans in control of both the House and Senate, with 117 new members of the House, most of whom committed to woman suffrage. The House approved overwhelmingly, and at last, the Senate on June 4, 1919 mustered enough votes for passage. But ratification, which required the approval of thirty-six state legislatures, was by no means a foregone conclusion. Some of the earliest supporters of woman suffrage, western states like Wyoming and Washington, dawdled, but eventually agreed. Southern states were particularly hard to crack; by contrast, all but two northern states—Vermont and Connecticut—had ratified. Eventually, Tennessee, by a one-vote margin, made the difference. It came down to a twenty-fouryear-old lawmaker named Harry Burns. The political leaders in his eastern Tennessee district were dead set against the amendment, but privately, Harry promised his mother, an ardent suffragist, that he would vote for ratification. She wrote to her son, “Vote for suffrage and don’t keep them in doubt. … Don’t forget to be a good boy and help Mrs. Catt put ‘Rat’ in Ratification.” After casting his vote in support, Harry Burns told the Tennessee House: “I believe we had a moral and legal

Success and Backlash of Progressive Policy: 1913–1920 57

right to ratify … I appreciated the fact that an opportunity such as this seldom comes to a mortal man to free seventeen million women from political slavery was mine.”91 Significance of this Policy On Election Day, November 2, 1920, some 22 million women were now eligible to cast their vote. Women in Alabama and Georgia had to wait because of lengthy registration requirements, and African American (but not white) women in South Carolina were required to read and correctly answer questions about the civil and criminal code. The United States was late among industrial democracies to give women the right to vote. Woman suffrage had been law in New Zealand (1893), Australia (1902), Finland (1906), Norway (1907), Iceland (1913), Denmark (1915), and Russia (1917). In 1918 and 1919, eleven more countries guaranteed women the right to vote.92 Today, more woman than men participate in national elections, and a record number of women now serve in Congress.

Protecting Children in the Labor Market The 1906 Beveridge child labor bill failed to pass, and Roosevelt and Taft were both lukewarm in remedying child labor abuses, calling for state, rather than federal, policy solutions. But the problems would not go away, and newspapers and magazine articles continued to stoke public awareness of the exploitations of child labor. To further publicize its cause, in 1908 the National Child Labor Committee (NCLC) hired photographer Lewis W. Hine to secretly document child labor abuses. Dressed in a suit, tie, and hat, Hine often posed as a Bible salesman, a postcard salesman, or an industrial photographer cataloguing machinery; or, if not allowed in the workplace, he would wait outside with his fifty pounds of camera equipment, determined to capture the plight of children.93 Increasingly the leadership of the child labor movement was coming to the conclusion that a national law, not just state remedies, was necessary. By April 1913, the NCLC had reversed its earlier official opposition to a federal law. That same year, the Senate also produced a nineteenvolume study exposing the dangerous and harsh conditions that women and children faced in the workplace.94 Woodrow Wilson had little sympathy for federal child labor legislation: to him, such legislation would be unconstitutional. While his constitutional principles said no, his political sense brought Wilson around to a neutral position. He wouldn’t go out of his way to support legislation, but he would not publicly oppose it. But this was the political reality: as long as Wilson wasn’t enthusiastic about a federal child labor bill, it would never get approved in the Senate.95 A 1914 bill backed by the NCLC banned children under fourteen from working in factories, workshops, canneries, and children under sixteen from working in mines and quarries. Further, children under sixteen could not work more than eight hours a day, or between 7:00 p.m. and 7:00 a.m. It sailed through the House, but was stymied by southern opposition in the Senate. Wilson kept silent, and his silence encouraged the upper chamber to do nothing and the Owen-Palmer child labor bill was not voted on in the Senate before the close of the congressional term.96 Legislative reform would have to wait for the next session of Congress. By 1914, twenty-two states still permitted children under the age of fourteen to work in factories; twenty-eight states allowed children under sixteen to work more than an eight-hour day; and twenty-three states had not tackled the issue of prohibiting children from working at night.97 In 1916, Congressman Edward Keating (Democrat—Colorado) and Senator Robert L. Owen (Democrat—Oklahoma) introduced child labor legislation early in the new session. The bill was based on the Beveridge’s 1906 efforts and called for the ban on sales of any product

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from a factory, shop, or cannery that employed children under the age of fourteen, from any mine that employed children under the age of sixteen, and factories where children were compelled to work at night or for more than eight hours a day. The bill affected only 150,000 children who worked in the mines and factories; another 1,850,000 children who worked in home-based businesses or on the streets were not protected. Wilson finally stepped forward, urging the Senate to pass the legislation. He had a good political reason to finally urge passage: earlier he had concerns about the constitutionality of child labor legislation, but now his Republican opponent in the 1916 presidential campaign, Charles Evans Hughes, had endorsed the legislation. The Keating-Owen bill easily passed in the House, 343–46; in the Senate, the vote was equally overwhelming, with 52–12. Two of the twelve dissenters were from Pennsylvania, the state with the highest number of affected children, and ten from Southern states.98 Wilson signed the measure into law, but as seen below, the impact of the Keating-Owen federal child labor act was short-lived.

POLICIES DELAYED OR DENIED

Anti-Lynching Legislation Ida B. Wells, born during the Civil War, had suffered the many indignities that befell her and other African Americans. A school teacher, Wells became a civil rights and social justice activist. In 1892, three of her friends were lynched, prompting her to write and crusade against lynching.99 Writing in 1900, she stated boldly: “Our country’s national crime is lynching.” Lynchings were not simply the spontaneous outburst of fury by an insane mob. They represented the cool, calculating deliberation of intelligent people who openly avow that there is an “unwritten law” that justifies them in putting human beings to death without complaint under oath, without trial by jury, without opportunity to make defense, and without the right of appeal.100

Photo 2.3 Ida B. Wells (1862–1931), advocate of anti-lynching legislation. Source: Library of Congress Archives.

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Lynchings were public spectacles. Announcements ran in local newspapers and church bulletins, photographs were taken, local politicians and civic leaders participated along with crowds of the curious and thrill seekers. The great majority of lynching victims were African Americans, though whites, Native Americans, and Hispanics were also victims. In 1891, some 8,000 to 20,000 vigilantes, yelling themselves hoarse, stormed the New Orleans parish jail, killed eleven Italian immigrants, then strung them up.101 But the lynchings of the late nineteenth century were not like the public hangings of centuries before, where at most spectators would throw garbage or jeer at the offender. No, the nineteenth-century lynch mob, wrote Wells, “cuts off ears, toes, and fingers, strips off flesh, and distributes portion of the body as souvenirs among the crowd.”102 As historian Leon F. Litwack described it, what was “strikingly” new in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries was “the sadism and exhibitionism that characterized white violence.”103 Wells wrote in 1900 that while lynchings and the accompanying barbarity had increased steadily during the past twenty years, “there has been no single effort put forth by the many moral and philanthropic forces of the country to put a stop to this wholesale slaughter. Indeed, the silence … grow[s] more marked as the years go by.”104 Finally, there was a response. In his last year in office, Congressman George H. White (Republican—North Carolina) proposed the first federal anti-lynching bill in 1900. The year before, White had witnessed the deadly Wilmington, North Carolina, race riot, where mobs of white supremacists, upset over having a multi-racial city council, killed as many as sixty Black citizens and forced other Blacks out of town. “I tremble with horror for the future of our nation,” White said, “when I think what must be the inevitable result if mob violence is not stamped out of existence and law once permitted to reign supreme.”105 On the House floor, White hectored fellow southern lawmakers, calling them out by name and reading their statements; they spoke so sensationally about lynchings in their own communities, but would do nothing to help victims, like those in Wilmington, obtain due process. There was a “prolonged applause” after his speech, but no more.106 His bill languished in a House committee and never was voted upon. White was the last of the post-Reconstruction African Americans to serve in Congress; no African American would be elected to Congress until Oscar De Priest (Republican—Illinois) won a seat in 1928.107 By the spring of 1916, the NAACP decided to make federal anti-lynching legislation one of its highest priorities.108 To publicize the atrocities of lynching, the NAACP during the following two years conducted investigations in states where lynchings had occurred and sent letters of protest to the governors and other state officials. On July 28, 1917, thousands of African Americans dressed in white, led by children, silently marched down Fifth Avenue in New York City to protest lynchings and the horrors of East St. Louis. The marchers demanded that President Wilson create legislation to protect the lives and property of African Americans. This “Negro Silent Protest Parade” was one of the first mass protests against racial violence.109 Then in 1918, the NAACP published a list and description of the 3,224 lynchings of African Americans that had occurred between 1889 and 1918.110 Federal anti-lynching legislation sentiment was picking up steam. Wilson, with his checkered history on race relations, publicly condemned lynching on July 25, 1918, charging that “every one of them has been a blow at the heart of law and humane justice.” Later, Wilson condemned mob violence. The governors of eleven states (including Georgia and Tennessee), Attorney General Palmer, jurist and former presidential candidate Charles Evans Hughes, and former president Taft all condemned lynchings and called for federal investigations.111 Many of the blacks seeking refuge from the East St. Louis riots came across the river, settling in the district of Congressman Leonidas C. Dyer (Republican—Missouri). As chairman of the House Committee on Rules, Dyer decried the attacks against blacks, calling them “the most

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dastardly and most criminal outrages ever perpetuated in this country.”112 In April 1918, he introduced anti-lynching legislation which would charge lynch mobs with capital crimes and have such cases tried in federal courts. In each county where a lynching had occurred, there would be a fine between $5,000 and $10,000, with the money dedicated to the victim’s family or, if no relatives could be found, the funds would go to a pool of money dedicated to federal prosecution. Further, lynch mob supporters and participants would be excluded from juries. For Dyer, the constitutional underpinnings for the anti-lynching legislation were clear: lynching, and the failure of states and local authorities to prosecute, violated the victims Fourteenth Amendment rights of equal protection and due process.113

Photo 2.4 Leonidas C. Dyer (1871–1957), Missouri congressman, introduced anti-lynching legislation during several congressional sessions. Source: Office of the Clerk, House of Representatives.

Dyer’s plea to fellow lawmakers was direct and compelling. Congress had passed legislation on child labor, on restricting alcohol consumption, why not protecting against vigilantism and lynching?114 At the time of the Dyer bill, a number of southern states had laws on their books that held individual counties or county officials liable for condoning or participating in lynchings. The southern state governments were merely washing their hands of responsibility. None of these states had laws that gave state authorities the power to prosecute members of lynch mobs.115 But the Sixty-fifth Congress (1917–1919) was controlled by Democrats, and dominated by southerners, and the Dyer bill was bottled up and died in the House Judiciary Committee. In 1920, the Republican Party, pressured by African American leaders, added an anti-lynching plank to its party platform. But the new Republican president, Warren G. Harding, was slow to push for legislation. Congressman Dyer tried again and again, but his legislation was killed by filibusters orchestrated by southern senators in 1922, 1923, and 1924.116

Reversal of Child Labor Protections In a five-to-four vote, the Supreme Court overturned the Keating-Owen Child Labor Act in Hammer v. Dagenhart (1918).117 The Court, through Justice William R. Day, ruled that

Success and Backlash of Progressive Policy: 1913–1920 61

under the Constitution, Congress did not have the authority to regulate child labor. The regulation of employment and employment conditions, according to Day, were purely a state, not a federal, matter. Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr. vigorously disagreed: If there is any matter upon which civilized countries have agreed—far more unanimously than they have with regard to intoxicants and some other matters over which this country is now emotionally aroused—it is the evil of premature and excessive child labor.118 Holmes noted that the law did not meddle with the states, but “when they seek to send their products across the state line they are no longer within their rights.” Another federal child labor law was passed in 1918, as part of the Revenue Act of 1919 (called the Child Labor Tax Law). Again, the Supreme Court ruled this law unconstitutional in Bailey v. Drexel Furniture Company (1922), noting, through Chief Justice Taft, that “the power of Congress to regulate interstate commerce does not extend to curbing the power of the states to regulate local trade.”119 Efforts to craft federal child labor policy did not end with these two Supreme Court decisions. In 1924 Congress proposed a constitutional amendment outlawing child labor, but not enough state legislatures ratified it. Not until 1941 was the Hammer decision overruled by the Supreme Court, in a decision that relied heavily on the wisdom of Holmes’s 1918 dissent.120

Failure to Plan Demobilization The war ended on November 11, 1918, amid jubilation and relief in the United States, but with little planning or understanding of how demobilization could be accomplished. Understandably, soldiers and their families, sick of war and deprivation, wanted to return him and to civilian life as quickly as possible. By the end of June 1919, some 2,600,000 enlisted men and 128,436 officers were mustered out. Hoping to return to their civilian jobs, many were disappointed with the failure of the Wilson administration and Congress to convert the wartime economy to peacetime. Without federal guidance, local authorities, businesses, labor unions, and individuals were left on their own, and “chaos reigned.”121

Notes 1 Epigraph quote from First Inaugural Address of President Wilson (1913), in John D. Buenker and Joseph Buenker, eds., Encyclopedia of the Gilded Age and Progressive Era, vol. 3 (Armonk, NY: Sharpe Reference, 2005), 1110. 2 Data from US Census Bureau, “Statistical Abstract of the United States: Area, Natural Resources, and Population,” 1910, https://www2.census.gov/prod2/statcomp/documents/1911-02.pdf (accessed March 1, 2018). 3 Roger Daniels, Coming to America: A History of Immigration and Ethnicity in American Life (New York: Harper Perennial, 1990), 122. 4 “Gives $10,000,000 to 26,000 Employees,” New York Times, January 6, 1914. 5 US Department of Labor, Bureau of Labor Statistics, “Hours, Earnings and Duration of Employment in Selected Industries in the District of Columbia” (Washington, DC: Government Printing Office, 1913), https://babel.hathitrust.org/cgi/pt?id=uc1.32106020334121;view=1up;seq=1 (accessed March 1, 2018). 6 From the History Learning website, http://www.historylearningsite.co.uk/inventions-and-discoveriesof-the-twentieth-century/inventions-1900-to-1990/ (accessed March 1, 2018). 7 Matthew Avery Sutton, “The Day Christian Fundamentalism Was Born,” Washington Post, May 25, 2019.

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8 See “The Zimmermann Telegram,” National Archives and Record Administration, https://www. archives.gov/education/lessons/zimmermann (accessed September 6, 2018). 9 See Howard M. Gitelman, Legacy of the Ludlow Massacre: A Chapter in American Industrial Relations (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1988) and Scott Martelle, Blood Passion: The Ludlow Massacre and Class War in the American West (New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press, 2008). 10 On the Seattle general strike, see “Seattle General Strike Project,” at depts.washington.edu/labhist/ strike (accessed December 1, 2017). 11 Advertisement in Pittsburgh Chronicle, October 6, 1919, http://explorepahistory.com/kora/files/1/2/12-9DE-25-ExplorePAHistory-a0j3v9-a_349.jpg (accessed December 14, 2018). 12 On the literature of civil liberties, freedom of speech and the Alien and Sedition laws, see Theodore Hornberger, “World War One and the Crisis of American Liberty,” American Quarterly 16 (1) (Spring 1964): 104–12; Geoffrey R. Stone, “Mr. Wilson’s First Amendment,” in John Milton Cooper, Jr., ed., Reconsidering Woodrow Wilson: Progressivism, Internationalism, War, and Peace (Washington, DC: Woodrow Wilson Center Press, 2008), 189–224. 13 Both quotes from Adam Hochschild, “Obstruction of Injustice,” The New Yorker, November 11, 2019, 28. 14 Beverly Gage, The Day Wall Street Exploded: A Story of America in Its First Age of Terror (New York: Oxford University Press, 2009). 15 Kenneth C. Davis, More Deadly Than War: The Hidden History of the Spanish Flu and the First World War (New York: Henry Holt, 2018); University of Michigan Center for the History of Medicine, “The American Influenza Epidemic of 1918–1919,” Influenza Encyclopedia, http://www.influenzaarchive.org (accessed August 18, 2017). The estimate of 50 million worldwide deaths may have been low; and the death rates from influenza and pneumonia in the United States had reached unusually high numbers in the years before the 1918–1919 pandemic. Jeffrey A. Taubenberger and Jeffrey A. Morens, “The 1918 Influenza: The Mother of All Pandemics,” Emerging Infectious Diseases 12 (1) (January 2006), https:// wwwnc.cdc.gov/eid/article/12/1/05-0979_article (accessed August 18, 2017); also, John M. Barry, The Great Influenza: The Story of the Deadliest Pandemic in History, rev. ed. (New York: Penguin, 2005). 16 Michael Wilson, “What New York Looked Like During the 1918 Flu Pandemic,” New York Times, April 2, 2020; Megan Flynn, “What Happens if Parades Are Not Canceled During Pandemics? Philadelphia Found Out in 1918, with Disastrous Results,” Washington Post, March 12, 2020. 17 George Dehner, Influenza: A Century of Science and Public Health Response (Pittsburgh: University of Pittsburgh Press, 2012), 61–62. 18 Centers for Disease Control website, https://www.cdc.gov/about/history/ourstory.htm (accessed November 17, 2017). 19 Harper Barnes, Never Been a Time: The Race Riot That Sparked the Civil Rights Movement (New York: Walker, 2008), 1–5. Also Elliott Rudwick, Race Riot at East St. Louis, July 2, 1917 (Champaign: University of Illinois Press, 1982); Charles L. Lumpkins, American Pogrom: The East St. Louis Race Riots and Black Politics (Athens: Ohio University Press, 2008); and Malcolm McLaughlin, Power, Community, and Racial Killing in East St. Louis (New York: Palgrave McMillan, 2005). 20 Gunnar Myrdal, An American Dilemma: The Negro Problem and American Democracy (New York: Harper & Bros., 1944), 566, cited in Barnes, Never Been a Time, 2. 21 Editorial, “Illinois and Race Riots,” Los Angeles Times, July 5, 1917. 22 On the racial tensions and discrimination in St. Louis, see Walter Johnson, The Broken Heart of America: St. Louis and the Violent History of the United States (New York: Basic Books, 2020). 23 Grif Stockley, “Elaine Massacre of 1919,” The Encyclopedia of Arkansas History and Culture, http:// www.encyclopediaofarkansas.net/encyclopedia/entry-detail.aspx?entryID=1102# (accessed May 11, 2019). Arkansas Gazette article quoted in this entry. The Supreme Court decision was Moore v. Dempsey, 261 US 86 (1923), https://supreme.justia.com/cases/federal/us/261/86/. The estimated number of African Americans killed, 100 to 237, comes from an Arkansas Senate concurring resolution commemorating the ninety-fourth anniversary of the Moore v. Dempsey decision, 91st General Assembly, 2017, http://www.arkleg.state.ar.us/assembly/2017/2017R/Bills/SCR6.pdf (accessed May 12, 2019). 24 David R. Krugler, 1919, The Year of Racial Violence: How African Americans Fought Back (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2015). 25 On the Chicago riot, see William M. Tuttle, Jr., Race Riot: Chicago in the Red Summer of 1919 (New York: Atheneum, 1980); Cameron McWhirtner, Red Summer: The Summer of 1919 and the Awakening of Black America (New York: St. Martin’s Griffin, 2012). 26 Krugler, 1919, The Year of Racial Violence.

Success and Backlash of Progressive Policy: 1913–1920 63 27 Monica Muñoz-Martinez, The Injustice Never Leaves You: Anti-Mexican Violence in Texas (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2018), 6. 28 On Mrs. Wilson’s role during Wilson’s incapacitation, see Judith L. Weaver, “Edith Bolling Wilson as First Lady: A Study in the Power of Personality, 1919–1920,” Presidential Studies Quarterly 15 (1) (Winter 1985): 51–76; Kristie Miller, Ellen and Edith: Woodrow Wilson’s First Ladies (Lawrence: University Press of Kansas, 2010); and Kenneth S. Lynn, “The Hidden Agony of Woodrow Wilson,” Wilson Quarterly (Winter 2004), http://archive.wilsonquarterly.com/essays/hidden-agony-woodrowwilson (accessed October 2, 2017). 29 H.W. Brands, Woodrow Wilson (New York: Henry Holt, Times Books, 2003), 30–31; also Sidney M. Milkis and Michael Nelson, The American Presidency: Origins and Development, 1776–2018, 8th ed. (Los Angeles: Sage Publications, 2020), 296–97. 30 Robert V. Remini, The House: The History of the House of Representatives (Washington, DC: Smithsonian Books and HarperCollins, 2006), 279. 31 Milkis and Nelson, The American Presidency, 298. 32 Arthur S. Link, Woodrow Wilson and the Progressive Era, 1910–1917 (New York: Harper & Brothers, 1954), xv. 33 Robert H. Ferrell, Presidential Leadership: From Woodrow Wilson to Harry S. Truman (Columbia: University of Missouri Press, 2006), 9. On the subject of international relations, historian H.W. Brands noted that Wilson “was about as innocent on the subject as a man could be and still consider himself educated.” Brands, Woodrow Wilson, 41. 34 W. Barksdale Maynard, Woodrow Wilson: Princeton to the Presidency (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2008), 325–26; Michael McGerr, A Fierce Discontent: The Rise and Fall of the Progressive Movement in America, 1870–1920 (New York: Free Press, 2003), 308–309. 35 Gary Gerstle, “Race and Nation in the Thought and Politics of Woodrow Wilson,” in Cooper, ed., Reconsidering Woodrow Wilson, 113. 36 Ibid., 111. 37 Gerstle, “Race and Nation in the Thought and Politics of Woodrow Wilson,” 108–109; Eric Yellin, “In the Nation’s Service: Racism and Federal Employees in Woodrow Wilson’s Washington,” PhD dissertation, Princeton University, 2007. 38 Quoted in Robert Shogan, Harry Truman and the Struggle for Racial Justice (Lawrence: University Press of Kansas, 2013), 9. 39 Letter from Washington to O.G. Villard, August 10, 1913, cited in Link, Woodrow Wilson and the Progressive Era, 248–49. 40 John Hope Franklin, “‘Birth of a Nation’: Propaganda as History,” The Massachusetts Review 20 (3) (Autumn, 1979): 417–34. 41 Matt Philips, “The Long Story of US Debt, from 1790 to 2011, in 1 Little Chart,” The Atlantic, November 13, 2012, https://www.theatlantic.com/business/archive/2012/11/the-long-story-of-usdebt-from-1790-to-2011-in-1-little-chart/265185/ (accessed February 21, 2018). 42 US Bureau of the Census, “District of Columbia: Race and Hispanic Origin, 1800–1990,” https:// web.archive.org/web/20080726045433/http://www.census.gov/population/www/documentation/ twps0056/tab23.pdf (accessed February 21, 2018). 43 The House membership was temporarily increased to 437 with the addition of Alaska and Hawaii in 1959; it reverted to 435 following the next apportionment. 44 Sarah J. Eckman, “Apportionment and Redistricting Process for US House of Representatives,” Congressional Research Service, updated November 22, 2021, https://crsreports.congress.gov/ product/pdf/R/R45951 (accessed December 2, 2021). 45 Morton Keller, “History of Congress: Progressivism and Normalcy, 1900–1933,” in Donald C. Baker, Roger H. Davidson, and Morton Keller, eds., Encyclopedia of the United States Congress, vol. 2. (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1995), 1015. 46 Walter J. Oleszek, “John Worth Kern: Portrait of a Floor Leader,” in Richard A. Baker and Roger H. Davidson, eds., First Among Equals: Outstanding Senate Leaders of the Twentieth Century (Washington, DC: Congressional Quarterly, 1991), 7. 47 Ralph K. Huitt, “The Internal Distribution of Influence: The Senate,” in David B. Truman, ed., The Congress and America’s Future (Englewood Cliffs: Prentice-Hall, 1965), 80. 48 William C. Widenour, “Henry Cabot Lodge: The Astute Parliamentarian,” in Baker and Davidson, eds., First Among Equals, 38–62. 49 White, in his earlier years, had been associated with the Ku Klux Klan in his home state of Louisiana. Benno C. Schmidt, Jr., noted that “White did not act like a Klansman on the Bench, at

64

50 51

52 53 54 55

56 57

58 59 60 61

62 63 64 65 66 67

The Early Years of the Twentieth Century least not after he took the center seat.” Schmidt, “Principle and Prejudice: The Supreme Court and Race in the Progressive Era. Part 3 : Black Disenfranchisement from the KKK to the Grandfather Clause,” Columbia Law Review 82 (5) (June 1982): 835–902, at 884. Herbert Hovenkamp, “Clayton Act (1914),” in Brian K. Landsberg, editor-in-chief, Major Acts of Congress, vol. 1 (New York: MacMillan Reference, 2004), 122–23. Over the years, the FTC and the Clayton Anti-Trust Act have been amendment and enhanced, including in recent years, the Telemarketing and Consumer Fraud and Abuse Prevention Act (1994), Children’s Online Privacy Protection Act (1998), and the Do-Not-Call Registry At (2003). The Clayton bill was named for Henry D. Clayton, Jr. (Democrat—Alabama), chairman of the House Judiciary Committee. Duplex Printing Press Company v. Deering, 254 US 443 (1921), https://supreme.justia.com/cases/ federal/us/254/443/case.html; and Dennis W. Johnson, The Laws that Shaped America: Fifteen Acts of Congress and Their Lasting Impact (New York: Routledge, 2009), 148. W. Elliott Brownlee, Federal Taxation in America: A History, 3rd ed. (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2016), 93–123, at 94. “Creation of the National Park Service,” National Park Service, U.S. Department of the Interior, https://www.nps.gov/articles/npshistory-creation.htm (accessed January 31, 2018). Christina Gerken, Model Immigrants and Undesirable Aliens: The Cost of Immigration Reform in the 1990s (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2013), 28–29. The Gentlemen’s Agreement of 1907 was signed to calm fears and resentments arising from Japanese immigration into the United States. In 1906, the school board of San Francisco arranged to segregate all Asian students from others. This caused immediate resentment from the Japanese government. President Roosevelt, trying to maintain a cordial relationship with Japan in the wake of Russian expansionist moves in the East, summoned the school board members and other San Francisco officials to the White House to back down on its actions. On February 24, 1907, the Gentlemen’s Agreement came in the form of a Japanese note agreeing to deny passports to Japanese laborers trying to enter the United States, and acknowledging the US right to exclude Japanese immigrants holding passports from other countries. The Gentlemen’s Agreement was superseded in 1924 by the Immigration Act of 1924. See Kiyo Sue Inui, “The Gentlemen’s Agreement: How It Has Functioned,” The Annals of the American Academy of Political and Social Science 122 (The Far East) (November 1925): 188–98. David T. Courtwright, Dark Paradise: A History of Opiate Addiction in America (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2001). Richard F. Weingroff, “Federal Aid Road Act of 1916: Building the Foundation,” Public Roads 60 (1) (Summer 1996), https://www.fhwa.dot.gov/publications/publicroads/96summer/p96su2.cfm (accessed February 21, 2018) and Richard F. Weingroff, “Creation of a Landmark: The Federal Aid Road Act of 1916,” Federal Highway Administration, n.d., https://www.fhwa.dot.gov/highwayhistory/landmark.pdf (accessed February 21, 2018). Arthur S. Link, Wilson: The New Freedom (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1956), 199. Ibid., 43–44. Ibid., 199–201; Jon R. Moen and Ellis W. Tallman, “The Panic of 1907,” Federal Reserve History, https://www.federalreservehistory.org/essays/panic_of_1907#footnote1 (accessed October 10, 2017). Neil Irwin, The Alchemists: Three Central Bankers and a World on Fire (New York: Penguin Press, 2013), 35–37. The six were Senator Nelson Aldrich, A. Piatt Andrew (economics professor, Harvard University), Henry Davison (partner at J.P. Morgan), Arthur Shelton (Aldrich’s private secretary), Frank Vanderlip (president, National City Bank), and Paul Warburg. Gary Richardson and Jesse Romero, “The Meeting at Jekyll Island: November 20, 1910–November 30, 1910,” Federal Reserve History (December 4, 2015), https://www.federalreservehistory.org/essays/jekyll_island_conference (accessed February 8, 2018). Irwin, The Alchemists, 43. Roger Lowenstein, America’s Bank: The Epic Struggle to Create the Federal Reserve (New York: Penguin Press, 2015), 140–41. Alvin M. Josephy, Jr. On the Hill: A History of the American Congress (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1990), 294. Quoted in Edward Morris, Wall Streeters: The Creators and Corruptors of American Finance (New York: Columbia University Press, 2015), 40. Lowenstein, America’s Bank, 181–82. Glass, Owen, and Untermyer all grew up in the same town, Lynchburg, Virginia, two years apart: Glass and Untermyer in 1858 and Owen in 1856.

Success and Backlash of Progressive Policy: 1913–1920 65 68 Irwin, The Alchemists, 45. 69 Allan H. Meltzer, A History of the Federal Reserve, vol. 1: 1913–1951 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2004), 74. The Federal Reserve banks were established in Boston, New York, Philadelphia, Cleveland, Richmond, Atlanta, Chicago, St. Louis, Minneapolis, Kansas City, Dallas, and San Francisco. 70 See Robert Jabaily, “Banking Holiday of 1933,” Federal Reserve History, https://www. federalreservehistory.org/essays/bank_holiday_of_1933 (accessed January 16, 2018). 71 Meltzer, A History of the Federal Reserve, vol. 1: 1913–1951, 1. 72 Link, Woodrow Wilson and the Progressive Era, 43–44. See also, Link, Wilson: The New Freedom, ch. 7; see also, Tim Todd, The Balance of Power: The Political Fight for an Independent Central Bank, 1790–Present, 2nd ed. Federal Reserve Bank of Kansas City, 2012, https://www.kansascityfed.org/ publicat/balanceofpower/balanceofpower.pdf (accessed January 16, 2018). 73 Quote and observation from K. Austin Kerr, review of Ruth Bordin, Francis Willard: A Biography (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1986). Kerr, The Business History Review 6 (2) (1987): 327–28. 74 National Woman’s Christian Temperance Union website, https://www.wctu.org/history.html (accessed October 18, 2017). 75 David E. Kyvig, Repealing National Prohibition (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1979), 5. 76 Daniel Okrent, Last Call: The Rise and Fall of Prohibition (New York: Scribner, 2010), 131. 77 Michael Kazin, The Populist Persuasion: An American History (New York: Basic Books, 1995), 106. Eric Burns, Spirits of America: A Social History of Alcohol (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 2004). 78 T. Justin Steuart, Wayne Wheeler Dry Boss: An Uncensored Biography of Wayne B. Wheeler (New York: Greenwood Press, 1971, 1928), quoted in John Kobler, Ardent Spirits: The Rise and Fall of Prohibition (New York: Putnam’s Sons, 1973), 182. 79 From the Anti-Saloon League Museum, Westerville, Ohio, public library, http://www. westervillelibrary.org/antisaloon (accessed February 10, 2016). Westerville was the headquarters of the Anti-Saloon League of America. 80 1979 Brewers’ Almanac (Washington, DC: United States Brewers Association, 1979), 12–13, in Martin H. Stack, “A Concise History of America’s Brewing Industry,” EH.net (Economic History Association), n.d., https://eh.net/encyclopedia/a-concise-history-of-americas-brewing-industry/ (accessed February 20, 2018). 81 The Eighteenth Amendment, section 1 read: “After one year from the ratification of this article the manufacture, sale, or transportation of intoxicating liquors within, the important thereof into, or the exportation thereof from the United States and all territory subject to the jurisdiction thereof for beverage purposes is hereby prohibited.” 82 Okrent, Last Call, 104–105. 83 Rae Katherine Eighmey, “Volstead: Prohibition’s Public Face,” Minnesota History 63 (8) (Winter 2013–2014): 312–23 at 321. 84 Okrent, Last Call, 373. 85 Carrie Chapman Catt and Nettie Rogers Shuler, Woman Suffrage and Politics: The Inner Story of the Suffrage Movement (New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1926), 472, in Johnson, The Laws that Shaped America, 114; Richard Barry, “Why Women Oppose Woman Suffrage,” Pearson’s Magazine (March 1910): 329, cited in Jane Jerome Camhi, Women Against Women: American Anti-Suffragism, 1880–1920 (New York: Carlson Publishing, 1994), 57. 86 Adapted from Johnson, The Laws that Shaped America, 105–39. 87 Victoria Bissell Brown, “Did Woodrow Wilson’s Gender Politics Matter?” in Cooper, ed., Reconsidering Woodrow Wilson, 135; Tina Cassidy, Mr. President, How Long Must We Wait? Alice Paul, Woodrow Wilson, and the Fight for the Right to Vote (New York: 37Ink, 2019). 88 “Wilson Pledges Aid to Women in Fight for Vote,” New York Times, September 9. 1916. 89 Brown, “Did Woodrow Wilson’s Gender Politics Matter?”, 142. 90 Kenneth R. Johnson, “White Racial Attitudes as a Factor in the Arguments Against the Nineteenth Amendment,” Phylon 31 (1) (First Quarter 1970), 32. 91 Quoted in Catt and Shuler, Woman Suffrage and Politics, 451. See Johnson, The Laws that Shaped America, 135–36. 92 In 1918, Canada, Austria, England (and Scotland and Wales), Germany, Hungary, Ireland, and Poland; in 1919, Holland and Sweden. P. Orman Ray, “The World-Wide Woman Suffrage Movement,” Journal of Comparative Legislation and International Law, 3rd Ser. 1 (3) (1919): 220–28.

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93 Some 5,100 of Hine’s photographs remain on display at the Library of Congress. Library of Congress, Prints and Photography Collection, National Child Labor Committee Collection, [n.d.], http://www. loc.gov/pictures/collection/nclc/background.html#intro (accessed June 26, 2017). 94 US Congress, Senate, 61st Cong. 2nd sess., Document No. 645. Report on Condition of Woman and Child Wage-Earners in the United States, 19 volumes (Washington, DC, US Government Printing Office, 1913). 95 Link, Woodrow Wilson and the Progressive Era, 59. 96 Michael Schuman, “History of Child Labor in the United States. Part 2: The Reform Movement,” Monthly Labor Review (January 2017), 13–14; Walter I. Trattner, “The First Child Labor Law (1916), Social Science Quarterly 50 (3) (December 1969): 507–24, at 517. 97 John Braeman, “Albert J. Beveridge and the First National Child Labor Bill,” Indiana Magazine of History LX (1) (March 1964): 1–36 at 34. 98 Schuman, “History of Child Labor in the United States,” 14–15. 99 Background on Wells see Linda O. McMurry, To Keep the Waters Troubled: The Life of Ida B. Wells (New York: Oxford University Press, 1998). 100 Ida B. Wells, “Lynch Law in America,” The Arena 23 (1) (January 1900): 15–24, in William A. Link and Susannah J. Link, eds., The Gilded Age and Progressive Era: A Documentary Reader (Malden: Wiley-Blackwell, 2012. 101 John V. Baiamonte, Jr., “‘Who Killa de Chief’ Revisited: The Hennessey Assassination and Its Aftermath, 1890–1891,” Louisiana History 33 (2) (Spring 1992): 117–46. The mob’s vengeance was brought on by the murder of the New Orleans police chief. The eleven Italian immigrants had been acquitted by a jury, but that was not what the lynch crowd wanted to hear. In 2019, the mayor of New Orleans, LaToya Cantrell, an African American, apologized to the Italian American community for the 1891 atrocity. Meagan Flynn, “New Orleans to Apologize for Lynching of 11 Italians in 1891, Among Worst in American History,” Washington Post, April 1, 2019. 102 Wells, “Lynch Law in America,” 22. 103 Leon F. Litwack, Trouble in Mind: Black Southerners in the Age of Jim Crow (New York: Vintage, 1999), 285–86. 104 Wells, “Lynch Law in America,” 204. 105 White quoted in Meagan Flynn, “A Black Lawmaker’s Anti-lynching Bill Failed 120 Years Ago. Now the House May Finally Act,” Washington Post, February 21, 2020. 106 “Speech of the Hon. George H. White,” US House of Representatives, February 23, 1900, https:// cdn.loc.gov/service/rbc/lcrbmrp/t2112/t2112.pdf (accessed February 21, 2020). 107 Benjamin R. Justesen, George Henry White: An Even Chance in the Race of Life (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 2001). 108 William B. Hixson, “Moorfield Storey and the Defense of the Dyer Anti-Lynching Bill,” New England Quarterly 42 (March 1969): 65–81; Robert L. Zangrando, The NAACP Crusade Against Lynching, 1909–1950 (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1980). 109 DeNeen L. Brown, “Google Memorializes the Silent Parade When 10,000 Black People Protested Lynchings,” Washington Post, July 28, 2017. 110 NAACP, Thirty Years of Lynchings in the United States, 1889–1918. Introduction by Paul Finkelman (New York: Lawbook Exchange, 2012, 1918). 111 Ibid., 66. Wilson quoted in Milkis and Nelson, The American Presidency, 306. 112 Black Americans in Congress, 1870–2007. US House of Representatives, Office of the Historian (Washington, DC: US Government Printing Office, 2008). “Anti-Lynching Legislation Renewed,” http://history.house.gov/Exhibitions-and-Publications/BAIC/Historical-Essays/Temporary-Farewell/ Anti-Lynching-Legislation/ (accessed January 8, 2016). 113 “Anti-Lynching Legislation Renewed.” 114 Congressional Record, House, 65th Cong., 2nd sess. (May 7, 1918): 6177–6178; quoted in “AntiLynching Legislation Renewed.” 115 Charles Mangum, The Legal Status of the Negro (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1940), 290–308, cited in Hixson, “Moorfield Storey and the Defense of the Dyer Anti-Lynching Bill,” 67, n6. 116 On the history of Senate filibusters, Gregory J. Wawro and Eric Schickler, Filibuster: Obstruction and Lawmaking in the US Senate (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2007); Gregory Koger, Filibustering: A Political History of Obstruction in the House and the Senate (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2010).

Success and Backlash of Progressive Policy: 1913–1920 67 117 247 U.S. 251 (1918); https://www.law.cornell.edu/supremecourt/text/247/251 (accessed January 13, 2017). 118 247 US 251, at 280. 119 259 US 20 (1922), https://supreme.justia.com/cases/federal/us/259/20/case.html (accessed January 12, 2017). 120 United States v. Darby Lumber Company, 312 US 100 (1941); https://supreme.justia.com/cases/ federal/us/312/100/case.html (accessed October 11, 2017). 121 Eugene P. Trani and David L. Wilson, The Presidency of Warren G. Harding (Lawrence: The Regents Press of Kansas, 1977), 11–13.

Chapter 3

The Return to “Normalcy” and the Onset of the Depression: 1921–1932

America’s present need is not heroics, but healing; not nostrums, but normalcy; not revolution, but restoration; not agitation, but adjustment; not surgery, but serenity; not the dramatic, but the dispassionate; not experiment, but equipoise; not submergence in internationality, but sustainment in triumphant nationality. (Presidential candidate Warren G. Harding, May 1920)1

AMERICA DURING THIS ERA With the cessation of the war, the American people and their elected leaders were eager to return to “normalcy.” Voters were tired of war, exhausted from the upset of the social order caused by violent strikes, racial violence, the devastation of the pandemic, and the upsurge of immigrant/nativist tensions. Conservative lawmakers, Supreme Court justices, and three Republican presidents were determined to hold down the cost of government, rein in labor unions and protect what they considered the sacred right of contract, permit, even encourage, big business to dominate federal regulatory agencies, and develop policies far less adventuresome than those of the Progressive era. But this was also the beginning of an era of federal intrusion into the lives of ordinary citizens, as the government took unprecedented actions to enforce the controversial policy of alcohol prohibition. The popular impression was that the 1920s were a lawless era, with prohibition-fueled bootlegging, bank robberies, murder, and other serious crimes. Violent crimes, however, were comparatively rare.2 But there were other blots on the American landscape: the flourishing of the Ku Klux Klan nationwide, attacks on Jews, Catholics, and non-English speaking immigrants, the spread of “100 percent Americanism,” and the rise of the pseudo-science of eugenics. Two sensational trials reflected the growing fissures on race, immigration, modern science, and old-time religion. Nationwide, indeed, worldwide attention was focused on the murder trials of Nicola Sacco and Bartolomeo Vanzetti in Braintree, Massachusetts; in Dayton, Tennessee, on the trial of young biology teacher John Scopes who dared to teach evolution in the local public school. Millions of listeners were glued to their radios or fervently read every word in their local newspapers about the battle between science and fundamentalist Christian doctrine. It was a new era of communication, with the radio going from a novelty to a household fixture. It was also a time of shocks to American culture, from Modernism, to women smoking cigarettes, and jazz music. During the 1920s, wages were increasing and relative prosperity seemed to be within the reach of millions of workers. But this was also the era when farm prices plummeted, bringing about a serious depression in the agricultural economy years before the October 1929 crash of the stock market. During the last two and a half years came economic hardship, failing banks, fortunes ruined, and jobs collapsing—an era soon called the Great Depression. DOI: 10.4324/9781003293538-5

The Return to “Normalcy” and the Onset of the Depression: 1921–1932 69

The Era by the Numbers By 1920, the country’s population had grown to 106,021,037, some 14 million more than in 1910 census and 30 percent more than in 1900. New York again was the largest city in the country, with 5.6 million residents, followed by Chicago (2.7 million), Philadelphia (1.8 million), Detroit (1.0 million), and Cleveland (0.79 million). The twenty-first century mega-cities of Los Angeles and Houston were far down the list. Los Angeles, the tenth most populous city, had only 576,000 residents while Houston with 138,000 was the forty-fifth largest city. New York continued to be the most populous state (10.3 million), followed by Pennsylvania (8.7 million), Illinois (6.5 million), Ohio (5.6 million), and Texas (4.6 million). In 1920, California was the tenth largest state and saw the greatest growth; Florida ranked far below, at thirty-sixth.3 For the first time, more Americans lived in urban areas, that is, towns and cities of 2,500 or more, than lived in rural areas. For many Americans, life was better, with the average wage for workers reaching a high point. Altogether, there were some 40 million Americans in the labor force. Workers generally saw a 6 to 10 percent increase in their wages from the previous decade. In 1926, clerks in manufacturing averaged $2,428 annually ($35,363 in 2020 dollars), while postal workers earned $2,128 and railway clerks earned $1,604.4 Members of Congress received $10,000 ($145,648 in 2020 dollars; their actual salary in 2020 was $174,000) while the president earned $75,000 (an astounding $1,092,360 in 2020 dollars; actual salary in 2020 was $400,000).5 There was widespread disparity in wealth. Nearly 40 percent of American families earned less than $1,500 per year. At the other end of the spectrum, the 24,000 wealthiest families enjoyed three times the total income of the 6 million poorest families.6 The top 0.1 percent of American families in 1929 had the combined incomes equal to the bottom 42 percent. Income inequality increased as the years went on. Wealth distribution showed an even greater disparity: by 1929, nearly 80 percent of American families had no savings whatsoever; the 2.3 percent of families with incomes of over $10,000 controlled two-thirds of all savings.7 Southern blacks increasingly migrated to northern cities. In the years immediately after World War I, a half million African Americans left the South; another one million followed during the 1920s, seeking jobs and some relief from the racial oppression and lack of opportunities in Dixie. Americans were healthier, with life expectancy at 54.6 years, compared with 47.3 years in 1900; death rates for major diseases like diphtheria, typhoid, and tuberculosis showed significant decreases. The miracle drug of insulin was introduced in 1922. A new health hazard, unknown in 1900, came from automobile accidents, claiming 10.3 Americans per 100,000 in population in 1920. By the end of the 1920s, four of every five households owned an automobile. Illiteracy had been reduced sharply, going from 10.7 percent in 1900 to 6 percent in 1920; for nonwhites, the rate went down from 44.5 percent in 1900 to 23 percent in 1920.8 At the beginning of this era, there were only two radio stations; by 1922, there were more than 300, broadcasting to over three million homes. The National Broadcasting Company (NBC) was formed in 1926 followed the next year by the Columbia Broadcasting System (CBS). The first issue of Reader’s Digest appeared in 1922 and the Book-of-the-Month Club was founded four years later.9

Society Under Stress Depression in Agriculture The years 1910 through 1914 were considered the Golden Age of agriculture in the United States.10 Then came the Great War, and with it increased demand abroad for American

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agricultural products. Prices for American farm products rose sharply in 1916, and by 1920, they had doubled. But with the cessation of hostilities and European farmers getting back on their feet, prices for American agricultural goods plummeted. Overall, prices fell by half, with staples like wheat tumbling from over $2 a bushel to less than $1 per bushel. Many farmers who purchased their land with borrowed funds found themselves in considerable financial difficulty, having to repay loans with fewer and fewer resources. The average income of farms throughout America dropped by half in 1920.11 Southern farmers were particularly hard hit. The boll weevil infestation, which began in Texas in the 1890s moved east by the 1920s and caused major damage to southern cotton fields. The devastating 1927 Mississippi River flood was followed by drought three years later. Many black sharecroppers, vital to southern agriculture, were migrating to the North and West and the southern farm market was collapsing.12 Farmers and agricultural interests turned to Washington for help year after year. They gained much-needed assistance during the first years of the Harding administration, but were blunted by the veto pen of Calvin Coolidge and the too-little, too-late support from Herbert Hoover. Weather would cause even greater calamity, from 1932 onward, as draught conditions and high winds would scatter precious topsoil for hundreds of miles in what would soon be called the Dust Bowl. The 1927 Mississippi Flooding One of the most destructive floods ever in the United States occurred on the Mississippi River and its tributaries in 1927. Throughout the Mississippi River watershed, persistent rains began in August 1926 and continued through the spring of 1927.13 By January 1927, the Ohio River had been inundated; by mid-April, a million acres of land were under water, and 55,000 people had to abandon their homes in Arkansas, Illinois, Mississippi, Kentucky, Missouri, Oklahoma, and Tennessee. The springtime snow melt-off added to the misery and the rains kept coming. Some 27,000 square miles of land in seven states were flooded; 637,000 persons (the great majority poor and black) were left homeless; and between 250 and 1,000 individuals perished. Who was to blame? Fingers first pointed to mismanagement or mistakes in southern engineering and, by extension, southern ways of doing business. The Mississippi River flood, however, brought to light the larger problems of poor engineering and resource management throughout the Mississippi water system, from headwaters in Minnesota, to streams in Colorado and Wyoming, and from New York to Pennsylvania. Deforestation, drainage of wetlands, destruction of grasslands, poor levee designs—not just in the South, but throughout the Mississippi watershed—added to the problems. Mississippi flooding was a national problem, with miscalculations and bad ecological management throughout. Secretary of Commerce Herbert C. Hoover was put in charge of disaster relief. Years earlier, Hoover had headed post-war relief in Belgium and France and was credited with saving an estimated 10 million persons from starvation, rightly earning the sobriquet “The Great Humanitarian.” Now in 1927, the most important response came from the federal government which took over the job of flood relief and mitigation. Under Hoover’s direction, some 31,000 volunteers and 1,400 paid workers fought the flood and helped keep the number of deaths from going into the thousands. Congress then responded with the Flood Control Act of 1928, which authorized funds for improved levees and river stabilization.14 Some $325 million was authorized over a ten-year period; up until this time, this was the largest federal public works allocation—even exceeding monies for the construction of the Panama Canal.15 Another series of devastating floods through the nation in 1936 and 1937 led to the Flood Control Act of 1936.

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Racial Violence The 1920s saw continued racial tension, with a massacre of black residents in Tulsa, Oklahoma, in 1921.16 It was described by Scott Ellsworth of the Oklahoma Historical Society as “the single worst incident of racial violence in American history.”17 Sparked by an accusation that a black teenager had assaulted a white teenage girl, an angry mob of white citizens attacked African Americans in the Greenwood District of that city. Greenwood was known as the “Black Wall Street,” for its relative affluence, and black professionals and businesses. Thirty-five square blocks of Greenwood were set aflame as whites rioted against the black residents; more than 1,000 homes and businesses were destroyed. Law enforcement did nothing to protect the African American residents. Credible estimates found that between 150–300 African Americans were killed, thousands fled the city, some 4,000 were rounded up and put in temporary detention centers, 6,000 were left homeless. Despite overwhelming evidence, no white perpetrator was put in jail for murders committed or for the widespread arson. For years afterwards, the subject of the race massacre was off limits, not taught in local schools, not mentioned in the news media. Not until 1997 did Oklahoma create a state commission to investigate the matter and offer recommendations to make amends. Five months after the Tulsa massacre, President Harding, who supported federal antilynching legislation and whose administration went after the Ku Klux Klan, traveled to Birmingham, Alabama, in October 1921, for the fiftieth anniversary of the city’s founding. At the Woodrow Wilson Park, he dared to deliver a speech on racial equality, “an end to prejudice,” calling for a measure of racial opportunity and equal education. “Let the Black man vote when he is fit to vote; prohibit the White man voting when he is unfit to vote,” said Harding. While white listeners fell largely silent, African Americans cheered from their segregated section of the park. Republicans generally applauded the speech; Democrats, particularly southern white Democrats, were furious.18 Mississippi’s senator Byron P. (Pat) Harrison decried Harding’s speech and warned: If the president’s theory is carried to its ultimate conclusion, namely, that the Black person, either man or woman, should have full economic and political rights with the White man and White woman, that means that the Black man can strive to be president of the United States, hold a cabinet position, and occupy the highest place of public trust in the nation.19 For African Americans in particular, the oppression was all-pervasive: in the South, they “knew their place” or they would be subjected to violent, even deadly, consequences. African Americans traveling North and West to escape the cruelties of the South faced other forms of discrimination in employment, housing, education, medical care, and other essentials of the American dream. The “Invisible Empire” and 100 Percent Americanism On April 26, 1913, a thirteen-year-old white girl, Mary Phagan, had been strangled and found dead in the basement of the National Pencil Factory in Atlanta. Throughout Georgia, newspapers, preachers, and politicians decried the terrible and unsafe conditions that children—particularly girls—faced in factories. Someone had to pay for this horrible crime. This time, it wouldn’t be a black man accused of murder; rather it was the factory superintendent, a white man named Leo Frank. Normally, there would be deference to the boss, but

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Frank had two strikes against him: he was a Yankee transplant and he was a Jew. The evidence against him was shaky, but Frank was found guilty and sentenced to death in an Atlanta court. A host of southern politicians and 10,000 petitioners urged Georgia governor John M. (Jack) Slaton to grant clemency. Slaton, not convinced of Frank’s guilt, commuted his sentence to life imprisonment. But that didn’t satisfy the white locals. A mob, calling itself the Knights of Mary Phagan, broke into the Marietta prison, abducted Frank, drove him 100 miles to Phagan’s home, hung him up on a tree, and lynched him.20 Within weeks of the lynching, the Knights of Mary Phagan were reincarnated into the Ku Klux Klan (KKK). This Version 2.0 of the Klan was formed at Stone Mountain, Georgia, on Thanksgiving eve, November 1915, when fifteen supporters joined William J. Simmons, a Spanish-American War veteran, turned preacher and salesman, to light a match to a pine cross. The new Klan, which started out somewhat slowly, was fueled by xenophobia and racism. The target of its hatred, to be sure, remained African Americans, but new enemies were added: Jews, Catholics, and foreigners. As more and more immigrants came in from southern and eastern Europe—speaking a foreign tongue, wearing different clothes, holding to their own customs, traditions, and religions—the cry came out that America should get back to its roots—to 100 percent Americanism. In 1920, Simmons teamed up with Atlanta publicists Edward Young Clark and Elizabeth Tyler. For an 80 percent cut of the membership fees, Clark and Tyler devised a publicity scheme to dramatically increase Klan membership. The KKK would be rabidly pro-American and it would aggressively fight to purify the country of those who were not. When Simmons was introduced at a Klan gathering in an auditorium, he laid down his rifle and his pistol, and thrust his Bowie knife into the table in front of him. “Now let the Niggers, Catholics, Jews and all others who disdain my imperial wizardry, come out!”21 The Invisible Empire rocketed in membership for a few thousand to nearly 100,000 by the summer of 1921. During the month of September 1921, the New York World published an exposé of Klan activities, an unprecedented twenty-one days of coverage. For that journalistic work, the newspaper was awarded a Pulitzer Prize. Surely, thought the editors, this exposure, seen by some 2 million readers, would hasten the downfall of the Klan. Congress, too, was prompted to investigate the Klan, but the effort was soon aborted. Instead, Imperial Wizard Simmons and his followers received tons of free publicity from the newspaper reports and the threat of a congressional investigation, vaunting it from a little-known regional organization to a national phenomenon.22 While having its roots in the Deep South, the new Klan was not simply a southern phenomenon: it spread throughout the country, surfacing in many places, including Colorado, Oregon, and Indiana. In Colorado, the Klan found a welcome reception, peaking in 1924, when it had the backing of the mayor of Denver, Benjamin Stapleton, the governor, Klansman Clarence J. Morley, and many of the state and federal legislators, and business and religious leaders. At its peak, 30,000 men (one-third of the white, US-born men) in Denver had joined the KKK; at least 11,000 women had joined Klan-affiliated groups in Colorado, mostly in Denver. Stapleton, who just a year earlier had renounced the Klan, changed his tune: at a Klan rally he said, “I will work with the Klan and for the Klan in the upcoming election, heart and soul. And if I am re-elected, I will give the Klan the kind of administration it wants.” Seven out of ten Denver voters backed Stapleton, and Stapleton came through appointing many Klansmen to city government positions. Following the election, the Denver Post concluded that the Klan “was the largest, most cohesive, and most efficiently organized political force in the state of Colorado today.”23

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In the case of Oregon, the Southern Poverty Law Center, which tracks and analyzes hate groups in America, noted that “Incredibly, within a year of the arrival of a single Klan salesman [in 1921], Oregon was so firmly in the grasp of the hooded nightriders that the governor admitted they controlled the state.”24 About 35,000 Oregonians joined the Klan, with auxiliary units for women (Women of the Ku Klux Klan), teenagers (Junior Order of Klansmen), and foreign-born Protestants (Royal Riders of the Red Robe).25 Klansmen won elections to the state legislature and helped elect Democrat Walter M. Pierce as governor. In Indiana, the Klan found a large, receptive audience.26 “In no other state in the Union, not even Texas, is the domination of the Ku Klux Klan so absolute as it is in Indiana,” remarked the New York Times in November 1923.27 The Indiana Klan claimed 700,000 members, topping Texas by 300,000, and second only to Ohio in actual numbers. But, as the news account noted, in proportion to its population, “Indiana seems to be in a class by herself.” The Klan, by the mid-1920s, controlled majorities in both legislative chambers, had an ally in Governor Edward L. Jackson, and won favor from a variety of local officeholders. It operated out of intimidation: blacklists of business establishments that were not 100 percent American, cross burnings, and mass rallies of masked and robed citizens. The Indiana Klan was headed by Grand Dragon DC Stephenson, a bombastic snake-oil salesman. The pretenses of moral authority and legitimacy of the Klan were severely shaken when Stephenson was tried and convicted of the abduction, rape, and murder of a young woman in 1925. In 1927, Stephenson exposed to journalists a heretofore secret list of Klan leaders and sympathetic politicians, leading to indictments, arrests, and thousands of everyday members abandoning the Klan.28 At the national politics level, the chaotic Democratic National Convention in 1924 lasted a sweaty, frustrating thirteen days at Madison Square Garden in New York. The front-runner for the presidential nomination was former Wilson administration cabinet member William G. McAdoo, who enjoyed (and never repudiated) support from the Klan. The principal anti-Klan and anti-prohibition candidate was New York governor Alfred E. (Al) Smith, a Catholic to boot. An anti-Klan proposal for the Democratic platform failed by a slim margin. The convention was forever known as the “Klanbake” with 20,000 Klansmen amassed across the Hudson River in New Jersey to burn crosses and Smith in effigy. Because of the Democratic Party’s two-thirds rule for nominating presidential candidates, it took 103 ballots before McAdoo and Smith were eliminated. Altogether, sixty candidates were placed in nomination, and it finally went to corporate lawyer John W. Davis. As Arthur Krock of the New York Times noted, “When the debris began to fall, somebody looked underneath the pile and dragged out John W. Davis.” Davis was handily defeated by Calvin Coolidge, receiving only 28.8 percent of the popular vote.29 Then came the Klan march on Washington. On August 9, 1925, some 30,000 to 35,000 hooded Klansmen, led by Grand Kleagle L. A. Mueller marched three hours before entering the Mall in Washington, DC “White Robed Klan Cheered on March in Nation’s Capital,” proclaimed the Washington Post. But the Klan and its followers were met by a torrential rainstorm. “Don’t leave,” Mueller exhorted, “God won’t let it rain.” The rain continued unabated, but then the march continued. The Post rhapsodized that it was “one of the greatest demonstrations this city has ever known.” The next day, the Klansmen laid a wreath at the Tomb of the Unknown Soldier and the newly dug grave of William Jennings Bryan, and that evening 75,000 citizens watched the burning of an 80-foot cross and 200 new members joining the ranks.30

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Photo 3.1 Ku Klux Klan march in Washington, DC, 1925. Source: National Photo Company Collection via Library of Congress.

But national infighting and power plays, scandal both personal and financial, and incompetence of its leaders hobbled any national Klan movement. The murder trial and conviction of DC Stephenson greatly hurt the Klan, and by the end of the decade the Klan had lost its steam, and those attracted to it found other inflammatory leaders to follow. Labor Relations Labor unions membership had peaked in 1920, with some 5 million workers belonging to unions. But this was also a period of intense labor-management strife, with nearly 20 percent of the workforce engaged in labor disputes. Also quite troublesome was the problem of unemployment, which reached 11 percent in 1921. In 1922, the country experienced its worst labor crisis since the 1890s when one million coal miners and railroad workers were on strike. The coal strike turned violent when eighteen strikebreakers were killed by miners.31 The Harding administration was generally unsympathetic to labor, with the fiercest voice coming from Attorney General Harry M. Daugherty. Harding, without informing other members of the Cabinet, directed Daugherty to seek an injunction against the striking rail workers. Daugherty in turn sought out federal judge James Wilkerson in Chicago and secured the restraining order. “The injunction,” wrote historians Eugene P. Trani and David L. Wilson, “was perhaps the most far reaching in the stormy history of American Labor.”32 Ironically, the union strike was about to fail under its own weight, but Daugherty pressed ahead. Hoover denounced the injunction, and sought to calm the waters and seek compromise in the labor-

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management controversy, but to no avail.33 The return to “normalcy” for the Harding Administration meant that business interests would not be restrained and that the union movement, becoming weaker since 1920, would not have an advocate, or even a voice, in the White House. After Harding’s death, with the scandal and downfall of Daugherty, Hoover as commerce secretary became the most important government participant in labor–management relations. In particular, he helped create the rail carrier union conferences that led to the 1926 Railway Labor Act, which became the first federal law guaranteeing the right of workers to unionize and bargain collectively without interference or coercion from employers. The Great Depression Begins Coolidge Prosperity was the name given to the economic good times experienced during the mid-1920s. By this time, nearly half of American families owned automobiles, washing machines, and radios. Electricity was commonplace in cities and towns and increased consumer credit meant that more people could buy more goods on time. More Americans began to dabble in the stock market. They bought common stock and corporate bonds, often buying on the margin—that is, borrowing money from a stockbroker and acquiring, for example, $100 in stocks for just $10. With stock prices going up and up, buying on margin was a good deal. In 1921, about $1 billion in broker loans were invested in the stock exchanges; by October 1929, some $8.5 billion of broker loans were in the market.34 Corporate profits went up by 75 percent from 1922 to 1927 and the stock market climbed as well. Old stocks, like oil and railroads, struggled, while the “new economy” stocks in automobiles and consumer appliances went up “exponentially.” The Dow Jones Industrial Average jumped from 150 to 200, then, beginning in the summer of 1938, jumped again from 200 to 380. The stock market, noted economist and investment manager Liaquat Ahamed, displayed every symptom of a mania: the progressive narrowing in the number of stocks going up, the nationwide fascination with the activities of Wall Street, the faddish invocations of a new era, the suspension of every conventional standard of financial rationality, and the rabble enlistment of an army of amateur and ill-informed speculators betting on the basis of rumors and tip sheets.35 Coolidge didn’t understand or appreciate the dangers of speculative market behavior. He emphasized thrift both for the individual and for the government; taxes should be as low as possible and unwise spending should be eliminated. He basically left the matter of stocks and markets up to Treasury Secretary Andrew W. Mellon, the third richest man in the America, and Hoover, who was also wealthy but certainly not in the same league as Mellon.36 Humorist Will Rogers, who shunned the stock market, predicted in 1926 that something terrible was going to happen to the economy in a few years. In June 1928, he cautioned that America was operating on luck and natural resources and that the Lord was liable to turn on them at any minute.37 Perhaps it was not the Lord’s doing, but certainly the economy did turn quickly and catastrophically. The New York stock market had been rocketing along: easy credit, sure-thing stock tips, and quick returns seemed assured. The New York Stock Exchange saw fantastic, almost unbelievable, growth from 1928 to 1929. Smart money pulled out of the market. Financier Bernard Baruch, who quietly pulled out of the stock market before the crash, recalled:

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Taxi drivers told you what to buy. The shoeshine boy could give you a summary of the day’s financial news as he worked with rag and polish. An old beggar who regularly patrolled the street in front of my office now gave me tips. … My cook had a brokerage account and followed the ticker closely. Her paper profits were quickly blown away in the gale of 1929.38 On October 24, 1929, “Black Thursday,” the New York stock market lost $9 billion in value; then on “Black Tuesday,” October 29, $30 billion of capital evaporated with the loss of $15 billion in market value. Some fortunes, based on quick-rich schemes and even those based on solid investments, were lost in a matter of days or weeks. The market did indeed crash, but few Americans actually owned stock—some 97.5 percent of the population held no stock at all. “The Crash in itself,” wrote historian David M. Kennedy, “had little direct or immediate economic effect on the typical American.”39 The psychological impact, however, was enormous. The singular feature of the 1929 Crash, noted economist John Kenneth Galbraith, was that “the worst continued to worsen. What looked one day like the end proved on the next day to have only been the beginning.”40 Despite assurances from Hoover, now president, and others that the economy was sound and prosperous, the public mood lurched from optimism to pessimism, from growth to contraction, from profligacy to penny-pinching, from expanded borrowing to defaulted mortgages. The impact on employment was devastating. In 1929, 2 million workers were unemployed; by 1931, 8 million were unemployed; and by 1932, that figure rose to 12 million. Banks, especially vulnerable, undercapitalized rural institutions, began to fail. In 1929, there were 659 bank failures; by 1931, some 2,294 banks, with deposits of $1.7 billion, had folded.41 But the worst for financial institutions was still to come. What was the underlying cause of the Depression? That has been an issue perplexing economist, historians, and policymakers ever since. Economist and former Federal Reserve chairman Ben Bernanke observed that “to understand the Great Depression is the Holy Grail of macroeconomics.”42 Economist Randall E. Parker observed that “while popular history treats the crash and the Depression as one and the same event, economists know that they were not.”43 But Will Rogers thought he knew: “I don’t think Hoover, the Republicans, or even Russia is responsible for this. I think the Lord just looked us over and decided to set us back where we belonged.”44 As the crisis continued, President Hoover failed to inspire confidence. Democrats went after him relentlessly, and Hoover was characterized as cold-hearted, unsympathetic, heartless, and paralyzed by his orthodox conservative approach to governing. He was shy and reserved, his speaking style was weak and ineffective, and he was unable to inspire hope and confidence. Indeed, not just Hoover, but the entire federal government—from the White House to Congress to the Federal Reserve—failed to alleviate the ills of the Depression during its first critical years.

THE NATIONAL GOVERNMENT

The Presidency In the presidential election of November 2, 1920, Ohio senator Warren Harding and his running mate, Massachusetts governor Calvin Coolidge, overwhelmed their Democratic opponents, Ohio governor James M. Cox and his running mate, former assistant secretary of the Navy, Franklin D. Roosevelt of New York. Voters were tired of Wilson, hurt by the recession

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during Wilson’s latter years, frightened by racial unrest, bitter strikes, and the pandemic, and, after eight years of Democratic rule, were ready for change.45 That change had been foretold by Republican gains in Congress in 1918, but now, it was sealed: the Progressive Era was over. Wrote Senate majority leader Henry Cabot Lodge, “There has never been such a change by popular majorities in the history of parliamentary government, certainly never in the United States. We have torn up Wilsonism by the roots.”46 Harding’s presidency was cut short by his sudden death from a stroke or heart attack in August 1923 in a hotel room in San Francisco. He had served just twenty-eight months. At the time of his death, the full impact of the administration’s public scandals was not yet known. Only later during the administration of his successor, Calvin Coolidge, did the country learn about the Teapot Dome scandal and the bribery committed by Secretary of the Interior Albert Fall. Coolidge ran for a complete term of his own in 1924. He handily defeated Progressive candidate Robert La Follette and Democratic candidate John W. Davis. Coolidge’s easy win and La Follette’s defeat seemed to forecast the end of progressive influence, the demise of third parties as political forces, and the last efforts of organized labor to engage in direct political revolt.47

Photo 3.2 Robert M. LaFollette (1855–1925), progressive Wisconsin senator and presidential candidate. Source: Library of Congress.

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“Silent Cal” emphasized thrift and more thrift: “I am for economy, and after that I am for more economy.”48 Federal budgets were cut, the pleas for government support of economically hardhit groups like farmers were brushed aside, as Coolidge embraced full-throated business capitalism, self-help and self-reliance, and a reduced role for the federal government. For years, however, Coolidge had suffered deep mental depression, brought on by the sudden death of his sixteen-year-old son, Calvin Jr. in July 1924. When he became president, he was vigorous, eager, ready to face the challenges; after his son’s death, Coolidge became withdrawn, slept late and took long naps, working perhaps four hours a day. “Coolidge displayed all ten of the symptoms listed by the American Psychiatric Association as evidence of major depression,” noted journalist Jack Beatty.49 The president surprised many, including his closest friends and White House staff, when he decided not to seek a full second term in 1928. Herbert Hoover claimed the Republican nomination and easily defeated New York governor Al Smith in 1928. In a way, Hoover was the exceptional candidate: a businessman, self-made millionaire, humanitarian, an engineer; as a cabinet secretary, he was someone who knew how government functioned. But as president, he was not so adept at the art of politics.50 He should have understood how Congress works, the demands and needs of its members, but he was unsuccessful in cultivating a good relationship with lawmakers. He had strained relations with the Republican-dominated Congress, and an increasingly hostile relationship once the economy slid into Depression. This era, then, saw three conservative Republican presidents, Harding (1921–1923), Coolidge (1923–1929), and Hoover (1929–1933). The assessments of historians and other observers have not been particularly kind. Harding, whose administration was plagued with both personal and institutional corruption and malfeasance, has generally been rated as one of the worst presidents in US history. Coolidge, who completed Harding’s term and one of his own, was fixated on balanced budgets, cuts in spending, and cuts in taxes. The warning signals of economic slowdown and eventually Depression did not move him to action. While Ronald Reagan and some modern-day conservatives applauded Coolidge’s presidency, most historians have not been as enthusiastic. Hoover, who was widely lauded during his pre-presidential years for his administrative prowess, was confronted with the nation’s worst economic crisis and was unable to grasp the federal tools or the political will to turn the economy around.51 Both Hoover and Coolidge now linger in the lower middle tier in presidential ratings. The Executive Branch The federal government had grown considerably since the beginning of the twentieth century. In 1901 there were 239,476 federal employees; following the end of the war, there were 655,265 employees in 1920. Similarly, the federal budget went from just over a half billion dollars ($520,861,000) in 1901 to $6.4 billion in 1920.52 Soon after taking office, Harding appointed financier and Army general Charles G. Dawes, who was soon to be the first head of the Bureau of the Budget, to examine the conditions of returning World War I servicemen. The Dawes Committee urged the formation of the Veterans Bureau (forerunner of the Department of Veterans Affairs), and Congress created that agency in August 1921. After eight years in the executive branch wilderness, it was now time for conservative probusiness Republicans to regain control of the federal bureaucracy. The quality of Harding’s appointments, however, ranged from “excellent to awful,” in the judgment of biographers Trani and Wilson.53 During the Harding administration, women were slowly beginning to emerge in the upper reaches of the federal bureaucracy, but African Americans were excluded, not even able to win back jobs that typically had gone to them before the Wilson purge. Harding also gave federal jobs to close friends, drinking buddies, and relatives.

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On April 21, 1922, Robert La Follette stood on the Senate floor, demanding an investigation of the leasing of the US Naval Oil Reserve Number Three in Natrona County, Wyoming. Local oilmen called the site Teapot Dome. Thus began an investigation which uncovered the scandal of administration officials secretly selling Wyoming oil leasing sites to Harry Sinclair of Mammoth Oil and California sites to Edward L. Doheny of Pan American Oil Company. Ultimately the Teapot Dome scandal led to the downfall of former Harding Secretary of the Interior Albert B. Fall, Attorney General Harry Daugherty, and crippled relations between Congress and Coolidge. Further scandal was uncovered in the some $250 million in graft found in the Veterans Bureau and corruption in the Office of the Alien Property Custodian.54 After the bulge in wartime spending, the federal budget shrunk and remained nearly the same throughout the 1920s, topping off in 1929 at $3.298 billion ($50.25 billion in 2020 dollars).55 Federal revenue sources, however, had fundamentally changed: in 1913, one-third of the federal budget came from taxes on alcohol; two-thirds from tobacco taxes and the tariff. With the enactment of the federal income tax and prohibition of sales of alcohol, the revenue stream changed significantly. By 1930, one-third of federal revenue came from tobacco taxes and tariffs; one-third from personal income taxes; and one-third from corporate taxes.56 But the federal personal income tax, adopted a decade earlier, had been whittled down through a series of tax cuts, mostly pushed by Treasury secretary Mellon. By 1927, some 98 percent of Americans paid no federal income tax; three-tenths of 1 percent paid 94 percent of all federal income taxes.57

The Congress After the downfall of Speaker Joseph Cannon, it would be a long time before the House leadership would attain substantial, let alone dictatorial, powers. Frederick H. Gillett (Republican—Massachusetts), who served as speaker from 1919 to 1925, was weak and ineffective. The majority leader, Frank Modell (Republican—Wyoming) fared no better, and was judged as a “proved incompetent.” The real power was with the committee chairmen, who achieved “absolute control of the legislative process.”58 The country was becoming increasingly urban, and when it came time to reapportion Congress following the 1920 census, lawmakers representing small towns and farm land balked. Altogether, there were forty-two separate reapportionment bills introduced in the House of Representatives from 1921 to 1928; none of them became law. As a result, for the first and only time, Congress failed to reapportion itself. In the estimation of journalist Daniel Okrent, “Never in American history, not even during the tumult of Civil War, had Congress disregarded the constitutional mandate … to reapportion itself following the completion of the decennial census.”59 In 1929, the House of Representatives passed the Permanent Reapportionment Act, setting the size of the House at 435, the number that had been set after the 1910 census. The 1930 census reflected the tremendous shift in population and the growing urbanization of the country: twenty-one states lost a total of twenty-seven seats, with California doubling its representation, and Texas, Michigan, Ohio, New York and New Jersey gaining seats.60 Republicans returned to the majority in both the House and the Senate during this era, holding the House until late 1931 and the Senate until 1932. The South remained solidly in the hands of the Democrats, with considerable assistance from the Ku Klux Klan. In 1924, for example, there were 105 House seats in the South; Democrats held 103 of them; in the Senate, Democrats held every one of the twenty-two southern seats.61 During the 1928 presidential election, the Deep South overwhelmingly voted for the most unlikely of candidates: antiProhibition New York governor Al Smith, the first Catholic candidate, with his New York City

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twang, funny big-city clothes, awkwardness with non-New York audiences, and whose campaign theme song was “Sidewalks of New York.” All this probably would have turned most southern voters away from Smith, except for the fact that he was, after all, a Democrat. In Mississippi, Smith received 82 percent of the vote, 76 percent in Louisiana, and 91 percent in South Carolina. Only the northern states of Rhode Island and Massachusetts, with heavy Catholic populations, voted for Smith along with the Deep South states; he could not even win his home state of New York. In this era of resurgent conservatism, there nonetheless was something of a progressive bloc in Congress: Senators La Follette (Wisconsin), Norris (Nebraska), Borah (Idaho), and Burton K. Wheeler (Democrat—Montana); in the House congressmen Fiorello La Guardia (Republican—New York), Victor Berger (Socialist—Wisconsin) and John M. Nelson (Republican—Wisconsin). Berger, who had been convicted of violating the Espionage Act of 1918, was elected, but twice barred from claiming his seat in Congress. The U.S. Supreme Court overturned Berger’s conviction, and he became the first member of the Socialist Party elected to Congress.62 The Congress, however, was hardly the enlightened body when it came to race relations and its only African American colleague. After a twenty-eight-year period with no African American member serving in Congress, Oscar De Priest, a Republican from Chicago, was seated in 1928. But when it came time for lunch or dinner, De Priest and his staff were relegated to the Negro restaurant in the basement of the Capitol, next to the kitchen; all other restaurants, including the private members dining room, were for whites only. One Massachusetts congressman defended this policy, stating that, “As a rule, the colored people prefer to attend their own churches, their own schools, and their own restaurants … and my experience has always been that they’re happy in that attitude.” Not De Priest, who tried again and again to desegregate the Capitol dining rooms, but was rebuffed every time.63 Leadership in the Senate On the Democratic side was first Oscar Underwood of Alabama, the Democratic floor leader, who resigned his position in 1922 because of ill health. Senate Democrats during the early 1920s were “tired and dispirited,” and the passive leadership of Underwood meant the party was in disarray. Succeeding him and jumping ahead over more senior lawmakers was Joseph T. Robinson of Arkansas. A pugnacious lawmaker, known as “Scrappy Joe,” he was elected as minority leader in late 1923 and remained in the Senate leadership until his death in 1937. A staunch defender of Democratic policies, he was described as “tough, self-assured, and unforgiving.”64 On the majority side, Henry Cabot Lodge of Massachusetts continued to be the Republican majority leader. Republicans lost ground following the 1922 elections, when they lost eight Senate seats and seventy-five seats in the House. Lodge barely won re-election, and at seventytwo many in the party felt he was no longer effective. He had served in Congress since 1887, but in his latter years devoted most of his time to writing and reading, rather than legislating. Lodge died in November 1924 of a cerebral hemorrhage at the age of seventy-four.65 He was succeeded by Charles Curtis of Kansas, whom Senator Borah once described as “a great reconciler, a walking political encyclopedia, and one of the best political poker players in America.”66 Like in the House, the Senate power was centered in committee chairmen. In May 1920, the Senate abolished forty-two obsolete and redundant committees—such as the Committee on Revolutionary War Claims. This left the Senate with about thirty-eight committees.

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Leadership in the House In 1923, Representative Sam Rayburn (Democrat—Texas) predicted: “I think that someday a man will be elected who’ll bring the speakership into real respectability again. He’ll be the real leader of the House. He’ll be master around here, and everyone will know it.”67 Rayburn was speaking about two of his colleagues, Nicholas Longworth (Republican—Ohio) and John Nance Garner (Democrat—Texas), both of whom would become leaders of the House. He also could have been speaking about himself: in 1941, Rayburn was elected speaker and would serve a total of seventeen years in that position. Longworth became the speaker of the House in 1925, succeeding the ineffective Frederick Gillett. Longworth brought much needed reforms and management skills, proving to be a competent leader. In one of his first acts, Longworth, wealthy, urbane son-in-law of Teddy Roosevelt, rebuked thirteen House Republicans who had defied the party and had voted for Progressive candidate La Follette in the 1924 election, depriving them of committee assignments. Thanks to Longworth, the House regained its stature as the preeminent law-making body. Longworth had been one of the leaders of the revolt against Joseph Cannon, but once he gained power, methodically restored many of the powers associated with Cannon’s rule, minus the dictatorial mannerisms. In April 1931, Longworth died after contracting pneumonia, his life cut short at the age of sixty-one. John Nance Garner was in many ways the opposite of his friend Nicholas Longworth. He was a rough-hewn, homespun Texan, born in a log cabin, and poorly educated; nevertheless, the ambitious Garner became an attorney after reading law in a Texas county law office. Like Longworth, Garner enjoyed drinking, card games, political gossip, and cutting deals, famously in their Capitol hideout, called the Board of Education. When the Democrats regained control of the House, Garner became speaker in December 1931, and often clashed with President Hoover. He didn’t endear himself to others, either. Labor leader John L. Lewis, head of the United Mine Workers union, once referred to Garner as a “labor-baiting, poker-playing, whiskey-drinking, evil old man.”68 After serving as speaker from 1931 through 1933, Garner served as vice president in the first and second Roosevelt administrations.

The Judiciary Former president William Howard Taft fulfilled his life-long dream when Harding appointed him chief justice of the United States in 1921. Harding also appointed three other conservative, property-rights-oriented justices: George Sutherland, Pierce Butler, and Edward Sanford. Three other associate justices were added during this era. Attorney General Harlan F. Stone was appointed by Calvin Coolidge in 1925, and later served as chief justice during the 1940s. Hoover nominated Owen J. Roberts in 1930 and Benjamin N. Cardozo in 1932. Following Taft’s death in January 1930, Charles Evans Hughes, one-time associate justice and 1912 presidential candidate, became chief justice. The Court did manage to affect public policy in significant ways, mostly by saying no to progressive ideas and legislation. Altogether, the Taft Court struck down 115 state laws, many of which involved the liberty of contracts.69

KEY POLICIES ENACTED Immediately after being sworn into office in March 1921, Warren Harding called Congress into special session, urging lawmakers to lower the income tax and to raise the tariff. The federal

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income tax was not yet ten years old, but presidents Harding, Coolidge, and Hoover and other conservative policymakers were intent on lowering taxes as much as possible. Tariffs took a different turn with the disastrous Smoot-Hawley tariff toward the end of this era. Business interests would have the top priority: there would be tax cuts and business interests would be promoted. One of the first important acts of Congress in 1921 was passage of the Budget and Accounting Act. Through this legislation, federal budgeting was put squarely in the hands of the executive branch. It created the Bureau of the Budget, an agency designed to assist the president in preparing the budget. Also created was the General Accounting Office (now the Government Accountability Office), designed to assist Congress in monitoring the president’s performance in implementing the federal budget.70 This era saw little growth in federal spending, a whittling away of the budget deficit forced upon the country by the world war, and modest budget surpluses. Policymakers addressed several of the stresses faced by society but also ignored or rejected solutions for other problems. Early on, there had been some relief for farmers, but as things became worse, the cries for assistance were met with resistance and deaf ears in Washington. The barriers imposed on organized labor were partially relieved by the 1932 legislation crafted by Senator Norris and Congressman La Guardia. A constitutional amendment to protect against child labor faced fierce opposition and, when put to the states, failed to be ratified. Nativism and the push for “100 percent Americanism” helped push lawmakers to devise restrictive immigration policies. The sight of the Ku Klux Klan marching down Constitution Avenue in the nation’s capital was enough to show conclusively that the federal government was not in any mood to adopt laws against domestic terrorism or to protect the civil rights of minorities. Most profoundly, policymakers, beginning with Hoover, were incapable of coming up with economic, financial, or social solutions to stanch the damage caused by the Great Depression.

Problems with Prohibition It had taken some eighty years for anti-saloon, prohibition forces to successfully pass and ratify the Eighteenth Amendment and the accompanying Volstead Act. But greed, hypocrisy, the insatiable desire for alcohol, widespread petty and serious corruption, a poorly designed law, ham-handed and underfunded federal and state enforcement meant two things: “the drys had their law, and the wets would have their liquor.”71 A federal policy of prohibition of alcohol would touch the lives and habits of millions of citizens. It also wiped out an industry: in 1916, there were 1,300 breweries producing fullstrength beer; a decade later, there were none. During the same period, distilleries were slashed by 85 percent, and wineries went from 318 in 1914 to just 27 in 1925. There was also a great impact on taxes collected by the federal government from distilled spirits, dropping from $365 million in 1919 to less than $19 million in 1929; revenue from fermented liquors went from $117 million to virtually zero.72 For a policy to be embraced by the general public, it should have widespread public support, it should be clear in its purpose, unambiguous and even-handed in its enforcement. Further, it should apply to all and not carve out licit or illicit exceptions. But by the summer of 1923, it became clear that prohibition was not working, failing all of those standards, and that federal enforcement had to be considered nothing other than a “dismal flop.”73 This era gave rise to bootleggers, gangster and thugs, speakeasies, cops on the take, and the KKK and the Anti-Saloon League (ASL) taking enforcement into their own hands. It also led to the rise of the Bureau of Investigation (later the FBI) in 1924 under J. Edgar Hoover.74 Prohibition violations also clogged the federal judicial system. Such cases accounted for

The Return to “Normalcy” and the Onset of the Depression: 1921–1932 83

65 percent of all cases in the federal courts and by the end of the decade, over one-third of the prisoners in federal penitentiaries were prohibition violators.75 Prohibition also made a mockery of federal justice. Federal officials, from the president down, violated the spirit of prohibition. Harding kept his private liquor stash in the White House; Treasury secretary Mellon (who was part-owner of a brewery) was firmly in the wet camp. Members of Congress historically have had this uncanny ability to legislate restrictions and consequences for others, but somehow find exemptions and omissions for themselves. Prohibition didn’t exempt members of Congress, but lawmakers and Capitol police turned a blind eye to the sale of alcohol right under their noses. For five years, from 1920 to 1925, a World War I veteran, George Cassiday, sold liquor from a hide-out in the House Office Building (present-day Cannon Building). Cassiday, known as the “man in the green hat,” had customers “nearly every day Congress was in session” and he hustled from 9:00 a.m. through to the evening hours to fulfill the demands of thirsty lawmakers. Finally, he was caught by Capitol police, pled guilty to selling alcohol, and was banned from the House. Undeterred, Cassiday then moved over to the Senate side, where he ran a similar brisk operation for lawmakers from 1925 to 1930.76 Toward the end of this era, it became increasingly clear that Prohibition had failed, and that, for the only time in American history, an amendment to the Constitution would be repealed.

Immigration Reform During the previous two decades, there had been an upsurge in immigration, with more than a million persons arriving in each of the years 1905, 1906, 1913, and 1914. The 1920 census revealed what many had sensed, and some even feared: the number of “native Whites of native parentage” had decreased between 1900 and 1920. The conservative, Republican-dominated Congress reacted with laws designed to restrict the flow of immigrants. The Emergency Quota Act of 1921 limited the number of immigrants from each country to 3 percent of the number found in the 1910 census. This was the first law that set a quantitative limit on immigration, with 3 percent of the 1910 census as the limit of foreign-born persons who could enter the United States. The 3 percent quota clearly was aimed at southern and eastern European immigrants, cutting their numbers from 800,000 in 1920 to a little more than 200,000 in 1922. On December 6, 1923, President Coolidge sent a message to Congress advocating restrictions on immigration: “American institutions rest solely on good citizenship. They were created by people who had a background of self-government. New arrivals should be limited to our capacity to absorb them into the ranks of good citizenship. America must be kept American.”77 Race, blood, and ancestry were at the forefront of lawmakers’ thinking. Eugenics—the belief and practice of improving the genetic qualities of a population and weeding out less desirable features—found a considerable following during the early 1900s.78 Eugenics was supported by many African American intellectuals, including W.E.B. Du Bois, the founder of Planned Parenthood Margaret Sanger, and in many institutions of higher education, especially Harvard University. In 1907, Indiana enacted the first state law requiring forced sterilization of mentally defective individuals; this law was soon replicated in thirty other states.79 In 1927, the Supreme Court weighed in, validating a Virginia sterilization program, with Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes infamously writing that “Three generations of imbeciles is enough.” Following that decision, some 60,000 sterilizations were performed by the states, with one-third of those performed in California.80 The vigorous California program caught the attention of the Nazi government in Germany.81 Groups advocating eugenic solutions included the American Breeders Association and the Immigration Restriction League and the American Eugenics Society. An influential eugenics

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specialist, Dr. Harry H. Laughlin, was called to Congress as an expert witness before the House Judiciary Committee on Immigration and Naturalization in 1920. He began his comments by stating that he wanted to present the “biological and eugenical aspect of immigration.” Laughlin noted that “our failure to sort immigrants on the basis of natural worth is a very serious national menace,” and, when questioned later, stated that “we want to prevent any deterioration of the American people due to the immigration from inferior stock.”82 Most members of the House committee were firmly on the side of eugenics, anti-immigration, and pseudo-science. One of the few objectors was Congressman Adolph J. Sabath (Democrat—Illinois), born in Czechoslovakia, who charged that fellow members “believe these people are inferior. They have been fed misinformation; they have been fed by new dope … by unreliable statisticians, and by Professor Laughlin’s eugenic and anthropological false tests.”83 In 1924, Congress passed the Johnson-Reed Immigration Act,84 which lowered the annual immigration quota from 350,000 to 150,000 individuals. The law gave preferential treatment to immigrants from Western Europe, and based the allocation formula on the 1890 census, rather than the more recent census figures that reflected the surge in Eastern and Southern European immigrants. Furthermore, the act barred all Asians as “aliens ineligible for citizenship.” The House sponsor, Albert Johnson (Republican—Washington), who served on the advisory committee of the American Eugenics Society, was firmly set on barring “undesirable” immigrants, and if he had had his way, all immigrants would have been excluded.85 Coolidge opposed the exclusion of Japanese, but Congress decided otherwise. The Johnson-Reed Act, which historian Kenneth M. Ludmerer considered “the greatest triumph of the American eugenics movement in national affairs,”86 stood until it was revised by the equally controversial 1952 McCarran-Walter immigration act. The 1924 law, however, did not put quotas on immigrations from the western hemisphere and soon attention was focused on the rising number of immigrants from Mexico. Following the 1914 Mexican revolution, some 100,000 Mexicans had migrated to the United States, crossing both legally and illegally, seeking jobs and security. Mexican immigrants filled the pressing demands for laborers in agriculture, Midwest steel and automobile factories, and meatpacking plants. In 1924, some 87,648 Mexican nationals were legally admitted into the United States. This represented 12.4 percent of all immigrants and was about 45 percent of the number of entrants from Eastern Europe. These figures appalled and frightened opponents of Mexican immigration. Nativists worried about Mexicans breeding inferior workers, they worried about a possible booming birth rate, and they worried about miscegenation. “No other alien race entering America,” argued Congressman John C. Box (Democrat—Texas) in 1925 congressional hearings, provides an easier channel for the intermixture of blood than does the mongrel Mexican. … Their presence and intermarriage with both White and Black races … create the most insidious and general mixture of White, Indian, and Negro blood strains ever produced in America.”87 Box wasn’t the only critic resorting to crude racial and cultural stereotypes. Many critics of Mexican immigration based their notions on the dubious proposition that Mexicans were not White, but rather Indians and mestizos, and thus inferior.88 In 1931, during the depths of the Depression, President Hoover announced a national program of “real jobs for real Americans.” “Real Americans” were the not too subtle code words for “not Mexicans or not Mexican Americans.” The federal program included ordinances prohibiting government employment for persons of Mexican descent, either permanent residents or even US citizens. Major companies, including Ford, US Steel, and Southern Pacific

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Railroad, worked with the federal government, forcing layoffs of Mexican-heritage workers. “Fear swept Mexican communities nationwide throughout the early 1930s as local law enforcement rounded up people in parks, hospitals, markets and social clubs, crammed them onto chartered trains and deposited them across the border,” wrote journalist Dianne Bernard. Research by Joseph Dunn noted that 1.8 million Mexicans were deported during the 1930s, with 60 percent of them being American citizens.89 Ironically, during this time, Congress passed legislation making all Native Americans US citizens, through the Indian Citizenship Act of 1924. Significance of this Policy The Johnson-Reed immigration law continued in force for the next thirty years. It exposed the lure of eugenics, the depth of anti-Asian prejudice, and the push to favor immigrants who looked, thought, and acted like the majority of Americans. Yet the door to immigration from Mexico and other parts of the western hemisphere was open, stirring up nativist tensions and racial anxieties.

Ill-Fated Protective Tariff With the ratification of the federal income tax amendment in 1913, it was thought tariffs no longer would need to be a principal source of income for the federal government. The WilsonProgressive era saw reductions in tariff rates, but with Republicans back in control of the White House and Congress in the 1920s, those lower tariff policies were reversed. Part of the motive of increasing tariffs was to protect American farmers and agricultural products and industrial goods. Customs duties were still an integral part of the federal revenue stream during the 1920s. From 1920 to 1922, the average revenue raised annually from tariffs was $330 million, about 10 percent of the entire federal budget revenues. The custom duties were increased dramatically through the Fordney-McCumber Act of 1922, raising tariffs to about $575 million annually.90 However, the tariff did little to help out the price of American farm goods. What it did accomplish was to spur on manufacturing interests to push for protection. Hoover urged caution on raising tariffs, but Congress had other plans. In 1930, Representative Willis C. Hawley (Republican—Oregon) and Senator Reed Smoot (Republican—Utah), ignoring the advice of Hoover, introduced a tariff bill, resulting in what legal expert Robert W. Barrie described as an “orgy of special-interest protectionism at the expense of rational economics and the national interests.”91 In the Senate alone, 1,200 amendments to the tariff bill were introduced. In June 1930, Thomas Lamont, a banker at J.P. Morgan, said “I almost went down on my knees to beg Herbert Hoover to veto the asinine Hawley-Smoot Tariff. That act intensified nationalism all over the world.”92 Earlier, 1,028 members of the American Economic Association petitioned Hoover not to sign the bill, but to no avail. Hoover was strongly opposed to the legislation, but caved in to pressure from leaders of his own party and business leaders. The tariff rates climbed to an average of 60 percent of the value of the goods, adding fuel to the fire of international trade wars and a downward spiral of economies worldwide. The tariff legislation did not improve the American economy and tariff revenues plummeted.93 Economists blamed the tariff for making things worse and further straining the worldwide depression. In the 1932 presidential campaign, Franklin Roosevelt ran against increased tariffs, the Democrats won by wide margins in both chambers, and both Smoot and Hawley were defeated for re-election.

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Significance of this Policy Political scientist Dennis S. Ippolito noted that “This ill-fated exercise effectively sealed the fate of protective tariffs, as the United States entered an era of free trade and reciprocal trade agreements. It also marked the end of the tariff as an important part of revenue policy.”94

Maternity and Infant Protection One of the early pieces of federal social welfare policy was the Sheppard-Towner Maternity and Infancy Act (1921), which authorized $1 million annually for five years to help states with programs for women and their newborns, especially in rural areas. In 1918, Representative Jeanette Rankin, the only woman in Congress, had offered similar legislation and since then, women’s groups helped to secure its passage and to prevent it from being overturned. Ironically, the only woman in Congress at the time of its passage, Mary Alice Robertson (Republican— Oklahoma), voted against the legislation because she considered it to be “harmful.” Robertson, characterized as “colorful, quotable, conservative, and hostile to the woman’s suffrage movement,” was the second woman to serve in Congress.95 When the Act came up for reauthorization, it met fierce opposition from the American Medical Association (AMA) and remnant forces that had fought against woman suffrage. The law was not reauthorized and funding ran out in 1929. The American Academy of Pediatrics was formed in 1930 largely because of the opposition of the AMA to Sheppard-Towner.96 Significance of this Policy Though modest in its design and lasting only a short period of time, historian J. Stanley Lemons characterized the Sheppard-Towner Act as “the first major dividend of the full enfranchisement of women.”97

Outlawing “Yellow Dog” Contracts and Federal Court Labor Injunctions During the latter years of the nineteenth century and early twentieth, efforts to organize workers into unions were severely hampered by two crippling restraints: the “yellow dog” contract and the court-mandated labor injunction. The “yellow dog” contract typically required workers to sign a contract stating that as a condition of their employment, they would agree not to join a union. In their battles with workers, companies used many tools of intimidation, including threats, blacklists, and private security forces. They also had assistance from state and local governments and the federal courts. The court-imposed labor injunction was at an all-time high during the 1920s. The most infamous example was the injunction imposed by federal circuit court judge John J. Parker in 1927, called the Red Jacket injunction, which barred the United Mine Workers union from organizing anywhere in West Virginia. A total of 316 coal companies and 40,000 coal miners were impacted. (In 1930, Parker was nominated to the US Supreme Court by Hoover, but by one vote the Senate denied him the nomination.) Federal judges could determine that a strike or a potential strike, a boycott, or labor picketing might violate the law, and could thus issue an injunction halting union activities. While such injunctions might be for short periods of time, they would impede the union’s momentum; furthermore, injunctions could be issued without notice given to the striking union and no burden of proof demonstrating that the injunction was necessary.98

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However, the mood of the country was changing, becoming more favorable to the labor movement and its struggles for recognition, better working conditions, and higher wages. Federal legislation to protect workers was first introduced in 1928, following the policy groundwork laid by lawyers and economists, especially Harvard Law professor Felix Frankfurter.99 It was a bitter and contentious fight, and it was not resolved until 1932 when the Norris-La Guardia Act was approved. The act, named after its sponsors Senator George W. Norris (Republican—Nebraska) and Representative Fiorello H. La Guardia (Republican—New York), declared that the “yellow dog” contact would be unenforceable in any US court and federal judges could no longer issue injunctions against peaceful strikes or assemblages. This pre-New Deal legislation was designed to remove the federal government from involvement in the fights between labor unions and employers. President Hoover signed the legislation, but then made public a letter from his attorney general questioning its constitutionality. Norris was furious at this move. Then, in the closing days of the 1932 presidential contest, the Republican Party tried to claim credit for Norris-La Guardia, proclaiming that Hoover had seized victory for labor through this legislation.100

Photo 3.3 George W. Norris (1861–1944), progressive Nebraska senator and Fiorello H. La Guardia (1882–1947), New York congressman and later mayor of New York City. Source: Harris & Ewing Collection via Library of Congress.

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Norris-La Guardia was basically superseded in 1935 by the National Labor Relations Act, but it has never been repealed. Probably its most important lasting impact was the stipulation that labor unions would be exempt from antitrust restrictions.101

Constitutional Amendment During this time, one constitutional amendment was ratified. The Twentieth Amendment, the so-called “Lame Duck” amendment, moved up the inauguration date of the president from March 4 to January 20, and established January 3 as the opening day for new sessions of Congress. The amendment was the brainchild of Senator Norris.102 Franklin Roosevelt was the first president affected by this change when he was re-elected in 1936; for Congress, the amendment took effect in 1935. While much of the focus was on moving the presidential inauguration up to January 20, a more critical factor was shortening the time when a defeated member of Congress would have to leave office. Under the previous calendar, a newly elected member chosen in November would have to wait thirteen months, until December of the following year, to sit in Congress. As the Saturday Evening Post wryly observed in 1932, “the principle of having legislation in the hands of defeated candidates does not commend itself to good judgment.”103 It had taken nearly a decade to have the Twentieth Amendment passed by Congress, but it was quickly ratified by the states in January 1933.

POLICIES DELAYED OR DENIED

Child Labor Advocates of restricting child labor were dealt setbacks in earlier years. The first came when the Supreme Court ruled that the 1916 child labor legislation exceeded the authority of Congress and violated the powers of the states.104 The second came when the Supreme Court ruled that a 10 percent tax imposed on the net profits of mining and other work employing child labor constituted a prohibition against child labor, and thus was unconstitutional.105 In the early 1920s, child labor reformers pressed for a constitutional amendment that would regulate the “labor of persons under eighteen years of age.” Congress responded and the proposed amendment was approved on June 2, 1924 and sent to the states for ratification. But the opposition to ratification was fierce: the National Association of Manufacturers (NAM), the Farm Bureau Federation, the Southern Textile Association, and others fought vigorously against the amendment. During the ratification process, the NAM sent out pamphlets warning that preventing boys from working was “taking away their manliness and self-respect, and making them into weaklings, and taking away the liberties of the parents.”106 The Catholic Church hierarchy also fought against the amendment, fearing that this would lead to federal intervention in parochial education. During the 1920s, just six states ratified the proposed amendment, while it was rejected in at least one branch in thirty-two state legislatures. In 1933, the amendment gained new life, with Franklin Roosevelt supporting it and fourteen states ratifying the amendment; but then ratification lost its momentum. No states voted for the amendment in 1935. By 1937, twenty-eight states had approved its ratification, but it was still eight states short of becoming a new constitutional amendment. A child labor amendment thus withered and was never ratified.

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Anti-Lynching Legislation The Dyer anti-lynching bill had died in the House of Representatives during the 1917–1919 session; now it was time to try one more time. With the Republican Party capturing the majority in both the House and the Senate, perhaps the conditions were more favorable. The anti-lynching effort’s biggest ally was the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP). In April 1919, the NAACP published a report, “Thirty Years of Lynching in the United States, 1889–1918.” One of the standard myths about lynchings was that they were justified because of black male attacks on white women. The NAACP report found that in less than one-sixth of the 2,500 African American lynchings had the victim been accused of rape. Most had simply, but dangerously, challenged white supremacy.107 More importantly, James Weldon Johnson, the executive director of the NAACP, became the chief lobbyist for anti-lynching legislation. Johnson bolstered Dyer, encouraging him to fight again and not give in to pressure coming from some Republicans to abandon the legislation.108 Reintroduced in January 1922, the Dyer bill found considerable support from Republicans but encountered subterfuge from Democrats. Southern Democrats boycotted House proceedings, hoping to prevent a quorum. The Speaker Gillett ordered the sergeant-at-arms to retrieve the missing members and to lock the House chamber doors to prevent others from leaving. Hatton W. Sumners (Democrat—Texas) led the charge against the Dyer bill. His defense was a familiar one: the South could take care of its own problems without the help or interference of the federal government. And he added another twist: Congress, by pushing for this legislation, was doing its own mob violence on the Constitution: “You say that the folks down in the South are not doing this thing fast enough, and the folks in the South say the officers are not doing this thing fast enough, and you each get ropes and they go after the criminal and you go after the Constitution.”109 On January 26, 1922, the Dyer bill passed the House with a healthy majority, 231–119, but was doomed in the Senate. As the session dragged on, Alabama’s Oscar Underwood, Senate minority leader, threatened a filibuster that would have bottled up legislation waiting to be passed at the end of the session. The Republican leadership caved in, and the Dyer bill was abandoned. The NAACP kept up pressure during subsequent sessions in the 1920s, and the Dyer bill was re-introduced time and time again, but to no avail. It would be another fifteen years before Congress would again address the scourge of lynchings.

Assistance to Farmers Many farm families were in desperate economic shape, burdened with high interest rates and heavy property taxes. They turned to President Harding and the farm bloc in Congress for assistance. In 1921, Congress enacted the Packers and Stockyards Act, giving the secretary of agriculture the authority to regulate livestock dealers, and prohibited unfair, discriminatory, or unfair practices that could result in a monopoly in poultry or dairy products. Farm cooperatives were exempted from government antitrust laws through the Cooperative Marketing (CapperVolstead) Act of 1922. The Grain Futures Act of 1921 established regulation of agricultural commodity exchanges. Then in 1923, the Agricultural Credits Act created twelve Federal Intermediate Credit Banks, each capitalized with $5 million, to make short-term loans for crops, livestock, land, and equipment.110 Two pieces of legislation offering federal assistance to farmers made it through Congress, but both were vetoed by Coolidge. The first, the Agriculture Surplus Control Bill, was sponsored by Senator Charles L. McNary (Republican—Oregon), chairman of the Senate Agriculture

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Committee, and Representative Gilbert N. Haugen (Republican—Iowa). The McNary-Haugen plan called for the federal government to subsidize the dumping of agricultural surpluses abroad. Earlier attempts at federal credit, tariff increases, and cooperation were not working. McNary and Haugen’s bill, introduced in 1924, was not passed by Congress until February 1927. Coolidge promptly vetoed the legislation, and his objection was forthright: the farm problem could not be solved through federal assistance; the real culprit was overproduction. A second Agriculture Surplus Control farm bill was passed by large majorities in the House and Senate in 1928. It had the support of Vice President Charles G. Dawes;111 nevertheless, Coolidge vetoed it. The fight had been bitter, and the southern-western coalition of farmers who backed the McNary-Haugen efforts was now losing power, as Coolidge stood firmly against the legislation. Historian Robert H. Ferrell summed up this flawed legislation: “The bill was bureaucracy gone mad, autocracy, ponderously futile, a preposterous economic and commercial fallacy, full of vicious devices, delusive experiments, and fantastic promised.”112 One last gasp for the McNary-Haugenites came during the 1928 Republican National Convention in Kansas City, where some of their political leaders called for 100,000 farmers to march in protest. Few showed up, and the convention upheld Coolidge’s position on aid to agriculture.113 Finally, the Agricultural Marketing Act of 1929 was passed, at the behest of the new president, Herbert Hoover. Its purpose was to bolster the domestic farm marketing system; but the policy never had a chance. Agricultural prices tumbled nearly 50 percent between 1929 and 1932. As agricultural historian Willard W. Cochrane noted, for American farmers and agricultural leaders, “it was a period of deep, dark depression, with little hope and even less activity.”114

Triumph of Freedom of Contract In 1918, Congress established a minimum wage for women and minors working in the District of Columbia. Willie Lyons, a female elevator operator, was paid $35 a week before the law went into effect, and her employer, Congress Hall Hotel, would be compelled to pay her $71.50 a week under the new law. Instead, the hotel, where many members of Congress and their families lived, fired her and gave the job to a man, at a lower wage. Lyons was frustrated, thinking she could never find a job in the District given the new minimum wage demands, and joined the Children’s Hospital in bringing a suit against Jesse C. Adkins and the two other members of the DC wage board. The Supreme Court, through Justice George A. Sutherland, ruled in Adkins v. Children’s Hospital115 that the federal law, applying to the District of Columbia, was an unconstitutional infringement of the freedom of contract. The Court broke away from the idea of protective legislation, declaring, in effect, that now that women have the right to vote, they would be on a par with men, and they have the right to compete for jobs and bargain for them with employers. Yet, fourteen years later, the Supreme Court reversed itself, overturning Adkins in the decision West Coast Hotel v. Parrish.116

Failure to Combat the Depression From 1929 through 1941, the United States and much of the world suffered through economic turmoil. The first three and a half years were the worst, when “virtually every single indicator of economic prosperity reflected the disaster.”117 Historians Thomas E. Hall and J. David Ferguson noted that the Depression led to huge changes in our social fabric. Large migrations of people occurred from the dust bowl areas of mid-America to more prosperous places like California, and from the rural

The Return to “Normalcy” and the Onset of the Depression: 1921–1932 91

south to the industrial north. There were food riots, violent labor strikes, and widespread discontent that made many fearful that the socialist or communist political parties might enjoy great gains in popularity or even rise to power.118 Political leaders during this period were unable to dig the United States out of its economic torpor; they did not create the legislative and policy tools to forestall the suffering and turn around the economy. The presidential election of 1932, pitting incumbent Hoover against New York governor Franklin D. Roosevelt, became a referendum on the dire economic situation. President Hoover followed predictable conservative philosophy: Americans should tighten their belts; farmers and the unemployed should not be given special assistance. Relief should come from local governments and private charities; above all, rugged individualism, Hoover believed, should bear the burden. Federal assistance, on the other hand, would “create a burdensome bureaucracy and destroy the initiative and self-reliance of the recipients.”119 The only possible assistance could be for businesses and banks, not for individuals. The Federal Reserve was determined to step in, but what to do? The board of governors warned the public of the dangers of stock market speculation and they asked member banks to deny credit to stock speculators. New York Fed chairman, George Harrison, wanted to go in another direction. He wanted to raise the discount lending rate to banks, and, in turn, raised the cost of borrowing from individuals and companies. His ideas were blocked several times by the Board, but they acquiesced in August 1929. Raising the discount rates had unintended consequences throughout the world, as central banks were forced to increase their rates. As the stock crisis grew, large amounts of money were withdrawn from the market and placed into major New York banks; but even larger amounts were withdrawn by nervous depositors. Quickly, and controversially, the New York Fed used its financial and monetary tools: it “purchased government securities on the open market, expedited lending through the discount window, and lowered the discount rate.”120 For the moment, the banking crisis was blunted and commercial banks kept in operation. Hoover was unbending in his beliefs and doubled-down on his commitments, leading historian Richard Hofstadter to comment, “Because, on his postulates, his program should have been successful, he went on talking as though it were, and the less his ideas worked, the more defiantly he advocated them.”121 Hoover, above all federal policymakers, bore the brunt of criticism and was the focus of blame. As the economic downturn continued and worsened, millions of families were unable to make their mortgage payments and their monthly rents, and were reduced to desperate, shantytown housing, hundreds of them throughout the nation. These desperate encampments were soon dubbed as “Hoovervilles,” a direct and stinging indictment of the president and his failure to lead. These encampments often became semi-permanent villages. In Seattle, for example, the main Hooverville, housing some 1,200, had its own “mayor” and was protected by progressive organizations and government officials sympathetic to their plight.122 Another black eye was the plight of the Bonus Army. World War I veterans were promised benefits which they could begin collecting in 1945. But with desperate economic times, many veterans couldn’t wait, and demanded that benefit payments begin in 1932. Twenty thousand veterans marched on Washington in June and July 1932, setting up camp, calling themselves the Bonus Expeditionary Army. Congressman J.W. Wright Patman (Democrat—Texas) proposed a relief bill, costing some $2.4 billion, but it was opposed by congressional leadership and by Hoover, who threatened a veto. Congressman La Guardia, who had a distinguished record as a fighter pilot during the war, was direct in his opposition:

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You are to give $2 billion to 4 percent of the population. It will not solve a single problem. There are eight million unemployed. I refuse, for one, to sacrifice them to this distorted, selfish purpose. Eight weeks after they get the bonus the veterans will have no money and the situation will be the same as before.123 At the time, veterans’ benefits counted as 25 percent of the entire federal budget outlay. In early July, Congress appropriated funds to help the veterans return home, and many of the 12,000 did. But some 5,000 stayed, and were evicted from a government-owned building they claimed as headquarters. A fight broke out, federal cavalry was brought in, along with six tanks, and a column of soldiers. The District of Columbia’s Anacostia flats, where many rag-tag protestors were camped out, was set afire by city police. For Hoover, it was a public relations disaster: forlorn veterans run out of Washington, with tear gas blinding their eyes, with General Douglas MacArthur, Army chief of staff, hunting down “communist agitators” among the American men who had fought in the war to end all wars.124 Just what could the federal government do to blunt the economic crisis? Lawmakers turned to protectionism: higher tariffs to protect American products. Hoover was adamantly against, but ultimately signed, the Smoot-Hawley tariff, only to find that this protectionist legislation only exacerbated international economics. Senator Robert Wagner (Democrat—New York) and Speaker John Nance Garner (Democrat—Texas) introduced a $2.1 billion emergency relief bill to dampen down the effects of massive unemployment. Hoover favored some portions, but opposed the measure that authorized the Reconstruction Finance Corporation to lend $1.5 billion to states, municipalities, individuals, and private corporations. “This proposal violates every sound principle of public finance of government,” Hoover objected in his veto statement. During this last session of the Seventy-Second Congress (1931–1933), Congress was paralyzed, unable to produce any important pieces of economic legislation; it was “an angry, turbulent, and ineffective body.”125 The failure of federal lawmakers to act severely damaged the reputation of Congress, as well as the reputation of the president.126 By the time Hoover had left office, on March 4, 1933, the nation’s banking system was on the verge of total collapse. Over 5,500 banks had closed during the past three years. Thirty-four states had already called for bank holidays—stop gap measures with days when the banks would be closed, hoping to stabilize their reserves from runs on the banks. Only such action had prevented total collapse.127 As historian David M. Kennedy observed, The Great Humanitarian who fed the starving Belgians in 1914, the Great Engineer so hopefully elevated to the presidency in 1928, now appeared as the Great Scrooge, a corrupted ideologue who could swallow government relief for the banks but priggishly scrupled over government provisions for the unemployed.128 A nationwide bank holiday, proclaimed by the new occupant of the White House, Franklin Roosevelt, would be forthcoming within hours of his inauguration.

Notes 1 Epigraph quote from Warren G. Harding, “Return to Normalcy,” from speech delivered in Boston, Massachusetts, May 14, 1920, http://teachingamericanhistory.org/library/document/return-tonormalcy (accessed December 12, 2017). 2 David E. Kyvig, Daily Life in the United States, 1920–1939: Decades of Promise and Pain (Westport: The Greenwood Press, 2002), 151.

The Return to “Normalcy” and the Onset of the Depression: 1921–1932 93 3 “Selected Historical Decennial Census Population and Housing Counts,” US Bureau of the Census, n.d., https://www.census.gov/population/www/censusdata/hiscendata.html (accessed March 19, 2018). 4 Robert H. Ferrell, The Presidency of Calvin Coolidge (Lawrence: University Press of Kansas, 1998), 171. 5 The president also receives a $50,000 annual expense account, a $100,000 non-taxable travel account, and a $19,000 entertainment account. 6 Carla Blank, Rediscovering America: The Making of Multicultural America, 1900–2000 (New York: Three Rivers Press, 2003), 130. 7 Robert S. McElvaine, The Great Depression: America, 1929–1941 (New York: Times Books, 1993, 1984), 37–39. 8 Eugene P. Trani and David L. Wilson, The Presidency of Warren G. Harding (Lawrence: Regents Press of Kansas, 1977), 4–5. 9 Kyvig, Daily Life in the United States, 1920–1939, 167–69. 10 Willard W. Cochrane, The Development of American Agriculture: A Historical Analysis (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1993), 100. 11 Steve Neal, “Charles L. McNary: The Quiet Man” in Richard A. Baker and Roger H. Davidson, eds., First Among Equals: Outstanding Senate Leaders of the Twentieth Century (Washington, DC: Congressional Quarterly, 1991), 102. 12 Pete Daniel, “The New Deal, Southern Agriculture, and Economic Change,” in James C. Cobb and Michael V. Namorato, eds., The New Deal and the South (Jackson: University Press of Mississippi, 1984), 38–40. 13 See John M. Barry, Rising Tide: The Great Mississippi Flood of 1927 and How It Changed America (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1997) and Susan Scott Parrish, “The Great Mississippi Flood of 1927 Laid Bare the Divide Between the North and the South,” Smithsonian, April 11, 2017, https://www. smithsonianmag.com/history/devastating-mississippi-river-flood-uprooted-americas-faith-progress180962856/ (accessed March 20, 2018). 14 “The 1927 Great Mississippi Flood: 80-Year Retrospective,” Risk Management Solutions (2007), https:// web.archive.org/web/20131029204950/https://support.rms.com/publications/1927_MississippiFlood. pdf (accessed March 20, 2018). 15 Joseph L. Arnold, “The Evolution of the Flood Control Act of 1936,” US Army Corps of Engineers (1988), 16, https://web.archive.org/web/20110529061103/http://140.194.76.129/publications/engpamphlets/ep870-1-29/entire.pdf (accessed March 20, 2018); Kyvig, Daily Life in the United States, 1920–1939, 155. 16 Among the many accounts is Alfred L. Brophy, Reconstructing the Dreamland: The Tulsa Race Riot of 1921, Race Reparations, and Reconciliation (New York: Oxford University Press, 2002). 17 Scott Ellsworth, “The Tulsa Race Massacre,” The Encyclopedia of Oklahoma History and Culture, n.d., https://www.okhistory.org/publications/enc/entry.php?entry=TU013 (accessed June 15, 2020). 18 Donna R. Causey, “First Speech Given in the South by a Sitting President Which Called for Racial Equality was Given in Birmingham, Alabama in 1921,” Alabama Pioneers, http://www.alabamapioneers. com/racial-equality/ (accessed November 12, 2018); “Harding Says Negro Must Have Equality in Political Life,” New York Times, October 27, 1921. 19 Excerpt quoted in Jonathan Bean, ed., Race and Liberty in America: The Essential Reader (Lexington: University Press of Kentucky, 2009), 140. 20 Leonard Dinnerstein, The Leo Frank Case, 2nd ed. (Athens: University of Georgia Press, 2008); Leonard Dinnerstein, “The Leo Frank Case,” New Georgia Encyclopedia, 2011, https://www. georgiaencyclopedia.org/articles/history-archaeology/leo-frank-case (accessed February 7, 2018); Alan Dawley, Struggles for Justice: Social Responsibility and the Liberal State (Cambridge: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 1991), 125–27. 21 Richard Baudouin, ed., Ku Klux Klan: A History of Racism and Violence, 6th ed. (Montgomery: Klan Watch Project, Southern Poverty Law Center, 2011), 15. 22 John T. Kneebone, “Publicity and Prejudice: The New York World’s Exposé of 1921 and the History of the Second Ku Klux Klan,” VCU Scholars Compass, Virginia Commonwealth University, 2015, https://scholarscompass.vcu.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?referer=&httpsredir=1&article=1014&context=hist_pubs (accessed March 13, 2018); Rodger Streitmatter, Mightier Than the Sword: How the News Media Have Shaped American History (Boulder: Westview Press, 2016), 90–104. 23 Denver Post quoted in Carl Abbott, Stephen J. Leonard, and Thomas J. Noel, Colorado: A History of the Centennial State, 5th ed. (Boulder: University Press of Colorado, 2013), 273–80, quotes at 276. Also, Robert A. Goldberg, Hooded Empire: The Ku Klux Klan in Colorado (Champaign-Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1981); Elise Schmelzer, “Under KKK Rule,” Denver Post, June 6, 2021.

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24 Baudouin, ed., Ku Klux Klan, 19. 25 Eckard Toy, “Ku Klux Klan,” The Oregon Encyclopedia, https://oregonencyclopedia.org/articles/ku_ klux_klan/#.WqgBShPwai4 (accessed March 13, 2018); Eckard V. Toy, “The Ku Klux Klan in Oregon” in G. Thomas Edwards and Carlos A. Schwantes, eds., Experiences in a Promised Land: Essays in Pacific Northwest History (Seattle: University of Washington Press, 1986). 26 Leonard J. Moore, Citizens Klansmen: The Ku Klux Klan and Indiana, 1921–1928 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1991); M. William Lutholtz, Grand Dragon: DC Stephenson and the Ku Klux Klan in Indiana (West Lafayette, IN: Purdue University Press, 1991); Richard K. Tucker, The Dragon and the Cross: The Rise and Fall of the Ku Klux Klan in Middle America (Hamden, CT: The Shoe String Press, 1991). 27 “Indiana Swayed Entirely by the Klan,” New York Times, November 7, 1923, 15. 28 The Klan even tried to establish its own Klan university. The financially strapped, unaccredited Valparaiso University was about to shut down for good, but in desperation was offered to the highest bidder. The Indiana Klan had hoped to remake the school into a Klan university, with all white, 100 percent American students and Klansmen as professors. Some townspeople were thrilled, many faculty members were appalled, and Catholic and Jewish students left in droves. The Klan never got its university, and the sale of the school finally went to a Lutheran organization. Lance Trusty, “All Talk and No ‘Kash’: Valparaiso University and the Ku Klux Klan,” Indiana Magazine of History 82 (1) (March 1986): 1–36. Understandably, none of this is mentioned on the current Valparaiso University official website. 29 Jack Shafer, “1924: The Wildest Convention in US History,” Politico, March 7, 2016, https://www. politico.com/magazine/story/2016/03/1924-the-craziest-convention-in-us-history-213708 (accessed September 30, 2018). Robert K. Murray, The 103rd Ballot: Democrats and the Disaster in Madison Square Garden (New York: Harper and Row, 1976). See also, Garland S. Tucker III, The High Tide of American Conservatism: Davis, Coolidge and the 1924 Election (Austin: Emerald Book Company, 2010). Krock quote in Shafer, “1924.” 30 “White Robed Klan Cheered on March in Nation’s Capital,” Washington Post, August 9, 1925; also Terence McArdle, “The Day 30,000 White Supremacists in KKK Robes Marched in the Nation’s Capital, Washington Post, August 11, 2017. 31 Dennis W. Johnson, The Laws that Shaped America: Fifteen Acts of Congress and Their Lasting Impact (New York: Routledge, 2009), 148–50; Robert H. Zieger, Republicans and Labor: 1919–1929 (Lexington: University Press of Kentucky, 1969), 11. 32 Trani and Wilson, The Presidency of Warren G. Harding, 98–101, quote at 100. 33 Zieger, Republicans and Labor, 12–14. 34 Kyvig, Daily Life in the United States, 1920–1939, 180–81. 35 Liaquat Ahamed, Lords of Finance: The Bankers Who Broke the World (New York: Penguin, 2009), 309. 36 On Mellon’s career and life, see David Cannadine, Mellon: An American Life (New York: Knopf, 2006). 37 Rogers quoted in William R. Linneman, “Will Rogers and the Great Depression,” Studies in American Humor, New Series 2, vol. 3 (2/3) (Summer/Fall 1984): 173–86, at 173. 38 Baruch quoted in John Rothchild, “When the Shoeshine Boys Talk Stocks It Was a Great Signal to Sell in 1929. So What Are the Shoeshine Boys Talking About Now?” Fortune, April 15, 1996, http:// archive.fortune.com/magazines/fortune/fortune_archive/1996/04/15/211503/index.htm (accessed November 12, 2018). On Baruch, Jordan A. Schwarz, The Speculator: Bernard M. Baruch in Washington, 1917–1965 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1981). 39 David M. Kennedy, Freedom from Fear: The American People in Depression and War, 1929–1945 (New York: Oxford University Press, 1999), 41. 40 John Kenneth Galbraith, The Great Crash 1929 (Boston: Mariner Books, 2009, 1954), 108. 41 Kyvig, Daily Life in the United States, 1920–1939, 185–86. 42 Ben S. Bernanke, Essays on the Great Depression (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2000), 5, reprinted from Bernanke, “The Macroeconomics of the Great Depression: A Comparative Approach,” Journal of Money, Credit and Banking 27 (1) (February 1995). 43 Randall E. Parker, The Economics of the Great Depression: A Twenty-first Century Look Back at the Economics of the Interwar Era (Cheltenham: Edward Elgar House Publishing, 2007), 6. 44 Rogers quoted in Linneman, “Will Rogers and the Great Depression,” 173. 45 Donald R. McCoy, Calvin Coolidge: The Quiet President (New York: American Political Biography Press, 2000), 130.

The Return to “Normalcy” and the Onset of the Depression: 1921–1932 95 46 William C. Widenor, “Henry Cabot Lodge: The Astute Parliamentarian,” in Baker and Davidson, eds., First Among Equals, 51. 47 Zieger, Republicans and Labor, 159. 48 Calvin Coolidge, Foundations of the Republic (New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1926), 47. 49 Jack Beatty, “President Coolidge’s Burden,” The Atlantic, December 2003, https://www.theatlantic. com/magazine/archive/2003/12/president-coolidges-burden/303175/ (accessed December 16, 2019); Robert E. Gilbert, The Tormented President: Calvin Coolidge, Death, and Clinical Depression (Westport: Praeger, 2003). 50 McElvaine, The Great Depression, 53. 51 Ranking of presidents has been a perennial favorite sport for scholars and the general public. See for example, Arthur M. Schlesinger, Jr., “Ranking the Presidents: From Washington to Clinton,” Political Science Quarterly 112 (2) (1997): 170–90; Nathan Miller, Star-Spangled Men: America’s Ten Worst Presidents (New York: Scribner, 1998); Presidential Historians Survey—2017, C-SPAN, https:// www.c-span.org/presidentsurvey2017/ (accessed November 20, 2017). 52 Trani and Wilson, The Presidency of Warren G. Harding, 9–10. 53 Ibid., 51. 54 McCoy, Calvin Coolidge, 222–23. Rosemary Stevens, A Time of Scandal: Charles R. Forbes, Warren G. Harding, and the Making of the Veterans Bureau (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2017). 55 In comparison, the FY 2020 federal budget projected outlays (as of September 2020) equaled $6.6 trillion; the revenues were $3.3 trillion and deficits were $3.3 trillion. Congressional Budget Office, https://www.cbo.gov/topics/budget (accessed November 22, 2020). 56 Ferrell, The Presidency of Calvin Coolidge, 169. 57 Ibid., 170–71. 58 Robert V. Remini, The House: The History of the House of Representatives (New York: HarperCollins and Smithsonian Books, 2006), 294. 59 Daniel Okrent, Last Call: The Rise and Fall of Prohibition (New York: Scribner, 2010), 240; Office of the Historian, “The Permanent Apportionment Act of 1929,” US House of Representatives, http:// history.house.gov/Historical-Highlights/1901-1950/The-Permanent-Apportionment-Act-of-1929/ (accessed October 3, 2017). 60 Remini, The House, 305–306. 61 Norman J. Ornstein, Thomas E. Mann, and Michael J. Malbin, Vital Statistics on Congress, 1991–1992 (Washington, DC: Congressional Quarterly Press, 1992), table 1-2, table 1-4, pp. 10–11, 12–13. 62 Sally M. Miller, Victor Berger and the Promise of Constructive Socialism (Westport: Greenwood Press, 1973). 63 Underwood quoted in Remini, The House, 304–305; Elliott M. Rudwick, “Oscar De Priest and the Jim Crow Restaurant in the US House of Representatives,” Journal of Negro Education 35 (1) (Winter 1966): 77–82. 64 US Senate, “Senate Leaders: Joseph T. Robinson: The ‘Fightingest Man’ in the US Senate,” n.d., https://www.senate.gov/artandhistory/history/common/generic/People_Leaders_Robinson.htm (accessed November 23, 2018); Donald C. Bacon, “Joseph Taylor Robinson: The Good Soldier,” in Baker and Davidson, eds., First Among Equals, 63–97. 65 William C. Widenor, “Henry Cabot Lodge: The Astute Parliamentarian,” in Baker and Davidson, eds., First Among Equals, 38–62. 66 Curtis quoted in Mark O. Hatfield, with the Senate Historical Office, Vice Presidents of the United States, 1789–1993, https://www.senate.gov/artandhistory/history/resources/pdf/charles_curtis.pdf (Washington: US Government Printing Office, 1997), 373–81. 67 Quoted in Ronald M. Peters, Jr., The American Speakership: The Office in Historical Perspective, 2nd ed. (Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 1997), 1. 68 Anthony Champagne, “John Nance Garner,” in Donald C. Bacon, Roger H. Davidson, and Morton Keller, eds., The Encyclopedia of the United States Congress, vol. 2 (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1995), 900. 69 Richard J. Regan, A Constitutional History of the US Supreme Court (Washington, DC: Catholic University of America Press, 2015), ch. 6. Edward S. Corwin, “Constitutional Law in 1921–1922: The Constitutional Decisions of the Supreme Court in the United States in the October Term 1921,” American Political Science Review 16 (4) (1922): 612–39. 70 Harold G. Vatter and John F. Walker, The Rise of Big Government (New York: Routledge, 2015, 1997), 174. 71 Okrent, Last Call, 114.

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72 Jack S. Blocker, Jr., “Did Prohibition Really Work? Alcohol Prohibition as a Public Health Innovation,” American Journal of Public Health 96 (2) (February 2006): 233–43, at 235. 73 Robert K. Murray, The Harding Era: Warren G. Harding and His Administration (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1969), 407. 74 On the ASL and the KKK, see Thomas R. Pegram, “Hoodwinked: The Anti-Saloon League and the Ku Klux Klan in 1920s Prohibition Enforcement,” Journal of the Gilded Age and Progressive Era 7 (1) (January 2008): 89–119. 75 David E. Kyvig, Daily Life in the United States, 1920–1940: How Americans Lived Through the Roaring Twenties and Great Depression. Rev. ed. (Chicago: Ivan Dee, 2004), 1. 76 “The Infamous House Bootlegger Known as the ‘Man in the Green Hat,’” US House of Representatives website, http://history.house.gov/HistoricalHighlight/Detail/36386?ret=True (accessed February 10, 2016). 77 Coolidge quoted in Alan Dawley, Struggles for Justice: Social Responsibility and the Liberal State (Cambridge: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 1991), 282. 78 Steven Selden, Inheriting Shame: The Story of Eugenics and Racism in America (New York: Teachers College Press, Columbia University, 1999). 79 The purpose of the Indiana law was “to prevent procreation of confirmed criminals, idiots, imbeciles and rapists,” Indiana Eugenics Law (1907), https://en.wikisource.org/wiki/1907_Indiana_Eugenics_ Law (accessed April 12, 2019). The Indiana Supreme Court declared this law unconstitutional in 1921. 80 Buck v. Bell, 274 US 200 (1927), https://www.law.cornell.edu/supremecourt/text/274/200; Adam Cohen, Imbecile: The Supreme Court, American Eugenics, and the Sterilization of Carrie Buck (New York: Penguin, 2016); Paul A. Lombardo, Three Generations, No Imbeciles: Eugenics, the Supreme Court, and Buck v. Bell (Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 2009); William E. Leuchtenburg, The Supreme Court Reborn: The Constitutional Revolution in the Age of Roosevelt (New York: Oxford University Press, 1995), 3–25. 81 Alexandra Minna Stern, Eugenic Nation: Faults and Frontiers of Better Breeding in Modern America (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 2015), 8; Daniel J. Kevles, “Eugenics and the Human Genome Project: Is The Past Prologue?,” in Timothy F. Murphy and Marc Lappé, eds., Justice and the Human Genome Project (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1994), 16. Edwin Black, The War Against the Weak: Eugenics and America’s Campaign to Create a Master Race, expanded edition (New York: Dialogue Press, 2012); Stefan Kühl, The Nazi Connection: Eugenics, American Racism, and German National Socialism (New York: Oxford University Press, 1994). 82 Statement of Harry H. Laughlin, “Biological Aspects of Immigration, US House of Representatives, Committee on Immigration and Naturalization (Washington, DC: Government Printing Office, 1921), April 16, 1920, https://books.google.com/books?id=pw5FAQAAMAAJ&pg=RA2-PA3#v= onepage&q&f=false (accessed January 23, 2019). 83 Congressional Record (April 5, 1924), 5662, quoted in Kenneth M. Ludmerer, “Genetics, Eugenics, and the Immigration Restriction Act of 1924,” Bulletin of the History of Medicine 46 (1) (January–February 1972): 59–81, at 77. 84 Its authors were Congressman Albert Johnson (Republican—Washington) and Senator David Reed (Republican—Pennsylvania). On the history of immigration and the culmination of this act, see Daniel Okrent, The Guarded Gate: Bigotry, Eugenics, and the Law that Kept Two Generation of Jews, Italians, and Other European Immigrants Out of America (New York: Scribner, 2019). 85 Trani and Wilson, The Presidency of Warren G. Harding, 60. 86 Ludmerer, “Genetics, Eugenics, and the Immigration Restriction Act of 1924,” 61. 87 House Committee on Immigration and Naturalization, Hearings on Western Hemisphere Immigration, Remarks of John C. Box, 1925, quoted in Mark Reisler, “Always the Laborer, Never the Citizen: Anglo Perceptions of Mexican Immigrants During the 1920s,” Pacific Historical Review 45 (2) (1976): 231–54 at 244. 88 Reisler, “Always the Laborer, Never the Citizen,” 238. 89 Dianne Bernard, “The Time a President Deported 1 Million Mexican Americans for Supposedly US Jobs,” Washington Post, August 13, 2018, https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/retropolis/wp/2018/ 08/13/the-time-a-president-deported-1-million-mexican-americans-for-stealing-u-s-jobs/?utm_ter (accessed December 30, 2018); Dunn is quoted in this article. 90 The legislation was named after its authors, Representative Joseph W. Fordney (Republican— Michigan) and Senator Porter J. McCumber (Republican—North Dakota).

The Return to “Normalcy” and the Onset of the Depression: 1921–1932 97 91 Robert W. Barrie, “Hawley-Smoot Tariff Act,” in Bacon, Davidson, and Keller, eds., The Encyclopedia of the United States Congress, vol. 2, 947. Remini, The House, 304–306.The tariff legislation was variously known as the Hawley-Smoot Tariff or the Smoot-Hawley Tariff. 92 Quoted in David Burner, Herbert Hoover: A Public Life (New York: Knopf, 1979), 298. See also, “The Battle of Smoot-Hawley,” The Economist, December 18, 2008, https://www.economist.com/node/ 12798595 (accessed March 11, 2018). 93 The classic examination of the Smoot-Hawley tariff is E.E. Schattschneider, Politics, Pressure, and the Tariff: A Study of Free Enterprise in Pressure Politics, As Shown in the 1929–1930 Revision of the Tariff (Englewood Cliffs: Prentice-Hall, 1935); Douglas A. Irwin, Peddling Protectionism: Smoot-Hawley and the Great Depression (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2011). 94 Dennis S. Ippolito, Deficits, Debt, and the New Politics of Tax Policy (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2012), 35. 95 “Mary Alice Robertson,” Office of the Historian, US House of Representatives website, n.d., http:// history.house.gov/People/Listing/R/ROBERTSON,-Alice-Mary-(R000318)/ (accessed March 7, 2018). 96 The sponsors were Senator Morris Sheppard (Democrat—Texas) and Representative Horace Mann Towner (Republican—Iowa). See, Theda Skocpol, Protecting Soldiers and Mothers: The Political Origins of Social Policy in the United States (Cambridge: Belknap Press, Harvard University Press, 1992), 480–524; Kimberly S. Johnson, Governing the American State: Congress and the New Federalism, 1877–1929 (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2007), 136–55; Jeffrey Paul Brosco, “Navigating the Future Through the Past: The Enduring Historical Legacy of the Federal Children’s Health Programs in the United States,” American Journal of Public Health 102 (10) (October 2012): 1848–57 at 1852. 97 J. Stanley Lemons, “The Sheppard-Towner Act: Progressivism in the 1920s,” Journal of American History 55 (4) (March 1969): 776–86, at 776. 98 Neil N. Bernstein, “Norris-LaGuardia Act (1932),” in Brian K. Landsberg, ed. in chief, Major Acts of Congress, vol. 3 (New York: Macmillan Reference, 2004), 74–79. 99 For example, Felix Frankfurter and Nathan Greene, The Labor Injunction (New York: Macmillan, 1930). 100 Johnson, The Laws that Shaped America, 151; Richard Lowitt, George W. Norris: The Persistence of a Progressive, 1913–1933 (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1971), 525–26. 101 Bernstein, “Norris-LaGuardia Act (1932),” 77–78. 102 Richard Lowitt, “George W. Norris,” in Bacon, Davidson, and Keller, eds., The Encyclopedia of the United States Congress, vol. 3, 1476. 103 “The Lame Duck Amendment,” The Saturday Evening Post, December 17, 1932. 104 Hammer v. Dagenhart, 247 US 251 (1918), https://supreme.justia.com/cases/federal/us/247/251/case. html (accessed November 27, 2017). 105 Bailey v. Drexel Furniture Company, 259 US 20 (1922), the vote was 8–1, https://supreme.justia.com/ cases/federal/us/259/20/case.html (accessed November 27, 2017). 106 NAM quoted in Dawley, Struggles for Justice, 282–83; Walter Trattner, Crusades for Children: A History of the National Labor Committee and Child Labor Reform in America (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1970), 170–79. 107 NAACP, Thirty Years of Lynching in the United States, 1889–1918, new introduction by Paul Finkelman (Clark, N.J.: The Lawbook Exchange, 2012, 1919). 108 On Johnson, see Robert Fleming, James Weldon Johnson (New York: Twayne Publishers, 1987); on the NAACP anti-lynching efforts, see Robert L. Zangrando, The NAACP Crusade Against Lynching, 1909–1950 (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1980). 109 History, Art & Archives, US House of Representatives, Office of the Historian, Black Americans in Congress, 1870–2007. Washington, DC: US Government Printing Office, 2008. “Anti-Lynching Legislation Renewed,” http://history.house.gov/Exhibitions-and-Publications/BAIC/HistoricalEssays/Temporary-Farewell/Anti-Lynching-Legislation/ (accessed January 8, 2016). 110 Stathis, Landmark Legislation, 1774–2002, 182–83. Murray R. Benedict, “The Trend in American Agricultural Policy, 1920–1949,” Journal of Institutional and Theoretical Economics 16 (1) (1950): 97–122. 111 Charles G. Dawes (1865–1951), banker, financier, and Army general, became the first director of the newly created Bureau of the Budget in 1921. The League of Nations recruited him to head a committee investigating German reparations. For that work, Dawes shared the Nobel Peace Prize in 1924. Dawes authored nine books, was an accomplished pianist and flutist, helped established grand opera in Chicago, and is the only vice president ever to have a song reach number one in Billboard’s pop charts. Originally called “Melody in A Major,” the piece written by Dawes was resurrected in the early 1950s, after his death, and was called “It’s All in the Game.” Stacy Conradt,

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The Early Years of the Twentieth Century “The Vice President Who Wrote a Hit Song,” Mental Floss, August 16, 2011, http://mentalfloss.com/ article/28528/vice-president-who-wrote-hit-song (accessed November 29, 2017); Bascom Nolly Timmons, Portrait of an American: Charles G. Dawes (New York: Holt, 1953). Ferrell, The Presidency of Calvin Coolidge, 92; Roger Biles, The South and the New Deal (Lexington: University Press of Kentucky, 1994), 1–3. McCoy, Calvin Coolidge, 325–28. Cochrane, The Development of American Agriculture, 121. 261 US 525 (1923), https://supreme.justia.com/cases/federal/us/261/525/case.html. Decision by Justice George Sutherland 300 US 379 (1937), https://supreme.justia.com/cases/federal/us/300/379/case.html. Thomas E. Hall and J. David Ferguson, The Great Depression (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1995), 1. Ibid. Nicholas Cripe, “A Critical Analysis and Comparison of Selected 1932 Presidential Campaign Speeches of Herbert Clark Hoover and Franklin Delano Roosevelt,” unpublished Ph.D. dissertation, Northwestern University, 1953, ii, in Mark Carcasson, “Herbert Hoover and the Presidential Campaign of 1932: The Failure of Apologia,” Presidential Studies Quarterly 28 (2) (The Buck Stops Here: Decision Making in the Oval Office) (Spring 1998): 349–65 at 350. Adam Cohen, Nothing to Fear: FDR’s Inner Circle and the Hundred Days That Created Modern America (New York: Penguin Press, 2009), 28–29. Gary Richardson, Alejandro Komai, Michael Gou, and Daniel Park, “Stock Market Crash of 1929,” Federal Reserve History, November 2013, https://www.federalreservehistory.org/essays/stock-marketcrash-of-1929 (accessed December 1, 2020); also Liaquat Ahamed, Lords of Finance: The Bankers Who Broke the World (New York: Penguin, 2009), 307–47. Richard Hofstadter, Age of Reform (New York: Vintage, 1960), cited in McElvaine, The Great Depression, 60. “Hoovervilles and Homelessness,” The Great Depression in Washington State, Pacific Northwest Labor & Civil Rights Projects, University of Washington, n.d., http://depts.washington.edu/depress/ hooverville.shtml (accessed December 4, 2018). Quoted in Johnson, The Laws That Shaped America, 210. T.H. Watkins, The Hungry Years: A Narrative History of the Great Depression in America (New York: Henry Holt, 1999), 131–41. Hoover statement quoted in “Relief Bill Vetoed in Sharp Message; Compromise Ready,” New York Times, July 12, 1932. James T. Patterson, Congressional Conservatism and the New Deal (Lexington: University Press of Kentucky, 1967), 2; Remini, The House, 310–11. Remini, The House, 311. Susan Estabrook Kennedy, The Banking Crisis of 1933 (Lexington: University Press of Kentucky, 1973), 224–29. Kennedy, Freedom From Fear, 91.

Chapter 4

The New Deal: 1933–1941

If … the wages of millworkers in the South should be raised to the point where workers could buy shoes, that would be a social revolution. (Labor Secretary Frances Perkins, 1933)1 The Hundred Days was more than the greatest burst of legislation in American history—it was a revolution. (Adam Cohen, 2009)2

AMERICA DURING THIS ERA This era was marked by three of the most important circumstances in American history—the persistent economic calamity known as the Great Depression, the beginning of the modern era of federal government involvement, and the prelude to American involvement in World War II. Stock values had plunged 85 percent from October 1929 to 1933, while the gross national product (GNP) fell 29 percent. The automobile industry was operating at 20 percent capacity and the steel industry at 12 percent. Construction was down 78 percent; manufacturing was down 54 percent; and investments almost vanished, down an astonishing 98 percent.3 At the beginning of the New Deal, the unemployment rate was 24.9 percent, and throughout the 1930s it remained in double digits, with 14.6 percent unemployed in 1940. It was also the era of tremendous growth of the federal government. In 1929, the federal government’s purchases of goods and services accounted for 1.3 percent of the gross domestic product; by 1939, it was 7.1 percent.4 Further, the federal government became involved in many new areas of public policy, from labor, banking reform, welfare and social security, work relief and public jobs, assistance to agriculture, promotion of electricity, and a wide variety of other functions. This marked the emergence of the modern federal administrative state. Far off on the horizon were troubling international events. In 1933, Adolph Hitler became chancellor of Germany; two years later, the Nuremberg Laws were passed denying Jews civil rights, and the Treaty of Versailles was nullified. In 1935, Italy under Benito Mussolini invaded Ethiopia. The following year, Germany remilitarized the Rhineland, in violation of the Treaty of Versailles. Following the September 1931 Japanese incursion into Manchuria, war broke out in 1937 between Japan and China following a skirmish at the historic Marco Polo (Lugou) Bridge, outside of Beijing. In 1938, Germany annexed Austria, and in October of that year, following the Munich conference with British prime minister Neville Chamberlain, French prime minister Édouard Daladier, and Hitler, Germany annexed the Sudetenland, the German-speaking section of the Czech-Slovak Republic. This was followed by the Anschluss, the annexation of Austria by Nazi Germany in March 1938 and the German invasion of Poland on September 1, 1939. DOI: 10.4324/9781003293538-6

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The Era by the Numbers During this time, the United States continued to grow. By 1940, the population was 132,164,569, an increase of 7.3 percent over the 1930 census figures. New York (13.7 million) continued to be the most populous state, followed by Pennsylvania (9.9 million), Illinois 7.9 million), Ohio (6.9 million), and moving up several places, California (6.9 million). New York City continued to be the largest city (7.5 million), more than twice the population of Chicago (3.4 million).5 California was soon becoming the key agriculture state. But the California agricultural market was unique: land monopoly, absentee ownership, and dependency on migrant labor. Twenty-five percent of California’s land was owned by just 2 percent of its agricultural interests, “with such unlikely cultivators of the earth” as Standard Oil, Shell Oil, Southern Pacific Railroad, and the Transamerica Corporation.6 Another key feature was monoculture— growing just one crop over a vast area of land—grapes, for example, grown on 12,000 acres in the Sacramento Valley. All this called for cheap labor, especially at harvest time. During the mid-1800s, that labor was supplied by Chinese, then Japanese and Koreans workers at the turn of the century, then Filipinos, and by the 1930s, Mexicans and Mexican Americans dominated the labor force.

Society Under Stress The Grinding Desperation of Poverty Millions of American workers suffered, desperate for relief, suspicious of their political leaders, hoping to find answers from a new president and new members of Congress, but frightened enough to listen to fringe voices of protest and radical reform. Some of the unemployed sold apples, shined shoes, sold Bibles, scratched for gold in exhausted fields, participated in dance marathons hoping for cash prizes—anything to survive. People were frantic for work. An advertisement in Birmingham, Alabama, for 750 men to dig a canal, earning 20 cents an hour, drew 12,000 applicants.7 Families were devastated: “Fathers deserted families, wives moved back in with their parents, and children were left at orphanages.”8 The devastation was not simply economic: many people felt guilt, shame, embarrassment over losing their jobs or being on the dole, they drank more, contemplated suicide, and with no end in sight, sunk into despair and torpor. Cities and local governments tried to come up with solutions: they established their own relief funds, encouraged people to hire workers to fix up their houses or tend to their lawns and gardens—anything to help out the displaced. Cities like Fort Wayne (Indiana), Portland (Oregon), Boston, Philadelphia, and others solicited funds from their most well-off citizens, getting them to donate a day’s wages to set up funds for the poor.9 But these stop-gap, localized efforts could not be sustained. In February 1930, the unemployment in Oregon reached 25 percent—three years before the national average reached that point. In Detroit, at the beginning of 1930, the unemployment was 30 percent (223,000 workers), a little over a year later, it had climbed to 50 percent (350,000 workers). Half the coal mines in West Virginia had been closed, with more than 135,000 families left destitute; Chicago had 40 percent of its labor force unemployed in October 1931; and in Boston unemployment averaged nearly 30 percent.10 On a single day in April 1932, one-quarter of the real property in Mississippi was sold at auction. Seventy-four sheriffs auctioned off 40,000 farms; most of the proceeds went to the state of Mississippi, which already owned about a million acres of farmland.11

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In 1933, more than 120,000 out of work young men were hired by the Civilian Conservation Corps (CCC) to build bridges, roads, culverts, hiking trails, sewage lines, and other public projects. Two years later, the Works Progress Administration (WPA) was created and offered jobs to millions of musicians, writers, visual artists, photographers, dancers, and others in the arts. By 1938, the number of recipients of WPA funds jumped to over 3 million. “Near the end of the decade,” observed sociologist Edwin Amenta, “the United States became a world leader in social spending.” That spending came through such work programs; Social Security payments would not begin until the early 1940s.12 While people throughout the United States suffered during the Depression, the region that lagged the most was the South. Predominantly an agricultural society, farming throughout much of the South in the 1930s was little different from how it was in the 1870s. Southern productivity, on the farm and in factories, also lagged behind other regions. It was, as historian Alan Dawley wrote, “not merely lower; it was part of a web of feedback links among low productivity, racism, chivalry, limited education, and poverty, which returned to haunt the region whenever it seemed to be making progress.”13 From 1934 to 1937, the United States experienced the worst drought in its history, destroying over 150,000 acres of farmland in Texas, Oklahoma, Kansas, Colorado, and Arkansas. The “Dust Bowl,” as it soon came to be known, caused enormous hardship and upheaval, as families abandoned farms, moving to California and other states hoping for relief. The displaced, desperate families, the “Okies,” were depicted in John Steinbeck’s novel, The Grapes of Wrath (1939), followed the next year by a movie version, starring Henry Fonda, and by Dorothea Lange’s iconic photograph of a thirty-two-year-old pea picker with her two children clinging to her. Historian Charles J. Shindo reminds us, however, that the Dust Bowl migrants comprised only about one-third of the more than million persons who migrated to California during the 1930s. Of those 300,000 Dust Bowl migrants, only about 130,000 were farmers or ranchers; the remainder were city folk, who had lost their businesses or were attempting to find employment in the California oil industry, particularly in Los Angeles and San Diego. The Okie farmers had a difficult time adjusting: the family farm, with which they were familiar, “scarcely existed” in California and they migrated mostly to the unfamiliar large, industrial farms in the San Joaquin and Imperial Valleys.14 The Clash in the Workplace During the 1920s, organized labor had no clout in Washington and by the beginning of the New Deal, with just 3 million workers, the labor movement had decreased as a percentage of the workforce. About 600 American Federation of Labor (AFL) union locals had been discontinued or suspended, and hundreds of thousands of workers had abandoned their union membership.15 But after about a dozen years of relative labor–management peace, tensions boiled over in 1933 and especially 1934. In the latter part of 1933, there were 1,695 work stoppages, involving 1.1 million workers: 60,000 miners, 60,000 dressmakers, 50,000 silk workers, 35,000 garment workers all walked off their jobs, demanding better pay and working conditions. Then in the summer of 1934, the International Longshoremen’s Association, led by militant Harry Bridges, called for a general strike in San Francisco. Over the course of four days, the city was at a standstill as 130,000 workers honored the strike. There were violent and deadly strikes in Toledo and Minneapolis, and then in August, came the largest—and ultimately unsuccessful—strike of 376,000 textile workers in twenty states in the East.16 The principal trade union group, the AFL, under the docile leadership of William Green, was both conservative and deferential to corporate interests. Labor historian Irving Bernstein characterized Green as an “uncomplicated intellectual mediocrity.” Less charitable was United

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Mineworkers chief John L. Lewis, “I have done a lot of exploring in Bill’s mind and I give you my word there is nothing there.”17 A second major trade union group, the Congress of Industrial Organizations (CIO), was created in 1935. Eight union chiefs, led by Lewis, banded together, upset with the slow moving and conservative AFL. With the signing of the Wagner Act in 1935, there seemed a great opportunity for unions to form and grow. By 1937, some three million workers had joined the CIO, and unions began asserting their newly won muscle. The new leaders included Lewis’s UMW lieutenant and the new head of the Steel Workers, Philip Murray, David Dubinsky of the International Ladies Garment Workers Union, and Sidney Hillman of the Amalgamated Clothing Workers. The conflicts between labor and management were often bloody and protracted, with the auto and steel corporations, particularly, resisting union recognition. Finally, however, the United Auto Workers (UAW) won recognition as the chief auto union following the historic 1936–1937 sit-down strike in Flint, Michigan, against General Motors at the Fischer Body Plant Number One. Soon thereafter, the US Steel Corporation also agreed to recognize the Steel Workers Organizing Committee (later renamed United Steel Workers), offering eighthour days, pay hikes, and time-and-a-half pay for overtime. Other corporations followed suit, but the battles continued with bloody, and deadly, encounters against Ford Motor Company, which resisted the UAW for over four years, and against “little Steel” corporations, such as Republic Steel Company in Chicago.18 Turn to Radical Voices There was a growing sense that the federal government should undertake a bigger role, helping individuals and groups who were suffering. But there were far different ideas as to what the government should do and whom it should assist. Businesses, banks, and farmers did not hesitate to turn to government for relief by accepting bailouts and subsidies but balked at government assistance for workers and unions.19 But many ordinary citizens, in desperation and frustration, turned to more radical voices. The American Communist Party hit its highest mark in the 1932 presidential contest with 102,000 votes; Norman Thomas and his American Socialist Party received 884,000 votes (Roosevelt had 22.8 million).20 To many, Floyd B. Olson, popular three-term governor of Minnesota, was the answer. He pushed through legislation for a graduated income tax, unemployment insurance, and public relief programs, in what was called the “Little New Deal.” Next door, Wisconsin had a progressive advocate in Robert La Follette, who served as governor, then US senator, then in 1924 ran for president under the banner of the Progressive Party.21 Historian John Milton Cooper, Jr., observed that “as a senator, he became a painstaking, effective legislator, a tireless, dogged investigator, and a resourceful agitator.”22 La Follette’s son, Philip, was governor of Wisconsin in the 1930s, and pushed for the enactment of the first comprehensive unemployment insurance act in any state. His other son, Robert Jr. (Little Bob), served in the US Senate following his father’s death in 1925 through 1947. But probably the most colorful politician was Senator Huey P. Long, Jr. (Democrat— Louisiana).23 Long had been a popular, controversial governor of Louisiana, who had bullied his way to power, taking Louisiana political corruption and shenanigans to new levels of imagination. His power base was among the many downtrodden, poorly educated citizens of his state. He was elected to the US Senate in 1930 but refused to give up the governorship for two years. He finally took his seat in the Senate in June 1933, initially supporting Roosevelt’s programs, but was soon contemptuous of the president and his high-born mannerisms.

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He soured on the New Deal, thinking it didn’t go far enough. In a nationwide radio address in February 1934, Long introduced an audacious plan, “Share the Wealth,” that would make “Every Man a King.”24 Long pledged “to limit the wealth of big men in the country.”25 Long invited people throughout the country to create their own Share the Wealth clubs and urged them to write to his Senate office to get a copy of his platform. Long’s Senate office was inundated with 60,000 letters a week by April 1935. Everyone knew Huey Long: loved or reviled, he became one of the media stars of the 1930s. The Kingfish, as he was known to all, made good press copy, used the new medium of radio to great advantage, cultivating an audience of 25 million listeners, and he was the third most photographed person in the country, just behind FDR and aviator Charles Lindbergh. The Share the Wealth campaign would cap personal fortunes at $50 million (about $600 million in 2020 dollars), limit annual income to $1 million ($12 million today), guarantee every family an annual income of $2,000 (in 1934, nearly half of American families lived on less than $1,250 per year), old-age pensions of $30 a month for those over sixty; free college or vocational education; a thirty-hour work week and a guaranteed four-week annual vacation for every worker. His Share the Wealth clubs charged no dues, were open to everyone, white or black.26 He didn’t hide his higher ambitions, writing in 1935 a book titled My First Days in the White House. As he was planning a run against FDR in 1936, Huey Long boasted: “I can take this Roosevelt. He’s scared of me. I can out-promise him, and he knows it.”27 But Long was assassinated at the Louisiana state capitol by the son-in-law of a political enemy on September 8, 1935. Long was not alone in calling for radical reform and tearing down the systems of capitalism and democracy. Gerald L.K. Smith, a fundamentalist preacher working in Shreveport, Louisiana, was lured by Long; he would abandon winning souls for God and concentrate on winning over poor people. Smith traveled around the country and soon helped established 27,000 Share the Wealth clubs, which had a 1935 membership of some 7.5 million. After Long’s assassination, Smith, a virulent anti-Semite, racist, and anti-communist, formed his own political party, the Christian Nationalist, and was a candidate for the US Senate and the presidency. He believed “Jews, African Americans, and communists conspired to create a world state in which atheism would replace Christianity.”28 Smith roamed the lunatic fringe of politics: he despised Roosevelt (“Franklin Double-Crossing Roosevelt” and “We’re going to get that cripple out of the White House”), embraced fascism, was a dyed-in-the-wool xenophobe and fervent isolationist; at the same time was considered by many to be the greatest orator of his day.29 Journalist Upton Sinclair, best known for the muckraking novel The Jungle, offered up his own scheme to end poverty: abandon capitalism and replace it with a cooperative socialist society. His 1934 pamphlet, I, Governor: And How I Ended Poverty in California, developed his ideas. The cover of the 20-cents pamphlet read: “This is not just a pamphlet. It is the beginning of a crusade. A Two-Year Plan to make over a state. To capture the Democratic primaries and use an old party for a new job. The EPIC Plan: (E)nd (P)overty (I)n (C)alifornia.” Sinclair’s plan to end poverty called for taking idle land and factories in California and turning them into cooperatives for unemployed workers. His plan caught fire with desperate and frightened voters. Along with Sinclair’s EPIC plan was the widely popular plan put forth by Francis Townsend. Starting in September 1933, Townsend, a sixty-seven-year-old, down on his luck, retired medical doctor, penned eight letters to the editor of the Long Beach, California Press Telegram, urging a plan to take care of the nation’s elderly. In his first letter, Townsend made a simple and straightforward proposal: “I suggest that the National Government retire all who reach [the age of sixty-five] on a monthly pension of $150 or more, on the condition that they spend the money as they get it.”30 The potential recipient would have to be retired, have no criminal record, and would have to spend the money by the end of the month received. There would be a 2 percent transactional tax, something akin to a sales tax, to pay for this idea, whose monthly

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amount was later raised to $200 a month. The idea was easily understood and received overwhelming, and unexpected, positive support. Townsend had no real idea of how to implement such a program, but he was soon working with his brother and a friend to create a non-profit: Old Age Revolving Pensions, Ltd. Thousands of Townsend Plan clubs were establish and in just three months, 20 million Americans (one adult out of every five) had signed petitions in support of the doctor’s scheme, which became known as the Townsend National Recovery Plan.31 Sixteen of California’s twenty-four members of Congress jumped on board, and the first federal bill was sponsored by Representative John S. McGroarty (Democrat—California), calling for a $200 a month payment to the elderly. However, it was voted down as an amendment to the pending federal social security legislation. While many jumped on the Townsend bandwagon, there were plenty of skeptics. In 1935, more than 87 percent of Americans lived on less than $2,500 a year. A retired couple, getting $200 each from the Townsend plan, would reap a substantial income of $4,800 a year ($90,678 in 2020 dollars).32 Economists and policy experts also had their doubts, particularly with the social security plan wending its way through Congress. Yet, the Townsend Plan was the least radical of the ideas brought forth by reformers: Townsendites were mostly middle class, elderly, and “in a word, respectable.”33 Father Charles Coughlin, a Canadian-born Roman Catholic priest, called the “Radio priest” in the early 1930s, at one time had an immense following of some 30 million listeners. Radio was the new mass medium, and by 1936, some 70 percent of all American families owned radios. From his Shrine of the Little Flower in Royal Oak, Michigan, Coughlin delivered his weekly messages in a lilting voice, “of such mellow richness, such manly, heartwarming, confidential intimacy, such emotional and ingratiating charm, that anyone tuning past it almost automatically returned to hear it again,” observed novelist Wallace Stegner.34 As his New York Times obituary noted, while there were many fiery radio preachers who played on the emotions and fears of their listeners during the 1930s, “none was more revered by his followers and loathed by his opponents” as Coughlin.35 At first, he was a fervent supporter of Franklin Roosevelt, asserting that it was either “Roosevelt or Ruin,” but he later broke with Roosevelt, calling him the “anti-God.” Coughlin became fiercely anti-Semitic, isolationist, and pro-fascist: “the mere mention of his name at rallies of the pro-Nazi German-American Bund touched off wild cheering,” noted the Times. Coughlin launched his own political party, the Union Party, with Representative William Lemke (Republican—North Dakota) as its standard bearer during the 1936 presidential election. Lemke promised to rid the country of “Franklin D. Jewsevelt.”36 However, with the onset of World War II, Catholic Church officials ordered Coughlin to refrain from further political commentary. He returned to the Shrine of the Little Flower as a parish priest until his death in 1966. La Follette, Olson, Long, Smith, and Coughlin found ready audiences. Times were desperate and even the most far-fetched scheme grabbed the attention and the hopes of millions. Radio, with its intimacy and immediacy, brought them into their living rooms. Race, Politics, and Southern Separation Racial segregation was firmly in place, especially in the South; almost without question, this was the natural order of things. Any disturbance of the racial order, particularly coming from the White House, would mean profound trouble for the president’s policy agendas. Roosevelt and his administration would have support from southern politicians and their white constituents so long as the systematic racism was not disturbed.37

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Photo 4.1 Francis E. Townsend (1867–1960), advocate of a highly popular old-age scheme. Source: Harris and Ewing Collection via Library of Congress (photograph) and Social Security Administration Archives (stamp).

Southern Democrats were uncomfortable with the growing influence of the emerging proNew Deal northerners.38 One of the first cracks was evident during the 1936 presidential convention, when the party abolished the two-thirds requirement for nominating presidential candidates. This, in effect, quashed the South’s veto on presidential candidates. The party also was demonstrating a greater inclusiveness, at least symbolically, when an African American

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minister led the convention in prayer. This was simply too much for Senator Ellison “Cotton Ed” Smith (Democrat—South Carolina), who stormed out of the convention: “By God, he’s as Black as melted midnight! Get out of my way. This mongrel meeting ain’t no place for a White man!”39 To add insult to white southern sensibilities, Chicago congressman Arthur W. Mitchell (Democrat—Illinois), the first African American Democrat elected to Congress, delivered a speech seconding Roosevelt’s nomination. The Jim Crow laws, touching virtually all aspects of life, were firmly in place throughout the South (and many other parts of the country as well). For example, a 1930 Birmingham, Alabama, ordinance read: “It shall be unlawful for a negro and a White person to play together or in company of each other any games of cards or dice, dominoes or checkers.” A 1924 Maryland law read: “Any White woman who shall suffer or permit herself to be got with child by a negro or mulatto … shall be sentenced to the penitentiary for not less than eighteen months.”40 The classified ads in newspapers throughout the country listed jobs as “Negro Only” and “White Only” (as well as separating them into “Women” and “Men”). Jobs for blacks were the most menial, most undesirable, and paid the least. Racial stereotypes abounded. By 1929, the new radio show Amos ‘n’ Andy, reached nearly 60 percent of all radio listeners. White actors portrayed African American characters, filling in all the blanks of white negative stereotypes of blacks.41 There was the smiling, servile, everfaithful house servant, Mammy; Aunt Jemima or Uncle Ben serving up pancakes mixes and rice; Jim Crow, Little Black Sambo, and Pickaninny. There were minstrel show-themed Coon Cards, that featured African Americans with “exaggerated and animal-like features … thick lips, kinky hair, flat noses, big ears, and big feet.”42 The cards had sayings, like “Golly, see dem chickens fly! Dey know a nigger’s goin’ by.” There were minstrel shows, hundreds of blackfaced musicians and actors, including popular white singers, movie stars, and comedians like, notably, Al Jolson, but also Myrna Loy, Jack Benny, Milton Berle, and James Cagney.43 In areas outside of the South, many cities, villages, suburbs, and counties blocked African Americans from living there. These were the “sundown towns,” which might blatantly display signs at the edge of town stating, “Nigger, Don’t Let the Sun Go Down on You in ___.” Sociologist James W. Loewen noted that “Outside the traditional South … probably a majority of all incorporated places kept out African Americans.” Of the 671 towns in Illinois, some 71 percent were all white, and the great majority of those had sundown restrictions. There is reason to believe, argued Loewen, that “more than half of all the towns in Oregon, Indiana, Ohio, the Cumberlands, the Ozarks, and diverse other areas were also all-white on purpose.”44 Many of the towns were small, relatively poor, but others, like wealthy Darien, Connecticut, or Kenilworth, Illinois, also had racial restrictions. Southern cities and towns were strictly segregated by race, but rarely were African Americans excluded altogether. One of the most infamous trials of the century occurred after nine young African Americans were falsely accused of raping two white women on board a train near the northern Alabama town of Scottsboro in 1931. Eight of the young men, the Scottsboro Boys, were quickly sentenced to death by an all-white jury; the ninth boy, just thirteen, was sentenced to life imprisonment. The case brought an international outcry, heightened by the recantation of one of the two women who was pressured into lying about the incident. Two separate Supreme Court decisions ruled that the constitution had been violated, but it took years to untangle this case of southern justice. Only in 2013, eighty years after the fact, did the Alabama Board of Pardons issue posthumous pardons for several of the defendants.45 Margaret Mitchell’s book, Gone with the Wind, published in June 1936, was a sensation, winning the Pulitzer Prize for fiction in 1937, and selling over a million copies within a year. It sympathetically depicted the Old South, with its plantations, aristocratic white women and men, and loyal, faithful slaves. David O. Selznick’s 1939 movie version, which toned down

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some of the racial elements, became the most viewed cinema of its time, supplanting Birth of a Nation, and became the most profitable film in history.46 Segregation laws, in the South and the rest of the country, at the state, local, and even federal levels inspired even more sinister racial laws in Hitler’s Germany. As legal scholar James Q. Whitman observed, “the Nazis took a sustained, significant, and sometimes even eager interest in the American example in race law.”47 Rise of Anti-Semitism Historian Leonard Dinnerstein observed that “the New Deal period coincided with a period of intense bigotry in American society and the Jews were victimized more than at any other time in American history.”48 Probably the most alarming episode took place in New York City, the center of American Jewish population. On February 20, 1939, an audience of 22,000 packed Madison Square Garden in New York City. They were members of the German American Bund, a pro-Nazi group, eager to hear Fritz Kuhn, the “American Hitler” spout his venom against Jews and communists. A parade of 3,000 Bund members dressed in SS-like uniforms, adorned with swastikas, marched down the two center aisles to shouts of “Sieg Heil!” and stiffarmed salutes from the fervent audience. After the pledge of allegiance, Kuhn, dressed in his Nazi-like uniform, rhetorically asked the crowd what it was fighting for. Not waiting for a replay, he shouted out, “first, a socially just, White, Gentile-ruled United States; second, Gentile-controlled labor unions, free from Jewish Moscow-directed domination.” At that point a protestor rushed the podium, but was stopped, and carried off by New York City police.49 The German American Bund demonstration may have been the most blatant display, but throughout America anti-Semitism was on the rise. Pollster Elmo Roper observed that antiJewish attitudes in the United States had reached their zenith in the years coming up to World War II; those views declined somewhat during the War, but then resurfaced afterwards. When asked by other pollsters, “Do you think Jews have too much power in the United States?”, 41 percent of the respondents said “Yes,” in a March 1938 survey; 48 percent responded the same way in October 1941.50

THE NATIONAL GOVERNMENT Roosevelt fought back challenges from John Nance Garner and former New York governor and 1928 Democratic presidential standard-bearer, Al Smith, winning the 1932 Democratic nomination by a “hairsbreadth.”51 Throughout the campaign, Roosevelt spoke of government’s responsibility to take care of its citizens, promising in an April 1932 radio address, to work for the “forgotten man at the bottom of the economic pyramid.” Historian Adam Cohen observed that this was “one of the most talked-about, and most revolutionary, speeches of the campaign.”52 Roosevelt delivered his acceptance speech at the Democratic National nominating convention in Chicago: “I pledge you, I pledge myself, to a new deal for the American people.”53 Despite all the economic and social adversities, Hoover somehow thought he could pull off a re-election upset. But reality set in, and Hoover was trounced by Roosevelt, who won 472 electoral votes to 59; Roosevelt won all but six states. Four years later, Roosevelt thrashed Republican opponent Alf Landon, the governor of Kansas, winning 523 electoral votes to 8 for Landon. Just two states, Maine and Vermont, were claimed by Landon. Roosevelt won 60.8 percent of the popular vote, a percentage topped only by Lyndon Johnson in 1964 with 61.1 percent.54

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The Presidency At the beginning of the Roosevelt administration, the White House staff was tiny: just thirtyseven individuals, nine of whom were professionals. There was no formal chief of staff or legislative liaison. Some civil servants in the Treasury Department’s Bureau of the Budget, which had thirty-five employees, also aided the White House.55 Roosevelt brought into his administration a number of talented and ambitious assistants, several of whom had worked with him when he was governor of New York. The Roosevelt campaign, and later the White House, relied on Roosevelt’s “brain trust”: Columbia University professors Rexford Guy Tugwell, Adolf A. Berle, Jr., Raymond Moley, and others. Roosevelt brought in Frances Perkins, New York state industrial commissioner, and “influential champion of working men and women,” and the “scourge of unscrupulous factory owners,” who served as labor secretary during the entirety of his presidency.56 Perkins was the first woman to head a cabinet agency. Also from New York state government came Henry Morgenthau, Jr., Harry Hopkins, and Samuel Rosenman. The cabinet secretary with the most national stature was Cordell Hull, who served as secretary of state. A former congressman and US senator from Tennessee, Hull was the longest serving secretary of state, from 1933 to 1944, and in 1945 was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize for his work in establishing the United Nations. Roosevelt also relied heavily on the policy advice of Harvard law professor Felix Frankfurter, later to be appointed to the Supreme Court, and his protégés Benjamin Cohen and Thomas Corcoran.57 The Executive Branch When Roosevelt took over, there were 578,231 executive branch employees, of whom 467,161 were civil service employees, and nearly everyone was a white man. The vast majority of them had been appointed during the Republican decade of the 1920s.58 New, ad hoc agencies were added, with Postmaster General James Farley assigned the task of coming up with 100,000 patronage jobs for Democrats. One estimate had it that Roosevelt by 1940 had created over 100 commissions and advisory boards. That number would increase dramatically during the war. During the 1920s, there were two significant administrative reforms: the Budget and Accounting Act of 1921 and the Classification Act of 1923, making the federal civil service more professional. However, the New Deal era was considered the “watershed” in US administrative history.59 During this era, four new regulatory bodies were created: the Securities Exchange Commission, the National Labor Relations Board, the Civil Aeronautics Authority, and the Federal Communications Commission. Several existing regulatory bodies were strengthened, particularly the Federal Power Commission, the Federal Trade Commission, the Interstate Commerce Commission, and the Federal Reserve Board.60 In addition, the Committee on Administrative Management—more popularly known as the Brownlow Committee—was appointed by Roosevelt to revamp the executive branch, giving the president expanded managerial power, through an increase in the president’s staff, an expanded merit system, improvements in fiscal planning, and other measures. Every president since Theodore Roosevelt had called for some investigation into executive branch efficiency. Unfortunately for FDR, the reorganization legislation was caught in the firestorm of his courtpacking plan, and it was not until 1939 that the Reorganization Act became law. What followed were the Reorganization Plan No. 1 (1939), which created the Executive Office of the President, and Executive Order 8248 (1939), which defined the purpose and role of the various sections of the Executive Office of the President. These are “considered among the most

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significant documents of public administration.”61 These were followed by the Hatch Acts (1940), which prevented federal employees from participating in overt political activities.

The Congress Sweeping in with Roosevelt was a massive majority of Democrats in both the House and the Senate, gaining strength in subsequent sessions. In the Seventy-third Congress (1933–1935), Democrats controlled the House, securing 311 seats to 116 for the Republicans. There were 131 new members, many coming from previously Republican districts, who quickly embraced the president’s and the Democratic leadership’s agenda. The Republicans, noted historian Robert V. Remini, were “disorganized, dispirited and quite fearful of Roosevelt’s popularity with the electorate.”62 In the Senate, Democrats gained a 60–35 edge. Until this time, in no other Congress did Democrats hold such numerical advantages.63 During the Seventy-fourth Congress (1935–1937), Democrats increased their majority in both chambers. In the House, the Democrats held a 322–103 advantage over Republicans, with 10 members identifying with other parties. In the Senate, Democrats dominated with 69 seats, 25 for Republicans, and 2 representing other parties. The Democratic majority increased again following the re-election of Roosevelt in 1936. During the Seventy-fifth Congress (1937–1939), the Democratic majority stood at 333 with just 89 Republicans, and 13 members identifying with other parties. In the Senate, Republicans sank to 17, while Democrats held 75 seats, and 4 senators affiliated with other parties. But, with the grim economic downturn in 1937–1938, many voters had had enough of the New Deal and Democrats. In November 1938, Democrats lost 72 seats and Republicans gained 81. Still in the Seventy-sixth Congress (1939–1941), Democrats held 262 seats, Republicans 169, and 4 others. In the Senate, Democrats had a decided advantage, holding 69 seats, with Republicans having 23, and 4 others. The huge majority numbers, particularly during the latter stages of this era, were somewhat deceiving. Many conservative, particularly southern, Democrats were reluctant to support the administration’s policies, and often toyed with joining forces with conservative Republicans. Leadership in the Senate The Democratic leader in the Senate was Joseph T. Robinson (Democrat—Arkansas). “Scrappy Joe” Robinson displayed a quick temper and a domineering style that threatened colleagues with prolonged sessions, canceled holidays and parliamentary maneuvers, and a temperament that ridiculed opponents and browbeat colleagues.64 He was a firm supporter of Franklin Roosevelt, despite some misgivings about New Deal policies. His long-held dream of a seat on the Supreme Court was dashed during the court-packing fight and Roosevelt’s insistence on court reform, or as many observed, his attempt to pack the court with like-minded jurists. Tough, hard-working, pushing himself further than anyone else, Robinson collapsed at home and died in July 1937, before the court-packing bill itself died a quiet death. Robinson, however, was a team player who “rarely expressed his true feelings about the New Deal.” But other Democratic lawmakers were less reluctant to oppose Roosevelt. During the latter years of the New Deal, Carter Glass of Virginia, Josiah Bailey of North Carolina, and Walter F. George of Georgia “were in open revolt against the administration.”65 One of the most influential Senate lawmakers was Robert F. Wagner, whose name was affixed to several landmark pieces of legislation during this period and during the next decade. His senate aide and later Truman’s head of the Council of Economic Advisers, Leon Keyserling, noted of Wagner: “he towers over any one or any ten New Dealers, and yet, because

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intellectuals and historians are attracted by the person with flair, of a sensational nature, they have never given Senator Wagner his due.”66 Robert (Young Bob) La Follette, Jr. (Republican—Wisconsin) also played a key role in enacting New Deal legislation. But, at the same time, he became one of the administration’s most persistent critics. The administration, he charged, was not going far enough or fast enough to restore mass purchasing power.67 Charles L. McNary (Republican—Oregon) became the Senate minority leader for the dwindling number of Republicans. He practiced something relatively new—bipartisan support for a popular president. Quiet, disciplined, and considered the most admired senator during his three decades of service, McNary became a friend and confidante of Roosevelt’s and supported much of the early New Deal programs, including the 1935 social security legislation. Following the 1936 elections, McNary’s Republican forces in the Senate numbered just sixteen—numbers not seen since the Republicans formed their party. Where McNary did break with the president was the court-packing scheme, leading Republicans and conservative Democrats against it, and ultimately triumphing when the bill was tabled. Ironically, Roosevelt in 1942 approached McNary with a Supreme Court appointment, but the senator declined.68 In 1940, McNary was selected as the vice-presidential candidate, with Wendell Willkie as the Republican Party’s presidential standard bearer. There were several other effective and intelligent lawmakers in the Senate during this time, including George W. Norris (Republican—Nebraska), Edward P. Costigan (Democrat— Colorado), and Bronson M. Cutting (Republican—New Mexico). Leadership in the House House Democrats were led by the relatively ineffective Speaker Henry T. Rainey (Illinois), then Joseph W. Byrns (Tennessee), and, after Byrns’s death in 1936, William B. Bankhead (Alabama). There were several gifted lawmakers, including Sam Rayburn (Democrat—Texas), and David J. Lewis (Democrat—Maryland). Most legislative power, however, was not in the leadership, but in the hands of the House and Senate committee chairmen, most of whom were southerners. Roosevelt needed the South. He needed southern votes to capture his party’s nomination and to get his legislation passed. But there would be a price to be paid: Southern politicians, no matter their stance on a wide variety of domestic issues, did not stray from the overwhelming and visceral white southern reaction to race relations. It was clothed as the “Negro problem,” and in reality meant that equality, opportunity, education, and social justice would continue to be denied African Americans.69 Observed historian Ira Katznelson, “None of the early New Deal could have happened had the South not been convinced that the Democratic Party would continue to protect its racial order.”70 This was, indeed, as Katznelson labeled it, the “Jim Crow Congress.” After the overwhelming Democratic victory in the 1936 elections, with many more northern Democratic legislators now in Congress, the South was no longer the dominant political force. Still, as southern lawmakers increasingly chafed at New Deal proposals, they were able to have a significant impact on FDR’s policies. At the same time, however, as New Deal programs went into effect, there was a growing shift in allegiance of northern African American voters away from the Republican Party, the party of Lincoln. In addition, was the creation of the CIO, which gave African American workers a strong ally. It was during this era that the northern Democratic Party increasingly was becoming the party of African American voters.71 That alliance would be strengthened during the Truman years and especially during the Johnson administration.

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During this time, Congress was overwhelmingly white and male. Just seven women served in the House with one woman in the Senate. There were just two African American men who served in the House, one succeeding the other from a district in Chicago.72

The Judiciary During the first years of this era, the Supreme Court was mostly in the hands of conservative justices issuing narrow and restrictive interpretations of the law and the Constitution. Charles Evans Hughes was the chief justice throughout this time. Hughes had a long history of public service: “No one was better equipped by training or experience to be Chief Justice of the United States,” observed legal scholar James F. Simon.73 In 1933, the Court was composed of Hughes and associate justices George A. Sutherland (appointed in 1922), Louis D. Brandeis (1916), Pierce Butler (1922), Willis Van Devanter (1911), James C. McReynolds (1914), Harlan F. Stone (1925), Owen J. Roberts (1930), and Benjamin N. Cardozo (1932). At the heart of opposition to New Deal policies were the so-called “Four Horsemen,” conservative justices McReynolds, Sutherland, Butler, and Van Devanter. McReynolds’s hostility to Roosevelt and his policies was visceral: he allegedly declared that he would never resign “as long as that crippled son of a bitch is in the White House.”74 (Alas, McReynolds resigned in 1941.) These four conservative stalwarts were often joined by the chief justice and Owen Roberts.75 The Supreme Court hadn’t been completely hostile to New Deal and progressive forces. During the 1933–1934 term, it upheld two important state laws, one from Minnesota restricting mortgage foreclosures and another from New York, fixing a minimum wholesale price for milk. But it was not until the next term that legislation enacted during the first hundred days made it to the court’s docket. On October 7, 1935, the new Supreme Court building, the “marble palace” masterpiece designed by Cass Gilbert, was dedicated. No longer would justices and their staff have to endure the cramped Supreme Court quarters within the Capitol building. Nearly every detail of this magnificent new structure had been planned out by Chief Justice Taft, who died five years before its dedication. The justices would no longer have to work from home, but would have their own conference room, library, three-room suites of offices, and other amenities. Even during the Depression times, this $9.7 million edifice was a bargain.76 The building’s dedication came on the opening day of the new court term, a term that would see several key pieces of New Deal legislation blunted by the Supreme Court. Those court decisions are elaborated upon in Chapter 5. Frustrated by the Court’s responses, Roosevelt, on February 5, 1937, unexpectedly sent a startling and unexpected message to Congress asking for legislation to grant the president the power to expand the membership of the Supreme Court and the lower federal courts. This “court-packing” plan was long in coming, when Roosevelt had ordered Attorney General Homer Cummings to devise a plan to restrain the power of the judiciary. Roosevelt, now fifty-five years old, somehow keeping a straight face, argued that he wanted to relieve the workload of those ancient justices, those over the age of seventy who refused to retire. His statement to lawmakers was blunt. It was a delicate subject, the mental and physical infirmity of judges, but, he noted, it had to be addressed: “Little by little, new facts become blurred through old glasses fitted, as it were, for the needs of another generation; older men, assuming that the scene is the same as it was in the past, cease to explore or inquire into the present or the future.”77 If Congress went along, that would have meant the president could appoint six new Supreme Court justices and forty-four lower federal court judges. Roosevelt’s “court-packing” scheme, as it was soon dubbed, was a massive political blunder, a ham-handed attempt to tamper with the

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judiciary and appoint like-minded judges to the courts.78 Vice President Garner held his nose and motioned thumbs down as the bill was being read in the Senate; he soon left town for an extended vacation in Texas, right during the time Roosevelt needed him the most. House Judiciary Committee chairman Hatton W. Sumners (Democrat—Texas) defected (“Boys, here’s where I cash in my chips”), as did other southern Democrats who were worried that Roosevelt’s scheme would usher in a more liberal Supreme Court and upset the foundations of the South’s segregated society.79 The court-packing fight bruised FDR’s relationship with key Democratic allies and was compounded by his overt attempts in the 1938 congressional elections to oust recalcitrant lawmakers. But two events intervened. First, on March 29, 1937, the Supreme Court ruled in West Coast Hotel v. Parrish that a Washington state minimum wage law was a reasonable regulation. This 5–4 decision, a major shift in court doctrine, overturned a 1923 ruling that held minimum wage laws unconstitutional because they had violated the freedom of contract between an employer and an employee. Many commentators felt that the court had caved in to the president, leading to the catchy observation, “a switch in time that saved nine.” But Chief Justice Hughes later stated that the court-packing proposal had “not the slightest effect” on the court’s decision, and that the swing vote, Justice Roberts, had made up his mind months before Roosevelt announced his plan.80 The second event was the retirement of conservative justice Willis Van Devanter on May 18, 1937. Congress had recently passed legislation giving full pay to justices who would retire after reaching seventy. Van Devanter had planned to retire earlier because of ill health, but had held on, hoping to counter New Deal policymaking. Now, with a pension, it was the time to leave. Finally, Roosevelt had the opportunity to appoint justices friendlier to his New Deal. Van Devanter was replaced by Alabama senator Hugo L. Black, a key backer of the New Deal. Black’s nomination was controversial: his lack of formal legal education upset traditionalists, his backing of unions upset southern elites, and the disclosure of his one-time membership in the Ku Klux Klan nearly cost him the appointment. But through his long tenure on the Court (1937 to 1971), Black became one of the most important defenders of civil rights, freedom of speech, procedural rights in criminal law, and religious freedom. Soon thereafter, Roosevelt was able to nominate more justices, all of whom were Democrats and more friendly to New Deal programs. Roosevelt nominated, and the Senate confirmed, Solicitor General Stanley F. Reed (to replace Sutherland) and Harvard professor Felix Frankfurter (to replace Cardozo) in 1938, Securities Exchange Commission head William O. Douglas (to replace Brandeis) and US attorney general and former Michigan governor Frank Murphy (to replace Pierce Butler) in 1939. Altogether, Roosevelt appointed nine justices to the Supreme Court, more than any other president since the original court appointments by George Washington.81 These appointments dominated the Court through the 1950s, with Frankfurter serving until 1962, Black serving until 1971, and Douglas serving until 1975. After the Roosevelt appointments, no New Deal legislation was overturned by the court. In 1937, Roosevelt appointed William H. Hastie, Jr., as the first African American federal judge; four years earlier, Florence Ellinwood Allen became the first woman appointed to the federal judiciary, as a judge in the US Court of Appeals, Sixth Circuit.82

KEY POLICIES ENACTED During the first hundred days of the new administration, Congress enacted fifteen major pieces of legislation.83 The first was the Emergency Banking Act (on March 9), calling for a “bank holiday” and halting the run on banking institutions. In an effort to cut the federal budget

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deficit, the Economy Act (March 20) reduced the salaries of federal workers by up to 15 percent and reduced or even eliminated several veterans’ benefits. Roosevelt’s attempt to economize was ingrained in his philosophy of government, not simply a “hypocritical concession to delighted conservatives.”84 The runaway inflation in Germany during the 1920s was still a vivid reminder of the threats of an unbalanced fiscal policy and budget balancing seemed to be a solution. To address the basic problem of unemployment, Congress created the Civilian Conservation Corps (CCC) (March 31), providing employment for 250,000 young workers between the ages of eighteen and twenty-five. The Federal Emergency Relief Act (May 12) authorized $500 million as direct payment to the states to assist needy families. Congress enacted the National Industrial Recovery Act (NIRA) (June 16), which created the National Recovery Administration to establish and enforcement “fair practice” codes for trade and manufacturing associations. This law also established the Public Works Administration (PWA) to provide grants to states and cities for large-scale public works, like roads, bridges, and hospitals. At the time, Roosevelt considered NIRA the most important and far-reaching legislation enacted by the US Congress.85 But the NIRA was mostly a failure and was found unconstitutional by two Supreme Court decisions in 1935. More significantly, through the Gold Standard Repeal (June 5), the United States cancelled the gold clause in all federal and private obligations.86 The hard-hit agriculture sector was assisted by the Agricultural Adjustment Act (May 12); the Emergency Farm Mortgage Act (May 12); and the Farm Credit Act (June 16). The Federal Securities Act of 1933 (May 27) required full disclosure to investors of new securities like stocks, bonds, and for those to be registered with the Federal Trade Commission.87 In addition, the Tennessee Valley Authority (May 18) was created, and the Banking Act of 1933 (GlassSteagall Act) (June 16) was enacted. Indeed, this was an extraordinary burst of congressional activity. While the White House and the president earned much credit for these laws, historian Patrick J. Maney reminds us that most of these measures were conceived in the halls of Congress: “Of the fifteen major pieces of legislation passed during the First Hundred Days, only two originated with [Roosevelt].”88 Indeed, Congress exerted a powerful influence, with legislative leadership coming from Representative Rayburn and Senators Norris, Wagner, and others.89 During this era, two constitutional amendments came into force. The Twentieth Amendment, the Lame Duck amendment, was ratified in January 1933, during the last weeks of the Hoover administration. The Seventy-fourth Congress (1935–1937) was the first to meet under the new calendar, convening on January 3, 1935. Beginning in 1937, the new president would be inaugurated on January 20. The Twenty-first Amendment repealed the Eighteenth Amendment prohibition against alcohol sales. In early 1933, before Roosevelt was sworn in as president, the Senate and then the House overwhelmingly passed the Twenty-first Amendment and sent it to the states for ratification. Rather than going to state legislatures, the amendment went to specially created state ratification conventions. Of the thirty-nine states that voted on prohibition, just North Carolina and South Carolina rejected it. And the vote to repeal was lopsided in all parts of the country; no constitutional amendment has been ratified more quickly.90 During the 1932 presidential campaign, Roosevelt soft-pedaled his support for repeal, not wanting to lose support from the South, where prohibition had its strongest base. But he also termed prohibition a “complete and tragic failure” because “we have depended too largely upon the power of governmental action.”91 In a message to Congress, just one week into his presidency, Roosevelt called for the repeal of the Volstead Act, stating that he deemed action “at this time to be of the highest importance.”92 When the clerk of the House read Roosevelt’s message urging repeal, “cheers rang out” and just thirty hours later, the “beer bill” sailed

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through the House.93 The Volstead Act met its demise a good six months before the formal ratification of the Twenty-first Amendment. Upon Prohibition’s repeal, Roosevelt popped open a bottle of wine to celebrate. In 1934, several significant laws were enacted. Through the Securities and Exchange Act, the Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) was established to license and regulate stock market transactions and prohibit price manipulations. The Taylor Grazing Act halted further sales of 80 million acres of public domain grasslands in the western states. The Communications Act created the Federal Communications Commission (FCC) to regulate telegraph, cable, and radio communications; the responsibility previously was held by the Interstate Commerce Commission and the Federal Radio Commission.94 The National Housing Act created the Federal Housing Administration (FHA) to insure against losses on mortgages for new housing construction and created the Federal Savings and Loan Corporation. The FHA also perpetuated and exacerbated racial segregation in housing. The FHA refused to guarantee mortgages in or near African American neighborhoods, in a system later referred to as “redlining,” and it also subsidized homebuilders who were massproducing subdivisions reserved for white families only. From 1934 until 1962, some $120 billion in federally backed housing was built, but just 2 percent of that went to black families, who were discriminated against through redlining and other practices.95 The year 1935 was the apogee of New Deal policymaking and is often called the Second New Deal. The most significant piece of legislation, and the one with the greatest long-term impact, was the Social Security Act. While the legislation would not go into effect for several years, Roosevelt, at the signing ceremony acknowledged that “If the Senate and the House of Representatives … had done nothing more than pass this Bill, the session would be regarded as historic for all time.”96 Just six weeks earlier, Roosevelt had signed into law the most important labor legislation, the National Labor Relations (Wagner) Act. In addition, Congress passed the Emergency Relief Appropriation Act (1935), which provided nearly $5 billion in federal funds that year. Following up on that act, Roosevelt by executive order created the Works Progress Administration, a national works program designed to provide jobs for the unemployed. Congress also passed the Public Utility Holding Company Act (1935), to regulate the interstate transmission of electric power and gas, and the Rural Electrification Act (1936) to make loans to rural electric cooperatives. In response to the Mississippi flooding of 1927 and subsequent natural disasters, Congress passed the Flood Control Act (1936), acknowledging that flood control was a proper federal activity and authorized the Army Corps of Engineers to undertake major flood control improvements. Then Congress passed the Walsh-Healey Public Contracts Act (1936), which established a minimum wage and an eight-hour day for federal government contractors. In 1937, Congress enacted the US Housing Act, creating a federal public housing program, and providing funds to cover the cost of housing construction. This law was the precursor to all subsequent federal housing legislation.97 By 1938, the political momentum of the New Deal had dissipated. The bumptious fight over Roosevelt’s court-packing scheme had taken its toll; so had the internal bickering among Democrats, as Roosevelt tried unsuccessfully to topple critics within his own party during the 1938 election. Republicans gained more seats and were finding a convenient alliance with conservative Democrats, particularly from the South. The last piece of important New Deal legislation was the Fair Labor Standards Act (1938), prohibiting child labor in dangerous workplaces and setting a federal minimum wage. As the war clouds darkened, Congress passed two important pieces of legislation. The Alien Registration Act (Smith Act) (1940) required all foreign nationals to register and be fingerprinted, and made it unlawful to advocate the forceful overthrow of the United States. The

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Selective Training and Service Act (1940) became America’s first national peacetime draft and required all men between twenty-one and thirty-five to register for a year of active duty and ten years in the reserves.98

Stabilizing the Banking and Financial System During the 1920s, small and undercapitalized banks were routinely going out of business; the great majority of them were in rural communities. In 1921, there were 31,000 banks; by 1933, there were only 18,000. After the 1929 Crash, came the collapse of banks in Kentucky, Tennessee, Arkansas, and North Carolina. Then in 1932, a chain of banks in Nevada collapsed, leading to bank failures throughout the state. State officials tried to stop a run on banks and declared a “bank holiday,” allowing the banks to reorganize. Nevada was not alone. Banks suspended operations in southern New Jersey, Illinois, Iowa, California, and other states, as well as the District of Columbia. As the financial crisis grew more desperate, Michigan declared a moratorium to protect its biggest banks just three weeks before the end of Hoover’s term, in February 1933. Hoover was upset with Roosevelt: in Hoover’s eyes, his successor would not cooperate during this lengthy lame duck period, would not indicate his support for financial and banking policies, and would not give an indication of his policy plans. From Hoover’s perspective, FDR’s proposed New Deal was nothing more than a “fountain of fear.”99 Hoover, in his final weeks in office, was incapable of alleviating the crisis; the bickering lame duck Congress was just as hopeless. On the afternoon before the Inauguration, the Hoovers invited the Roosevelts to tea. After exchanging small talk, Hoover asked Roosevelt to join him in another room for a private conversation, according to Mrs. Roosevelt. But they didn’t close the door, and the overheard conversation went something like this: Hoover: “Will you join me in signing a joint proclamation tonight, closing all the banks?” Roosevelt responded: “Like hell I will! If you don’t have the guts to do it yourself, I’ll wait until I’m president to do it.”100 It would be the last time that Hoover and Roosevelt would see each other, apart from the frosty formalities on the next day’s Inauguration.101 By Inauguration Day, March 4, 1933, thirty-three states had declared bank holidays; the New York Stock Exchange and the Chicago Board of Trade had suspended trading. The entire financial system of the country was in peril. As historian Arthur M. Schlesinger, Jr., noted, “As dawn broke over America, the banks of the nation seemed in rigor mortis.”102 Inauguration Day was on a cold, cheerless Saturday. In his Inauguration address, Roosevelt reassured a nervous America that it “had nothing to fear but fear itself—nameless, unreasoning, unjustified terror which paralyzes needed efforts to convert retreat into advance.” He proclaimed that the “greatest primary task is to put people to work.”103 But first came the banking crisis, which dominated week one of the new administration. The next day, Sunday, March 5, Roosevelt audaciously called Congress back into emergency session, invoking the Trading with the Enemy Act to halt rampant international trading in gold, and declaring a four-day nationwide bank holiday. Roosevelt’s first official act was announced at 1:00 a.m. on Monday, March 6. Proclamation 2039 called for a “bank holiday,” suspending all banking activities throughout the nation, effective immediately.104 Lawmakers met on Thursday, March 9. “It was a grim Congress which met today,” intoned the New York Times, “the most momentous gathering of the country’s legislators since war was declared in 1917.”105 The House of Representatives, with virtually no debate, unanimously passed the Emergency Banking Relief Act, sight unseen. The bill, still in rough form, had been hammered out by Roosevelt and his advisers at 2:00 that morning. “Vote, vote, vote!” cried out lawmakers, not even waiting to have the printed copy of the bill before them.106 “Congress barely knew what was in the bill it passed today,” the New York Times correspondent

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continued. “In the House, there were no copies of the measure, and it was read and explained on the floor by Representative [Henry] Steagall [Democrat—Alabama]. There was no time to study the implications and ramifications.”107 The Senate followed suit, and Roosevelt signed the legislation a few minutes after 8:30 that evening.108 Roosevelt was adopting a resumption plan that was crafted, ironically, by Hoover’s secretary of the treasury, Ogden L. Mills. Banks would be placed in one of three categories: wholly sound, questionable, and hopeless. Those safe and sound banks could open immediately, those that were hopeless were closed for good, and those that needed time and assistance were given breathing room before re-opening. On March 12, Roosevelt addressed the nation with his first “fireside chat,” to clearly and simply explain what Washington was doing: “I want to tell you what has been done in the last few days, and why it was done, and what the next steps are going to be.” Roosevelt reassured his radio audience: “I can assure you, my friends, that it is safer to keep your money in a re-opened bank than it is to keep it under the mattress.”109 By March 19, some 90 percent of the country’s banking resources were back in business, with some 4,000 weak and failing banks closed forever.110 This emergency legislation was indeed a stopgap, with little time or thought for a more complete fix of the banking system. That would come in June, when Congress sought to stabilize the banking and financial industries. One key issue was whether commercial banking should be separated from investment banking. That debate had been going on in Congress since the Pujo banking investigation in 1913. Senator Glass, an author of the Federal Reserve Act of 1916 and former Treasury secretary, had a special interest in banking reform and in 1929 began writing newspaper editorials denouncing commercial bank involvement in financial investment. Legislation sponsored by Glass passed the Senate in 1932 but fell short in the House. For the new Banking Act of 1933, Glass was joined by co-sponsor Henry Steagall, the chairman of the House Banking and Currency Committee. One of the most important parts of this legislation was, in fact, the separation of commercial banking from financial services. This was a contentious provision, because in 1932 some 36 percent of national banks’ profits came from investment portfolios.111 Another key feature was the creation of the Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation (FDIC), an independent government agency authorized to insure that bank deposits would be federally protected. Many opposed this provision, thinking it gave too much freedom to banks. Roosevelt threatened to veto the Banking Act because of the FDIC, but Steagall, looking after the interests of small (and often the most vulnerable) rural banks, insisted on its inclusion. Glass also opposed the FDIC, but was persuaded to include it. In the aftermath of the Bank holiday, public opinion supported deposit insurance and tended to point its collective finger at Wall Street and big institutional banks as the culprits, not local banks. Individual deposits were first insured up to $2,500; the limit was raised over the years, and currently deposits are insured to $250,000.112 Significance of these Policies With the bank holiday, and later the Banking Act of 1933 (the Glass-Steagall Act), the federal government decisively stepped in to save the financial system from collapse. Glass-Steagall has been described as “the continental divide in American financial and banking history.”113 Decades later, the Glass-Steagall Act was undermined by the passage of the Gramm-LeachBliley Act of 1999 (GLBA).114 The most important aspect of GLBA was the repeal of the Glass-Steagall provision that prevented commercial banks from offering financial services as part of their banking operations. GLBA and its ramifications in the financial market are discussed further in Chapter 10.

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Electricity, Flood Control, and Economic Support for the Tennessee Valley and Rural America Another significant achievement was the taming of the Tennessee River. The Tennessee River watershed embraced eight states—Tennessee, parts of Georgia, Kentucky, North Carolina, Alabama, Mississippi, Virginia, and West Virginia. The Tennessee River at Muscle Shoals in the northwest corner of the Alabama begins a forty-foot drop that extends over a thirty-mile stretch of river. This natural decline made the site ideal for a hydroelectric dam, which could be used to generate electricity. In 1916, the federal government purchased Muscle Shoals, using it to harness electricity for the wartime production of nitrate.115 During the 1920s, George W. Norris, chairman of the Senate Committee on Agriculture and Forestry, became the chief advocate for the creation of an independent public corporation for the generation of electricity in the Tennessee Valley. From 1921 to 1933, Norris had introduced legislation eight times, only to be rejected by both Coolidge and Hoover as an overreach of federal responsibility. Now with a new administration and new Congress, the Norris-sponsored Tennessee Valley Authority (TVA) legislation sailed through both chambers. On the floor of the House, John E. Rankin (Democrat—Mississippi), one of the co-sponsors, boasted that the TVA project would produce “hydroelectric power that will exceed in amount the amount of physical strength of all the slaves freed by the Civil War.”116 On signing the bill, which he enthusiastically backed, Roosevelt stated that the TVA would be a “corporation clothed with the power of government but possessed of the flexibility and initiative of a private enterprise.”117 Initial funding for the TVA was $750 million. Altogether, sixty-five dams were created, power lines were strung throughout the region, and electricity was to be sold at the cheapest rate possible. The TVA was also charged with agricultural and industrial development, flood control, and improvement of navigation in the Tennessee River and Mississippi River basins. The Tennessee River watershed embraced 201 counties, an area larger than New England.118 The TVA provided a much-needed boost to an economically hard-hit area of the country, and was widely admired for bringing jobs, cheap electricity, and flood control to the eight-state region. It also maintained the racial status quo: TVA communities were rigidly segregated and blacks were eligible for only the most menial of jobs. It also drew controversy from those who did not want the federal government’s involvement in such wide-ranging economic affairs and was criticized by competing private power companies. Republican leaders were not amused at Norris’s “socialist” efforts in supporting public power and forced him out of the party. He was re-elected anyway, as an Independent in 1936. Also in that year, the Supreme Court upheld the constitutionality of the TVA Act.119 By the 1930s, electricity was central to everyday life. City people and those living nearby could hardly remember what it was like before electricity, and the conveniences it brought. But out in the country, most farm families suffered through the drudgery of backbreaking chores because they lacked electricity. In 1935, more than 6 million of the country’s 6.8 million farms did not have electricity.120 But for years rural interests had been rebuffed by private utility companies, on the grounds that it was simply too expensive to connect electric wires to individual farms, and besides, the utilities argued, farm families wouldn’t use much electricity, simply because it would be too expensive. For decades, there had been attempts to bring federal government control over electric power generation, particularly hydroelectric power. But those efforts had been stymied by powerful utility companies who in the 1920s were supported by Republican officeholders. The United States had lagged significantly behind European countries in providing electricity to rural areas.

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But with the 1932 presidential election, things changed profoundly. Roosevelt, long interested in cheap electric power available to the public, was an enthusiastic supporter of the TVA, and on March 11, 1935, signed an executive order establishing the Rural Electrification Administration (REA). The next year, Representative Rayburn and Senator Norris pushed through the legislation making rural electrification a reality. The Rural Electrification Act set up the mechanisms to grant loans to the states for rural electrification. Significance of these Policies Roosevelt had hoped to replicate the TVA model with river-based authorities on the Columbia River and the Missouri River. But his administration was successful only in the Pacific Northwest. The Bonneville Power Administration, on the Columbia River, was enacted in 1937, and now supplies electricity to nearly three million people in the Pacific Northwest, onethird of the region’s population.121 By mid-1943, with David E. Lilienthal as chairman, the TVA became, in Lilienthal’s words, “the largest producer of power for war in the Western Hemisphere.” Lilienthal was later appointed head of the new Atomic Energy Commission by President Harry Truman in 1946.122 Within eighteen months of its passage, the REA brought electricity to half a million American farms and to REA-financed rural electric cooperatives. By 1950, some 90 percent of all farms in America had electricity. In 1949, the legislation was amended to permit REA loans to telephone companies to add service to rural areas. In 1994, REA became the Rural Utilities Service of the Department of Agriculture, and has provided water and sewage services, as well as a 2014 pilot program for rural gigabyte broadband Internet service. The 2021 infrastructure legislation greatly expanded support for broadband service.

Protecting the Working Family and Union Democracy While union membership reached a high mark in 1920, with some 5 million workers, it fell to 3.6 million by 1923 thanks to the inevitable economic slowdown after the war. But the 1920s also saw aggressive anti-union moves by corporations and business organizations. Companies employed blacklists, private security forces, intimidation, and yellow-dog contracts, and enlisted the support of local and state governments and the court system to fight against union growth and activities. The National Association of Manufacturers advocated an aggressive open-shop effort, called “The American Plan,” designed to push state legislation to guarantee that workers would not be compelled to join a union.123 Businesses created their own company unions, which historian David M. Kennedy characterized as “docile and housebroken creatures of management.”124 However, with the onset of the Depression, public sentiment had shifted, and Congress passed the Norris-LaGuardia Act (1932) to outlaw court-ordered injunctions and enforcement of yellow-dog contracts. Then came the new administration. Senator Hugo L. Black offered legislation calling for a thirty-hour workweek for all industries; it passed in the Senate by 53–30 on April 16, 1933. But Roosevelt thought the bill was too much of a threat to the nation’s economy and would not endorse it. What the new administration wanted was legislation hammered out by Senator Robert F. Wagner, a policy group from the Department of Commerce, and presidential advisor Raymond Moley. The administration bill, sent to Congress on May 15, 1933, became the National Industrial Recovery Act (NIRA). The NIRA, which was to be the centerpiece of New Deal business–labor relations, suspended antitrust laws to permit employers to form trade associations and create “codes of fair competition.” Employers could establish minimum wages, maximum hours, and employment

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rules. Unions were encouraged through section 7(a), which guaranteed workers “the right to organize and bargain collectively through representatives of their own choosing.” The NIRA created the National Recovery Administration (NRA) to oversee the establishment of industry codes and the National Labor Board (NLB) to settle disputes. The NRA developed a public relations plan, calling on businesses large and small to work with the new government agency. Cooperating businesses would display a Blue Eagle sign in their windows or a flag, proclaiming “We Do Our Part.” At the outset, Senator Wagner was thrilled: with the enactment of the NIRA, he stated the “greatest victory in my war against human misery had been achieved.”125 At the signing ceremony on June 16, 1933, Roosevelt promised that the NIRA would put people back to work and jumpstart the economy. Later, he beamed, “There is a unity in this country which I have not seen and you have not seen since April, 1917.”126 It took a while for the new bureaucracies to get off the ground, and while there was some initial success in getting businesses and labor groups to work together, by November 1933, the National Association of Manufacturers began digging in its heels, accusing the NLB of interfering with sound business practices. One major weakness of the legislation was that the NLB had no enforcement power, and many businesses were determined not to cooperate. Unwisely, Roosevelt decided to personally intervene in the contentious automobile labor negotiations. He meddled in the details, tried to rewrite NLB policies, and in the end, just about killed off the NLB. The years 1933 and 1934 were particularly violent, with thousands of work stoppages, with hundreds of businesses and millions of workers affected. In the observation of labor historian Irving Bernstein, 1935 was a time which “ripped the cloak of civilized decorum from society, leaving exposed naked class conflict.”127 By the spring of 1934, there was growing disillusionment with the NIRA: leading progressive senators attacked it, business leaders friendly to the New Deal denounced it, and among the public, the National Recovery Administration was derisively called the “National RunAround.”128 The NIRA was scheduled to expire during the summer of 1935, and Roosevelt had asked Congress to renew the law, despite its shortcomings. There was strong opposition in Congress, but eventually the NIRA was renewed, but in greatly modified form, and only for another ten months, until April 1, 1936. In the meantime, Senator Wagner directed his aide Leon H. Keyserling and legal staffers from the NLB to draft a new bill, which became the National Labor Relations Act, or commonly called, the Wagner Act. Neither Roosevelt, labor secretary Frances Perkins, nor others in the White House were involved. As Perkins later noted in her memoirs, “the president did not take part in the developing of the National Labor Relations Act and, in fact, was hardly consulted about it. … All the credit for it belongs to Wagner.”129 After contentious hearings, the Wagner legislation passed in the Senate on May 16, 1935, by an overwhelming margin of 63 to 12. Finally, after fifteen months of deliberation, Roosevelt perked up. He ushered Wagner, Perkins, and others involved in the fight into his office, to publicly announce his endorsement, but also to declare that this was “must pass” legislation. The urgency was heightened when, three days later, the Supreme Court unanimously struck down the NIRA. With the sudden collapse of the NIRA, some 411 pending lawsuits were dropped, and within days of the decision the American Federation of Labor was reporting that throughout the country, wages were being cut, and workers were being forced into longer hours.130 After the Supreme Court decision, the House and Senate versions made some changes and the Wagner legislation was ironed out in conference. The legislation Roosevelt signed into law on July 5, 1935 stated in its preamble that it was “declared to be the policy of the United States

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to … [encourage] the practice and procedure of collective bargaining.” The heart of the Wagner Act was Section 7(a), which was taken verbatim from the NIRA: Employees shall have the right to self-organization, to form, join, or assist labor organizations, to bargain collectively through representatives of their own choosing, and to engage in concerted activities, for the purpose of collective bargaining or other mutual aid or protection. Significantly, there was no parallel set of rights established for companies or businesses. Next, came a list of five unfair labor practices that companies were forbidden to engage in: (1) “interfere with, restrain, or coerce” employees trying to exercise their 7(a) rights; (2) “dominate or interfere with” the formation or administration of any labor organization or contribute financially to it; (3) discriminate between union and nonunion employees in any way that would prevent them from joining unions; (4) discriminate against any worker who had filed charges or gave testimony; and (5) refuse to bargain in good faith. Through the second of these unfair labor practices, the old practice of company unions was outlawed. There was no mention in the legislation about possible unfair labor union practices. In addition, a new, independent National Labor Relations Board (NLRB) was created to protect workers against unfair labor practices and to investigate possible violations.131 Also immediately, industry struck back, with the National Association of Manufacturers (NAM) leading the way. The NAM spread its anti-union message during the next thirteen years, spending more than $15 million on leaflets, radio speeches, movie shorts, editorial space in some 260 newspapers, and other forms of propaganda to castigate the Wagner Act. Many business leaders thought it would only be a matter of time before the Supreme Court also found the Wagner Act unconstitutional; they dug in their heels and refused to comply. In reaction to the delay and obfuscation, the Senate passed Resolution 266, to conduct investigations into alleged violations of civil liberties in the field of labor relations. Heading the investigation was Robert M. (Young Bob) La Follette, Jr., who focused on the NAM and its “organized disregard for the National Labor Relations Act.” The Senate Civil Liberties Committee conducted, in the summation of La Follette’s biographer Patrick J. Maney, “one of the most extensive, productive, and controversial congressional probes in history, expos[ing] the heavy-handed, often brutal manner in which many employers tried to prevent workers from organizing.”132 It would be bitter battles in the steel industry that decided the fate of the Wagner Act. In defiance of both the Wagner Act and the NLRB, the Jones & Laughlin Steel Corporation fired ten employees who were attempting to organize fellow workers. When the case came before the Supreme Court, it was joined by four other cases, and over the course of three days of oral argument, dozens of attorneys spent more than twelve hours trying to convince the court. The federal government presented a 1,000-page brief describing the far-flung operations of the steel operations and their impact on interstate commerce. This was key, because until this time manufacturing had been considered local, that is, intrastate, rather than a federal matter, dealing with interstate commerce. On April 18, 1937, Chief Justice Hughes, in a strong voice, delivered the five-to-four opinion of the Court in NLRB v. Jones & Laughlin Steel Corporation. For the first time, the Court acknowledged that local manufacturing could come under the regulatory jurisdiction of Congress, and thus, workers would have full protection under the Wagner Act. “Employees,” wrote Hughes in the majority opinion, “have as clear a right to organize and select their representatives for lawful purposes as the respondent has to organize its business and select its own offices and agents.”133

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The United Auto Workers (UAW) began a sit-down strike on December 30, 1936, at the General Motors Fisher Body Plant in Flint, Michigan. For forty-four days, the assembly lines were shut down at Flint and then other GM plants. Finally, in February 1937, the UAW won bargaining recognition from GM; then, in quick succession Hudson, Packard, and Chrysler Corporation and the number of automotive suppliers agreed to unionize. Soon, US Steel reached a peaceful, historic agreement with the Steel Workers Organizing Committee (SWOC): eighthour days, forty hours a week with time-and-a-half for overtime, and wages boosted by 10 cents to 62.5 cents an hour ($11.73 in 2020 dollars). Soon, fifty-one companies signed similar agreements with SWOC, including Jones & Laughlin. But several steel companies, dubbed “little steel,” such as Republic Steel in southside Chicago, refused to obey, and did not recognize the steel workers union until 1941. In the automobile manufacturing business, Ford Motor Company would not capitulate until after a crippling 1941 strike at its massive River Rouge plant.134 While the Court had clearly spoken and the law was deemed constitutional, the obstruction and delay did not stop. In May 1937, a month after the Jones & Laughlin decision, 1,064 complaints were filed with the NLRB; two months later, there were 10,000 cases, charging unfair labor practices.135 By 1940, union membership had grown dramatically, reaching 8.9 million members (15.5 percent of the total work force). Over 2,000 company-sponsored unions— forbidden by the Act—were disestablished, and 300,000 workers were reinstated with back pay, amounting to $9 million, when employers were found guilty of unfair labor practices.136 Despite the union successes, opposition was mounting. Senator Carter Glass complained: “I think the National Labor Relations Act the worst law ever put on the federal statute books, and would gladly vote for its repeal or its modification in any respect.”137 Other conservatives, Democrats and Republicans, also wanted to modify it, but a full-scale assault on it would have to wait until after the war and the Republican takeover of the Congress. Significance of this Policy The Wagner Act was indeed a watershed piece of legislation, guaranteeing worker rights. But as soon as Republicans took over Congress, they curtailed its provisions through the TaftHartley Act. Union membership reached its zenith in the early 1950s and has been declining ever since. A changing economy, globalization, the stains of union corruption, mechanization and automation, along with uncertain leadership have all contributed to this decline.

Assistance for the Elderly: Social Security Harsh economic times were particularly devastating on the elderly, many of whom were living on the edge of survival.138 Past their working years, fearful of injury or even the smallest of medical expenses, often with no support from other family members, the elderly were especially vulnerable. There was some relief from state governments: in 1923, Montana became the first state to enact an old-age pension program. By 1935, another thirty-three states and two territories had enacted old-age relief policies. But state-sponsored pensions were less than they might have seemed, often incomplete and poorly funded. Where old age pensions were probably most needed, in the desperately poor South, none of those states had adopted such programs. The lion’s share of state old-age pensions, 87 percent, came from just three states: California, Massachusetts, and New York.139 In 1934, members of Congress were getting heavy pressure from the Townsend movement, whose members were flooding Congress with letters and appeals demanding lawmakers enact oldage security legislation. California congressman John McGroarty introduced the main features of the Townsend Plan in January 1935, but it was rejected by the House. To blunt the Townsend

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movement, the administration had to come up with its own plan. “We have to have it,” Roosevelt told Labor Secretary Frances Perkins. “The Congress can’t stand the pressure of the Townsend Plan unless we have a real old-age insurance program, nor can I face the country.”140 Dr. Townsend himself was summoned to Washington to testify, and compelled to answer tough questions about his plan’s financing. For two hours, he was grilled by members of the Senate Finance Committee; some of the questions were thoughtful, others were laced with sarcasm and derision. Unsmiling and grim-faced, Townsend tried but failed to answer even basic questions about the proposed transactional tax that would fund his scheme. At the end of the hearing Senator Byron P. (Pat) Harrison (Democrat—Mississippi) announced that his committee would craft a bill, but that the Townsend Plan provisions wouldn’t be included.141 While Roosevelt was relatively disengaged from the Wagner Act, he was fully supportive of old age assistance. As governor of New York, he had supported an old-age pension program which he described as the “most liberal in the country.” As president, he wanted a program that would be considered social insurance, rather than a welfare program, with its political baggage of handouts and undeserved rewards. The president envisaged a program covering everyone. In a cabinet meeting, Frances Perkins remembered Roosevelt saying that he wanted the legislation to be so simple that everybody will understand it. And what’s more, there’s no reason why every child, from the day he is born, shouldn’t be a member of the social security system. … Everybody ought to be in on it—the farmer and his wife and family. … Cradle to the grave.142 To craft the legislation, Roosevelt brought together an interagency, cabinet-level task force, the Committee on Economic Security (CES), headed by Edwin Witte, an economics professor from the University of Wisconsin.143 Before the CES had developed the administration plan, nearly all the attention in Congress had been on unemployment issues; but now, with pressure from the public and a growing awareness by members of Congress, the focus shifted to the issue of old-age security. Further, the term “social security” was unfamiliar to most lawmakers and the public. Not until the House Ways and Means Committee tried to distinguish its bill from another FDR piece of legislation, did it come up with the name “Social Security Act.”144

Photo 4.2 Robert F. Wagner (1877–1953), New York senator, author of major legislation during the New Deal. Source: Harris & Ewing Collection via Library of Congress.

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The administration’s bill was introduced by Wagner in the Senate and David J. Lewis (Democrat—Maryland) in the House. The fight in both the House and the Senate was contentious, with opponents yelling, “stop the steamroller.” On the floor of the House, in April 1935, the pleas were ignored, and some fifty amendments, from radical ideas to outright attempts to scuttle the legislation, were swept aside. For many conservatives, Social Security was just crazy: “Never in the history of the world,” cried out Congressman John Taber (Republican—New York), “has any measure been brought in here so insidiously designed as to prevent business recovery, to enslave workers, and to prevent any possibility of the employers providing work for the people.”145 Despite the angst and hyperbole, the bill was overwhelmingly approved, with just thirty-three lawmakers voting against it. Soon, the Senate considered the bill, adding a new provision for federal assistance to the blind. It was shepherded through the Senate by Pat Harrison.146 Several other southern senators, led by Harry F. Byrd, Sr. (Democrat—Virginia), however, were worried that the legislation would be another federal wedge, bringing government interference into state issues, and ominously into the “Negro question.” As crafted, there were four major parts in the Social Security Act. First, was a federal-state unemployment insurance program, based on the Wagner-Lewis legislation of the year before. There would be a uniform nationwide tax on employers to help fund the program. Second, there would be federal grants to states for welfare payments, for needy children, the blind, and elderly. Third, were federal grants to states for vocational rehabilitation, infant and maternal heal, aid to crippled children, and public health programs. Finally, was the most significant, an old-age insurance program, administered by the federal government directly to individuals. The first retirement checks were to be issued in 1942 to persons sixty-five or older who had worked at least five days in each of the years from 1937 to 1941. But not everyone was covered. The CES estimated that there were 49 million Americans gainfully employed. Of those, 26 million would be covered by the old-age benefits program; but some 22.1 million would not be covered.147 Who was excluded? Those who were selfemployed, owners and operators (12 million), those in excluded industries (9 million), casual workers (half million), and others. Commentators have long pointed out that farm and domestic workers—most of whom were African Americans—were excluded, and that this was a political sop to placate southern lawmakers. Indeed, 65 percent of African Americans nationwide and 70 to 80 percent in the South were ineligible. This vaunted new safety net was “a sieve with holes just big enough for the majority of Negroes to fall through,” protested the NAACP.148 But it was Treasury secretary Henry Morgenthau, Jr., in a surprise testimony before the Senate Finance Committee, who urged that farm and domestic workers not be included. “It was not presumptively racist Southern politicians who moved to delete coverage for these workers,” observed Social Security historian Larry DeWitt, “but northeastern patrician Henry Morgenthau, Jr., who was trying to avoid an onerous task for the Treasury. Congress was only too happy to oblige Morgenthau by excluding several million workers and their employers from the burden of paying those taxes.”149 The program would be paid for through a payroll tax, a 1 percent tax on the first $3,000 of income, beginning in 1937. Roosevelt insisted on a payroll tax, rather than some other method of raising the needed funds. The president explained, in a letter to Frances Perkins: “We put those payroll contributions there so as to give the contributors a legal, moral, and political right to collect their pensions. … With those taxes in there, no damn politician can ever scrap my social security program.”150 Thus, Social Security from then on would be characterized as an insurance program, not a welfare program.

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Photo 4.3 Frances C. Perkins (1880–1965), Labor secretary during the Franklin Roosevelt administration. Source: Library of Congress.

It was a flawed system, but it would grow over the decades to become one of the most significant pieces of domestic legislation ever enacted. As historian Robert S. McElvaine summed it up, A system that excluded the neediest, took money from workers, and reduced aggregate demand in the midst of a depression was something less than a model for progressive legislation. Yet the Social Security Act helped, in combination with other parts of the Second New Deal, to win back for Roosevelt the allegiance of the forgotten man.151 Social Security would be tested on the campaign trail and later in the courts. In 1936, the Republican National Committee distributed millions of fliers to be put into pay envelopes right before the November presidential election. One pamphlet, with a picture of a “New Deal Judge” on it warned: “You’re Sentenced TO A WEEKLY PAY DEDUCTION for ALL OF YOU WORKING LIFE. YOU’LL HAVE TO SERVE THE SENTENCE UNLESS YOU HELP TO REVERSE IT. NOV. 3, ELECTION DAY.” Anticipating this kind of political attack, the Social Security Board prepared 50 million leaflets, distributed mostly through labor unions, along with short public service videos shown at movie theaters explaining the new program. On election day, Republicans were clobbered, with presidential hopeful Alf Landon winning just two states, and Republicans losing ground in both the House and the Senate.152 Almost immediately, the Social Security Act was challenged in the courts. Just six weeks after affirming the Wagner Act in May 1937, the Supreme Court upheld the Social Security Act through two decisions. In the first, Steward Machine Company v. Davis, the Court ruled that the federal-state unemployment compensation program was a legitimate exercise of federal power; in the second, Helvering v. Davis, the court ruled that the old-age program was constitutional under the taxing and spending authority of Congress.153 Even before the Social Security Act became operational, it was amended in 1939 to add child, spouse, and survivors’ benefits. The original plan’s Old-Age Insurance now became OldAge and Survivors Insurance (OASI), a “tremendous step forward,” noted Roosevelt when he signed the amendment. Through this amendment as well, benefits were allowed to begin in

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1940. Payments would no longer be in lump sums, but in monthly installments; in addition, the payments would be based on last wages rather than a worker’s total wage history. The Townsend movement, still powerful, contributed to the pressure on Congress to expand the original program.154 Even in the 1940s, the Townsend movement was a potent voice, leading to Social Security’s significant expansion by mid-century. It took a massive bureaucratic effort to implement Social Security. A new agency had to be built from scratch, and by the end of 1936, some 2,500 federal workers, mostly women, were hired. The new Bureau of Old-Age Insurance began receiving1.7 million employer reports from the Bureau of Internal Revenue. By April 1938, some 38 million social security accounts were created, filling a half-acre space in an old Coca Cola bottling plant in Baltimore, the only building within the Washington-Baltimore corridor that could accommodate the paper files and workers. This all took place before computers, electronic storage, and magnetic tape. A core value of the social security program was established by Arthur J. Altmeyer, the chairman of the Social Security board: the federal government had an affirmative obligation to assist citizens in obtaining their federal benefits. That philosophy holds true today. In 1940, Ida M. Fuller, seventy-six, of Ludlow, Vermont, became the first person to receive Social Security benefits; another 22,487 recipients joined her that year.155 Significance of this Policy Social Security, amended and enhanced many times in the coming decades, is the grand charter of American domestic public policy. It has been the most successful anti-poverty program and now provides basic, vital security to millions of Americans. Despite its costs, its limitations, and the actuarial realities of today’s workforce and retired workers, Social Security remains central to the American way of life.

Establishing a Federal Minimum Wage and Prohibiting Child Labor The policy fight to protect workers and children had been long and contentious, and thus far, not completely successful. Indeed, child labor was down from its peak in 1910, when 18.4 percent of children aged ten to fifteen were gainfully employed; by 1930, that percentage had shrunk to 4.7 percent.156 With the New Deal, came a new chapter in the fight. When approached to be secretary of labor, Frances Perkins said she would accept the position only if she could advocate for minimum wage-maximum hours legislation and for the abolishment of child labor.157 Lawyers from the Department of Labor promptly began working on federal minimum wage/maximum hours legislation, and Perkins tucked away the draft legislation in her office desk drawer. Following the 1936 election, a landslide for Roosevelt and the Democratic Party, Roosevelt turned to Perkins and asked, “What happened to that nice unconstitutional bill you had tucked away?”158 White House lawyers Cohen and Corcoran reworked the Perkins legislation, and at the urging of Grace Abbott, head of the Children’s Bureau, the measure included the prohibition in interstate commerce of goods produced by child labor. The timing seemed right. On May 24, 1937, Roosevelt sent a message to Congress calling for legislation to abolish the “evil of child labor.” Roosevelt stated that “a self-supporting and selfrespecting democracy can plead no justification for the existence of child labor, no economic reason for chiseling workers’ wages or stretching workers’ hours.” The president noted that in 1918 the Supreme Court had invalidated the Child Labor Act of 1916, but then he cited the stirring dissenting opinion of Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes: “Although Mr. Justice Holmes spoke for a minority of the Supreme Court, he spoke for a majority of the American people.”159

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The administration’s bill, the Fair Labor Standards Act, was offered by two long-time proponents of labor reform, William P. Connery, Jr. (Democrat—Massachusetts), the chair of the House Labor Committee and Hugo L. Black, the chair of the Senate Committee on Education and Labor. The legislation called for a forty-cent per hour minimum wage and a forty-hour maximum workweek. It also barred from interstate commerce any products made with “oppressive child labor,” which meant products from children under sixteen and products from children under eighteen in hazardous occupations.160 The legislative fight was long and contentious. Opponents, especially southerners, strenuously argued that there should be accommodations for regional pay differentials; this would allow the South to continue paying the lowest wages of all regions of the country. On the Senate floor, southern lawmakers denounced the legislation, charging that the North wanted to “crucify” southern industry and make it less competitive and prevent the South from rising, seventy years later, from the devastation caused by the Civil War.161 In addition, opponents insisted, certain fields of work should be exempted: agriculture, fishing, cannery work, intrastate retail businesses, government employees, and, though not stated specifically, domestic workers. The final bill added an amendment that expanded the definition of exempted farm workers to include packaging or processing of agricultural goods during harvest seasons—work typically done by Black laborers. This certainly wasn’t the first New Deal legislation that exempted farm workers or sharecroppers—so did the NIRA, the AAA, the Wagner Act, and Social Security. To do otherwise would have killed the legislation: southerners just wouldn’t go along.162 Also opposing the legislation were most Republican lawmakers and a phalanx of businessoriented interests, including the US Chamber of Commerce, the National Association of Manufacturers, the National Association of Wood Manufacturers, and a variety of southern agricultural, textile, and manufacturing interests.163 Finally, in June 1938, the Fair Labor Standards bill became law. First, it established a minimum wage of twenty-five cents an hour, going to thirty cents the next year, then forty cents within six years. Maximum working hours would be forty-four per week during the first year, forty-two during the second, and forty hours per week after that. It also prohibited child labor for goods that would be engaged in interstate commerce. A compromise in the hard-fought battle over regional differentials in wages was hammered out through a newly established wage-hour division within the Department of Labor, which could consider such differences. As historian Frank Freidel observed, the legislation “was so watered down and weak that it seemed more symbol than substance.”164 An early estimate was that one-fifth of the national labor market, roughly eleven million workers, was impacted by this legislation. The law did not affect all children, just those who worked in “oppressive” situations, such as mining or manufacturing. That meant children fourteen or fifteen years old still could be employed, if they were not in a category of prohibited work. It also meant that children working in agriculture—an estimated 500,000 to 600,000—were not covered. Girls working in restaurants, hotels, or beauty parlors were not protected, primarily because their work was not considered a part of interstate commerce.165 This was the last major piece of New Deal legislation. It went through the wringer of legislative battles and put an enormous strain on the Democratic Party. Southern lawmakers (and their backers) would only go so far in disturbing the low-wage economy that the South so desperately counted on. It revealed, “a growing schism in the party, one that would become even more apparent in the 1940s.”166 With racial discrimination becoming more of an issue and focus during the 1940s, the Democratic Party split was now just in its beginning stages. Once again, the federal legislation was challenged in the courts. In United States v. Darby Lumber (1941),167 the Supreme Court unanimously upheld the law. The Darby case thus

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overturned Hammer v. Dagenhart, the 1918 law which undermined the earlier child labor legislation and confirmed the minimum wage decision of West Coast Hotel v. Parrish, decided in 1937. Significance of this Policy Over the decades, the Fair Labor Standards Act has been amended many times. A greater pool of workers has been added, including retail and service industry, farm workers, government, transit employees, and restaurant, hotel, and domestic workers. Not until 1978, however, did all employees covered by the act earn the same minimum wage.

POLICIES DELAYED OR DENIED

The Court Weighs In Unlike any of the other eras in this study, the 1930s saw vigorous activity by the Supreme Court, negating several early New Deal laws and policies. Altogether, the Court ruled unconstitutional eight pieces of New Deal legislation during from 1933 to 1937. In January 1935, the Supreme Court ruled on the first piece of New Deal legislation in Panama Refining Company v. Ryan,168 overturning parts of the National Industrial Recovery Act. The NIRA gave the president authority to prohibit the transportation of oil that was beyond the quotas set by the oil-producing states. Chief Justice Hughes, who was joined by all the other justices except Cardozo, ruled that the law unconstitutionally delegated legislative power to the president. This decision was unprecedented. “Never before,” noted legal historian Richard J. Regan, “had the court invalidated a federal law because it illegally delegated legislation power to the executive.”169 On May 27, 1935, the Supreme Court ruled against three major New Deal pieces of legislation. To supporters of the Roosevelt agenda, that day was forever known as “Black Monday.” First, the Court ruled unanimously that the National Industrial Recovery Act was unconstitutional, in Schechter Poultry Corp. v. United States.170 The National Labor Board had convicted the Schechter brothers, a New York City kosher slaughterhouse, of violating the Live Poultry Code, which was established under the NIRA. The Court ruled that the NIRA was unconstitutional, and that it had delegated too much power to the president and to private organizations. “Such delegation of legislative power is unknown to our law,” wrote Chief Justice Hughes, “and is utterly inconsistent with the constitutional prerogatives and duties of Congress.” Justice Cardozo penned in his concurring opinion, that this was “delegation run riot.” Justice Brandeis, who thought from the beginning that the NIRA was a bad idea, later stated that “May 27 was the most important day in the history of the Supreme Court and the most beneficent.”171 Roosevelt was stunned; exactly one month later, the Senate and House ironed out their differences on the new legislation, the Wagner Act. A second case was Louisville Joint Stock Land Bank v. Radford,172 where the Court unanimously ruled unconstitutional the Frazier-Lemke Emergency Farm Mortgage Act (1933). The Court determined that the law, which allowed farmers whose properties had been foreclosed to purchase them at a reappraised lower price at just at a 1 percent interest rate, violated the Fifth Amendment. The third case was Humphrey’s Executor v. United States,173 in which the Court ruled unanimously that the president could not summarily remove a member of the independent Federal Trade Commission. William Humphreys had balked at New Deal policies and

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Roosevelt wanted him out. The Court determined that such removal would have also required congressional consent. Roosevelt was angry about the Schechter decision, but even more so with the Humphrey’s Executor, which he considered a personal rebuke.174 It got worse for Roosevelt and his administration. The following year, 1936, the Court again found New Deal policies to be constitutionally flawed. In January 1936, the Court invalidated the 1933 Agriculture Adjustment Act (AAA) through United States v. Butler.175 The AAA attempted to lift prices of agricultural products by restricting production. If farmers, through their cooperatives, agreed to reduce production, they could receive funds that were generated by a tax on the processing mills. Justice Roberts, in a 6–3 opinion, however, reasoned that the AAA was in violation of the Tenth Amendment. As legal historian Richard J. Regan noted: “Critical commentators called the opinion troublesome, quixotic, and even inept.”176 Further, the Bituminous Coal Act (1935), known also as the Guffrey Coal Act, was struck down by the Court in Carter v. Carter Coal Company.177 Justice Sutherland, writing for the five-member majority, ruled that coal production was not a part of interstate commerce, and thus could not be regulated by Congress. Historian William E. Leuchtenburg summed up: “In 1935 and 1936, over an unwontedly destructive sixteen-month period, the Court demolished a number of acts of Congress, as well as important state legislation.”178 During the first term of Roosevelt, the Court ruled in favor of the administration just twice, in the Gold Clauses Cases (upholding the ban on gold currency and certificates) and Ashwander v. Tennesee Valley Authority (upholding the sale of TVA electricity).179 Then came 1937, with Roosevelt’s audacious plan to pack the Court, then the important decision of West Coast Hotel v. Parrish,180 which saw a major reversal in the Court’s alignment. Then came the retirement of Justice Van Devanter, the appointment of Hugo Black as his replacement, and with it the beginning of the Roosevelt-friendly court.

Failure of Anti-lynching Legislation On October 19, 1934, the Dothan, Alabama, Eagle newspaper let the good people of southern Alabama and the Florida panhandle know what would happen on that particular evening: “Florida to Burn Negro at Stake: Sex Criminal Seized from Brewton Jail, Will be Mutilated, Set Afire in Extra-Legal Vengeance for Deed.” At the same time, the local radio several times during the day announced the impending lynching.181 That night, a crowd of some 4,000, including many children, witnessed the lynching and mutilation of Claude Neal, a twentythree-year-old African American farmhand, accused of the rape and murder of Lola Canaday, a nineteen-year-old white woman. Neal was seized from a jail in Alabama and taken to the small town of Marianna in the Florida panhandle. The crowd witnessed a horrific, sadistic form of southern justice. Political scientist Ira Katznelson described the scene: Neal was stabbed, burned, and castrated. He was forced to eat his own genitals before being dragged by an automobile to his death; then his body, mutilated and nude, was suspended from a tree in the courthouse square of Marianna, Florida. Photographs were sold for fifty cents. Neal’s toes and fingers were put on display.182 The next day, local whites rioted, attacked black citizens, and destroyed several of their homes in Marianna. The governor ordered the National Guard to suppress the violence, but none of the lynching vigilantes was identified. Marianna, which today labels itself the “City of Southern Charm,” is the county seat of Jackson County, an area of northwest Florida that was notorious for Klan activity and the brutal suppression of African Americans.183

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This was not an isolated incident. Lynchings were on the rise in the South at the beginning of 1933. As the Chicago Defender reported, there were multiple murders of blacks in Tennessee, Florida, Maryland, Louisiana, and South Carolina, hunted down by white vigilantes, often aided by local police. The victims were bludgeoned, hacked to death, hung from trees, tortured, and shot.184 Walter White and the NAACP legal staff once again drafted anti-lynching legislation. White was an African American, but with fair skin, blonde hair, and blue eyes; he passed for being Caucasian.185 He took advantage of his appearance and, undercover, was able to gain valuable information about white brutality. The vicious race riot in Elaine, Arkansas, in 1919 left 200 African Americans and five whites dead. Walter White posed as a reporter for the Chicago Daily News, was able to interview seventy-nine imprisoned African Americans, some of the lynchers, and the governor, before being discovered; he escaped by train a step ahead of a white mob.186 He courageously infiltrated the Ku Klux Klan and other white supremacist organizations, giving the NAACP first-hand information on at least forty murders perpetrated by the Klan.187

Photo 4.4 Walter F. White (1893–1955), leader of NAACP and civil rights advocate. Source: Gordon Parks, photographer. Farm Security Administration/Office of War Information Black-and-White Negatives Photo Collection via Library of Congress.

In early 1934, Senator Wagner and Representative Edward P. Costigan (Democrat— Colorado) introduced the NAACP-drafted anti-lynching legislation. The proposal called for federal trials for any local law enforcement officers who had failed to exercise their responsibilities during a lynching incident. Lynching would thus be a federal crime if local law enforcement officials had failed their duty. The objective, in the estimation of historian Robert L. Zangrando, was to “destroy the usual complacence of mob murder and make lynching too hazardous as a local pastime.”188 Walter White wrote to Eleanor Roosevelt, noting his and others’ displeasure that the president had not included a statement on anti-lynching legislation in his address to Congress. White urged people to be patient, because perhaps “the president will be sending a special message to Congress on lynching.” “I wonder,” wrote White, “if you could advise me if my optimism is well-founded. It would help during this very trying period to know that our efforts had not been in vain.”189 Roosevelt had spoken three times earlier during his first term against lynching, but had not spoken up for the Wagner-Costigan bill. Eleanor Roosevelt became the go-between for the

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NAACP and the president, giving the NAACP and White hope that the president would ultimately speak out for their legislation. When he did not, White became increasingly frustrated and disillusioned.190 But Roosevelt himself explained that it was southern opposition that prevented him from doing anything about lynching: Had I been permitted to choose [the tools with which I must work] I would have selected quite different ones. But I’ve got to get legislation passed by Congress to save America. The southerners by reason of the seniority rule in Congress are chairman or occupy strategic places on most of the Senate and House committees. If I come out for the antilynching bill now, they will block every bill I ask Congress to pass to keep America from collapsing. I just can’t take the risk.191 The South could take care of its own problems, the southern lawmakers would say; they could deal with the perpetrators of violence and bring them to justice. The stark reality, however, was that by 1933, less than 1 percent of the lynchings had led to any successful conviction.192 Anti-lynching forces were up against dogged preservation of white supremacy and vicious racism. “Whenever a Negro crosses this dead line between the White and the Negro races and lays his Black hand on a White woman, he deserves to die,” Senator James Thomas (Cotton Tom) Heflin (Democrat—Alabama) proclaimed in 1930.193 Apart from outright racist threats by leading southern politicians, Southern opposition centered on simple delay and obstruction, together with an undisguised contempt for Walter White, the NAACP, and their supporters. In the Senate, they employed the filibuster to talk the anti-lynching measure to death. “This bill is not going to pass. … We will be here all summer. … We will speak night and day,” Senator Josiah Bailey (Democrat—North Carolina) warned in April 1935.194 In 1938, southern senators and their allies consumed nearly six weeks of filibustering to prevent the anti-lynching bill from being considered by the full Senate. The NAACP tried again in 1939 and 1940, only to have the bills bottled up in committee; in 1941 and 1942, no such legislation was reported out of committee.195 Altogether, from 1882 through 1968, almost 200 anti-lynching bills were introduced in Congress; three were passed by the House, but none survived in the Senate.

Notes 1 Perkins quote from Nelson Lichtenstein, State of the Union: A Century of American Labor, rev. and expanded ed. (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2002), 26. 2 Adam Cohen, Nothing to Fear: FDR’s Inner Circle and the Hundred Days That Created Modern America (New York: Penguin Press, 2009), 10. 3 Lichtenstein, State of the Union, 24. 4 Thomas E. Hall and J. David Ferguson, The Great Depression: An International Disaster of Perverse Economic Policies (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1998), 3. 5 US Census Bureau, “Population of the 100 Largest Cities and Other Urban Places in the United States: 1790 to 1990.” 6 T.H. Watkins, The Hungry Years: A Narrative History of the Great Depression in America (New York: Henry Holt and Company, 1999), 393. 7 Cohen, Nothing to Fear, 14. 8 Ibid., 15. 9 Watkins, The Hungry Years, 82–86. 10 Ibid., 44–45. 11 “One-Fourth of a State Sold for Taxes,” The Literary Digest 93 (May 7, 1932), 10. 12 Edwin Amenta, Bold Relief: Institutional Politics and the Origins of Modern American Social Policy (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1998), 122–61, at 123.

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13 Gilbert C. Fite quoted in Numan V. Bartley, “The Era of the New Deal as a Turning Point in Southern History,” in James C. Cobb and Michael V. Namorato, eds., The New Deal and the South (Jackson: University Press of Mississippi, 1984), 139. Alan Dawley, Struggles for Justice: Social Responsibility and the Liberal State (Cambridge: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 1991), 123. 14 Charles J. Shindo, “The Dust Bowl Myth,” The Wilson Quarterly 24 (4) (Autumn 2000): 25–30. The woman depicted in Lange’s photograph was Florence Thompson. 15 Dawley, Struggles for Justice, 280 and Nelson Lichtenstein, Labor’s War at Home: The CIO in World War II (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 2008). 16 Dennis W. Johnson, The Laws That Shaped America: Fifteen Acts of Congress and Their Lasting Impact (New York: Routledge, 2009), 154–55. 17 Quoted in Irving Bernstein, The Turbulent Years: A History of the American Worker, 1933–1941 (Boston: Houghton Mifflin Company, 1970), 1–2. 18 David M. Kennedy, Freedom from Fear: The American People in Depression and War, 1929–1945 (New York: Oxford University Press, 1999) 288–322. 19 David E. Kyvig, Daily Life in the United States, 1920–1939: Decades of Promise and Pain (Westport, CT: Greenwood Press, 2002), 251. 20 Kennedy, Freedom from Fear, 220–25. 21 A Senate panel in 1957 selected La Follette senior as one of the five most significant senators in history. The others chosen were Daniel Webster of Massachusetts, Henry Clay of Kentucky, John C. Calhoun of South Carolina, and Robert Taft of Ohio. 22 John Milton Cooper, Jr., “Robert M. La Follette: Political Prophet,” The Wisconsin Magazine of History, 60 (2) (Winter, 1985-86): 90–105, at 105. 23 Kennedy, Freedom from Fear, 236–42; and Alan Brinkley, Voices of Protest: Huey Long, Father Coughlin, & the Great Depression (New York: Vintage Books, 1983). 24 Long used that slogan before, when running unsuccessfully for governor in 1924, and in his autobiography, Every Man a King (1933). 25 Huey P. Long, “Every Man a King,” Share Our Wealth radio address, February 23, 1934, text at https://www.hueylong.com/programs/share-our-wealth-speech.php; speech itself found at https:// www.youtube.com/watch?v=8vf9x3fXlSw (accessed March 14, 2019); Senator Huey P. Long, “Statement of the Share Our Wealth Movement” Congressional Record, 74th Cong., 1st sess., vol. 79, 8040–43 (May 23, 1935); T. Harry Williams, Huey Long (New York: Vintage, 1981), 676–706. 26 Huey Long: The Man, His Mission, and Legacy website, https://www.hueylong.com/programs/shareour-wealth.php (accessed March 14, 2019); Williams, Huey Long, 676–706. 27 Robert E. Snyder, “Huey Long and the Presidential Election of 1936,” Louisiana History 16 (1975), 127–28. 28 Glen Jeansonne, “Huey P. Long, Gerald L.K. Smith, and Leander H. Perez as Charismatic Leaders,” Louisiana History 35 (1) (Winter, 1994): 18. 29 Glen Jeansonne, Gerald L. K. Smith: Minister of Hate (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1988); Jeansonne, “Huey P. Long, Gerald L.K. Smith, and Leander H. Perez as Charismatic Leaders.” 30 J.D. Gaydowski, “Eight Letters to the Editor: The Genesis of the Townsend National Recovery Plan,” Southern California Quarterly 52 (4) (December 1970): 365–82; Letter No. 1: “Cure for Depression,” September 30, 1933. 31 Johnson, The Laws That Shaped America, 181–83. On the Townsend Plan, Abraham Holtzman, The Townsend Movement: A Political Study (New York: Bookman Associates), 1963; Edwin Amenta, When Movements Matter: The Townsend Plan and the Rise of Social Security (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2006); Edward D. Berkowitz, America’s Welfare State: From Roosevelt to Reagan (Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 1991); Bruce Mason, “The Townsend Movement,” Southwestern Social Science Quarterly 35 (1) (June 1954): 36–47. 32 McElvaine, The Great Depression, 242. 33 Ibid., 243. 34 Stegner quoted in Michael Kazin, The Populist Persuasion: An American History (New York: Basic Books, 1995), 114; on Coughlin, 113–33. 35 Obituary, “Charles Coughlin: 30’s ‘Radio Priest’,” New York Times, October 28, 1979. 36 Peter Schrag, Not Fit For Our Society: Immigration and Nativism in America (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 2010), 145. 37 Ira Katznelson, Fear Itself: The New Deal and the Origins of Our Time (New York: Liveright Publishing, 2013), 159–60.

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38 On the Republican Party in the South, Boris Heersink and Jeffrey A. Jenkins, Republican Party Politics and the American South, 1865–1968 (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2020). 39 Quoted in Kennedy, Freedom from Fear, 341; William F. Winter, “The Evolution of Politics in the Deep South,” Southern Quarterly 51 (1/2) (Fall 2013/Winter 2014): 93–105, at 98. Smith was quoted saying, “As he started praying, I started walking. And as I pushed through those great doors and walked across that vast rotunda, it seemed to me that old John Calhoun leaned down from his mansion in the sky and whispered in my ear, ‘You did right, Ed.’” 40 Smithsonian Institution, “Separate is not Equal: Jim Crow Laws,” [n.d.], http://americanhistory.si. edu/brown/history/1-segregated/detail/jim-crow-laws.html (accessed May 30, 2017). 41 McElvaine, The Great Depression, 190. 42 “‘Coon Cards’: Racist Postcards Have Become Collectors’ Items,” The Journal of Blacks in Higher Education, 25 (Autumn 1999), 72, quoted in Catherine Roth, “The Coon Chicken Inn: North Seattle’s Beacon of Bigotry,” The Seattle Civil Rights and Labor History Project, University of Washington, Fall 2008), https://depts.washington.edu/civilr/coon_chicken.htm (accessed February 21, 2019). 43 A Wikipedia page lists hundreds of entertainers who appeared in minstrel shows and television who appeared in blackface; https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_entertainers_who_performed_in_ blackface (accessed March 18, 2019). 44 James W. Loewen, Sundown Towns: A Hidden Dimension of American Racism (New York: New Press, 2018), 4–5. The statistics for Illinois are from the year 1970. Emphasis in the original. 45 Dan T. Carter, Scottsboro: A Tragedy of the American South, rev. ed. (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1979). In Powell v. Alabama, 287 US 45 (1932), https://supreme.justia.com/cases/ federal/us/287/45/, the Court ruled that the defendants had been denied the right to counsel. In Norris v. Alabama, 294 US 587 (1935), https://supreme.justia.com/cases/federal/us/294/587/, the Court ruled that the systematic exclusion of African Americans from the Jackson County jury pool denied the defendants of their right to a fair trial. Allan Blinder, “Alabama Pardons 3 ‘Scottsboro Boys’ After 80 Years,” New York Times, November 21, 2013, https://www.nytimes.com/2013/11/22/ us/with-last-3-pardons-alabama-hopes-to-put-infamous-scottsboro-boys-case-to-rest.html (accessed May 13, 2019). 46 Leonard J. Leff, “David O. Selznick’s ‘Gone with the Wind’: ‘The Negro Problem,’” The Georgia Review 38 (1) (Spring, 1984): 146–64. 47 James Q. Whitman, Hitler’s American Model: The United States and Making the Race Laws (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2017), 4–5. 48 Leonard Dinnerstein, “Jews and the New Deal,” American Jewish History 74 (2) (June 1983): 461–76, at 461–62. 49 Bradley Hart, Hitler’s American Friends: The Third Reich’s Supporters in the United States (New York: Thomas Dunne, 2018). A seven-minute excerpt of the rally is in “A Night at the Garden—Field of Vision,” https://www.washingtonpost.com/history/2018/12/09/night-thousands-nazis-packed-madisonsquare-garden-rally-violence-erupted/?utm_term=.c6a47db3b015 (accessed June 17, 2019). Also, Diane Bernard, “The Night Thousands Nazis Packed Madison Square Garden for a Rally—and Violence Erupted,” Washington Post, December 9, 2018. 50 Leonard Dinnerstein, “Anti-Semitism Exposed and Attacked, 1945–1950,” American Jewish History 71 91) (September 1981): 134–49, at 134–35. 51 James McGregor Burns, Roosevelt: The Lion and the Fox (New York: Harcourt, Brace, 1956), 123–38. 52 Cohen, Nothing to Fear, 189, 33. 53 “Acceptance Speech to the 1932 Democratic Convention,” Franklin D. Roosevelt Presidential Library, https://www.fdrlibrary.org/dnc-curriculum-hub (accessed June 4, 2019). 54 Ronald Reagan in 1984 won 525 electoral votes, losing only Minnesota (by a whisker) and the District of Columbia; Reagan gathered 58.8 percent of the popular vote. 55 James P. Pfiffner, Organizing the Presidency (Washington, DC: Brookings Institution, 2002), 21–35. 56 Cohen, Nothing to Fear, 14. 57 Dinnerstein, “Jews and the New Deal.” Also in the second level of advisors were several brilliant choices: Dean Acheson, Jerome Frank, Charles Wyzanski, James Landis, and others, who were in their mid-thirties or forties at the time. Pfiffner, Organizing the Presidency, 24. Acheson later became secretary of state under Harry Truman and was an architect of US cold war policy; Frank became chairman of the SEC and later an influential judge in the US Court of Appeals; Wyzanski became a prominent federal judge; and Landis was chairman of the SEC, dean of the Harvard Law School, and a prominent academic. 58 Pfiffner, Organizing the Presidency, 21.

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59 George Thomas Kurian, editor-in-chief, A Historical Guide to the US Government (New York: Oxford University Press, 1998), xi. 60 Kennedy, Freedom from Fear, 367, 367 n.7. 61 Kurian, A Historical Guide to the US Government, xii. 62 Robert V. Remini, The House: The History of the House of Representatives (Washington, DC: Smithsonian Books, 2006), 312. 63 James T. Patterson, Congressional Conservatism and the New Deal (Lexington: University Press of Kentucky, 1967), 5. 64 Donald C. Bacon, “Joseph Taylor Robinson: The Good Soldier,” in Richard A. Baker and Roger H. Davidson, eds., First Among Equals: Outstanding Senate Leaders of the Twentieth Century (Washington, DC: Congressional Quarterly, 1991), 63. 65 Bacon, “Joseph Taylor Robinson,” 83. 66 Oral history, Leon H. Keyserling, Harry S. Truman Presidential Library, May 3, 1971, Washington, DC, conducted by Jerry N. Hess, 23, https://www.trumanlibrary.org/oralhist/keyserl1.htm#23 (accessed June 18, 2019). 67 Patrick J. Maney, Young Bob: A Biography of Robert M. La Follette, Jr. 2nd ed. (Madison: Wisconsin Historical Society Press, 2003), xiv. 68 Steve Neal, “Charles L. McNary: The Quiet Man,” in Baker and Davidson, eds., First Among Equals, 98–123. 69 Alan Brinkley, “The New Deal and Southern Politics,” in Cobb and Namorato, eds., The New Deal and the South, 104. 70 Katznelson, Fear Itself, 164. 71 Eric Schickler, Racial Realignment: The Transformation of American Liberalism, 1932–1965 (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2016). 72 “Women Representatives and Senators by Congress, 1917 to Present,” History, Arts, and Archives, US House of Representatives, https://history.house.gov/Exhibitions-and-Publications/WIC/ Historical-Data/Women-Representatives-and-Senators-by-Congress/ (accessed May 9, 2019). The one female senator throughout this era was Hattie Wyatt Caraway (Democrat—Arkansas); in the House the most prominent female legislators during this time were Mary Norton (Democrat—New Jersey, 1933–1951) and Edith Nourse Rogers (Republican—Massachusetts, 1925–1960). For a short time, Dixie Bibb Graves (Democrat—Alabama, August 1937–January 1938) served when Hugo Black was appointed to the Supreme Court. African American representative Oscar S. De Priest (Republican—Illinois, 1929–1935) was defeated by another African American, Arthur W. Mitchell. 73 On the relationship between Hughes and FDR, James F. Simon, FDR and Chief Justice Hughes: The President, the Supreme Court, and the Epic Battle over the New Deal (New York: Simon & Schuster, 2012); quoted from 5. 74 William E. Leuchtenburg, The Supreme Court Reborn: The Constitutional Revolution in the Age of Roosevelt (New York: Oxford University Press, 1995), 115, cited in Kennedy, Freedom from Fear, 336. 75 Melvin I. Urofsky, “The Roosevelt Court,” in William H. Chafe, ed., The Achievement of American Liberalism: The New Deal and Its Legacies (New York: Columbia University Press, 2003), 63–98. 76 Peter Charles Hoffer, Williamjames Hull Hoffer, and N.E.H. Hull, The Supreme Court: An Essential History, 2nd ed. (Lawrence: University Press of Kansas, 2018), 253. 77 Leuchtenburg, The Supreme Court Reborn, 133–34. 78 On the court-packing scheme, Marian C. McKenna, Franklin Roosevelt and the Great Constitutional War: The Court-Packing Crisis of 1937 (New York: Fordham University Press, 2002); William E. Leuchtenburg, “The Origins of Franklin D. Roosevelt’s ‘Court-Packing’ Plan,” The Supreme Court Review 1966 (1966): 347–400; Burt Solomon, FDR v. The Constitution: the Court-Packing Fight and the Triumph of Democracy (New York: Walker Publishing Co., 2009); Burns, Roosevelt, 291–315; Kennedy, Freedom from Fear, 331–37; William Lasser, Benjamin V. Cohen: Architect of the New Deal (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2002), 150–81. 79 Robert Shogan, Harry Truman and the Struggle for Racial Justice (Lawrence: University Press of Kansas, 2013), 49–50. 80 Alfred H. Kelly and Winfred A. Harbison, The American Constitution: Its Origins and Development, 4th ed. (New York: W.W. Norton, 1970, 1948), 763–64; McKenna, Franklin Roosevelt and the Great Constitutional War, 419; Leuchtenburg, The Supreme Court Reborn, 310; Hoffer, Hoffer, and Hull, The Supreme Court, 263–65. 81 With the retirement of McReynolds in 1941, FDR nominated James F. Byrnes of South Carolina. Also in 1941, Hughes stepped down as chief justice and was replaced by Stone; Stone’s vacancy was

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94 95 96 97 98 99 100

The Early Years of the Twentieth Century then filled by Robert H. Jackson. When FDR appointed Byrnes to head the Office of Economic Stabilization in 1943, Wiley B. Rutledge took his place on the court. Hastie served as a federal judge in the US Virgin Islands (1937–1939), then became governor of the Virgin Islands (1946–1949), dean of Howard University Law School, and later a judge on the US Court of Appeals, Third Circuit (1949–1971). Genevieve R. Cline had earlier served as a federal judge in the US Customs Court, an Article I court; Allen was the first woman to serve on an Article III court. “Florence Ellinwood Allen,” biographical entry, Federal Judicial Center, https://www.fjc. gov/node/137711 (accessed June 11, 2019). On the laws enacted during the Hundred Days, see Stathis, Landmark Legislation, 1774–2002, 199–204; William Lasser, Benjamin V. Cohen: Architect of the New Deal (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2002), 70–71; Kennedy, Freedom From Fear, 131–59; Frank Freidel, Franklin D. Roosevelt: Rendezvous with Destiny (Boston: Bay Back Books, 1990), 92–105; James McGregor Burns, Roosevelt: The Lion and the Fox (New York: Harcourt Brace, 1956), 161–82; and Cohen, Nothing to Fear. Freidel, Franklin D. Roosevelt, 96. Burns, Roosevelt, 180. Parts of the Gold Standard Repeal were held unconstitutional in Perry v. United States, 294 US 330 (1935), https://caselaw.findlaw.com/us-supreme-court/294/330.html Exempted from disclosure were federal, state, and municipal bonds, railroad securities, and securities for religious, charitable, and educational institutions. Stathis, Landmark Legislation, 1774–2002, 202; Lasser, Benjamin V. Cohen, 65–85. Patrick J. Maney, “The Rise and Fall of the New Deal Congress, 1933–1945” Magazine of History 12 (4), 13. Freidel, Franklin D. Roosevelt, 98. W.J. Rorabaugh, Prohibition: A Concise History (New York: Oxford University Press, 2018), 110; David E. Kyvig, Repealing National Prohibition (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1979), 177–78. Roosevelt quoted in Michael McGerr, A Fierce Discontent: The Rise and Fall of the Progressive Movement in America, 1870–1920 (New York: Free Press, 2003), 317. Franklin D. Roosevelt: “Message to Congress on Repeal of the Volstead Act,” March 13, 1933. Online by Gerhard Peters and John T. Woolley, The American Presidency Project, http://www. presidency.ucsb.edu/ws/?pid=14551 (accessed February 19, 2018). Lisa McGirr, The War on Alcohol: Prohibition and the Rise of the American State (New York: Norton, 2016), xiii. For a more theoretical treatment, see Mark Lawrence Schrad, The Political Power of Bad Ideas: Networks, Institutions, and the Global Prohibition Wave (New York: Oxford University Press, 2010), 62; Mark Lawrence Schrad, “Constitutional Blemishes: American Alcohol Prohibition and Repeal as Policy Punctuation,” Policy Studies Journal 35 (3) (2007): 437–63. Schrad examines the international phenomenon of prohibition, particularly in Sweden and Russia, noting that every country that adopted prohibition repealed it within fifteen years. Stathis, Landmark Legislation, 1774–2002, 202–204. Richard Rothstein, The Color of Law: A Forgotten History of How Our Government Segregated America (New York: Liveright Publishing, 2018); George Lipsitz, The Possessive Investment in Whiteness (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 2009). Freidel, Franklin D. Roosevelt, 170. The law was also known as the Wagner-Steagall Housing Act, named after Senator Wagner of New York and Representative Steagall of Alabama. Charles E. Daye, “United States Housing Act of 1937,” Landsberg, ed. in chief, Major Acts of Congress, vol. 3, 248–52. The Alien Registration Act was named after its sponsor Representative Howard W. Smith (Democrat—Virginia). The Selective Training and Service Act was extended the following year, gaining the narrowest of votes in the House, 203–202. Susan Estabrook Kennedy, The Banking Crisis of 1933 (Lexington: University Press of Kentucky, 1973), 228. Dorothy Roe Lewis, “What FDR told Hoover, March 3, ’33,” New York Times, March 13, 1981. Lewis and three other female reporters were talking with Mrs. Roosevelt. She urged the reporters to publish the information, but they averred. Lewis: “One of us said, ‘Mrs. Roosevelt you don’t really want us to print that, do you?’ Then everyone was trying to talk at once. Don’t you realize what would happen if that story went out tonight? The New York Stock exchange would close. The London Stock Exchange would close. The country would go off the gold standard. There would be a worldwide panic. Besides, it’s all hearsay. We couldn’t quote either president directly.”

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101 102 103 104 105 106 107 108 109 110 111 112 113

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“She stared back at us, about to burst into tears, and said: ‘Oh-h-h. I didn’t think about that. What are we going to do?’” The reporters did nothing. Lewis concluded: “Who says women can’t keep a secret?” Kennedy, Freedom From Fear, 133. Arthur M. Schlesinger, Jr., The Age of Roosevelt, vol. 1, The Crisis of the Old Order, 1919–1933 (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1985, 1957), 481. Roosevelt quoted in Burns, Roosevelt, 163–64. Robert Jabaily, “Bank Holiday of 1933,” Federal Reserve History, https://www.federalreservehistory. org/essays/bank_holiday_of_1933 (accessed March 12, 2019). “Spirit of Congress Grim in Bank Task,” New York Times, March 10, 1933, 1. Burns, Roosevelt, 167. “Spirit of Congress Grim in Bank Task.” Kennedy, Freedom From Fear, 135-36. Roosevelt’s first fireside chat, March 12, 1933, available at https://www.youtube.com/watch?v= iipnhLTdh-0 (accessed March 14, 2019). Kennedy, The Banking Crisis of 1933, 231–32; Freidel, Franklin D. Roosevelt, 93-96; Jabaily, “Bank Holiday of 1933.” Jill M. Hendrickson, “The Long and Bumpy Road to Glass-Steagall Reform: A Historical and Evolutionary Analysis of Banking Reform,” American Journal of Economics and Sociology 60 (4) (October 2001): 849–79, at 858. Julia Maues, “The Banking Act of 1933 (Glass-Steagall),” Federal Reserve History, November 22, 2013, https://www.federalreservehistory.org/essays/glass_steagall_act Carlos D. Ramirez and J. Bradford de Long, “Understanding America’s Hesitant Steps Toward Financial Capitalism: Politics, the Depression, and the Separation of Commercial and Investment Banking,” Public Choice 106 (1/2) (2001): 93–116 at 101. An earlier Glass-Steagall Act was passed in 1932, authorizing Federal Reserve banks to use government bonds and securities as collateral for Federal Reserve notes. A total of $750 million in government gold reserves was made available for loans to private industry. This law is often referred to as Glass-Steagall I and the 1933 legislation referred to as Glass-Steagall II. GLBA is named after its sponsors, Senator W. Philip (Phil) Gramm (Republican—Texas) and Representatives James (Jim) A.S. Leach (Republican—Iowa) and Thomas J. Bliley, Jr. (Republican—Virginia). Preston J. Hubbard, The Origins of the TVA: The Muscle Shoals Controversy, 1920–1932 (New York: Norton, 1968, 1961). Rankin quoted in Katznelson, Fear Itself, 253. Franklin D. Roosevelt, “Message to Congress Suggesting the Tennessee Valley Authority,” FDR Library, April 10, 1933, docs.fdrlibrary.marist.edu/odtvacon.html (accessed May 21, 2019). James Branscome, “The Federal Government in Appalachia: TVA,” in Helen Matthews Lewis, Linda Johnson, and Donald Askins, eds., Colonialism in Modern America: The Appalachian Case (Boone: Appalachian State University, 1978), 283–93; Kyle A. Loring, “Tennessee Valley Authority Act (1933),” in Landsberg, ed. in chief, Major Acts of Congress, vol. 3, 225–28. Ashwander v. Tennesee Valley Authority, 297 US 288 (1936), https://supreme.justia.com/cases/federal/ us/297/288/ Robert Caro, The Years of Lyndon B. Johnson: The Path to Power (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1982), 503–28. Bonneville Power Administration website, https://www.bpa.gov/news/AboutUs/History/Pages/default. aspx (accessed February 1, 2019). Thanks to his friendship and support of Roosevelt, Oregon senator Charles McNary was able to secure federal funds for many projects, including the Bonneville dam. “I’ve got to give Charlie his dam,” said FDR as he signed the bill of its construction. Steve Neal, “Charles L. McNary: The Quiet Man,” in Baker and Davidson, eds., First Among Equals, 109. Obituary, “David E. Lilienthal is Dead at 81,” New York Times, January 16, 1981; David E. Lilienthal, TVA: Democracy on the March (New York: Harper & Brothers, 1944). Dennis W. Johnson, The Laws that Shaped America: Fifteen Acts of Congress and Their Lasting Impact (New York: Routledge, 2009), 140–74. Much of this section comes from this source. Kennedy, Freedom From Fear, 292. J. Joseph Huthmacher, Senator Robert F. Wagner and the Rise of Urban Liberalism (New York: Atheneum, 1968), 155.

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126 William E. Leuchtenburg, Franklin D. Roosevelt and the New Deal, 1932–1940 (New York: Harper and Row, 1963), 66. 127 Irving Bernstein, The Lean Years: A History of the American Worker, 1920–1933 (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1966), 217. 128 Bernard Bellush, Failure of the NRA (New York: Norton, 1975), 176. 129 Frances Perkins, The Roosevelt I Knew (New York: Viking Press, 1946), 239. 130 Bellush, Failure of the NRA, 172. 131 “National Labor Relations Act,” National Labor Relations Board website, https://www.nlrb.gov/ how-we-work/national-labor-relations-act (accessed May 24, 2019). 132 Patrick J. Maney, “Young Bob” La Follette: A Biography of Robert M. La Follette, Jr., 1895–1953 (Columbia: University of Missouri Press, 1978), 170; also Jerold S. Auerbach, Labor and Liberty: The La Follette Committee and the New Deal (Indianapolis: bobs-Merrill, 1966). 133 NLRB v. Jones & Laughlin Steel Corporation, 301 US 1, at 27 (1937), https://supreme.justia.com/cases/ federal/us/301/1/#tab-opinion-1935607. 134 Johnson, The Laws that Shaped America, 167–70. 135 James A. Gross, The Making of the National Labor Relations Board, vol. I, 1933–1937 (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1974), 189. 136 Foster Rhea Dulles and Melvin Dubofsky, Labor in American: A History, 4th ed. (Arlington Heights, IL: Harlan Davidson, 1984, 1949), 271. 137 Patterson, Congressional Conservatism and the New Deal, 316–17. 138 Johnson, The Laws that Shaped America, 175–201. Much of this section comes from this source. Martha Derthick, Policymaking for Social Security (Washington, DC: Brookings Institution, 1979). 139 Larry DeWitt, “Historical Background and Development of Social Security,” Social Security Administration, http://www.ssa.gov/history/briefhistory3.html 140 T.H. Watkins, The Hungry Years: A Narrative History of the Great Depression in America (New York: Henry Holt and Company, 1999), 257. 141 “Townsend Queried on Pension Plan,” New York Times, February 17, 1935, 5. Bruce Mason, “The Townsend Movement,” Southwest Social Science Quarterly 35 (1) (June 1954): 36–47; Amenta, When Movements Mattered; Edwin Amenta, “The Social Security Debate: Now and Then,” Context 5 (3) (2006): 18–22. 142 Perkins, The Roosevelt I Knew, 282–83. 143 The University of Wisconsin had been at the forefront of state policymaking ideas, particularly through the work of professors Harold R. Groves and Paul A. Rauschenbush. The “Wisconsin Plan,” as it was known, was a 1932 unemployment insurance law, pushed through the state legislature by governor Philip F. La Follette. The plan required employers to build reserves in order to take care of their workers. Edwin E. Witte, from the University of Wisconsin, has often been credited as the “father of the Social Security Act.” See, Johnson, The Laws that Shaped America, 175–201. 144 Edwin E. Witte, “Social Security: A Wild Dream or a Practical Plan?” (1938) in Robert J. Lampman, ed., Social Security Perspectives: Essays by Edwin E. Witte (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1972), 3. 145 Schlesinger, The Age of Roosevelt, 311. 146 Martha Swain, “Pat Harrison and the Social Security Act of 1935,” in Douglas B. Chambers and Kenneth Watson, eds., The Past Is Not Dead: Essays from the Southern Quarterly (Oxford: University Press of Mississippi, 2012): 75–86. Martha Swain, Pat Harrison: The New Deal Years (Jackson: University Press of Mississippi, 1978). 147 Larry DeWitt, “The Decision to Exclude Agriculture and Domestic Workers from the 1935 Social Security Act,” Social Security Bulletin70 (45) (2010), https://www.ssa.gov/policy/docs/ssb/v70n4/ v70n4p49.html#mn2 (accessed May 21, 2019). The following groups initially were excluded from Social Security benefits: self-employed individuals (including farmers); persons working in the nonprofit sector; seamen in the merchant marine; employees of charitable and educational foundations; employees of the American Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals; persons 65 and older; casual laborers; members of Congress; employees of federal, state, and local governments. 148 Ta-Nehisi Coates, “The Case for Reparations,” The Atlantic, June 2014, https://www.theatlantic. com/magazine/archive/2014/06/the-case-for-reparations/361631/ (accessed October 26, 2020). 149 DeWitt, “The Decision to Exclude Agriculture and Domestic Workers from the 1935 Social Security Act.” 150 Quoted in Schlesinger, The Coming of the New Deal, 307–308. 151 McElvaine, The Great Depression, 257.

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152 Johnson, The Laws that Shaped America, 192. 153 Steward Machine Company v. Davis, 301 US 548 (1937), https://supreme.justia.com/cases/federal/us/ 301/548/; opinion by Justice Cardozo. Helvering v. Davis, 301 US 619 (1937), https://casetext.com/ case/helvering-v-davis; opinion by Justice Cardozo. 154 Patricia P. Martin and David A. Weaver, “Social Security: A Program and Policy History,” Social Security Bulletin 66 (1) (2005): 1–15; Amenta, “The Social Security Debate.” 155 Johnson, The Laws that Shaped America, 193–95. 156 Dawley, Struggles for Justice, 66. 157 John A. Fliter, Child Labor in America: The Epic Legal Struggle to Protect Children (Lawrence: University Press of Kansas, 2018), 191; Katherine Du Pre Lumpkin, “The Child Labor Provisions of the Fair Labor Standards Act,” Law and Contemporary Problems 6 (3, The Wage and Hour Law) (Summer, 1939): 391–405. 158 Roger K. Newman, “Fair Labor Standards Act (1938),” in Landsberg, ed. in chief, Major Acts of Congress, vol. 2, 4. 159 CQ Researcher, “Control of Child Labor,” May 26, 1937, http://library.cqpress.com/cqresearcher/ document.php?id=cqresrre1937052600 (accessed November 27, 2017); Fliter, Child Labor in America, 192. 160 CQ Researcher, “Control of Child Labor,” May 26, 1937. 161 Fliter, Child Labor in America, 197. 162 Katznelson, Fear Itself, 267–72. 163 Fliter, Child Labor in America, 194. 164 Freidel, Franklin D. Roosevelt, 281. 165 Fliter, Child Labor in America, 205; Sarah A. Donovan and Jon O. Shimabukuro, The Fair Labor Standards Act (FLSA) Child Provisions, Congressional Research Service, June 29, 2016, https://fas. org/sgp/crs/misc/R44548.pdf. 166 Katznelson, Fear Itself, 272. 167 312 US 100 (1941), https://www.law.cornell.edu/supremecourt/text/312/100; opinion by Justice Harlan Fiske Stone; the opinion of Carter v. Carter Coal Company was declared to have been limited. 168 293 US 388 (1935), https://supreme.justia.com/cases/federal/us/293/388/; opinion written by Chief Justice Hughes. This case is also known as the “Hot Oil” case. 169 Richard J. Regan, A Constitutional History of the US Supreme Court (Washington, DC: Catholic University of America Press, 2015), 105. Cardozo, in dissent, argued that the delegation of power was necessary, given the national emergency the country faced. 170 295 US 495 (1935), https://supreme.justia.com/cases/federal/us/295/495/; opinion written by Chief Justice Hughes. 171 A.L.A. Schechter v. United States, 295 US 495 (1937), https://www.oyez.org/cases/1900-1940/ 295us495; opinion written by Chief Justice Hugh; Johnson, Laws that Shaped America, 160. 172 295 US 555 (1935); https://supreme.justia.com/cases/federal/us/295/555/; opinion written by Chief Justice Hughes. 173 295 US 603 (1935); https://www.law.cornell.edu/supremecourt/text/295/602; opinion written by Justice Sutherland. 174 Regan, A Constitutional History of the US Supreme Court, 107. 175 297 US 1 (1936); https://supreme.justia.com/cases/federal/us/297/1/#tab-opinion-1934959; opinion written by Justice Roberts. 176 Regan, A Constitutional History of the US Supreme Court, 108. 177 Carter v. Carter Coal Company, 298 US 238 (1936); https://supreme.justia.com/cases/federal/us/298/ 238/; the opinion was written by Justice Sutherland. 178 Leuchtenburg, The Supreme Court Reborn, 215. 179 Gold Clause Cases (Norman v. Baltimore & Ohio Railroad; US v. Bankers Trust Co.; Nortz v. US; and Perry v. US, 294 US 240 (1935); Ashwander v. Tennessee Valley Authority, 297 US 288 (1936). 180 West Coast Hotel Company v. Parrish, 300 US 379 (1937), https://supreme.justia.com/cases/federal/us/ 300/379/; opinion written by chief Justice Hughes. 181 Headline found in James R. McGovern and Walter T. Howard, “Private Justice and National Concern: The Lynching of Claude Neal,” The Historian 43 (4) (August 1981): 546–59, at 550. 182 Katznelson, Fear Itself, 167. See, also McGovern and Howard, “Private Justice and National Concern.” 183 City of Marianna, Florida, official website, http://www.cityofmarianna.com/. There is no mention of Marianna’s racially fraught past on the city’s website.

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184 Katznelson, Fear Itself, 96–97. 185 In his autobiography, White forthrightly declared that he was not a white person: “I am not white. There is nothing within my mind and heart which tempts me to think that I am. Yet I realize acutely that the only characteristic which matters to either the white or the colored race—the appearance of whiteness—is mine. There is magic in a white skin; there is tragedy, loneliness, exile, in a black skin.” Walter F. White, A Man Called White: The Autobiography of Walter F. White (Athens: University of Georgia Press, 1995, 1948), 3. 186 “Walter White, 61, Dies in Home Here,” New York Times, March 22, 1955. 187 Matthew C. Whitaker, “Walter F. White, 1893–1955,” Black Past, January 21, 2007, https://www. blackpast.org/african-american-history/white-walter-f-1893-1955/ (accessed February 12, 2019). 188 Robert L. Zangrando, “The NAACP and a Federal Anti-Lynching Bill, 1934–1940” Journal of Negro History 50 (2) (April 1965): 106–17, at 107. 189 Letter, Walter White to Eleanor Roosevelt, January 10, 1935, Franklin D. Roosevelt Presidential Library, http://www.fdrlibrary.marist.edu/_resources/images/ersel/ersel098b.pdf (accessed March 1, 2019). On the official stationery of the NAACP was this printed question: “How do your Senators and Congressmen stand on the Costigan-Wagner Anti-Lynching Bill?” 190 Melissa Cooper, “Reframing Eleanor Roosevelt’s Influence in the 1930s Anti-Lynching Movement Around a “New Philosophy of Government,” European Journal of American Studies 12 (1) (Spring 2017), https://journals.openedition.org/ejas/11914 (accessed March 1, 2019). 191 Quoted in Harvard Sitkoff, “The Impact of the New Deal on Black Southerners,” in James C. Cobb and Michael V. Namorato, eds., The New Deal and The South (Jackson: University Press of Mississippi, 1984), 118. 192 Ivan Evans, Cultures of Violence: Lynching and Racial Killings in South Africa and the American South (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2009), 185. 193 Quoted in Avis Thomas-Lester, “A Senate Apology for History on Lynching,” Washington Post, June 14, 2005. 194 Quoted in Zangrando, “The NAACP and a Federal Anti-Lynching Bill, 1934–1940” 113. 195 Douglas O. Linder, “Lynchings: By Year and Race,” Famous Trials, https://www.famous-trials.com/ sheriffshipp/1084-lynchingsyear (accessed February 12, 2019).

Part II

The War Years, Post-War and Modern America

Chapter 5

War, Recovery, and Readjustment: 1941–1952

We must be the great arsenal of democracy. Franklin Roosevelt, fireside chat, December 29, 1940.1

AMERICA DURING THIS ERA On September 1, 1939, Hitler’s army invaded Poland; two days later, France and Great Britain declared war on Germany. The world war had started even earlier in the Pacific, when Japanese forces attacked Chinese soldiers outside of Beijing on July 7, 1937. The United States military at the time was wholly unprepared for what would come. When it frantically began its rearming in July 1940, the US military ranked nineteenth in size worldwide, between Portugal’s and Bulgaria’s.2 One year later, in June 1941, Hitler launched the most massive attack in world history, some 3.6 million troops, with thousands of aircraft and tanks against the forces of the Soviet Union. Germany was rapidly expanding into western Europe, the Mediterranean, and North Africa; close ally Britain was barely hanging on. What to do? As historian David M. Kennedy described it, Roosevelt “writhed on the horns of this dilemma through the spring and summer of 1941. Needled by conflicting counsel and buffeted by irreconcilable demands, he flip-flopped, dodged, waffled, and dissembled.”3 With Pearl Harbor and the declaration of war on Japan and Germany, the nation’s focus shifted to winning the war. Men and materiel were needed, price controls were imposed, vital goods were rationed, surveillance and the curtailment of robust speech became the norm, the feeble and uncertain economy of the 1930s became revitalized by the exigencies of war. In 1940, Roosevelt appointed William S. Knudsen, the president of General Motors, as director of industrial production for the National Defense Research Committee and then as head of the US Office of Production Management the following year. During the next four years, the industrial might of the United States would produce extraordinary results for the war effort. Domestic and consumer production lines were soon replaced by the demands of war. General Motors went from automobile and truck manufacturing to military trucks, tanks, and aircraft parts; Kimberly-Clark, the maker of Kleenex tissue, built machine gun mounts; Kellogg cereals now produced K-rations. During the war, American companies produced 86,000 tanks, 2.5 million trucks, 500,000 jeeps, 2.67 million machine guns, 8,800 ships and boats, and nearly 300,000 aircraft. This was truly the “arsenal of Democracy.” The US military, once derisively called “nice boys with BB guns,” by Time magazine, became the most powerful, best equipped and trained armed force in the world.4 Despite the hardships, America after the war was stronger, richer, and particularly in comparison with war-torn Europe and Asia, in far better economic shape. But going from a wartime economy to a peacetime economy caused major disruptions. Price controls were lifted DOI: 10.4324/9781003293538-8

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and inflation took root. Vital supplies, especially housing, were scarce. Wartime demands for women’s labor diminished and the iconic Rosie the Riveter for the most part returned to traditional homemaking roles. But at the same time, as Americans sought to return to normal times, there was a higher level of stress, a spike in divorces, and a disruption of family life. •

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•

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Demand for automobiles. In August 1942, the Office of Price Administration delivered a stunning notice: no new automobiles were to be sold to non-military personnel, there would be price limits, and mandatory indoor storage for unsold cars. After the war, there was a pent-up demand for new automobiles. Ford Motor Company put out its first new cars in July 1945 (basically its 1942 models), beating rival Chevrolet. In September 1945, millions of anxious consumers gathered outside of automobile show rooms as new cars were being sold for the first time since the beginning of the war. Yet it took the auto industry until 1949 to completely redesigned its fleet. Levittown and the American Dream. In 1947, the homebuilding construction company of Levitt and Sons began assembling 800-square foot, mass-produced homes on concrete slabs in the potato and onion fields of Long Island, New York. For $7,990 with 5 percent down (zero percent for veterans), eager buyers could invest in the American Dream, and the American suburb was born. At its peak, Levittown’s 17,000 detached single-family homes were built at a clip of one every 16 minutes, using nonunion labor and standardized templates. “We are not builders,” William Levitt said, “we are manufacturers.” Thanks to the Housing Act of 1949, billions of dollars of credit were available for low interest rates mortgages.5 Nearly all of the developments, which soon included two sites near Philadelphia and one in New Jersey, were all-white, thanks to local racial zoning restrictions. The first black family to move into the Pennsylvania Levittown was met with protests and a burning cross.6 Television, radio, and electricity. Television was becoming the sought-after household item in the late 1940s. By 1947, Harry Truman’s state of the union address was televised, so too was the World Series between the New York Yankees and the Brooklyn Dodgers. In 1948, only about 1 percent of American homes had televisions, but in 1949, some 100,000 were sold each week, and three years later, 10 percent of households would own a television—a grainy, black and white, Motorola, Zenith, RCA-Victor, Philco, or a Stromberg-Carlson set prominently displayed in their living rooms. By the late 1940s, there were ninety-eight commercial television stations in the nation’s fifty largest cities. While television was coming into its own, by 1947, some 90 percent of American households owned one or more radios, still the most important electronic communications link to the outside world. In 1945, about 46 percent of households had a telephone, which was owned by the local telephone company. Still isolated, 25 million farm families did not have electricity, despite the efforts of the Rural Electrification Administration. Creation of the modern computer. One of the most important technological advances during this era was the invention of the first practical computer. During the war, physicist J. Presper (Pres) Eckert, Jr., and John W. Mauchly at the University of Pennsylvania invented ENIAC (Electronic Numerical Integrator and Computer). The computing device had no moving parts, had miles of wiring, required 18,000 vacuum tubes, and could compute a thousand times faster than any previous machine. ENIAC filled a large room and weighed thirty tons. This technological marvel was introduced to the public in a February 1946 article in the New York Times, marking the beginning of the modern computer age. By 1950, Remington Rand had developed the first computer that could be used by businesses.7

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The Era by the Numbers In 1940, the American population stood at 142.1 million, a gain of 18.9 million from the 1930 census figures. By 1950, with the surge in birth rate, the population reached 152.3 million. New York City (7.9 million) continued to be the most populous city, with Chicago (3.6 million), Philadelphia (2.0 million), and Los Angeles (1.9 million) as the next biggest cities. New York (14.8 million) continued to be the most populous state, with California (10.6 million) gaining quickly, followed by Pennsylvania (10.5 million) and Illinois (8.7 million). California had grown by 53.3 percent since 1940, more than any other state.8 In 1939, the federal minimum wage was thirty cents an hour, boosted to forty cents in 1945, and then to seventy-five cents in 1950 ($8.05 in 2020 dollars).9 The average family income in 1950 was $3,300 per year (or $35,135 in 2020 dollars). In the post-War era, “the average American now earned more in real dollars, ate better, lived more comfortably, and stayed alive longer than his or her parents.”10 Financing the war effort meant spending heavily and borrowing heavily. Fiscal Year (FY) 1945 had receipts of $45.2 billion and outlays of $92.7 billion, leaving a deficit of $47.6 billion. (In 2020 dollars, $653.6 billion, $1.340 trillion, and $688.2 billion, respectively. By contrast, the FY 2020 budget was $6.6 trillion, with $3.3 trillion in revenue and $3.3 trillion in deficits.) The war effort in 1945 absorbed 20.4 percent of the total gross domestic product that year. By 1950, the federal budget had returned to peacetime figures, at $39.4 billion.11

Society Under Stress Labor Unrest and Adjustment to the Post-war Economy In April 1943, Roosevelt issued an executive order freezing wages and prices. This prompted the United Mine Workers (UMW) president John L. Lewis to call for an immediate strike. Coal was a far more vital source of energy in the 1940s than in the following decades. The UMW had signed a no-strike pledge shortly after Pearl Harbor, and now had broken it; the public was furious, so too was the president. Roosevelt, through Executive Order 9340, placed the coal mines under the authority of the federal government and threatened to draft the miners. In June 1943, Congress stepped in and enacted the Smith-Connally War Disputes Act, which authorized the president to seize and operate any private industrial war plant during the war. Roosevelt vetoed the bill, but Congress overrode his objections.12 Despite a presidential appeal, 500,000 soft coal miners struck; on May 1, Roosevelt seized the mines. There were three more strikes, on and off, during the year. The disputes were handed over to the National War Labor Board, and after months of wrangling, the coal miners agreed to return to work, under conditions they favored.13 Then, in the last days of the war in Europe, there was another coal strike. On April 30, 1945, just eighteen days after Truman took office, Lewis ordered 72,000 anthracite coal miners on strike. Truman viewed “any stoppages in any of the basic industries as direct threats to the war effort,” and the following week issued an executive order placing the affected mines under the temporary jurisdiction of the Department of the Interior.14 Lewis scoffed: “Let Truman dig coal with his bayonets.” There were further coal miner strikes, with work stoppages and wildcat strikes during the summer. “Defiant of public opinion, defiant of Franklin Roosevelt, defiant of Harry Truman, his coal strikes year after year had made Lewis a pariah, excoriated in Congress and the press, as hated by many Americans as he was loved by the miners,” observed Truman biographer Robert J. Donovan.15 A year later, Truman seized the bituminous coal mines, ending a forty-day strike. Again, in November 1946, Lewis called for a strike. This time a federal judge intervened, fining the

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union $3.5 million and fining Lewis $10,000 in civil and criminal contempt for violating an anti-strike injunction. Lewis capitulated, and the Supreme Court upheld $700,000 of the fine against the union. Truman’s standing with the press and the public rose appreciably. Following the War, labor unions, not just coal miners, flexed their muscle. The war-time economy had rationed goods, restricted wages, and called for common sacrifice. But now in the postwar era, new realities set in: inflation, loss of overtime pay, decline in the value of takehome pay, and the scarcity of staples, like meat. The year 1946 was an exceptionally turbulent one in labor-management history, with 4,985 work stoppages by 4.6 million workers. One out of every fourteen laborers in the workforce was involved, totaling 116 million worker-days of labor lost to strikes. For the most part, issues centered on wages and benefits, not, as in the 1930s, on union recognition.16 As Donovan noted, In one year, [Truman] had seized the coal mines twice; he had seized the railroads; he had seized 134 meat-packing plants; he had seized ninety-one tugboats; he had seized the facilities of twenty-six oil producing and refining companies; he had seized the Great Lakes Towing Company. All he had on his hands now was disaster.17 Then the Brotherhood of Railroad Trainmen and the Brotherhood of Railroad Engineers called for a nationwide strike. Truman was furious, ordering the railroads to be seized and vowing to draft striking railroad workers into the military. “Labor,” declared the head of the Congress of Industrial Organizations’s (CIO) political action committee, R.J. Thomas, “is through with Truman.” To many union leaders, Truman was seen as the “Number One strikebreaker.”18 McCarthyism and “Soft on Communism” “Young Bob” La Follette, the senator from Wisconsin, was challenged by upstart Joseph McCarthy in the 1946 Republican primary for the US Senate.19 McCarthy won in an upset, and then handily defeated his Democratic opponent in November. Washington correspondents voted McCarthy as the worst senator after his first two years in office, but in 1950, he leapt to national attention with his audacious and unsubstantiated claim that some 250 communists had infiltrated the State Department, and that he had their names.20 Just as Huey Long and Charles Coughlin were able to use radio to sway vast audiences during the 1930s, so did Joe McCarthy, using television to play to the fears and suspicions of the average American. As historian Michael Kazin observed, The man everyone called “Joe” was one of the first politicians to exploit the ability of television to boost an individual who is witty, alert, and at ease with before a camera. … McCarthy understood instinctively how to play an Everyman, and one whom the viewing public would not switch off.21 Who in the State Department had sold out China? Who was leaking atomic bomb secrets to the Soviets? Who was a member of the American Communist Party and other such groups? Who was not being loyal to the United States and had to be ferreted out? No matter that the Soviet Union and China were devastated by the war. Conservatives and anti-communists pounded home the fear that communists had infiltrated American government and society. At times, Truman battled against McCarthy and his cohorts. At the dedication of the new Washington headquarters of the American Legion in 1951, Truman lashed out at “scaremongers” and “hatemongers,” while not specifically mentioning McCarthy: “Character

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assassination is their stock in trade. Guilt by association is their motto. They have created such a fear and uncertainty that their attacks upon our liberties go almost unchallenged.” For the most part, the Legionnaires sat silent throughout Truman’s speech. Senator Robert A. Taft (Republican—Ohio) later told reporters that Truman was “hysterical.” Arch-conservative senator Homer E. Capehart (Republican—Indiana) replied, “All [Truman] has to do to stop the honest criticism of 100 percent Americans is to clean house—sweep out the communists and the pinks in his administration.”22 Few lawmakers, Republican or Democrat, were willing to challenge McCarthy’s blatant, false, and misleading charges that there were communists roaming the federal bureaucracy. One who spoke out was Senator Margaret Chase Smith (Republican—Maine), in her second year (1950) in the Senate; she delivered a forceful, fifteen-minute speech, her “Declaration of Conscience,” stating that the American people “are sick and tired of being afraid to speak their minds lest they be politically smeared as ‘Communists’ or ‘Fascists’ by their opponents.” She did not mention McCarthy by name, but everyone knew whom she was disapproving. As for her own party, she said, I don’t want to see the Republican Party ride to victory on the Four Horsemen of Calumny—Fear, Ignorance, Bigotry and Smear. … I do not believe the American people will uphold any political party that puts political exploitation above national interest. Surely, we Republicans are not that desperate for victory.23 Senator William B. Benton (Democrat—Connecticut) introduced a measure in the Senate calling for McCarthy’s expulsion, and Millard E. Tydings (Democrat—Maryland) headed a special investigation into alleged communist influence in the State Department. The committee, on a strict party-line vote, issued a 350,000 word, 313-page report that concluded that McCarthy had perpetrated a “fraud and a hoax … on the Senate.” The report concluded: “For the first time in our history, we have seen the totalitarian technique of the ‘big lie’ employed on a sustained basis.” The Tydings report was an “unprecedented rebuke” of McCarthy, and it drew condemnation from Senate Republicans, none of whom endorsed the committee’s findings. It was “one of the most vicious debates in the history of the Senate, marked by profanities and Republican attempts to cut off the discussion and kill a vote on the report.”24 Adding fuel to McCarthy’s fire was J. Edgar Hoover’s announcement that Julius Rosenberg (and later his wife, Ethel, and David Greenglass) were arrested for treason on charges of leading a spy ring and passing atomic bomb secrets to the Soviets. With a vengeance, McCarthy went after Tydings, who was up for re-election in 1950. McCarthy campaigned vigorously in Maryland, stating that Tydings was a “Red coddler,” who was “protecting Communists for political reason.” Doctored campaign photos showed Tydings looking intently at the face of Earl Browder, the leader of the American Communist Party. Tydings lost, becoming the first Senate victim of McCarthy; but he was joined with the defeat of Democrats Scott Lucas in Illinois who had called for an investigation, Elbert D. Thomas in Utah, and Helen Gahagan Douglas in California, the “pink lady” who was defeated by the young, ambitious Richard M. Nixon.25 McCarthy’s biggest stage (and his downfall) would come in the early days of the Eisenhower administration, with the fateful Army-McCarthy hearings, the glare of television and television commentary, and his rebuke by fellow senators. With the opening of Soviet archives after 1990, we now know that some 500 Americans were in some way involved in transmitting military, technical, political, and counterintelligence information to the Soviet Union during the 1930s and early 1940s. Indeed, the Communist Party USA was deeply involved in these efforts. But the Soviet actions were

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dismantled in 1945. As historian K.A. Cuordileone observed, “The feverish hunt for traitors began after the threat to US national security had passed.”26 But McCarthy was not alone. Like 1920, a Red Scare was sweeping through the land. During the 1940s and early 1950s, there were over 300 federal, state, and local laws enacted against communist “subversives” and the House Committee on Un-American Activities had compiled a list of 1 million suspects.27 In November 1946, Truman created a temporary commission on employee loyalty, hoping to deflect some of the pressure from conservatives and anticommunist activists. The American Legion, the Catholic Church, the US Chamber of Commerce, FBI director J. Edgar Hoover, and the House Committee on Un-American Activities, with its fierce new chairman, J. Parnell Thomas (Republican—New Jersey), and others pressed hard demanding that Soviet and Chinese communist sympathizers be exposed and brought to justice.28 Truman’s critics caught wind of the secret Venona Project, the US War Department’s code breaking of Soviet cables. Many of the cables were not deciphered until after the war ended, but they revealed a startling level of espionage by Americans who aided the Soviet Union. The Soviets had “recruited spies in virtually every major American government agency of military or diplomatic importance;” some 349 individuals, using false identities (“Farmhand,” “Beaver Cloth,” “Daughter,” and so forth), were found to have a covert relationship with Soviet intelligence agencies.29 Then, in March 1947, Truman promulgated Executive Order 98345, creating a federal loyalty program. All civilian employees of the federal government, from high-level security employees to forest rangers and file clerks, were to be listed with the FBI and have their names checked and fingerprints taken. A permanent Loyalty Review Board was created, with an initial budget of $11 million. In early 1948, Attorney General Tom Clark (who later served on the Supreme Court) declared: “Those who do not believe in the ideology of the United States, shall not be allowed to stay in the United States.”30 In October 1945, Truman suddenly dismantled the Office of Special Services (OSS), the principal US intelligence agency. With mounting pressure and leaking evidence of intelligence failures, the National Security Act (1947) created the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA), as a stronger, more effective version of the OSS. It wasn’t just leftist ideology that frightened Washington. When it was revealed that ninetyone persons had been fired from the State Department because they were believed to be homosexuals, there was outrage and consternation throughout the halls of Congress. Those State Department employees were ripe for blackmail and posed distinct security risks, the reasoning went. This was the beginning of the Lavender Scare. Altogether, some five thousand homosexuals lost their jobs. Historian David K. Johnson observed that “In 1950, many politicians, journalists, and citizens thought that homosexuals posed more of a threat to national security than Communists.”31 Whether suspected of being a communist, socialist, left-winger, or homosexual, by 1953, some 4,765,705 federal employees were required to fill out the forms that began the investigation process—a requirement, as political scientist Ira Katznelson pointed out was “unprecedented in American history.”32 Ultimately, 560 individuals were fired or not hired, with 1,776 cases pending at the end of this period.33 Particularly affected were scientist, engineers, and technicians, perhaps fifty thousand, whose work was not cleared or who were waiting to be cleared. A tiny fraction of scientists did aid the Soviet Union, such as Ted Hall (who was never caught), Morton Sobell (who received a thirty-year prison term); and Julius and Ethel Rosenberg (who were executed). But for those trying to ferret out communists and their sympathizers, a “tiny fraction” was all that was needed to put the pressure on the entire federal government apparatus.

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The loyalty program probably helped Truman during the 1948 election, stealing an issue away from conservative Republicans. Years later, in his memoirs Truman defended his actions, writing that he started out trying to be as fair as possible, given the climate of public opinion. But in private conversation with friends, he conceded that the loyalty program was a bad mistake: “Yes, it was terrible,” he said.34 Racial Unrest Immediately after the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor, the American Red Cross issued a plea for 15,000 blood donors: but only from whites; African Americans were turned away. “For pure, unadulterated, insulting gall, the American Red Cross takes the honors,” charged Roy O. Wilkins, editor of The Crisis, the NAACP’s official organ. It wasn’t just the Red Cross; the War Department earlier decided to collect blood only from white donors. “We have thousands of southern Whites in our forces, and they are absolutely against having the blood of colored donors let into their systems,” noted the director of Washington’s Red Cross, himself a physician. There was no scientific basis for rejecting African American blood, but the decision boiled down directly to racial fears and prejudice.35 Continued racial suppression, loss of land, and the promise for jobs in the industrial North and West Coast led to a massive migration of African Americans from the land of Jim Crow during the war. The numbers far exceeded the migration following World War I. Approximately one in four rural African Americans left the South during the 1940s, and the percentage of America’s blacks living in the South fell from 77 percent to 68 percent. In addition, black farm hands were leaving the South in droves, thanks in part to agricultural mechanization, with less need for mules and backbreaking farm labor, and more scientific farming.36 Migrating primarily to industrial cities, like Baltimore, Chicago, Gary, Detroit, Pittsburgh, and New York, African Americans came to northern cities where they had friends or relatives, but were faced with racial restrictive covenants and redlining cutting off the opportunity to live among white urbanites. West Coast cities did not have the concentrated ghettoes of the East and Midwest cities, but “they were hardly havens for interracial equality.”37 West Coast cities soon had their own racially segregated areas: many Chinese, Japanese, and Mexicans were excluded from white areas, and blacks were increasingly concentrated in Watts (Los Angeles), the Fillmore District (San Francisco), and East Oakland. The Detroit and Harlem Race Riots With war production at fever pitch in 1943, many southern workers, white and black, moved to Detroit and surrounding communities, looking for better opportunity, higher wages, and to do their part in the war effort. Since 1933, the number of blacks coming to Detroit from the South had doubled to more than 200,000. But they were excluded from public housing, and many lived in crowded homes without indoor plumbing, paying rents that were two to three times higher than paid by white families. In June 1943, the Packard auto plant, now converted to producing engine bombers and PT (patrol torpedo) boats, employed 25,000 workers. As required under federal regulations, African Americans were to be integrated into the work force. When three blacks were promoted, white agitators fought back, resulting in a work stoppage.38 One hundred and fifty angry whites picketed a housing project designated for black residents; the next day the number grew to 1,200 white protesters, many of whom were armed. No one was hurt, but the city was about to explode. Detroit newspapers and national magazines gave warning, but no federal, state, or city official was ready to do anything to tamp down racial tension. Then came thirty-six horrific

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hours of violence; thirty-four people were killed (twenty-five of them black) and 1,800 persons were arrested for looting and other offenses. Fingers were pointed. Blacks blamed whites; whites blamed blacks. Lawyer Thurgood Marshall, of the NAACP, charged that the “weak-kneed policy of the police commissioner coupled with the anti-Negro attitude of many members of the force helped to make a riot inevitable.”39 Mayors across the country were worried that simmering racial tensions would erupt. Then came New York City. In early August of that year, a black soldier attempted to stop a white police officer from arresting a black woman for disorderly conduct in Harlem, a predominantly African American section of New York City. The officer drew his gun and shot the soldier. This was the spark that led to a racial explosion. Mayor Fiorello La Guardia was compelled to call out US Army troops to quell the rioting and looting. Six people were killed; 495 were injured; and more than 500 were arrested. One of the simmering issues, besides racial prejudice, police harassment, food shortages, and high living costs, was landlord price gouging in Harlem. Here, sociologist L. Alex Swan noted, was a new pattern of racial rioting: in Harlem there were no white mobs forming and engaging blacks, in contrast to the older pattern of racial rioting, found in Detroit, with blacks and whites confronting each other.40 The Right to Vote and Double V The Supreme Court in 1944 ruled unconstitutional the Texas Democratic Party’s all-white primary, which had been defended as a private affair, not subject to government scrutiny. After the decision, leading southern politicians vowed to block African Americans from voting. “No Negro will vote in Georgia for the next four years,” declared Eugene Talmadge, running for Democratic nomination for governor in 1946. On February 7, 1942, an article appeared in the African American newspaper The Pittsburgh Courier encouraging African Americans to support national defense as well as fight for justice and equality. This call was inspired by a letter written to the newspaper by James G. Thompson of Wichita, Kansas, titled “Should I Sacrifice to Live ‘Half American’?” Thompson advocated a “Double V,” victory over America’s enemies and victory at home against racism and secondclass treatment. The Courier picked up on this theme and began the call for a Double V. Indeed, the treatment of black servicemen and women was shameful. The Social Science Institute at Fisk University noted in 1943 there were 242 separate instances of racial confrontations in forty-seven cities involving soldiers, with major disturbances in Beaumont, Texas, Los Angeles, Mobile, Alabama, as well as Detroit and New York.41 “My God. I had no idea it was as terrible as that,” Truman said to aides when hearing about one particular episode involving an African American soldier. “We’ve got to do something.”42 Soon, Truman would use his executive authority to desegregate the armed forces. But before issuing this executive order, Truman had Attorney General Tom Clark draw up an executive order to create a committee to look into mob violence and the whole field of civil rights problems. On December 5, 1946, Truman signed an executive order creating the President’s Commission on Civil Rights. After nine months of work, the Commission presented its final report, To Secure These Rights, in October 1947. The report, with its clear call for federal enforcement and direct action to protect African Americans, was “a political bombshell that catapulted the civil rights question to the forefront as never before in the twentieth century”43 and led to a split in the Democratic Party. Historian James T. Patterson concluded that Truman’s appointment of the civil rights commission demonstrated that he was a friend of civil rights. “No American president before him, FDR included, had taken such a strong stand.”44

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THE NATIONAL GOVERNMENT

The Presidency Roosevelt broke precedent and ran for a third term, with agriculture secretary Henry A. Wallace as his running mate. He defeated business executive Wendell L. Willkie, who until four years earlier had been a Democrat, was a supporter of many of the New Deal policies and was at odds with a number of Republican lawmakers, especially on foreign policy issues. Four years later, a visibly exhausted Roosevelt ran for president for a fourth term, with Harry Truman as his running mate. Truman, who never relished the idea of being vice president, had been Roosevelt’s vice president for just eighty-two days; they had met only twice during that period. Truman never had the ear or respect of Roosevelt and his longtime advisers. Old New Dealers regarded Truman as a “sorry substitute” for the real thing, their hero FDR.45 Truman replaced several Roosevelt holdovers, and in the process irritated New Dealers and liberals. Truman harbored distrust, even contempt, for the Roosevelt holdovers: Edward R. Stettinius, Jr., secretary of state, was “dumb as they come;” Henry Morgenthau, Jr., secretary of the treasury, “didn’t know shit from apple butter;” and most of the people around Roosevelt were “crackpots and lunatic fringe.”46 By the end of the first four months of the Truman administration, all but two of Roosevelt’s cabinet members were fired or quit. Two remained, Secretary of the Interior Harold Ickes and Secretary of Commerce (and former vice president) Henry Wallace. Soon Ickes was gone, leaving only Wallace. Just months before the crucial 1946 congressional elections, Truman fired Wallace for publicly deviating from Truman’s hard line against the Soviet Union. Once the war had concluded, the domestic problems of converting back to peacetime were enormous. In September 1945, Truman launched his own domestic agenda, through a TwentyOne Point plan that called for full employment, national health care, expansion of social security, and “decent housing.” Roosevelt the year before had called for an Economic Bill of Rights; now Truman was doing him one better. Minority leader Joseph W. Martin, Jr. (Republican— Massachusetts) complained that Truman was “out-New Dealing the New Deal.”47 But little was accomplished. The public soon tired of Truman: two months after assuming the presidency, Truman’s public approval rating stood at 87 percent; fifteen months later, in September 1946, it had plummeted to 32 percent approval.48 The biggest domestic challenge to his presidency came during the fight over the 1948 Democratic platform and the nomination for a full term as president. The party faithful who assembled in Philadelphia were despondent and demoralized. Few thought that Truman could win against the Republican team of Thomas E. Dewey, the popular governor of New York, and his running mate, Earl Warren, the equally popular governor of California. Many were hoping the Dwight Eisenhower could somehow be persuaded to run instead of Truman. The Democratic platform committee, headed by Minneapolis mayor and now US Senate candidate Hubert Humphrey, submitted a forthright plank on civil rights and justice. This culminated with a stirring speech by Humphrey; “My friends, to those who say that we are rushing this issue of civil rights, I say to them, we are one hundred seventy-two years late!” and concluding that “the time has arrived in America for the Democratic Party to get out of the shadows of states’ rights and walk forthrightly into the bright sunshine of human rights.”49 The entire Mississippi delegation and much of the Alabama delegation bolted, later coming together under the leadership of South Carolina governor Strom Thurmond as the Dixiecrats. Thurmond made it clear where he, and his followers, stood on racial integration: “There’s not enough troops in the Army to force the southern people to break down segregation and admit the Negro race into our theaters, into our swimming pools, into schools and into our homes.”50

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Weeks later, Henry Wallace, who had formed his own progressive third party, announced his bid for the presidency. The Democratic Party was now splintered into three competing pieces: despondent Truman regulars, Wallace progressives, and die-hard Dixiecrats. To the astonishment of nearly everyone, Truman won. Writing in his memoirs about the 1948 election, Truman commented that “the greatest achievement was winning without the extreme radicals in the party and without the Solid South.”51 The Executive Branch By today’s standards, the White House staff was minuscule. In January 1948, there were just sixteen full-time civilian employees in January 1948 and twenty-two in January 1952.52 Political scientist Francis Heller, who assisted Truman in preparation of his memoirs, noted that “The White House between 1945 and 1953 was orderly because Harry Truman was an orderly person. It was profoundly human because that was Mr. Truman’s way. It was a successful operation because Mr. Truman was a professional and surrounded himself with staff members who, in their different ways, were also professionals.”53 The biggest changes in the executive branch came from the consolidation and elimination of wartime and Depression era special commissions, special boards and agencies. The most important long-range reorganization was in the area of national defense and foreign policy. The National Security Act (1947) created the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA), the National Security Council, while the War Department and the Navy Department were merged into the Defense Department, under a new secretary of Defense, James V. Forrestal. In addition, the Air Force was created as a separate service department. Nearly forty years later, the GoldwaterNichols Defense Reorganization Act (1986) made substantial changes in the organization of the nation’s military establishment.

The Congress During the Seventy-sixth Congress (1939–1941), Democrats still held majorities in both chambers: they had a 262–169–4 majority in the House and a 69–23–4 advantage in the Senate. But there were clear fissures in Democratic support. The Republicans had a new, aggressive leader, Joseph W. Martin, Jr. (Massachusetts), who used his leverage and gained support from southern Democrats: “It did not take us long to put the fear of God into the Democratic leadership. I instituted new discipline in our ranks.” Martin boasted, “nineteen times in a row we defeated the Democrats” on a variety of issues.54 While the Democratic Party was getting increased support from northerners and African Americans (the great majority from the North), the solid South still held leverage and power. In January 1940, in the middle of a fight on yet another anti-lynching bill, Mississippi congressman John Rankin came before the House to warn his northern colleagues: “Remember, southern Democrats now have the balance of power in both Houses of Congress. By your conduct you may make it impossible for us to support many of you for important committee assignments, and other positions to which you aspire.”55 Democrats maintained control of both the House and the Senate throughout the war years, but the 1946 congressional elections proved their undoing. “Had Enough? Vote Republican.” This was the simple, but effective slogan of Republicans—divided as they were—against Democrats, Truman, and against the legacy of Roosevelt. Republicans picked up fifteen Senate seats, for a 51–45 majority; they won fifty-five seats in the House, giving them a 246–188 edge. These were the biggest Republican numbers since 1930. The Republican victories in 1946 were doubly

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impressive because the solid South remained so, with Democrats winning 103 out of 105 House seats; the big Republican pick up came in non-southern districts and states.56 The Republican majority lasted only two years. Democrats were back in control following the 1948 elections, gaining seventy-five seats in the House and nine in the Senate. Still, however, southerners held the majority in the party. This meant that any discussion of policy changes affecting the racial status quo in the South were forbidden topics, to be met with fury and near unanimous opposition by southern lawmakers. Those southern lawmakers who had joined in the Dixiecrat opposition faced little pushback to remove them from positions of power. Congressman John D. Dingell, Sr. (Democrat— Michigan) wrote DNC chairman J. Howard McGrath, that anti-Truman Democrats should be denied patronage because “they will have to do some penance for their lack of faith and cowardly abandonment of the president before being restored to good standing.”57 It was the height of wishful thinking. From 1945 through 1955, there were only two African American members of the House of Representatives—William Dawson (Democrat—Illinois) and the newly elected Adam Clayton Powell, Jr. (Democrat—New York). Following the lead of Oscar DePriest fifteen years earlier, Powell often took his staff and Black constituents to the whites-only House restaurant, and he successfully desegregated the press gallery.58 During this time there were just a handful of women, only seven in the House and one in the Senate in 1948, and just three more women elected to the House by the early 1950s.59 Leadership in the Senate With the death of Joe Robinson in July 1937, the leadership fight grew intense between Democrats Alben W. Barkley of Kentucky and Pat Harrison of Mississippi. But as congressional historian Donald A. Ritchie observed, the real contender for the Senate leadership was Franklin Roosevelt.60 The president had been badly damaged politically by the court-packing fight and by the resurgence of conservatives within his own party. Roosevelt worked behind the scenes for Barkley’s nomination. Barkley won, but just by one vote, and many of Roosevelt’s critics blasted the president for interfering with internal Senate affairs. Roosevelt’s efforts hurt Barkley, who for years was seen as nothing more than a “presidential flag carrier.” When Barkley became vice president under Harry Truman, the Democratic leadership in the Senate went to Scott W. Lucas of Illinois and then Ernest W. (Mac) McFarland of Arizona. But neither was impressive. Not until Lyndon Johnson became majority leader in 1957 did the office become a powerful force within the modern Senate.61 On the Republican side, the dominant senator was Robert A. Taft (Ohio). The son of former president and chief justice William Howard Taft, he was, in the assessment of journalist Robert W. Merry, “an intensely partisan Republican with strong conservative convictions, [who] emerged in the midst of the New Deal era as a stubborn and somewhat self-righteous politician standing athwart history yelling ‘Stop!’”62 Indeed, he had a remarkable impact during his time in the Senate. To many, he was “Mr. Republican,” the reserved, diligent workaholic, who was steeped in conservative conviction, armed with persuasive arguments, and loaded with facts. He was, to friend and foe alike, a legislator’s legislator. But he could be rude, blunt, and, at times, ruthless; yet he was also a shrewd compromiser. His signature piece of legislation, the Taft-Hartley Act of 1947, clipped the powers of labor unions. For a time, Congress and especially Taft dominated in the policy fights with Truman. Taft blocked Truman’s call for an increase in the minimum wage and pushed through a tax reduction bill over the president’s veto. The ambitious Taft was on a roll but was bitterly disappointed when his party chose his arch-rival, liberal governor of New York, Thomas E. Dewey, as its nominee

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for president in 1948; Taft had also sought his party’s nomination in 1940, losing out to Wendell Willkie. Taft would be disappointed once again in 1952 when Republicans turned to Dwight Eisenhower instead of him.

Photo 5.1 Robert A. Taft, Sr. (1889–1953), Ohio senator, leader of conservative wing of Republican Party. Source: Pocket Congressional Directory (1953) via Wikimedia Commons.

The Senate Class of 1948 was particularly notable. Nineteen new senators were seated in January 1949, fifteen of whom were Democrats, including Paul H. Douglas (Illinois), Hubert H. Humphrey (Minnesota), and C. Estes Kefauver (Tennessee) in 1948. They were joined by Lyndon B. Johnson (Texas), who had spent a decade in the House, before barely winning the Democratic Senate primary and then the general election. Leadership in the House With the death of Speaker of the House William Bankhead (Democrat—Alabama), the House soon elevated a Texan, Samuel T. (Sam) Rayburn, who would become of the most influential and important leaders in its history. Joining Rayburn was John W. McCormack (Democrat—Massachusetts) who became the majority leader. Altogether, Rayburn would serve as speaker, over three separate stints, for seventeen years, the longest in congressional history. McCormack served as majority leader during this same time, and then was speaker from 1962 to 1971. During the two years of Republican control of the House during this era, Joseph Martin, also of Massachusetts, was the speaker; he later served as speaker in 1953–1954. Two young congressmen, who would later become presidents, were elected in this era, Richard M. Nixon (Republican—California) and John F. Kennedy (Democrat—Massachusetts). “The Nixon and Kennedy victories,” observed historian Robert Dallek, “signaled a shift in the American political landscape.”63 Through the Legislative Reorganization Act (1946), the bloated committee system in Congress was sharply reduced. For at least the past fifty years, congressional committees and subcommittees just continued to be added. One of the sponsors of this legislation, A.S. (Mike) Monroney (Democrat—Oklahoma) observed that the congressional workload had “increased by geometric proportions in recent years and we must modernize our machinery to handle it.” The House reduced standing committees from forty-eight to nineteen, while the Senate went

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from thirty-three to fifteen standing committees. The act provided for professional staff and strengthened the Legislative Reference Service (later named the Congressional Research Service). In addition, the salaries of members of Congress and senators were raised from $10,000 to $12,500 ($145,868 in 2020 dollars).64 The reorganization act, however, left intact the exceptional power of the House Rules Committee to block or delay legislation.

The Judiciary During this era, there was considerable turnover in the Supreme Court. When Chief Justice Hughes retired in June 1941, Roosevelt elevated associate justice Harlan F. Stone to the chief justiceship. To replace Stone, Roosevelt nominated Robert Jackson, the US attorney general. In May 1945, Jackson took leave from the court to become lead prosecutor in the Nuremburg trials, but returned for the 1946 session. Before Hughes left the court, arch-critic of the FDR administration James McReynolds announced his retirement in February 1941; he was replaced by James Byrnes, Democratic senator from South Carolina. Byrnes, however, did not remain long on the court: the following year, he resigned to become director of economic stabilization and then in 1945, became secretary of state, replacing Stettinius. Wiley B. Rutledge, a judge on the US Court of Appeals, replaced Byrnes on the Supreme Court in 1942. Rutledge, an ardent liberal, was the last of the nine Roosevelt appointees to the Supreme Court. Owen Roberts, the last remaining Republican on the court, resigned in July 1945, and Truman nominated Ohio senator Harold H. Burton, a Republican, as his replacement. When Chief Justice Stone died in 1946, he was replaced by Frederick (Fred) M. Vinson, a former Kentucky congressman and federal appeals judge, who was then US secretary of the treasury. Truman’s next appointment was Tom Clark, a Texan who was US attorney general; Clark took the place of Frank Murphy who had died in July 1949. When Wiley Rutledge died in September 1949, he was replaced with former Indiana senator and US appeals court judge Sherman Minton. Hugo Black, William O. Douglas, Stanley Reed, and Felix Frankfurter, all appointed earlier by Roosevelt, continued to serve during this era.65 There was considerable internal division in the Court during the 1940s and into the early 1950s. Historian James T. Patterson noted that during the 1949 term, the Court managed to reach unanimity in just 26 percent of its opinion, compared with 85 percent in most years before 1935.66 Many of the justices simply didn’t like each other, were dismissive of each other’s intellectual capacities, or disdainful of their interpretations of the Constitution. Some could barely tolerate the ritual shaking of hands that started each conference meeting. Frankfurter complained of Douglas’s sloppy writing, once calling him “one of the two completely evil men” he had ever known. Frankfurter was a frequent foe of Black; Jackson blamed Black for persuading Truman to not appoint him as chief justice. Truman chose his friend and fellow poker player, Fred Vinson, as chief justice, but Vinson found little admiration among his fellow justices. “Some were so contemptuous of Vinson,” wrote Patterson, “that they discussed even in his presence the idea of annually rotating the job of Chief.”67 Bumpy relations or not, the Supreme Court handed down several significant decisions that impacted public policy, as seen below.

KEY POLICIES ENACTED During this era, much of the policy focus was on the war effort and, later, on international postwar concerns. In 1941, Congress created the Lend-Lease program, giving the president the

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authority to send desperately needed weapons and supplies to England and other allies. Lend Lease was extended in 1943 and 1944. The Selective Service Extension (1941) increased the term of service for draftees from one year to eighteen months, and two further Selective Service amendments extended draft eligibility, including making eighteen- and nineteen-year-olds eligible. Congress enacted emergency price controls and, despite a presidential veto, enacted the Smith-Connally Antistrike Act (1943), which authorized the president to take possession of industries producing war materiel, and prohibiting strikes, lockouts, or other disruptions of war production. Congress in 1943 repealed the Chinese Exclusion Act and created the Public Health Service. The following year, Congress enacted the most significant piece of domestic action during the war, the GI Bill (the Servicemen’s Readjustment Act of 1944), which is described below. The United States went heavily into debt during World War II and relied on the selling of war bonds and vastly widened the federal income tax base. Federal expenditures increased dramatically: at the height of the war, the government was spending twelve times more than during the last peacetime year. War bonds were vigorously promoted, flooding the radio airwaves with appeals from movie stars, radio personalities, and others. The most popular was the Series E bond, which could be purchased for $18.75 and redeemed for $25 in ten-years’ time. Before the war, just 25 percent of Americans paid taxes, and they were paid on a quarterly basis. It soon became evident that a quarterly payment would not meet the immediate and pressing wartime needs. Thus in 1943, through the Current Tax Payment Act, a pay-as-you-go system was created, with taxes now withheld from every paycheck, with a possible refund at the end of the year. Taxes were increased and broadened, with nearly 40 million persons now paying income taxes for the first time. Individuals earning $2,000 would now pay a 13 percent rate, and those with incomes over $200,000 would pay 82 percent. Also increased were gift taxes, estate taxes, and excise taxes on alcoholic beverages, tobacco, and gasoline. To help citizens understand the new taxes, the US Treasury Department recruited the Walt Disney studios, which produced a short cartoon, “The New Spirit,” featuring Donald Duck dutifully paying his taxes. Donald was armed with a bottle of aspirin, but didn’t need it, because filling out the forms was so easy. He listed three dependents, Huey, Dewey, and Louie, and only had to pay $13 on his actor’s income of $2,501. More than two-thirds of Americans attended at least one movie a week, and some 32 million saw Donald doing his patriotic duty. Thirty-seven percent of moviegoers said that the cartoon had a positive effect on their willingness to pay their taxes.68 In 1946, Congress enacted the Atomic Energy Act (McMahon Act), establishing the Atomic Energy Commission (AEC) and reflecting the desire of the United States to maintain a nuclear weapons monopoly. The National School Lunch program was created in 1946, adopting legislation sponsored by Senator Richard B. Russell (Democrat—Georgia). A key factor for creating the program was the glaring statistic of 4,500,000 draftees who were rejected by the Selective Service System because of low nutrition. Russell, backed by powerful farm bloc interests, insisted that the program be housed in the Department of Agriculture rather than under the purview of the Commissioner of Education. The program relied heavily on surplus food, chiefly milk, cheese, corn, beef, and rice. During its first year, 7.1 million school-aged children participated; by 2016, 30.4 million children were in the program. There were no eligibility guidelines, and during its first fifteen years of operation, most surplus food went to rural, white school districts. Children who participated were often singled out and had to stand in separate lines, take separate food trays, even sweep up afterwards in the cafeteria.69 The federal minimum wage was increased in 1948 from 40 cents an hour to 75 cents an hour, but a conservative coalition in Congress defeated administration plans to broaden the

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coverage; in fact, Congress reduced the number of eligible workers covered by the minimum wage by half a million.70 Social Security benefits were extended to some 10 million more retirees and their families. Until 1950, only one-quarter of all elderly persons were covered. But in 1950, Congress enacted the first major change since 1939, increasing benefits by 77 percent, adding domestic and farm workers, non-farm self-employed professionals and some federal employees. In addition, there were double-digit increases in benefits in 1952 and then in 1954.71 One of the most significant pieces of legislation was the Marshall Plan (the Economic Cooperation Act of 1948), which, over the course of four years, sent $13.5 billion to warravaged Europe. One of the primary purposes of the Marshall Plan assistance was to stabilize the governments and economies, with the side benefit of supplying European governments and their people with needed food and fuel supplies. The annual federal budget at this time was between $35 billion and $40 billion; in an extraordinary gesture, nearly 10 percent of the annual budget was dedicated to foreign assistance. (In 2019, the foreign aid budget was $39.2 billion, less than 1 percent of the federal budget.)72 Further, the Marshall Plan compelled European countries to work together to formulate a coordinated European-wide response and request for US aid. As Helmut Schmidt, former chancellor of Germany, observed in 1997, “The United States ought not forget that the emerging European Union is one of its own greatest achievements: it would never have happened without the Marshall Plan.”73 Less than six months into his presidency, in September 1945, Truman outlined a twenty-one point domestic policy program that would have sustained and moved well beyond the programs of the New Deal. The 1945 proposals were blocked or stymied in Congress. With Truman’s victory in 1948 and Democrats retaking control in both chambers of Congress, Truman’s 1949 state of the union address articulated his goals for the next four years. Truman called it the Fair Deal, which focused on several ambitious policy fields, including civil rights legislation, national health insurance, repeal of Taft-Hartley, federal support for higher education, expansion of Social Security benefits, farm aid, an anti-lynching law, and a Federal Employment Practices Commission. Somehow Robert Taft didn’t see a policy mandate for the president or the Democrats. Yes, Truman won in 1948, but that election was “indecisive,” Taft observed, because the people “did not clearly understand the issues.” The Ohio conservative feared the dreaded creeping socialism: “It is said that Harry Truman is no socialist. That makes little difference if all his policies lead to socialism.”74 Several major pieces of Republican-generated legislation were passed during this period, several of which met with fierce resistance from Truman’s veto pen. However, the only major Fair Deal legislative victory was the Housing Act of 1949. The stresses on society during this era were only partially dealt with. Against the strong protestations of labor unions and the veto pen of Truman, Congress enacted the Taft-Hartley Act, restricting labor activities. Civil rights legislation was off the table in Congress, primarily because of the implacable resistance from southern lawmakers, and the only remedy had to come through Truman’s executive orders and decisions of the Supreme Court. Immigration policy was tied to anti-communism as Congress reinforced and tightened its immigration policy. The multiple stresses of waging world war were partially mitigated through the GI bill and its assistance to veterans and their families.

Protecting the Returning Veteran Three weeks before the D-Day invasion of Europe and thirteen months before the end of hostilities in the Pacific Theater, Congress enacted the Servicemen’s Readjustment Act of

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1944, the GI Bill.75 The end of war was in sight, though with plenty of blood yet to be spilled and treasure spent. Lawmakers were eager to craft legislation to assist the returning veterans and their families. Underlying it all was the determination to prevent hard times and political instability once the war ceased and veterans returned to the workplace and domestic life. The often bitter and confusing experiences of post-World War I veterans could not be repeated. Four million American World War I veterans were mustered out, receiving a $60 payday plus a train ticket home. Some disabled veterans received rehabilitation and training, but many veterans ended up without jobs, with their lives further upended by demobilization. The Adjusted Compensation Act (1924) was the source of considerable controversy. It provided a deferred bonus of $1.25 per day for overseas veterans and $1.00 for homebound military service, payable in full in 1945. Desperate veterans marched on Washington in 1932; but their rag-tag Bonus Army was forced out of the nation’s capital by the US Army guns, tanks, and cavalry. Throughout this crisis, Congress adjourned without addressing the Bonus Army issues. The Bonus bill resurfaced during the 1930s, and in May 1935, Roosevelt, before a joint session of Congress vetoed the legislation; his veto was sustained by the House. In the new session of Congress in 1936, the Bonus bill again came to Roosevelt’s desk; again, he vetoed it. By June 1936, some $2 billion was given to World War I veterans, giving the economy a much-needed jolt. Historian Stephen R. Ortiz argued that the Bonus bill, though Roosevelt vetoed it, “may well have been the most successful piece of legislation” during the second New Deal.76 In November 1942, Roosevelt appointed a committee, headed by Brigadier General Frederick H. Osborn, to look into postwar demobilization plans for veterans. Members of Congress quickly jumped in, with some 640 separate bills introduced dealing with returning veterans. The most important veteran’s lobbying group was the American Legion. Formed in 1919 by Colonel Theodore Roosevelt, Jr. and Major Joel Bennett (Bennett Champ) Clark, the American Legion would be the advocate for World War II veterans just as the Grand Army of the Republic would be for Union soldiers following the Civil War. Under the leadership of Legion national commander Warren H. Atherton, a special committee was formed to create a “master plan” for returning veterans. Camped out at the Mayflower Hotel in Washington, American Legion committee members spent the Christmas holiday season of 1943 crafting a comprehensive legislative proposal. Using hotel stationery, the draft was written in long-hand, and on January 8, 1944, it was introduced to the public as “a bill of rights for GI Joe and GI Jane.” Joel Bennett Clark, now a senator from Missouri, was the chief sponsor. Seventy-nine other senators joined immediately as co-sponsors; another sixteen were disappointed that they hadn’t been able to sign the bill before it reached the floor of the Senate. Other veterans organizations—Veterans of Foreign Wars, the Disabled American Veterans, the Military Order of the Purple Heart, and the Regular Veterans Association—had their own ideas and legislative plans, but the American Legion beat them to the legislative drawing board and to the attention of members of Congress. In the House, the legislation had a rougher time, chiefly because of the determination and dogged maneuvering of John Rankin of Mississippi, the chairman of the Committee on World War Veterans Legislation. Rankin was a master parliamentarian, a fervent white supremacist, and was contemptuous of Jews, organized labor, and Yankees. He feared the federal government would interfere with racial segregation in public education and he opposed unemployment insurance going to blacks or to union workers. In mid-March 1944, the American Legion mobilized its forces, some 1.5 million members, of whom 200,000 were World War II veterans. A call to arms was sent out to the 12,000

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Legion posts, urging members to go door-to-door, office-to-office, store-to-store to gather signatures urging the passage of the GI Bill. A petition, with more than a million signatures was presented to Congress. The Senate version was more generous than the House, but after rancorous conference wrangling, and the last-minute airlifting of a conferee from his home in Georgia, the legislation passed. A beaming Roosevelt signed the GI Bill of Rights on June 22, 1944, less than three weeks after the D-Day invasion. The landmark legislation provided unemployment compensation of up to fifty-two weeks at $20 per week; it guaranteed 50 percent of the loans (up to $2,000) for the purchase of a home or business at no more than 4 percent interest. The legislation also provided for the construction of additional hospital facilities for veterans’ care and strengthened provisions to assist veterans in finding employment through the US Employment Service. The best-known feature of the GI Bill was its educational benefits. The law authorized allowances for up to four years of individual grants of $500 per year for training and education, plus a monthly subsistence of $50 a month for a single veteran and $75 a month for a married veteran. In the early 1940s, only 25 percent of American adults had achieved a high school diploma. Just 14 percent of enlisted Army men and only 6 percent in the Navy had ever attended college before enlisting. During the war, the most successful adult literacy program was run by the armed services, with 180,000 poorly educated soldiers attending special classes. Of those, some 85 percent, or 150,000, attained some level of literacy. Poor whites (about 64,000) and poor blacks (86,000) received a modicum of formal education. Most returning veterans, about 60 percent, had not finished high school. Many enrolled in on-the-job training programs, agricultural and industrial schools, flight school, and correspondence programs. This led to a gold-rush of non-college schools being established, many with dubious financial and academic credentials, hoping to reap the rewards of GI Bill monies. Some 1,200 schools were found to have financial and other irregularities, with 963 of them being for-profit institutions. Many schools dramatically hiked their tuition and fee rates. Altogether, some 2.2 million veterans attended college under the GI Bill, at a cost of $5.5 billion. The annual tuition benefit, $500, might seem like nothing today, but in the early 1940s, the average annual tuition was $91 for a four-year public college, and no private college—even the most expensive Ivy League school—charged more than $500 ($6,676 in 2020 dollars). Enrollments soared: the George Washington University doubled its enrollment, as did the University of Wisconsin, Rutgers University, Stanford University, and many other universities. Classes were crowded, professors were in short supply, Quonset huts were turned into married student dormitories. But the veteran students brought a new element to campus: eighteen-year-olds right out of high school now rubbed shoulders with mature students, often ten years older than them; many of the veterans were married with young children. Catholic schools and land grant institutions saw their enrollments soar; elite private institutions now began accepting Jews, first-generation Americans, and students who were the first in their families to go to college.77 But the GI Bill program didn’t reach everyone. Social scientist Ira Katznelson observed that “written under Southern auspices, the [GI Bill] was deliberately designed to accommodate Jim Crow.”78 It perpetuated racial discrimination in the training programs, in admission to higher education, in the application for business loans and home mortgages. Black veterans were denied admission at segregated whites-only schools and training programs; black colleges were overwhelmed with the 70,000 returning black soldiers and could not accommodate them all. When they sought job assistance, black veterans were channeled into low-paying unskilled jobs. When black veterans applied for low-interest housing loans under Title III of the GI Bill,

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they were systematically refused mortgage loans. Historian Kathleen J. Frydl noted that so many blacks were denied this benefit, “that it is more accurate simply to say that Blacks could not use this particular title.”79 Significance of this Policy The GI Bill became, in the assessment of historian Ronald Allen Goldberg, “the most significant development in the modern history of American education.”80 The GI Bill was soon expanded to include veterans from the Korean War (the Korean GI Bill, 1952), the Vietnam War (Vietnam Era GI Bill, 1966), the Montgomery GI Bill (1985), and the Post-9/11 GI Bill (2008). By 2004, however, only about one-third of veterans had taken advantage of the educational programs; veterans could receive more than $36,000 for tuition, books, and living expenses provided the money was spent within a ten-year period.81

Hospital Construction When Truman addressed Congress in November 1945 outlining what needed to be done for health care, the first item on his list was the construction of hospitals and medical facilities. The following year, in a show of bipartisanship, Congress passed the Hospital Survey and Construction Act, more commonly called the Hill-Burton Act, named after Congressman J. Lister Hill (Democrat—Alabama) and Senator Harold H. Burton (Republican—Ohio). The law was passed “at the height of the South’s paradoxical status as the nation’s neediest yet most politically powerful region.”82 At the end of 1945, some 40 percent of counties in the United States lacked a hospital, and the need was most acute in the South. The law provided construction grants and federal loans to communities that could demonstrate that, once the hospitals were built, they could be sustained once they were in operation. The applicants could not discriminate based on race, color, national origin, or creed, but the hospitals could be run as “separate but equal” facilities. This latter provision, a concession to southern white politicians, was later ruled unconstitutional by a federal court and then outlawed altogether by the 1964 Civil Rights Act.83 Hill-Burton had required that federally funded hospitals provide a “reasonable volume” of free care to indigent patients. This, however, required that state and local funding also contributed to the monies needed to cover those who could not afford hospitalization. Many of those jurisdictions simply could not or would not provide the matching funds. Further, there was little federal inspection to determine if the facilities were providing enough services to the poorest of patients. When Medicare and Medicaid were enacted in 1965, those benefits were added to the requirements of hospitals seeking Hill-Burton funds. Significance of this Policy By 1975, the law was responsible for the construction of nearly one-third of all hospitals in the United States. Hill-Burton was amended and became Title XVI of the Public Health Service Act. Health care historian Karen Kruse Thomas observed that Hill-Burton was the first federal program to incorporate a graduated, need-based allocation formula that favored the South, paving the way for federal sponsorship of health, education, and welfare as well as costly new infrastructure that made Sun Belt prosperity possible while allowing southern states to maintain low taxes.84

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By the end of the twentieth century, some 6,800 health facilities in 4,000 communities were financed through Hill-Burton federal assistance. In the assessment of physician and medical historian Howard Markel, “after the passage of Medicare and Medicaid, Hill-Burton ranks right up there among the most important pieces of legislation in the twentieth century.”85

Migrant Workers, Immigrants, and Refugees The Braceros Program In 1942, the United States and Mexico signed an agreement that permitted temporary contract laborers from Mexico to work in the United States. The Mexican Farm Labor Program Agreement, informally known as the braceros program, saw an influx of Mexican workers that filled the gap created when American workers were summoned to the military or defense industries. Mexican laborers had for decades provided the backbreaking stoop labor, especially in the expansive agricultural fields in the southwest and California. But hundreds of thousands of Mexican workers did not or could not sign the required six-month temporary contract and, as a result, they came into the United States illegally.86 Texas banned workers under the braceros program; nevertheless, thousands of illegals poured across the border. The conflict was intractable: powerful agricultural growers associations argued that Mexican laborers were vital in the harvesting of crops; farm unions complained that these workers, paid 60 cents an hour, were undercutting American workers. Many lawmakers complained that there needed to be more border patrol agents, that the Mexican workers were bringing in drugs, lawlessness, and crime, and that their large numbers were changing the face of American culture. The issue of illegal immigration would come to a head in 1954, with the Eisenhower Administration’s crackdown, called “Operation Wetback.” Chinese Immigration In October 1943, President Roosevelt urged Congress to repeal the 1882 ban on Chinese immigration to the United States. “China is our ally,” Roosevelt urged, “For many years, she stood alone in the fight against aggression. Today we fight at her side.” Roosevelt noted that the exclusion law was an “anachronism,” and that America had made a mistake. “Nations like people make mistakes. We must be big enough to acknowledge our mistakes of the past and correct them. By the repeal of the Chinese exclusion laws we can correct a historic mistake and silence Japanese propaganda.”87 In December of that year, Congress finally lifted the ban on Chinese immigration, passing legislation authored by Representative Warren G. Magnuson (Democrat—Washington). But the measure was less than it appeared. Yes, the ban would be lifted, but only 105 Chinese immigrants would be allowed to enter the United States each year. In a public opinion study, 60 percent of those responding wanted the exclusionary law repealed, but 75 percent still wanted to have a cap on the number of Chinese who could come to the United States. During the war, about 7,000 Chinese women married Americans, and their entry into the United States was facilitated by the War Brides Act (1945) and the Chinese Alien Wives of American Citizens Act (1946).88 The Displaced Persons Act (1948) This was the first major expression of US policy on admitting persons fleeing war-time persecution. This refugee program permitted up to 205,000 displaced persons during a two-year

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period, beginning July 1, 1948. In 1950, the law was extended, bringing a total of 410,000 refugees to America. More than 70 percent of the refugees came from Eastern Europe and the Soviet Union. Some 7 to 11 million displaced persons were living in war-ravaged Germany, Italy, and Austria at the end of 1945. In March 1952, the Truman administration announced the Emergency Migration Program (EMP), which would admit 300,000 Europeans, but also 21,000 “religious and political refugees from communism in eastern Europe.” But it was election season and the mood in Congress (and the nation) did not support liberalization of refugee status. EMP died on the vine. In 1953, with a new Eisenhower administration and an increased Red Scare atmosphere, Congress created the contentious Refugee Relief Program.89

Immigrants and National Security Two acts, both authored by Senator Patrick A. McCarran (Democrat—Nevada), dealt with immigration, international security, and the threat of communism. Both measures were vetoed by Truman, and both were overridden by the Democratic majority in both Houses. McCarran, himself the son of immigrants, was fiercely nativist, “frightened to death by every foreigner except General Franco,” the New York Times editorialized. McCarran claimed that there were 5 million illegal aliens in the United States, including vast numbers of “militant communists, Sicilian bandits and other criminals.”90 In 1950, McCarran introduced the McCarran Internal Security Act, which required members of the Communist Party to register with the US attorney general and created a Subversive Activities Control Board. In his veto statement, Truman insisted that the legislation was a “terrible mistake” that would “help the communists not hurt them.” In a free country, Truman urged, “we punish men for the crimes they commit, but never for the opinions they have.”91 The same day, however, both the House and Senate overrode Truman’s veto.

Photo 5.2 Patrick A. McCarran (1876–1954), Nevada senator, author of national security and immigration legislation. Source: Harris & Ewing Collection via Library of Congress.

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Then, in 1952, Congress passed the Immigration and Nationality Act (McCarran-Walter Act), named after its sponsors, Senator McCarran and Congressman Francis E. Walter (Democrat—Pennsylvania). The law constituted a major revision in immigration law.92 It kept, with few modifications, the quota system put in place in the 1924 immigration act, but did away with restrictions on Asian immigrants, and also highly favored immigrants coming from Europe. A key feature, however, gave the president the authority to overturn those quotas, because of national security concerns. A controversial section of the law, Section 212(f) read: Whenever the President finds that the entry of any aliens or of any class of aliens into the United States would be detrimental to the interests of the United States, he may by proclamation, and for such period as he shall deem necessary, suspend the entry of all aliens or any class of aliens as immigrants or nonimmigrants, or impose on the entry of aliens any restricts he may deem to be appropriate. Truman vetoed the bill, remarking that “seldom has a bill exhibited the distrust evidenced here for citizens and aliens alike—at a time when we need unity at home and the confidence of our friends abroad.”93 Truman objected to the “sweeping powers” given to the attorney general to deport aliens. The New York Times editorialized that “free men everywhere will be heartened by the president’s fighting words.” But Congress narrowly overrode Truman’s veto, “partly,” observed historian Alonzo L. Hamby, “because the State Department was too terrified of McCarran’s power over appropriations to work against legislation bearing his name.”94 Hundreds of individuals, many in the trade unions, were deported. Significance of these Policies Law professor David Cole later observed that in the McCarran-Walter Act we applied to aliens a range of principles and practices that we would have considered constitutional anathema if applied to citizens: guilt by association, persecution for one’s beliefs, censorship of anti-government speech and secret “Star Chamber” enforcement proceedings.95 With the 1990 Immigration Act, the McCarran-Walter provisions were repealed; yet, according to Cole, “The new law continues to draw ideological lines and may well increase the administration’s ability to exclude and deport aliens for political reasons.”96 President Donald Trump issued Executive Order 13769 in 2016 temporarily prohibiting refugees and citizens of seven predominantly Muslim countries from entering the United States and blocking Syrian refugees for an indefinite period of time. After two lower federal court opinions against the ban, the Trump administration modified its proposal, and despite Trump’s incendiary comments about Muslims, the Supreme Court, by a 5–4 decision, upheld the ban.97

Fighting Racial Discrimination Through Executive Orders and Court Decisions Why develop policy through an executive order rather than a law passed by Congress? Antidiscrimination legislation would collide with the fierce objections of segregationists in the House and Senate, would be filibustered to death, or would be so emasculated through compromise that the law would be nothing more than window-dressing. Executive orders have the same authority as an act of Congress but are in force only during the time the president is in

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office, and may be either renewed, ignored, or replaced by subsequent chief executives. Furthermore, executive orders are only supposed to pertain to those arenas where the president has jurisdiction, such as here, as commander-in-chief of the armed forces. The executive order was a clear, direct policymaking tool: all it took was the stroke of a pen. Preventing Racial Discrimination in Federal Job Training Programs Under pressure from A. Philip Randolph, the head of the Brotherhood of Sleeping Car Porters (the only black union in the AFL), Roosevelt signed Executive Order 8802 (1941), which for the first time prohibited racial discrimination in job training programs and in defense contracting; it also established the Fair Employment Practices Committee (FEPC). The executive order’s key wording, which was hastily constructed by a young administration lawyer, Joseph L. Rauh, Jr., became an essential clause in this and subsequent federal anti-discrimination measures: “No discrimination on grounds of race, color, creed, or national origin.” By the end of 1944, some 2 million African Americans were at work in the defense industry.98

Photo 5.3 A. Philip Randolph (1889–1979), civil rights leader, head of Brotherhood of Sleeping Car Porters. Source: World Telegram & Sun photo by John Bottega via Library of Congress.

Predictably, the FEPC was met with fierce opposition from segregationists. Georgia senator Richard B. Russell warned, “The FEPC is the most sickening manifestation of the trend that is now in effect to force social equality and miscegenation of the White and Black races of the South.”99 William Colmer (Democrat—Mississippi) spoke of the dangers of the FEPC and its call for equality in employment: “Hitler in his heyday put through nothing more vicious than this.” And the good white folks at a Methodist church men’s club in Savannah, Georgia, labeled the FEPC as “un-constitutional, un-American, and un-Christian.”100 Desegregating the Armed Services In his landmark study of race relations, An American Dilemma (1944), economist and sociologist Gunnar Myrdal observed, “There is bound to be a redefinition of the Negro’s status in America as a result of this war.”101 Through the end of December 1945, some 2.5 million African Americans had registered for the draft, and more than a million had been inducted

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into the Armed Forces. More than half a million black servicemen and women were stationed in Europe, Africa, and the Pacific.102 Nearly all of them served in segregated units, often assigned menial or dangerous jobs. The Soviet takeover of Czechoslovakia in February 1948 provided a flash point and warning for America’s defense. Truman urged Congress to be prepared for a wider conflict and he renewed his proposal for universal military training and asked for a revival of the draft. This was a new opportunity for Randolph and other black leaders to push for a ban on racial discrimination in the armed services. Randolph urged Congress to end the segregation of the military. But there was considerable pushback, both from lawmakers and military leaders. Senator James O. Eastland (Democrat—Mississippi) declared that southern white soldiers were fighting to maintain the rights of the states: “Those boy are fighting to maintain White supremacy.” Secretary of War Henry Stimson and Army chief of staff George C. Marshall both opposed desegregating the military services. General Dwight D. Eisenhower testified before the Senate Committee on Armed Services: “In general the Negro is less well educated,” and would have trouble getting promoted “because the competition is too tough.” Furthermore, Eisenhower said, “I do believe that if we attempt merely by passing a lot of laws to force someone to like someone else we are just going to get into trouble.”103 Truman knew that Congress would not pass legislation integrating the armed forces; southern lawmakers and their allies were implacable; and the public did not support it. His alternative was to issue an executive order, and such an action certainly fell within his jurisdiction as commander-in-chief of the armed forces. On July 26, 1948, Truman issued Executive Order 9981, calling for “equality of treatment and opportunity” for all persons serving in the armed forces, regardless of race or religion. The executive order was ambiguous and did not directly and specifically say that racial segregation should end. Truman knew there would be resistance from service brass, thus he announced the establishment of an advisory committee to set rules and procedures and the monitoring of progress toward desegregation of the services. The first head of the new Defense Department, James V. Forrestal, was reluctant to push racial integration, but his replacement, Louis A. Johnson, had no such problem. The newest military service, the Air Force, was the first to comply, while the Navy, Marines, and especially the Army dragged their collective bureaucratic feet. More than anything, the onset of the Korean War and the need for combat troops led to the integration of the armed forces. By the time Truman left office, racial integration had become a reality in the war zone and in many training fields in the United States.104 Yet there was plenty of delay in the military. It was not until October 1954 that Secretary of Defense Charles Wilson could announce that the last racially segregated unit in the armed forces had been abolished. Truman cajoled the military to desegregate; Eisenhower, using his authority as commander-in-chief, gave the direct order.105 Ending the White Primary Most of the racial progress, albeit halting, came from several Supreme Court decisions that struck down blatant state discriminatory practices. Texas, like several other southern states, was virtually a one-party state: Democrats dominated throughout state government and in its congressional delegation. The real contest came in the Democratic primaries, where candidates from various factions would compete. But in Texas, the Democratic primaries were considered private affairs—immune from state responsibility or control. And the primaries were only open to white citizens. Nine years earlier, the Supreme Court had ruled that the white primary was not state action, and thus permissible. But in Smith v. Allwright (1944), the Court overturned both that ruling

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and the Texas white primary. The US Constitution, noted Justice Stanley Reed, “grants to all citizens a right to participate in the choice of elected officials without restriction by any state because of race.”106 During the 1946 elections, the first elections that followed the abolition of the white primary, Senator Theodore Bilbo warned his fellow Mississippians of the threat of black voting. “Don’t let a single nigger vote,” he barked to the audience. “If you let a few register and vote this year, next year will be twice as many, and the first thing you know the whole thing will be out of hand.” Bilbo (twice governor and a member of the Ku Klux Klan) boasted that he could supply voting registration officials with “at least a hundred questions no nigger can answer.” But the “proper time to manage the nigger vote is the night before the election.”107 Mississippi and other southern states grudgingly opened up their primaries, but states and individual counties still kept in place schemes to keep blacks from registering or voting: literacy tests, poll taxes, misinformation, and outright intimidation.108 Desegregating Interstate Buses In an episode that predated by a decade Rosa Parks’s refusal to give up her seat on a Montgomery, Alabama city bus, Irene Morgan, an African American woman, was arrested in Saluda, Virginia, for refusing to give up her seat to a white passenger on a Greyhound bus going from her home in Gloucester County, Virginia to Baltimore, Maryland. In Morgan v. Virginia,109 the Supreme Court struck down a Virginia statute that required the segregation of the races on commercial interstate buses as a violation of the Interstate Commerce Clause of the Constitution. Virginia governor William M. Tuck saw the Morgan decision as an affront to white supremacy: “If this policy of expansion of federal activities into state fields continues, it will result in the virtual abolition of the states,” he warned. The Greyhound Company, however, bent to white southern demands by explicitly changing its policy to have whites seated from the front and blacks from the back of the bus when traveling in segregated states. Intimidation and threats continued, and despite the Morgan decision, racial segregation persisted in southern interstate transportation.110 Prohibiting Restrictive Covenants Throughout the United States, not just in the South, African Americans were barred from living in certain neighborhoods. Not only was it because of the policy of redlining, where federal-backed mortgages were not available in or near African American neighborhoods, but African Americans were forbidden from owning property in subdivisions and neighborhoods because of private restrictive covenants. In 1948, the Supreme Court heard a case involving a 1911 restrictive covenant in a St. Louis neighborhood that prohibited “people of the Negro or Mongolian race” from owning property. J.D. and Ethel Lee Shelley, African Americans, bought property in this neighborhood; Louis and Fern Kraemer, white residents who lived ten blocks away, filed suit to prevent Shelley from moving into the property. When this case, Shelley v. Kraemer, came to the Supreme Court, Chief Justice Vinson, along with five other justices, ruled that racially restrictive covenants were private matters, and were not in themselves violations of the Constitution: “the [racially] restrictive agreements, standing alone, cannot be regarded as violative of any rights guaranteed to petitioners by the Fourteenth Amendment.”111 However, the Court also ruled that the state could not enforce a private restrictive covenant; doing so would be a violation of the Fourteenth Amendment equal protection clause. From the perspective of many civil rights advocates, this was a half-loaf victory: no state enforcement, but private discrimination was still allowed.

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From 1915 through the Shelley case, the NAACP, with its NAACP Legal Defense and Education Fund, was the most successful party in bringing civil rights cases to the Supreme Court. Its side prevailed in twenty-three out of twenty-five cases it sponsored before the high court. In 1936, Charles H. Houston became the NAACP’s first full-time legal counsel; he was joined by Thurgood Marshall in 1938 as special counsel.112

Constitutional Amendment: Limiting the President’s Term of Office In 1947, on their first day in power during the new congressional session, Republicans introduced the Twenty-Second Amendment, limiting the presidential term of office to two terms. Truman played no role in the proposal or ratification of the amendment, though in earlier years he had joined a small group of senators who had opposed a third term for Roosevelt. To demonstrate its non-partisan nature, the Republican leadership specifically excluded the sitting president from the term limit. This was not a new issue. From the beginning of the Republic until 1947, there had been some 270 resolutions introduced in Congress to limit the eligibility for re-election of the president. But on the minds of the postNew Deal Republicans, of course, was the unprecedented tenure of Franklin Roosevelt, who had served from March 1933 through April 1945. But the states were in no hurry: it took four more years—an unusual amount of time—to ratify the amendment.113 Since its ratification in 1951, five presidents had bumped up against the two-term limit: three Republicans, Dwight Eisenhower (1953–1961), Ronald Reagan (1981–1989), and George W. Bush (2001–2009), along with two Democrats, Bill Clinton (1993–2001) and Barack Obama (2009–2017). Had there been no term limit amendment, Bush, Clinton, and Obama were all healthy and young enough to run again, though they would have faced rough going in the political arena.

Revamping Labor–Management Relations On the first day Republicans gained control of the House and Senate in January 1947, they introduced seventeen anti-labor bills. Truman pleaded for labor restraint in his 1947 State of the Union speech, but by the end of the week, more than one hundred anti-labor bills had been filed. Given the turmoil and union–management strife in the eighteen months since the end of the war, Republicans were determined that something had to be done, that reform was long overdue. Their target was the Wagner Act (the so-called “Labor Bill of Rights”), which many Republican lawmakers saw as overly favorable to unions, prohibiting unfair business practices but without the corresponding checks on labor unions. Republican efforts culminated in the legislation sponsored in the House by Fred A. Hartley, Jr. (Republican—New Jersey), the new chairman of the Committee on Education and Labor, and in the Senate by Robert A. Taft (Republican—Ohio), the new chairman of the Labor and Public Welfare Committee. As it turned out, the Labor Management Relations Act of 1947 (Taft-Hartley Act) was the only major piece of legislation passed by the Republican-dominated Eightieth Congress that clipped the wings of a major New Deal initiative.114 The legislation sailed through the House, bolstered by southern Democratic support, with a three-to-one margin; Republicans and southern senators were equally enthusiastic, with the legislation supported by nearly the same three-to-one margin. The Wagner Act was not overturned, but it was significantly weakened. Through TaftHartley, the closed shop (requiring membership in a particular union in order to be employed) was outlawed. State right-to-work laws were permitted, and subsequently, many states adopted laws that outlawed union–shop agreements. Union leaders were required to file affidavits

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stating that they were not supporters of the Communist Party or any other organization seeking to “overthrow the United States government.”115 Unions and employers were required to give each other and federal and state mediation bodies eighty days’ notice before undertaking a strike or work stoppage. No issue had so riled up voters: over 750,000 postcards, letters, and telegrams flooded the White House, overwhelmingly in favor of a Truman veto. The American Federation of Labor spent nearly a $1 million to press the case against Taft-Hartley; the National Association of Manufacturers and others fought back hard on the other side.116 Truman vetoed the legislation, and in a nighttime national radio broadcast on June 20, 1947, he explained his reasoning: “I vetoed this bill because I am convinced it is a bad bill. It is bad for labor, bad for management, and bad for the country.” Taft-Hartley was “a shocking piece of legislation,” that was “unfair to the working people” and “deliberately designed to weaken labor unions.”117 No matter, both the House and Senate overrode his veto, with many Democrats joining Republicans in the override. The author of the landmark National Labor Relations Act, Senator Robert Wagner, now age seventy and convalescing from a heart ailment, wrote to Truman after Congress overrode his veto of Taft-Hartley: this was “one of the bitterest disappointments I have ever experienced. For I was forced to see the work of a lifetime destroyed, while I lay on my back in bed.”118 Significance of this Policy Truman had been on the outs with much of organized labor, especially because of his handling of the coal miners’ strikes and his firm stand against the railroad unions. Bruised and bloodied from their losses in Taft-Hartley, Truman and labor unions nevertheless forged a political bond with far-reaching and long-lasting consequences. There was also an immediate impact: Truman received the organization support and solid backing of labor during the 1948 presidential election. For years and elections to come, repeal of Taft-Hartley became a litmus test for loyalty to the Democratic Party and to organized labor. But in one telling episode, many rank-and-file union workers, bucking their union leadership, voted for Robert Taft—labor’s supposed nemesis—when he was up for re-election in 1950.

Public Housing, Slum Clearance, Redlining and Discrimination The goal was lofty: to fund a national program to eliminate slums and provide “a decent home and suitable living environment for every American family.”119 After eighteen years of federal government involvement in housing at some level or another, the first national housing policy was adopted in July 1949, with the National Housing (Taft-Ellender-Wagner) Act.120 This was the only significant Fair Deal piece of legislation passed during Truman’s second term.121 It was introduced four years earlier by an odd ideological mix of lawmakers, conservative senators Robert Taft and Allan J. Ellender (Democrat—Louisiana) along with progressive senator Robert Wagner. From the start, the debate was heated and contentious. Eighty-three-year-old Democratic congressman Adolph J. Sabath from Chicago on the floor of the House denounced the “unholy alliance and coalition” of Republicans and southern Democrats who had tried to block public housing in past sessions. Sixty-nine-year-old congressman Edward E. (Goober) Cox (Democrat—Georgia) shouted “Liar!” and slapped the five-foot-four Sabath in the face, knocking off his glasses. Sabath countered with a one-two, right-left to Cox’s face. “A pair of beauties,” remarked Pennsylvania congressman Francis E. Walter, who witnessed the scuffle.

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The two prizefighters later made up, posed for photographers, and Cox gushed, “I have a genuine affection for Adolph. He’s a fine old man. I really love him.”122 The real estate lobby cried out “socialism” and Truman lashed out against the real estate lobbyists “deliberate campaign of misrepresentation and distortion”—the worst he had ever seen.123 Indeed, housing policy historian Alexander von Hoffman described the law as “the product of seven years of bitter legislative stalemate and a shotgun wedding between enemy lobbying groups.”124 The chief purpose of the Housing Act was to enlarge federal action against city slums and to increase spending on public housing. During the first six years, 810,000 public housing units were to be built, and an urban development program was created under the authority of the Housing and Home Financing Agency to provide loans and grants to cities for slum clearance. But the Housing Act was a disappointment: it was “underfunded by Congress, weakly managed by a housing administrator friendly to the real estate lobby, stymied in many cities by local opposition,” observed historian Richard O. Davies.”125 Advocates for urban slum dwellers, especially persons of color, decried the legislation as a cynical way to deprive African Americans and others of homes. Activist and celebrated author James Baldwin put it succinctly in 1963: “urban renewal … means Negro removal.”126 By 1964, just 356,203 public housing units had been built (not the 810,000 originally planned), and more families were living in substandard housing that year than in 1949. For urban reform activist Jane Jacobs, public housing projects had become “worse centers of delinquency, vandalism and general social hopelessness than the slums they were to replace.”127 Opening with great fanfare in 1954 through 1956, the Captain William W.O. Pruitt Homes and the William L. Igoe Apartments on the north side of St. Louis, Missouri, consisted of thirty-three eleven-story public housing buildings for middle-class dwellers. Adopting Missouri law, which required racial segregation in public housing, the Pruitt homes were originally for blacks only, while the Igoe apartments were for whites. Soon after the Supreme Court’s decision of Brown v. Board of Education I (1954), whites began abandoning the Igoe apartments (with many other whites leaving the St. Louis altogether), leaving the entire Pruitt-Igoe complex to black residents. Federal government budget restraints meant that the public housing would be of low quality, with little maintenance: heaters, toilets, garbage disposals all failed to work. Gang activity, drug dealing, prostitution, even murders were all too common. Those families that could, fled; by the 1970s, just seventeen of the original 2,870 units were occupied. Television audiences witnessed the demise of Pruitt-Igoe, and by extension the massive experiment in public housing, when portions of the complex were dynamited in 1972, and the final structure demolished a few years afterward. Celebrated architect Minoru Yamasaki designed the Pruitt-Igoe buildings; his other iconic structures, the New York City Twin Towers were destroyed in 2001.128 Significance of this Policy Today, the crisis in affordable housing is a simmering, unmet issue in federal public policy. In nearly 200 cities in 2019, homes were selling at a median price of $1 million. In many cities, large numbers of homeowners pay more than 50 percent of their incomes toward housing.129 Low-cost, subsidized housing continues to be an unmet national goal.

The Court Weighs In The court ruled on several First Amendment religious establishment clause issues. In Everson v. Board of Education (1947),130 the court determined for the first time that the First Amendment

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establishment clause also applies to the states through the Due Process clause of the Fourteenth Amendment. A public funding program in Ewing Township, New Jersey, reimbursed parents who sent their children to parochial schools for transportation costs. The court ruled that such a program was for a public purpose and did not violate the Establishment Clause as it applied to the states. In McCollum v. Board of Education (1948),131 the court ruled that public schools cannot allow religious groups to use their facilities to provide religious instruction to children. The court then ruled in Zorach v. Clausen (1952),132 that a New York City plan that allowed “released time,” where students could be dismissed from public school for religious instruction elsewhere for one hour a week, was not a violation of the establishment clause. The court also decided a major freedom of speech case in Dennis v. United States (1951).133 In 1948, eleven members of the Communist Party USA were convicted for advocating the violent overthrow of the federal government in violation of parts of the Smith Act. By a 6–2 decision, the court affirmed the conviction of Eugene Dennis, the head of the Communist Party USA, ruling that Dennis did not have the right under the First Amendment to freedom of speech if his speech involved the attempted overthrow of the government. In a blistering dissent, Justice Black argued that this amounted to “a virulent form of prior censorship of speech and press, which I believe the First Amendment forbids.” The internment of Japanese during World War II brought several cases to the Supreme Court, including that of Fred T. Korematsu. An American citizen, born in Oakland, California, Korematsu defied Executive Order 9066, which authorized the military to remove over 120,000 persons of Japanese descent from the west coast. He was convicted for violating military orders; he and his family were ultimately sent to one of the ten wartime incarceration camps for Japanese Americans. Korematsu sued and in 1944, the Supreme Court, by a vote of six to three, ruled against him, stating that the case was not about racism but military necessity. Justice Black, writing the majority opinion stated, “There was evidence of disloyalty on the part of some, the military authorities considered that the need for action was great, and time was short. We cannot—by availing ourselves of the calm perspective of hindsight—now say that, at that time, these actions were unjustified.” In a stinging dissent, Frank Murphy condemned the exclusion of Japanese-Americans, stating that it “falls into the ugly abyss of racism.”134 Legal historian Peter Irons discovered a trove of documents from national security agencies, unknown to the Supreme Court in 1944, that showed conclusively that Japanese Americans had committed no acts of treason to justify their incarceration. Korematsu’s case was reopened and his conviction was overturned by a federal court in 1983. The federal government issued a formal apology to Japanese Americans and their families who were interred, and offered $20,000 as token reparations to each survivor. In 1998, Fred Korematsu received the Presidential Medal of Freedom, the nation’s highest civilian award, from President Clinton.135 Two important decisions in 1950 dealt with racial discrimination and higher education. A unanimous court ruled that denying an African American applicant to the University of Texas law school solely on the basis of his race was a violation of the equal protection clause of the Fourteenth Amendment. Texas had just created a law school for blacks only, but the court determined that the black school was in no way equal, either in educational standards or in prestige, to the all-white law school. In an Oklahoma case, an African American graduate student was physically segregated from other students at the University of Oklahoma. Again, a unanimous Supreme Court ruled that this amounted to a violation of the equal protection clause and ordered the segregation to cease.136

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POLICIES DELAYED OR DENIED

Failure to Eliminate the Poll Tax In 1937, the Supreme Court ruled that Georgia could impose a poll tax—a fee for voting—on its citizens. Justice Pierce Butler noted that “The payment of poll taxes as a prerequisite to voting is a familiar and reasonable regulation long enforced in many states and for more than a century in Georgia.”137 The unspoken rationale for the poll tax was simple and direct: to keep poor citizens, particularly African Americans, from participating in elections. But it seemed that the tide was turning in Congress against such discrimination. In the fall of 1942, the House of Representatives voted overwhelmingly in favor of legislation to ban the poll tax. Yet it was defeated in the Senate thanks to a filibuster by southerners. It was not until 1964 that the Twenty-Fourth amendment to the Constitution was ratified, prohibiting poll taxes in all federal elections. At the time, five states—Alabama, Arkansas, Mississippi, Texas, and Virginia—still imposed such taxes. Not until 1966, however, did the Supreme Court rule that poll taxes at any state or local level violated the equal protection clause of the Fourteenth Amendment.138

National Health Insurance Harry Truman’s come-from-behind victory in 1948 stunned many people and organizations, but none more so than the American Medical Association (AMA). Since the 1920s, the AMA had been campaigning vigorously against federal government involvement in health care, against what was labeled “socialized medicine.” While there was little interest in national health care during the 1920s, Congress did pass, over the strong objections of the AMA, the Sheppard-Towner Act (1921) to provide for “welfare and hygiene” for infants and mothers. When Senator Wagner was crafting the Social Security Act, he decided not to include health care as part of the package, thanks in part to opposition from the AMA and other organizations. The fight for medical care would have to wait for another session.139 In 1943, the first national health insurance was plan was presented by Wagner, his Senate colleague James E. Murray (Democrat—Montana) and Representative John D. Dingell, Sr. (Democrat—Michigan) in the House. Roosevelt stayed away from the issue; the AMA and its allies vigorously opposed it; and Congress would not take up the legislation. The Wagner-MurrayDingell legislation was resubmitted to Congress in 1945, 1947, and 1949, failing every time. In November 1945, Truman gave national health insurance a significant boost, strongly and publicly endorsing it. In a message to Congress, Truman urged that “our new economic bill of rights should mean health security for all, regardless of residence, station, or race—everywhere in the United States.” Truman avoided the red flag of “socialized medicine,” calling instead for an expansion of hospitals, increases in public health spending, support for child and maternal care, and a health insurance program that would cover every person who was not covered by Social Security.140 But resistance came swiftly. In a committee hearing, Senator Taft blurted out: this bill is “the most socialistic measure that this Congress has ever had before it, seriously.”141 Taft had to be restrained and escorted out of the building by Capitol police. Beginning in January 1947, Republicans were in charge, and there certainly wouldn’t be any more talk of national health insurance or socialized medicine. But Truman won in November 1948, and in his State of the Union address before the Eightyfirst Congress on January 5, 1949, he went on the offensive, proposing a $4 billion tax increase, the repeal of Taft-Hartley, and the protection of civil rights. Democrats were now back in control of the House and the Senate. Truman then went directly to the issue of health care:

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We must spare no effort to raise the general level of health in this country. In a nation as rich as ours, it is a shocking fact that tens of millions lack adequate medical care. We are short of doctors, hospitals, nurses. … We need—and we must have without further delay— a system of prepaid medical insurance which will enable every American to afford good medical care.142 Alarmed at Truman’s aggressive proclamation, the AMA struck back hard, turning to political consulting professionals Clem Whitaker and Leone Baxter to craft a lobbying, grassroots, and media blitz to block Truman’s health care efforts. Over the next three-and-a-half years, their firm, Whitaker & Baxter, along with a staff of thirty-seven, gathered 8,000 endorsements from non-medical groups (like the American Legion), distributed 40–50 million pieces of literature in doctors’ and dentists’ waiting rooms and in pharmacies. The AMA and Whitaker & Baxter didn’t go after Truman directly—he was too popular—but they resurrected the hoary theme of “socialized medicine” to great effect. This played into the fears of some unknown socialist (maybe even communist) threat to America, and fit right in to the red-baiting of the House Committee on Un-American Activities, the rising star in the Republican Party Richard Nixon, and was later perfected by Senator Joseph McCarthy (Republican—Wisconsin). The strategy worked. Congress simply sat on Truman’s national health insurance proposal and did nothing. By 1950, Truman’s plan for universal national health insurance was dead. But in the last months of his presidency, a new administration plan was hatched which would give sixty days of free hospital care to Social Security beneficiaries, the elderly, widows, and children. It went nowhere but became the impetus for the most significant amendment to Social Security, the enactment of Medicare and Medicaid in 1965.

Executive Order to Seize Steel Industry and Court Rebuff Labor contracts in the steel industry had expired on December 31, 1951, and neither the unions nor the steel companies were budging. The Korean War was still being fought and wage and price controls were still in effect. The steelworkers union, under its president Philip Murray, who was also chief of the CIO, gave notice that it would strike. Truman quickly retorted that such a labor dispute “gravely threatens the progress of national defense.” Truman decided not to use the Taft-Hartley “cooling off” provision; Taft-Hartley was labor’s worst enemy and Truman had vigorously denounced it. Instead, he ordered the Wage Stabilization Board to negotiate. But after two months of back-and-forth negotiations, the unions decided to strike on April 9, 1952. But Truman beat them to the punch. The day before, on April 8, through Executive Order 10340, the president directed the takeover of the steel industry. Truman based his authority on “the Constitution and the laws of the United States and as President and Commander in Chief of the armed forces.” He was said to have the private encouragement of his close friend, and fellow poker player, Chief Justice Fred Vinson.143 At this point in his presidency, Truman was at a low point in power and popularity; people were simply tired of Truman. There were howls and objections from opponents in Congress, fourteen separate impeachment resolutions were introduced, and ultimately the issue ended up in the Supreme Court. Could the president, by executive order, take over the steel industry? By a 6–3 margin, the Court in Youngstown Sheet & Tube v. Sawyer144 ruled that Truman had gone too far. While the chief justice privately had advised Truman that he had the inherent power, Vinson could not convince his fellow justices. Writing for the majority, Hugo Black stated that “The founders of this nation entrusted the lawmaking power to Congress alone in both good times and bad.” Vinson, Stanley Reed, and Sherman Minton, in dissent, sided with the

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president. Just hours after the court ruling, Truman, who was shocked by the decision, ordered Secretary of Commerce Charles Sawyer to return control of the steel companies to their owners. As a last-ditch effort, Truman pleaded with Congress to give him authority to seize the mills, but the lawmakers said no. The strike went on, with 600,000 steelworkers shutting down the steel companies for seven weeks. For a while, steel inventories were sufficient, but on the fifty-first day of the strike, Secretary of Defense Robert A. Lovett stated that the work stoppage had done more damage than maximum enemy bombing could have done. Truman called on Murray and Benjamin F. Fairless, president of the US Steel Corporation, demanding an end to the labor strife. The union and management settled—with both wages and prices of steel substantially the same as before the strike began.145

Notes 1 Franklin D. Roosevelt, Fireside Chat, “Great Arsenal of Democracy,” December 29, 1940; https:// www.youtube.com/watch?v=8oI-xc7XbWA (accessed September 26, 2019). 2 John Pomfret, The Beautiful Country and the Middle Kingdom: America and China, 1776 to the Present (New York: Henry Holt, 2016), 269. 3 David M. Kennedy, Freedom from Fear: The American People in Depression and War, 1929–1945 (New York: Oxford University Press, 1999), 465–515, quote at 491. 4 Arthur Herman, Freedom’s Forge: How American Business Produced Victory in World War II (New York: Random House, 2012); Doris Kearns Goodwin, No Ordinary Time: Franklin and Eleanor Roosevelt: The Home Front in World War II (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1994), 40–61. Tim Trainor, “How Ford’s Willow Run Assembly Plant Helped Win World War II,” Assembly Magazine, January 3, 2019, https://www.assemblymag.com/articles/94614-how-fords-willow-run-assemblyplant-helped-win-world-war-ii (accessed January 2, 2021). 5 “Levittown, the Protoypical American Suburb,” The Guardian, April 28, 2015, https://www. theguardian.com/cities/2015/apr/28/levittown-america-prototypical-suburb-history-cities (accessed September 23, 2019). On the sociology of the New Jersey Levittown, see Herbert J. Gans, The Levittowners: Life and Politics in a New Suburban Community (New York: Columbia University Press, 2017, 1962). 6 Ta-Nehisi Coates, “The Case for Reparations,” The Atlantic, June 2014, https://www.theatlantic. com/magazine/archive/2014/06/the-case-for-reparations/361631/ (accessed October 26, 2020). 7 T.R. Kennedy, Jr. “Electronic Computer Flashes Answers, May Speed Engineering,” New York Times, February 15, 1946; Ronald Allen Goldberg, America in the Forties (Syracuse: Syracuse University Press, 2012), 97. 8 Statistical Abstract of the United States, 1951, US Department of Commerce, Bureau of the Census, https://www2.census.gov/prod2/statcomp/documents/1951-02.pdf 9 “History of Federal Minimum Wage Rates Under the Fair Labor Standards Act, 1938–2009,” US Department of Labor, Wage and Hour Division, n.d., https://www.dol.gov/whd/minwage/chart.htm. 10 Goldberg, America in the Forties, 99. 11 “Federal Budget Receipts and Outlays, Coolidge to Obama,” American Presidency Project, University of California, San Diego, n.d., https://www.presidency.ucsb.edu/statistics/data/federalbudget-receipts-and-outlays (accessed September 30, 2019). 12 J.R. Sperry, “Rebellion Within the Ranks: Pennsylvania Anthracite, John L. Lewis, and the Coal Strikes of 1943,” Pennsylvania History 40 (30 (July 1973): 292–312. The legislation was sponsored by Rep. Howard W. Smith (Democrat—Virginia) and Senator Thomas T. (Tom) Connally (Democrat—Texas). 13 Jessie Kratz, “You Can’t Dig Coal with Bayonets,” National Archives blog, Pieces of History, July 11, 2018, https://prologue.blogs.archives.gov/2018/07/11/you-cant-dig-coal-with-bayonets/ (accessed August 9, 2019). 14 Harry S. Truman, Memoirs. Vol. 1: Year of Decision (Garden City, NY: Doubleday, 1955), 496. 15 Robert J. Donovan, Conflict and Crisis: The Presidency of Harry S Truman, 1945–1948, vol. 1 (New York: W.W. Norton, 1977), 240. 16 Goldberg, America in the Forties, 108.

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17 Donovan, Conflict and Crisis, 211. 18 William E. Leuchtenburg, “New Faces of 1946,” Smithsonian Magazine (November 2006), https:// www.smithsonianmag.com/history/new-faces-of-1946-135190660/ (accessed September 19, 2019); Dennis W. Johnson, The Laws That Shaped America: Fifteen Acts of Congress and Their Lasting Impact (New York: Routledge, 2009), 170–72. 19 In February 1953, La Follette committed suicide in his Washington, DC home. After his defeat in Wisconsin, La Follette remained in Washington as a business consultant. He was fifty-eight, but had many health issues and suffered deep depression. He had told friends he feared being dragged before McCarthy’s subcommittee. He was humiliated by his defeat to McCarthy in the Wisconsin primaries, and feared that he had let his father down and, thanks to McCarthy, had sullied all that he had worked for. Haynes Johnson, The Age of Anxiety: McCarthyism to Terrorism (Orlando: Harcourt, 2005), 262–63. 20 Robert Dallek, The Lost Peace: Leadership in a Time of Horror and Hope, 1945–1953 (New York: Harper, 2010), 223–25. 21 Michael Kazin, The Populist Persuasion: An American History (New York: Basic Books, 1995), 187. 22 Thomas C. Reeves, The Life and Times of Joe McCarthy (Lanham: Madison Books, 1997, 1982), 380. 23 Margaret Chase Smith, “Declaration of Conscience,” June 1, 1950, https://www.senate.gov/ artandhistory/history/resources/pdf/SmithDeclaration.pdf (accessed November 14, 2019). Six Senate colleagues, all Republicans, agreed with her: Charles W. Tobey (New Hampshire); George D. Aiken (Vermont), Wayne L. Morse (Oregon), Irving Ives (New York), Edward J. Thye (Minnesota), and Robert C. Hendrickson (New Jersey). McCarthy dismissed Smith and her six colleagues as “Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs.” Morse became an Independent after the 1952 elections, then later a Democrat. 24 Johnson, The Age of Anxiety, 185–86. 25 Lucas lost to Republican Everett M. Dirksen; Thomas lost to Republican Wallace Bennett. 26 K.A. Cuordileone, “The Torment of Secrecy: Reckoning with American Communism and Anticommunism after Venona,” Diplomatic History 35 (4) (September 2011): 615–42, at 620. 27 David Cole, “Enemy Aliens,” Stanford Law Review 54 (5) (May 2002): 953–1004 at 996. 28 In 1948, J. Parnell Thomas was convicted of taking salary kickbacks from members of his own congressional staff. Robert H. Ferrell, Harry S. Truman: A Life (Columbia: University of Missouri Press, 1996), 303. 29 John Earl Haynes and Harvey Klehr, Venona: Decoding Soviet Espionage in America (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2000), 10. 30 Quoted in David Caute, The Great Fear: The Anti-Communist Purge Under Truman and Eisenhower (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1978), 16. 31 David K. Johnson, The Lavender Scare: The Cold War Persecution of Gays and Lesbians in the Federal Government (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2004). 32 Ira Katznelson, Fear Itself: The New Deal and the Origins of Our Time (New York: Liveright Publishing, 2013), 460. 33 Ibid. 34 Truman quoted in David McCullough, Truman (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1992), 553. 35 Rawn James, Jr., The Double V: How Wars, Protest, and Harry Truman Desegregated America’s Military (New York: Bloomsbury, 2014) 137–39. 36 Numan V. Bartley, “The Era of the New Deal as a Turning Point in Southern History,” in James C. Cobb and Michael V. Namorato, eds., The New Deal and the South (Jackson: University Press of Mississippi, 1984), 139; Isabel Wilkerson, The Warmth of Other Suns: The Epic Story of America’s Great Migration (New York: Vintage Press, 2010). 37 Lance Freeman, A Haven and a Hell: The Ghetto in Black America (New York: Columbia University Press, 2019), 99–131, quote at 101–102. 38 “The 1943 Detroit Race Riots,” Detroit News, February 10, 1999, http://blogs.detroitnews.com/ history/1999/02/10/the-1943-detroit-race-riots/ (accessed August 5, 2019). 39 “The 1943 Detroit Race Riots;” Howard Sitkoff, Toward Freedom Land: The Long Struggle for Racial Equality in America (Lexington: University Press of Kentucky, 2010), 43–64. 40 L. Alex Swan, “The Harlem and Detroit Riots of 1943: A Comparative Analysis,” Berkeley Journal of Sociology 16 (1971–1972): 75–93. 41 Fisk study cited in Daniel Kryder, Divided Arsenal: Race and the American State During World War II (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2001), 3. 42 Donovan, Conflict and Crisis, 245.

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43 Ibid., 332. 44 James T. Patterson, Grand Expectations: The United States, 1945–1974 (New York: Oxford University Press, 1996), 150. 45 Truman quoted in William E. Leuchtenburg, In the Shadow of FDR: From Harry Truman to Barack Obama (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2009), 2, 4. 46 Truman quoted in Ibid., 15. 47 Sean J. Savage, Truman and the Democratic Party (Lexington: University Press of Kentucky, 1997), 92. 48 Ibid., 102. 49 Humphrey quote from Robert Mann, The Walls of Jericho: Hubert Humphrey, Richard Russell, and the Struggle for Civil Rights (New York: Harcourt Brace, 1996), 18. 50 Thurmond quoted in David Pietrusza, 1948: Harry Truman’s Improbable Victory and the Year That Transformed America’s Role in the World (New York: Union Square Press, 2011), 82. 51 Harry S. Truman, Memoirs. Vol. 2: Years of Triumph and Hope (New York: New American Library, 1965, 1955), 257, quoted in Savage, Truman and the Democratic Party, 111. Kari Frederickson, The Dixiecrat Revolt and the End of the Solid South, 1932–1968 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2001), 150–87. 52 Richard E. Neustadt, “The White House Staff Later Period,” in Francis H. Heller, ed., The Truman White House: The Administration of the Presidency, 1945–1953 (Lawrence: The Regents Press of Kansas, 1980), 94. 53 Francis H. Heller, “Introduction,” in Heller, ed., The Truman White House, xxiii. 54 Joseph W. Martin, My First Fifty Years in Politics (New York: McGraw-Hill, 1960), 82–83, quoted in Robert V. Remini, The House: The History of the House of Representatives (Washington, DC: Smithsonian Books, 2006), 323. 55 Quoted in Ira Katznelson, When Affirmative Action Was White (New York: W.W. Norton, 2005), 21. Six years later, in 1946, the last recorded mass lynching occurred in rural Walton County, Georgia. Two African American couples were dragged from their car, bound, beaten, and shot more than sixty times at close range by a white mob. As of 2019, the murders were still unsolved. Kim Bellware, “America’s ‘Last Mass Lynching’ Is a Cold Case. Breaking a Long-Held Grand Jury Rule Could Solve It,” Washington Post, October 24, 2019. 56 Michael Barone, “What 1946 Can Tell Us About 2010,” The American (American Enterprise Institute), April 6, 2010, http://www.aei.org/publication/what-1946-can-tell-us-about-2010/ (accessed August 6, 2019). 57 Quoted in Savage, Truman and the Democratic Party, 149. 58 “Adam Clayton Powell,” Office of Art and Archives, Office of the Clerk, US House of Representatives, n.d., https://history.house.gov/People/Listing/P/POWELL,-Adam-Clayton,-Jr--(P000477)/ (accessed October 21, 2019). 59 “Women Representatives and Senators, by Congress, 1917–Present,” History, Art & Archives, US House of Representatives, n.d., https://history.house.gov/Exhibitions-and-Publications/WIC/ Historical-Data/Women-Representatives-and-Senators-by-Congress/ (accessed October 24, 2019). 60 Donald A. Ritchie, “Alben W. Barkley: The President’s Man,” in Richard A. Baker and Roger H. Davidson, eds., First Among Equals: Outstanding Senate Leaders of the Twentieth Century (Washington, DC: Congressional Quarterly, 1991), 127–28. 61 Ritchie, “Alben W. Barkley,” 157. 62 Robert W. Merry, “Robert A. Taft: A Study in the Accumulation of Legislative Power,” in Baker and Davidson, eds., First Among Equals, 163–64. James T. Patterson, Mr. Republican: A Biography of Robert A. Taft (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1972). 63 Dallek, The Lost Peace, 223. 64 “The Legislative Reorganization Act of 1946,” US House of Representatives, https://history.house. gov/Historical-Highlights/1901-1950/The-Legislative-Reorganization-Act-of-1946/ (accessed July 29, 2019). The other sponsor of this legislation was Senator La Follette, Jr. In 2020, congressional salaries were $174,000 for rank-and-file members; the speaker of the House received $223,500, and the majority and minority leaders in both chambers receive $193,400. 65 Richard J. Regan, A Constitutional History of the US Supreme Court (Washington, DC: Catholic University Press, 2015), 124. Jackson and Byrnes were the last two Supreme Court justices who did not have law degrees. 66 James T. Patterson, Brown v. Board of Education: A Civil Rights Milestone and Its Troubled Legacy (New York: Oxford University Press, 2001), 47.

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67 Ibid., 51–52. Also, Melvin I. Urofsky, Division and Discord: The Supreme Court Under Stone and Vinson, 1941–1953 (Columbia: University of South Carolina Press, 1997); Melvin I. Urofsky, “Conflict Among the Brethren: Felix Frankfurter, William O. Douglas and the Clash of Personalities and Philosophies on the United States Supreme Court,” Duke Law Journal (1988): 71–113. Epigraph quote from “President Urges Congress Repeal of Chinese Exclusion Act as War Aid,” New York Times, October 11, 1943, 1. 68 W. Elliott Brownlee, Federal Taxation in America: A History, third ed. (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2016), 124–48; Stuart D. Brandes, “Financing World War II,” Encyclopedia.com; Carolyn C. Jones, “Mass-Based Income Taxation: Creating a Taxpaying Culture, 1940–1952,” in W. Elliott Brownlee, ed., Funding the Modern American State, 1941–1995: The Rise and Fall of Easy Finance (Washington, DC: Woodrow Wilson Center Press, 1996). 69 Susan Levine, School Lunch Politics: The Surprising History of America’s Favorite Welfare Program (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2008), 71–88. “The National School Lunch Program,” US Department of Agriculture (November 2017), https://fns-prod.azureedge.net/sites/default/files/cn/ NSLPFactSheet.pdf (accessed July 24, 2019); “Hershey Decries Low Nutrition,” New York Times, March 28, 1945. 70 Robert J. Donovan, Tumultuous Years: The Presidency of Harry S Truman, 1949–1953, vol. 2 (New York: W.W. Norton, 1982), 127. 71 Dennis W. Johnson, The Laws That Shaped America: Fifteen Acts of Congress and Their Lasting Impact (New York: Routledge, 2009), 195–96; Wilbur J. Cohen and Robert J. Myers, “Social Security Amendments of 1950: A Summary and Legislative History,” Social Security Bulletin (October 1950), https://www.ssa.gov/history/1950amend.html (accessed August 6, 2019). 72 George Ingram, “What Every American Should Know About US Foreign Aid,” Brookings Institution, Policy 2020, October 15, 2019, https://www.brookings.edu/policy2020/votervital/whatevery-american-should-know-about-us-foreign-aid/ (accessed January 5, 2020). 73 Helmut Schmidt, “Miles to Go: From American Plan to European Union,” Foreign Affairs (May/June 1997): 213; Johnson, The Laws That Shaped America, 229–60. 74 Robert A. Taft, “The Fair Deal is Creeping Socialism,” in Hamby, ed., Harry S. Truman and the Fair Deal, 45. 75 Much of this section comes from Johnson, The Laws That Shaped America, 202–28. Also, Theda Skocpol, Protecting Soldiers and Mothers: The Political Origins of Social Policy in the United States (Cambridge: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 1992); Theodore R. Mosch, The GI Bill: A Breakthrough in Educational and Social Policy in the United States (Hicksville, NY: Exposition Press, 1975); Michael J. Bennett, When Dreams Come True: The GI Bill and the Making of Modern America (Washington, DC: Brassey’s, 1996); Keith W. Olson, The GI Bill, the Veterans, and the Colleges (Lexington: University Press of Kentucky, 1974). 76 Stephen R. Ortiz, Beyond the Bonus March and GI Bill: How Veteran Politics Shaped the New Deal (New York: New York University Press, 2010), 11. The legislation was formally called the Adjusted Compensation Pay Act (1936). 77 Elizabeth A. Edmondson, “Without Comment or Controversy: The GI Bill and Catholic Colleges,” Church History 71 (4) (December 2002): 826. 78 Ira Katznelson, When Affirmative Action Was White: The Untold History of Racial Inequality in Twentieth-Century America (New York: Norton, 2005), 68. 79 Frydl, The GI Bill, quoted in Ta-Nehisi Coates, “The Case for Reparations,” The Atlantic, June 2014, https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2014/06/the-case-for-reparations/361631/ (accessed October 20, 2020). 80 Ronald Allen Goldberg, America in the Forties (Syracuse, NY: Syracuse University Press, 2012), 100. For a more critical view, see Kathleen J. Frydl, The GI Bill (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2009). 81 William Celis III, “50 Years Later, the Value of the GI Bill is Questioned,” New York Times, June 22, 1994; Greg Winter, “From Combat to Campus on the GI Bill,” New York Times, January 16, 2005. 82 Karen Kruse Thomas, “The Hill-Burton Act and Civil Rights: Expanded Hospital Care for Black Southerners, 1939–1960,” Journal of Southern History 72 (4) (November 2006): 823–70; https://www. questia.com/library/journal/1G1-155039477/the-hill-burton-act-and-civil-rights-expanding-hospital (accessed October 20, 2020). Harold Burton was nominated to fill a vacancy on the Supreme Court in September 1945, before this legislation was enacted into law. 83 Simkins v. Moses H. Cone Memorial Hospital, 323 F 2d. 959 (4th Cir. 1963), https://casetext.com/ case/simkins-v-moses-h-cone-memorial-hospital-2 (accessed October 22, 2020).

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84 Thomas, “The Hill-Burton Act and Civil Rights,” 823. 85 Markel quoted in John Henning Schuman, “A Bygone Era: When Bipartisanship Led to Health Care Transformation,” National Public Radio, October 2, 2016; https://www.npr.org/sections/healthshots/2016/10/02/495775518/a-bygone-era-when-bipartisanship-led-to-health-care-transformation (accessed October 20, 2020). 86 Neil Foley, Mexicans in the Making of America (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2014), chapter 5. On the human dimension of Mexican laborers, Deborah Cohen, Braceros: Migrant Citizens and Transnational Subjects in the Post-war United States and Mexico (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2011). 87 Roosevelt text found in “President Urges Congress Repeal of Chinese Exclusion Act as War Aid,” New York Times, October 11, 1943, 1. 88 Pomfret, The Beautiful Country and the Middle Kingdom, 298, 398–99; Gerald T. White, “The Chinese and Immigration Law,” Far Eastern Survey 19 (7) (April 1950): 68–70. 89 Carl Bon Tempo, Americans at the Gate: The United States and Refugees During the Cold War (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2015), 33. 90 Editorial, “McCarran and the Alien,” New York Times, August 23, 1951. 91 Truman’s veto message to the House of Representatives, September 23, 1950, https:// teachingamericanhistory.org/library/document/speech-on-the-veto-of-the-mccarran-internalsecurity-act/ (accessed July 26, 2019). 92 On McCarran-Walter and earlier post-war immigration legislation, see E.P. Hutchison, Legislative History of American Immigration Policy, 1789–1965 (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1981), chapter 7. 93 Truman quoted in Larry Ceplair, Anti-Communism in Twentieth Century America: A Critical History (Santa Barbara, CA: Praeger, 2011), 98. 94 Alonzo L. Hamby, Beyond the New Deal: Harry S. Truman and American Liberalism (New York: Columbia University Press, 1973), 484. 95 “David Cole, “McCarran-Walter Act Reborn?” Washington Post, November 18, 1990. 96 Cole, McCarran-Walter Act Reborn?” 97 Trump, President of the United States, et al. v. Hawaii et al., 585 US ____ (2018); https://www. supremecourt.gov/opinions/17pdf/17-965_h315.pdf. Section 1182(f) of the Immigration and Nationality Act incorporates the language of McCarran-Walter. The Court, through Chief Justice Roberts, ruled that “By its terms, §1182(f) exudes deference to the President in every clause,” at 10. In one of his first acts as president, Joe Biden threw out the Muslim travel ban. 98 Joseph Rauh, Jr. (1911–1992) later headed the Americans for Democratic Action, was chief legal counsel for the NAACP, and an influential advocate for future civil rights and civil liberties legislation. See Wolfgang Saxon, “Joseph Rauh, Jr., Prominent Civil Liberties Attorney, Dies at 81,” New York Times, September 5, 1992. David Brinkley, Washington Goes to War (New York: Ballantine Books, 1988), 80–82; David Lucander, Winning the War for Democracy: The March on Washington Movement, 1941–1946 (Campaign-Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2014), 154–62. 99 Quoted in Jason Morgan Ward, Defending White Democracy: The Making of a Segregationist Movement and the Remaking of Racial Politics, 1936-1965 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2011), 78. 100 Quoted in Ibid., 78–83. 101 Quoted in Robert Shogan, Harry Truman and the Struggle for Racial Justice (Lawrence: University Press of Kansas, 2013), 2 102 Rawn James, Jr., The Double V: How Wars, Protest, and Harry Truman Desegregated America’s Military (New York: Bloomsbury, 2013), 166. 103 Quoted in Shogan, Harry Truman and the Struggle for Racial Justice, 129–30. 104 Ibid., 145–61. 105 Jean Edward Smith, Eisenhower in War and Peace (New York: Random House, 2012), 710. 106 Smith v. Allwright, 321 US 649 (1944); https://supreme.justia.com/cases/federal/us/321/649/#tabopinion-1938079, quote at 664; opinion by Justice Reed. This ruling overturned Grovey v. Townsend, 295 US 45 (1935), https://supreme.justia.com/cases/federal/us/295/45/. 107 Quoted in Ward, Defending White Democracy, 90. Bilbo authored Take Your Choice: Separation or Mongrelization (Burlington: Ostara Publications, 2013, 1947), 8, where he argued that “Negro problem” can only be permanently resolved “by the physical separation of the races or by resigning ourselves to total mongrelization resulting in the destruction of both the white and the black races.”

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108 O. Douglas Weeks, “The White Primary: 1944–1948,” American Political Science Review 42 (3) (June 1948): 500–10. 109 Morgan v. Virginia, 328 US 323 (1946), https://www.law.cornell.edu/supremecourt/text/328/373 (accessed July 9, 2019). 110 Derek C. Catsam and Brendan Wolfe, “Morgan v. Virginia (1946)” Encyclopedia Virginia, https:// www.encyclopediavirginia.org/morgan_v_virginia#start_entry; “You Don’t Have to Ride Jim Crow,” video https://www.encyclopediavirginia.org/media_player?mets_filename=evm00000831mets.xml (accessed July 9, 2019). 111 Shelley v. Kraemer, 334 US 1 (1948); quote at 1; three justices did not participate in the decision because they lived in neighborhoods with restrictive covenants; https://supreme.justia.com/cases/ federal/us/334/1/. See also, Mark D. Rosen, “Was Shelley v. Kraemer Incorrectly Decided—Some New Answers,” California Law Review 95 (2) (2007): 451–512, https://scholarship.law.berkeley.edu/ cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=1224&context=californialawreview (accessed September 6, 2019). 112 Clement E. Vose, “NAACP Strategy in the Covenant Cases,” Case Western Reserve Law School 6 (2) (1955): 101–55; https://scholarlycommons.law.case.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=3433&context= caselrev (accessed September 6, 2019). 113 Brian C. Kalt, Constitutional Cliffhangers (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2012), 133–57; Paul G. Willis and George L. Willis, “The Politics of the Twenty-Second Amendment,” Western Political Quarterly 5 (3) (September 1952), 469; Paul B. Davis, “The Results and Implications of the Enactment of the Twenty-Second Amendment,” Presidential Studies Quarterly 9 (3) (Summer 1979): 289–303. The Twenty-seventh Amendment, which prohibits increases or decreases in the pay of federal lawmakers until the beginning of the next term of office, took the longest time to be ratified. It was originally proposed in 1789, but was not ratified until 1992, some 202 years later. 114 Sean J. Savage, Truman and the Democratic Party (Lexington: University Press of Kentucky, 1997), 107. 115 This section was ruled unconstitutional as a bill of attainder in United States v. Brown, 381 US 437 (1965), https://www.law.cornell.edu/supremecourt/text/381/437 116 Robert A. Taft, “The Taft-Hartley Act: A Favorable View,” and William Green, “The Taft-Hartley Act: A Critical View,” The Annals of the American Academy of Political and Social Science 274 (March 1951): 195–99 at 195, and 200–205 at 201, respectively. 117 The radio address is found at Harry S. Truman Presidency, Miller Center, University of Virginia, https://millercenter.org/the-presidency/presidential-speeches/june-20-1947-veto-taft-hartley-bill (accessed August 13, 2019). 118 J. Joseph Huthmacher, Senator Robert F. Wagner and the Rise of Urban Liberalism (New York: Atheneum, 1968), 337. 119 National Housing Policy, 1949, 81st Congress, 1st Session, Ch. 338, July 15, 1949, https://www.loc. gov/law/help/statutes-at-large/81st-congress/session-1/c81s1ch338.pdf 120 “Federal Housing Policy Development 1932–50,” Monthly Labor Review 71 (6) (1950): 682–83; Morton J. Schussheim, “Federal Housing Acts,” in Donald C. Bacon, Roger H. Davidson, and Morton Keller, eds., The Encyclopedia of the United States Congress, vol. 2 (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1995), 813–14. 121 Donovan, Tumultuous Years, 127. 122 “Sabath, Cox Mix It Up During Housing Row,” Associated Press, June 22, 1949; Remini, The House, 347–48. 123 Donovan, Tumultuous Years, 127. 124 Alexander Von Hoffman, “A Study of Contradictions: The Origins and Legacy of the Housing Act of 1949,” Housing Policy Debate 11 (2) (2000): 299–326, https://www.innovations.harvard.edu/sites/ default/files/hpd_1102_hoffman.pdf (accessed July 23, 2019). 125 Richard O. Davies, “Housing Reform: A Fair Deal Case Study,” in Hamby, ed., Harry S. Truman and the Fair Deal, 163. 126 James Baldwin in interview with Kenneth Clark (1963), https://www.youtube.com/watch?v= T8Abhj17kYU (accessed July 24, 2019); Lance Freeman, The Ghetto in Black America (New York: Columbia University Press, 2019), 99–131. 127 Jacobs quoted in Davies, “Housing Reform,” 167. 128 “Pruitt-Igoe: The Troubled High-rise That Came to Define Urban America,” The Guardian (April 22, 2015), https://www.theguardian.com/cities/2015/apr/22/pruitt-igoe-high-rise-urban-americahistory-cities (accessed August 13, 2019).

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129 Lizabeth Cohen, “Only Washington Can Solve the Nation’s Housing Crisis,” New York Times, July 10, 2019. 130 Everson v. Board of Education, 330 US 1 (1947), https://supreme.justia.com/cases/federal/us/330/1/. The ruling was 5–4, with Justice Black writing for the majority. 131 Illinois ex rel. McCollum v. Board of Education, 333 US 203 (1948), https://supreme.justia.com/cases/ federal/us/333/203/. The ruling was 6-1, with Justice Black writing for the majority. 132 Zorach v. Clausen, 343 US 306 (1952), https://www.law.cornell.edu/supremecourt/text/343/306. The ruling was 6–3, with Justice Douglas writing for the majority. 133 Dennis v. United States, 341 US 494 (1951), https://supreme.justia.com/cases/federal/us/341/494/. The ruling was 6–2, with Chief Justice Vinson writing for the majority. Black dissenting quote at 579. 134 Korematsu v. United States, 323 US 214 (1944); https://supreme.justia.com/cases/federal/us/323/214/. Black quote at 223–24; Murphy dissent at 233. 135 “Fred T. Korematsu,” Fred T. Korematsu Institute, San Francisco, California, n.d., http://www. korematsuinstitute.org/fred-t-korematsu-lifetime (accessed September 10, 2019). 136 Sweatt v. Painter, 339 US 629 (1950); https://www.law.cornell.edu/supremecourt/text/339/629; McLaurin v. Oklahoma State Regents, 339 US 637 (1950), https://www.law.cornell.edu/supremecourt/ text/339/637. See Clarke Rountree, “Setting the Stage for Brown v. Board of Education: The NAACP’s Litigation Campaign Against the ‘Separate but Equal’ Doctrine,” in Clarke Rountree, ed., Brown v. Board of Education at Fifty (Lanham: Lexington Books, 2004), 49–90. 137 Breedlove v. Suttles, 302 US 277 (1937), https://supreme.justia.com/cases/federal/us/302/277/; quote at 283–84. 138 Harper v. Virginia Board of Elections, 383 US 663 (1966), https://supreme.justia.com/cases/federal/us/ 383/663 139 Much of this section comes from Johnson, The Laws That Shaped America, 336–42. 140 Paul Starr, The Social Transformation of American Medicine (New York: Basic Books, 1982), 281. 141 Quoted in Alan Derickson, “Health Security for All? Social Unionism and Universal Health Insurance,” Journal of American History 80 (4) (March 1944), 1342. 142 Harry S. Truman, Annual Message to the Congress on the State of the Union, January 5, 1949, in John Woolley and Gerhard Peters, The American Presidency Project (online), Santa Barbara, CA: University of California (hosted), http://www.presidency/ucsb.edu/?pid=13293. 143 Donovan, Tumultuous Years, 382–91; Maeva Marcus, Truman and the Steel Seizure Case: The Limits of Presidential Power (New York: Columbia University, 1977). 144 Youngstown Sheet & Tube v. Sawyer, 343 US 579 (1952), https://supreme.justia.com/cases/federal/us/ 343/579/ 145 James N. Giglio, “Harry S. Truman,” in Ken Gormley, ed., The Presidents and the Constitution: A Living History (New York: NYU Press, 2016), 434–36.

Chapter 6

America at Midcentury: 1953–1960

The Fifties were captured in black and white, most often by still photographers; by contrast, the decade that followed was, more often than not, caught in living color on tape or film. Not surprisingly, in retrospect the pace of the Fifties seemed slower, almost languid. Social ferment, however, was beginning just beneath this placid surface. (David Halberstam, 1993)1

AMERICA DURING THIS ERA In the 1950s, Americans could actually see far away events happening, rather than simply reading or hearing about them. Entertainment, sports, and news were now coming to American living rooms through television. Douglas Edwards of CBS, Mike Wallace of DuMont, and John Cameron Swayze of NBC read the news during fifteen-minute evening segments in bare bones studios, with no boom microphones, no glitzy sets, and no remote hookup to far corners of the world. Newsmen (all men, indeed) would also pitch cigarettes, men’s clothing, or appliances. Some 20 million viewers watched the Army-McCarthy hearings in 1954, one of the first such live televised events in congressional history, and later listened to the searing commentary of CBS reporter Edward R. Murrow. Television also was becoming an integral part of political campaigning, with cartoons, jingles, and man-on-the-street pitches for Adlai Stevenson and Dwight Eisenhower. Vice-presidential candidate Richard M. Nixon gained sympathy and partial exoneration from a political scandal with his nationally televised “Checkers” speech. Movie actor Ronald Reagan began hosting General Electric Theater in 1953, urging viewers to “live better, electrically,” inviting them through their television sets to view his all-electric house in Pacific Palisades, California. In 1956, 25 million viewers, the third highest rating of all shows that year, watched the General Electric Theater and its genial host. (An average of 21 million viewers watched the first season of Donald Trump’s The Apprentice.)2 Americans were becoming more religious with a revival of Christianity. In the 1940s, less than half of the US population belonged to any kind of church; by the end of the 1950s, that number climbed to 69 percent. Even door-to-door Bible salesmen were prospering.3 On Flag Day, in June 1954, President Eisenhower signed legislation that incorporated the phrase “one nation under God” into the Pledge of Allegiance. Then Eisenhower uttered: “Our government makes no sense unless it is founded on a deeply religious faith—and I don’t care what it is.” A year later, Congress added “In God We Trust” to American currency.4 To many, religion was embodied in the widely recognized figures of the Rev. Dr. Norman Vincent Peale, Bishop Fulton J. Sheen, and especially Billy Graham, an immensely popular preacher, who became a frequent visitor to the White House and Capitol Hill. But for all their religious intentions, many Americans were woefully ignorant of even the most basic of DOI: 10.4324/9781003293538-9

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theological concepts. A 1951 Gallup Poll found that more than one-half of Americans surveyed could not name one of the gospels; few were able to explain the concept of the Trinity. In another poll, however, some 95 percent of respondents claimed to be religious.5 Another religious leader was laying the groundwork for his civil rights activism in the 1960s. A young Baptist preacher, Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., along with several others, formed the Southern Christian Leadership Conference in 1957 and helped orchestrate the thirteen-month boycott of public transportation in Montgomery, Alabama. During this time, one of the most serious health crises struck America. In 1952, some 60,000 children were afflicted with infantile paralysis (polio), with thousands of them paralyzed; 3,000 children had died. Iron lungs were hastily set up in hospitals, hoping to keep patients alive. Swimming pools and other public spaces were shut down, and parents lived in fear that their children might contract the disease. In 1954, University of Pittsburgh virologist Dr. Jonas E. Salk injected some 2 million children with a promising new polio vaccine, in what was up until then the largest human trial ever attempted. Dr. Albert B. Sabine of the Cincinnati Children’s Hospital produced an effective oral vaccine. By 1955, widespread vaccinations were available throughout the country, and by 1979, polio had been eliminated in the United States.6 Much of America’s attention was captivated by war, intrigue, and international events with lasting impact. First came the brokered truce on the Korean peninsula, then in 1954, the collapse of the French presence in Vietnam, and soon the beginning of American involvement as military advisers. Then came the CIA-directed coup in Iran, bringing in Mohammed Reza Pahlavi, the Shah of Iran, who ruled as a dictator for the next twenty-five years. American CIA involvement extended to Central America, with a coup in Guatemala. Then in 1956 came Egypt’s nationalization of the Suez Canal and the subsequent clashes with England and France; that same year came the ruthless suppression of an uprising against Soviet forces in Hungary. Eisenhower met with Soviet leader Nikita Khrushchev in September 1959 at the presidential retreat, leading to some optimism for American–Soviet relations, known as the “spirit of Camp David.” The thawing relations were abruptly reversed with the shooting down of the American U-2 spy plane over Soviet territory. Khrushchev demanded an apology; Eisenhower refused, and the Cold War suddenly grew colder.7

The Era by the Numbers The US population in 1950 was 161,325,798, a 19.1 million (or 14.5 percent) increase from 1940. In 1959, forty-seven years after Arizona was admitted to statehood, Alaska, then Hawaii, became the forty-ninth and fiftieth states respectively. During this era, immigration declined to a new low in the twentieth century. In 1950, the percentage of foreign-born was 7.5 percent; by 1960, it dropped to 5.4 percent. Immigration slowed to a relative trickle, just averaging about 250,000 individuals per year. The waiting time to become a citizen, however, was reduced significantly. During the 1950s, immigrants became citizens in just seven years; a decade before, the average waiting time was twenty-three years.8 The minimum wage was raised to $1 per hour in 1956 ($9.57 in 2020 dollars; the actual minimum wage in 2020 was $7.25). For the first time, the Dow Jones Industrial Average reached 500 in 1956 (in 2022, it reached nearly 36,800). The poverty rate had dropped considerably; in 1950, 30.2 percent of the population were considered in poverty.9 During the mid-1950s, one quarter of the American population, 40 to 50 million, was poor. And because neither the federal nor state governments had put into place a food stamp or housing assistance program, “this poverty was searing,” noted historian Stephanie Coontz. Poverty hit children and the elderly the hardest. By the end of the 1950s, a full one-third of American children were poor, and in 1958,

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60 percent of American seniors had incomes below $1,000. At the time, $3,000 to $10,000 was considered to be a middle-class income. Most seniors had no medical care.10

Society Under Stress McCarthy and “Soft on Communism,” Part 2 The November 1952 elections saw Dwight Eisenhower swept into the presidency, along with his young vice president, Richard M. Nixon. The November elections brought Republicans back in control of both the House and the Senate, and significantly, marked the re-election of Senator Joe McCarthy. During his re-election campaign, McCarthy was at full throttle: he accused Adlai Stevenson, the Democratic presidential candidate, of being “soft on communism” and allied with American traitors; he labeled the Democratic Party as a tool of a communist conspiracy and the leftist media. Earlier, when Truman fired General Douglas MacArthur during the Korean War, McCarthy railed against Truman: “That son of a bitch should be impeached.”11 Now was time for McCarthy to reassert himself as chairman of the Committee on Government Operations, and its Senate Permanent Subcommittee on Investigations. After McCarthy took over, the focus shifted to rooting out potential communists and other subversives. As the McCarthy hearings gained momentum in 1953, journalist Haynes B. Johnson wrote: Washington’s atmosphere, laden with feelings of terror, rage, and helplessness enveloped the nation. McCarthyism was nearly immobilizing America, distracting the nation and destroying confidence in its institutions, schools, churches, government, press, military, and private and political leaders. Debate and dissent were stifled, making increasingly difficult America’s ability to deal intelligently with vital questions of the day12 It seemed to many that McCarthy, not Eisenhower, was the dominant force in the Republican Party, grabbing the headlines, attacking Democrats, and, finally, assailing the US Army leadership. Working for McCarthy was the twenty-five-year-old aggressive assistant Roy Cohn, who became as reviled and despised as McCarthy himself.13 Another legal assistant for some time was Robert F. Kennedy, the recent law school graduate, the son of McCarthy’s good friend Joseph P. Kennedy, Sr. McCarthy had gone too far, and his downfall would be the Army-McCarthy hearings, Edward R. Murrow’s take down, and finally, the Senate censure. In early 1954, the Army accused McCarthy and Roy Cohn of demanding special treatment for a former McCarthy staffer G. David Shine, now a private in the Army. McCarthy accused the Army of retaliation. The confrontation would now play out to a nationwide audience. As many as 20 million television viewers watched the Army-McCarthy hearings, with gavel-to-gavel coverage by ABC and the DuMont networks, beginning on April 22, 1954, and lasting for thirty-six days. It was a circus, and a national obsession, with more than one hundred reporters and crowds of spectators jammed into the Senate hearing room. On March 9, CBS newscaster Edward R. Murrow devoted the entire episode of his popular show See It Now to McCarthy. This was the first time that a television network had openly criticized the senator. Most of the thirty-minute show featured tape and film of McCarthy in action. The edited piece showed McCarthy in an unflattering light: “belching, picking his nose, contradicting himself, giggling at his own vulgar humor (‘Alger—I mean Adlai’), and harshly berating witnesses.” Murrow calmly and quietly eviscerated McCarthy: “It is necessary,” Murrow observed, “to investigate before legislating, but the line between investigation and

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persecution is a very fine one, and the junior senator has stepped over it repeatedly.”14 Murrow’s broadcast drew record-breaking numbers of calls and telegrams, more than ever before in CBS history. Not all of it was laudatory. Murrow’s criticisms of McCarthy caused the Far Right heartburn.15 On June 9, the thirtieth day of the hearings, Army chief legal counsel Joseph Nye Welch demanded that McCarthy aide Roy Cohn promptly turn over the names of 130 of supposed subversives to Attorney General Brownell. McCarthy interjected that if Welch was so concerned, they should start with one of Welch’s young law firm colleagues, who belonged to the progressive National Lawyers Guild. This led to one of the most famous rejoinders in congressional hearings history: “Until this moment, Senator, I think I never really gauged your cruelty or your recklessness.” McCarthy pressed on, but Welch would not back off: “Let us not assassinate this lad further, Senator. You’ve done enough. Have you no sense of decency, sir, at long last? Have you left no sense of decency?”16 The hearing room erupted in applause. McCarthy was slipping; he had over-reached, and his power was diminishing rapidly. Republican leaders, like staunch conservative William F. Knowland of California, refused to authorize further McCarthy hearings outside of Washington. Committee staffers demanded that Roy Cohn be fired; and Cohn ultimately resigned in late July. Senator Ralph E. Flanders (Republican—Vermont) had had enough. With television cameras catching the scene, he dropped off a note at McCarthy’s desk informing him that he [Flanders] that afternoon would introduce a resolution in the Senate calling for the Wisconsin senator’s censure. In a dramatic floor speech on March 9, 1954, Flanders became one of the first senators to denounce McCarthy. On June 2, Flanders compared McCarthy to Hitler and to communists, asserting that “Were the junior senator from Wisconsin in the pay of the communists he could not have done a better job for them.”17 Finally, on December 2, 1954 the Senate voted, 67–22, to censure its colleague because he “acted contrary to senatorial ethics and tended to bring the Senate to dishonor and disrepute,” but did not expel McCarthy from office. The Senate censure was bad, but what was even worse was what the press did to McCarthy: it ignored him. “He never recovered,” observed Lyndon Johnson aide Harry McPherson. “I would just see him lurch down the halls in the mornings, and he had a kind of bloated face with heavy jowls, he really looked terrible. And he would make those long, awful, incomprehensible speeches, seconded by other Republican drunks.”18 The Senate censure was just the beginning of a long slide into alcoholism, political irrelevancy, and quiet desperation. McCarthy died in 1957 of liver failure, caused by alcohol poisoning, at the age of forty-eight, while still a sitting US senator. McCarthy’s replacement in the Senate was Democrat E. William Proxmire, who would serve for the next thirty-two years. Organized Crime and Union Corruption During 1950–1951, the Senate created the Special Committee to Investigate Crime in Interstate Commerce (Kefauver Committee) to focus on organized criminal activity. Its chairman, C. Estes Kefauver (Democrat—Tennessee) conducted “spectacular and unprecedented” hearings in fourteen major cities throughout America on the influence of organized crime. The hearings were captured on the new medium of television. Viewers were both fascinated and appalled by colorful mob bosses, like Frank Costello, Meyer Lansky, Antonio (Big Tuna) Accardo, pleading the Fifth Amendment, and the mounting evidence of widespread organized crime throughout the United States. Historian R. Alton Lee described it thus: “the results were phenomenal: millions of schoolchildren and adults interrupted their daily routine to view the hearings.”19

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The Kefauver Committee published its findings, recommended civil penalties, and called for the creation of a “racket squad” within the Department of Justice. The committee’s efforts bore fruit twenty years later with the enactment of the Racketeer Influenced and Corrupt Operations Act (RICO) in 1970. J. Edgar Hoover, head of the Federal Bureau of Investigation, was compelled to admit that there was a nationwide network of organized crime and that the FBI had done little to crack it. In 1954, the Senate turned its attention to alleged union corruption, forming the Select Committee on Improper Activities in the Labor Management Field (McClellan AntiRacketeering Committee). The chairman of the committee was Senator McClellan and its chief legal counsel was the young Robert F. Kennedy. Over a two-year period beginning in February 1957, the committee held 270 days of hearings, grilling mobsters, union bosses, and racketeers; the committee also heard from union members who were trying to fight corruption. Testimony was taken from 1,526 witnesses and the results were published in reports filling fiftyeight volumes. The anti-racketeering focus was on five unions: Bakers and Confectionary Workers, United Textile Workers, Operating Engineers, the Allied Industrial Workers of America, and most notably, the International Brotherhood of Teamsters. Most attention was on James Riddle (Jimmy) Hoffa, the popular and controversial president of the Teamsters since 1957. His predecessor David D. (Dave) Beck was questioned about $322,000 in missing Teamsters funds, and later was found guilty of embezzlement, labor racketeering, and income tax evasion. (In 1975, Beck was pardoned by President Gerald Ford for the federal charges against him.)20 The contentious hearings exposed the corruption in the Teamsters organization. As Alton Lee observed, “This is how democracy operated in the Teamsters: intimidation, bribery, misuse of trusteeship, and collusion with management.”21 Hoffa was later convicted of jury tampering, fraud, and attempted bribery in 1964 and began serving a thirteen-year sentence in 1967. He was pardoned by President Richard Nixon in 1971 with the stipulation that he stay away from union activities until 1980. But Hoffa did not make it that far, mysteriously disappearing on June 30, 1975, after mobsters Anthony (Tony Jack) Giacalone from Detroit and Anthony (Tony Pro) Provenzano from New Jersey stood him up for a lunch at a restaurant in Bloomfield Township, Michigan. Hoffa, whose body was never discovered, was declared legally dead in 1982.22 The Teamsters Union forged a bond with the Republican Party during the Nixon administration and later with the Reagan presidency. It began with Nixon’s pardon of Hoffa in 1971, extended to Hoffa’s successor Frank Fitzsimmons, the “only Republican labor leader.” The Teamsters was the only union to endorse Ronald Reagan in 1980 and 1984, and its president Jackie Presser was a part of Reagan’s transition team. Questions were raised on Capitol Hill when the Reagan administration dropped racketeering charges against Presser, although government prosecutors in Cleveland recommended indicting him.23 In addition to nefarious financial activities by union bosses and their multitude of lawyers, the McClellan Committee also found collusion among employers. Such activity was completely illegal, in violation of the Taft-Hartley Act.24 The McClellan Committee’s report uncovered a wide variety of abuses: rank-and-file union members were denied basic democratic rights, while union leaders stole money, committed bribery, and used intimidation to keep members in line. Further, several unions were in cahoots with organized crime, siphoning off funds, extorting union officials and corporations. The Teamsters Union was expelled from the newly merged AFL-CIO, which in anticipation of McClellan Committee recommendations came up with its own code of ethical behavior. But the AFL-CIO action was too little, too late. Thanks to the McClellan findings and pressure from the public, Congress would soon create its own labor-management legislation.

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Racial Tensions This was an era of increasing racial tensions, gathering protests of African Americans, and pushback from white citizens, political leaders, and their elected representatives. One of the first shocks was the 1955 murder of Emmett Till, a fourteen-year-old African American Chicago boy, visiting relatives in the small town of Money, Mississippi. Till, unaware of the potentially deadly racial sensitivities in the Deep South, said something that insulted a young white female clerk at a grocery store. This set off a series of events that lead to white vigilantes determined to straighten out the smart-alecky Chicago teenager. The leading perpetrator was J.W. (Big) Milam, a World War II combat veteran with a ninthgrade education, who, according to local folks, could “handle Negroes better than anybody in the country.” When Milam confronted Emmett, the teenager barked back that he had been with white women before and that in fact his grandmother was white. That was too much for Big. Emmett was bludgeoned with Milam’s 45-caliber pistol, shot in the ear, and tossed in the local river, weighted down by a heavy industrial fan, whose electrical cord was wrapped around his neck. His body was found days later in the river. Milam was unapologetic: “I just made up my mind. ‘Chicago boy,’ I said, ‘I’m tired of’em sending your kind down here to stir up trouble. Goddam you, I’m going to make an example of you—just so everybody can know how me and my folks stand.’”25 Mississippi justice prevailed. An all-white petit jury in Sumner, Mississippi, found Till’s abductors not guilty. Then an all-white grand jury in Greenwood declined to indict them for kidnapping. At the murder trial, according to the Memphis Commercial Appeal, evidence for a murder conviction was “lacking.” For the swarms of national press covering the trial of Milam and Roy Bryant, it was another shocking exposure to southern justice.26 But when Emmett’s body was returned to Chicago, his mother insisted on an open casket, showing to the world his mutilated and bloated body. “If Jesus Christ bore our sins, then Emmett Till bore our prejudices,” remarked Mamie Till-Mobley, his mother, in an interview in 1989.27 That year, African Americans in Montgomery, Alabama, began their lengthy bus boycott. African American seamstress Rosa L. Parks, who refused to give up her seat and sparked the boycott movement, became the symbol of resistance, and since then has often called the “first lady of civil rights.” The February 18, 1957 issue of Time magazine featured the twenty-eight-yearold Martin Luther King, Jr. on its cover and an admiring article about the Montgomery boycott.28 King became the face of civil rights protest. The boycott lasted 381 days, ending only with a Supreme Court ruling, Browder v. Gayle, that upheld a lower court finding that state enforcement of a racially segregated but privately owned bus system violated the Equal Protection Clause of the Fourteenth Amendment.29 This ruling, in effect, overturned the long-standing Plessy v. Ferguson decision (1896) on racial discrimination in transportation. But after Browder, white vigilantes “unleashed a wave of violence, tossing dynamite into the homes of civil rights leaders and blowing up their churches.”30 King’s home was assaulted by shotgun blasts, while his colleague, Ralph David Abernathy, had his home damaged by home-made bombs. The contentious issue of racial segregation of public schools culminated in the two Brown v. Board of Education decisions by the Supreme Court in 1954 and 1955. Those decisions and the aftermath, particularly the crisis at the Little Rock, Arkansas, schools are discussed below. A few southern schools were grudgingly integrated, with compliance gradual, piecemeal, reluctant, and complicated. In Virginia, Senator Harry F. Byrd, Sr. (Democrat) urged “massive resistance” to the Supreme Court decisions and the commonwealth of Virginia passed a series of laws to prevent school integration. One such was a law that cut off state funding to any public school in Virginia that attempted to integrate. Under court order, several schools in Warren County, Charlottesville, and Norfolk were about to integrate in September 1958. The

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schools were temporarily seized and closed, but the Virginia Supreme Court and later a federal district court overturned the school closing law. Then in January 1959, the Virginia General Assembly repealed its compulsory school attendance law and made public education a local option for cities and counties. A few counties decided it was better to integrate its schools than have no education at all, but Prince Edward County officials decided to close all of its public schools. Stepping in was the Prince Edward Foundation, which created a series of private schools for white students only. The foundation was supported by tuition grants and state tax credits. Nothing was done for African American students, and it was not until 1964 that the public schools were again re-opened and the Supreme Court ruled that such state support of private segregated education was unconstitutional.31 This decision had widespread repercussions: ten southern states had education closure laws similar to that of Virginia. Altogether, African American students in Prince Edward County lost five years of education. CBS commentator Edward R. Murrow brought this shameful episode to the public’s attention in a program called The Lost Class of ’59.32 In Virginia, massive resistance was over; however, the underlying problems of race, desegregation, and acceptance remained festering and seemingly intractable. Yet success was in the eyes of the beholder, and as late as 1960, however, Eisenhower administration attorney general William Rogers assessed the pace of school desegregation as “surprisingly good,” given the legal and political difficulties involved. At that time, fewer than two-tenths of 1 percent of African American children in eleven southern states were attending classes with white children.33 Racial discrimination and violence were problems throughout the country, not just in the segregated South. Redlining of neighborhoods, restrictive covenants, and subtle and not so subtle resistance by white northern citizens was widespread. When African American Harvey Clark in 1951 tried to move into a home in Cicero, Illinois, right outside of Chicago, a white mob of 4,000 spent four days tearing apart his home, while local police watched and joked. In 1957, Life magazine noted that 10,000 African Americans were working at the Ford plant in Dearborn, Michigan, “but not one Negro can live in Dearborn itself.”34

THE NATIONAL GOVERNMENT

The Presidency Dwight D. Eisenhower was president throughout this eight-year period. Biographer Jean Edward Smith has argued that, with the exception of FDR, Dwight Eisenhower was “the most successful president of the twentieth century.” Eisenhower “punctured the Roosevelt coalition, weaned the Republican Party from its isolationist past, restored the nation’s past, restored the nation’s sanity after the McCarthyite binge of Communist witch-hunting, and proved unbeatable at the polls.”35 He was, Smith noted, the only president during the twentieth century to preside over eight years of peace and prosperity.36 Historian William H. Chafe observed that the Eisenhower administration “proved singularly successful in offering a respite from conflict and controversy, charting a path so close to the middle of the road that it was difficult for critics to gain an audience.” Eisenhower, unlike many in his party, was part of the liberal consensus, and he intended to run the government like a successful business or military command. As Eisenhower stated, in Chafe’s words, the government “should be liberal when it came to human beings, conservative when it comes to spending.”37 But Eisenhower’s second term, especially during 1957, would be long and difficult. The economy was headed into recession, the president had to deal with the contentious Little

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Rock, Arkansas, school desegregation, and the Soviet Union launched its Sputnik satellites, followed by the embarrassing failure of the US Vanguard rocket a month later. Eisenhower tried to minimize the Soviet accomplishments, but many Americans were fearful that he was trying to conceal American military weakness.38 The Executive Branch During his first year in office, Eisenhower presented Congress with plans to reorganize ten agencies of the executive branch. The most important was the creation of the Department of Health, Education, and Welfare in early 1953, which would be led by the second woman to hold a cabinet secretariat, Oveta Culp Hobby. Coming from a prominent and wealthy political family in Texas, Hobby was part of a business-friendly administration, jokingly called “eight millionaires and a plumber” by The New Republic; the plumber being Martin Durkin, president of the AFL’s plumbers and steamfitters union, who became the secretary of labor.39 The other administrative reorganization plans all were implemented as well. In addition, the Small Business Administration (1953) and the Federal Aviation Administration (1958) were also created.40 The federal budget, which soared during World War II, had been reduced drastically during the post-war years; but with the Korean War, the federal budget again ballooned. For Fiscal Year 1953, the budget was $80 billion ($779 billion in 2020 dollars), with the defense expenditures claiming a lion’s share, $56.9 billion ($554 billion in 2020), or 71 percent. By Fiscal Year 1960, the federal budget had grown to $97.3 billion ($855 billion in 2020), with the defense segment down to $53.3 billion ($468 billion in 2020), roughly 55 percent of the entire budget. By contrast, the Fiscal Year 2019 federal budget was $6.6 trillion, with defense expenditures at $750 billion, or 13.6 percent. In the 1950s, the nation’s capital was still fundamentally a southern city, full of racial restrictions, tensions, and prejudices. E. Frederic Morrow, an African American who became a White House assistant to Eisenhower, was stunned when he first came to the capital. White cab drivers would not pick him up, he couldn’t eat at white restaurants or stay at white hotels, he certainly couldn’t find an apartment in the white sections of the city. Morrow was even more stunned by the treatment he received from executive branch officials and staffers, with daily humiliations, insults, the hands-off treatment, and inability to have access to the president.41

The Congress Only during the Eighty-third Congress (1953–1955) did Republicans have control of both the House and Senate. For the remaining legislative sessions, Democrats held majorities (albeit slim at times) in both the House and the Senate. Then during the Eighty-sixth Congress (1959–1961), Democrats took solid control in both chambers, with sixty-three new Democrats in the House, giving them a 283–153 majority and fifteen new Democratic senators, for a 64–34 majority in that chamber.42 Several Democrats eager for legislative reform were elected, including John Brademas (Indiana), Robert Kastenmeier (Wisconsin), James O’Hara (Michigan), and Ken Hechler (West Virginia). In the Senate, several reformers were also elected: Eugene McCarthy (Minnesota), Edmund Muskie (Maine), and Philip Hart (Michigan). The pressure from the new freshman class of 1958 led Majority Leader Lyndon B. Johnson to reward them with desirable committee and subcommittee assignments, further spreading out power and influence.43 Indeed, with the wave of new Democratic membership in 1958, Congress now posed significant hurdles for the Republican president. During his last two years in office, Eisenhower

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would face “an energetic Congress and the greatest opposition on Capitol Hill that any president had yet faced in the twentieth century.”44 Southern lawmakers continued to hold the greatest number of Democratic seats. In 1950, there were no southern Republican senators and just two Republican House members out of 105 in the southern delegation. Commenting on the Republican Party, political scientists Earl Black and Merle Black observed that “nowhere else in the United States had a major political party been so feeble for so many decades.”45 Altogether, of the 234 Democrats in the Eightyfifth Congress (1957–1959), 134 came from the South—a bigger number than from all other regions combined.46 The consequences for public policy were plainly evident: it would be difficult, if not impossible, for Congress to enact tough, enforceable protections for African Americans in the face of entrenched racial discrimination. During the 1950s, in the Senate Office Building (later named the Russell Senate Office Building), some 1,100 individuals labored—personal staff of senators, committee and administrative staff, maintenance workers, and ninety-six senators. Johnson biographer Robert Caro described the magnificent marble building at mid-century: “a place of courtesy, of courtliness, of dignity, or restraint, of refinement and of uncompromising austerity and rigidity. Its corridors were corridors of power—of the Senate brand of power, cold and hard.”47 Leadership in the Senate Robert Taft reluctantly agreed to be Senate majority leader when Congress assembled in January 1953; seven months later, he died of cancer, at the age of sixty-four. Taking his place was William F. Knowland of California, described as humorless and bullheaded, and far less inclined to work with Eisenhower than Taft. The Eighty-third Congress (1953–1955) was unusual for the razor-thin majority held by Senate Republicans. Oregon’s Wayne L. Morse, once a Republican, now considered himself an Independent; Taft’s Ohio replacement was a Democrat, and during the session nine senators died, and with each change the party balanced shifted. Many of the Senate Republicans were intent on repudiating the New Deal measures enacted during the past two decades. Conservatives introduced 107 constitutional amendments, trying to undo the New Deal; every one of those attempts failed.48 With Democrats in control after the 1956 elections, Lyndon Johnson, at forty-six years old, became the youngest Senate majority leader. With cunning, wile, and sheer political force, Johnson was determined to use his office to counterbalance the grip of committee chairs, who were many years his senior. It fell to Vice President Richard Nixon to “reconcile the irreconcilable” in the Republican Party—the eastern, internationalist wing represented by Thomas Dewey and the anticommunist, conservative, isolationist wing of Robert Taft and his successors. Nixon tried to appease all sides, but it simply did not work for him. “From the moment [Nixon] arrived in Washington,” wrote journalist David Halberstam, “he exuded such odor of personal ambition that the old order was offended.” Barry Goldwater later wrote that Nixon was “the most dishonest individual I ever met in my life.”49 Estes Kefauver received widespread publicity from his 1950–1951 organized crime investigations, using them as a launching pad for an unsuccessful presidential nomination bid in 1952 and the Democratic vice-presidential nod in 1956. He was also known for sporting a coonskin cap, capitalizing on the Disney-inspired Davey Crockett craze in the mid-1950s. Crockett, frontiersman and one-time member of Congress from Kefauver’s Tennessee, was celebrated as the “king of the wild frontier.”

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One of the organizing principles in Congress was seniority: length of service, not talent, not temperament, not ability, was the vehicle for reaching the chairmanship. The chairmen were “masters of their committees,” arranging agendas, appointing subcommittees, deciding if and when to hold meetings, approving the lists of approved witnesses, authorizing staff studies, and, importantly, presiding over meetings. One of the key powers was to “pigeonhole” proposed offending legislation, making sure it never reached committee level or was delayed indefinitely.50 Leadership in the House During the Eighty-third Congress, Joseph Martin of Massachusetts reclaimed the speakership and Charles Halleck (Republican—Indiana) became the majority leader. Halleck became Eisenhower’s principal ally and his spokesman in the House; however, Martin and Halleck were “barely on speaking terms.” Eisenhower was frustrated by conservative Republicans who fought against his moderate policies and tactics and the infighting within his own party. Historian Robert V. Remini observed that the Republican majorities during the first two years of the Eisenhower administration, 1953–1955, “never established real command of the Congress.”51 Late in his second term, Eisenhower confided to his secretary Ann Whitman, “I don’t know why anyone should be a member of the Republican Party.”52 Eisenhower had a much better relationship with the Democratic leadership, when Sam Rayburn returned to the speakership during the Eighty-fourth Congress (1955–1957). Eisenhower grew up in Denison, Texas, in Rayburn’s congressional district. They had known, admired, and respected each other for years. Rayburn had affectionately called Eisenhower “Captain Ike.” As a measure of the comity between the two, Rayburn, the Democrat, told Eisenhower, the Republican, that he should know more about what it took to defend this country than practically anyone and that if he would send up a budget for the amount he thought was necessary to put the country in a position to defend ourselves against attack, I would promise to deliver 95 percent of the Democratic votes in the House.53 Political scientist Barbara Sinclair observed that Rayburn, “the most highly regarded Speaker of the committee government era, was permissive, informal, and highly personal” relying on “personal persuasion and the members’ sense of obligation.”54 House committee chairman Howard W. (Judge) Smith (Democrat—Virginia) was particularly skilled at obstruction and delay. First elected to Congress in 1930, Smith was chairman of the House Rules Committee from 1955 to 1967. Like other southern lawmakers, he was adamantly opposed to civil rights legislation, halting it any way he could. In his memoirs, future speaker Thomas P. (Tip) O’Neill (Democrat—Massachusetts) described Smith as “a taciturn man who used to wear rimless glasses and an old-fashioned wing collar. He was also an arrogant son of a bitch, and an ultraconservative who was no more a Democrat than the man in the moon.”55 Smith’s power was somewhat curtailed during the 1960s with an expansion of the Rules Committee, but he remained a potent force of opposition to civil rights reform until he was defeated in Democratic primary in 1966.56

The Judiciary When Chief Justice Fred Vinson died in September 1953, President Eisenhower named California governor Earl Warren as his replacement. Warren was first chosen as a recess

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appointment in October (at the beginning of the court’s term) and then was confirmed for the permanent post in March 1954. Warren’s selection would be an auspicious one, with major decisions coming from the court during his full tenure (1953–1969) as presiding justice. Several new justices joined the court. Following the death of Robert Jackson in 1954, Eisenhower nominated John Marshall Harlan II, the grandson of Supreme Court justice John Marshall Harlan. Harlan II, a Republican, had been a Rhodes Scholar, then mostly engaged in private practice, but served one year on the US Court of Appeals before being chosen by Eisenhower. He retired from the court in 1971. Sherman Minton retired in 1956; William J. Brennan, Jr., a Democrat from New Jersey, was chosen as his replacement. Brennan had been chief justice of the New Jersey Supreme Court for four years prior to joining the high court. He served until his retirement in 1990. Many of the most important decisions were written by Brennan, whom his biographers called “the most forceful and effective liberal ever to serve on the Court.”57

Photo 6.1 William J. Brennan (1906–1997), Supreme Court justice, author of a significant number of major constitutional decisions. Source: US Supreme Court via Library of Congress.

Stanley F. Reed retired in 1957 and was replaced by Charles E. Whittaker, a Republican from Kansas. Whittaker had been a judge of a US Court of Appeals before joining the Court and served until his retirement in 1962. Potter Stewart, a Republican from Ohio, replaced Harold H. Burton, who retired in 1958. Stewart had been a judge for four years on a US Court of Appeals; he retired in 1981. Remaining of the Supreme Court during this era were Felix Frankfurter, Hugo Black, William O. Douglas, all of whom were appointed by Franklin Roosevelt. Tom Clark, appointed by Truman, also served during this entire period. Many important decisions were handed down by the Warren Court, but nearly all of them came during the next era, the 1960s. The most important Supreme Court decisions during the 1950s involved public school desegregation, the Brown v. Board of Education cases (1954 and 1955) and Cooper v. Aaron (1958), discussed more fully below.

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KEY POLICIES ENACTED During this era, the focus was primarily on international relations, but there were a number of important domestic policy decisions made. Through the Submerged Lands Act (1953) and the Outer Continental Shelf Lands Act (1953), Congress settled the contentious question of who owned the rights to potentially lucrative offshore oil and gas deposits. Coastal states would now own the submerged lands and their resources, while the federal government would have control of the seabed of the continental shelf beyond those lands. This removed federal control from at least $40 billion of offshore oil lands, and prompted the New York Times to regard the legislation as “one of the greatest and surely the most unjustified give-away program in all the history of the United States.”58 Through the Atomic Energy Act (1954), the federal government encouraged the development of commercial nuclear power. One of the two great public works projects during this era was the St. Lawrence Seaway, a 189-mile series of locks and dams between Montreal and Lake Ontario, which has been considered one of the “most challenging engineering feats in history.” It was a joint Canadian–American operation, with Canada assuming three-quarters of the cost of the $470.3 million project. The Seaway was opened for navigation in 1959.59 The other major public works project, discussed below, is the Interstate highway system. Congress also passed the Labor-Management Reporting and Disclosure Act (LandrumGriffin Act), designed to regulate the internal affairs of labor unions, providing a “bill of rights” to protect rank-and-file workers.

Immigrants and Refugees Operation Wetback Immigrant and farm labor from Mexico and other Latin countries continued to be a major issue. In 1953, the US Border Patrol had apprehended over one million Mexican nationals who had entered the United States illegally.60 Eisenhower’s attorney general, Herbert Brownell, Jr., testified before Congress that, in June 1953, the Border Patrol arrested and deported some 50,000 illegal migrants near Los Angeles; 60,000 in August; and 65,000 in September. Along with the arrests, Brownell wanted to beef up the border patrol by sending troops to assist them at border crossings.61 A year later, the New York Times noted in January 1954 that illegal “wetbacks” were pouring into the United States, at a rate of one every thirty seconds: “Two Every Minute Across the Border: Mexican ‘Wetbacks’ Continue to Invade US in an Unending—and Uncontrollable—Stream,” the headline read.62 The Brownell initiative was soon called “Operation Wetback,” with Lt. General Joseph M. Swing, the recently appointed commissioner of the Immigration and Naturalization Service, in charge. Using military tactics, well over a million migrant workers—some American citizens—were rounded up and removed to Mexico. During the first year of its roundups, Operation Wetback “returned” over 1 million migrant workers, and during its second year, 1955, about a quarter of a million workers were sent to Mexico. The program was highly controversial, with many American agricultural interests objecting to the economic impact of losing cheap foreign labor. While the emphasis was on rounding up and deporting immigrants, Congress did not pass any legislation that would punish corporate agricultural interests that hired illegal laborers. The pejorative term “wetback” (meaning an immigrant who waded or swam across the Rio Grande River) was commonly used in newspapers, on the Senate floor, and even in official White House documents.

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Refugee Relief At his first state of the union address, in January 1953, Eisenhower argued that current immigration law did “in fact discriminate” and that a new policy should “guard our legitimate interests and be faithful to our basic ideas of freedom and fairness to all.”63 Congress then passed the Refugee Relief Act (1953), permitting 214,000 refugees to enter the United States. This legislation filled in for the Displaced Persons Act, which expired in 1952, and granted admission to persons who were blocked by the immigration quotas established by the restrictive McCarran-Walter immigration act. While the Refugee Relief Act passed by voice vote in the Senate, one voice loudly stood in opposition. Senator McCarran objected: We have in the United States today hard-core, indigestible blocs which have not become integrated into the American way of life, but which, on the contrary are its deadly enemies. … Today, as never before, untold millions are storming our gates for admission and those gates are cracking under the strain.64 In signing the legislation, Eisenhower took a far more generous view of humanity: “This action demonstrates again America’s traditional concern for the homeless, the persecuted and the less fortunate of other lands. It is a dramatic contrast to the tragic events taking place in East Germany and in other captive nations.”65 Significance of these Policies The focus on Mexican workers and refugees underscored racial and cultural tensions that would again and again be tested in federal law, the courts, and through executive action in the decades to follow.

Racial Justice Thousands of courageous civil rights activists, black and white, struggled to change discriminatory law, custom, and practice. They were aided by increased media coverage which began turning the nation’s attention to the ugliest of its racial problems. However, thousands, millions, more were determined to keep the status quo and its inherent, systemic racism, demanding that their representatives in Congress fight to uphold the threatened “southern way of life.” The battle for racial justice was most effectively fought in the federal courts. It was the strategy of the NAACP and its allies to strike segregation where it would hurt the most for states to develop alternative remedies based on the conceit of “separate but equal.” During the 1940s, they won victories in cases involving law schools, graduate, and professional education. Now, it was time to tackle the biggest challenge, racial segregation at the elementary and secondary level. The most important Supreme Court cases during this era were the Brown v. Board of Education decisions in 1954 and 1955. Together they were two of the most influential decisions in the court’s history. Five school desegregation cases, some beginning in the late 1940s, were consolidated into the first Brown case. In every instance, the lower federal courts had turned against them and none reversed the Plessy decision which established the “separate but equal” doctrine. Indeed, the schools were separate, but by no stretch of the imagination were they

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equal. Historian James T. Patterson wrote that these plaintiffs “were in the vanguard of the most powerful and inspiring social movement of modern American history.”66 Oral argument in Brown began in December 1952, with the Court under the leadership of Chief Justice Fred Vinson. Vinson, a Kentuckian, a “long faced man with bushy eyebrows and deep pouches under the eyes,” was reluctant to rock the boat and displease the South. According to Richard Kluger, “little evidence has been uncovered to suggest that Vinson was willing to vote against segregation.”67 Neither were Stanley Reed, a fellow Kentuckian, nor Tom Clark, a Texan, prepared to overturn Plessy. The courtroom was jammed, with 400 more people lined up in the corridors hoping to catch a glimpse of history. But the Court did not issue an opinion; rather, it ordered a rehearing of the cases for the beginning of the October 1953 term. In the meantime, a new president had been sworn in, and on September 8, 1953, Vinson died of a heart attack at the age of sixty-three. Upon hearing of Vinson’s death, Justice Frankfurter—no admirer of his departed Kentucky colleague—told a former clerk, “This is the first indication I have ever had that there is a God.”68 Within weeks of Vinson’s death, Eisenhower chose the popular three-term governor of California, Earl Warren as the new chief justice. Warren, a recess appointment, was not confirmed by the full Senate until March 1954, but he immediately got to work. While Warren had been California’s attorney general, he had never served as a jurist. He did, however, have well-tuned political skills. Soon after assuming his new role, Warren was reaching out to his new colleagues, mending fences, listening to their ideas and complaints.

Photo 6.2 Earl Warren (1891–1974), Chief Justice of the United States, who presided over an extraordinary period of Supreme Court decisions. Source: Harris & Ewing Collection via Library of Congress.

In December 1953, a new round of oral arguments was set: three days of exhaustive hearings. Armed with impressive constitutional and historical research, Thurgood Marshall and his colleagues69 were facing a formidable opponent, John W. Davis—former congressman, solicitor general in the Wilson administration, ambassador to Great Britain, Democratic candidate for president in 1924, and perhaps most impressively, a veteran litigator of 250 cases argued before the Supreme Court. In 1954, seventeen southern and border states required the segregation (de jure segregation) of the races in public schools. Four other states—Arizona, Kansas, New Mexico, and

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Wyoming—permitted local communities to impose segregation.70 De facto segregation of schools—not required by law, but plainly evident in fact—was widespread throughout the rest of the country. Most important for Warren was that the much-anticipated opinion be unanimous, and it was a testament to his political skills that unanimity was secured. On May 17, 1954, the chief justice read the opinion with a firm, clear voice. It was just eleven pages long, and part of its justification relied on the research findings of psychologist Kenneth Clark: that racial segregation leads to feelings of inferiority and psychologically damages the motivation of black children to learn. Thus, the court concluded: “Whatever may have been the extent of psychological knowledge at the time of Plessy v. Ferguson, this finding is amply supported by modern authority.”71 Here the court referred to what had become known as the famous, or infamous, footnote 11, which cited the psychological findings of Clark and others. For the Court, the fundamental question was this: “Does segregation of children in public schools solely on the basis of race, even though the physical facilities and other ‘tangible’ factors may be equal, deprive the children of the minority group of equal education opportunities?” The answer was clear: “We believe that it does.” Then came the pronouncement that became one of the most quoted and consequential in Supreme Court history: “We conclude that in the field of public education the doctrine of ‘separate but equal’ has no place. Separate educational facilities are inherently unequal.” Following the decision, Thurgood Marshall, lead counsel for the NAACP, later recalled: “I was so happy I was numb.” He predicted that total desegregation of public schools would be accomplished within five years. But he and other advocates for reform would be bitterly disappointed. On the same day that Brown was handed down, Virginia governor Thomas B. Stanley spoke about maintaining calm and bringing together a panel of state leaders to form a plan “acceptable to our citizens and in keeping with the edict of the Court.”72 But soon pressure built from segregationists and Stanley declared: “I shall use every legal means at my command to continue segregated schools in Virginia.”73 When pressed by reporters, Eisenhower awkwardly responded that he was duty-bound to support the decision: “The Supreme Court has spoken, and I am sworn to uphold their—the constitutional processes in this country, and I am trying. I will obey.”74 But the president was hardly enthusiastic. Throughout his tenure, Eisenhower never endorsed Brown, nor did he publicly denounce it. Historian William I. Hitchcock observed that at the beginning of his second term in office, Eisenhower remained “deeply ambivalent” about the role the federal government would play in civil rights reforms.75 But as historian David A. Nichols points out, the most compelling evidence of Eisenhower’s support for civil rights came in his actions, not his words. Before Brown, Eisenhower ordered the desegregation of schools for military dependents, and immediately after Brown I, he directed the commissioners of Washington, DC, to make its public schools the model of desegregation.76 Nonetheless, complete desegregation in the South, Eisenhower believed, would take years, if not decades, to achieve, and would require education and persuasion, not just pronouncements from the federal judiciary.77 Brown I, as it soon was labeled, settled the constitutional issue; now the implementation had to be worked out. The Court invited the US attorney general and the attorneys general of all the states affected, and others, to present their views in a second case. In Brown II, decided one year and two weeks after Brown I, on May 31, 1955, the Supreme Court issued its finding: desegregation should proceed “with all deliberate speed.”78

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But “with all deliberate speed” quickly became a euphemism for obstruction and delay, and in several southern states political leaders and opinion writers called for “massive resistance.” In March 1956, the House and Senate were presented with “A Declaration of Constitutional Principles,” a document signed by nineteen southern senators and eighty-one southern representatives decrying the Supreme Court’s rulings. The press dubbed the document “The Southern Manifesto.”79 The embittered southern lawmakers declared that: This unwarranted exercise of power by the Court, contrary to the Constitution, is creating chaos and confusion in the States principally affected. It is destroying the amicable relations between the White and Negro races that have been created through 90 years of patient effort by the good people of both races. It has planted hatred and suspicion where there has been heretofore friendship and understanding.80 Obstruction and defiance soon arose throughout the South, with the early focus on Little Rock, Arkansas.81 Arkansas governor Orval E. Faubus had been elected as a progressive advocate of economic development, but he also operated behind the scenes to rally his fellow Arkansas lawmakers to support the Southern Manifesto. At the beginning of the September 1957 school year, in defiance of a federal court order, Faubus called out the Arkansas National Guard and blocked nine African American students from entering Little Rock Central High School. Confronting the nine students was a mob of angry whites. One of the nine, Carlotta Walls LaNier, recalled her shock at seeing the mob. “There must have been hundreds of people—White mothers with faces contorted in anger, White fathers pumping their firsts in the air and shouting, White teenagers and children waving Confederate flags and mimicking their parents.” LaNier continued, “The scene felt surreal. With everyone screaming and jeering at once, their words sounded muddled, except for one: nigger …nigger …nigger.”82 The governor’s actions of delay and defiance only added fuel to the already incendiary situation. This put the president in a bind. “I can’t imagine any set of circumstances that would ever induce me to send federal troops to enforce the orders of a federal court,” Eisenhower said earlier in the year, “because I believe that [the] common sense of America will never require it.”83 In October, however, Eisenhower federalized the Arkansas National Guard (thus removing it from the authority of Faubus) and dispatched to Arkansas 1,000 paratroopers from the 101st Airborne Division to protect the African American students and to reinforce the federal court order to desegregate. Eisenhower told journalist John L. Steele of Time magazine that sending troops to Little Rock was the hardest decision, save possibly D-Day, that he had ever had to make. “But Goddam it, it was the only thing I could do. … These damned hooligans … I was trying to speak last night to the reasonable people, the decent people of the South.”84 Senator Wayne Morse (Democrat—Oregon) and Patrick V. McNamara (Democrat— Michigan) praised Eisenhower’s actions. Gilbert Fite, biographer of Georgia senator Richard Russell, observed that “probably no one was more angry at Eisenhower’s [Little Rock] actions” than Russell. The rights of American citizens, Russell wrote in a lengthy telegram to the president, were being violated, “by applying tactics which must have been copied from … the office of Hitler’s Storm Troopers.” Russell released his telegram to the press before it was received in the White House. Eisenhower was furious. To Russell’s crude and bizarre reference to Hitler, the president replied that in Germany troops were used to achieve the goals of “a ruthless dictator,” while in Little Rock American troops were used “to preserve the institutions of free government.”85

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Photo 6.3 Richard B. Russell, Jr. (1897–1971), long-serving Georgia senator and leader of Southern opposition to civil rights reforms. Source: United States Senate Historical Office.

From late September to late November, the 101st Airborne unit remained in Little Rock, then was gradually replaced by the Arkansas National Guard. Not until May 8, 1958, did Eisenhower announce that the Guard would be released at the conclusion of the school year. Faubus, who probably would not have won re-election before the Little Rock episode, decisively won, then won again for a fourth, fifth, and sixth term as governor. White folks in Arkansas, and perhaps segregationists throughout the world, had found their hero. A Gallup poll that year listed Faubus as one of the ten most admired men in the world.86 The authority of the Supreme Court again had been threatened. Normally, a new Court term begins on the first Monday in October, but these were not ordinary times. The Court heard oral argument for the Little Rock case on September 11, 1958, decided it the next day, and announced its opinion on September 29. Thus, in Cooper v. Aaron,87 a unanimous decision—with each justice affixing his name as author, an unprecedented action—the Court responded decisively to the direct attack on its authority. The justices blamed Faubus and the Arkansas state legislature for causing delay and defiance by refusing to follow the clear mandate of Brown II: the constitutional rights of the children “can neither be nullified openly and directly by state legislators or state executive or judicial officers, nor nullified indirectly by them through evasive schemes for segregation whether attempted ‘ingeniously or ingenuously.’”88 For the first time, the Department of Justice, through the Solicitor General, appeared as friend of the court in an implementation case, and vigorously asserted that neither intimidation nor delay would be tolerated.89 But that did not stop Faubus and his segregationist allies in Arkansas. The governor closed all of the schools in Little Rock during 1958–1959 rather than desegregate them. In many areas, well over a decade would pass without desegregation, and, as seen, the unusual action of closing down public schools entirely in Prince Edward County, Virginia, for five years, would take place. In the 1964 Supreme Court decisions that required the reopening of the schools, a unanimous court determined “the time for mere ‘deliberate speed’ has run out.”90

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Significance of these Policies In 1968, fourteen years after Brown I, the Court once again declared, “the time for ‘mere deliberate speed’” had expired and now was the time for school officials “to come forward with a plan that promises realistically to work, and promises to realistically to work now.”91 The federal government did not have the enforcement tools to compel the desegregation of public schools until passage of Title VI of the Civil Rights Act (1964) and the Elementary and Secondary Education Act (1965), with its provision for withholding federal funds from segregating school districts.92 But that authority was hobbled through a series of court decisions culminating in Milliken v. Bradley (1974), a school busing decision which “effectively repudiated” the mandate in Brown.93 In 1870, the Fifteenth Amendment to the US Constitution was ratified, giving African American males the right to vote. For the next ninety-five years that right was thwarted, fought against, and suppressed in areas throughout the South, rendering the amendment toothless, and making a mockery of this constitutional protection. In 1954 and 1955, the celebrated Brown decisions broke the legal and constitutional chains of racial segregation in schools. But defiance, delay, bluster, and threats crippled Brown and the authority of the Supreme Court to impose constitutional protections. Sixty years after Brown, public schools throughout the South have gone back to segregated systems. Many school systems which achieved hard-fought integration goals under court order had been released from their legal requirements and judicial oversight, and have quietly and effectively begun to resegregate.94

Ribbons of Highway With a growing number of American families able to afford automobiles and with the pent-up demand for new cars following World War II, it was apparent that states and the federal government would have to pay more attention to highways and transportation infrastructure. The federal government had been in the business of funding highways since 1916 with the enactment of the first Federal-Aid Highway Act. Over the years, the law provided states with money for road building and repair and became an essential boost to their transportation budgets. The most important federal official during the early years of the twentieth century was Thomas H. McDonald, the chief of the Bureau of Public Roads (BPR) from 1919 to 1953. In 1939, the BPR produced Toll Roads and Free Roads, a wide-ranging report, recommending a comprehensive nationwide system of low-cost, non-toll roads covering 26,700 miles which would connect the downtown centers of the country’s major cities. The next year, the Pennsylvania Turnpike toll road was dedicated; it was an engineering triumph and an instant hit with motorists: no stop signs, no intersections, and no speed limits. Soon five other states—New York, Maryland, Maine, Florida, and Illinois—created their toll road commissions. By 1942, a coalition of 240 automobile manufacturers, oil companies, unions, state highway administrators, and automobile clubs was meeting secretly in Washington, DC, to lobby for better roads. This coalition, dubbed the Road Gang, managed to persuade Congress to spend more on primary and secondary roads, but there simply weren’t enough funds available for a nationwide interstate highway system. By 1949, over 37,000 miles of US highways were examined and found to be in need of repair and standardization. Many of the roads were decades old, with varying widths and different types of pavement, and many of the bridges were substandard. Eisenhower had first-hand appreciation of reliable highways. During World War II, he was impressed by the German Autobahnen, Hitler’s military highways. In his memoirs, he wrote, “I

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recognized then [upon seeing the Autobahnen], that the United States was behind in highway construction. In the middle 1950s, I did not want us to fall still further behind.”95 Leapfrogging the BPR and a slow-moving Congress, Eisenhower took the lead by proposing a $50 billion, ten-year highway program at the 1954 annual meeting of the National Governor’s Association at Lake George, New York. The governors were given no advanced notice of the president’s announcement, but the effect was “electrifying.”96 The President’s Advisory Committee on a National Highway Program, headed by Eisenhower’s friend and Army colleague, General Lucius D. Clay, held hearings on federal road construction. The highway lobby was out in force, anticipating the sweet smell of federal construction money, pork barrel spending, and easy profits. The Clay Committee released its report, Ten-Year National Highway Program, in January 1955, calling for a $110 billion program for primary, secondary, and urban highways and an interstate highway system. It was an extraordinary amount of funds (considering that the federal budget in Fiscal Year 1956 was $70.6 billion),97 and was bound to be controversial. Yet it became the guidepost for Congress during its next six months of deliberation. But how to pay for such a massive infrastructure project? Should the interstate highway system be funded through an immense bond issuance, through a system of self-financed tolls, some form of higher taxes, or perhaps a users’ fee? Should the funds come from a single source, like a gasoline tax, or should they come from the general revenue funds? Should this be solely a federal project, or should states also contribute to the funding? Several high-level boards and advisors, including the Clay Committee, were appointed by Eisenhower, but their solutions relied on Wall Street financial analyses, and did not focus on the messy politics of road building and pork barrel spending. If Senator Harry Byrd had his way, the system would be funded on a pay-as-you-go system: special fees, gas taxes, and other mechanisms. That’s the way Virginia had financed its roads for over seventy years, he told the Public Works Committee. Finally, breaking a four-month deadlock, the Highway Act of 1956 was introduced in the House by George H. Fallon (Democrat—Maryland) and T. Hale Boggs (Democrat—Louisiana) and Senator Albert A. Gore, Sr. (Democrat—Tennessee) in the Senate. Francis C. Turner, a senior administrator of the Bureau of Public Roads, was the principal liaison between the BPR and the key congressional committees.98 Title I of the Act encompassed the Federal-Aid Highway Act of 1956, which authorized nearly $31 billion in federal and state funds over a thirteen-year period; $26 billion would be provided by the federal government, the remainder from the states. Title II was the Highway Revenue Act of 1956, crafted by Representative Boggs, which dealt with financing. The funds would come from taxes (3 cents) on every gallon of gas and from user fees, mostly from trucking companies. In 1956, a gallon of gasoline cost an average of $0.30 ($2.87 in 2020 dollars). The American Petroleum Institute and other petroleum industry interest objected strongly to the tax, but everyone else was on board. The House approved the legislation by an overwhelming vote of 388–19, while the Senate approved it by voice vote. As historian James A. Dunn, Jr. noted, the legislation rolled through Congress “like a tractor trailer on a downgrade.”99 The motoring public, aided by a powerful highway lobby, clamored for better roads, a popular president pushed for better highway transportation, and a willing Congress saw this as the mother of all public works projects. The interstate system would be self-funded with user fees and gasoline taxes. The giant construction project came at the propitious time in American history: before pesky environmentalist decried the destruction of ecologically sensitive areas, before historic preservationists sounded the alarm against the tearing up of historic urban areas, and before civil rights advocates cried out against the ripping up of whole minority communities for the advancement of multi-lane urban connections. Nor in 1956 were urban

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transportation advocates strong enough to claim a significant piece of the overall transportation budget. Those fights would come later, particularly in the 1960s and 1970s. The interstate highway program, however, got off to a rocky start, with high-profile investigations in 1957 and 1960 into fraud and abuse in highway contracting, including bidrigging and price-fixing, and graft involving land transactions in twenty states. Further, the putative rationale for such highways was to promote America’s defense and the ability of heavy military equipment to be moved long distance quickly and efficiently. Unfortunately, the 14foot minimum clearance for interstate bridges and overpasses was too short for many of the military weapons systems when transported by truck. In 1960, the standards were reset at a 16foot minimum for interstate structures, making 2,200 bridges and overpasses obsolete.100 Significance of these Policies Despite early troubles, the interstate highway system has become the crown jewel in American surface transportation. It has transformed cities and suburbs, made driving far safer and reliable, and, over the years, Congress has pumped billions of dollars into the construction, maintenance, and improvement of the interstate system. While comprising just 1 percent of America’s total highway miles, the interstate system carries 23 percent of the country’s motor vehicle traffic. One study in 1996 estimated that 187,000 lives were saved over the first forty years of the system’s history thanks to the limited-access, multiple-lane configurations of the highways. By 1992, 99.7 percent of the interstate highway system had been completed. However, the challenges continued to be daunting: a gasoline tax that hadn’t been adjusted in decades, growing evidence of substandard highway infrastructure, and a reluctance of federal lawmakers to address the transportation crisis head on.101 Sixty-five years after its enactment, much needed funds for repair and replacement have been allocated through the Infrastructure Investment and Jobs Act (2021).

Protecting the Elderly and Those with Disabilities The first social security funds were distributed during the early 1940s, with relatively small benefits given to a limited number of recipients. In the 1950s, there were significant increases in both the amount of benefits and the number of persons eligible to receive them. The first major increase came in 1950, when President Truman signed into law a package that broadened the coverage of social security, adding 10 million recipients, including farm and domestic workers, certain self-employed individuals like doctors, lawyers, engineers, and other professionals, and workers in Puerto Rico and the Virgin Islands. On a voluntary basis, state and local governments without their own retirement system could be added to the federal program. In addition, the benefits were raised by 77 percent. With this expansion, three out of four American workers would now be covered.102 In his state of the union address in January 1953, President Eisenhower recommended that “OASI [Old Age Survivors Insurance] should promptly be expanded to cover millions of citizens who have been left out of the Social Security system.”103 Congress was in the mood to help. During each of the following sessions, social security benefits were increased and new beneficiaries were added. Then during the 1956 session, Congress took a major step by including disability as a category of federal protection. This provision had been argued for (and against) since Social Security was first enacted in 1935 but disability insurance was not included in the original program. In the 1956 legislation, “disability” was defined as the “inability to engage in any substantial gainful activity by reason of any medically determinable physical or mental

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impairment which can be expected to result in death or to be of long-continued and indefinite duration.” These amendments provided, among other benefits, full social security coverage for persons aged fifty to sixty-four who were permanently and totally disabled, benefits for women at age sixty-two, and coverage to disabled children under the age of eighteen. To pay for the increased benefits, the social security tax rates were increased for both employers and employees to 4.25 percent. The law created a separate Disability Trust Fund, and the social security program then became OASDI (Old Age, Survivors, and Disability Insurance).104 Two years later, in the Social Security Amendments of 1958, requirements were loosened and benefits were now provided for the dependents, spouses, and children of disabled workers. Then the 1960 amendments eliminated the age fifty requirement for eligibility for disability benefits and eliminated the six-month waiting period for a disability that had recurred after an apparent recovery.105 Significance of these Policies The Disability program grew dramatically during the 1970s, with the institution of the cost-ofliving adjustment, and more persons seeking disability coverage. So, too, did the administrative burdens of processing claims amid staff reductions. From 1980 to 2011, the percentage of workers claiming Social Security Disability Insurance (SSDI) had doubled. In some states, struggling with poverty, disability insurance has become an important component of general federal assistance. West Virginia has the highest rate, an astounding 15 percent, of workers on disability insurance. Alabama, Kentucky, Louisiana, and Mississippi are the only other states with more than 10 percent of its workers on disability. By contrast, Utah and North Dakota have just 3 percent of their workforce receiving disability insurance.106

Federal Aid to Education During the 1950s, there was a dearth of qualified secondary school teachers. A 1956 survey found that one-third of high school teachers lacked the minimum education, a bachelor’s degree. Teachers’ pay was meager, and many unqualified persons filled vacant slots. In 1955, only 175 qualified high school physics teachers were available throughout the entire nation. The problem extended to the college level as well. One 1954 survey found that the country needed another 35,000 to 40,000 engineers, and that within another decade, another 100,000 scientists and engineers would be required.107 For decades, there had been opposition to the federal government giving aid to education. Public education, whether the college level, high schools, or elementary schools, was the responsibility of state and local governments. Private education, at all levels, was the province of private donors, often church-supported, especially at the elementary and secondary school level. In 1955, Eisenhower asked Congress to provide federal assistance to states for school construction, a four-year $325 million-a-year program, a novel and forward-thinking policy that lawmakers ignored for two sessions. At the same time, the president insisted that the federal government stay out of curricula and instruction. At an April 1957 news conference, he said, I have tried to make it clear time and again that I think the federal government has not any proper role in the operations and in the general maintenance of our public school systems. It belongs to the localities and the states.108 This hands-off approach from policymakers in Congress and in the White House was abruptly challenged. On October 4, 1957, the Soviet Union launched the first earth-orbiting

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satellite. Sputnik was a small aluminum sphere, weighing 184 pounds, carrying no weapon system and no scientific equipment. But its successful launching caught the world by surprise; American reaction varied from “measured anxiety to total hysteria.”109 The Soviets had accomplished this technological triumph, many argued, while America sat on the sidelines. Historian Ryan Boyle observed that “what happened on the fourth of October 1957, was nothing short of a total crisis of confidence in the American way of life.”110 Only the moon landing a decade later and the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989 had a similar impact. Even worse, just a few weeks later, the Soviets launch Sputnik II, a satellite six times bigger, orbiting at a higher altitude. When an American Vanguard Explorer II rocket spectacularly failed on December 6, Senator Lyndon Johnson bemoaned: “How long, how long, oh God, how long will it take us to catch up with the Russians’ two satellites?”111 During the previous three sessions of Congress, the Senate had passed federal aid to education bills, but they all died in the House. Now, some policymakers thought, the challenge of Sputnik might finally spur on federal assistance. There was fear in the public, and among lawmakers and other policymakers, that the Soviet Union was catching up to, or indeed surpassing, the United States in science, mathematics, and technology. For many, advances in Soviet education meant direct threats to American security. After Sputnik, Eisenhower began stressing science and national security in his public statements. Then, in a special message on education delivered to Congress on January 27, 1958, he proposed a four-year, $1 billion, federal assistance program calling for 10,000 national scholarships, 5,500 fellowships, and matching grants for universities to create or expand science programs, with additional grants for science, mathematics, and foreign language instruction.112 In the House and Senate, lawmakers were also busy. On the advice of Stewart McClure, the chief clerk of the Senate Education and Labor Committee, its chairman Lister Hill (Democrat—Alabama) reframed his federal education bill to become a national defense bill. The Senate bill was more generous than the House version, but in the end the National Defense Education Act (NDEA) of 1958 contained many of Eisenhower’s recommendations. The measure passed with broad support in both chambers and was signed into law in September 1958. The NDEA provided $1 billion in federal education assistance over a seven-year period (the 1958 federal defense budget was $41 billion). A third of the money went to loans for graduate and undergraduate students; another third would go to states for matching grants to purchase modern science laboratory equipment; a program of National Defense fellowships was created ($59.4 million) to assist graduate students who would become science teachers; money was also given for the study of languages, everything from German to Russian, Hindi to Chinese. One controversial section, however, required recipients to sign what amounted to a quasiloyalty oath—declaring that not only did they swear allegiance to the United States but that they did not belong to any organization designed to overthrow the government. The American Council of Education, the National Education Association, and the American Association of University Professors all publicly protested. Over twenty colleges and universities refused to participate in NDEA programs because of this clause. Lawrence McKinley Gould, an eminent scientist and president of Carleton College, objected, “We give $6 billion to farmers but don’t expect any loyalty oath.”113 There were objections from the right as well. Senator Barry Goldwater (Republican— Arizona) saw the NDEA as a dangerous tool for increased federal control over education, while Strom Thurmond (Democrat—South Carolina) worried that the federal government would cut off aid to southern schools that racially discriminated (apparently Thurmond was not quite ready to accept the clear mandate from the Supreme Court that such discrimination was unconstitutional).

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Significance of this Policy The NDEA became one of the most successful federal programs in higher education, reaching millions of low-income students, and both public and private colleges and universities. The focus was on mathematics, foreign language, and science education. Funding began in 1958; by 1960, there were 3.6 million students enrolled in higher education; by 1972, that number had more than doubled to 7.5 million students. Much of that increase was due to the funds available through the NDEA.114 The NDEA was extended in 1960 for another two years, with two more extensions in 1962 and 1964.

POLICIES DENIED OR DELAYED

Medical Insurance for the Elderly Poor It might be somewhat unfair to put the Kerr-Mills Act of 1960 in this category of policies denied or delayed, for it was a step toward the eventual enactment of Medicare-Medicaid five years later. Yet, Kerr-Mills (Medical Assistance for the Aged) was a flawed, uneven piece of legislation that could not fulfill even its modest objectives. It was conceived by Wilbur J. Cohen, assistant secretary for legislation at HEW, Senator Robert S. Kerr (Democrat— Oklahoma) and Representative Wilbur D. Mills (Democrat—Arkansas), the chairman of the powerful Ways and Means Committee. Kerr-Mills opened up a new category of recipients, the medically indigent; that is, persons sixty-five years and older who were not receiving old age assistance cash payments, but whose incomes would be “insufficient to meet the costs of necessary medical services.”115 The program was designed for those who were both aged and indigent living in rural areas. The federal government would pay 50 to 80 percent of the funds that states spent on medical assistance to the elderly poor, with the poorest states to receive the highest federal match. The Kerr-Mills program would cover a wide variety of health expenses, from hospital costs to surgeries and doctors’ fees, drugs, and false teeth. However, at the end of its first year in operation, some 60 percent of the recipients came from just three states, Massachusetts, New York, and California, absorbing 90 percent of the available funds. Poor states spent the least on health assistance for the indigent and elderly, and consequently received far less in federal matching funds. Just 1 percent of the elderly indigent population was covered, and there were large inconsistencies and discrepancies in the way the program was administered. Senator Kerr had estimated that some 10 million persons would be protected, but by 1965, the actual number of participants was just 264,687—less than 2 percent of the elderly.116

Watered Down Civil Rights Protections For the first time since Reconstruction, Congress enacted two pieces of legislation, the Civil Rights Act of 1957 and the Civil Rights Act of 1960, to protect the rights of African Americans. The opposition to these laws was fierce and persistent, and through the machinations of the legislative process, the protections became so weakened as to become little more than symbolic gestures. In 1956, Eisenhower and Attorney General Brownell agreed that the Department of Justice would craft and present a civil rights bill, to be introduced at a cabinet meeting. That way, Brownell would be the president’s “civil rights lightning rod,” deflecting blame away from Eisenhower. Days later, the Southern Manifesto was made published, and it became more

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evident that southern lawmakers would fight tooth and nail against any civil rights measures, legislative, judicial, or otherwise. Most importantly, it was an election year, and there was little hope that any civil rights progress could be achieved.117 After the 1956 elections, Eisenhower was on firmer ground. It was time to reintroduce civil rights legislation, with a focus on protecting the right to vote. “Steadily we are moving closer to the goal of fair and equal treatment of citizens without regard to race or color,” Eisenhower said in his January 1957 state of the union address, “but much remains to be done.” Southern lawmakers struck back quickly. They didn’t directly oppose voting rights but concentrated instead on raising alarms about a feared expansion of federal power. They conjured up “a fearful image of federal judges throwing southerners in jail without trial.”118 Majority Leader Lyndon Johnson did his best to thread his way between southern intransigence, northern impatience, and the pleas of civil rights activists to finally, after these many decades, come up with some kind of remedy. He also knew that a Johnson-backed civil rights law would be key to his presidential ambitions. Biographer Robert A. Caro wrote that in the twenty years that Johnson had served in Congress since coming to the House in 1937, he had never supported civil rights legislation—any civil rights legislation … his record was an unbroken one of votes against every civil rights bill that had ever come to a vote: against voting rights bills; against bills that would have struck at job discrimination and at segregation in other areas of America life; even against bills that would have protected Blacks from lynching.119 In the Senate cloakrooms and in private conversations with fellow southern lawmakers, Johnson spoke their language: “Be ready to take up the goddamned nigra bill again,” he told Sam Ervin (Democrat—North Carolina). He had no choice, Johnson said to a group of southern lawmakers in 1957, “I’m on your side, not theirs. But be practical. We’ve got to give the goddamned niggers something.” And to James O. Eastland (Democrat—Mississippi), “we might as well face it. We’re not gonna be able to get out of here until we’ve got some kind of nigger bill.”120 But for Johnson, dreams of the White House beckoned. Southerners could control the Senate, they could have key assignments in the House, but the rest of the country, he reckoned, just would not abide a southern president. Johnson was convinced what held them back was growing northern antipathy to southern white attitudes toward race—sometimes crude and visceral, many times subtle, uniformly condescending and paternalistic, and dead set on keeping African Americans in their place. What could possibly change that perception of southern politicians? Perhaps a southerner—Lyndon Johnson—who would courageously break the mold and steer Congress to a new era of civil rights policy. “In one of the great ironies of modern politics,” wrote historian William Hitchcock, “the Texas senator, a longtime stalwart of southern intransigence, now planned to ride civil rights all the way to the White House.”121 Opponents to the 1957 civil rights measure, particularly Richard Russell, pulled out all stops in fighting against the legislation, especially Title III (which would have given the US attorney general unprecedented authority to file suits to protect constitutional rights). Russell later boasted about weakening the legislation, calling it “the greatest victory of his twenty-five years in the Senate.”122 Segregationist Strom Thurmond, hoping to gum up the legislative process, launched into a record-breaking twenty-four hours and eighteen-minute filibuster, filling ninety-six pages of the Congressional Record with recitals of state election laws, the Declaration of Independence, George Washington’s Farewell speech, and much more.123

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The civil rights bill became law, but most of its important protections and weapons for federal involvement were stripped away. It created a separate Civil Rights Division within the Department of Justice and created a temporary US Commission on Civil Rights (still in existence). Many civil rights advocates and progressive lawmakers were disappointed; so too were segregationists who saw any federal law as an intrusion on states’ rights and the southern way of life. In a letter to Vice President Nixon, Martin Luther King, Jr. conceded, “the present bill is far better than no bill at all.” King thanked Nixon for his efforts and concluded: “I am sure we will soon emerge from the bleak and desolate midnight of man’s inhumanity to man to the bright and glittering daybreak of freedom and justice for all men.”124 Senator Paul Douglas (Democrat—Illinois) was not so charitable: the Civil Rights Act of 1957 was “like soup made from the shadow of a crow which had starved to death.”125 The Commission on Civil Rights issued its first report in 1959, calling for the president to appoint voting registrars in areas where there was blatant voting discrimination against African Americans. If warranted, the registrars would enroll black voters. The reactions from southern leaders, even before the report was released, were predictable: the report was “shocking, extreme, indefensible, irresponsible, radical, vicious, unconstitutional, and obnoxious.”126 The 1960 Civil Rights Act was even weaker than the 1957 legislation. It was, in Caro’s assessment, “a civil rights bill so weak as to be virtually no bill at all.”127 Joseph L. Rauh, Jr., former chairman of both the Americans for Democratic Action and the Leadership Conference on Civil Rights, said of the 1960 bill: “It was a joke. Everybody knew it was a joke. Nobody who was really for civil rights then could have supported it.”128 However, there was some measure of good that came out of the 1960 act. Title III required “every officer of election” in the country to “retain and preserve” all voting records for a period of twenty-two months and produce those records on demand from the US attorney general. Lawyers for attorneys general William P. Rogers in the last year of the Eisenhower administration and Robert F. Kennedy in the new Kennedy administration, over a period of sixteen months, inspected voting records from twenty-six southern counties. What those records revealed was what was long suspected: blatant, pervasive discrimination against African American voters. Some counties demanded blacks take literacy tests but didn’t require whites to do so; others gave different (and easier) questions to whites than to blacks; records showed that illiterate whites (marking their forms with an “x”) were able to pass the literacy test. These records gave conclusive proof that discrimination was occurring in the voting rolls and was used effectively during the Justice Department planning for the Voting Rights Act of 1965.129 At the end of Eisenhower’s second term in office, just 28 percent of southern African Americans had the right to vote; in Mississippi, only 5 percent enjoyed this most basic right of a democracy.130 Civil rights protections for LGBTQ individuals were still decades away. In April 1953, Eisenhower signed Executive Order 10450, which provided a long list of those who would be excluded from government service. Those included persons who were unreliable or untrustworthy, had mental conditions, aided or were sympathetic to saboteurs and revolutionists. Also excluded were persons who practiced “any criminal, infamous, dishonest, immoral, or notoriously disgraceful conduct, habitual use of intoxicants to excess, drug addiction, [or] sexual perversion.” This provision led to the purge of thousands of LGBTQ federal employees. It was not until 1975 that the federal employment prohibition against homosexuals was removed.131

Notes 1 David Halberstam, The Fifties (New York: Villard Books, 1993), ix.

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2 Laura Bradley, “Donald Trump’s All-Consuming Obsession with TV Ratings: A History,” Vanity Fair, January 20, 2017, https://www.vanityfair.com/hollywood/2017/01/donald-trump-ratings (accessed October 2, 2020). 3 America in the 20th Century: 1950–1959, 2nd ed. (New York: Marshall Cavendish, 2003, 1995), 765. 4 James T. Patterson, Grand Expectations: The United States, 1945–1974 (New York: Oxford University Press, 1996), 329. 5 America in the 20th Century: 1950–1959, 772. 6 Jason Beaubien, “Wiping Out Polio: How the US Snuffed Out a Killer,” NPR, October 15, 2012, https://www.npr.org/sections/health-shots/2012/10/16/162670836/wiping-out-polio-how-the-u-ssnuffed-out-a-killer (accessed March 14, 2020). 7 Chester J. Pach, Jr., Dwight D. Eisenhower: Foreign Affairs, Miller Center, University of Virginia, n.d., https://millercenter.org/president/eisenhower/foreign-affairs (accessed November 21, 2019); Jean Edward Smith, Eisenhower in War and Peace (New York: Random House, 2012), 607–33; 686–704; William I. Hitchcock, The Age of Eisenhower: America and the World in the 1950s (New York: Simon and Schuster, 2018), 176–210; 306–40; 456–74. 8 Patterson, Grand Expectations, 327–28; Richard Polenberg, One Nation Divisible: Class, Race, and Ethnicity in the United States Since 1938 (New York: Viking, 1980), 145–46. 9 Frank Stricker, Why America Lost the War on Poverty—and How to Win It (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2007), 9. 10 Stephanie Coontz, The Way We Never Were: American Families and the Nostalgia Trap, rev. ed. (New York: Basic Books, 2016, 1992), 30–31. 11 Oshinsky, A Conspiracy So Immense, 195. 12 Haynes Johnson, The Age of Anxiety: McCarthyism to Terrorism (New York: Harcourt, 2005), 286–87. 13 Cohn became a notorious, truculent, and unrepentant fixer in New York politics and finance. He became the quintessential “fixer.” He was indicted four times during the 1960s and 1970s for perjury, stock swindling, obstruction of justice, bribery, and conspiracy. Three times he beat the rap, the fourth time the jury was hung. He was found to be a tax cheat, and he was finally disbarred. His mantra of “never explain, never apologized” appealed to another young upstart, Donald Trump. Among Cohn’s clients were Trump, Rupert Murdoch, the Roman Catholic Archdiocese of New York, assorted mafia types, including John Gotti, New York Yankees’ George Steinbrenner, and many others. Cohn died of AIDS at the age of fifty-nine in 1986. Michael Kruse, “The Final Lesson Donald Trump Never Learned from Roy Cohn,” Politico, September 19, 2019. 14 Thomas C. Reeves, The Life and Times of Joe McCarthy: A Biography (Lanham: Madison Books, 1997, 1982), 564. 15 Ibid., 564–66. 16 Oshinsky, A Conspiracy So Immense, 164. 17 William S. White, “Flanders Likens McCarthy, Hitler,” New York Times, June 2, 1954. 18 Quoted in Randall B. Woods, LBJ: Architect of American Ambition (New York: Free Press, 2006), 272. 19 R. Alton Lee, Eisenhower and Landrum-Griffin: A Study in Labor-Management Politics (Lexington: University Press of Kentucky, 1990), 45–46. 20 Ronald Sullivan, “Dave Beck, 99, Teamsters Chief, Convicted of Corruption, is Dead,” New York Times, December 28, 1993. 21 Lee, Eisenhower and Landrum-Griffin, 56. See also, Robert F. Kennedy, The Enemy Within: The McClellan Committee’s Crusade Against Jimmy Hoffa and Corrupt Labor Unions (New York: Da Capo Press, 1994, 1960). 22 Among the many books on Hoffa and his disappearance are Charles Brandt, I Hear You Paint Houses: Frank “The Irishman” Sheeran and Closing the Case on Jimmy Hoffa (Hanover: Steerforth, 2016). This account was adopted by Martin Scorsese as the Netflix film The Irishman in 2019, starring Robert De Niro, Al Pacino (as Hoffa), and Joe Pesci. “I hear you paint houses” supposedly was mafia code for “I understand you are willing to kill people.” Tim Ott, “What Happened to Jimmy Hoffa?” Biography.com, https://www.biography.com/news/jimmy-hoffa-disappearance-where-buried (accessed October 9, 2019). 23 James R. Dickenson, “Teamsters, GOP Forge Increasingly Close Links,” Washington Post, July 25, 1985. 24 Lee, Eisenhower and Landrum-Griffin, 63. 25 William Bradford Huie, “The Shocking Story of Approved Killing in Mississippi,” The Murder of Emmett Till, PBS, n.d., http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/amex/till/sfeature/sf_look_confession.html (accessed October 12, 2019).

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26 Darryl Mace, The Remembrance of Emmett Till: Regional Stories and Media Responses to the Black Freedom Struggle (Lexington: University Press of Kentucky, 2014), 79–94; Christopher Metress, ed., The Lynching of Emmett Till: A Documentary Narrative (Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press, 2002). 27 Mace, The Remembrance of Emmett Till, 11. 28 David J. Garrow, “The Origins of the Montgomery Bus Boycott,” Southern Changes: The Journal of the Southern Regional Council, 1978–2003, 7 (5) (1985), https://web.archive.org/web/20100714210519/ http://beck.library.emory.edu/southernchanges/article.php?id=sc07-5_006 (Accessed October 29, 2019). David J. Garrow, Bearing the Cross: Martin Luther King, Jr., and the Southern Christian Leadership Conference (New York: Quill, 1989), 11–82. 29 352 US 903 (1956), https://www.oyez.org/cases/1956/342; Robert Jerome Glennon, “The Role of Law in the Civil Rights Movement: The Montgomery Boycott, 1955–1957,” Law and History Review 9 (1) (Spring 1991): 59–112. 30 Hitchcock, The Age of Eisenhower, 345. 31 Griffin v. County School Board of Prince Edward County, 377 US 218 (1964), https://supreme.justia. com/cases/federal/us/377/218/. 32 “The Closing of Prince Edward County Schools,” Virginia Museum of History and Culture, n.d., https://www.virginiahistory.org/collections-and-resources/virginia-history-explorer/civil-rightsmovement-virginia/closing-prince (accessed October 20, 2019). 33 Reed Sarratt, The Ordeal of Desegregation: The First Decade (New York: Harper & Row, 1966), 51. 34 Coontz, The Way We Never Were, 30–31. 35 Smith, Eisenhower in War and Peace, xii–xiii; see, as partial rejoinder, John Lewis Gaddis, “He Made It Look Easy,” New York Times Book Review, April 20, 2012, review of Smith’s book; https://nytimes. com/2012/04/22/books/review/eisenhower-in-war-and-peace-by-jean-edward-smith.htm (accessed November 9, 2019). 36 Smith, Eisenhower in War and Peace, 551. 37 William H. Chafe, The Unfinished Journey: American Since World War II, 7th ed. (New York: Oxford University Press, 2011), 132–33. 38 David Snead, The Gaither Committee, Eisenhower, and the Cold War (Columbus: The Ohio State University Press, 1999), 1. 39 Smith, Eisenhower in War and Peace, 555–57. Hobby was not an original appointment, because the Department of HEW had not yet been established, and she was not chosen until April 1953. Thus the “eight millionaires” would have to be revised to “nine millionaires.” 40 Stephen W. Stathis, Landmark Legislation, 1774–2002 (Washington, DC: CQ Press, 2003), 239–40. 41 Halberstam, The Fifties, 424–28. Unlike most presidential aides, Morrow had great difficulty in finding a post-White House job. Halberstam wrote, “Some thirty years later, by then in his eighties, Frederic Morrow, living in retirement in New York City, could not control the anger he felt over the hard times of prolonged unemployment in the early 1960s,” at 428. Also, E. Frederic Morrow, Black Man in the White House (New York: McFadden-Bartell Corp., 1963). 42 With the addition of Alaska as a state, there were temporarily 436 members of the House of Representatives. A 437th seat was added when Hawaii became a state. During the Eighty-eighth Congress (1963–1965) the number reverted to 435. 43 Barbara Sinclair, “Congressional Reform,” in Julian E. Zelizer, ed., The American Congress: The Building of Democracy (Boston: Houghton Mifflin Company, 2004), 627–29. 44 Yanek Mieczkowski, Eisenhower’s Sputnik Moment: The Race for Space and World Prestige (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2013), 180. 45 Earl Black and Merle Black, The Rise of Southern Republicans (Cambridge: Belknap Press, Harvard University, 2003), 2–3. 46 Robert V. Remini, The House: The History of the House of Representatives (Washington, DC: Smithsonian Books, 2006), 376. 47 Robert A. Caro, The Years of Lyndon Johnson. Vol. 3, Master of the Senate (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 2002), 89. 48 Smith, Eisenhower in War and Peace, 649. 49 Halberstam, The Fifties, 312–14. 50 Christopher J. Deering and Stephen S. Smith, Congress in Committees, 3rd ed. (Washington, DC: CQ Press, 1997), 32. 51 Remini, The House, 360 (observation about Reed), and 359 (second quote). 52 Smith, Eisenhower in War and Peace, 649.

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53 Quoted in Smith, Eisenhower in War and Peace, 649. 54 Sinclair, “Congressional Reform,” 626. 55 Thomas P. O’Neill and William Novak, Man of the House: The Life and Political Memoirs of Speaker Tip O’Neill (New York: Random House, 1987), 204, quoted in Remini, The House, 366. 56 In 1995, the Republican chairman of the House Rules Committee wanted to hang a portrait of Smith in the committee room. The Congressional Black Caucus objected, and Congressman John Lewis (Democrat—Georgia) asserted, “it is an affront to all of us … [Smith is] perhaps best remembered for his obstruction in passing this country’s civil rights laws. A man who in his own words never accepted the colored race as a race of people who had equal intelligence and education and social attainments as the White people of the South.” The portrait was later removed. David E. Rosenbaum, “Offending Portrait Succumbs to Black Lawmakers’ Protest,” New York Times, January 25, 1995. 57 Seth Stern and Stephen Wermiel, Justice Brennan: Liberal Champion (New York: Houghton Mifflin, 2010), xiii. 58 Quoted in Chafe, The Unfinished Journey, 133. 59 D’Arcy Jenish, The St. Lawrence Seaway: Fifty Years and Counting (Manotick, Ontario: Penumbra Press, 2009); Dan Egan, The Death and Life of the Great Lakes (New York: Norton, 2017), 3–36. 60 Neil Foley, Mexicans in the Making of America (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2014), chapter 5. 61 Statement of Honorable Herbert Brownell, Attorney General of the United States, before the Subcommittee on Immigration, Committee on the Judiciary, US Senate, April 13, 1956, https:// www.justice.gov/sites/default/files/ag/legacy/2011/09/12/04-13-1956%20pro.pdf (accessed June 26, 2019). 62 Gladwin Hill, “Two Every Minute Across the Border,” New York Times, January 31, 1954. 63 Quoted in Remini, The House, 363. 64 McCarran quoted in Andrew Glass, “Eisenhower Signs Refugee Relief Act, Aug. 7, 1953,” Politico, August 7, 2018, https://www.politico.com/story/2018/08/07/this-day-in-politics-aug-7-1953-760670 (accessed October 24, 2019). 65 Eisenhower quoted in Glass, “Eisenhower Signs Refugee Relief Act, Aug. 7, 1953.” 66 James T. Patterson, Brown v. Board of Education: A Civil Rights Milestone and Its Troubled Legacy (New York: Oxford University Press, 2001), 36–37. 67 Richard Kluger, Simple Justice: The History of Brown v. Board of Education and Black America’s Struggle for Equality (New York: Vintage Books, 1975), 591. The “long-faced” observation comes from Patterson, Brown v. Board of Education, 52. 68 Patterson, Brown v. Board of Education, 52–57; Frankfurter quote from Bernard Schwartz, “Chief Justice Rehnquist, Justice Jackson, and the Brown Case,” Supreme Court Review (1988), 267. 69 Joining Marshall were Robert L. Carter, Spotswood Robinson III, and Jack Greenberg. 70 Patterson, Brown v. Board of Education, xv–xvi; Charles J. Ogletree, “With All Deliberate Speed,” Center for American Progress, April 12, 2004, https://www.americanprogress.org/issues/general/news/ 2004/04/12/660/all-deliberate-speed/ (accessed November 4, 2019). 71 Brown et al. v. Board of Education of Topeka, 347 US 483 (1954), 494; https://supreme.justia.com/ cases/federal/us/347/483/ (accessed November 9, 2019). 72 Governor Stanley Response to Decision in Brown v. Board of Education, Audio Clip, 1954,” Document Bank of Virginia, http://edu.lva.virginia.gov/dbva/items/show/207 (accessed November 7, 2019). 73 Kluger, Simple Justice, 700–47, at 714. 74 Patterson, Brown v. Board of Education, 81. 75 Hitchcock, The Age of Eisenhower, 347. 76 David A. Nichols, A Matter of Justice: Eisenhower and the Beginning of the Civil Rights Revolution (New York: Simon & Schuster, 2007), 109. 77 James F. Simon, Eisenhower vs. Warren: The Battle for Civil Rights and Liberties (New York: Liveright Publishing, 2018), xvi. Roy Wilkins, executive secretary of the NAACP, was not so kind in his assessment of Eisenhower, saying that “If he had fought World War II the way he fought for civil rights, we would all be speaking German today.” Quoted in Patterson, Brown v. Board of Education, 82. 78 Brown v. Board of Education (II) 349 US 294 (1955), https://www.oyez.org/cases/1940-1955/349us294. 79 Every member of the Alabama, Virginia, Mississippi, Arkansas, Georgia, Louisiana, and South Carolina delegations signed the Declaration. Notables who did not sign were Tennessee senators Albert A. Gore, Sr. and Estes Kefauver, and Texan Lyndon Johnson; in the House, speaker Sam Rayburn and Jim Wright (Democrat—Texas), a future speaker. Tony Badger, “Southerners Who Refused to Sign the Southern Manifesto,” The Historical Journal 42 (2) (June 1999): 517–34.

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80 Congressional Record, 84th Congress Second Session. Vol. 102, part 4 (March 12, 1956). Washington, DC: Governmental Printing Office, 1956. 4459–60. 81 Simon, Eisenhower vs. Warren, 290–324; Hitchcock, The Age of Eisenhower, 360–75; Nichols, A Matter of Justice, 168–213. 82 Carlotta Walls LaNier with Lisa Frazier Page, A Mighty Long Way: My Journey to Justice at Little Rock Central High School (New York: One World Books, 2009), 70. 83 Stephen Ambrose, Eisenhower: Soldier and President (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1990), 441. 84 Quoted in Smith, Eisenhower in War and Peace, 726. On the role played by Attorney General Brownell, “Brownell Opinion to Eisenhower on Little Rock Desegregation,” in Herbert Brownell with John P. Burke, Advising Ike: The Memoirs of Attorney General Herbert Brownell (Lawrence: University Press of Kansas, 1993), 365–83. 85 Gilbert C. Fite, Richard B. Russell, Jr.: Senator from Georgia (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1991), 343–44; Smith, Eisenhower in War and Peace, 727–28. 86 Rick Perlstein, Before the Storm: Barry Goldwater and the Unmaking of the American Consensus (New York: Hill and Wang, 2001), 15. 87 Cooper et al. v. Aaron et al., 358 US 1 (1958), https://supreme.justia.com/cases/federal/us/358/1/. Opinion by Chief Justice Warren, Justices Black, Frankfurter, Douglas, Burton, Clark, Harlan, Brennan, and Whittaker. (The latter three justices took their seats after Brown I was decided.) Frankfurter, in a concurring opinion, wrote a stinging denunciation of the state officials. 88 358 US 1, at 7. 89 Dennis W. Johnson, Friend of the Court: The United States Department of Justice as Amicus Curiae in Civil Rights Cases before the Supreme Court, 1947–1971, unpublished Ph.D. dissertation, Duke University, 1972, at 214–15. 90 Griffin v. County School Board, 377 US 218, at 234, https://supreme.justia.com/cases/federal/us/377/ 218/; Jim Chen, “With All Deliberate Speed: Brown II and Desegregation’s Children,” Law & Inequality: A Journal of Theory and Practice 24 (1) (2006): 1–7, http://scholarship.law.umn.edu/ lawineq/vol24/iss1/1 (accessed November 2, 2019). 91 Green v. County School Board, 391 US 430 (1968), at 438–39, https://www.law.cornell.edu/ supremecourt/text/391/430 (emphasis in the original). New Kent County, Virginia, had tried to come up with a freedom of choice plan to meet the requirements of Brown. The Court ruled that the freedom of choice plan was unacceptable, placing a burden on parents, when, in fact the burden rested with the school board itself. 92 Chen, “With All Deliberate Speed;” Erika Frankenberg and Kendra Taylor, “ESEA and the Civil Rights Act: An Interbranch Approach to Furthering Desegregation,” RSF: The Russell Sage Foundation Journal of the Social Sciences 1 (3) (December 2015): 32–49, https://muse.jhu.edu/article/ 605399 (accessed November 2, 2019). 93 Richard Thompson Ford, “Brown’s Ghost,” 117 Harvard Law Review (2004): 1305 at 1312, quoted in Chen, “With All Deliberate Speed,” 4. 94 See, for example, Nikole Hannah-Jones, “The Resegregation of Jefferson County,” New York Times, September 6, 2017. 95 Dwight D. Eisenhower, Mandate for Change, 1953–1956 (Garden City, NY: Doubleday & Company, 1963), 548. 96 Richard F. Weingroff, “The Man Who Changed America, Part 1,” Public Roads (March/April 2003). Vice President Nixon delivered the remarks in place of Eisenhower, who was attending a family funeral. 97 Citizen’s Guide to the Federal Budget, Executive Office of the President, Fiscal Year 1996, https://www. govinfo.gov/content/pkg/BUDGET-1996-CITIZENSGUIDE/pdf/BUDGET-1996CITIZENSGUIDE.pdf (accessed October 31, 2019). 98 Turner later became the administrator of the Federal Highway Administration, and in its own history was considered the “Father” of the interstate highway system. Johnson, The Laws that Shaped America, 279. 99 James A. Dunn, Jr., Miles to Go: European and American Transportation Policies (Cambridge: MIT Press, 1981), 121. 100 Helen Leavitt, Superhighway—Superhoax (Garden City, NY: Doubleday, 1970), 187–88. 101 Johnson, The Laws that Shaped America, 279. 102 Sam Zagoria, “3 Out of 4 US Workers Eligible for Expanded Social Security,” Washington Post, December 30, 1950.

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103 Eisenhower quoted in “Social Security: Major Decisions in the House and Senate Since 1935,” US Congress, Congressional Research Service, updated March 28, 2019, RL30920; written by Tamar B. Breslauer and William R. Morton. 104 Edward D. Berkowitz, Disabled Policy: America’s Programs for the Handicapped (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1987), 52–54, 69–72, 161–62; Martha Derthick, Policymaking for Social Security (Washington, DC: Brookings Institution, 1979). 105 John R. Kearney, “Social Security and the ‘D’ of OASDI: the History of a Federal Program Insuring Earners Against Disability,” Social Security Bulletin 66 (3) (2005/2006). 106 Chuck Devore, “Out on Disability: What’s Wrong With West Virginia (and Right with North Dakota)?” Forbes, July 1, 2015, https://www.forbes.com/sites/chuckdevore/2015/07/01/out-ondisability-whats-wrong-with-west-virginia-and-right-with-north-dakota/#535b423d6148 (accessed October 21, 2019). 107 Yanek Mieczkowski, Eisenhower’s Sputnik Moment: The Race for Space and World Prestige (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2013), 155. 108 Ibid., 158. 109 Smith, Eisenhower in War and Peace, 647, quote at 731. 110 Ryan Boyle, “A Red Moon over the Mall: The Sputnik Panic and Domestic America,” The Journal of American Culture (October 29, 2008), 373. 111 Robert Dallek, Lone Star Rising: Lyndon Johnson and His Times, 1908–1960 (New York: Oxford University Press, 1991), 531. 112 Mieczkowski, Eisenhower’s Sputnik Moment, 160. 113 Ibid., 160–62; quote at 160. 114 “Sputnik Spurs Passage of the National Defense Education Act,” US Senate, Art and History, n.d., https://www.senate.gov/artandhistory/history/minute/Sputnik_Spurs_Passage_of_National_Defense_ Education_Act.htm (accessed October 7, 2019). 115 Kerr-Mills language quoted in Judith D. Moore and David G. Smith, “Legislating Medicaid: Considering Medicaid and Its Origins,” Health Care Financing Review 27 (2) (Winter 2005/2006): 45–52, at 46. See also, David G. Smith and Judith D. Moore, Medicaid Politics and Policy, 2nd ed. (New Brunswick: Transaction, 2015). 116 Moore and Smith, “Legislating Medicaid: Considering Medicaid and Its Origins,” at 47; Matthew Gritter, “The Kerr-Mills Act and the Puzzles of Health Care Reform,” Social Science Quarterly 100 (6) (August 2019): 2209–22; Joseph A. Califano, Jr., “The Last Time We Reinvented Health Care,” Washington Post, April 1, 1993. 117 Nichols, A Matter of Justice, 127–28. 118 Hitchcock, The Age of Eisenhower, 357. 119 Robert A. Caro, The Years of Lyndon Johnson, vol. 3: Master of the Senate (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 2002), xv. 120 Ibid., xv. These statements were made in private. Caro noted that the Congressional Record, which contains the complete record of statements on the Senate floor, occasionally were altered, and were “particularly damaging” to the historical record in the area of civil rights. “[D]uring interviews, journalists and Senate staff members would vividly recall for me venomous racist remarks that some southern senator or other had made during a debate, but time and again when I went to the Record for the relevant date, no such remark (or any approximate version of it) was there.” At 1053. 121 Hitchcock, The Age of Eisenhower, 351. 122 Ibid., 359. 123 Joseph Crespino, Strom Thurmond’s America (New York: Hill & Wang, 2012), 111–12, 116–20); Ezra Klein, Why We’re Polarized (New York: Avid Reader Press/Simon & Schuster, 2020), 19–22. 124 King quoted in Hitchcock, The Age of Eisenhower, 360. 125 Quoted in Randall B. Woods, LBJ: Architect of American Ambition (New York: Free Press, 2006), 330. 126 Quoted in Nichols, A Matter of Justice, 248. 127 Robert A. Caro, The Years of Lyndon Johnson, vol. 4: The Passage of Power (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 2012), 77. 128 Ibid. 129 William Sturkey, “The Hidden History of the Civil Rights Act of 1960,” Black Perspectives, the African American Intellectual History Society, February 8, 2018, https://www.aaihs.org/the-hiddenhistory-of-the-civil-rights-act-of-1960/ (accessed October 23, 2018); Daniel M. Berman, A Bill

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Becomes a Law: The Civil Rights Act of 1960 (New York: Macmillan, 1962); Nichols, A Matter of Justice, 254–57. 130 Patterson, Grand Expectations, 413; Numan Bartley, The Rise of Massive Resistance: Race and Politics in the South During the 1950s (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1969), 7–8. 131 Executive Order 10450: Security Requirements for Government Employment, National Archives and Record Administration, https://www.archives.gov/federal-register/codification/executive-order/ 10450.html (accessed August 6, 2020). Mathew S. Nosanchuk, “The Endurance Test: Executive Power and the Civil Rights of LBGT Americans,” Albany Government Law Review 5 (2012): 440–77.

Chapter 7

The New Frontier and Great Society: 1961–1968

If conformity was the keynote of the fifties, conflict was the leitmotif of the sixties. (Rudolph J. Vecoli, 1996)1 Trust in government was the first thing to go. (Kevin M. Kruze and Julian E. Zelizer, 2019)2

AMERICA DURING THIS ERA The decade of the 1960s was one of the most turbulent in twentieth-century America. The stresses on society were pronounced: the shock of assassinations, the beatings and threats against civil rights activists demanding their basic democratic rights, the realization that the war in distant Vietnam was far from won despite reassurances from civilian and military leaders, and the civil unrest, looting, and death experienced in cities throughout America. This tumultuous era culminated in the unrest and upheaval of 1968, with political uncertainty, assassinations, and the inevitable reactions against progressive forces and federal authority. Trust in American political institutions plummeted; conspiracy theories sprouted up amid assassination investigations; and the seemingly endless war continued to rip families and generations apart. It was also the decade that produced an extraordinary range of domestic policy advances, ranging from civil and voting rights, to medical care for the aged and poor, and expansion of federal assistance to education, and an attempt to alleviate poverty.

The Era by the Numbers Following the Eighteenth Census, the United States population in 1960 was 179,323,175, an increase of 18.5 percent (28 million) over 1950. As historian Robert M. Collins observed, “economic growth—as an idea, as a policy goal, and as a social reality—helps to define the sixties.”3 Between 1961 and 1965, real GNP increased by 5 percent a year. By January 1966, the unemployment rate had dropped to 3.9 percent. By the beginning of this era, the average wage was $5,315 and the minimum wage was raised from $1 an hour (set in 1956) to $1.25 an hour in 1961 ($10.88 in 2020 dollars). Many more individuals were now receiving Social Security and ADC benefits, climbing from 2 million in 1945 to 18 million in 1960. In 1962, the richest 1 percent of the population held 33 percent of all assets, while the poorest 40 percent received just 15 percent of national income.4 Hispanics, many of whom had been impacted by Eisenhower’s mass deportation scheme, constituted the second largest ethnic group in the United States by 1960. While Hispanics represented just 2.3 percent of the total American population, they made up 12 percent of the combined populations of California, Texas, Colorado, and New Mexico.5 DOI: 10.4324/9781003293538-10

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Society Under Stress Poverty, Urban and Rural While the decade saw real economic growth, policymakers also began focusing on the plight of the poor and the alleviation of poverty. Several widely read studies highlighted the problem of poverty and hunger. In economist John Kenneth Galbraith’s 1958 best-selling book, The Affluent Society, readers became aware that there was a permanent class of impoverished Americans. Michael Harrington’s 1962 book, The Other America, described the 40 to 60 million Americans—25 percent of the population—who were suffering from the grip of poverty. Harrington’s book struck a chord. More than a million copies of the paperback edition were sold; Time magazine in 1999 deemed it one of the ten most influential nonfiction books of the twentieth century. Dwight Macdonald, in his 1963 lengthy essay in The New Yorker magazine titled “Our Invisible Poor,”6 observed that “For a long time now, almost everybody has assumed that, because of the New Deal’s social legislation and—more important—the prosperity we have enjoyed since 1940, mass poverty no longer exists in this country.” But surely, he wrote, this was not the case. Over the next few years, there was a “virtual avalanche” of books, newspaper articles, and magazine features about poverty in America. As historian James T. Patterson observed, “for the first time since the 1930s, poverty was front-page news.”7 When campaigning during the 1960 Democratic primaries in West Virginia, John Kennedy was appalled by the widespread poverty he saw. The 1960 presidential campaign chronicler Theodore H. White observed that “Kennedy’s shock at the suffering he saw in West Virginia was so fresh, that it communicated itself with the emotion of original discovery.” Kennedy himself declared, I shall never forget what I have seen. I have seen men, proud men, looking for work who cannot find it. I have seen people over forty who are told that their services are no longer needed—too old … I have seen older people who seek medical care that is too expensive for them to afford. I have seen unemployed miners and their families eating a diet of dry rations.8 Just who were the poor and where did they live? Before 1964, federal agencies had unofficially given various estimates and definitions of poverty. Then, in 1964, an official poverty measure was developed. A family of four was considered below the “poverty line” if it lived on less than $3,130 annually; for a single individual, the amount was $1,500 ($26,274 and $12,591, respectively, in 2020 dollars). This meant that roughly 21 percent of Americans (40.3 million people) were considered “poor.” More than half of African Americans fit into this category, with nearly half of persons living in female-headed households, and one-third of those over sixty-five.9 Poverty, hunger, and malnutrition were further highlighted when Senators Joseph Clark (Democrat—Pennsylvania) and Robert F. Kennedy (Democrat—New York) conducted a muchpublicized tour through the poverty-stricken Delta region of Mississippi. By the middle 1960s, poverty and hunger were much on the minds of American policymakers and the public at large. The Kennedy Assassination and Public Trust The assassination of John Kennedy affected Americans more profoundly than anything since the death of Franklin Roosevelt in 1945. As Kennedy biographer Robert A. Dallek observed, “To accept that an act of random violence by an obscure malcontent could bring down a president of the United States is to acknowledge a chaotic, disorderly world that frightens most Americans.”10 Who was behind the assassination? Conspiracy theories abounded and there was widespread distrust of the official findings of the Warren Commission. Led by Chief Justice Earl Warren, the commission concluded that Lee Harvey Oswald acted alone. That finding did not sit well with

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the public. By January 1967, some 64 percent of Americans thought that there was a conspiracy. After Oliver Stone’s 1991 blockbuster movie, JFK, laced with both historical and conspiratorial teasers, fewer than one-third of Americans surveyed in 1992 found the Warren Commission findings persuasive. Suspicions flew everywhere: Vietnamese getting revenge for the recent assassination of Prime Minister Ngo Dinh Diem; the Russians, pro-Castro forces, anti-Castro forces, labor bosses, the mafia, the CIA, military chiefs, even a jealous Lyndon Johnson. The public’s confidence that the government will do the right thing is one of the most important elements of a stable democratic institution. In the 1960s, trust in government began to erode. In 1963, before the Kennedy assassination, some 75 percent of Americans surveyed said they trusted the government to do the right thing “just about always/most of the time.” That percentage increased to 77 percent right after Johnson took office, but then fell precipitously to 27 percent by 1978. The contentious Vietnam War, the jolts of the assassinations of Martin Luther King, Jr., and Robert F. Kennedy, and later, the Watergate scandal, Nixon’s resignation and Ford’s pardon, the energy crisis—all contributed to the erosion of public trust. Cuba, Vietnam, and Discontent Just three months after his inauguration, John Kennedy authorized an invasion of Cuba. The invasion was, in the summation of historian James T. Patterson, “one of the most disastrous military ventures in modern American history.”11 The infamous Bay of Pigs invasion was poorly planned, badly executed, and American advisers clearly underestimated Castro’s armed forces. Rather than crippling Castro, this victory over Yanqi-backed traitors bolstered his reputation among his countrymen. Just a few months after the Bay of Pigs, the Soviet Union began sending military personnel to Cuba, and by the summer of 1962, the Soviet technicians were installing medium-range missiles capable of hitting targets 1,000 miles away; nine such tactical missiles were armed with nuclear warheads. By mid-October 1962, photographs taken from American reconnaissance U-2 flights confirmed the presence of twenty-four missile launchers. Americans learned of the “Cuban missile crisis” when Kennedy unexpectedly spoke to a nationwide audience on October 22, 1962, revealing the threat of Soviet missiles in Cuba. One hundred million Americans, the largest audience up to that time to hear a presidential address, listened intently to the deliberate and sober announcement by the president.12 Soviet missiles, Kennedy warned, could strike Washington, D.C., and any other city in the southeastern part of the country. As historian W.J. Rorabaugh observed, “At no time did the Cold War seem more frightening than during the Cuban Missile Crisis in October 1962.”13 To those American advisers and strategists involved, it was clear that the United States was on the brink of military action against the Soviet Union. The crisis was ultimately resolved, with Nikita Khrushchev promising to remove the missiles and the Soviet aircraft. Kennedy resisted intense pressure from his military leaders for air attacks and an invasion of Cuba. American involvement in Vietnam began in the mid-1950s, and the first American soldiers, “advisers,” were killed in July of 1959. In May 1961, President Kennedy sent 400 Green Beret troops and helicopters, and authorized secret raids against the Viet Cong. By November 1963, the US government backed a South Vietnamese military coup, resulting in the brutal murder of President Ngo Dinh Diem and his brother. From this point until 1965, South Vietnam was ruled by a succession of twelve unstable governments. During the 1964 presidential primaries, Republicans repeatedly attacked Johnson as weak and indecisive, Goldwater accused him of “napping” while the war in Vietnam was “drifting toward disaster.”14 In August 1964 (less than three months before the election), in the Gulf of Tonkin, two US naval ships allegedly were fired upon by North Vietnamese patrol boats. Johnson used

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this incident to spur Congress into giving him a near blank check to fight against the North Vietnamese. In early 1965, the Vietcong had attacked US military barracks at Pleiku, killing nine Americans and wounding more than one hundred. In March 1965, Johnson launched Operation Rolling Thunder, a three-year campaign of bombing targets in North Vietnam and along the Ho Chi Minh Trail. Also in March 1965, the first American combat troops landed on the beaches near Da Nang, South Vietnam. Pressed by Defense Secretary Robert S. McNamara and other war hawks, Johnson called for more troops, and young men were drafted at the rate of 35,000 per month.15 At its peak, there were 549,000 American soldiers in the field of battle. Hoping to bolster his Great Society domestic agenda, Johnson downplayed the extent of US involvement, its costs, and casualties. How could the United States afford all the new domestic programs and fund the war at the same time, many asked. “Guns and Butter” became the popular phrase; could America afford both? The war would grind on; escalating costs would rob the treasury and tens of thousands of American youth would be wounded or killed. Later, Johnson lamented, “That bitch of a war killed the lady I really loved—the Great Society.”16 As the war escalated, so did doubts about the fighting and dying for a dubious cause. In the end, still years away, the Vietnam War would come at a considerable cost: nearly 60,000 American soldiers killed, well over 150,000 wounded. Untold hundreds of thousands of Vietnamese army, irregular forces, and civilians lost their lives. The war caused extraordinary levels of tension and distrust. The draft increasingly was seen as inequitable, letting the well-off and college-bound escape service, opening up loopholes for others clever and resourceful enough to take advantage of them. More and more, it looked as though the war was being fought using draftees, rather than regular professional soldiers. And those draftees came disproportionately from minority groups and those with lesser education and prospects. “Hey, hey, LBJ. How many kids have you killed today?” College students argued vociferously against the draft, held sit-ins to protest the war, albeit while supporters of the president and defenders of the military railed against draft dodgers, protestors, and draft-card burning. Disbelief, anger, and distrust of government built as Americans saw on television the futility of the war unfold. Racial Tensions and Struggle It was a decade of turmoil, of individual and collective bravery, of police brutality and visceral white resistance: lunch counter sit-ins, students blocked at southern universities, the bludgeons of overzealous police, the fire hoses and police dogs, the bombing of churches, the murder of activists and innocents, much of which was captured on television for all the world to see. The era saw riots, explosions in inner cities, state and local police and federal military attempting to quell the worst of urban disturbances. It also led to a backlash, cries of “law and order,” get tough on crime, and politicians appealing to the basest of fears and instincts. In 1961, civil rights activists, led by James Farmer and the Congress of Racial Equality (CORE), began a series of “freedom rides” throughout the South to highlight persistent discrimination in public accommodations. Over seven months, some 400 freedom riders—black, white, men, and women—ventured by bus into the South, into waiting rooms, restrooms, and terminal restaurants reserved for whites. From the outset, they were met with intimidation, delay, and outright hatred. One of the first to be assaulted was twenty-one-year-old John R. Lewis, who years later would become a leading lawmaker in Congress. On May 14, 1961, outside of Anniston, Alabama, one of the most frightening attacks occurred. A Greyhound bus, filled with freedom riders, was forced off the road by a white mob of 200, and a firebomb filled the bus with flames and smoke. “Burn them alive,” someone cried out. “Fry the goddamn niggers.” The riders were lucky to escape but were pummeled with baseball bats as they ran from the bus.17 White mobs threatened the riders in

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Birmingham, Montgomery, and Jackson, Mississippi. Attorney General Robert Kennedy called out 600 federal marshals to quell the violence in Montgomery, and finally, after six months, the Kennedy administration put enough pressure on the Interstate Commerce Commission to have it issue regulations prohibiting racial segregation in interstate bus terminals.18 James Meredith, a twenty-eight-year-old African American army veteran and student, inspired by the election of John Kennedy, was determined to enroll in the University of Mississippi. For twenty months he was rebuffed by state and university officials, only to be admitted on the orders of the Supreme Court, which demanded that the university end its “calculated campaign of delay, harassment, and masterly inactivity.” “Ole Miss,” the flagship University of Mississippi, where the upper crust of white Mississippi sent its sons and daughters, never enrolled a black student, and Governor R. Ross Barnett assured his fellow Mississippians that he would do “everything in my power to prevent integration in our schools.” On September 30, 1962, Kennedy was compelled to send 500 US marshals to ensure Meredith’s safety.19 But they were not enough. Barnett had withdrawn the state highway patrol officers who were also on hand, and soon the white mob of 2,400 exploded. Before Kennedy could send in additional military support, two persons were killed and 160 marshals were injured. Meredith finally was enrolled, but was mostly shunned by students, sometimes harassed; yet he was able to graduate the following year. The Ole Miss episode exposed Kennedy to the raw segregationist sentiments in the South, not just among the common white folk, but from their leaders. The episode disappointed civil rights leaders, who were expecting more forceful action from the president. But Kennedy hesitated. Historian Taylor Branch noted that Kennedy’s “most effective political response to the Ole Miss riot was to move on to other things.”20 As for Martin Luther King, the civil rights leader “knew that Kennedy and Barnett still had more in common with each other than either had with him. Their performance at Oxford, Mississippi,” he wrote, “made Negroes feel like pawns in a White man’s political game.”21 May 2, 1963 was another day of protest in Birmingham led by King and the Alabama Southern Christian Leadership Conference (SCLC). Eugene (Bull) Connor’s police were preparing to haul off another small contingent of singing and protesting African Americans. But this time was different. Out of the Sixteenth Street Baptist Church came hundreds of college students, kids from high schools, even elementary school children. They were herded up, crammed into jail cells, in all, 685 prisoners. The next day, it happened again, with a thousand new protesters. But now, the whole world was watching: 178 reporters and television crews were awaiting the showdown. Connor and his forces came with powerful fire hoses and police dogs. Journalist Rick Perlstein observed: That evening the nation saw shrieking children on TV, some as young as six, pinned down to the pavement from one end of the street to the other, refusing to retreat even as Bull Connor brought out his ‘K-9 Corps’—dogs set loose to tear chunks of flesh from their hides.22 Editorials and some northern politicians demanded action. Kennedy sent Assistant Attorney General Burke Marshall to work out a settlement between the SCLC and Birmingham power brokers. After weeks of negotiations, a settlement was reached to desegregate some facilities, but diehard segregationist and the new mayor of Birmingham, Albert Boutwell, backed off any compromise. Alabama and Georgia Klansmen staged a rally in a Birmingham park, bombs exploded, state troopers and anti-riot forces responded, and a four-hour rampage by locals left a black section of the city in flames. In the meantime, Alabama governor George C. Wallace vowed to block two African American students from entering the all-white University of Alabama. The university president, Frank Rose,

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wanted to admit black students, but Wallace was determined to make political hay by “standing in the schoolhouse door.” Not wanting another Ole Miss conflagration, Kennedy federalized the national guard and Deputy Attorney General Nicholas Katzenbach was dispatched to Tuscaloosa to demand that the students be admitted. A visibly nervous Wallace stood at the entryway of Foster Auditorium, with television cameras and reporters capturing it all. Katzenbach read a proclamation from the president, Wallace denounced federal power, and refused to step aside until ordered by the head of the Alabama Guard, now under federal authority.23 The two students, Vivian Malone and James Hood, were admitted; Wallace’s theatrics looked pointless, and later that evening Kennedy gave a televised address announcing his decision to ask for a new civil rights law. The next evening, Medgar Evers, a prominent local official in the Mississippi NAACP, was gunned down in his driveway. It was the first political assassination of the 1960s.24 His murderer, Byron de la Beckwith, later told fellow Klansmen that “killing that nigger gave me no more inner discomfort than our wives endure when they give birth to our children. We ask them to do that for us. We should do just as much.” It wasn’t until 1994, thirty years later, that de la Beckwith was found guilty of the crime.25 Frustrated with the lack of progress in enacting civil rights legislation, veteran activist A. Philip Randolph, Bayard Rustin, Whitney M. Young, Jr., James Farmer, Roy Wilkins, John Lewis, Martin Luther King, Jr., and others planned a march on Washington, scheduled for late August 1963. More than 250,000 persons lined the Lincoln Memorial and reflecting pool, while some 3,000 reporters covered the event. Most memorable was the final speaker, Martin Luther King, whose “I have a Dream” oration became a lasting monument of the civil rights struggle. The extraordinary event was nonviolent, but violence would not be far off. Again, brute force and death came to Birmingham, Alabama. This time was the horrific bombing of the Sixteenth Street Baptist Church, killing four young black girls and injuring twenty-two others, on September 15. King sent a telegram to Governor Wallace declaring that “the blood of our little children is on your hands.” This incident helped galvanize public sentiment, giving greater urgency to Kennedy’s legislation. On the eve of passage of the historic 1964 Civil Rights Act, three civil rights workers— James Chaney, Andrew Goodman, and Michael Schwerner—were abducted and murdered in Neshoba County, Mississippi. Their murders sparked national outrage and helped bring about the passage of the law. Mississippi during the summer of 1964 was a hotbed of violence and repression. Klan membership had soared to 10,000 in the state and sixty-four black churches were burned. It wasn’t just the Deep South. Two weeks after the signing of the Civil Rights Act of 1964, a white off-duty New York City police officer killed a sixteen-year-old African American boy who had allegedly threatened him with a knife. Turmoil lasted five days, with 150 injuries, 500 arrests, and damage to more than 500 businesses. In Rochester, New York, more violence erupted, with 4 deaths, 350 injuries, and 800 arrests.26 In August 1965, the Watts section of Los Angeles experienced a five-day riot, with thirty-four deaths and thousands of persons injured. In Detroit, three years later, came five days of urban unrest. On July 23, 1967, the Detroit police vice squad raided a “blind pig,” that is, an unlicensed bar in the middle of one of the oldest and poorest black neighborhoods. All eighty-two patrons, who were there celebrating the return of two black veterans from Vietnam, were arrested. As the patrons were being transported away by police, some 200 locals gathered outside, and rumors spread of police brutality. During the following five days and nights, thirty-three blacks and ten whites were killed, 1,189 persons injured, and over 7,200 persons were arrested; some 2,500 shops were looted. The Detroit race riot, or as some called it the “Detroit Rebellion,” was the biggest, most explosive urban uprising during the 1960s, until the following year and the urban conflagration following the assassination of King.27 In all, there was violence and uprisings in 159 cities during the summer of 1967. Johnson commissioned an investigation, headed by Illinois governor Otto Kerner, Jr. to study and report

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on the state of race relations. After interviewing hundreds of civic leaders, citizens, and pouring through thousands of pages of reports, the eleven-member Kerner Commission came to this harsh, clear-headed conclusion: “our nation is moving toward two societies, one Black, one White—separate and unequal.” White America, the Commission argued, was mostly to blame. “White racism is essentially responsible for the explosive mixture which has been accumulating in our cities since the end of World War II.”28 The Kerner Commission, composed mostly of liberal and some conservative white elected leaders, called for major investments in existing programs, such as War on Poverty, Model Cities, and urban renewal, along with more monies for educational opportunities, and increased enforcement of housing programs. The commission report was “big, bold, and unusual.” It also gave the beleaguered Lyndon Johnson political heartburn; he canceled the White House ceremony when the commission released its findings and avoided commenting on its findings.29 Throughout all this turmoil came the backlash. The Solid South, which had been cracking ever since the 1948 presidential election, looked like it was about to split wide open in 1964. At the Democratic National convention in Atlantic City, New Jersey, civil rights activists, led by Fannie Lou Hamer and others of the Mississippi Freedom Democratic Party (MFDP), challenged the regular all-white Mississippi delegation. In her plain-spoken but steady voice, Hamer catalogued the abuses against blacks in Mississippi and declared to the nationwide television audience that she was “sick and tired of being sick and tired.” Mississippi senator James O. Eastland objected: “The State of Mississippi has been subjected to an invasion which the communists regard as only the opening maneuver in the coming Negro revolution.”30

Photo 7.1 Fannie Lou Hamer (1917–1977), civil rights activist and cofounder of Freedom Democratic Party. Source: Warren K. Leffler, photographer; US News and World Report collection via Library of Congress.

After tense negotiations and fearful of losing the white South entirely, Lyndon Johnson saw to it that two of the MFDP would be permitted to watch the proceedings but not vote, and the regular Mississippi delegates would not be replaced. Johnson’s fears of losing the Deep South came to pass. Barry Goldwater won six states altogether, his own, Arizona (by just 1 percent), but overwhelmingly in the Deep South states of Mississippi (winning 87 percent of the vote), Alabama (69 percent), Louisiana (56 percent), Georgia (54 percent), and South Carolina

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(59 percent). In Alabama, Johnson was not even on the presidential ballot, just like Truman had been denied a spot on its ballot in 1948. But nationwide, the Johnson-Humphrey victory was overwhelming: Johnson won 61.05 percent of the popular vote, a record in modern presidential elections, and 486 electoral votes to 52 for Goldwater-Miller. Yet while Democrats were chalking up victories nationwide, in Alabama, five new Republican congressmen were elected—an unheard political development in the once solid Democratic South.

Photo 7.2 Barry Goldwater (1909–1998), Arizona senator, leading conservative legislator, presidential candidate. Source: US Senate Historical Office.

This would be the last time that conservative-leaning states would vote Democratic: Alaska, Idaho, Kansas, Nebraska, North Dakota, Oklahoma, South Dakota, Utah, and Wyoming would not vote again for a Democrat in presidential elections.31 Many other states would not vote Democratic for the next twenty or thirty years. The Solid South, at the presidential level, was going Republican; in subsequent years, southern white Democratic office holders at the congressional and at the state legislature level soon would also become endangered species. 1968 This was one of the most turbulent years in American domestic politics. It was, “not just ferocious and tumultuous; it was also a year that changed America,” observed historians Irwin and Debi Unger. It was a year that the liberal consensus, so prominent in the last few years, collapsed and was replaced by “rancorous resistance to further social change.”32 The unrest began on January 23, when North Korean naval forces captured the USS Pueblo, a naval intelligence vessel. One American was killed, while the rest of the crew was captured, tortured, and forced to acknowledge that they were spying on North Korea. Then came the Tet Offensive, beginning on the Lunar New Year, January 31. Eighty-five thousand North Vietnamese soldiers attacked thirty-six major cities in South Vietnam. American intelligence was caught off guard. During the week of February 11–17, 543 American military, a record number, were killed. It soon became evident that the Vietnam War was not going as successfully as the White House and Defense Department led America to believe. Walter Cronkite, the highly respected CBS television anchorman, upset by continued false assurances from the military, went to Vietnam to see for himself, and, upon returning, delivered an

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editorial on the war: “It seems more certain than ever that the bloody experience of Vietnam is to end in a stalemate,” he told his CBS audience.33 Then came the shock of Senator Eugene J. McCarthy (Democrat—Minnesota), the softspoken but fierce anti-war opponent of the president, gaining 42 percent of the vote in the Democratic presidential primary in New Hampshire. Next came the wholly unexpected announcement by President Johnson on March 31 that he would “neither seek re-election nor accept” the nomination of his party for re-election that year. Less than one week later, on April 4, Martin Luther King, Jr. was assassinated in Memphis. The weeks that followed saw extraordinary levels of disbelief, frustration, urban unrest, and rioting. Unrest broke out in more than 120 American cities. After a long period of anticipation, Robert F. Kennedy became a candidate for president and had just been declared the winner of the South Dakota and California primaries when he was assassinated in Los Angeles on June 5. Weeks earlier, Hubert Humphrey, in a particularly tone deaf moment, announced his presidential bid, calling for a “politics of joy.” He was able to capture the Democratic nomination without entering a single primary. The Democratic Convention in Chicago became a bloody, contentious affair, with armed an police force under the direction of Mayor Richard J. Daley rounding up and pummeling protesters on the streets, conventioneers under the strain of raw emotion and disbelief, and all on display before a nationwide television audience. A three-way race pitted former vice president Richard M. Nixon against Humphrey, and third-party candidate Alabama governor George C. Wallace. Humphrey finally broke with Johnson on Vietnam policy, Nixon promised to bring American troops home with a “secret plan,” and with Humphrey closing fast, Nixon barely won the presidency.

Photo 7.3 Hubert H. Humphrey, Jr. (1911–1978), Minnesota senator and leading advocate of liberal reforms, vice president during the Lyndon Johnson administration. Source: Executive Office of the President of the United States.

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With Humphrey’s defeat came an end to the Great Society, although its denouement was evident at least two years earlier. The peace movement, the New Left, Black separatism and Black power, hippies and counter-culture, drugs-sex-rock n’ roll, campus sit-ins, and student protests had been building, and now with Nixon’s election, the mood of the nation, and its voters, had changed. Liberalism had its moment; much had been accomplished, and several of the most significant policies would have long-lasting impact. But now, the country was listening to Richard Nixon and George Wallace. Nixon coopted the language and fears of Wallace, berating school busing, antiwar activists, federal enforcement of civil rights laws, and the federal judiciary. The Democratic Party, once so dominant, was being torn apart, with southerners abandoning their long-time allegiance, being courted by Nixon and his “southern strategy.”

THE NATIONAL GOVERNMENT

The Presidency John F. Kennedy served as president from January 1961 until his assassination on November 22, 1963. Lyndon Johnson served out the remainder of the term and won a commanding victory in the 1964 presidential election. This era ends with the election of Richard Nixon in November 1968, a stunning reversal of fortunes for the Democratic Party and liberal policy initiatives. Johnson, whose political hero was Franklin Roosevelt, hoped to complete what FDR had begun with the New Deal. The extraordinary number and range of the Great Society programs showed the political mastery of Johnson—the bluster, bullying, ruthless energy—to make hay while the sun shines. The political window for Johnson and his allies was tight, and as domestic bill after bill was introduced, another story was developing, the quagmire of a far-away war, tearing up the fabric of society. This was the tragedy of Lyndon Johnson: domestic accomplishments without parallel, coupled with a war that could not be sustained or won. The Executive Branch Two cabinet agencies were created during this time. In 1965, the Department of Housing and Urban Development (HUD) was established, and the following year the Department of Transportation (DOT) was created. With the establishment of the Peace Corps in 1961, the Office of Economic Opportunity in 1964, the creation of HUD and DOT, and the federal manpower needed to implement Medicare and Medicaid, the Elementary and Secondary Education Act, and other measures, the grand total of federal workers during the 1960s jumped from 2,398,704 to 2,981,574 in 1970.34 For the first time, the federal budget outlays topped $100 billion, reaching $106.8 billion in fiscal year 1962; by the end of this era, fiscal year 1969, they had reach $183.6 billion ($1.3 trillion in 2020 dollars). During this time, the federal outlays as a percentage of gross domestic product (GDP) centered around 16 to 18 percent. In less than twenty years, in fiscal year 1987, the outlays would cross the $1 trillion figure (and $6.6 trillion in fiscal year 2020).35

The Congress During this time, Democrats dominated in both the House and the Senate. In the Eighty-seventh Congress (1961–1963), there were 262 Democrats and 175 Republicans in the House, and 48 Democrats and 47 Republicans (and one Independent) in the Senate.36 Democrats gained Senate seats during the Eighty-eighth Congress (1963–1965), holding a commanding 66 to 33 advantage

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over Republicans. Then came the Eighty-ninth Congress (1965–1967), where Democrats substantially increased their margins in both the House and the Senate. There were 295 Democrats and 140 Republicans in the House; 68 Democrats and 32 Republicans in the Senate. Of the 71 new Democrats, 67 voted for LBJ’s Great Society programs.37 During the Ninetieth Congress (1967–1969), Democrats maintained control of both chambers, but lost 47 seats in the House and 4 seats in the Senate. The losses were particularly critical in northern congressional districts, where support for Great Society programs was the strongest. The numbers, however, could be deceiving. Particularly when it came to questions of civil rights or federal involvement in education, the Democratic Party was predictably and increasingly split. Of the 262 Democrats in the Eighty-seventh Congress, 101 came from the South; when it came time to vote on such measures, they almost all turned against the Kennedy and Johnson administration policies. The most remarkable period of legislative activity came during the Eighty-ninth Congress. With the thorough defeat of Barry Goldwater, the enormous Democratic majorities in both the House and Senate, the burning memory of an assassinated president, and the drive and cunning of Lyndon Johnson and his staff, legislative proposals cascaded out of the White House, committee chairmen, members, and their staffs completely inundated. “I had never seen so much activity in my life around here!” said Stuart McClure, chief clerk of the Senate Education and Labor Committee. “We were passing major bills every week. It was unbelievable.”38 After the adjournment of the Eighty-ninth Congress in October 1966, presidential advisers Lawrence F. (Larry) O’Brien, Jr. and Joseph A. Califano, Jr. released a report showing that a grand total of 200 measures had been proposed and 181 had been passed by Congress, “for a batting average of .905.”39 Leadership in the Senate Throughout this time, the majority leader was Michael J. (Mike) Mansfield (Democrat— Montana) and the minority leader was Everett M. Dirksen (Republican—Illinois). Mansfield, former Marine and former Asian history professor, was a public servant of great dignity and power; he was also the longest serving majority leader in Senate history, holding that position for sixteen years. Modest and self-effacing, his leadership style was to share power broadly and he skillfully maneuvered civil rights legislation through the Senate.40 Under the leadership of Mansfield, the “old Inner Club of southerners and elders” described in William S. White’s 1956 book, The Citadel, was on its last legs. “The bourbon and magnolia reign of the southern patricians,” wrote Mansfield’s biographer, “had been degraded if not destroyed by Mansfield’s decision to democratize Democratic policy decisions and committee assignments.”41 Dirksen, a Taft conservative during the 1950s, switched over to the Eisenhower moderate side of the Republican Party, and succeeded William F. Knowland as Senate Republican leader. Once labeled the Senate’s “Wizard of Ooze,” Dirksen was famous for being noncommittal, or more accurately, changing his mind, on issues. He loved being the center of attention, enjoyed the sound of his mellifluous baritone voice, was one of the most televised senators of the era; but was also a trusted and brilliant parliamentarian. His role was vital in gathering up moderate Republicans to help pass the civil rights legislation. Lyndon Johnson and Hubert Humphrey worked on Dirksen, stroking his ego, giving him credit, and letting him take center stage. “You’ve got to play to Ev Dirksen,” Johnson told Humphrey, “You’ve got to let him have a piece of the action. He’s got to look good all the time.”42 Hubert Humphrey, destined to become vice-president following the 1964 elections, was a principal legislative leader, especially during the fight for civil rights legislation. Humphrey,

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then mayor of Minneapolis, had made a name for himself in 1948 with his fiery speech at the Democratic National Convention, and continued through the 1950s and 1960s to be a key figure on the progressive side of Democratic politics. Humphrey had presidential ambitions, running unsuccessfully for his party’s nomination in 1960 and 1972. After he received the contentious nomination in 1968, he was narrowly defeated by Richard Nixon. One of the young Senate lawmakers to emerge during this time was Birch E. Bayh (Democrat—Indiana). He was the author of two constitutional amendments (presidential succession and lowering the voting age to eighteen), author of two proposed amendments that came close but were not ratified (equal rights amendment and electoral college abolishment), and author of Title IX of the Higher Education Act Amendments of 1972. Bayh also ran for president in 1972 but withdrew from the race when his wife was diagnosed with cancer.

Photo 7.4 Birch E. Bayh, Jr. (1928–2019), Indiana senator, author of two constitutional amendments and progressive legislation. Source: United States Senate.

Richard Russell of Georgia, still the dominant southern senator, was pivotal in leading the obstruction to the Civil Rights Act of 1964 but, suffering from debilitating emphysema, was unable to lead forces of opposition to the Voting Rights Act of 1965. Russell biographer Gilbert C. Fite wrote that the senator was a prisoner of history as he understood it, and on the race question, he never left the nineteenth century. … Unable to modify his racial views, he wasted his great talents and an enormous amount of time and energy fighting unsuccessfully against programs for racial justice. He sought to defend a social system that was indefensible. That was the tragedy of Richard Brevard Russell, Jr.43 Leadership in the House On June 12, 1961, Sam Rayburn relinquished his position as speaker of the House. Rayburn had been speaker for 16 years and 273 days, longer than anyone in history. On the day of his retirement, a parade of representatives from both parties praised his leadership. Historian of the House Robert V. Remini remarked that “what was truly remarkable was that all acknowledged

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the civility that characterized House proceedings under Rayburn’s control, even during the most heated debates.”44 Replacing him as speaker was John W. McCormack (Democrat— Massachusetts). The Washington Post described McCormack as tall, thin, silver-haired, a tee-totaling Irishman who liked to wheel and deal, brokering deals with handshakes and an arm around his colleague’s shoulder. He maintained warm ties with some southerners whom Rayburn could never budge, but he never quite mastered Rayburn’s knack of making the House behave.45 Carl Albert (Democrat—Oklahoma) became majority leader and T. Hale Boggs, Sr. (Democrat—Louisiana) was chosen as party whip. On the Republican side, Charles A. Halleck of Indiana became minority leader. But with Republicans on the losing side of the 1964 elections, there were rumblings among its membership. Halleck, many believed, was “too old, too forbidding, too irascible. He drank too much and lacked initiative.”46 Younger Republican members (the “Young Turks,” led by Donald H. Rumsfeld of Illinois) turned to Gerald R. Ford of Michigan, who, though he was just as conservative as Halleck, was well-liked and energetic. He would be the kind of leader needed in the busy Eighty-ninth Congress. Joining Ford was Leslie C. Arends of Illinois as minority whip. One of the biggest hurdles that both Kennedy and Johnson would face came from archconservative Democrat Howard Smith of Virginia, the chairman of the House Rules Committee, who over the years bottled up civil rights legislation. Smith was responsible for the Alien Registration Act (Smith Act) in 1940 but was most known for his abilities as an effective obstructionist to progressive policies, especially those involving race relations. “A dedicated conservative,” the New York Times noted in 1964, “Smith has killed, watered down or postponed more progressive legislation than any other congressman in modern times.”47

The Judiciary Earl Warren continued as chief justice and then, after serving for sixteen years, resigned in 1969. Remaining on the Court were two Roosevelt appointees, Justices Hugo Black (1937–1971) and William O. Douglas (1939–1975), and two Eisenhower appointees, John Marshall Harlan II (1955–1971) and William Brennan (1956–1990). During this era, five Democrats joined the Supreme Court. When Charles E. Whittaker retired in 1962, Kennedy appointed Byron R. (Whizzer) White of Colorado. White was a halfback on the University of Colorado football team, played one very successful year in the NFL for the Pittsburgh Pirates (now Steelers), and was a Rhodes Scholar at Oxford University. Once a law clerk for Vinson, White had been a deputy US attorney general immediately before his nomination; he served until 1993. Felix Frankfurter, who began his court service in 1939, also retired in 1962, and was replaced by labor secretary Arthur J. Goldberg. An expert on labor law, Goldberg had been general counsel to the CIO and the United Steel Workers before being appointed as labor secretary by Kennedy. With the addition of Goldberg, the Court now had a solid liberal majority, led by Warren, Brennan, Douglas, and Black, though Black was becoming more conservative in his latter years. But less than three years later, Lyndon Johnson enticed Goldberg to resign and accept the position of US ambassador to the United Nations. The private practice lawyer most responsible for navigating Lyndon Johnson’s “landslide” senate victory (by eighty-seven votes) in 1948, Abraham (Abe) Fortas replaced Goldberg in 1965. When Warren was ready to retire in 1968, Johnson put Fortas’s name forward for chief justice. But the Senate balked at Fortas’s financial irregularities; his

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name was withdrawn from consideration but following further financial difficulties and the threat of impeachment, Fortas resigned from the Court the following year.48 Johnson missed the opportunity to replace the chief justice during the last months of his administration. Following Tom Clark’s resignation in 1967, Johnson nominated Thurgood Marshall, probably the best known of all the nominees during this era. Marshall had been lead counsel for the NAACP Legal Defense Fund, served on the US Court of Appeals, and when nominated, had served for two years as US solicitor general. He would serve on the Court until 1991. During the 1950s, right wing groups, like the John Birch Society, plastered highway billboards with “Impeach Earl Warren” signs. “It was kind of an honor to be accused by the John Birch Society,” said Warren. “It was a little rough on my wife, but it never bothered me.”49 Later, the Nixon administration complained that the Warren Court, through its series of criminal justice rulings, was “coddling” criminals and leading America to becoming a “permissive” society. Many of those decisions, and others, were handed down during the mid-1960s, the “real heyday” of the Warren Court. Altogether, during the Warren Court era (1953–1969), the Supreme Court overturned forty-five prior court decisions.50

KEY POLICIES ENACTED The widespread poverty John F. Kennedy witnessed in West Virginia during the 1960 presidential primaries prompted him to develop a ten-point relief program. He would increase unemployment benefits, increase Social Security, expand food distribution, and stimulate the coal industry. “Much more can and should be done,” he announced. “That is why West Virginia will be on the top of my agenda at the White House.”51 Much of what Kennedy asked for was not adopted, but four months after becoming president, the Area Redevelopment Act (1961) was approved, a multi-million-dollar program to assist financial industrial redevelopment and assistance to rural communities. Yet, while considered a success at the time, Congress in 1963 refused to reauthorize the program.52 Kennedy established the Peace Corps in March 1961, which was given permanent legislative authority later that year. The scare over crippling birth defects, caused by the tranquilizing drug thalidomide, led to the strengthening of drug safety regulations through the Kefauver-Harris Drug Efficacy Amendment (1962) to the Food, Drug, and Cosmetic Act (1938), requiring, for the first time, drug manufacturers to supply proof that their drugs actually worked. But other major policy initiatives sought by Kennedy were blunted by Congress. There would be no tax cut, no federal aid to education; Medicare and civil rights protections would not be passed during his presidency. They would come under his successor, Lyndon Johnson. In the analysis of historian Robert A. Dallek, the domestic record during Kennedy’s thousand days in office “was distinctly limited.”53 During the Johnson presidency, and especially during the Eighty-ninth Congress (1965–1966), there was an historic outpouring of domestic policies initiatives and accomplishments. Upon his retirement from office, members of Johnson’s cabinet presented the president with a framed document, “Landmark Laws of the Lyndon B. Johnson Administration,” with the subtitle of “With these acts President Lyndon B. Johnson and the Congress wrote a record of hope and opportunity for America.” Listed were 205 pieces of legislation. In his memoirs, Johnson proudly displayed this document in the frontispiece.54 They were not all “landmark,” in the sense used here in this book, but certainly the number of domestic (and international-related) policies were extraordinary. Lyndon Johnson, observed historian Randall B. Woods, “proved to be the most ardent presidential lawmaker of the twentieth century.”55 At the same time, the Supreme Court, under the leadership of Earl Warren, handed down several landmark decisions, adapting most of the Bill of Rights protections to apply to the

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states, especially in the arena of criminal justice, free speech, and press, separation of church and state, the right of privacy, redistricting, the right to travel, and the protection of interracial marriages.

Constitutional Amendments Three amendments were ratified during this era. The Twenty-third Amendment (1961) permitted citizens living in the District of Columbia to vote for president and vice president, and three electoral votes were assigned to the District. There was no provision for adding new electoral votes should the population of the District increase in subsequent years. Nor was there any mention of statehood or voting representation in the House or the Senate in this amendment. In 1978, Congress passed the Washington, D.C. Voting Rights Amendment, which would have given the District full representation in the House and Senate, but the proposed amendment did not gain enough support from the states to be ratified. At the end of the seven-year ratification period, just sixteen states had agreed; ratification required agreement from thirty-eight states. The Twenty-fourth Amendment, ratified in 1964, outlawed the poll tax for federal elections. By 1962, only five states—Alabama, Arkansas, Mississippi, Texas, and Virginia—still required citizens to pay a fee to vote. After considerable wrangling and compromise, Congress passed the proposed amendment in 1962, and it was ratified and went into effect in 1964. At the ceremony formalizing the amendment, President Johnson observed that “there can be no one too poor to vote.” The amendment would apply only to federal elections, not to state and local elections. Virginia, nevertheless, tried to circumvent the amendment by offering its citizens a choice: pay a poll tax or file a notarized certificate of residency six months prior to an election. The Supreme Court unanimously ruled that this Virginia scheme violated the new Twenty-fourth Amendment. In 1966, in Harper v. Virginia Board of Elections, the Court determined that all poll taxes constituted a violation of the equal protection clause of the Fourteenth Amendment.56 The Twenty-fifth Amendment (1967) dealt with presidential succession. Throughout the twentieth century, there had been concern about the president’s health and what would happen if the chief executive died or were incapacitated. Four twentieth-century presidents—William McKinley, Warren Harding, Franklin Roosevelt, and John Kennedy—died while in office. In addition, Woodrow Wilson experienced two debilitating strokes in 1919; Calvin Coolidge suffered deep depression following the death of his sixteen-year-old son; Franklin Roosevelt’s fragile physical condition was hidden by his staff and doctors when he was inaugurated for a fourth term; and Dwight Eisenhower had a serious heart attack in 1955, then later suffered a stroke. Following President Kennedy’s assassination in November 1963, it became clear that there needed to be more definitive guideposts for presidential succession. At the time of Kennedy’s death, the successors to the president would have been Vice President Johnson, who had his own major health issues, then seventy-one-year-old John McCormack (Democrat—Massachusetts), the speaker of the House, then eighty-six-year-old Carl Hayden (Democrat—Arizona), the Senate pro tempore. Senator Birch E. Bayh (Democrat—Indiana), chairman of the Senate Subcommittee on the Judiciary, the committee that proposed constitutional amendments, authored the Twenty-fifth Amendment in 1965.57 It was ratified by the states in 1967. The amendment cleared up the ambiguity of the original Constitution, by stating, in Section 1, that the vice president becomes the president, and not merely assumes the duties of the president. In addition, the amendment provided the mechanism for appointing a vice president when there was a vacancy. During the twentieth century, there were several years when there was no vice president: after Theodore Roosevelt became president following McKinley’s assassination (September 1901–January

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1905), when Coolidge became president following Harding’s death (August 1923–January 1925), when Truman became president following Franklin Roosevelt’s death (April 1945–January 1949), and when Lyndon Johnson became president following Kennedy’s assassination (November 1963–January 1965). Section 2 provided filling the vacancy in the vice president’s office, with the president nominating a new vice president, who would then take office upon approval of a majority in both houses of Congress. During and following the Watergate scandal, the Twenty-fifth Amendment was invoked three times: in 1973, when Vice President Spiro Agnew resigned and was replaced by Representative Gerald R. Ford (Section 2); in 1974, when Richard Nixon resigned and Ford became president (Section 1); then during the same year when the vice-presidential vacancy was filled by former governor of New York, Nelson A. Rockefeller (Section 2). Section 3, the “acting president” provision, has been used three times: Reagan, Bush II, and Biden all temporarily transferred presidential powers to their vice presidents, as they recuperated from colonoscopy procedures. Section 4, which calls for the removal of an incapacitated president, has never been invoked, although there had been serious discussion concerning Reagan’s mental acuity during his last year in office and discussions within the Justice Department about approaching Vice President Mike Pence concerning President Donald Trump’s mental state in 2017.58 During the last tumultuous days of the Trump administration, when the president incited followers to storm the Capitol, there were calls to invoke this section. Section 4 contemplates the situation when a president suffers a debilitating episode (like a stroke), or an extreme mental condition (psychosis or paranoia). It then falls to the vice president and “majority of either the principal officers of the executive departments or of such other body as Congress may by law provide,” to declare that the president is no longer capable of performing the duties of office. Once that declaration is made, the transfer of power is immediate. In the end, it is not a medical decision, to be determined by medical doctors, but a political decision, with the principal actor being the vice president.59

Protecting the Rights of Minorities The Civil Rights Act (1964) Civil rights leaders, like Martin Luther King, Jr., James Forman, Bayard Rustin, and others were skeptical of the new president’s commitment to civil rights.60 During his first six months in office, Kennedy sent no civil rights legislative proposals or executive orders desegregating federal financed housing, as he had promised when he was on the campaign trail running for president. Following the standoff at the University of Alabama on June 11, 1963, Kennedy was determined to give a nationwide speech. His speech, hastily prepared and unrehearsed, informed the country that he would soon deliver a major civil rights bill to Congress. One week later, on June 19, Kennedy sent to Congress his proposed legislation, along with a 5,500-word message encouraging Congress to “join the executive and judicial branches in making it clear to all that race has no place in American life or law.”61 Title II of the civil rights proposal was most controversial: it would prohibit racial discrimination in public accommodations like hotels, restaurants, movie theaters, and retail establishments. “Whites only” and “colored only” facilities, common throughout the South, could no longer discriminate. Southern politicians were livid, rushing to the microphones to condemn Kennedy’s proposal. “Unconstitutional, unnecessary, unwise and beyond the realm of reason,” cried J. Strom Thurmond of South Carolina. James O. Eastland of Mississippi feared that this was a “complete blueprint for the totalitarian state … [E]very hamburger stand, every barber shop, every beauty

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parlor, every rooming house up to every bank and insurance company” would come under federal control, he warned.62 Indeed, it would be difficult getting the legislation passed, especially in the Senate with the threat of a southern filibuster. Kennedy’s legislative team tried the House first, and the bill went to the only subcommittee of the House Judiciary Committee that was dominated by northern Democrats. On the Democratic side, the senior subcommittee member was Emmanuel Celler of New York; on the Republican side was William McCulloch, a low-profile conservative from Ohio. McCulloch, who had fought for civil rights reforms in 1957 and 1960, and become a key figure in the deliberations, was courted by Kennedy and his advisers. Deputy Attorney General Nicholas Katzenbach and McCulloch hammered out a compromise that weakened the voting rights section of the bill, only to upset liberal Democrats who had not participated in the deliberations. McCulloch insisted on a “reasonable bill,” one that Republicans could support and that would not be watered down by compromise in the Senate to appease southern Democrats. Then Democrats came back with a tougher bill which added a fair employment section. It was McCulloch’s turn to be upset, and Republicans and conservative Democrats threatened to eviscerate the bill once it reached the floor.63 Two extraordinary, tragic events then occurred. The first was the bombing of the Sixteenth Street Baptist Church in Birmingham, and the deaths of the four African American girls on September 15. The civil rights law now seemed all the more urgent. Finally, on November 20, the Judiciary Committee was able to report its bill: stronger than Kennedy’s original proposal yet acceptable to a majority of Republicans. Then came the second shock, the assassination of President Kennedy on November 22. With his death, the political landscape would be profoundly changed. The day after Kennedy was buried, the new president, Lyndon Johnson, addressed a joint session of Congress. To a packed chamber, hushed with anticipation, Johnson said: No memorial oration or eulogy could more eloquently honor President Kennedy’s memory than the earliest possible passage of the civil rights bill for equal rights. We have talked for one hundred years or more. It is now time to write the next chapter—and write it in the books of law.64 Despite the momentum building for reform, one of the biggest hurdles remained: the adamant opposition from House Rules Committee chairman Howard Smith. The civil rights bill was bottled up in the Rules Committee and Smith wouldn’t even consider hearings on it. An attempt to force the bill out of committee, called a discharge petition, needed 218 votes, but fell short by 60 votes. But after the Christmas break and before the new legislative year in January, enough members agreed to the discharge petition. Smith could count the votes, and finally relented. He would hold hearings and, predictably, a parade of southern lawmakers came to the Rules Committee to testify against the bill. Finally, it went to the full House for consideration. Smith surprised everyone with an amendment on the House floor. He wanted to insert the word “sex” into the proposed Title VII, which prohibited employment discrimination, along with protections on the basis of race and national origin. What was Smith up to? Many thought Smith was throwing a monkey wrench into the bill: something so outrageous—protecting women against discrimination—that the whole bill would collapse. Carl A. Elliott (Democrat—Alabama) declared: “Smith didn’t give a damn about women’s rights, Black rights, equality. He was trying to knock off votes either then or down the line because there was always a hard core of men who didn’t favor women’s rights.”65 Celler, staunch liberal from New York (but no friend of the Equal Rights Amendment) thought Smith’s amendment was illogical and wrongheaded. No matter Smith’s motivation, women in the House climbed on

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board. In a long, impassioned plea, Martha W. Griffiths (Democrat—Michigan), a formidable member of the House Ways and Means Committee, warned: if “sex” is not included, then “White women will be the last at the hiring gate.”66 After two hours of debate, Smith’s amendment passed, 168–133. Some lawmakers just shook their heads in disbelief: the old guard southern conservative wanting to protect women in a federal civil rights bill while some northern liberals wanted to scrap the added language. On February 10, the House heard over 120 amendments, agreeing to 28 of them, most of which were technical; it then overwhelmingly passed the civil rights bill, 290 to 110. This was indeed a bipartisan victory, with 138 Republicans joining 152 Democrats; nearly all the opposition, 96 votes, came from the southern Democrats. The Senate would present the biggest problems. First, the chairman of the Judiciary Committee, James O. Eastland of Mississippi, was certainly no friend of the legislation. However, Senate Majority Leader Mike Mansfield engaged in clever parliamentary legerdemain: when the completed House bill was walked over to the Senate, Mansfield intercepted it; otherwise, it would have been sent directly to Eastland’s Judiciary graveyard. Indeed, 120 out of 121 civil rights bills over the past decade had died in Eastland’s committee. Instead of sending the House bill to a committee, Mansfield would have the Senate act as a committee of the whole, and have the bill directly considered on the floor. Another Mansfield tactic was to suspend all other Senate business (except for the Appropriations Committee) and make sure that there was a quorum (fifty) of senators present at all times. Mansfield did this to thwart Richard Russell, who with endless parliamentary maneuvers and quorum calls, would try to grind the session to a halt. Earlier, Johnson, too, warned his old friend and mentor from Georgia: “if you get in my way” on the civil rights bill, “I’m going to run you down. I want you to know that, because I care about you.”67 Johnson asked Mansfield to deploy Hubert Humphrey as floor leader for the upcoming fight; alongside him would be Thomas H. Kuchel (Republican—California), who was responsible for rounding up fifteen Republican colleagues. Moderate Republicans would be needed to offset conservative southern Democrats. The key would be to persuade Senate minority leader Everett Dirksen to convince enough of his party’s colleagues to vote for reform. The demagoguery and race baiting coming from most southern politicians found strong support from a majority of white folks back home. Moderate southern lawmakers were caught in a bind. If they voted for civil rights reform, it would mean the end of their careers. White southern voters simply would not stand for it. One such moderate, J. William Fulbright (Democrat—Arkansas) confessed to Johnson in a telephone conversation, “Christ, I’m over a barrel on this thing. I wish to hell I could vote with you. You know that.” Johnson replied: “I know that, I know it.” Fulbright: “I hope to hell I can get this thing out of the way, but I feel like a traitor, you know.”68 In the middle of all the debates and bluster on civil rights were the 1964 presidential primaries. On April 7, Alabama governor George Wallace tallied an astounding 34 percent of the Democratic primary votes in Wisconsin: blue collar ethnic workers, fearful of crime and afraid of African Americans coming into their neighborhoods saw Wallace as someone, finally, who understood them. Wallace gained 24 percent of the Indiana primary votes, then nearly won in Maryland. Wallace boasted, “If it hadn’t been for the nigger vote bloc, we’d have won it all.”69 Wallace’s overt racist attitudes were certainly part of the appeal; but it was more than that. His appeal to white, blue-collar voters worried Johnson and his aides, and showed a raw, visceral side of America that would be exploited by Nixon, Reagan, and others in the coming decade, and Trump in later years. In their fight against civil rights legislation, southern senators could do only one thing: mount a filibuster and hope that the fight would drag on and pro-civil rights forces would

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quit in frustration. But that didn’t happen: the pro-civil rights forces were impressively organized, under the leadership of Humphrey and Kuchel. The longest filibuster in Senate history began on March 30 and continued until June 10, taking up seventy-five calendar days and consuming nearly 6 million words in the Congressional Record. Eighteen southern Democrats and one Republican, John G. Tower of Texas, formed a platoon system, with six senators forming a filibuster team, then replaced by six others. They droned on and on. Finally on June 1, a filibuster-ending cloture petition was filed, and on June 10, after firstterm senator Robert C. Byrd (Democrat—West Virginia) finished a fourteen-hour, thirteenminute speech, the vote was taken. For the first time in Senate history, a civil rights filibuster was shut down, by a vote of 71–29, with four more votes than needed. Twenty-seven Republicans joined forty-four Democrats, including Clair Engle of California, who was wheeled into the chamber, barely able to move, his body wracked with the effects of a malignant brain tumor. “This is a sad day for America,” said Strom Thurmond of South Carolina who was about to switch his allegiance to the Republican Party and to Barry Goldwater. Retorted Jacob K. Javits (Republican—New York), “This was one of the Senate’s finest hours.”70 Engle lived long enough to vote for final passage. At the signing ceremony, Lyndon Johnson handed out seventy-five pens, to Dirksen, Humphrey, Celler, McCulloch, Robert Kennedy, and dozens of civil rights leaders. Key to passage was the pressure exerted by Clarence Mitchell of the NAACP, Joseph Rauh of the Leadership Conference on Civil Rights, from the National Council of Churches, and a wide variety of faith-based organizations, labor organizations, and business leaders. Indeed, Hubert Humphrey noted that “Without the clergy, we could never has passed the bill.”71 In his remarks, President Johnson stated that millions of Americans had been denied essential freedoms, but no longer: “Our Constitution, the foundation of our Republic, forbids it. The principles of our freedom forbid it. Morality forbids it. And the law I sign tonight forbids it.”72 The 1964 Civil Rights Act had eleven separate titles, dealing with voting rights, the extension of the Civil Rights Commission, and other provisions. But the most important sections were these: Title II (Public Accommodations), which barred discrimination on the basis of race, color, religion, or national origin in public accommodations, such as hotels, restaurants, lunch counters, movie theatres, or any other public accommodation that affected interstate commerce. Title III (Attorney General) authorized the US attorney general to pursue legal proceedings on behalf of individuals who may not have funds or feel that bringing a suit on their own behalf would jeopardize their own safety. Title IV (Public Schools) called for active pursuit of desegregation in public schools. Title VI (Loss of Federal Funds) declared that any government agency receiving federal funds could lose those funds if it engaged in unlawful discrimination. Title VII (Employment Discrimination) declared it unlawful for employers, employment agencies, labor unions or training programs to discriminate on the basis of race, color, religion, sex, or national origin in hiring, discharging, or in terms of conditions of employment. The law was immediately challenged in court, but was upheld in two significant decisions. In Heart of Atlanta Motel v. United States, a unanimous Supreme Court determined that Congress had “ample power” to protect against racial discrimination in hotels and motels serving interstate commerce. In Katzenbach v. McClung, the Supreme Court ruled, again unanimously, that even a local, family-owned establishment, Ollie’s Barbecue, which refused to serve black customers, came under the jurisdiction of Title II, because it drew a substantial portion of its food supplies from outside the state. Senator Eastland’s fears (“every hamburger stand, every barbershop”) were becoming a reality.73

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Significance of these Policies The biggest triumph of this act was to halt racial discrimination in public accommodations. No longer would African Americans have to search high and low for a place to eat or sleep while traveling or face the indignities of “Whites only” barriers. The threatened loss of federal funds became an important deterrent to local and state governments. Far less successful was the pursuit of racial desegregation of public schools: white flight, private schools, and lack of political will crippled true integration of public schools. The Voting Rights Act (1965) There had been progress in registering African Americans in some parts of the South. Tennessee had registered 69 percent of its adult African American population; while Florida registered 64 percent, and Texas registered 58 percent. But in the Deep South, it was a different story. In Mississippi, just 6.7 percent of eligible black voters were registered. Many, like civil rights activist Fannie Lou Hamer, did not even know they could register and vote. All three of the modern civil rights acts, the 1957, 1960, and the 1964 act dealt to some degree with protecting against voter discrimination. But voter discrimination still had to be dealt with head on. The fight for the 1964 Civil Rights Act had been courageous but arduous, and fraught with both predictable and unknown political repercussions. Johnson wanted to move on from civil rights to other domestic programs, but King and others pressed a reluctant president to focus on the most basic of democratic values, the right to vote. On January 2, King, Hosea Williams and other leaders of the Southern Christian Leadership Conference (SCLC), John Lewis and the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC), and local African American leaders began a voting rights protest in Selma, Alabama. Early in 1965, Johnson met with a group of civil rights leaders—King, A. Philip Randolph, Roy Wilkins, Whitney Young, Jr., and Clarence Mitchell—to look ahead at voting rights legislation. Following Johnson’s January 1965 State of the Union address calling for the elimination of “every remaining obstacle to the right to vote,” Senate Majority Leader Mansfield, Minority Leader Dirksen and the new attorney general, Nicholas Katzenbach, began crafting a tough, sweeping bill to protect rights. Mansfield, who rarely lost his temper, gave his staff instructions to draft the simplest and harshest of bills, no more than a page long. “I want a bill,” he told his staff, “that a man with a first-grade education, colored or White, can understand.”74 Then Selma erupted, on March 7, in what became known as “bloody Sunday.” Law enforcement under Sheriff Jim Clark and Alabama state troopers, brandishing whips, nightsticks, and tear gas, savagely beat many of the 600 black and white protesters, forcing them to retreat from the Edmund Pettus Bridge back to Selma. The horrific scene75 was captured on television, enraging Americans and viewers throughout the world. On Monday, March 15, 1965, Lyndon Johnson went before a joint session of Congress and gave perhaps the most memorable speech of his public life. It was forty-five minutes long, interrupted thirty-six times by applause and two standing ovations. Johnson recalled, standing before the assembled Congress, nearly blinded by the television lights, feeling the tension in the chamber, “I could hear the emotion in the echoes of my own words.” “I paused for breath. In that fleeting moment my thoughts turned to the picket lines in Birmingham, the sit-ins in North Carolina, the marches in Selma.”76 Johnson declared: But even if we pass this bill, the battle will not be over. What happened in Selma is part of a far larger movement which reaches into every section and state of America. It is the effort of American Negroes to secure for themselves the full blessings of American life.

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Their cause must be our cause, too. Because it is not just Negroes, but really it is all of us who must overcome the crippling legacy of bigotry and injustice. … And we shall overcome.77 Johnson recalled, “Soon most of the Chamber was on its feet with a shouting ovation that I shall never forget as long as I live.”78 But not everyone was pleased: the Virginia and Mississippi delegations, along with some others, boycotted the speech altogether; other southern lawmakers squirmed in their seats.79 In a telephone call to King, Johnson said, “The greatest achievement of my administration … was the passage of the 1964 Civil Right Act. But I think this [voting rights legislation] will be bigger, because it’ll do things that even the ’64 act couldn’t do.”80 Emmanuel Celler immediately began hearings on May 12 and reported the bill out of the Judiciary Committee. It then went to Smith’s Rules Committee. Smith procrastinated for three weeks, and when the bill finally got to the full House, he bottled it up for an additional five weeks through parliamentary maneuvering. Finally, on July 9, 1965, the House overwhelmingly approved the bill, 333–85. After Johnson’s memorable speech, sixty-seven Senators signed on as co-sponsors of the legislation, guaranteeing to override any southern filibuster and assuring that the bill would pass. The southern leader, Richard Russell, suffering from emphysema, was sidelined, but even his presence would have been futile in obstructing the bill. This time, two southern Democratic senators, Ralph W. Yarborough of Texas and George A. Smathers of Florida, defied the southern obstruction and voted for the voting rights bill, which passed 77–19. Section 2 of the Voting Rights Act prohibited the denial or abridgement of the right to vote based on literacy tests. Most significant was Section 5. It targeted states or their political subdivisions which had voting tests (such as literacy, good character, knowledge of the state’s constitution, or other requirements). In the states and local governments where less than 50 percent of adults had voted during the 1964 elections, voting tests were voided and the states could not make changes without pre-clearance from the US attorney general or the US District Court in the District of Columbia. Federal examiners would be sent to assist in voter registration and monitor polling stations. On August 6, 1965, Lyndon Johnson signed the Voting Rights Act in the ornate President’s Room in the US Capitol, the same room used by Lincoln 104 years earlier to free slaves who were pressed into duty by the Confederacy. Johnson, along with the more than one hundred dignitaries who witnessed his signature, moved to the Capitol Rotunda, where he pronounced the signing “a victory for the freedom of the American Negro, but … also a victory for the freedom of the American nation.”81 The Voting Rights Act did not specify offending states. But immediately the attorney general announced that the voting provisions would apply to South Carolina, Georgia, Alabama, Louisiana, Mississippi, Virginia, and twenty-six counties in North Carolina. In those six states, just 1.1 million African Americans had been registered; twice that number had not. Forty-five federal examiners, each one a volunteer and a southerner, were dispatched to the affected areas to register voters and to prevent further discriminatory voting treatment. Katzenbach filed suit against the poll tax in Mississippi, with federal suits following in Alabama, Texas, and Virginia. Like the 1964 Civil Rights Act, the new voting rights legislation was immediately challenged in court. In South Carolina v. Katzenbach (1966), the Supreme Court, in a nearunanimous opinion, upheld the Voting Rights Act, rejecting out of hand South Carolina’s challenge.82

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Significance of this Policy The right to vote is a bedrock principle of American democracy. The fight to preserve it was, as one historian described it, the Second Reconstruction.83 For much of the South, that principle for generations had been fundamentally violated through intimidation, bogus literacy tests, poll taxes, and other measures aimed at keeping African Americans away from the voting booth. The Voting Rights Act forced recalcitrant southern states and counties to break the chains of racial discrimination. But the Voting Rights Act, as forceful and as compelling as it was, also led to fundamental changes in political allegiance. The “solid South” was now crumbling. Southern allegiance to the Democratic Party had been slipping since the New Deal, particularly through the 1948 presidential election, and now through tough new federal laws that would transform the racial order of southern society. In 1968, third-party candidate George Wallace and Republican Richard Nixon appealed to disaffected southerners and other white voters, drawing many away from the increasingly liberal Democratic Party. For many, the Democratic Party had become the party of court-ordered busing, of federal intrusion into matters best left to individuals and communities, of liberal northern elites telling ordinary people what to do, or politicians out of touch with the wishes and desires of average white voters. The political impact was swift. Just as Kennedy and Johnson predicted, the once solid white Democratic South rapidly became Republican, not only at the presidential, gubernatorial, and congressional levels, but also at the local level. African American voters, increasingly showing their allegiance to the Democratic Party, made substantial gains, tripling the number of registered voters in the four years following the Voting Rights Act. By 1969, nearly 500 African Americans held elective public office in the Deep South.84 One early victim of the Voting Rights Act was Howard Smith, who lost by 364 votes in a Democratic primary to liberal state lawmaker George C. Rawlings, Jr., who lashed out at Smith for his obstruction to Medicare, anti-poverty programs, and civil rights legislation. African Americans in the House district turned out in record numbers, ensuring Smith’s defeat. Rawlings, however, lost in November to a conservative Republican, William L. Scott, as many Smith followers jumped to the Republican side, many never to return.85 By 1988, the gap between black and white voter registration rates had narrowed considerably in the Deep South. A gap of 49.9 percent in Alabama in 1965 shrunk to 6.6 percent in 1988; in Mississippi the 62.3 percent gap shrank to 6.3 percent; and in Louisiana a 48.9 percent gap became a 2.0 percent gap in favor of black voters.86 But pressure on black voting did not fully stop. It moved from outright denial of the right to vote to the dilution of voting strength, by creating multi-member districts and at-large districts, appointing rather than electing officials, and gerrymandering. These were tools used in cities and counties throughout the South to dilute black voting strength. The Voting Rights Act was extended for five years in 1970. In 1975, there were extensive hearings on how non-English speaking citizens were treated. Preclearance was then extended to cover Spanish-speaking citizens in Texas where it was found that considerable discrimination had been practiced. In May 1981, a House Judiciary Committee subcommittee under W. Don Edwards (Democrat—California) held eighteen separate hearings in Washington, D.C., Alabama, and Texas, finding both blatant and subtle discrimination against Hispanics. “What we learned in those eighteen days of hearings was shocking—and sad,” observed Edwards.87 On signing the extension of the Voting Rights Act in 1981, President Ronald Reagan said, “For this Nation to remain true to its principles, we cannot allow any American’s vote to be denied, diluted, or defiled. The right to vote is the crown jewel of American liberties, and we will not see its luster diminished.”88

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As seen in subsequent chapters, however, the protections of the Voting Rights Act have been chipped away through by both judicial and legislative action, and, in the most profound way, the attempt of Donald Trump to invalidate the 2020 presidential election.

Health Care Assistance for Seniors and the Indigent After the defeats during the Truman years, during much of the 1950s, there was little appetite for trying again for a national health care system. The advocates of national health care decided to try a different route. In 1956, Congress expanded Social Security with benefits for the totally and permanently disabled. The AFL-CIO, under the direction of Nelson Cruikshank of its social security department, pressed for more. The labor union presented a bill to the House Ways and Means Committee calling for insurance protection for surgery, sixtyday coverage for hospitalization, another sixty days for nursing home care, and funds for prescription drugs. Wilbur D. Mills (Democrat—Arkansas), the new chairman of the Ways and Means Committee, declined to take up the AFL-CIO’s legislative package; so did two other senior members of the committee. Then Aime J. Forand (Democrat—Rhode Island) stepped in and agreed to sponsor the legislation. From that point in 1957 through 1960, the Forand bill became the focus of health care proponents. But Forand’s legislation met stiff opposition from the Eisenhower Administration, from a quarter-million-dollar campaign waged against it from the American Medical Association (AMA), and most critically, from the Ways and Means Committee and its chairman, Wilbur Mills. Why focus on the elderly for medical coverage? No other industrialized country with national health insurance coverage focused exclusively on the elderly, the most expensive and medically needy cohort of citizens. Robert M. Ball, who later became commissioner of the Social Security Administration, recalled that opposition to national health insurance was too strong, and the only way to secure any kind of health care benefits would be to graft them onto existing legislation: that is, become an amendment to the already successful Social Security Act. “We expected Medicare to be a first step toward universal national health insurance,” Ball wrote years later.89 In the meantime, in 1960 Congress passed legislation to help the neediest of the elderly with their medical expenses, the Kerr-Mills Act. It proved to be a flawed and underperforming program. That same year, John Kennedy introduced a Forand-type bill in the Senate but received just one Republican vote on the measure. When he became president, Medicare (as it was now being called) was high on Kennedy’s agenda, urging in his first State of the Union address in January 1961 that medical insurance for the elderly be enacted.90 Wilbur J. Cohen, appointed assistant secretary at Health, Education, and Welfare (HEW), was in charge of developing the Medicare legislation, and was “practically the administration’s ambassador to Wilbur Mills.”91 Mills was reluctant to support the Kennedy plan, neither was he in the mood to support administration-backed Medicare legislation brought up by Forand’s successors, Clinton P. Anderson (Democrat—New Mexico) in the Senate and Cecil R. King (Democrat— California) in the House. Mills opposed the Anderson-King bill, hoping instead to revive the legislation which bore his name, Kerr-Mills. Introduced in both 1961 and 1962, the AndersonKing bill didn’t even receive a hearing in the Ways and Means Committee until November 1963.92 On the campaign trail, Lyndon Johnson made it clear that Medicare would be one of his top priorities. His Republican opponent, Senator Barry Goldwater of Arizona, was dead set against it. Goldwater was handing Johnson a gift, and the president hammered home his support for the increasingly popular idea that the elderly deserve federal health care assistance.

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Voters were given the choice between two vastly different candidates for president and between competing policy choices on civil rights and Medicare. White voters in the Deep South flocked to Goldwater’s side primarily because of his opposition to the Civil Rights Act, but the rest of the country rejected him. Goldwater was crushed by Johnson and the path for Medicare was becoming clear: a forceful president, with a clear mandate, and a new crop of legislative troops to back him up. “For all practical purposes,” said Johnson advisor Larry O’Brien, “Medicare was passed on Election Day.”93 Indeed, during his January 1965 State of the Union address, Johnson urged the assembled lawmakers to make Medicare its first order of business. It became so, with Anderson’s Senate bill labeled as “S-1” and King’s House bill labeled “H-1,” signifying that they were the first order of business in each chamber during the new legislative session. The Eighty-ninth Congress brought not only a record number of new Democrats to office, but also the defeat of three Republican diehard opponents on the Ways and Means Committee. With a greater percentage of Democrats in Congress, Johnson persuaded Speaker McCormack to increase the size of the committee, bringing in two more Democrats who favored Medicare. The decks were now clearly stacked in favor of progressive Democrats. Still, Mills had to be convinced. But, as Lyndon Johnson noted in his memoirs, Mills, a wizard at the tax code and actuarial figures, could also count votes: “when the election changed the head count in Congress, [Wilbur Mills’s] mind changed as well.”94 In a speech in Little Rock, Mills had endorsed Medicare and, right after the State of the Union address, he announced that Medicare would be the first order of business for his committee, and pledged to get it to the floor of the House by mid-March.95 This news stunned the American Medical Association. The AMA strongly backed Goldwater for president, and, unable to compromise and unable to grasp its inevitable defeat, launched a last-minute, half-million-dollar anti-Medicare campaign. It came up with its own plan, dubbed Eldercare, which would provide federal and state grants under Kerr-Mills guidelines, to subsidize private health insurance policies. The AMA even brought in retired actor Ronald Reagan to record an appeal to the wives of AMA members, urging them to defeat Medicare and write to their member of Congress: “If you don’t do this,” Reagan implored, “one of these days you and I are going to spend our sunset years telling our children and our children’s children what it once was like in America when men were free.”96 The AMA last-ditch effort frustrated its supporters, irritated Wilbur Mills, and delighted the White House. Medicare was going to happen, the votes were there, and poll after poll showed that Americans, concerned about the cost of private health care, were clamoring for a solution. The AMA-backed Eldercare plan gathered only lukewarm support. Then, unexpectedly, John W. Byrnes (Republican—Wisconsin) introduced a Republican alternative, called Bettercare, patterned after the high-option plan then in place for federal workers. The plan was a sound one, more generous in several ways than King-Anderson, and might have found traction as the committee leaders reviewed it. Wilbur Cohen, the chief administration architect of Medicare, was invited to appear before the Ways and Means Committee on March 9, 1965, to explain the various measures found in the King-Anderson legislation as well as the Byrnes proposal. After hearing the summary, Mills turned to his colleague Byrnes and said, “You know, John, I like that part of your bill about taking care of doctor bills as well as hospital expenses.”97 For Mills, it was a stroke of policy genius: combine the administration’s bill (hospital coverage) with the Republican-backed alternative (doctors’ fees), and then, for good measure, throw in medical assistance for the poor (Medicaid). The Mills plan, soon called the “threelayer cake” (hospitalization, doctors’ fees, and Medicaid), temporarily blunted the AMA and set Republicans back on their heels. Wilbur Cohen rushed back to the White House in, as

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Johnson described it, a “state of high excitement,” telling the president that “Mills did it so fast, the Republicans were dumbstruck.” Then Johnson ordered Cohen and his team to redraft the administration’s bill, incorporating Mills’s compromise.98 But the president wanted Cohen to make sure that the Democrats got the credit. “Just tell them,” Johnson said to Cohen, “to snip off that name ‘Republican’ and slip those little changes into the bill.”99 The three-part Medicare package was quickly passed in committee and sent to the full House on April 8. Mills, up until now the key lawmaker dragging his feet, was now greeted as Medicare’s hero, with a standing ovation in the House. The 200-page legislation passed 313–115; but leaving no stone unturned, Johnson personally telephoned every doubtful member of Congress. There was a flurry of minor amendments in the Senate, but Medicare, too, passed with a resounding 68–21 vote. On July 30, 1965, a hot, muggy day in Independence, Missouri, President Johnson affixed his signature to the Social Security Amendments of 1965, known to all as Medicare and Medicaid. At the Truman Presidential Library, Johnson handed the first Medicare card to President Truman. The frail, eighty-one-year-old Truman struggled to find the right words: “I am glad to have lived this long and to witness today the signing of the Medicare bill.” Johnson praised Truman for his health care advocacy twenty years earlier. “The people of the United States love and voted for Harry Truman, not because he gave them hell—but because he gave them hope,” Johnson said to a crowd of 250 dignitaries and guests. “I am a very happy man,” beamed Truman.100 Medicare and Medicaid had three basic components. Medicare Part A was hospital insurance, covering hospital, skilled nursing, and home health care services. It was funded by payroll taxes under Social Security and beneficiaries were those persons sixty-five and older who were also eligible for Social Security. Medicare Part B was Supplementary Medical Insurance, which covered the cost of physician services, outpatient care, and ambulatory services. It was for those elderly persons eligible for Social Security and was funded by general revenues and by patient deductibles. The third component was Medicaid, providing health care insurance to persons of low income, regardless of their age. It was jointly funded by federal and state governments, with the federal government’s portion coming from general revenue funds instead of payroll taxes. By July 1, 1966, Medicare went into operation. Nearly 19 million recipients, nearly all eligible elderly, enrolled in Part A (Hospital Insurance), and 93 percent, nearly 18 million, were enrolled in Part B (doctors’ fees). Robert M. Ball, head of the Social Security Administration since 1961, was put in charge. Some 1,800 new employees were hired, twentyone branch offices and seventy-one temporary service centers were set up. It was a massive undertaking, but Lyndon Johnson was determined to get it up and running as soon as possible. But in rushing to get the program going, the administration basically ceded to the medical industry the rates they would charge. “We let the doctors and hospitals write reimbursement rules that would make them rich without any exposure to financial risk. In our zest to get Medicare off to a roaring start, we let them dig deep into the taxpayers’ pockets,” wrote Joseph A. Califano, Jr., one of Johnson’s domestic policy aides.101 The medical charges would be pegged as “reasonable” and “customary.” Nonetheless, doctors’ fees more than doubled between 1965 and 1966.102 Significance of these Policies There were several immediate ramifications for Medicare. If doctors and hospitals were to receive compensation from Medicare, they would have to comply with Title VI of the 1964 Civil Rights Act, which required that recipients of federal funds not discriminate on the basis

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of race. The White House started receiving plaintive phone calls, usually from doctors, medical administrators, and local politicians, most often from rural southern communities, all of whom said they were friends of Lyndon. The pleas often sounded like this: “They’re [the hospitals] not going to change their ways overnight. You know that as well as I do. Doctors won’t treat the colored, and the nurses won’t treat them.” But federal law now required that they comply. Many facilities dragged their feet as long as they could; some simply decided to close down.103 Another early problem was fraud. Federal prosecutors were busy trying to fight against doctors who overbilled and hospitals that submitted false claims. There was fraud in the early years, but nothing like the hospital fraud in the late 1990s and early 2000s, when HCA, Inc., a Tennesseebased hospital management firm, and later its subsidiaries, were charged with criminal conduct, and fined $1.7 billion, a sum far greater than any other health care provider.104 Nonetheless, Medicare and Medicaid became the fundamental health care program of the federal government, providing services to millions of the aged and persons with few means. It has been amended throughout the succeeding years, adding benefits (such as drug services), and has become a vital, though costly, component federal health and medical assistance.

The “War on Poverty” In his first State of the Union address in January 1964, Lyndon Johnson declared a “War on Poverty.” “Our aim,” Johnson said, “is not only to relieve the symptoms of poverty, but to cure it and, above all, to prevent it.” There were four basic policy programs under the umbrella of the War on Poverty. First, were the Social Security Amendments of 1965, which created Medicare and Medicaid. Second, was the Food Stamp Act of 1964, which made the food stamp program permanent. Third, was the Economic Opportunity Act of 1964, which established the Office of Economic Opportunity (OEO), created the Head Start Program, VISTA, Job Corps, and a number of other projects, some of which caused considerable controversy. Fourth, was the Elementary and Secondary Education Act (ESEA) of 1965. Medicare/Medicaid and ESEA are discussed elsewhere in this chapter, and the focus here is on two of the long-lasting and successful policies under the War on Poverty: food stamps and the Head Start program. Food Stamps The basic legislation for providing food to poor people began during the Depression. The Federal Surplus Commodities Corporation was given the charge to distribute surplus food to needy families and school lunch programs. In May 1939, a food stamp program was begun and lasted until mid-1943. During the 1950s, Senator George D. Aiken (Republican—Vermont), Representative Leonor K. Sullivan (Democrat—Missouri), and Hubert Humphrey championed a federal food stamp program. John Kennedy’s first executive order as president was to create a food stamp program in West Virginia and six other states. This was later extended to fortythree programs by 1964, with some 392,400 individuals participating.105 In 1964, through the Food Stamp Act, Kennedy’s program was made permanent. Much of the support for a permanent food stamp program came from farm state senators Robert J. Dole (Republican—Kansas) and George S. McGovern (Democrat—South Dakota). A three-year program was authorized, but the results were far from satisfactory. A 1969 Senate committee report found that in only Washington State and the District of Columbia were at least 40 percent of the poor population participating in the food stamp program, and that the national average was just 21.6 percent of poor persons receiving benefits. Food stamp benefits simply were not getting to those who needed them.

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Even before this 1969 Senate report, lawmakers were trying to determine why the participation rate was so low. In 1967, senators Joseph S. Clark, Jr. (Democrat—Pennsylvania) and Robert F. Kennedy (Democrat—New York) went on a highly publicized fact-finding mission to the Mississippi Delta. A month before they left for Mississippi, a twenty-seven-year-old Jackson, Mississippi, attorney for the NAACP, Marian Wright, persuasively testified that people were going hungry in the Delta and needed assistance.106 With the fact-finding investigation, the spotlight suddenly focused on Mississippi, with television crews and the international media hoping to capture another clash between Washington, southern politicians, and the harsh realities of southern poverty. In Jackson, Clark assured the assembled crowd of over a thousand that the field hearings would be “neither a witch hunt nor a whitewash. We are here to find out the basic facts.”107 Clark and Kennedy saw stunning levels of poverty, malnutrition, and the suffering of children and adults alike. But white Mississippi politicians were appalled and protested loudly. Governor Paul B. Johnson, Jr. dismissed allegations of poverty and hunger coming from “socialist-minded senators.” He later told a reporter from the New Orleans Times-Picayune that “all Negroes I’ve seen around here are so fat they shine.”108 The senators recommended free food stamps for those who could not afford them, lower purchase prices, and investigations into alleged overcharges for stamps. In response, the US Department of Agriculture, which oversaw the food stamp program, reduced the cost of stamps in Mississippi and began negotiating with state officials to guarantee federal funding. Hunger in America became a recurrent theme in the late 1960s. A report, Hunger USA, pinpointed 256 “hunger counties” in the United States; a CBS television documentary, Hunger in America, reached a wider audience; civil rights leader Ralph David Abernathy led a Poor People’s Campaign to spur on the Department of Agriculture; and the Senate established a new Select Committee on Nutrition and Human Need, chaired by Senator McGovern. Not until after the 1968 election, however, did substantial changes come to the food stamp program. In May 1969, President Richard Nixon declared that the moment “was at hand to put an end to hunger in America itself for all time.”109 He recommended that food stamps be given priority over food distribution, that the most needy receive free stamps, and that stamp allotments should be increased. Most of his recommendations were incorporated into the Food Stamp Act Amendments of 1971, setting nationwide uniform income and resource eligibility standards and increasing the federal share of administrative costs. Political scientist Richard P. Nathan in 1975 observed that the expansion of the food stamp program since 1964 was “the most important change in public welfare policy since the passage of the Social Security Act in 1935.”110 There were subsequent amendments and adjustments to the program during the next decades. The food stamp program is now called Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP), and in 2018 provided assistance to some 40 million Americans. Head Start During the summers of 1965 and 1966, the Office of Economic Opportunity launched an eightweek Project Head Start. Recent research on child development and the needs of disadvantaged preschool children spurred the Head Start program to attempt to break the cycle of poverty by providing low-income children and their families support for their emotional, social, nutritional, and psychological needs. Sargent Shriver, John Kennedy’s brother-in-law, assembled a panel of experts in the field, including Dr. Robert Cooke, a pediatrician from Johns Hopkins University, and Dr. Edward Zigler, a professor of psychology and head of Yale University’s Child Study Center.

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Since 1965, more than 30 million children have been served through the Head Start program. Head Start currently serves over a million urban and rural children and their families in all fifty states, the District of Columbia, Puerto Rico, and the US territories. It also serves Native Americans and children in seasonal and migrant communities. The long-term impact of Head Start programs has been examined, finding that children receiving assistance have improved their educational, social, emotional, and behavioral development, and that the program has assisted parents as well.111 In his memoirs, Walter F. Mondale, writing about his time as a junior senator from Minnesota, noted that most War on Poverty programs had to “scraped along on rather lean budgets,” concluding that “we authorized dreams and appropriated peanuts.”112 Significance of these Policies OEO was dismantled during the Nixon administration, with programs shunted off to various federal agencies. OEO was renamed the Community Services Administration in 1975 and then shut down completely in 1981. Throughout the years, there has been considerable debate about the effectiveness of anti-poverty programs. Critics have pointed to government statistics indicating little, if any, improvement in the percentage of citizens who are considered poor. Have the programs been successful?113 However, scholars and researchers have pointed out deep flaws in the way poverty has been measured. The official government statistics had failed fully to capture the role of government safety nets because the value of in-kind benefits (such as food stamps) was excluded and tax credits, like the Earned Income Tax Credit, were not counted. The original poverty index, developed in the 1950s and 1960s, relied on the cost of household necessities, like food and housing. But since then, there have been dramatic changes, with food costing less and housing often much more. The Bureau of the Census revised its methods for defining poverty in 2010. Using the new measures, research from Columbia University scholars has noted that federal safety net programs have reduced the poverty rate from 26 percent in 1967 to 16 percent in 2012. Without those federal anti-poverty programs, 29 percent of Americans would be in poverty today, compared with 27 percent in 1967. However, deep poverty, that is, those individuals who are below 50 percent of the poverty line, has not measurably changed in the past fifty years. Deep poverty rate has “remained relatively constant” over the past fifty years, hovering around 5 percent of the total population.114

Immigration Reform During his January 1965 State of the Union address, President Johnson urged Congress to eliminate the immigration quota system put in place forty years before and pass a reform bill that was “based on the work a man can do and not where he was born or how he spells his name.” There were earlier attempts to craft a new immigration bill, but they were bogged down by defenders of Northern European-centric immigration policies. Immigration reform had been a top priority of Emmanuel Celler who earlier introduced legislation to undo the quota system established by the 1924 Johnson-Reed legislation and the 1952 McCarran-Walter. Celler, the dean of the House, was the only member who had been in office when the 1924 bill was passed and he considered quotas to be racist measures. Both John Kennedy and Lyndon Johnson had voted for the McCarran-Walter legislation when they were

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in Congress, but following the decisive presidential and congressional elections of 1964, immigration reform was on the “must” list for passage. But soon after Johnson’s address, Senator Philip D. Hart (Democrat—Michigan) and Celler introduced administration-backed legislation. The Celler-Hart legislation ran into opposition from Representative Michael A. Feighan (Democrat—Ohio), chairman of the House Subcommittee on Immigration and Nationality, who, backed by other conservatives, argued that the priority should be given to immigrant applicants who already had relatives living in the United States. In his testimony before Feighan’s subcommittee, Attorney General Nicholas Katzenbach noted that the current system greatly favored immigrants from Northern Europe and discriminated heavily against those from Southern and Eastern Europe and Asia. Immigrants from just three countries embraced 70 percent of the total annual quota. “Such a system should be intolerable on principle alone,” Katzenbach said. “I cannot believe that any American would want to defend a system that presupposes that some people are inferior to others solely because of their birthplace.”115 In the beginning, Feighan, characterized by journalist Tom Gjelten as “famously ornery,” even refused to hold hearings on the legislation, and it took arm-twisting from the president, the well-known “Johnson Treatment,” to get him to cooperate.116 Feighan reluctantly agreed to consider Celler’s legislation, but insisted that family unification be the major criterion, rather than giving priority to immigrants with special skills. Feighan’s intent was clear: family unification would mean a quota system by another name. In order to keep the legislation on track, however, the administration and its backers relented: family considerations would be paramount. This satisfied many of the bill’s conservative critics, but not all. During the bill’s debate, some conservatives and nativists emphasized that national quotas should remain, to preserve the country’s Anglo-European heritage. Senator Sam Ervin (Democrat—North Carolina) said he objected to the idea of giving someone from Ethiopia the same right to immigrate to the United States as given to someone from England, France, or Germany. “With all due respect to Ethiopia,” Ervin said, “I don’t know of any contributions that Ethiopia has made to the making of America.”117 In the end, the House voted overwhelmingly, 318–95, for the Hart-Celler immigration amendments and the Senate accepted the bill by voice vote. The Immigration and Nationality Act Amendments abolished quota systems and eliminated national origin, race, or ancestry as a factor in immigration. This had a particular impact on Asians. Before the 1965 amendments, Asians were the only groups that were restricted on the basis of race.118 The law established a ceiling of 120,000 immigrants from the Western Hemisphere and a 170,000 ceiling of immigrants from the Eastern Hemisphere, with the exception to those ceilings for immediate relatives of US citizens and certain special immigrants. The amendments also established a 20,000-per-country limit for Eastern Hemisphere immigrants, which later in 1976 also applied to Western Hemisphere immigrants.119 Who was inadmissible? Much of the earlier immigration language remained. Applicants for visas still had to demonstrate that they were not illiterate, homosexual, sick, or disabled, didn’t work in the sex trade and were not “likely to become a public charge.”120 President Johnson, on the afternoon of October 3, 1965, signed the new immigration law. The signing ceremony was striking and symbolic: Johnson stood at the foot of the Statue of Liberty in New York harbor and declared that the new law repaired a “very deep and painful flaw in the fabric of American justice, it corrects a cruel and enduring wrong in the conduct of the American nation. It will make us truer to ourselves as a country and as a people. It will strengthen us in a hundred unforeseen ways.”121

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Significance of this Policy The Immigration and Nationality Amendments of 1965, in the assessment of historian Randall B. Woods, was “one of the least noticed but most important” policy of the Great Society.122 The centerpiece of the immigration amendments—family unification—produced unintended consequences. By the time the new law was put into effect in 1968, the number of northern Europeans seeking admission to the United States was waning, while the desire to come to America was increasing in Asia, Africa, and other non-European areas. By 1970, 61.7 percent of immigrants came from Europe and 38.3 percent came from all other locations; by 1990, 22.9 percent came from Europe and 77.1 percent were from all other locations; and by 2010, just 12.1 percent came from Europe and 87.9 percent came from elsewhere.123 The Pew Research Center in 2015 estimated that without post-1965 immigration, America would have been 75 percent white, 14 percent black, 8 percent Hispanic, and less than 1 percent Asian. By 2015, the United States was 62 percent white, 12 percent black, 18 percent Hispanic, and 6 percent Asian.124

Federal Education Assistance As seen above, in signing some of the most important pieces of legislation during his presidency, Lyndon Johnson had the flair for the dramatic. The Elementary and Secondary Education Act (ESEA) of 1965, the most significant piece of federal education policy, was signed into law at Johnson’s old one-room elementary school, just a mile and a half from Johnson’s ranch. His elementary school teacher Kathryn Deadrich Loney (“Miss Kate”), several former classmates, and some of the Mexican-American students he taught in 1927 and 1928 were present. “I believe deeply that no law I have ever signed,” Johnson stated, “or ever will sign means more to the future of America.”125 Before passage of the ESEA, education policy was almost exclusively in the hands of state and local governments. But there certainly was tension between federal and state policymakers, especially when it came to matters of race. The Brown decision, Eisenhower’s decision to bring federal troops to Little Rock, and other aspects of the growing civil rights movement made many southern lawmakers wary of any kind of federal support or intrusion into educational policy. Further, Adam Clayton Powell’s persistent use of the Powell Amendment (no federal support for entities supporting de jure segregation) put federal education bills in jeopardy.126 Another roadblock to federal education aid came from parochial school interests, especially the Catholic Church, which favored federal monies, and from opposite forces who opposed any such federal aid to parochial schools, arguing it was in violation of the concept of separation of church and state. Two federal policy developments, the GI Bill in 1944 and the National Defense Education Act of 1958, were forerunners to the significant educational assistance given during the mid1960s. The Kennedy administration had developed a number of education proposals, with the goal of making American education competitive with other countries and providing equal education opportunities for American children. Following Kennedy’s assassination, Johnson revised his predecessor’s legislative goals. But opposition to the proposed Elementary and Secondary Education Act came from three predictable forces: white southerners, especially from the Deep South, fearful of federal intrusion into race policy; Republicans and conservative Democrats objecting to further federal control; and from those protecting the interests of parochial education. But they could not halt this legislation. Representative Carl D. Perkins (Democrat—Kentucky), Speaker McCormack, and Majority Leader Albert played key roles in the House, while Wayne L. Morse (Democrat—Oregon) was instrumental in the Senate in the quick passage of ESEA.127 In congressional time, the legislation went through like greased lightning: three committees simultaneously held hearings

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and in just eighty-seven days, from introduction to Johnson’s signature, with little debate and no amendments. ESEA spread money around, providing funding for about 90 percent of all the country’s public and parochial schools.128 Title I of ESEA provided funding and guidelines for assisting the “educationally disadvantaged” children; Congress budgeted more than 80 percent of the funds available for this section. Other titles helped purchase library and audio/visual materials (Title II), programs for “at risk” schools (Title III), college and university research on education (Title IV), and money for individual state departments of education (Title V).129 Yet the language was vague, and when local school districts received federal money for assisting disadvantaged students, they often went their own ways, taking the money, and spending it according to their own priorities. As one critic observed, there wasn’t one Title I program, but 30,000 separate and different Title I programs.130 Significance of these Policies Over the years, Congress reauthorized ESEA several times. A new focus on educational accountability for student achievement came through the 1994 Improving America’s Schools Act and in 2001, ESEA was amended to become “No Child Left Behind,” an ambitious and controversial expansion of federal power. In summing up the impact of ESEA, John B. King, Jr., president and chief executive officer of the Education Trust, observed that since its passage in 1965, ESEA has helped establish the expectation that a child’s ZIP code, race, family income, background, home language, or disability should never be a barrier to a quality education. The law also helped historically underserved children receive the resources they need, so that the promise of America—as a country in which our people can become whatever they dream—can be a reality for all.131 In addition to ESEA, Congress enacted the Higher Education Assistance Act (HEA) in 1965, giving a wide range of federal aid to students and their families for post-secondary education, special assistance to less-advantaged students and families, and assistance to colleges and universities. To provide student loans, Congress created in 1972 the Student Loan Marketing Association, commonly known as Sallie Mae. This government-sponsored agency began to privatize in 1997, with Congress terminating its charter in 2004, and began offering private student loans. Since its enactment, the HEA has been expanded and reauthorized several times, particularly with the addition of Title IX in 1972, which barred discrimination on the basis of sex, and is discussed in Chapter 8. By Fiscal Year 2017, some 12.9 million students were being assisted through $122.5 billion in federal aid, and $2.3 billion in federal support for colleges and universities.132 Yet the student loan programs, and the financial industry profiting off the loans, have come under increasingly sharp criticism, with some policymakers and presidential candidates calling for wholesale reform, even the cancelling of student debt. More than one million individuals owe more than $200,000 each in student loans, and the total student debt by 2021 had reached $1.6 trillion. Journalist Josh Mitchell labelled the student loan dilemma as a “monster.”133

Protecting the Wilderness and Environment In the early 1950s, the federal government was considering plans to develop water and power resources in the Colorado River Storage Project. Part of this project involved erection of the

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Echo Park Dam in the Dinosaur National Monument in northwestern Colorado and northeastern Utah.134 This controversial proposal led to an aggressive grassroots movement that ultimately blocked the Echo Park Dam. Building on this success, conservationists were urged on by Howard C. Zahniser, leader of the Wilderness Society, to seize the policy initiative and craft national policy to protect wilderness areas. In 1956, Zahniser drafted a wilderness protection bill to cover the remaining natural landscape. Senator Humphrey and Representative John P. Saylor (Republican—Pennsylvania) introduced Zahniser’s wilderness bill that year, but it met with bitter opposition from Western mining, grazing, and timber interests. In 1961, the efforts gained an important ally when President Kennedy endorsed the idea of a wilderness protection policy, but legislation was throttled by opposition from Representative Wayne N. Aspinall (Democrat—Colorado), the chairman of the House Interior and Insular Affairs Committee, who represented Western mining, grazing, and timber interests. After eight years, sixty-six revisions, and 6,000 pages of testimony, Zahniser’s model legislation gained President Johnson’s support and, after many compromises and concessions, became law in 1964. Zahniser, the principal architect of the law, did not live to see his accomplishments bear fruit; he died four months before the bill became law. The Wilderness Act (1964) is considered one of the America’s most important conservation achievements. It gives the legal definition of wilderness as “an area where the earth and its community of life are untrammeled by man, where man himself is a visitor who does not remain.” Such areas could not have permanent or temporary roads, permanent buildings, motorized equipment or transport, or commercial enterprises. A total of 9.1 million acres in thirteen states were immediately designated as protected wilderness areas, including the Boundary Waters Canoe Area Wilderness in Minnesota, the Bridger Wilderness in Wyoming, the Bob Marshall Wilderness in Montana, and the Ansel Adams Wilderness in California. By 2020, the wilderness system included some 111 million acres in national parks, national forests, national wildlife refuges, and Bureau of Land Management sites, with 750 designated wilderness areas, in all but six states.135 Protection of wilderness areas culminated with the Omnibus Public Land Management Act (2009), signed by President Barack Obama, adding 2 million acres to the National Wilderness Preservation System. Significance of these Policies In all, Johnson signed into law nearly 300 conservation and beautification measures, committing over $12 billion in federal funds. These included the Clean Air Act (1963), the Water Quality Act (1965), the Endangered Species Act (1966), the Air Quality Act (1967), and the National Emissions Standards Act (1967).136 These measures were forerunners to the greater environmental awareness and policy responses found during the 1970s.

The Court Weighs In The Supreme Court, with Earl Warren serving as chief justice, handed down a record number of landmark decisions during this era. Expanded Rights of Persons Accused of Crimes In quick succession, the Court expanded the rights and protections afforded persons accused of crime. Beyond the Brown decisions a decade earlier, these criminal rights decisions, along with several others, were possibly the most important judgments of the Warren Court. In 1961, in

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Mapp v. Ohio,137 a closely divided court determined that evidence obtained without a search warrant was inadmissible in court. The Supreme Court, through Justice Tom Clark, ruled that all evidence obtain through searches and seizures in violation of the Fourteenth Amendment could not be used in a state court. Thus, the exclusionary rule, which applied to illegally obtained evidence in federal courts, now would apply to state courts as well. Following the Mapp decision, the Court continued to make Bill of Rights protections applicable to the states through the Fourteenth Amendment due process and equal protection clauses. “This was a most significant development,” observed Justice Brennan in 1974. “Ultimately, all but three or four of the Bill’s guarantees were laid on the States.”138 In Gideon v. Wainwright (1963),139 the Court ruled that an indigent defendant, Clarence Earl Gideon, had the right to counsel in criminal cases, and if the defendant could not afford a lawyer, then the state would be obligated to provide one. In a unanimous opinion written by Justice Black, the Court ruled that the Sixth Amendment federal right to counsel would now apply to the states through the Fourteenth Amendment due process clause. The following year, the Court extended the right to counsel during police interrogations. In Escobedo v. Illinois (1964),140 the Court ruled that evidence obtained during an interrogation in the absence of counsel violated the Sixth Amendment and could not be used as evidence. Two years later, the Court, in Miranda v. Arizona,141 the issue concerned the admissibility of oral or written statements given by persons being interrogated by the police. The Court, through Chief Justice Warren, determined that the Fifth Amendment privilege against selfincrimination is also available outside the courtroom and applies to police interrogations. Thus, the prosecution could not use statements made by persons in custodial interrogation “unless it demonstrates the use of procedural safeguards effective to secure the privilege against self-incrimination.” Recognizable to anyone who watches television crime shows is the now familiar Miranda rights warning: You have the right to remain silent. Anything you say can and will be used against you in a court of law. You have the right to an attorney. If you cannot afford an attorney, one will be provided for you. Do you understand the rights I have just read to you? With these rights in mind, do you wish to speak to me? Prayer and Bible Reading in Public Schools In two major and controversial rulings, the Court determined that prayer and the reading of the Bible in public schools violated the First Amendment establishment of religion clause. In Engel v. Vitale (1962),142 Justice Hugo Black, writing for the six justices in the majority, argued that the nondenominational prayer recited in New York public schools had violated the First Amendment: “We think that, by using its public school system to encourage recitation of the Regents’ Prayer, the State of New York has adopted a practice wholly inconsistent with the Establishment Clause.” The next year, in Abington School District v. Schempp,143 the Court ruled, 8–1, that statesponsored Bible reading in public schools violated the First Amendment establishment clause. Pennsylvania law required that “[a]t least ten verses from the Holy Bible [be] read, without comment, at the opening of each public school on each school day.” Justice Clark rule: “we hold that the practices at issue and the laws requiring them are unconstitutional under the Establishment Clause, as applied to the States through the Fourteenth Amendment.” The controversy over prayer and Bible reading in public schools, however, generated significant blowback, with hundreds of proposed constitutional amendments introduced in

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Congress over the years, seeking to permit religion in public schools. The rulings have also spurred religious organizations, school boards, and likeminded organizations to create club ministries, after-school and faith-based programs, and interfaith services.144 The Right to Privacy In 1965, the Court ruled that there was a constitutionally guaranteed right to privacy in Griswold v. Connecticut.145 In direct violation of a Connecticut law prohibiting the dispensing of birth control information or devices, Estelle Griswold, executive director of the Planned Parenthood League of Connecticut, opened up a birth control clinic in New Haven in 1961. She and a colleague were immediately arrested, fined, and found guilty. The Supreme Court, in a 7–2 decision authored by Justice Douglas, ruled that the Connecticut statute was unconstitutional. The Court determined that, while not specifically stated in the Constitution, there were various “penumbras” emanating from the Bill of Rights, and these penumbras created a “right to privacy” that protected the rights of married couples.146 While criticized in some legal circles, the concept of the “right of privacy” became a central feature in later court decisions concerning marital rights and individual behavior. Freedom of the Press On March 29, 1960, defenders of Martin Luther King, Jr. placed a full-page advertisement in the New York Times, called “Heed Their Rising Voices.”147 The advertisement began by stating that “As the whole world knows by now, thousands of Southern Negro students are engaged in widespread nonviolent demonstrations in positive affirmation of the right to live in human dignity as guaranteed by the US Constitution and the Bill of Rights.” Then the advertisement stated that those students “are being met by an unprecedented wave of terror by those who would deny and negate that document which the whole world looks upon as setting the pattern for modern freedom.” There were several inconsistencies and factual errors in the advertisement (such as the number of times King had been arrested), prompting Montgomery, Alabama, public safety commissioner, L.B. Sullivan, to sue the New York Times for defamation. Sullivan had not been mentioned in the advertisement, but he claimed that criticism of his subordinates reflected badly on him. Alabama libel law required that the newspaper retract its statements; but the New York Times refused. An all-white, male jury in an Alabama state court awarded Sullivan $500,000 in damages. Libel suits were part of the arsenal of segregationists: sue accusers, newspapers, or individuals for libel to stop them from exposing possible wrongdoing. By 1964, some $300 million in libel damages were brought by southern officials. A unanimous court, with the opinion written by Justice William Brennan, ruled in New York Times v. Sullivan (1964)148 that Alabama’s libel law unconstitutionally infringed upon the First Amendment freedom of speech and freedom of press protections. Brennan wrote, quoting an earlier decision, that “public discussion is a political duty, and that this should be a fundamental principle of the American government.” Such discussion, he argued, must be “uninhibited, robust, and wide-open,” and “may well include vehement, caustic, and sometimes unpleasantly sharp attacks on government and public officials.” While there may have been minor errors, the statements still must be protected. “Erroneous statement is inevitable in free debate,” Justice Brennan reasoned, and “must be protected if the freedoms of expression are to have the breathing space that they need to survive.” While private citizens need only show that a statement is libelous if the falsehood is a result of negligence, public officials need to surmount a higher bar: they must show “actual malice,” that

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is, they must prove that the defendant knew the statement was false, or recklessly disregarded its truth or falsity. Soon, the Court extended libel coverage to public figures, like celebrities, political candidates, well-known individuals, even private individuals who were involved in a matter of public interest.149 Fifty years after the decision, a 2014 New York Times editorial asserted that the ruling “instantly changed libel law in the United States, and it still represents the clearest and most forceful defense of press freedom in American history.”150 Interracial Marriages Virginia, along with fifteen other southern and border states, prohibited marriages between persons of different races. The Virginia anti-miscegenation law, the Act to Preserve Racial Integrity (1924), prevented “White” persons from marrying “colored” persons, or, significantly, for a racially mixed couple to go out of state for such a marriage. Richard Loving, a white man, and Mildred Jeter, a woman of mixed African American and Native American ancestry, left their home in rural Virginia in 1958, ventured into the District of Columbia, and were married. They returned to Virginia after the marriage. One month later, the county sheriff and his deputies entered their bedroom during the early hours of the morning, and arrested them for violating the state’s anti-miscegenation statute. Mildred Loving later remembered: the police asked Richard who was that woman he was sleeping with. “[He] said [of me], ‘I’m his wife,’ and the sheriff said, ‘Not here you’re not.’”151 A local judge sentenced the Lovings to one year in jail, but suspended the sentence if the couple would leave the state and not return for twenty-five years. The Lovings later sued to return to Virginia, but Judge Leon M. Bazile of the Caroline County, Virginia circuit court in 1965 refused to vacate their 1959 sentence. His colorful, specious rationale invoked God to defend Virginia’s segregation policies. “Almighty God,” intoned the judge, “created the races White, Black, yellow, malay and red and placed them on separate continents. … The fact that he separated the races shows that he did not intend for the races to mix.”152 When the case appeared before the Supreme Court, Richard and Mildred Loving’s attorney in oral argument pointed out the seriousness of the offense in Virginia: the couple could be subject to immediate arrest under Virginia’s fornication, lewd and lascivious cohabitation statutes, their children would be declared bastards, and they could lose rights to insurance, social security, and other benefits.153 The Supreme Court, in a unanimous opinion, struck down the Virginia anti-miscegenation law, in Loving v. Virginia (1966),154 stating that the law was a violation of the equal protection clause of the Fourteenth Amendment. Chief Justice Warren delivered the opinion, noting that freedom to marry “is one of the basic civil rights of man, fundamental to our very existence and survival.” Warren concluded that under the Constitution, “the freedom to marry, or not marry, a person of another race resides with the individual, and cannot be infringed by the State.” Redistricting and Equal Representation For decades, many states and local governments carved up legislative and other governmental districts of starkly unequal size. Usually this meant that the rural district would have much greater weight than urban areas. In California, for example, Los Angeles County had 422 times more residents than did the smallest of California counties. Nevertheless, both counties had just one representative in the state senate. Despite this and other obvious disparities, the judicial branch was reluctant to wade into the issue. It was considered a strictly political issue, to be decided by

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the states, their representatives, and ultimately their voters. The Court, as it said in 1946, did not want to get into a “political thicket” by refereeing redistricting decisions.155 But in 1962, the Court ruled that legislative redistricting wasn’t simply a matter to be determined by political parties and voters, but rather it was an issue that could be decided by the judiciary. The Supreme Court, through Justice Brennan, determined in Baker v. Carr (1962)156 that a Tennessee redistricting plan, which favored rural areas over urban centers was the kind of issue that could be decided by the courts. It was, in Brennan’s words, a “justiciable” issue. The Court made no decision on the merits, simply to say that the issue was within the purview of the judicial branch. In his memoirs, Warren noted that Baker v. Carr was “perhaps the most important case we’ve had since I’ve been on the Court.”157 Two years later, the Court ruled, in Reynolds v. Sims (1964),158 on the Alabama county-unit system, which gave each county one representative in the state legislature. On one level, this seemed fair—each county, one vote. But the disparities in population of the countries could not be overlooked: the most extreme case was a 44 to 1 disparity. Chief Justice Warren, in striking down the Alabama scheme, stated that “legislators represent people, not trees or acres. Legislators are elected by voters, not farms or cities or economic interests.” Warren determined that state legislative districts, both in the state house and senate, should be as equal in population as practicable. Thus, the Court articulated the principle of “one man, one vote.” Then the Supreme Court extended “one man, one vote” to congressional districts in Wesberry v. Saunders (1964).159 Following these redistricting decisions, Senator Everett Dirksen proposed a constitutional amendment that would permit one state house to be apportioned on the basis of factors other than population—a direct challenge to the court rulings. The amendment, which originated in the states rather than through Congress, came close, but failed to obtain, the two-thirds required for ratification.160 In sum, legal scholars Geoffrey R. Stone and David A. Strauss observed that “the Constitution, as we know it today, is very much the work of the Warren Court. It would be unthinkable to return to the world that existed before the Warren Court.”161

Notes 1 Rudolph J. Vecoli, “Ethnicity and Immigration,” in Stanley I. Kutler, ed., Encyclopedia of the United States in the Twentieth Century, vol. 1 (New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1996), 180. 2 Kevin M. Kruse and Julian E. Zelizer, Fault Lines: A History of the United States Since 1974 (New York: W.W. Norton, 2019), 7. 3 Robert M. Collins, “Growth Liberalism in the Sixties,” in David Farber, ed., The Sixties: From Memory to History (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1994), 11. 4 Frank Stricker, Why America Lost the War on Poverty—and How to Win It (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2007), 12–13. 5 Randall B. Woods, Prisoners of Hope: Lyndon B. Johnson, the Great Society, and the Limits of Liberalism (New York: Basic Books, 2016), 223; “Selected Population Profile in the United States: 2017 American Community Survey, US Bureau of the Census, n.d., https://factfinder.census.gov/faces/ tableservices/jsf/pages/productview.xhtml?src=bkmk (accessed February 11, 2020). 6 John Kenneth Galbraith, The Affluent Society (New York: Houghton Mifflin, 1958); Michael Harrington, The Other America: Poverty in the United States (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1962); Dwight Macdonald, “The Invisible Poor,” The New Yorker, January 11, 1963, https://www.newyorker. com/magazine/1963/01/19/our-invisible-poor; Maurice Isserman, “Michael Harrington: Warrior on Poverty,” New York Times, June 19, 2009. 7 James T. Patterson, America’s Struggle Against Poverty in the Twentieth Century (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2000, 1981), 97–111, quote at 97. 8 Theodore H. White, Making of the President 1960 (New York: Atheneum Books, 1961), 106, quoted in Robert Dallek, An Unfinished Life: John F. Kennedy, 1917–1963 (Boston: Little, Brown, 2003), 254–55.

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9 James T. Patterson, Grand Expectations: The United States, 1945–1974 (New York: Oxford University Press, 1996), 534. 10 Dallek, An Unfinished Life, 699. 11 Patterson, Grand Expectations, 492. 12 The 17-minute speech is available at https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EgdUgzAWcrw (accessed January 9, 2020). On the Cuban missile crisis, Graham Allison and Philip Zelikow, Essence of Decision: Explaining the Cuban Missile Crisis (New York: Pearson, 1999, 1971); Arthur M. Schlesinger, Jr. and Michael Beschloss, Robert F. Kennedy and His Times (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 2002, 1978), 499–533; Patterson, Grand Expectations, 498–509; John Lewis Gaddis, We Now Know: Rethinking Cold War History (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1997), 260–80; Dallek, An Unfinished Life, 535–75. 13 W.J. Rorabaugh, Kennedy and the Promise of the Sixties (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002), 47. 14 Quoted in Randall Woods, LBJ: Architect of American Ambition (New York: Free Press, 2006), 507. 15 For an inside account, Joseph A. Califano, Jr., The Triumph and Tragedy of Lyndon Johnson: The White House Years (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1991), 31–52. 16 Johnson quoted in Julian Zelizer, “Guns and Butter: Government Can Run More Than a War,” New York Times, December 30, 2001. 17 Marian Smith Holmes, “The Freedom Riders, Then and Now,” Smithsonian Magazine, February 2009, https://www.smithsonianmag.com/history/the-freedom-riders-then-and-now-45351758/ (accessed January 13, 2020); Raymond Arsenault, Freedom Riders: 1961 and the Struggle for Racial Justice (New York: Oxford University Press, 2006); Jon Meacham, His Truth is Marching On: John Lewis and the Power of Hope (New York: Random House, 2020), 83–116. 18 Diane McWhorter, Carry Me Home: Birmingham, Alabama: The Climactic Battle of the Civil Rights Revolution (New York: Simon & Schuster, 2013), 182–217; Andrew M. Manis, A Fire You Can’t Put Out: The Civil Rights Life of Birmingham’s Reverend Fred Shuttlesworth (Tuscaloosa: University of Alabama Press, 1999). 19 Of the many accounts of this episode, see Charles W. Eagles, The Price of Defiance: James Meredith and the Integration of Ole Miss (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2009). 20 Taylor Branch, Parting the Waters: America in the King Years 1954–1963 (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1989), 633–72, at 671–72. 21 Ibid., 672. 22 Rick Perlstein, Before the Storm: Barry Goldwater and the Unmaking of the American Consensus (New York: Hill and Want, 2001), 203. 23 Nicholas deB. Katzenbach, Some of It Was Fun: Working with RFK and LBJ (New York: W.W. Norton, 2008), 108–16. 24 Rorabaugh, Kennedy and the Promise of the Sixties, 115. 25 Dan Carter, The Politics of Rage: George Wallace, the Origins of New Conservatism, and the Transformation of American Politics (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1995), 153–54. De la Beckwith died in prison in 2001. 26 Timothy N. Thurber, The Politics of Equality: Hubert H. Humphrey and the African American Freedom Struggle (New York: Columbia University Press, 1999), 149. 27 Tabitha Wang, “The Detroit Race Riot,” BlackPast, July 3, 2008, https://www.blackpast.org/africanamerican-history/detroit-race-riot-1967/ (accessed January 8, 2020). 28 National Advisory Commission on Civil Disorders, The Kerner Report (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2016, 1968), 207. 29 Jason Hackworth, Manufacturing Decline: How Racism and the Conservative Movement Crush the American Rust Belt (New York: Columbia University Press, 2019), 1–2. 30 Maarten Zwiers, Senator James Eastland: Mississippi’s Jim Crow Democrat (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 2015), 228. Earnest N. Bracey, Fannie Lou Hamer: The Life of a Civil Rights Icon (Jefferson, NC: McFarland, 2011); Kate Clifford Larson, Walk with Me: A Biography of Fannie Lou Hamer (New York: Oxford University Press, 2021). 31 Obama in 2008 received one electoral vote from Nebraska; Nebraska and Maine are the only two states that do not have the winner-take-all method of choosing presidential electors. 32 Irwin Unger and Debi Unger, Turning Point 1968 (New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1988), 3. 33 Editorial comments by Walter Cronkite, CBS Evening News, February 27, 1968, https://www. youtube.com/watch?v=Dn2RjahTi3M (accessed January 9, 2020).

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34 Bernard A. Weisberger, “What Made the Federal Government Grow?” American Heritage 48 (5) (September 1997), https://www.americanheritage.com/what-made-government-grow#8 (accessed January 16, 2020). 35 “Table 1.1: Summary of Receipts, Outlays, and Surpluses or Deficits: 1789–2024,” Office of Management and Budget Historical Tables, https://www.whitehouse.gov/omb/historical-tables/ (accessed January 14, 2020). 36 In this session, the House had 437 seats following the admission of Hawaii and Alaska, but reverted to 435 the following session. 37 Robert V. Remini, The House: The History of the House of Representatives (Washington, DC: Smithsonian Books, 2006), 408. 38 “Mike Mansfield: Quiet Leadership in Troubled Times,” US Senate, Art and History, https://www. senate.gov/artandhistory/history/common/generic/People_Leaders_Mansfield.htm (accessed December 30, 2019). 39 Califano, The Triumph and Tragedy of Lyndon Johnson, 150. For a slightly different calculation, see Julian E. Zelizer, The Fierce Urgency of Now: Lyndon Johnson, Congress, and the Battle for the Great Society (New York: Penguin Press, 2015), 221. 40 Don Oberdorfer, Senator Mansfield: The Extraordinary Life of a Great American Statesman and Diplomat (Washington, DC: Smithsonian Books, 2003), 226–36. 41 Ibid., 308. William S. White, The Citadel: The Story of the US Senate (New York: Harpers, 1957). 42 Humphrey quote from Hubert H. Humphrey, Oral History, Part III, Lyndon B. Johnson Library, June 21, 1977; interview conducted by Michael L. Gillette, 6; William Barry Furlong, “The Senate’s Wizard of Ooze: Everett Dirksen,” Harper’s, December 1959; Frank H. Mackaman, introduction, Everett McKinley Dirksen, The Education of a Senator (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1998), xxxi; Neil McNeil, Portrait of a Public Man (New York: World Publishing, 1970); Burdett Loomis, “Everett McKinley Dirksen: The Consummate Minority Leader,” in Richard A. Baker and Roger H. Davidson, eds., First Among Equals: Outstanding Senate Leaders of the Twentieth Century (Washington, DC: Congressional Quarterly, 1991), 236–63. 43 Fite, Richard B. Russell, Jr., 501. 44 Remini, The House, 389. Rayburn died six months later of cancer at the age of seventy-nine. 45 Richard L. Lyons, “Ex-Speaker John McCormack Dies,” Washington Post, November 23, 1980. On McCormack’s career, Garrison Nelson, John William McCormack: A Political Biography (New York: Bloomsbury Academic, 2017). 46 Remini, The House, 403. 47 “Judge Smith Moves with Deliberate Drag,” New York Times, January 12, 1964. 48 On the Fortas episode, see Califano, The Triumph and Tragedy of Lyndon Johnson, 307–17; Bruce Allen Murphy, Fortas: The Rise and Ruin of a Supreme Court Justice (New York: Morrow, 1988). 49 Alden Whitman, “For 16 Years, Warren Saw the Constitution as Protector of Rights and Equality,” New York Times, July 10, 1974. 50 Ibid. “Real heyday” quote from David J. Garrow, “The Tragedy of William O. Douglas,” The Nation, March 27, 2003, https://www.thenation.com/article/archive/tragedy-william-o-douglas/ (accessed June 21, 2020). 51 Robert Dallek, An Unfinished Life: John F. Kennedy, 1917–1963 (Boston: Little, Brown, 2003), 255. 52 Robert Caro, The Years of Lyndon Johnson, vol. 4: The Passage of Power (New York: Knopf, 2012), 455. 53 Ibid., 707. 54 Lyndon Baines Johnson, The Vantage Point: Perspectives of the Presidency 1963–1969 (New York: Holt Rinehart, 1971). 55 Woods, LBJ, 440. 56 Deborah N. Archer and Derek T. Muller, “The Twenty-fourth Amendment,” The National Constitution Center, n.d., https://constitutioncenter.org/interactive-constitution/interpretation/ amendment-xxiv/interps/157 (accessed November 29, 2019). Harper v. Virginia Board of Elections, 383 US 663 (1966), https://supreme.justia.com/cases/federal/us/383/663/. The Virginia scheme was ruled unconstitutional in Harman v. Forssenius, 380 US 528 (1965), https://supreme.justia.com/cases/ federal/us/380/528/ 57 In the House, the legislation was sponsored by Emanuel Celler (Democrat—New York). 58 Howard Baker, upon being chosen as Reagan’s chief of staff, in 1987 asked White House staff to prepare for the possible invocation of Section 4, given Reagan’s mental deterioration. After Trump fired James Comey, the acting FBI director, Andrew McCabe held discussions within the Justice Department about approaching Pence. Jane Meyer, “Worrying About Reagan,” The New Yorker,

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February 24, 2011; Devan Cole and Laura Jarrett, “McCabe Confirms Talk Held At Justice Department About Removing Trump,” CNN, February 14, 2019. Robert Blaemire, Birch Bayh: Making a Difference (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2019), 75–79; Birch E. Bayh, One Heartbeat Away: Presidential Disability and Succession (Indianapolis: BobbsMerrill, 1968); Jeffrey Rosen, “The Twenty-fifth Amendment Makes Presidential Disability a Political Question,” The Atlantic, May 23, 2017, https://www.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2017/ 05/presidential-disability-is-a-political-question/527703/; John D. Feerick, The Twenty-fifth Amendment: Its Complete History and Applications, third ed. (New York: Fordham University Press, 2014), 79–125. Dennis W. Johnson, The Laws that Shaped America: Fifteen Acts of Congress and Their Lasting Impact (New York: Routledge, 2009), 293–332. John F. Kennedy, “Radio and Television Report to the American People on Civil Rights,” June 11, 1963, John F. Kennedy Presidential Library, http://wwwl.jfklibrary.org Lawmakers quoted in “Rights Plan Hit by Southern Bloc,” New York Times, June 20, 1963, 18. Nicholas deB. Katzenbach, Some of It Was Fun: Working with RFK and LBJ (New York: W.W. Norton, 2008), 121–29. Lyndon B. Johnson, Address before a Joint Session of Congress, November 27, 1963, John T. Wooley and Gerhard Peters, The American Presidency Project, University of California, Santa Barbara, http://presidency.ucsb.edu/?pid+25988 (accessed December 23, 2019). Bruce J. Dierenfield, Keeper of the Rules: Congressman Howard W. Smith of Virginia (Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press, 1987), 194. Marie Smith, “Should Sex Amendment Be in Rights Bill?” Washington Post, February 11, 1964, 35; E.W. Kenworthy, “Jobs Issue Blocks Attempt in House to Vote on Rights,” New York Times, February 9, 1964; Carl M. Brauer, “Women Activists, Southern Conservatives, and the Prohibition of Sex Discrimination in Title VII of the 1964 Civil Rights Act,” Journal of Southern History 49 (1) (February, 1983): 37–56; Cynthia Deitch, “Gender, Race, and Class Politics and the Inclusion of Women in Title VII of the 1964 Civil Rights Act,” Gender and Society 7 (2) (June, 1993): 183–203. Robert Mann, The Walls of Jericho: Lyndon Johnson, Hubert Humphrey, Richard Russell, and the Struggle for Civil Rights (New York: Harcourt Brace, 1996), 384–85; Taylor Branch, Pillar of Fire: American in the King Years, 1963–1965 (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1998), 187. Jonathan Rosenberg and Zachary Karabell, Kennedy, Johnson, and the Quest for Justice: The Civil Rights Tapes (New York: W.W. Norton, 2003), 298. A slightly different version is in Michael R. Beschloss, ed., Taking Charge: The Johnson White House Tapes, 1963–1964 (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1997), 334. The telephone conversation between Johnson and Fulbright took place on April 29, 1964. Carter, The Politics of Rage, 213–15, quote at 215. Robert E. Baker, “Senate Stops Filibuster, 71–29,” Washington Post, June 11, 1964, A1. Frank H. Mackaman, The Long, Hard Furrow: Everett Dirksen’s Part in the Civil Rights Act of 1964, 5th ed. The Dirksen Center, Creative Space Independent Publishing Platform, 2014; Todd Purdum, An Idea Whose Time Has Come: Two Presidents, Two Parties, and the Battle for the Civil Rights Act of 1964 (New York: Henry Holt, 2014). Hubert H. Humphrey, The Education of a Public Man: My Life and Politics (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1991), 209. Lyndon B. Johnson, “Radio and Television Remarks Upon Signing the Civil Rights Bill,” http:// presidency.ucsb.edu/ws/?pid=26361. Heart of Atlanta Hotel v. United States, 379 US 241 (1964), https://supreme.justia.com/cases/federal/ us/379/241/#tab-opinion-1945221; Katzenbach v. McClung, 379 US 294 (1964), https://supreme.justia.com/cases/federal/us/379/294/. Johnson, The Laws that Shaped America, 321. Meacham, His Truth is Marching On, 183–209. Johnson, The Vantage Point, 165. Lyndon B. Johnson, “Special Message to Congress: The American Promise,” March 15, 1965. Wooley and Peters, The American Presidency Project, http://www.presidency.ubsb.edu/ws/?pid=26805; Katzenbach, Some of It Was Fun, 167–68. Johnson, The Vantage Point, 166. Tom Wicker, “Johnson Urges Congress at Joint Session to Pass Law Insuring Negro Vote,” New York Times, March 16, 1965, 1.

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80 Transcript of telephone conversation in Michael R. Beschloss, ed., Reaching for Glory: Lyndon Johnson’s Secret White House Tapes, 1964–1965 (New York: Touchstone, 2001), 159. 81 “Text of Johnson’s Statement on Voting Rights Law,” New York Times, August 7, 1965, 8; Robert E. Baker, “LBJ Signs Vote Rights Bill Today,” Washington Post, August 6, 1965, A1. 82 South Carolina v. Katzenbach, 383 US 301 (1966), https://supreme.justia.com/cases/federal/us/383/ 301/ (accessed December 27, 2019). 83 Richard M. Vallely, The Two Reconstructions: The Struggle for Black Enfranchisement (Chicago; University of Chicago Press, 2004). 84 Alfred H. Kelly and Winfred A. Harbison, The American Constitution: Its Origins and Development, 4th ed. (New York: Norton, 1970), 967–68. 85 Remini, The House, 410. 86 Bernard Groffman, Lisa Handley, and Richard G. Niemi, Minority Representation and the Quest for Voting Equality (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1992), 23–24. 87 Don Edwards, “Voting Rights Act of 1965,” in Lorn S. Foster, ed., The Voting Rights Act: Consequences and Implications (New York: Praeger, 1985), 7. 88 “Text of the President’s Statement,” New York Times, November 7, 1981. 89 Robert M. Ball, “What Medicare’s Architects Had in Mind,” Health Affairs 14 (45) (Winter, 1995), 62. 90 Ross K. Baker, “Mike Mansfield and the Birth of the Modern Senate,” in Baker and Davidson, eds., First Among Equals, 275. 91 Edward D. Berkowitz, Mr. Social Security: The Life of Wilbur J. Cohen (Lawrence: University Press of Kansas, 1995), 161. 92 Caro, The Passage of Power, 455. 93 Lawrence F. O’Brien, No Final Victories: A Life in Politics from John F. Kennedy to Watergate (New York: Ballantine Books, 1976), 188–89; Johnson, The Vantage Point, 213. 94 Johnson, The Vantage Point, 213. 95 Zelizer, The Fierce Urgency of Now, 192–201. 96 Richard Sorian, The Bitter Pill: Tough Choices in America’s Health Policy (New York: McGraw Hill, 1988), 92–93. 97 Merle Miller, Lyndon: An Oral Biography (New York: G.P. Putnam’s Sons, 1980), 410; Berkowitz, Mr. Social Security, 227–32. Years later, Mills recalled that “I whispered in his [Byrne’s] ear, ‘John, I wish you’d offer a motion to include it.’ I’d be glad to’ [he responded].” Transcript, Wilbur Mills Oral History Interview II, March 25, 1987, by Michael L. Gillette, Internet Copy, Lyndon Johnson Library, 1. 98 Johnson, The Vantage Point, 215. 99 Eric F. Goldman, The Tragedy of Lyndon Johnson (New York: Knopf, 1969), 290. On Mills and Medicare, Julian E. Zelizer, Taxing America: Wilbur D. Mills, Congress, and the State, 1945–1975, rev. ed. (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998), 212–52. 100 Edward T. Folliard, “Medicare Bill Signed by Johnson,” Washington Post, July 31, 1965, A1; John D. Morris, “President Signs Medicare Bill; Praises Truman,” New York Times, July 31, 1965, 1. 101 Joseph A. Califano, Jr., America’s Health Care Revolution: Who Lives? Who Dies? Who Pays? (New York: Random House, 1986), 142–43. 102 Theodore Marmor, The Politics of Medicare, 2nd ed. (Hawthorne, NY: Aldine de Gruyter, 2000), “Social Security Medicare Program Enacted,” 1965 CQ Almanac (Washington, DC: Congressional Quarterly, 1966), 246. 103 Miller, Lyndon, 412. 104 “Largest Health Care Fraud Case in US History Settled. HCA Investigation Nets Record Total of $1.7 Billion,” US Department of Justice press release, June 26, 2003, http://www.usdoj.gov/opa/pr/ 2003/June/03_civ_386.htm (accessed December 14, 2019). 105 Maurice MacDonald, “Food Stamps: An Analytic History,” Social Service Review 51 (4) (December 1977): 642–58. 106 Marian Wright became Marian Wright Edelman, and what followed was a long and distinguished career in child advocacy and civil rights. 107 Ellen Meacham, Delta Epiphany: Robert F. Kennedy in Mississippi (Jackson: University of Mississippi Press, 2018). 108 Ellen Meacham, “Fifty Years Ago, RFK Exposed Hunger in the Delta,” Clarion (Mississippi) Ledger, April 10, 2017; https://www.clarionledger.com/story/opinion/columnists/2017/04/10/50-years-agorfk-exposed-hunger-mississippi-delta/100296752/ (accessed December 27, 2019).

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109 Nixon quoted in Maurice MacDonald, “Food Stamps: An Analytical History,” Social Service Review 51 (4) (December 1977): 642–58, at 646. 110 Nathan testimony before the Senate Select Committee on Nutrition and Human Needs, October 21, 1975, quoted in MacDonald, “Food Stamps,” 642. 111 Diane Whitmore Schanzenbach and Lauren Bauer, “The Long-Term Impact of the Head Start Program,” Brookings Institution, August 2016, https://www.brookings.edu/research/the-long-termimpact-of-the-head-start-program/ (accessed December 15, 2019). 112 Walter F. Mondale with David Hage, The Good Fight: A Life in Liberal Politics (New York: Scribner, 2010), 48. 113 Liana Fox, Christopher Wimer, Irwin Garfinkel, Neeraj Kaushal, JaeHyun Nam and Jane Waldfogel, “Deep Poverty from 1968 to 2011: The Influence of Family Structure, Employment Patterns, and the Safety Net,” RSF: The Russell Sage Foundation Journal of the Social Sciences 1 (1, Severe Deprivation in America) (November 2015): 14–34. 114 Ibid., 14–17. Zachary A. Goldfarb, “Study: US Poverty Decreased Over Past Half-Century Thanks to Safety-Net Programs, Washington Post, December 9, 2013. 115 Statement by Attorney General Nicholas deB. Katzenbach before the Immigration and Nationality Subcommittee of the House Judiciary Committee on HR 2580, An Act to Amend the Immigration and Nationality Act, March 3, 1965, http://acsc.lib.udel.edu/exhibits/show/legislation/item/303 (accessed December 9, 2019). 116 Tom Gjelten, “In 1965, a Conservative Tried to Keep America White. His Plan Backfired,” National Public Radio, October 3, 2015, https://www.npr.org/2015/10/03/445339838/the-unintendedconsequences-of-the-1965-immigration-act (accessed December 9,2019). Tom Gjelten, A Nation of Nations: A Great American Immigration Story (New York: Simon & Schuster, 2015). 117 Gjelten, “In 1965, a Conservative Tried to Keep America White.” 118 Gabriel J. Chin, “The Civil Rights Revolution Comes to Immigration Law: A New Look at the Immigration and Nationality Act of 1965,” North Carolina Law Review 75 (1) (November 1996), 281. 119 The Western Hemisphere comprises portions of western Europe, North and South America. The Eastern Hemisphere comprises Africa, EuroAsia, Australia, and New Zealand. 120 Jesse Hoffnung-Garskof, “The Immigration Reform Act of 1965,” in Brooke L. Blower and Mark Philip Bradley, eds., The Familiar Made Strange: American Icons and Artifacts After the Transnational Turn (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2015), 125–40. 121 “Text of President’s Speech on Immigration,” New York Times, October 4, 1965. Shortly before the signing ceremony, Johnson announced that he would welcome any Cubans who wanted to escape Fidel Castro’s regime and “seek freedom” in the United States. Robert B. Semple, Jr., “US to Admit Cubans Castro Frees; Johnson Signs New Immigration Bill,” New York Times, October 4, 1965, 1. 122 Woods, Prisoners of Hope, 217–26, at 217. 123 US Census Bureau figures cited in Gjelten, “In 1965, a Conservative Tried to Keep America White.” 124 “Modern Immigration Wave Brings 59 Million to US, Driving Population Growth and Change Through 2065,” Pew Research Center, September 28, 2015, https://www.pewresearch.org/hispanic/ 2015/09/28/modern-immigration-wave-brings-59-million-to-u-s-driving-population-growth-andchange-through-2065/ (accessed June 1, 2020). 125 James T. Patterson, The Eve of Destruction: How 1965 Transformed America (New York: Basic Books, 2012), 60. Quote from Johnson, Vantage Point, 212. 126 See John B. Gilmour, “The Powell Amendment Voting Cycle: An Obituary,” Legislative Studies Quarterly 26 (2) (May 2001): 249–62 on the 1956 federal education bill and the author’s conclusion that the Powell Amendment was not responsible for the bill’s defeat. 127 James W. Guthrie, “A Political Case History: Passage of the ESEA,” The Phi Beta Kappan 49 (6) (February 1968): 302–306 at 305. 128 Tomiko Brown-Nagin, “Elementary and Secondary Education Act of 1965” in Landsberg, editor-inchief, Major Acts of Congress, vol. 1, 233–35. Stephen K. Bailey and Edith K. Mosher, ESEA: The Office of Education Administers a Law (Syracuse, NY: Syracuse University Press, 1968); Julie R. Jeffrey, Education for the Children of the Poor: A Study of the Origins and Implementation of the Elementary and Secondary Education Act of 1965 (Columbus: Ohio State University Press, 1978). 129 Harvey Kantor, “Education, Social Reform, and the State: ESEA and the Federal Education Policy in the 1960s,” American Journal of Education 100 (1) (November 1991): 47–83; Guthrie, “A Political Case History: Passage of the ESEA”; David A. Gamson, Kathryn A. McDermott, and Douglas S. Reed, “The Elementary and Secondary Education Act at Fifty: Aspirations, Effects, and Limitations,” RSF: Russell Sage Foundation Journal of the Social Sciences 1 (3) (December 2015): 1–29.

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130 Patrick McGuinn, “Schooling the State: ESEA and the Evolution of the US Department of Education,” RSF: Russell Sage Foundation Journal of the Social Sciences 1 (3) (December 2015): 77–94, at 81, citing Hugh Davis Graham, The Uncertain Trumpet: Federal Education Policy During the Kennedy and Johnson Years (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1984), 204. 131 John B. King, Jr., “Recommitting to the Civil Rights Legacy of ESEA,” The Education Trust, April 11, 2017, https://edtrust.org/the-equity-line/recommitting-civil-rights-legacy-esea/ (accessed December 19, 2019). 132 The Higher Education Act (HEA): A Primer, Congressional Research Service, Report R43351, Updated: October 24, 2018, https://files.eric.ed.gov/fulltext/ED593624.pdf (accessed December 11, 2019). 133 John Mitchell, The Debt Trap: How Student Loans Became a National Catastrophe (New York: Simon & Schuster, 2021). 134 Dee V. Benson, “The Wilderness Act of 1964: Where Do We Go From Here?” BYU Law Review 1975 (3) (1975): 727–61. 135 James F. (Jim) Bridger was a legendary scout and guide during the early 1800s. Robert (Bob) Marshall was a principal founder of the Wilderness Society. The Montana wilderness area is affectionately called “The Bob.” Ansel E. Adams was a famous photographer and environmentalist known for his black and white nature photography. “The Wilderness Act,” The Wilderness Society, n.d., https:// www.wilderness.org/articles/article/wilderness-act (accessed December 11, 2019). 136 Robert M. Collins, “Growth Liberalism in the Sixties,” in David Farber, ed., The Sixties: From Memory to History (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1994), 28. 137 Mapp v. Ohio, 367 US 643 (1961), https://supreme.justia.com/cases/federal/us/367/643/#tab-opinion1943405 138 Alden Whitman, “For 16 Years, Warren Saw the Constitution as Protector of Rights and Equality,” New York Times, July 10, 1974. 139 Gideon v. Wainwright, 372 US 335 (1963), https://supreme.justia.com/cases/federal/us/372/335/. Also, Anthony Lewis, Gideon’s Trumpet (New York: Penguin, 1989, 1964). A television drama, Gideon’s Trumpet, starring Henry Fonda as Gideon and Jose Ferrer as Fortas, aired in 1980. 140 Escobedo v. Illinois, 378 US 478 (1964), https://www.oyez.org/cases/1963/615 141 Miranda v. Arizona, 384 US 436 (1966), https://supreme.justia.com/cases/federal/us/384/436/ 142 Engel v. Vitale, 370 US 421 (1962), at 424; https://supreme.justia.com/cases/federal/us/370/421/ 143 School District of Abington Township, Pennsylvania v. Schempp, 374 US 203 (1963), https://www.law. cornell.edu/supremecourt/text/374/203 144 Lee Lawrence, “School Prayer: 50 Years After the Ban, God and Faith More Present Than Ever,” Christian Science Monitor, June 16, 2013, https://www.csmonitor.com/The-Culture/Family/2013/0616/ School-prayer-50-years-after-the-ban-God-and-faith-more-present-than-ever (accessed December 6, 2019). Steven K. Green, The Third Disestablishment: Church, State, and American Culture, 1940–1975 (New York: Oxford University Press, 2019). 145 Griswold v. Connecticut, 381 US 479 (1965), https://www.law.cornell.edu/supremecourt/text/381/ 479#writing-USSC_CR_0381_0479_ZS 146 Later, the protection was extended to unmarried individuals as well, in Eisenstadt v. Baird, 405 US 438 (1972), https://supreme.justia.com/cases/federal/us/405/438/ 147 Advertisement. “Heed Their Rising Voices,” New York Times, March 29, 1960, https://upload. wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/e/e3/Heed_Their_Rising_Voices.jpg (accessed December 6, 2019). 148 New York Times v. Sullivan, 376 US 254 (1964), https://supreme.justia.com/cases/federal/us/376/254/. Anthony Lewis, Make No Law: The Sullivan Case and the First Amendment (New York: Vintage, 1991). 149 Rick Schmitt, “Window to the Past: New York Times v. Sullivan,” Washington Lawyer, October 2014, https://www.DCbar.org/bar-resources/publications/washington-lawyer/articles/october-2014nyt-sullivan.cfm (accessed December 6, 2019). 150 Editorial, “The Uninhibited Press: 50 Years Later,” New York Times, March 8, 2014. 151 Phyl Newbeck and Brendan Wolfe, “Loving v. Virginia 1967,” Encyclopedia Virginia: Virginia Humanities, n.d., https://www.encyclopediavirginia.org/loving_v_virginia_1967#start_entry 152 Opinion of Judge Leon M. Bazile (January 22, 1965), Encyclopedia Virginia: Virginia Humanities, https://www.encyclopediavirginia.org/opinion_of_judge_leon_m_bazile_january_22_1965 153 Transcript of oral argument, Loving v. Virginia, April 10, 1967, Philip J. Hirschkop, attorney; https:// www.oyez.org/cases/1966/395, at 03.20 154 Loving v. Virginia, 388 US 1 (1967), 10; https://www.law.cornell.edu/supremecourt/text/388/1# writing-USSC_CR_0388_0001_ZO 155 Colegrove v. Green, 328 US 549 (1946), https://supreme.justia.com/cases/federal/us/328/549/

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156 Baker v. Carr, 369 US 186 (1962), https://supreme.justia.com/cases/federal/us/369/186/#tab-opinion1943625. 157 Earl Warren, The Memoirs of Chief Justice Earl Warren (New York: Doubleday, 1977), 306 158 Reynolds v. Sims, 373 US 533 (1964), https://supreme.justia.com/cases/federal/us/377/533/ 159 Wesberry v. Sanders, 376 US 1 (1964), https://supreme.justia.com/cases/federal/us/376/1/ 160 Richard J. Regan, A Constitutional History of the US Supreme Court (Washington, DC: Catholic University Press, 2015), 162. 161 Geoffrey R. Stone and David A. Strauss, Democracy and Equality: The Enduring Constitutional Vision of the Warren Court (New York: Oxford University Press, 2020), iii.

Chapter 8

Watergate, Distrust, and Malaise: 1969–1980

The seventies transformed American economic and cultural life as much as, if not more than, the revolutions in manners and morals of the 1920s and the 1960s. The decade reshaped the political landscape more dramatically than the 1930s. In race relations, religion, family life, politics and popular culture, the 1970s marked the most significant watershed of modern US history, the beginning of our own time. (Bruce J. Schulman, 2001)1

AMERICA DURING THIS ERA This era began with the denouement of Great Society policies and the triumph of Richard Nixon in November 1968. It ended with the defeat of President Jimmy Carter by three-time presidential aspirant, Ronald Reagan. In between was the agonizing continuation of the war in Vietnam, the horrific bombing and destruction, the ignominious collapse of a corrupt and weak ally, and the bitter taste of defeat and humiliation. The Watergate scandal and its ensuing hearings transfixed a nation, leading to the first impeachment hearings in over one hundred years, and, with quickly collapsing support, the only resignation of a president in America’s history, followed by a controversial presidential pardon. The country suffered through unprecedented levels of inflation, combined with high employment. This unusual condition perplexed economists and led to the coining of the term “stagflation” to describe the new economic reality. Americans were jolted by the oil boycott from countries that few heretofore had paid attention to, the members of the Organization of Petroleum Exporting Countries (OPEC). Gas lines and temporary rationing brought home America’s vulnerability and reliance on foreign oil. This was also an era of “malaise,” with Jimmy Carter’s plea that America was experiencing a “crisis in confidence” and the “growing doubt in the meaning of our lives.”2 The capture of fifty-two American hostages in Iran for 444 days led to the painful end of the Carter administration. Viewers of CBS News would see news anchor Walter Cronkite sign off each night, noting the number of days that the hostages had been imprisoned. A reckless attempt to rescue them was aborted, raining criticism down on the American military and executive leadership. Only with the inauguration of Ronald Reagan were the hostages released. Culturally, the 1970s, in the jaundiced view of historian Bruce Shulman, was an era of “bad clothes, bad hair, and bad music impossible to take seriously.”3 It was the era of Woodstock, disco music, the jogging craze, Whole Earth Catalogue, and the New Age movement. Americans were entertained by the television series Roots, watched by 130 million viewers, and the movies Godfather I and II, and Star Wars. It was the era of Bobby Riggs versus Billie Jean King in the hyped up “battle of the sexes,” Gloria Steinem and Betty Friedan, the National Woman’s DOI: 10.4324/9781003293538-11

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Caucus, Our Bodies, Ourselves, Kate Millett’s Sexual Politics, the Equal Rights Amendment, Title IX, and Shirley Chisholm running for president. During the 1980 presidential election, for the first time, more women than men voted. It was the time of increased white flight from cities, bitter fights over the busing of school children to achieve racial balance not only in the South but in northern cities as well, and Nixon’s “southern strategy” to win over former George Wallace supporters and cement the white South as a Republican stronghold. The young political activist Kevin Phillip’s prescient, but controversial, book, The Emerging Republican Majority (1969), explained how Nixon won the 1968 presidential campaign, coined the term “Sunbelt,” and saw the South as the bastion of support for political and cultural conservatives and the Republican Party.4 It saw the spread of conservative Christianity and the emergence of televangelists like Jerry Falwell, Marion G. (Pat) Robertson, Oral Roberts, Jimmy Swaggart, Jim and Tammy Faye Bakker and scores of others preaching biblical fundamentalism, healing miracles, and a prosperity gospel. Indeed, Newsweek magazine declared 1976 “The Year of the Evangelical.”5 On the political side, the New Christian Right, spearheaded by Falwell’s Moral Majority, took aim at what it considered to be the breakdown of family values, secular humanism, moral relativism, and sexual permissiveness.6 Jimmy Carter, the unabashed born-again evangelical, initially enjoyed support from fellow southerners, but during the 1980 election he felt the sting of Falwell’s crusade. The Moral Majority spent $10 million in radio and television advertising across the South, branding Carter as a “traitor to the South and no longer a Christian.”7 Conservative voices, successors to Barry Goldwater, were emerging on the national scene: activist Phyllis Schlafly, president of the Eagle Forum, already well-known for her 1964 proGoldwater book, A Choice Not an Echo, became the lightning rod for opposition to the proposed Equal Rights Amendment. Gary Bauer’s Family Research Council also fought for what it considered pro-family values and practices. The National Conservative Political Action Committee (NCPAC) actively targeted liberal Democrats and moderate Republicans for defeat. Direct-mail political consultant Richard Viguerie tapped into the frustrations of Goldwater supporters and developed an extensive database of conservative activists, ready to join the fray. At the grassroots level was the so-called “Silent Majority,” encouraged by Nixon and his running mate, the governor of Maryland Spiro T. Agnew.

The Era by the Numbers The population of the United States in 1970 was 213,302,031, an increase of 23.9 million (13.4 percent) over the 1960 Census. California, which became the most populous state in 1962, continued as the largest following the 1970 census, with 19.9 million residents. New York (18.2 million) was close behind in second, followed by Pennsylvania (11.8 million), Texas (11.2 million), and Illinois (11.1 million). Fast-growing Florida (6.8 million) was the ninth largest state. Hispanic population in 1970 was 9.1 million, with the great majority living in Los Angeles County and its surrounding communities (by 2012, that national number had jumped to 51.1 million).8 African American population was 22.6 million, or 11.1 percent of the total US population.9 In 1970, the median income of families in the United States was $9,870 ($65,623 in 2020 dollars; the median family income in 2019 was $68,703). For African American and other minority families in 1970, the median income was $6,520, or 64 percent of that of median white families ($10,240).10

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Society Under Stress The Vietnam War In 1968, the bloodiest year of the war, a total of 16,899 American soldiers were killed; the next year counted 11,780 American deaths.11 The deaths of South Vietnam soldiers and civilian, and those from the North were incalculably higher. More and more, Americans were disillusioned and numbed by the war, only wanting it to end. Lyndon Johnson, in his last months in office tried in vain to craft a peace agreement, or at least a cease fire. The talks never came to fruition, and on November 5, 1968, Richard Nixon barely squeezed by Hubert Humphrey and third-party candidate George Wallace to win the presidency. “I will not be the first president of the United States to lose a war,” Nixon proclaimed in late 1969. He assured the American public that he would win “peace with honor.” Until 1972, however, he refused to negotiate any settlement that would permit North Vietnam to keep troops in South Vietnam, and he persisted, in the words of historian James T. Patterson “to blast the enemy into talking.”12 Bombing continued, with more than one million tons of explosives dropped on Cambodia over the span of four years. Cambodia had been a neutral country, but North Vietnamese troops were using it as a sanctuary. In the meantime, Nixon began pursuing a policy of Vietnamization, pouring money and materiel into the South Vietnam forces, while withdrawing 25,000 American troops beginning in June 1969. Many American combat soldiers, fatigued by years of fighting, were determined not to be the last to die in a seemingly endless, fruitless war. There were racial conflicts among soldiers, high desertion and AWOL rates, and rampant drug use. Dissent and protest among the civilian population continued unabated. The largest protest crowds of the entire war, up to 750,000, came to Washington on November 15, 1969, for Mobilization Day. With the widening of the war into Cambodia, there followed a wave of protests, culminating with the deaths of four students at Kent State University in Ohio and two deaths and eleven students wounded at Jackson State College in Mississippi. But there was also the backlash from White blue collar workers, fed up with hippies and protestors, fed up with their undeserved privilege, pampered college life, and abuse of the American flag and American values. Most trenchantly was the May 8, 1970, confrontation in New York City between some 200 construction workers and anti-war protestors. As police stood by, the hard hats—steamfitters, ironworkers, pipefitters, welders and others working in nearby building projects—unleashed their fury, beating protestors with clubs, their tools, and their hard hats themselves. This blue-collar rampage came to be known as the “Hard Hat Riot.” For the Democratic Party, it was a moment of reckoning, as two core elements of its constituency—working-class whites and anti-war students—clashed. A growing list of liberal policies and attitudes—civil rights, anti-war sentiment, women’s rights, sexual freedom and liberation—were driving conservative white workers further and further away from the party. Peter Brennan, head of the local construction workers union, traveled to the White House and presented Nixon with an honorary hard hat. Brennan would soon become Nixon’s labor secretary. In a memo to Nixon, White House aide Patrick Buchanan said of the blue-collar workers, “These, quite candidly, are our people now.”13 Beating back the feeble challenge from George McGovern in November 1972, Nixon then unleashed American airpower in an attempt to force North Vietnamese back to the bargaining table. For twelve days—the so-called Christmas bombing—American warplanes dropped 36,000 tons of explosives on Hanoi, more than all tonnage in the war from 1969 to 1971. Critics from around the world condemned the bombing. Senator Harold E. Hughes (Democrat—Iowa) decried the bombing: “It is unbelievable savagery that we have unleashed

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in this holy season … There can be no victory in this kind of war.” Senate leader Mike Mansfield called this “raw power play” “abhorrent”: “It is the ‘Stone Age’ strategy in a war almost unanimously recognized in this nation as a ‘mistaken’ one.”14 A cease fire was announced on January 27, 1973, with Nixon assuring the world that it represented “peace with honor.” But for most Americans that was a bitter pill to swallow. From the time of his inauguration in January 1969 until the announcement of the cease fire in early 1973, a total of 20,553 American military had lost their lives (more than one-third of the total 58,318 killed in action); another 107,504 South Vietnamese were killed during this time along with about 500,000 North Vietnamese.15 More carnage would come to Cambodia as American bombers dropped more tonnage than all the explosives on Japan during World War II. The war images haunted the American psyche: the young Vietnamese girl, naked, running and screaming, engulfed in flames from a napalm attack; the point-blank assassination of a local villager; the My Lai massacre; the ignominy of seeing the last American helicopter escape from the US embassy in Saigon and desperate Vietnamese with outstretched arms being pushed away. The corrupt and inept South Vietnamese government fell, and America, with the world’s most powerful military, had lost this ill-advised, controversial war. Soldiers, many with serious fatigue and mental stress, returned home, not as conquering heroes, but often shunned or treated as pariahs. One of the biggest casualties was the loss of trust in American leaders and institutions. As James Patterson observed, “nothing did more than Vietnam to subvert the grand expectations that many Americans had developed by 1975 about the capacity of government to deal with public problems.”16 Environmental Consciousness There was growing interest in ecology and the environment, as witnessed through the sale of popular books. In 1949, ecologist Aldo Leopold’s A Sand County Almanac became an important resource for the growing awareness of the ecological movement. His book sold more than 2 million copies and was compared to Thoreau’s Walden Pond in its impact. Other books followed, such as Stewart L. Udall’s The Quiet Crisis (1963), calling for action for environmental protection, and Paul R. Ehrlich’s The Population Bomb (1968), warning of the dangers of overpopulation. However, the book with the greatest impact was Rachel Carson’s Silent Spring (1962),17 which documented the dangers of pesticides, especially DDT, and the impact of bioaccumulation. Carson was roundly criticized by the chemical industry, which spent well over a quarter million dollars to try to discredit her: they accused her of “hysteria,” challenged her scientific credentials, and wondered out loud how an unmarried woman would dare challenge the authority of the male-dominated chemical/scientific community.18 Between 10–15 million television viewers watched a CBS special, The Silent Spring of Rachel Carson, produced by Jay McMullen, and saw a “dignified, polite, concerned scientist” in Carson, in contrast to her best foil, the “wild-eyed, loud-voiced” Dr. Robert White-Stevens, dressed in a white laboratory coat, representing the chemical industry. Historian Linda Lear, Carson’s biographer, summed up the impact of the CBS documentary: “In a single evening, Jay McMullen’s broadcast added the environment to the public agenda.”19 In the mid-1960s, there were several high-profile incidents pitting corporate interests against the growing resistance of environmentalist and grassroots activists. In 1963, Consolidated Edison (ConEd), the New York electric utility company, announced that it would build a power plant near Storm Mountain, along the Hudson River. A grassroots effort, the Scenic Hudson Preservation Conference, fought against ConEd’s plans. The Federal Power Commission (FPC)

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allowed the plant to be built, but later a federal court reversed the FPC and determined that the conservation group had standing to sue. It took another decade of negotiations and wrangling, but ConEd was forced to abandon its project, and an important precedent was set in permitting an environmental group to bring suit against suspected polluters. Through the efforts of Senator Paul H. Douglas (Democrat—Illinois) and a citizens group called Save the Dunes Council, the Indiana dunes, the pristine sand dunes along the shoreline of Lake Michigan were protected by the creation of the Indiana Dunes National Lakeshore in 1966. Until this time, railroad boxcars systematically carted off the sand to be used by the Ball Corporation in Muncie, Indiana, which manufactured glass jars, and the Pittsburgh Plate Glass Company, with a plant in nearby Kokomo, Indiana. There were two spectacular environmental events in 1969. On January 28, a Union Oil Company (Unocal) oil rig, stationed six miles into the Pacific Ocean off the Santa Barbara, California, coastline suffered a blowout. A total of 800 square miles of beaches in central California were contaminated, with an estimated 3,600 birds killed. The pictures of the oil-drenched birds were seen world-wide. But Fred L. Hartley, the CEO of Unocal, refused to call this an environmental disaster. “I am amazed at the publicity for the loss of a few birds,” he lamented.20 But over 100,000 people signed petitions to ban offshore oil drilling and the nation was awakening to environmental problems. Then came the burning of the Cuyahoga River in Cleveland. In June, for the tenth time in one hundred years, the river was on fire. “Chocolate-brown, oily, bubbly with subsurface gases, it oozes rather than flows,” was the way Time magazine describe the Cuyahoga.21 But rivers aren’t supposed to catch on fire, and the event became a media sensation with Cleveland becoming the butt of many jokes. Hardly any of the 1968 presidential candidates spoke about protecting the environment, but the public was rapidly becoming concerned. The public was also ahead of many of the traditional environmental and conservation groups, like the Sierra Club, the National Audubon Society, the National Wildlife Federation, the Izaak Walton League, and others. By mid-1969, following the California oil spill and the burning of the Cuyahoga River, Richard Nixon’s environmental aide, John T. Whitaker, later wrote that there was “only one word, hysteria, to describe the Washington mood on the environment issue in the fall of 1969.”22 Then came Earth Day, April 24, 1970, the first national day to focus on the environment. It was the brainchild of Senator Gaylord A. Nelson (Democrat—Wisconsin), who was inspired by the student Vietnam teach-in movement. Nelson persuaded Representative Paul N. (Pete) McCloskey, Jr. (Republican—California) to join him as co-chair. They recruited twenty-fiveyear-old Denis Hayes to be national coordinator, and Hayes promptly enlisted a staff of eightyfive activists.23 It was the biggest grassroots protest event in American history, with some 22 million—one-tenth the US population—participating throughout the country. Determined activists, students, ordinary citizens, young and old, attended teach-ins, listened to speeches, and took action. Some wore gas masks, buried automobiles in mock funerals to symbolize the end of the fossil fuel era, others painted park benches, pulled old tires and car batteries out of rivers and streams. Thousands gathered on the National Mall, singing along with folk troubadours Peter Seeger and Phil Ochs, “all we are saying, is give Earth a chance.” Rallies and teach-ins were held throughout colleges and universities. There were critics. President Nixon, who at the beginning of the year had declared the 1970s as the “Decade of the Environment,” scoffed at the idea of Earth Day. Congressman Joel T. Broyhill (Republican—Virginia) saw little difference between anti-war activists and environmentalists. At a banquet for the Washington, DC chapter of the National Police Officers Association, he labeled the student protestors as “screaming punks, misfits, and squirts.” Instead of Earth Day, Broyhill said, “we need a national Shave Day and Bath Day.”24

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Environmentalism was now the big new thing. The Vietnam War, the civil rights struggles, even the growing feminist movement were yesterday’s concerns; now lawmakers and the public turned to saving the environment. Oil spills, polluting power plants and factories, pesticides, toxic dumps, the loss of habitat and wilderness, raw sewage, dirty air and filthy water—these were the hot new topics. During the late 1960s, except for Nelson, Henry M. (Scoop) Jackson (Democrat—Washington), and Edmund S. Muskie (Democrat—Maine), few federal lawmakers had any interest in conservation and environmentalism. But now, they were jumping on the bandwagon, and everyone in Congress, it seemed, was an environmentalist. What scientists, and now particularly, public officials were beginning to comprehend was a new reality: decades of unregulated toxic waste dumps, continued air pollution, contaminated waterways, and other hazardous materials needed to be addressed. That reminder came quickly in a small community in upstate New York. In 1952, the Hooker Chemical Company, which for decades was using a water-filled property as an industrial and toxic dump site, sold it to the city of Niagara Falls, New York, for one dollar. The site was called the Love Canal. By the late 1950s, about 100 homes had been built on the landfill. But in 1978, following a record rainfall, the toxic chemicals that had been percolating in the landfill leached up to the surface. Backyard gardens and trees turned black, chemicals seeped into swimming pools and the public school. Hooker had dumped eighty-two different chemicals, eleven of which, especially benzene, were suspected to be carcinogenic. Birth defects and other forms of cancer were at unusually high rates among the 100 families living on the site. New York State bought up all the property and relocated some 200 homes, at a cost of $7 million. Eckardt C. Beck, the regional administrator of the EPA, wrote in 1979, quite simply, Love Canal is one of the most appalling environmental tragedies in American history. But that’s not the most disturbing fact. What is worse is that it cannot be regarded as an isolated event. It could happen again—anywhere in this country—unless we move expeditiously to prevent it.25 Oil Crisis and Economic Turmoil Americans had never seen this before: long lines of automobiles, snaking around the block, with drivers impatiently waiting to “top off” their gas tanks. As energy authority Daniel Yergin explained, the gas shortfall struck at fundamental beliefs in the endless abundance of resources, convictions so deeply rooted in the American character and experience that a large part of the public did not even know, up until October 1973, that the United States imported any oil at all.26 Cheap, abundant energy had been almost a given in modern American society. But now, in October 1973, the Arab nations of OPEC had announced a boycott, determined to keep petroleum supplies from Western markets, in retaliation for US assistance to Israel during the Arab–Israel War. Average gasoline prices in the United States went up 43 percent, from 38.5 cents in May 1973 to 55.1 cents in May 1974 ($2.90 in 2020 dollars). The boycott lasted until March 1974, causing an abrupt break in America’s past and uncertainty about its energy sources and independence.27 The United States was particularly vulnerable, with domestic oil production receding, and reliance on foreign oil becoming greater. So, too, became the realization of the difficulty of balancing two competing interests: American support for Israel and America’s need for Mideast oil.28

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Nixon announced a new initiative, “Project Independence.” “Let us set as our national goal,” Nixon told a nationwide audience on November 7, 1973, “in the spirit of Apollo, with the determination of the Manhattan Project, that by the end of this decade we will have developed the potential to meet our own energy needs without depending on any foreign energy source.”29 But oil independence did not materialize. By 1975, the United States was importing about 8 million barrels per day; by 2004, it was importing 12.5 million barrels per day.30 Only a decade later, with the technological revolution of fracking and shale oil extraction, did the United States come closer to fossil fuel independence. There were other initiatives as well: the creation of the Strategic Petroleum Reserve, a national fifty-five mile per hour speed limit on US highways, and the first fuel economy standards set for automobiles. In the early part of this era, the economy was showing signs of weakness, with recessions occurring in 1970 and 1973–1975. In August 1971, President Nixon announced a New Economic Policy, a ninety-day freeze on wages and prices, a temporary 10 percent surcharge on imports, and the end of the redemption of dollars in gold. The federal budget was reduced, but inflation continued unabated. Nixon again introduced wage price controls, then came the OPEC oil embargo, which wreaked havoc on the economy. By 1976, the unemployment rate was 9 percent, and the inflation rate was 5.8 percent and rising. President Gerald Ford’s team came up with a voluntary price control program, Whip Inflation Now (WIN), which went nowhere. In June 1979, Levittown, Pennsylvania became the epicenter of a nationwide protest against gas rationing and price increases. Angry white suburbanites, waiting for hours at the gas station and faced with soaring gas prices, erupted. About 2,000 people in the 15,000 household Levittown community staged a two-day riot. Tip O’Neill commented, “I’ve never seen the public so mad. You take away gasoline, and you destroy the family.” It wouldn’t be long before white suburbanites turned against Carter, looking for someone who understood them and would fight for them.31 Stuart E. Eizenstat, senior adviser to Jimmy Carter, argued that Carter “inherited a witches’ brew that began when Lyndon Johnson decided to fund the Vietnam War simultaneously with the Great Society.” Then, “it was compounded by Nixon’s decision to impose wage and price controls” and the Federal Reserve chairman, Arthur Burns, decision to “print money that helped ease [Nixon’s] way to reelection.”32 Economists and journalists gave us a new word, “stagflation”—the worrisome combination of two evils: high unemployment and high inflation. Traditional Keynesian economic thinking, particularly through the Philips Curve, told us that when an economy experiences recession, prices go down, and when an economy experiences inflation, employment rises. But just the opposite was happening here: the economy was stagnant, and prices continued to go up. With continued economic difficulties, citizens became further acquainted with the “Misery Index,” a simple calculation developed by economist Arthur Okun, which combined the inflation rate with the rate of unemployment. When Nixon resigned in 1974, the Index was 17.01 percent; during the last year of Carter’s administration, 1980, the Index was 21.98 percent, an all-time high. (By contrast, in May 2022, the Index was 11.86 percent.)33 Carter often mentioned the Misery Index in his speeches and the Reagan campaign effectively used it against him during the 1980 presidential campaign. The simple but deadly question Reagan would ask audiences was this: “Are you better off today than you were four years ago?”34 The Rise of Feminism, Native American Consciousness, Hispanic and Gay Activism The women’s rights movement was invigorated by two events in the early 1960s: the publication of Betty Friedan’s book, The Feminine Mystique (1963), which sold over one million

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copies during the following year. The book argued that traditional roles of housewife and mother kept middle-class women from pursuing careers and self-fulfillment. As she made the beds, shopped for groceries, matched slipcover material, ate peanut butter sandwiches with her children, chauffeured Cub Scouts and Brownies, lay beside her husband at night—she was afraid to ask even of herself the silent question—“Is this all?”35 Millions of women were asking the same question. In 1961, President Kennedy appointed a special commission to investigate how women were treated in the workplace, in the law, and in the economy. Former first lady Eleanor Roosevelt initially headed the Commission on the Status of Women and helped put women’s voices in the public arena. Out of the concerns of the commission, which backed much of what Friedan was saying, came the Equal Pay Act (1963), requiring employers to pay the same wages for men and women in the same job. Then came the inclusion of gender as a protected employment area in Title VII of the Civil Rights Act. Two important organizations were created during the 1960s: the National Organization for Women (NOW) and the Women’s Equity Action League (WEAL). These organizations focused on many aspects of sex discrimination, including law, employment, religion, education, poverty, abortion rights, and, particularly in the 1970s, the enactment of the Equal Rights Amendment. Native American population was about 827,000 in 1970. During this time, Native American activists fought to expose the poor health conditions, housing, and opportunities for American Indian tribes. From November 1969 through July 1971, activists occupied Alcatraz, the former federal prison in San Francisco Bay. In 1972, the American Indian Movement (AIM) and the National Indian Youth Council occupied the Bureau of Indian Affairs in Washington, DC, to protest the US government’s breaking of its treaty obligations. In 1973 for seventy-one days, AIM took over the Pine Ridge Indian Reservation in South Dakota, the site of the Wounded Knee Massacre of 1890. The plight of Native Americans was brought to a wider audience by the publication of Dee Brown’s Bury My Heart at Wounded Knee36 in 1971. This activism prompted Congress to enact several laws, offering cash compensation, land, education, and other benefits. In 1968, Congress passed the Indian Civil Rights Act, which guaranteed civil liberties on Indian reservations. Three years later, in 1971, the Alaska Native Claim Settlement Act was enacted, giving 44 million acres and cash compensation to Alaskan natives. The Maine Indian Settlement Act (1980) provided funds for the purchase of 300,000 acres that were taken by the states of Maine and Massachusetts, along with a $27 million trust fund for economic development. The Indian Education Act (1972) and the Indian Self-Determination and Education Assistance Act (1975) helped Indian-controlled school boards to assist their children.37 The struggle of impoverished farm workers, many of them migrants, in California led César Chavéz and Dolores Huerta to establish the National Farm Workers Association (NFWA) and later the United Farm Workers (UFW), the first union of agricultural workers in America. The termination of the bracero program in 1964 reduced contracted labor giving domestic workers increased power, and the activism found in the larger civil rights movement gave farm workers examples of successful organization. In 1965 came the effort to organize workers in California’s grape fields. The UFW used tactics found in the civil rights movement, such as boycotts, mass marches, non-violence, but also turned to the new emphasis on the environment to show the adverse effects of pesticides on workers and consumers. The largest farm worker strike in American history began in August 1970, led by the Teamsters Union and the UFW, a five-year struggle, resulting in a victory for the unions, with

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wage increases, a seniority system, and strict pesticide controls. But the UFW almost immediately suffered defeat when the Teamsters Union signed a sweetheart deal with growers, effectively blocking expansion of the UFW. Chavéz, working closely with California governor Edmund (Jerry) Brown, Jr., won passage of the 1975 California Agriculture Labor Relations Act, which granted farmworkers the right to form a union. At its peak in the late 1970s, the UFW represented about 100,000 farm workers, only to suffer internal dissent, lose power, size, and significance during the 1980s.38 On June 28, 1969, police raided the Stonewall Inn, a gay bar in Greenwich Village, New York. Police raids of gay establishments were routine during the 1960s, but this episode was particularly violent, and in frustration, gay activists rioted for several days. They had protested for years, but Stonewall became a tipping point, leading to more cohesive political activism. On the one-year anniversary of the Stonewall uprising, the first Gay Pride parades were held in New York, Chicago, and San Francisco. To many, Stonewall marked the beginning of LGBTQ activism, which decades later led to legal protections and rights. In 1973, the American Psychiatric Association removed homosexuality from its list of disorders. THE NATIONAL GOVERNMENT

The Presidency Three presidents served during this era, Richard M. Nixon (January 1969–August 1974), Gerald R. Ford (August 1974–January 1977), and James E. (Jimmy) Carter (January 1977–January 1981). It was a tumultuous time. Richard Nixon barely was elected to office, with just 43.4 percent of the popular vote, against Hubert Humphrey and third-party candidate George Wallace. But when it came re-election time, Nixon triumphed over Democrat George McGovern, easily winning 60.7 percent of the popular vote and carrying every state except Massachusetts and the District of Columbia. Nixon’s win was almost as lopsided in popular support and more impressive in electoral votes than Lyndon Johnson’s in 1964. But along with Johnson’s win came a raft of new members to Congress, ready to approve progressive policies. Nixon’s 1972 coattails were far less dramatic: Republicans gained only twelve seats in the House and actually lost two seats in the Senate. Again, Democrats dominated both chambers. With Watergate and Nixon’s resignation came Gerald Ford, the only unelected president in American history. The Twenty-fifth Amendment, outlining presidential succession, now came into play: Ford replaced the disgraced Spiro T. Agnew as vice president, Ford replaced Nixon, and Nelson Rockefeller replaced Ford as vice president.39 Also came the only pardon of a former president, when Ford on September 8, 1974, issued a “full, free, and absolute pardon” for “all offenses against the United States which he, Richard Nixon, has committed or may have committed or taken part in” during his time in office.40 Ford’s tenure in office was relatively non-descript and he was seriously challenged for the Republican presidential nomination by Ronald Reagan, the governor of California. But, perhaps showing the continued strength of conservative and moderate Republican forces throughout the country, Ford was just barely beaten by former Georgia governor, Jimmy Carter, in 1976. Carter’s presidency was a disappointment to many, and he was challenged for his party’s nomination (never a good sign) in 1980 by California governor Jerry Brown, and, more significantly, by Massachusetts senator Edward M. (Ted) Kennedy. Much of Carter’s presidency was subsumed by the economic turmoil, the energy crisis, and the Iranian hostage crisis. Carter was clearly defeated by Ronald Reagan in November 1980; historians have mostly applauded his lengthy post-presidential career, rather than what he had or could have accomplished in office.

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One important change was Carter’s decision to make the vice president a significant player in policymaking. Walter F. Mondale, the vice president, became an integral part of the Carter team, and in the assessment of legal scholar Joel K. Goldstein, the “Mondale model emphasized the vice-presidency as a contributing institution in the executive branch, not just as a national insurance policy.”41 The Executive Branch Just six months into his presidency, Richard Nixon announced an aggressive new program called the “New Federalism.” His focus was a new vision of how power and authority should be shared between the federal government and state governments. There would be revenue sharing, changes in job training and welfare requirements, and “more money” to the states and “less interference” from the federal government.42 The Bureau of the Budget, originally established in 1921, was transformed into the Office of Management and Budget (OMB) and placed within the executive office of the president in 1970. Two new cabinet agencies were created during this time: the Department of Energy (1977) and the Department of Education (1979). In addition, the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) was created in 1970, cobbling together several environmental and conservation functions housed in other agencies. The federal government grew both in numbers of employees and in the amount of money spent. In 1960, there were 1.81 million federal civilian and military employees; in 1970, 2.20 million; and by 1980, there were 2.16 million employees. The biggest growth of federal employees came in the civilian sector, from 761,000 in 1960 to 1.20 million in 1980.43 The federal budget in 1980 ($590.9 billion) was more than five times the size of the 1962 budget ($106.8 billion). In 2020 dollars, the 1980 federal budget would have been $1.866 trillion (the actual 2020 outlays were $6.6 trillion).44

The Congress The House of Representatives and the Senate remained firmly under the control of Democrats during this era. Especially after Watergate, Democrats gained forty-nine seats in the House, giving them a 147-seat advantage over Republicans. Democratic dominance in both chambers began in the mid-1950s and continued through the 1960s and the 1970s, even though the progressive push, especially found during the Great Society years, was now waning. Yet, at the beginning of the Ninety-fourth Congress (January 1975), ninety-three new Members of the House were sworn in; seventy-six of whom were Democrats. They were derisively called the “Watergate Babies,” by their critics, the “Class of ’74” by their champions. The new members, while most never campaigned as institutional reformers, formed their own caucus, and fought for change. They wanted more transparency, greater sharing of power, more authority given to subcommittees, and most of all, to rid the House of the stultifying seniority system, which rewarded ancient lawmakers, safe in their districts, who were out of touch with modern-day issues and ruled with an iron fist. During this era, congressional reforms were enacted, transforming the way business was conducted, spreading out decision-making and power to subcommittees, giving power to party caucuses, and bringing more deliberations out into the public.45 This era also brought a new crop of conservative Republicans, willing to heighten partisan rhetoric and flaunt the proprieties of established congressional behavior. Above all, Newt Gingrich (Republican—Georgia), elected in 1978, brought attention to himself and to fellow

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conservatives by cleverly and strategically using the medium of television to voice his concerns and show his disdain for congressional business as usual. One of the most important institutional changes in the House (and later the Senate) was the introduction of live television coverage. On March 19, 1979, C-SPAN began televising House floor proceedings. The first to speak before the television cameras was thirty-one-year-old Albert A. Gore, Jr. (Democrat—Tennessee), who stated: “It is a solution for the lack of confidence in government. The marriage of this medium and of our open debate have the potential, Mr. Speaker, to revitalize representative democracy.”46 For Gingrich and his fellow “Young Turks,” television was the breakthrough medium, the platform (and weapon) to launch their own revolution. Senators, perhaps envious of the attention House members were getting, decided to have televised sessions in 1986. Leadership in the Senate Mike Mansfield concluded his long career as Senate majority leader when he retired in January 1977. Gravely ill, Everett Dirksen stepped down from the Senate minority leadership position in September 1969 and was replaced by Hugh Scott (Republican—Pennsylvania), who became the first moderate Republican leader since World War II. Scott served until January 1977. The Pennsylvania lawmaker was an avid collector of Chinese art and a confirmed smoker, with a collection of 500 pipes. “Bespectacled, portly, with slicked-back hair and a mustache, he was easy to pick out in a crowd of legislators,” observed the New York Times.47 Both Senate leaders, Mansfield and Scott, retired at the end of the Ninety-fourth Congress (1975–1977), and were replaced by Robert C. Byrd (Democrat—West Virginia) and Howard H. Baker, Jr. (Republican—Tennessee), respectively. Baker, a moderate, who became best known nationally during the Nixon impeachment trials, served as minority leader from January 1977 through January 1981, at which time the Republicans captured the majority in the Senate. Byrd then became the minority leader throughout the 1980s, and once again becoming majority leader in January 1987 at the beginning of the One Hundredth Congress. Leadership in the House During the earlier years of this era, Carl Albert was the speaker of the House, replacing longtime leader John McCormack. At five feet four inches tall, Albert was called the “Little Man from Little Dixie,” the area of Oklahoma where he grew up. A political moderate, Albert served six years as speaker, from 1971 to 1977. A one-time Rhodes scholar at Oxford University, Albert served as Democratic whip in 1955. He was a moderate lawmaker, who initially opposed civil rights legislation, but came around to support Great Society initiatives including the Civil Rights Act of 1964.48 He was succeeded by Thomas P. (Tip) O’Neill, Jr. (Democrat—Massachusetts), who served for a decade as speaker, from 1977 to 1987. O’Neill became one of the most powerful lawmakers of his time, a liberal icon, who later both clashed with and cooperated with President Ronald Reagan.49 While House reforms spread power and authority, dispersing power to subcommittees, and curbing the rigid seniority system, they also gave more authority to the speaker. By the late 1970s, Democrats realized that dispersing power to more and more subcommittees would jeopardize their ability to craft public policy. Thus, the new speaker, O’Neill, and his successors James C. (Jim) Wright, Jr. (Democrat—Texas, 1987–1989), and Thomas S. Foley (Democrat—Washington, 1989–1995), were encouraged to use their powers to overcome party fragmentation and to defeat obstructionist tactics coming from Republican lawmakers.50

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The Judiciary Following the failed attempt to elevate Abe Fortas to the chief justiceship, Lyndon Johnson decided to let the next president choose the chief justice. Earl Warren announced his intention to retire in June 1968 but remained chief justice until the end of the 1968–1969 court term, in June 1969. Warren, reviled by some conservatives, was praised by a group of American historians as the most consequential chief justice since John Marshall.51 The new chief justice, nominated by Richard Nixon, was Warren E. Burger from Minnesota. Burger, a graduate of William Mitchell College of Law, was an assistant attorney general for three years, and a judge on the US Court of Appeals for thirteen years before his selection. Burger certainly looked the part of a chief justice: his flowing white mane, his formal bearing and demeanor, and his sense of decorum and dignity. But he could also be overbearing, rubbing fellow justices the wrong way, with a streak of pettiness when crossed by others. He managed to change or hide his views on pending cases, so that he could be in charge of writing the opinions. But Burger was also an energetic and efficient court manager, reducing oral arguments to just one hour, dispensing with reading of opinions except in the most important of cases, and reducing the backlog of cases pending before the Court. Burger would serve for seventeen, often frustrating, years on the court, retiring in 1986 to become head of the nation’s bicentennial commemoration of the US Constitution.52 The Burger Court (during this era and into 1985) was more of an activist court than the Warren Court, and invalidated more lower court rulings than its predecessor. It heard more cases and gave more signed or per curiam decisions than its predecessors.53 Besides Chief Justice Burger, Nixon nominated three others, Harry A. Blackmun, Lewis F. Powell, Jr., and William H. Rehnquist. President Ford nominated John Paul Stevens; there were no vacancies during the Carter presidency. In May 1969, Abe Fortas, embroiled in even further scandal, resigned from the court. Nixon then nominated two southern judges, Clement F. Haynsworth, Jr., and then G. Harrold Carswell. Financial improprieties and racial insensitivities tripped them up, with the Senate rejecting both. Nixon then turned to an uncontroversial choice, the moderate, self-effacing Republican Harry Blackmun, a Harvard Law School graduate, and US Court of Appeals judge for eleven years. His nomination sailed through the Senate, 94–0. Blackmun and Burger, both from St. Paul, Minnesota, were friends and colleagues for years, and were soon dubbed the “Minnesota Twins.” Over the years, Blackmun, first viewed as a moderate, emerged as one of the more liberal members of the Burger court, and the case he is closely associated with is Roe v. Wade, the most important decision concerning a woman’s right to choose to have or not have an abortion. Blackmun retired in August 1994. Hugo Black began his service on the court in 1937; in 1971, he retired. Nixon appointed another southerner, Lewis F. Powell, Jr., a longtime corporate lawyer, former president of the American Bar Association, and pillar of the Richmond, Virginia, legal establishment. Powell graduated from Washington and Lee Law School and Harvard University, and was in private practice for nearly four decades. He served on the court from 1972 to June 1987. His colleague, Sandra Day O’Connor, said of Powell: “For those who seek a model of human kindness, decency, exemplary behavior, and integrity, there will never be a better man.”54 When John M. Harlan II retired in also in 1971, Nixon appointed a young assistant attorney general, William H. Rehnquist, to fill this vacancy. Rehnquist had graduated from Stanford Law School and had clerked for Justice Robert Jackson during the 1952 and 1953 terms. He was one of the more conservative justices during this period, and served as associate justice from 1971 through 1986, when he was appointed chief justice by President Reagan. Altogether, Rehnquist served thirty-three years on the court; he died on September 3, 2005, the only justice to die while still in office since Robert Jackson in 1954.

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John Paul Stevens, a prominent lawyer in private practice who served five years on the US Court of Appeals, succeeded William O. Douglas, who retired in 1975 after twenty-six years of service. Stevens graduated from Northwestern Law School and had clerked for Justice Wiley B. Rutledge in 1947–1948. Stevens would become one of the more liberal justices on the Burger and succeeding courts. He served nearly as long as his predecessor Douglas, and was on the bench from December 1975 through June 2010, for a total of thirty-four-and-a-half years. In retirement, Stevens wrote two memoirs and a book on proposed constitutional amendments.55 The first female justice, Sandra Day O’Connor was appointed in 1981. Remaining of the court during this time were Justices Brennan, Stewart, White, and Marshall.

KEY POLICIES ENACTED A number of significant laws were passed during this era. Some extended or reinforced earlier legislation. Through the Food Stamp Act Amendments (1970), the federal government established a nationwide standard for the food stamp program and extended the program for three more years. In addressing the problem of persistent hunger in America, President Nixon stated, “That hunger and malnutrition should persist in a land such as ours is embarrassing and intolerable.”56 The Voting Rights Act of 1965 was amended twice, once in 1970 and the second time in 1975. The 1975 extension broadened the act’s coverage to included Spanishspeaking Americans, Native Americans, Asian Americans, and Alaska natives; in addition, there was also a permanent nationwide ban on literacy tests. In response to the energy crisis, several limited measures were enacted. In 1973, Congress authorized the immediate construction of a major 789-mile oil pipeline, through the TransAlaska Pipeline Authorization Act. The Energy Policy and Conservation Act (1975) gave the president standby authority to deal with energy emergencies, created a strategic petroleum reserve, encouraged the use of fossil fuels, and supported energy efficiency in automobiles. In 1977, the Department of Energy was created, and several federal energy programs were consolidated into the new department. Through the Energy Tax Act (1978), homeowners were given tax credits for installing solar, wind, and geothermal energy equipment; a “gas guzzler” tax was imposed on automobiles with fuel economy of less than eighteen miles per gallon. The Energy Security Act (1980) established a national goal of production of synthetic fuels to at least the equivalent of 500,000 barrels of crude oil a day in 1987 and 2 million by 1992. Each year during the 1960s, some 14,000 workers were dying from injuries suffered on the job. In response, in late 1970, the Occupational Health and Safety Act (OSHA) became law, putting into place workplace rules and standards along with enforcement procedures to protect worker safety. This era was also the beginning of deregulation, spearheaded by Alfred E. Kahn, the chairman of the Civil Aeronautics Board and an expert on deregulation at Cornell University. It was charged that the airline industry had merged into an oligopoly, practicing predatory pricing, charging travelers unacceptably high fares. Through the work of Kahn and Senator Edward Kennedy, the Carter administration worked with Congress to enact the Airline Deregulation Act (1978), the first total dismantling of a federal regulatory system since the 1930s.57 Deregulation democratized air travel, opened up routes to start-up companies like Jet Blue and Southwestern, cut travel costs significantly, and brought about a seven-fold increase in passenger travel between 1974 and 2010.58 In 1975, New York City was dangerously close to bankruptcy, spending far more than it was taking in. President Ford had hoped to mobilize Congress and public opinion, but it did not happen. Instead, the New York Daily News, no stranger to hyperbole, posted this devastating

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headline: “Ford to City: Drop Dead.” Finally, Congress passed the New York City Loan Guarantee Act (1978), rescuing the city’s finances. It was all paid back, with interest, and New York survived. But the “drop dead” headline wounded Ford, who thirty years later said, “I wanted to be helpful. I did not tell them to drop dead. I told them, ‘We will cooperate if you straighten out your finances.’ That’s all they had to do.”59 On the heels of the New York City bailout came the pleas from the Chrysler Corporation, facing its own bankruptcy. Led by Carter’s new treasury secretary William G. Miller, a $1 billion loan guarantee package was created, but with the requirement that unions, management, state and local governments, banks had to relax their demands and conditions. In December 1979, Congress, with bipartisan support, easily passed the Chrysler bailout, saving tens of thousands of jobs and the Chrysler Corporation itself. But, as Carter senior aide Stuart Eizenstat lamented, just as New York mayor Ed Koch turned against Carter after that city was saved from bankruptcy, so too did the United Auto Workers turn against Carter, endorsing Edward Kennedy during the 1980 presidential primaries.60 Social Security benefits increased dramatically during the 1970s. Through the 1977 Social Security amendments, Congress enacted the first large-scale efforts to control the size of the program. From this point on, the emphasis was “no longer focused on expanding the program on a large scale but rather on limiting program growth or finding additional sources of revenue.”61 Beginning in the late 1960s and continuing through the 1980s, consumer and government reform advocate, Ralph Nader pushed for policy reforms. His activism gained him enemies on the right and in corporate boardrooms, earning him the sobriquet as the “most dangerous man in America.” Because of his efforts, and those of the consumer-environmental organizations created by him, he is credited with sparking the passage of the Nation Traffic and Motor Vehicle Safety Act (1966), the Freedom of Information Act (1967), the Clean Water Act (1972), the Foreign Corrupt Practices Act (1977), the Whistleblowers Protection Act (1989), among others.62 Nader also challenged the liberal establishment’s sense of governance and order, and, importantly, fomented popular distrust of government.63

Photo 8.1 Ralph Nader (b. 1934), auto safety and consumer advocate; multiple times presidential candidate. Source: US News & World Report Collection via Library of Congress.

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Of stresses on society noted in this era and in the past, lawmakers paid the most attention to the issues of environmental degradation. The long-standing issues of racial justice were taken up by the Supreme Court, with decisions affirming, then limiting the reach of court-ordered busing and affirmative action. The rise of feminism brought about Title IX protections in higher education, but also the disappointment of a failed Equal Rights Amendment. The Supreme Court also ruled that the economic disparity between relatively wealthy all-white neighborhoods and poorer predominantly Hispanic districts did not violate the equal protection of the Fourteenth Amendment.

Guaranteeing Eighteen-year-olds the Right to Vote In 1971, the Senate adopted and the states ratified the Twenty-sixth Amendment, giving eighteen-year-olds the right to vote in all elections. No other constitutional amendment was so quickly ratified: Congress approved it on March 23, 1971 and it was ratified by the states on July 1, going into effect on July 7. With the Vietnam War, the question of voting eligibility became even more pressing. In the Voting Rights Act amendments of 1970, Congress had reduced the voting age from twenty-one to eighteen for both state and federal elections. But the Supreme Court ruled that the provision for eighteen-year-olds could only apply to federal elections.64 Thus, to avoid confusion and administrative problems with such a variety of eligibility standards, there needed to be a constitutional amendment to cover all elections. The amendment was introduced by Senator Birch Bayh of Indiana. The wording of the amendment was straightforward: “The right of citizens of the United States, who are eighteen years of age or older, to vote shall not be denied or abridged by the United States or any State on account of age.” With its ratification, some 25 million additional young persons would now be eligible to vote. This became the sixth constitutional amendment dealing with voting and democratic participation: the others were the Fifteenth (“race, color, or previous condition of servitude”); Seventeenth (popular election of senators); Nineteenth (women); Twenty-third (DC residents); Twenty-fourth (poll taxes); and Twenty-sixth (eighteen-year-olds).

The Decade of the Environment The growing environmental movement brought a cascade of laws and protections during this era. Remarkably, many of the pieces of legislation were passed by voice vote or by unusually large majorities in both the House and Senate. The big battle was who would claim credit, who would be the new voice of the environment. Gaylord Nelson noted that in 1960, there might have been a handful of lawmakers who were environmentalist; but by 1990, at least 200 claimed to be on board. “Even more startling, however,” noted environmental journalist Philip Shabecoff, “is the fact that there is hardly a member of the Senate or House of Representatives who does not claim to be an environmentalist no matter how vigorous an enemy of environmental regulation he or she may be.”65 The first major environmental law was also the shortest, just five pages long, the National Environmental Policy Act (NEPA) of 1969. Political scientist Lynton K. Caldwell at Indiana University had written a seminal article in 1963 calling for a federal focus on environmental policy.66 For years, he had been the leading academic voice for this emerging field of public policy. In 1968, Caldwell was asked by the Senate Interior Committee counsel, William Van Ness, to develop a rationale and policy ideas for the protection of the environment.

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Senator Henry Jackson, as chairman of the Committee on Interior and Insular Affairs, was becoming a major force in the new environmental policymaking. So, too, was Senator Edmund S. Muskie, who gained national attention as Hubert Humphrey’s running mate in 1968, and was considered the Senate’s “Mr. Clean” and “Ecology Ed.” By early October 1969, Muskie and Jackson, who had been bumping heads, put their egos in check and hammered out a compromise. Just days before the December adjournment, both chambers easily approved NEPA; indeed, in the Senate, it was by voice vote. NEPA has often been referred to as the “Magna Carta” of environmental legislation, written in simple, forceful language, almost like a constitution rather than technical legislation. Title I contained the Declaration of a National Environmental Policy and the requirement of environmental impact statements. The language was clear: all agencies of the federal government, shall be required in every federal agency recommendation or report to give a “detailed statement” of the environment impact. This was the Environmental Impact Statement (EIS), advocated by Caldwell. As Caldwell later wrote, without a mandatory performance requirement, “the Act might be no more than a pious resolve which the federal bureaucracy could ignore with impunity.”67 Further, the declaration required that federal agencies shall consult with other agencies having expertise, and before their final reports are published, they will be available to the new Council on Environmental Quality and the public. This last point was groundbreaking: now individual citizens and environmental organizations would be able to have input into federal policymaking. As historian Richard A. Liroff noted, “For many legislators, undoubtedly, a vote for NEPA was symbolic—akin to a vote for motherhood and apple pie. Little did they realize, however, that in voting to enact NEPA, they were placing a potent weapon in the hands of citizen activists.”68 Further, President Nixon, through an executive order, established the Council on Environmental Quality in the Executive Office of the President and it was given the task of preparing annual reports and assisting other agencies in implementing the law. Now came the dance to take credit for the new law. On New Year’s Day, 1970, when most people were recovering from the night before or watching college bowl games, Richard Nixon summoned reporters to the Western White House in San Clemente, California, to witness his signing of NEPA into law. Nixon stated that “the nineteen-seventies absolutely must be the years when America pays its debt to the past by reclaiming the purity of its air, its waters, and our living environment. It is literally now or never.” Nixon was now in the spotlight, signing the law, proclaiming the 1970s the Decade of the Environment. Yet, neither Nixon nor his administration had any meaningful role in the passage of NEPA and his officials had earlier testified against the creation of a Council on Environmental Quality. But the president portrayed this day as a victory for his administration. He praised Henry Jackson and other lawmakers but failed to mention Muskie. When another major environmental law, the Clean Air Act Amendments, was passed in late 1970, Nixon also failed to acknowledge Muskie, the champion of the legislation. Why not tip a hat to Muskie, the Senate’s “Mr. Clean”? Because Nixon saw him as a threat in the upcoming 1972 presidential election. Why give Muskie any credit? In his memoirs, Russell E. Train, the chairman of the CEQ, considered Nixon’s slight as “an act of pettiness,” which probably helped highlight Muskie’s role, just the opposite to the response Nixon wanted.69 The Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) was created later in 1970 when President Nixon submitted a reorganization plan to Congress, cobbling together forty-four regulatory and public health bureaus and programs, and rebranding the emerging organization as the EPA. Neither the House nor the Senate voted against the reorganization, and thus the new federal environmental watchdog was created without the benefit of any statute enacted by Congress. William D. Ruckelshaus, then an assistant attorney general, was appointed as the first

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administrator of EPA. The new agency’s task was daunting, with new environmental laws cascading out of Congress, all needing rules and regulations, enforcement procedures and protocols. Quickly came new environmental legislation. There had been several attempts to regulate water quality in the past, beginning with legislation in 1948. The Clean Water Act (1972)70 greatly strengthened earlier federal legislation, setting water quality standards, and ambitious goals for cleanup. It set the goal of zero discharge of pollutants by 1985 and an interim goal of “fishable” and “swimmable” water, where possible, by 1983. The law also provided federal financial assistance to municipalities for sewage treatment plant construction and set regulatory requirements for industrial and municipal dischargers.71 The original Clean Air Act (1963) set the stage for air pollution control and in 1965 it was amended to eliminate lead from gasoline. Major enforcement improvements were made with the Clean Air Act Amendments (1970), which passed overwhelmingly in both chambers. The law was strengthened both in 1977 and in 1990. In 1972 came FIFRA (the Federal Insecticide, Fungicide, and Rodenticide Act), the Noise Control Act, the Coastal Zone Management Act, and the Marine Mammals Protection Act. The next year came the Endangered Species Act and in 1974, the Safe Drinking Water Act. In 1976 came the Toxic Substances Control Act, the Resource Conservation and Recovery Act, the Federal Land Management Act, and in 1977, the National Forest Management Act. The Clean Water and Clean Water acts were also expanded and strengthened in 1977. Over 100 million acres were set aside in perpetuity through the Alaska National Interest Lands Act (1980), and during a lame-duck session that year, Congress passed the Superfund law to tackle the worst of the abandoned toxic waste sites throughout the country.72 In addition, several other environmental and conservation laws were passed during this era. During the Reagan administration, there were no new environmental laws enacted, though several of the laws passed in the 1970s were expanded or amended. Environmental policy scholar Walter A. Rosenbaum noted that “practically every important environmental ill” has been tackled by Congress, but “delay and difficulty in program implementation routinely impede enforcement.” Many have been implemented at a “plodding pace” and portions of the laws “exhibit regulatory rigor mortis.”73 Amended environmental laws have grown in complexity and costs have risen dramatically. For example, the original Clean Air Act (1970) was 68 pages, while the Clean Air Act Amendments (1990) were 788 pages, and regulations exceeded 10,000 pages. Some have also required far more money for cleanup and mitigation. The Superfund program, for example, originally authorized $1.6 billion, then $15.2 billion by the mid-1980s, and $27 billion by 2000.74 Significance of these Policies Despite the problems and delays, incredible progress had been made. Summing up the environmental policy achievements of the 1970s, Philip Shabecoff noted that the laws “taken together, must be regarded as one of the great legislative achievements of the nation’s history.”75 For the most part, corporate America was caught flat-footed by the flood of new environmental laws, and many corporations, trade groups, and other business interests soon realized that to protect their interests they would need to beef up their Washington presence, with their own government affairs and government relations offices.

Educational Equality for Women One of the driving forces for woman’s equality in education was Dr. Bernice (Bunny) Resnick Sandler, who for forty years advocated on behalf of women and girls for the Women’s Equity

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Action League. From 1969–1971, she sued some 250 educational institutions, using the authority of an executive order that prevented contractors from discriminating against employees.76 Sandler worked closely with Representative Edith S. Green (Democrat—Oregon) to develop Title IX, barring discrimination on the basis of sex in higher education. Green’s legislation did not pass in 1971, but the next year it was taken up by Representative Patsy T. Mink (Democrat—Hawaii) who introduced it in the Education Amendments of 1972. In the Senate, Title IX was championed by Birch Bayh. The wording is short and simple: “No person in the United States shall, on the basis of sex, be excluded from participation in, be denied the benefits of, or be subjected to discrimination under any education program or activity receiving Federal financial assistance.”

Photo 8.2 Patsy M.T. Mink (1927–2002), Hawaii representative, coauthor of Title IX education amendments. Source: Collection of the US House of Representatives.

With few exceptions, Title IX applied to all aspects of federal funded education programs and activities. Bayh biographer Robert Blaemire noted that in the first few years after Title IX was enacted, “few people had heard of it.”77 President Nixon made no mention of it when he signed the education amendments into law. As the ramifications of Title IX began to sink in, there were several congressional attempts to push back, particularly on the issue of collegiate sports. Nonetheless, Congress defeated several attempts to exclude collegiate sports that were income producing (primarily football and basketball) from Title IX requirements. One setback was the Supreme Court decision in Grove City College v. Bell,78 which determined that Title IX affected only those programs that directly received federal assistance, in this case student financial aid, not sports programs. But four years later, Congress overrode the Grove City decision with the Civil Rights Restoration Act of 1987, which stated that Title IX would apply to all aspects of an institution if it accepted federal funds. Reagan vetoed this legislation, but it was overridden by Congress. This was the first time since Reconstruction that a president had vetoed a civil rights bill. Significance of this Policy Today, Title IX is mostly known for its positive impact of collegiate sports programs. In 1971, just 294,015 girls participated in sports activities in high school of college. By 2001, that number had risen ten-fold to 2.8 million and rose again to 3.2 million in 2010–2011. In a 2010

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interview, Bayh stated that Title IX “had a more profound impact on Americans than anything else I was able to do.” Following her death in 2002, the law was renamed the Patsy T. Mink Equal Opportunity in Education Act.79

Campaign Financing When Lyndon Johnson was Senate majority leader during the 1950s, he also served as a cash machine for fellow Democrats seeking re-election. Johnson’s aides and cronies would fly from Washington to Texas, receive cash donations from oil barons and corporate interests, stuff the money into their suit coat pockets, and return to Johnson’s Senate office. There, the majority leader would dole out campaign monies to grateful lawmakers and candidates. No limits, no disclosures, no way of knowing who got what or from whom.80 That was the unbridled and unregulated state of federal campaigning. Earlier laws were enacted to prevent unions or corporations from giving directly to candidates, but that was the extent of the law. Most of these provisions were ignored, because there was no effective way to administer the laws. House and Senate candidates reported spending $8.5 million during the 1968 elections ($63.56 million in 2020 dollars) (In 2020, the senate contest in North Carolina cost $265 million, the Iowa senate contest cost $218 million, and altogether, the total of all federal and presidential campaign expenses was a record-breaking $14 billion.)81 In May 1971, the Federal Election Campaign Act (FECA) was introduced in the Senate by John O. Pastore (Democrat—Rhode Island), and three months later was overwhelmingly approved, 88–2; similar legislation was approved in the House. “We have a crackerjack bill here,” laughed John B. Anderson (Republican—Illinois). “It will stop millionaires from buying Senate seats and the presidency. It brings this television monster under control.”82 In February 1972, Richard Nixon signed the legislation into law, stating “by giving the American public full access to the facts of political financing, this legislation will guard against campaign abuses and will work to build public confidence in the integrity of the electoral process.”83 This was well before the American public learned about the unreported, mysterious millions of dollars that flowed into the Nixon re-election coffers. One of the weaknesses of the 1971 legislation was that it did not provide for a single, independent body to monitor and enforce the law. Rather, the responsibilities of campaign monitoring were given to the clerk of the House, the secretary of the Senate, and the comptroller general of the General Accounting Office. Following the 1972 elections, about 7,000 cases were referred by congressional officials to the Justice Department and about 100 cases were referred from the comptroller general. Few were litigated.84 The 1972 presidential election was, in the estimation of campaign finance expert Herbert E. Alexander, “the high-water mark for large donors.” Richard Nixon received nearly $2.1 million from insurance magnate W. Clement Stone, and $1 million from Richard Mellon Scaife, the heir to the Mellon banking and oil empire. Stewart R. Mott, heir to General Motors money, gave George McGovern $400,000 and another $422,000 to other Democratic candidates and causes. These were eye-popping figures making headlines across America.85 (In 2020, Sheldon and Miriam Adelson spent $218 million on Republican candidates; Michael Bloomberg spent over $1 billion on his own campaign.) But other money, much of it illegal, was coming in as well, especially to the Nixon re-election campaign. The new federal campaign act would go into effect on April 7, 1972. Fred Wertheimer, who was then counsel to the watchdog group Common Cause, observed that as the April deadline drew nearer, and the new law would require disclosure of names and amounts, contributors to the Nixon campaign “were literally flying into Washington with satchels of cash.”86

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The Committee for the Re-election of the President (mischievously called CREEP by opponents) was also gathering millions in illegal corporation contributions, much of it coming from business executives who felt pressured to contribute. The donor records were kept secret, in a locked drawer in the desk of Rose Mary Woods, Nixon’s secretary. The list, called “Rose Mary’s Baby” wasn’t made public until Wertheimer filed a lawsuit. In 1974, with the impact of the Watergate abuses becoming more evident, Congress strengthened the federal campaign act, by creating the Federal Election Commission (FEC) to serve as the independent enforcement mechanism. It also set up a system of disclosure: those giving more than $200 to a candidate or party must give their names, addresses, and places of employment. The law also set up a system of voluntary public financing for presidential candidates. Altogether, the federal campaign law and its 1974 amendments restricted the amount of campaign funds individuals could give to a federal candidate or political party: $1,000 per election (primary, runoff, general) to each candidate; $5,000 per year to a political action committee; $20,000 per year to a national political party; and $25,000 total per calendar year. It set a limit of $1,000 to be spent by an individual for an independent expenditure. Also, the law set a limit on how much individual congressional candidates could spend of their own money and how much money could be spent overall on federal elections. The law was soon challenged by Senator James L. Buckley (Conservative—New York), who argued that he should be able to spend as much of his own money on his own race as he thought necessary. He was joined by former presidential candidate and senator Eugene McCarthy and several others. In Buckley v. Valeo (1976),87 the Supreme Court ruled the spending restrictions on candidates and those through independent expenditures violated the First Amendment. However, the restrictions on individuals giving to candidates, political action committees, or parties could remain. Thus, FECA was fundamentally altered in three ways: it invalidated the total spending ceiling for all federal races, spending by individual candidates, and spending by independent expenditures committees. Now, Buckley and other wealthy candidates could spend as much of their money as they chose, and individuals and political action committees could spend as much they wanted as independent expenditures. “So long as persons and groups eschew expenditures that, in express terms advocate the election or defeat of a clearly identified candidate,” the court ruled, “they are free to spend as much as they want to promote the candidate and his views.” That means that so long as the words “vote for,” “elect,” “support,” “cast your ballot for,” “Smith for Congress,” “vote against,” “defeat,” or “reject” are not used, and the independent expenditure is made without the knowledge of, consultation with, or cooperation with any candidate, then the group can spend as much as it wants. Thus, with a wink and a nod, independent groups were free to spend, and candidates wouldn’t know—wink, wink—anything about it. Significance of these Policies The FECA and its amendments were the foundation of federal campaign law, but as seen in recent years, the law has been nearly eviscerated by Supreme Court decisions and the discovery of other ways to finance elections.

The Supreme Court Weighs In Several of the most difficult and complex policy issues were decided by the Supreme Court: the limitations on abortion rights, the extent of presidential power, the desegregation of public schools through court-ordered busing, the methods of funding public schools, and affirmative action.

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The Right to Have an Abortion On January 22, 1973, the Supreme Court in Roe v. Wade88 declared that a restrictive Texas antiabortion law was unconstitutional, denying Jane Roe’s constitutional right to privacy. The 7–2 ruling became one of the most important, controversial, and debated decisions of the past fifty years.89 Justice Harry A. Blackmun, a moderate Republican and once the legal counsel for the Mayo Clinic, delivered the opinion, ruling that this Texas anti-abortion law was unduly restrictive and violated a woman’s right to privacy. Blackmun wrote that only a “compelling state interest” could limit a fundamental right, such as privacy, and that an anti-abortion law would have to be drawn narrowly “to express only the legitimate state interests at stake.” The Court ruled that a woman would not have complete freedom to have an abortion; however, the state’s interest in preserving the health of pregnant women and the potential life of a fetus would allow it to regulate abortions “at approximately the end of the first trimester” of a pregnancy. Blackmun became a staunch supporter of a woman’s right to an abortion. He later wrote Few decisions are more personal and intimate, more properly private, or more basic to individual dignity and autonomy, than a woman’s decision—with the guidance of her physician and within the limits specified in Roe—whether to end her pregnancy. A woman’s right to make that choice freely is fundamental. Indeed, before Roe, “hundreds of thousands” of women had to break the law to end a pregnancy.90 Soon, there was pushback in Congress from conservative, anti-abortion lawmakers. In 1976, using language that reminded many of Nazi Germany, Henry J. Hyde (Republican—Illinois) rose in the House chamber to offer an amendment to the Department of Health and Human Services appropriations bill: “The only virtue to abortion is that it is a final solution,” Hyde said. “Believe me, it is a final solution, especially to the unborn child.”91 The Hyde Amendment banned federal Medicaid funds for most abortions.92 After bitter, often emotional, wrangling in both the House and Senate, compromise language was introduced by Silvio O. Conte (Republican— Massachusetts), carving out this exception: “where the life of the mother would be endangered if the fetus were carried to term.” Pro-choice lawmakers were taken aback, not expecting the strong support for this amendment. The Hyde Amendment was an unexpected victory for pro-life forces, with the House voting 256–114 in favor, and the Senate approving 47–21 the next day. The ban did not take effect until 1980 when the Supreme Court determined that it was constitutional. Every session of Congress since then has had Hyde-type funding bans added to annual spending bills. By 2009, federal abortion funding would be banned in federal worker health plans, women in the military, serving time in federal prisons, or working in the Peace Corps. The ban also extended to international family planning programs that use non-US funds to perform or advocate abortion.93 In 2020, Joe Biden campaigned against the Hyde Amendment, and 2021 budget bill, for the first time in decades, did not include the Hyde provision. Dr. Wanda Franz, president of the National Right to Life Committee, commented shortly after Hyde’s death in 2007: “By conservative estimate, well over one million Americans are alive today because of the Hyde Amendment—more likely two million.” But Nancy Northrup, president of the Center for Reproductive Rights, had a much different take: “The Hyde Amendment was one of the cruelest injustices perpetrated on American women,” she said. “For over thirty years, it has allowed anti-choice politicians to deprive poor women of medically necessary treatment.”94 Pro-life efforts have not only tried to overturn Roe completely, but, failing that, have chipped away at the pro-choice side has in obtaining abortion services. In 2021–2022, pro-life bills from Texas, Mississippi, Oklahoma and other states squarely went after Roe. Every January 22, pro-life supporters

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descend upon Washington, button-holing lawmakers and administration officials, demanding a reversal of Roe.95 Executive Privilege and Wrongdoing Central to the Watergate investigation were the White House tape recordings and their transcripts. Presidential aide Alexander P. Butterfield revealed to investigators that the White House recorded presidential conversations, setting off a scramble on the part of the White House to keep the tapes secret and on the part of congressional investigators and lawmakers to have their contents revealed. Was there a “smoking gun”: evidence on the tapes of Nixon’s knowledge of the Watergate crimes and his participation in a cover-up? Nixon tried to fend off the issue by partially releasing transcripts and by having seventy-three-year-old (and hard of hearing) Senator John C. Stennis (Democrat—Mississippi) listen to the tapes to verify the faithfulness of the transcripts. This did not satisfy the Watergate special counsel, Archibald Cox, Jr., who kept pressing for full disclosure of the tapes. The special counsel’s doggedness led to the infamous “Saturday Night Massacre,” when, on October 20, 1973, Attorney General Elliot L. Richardson and Deputy Attorney General William Ruckelshaus both resigned rather than fire Cox, as Nixon demanded. Solicitor General Robert Bork, next in line, agreed to fire the special counsel. Impeachment proceedings began ten days later and a new special prosecutor, Leon Jaworski, was soon appointed. Later in November, it was revealed that the Nixon tapes had an eighteenand-a-half-minute gap in them. All along, the White House claimed that the tapes were privileged and could not be turned over to prosecutors. In April 1974, Jaworski issued a subpoena ordering the White House to hand over the tapes, and the subpoena was affirmed by US District Court judge, John J. Sirica. In United States v. Nixon,96 the Supreme Court, through an 8–0 opinion delivered by Chief Justice Burger, determined, for the first time, that a president could invoke executive privilege under certain circumstances, but rejected the president’s claim to “absolute, unqualified presidential privilege of immunity from judicial process under all circumstances.” Nixon’s claim of executive privilege regarding the use of the Watergate tapes in a criminal trial could not override the needs of the judicial process. This was not a matter of military or diplomatic secrets, Burger wrote, and Nixon’s claim of absolute privilege could not stand. Nixon was ordered to deliver the subpoenaed materials to the federal court. The tapes conclusively showed Nixon’s knowledge and involvement—the “smoking gun.” Sixteen days later, on August 9, 1974, Nixon resigned. Desegregation of Public Schools and Busing In Swann v. Charlotte-Mecklenburg Board of Education (1971),97 a unanimous court ruled that court-ordered busing was a constitutionally based method for the desegregating of public schools. After considerable bargaining with other justices and seven separate drafts, Chief Justice Burger, who originally was against busing, was able to fashion a unanimous opinion. The Court reaffirmed the fundamental objective: “to remove from the public schools all vestiges of state-imposed segregation” consistent with the Brown decisions. The school authorities had defaulted on their obligation to provide those remedies and thus the federal courts had broad authority to fashion remedies that would create a unitary school system.98 Immediately after the Swann decision, the Nixon White House sent to Congress two pieces of legislation, the Equal Education Opportunities Act and the Student Transportation Moratorium Act, designed to place, in Nixon’s words, “firm and effective curbs on busing.”99

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The system of mandatory busing at Charlotte-Mecklenburg lasted from 1972 to 1992, with mixed results, and with black students spending far more time being bused than white students.100 Three years later, the Court tackled another significant busing issue: could a remedy for desegregation involve a metropolitan area, not simply the central city. In Milliken v. Bradley,101 a 5–4 decision determined that the integration of public schools in Detroit would not involve a metropolitan-wide solution, but would have to be accomplished within the city of Detroit itself. At the time, two-thirds of the students in Detroit’s public schools were African American, and the number of white families leaving Detroit for the nearly all-white suburbs was increasing. More and more, Americans heard of and experienced “white flight” to the suburbs. The NAACP had sued the state of Michigan and the city of Detroit, arguing that black families, through racial covenants, redlining, and other practices, had been kept out of the suburbs and that their children were not hemmed in by public school boundaries. A lower federal court ordered desegregation metropolitan-wide, requiring the city of Detroit and fiftythree other school districts to participate. The Supreme Court determined that the federal court did not have the authority to mandate a metropolitan-wide solution. The solution would have to come from within Detroit itself. The United States government has had a long history of advocating, through friend of the court briefs, for the desegregation of public schools. Here, however, the Department of Justice took a restrictive view, arguing against a metropolitan-wide solution. Robert H. Bork, US solicitor general, argued the federal government’s case. Thurgood Marshall, in dissent, called the decision a “giant step backward.” “The Detroit-only plan simply has no hope of achieving actual desegregation,” he wrote. “Under such a plan, White and Negro students will not go to school together. Instead, Negro children will continue to attend all-Negro schools. The very evil that was Brown was aimed at will not be cured but will be perpetuated.”102 According to legal scholar Robert A. Sedler, “Milliken is enormously significant because it effectively insured the continued existence in this Nation of predominantly Black urban school systems surrounded by all-White, or virtually all-White, suburban school systems.”103 Inequality in Public School Financing and the Right to Education In Bexar County, which embraces San Antonio, Texas, the funding for public school districts heavily relied on local property taxes. Despite some state assistance, the practical effect was that wealthier neighborhoods had more money to spend than poorer ones—on teachers’ salaries, school supplies and equipment, and on student-to-teacher ratios. A lower federal court determined that the system of school financing adopted by the state of Texas violated the equal protection clause of the Fourteenth Amendment because it had not offered a compelling case for adopting a system that allowed ongoing wealth-based disparities in school funding. When the case came to the Supreme Court in 1973, the justices reversed this decision. In San Antonio Independent School District v. Rodriguez,104 the Court through Justice Lewis Powell determined, in a 5-to-4 decision, that the right to education is not a fundamental right protected by the Constitution. Powell argued that while education was an important state service, “it is not within the limited category of rights recognized by this Court as guaranteed by the Constitution. … There is no showing that the Texas system fails to provide the basic minimal skills necessary for that purpose.” Of the five justices who rejected Rodriguez’s claim, four—Burger, Blackmun, Powell, and Rehnquist—were Nixon appointees. The lead dissent came from Thurgood Marshall: “The majority’s holding can only be seen as a retreat from our historic commitment to equality of educational opportunity. … In my judgment,

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the right of every American to an equal start in life, so far as the provision of a state service as important as education is concerned, is far too vital to permit state discrimination” of this sort. The Rodriguez case prompted state legislatures and state courts to get involved. Since 1973, there have been school funding equalization reforms throughout the states, some more successful than others in mitigating wealth barriers. Legal scholar Jeffrey S. Sutton observed, “One can fairly wonder whether the reforms developed by fifty state legislatures and required by twenty-eight state supreme courts over the past twenty-five years would have been as farreaching if the Rodriguez Court had not shifted the spotlight to the States.”105 Legal scholar Geoffrey R. Stone, however, takes a far more pessimistic view: that Rodriguez was a “terrible decision” when decided, remains a “terrible decision today,” and is only getting worse.106 He noted in his home state of Illinois, the average state expenditure per elementary school pupil was about $11,600 in 2017, but the school districts ranged from $28,500 to $6,400 per pupil. This disparity comes about because the states set a modest sum for an “adequate” education and permit local wealthy communities to add funds as they choose. Affirmative Action Allan Bakke, a thirty-five-year-old white man had twice applied for admission to the University of California-Davis Medical School. Twice he was denied. The medical school had an affirmative action admissions standard, which it stated was to help redress longstanding discrimination and unlawful practices: it reserved sixteen slots, out of the one hundred available, for “qualified” minorities. Bakke argued that his grades and standardized test scores during both rounds of admissions exceeded those measures of any of the minorities granted admission. Bakke contended that he was excluded solely because of his race. The question before the Supreme Court was whether the University of California had violated Bakke’s Fourteenth Amendment equal protection clause rights and the 1964 Civil Rights Act by practicing affirmative action, resulting in his rejection from medical school. In Regents of the University of California v. Bakke,107 the Court split hairs in an 8–1 decision, with Justice Blackmun writing the opinion. Bakke was admitted to the medical program when four justices and Lewis F. Powell, Jr. agreed that a racial quota system violated the 1964 Civil Rights Act. But Powell also agreed with the four other justices that the use of race was constitutionally permissible, along with other criterion, in determining admissions policies in higher education. Thus, affirmative action was constitutional, but the use of racial quotas was invalid. Powell’s decision set the constitutional standard for the next forty years in how affirmative action programs could operate.108

POLICIES DENIED OR DELAYED

Universal Childcare In 1972, a bipartisan Comprehensive Child Development Act was passed, with co-sponsors Senator Walter Mondale and Representative S. John Brademas, Jr. (Democrat—Indiana), establishing a network of nationally funded, locally administered childcare centers. The centers would have provided education, nutrition, and medical services. However, Nixon vetoed the measure, warning that it would “commit the vast moral authority of the national government to the side of communal approaches to child rearing over against the family-centered approach.” The veto language was inspired by Nixon speechwriter Patrick Buchanan, who encouraged Nixon to slam the bill in order to rally social conservatives. There weren’t enough votes in Congress to overrule Nixon’s veto.

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Mondale, in his memoirs, remembered first hearing of Nixon’s veto. “Worse than the veto was the harsh language used in the veto message. He accused us of ‘Sovietizing’ American youth. He said our bill would take responsibility of child rearing away from parents.” Nixon’s message, Mondale continued “was plainly designed to scare people, poison the conversation about helping families, and dip into the nation’s stew of cultural resentments. Even for Nixon, it was surprising.”109 Despite Nixon’s objections, the Republican Party’s party platform that year had a strong childcare plank. Then came anonymous fliers, placed on the windshields of cars outside southern and western fundamentalist churches, making wild-eyed claims that with federal support for childhood education, it would be “illegal for parents to make their children go to church or take out the trash, that children would have the right to sue their parents and organize labor unions.”110 Thousands of angry letters poured into the offices of federal lawmakers objecting to federal involvement. Journalist Nancy L. Cohen noted that the United States ranked third to last among the thirtysix OECD countries on public spending on family benefits. “It is not because American society refuses to come to grips with the reality of working mothers. Rather, it is the result of a political hijacking so fabulously successful it wiped away virtually any trace of its own handiwork.”111 The “fragmented and decentralized” preschool system currently in place owes much to Nixon’s veto.112 Biden’s failed $1.75 trillion “Build Back Better” program would have greatly enhance funds for early childhood education. “This would be a major chapter in the history book of early education,” observed Albert Wat of the Alliance for Early Success.113

The Equal Rights Amendment During every congressional session from 1923 to 1970, proponents had pushed for a constitutional amendment guaranteeing equal rights for women. Every year it had been defeated or, more often than not, ignored. Alice Paul and the National Woman’s Party first placed the amendment before Congress in 1923, and in the early years it was referred to as the Alice Paul Amendment.114 Surprisingly, Howard W. Smith of Virginia, who spent years blocking civil rights legislation, was both a friend of the eighty-four-year-old Alice Paul and an advocate for the equal rights amendment.115 The chairman of the House Judiciary, Emmanuel Celler, an ardent supporter of the rights of African Americans and champion of immigration reform, however, bottled up equal rights legislation in his committee. In the 1960s, the Equal Rights Amendment (ERA) movement gained in public awareness and political power. Title VII of the 1964 Civil Rights Act, which included “sex” in the proscribed forms of employment discrimination (put in by Representative Smith, and opposed by Celler), was a surprising but fruitful federal tool to fight inequality. This helped open the way for organized labor, which for decades had opposed the ERA, to support the amendment. In addition, mounting political pressure meant that Congress inevitably would be confronted with a major effort to adopt the ERA. While conducting hearings of the right of eighteen-year-olds to vote (the Twenty-sixth Amendment), Senator Bayh was interrupted by protests from ERA supporters. It was indeed their time, and Bayh promised soon to hold hearings on an equal rights amendment. In an unusual and successful move, Representatives Martha Griffiths and Edith Green forced through a discharge petition the release of the ERA bill from the House Judiciary Committee, which had been sitting on it. In 1970, the House overwhelmingly approved the ERA discharge petition, but in the Senate the bill was killed when an amendment exempting women from the military draft was adopted, giving on-the-fence senators an excuse for not supporting it. Two years later (just months after Nixon vetoed the Comprehensive Child Development Act), Griffiths, who many called the “Mother of the ERA,” reintroduced the proposed amendment.

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After many hearings, with proposed alternative language and pesky revisions, both the House and the Senate approved the ERA. The amendment was straightforward and concise: “Equality of rights under the law shall not be denied or abridged by the United States or any State on account of sex.” Within a year, thirty of the required thirty-eight states had ratified the ERA. The eighty-fouryear-old Celler, the fifty-year veteran of the House, lost in a Democratic primary to newcomer Elizabeth Holtzman, chiefly because of his opposition to the equal rights amendment. But on the conservative side, anti-ERA forces, spearheaded by activist Phyllis Schlafly’s Stop ERA organization, gathered momentum, and sounded the alarm: scary predictions that women would be drafted into the military, would be forced to share public bathrooms with men, would be left destitute in alimony fights during divorce, and other hoary (and bogus) consequences. By 1975, thirty-five states had ratified the amendment; but there would be no more. The states failing to ratify were primarily in the South. In 1978, Congress extended the ratification time for another three years, but no additional states joined in. By the deadline, June 30, 1982, several states were actively considering taking back their vote to ratify. Subsequently, the state legislatures in Idaho, Kentucky, Nebraska, and South Dakota rescinded their ratification. Supporters of the ERA argued that there was no provision within the US constitution for rescission; no federal court, however, has conclusively ruled on that question. It certainly seemed like the ERA was dead. The ERA has been introduced in each congressional session since 1982 but has never been sent to the states for ratification. Despite the inability to have the ERA passed, public support remains high, in the 90 percent range in recent polls. However, one problem for advocates of a renewed effort is that many citizens, up to 80 percent, believe that the guarantee of equality is already embedded in the constitution.116 After nearly three decades, the Democratic Party regained control of both chambers of the Virginia General Assembly in 2020. This was not the conservative Democratic Party of old, but lawmakers, especially a new crop of female lawmakers, intent on enacting progressive legislation. In January 2020, the Virginia General Assembly ratified the Equal Rights Amendment. Earlier, Nevada and Illinois had ratified the ERA; now Virginia became the thirty-eighth state to ratify. But the Virginia action came too late. The US Justice Department immediately issued an opinion stating that the amendment had expired and could no longer be ratified.117

Abolishing the Electoral College Alabama governor George Wallace knew he couldn’t win the 1968 presidential election. He was a regional, third-party candidate, whose racist appeals had been somewhat toned down, replaced by dog-whistle appeals to the white working man: Wallace would fight against hippies, socialists, and so-called intellectuals. His strategy was to get enough electoral votes to deprive either Nixon or Humphrey of the needed majority, throw the election into the House of Representatives, and use his leverage to extract concessions, especially to foil federal desegregation efforts. It almost worked. During the mid-1960s, Senator Bayh had introduced an amendment to the Constitution to abolish the Electoral College and replace it with direct nationwide election of the president. There was strong public support, with about 80 percent of Americans in favor, and President Johnson endorsed the effort. The amendment didn’t gain traction in Congress, but then came the three-way split in the 1968 election. With the Wallace challenge, the peculiarities of the Electoral College became plainly evident to both parties and national leaders. Bayh reintroduced his proposed constitutional amendment, which was supported by President Nixon, and in September 1969 it easily passed in the House, 333 to 70. But southern

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senators—led by Strom Thurmond (South Carolina), James Eastland (Mississippi), and Sam Ervin (North Carolina)—hoping to keep their leverage, blocked the legislation, filibustering the amendment until it died in 1970. As historian Alexander Keyssar noted, “reform was blocked by a coalition of Southern Democrats and small-state conservative Republicans.”118 Later, President Jimmy Carter and Bayh tried to resurrect the amendment, and finally in 1979, it was considered in both the House and the Senate, but died when neither chamber was able to gain the required two-thirds vote for a proposed constitutional amendment.119 Up until this time, there had been more than 700 attempts in Congress to abolish the Electoral College. The Bayh efforts came close, but still the awkward and potentially divisive antiquity of the Electoral College remained in force. It was “the greatest disappointment” of Bayh’s life, observed one of his aides.120 In 2000 and in 2016, the presidential candidates (Al Gore and Hillary Clinton) with the most popular votes did not win; in 2020, the losing candidate, Donald Trump, lost by over 7 million votes, but a shift of fewer than 50,000 votes in key states would have given him the victory.

Full Voting Participation in Congress for District of Columbia In March 1978, the House and Senate approved, by substantial margins, an amendment to the Constitution that would provide the District of Columbia full voting rights in the House and Senate, full representation in the Electoral College system, and full representation in the system by which the federal Constitution is amended. Statehood, however, would not be granted. The District had been given a non-voting delegate in the House, but not a full-fledged member; nor did it have voting membership in the Senate. The Twenty-third Amendment, which earlier had granted the District voting in the Electoral College equivalent to the smallest of states, would have been repealed. Congress set a deadline of seven years for the proposed amendment to be ratified. But during that seven-year period, only sixteen of the required thirty-eight states ratified. Why were state legislatures so against allowing the District voting rights in Congress? Walter E. Fauntroy, the District of Columbia delegate in the House, put it this way: “The District of Columbia is too urban, too liberal, too Democratic and too Black.”121

Notes 1 Bruce J. Schulman, The Seventies: The Great Shift in American Culture, Society, and Politics (New York: The Free Press, 2001), xii. 2 Kevin Mattson, “What the Heck Are You Up To, Mr. President?” Jimmy Carter, America’s “Malaise,” and the Speech That Should Have Changed the Country (New York: Bloomsbury USA, 2009); Stuart E. Eizenstat, President Carter: The White House Years (New York: Thomas Dunne Books, 2018), 661–93. Carter never actually used the term “malaise” in his speech, but it came from a leaked memorandum from Carter’s pollster, Patrick Caddell, then used by Elizabeth Drew in a New Yorker piece for the first time in print. 3 Schulman, The Seventies, xi. 4 Kevin Phillips, The Emerging Republican Majority (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2014, 1969); James Boyd, “Nixon’s Southern Strategy, ‘It’s All In the Charts,’” New York Times, May 17, 1970. 5 Rick Perlstein, Reaganland: America’s Right Turn 1976–1980 (New York: Simon & Schuster, 2020), 466–96. 6 Andrew R. Murphy, “The Christian Right’s Traditionalist Jeremiad: Piety and Politics in the Age of Reagan,” in Kimberly R. Moffitt and Duncan A. Campbell, eds. The 1980s: A Critical and Transitional Decade (Lanham: Lexington Books, 2011), 145–77. William Martin, With God on Our Side: The Rise of the Religious Right in America (New York: Broadway, 1996). 7 Falwell quote from James T. Patterson, Restless Giant: The United States from Watergate to Bush v. Gore (New York: Oxford University Press, 2005), 139; Eizenstat, President Carter, 869.

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8 Anna Brown, “US Hispanic Population Has Increased Six-Fold Since 1970,” Pew Research Center, February 26, 2014, https://www.pewresearch.org/fact-tank/2014/02/26/the-u-s-hispanic-populationhas-increased-sixfold-since-1970/ (accessed February 17, 2020). 9 “We, the American Blacks,” US Census Bureau, September 1993, 4, https://www.census.gov/prod/ cen1990/wepeople/we-1.pdf (accessed February 17, 2020). 10 “Median Family Income Up in 1970,” US Census Bureau, Report P60-78, May 20, 1971, https:// www.census.gov/library/publications/1971/demo/p60-78.html (accessed February 17, 2020). 11 “Vietnam War US Military Fatal Casualty Statistics,” US National Archives and Records Administration, n.d., https://www.archives.gov/research/military/vietnam-war/casualty-statistics (accessed February 10, 2020). 12 James T. Patterson, Grand Expectations: The United States, 1945–1974 (New York: Oxford University Press, 1996), 750. 13 Paul David Kuhn, The Hard Hat Riot: Nixon, New York City, and the Dawn of the White Working-Class Revolution (New York: Oxford University Press, 2020). 14 Hughes and Mansfield quoted in David E. Rosenbaum, “Efficacy of the Bombing in North Vietnam,” New York Times, December 26, 1972), 10; Patterson, Grand Expectations, 765–66. 15 Patterson, Grand Expectations, 766; George Herring, America’s Longest War: The United States and Vietnam, 1950–1975 (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1986), 256. 16 Patterson, Grand Expectations, 769. 17 Aldo Leopold, A Sand County Almanac, and Sketches Here and There (New York: Oxford University Press, 1949); Stewart L. Udall, The Quiet Crisis (New York: Holt, Rinehart and Winston, 1963); Paul R. Ehrlich, The Population Bomb (New York: Ballantine books, 1968); Rachel Carson, Silent Spring (Greenwich, CT: Fawcett, 1962). 18 Linda Lear, Rachel Carson: Witness for Nature (New York: Henry Holt, 1997), 428–30. 19 Ibid., 450. 20 Wolfgang Saxon, “Fred L. Hartley, 73, Built Unocal Into Multibillion Dollar Company,” New York Times, October 2, 1990. 21 “The Cities: The Price of Optimism,” Time (August 1, 1969). 22 Cited in Meir Rinde, “Richard Nixon and the Rise of American Environmentalism,” Science History Institute, June 2, 2017, https://www.sciencehistory.org/distillations/magazine/richard-nixon-and-therise-of-american-environmentalism (accessed January 29, 2020). 23 “The History of Earth Day,” earthday.org, https://www.earthday.org/history/ (accessed January 28, 2020). 24 Carl Bernstein, “Protestors Rouse Fury of Broyhill,” Washington Post, May 15, 1970, B11. 25 Eckardt C. Beck, “The Love Canal Tragedy,” EPA Journal, January 1979, https://archive.epa.gov/ epa/aboutepa/love-canal-tragedy.html (accessed March 7, 2020). 26 Daniel Yergin, The Prize: The Epic Quest for Oil, Money, and Power (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1991), 616. 27 Mohammed E. Ahrari, OPEC: The Failing Giant (Lexington: University Press of Kentucky, 1986): 111–32; Robert McNally, Crude Volatility: The History and Future of Boom-Bust Oil Prices (New York: Columbia University Press, 2017), 123–44. 28 “Oil Embargo, 1973–1974,” Office of the Historian, US Department of State, n.d., https://history. state.gov/milestones/1969-1976/oil-embargo (accessed February 11, 2020). 29 Quoted in Yergin, The Prize, 617. 30 US Energy Information Administration, Monthly Energy Review, Table 3.1 “US Petroleum and Other Liquids, Consumption, Production, and Net Imports (1949–2014), (2015). 31 Leonard Steinhorn, “The Forgotten Riot That Explains Trump’s Appeal to the White Working Class,” Washington Post, June 24, 2019. 32 Eizenstat, President Carter, 279. 33 “US Misery Index, November 2021,” YCharts, https://ycharts.com/indicators/us_misery_index (accessed December 1, 2021). Michael Bryan, “The Great Inflation: 1965–1982,” Federal Reserve History, n.d., https://www.federalreservehistory.org/essays/great_inflation (accessed September 21, 2020). 34 In Carter’s defense, Stuart Eizenstat noted that the “Carter administration could boast four years of growth and the creation of more than 10 million new jobs. That was more than were created under Nixon and Ford, almost twice the number created during Reagan’s first term, and almost identical to that in his second; nearly four times more than in the George H.W. Bush’s one term, and just below the job growth in Bill Clinton’s first four years.” Eizenstat, President Carter, 279–80.

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35 Betty Friedan, The Feminine Mystique. Fiftieth anniversary edition (New York: W.W. Norton, 2013), 57. The conservative magazine Human Events ranked The Feminine Mystique as the seventh most harmful book published during the nineteenth or twentieth centuries. Marx and Engels, The Communist Manifesto, Hitler, Mein Kampf, and Mao Zedong, Quotations from Chairman Mao, topped their list. “Ten Most Harmful Books of the 19th and 20th Centuries,” Human Events, May 31, 2005, https://humanevents.com/2005/05/31/ten-most-harmful-books-of-the-19th-and-20th-centuries/ (accessed February 15, 2020). 36 Dee Brown, Bury My Heart at Wounded Knee: An Indian History of the American West (New York: Henry Holt, 2007, 1971). 37 John Korasick, “Native Americans,” in Donald T. Critchlow, ed., Encyclopedia of American History: Contemporary United States, 1969 to the Present (New York: Facts on File, 2003), 213–15. 38 “United Farm Workers,” in Thomas S. Langston, ed., Encyclopedia of US Political History, vol. 6: Postwar Consensus to Social Unrest, 1946–1975 (Washington, DC: CQ Press, 2010), 379–80; Craig Jenkins, The Politics of Insurgency: The Farm Workers Movement in the 1960s (New York: Columbia University Press, 1985). 39 On Spiro Agnew and his misdeeds, see Richard M. Cohen and Jules Witcover, A Heartbeat Away: The Investigation and Resignation of Spiro T. Agnew (New York: Viking, 1974); Rachel Maddow and Michael Yarvitz, Bag Man: The Wild Crimes, Audacious Cover-up, and Spectacular Downfall of a Brazen Crook in the White House (New York: Crown books), 2020. 40 President Gerald R. Ford’s Proclamation 4311, Granting a Pardon to Richard Nixon, Gerald R. Ford Presidential Library & Museum, September 8, 1974, https://www.fordlibrarymuseum.gov/library/ speeches/740061.asp (accessed February 16, 2020). On the pardon and its aftermath, James Cannon, Gerald R. Ford: An Honorable Life (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2013), 235–50. 41 Joel K. Goldstein, The White House Vice Presidency: The Path to Significance, Mondale to Biden (Lawrence: University Press of Kansas, 2016), 52. 42 Nixon quoted in Bruce Katz, “Nixon’s New Federalism 45 Years Later,” Brookings Institution blog, “The Avenue,” August 11, 2014, https://www.brookings.edu/blog/the-avenue/2014/08/11/nixonsnew-federalism-45-years-later/ (accessed February 16, 2020). 43 “Historical Federal Workforce Tables,” Office of Personnel Management, https://www.opm.gov/ policy-data-oversight/data-analysis-documentation/federal-employment-reports/historical-tables/ executive-branch-civilian-employment-since-1940/ (accessed February 17, 2020). 44 “United States Federal Budget Summary of Receipts, Outlays, and Surpluses or Deficits, 1789–2019,” http://stats.areppim.com/stats/stats_usxbudget_history.htm#us_budget_history (accessed February 10, 2020). 45 Julian E. Zelizer, “Seizing Power: Conservatives and Congress Since the 1970s,” in Paul Pierson and Theda Skocpol, eds., The Transformation of American Politics (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2007), 108–17; Barbara Sinclair, “Congressional Reform,” in Julian E. Zelizer, ed., The American Congress: The Building of Democracy (Boston: Houghton Mifflin Company, 2004), 631–36. 46 Quoted in History, Art & Archives, US House of Representatives, “Speaker Martin’s Television Debut: The House and Television,” https://history.house.gov/Exhibitions-and-Publications/ Electronic-Technology/Television/ (accessed February 5, 2020). 47 David Binder, “Senator Hugh Scott, 93, Dies; Former Leader of Republicans,” New York Times, July 23, 1994, 27. 48 Carl B. Albert and Danny Goble, Little Giant: The Life and Times of Speaker Carl Albert (Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 1990). 49 On O’Neill, John A. Farrell, Tip O’Neill and the Democratic Century: A Biography (Boston: Little, Brown, 2001); Thomas P. O’Neill and William Novak, Man of the House: The Life and Political Memoirs of Speaker Tip O’Neill (New York: Random House, 1987). 50 Roger H. Davidson and Walter J. Oleszek, Congress and Its Members, 10th ed. (Washington, DC: CQ Press, 2006), 154–55. 51 “The Hundred Most Influential Figures in American History,” The Atlantic, December 2006, https:// www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2006/12/the-100-most-influential-figures-in-americanhistory/305384/ (accessed February 7, 2020). 52 Peter Charles Hoffer, Williamjames Hull Hoffer, and N.E.H. Hull, The Federal Courts: An Essential History (New York: Oxford University Press, 2016), 370–73. 53 Richard J. Regan, A Constitutional History of the US Supreme Court (Washington, DC: Catholic University Press, 2015), 210.

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54 Sandra Day O’Connor, The Majesty of the Law: Reflections of a Supreme Court Justice (New York: Random House, 2007), 150. 55 John Paul Stevens, Five Chiefs: A Supreme Court Memoir (Boston: Little, Brown, 2011); The Making of a Justice: Reflections on My First 94 Years (Boston: Little Brown, 2019); Six Amendments: How and Why We Should Change the Constitution (Boston: Little, Brown, 2014). 56 Nixon quoted in Lily Rothman, “A Turning Point for Hunger in America,” Time, September 7, 2016. 57 Robert D. Hershey, Jr., “Alfred E. Kahn Dies at 93; Prime Mover of Airline Deregulation,” New York Times, December 28, 2010. 58 Eizenstat, President Carter, 361–72. 59 James Cannon, Gerald R. Ford: An Honorable Life (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2013), 360–64, quote at 364. Jeff Nussbaum, “The Night New York Saved Itself from Bankruptcy,” New Yorker, October 15, 2016, https://www.newyorker.com/news/news-desk/the-night-new-york-saveditself-from-bankruptcy (accessed February 24, 2020). 60 Eizenstat, President Carter, 400–405. 61 Patricia P. Martin and David A. Weaver, “Social Security: A Program and Policy History,” Social Security Bulletin 66 (1) (2005), https://www.ssa.gov/policy/docs/ssb/v66n1/v66n1p1.html (accessed June 2, 2020). 62 “Most dangerous man” comes from Jonathan Rowe, “The Most Dangerous Man in America,” Rolling Stone (November 16, 1995): 85–92; biographer Justin Martin, Nader: Crusader, Spoiler, Icon (New York: Perseus Press, 2002), credits Nader with influencing some twenty-five pieces of important federal legislation. 63 On this point, see Paul Sabin, Public Citizens: The Attack on Big Government and the Remaking of American Liberalism (New York: Norton, 2021). 64 Oregon v. Mitchell, 411 US 112 (1970), https://www.law.cornell.edu/supremecourt/text/400/112. Senate Report quoted in Edward S. Corwin, Harold W. Chase, and Craig R. Ducat, Edward Corwin’s Constitution and What It Means Today (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1978), 556. 65 Philip Shabecoff, A Fierce Green Fire: The American Environmental Movement (New York: Hill & Wang, 1993), 138. 66 Lynton K. Caldwell, “A National Policy for the Environment,” reprinted in Lynton K. Caldwell, Environment as a Focus for Public Policy, Robert V. Bartlett and James N. Gladden, eds. (College Station: Texas A&M University Press, 1995), 27–41; Wendy Read Wertz, Lynton Keith Caldwell: An Environmental Visionary and the National Environmental Policy Act (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2014). Later, Caldwell summed up NEPA in National Environmental Policy Act: An Agenda for the Future (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1998). 67 Caldwell, National Environmental Policy Act, 44. 68 Richard A. Liroff, A National Policy for the Environment (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1976), 5. 69 Russell E. Train, Politics, Pollution and Pandas: An Environmental Memoir (Washington, DC: Island Press, 2003), 86. 70 Official title is Federal Water Pollution Control Act Amendments (1972). 71 For analysis of the Clean Water Act, Claudia Copeland, “Clean Water Act: A Summary of the Law,” Congressional Research Service, US Congress, Report RL 30030, October 2016, https://fas. org/sgp/crs/misc/RL30030.pdf (accessed January 29, 2020). 72 The official name is Comprehensive Environmental Response, Compensation, and Liability Act (CERCLA). 73 Walter A. Rosenbaum, Environmental Politics and Policy, 5th ed. (Washington, DC: CQ Press, 2002), 9. 74 Ibid., 9, 11. 75 Shabecoff, A Fierce Green Fire, 129. 76 “Bernice Resnick Sandler,” National Women’s Hall of Fame, https://www.womenofthehall.org/ inductee/bernice-resnick-sandler/; Resnick Oral History, National Women’s Hall of Fame, interviewed by Betty M. Bayer, September 16, 2016, https://www.womenofthehall.org/women-of-thehall/voices-great-women/bernice-resnick-sandler/ (accessed January 31, 2020). 77 Robert Blaemire, Birch Bayh: Making a Difference (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2019), 210. 78 Grove City College v. Bell, 465 US 555 (1984), https://www.oyez.org/cases/1983/82-792. 79 Bayh quoted in Adam Clymer, “Birch Bayh, 91, Dies; Senator Drove Title IX and 2 Amendments,” New York Times, March 14, 2019; Mechelle Voepel, “Remembering the Mother of Title IX” ESPN.com http://a.espncdn.com/ncw/columns/voepel/1479394.html (accessed January 3, 2020).

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80 Robert Caro, The Years of Lyndon Johnson: Master of the Senate (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 2002), 403–13. 81 “2020 Election to Cost $14 Billion, Blowing Away Spending Records,” OpenSecrets.org, October 28, 2020, https://www.opensecrets.org/news/2020/10/cost-of-2020-election-14billion-update/ (accessed February 19, 2021). 82 Remini, The House, 430. 83 Richard Nixon, “Statement on Signing the Federal Election Campaign Act of 1971,” Gerhard Peters and John T. Woolley, The American Presidency Project https://www.presidency.ucsb.edu/node/ 255035 (accessed January 31, 2020). 84 “The Federal Campaign Laws: A Short History,” Federal Election Commission, https://transition.fec. gov/info/appfour.htm (January 31, 2020). 85 Herbert E. Alexander, Financing Politics: Money, Elections, and Political Reform, 4th ed. (Washington, DC: CQ Press, 1992), 20. 86 Jill Abramson, “Return of the Secret Donors,” New York Times, October 16, 2010. 87 Buckley v. Valeo, 424 US 1 (1976), https://www.law.cornell.edu/supremecourt/text/424/1. 88 Roe v. Wade, 410 US 113 (1973), https://www.law.cornell.edu/supremecourt/text/410/113. “Jane Roe” was a pseudonym; later, Norma Leah Nelson McCorvey identified herself as Jane Roe. Norma McCorvey, I Am Roe: My Life, Roe v. Wade, and Freedom of Choice (New York: Perennial, 1995). 89 Mary Ziegler, After Roe: The Lost History of the Abortion Debate (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2015), 219–40. 90 Quoted in Linda Greenhouse, Becoming Justice Blackmun: Harry Blackmun’s Supreme Court Journey (New York: Times Books, 2005), 185; Joan Biskupic, “Justice Blackmun Dies, Leaving Rights Legacy,” Washington Post, March 5, 1999. 91 Hyde quoted in Isaac Stanley-Becker, “Henry Hyde, Abortion Amendment’s Namesake, Was A Cultural Warrior with Some Surprising Causes,” Washington Post, June 7, 2019. 92 Julie Rovner, “Abortion Funding Ban Has Evolved Over the Years,” NPR, December 14, 2009, https://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=121402281?storyId=121402281 (accessed January 26, 2020). 93 Ibid. Maris Vinovskis, “The Politics of Abortion in the House of Representatives in 1976,” Michigan Law Review 77 (7) (Symposium on the Law and Politics of Abortion) (August 1979): 1790–1827. 94 Franz and Northrup quoted in Adam Clymer, “Henry Hyde, 83, Former U.S. Representative Who Led Effort to Impeach Clinton,” New York Times, November 30, 2007. 95 On public opinion and Democratic/Republican attitudes toward abortion before Roe, and afterwards, see James A. Stimson, Tides of Consent: How Public Opinion Shapes American Politics, 2nd ed. (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2015), 52ff. 96 United States v. Nixon, 418 US 683 (1974), https://www.law.cornell.edu/supremecourt/text/418/683. Justice Rehnquist, a Nixon appointee, recused himself from consideration of the case. 97 Swann v. Charlotte-Mecklenburg Board of Education. 401 US 1 (1971), https://supreme.justia.com/ cases/federal/us/402/1/#tab-opinion-1949253. 98 Michael J. Graetz and Linda Greenhouse, The Burger Court and the Rise of the Judicial Right (New York: Simon & Schuster, 2016), 84–90, 95, 97. 99 “The Nixon Busing Bills and Congressional Power,” Yale Law Review 81 (8) (1972): 1742–73, at 1543. 100 Roslyn Arlin Mickelson, “Subverting Swann: First- and Second-Generation Segregation in Charlotte-Mecklenburg Schools,” American Education Research Journal 38 (2) (Summer, 2001): 215–52. 101 Milliken v. Bradley, 418 US 717 (1974); https://supreme.justia.com/cases/federal/us/418/717/#tabopinion-1950931; opinion by Chief Justice Warren Burger. 102 Ibid., 781 ff. 103 Robert A. Sedler, “The Profound Impact of Milliken v. Bradley,” Wayne Law Review 33 (1987): 1663–1722, at 1695. 104 411 US 1 (1973), https://www.law.cornell.edu/supremecourt/text/411/1; Jeffrey S. Sutton, “San Antonio Independent School District v. Rodriquez and Its Aftermath,” Virginia Law Review 94 (8) (December 2008): 1963–86. 105 Sutton, “San Antonio Independent School District v. Rodriquez and Its Aftermath,” 1980. 106 Geoffrey R. Stone, “How a 1973 Supreme Court Decision has Contributed to Our Inequality,” theDailyBeast.com, July 12, 2017, https://www.thedailybeast.com/how-a-1973-supreme-courtdecision-has-contributed-to-our-inequality?ref=scroll (accessed January 20, 2020).

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107 Regents of the University of California v. Bakke, 438 US 265 (1978); https://www.oyez.org/cases/1979/ 76-811. 108 Adam Harris, “The Supreme Court Justice Who Forever Changed Affirmative Action,” The Atlantic, October 13, 2018, https://www.theatlantic.com/education/archive/2018/10/how-lewis-powellchanged-affirmative-action/572938/ (accessed February 4, 2020). 109 Walter F. Mondale, The Good Fight: A Life in Liberal Politics (New York: Simon & Schuster, 2010), 99; Claire Cain Miller, “Why the US Had Long Resisted Universal Child Care,” New York Times, August 15, 2019. 110 Nancy L. Cohen, “Why America Never Had Universal Child Care,” The New Republic, April 23, 2013, https://newrepublic.com/article/113009/child-care-america-was-very-close-universal-day-care (accessed January 20, 2020). 111 Ibid. 112 Andrew Karch, Early Start: Preschool Politics in the United States (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2013), 200–10. 113 Wat quoted in Lauren Camera, “Build Back Better Act—a Game-Changer for Early Childhood Education,” US News & World Report, November 19, 2021, https://www.usnews.com/news/ education-news/articles/2021-11-19/build-back-better-act-a-game-changer-for-early-childhoodeducation (accessed December 3, 2021). 114 Christine Knauer, “The Equal Rights Amendment,” in Lynne E. Ford, ed., Encyclopedia of Women and American Politics (New York: Facts on File, 2018), 170–72. Mary Frances Berry, Why ERA Failed: Politics, Women’s Rights and the Amendment Process of the Constitution (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1986); Jane Mansbridge, Why We Lost the ERA (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1986). 115 Blaemire, Birch Bayh, 207. 116 “Advocates Reignite the Fight for an Equal Rights Amendment,” ABA, November 16, 2018, https:// www.americanbar.org/groups/diversity/women/publications/perspectives/2018/october-november/ advocates-reignite-fight-an-equal-rights-amendment/ (accessed October 2, 2019). 117 Gregory S. Schneider, Laura Vozzella, and Patricia Sullivan, “‘A Long Time to Wait’: Virginia Passes Equal Rights Amendment in Historic Vote,” Washington Post, January 15, 2020. “Ratification of the Equal Rights Amendment,” Office of Legal Counsel, Department of Justice, January 6, 2020, https:// www.justice.gov/olc/file/1232501/download (accessed January 16, 2020). 118 Keyssar quoted in Jesse Wegman, “The Filibuster That Saved the Electoral College,” New York Times, February 8, 2021. Alexander Keyssar, Why Do We Still Have the Electoral College? (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2020). 119 Blaemire, Birch Bayh, 136–39, 155, 325–26; Gillian Brockwell, “One the 700 Attempts to Fix or Abolish the Electoral College, This One Nearly Succeeded,” Washington Post, December 5, 2020. “Electoral College History,” National Archives and Records Administration, n.d., https://www. archives.gov/electoral-college/history (accessed January 29, 2020). 120 Wegman, “The Filibuster That Saved the Electoral College.” 121 Fauntroy quoted in Editorial, “D.C. is Too, Too, Too, Too,” Los Angeles Times, May 14, 1985, https:// www.latimes.com/archives/la-xpm-1985-05-14-me-19085-story.html (accessed February 4, 2020).

Part III

Polarization, Growing Inequality, and Difficult Choices

Chapter 9

Conservative Dominance: 1981–1992

Are you better off than you were four years ago? (Ronald Reagan debating Jimmy Carter, 1980) Read my lips … no new taxes! (George H.W. Bush at the Republican nominating convention, 1988)

AMERICA DURING THIS ERA This era ushered in profound shifts in mass communications. Cable television first emerged in 1972, with the development of Home Box Office (HBO). Then in 1980, entrepreneur Ted Turner parlayed his father’s billboard business into Cable News Network (CNN), the first twenty-four-hour cable news outlet. Music Television (MTV) began broadcasting later that year, pumping out music videos to eager teenage viewers. The cable television industry gained a favorable regulatory environment with the passage of the Cable Act of 1984 and investors pumped in $15 billion in wiring for cable. The twenty-eight cable networks in 1980 expanded to seventy-nine by the end of the decade; by the end of the 1980s, some 53 million households subscribed to cable TV.1 Meanwhile, the three national networks—CBS, NBC, and ABC—were caught flatfooted. Media critic Ken Auletta, in his aptly named book, Three Blind Mice, chronicled how the three networks managed to lose one third of their audiences and half of their profits while cable television grew rapidly in the 1980s.2 In 1982, USA Today, under the direction of Allen H. (Al) Neuharth of the Gannett Company, became the first nationwide newspaper. It was a sign of newspapers to come: heavy use of color photos and graphics, pithy stories with little depth, and news splashes from every state. Newspaper profits and advertising revenue were still climbing in the 1980s; the agonizing decline and demise of many newspapers were not yet on the horizon. Another important factor was the disbanding of the Fairness Doctrine. In 1949, the Federal Communications Commission (FCC) mandated that television and radio stations promote “basic standards of fairness.” This meant that, as a part of their receiving bandwidth and licenses, the stations would promote “fair and balanced” coverage of controversial issues. For political candidates, it meant that they were to receive equal time to respond to their opponents or editorials. The Supreme Court upheld the FCC fairness doctrine in 1969. But in 1985, the FCC determined that the fairness doctrine had a “chilling effect” on free speech, and in 1987, under pressure from the new cable and satellite television stations, formally repealed the doctrine, but kept until 2000 equal time provisions for editorials and responses to personal attacks. Nonpartisan network news was soon joined by partisan cable voices. DOI: 10.4324/9781003293538-13

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American audiences had by then been exposed to “shock jock” radio personalities who provoked and prodded their listeners with often sophomoric humor and outrage. But it wasn’t until Rush Limbaugh emerged on a Sacramento radio station that conservative listeners got a taste of humor, sarcasm, and bombast, aimed at the foibles of liberal politicians. Limbaugh went after feminists (femi-Nazis), “environmental wackos,” “commie libs”; going after the Clintons in the 1990s and especially after Barack Obama and African Americans in general during the 2010s. He was the self-described “voice of God,” and the “Doctor of Democracy,” and his 27 million or so “Ditto-heads (those conservatives that made up his audience), had, at last, found someone who spoke their language and said out loud what they had been thinking all along. The world of personal computing was about to unfold. In 1977, Steve Jobs and Steve Wozniak introduced the Apple II personal computer. In 1981, IBM, the leading manufacturer of business computers, introduced its first personal computer, the Model 5150. The following year, the Commodore 64 was introduced, with far more power and at a much cheaper price than its competitors, helping it become the highest-selling model of all time. Computer gamers were introduced by Nintendo in 1985. In the 1970s, scientists Robert Kahn and Vinton (Vint) Cerf developed TCP/IP (Transmission Control Protocol and Internet Protocol), setting standards for how data could be transmitted between computer networks. Then in 1983, the Internet was born. ARPANet, the Advanced Research Projects Agency Network, adopted TCP/IP protocols allowing the exchange among different networks. In 1990, computer scientist Tim Berners-Lee invented the World Wide Web, which became the most common form of accessing data online. A whole new world of personal and commercial online communication was about to unfold.

Turmoil in the World This was an era of international turmoil: bitter relations between the United States and Iran; the bombing of US Marines base in Lebanon, killing 241 military personnel; the Iran-Contra scandal; the Iraq-Iran war; the Soviet incursion into Afghanistan; Operation Desert Storm in Iraq; and the dissolution of the Soviet Union. India’s prime minister Indira Gandhi was assassinated, as was Egyptian president Anwar Sadat; Pope John Paul II and President Reagan were also shot in failed assassination attempts. Terrorist attacks downed an international flight near Lockerbie, Scotland, killing 290 persons; and an Air India flight was destroyed off the coast of Ireland, killing 329 persons; an American guided missile mistakenly shot down an Iran Airlines flight, killing 290 persons, and a Korean Airlines flight was mistakenly shot down by a Soviet missile, killing 269 individuals.

The Era by the Numbers The 1990 census counted 248,718,301 persons, for an increase of 9.8 percent over the 1980 figures, the smallest increase since the 1940 census.3 California continued to be the most populous state, with 29.7 million individuals (a whopping increase of 25.76 percent over 1980 figures). It was followed by New York (17.99 million), Texas (16.98 million), and Florida (12.93 million). Both Texas and Florida had large percentage increases in their population, but not as high as California’s. The states with the greatest percentage increase were Alaska (36.8 percent) and Arizona (34.8 percent). Following the 1990 census, California picked up seven congressional districts, Florida gained four, and Texas, three. (Even though it grew in population, New York lost three congressional districts following the 1990 reapportionment.)4 Some states actually lost population: with severe problems in its agricultural sector, Iowa was the biggest loser followed by West Virginia, North Dakota, and Wyoming.

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The number of legal immigrants between 1981 and 1990 hit 8.7 million (with perhaps millions more unauthorized immigrants not counted); this surpassed the number of immigrants coming during the great southern European diaspora of 1901–1910. Seventy percent of immigrants concentrated in just six states, California, Texas, Florida, New York, New Jersey, and Illinois. Most immigrants were admitted because of family connections, as sanctioned through the Hart-Celler immigration legislation.5 In 1979, President Carter appointed Paul A. Volcker, Jr. to be the chairman of the Federal Reserve, with the principal goal to curb the galloping inflation, which was at 13.58 percent in late 1980. The Federal Reserve under Volcker raised the federal funds rate from 11.2 percent to 20 percent by June 1981. By this time, Ronald Reagan was president. It now became much harder to borrow money, a factor affecting the 1980–1982 recession. Some were calling this new economic reality the Volcker Bear Market.6 The depressed stock market lasted for 451 days, reaching its bottom on February 22, 1982. From the start of 1980 through late1982, the United States was in recession for 60 percent of the time.7 By November 1982, however, the market had bounced back. The Dow-Jones average hit 2,000 for the first time in January 1987. However, just ten months later, the market hit a sharp decline, losing 22.6 percent of its value. The American economy was again in recession from 1990 through the first three months of 1991. The decline was severe and the recovery was slow. Unemployment was at its highest rate in a decade; an estimated 4.5 million workers had lost their jobs, many of whom were in the white-collar category of workers.8 The weak economy would soon be the albatross around George H.W. Bush’s presidency, and despite the spike in popularity right after the Gulf War, his approval rating would drop quickly.

Society Under Stress Rustbelt America In September 1977, Youngstown Sheet & Tube, a major manufacturer of steel in Ohio, shut its doors, with 40,000 workers losing their jobs. The demand for steel had been high during World War II and the decade afterwards, but by the 1970s, the demand slackened. The closing was symbolic of the long, agonizing loss of manufacturing and production jobs throughout much of the Midwest, from Milwaukee, Wisconsin in the West to Buffalo, New York, in the East. Yet, as economist Lee E. Ohanian has argued, the decline in manufacturing began in the 1950s when the region faced little or no competition for products and little pushback from labor unions. There was little incentive to be more productive or to innovate.9 It wasn’t just the loss of jobs in the steel industry. Automobile manufacturing was also hit hard. Pressure was coming from upstart Japanese and German imports, with their cheaper Hondas, Toyotas, Datsuns (later, Nissan), and Volkswagens competing against the Big Three American automobile monopoly. The automotive leader, General Motors, enjoyed 50.7 percent of the American market share in 1962, but slipped to 35.1 percent in 1990, and 17 percent in 2016. Toyota, with just 6.6 percent of the American market share in 1980, had 13.8 percent in 2016.10 American companies increased their outsourcing of manufacturing to plants on the northern Mexico border, the maquiladoras. The Mexico-based plants had younger, healthier, more productive employees working at a fraction of American wages at newer manufacturing facilities, not hobbled by US environmental, safety regulations, or union demands. Manufacturing plants began blossoming in the American South as well, as corporations headed to states where unions were weak or nonexistent, and where states aggressively wooed industries with tax incentives and corporate sweeteners.

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Running for president in 1984, Democrat Walter Mondale lashed out against Ronald Reagan for lifting quotas on imported steel: “Reagan’s policies are turning the industrial Midwest into a rust bowl.” The press picked up on Mondale’s charge, labeling the industrial Midwest the “Rust Belt,” taking off on Kevin Phillip’s naming the booming South the “Sun Belt” in his book, The Emerging Republican Majority.11 Midwest cities, often supporting thousands of blue-collar workers, many with first- or secondgeneration immigrant families, began losing population and household incomes, with steep declines in Cleveland, Buffalo, Pittsburgh, and especially Detroit. As the Midwest lost population, the South and the Sunbelt gained, with both retirees and job seekers from the Midwest steadily migrating to Georgia, Florida, Texas, and other centers of increasing economic growth. The worst, however, was still to come. With the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA) crafted in the mid-1990s increasing international competition, particularly from Mexico and the opening up of manufacturing in China and other Asian centers brought further pressure on Midwest production. America was moving more toward a service economy, baristas replacing tool-and-die workers, with wages often far below those once attained in the manufacturing sector. Police Brutality and Urban Unrest In 1992 came one of the worst urban riots in American history, when four Los Angeles police officers—three white, one Hispanic—were acquitted of the brutal beating of Rodney King, an African American man. The beating was captured on video and was repeatedly shown nationwide on television news segments. The Los Angeles Police Department (LAPD) was widely criticized for not responding quickly to quell the rioting. Governor Pete Wilson was compelled to send in 2,000 National Guard troops. Over five days of unrest, there were more than sixty-three riot-related deaths, including ten persons shot by the LAPD or the National Guard. More than 2,300 were injured, 12,000 arrested (mostly Hispanic and African American residents), a thousand buildings damaged, and some 2,000 Korean businesses were damaged or destroyed. Property damage amounted to at least 1 billion dollars. A five-month study, under the direction of former FBI head William H. Webster and Hubert Williams, head of the Washington-based Police Foundation, found that “underlying social problems, inadequate crisis planning and a failure to respond aggressively were responsible for the worst urban rioting of this century.” Police chief Daryl F. Gates resigned under pressure, telling a radio talk show host, “I haven’t read the report but I can just tell you that both Hubert Williams and William Webster—and I make this charge—are liars.”12 AIDS Epidemic On June 5, 1981, the Morbidity and Mortality Weekly Report from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) described rare lung infections found in five young, previously healthy, gay men living in Los Angeles. Their immune systems were not working and two had died. This was the first official reporting of what was initially called “gay cancer” or “gay-related immune deficiency.” By the end of the year, 270 cases had been reported and 121 men had died. The following year, the mysterious disease would be called AIDS—Acquired Immune Deficiency Syndrome.13 California Democratic congressmen Henry D. Waxman (Los Angeles) and Phillip Burton (San Francisco), introduced legislation in Congress, requesting $15 million for AIDS surveillance and research at the CDC and National Institutes of Health. AIDS was becoming better known by the public, but the Reagan White House was slow to react. In October 1982, Larry Speakes, press secretary, joked to reporters about the “gay plague”;

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at the time, about 1,000 persons had died from the disease.14 Years passed, thousands more died, and Reagan remained silent. As clinical psychologist and AIDS activist Walt Odets wrote, five and a half years into the epidemic—we had accumulated 28,712 reported AIDS cases, 24,559 deaths, and the almost-certain probability of hundreds of thousands of existing infections that had not yet manifested as clinical AIDS. The president of the United States had still not publicly uttered a single word on the subject.15 Unlike the H1N1 pandemic of 2009, or the coronavirus pandemic of 2020–2022, deadly as they were, when a person contracted AIDS in the 1980s, it was almost certainly a death sentence. The backlash against gays and gay lifestyle was in full swing during this time, with conservative activists like Anita Bryant and her “Save Our Children,” campaign, and the Rev. Jerry Falwell and his Moral Majority condemning homosexuals. Reagan, like many of his generation, refused to publicly acknowledge homosexuality and the devastation caused by this deadly epidemic. Reagan’s first mention of AIDS came on May 31, 1987. Invited by actress Elizabeth Taylor to speak at the American Foundation for AIDS Research (amfAR), Reagan finally spoke out (although not mentioning the word “gay” or “homosexual”): America faces a disease that is fatal and spreading. And this calls for urgency, not panic. It calls for compassion, not blame. And it calls for understanding, not ignorance. It’s also important that America not reject those who have the disease, but care for them with dignity and kindness. … This is a battle against disease, not against our fellow Americans. We mustn’t allow those with the AIDS virus to suffer discrimination. … We must prevent the persecution, through ignorance or malice, of our fellow citizens.16 This speech was delivered nearly two years after the death of movie heartthrob Rock Hudson, an old friend of the Reagans, who had died of the disease. Immediately afterward Hudson’s death, AIDS was in every newspaper and grocery store magazine rack in America. As AIDS historian and activist Randy Shilts wrote in 1987, “[it] was commonly accepted” that there were two phases of AIDS in the United States. “There was AIDS before Rock Hudson and AIDS after.”17 The Food and Drug Administration accelerated research and cut through older protocols to streamline the approval of new drugs that were being developed by the pharmaceutical industry.18 Still, it was not enough. In October 1986, the Institute of Medicine and the National Academy of Sciences released a report strongly criticizing the federal government’s response to the AIDS epidemic, noting that it had been “dangerously inadequate.” “This is a national health crisis … of a magnitude that requires presidential leadership to bring together all elements of society to deal with the problem.” The report called for a $2 billion educational and research effort to fight the disease.19 In 1986, Surgeon General Dr. C. Everett Koop produced a report, which in explicit terms explained how AIDS was transmitted, and warned that some 270,000 persons might contract the disease within five years. Worried that the report, which among other things recommended the use of condoms, was being shunted aside by the administration, Koop and the new director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, Dr. Anthony S. Fauci, came up with a plan to mail a summary version of the report to every household and mailbox in America. Congress came up with the funds, and through the largest mass mailing in American history, 107 million households received the seven-page Centers for Disease Control brochure, “Understanding AIDS,” written without the help or interference of the White House. Written

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in English, Spanish, Chinese, Haitian-Creole, Vietnamese, Laotian, Cambodian, and Braille, the brochure answered questions and debunked rumors about how AIDS spread. Some 87 million adults had read at least parts of the brochure.20 Federal funding for HIV/AIDS21 came about thanks in large part to the tragic circumstances of a high school student, Ryan White, who was given a tainted blood transfusion. At age thirteen, White was one of the first hemophiliac children to contract HIV/AIDS, and, like other infected kids, was barred from his high school. Ryan became the public face of this horrible disease. Hollywood celebrities and sports stars embraced him and a movie, The Ryan White Story (1989), told his compelling story. Ryan gave political cover for some wavering lawmakers: he was an innocent teenage victim suffering from hemophilia, a white middle-class kid from the Midwest, and he was not a homosexual. In August 1990, Congress enacted the Ryan White Comprehensive AIDS Resources Emergency Act (the Ryan White CARE Act), which became the largest federally funded program for persons living with HIV/AIDS. (Ryan died four months before the law was enacted.) The act provided federal dollars when no other funding was available. During its first year of operation in 1991, approximately $220 million was spent; by 2005, that figure was $2.1 billion. The program expired in 2013, although the funding still continued through other health care appropriations. Yet, AIDS still plagues America. In 2016, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention reported that some 1.2 million persons were living with HIV, and nearly one-eighth of those were not aware they were infected. While HIV/AIDs is found in all regions of the country, the hardest hit area is the South, especially New Orleans, Jackson, Mississippi, Miami, and Orlando, Florida.22 Environmental Backlash Reagan’s nomination as secretary of the Interior was highly controversial. An advocate of the “sagebrush rebellion,” James G. Watt was president of the Mountain States Legal Foundation, a pro-oil and gas industry group, founded by conservative beer magnate Joseph Coors, which sought to be a conservative counterweight to environmental organizations such as Defenders of Wildlife and the Sierra Club.23 Almost immediately after becoming the Interior secretary, Watt stated that his job was to carry out Ronald Reagan’s mandate, which Watt described as to “undo fifty years of bad government.” But his enthusiasm, coupled with his abrasive and confrontational personality, quickly got him into trouble, not only with environmental and conservation groups, but also with Reagan’s own advisers. As journalist William Prochnau noted, just five months after Watt’s confirmation, “no member of the Reagan team with the possible exception of Secretary of State Alexander M. Haig Jr. has stirred quite so much unease among his allies and antagonism among his opponents.”24 Watt managed to offend Native Americans, fans of the Beach Boys, Jewish leaders, and environmentalists with his caustic comments. His policies on protecting the wilderness, offshore leasing, and coal production caused conservationist heartburn. But insensitive off-the-cuff comments delivered at a business breakfast in September 1983 did him in. He told the assembled lobbyists that the members of a panel reviewing coal leasing had “every kind of mix you could have. I have a Black, I have a woman, two Jews, and a cripple. And we have talent.”25 Democratic lawmakers and environmental groups had long called for Watts’s resignation, but now six prominent Republican senators also demanded he be fired. Lowell P. Weicker, Jr. (Connecticut) said Watts “articulates the trash of American thought”; Alphonse M. D’Amato (New York) called him a “colossal bigot”; T. Slade Gorton III (Washington) labeled

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Watt a “dead bird for the president.”26 Watt apologized to the president, then two weeks later resigned. Reagan praised his former Interior secretary and accepted his letter of resignation “with reluctance.”27 His successor was the low-key William P. Clark, Jr., former national security advisor and close friend of President Reagan. Watt was hardly the only controversial appointee chosen to protect America’s environment. Joseph Coors and Watt endorsed Anne M. Gorsuch, then a Colorado state legislator with a thin record on conservation issues, to head the Environmental Protection Agency. Confirmation hearings were prolonged for months, with senators questioning her credentials. Eventually, she was confirmed, but then came her undoing. Immediately, Gorsuch imposed budget cuts on the EPA, stripping away 3,200 personnel, eliminating 30 percent of the agency’s employees. Critics charged that these cuts clearly demonstrated a basic retreat from all the environmental programs developed over the past decade. At the EPA, it was near open warfare between career appointees and professional staff on the one hand, and the new Gorsuch team on the other. One senior political aide, Rita M. Lavelle, later was found to have misused Superfund monies, was charged and convicted of lying to Congress.28 In a scathing February 1983 editorial, the New York Times lamented: “On becoming head of the Environmental Protection Agency, Anne Gorsuch inherited one of the most efficient and capable agencies in government. She has turned it into an Augean stable, reeking of cynicism, mismanagement, and decay.”29 Six congressional committees probed into alleged mismanagement and manipulation of the program designed to clean up toxic wastes, the Superfund. Subpoenaed EPA documents had been illegally shredded, and Gorsuch became the first cabinet-level official to be cited for contempt by the House of Representatives. In all, twenty EPA officials resigned, most of whom were Reagan appointees. Gorsuch, who now was Anne Gorsuch Burford, was the last of those to resign, doing so in March 1983, after having served just twenty months. “The big mistake Anne Gorsuch made when she first came in was she sort of bought into the rhetoric of the campaign,” said William Ruckelshaus, the first EPA administrator who was brought back in 1983 to restore morale and pick up the pieces. “She treated a lot of people in the agency as the enemy, and they weren’t. But within a week, they were. … It was not a pleasant place.”30 (Thirty-four years later, her son, Neil, would be confirmed as associate justice on the Supreme Court.)

THE NATIONAL GOVERNMENT

The Presidency Two presidents served during this era, Ronald Reagan, from 1981–1989, and George H.W. Bush, from 1989–1993. Reagan handily defeated Jimmy Carter in his bid for a second term, and Reagan won by historic numbers against former vice president Walter Mondale in 1984. Unlike Carter, Reagan was quickly able to grasp the reins of power. As journalist Martin Tolchin observed, “[Reagan] had effectively taken control of the Congress, raising questions about the ability of the House and Senate to compete on anything like an equal footing with a popular president who knows how to use the power of his office.”31 The new president also displayed his authority in the showdown with the Professional Air Traffic Controllers Association (PATCO). The strike of PATCO workers was illegal; the president fired 11,000 workers in August 1981 and the Federal Labor Relations Authority decertified the union. Indeed, Reagan’s first two years in office were quite productive. “A truly remarkable rookie year,” observed Majority Leader Tip O’Neill. “He pushed through the greatest increase in

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defense spending in American history, together with the greatest cutbacks in domestic programs and the largest tax cuts this country had ever seen.”32 The president’s popularity was high, thanks to his buoyant, optimistic personality and his shrugging off an assassination attempt in April 1981. Reagan also had a crack team of advisers, some with far more experience than Carter’s first team: especially Michael K. Deaver, Edwin (Ed) Meese III, James A. (Jim) Baker III, and David A. Stockman. Reagan, unlike Carter, knew how to use his political muscle and he was adept at courting moderate and conservative Democrats. Tip O’Neill described Reagan’s team’s 1981 efforts as “probably the best-run political operating unit I’ve ever seen.”33 Trying to hold the House Democrats together and trying to provide the leadership to a shaken opposition, O’Neill lamented Reagan’s powers to persuade: “Some House members said they saw more of [Reagan] during his first four months in office than they saw of Jimmy Carter during his entire four years.” Reagan would instruct his aides and allies: “‘Tell me who you want me to call and I’ll take care of it.’” O’Neill confessed: “I would have given my right arm to hear those words from Jimmy Carter.”34

Photo 9.1 Thomas P. (Tip) O’Neill (1912–1994), Massachusetts congressman, speaker of the House. Source: National Archives via Wikimedia Commons.

Reagan’s team focused on one major policy issue at a time: tax cuts, then budget cuts, then other programs. However, his greatest contribution, rather than any specific policy achievement, was his ability to revive “national confidence at a time when there was a great need for inspiration.” This, biographer Lou Cannon found was “his great contribution as president.”35 Admirers, and increasingly historians, were calling it the “Reagan Revolution.” Historian Sean Wilentz observed that “Ronald Reagan has been the single most important figure of the age.” While other conservatives and institutions were important, “without Reagan, the conservative movement would never have been as successful as it was.”36 Vice President Bush secured the 1988 Republican presidential nomination and defeated Massachusetts governor Michael S. Dukakis in the November general election. It was a nasty race, with race-baiting political advertising, plenty of irrelevant flag waving, and personal insults. Much of the negative tone and innuendo honed by political consultants in state and congressional contests in earlier contests now came to roost in the 1988 presidential contests. Reagan’s 1984 campaign ad, “Morning Again in America,” with its soft music and images of an

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idyllic white America, was replaced by the rough “Willie Horton” ads of the Bush campaign led by his chief political consultant, the take-no-prisoners Lee Atwater.37 From the day he announced his candidacy and throughout his term of office, Bush was regarded by many conservatives as the light-weight version of Reagan. He won high marks from the American people for his handling of the Gulf War, but as the economic recession ground on, his popularity plummeted from a high of 89 percent to below 40 percent during the 1992 election year. As for domestic policy initiatives, most came from the Democratic-controlled Congress. Bush became just the sixth incumbent during the time of this study to lose a bid for a second term. In a three-way race, with Arkansas governor William J. (Bill) Clinton as the Democratic candidate and H. Ross Perot as an Independent candidate, Bush ended up with just 34.7 percent of the popular vote. In contrast to other incumbent presidents seeking re-election, Herbert Hoover received 39.7 percent of the popular vote in 1932; Jimmy Carter received 41 percent in 1980; Donald Trump received 46.9 percent in 2020; and Gerald Ford received 48 percent in 1976. Only William Howard Taft in 1912 fared worse than Bush, receiving just 23.2 percent of the vote. The Executive Branch The US military underwent the largest reorganization since the creation of the Department of Defense in 1947, with the Goldwater-Nichols Department of Defense Reorganization Act of 1986. For nearly five years, Congress and the Pentagon tried to solve a major weakness: interservice rivalry. The military branches needed to improve their ability to work together at an operational level. The failure to coordinate military operations was evident in two recent actions: the aborted mission to rescue American hostages in Tehran in 1980 and the flawed rescue of Americans in Grenada in 1983.38 The law, named for Senator Barry Goldwater (Republican—Arizona) and Representative William F. Nichols (Democrat—Alabama), centralized authority through the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff rather than the individual service chiefs, streamlined the military chain of command, required senior officers to have joint experience in order to be promoted, and other measures. In addition, the Veterans Administration was re-designated as the Department of Veterans Affairs and given cabinet status in 1988.

The Congress For the first time since 1954, Republicans gained control of the Senate following the 1980 elections. Defeated were several high-profile, liberal Democrats: George S. McGovern (South Dakota), Birch E. Bayh, Jr. (Indiana), Frank F. Church, III (Idaho), John C. Culver (Iowa), and Gaylord A. Nelson (Wisconsin). Also losing their seats were two long-serving senators, Warren G. Magnuson (Washington) and Herman E. Talmadge (Georgia). There was further erosion of Democratic strength in the once-solid South, with Republicans winning senate seats in Florida, Alabama, Georgia, and North Carolina. Newly elected Republican senators included Charles E. Grassley (Iowa), Warren B. Rudman (New Hampshire), and Alphonse M. D’Amato (New York). Arch-conservative southerners Jesse A. Helms, Jr. (Republican—North Carolina) and Strom Thurmond (now a Republican—South Carolina) became committee chairmen. During the Ninety-seventh Congress (1981–1983), Republicans controlled the Senate, with a margin of 53–46 over Democrats. The margins remained nearly the same during the next two congresses, but in the elections of 1986, for the new One Hundredth Congress (1987–1989), Democrats reclaimed the Senate, with a 55–45 advantage.

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In the House of Representatives, twenty-seven Democrats lost their seats in 1980, including four committee chairmen, but the party nevertheless maintained control throughout this era, though a number of times Democrats crossed over to vote with their Republican counterparts. Forty-seven Democrats had formed the Conservative Democratic forum, and, under pressure from outside conservative forces, were urged to oppose O’Neill’s leadership. O’Neill, in turn, trying to assuage his conservative wing, offered them choice committee assignments. But this only led to further frustration from party liberals and moderates.39 From the Ninety-seventh Congress (1981–1983) through the One Hundred First Congress (1989–1991), Democrats controlled between 269 seats at the highest (1983) to 242 at their lowest point (1981), while Republicans reached their highest point in 1981 with 192 seats, and their lowest point in 1983 with 166 seats. Political scientist Barbara L. Sinclair noted how the legislative process was being transformed from the standard textbook model of bills reported out of a single committee and then debated on the floor. The path for lawmaking had become far more complicated. Many measures were now being considered by several committees, especially in the House, passed using shortcut procedures, like suspension of the rules and unanimous consent, and in the Senate, the threat of a filibuster affecting all parts of the legislative process.40 Leadership in the Senate The new leader of the Senate was Howard H. Baker, Jr. (Republican—Tennessee) and the minority leader was Robert C. Byrd (Democrat—West Virginia). Baker began his career in the Senate in 1967 and was best known to the public during the Senate Watergate hearings in 1973–1974. After serving as Senate leader, he was appointed by President Bush I to be ambassador to Japan. Robert Byrd began his service in the House of Representatives in 1953 and became a senator in 1959. He died in office in 2010, having served longer than any other senator, as majority leader from 1977–1981 and 1987–1989, and minority leader from 1981–1987. When Democrats reclaimed the Senate following the 1986 elections, Byrd became majority leader and Robert J. Dole (Republican—Kansas) became minority leaders. Dole, first elected to the House in 1961, became a senator in 1969 and was best known as Gerald Ford’s running mate during the 1976 presidential election. He twice sought the Republican Party’s nomination for president (1980 and 1988) and was the party’s candidate in 1996, losing to incumbent Bill Clinton. Following the 1988 election, George J. Mitchell, Jr. (Democrat—Maine) became majority leader and Dole retained the minority leadership role. Mitchell was appointed senator in 1980 when Edmund S. Muskie became secretary of state. He served in the Senate until January 1995. After his senate service, he was appointed by Clinton to be special envoy for Northern Ireland and, later, under Barack Obama, special envoy to the Middle East. During this time, Alan M. Cranston (Democrat—California) served as Democratic whip, while Theodore F. (Ted) Stevens, Sr. (Republican—Alaska) and Alan K. Simpson (Republican—Wyoming) were the Republican whips. Leadership in the House The most important and visible House Democrat was speaker Tip O’Neill of Massachusetts. O’Neill became speaker in 1977 and would continue in that role until 1987. For many Republicans, O’Neill, now the chief spokesman for his party, was the perfect caricature of liberalism, urban politics, and the Democrats: he was the bloated, shambling, cigar-chomping politico, at home in smoke-filled rooms with other corrupt politicians, ready to reward cronies and dish out federal money to the undeserving. But they underestimated O’Neill’s political skills.

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O’Neill at times cooperated with Reagan and the White House, but also pushed back. In the assessment of O’Neill’s biographer, the speaker “chose to oppose, but not obstruct.”41 He could have blocked Reagan initiatives, but was willing to let Reagan policies unfold, forcing Republicans and Reagan to bear the consequences of their actions. O’Neill had a difficult time with an unruly Democratic membership, particularly the renegade “boll weevils,” the moderate/conservative southern Democrats—who were becoming more and more an endangered species in the party. They backed the president’s economic package of tax cuts and budget reductions, bucking O’Neill and his allies. But O’Neill was still “king of the Hill,” exercising, in the estimation of one reporter, “more authority over the unruly House than any other member of Congress.”42 Succeeding O’Neill, who retired in 1988, as speaker was James C. (Jim) Wright, Jr. (Democrat—Texas), who had been the long-time second-in-command for House Democrats. Wright had entered Congress in 1955, became majority leader in 1977 and served in that capacity until 1987, when he was elevated to speaker. However, just eighteen months later in June 1989, Wright resigned from both the speakership and his seat in Congress amid recurrent ethics charges. Wright and Democratic leaders were incensed because the charges were launched by Newt Gingrich (Republican—Georgia), who was gaining considerable attention as a conservative firebrand and critic of institutional politics in Congress. “All of us in both political parties must resolve to bring this period of mindless cannibalism to an end,” Wright said at the time of his resignation.43 But combative, deeply partisan, and ruthless politics were taking hold. Historian Julian E. Zelizer observed that “We can date precisely the moment when our toxic political environment was born: Speaker Wright’s downfall in 1989.”44 Replacing Wright was Thomas S. Foley (Democrat—Washington), who had once been Henry Jackson’s senate aide. Foley began his congressional service in 1965 and moved up through the leadership ranks, becoming majority leader when Wright became speaker. Foley served until he was defeated in 1994 by newcomer George Nethercutt, the first time in over one hundred years that a speaker of the House had been defeated. Foley was later nominated to be ambassador to Japan by President Bill Clinton and served in that position for four years. Throughout this era, Robert H. Michel (Republican—Illinois) was the minority leader. He assumed the leadership in 1981, replacing John J. Rhodes (Republican—Arizona), the minority leader since 1975. Michel served for thirty-eight years in the House and became the longestserving Republican leader from 1981 to 1995. He was a moderate, gracious, known for his ability to work across the partisan divide. Michel and O’Neill, while often disagreeing on issues, had a good working relationship, regularly playing golf and gin rummy.45 During the latter days of the Bush administration and into the Clinton first years, Michel came under increasing criticism from within his own party, especially from Gingrich and other conservatives who clamored for a more combative partisan approach to lawmaking. Presidential candidate Bush openly proclaimed, “Read my lips, no new taxes” at the Republican nominating convention in 1988. But when he proposed raising taxes in 1990, conservative members in Congress went ballistic. The New York Post headline screamed: “Read My Lips, I Lied.”46 This was the opportunity for Gingrich, who plotted a takeover of the leadership of the House and the forced removal, if necessary, of Michel. The House minority leader, in Gingrich’s estimation, was too willing to go along, to open to bipartisan solutions, and not gutsy enough to fight.

The Judiciary Chief Justice Warren Burger, appointed in 1969, served during the early years of this era, resigning in 1986. His successor was Associate Justice William H. Rehnquist, the conservative

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justice first appointed by Richard Nixon; Rehnquist served as chief justice until his death in September 2005. Antonin Scalia replaced Rehnquist as associate justice in 1986. Scalia had been a law professor, served in the Nixon White House, and had been on the US Court of Appeals for four years immediately before joining the high court. Through the strength of his intellect and personality, he became the leading conservative voice on the court. Scalia would serve until his death, in February 2016. Lewis Powell retired from the court in 1987, and Reagan nominated Robert H. Bork, former solicitor general, as his replacement. A prolonged, nasty fight ensured in the Senate, as liberal justices zeroed in our Bork’s lengthy conservative and controversial record. Despite knowing that his Senate nomination was in serious jeopardy, Bork insisted on a vote and, as predicted, did not receive the nomination, on a vote of 42–58; six Republicans voting against him. Next, Reagan nominated Douglas H. Ginsburg, then serving on the US Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia. Ginsburg’s nomination was derailed when it was disclosed that he had shared marijuana with some of his students when he was a professor at Harvard Law School. Ginsburg asked Reagan to withdraw his nomination and continued to serve on the court of appeals. On the third try, Anthony M. Kennedy was selected as Powell’s replacement. Kennedy had been a member of the US Court of Appeals for the ninth circuit and a professor at the University of the Pacific Law School. As the court became increasingly more divided ideologically, Kennedy became the swing vote. He served until his retirement in July 2018. William Brennan, first appointed in 1957, retired in 1990. His replacement was David Souter, who had earlier served as chief justice of the New Hampshire supreme court and briefly on a federal court of appeals. For judicial nominees during this era, their position or past writings on Roe became the critical litmus test. Souter had made no public statements, had written nothing on the subject while on the bench, and thus was considered by the Bush White House as a safe, conservative-leaning appointee. The enigmatic Souter, who served until his retirement in 2009, however, increasingly sided with liberal justices over the course of his service on the court. Thurgood Marshall retired from the court in 1991, and his replacement was conservative African American Clarence Thomas. Thomas had been chairman of the Equal Educational Opportunity Commission for eight years and served one year on a federal court of appeals. His nomination generated considerable controversy when one-time aide, Anita Hill, accused him of sexual harassment. After protracted, bitter hearings, he was confirmed by 52–48. Remaining on the Supreme Court during this era were Justices White, Blackmun, Stevens, and O’Connor. Also added to the Rehnquist court, during the 1990s, were Ruth Bader Ginsburg (1993) and Stephen G. Breyer (1994), appointed during the Clinton administration. Their appointments are discussed in Chapter 10. The Rehnquist Court was a “fractured” court, with the justices often sharply divided along conservative/liberal lines.47 At the beginning of the Rehnquist court, there were three conservative justices (Rehnquist, O’Connor, and Scalia), three liberals (Brennan, Marshall, and Stevens), two justices who often voted with their liberal colleagues (Blackmun and White), and one swing justice (Powell). The conservative bloc became the majority with the appointment of Kennedy and Thomas. O’Connor and Kennedy would sometimes shift over to the liberal side, but otherwise the Rehnquist court during this era was mostly dominated by conservative leanings and writings.

KEY POLICIES ENACTED With the new conservative administration, a Republican takeover in the Senate, and strong popular support for President Reagan, it was time for significant policy changes. Indeed, the

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“Reagan Revolution” brought about the largest tax cut in American history, followed by the largest tax increase, along with the biggest cuts in domestic programs, followed by resistance against further cuts, culminating in massive increases in federal indebtedness. Reagan quipped, “we fought a war on poverty, and poverty won.” Indeed, the New Deal and its successor, the Great Society, were dead. While the most important civil rights legislation was crafted during the 1960s, this era saw the extension of the laws, but also revealed grudging acceptance and presidential vetoes. The Voting Rights Act was amended in 1981, and its protections were extended for another five years. In 1983, Congress passed legislation designating Martin Luther King, Jr. national holiday; the holiday went into effect in 1986. It took years of dogged work by John J. Conyers, Jr. (Democrat—Michigan) and the Congressional Black Caucus to get the legislation passed, fighting off filibusters from southern opponents. Not until 2000 did all states honor the national holiday designation, and some southern states tied the holiday with veneration for Confederate war heroes. President Reagan vetoed the Civil Rights Restoration Act of 1987, which was enacted in reaction to the Supreme Court’s interpretation of Title IX of the Education Amendments. President Bush then vetoed a civil rights bill, arguing that it maintained racial quotas, only to have the Democratic-controlled Congress successfully pass a similar, but not as strong, bill in 1991, in response to the Supreme Court’s decisions limiting the rights of employees who had sued their employers for discrimination. Billions of dollars were added to the Superfund for cleaning up the worst toxic waste sites; and in 1992 came the Energy Policy Act, which mandated greater energy efficiencies for buildings, plumbing equipment, and appliances, streamlined the building process for nuclear power plants, and required state, local, and federal governments to use alternative fuel for their vehicles. The savings and loan crisis prompted the Financial Institutions Reform, Recovery, and Enforcement Act of 1989, providing $50 billion in federal funds to close or sell approximately 250 insolvent savings and loan institutions. The law also created the Office of Thrift Supervision in the Treasury Department to supervise such institutions. Another GI bill was enacted in 1984, through the Veterans Educational Assistance Act (1984), and four years later, the Department of Veterans Affairs was elevated to cabinet-level status.

Tax Policy and Budget Cuts In the mid-1970s, the concept of “supply-side” economics was championed by conservative economists, like Arthur Laffer, and policymakers. Supply-side, in essence, argued that economic growth could best be achieved by reducing taxes and cutting regulations.48 Congressman Jack F. Kemp (Republican—New York) and Senator William V. Roth, Jr. (Republican—Delaware) championed supply-side economics and tried, but failed, to have a tax cut enacted during the late 1970s. President Carter objected, arguing that such a tax cut would only exacerbate federal deficits. When Reagan became president, the Kemp–Roth tax cut policy was one of the first items on the new administration’s agenda. The Senate, now under control of Republicans, would be receptive; Democrats still maintained control in the House, but many moderates and conservatives were willing to support the popular president and his agenda. Supply-side economics was controversial, both with academics and policymakers. On the campaign trail in 1980, George H.W. Bush, running against Reagan for the Republican nomination, dubbed it “voodoo economics.” Tip O’Neill later wrote in his memoirs: “There was no way I was going to swallow the ridiculous notion that supply-side economics would lead to prosperity. … The policy itself came from the administration of Herbert Hoover, who in my opinion is not the sort of guy whose economic views you want to emulate.”49

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Voters once again heard about “trickle down” economics: give tax cuts to corporations and wealthy individuals, and eventually some of that money will trickle down to middle-class and poorer people. Humorist Will Rogers probably coined the term when he ridiculed President Hoover’s efforts to combat the Depression. “The money was all appropriated for the top,” Rogers wrote in 1932, “in the hopes that it would trickle down to the needy.”50 Nonetheless, Reagan was able to persuade enough moderate and conservative Democrats to join in, and the Economic Recovery Tax Act (ERTA) of 1981 soon became law. It was introduced in the House by the new Ways and Means chairman Daniel D. (Dan) Rostenkowski (Democrat—Illinois), in July 1981; less than a week later, by a three-to-one margin, it was passed by the full House; in the Senate it was approved by voice vote.51 On August 13, President Reagan signed it into law. In just a little more than three weeks, the largest tax cut in American history, $749 billion, became law. Top tax rates fell from 70 percent to 50 percent, the lowest rates were cut from 14 percent to 11 percent; capital gains, estate taxes, and corporate taxes were all slashed. Just one year after ERTA was enacted, it became evident that the lost tax revenues would only ramp up the federal deficit. The tax cut may have been called the “Economic Recovery” tax act, but the economy was now sliding, dangerously. Interest rates shot up from 10 percent to over 20 percent; the Dow Jones Industrial average had reached 1,000, but by September 1982 had plunged to 770. In a whiplash-like about face, Congress then enacted the Tax Equity and Fiscal Responsibility Act (TEFRA) of 1982, which repealed some of the Kemp–Roth tax breaks and partially repealed future tax cuts. Engineered by Senate Finance Committee chairman Robert J. Dole (Republican–Kansas), TEFRA generated $235 billion over a five-year period. Critics shouted that this was the largest tax increase in American history.52 One of the underlying themes of conservative policymakers was to “starve the beast”: if there was less federal money to spend, then expensive domestic (but not military) programs would have to be cut. But it turned out, plenty of conservative lawmakers, just like liberals, liked their pet domestic projects, and were reluctant to cut them. With a downturn in the economy, soaring interest rates and reduced tax revenues, and spending unabated, the annual deficits and the cumulative national debt soared. In Fiscal Year 1969, during the last year of the Johnson administration, there was a $3 billion surplus, the last time there was a federal budget surplus until Fiscal Year 1998, during the dot-com boom times of the Clinton administration. One of the fundamentals of conservative thinking, a belief in a balanced budget, was brushed aside during the 1980s. During the Reagan years, the federal budget experienced record deficits: $128 billion in Fiscal Year 1982, $208 billion in Fiscal Year 1983, and so forth, totaling $1.412 trillion in added national indebtedness, a 142 percent increase. Never in post-World War II history had the annual deficit come anywhere close to $100 billion a year; now, during the 1980s, it was routine and commonplace.53 (Reagan-era lawmakers and economists would be shocked at the debts incurred during the twenty-first century.) Domestic Budget Cuts Prepared by W. Philip (Phil) Gramm (Democrat—Texas) and Delbert L. (Del) Latta (Republican—Ohio), the Gramm-Latta budget (Omnibus Reconciliation Act of 1981) boosted defense spending by $28 billion, but then made draconian cuts to domestic programs: public service jobs, college education benefits through Social Security, Medicare, student loans, child nutrition programs, unemployment compensation, food stamp recipients. These cuts, and more, constituted the largest peacetime cuts in domestic spending in American history, albeit during a severe economic recession.54

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The budget proposal was contained in one massive package, an 800-page document “that passed the House so quickly that many members didn’t even know what they were voting for,” remembered Tip O’Neill. “The legislation was so complicated and so enormous that the president could have put us into war and we might not have discovered it for weeks.”55 For the speaker of the House, this was the “absolutely the lowest point in my career,” O’Neill recalled. In 1981, everything I had fought for, everything I had believed in, was being cast aside. The most depressing thing of all was the hatred for the poor that developed all across America. Almost overnight, there was a new and widespread hostility on the part of the haves toward the have nots. … Millions of Americans who had achieved some success now wanted to pull up the ladder to prevent anyone else from climbing aboard.56 It was a difficult time for the poor. From 1977 through 1987, the average family income for the poorest 10 percent of Americans fell by 10 percent, while the wealthiest 1 percent grew their income by 74.2 percent. The percentage of children in poverty grew 26 percent from 1979 to 1989.57 Following the budget cuts, the Agriculture Department’s Food and Nutrition Service revised its regulations for the National School Lunch Subsidy Program. Children should have vegetables, everyone agreed. But what was a “vegetable”? Federal rules were revised to allow pickles to be counted as vegetables; the media expanded the condiment battle to question whether ketchup (on French fries) should be counted as a vegetable. This led to a national outcry, and as reporter Bernard Weinraub observed, “the opposition had a Dickensian field day of outrage and mockery that contrasted school children’s shrinking meal subsidies with the Pentagon generals’ groaning board of budget increases.”58 In addition, the Gramm-Latta budget hit a buzz saw when it did away with Social Security’s minimum monthly payment. Sensing an opening, Tip O’Neill and his allies pounced: Reagan was trying to cut Social Security, the sacred trust of the New Deal and Democrats ever since. Senior citizen groups flocked to the Capitol, staging a 5,000-person rally; Democrats charged Reagan with a “breach of faith.” Majority leader Jim Wright and Senator Daniel P. Moynihan (Democrat—New York) introduced resolutions to restore the minimum monthly payment; even Reagan backtracked and called for its restoration. Democrats and Republicans alike quickly and overwhelmingly passed the resolution. Social Security became the chink in Reagan’s popularity. O’Neill politicized the issue and laid all the blame at the feet of Republicans. O’Neill “took Social Security and just drove it home ruthlessly and in some respects dishonestly, but with great effectiveness,” recalled Newt Gingrich, who himself knew a thing or two about ruthlessness and dishonesty. “The Republicans, to this day, haven’t gotten over it,” said O’Neill lieutenant Kirk O’Donnell in 1998.59 O’Neill reminded all who would listen that the troubles they were facing were caused by Republican tax and budget cutting efforts. “From now on, it’s Reagan’s budget,” O’Neill declared after the president’s plan had been enacted. “From now on, it’s Reagan’s unemployment rate. From now on, it’s Reagan’s inflation rate. You can’t criticize the Democrats. It’s Reagan’s ball game.”60 But voters still loved Reagan, who scored an overwhelming victory in the 1984 presidential election. However in Congress, Democrats gained twenty-seven seats, giving them a solid majority in the House, and the 1986 elections saw Democrats retake the majority in the Senate. The Reagan revolution had run out of steam.

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Significance of these Policies The tax cuts, eagerly and quickly put in place, and based on dubious economic thinking, became the backbone of conservative fiscal policy. Members of Congress, Democrats especially, fought hard to protect favorite programs. Hard decisions were avoided, and the bill to cover the lost tax revenue and the continued social spending was passed on to the next generation. Economist Murray L. Weidenbaum, chairman of the Council of Economic Advisers for Reagan, wrote about the hard choices that American policymakers and individuals refused to make. As citizens of the United States, we are consuming more than we are producing, borrowing more than we are saving, and spending more than we are earning. We are rapidly approaching the time when we have to pay the piper. Neither Republicans nor Democrats in the Congress have shown much interest in voting for the taxes to pay for those rapidly rising costs.61 A discouraged and disillusioned David A. Stockman, Reagan’s young director of the Office of Management and Budget, concluded that “politics had triumphed: first by blocking spending cuts and then by stopping revenue increases.” The anti-spending talk was just that: talk. When Republicans were faced with painful cuts, in military bases, farm subsidies, Medicaid reimbursements, and other items, they caved. “The Reaganites were, in the final analysis,” Stockman wrote, “just plain welfare politicians like everybody else.”62

Making Social Security Solvent By the beginning of this era, the Social Security Trust Fund, the money set aside for the payment of benefits to the elderly and other recipients, was facing bankruptcy. Since 1975, the monies available from the Trust Fund were falling short of the benefit needs. But attempts in early 1981 to reduce social security benefits proved to be an enormous political hot potato for the president, and Congress, particularly Democrats, was in no mood to enact such reforms that year. In late September 1981, Reagan announced the creation of a blue-ribbon commission to tackle social security reform. “To remove Social Security from politics once and for all,” Reagan announced, he was asking O’Neill and Senate Majority Leader Howard Baker to choose five persons each to join five chosen by the president to recommend solutions. At the same time as noted above, Reagan asked Congress to restore the minimum social security benefits that were cut in the Gramm-Latta budget package and gave Reagan such heartburn. Through Executive Order 12335, Reagan created the National Commission on Social Security Reform, chaired by economist Alan Greenspan. In its final report, delivered in late January 1983, the Greenspan Commission gave this stark analysis: if nothing were done, the Social Security Trust Fund could not meet its obligations fully in July 1983; at least $100–150 billion would be needed to restore financial viability during the 1980s.63 Social Security was the vital lifeline for millions of recipients and their families. It had often been called the “third rail” in politics: touch it, and you die! Just like the electrified third rail in a subway, messing with social security would bring the immediate wrath of constituents. Congress accepted many of the recommendations of the Greenspan Commission, and in less than three months the Social Security Amendments of 1983, which would save or generate $165 billion in funds, were signed into law. On a windblown, blustery day in late April, 800 people stood on the White House lawn, along with a full military color guard and Marine Corps musicians. On the platform were members of the Greenspan Commission and congressional leaders. In affixing his name to the document, Reagan used twelve signing pens, one for each letter in his

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name. “A happy day for America,” said a beaming Tip O’Neill. Reagan, emphasizing the bipartisan theme of the day, said, “None of us here today would pretend that this bill is perfect. Each of us had to compromise one way or another … but the essence of bipartisanship is to give up a little to get a lot. My fellow Americans, I think we got a great deal.”64 The adjustments in social security would require cutbacks and sacrifices, but little pain for current recipients. There were three significant changes: first, the amendments allowed taxation of benefits for higher income recipients; second, was the increase in age for full retirement benefits, from sixty-five eventually to sixty-seven; third, was the expansion of the pool of retirees eligible for social security—new federal employees, for example, would now be included. These three changes accounted for about 75 percent of the solution for making the system solvent.65 Further, the Social Security Trust Fund was removed from the unified federal budget. But over the years, as surpluses in the Fund grew and grew, reaching $2.9 trillion by 2020, they became a tempting source of revenue, which was “borrowed” to help make up the shortfall in the general budget. Significance of this Policy Yes, there would be a temporary halt in the cost-of-living-adjustments, but in the assessment of critic Brenton Smith, the amendment was a “bipartisan effort to kick-the-can” and pass along the looming burdens to late-baby boomers.66 The largest tax increases and the biggest cuts in benefits “targeted people who were eleven and younger at the time.”

Attempts to Balance the Budget The growing deficit spending during the first several years of this era was causing heartburn on Capitol Hill and at the White House. Deficits in the annual budget of hundreds of billions of dollars were becoming routine and the accumulated national debt was steadily climbing above $2 trillion. (The national debt in April 2022 was above $30.3 trillion.) For Fiscal Year 1985, the deficit was $212 billion, or 5.1 percent of GDP. For the next fiscal year, Reagan proposed a federal budget calling for significant cuts in domestic spending, a 5.9 percent inflation-adjusted increase for defense spending, and a $180 billion deficit. The budget proposal pleased few lawmakers. Budget wrangling went on for seven months before lawmakers finally agreed in late August 1985 to a $171.9 billion deficit and agreed to raise the debt ceiling to $2.079 trillion.

Photo 9.2 W. Philip (Phil) Gramm (b. 1942). Republican lawmaker from Texas and leader in 1980s budgetreduction fight. Source: US House of Representatives.

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But attached to the debt ceiling legislation was an extraordinary proposal. Senators Phil Gramm, Warren B. Rudman (Republican—New Hampshire), and Ernest F. (Fritz) Hollings (Democrat—South Carolina) introduced an amendment to bind Congress to forced reductions in the yearly budget deficit, producing a balanced budget in six years. Unofficially called GrammRudman-Hollings (GRH),67 this amendment required that if spending budget targets were not met, then a series of across-the-board spending cuts, called sequestrations, would automatically go into effect. But there were enough budget gimmicks to make the GRH unworkable: social security or interest payments on the national debt, for example, two of the biggest federal expenses, would be exempt. Also exempt were Medicaid, veterans’ compensation and benefits, food stamps, Aid to Families with Dependent Children, Supplemental Security Income, and other programs. Later, one of its authors, Fritz Hollings, distanced himself from the loopholes and exemptions: “I’m filing for divorce on grounds of infidelity and irreconcilable differences.”68 Then the Supreme Court struck down one of GRH’s key provisions, the automatic acrossthe-board cuts, the sequestration, as a violation of the doctrine of separation of powers.69 Congress then passed a second version of GRH, now called Gramm-Rudman-Hollings II,70 but it did little to help control the budget. In the meantime, with the 1986 tax reform package, more tax revenue was anticipated, and the pressure to adhere to GRH was relaxed. In 1990, Congress passed the Budget Enforcement Act (BEA), one more attempt to control the budget equation.71 This time, the focus was on spending, rather than on revenue. The BEA created caps on discretionary spending and created a “pay-as-you-go” (PAYGO) set of rules for taxes and some entitlement programs. This meant that any changes in the federal budget had to be deficit-neutral or deficit-reducing: if a program were to be given more funds, there would have to be more taxes raised or some other program would have to be cut in equal amount. One of the immediate brush-backs, especially from conservative Republicans, was that the legislation raised taxes, something that President Bush famously and publicly vowed (“Read my lips, no new taxes”) never to do. The Budget Enforcement Act expired in 2002. Significance of these Policies These deficit reduction packages showed Congress as an ineffectual institution, lacking in political will and political compromise to keep the country from sliding into dangerous budgetary waters. Gramm-Rudman-Hollings was, in the words of journalist Jackie Calmes, “an act of desperation at a time of mounting deficits, partisan paralysis over solutions and a desire for political cover to raise the debt limit.”72

Tax Reform “Few other measures have been shaped and reshaped by so many conflicts and by so much cooperation,” wrote journalist David Rosenbaum of the Tax Reform Act of 1986. “Few have reflected so many political trade-offs by so many politicians with such different styles and viewpoints. No other legislation in years has survived so many narrow escapes.”73 During his State of the Union address in January 1984, the president announced that he would direct his secretary of the Treasury, Donald T. Regan, to develop a plan “to simplify the entire tax code so all taxpayers, big and small, are treated more fairly.’” To the guffaws of lawmakers, Reagan said he wanted such a tax plan ready for right after the November election. It was Reagan’s idea to take the issue of taxes off the table during the election season. The president’s advisers worried that Senator William W. (Bill) Bradley (Democrat—New Jersey) and Congressman Richard A. (Dick) Gephardt (Democrat—Missouri) would come up with a rival plan, more appealing to voters. That threat was momentarily blunted, however, when the

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Democratic presidential candidate, former vice president Walter F. Mondale refused to go along with the Bradley–Gephardt tax proposals. Over the course of the next two years, competing tax proposals were floated by the White House, by Dan Rostenkowski, and the powerful House Ways and Means Committee, by Robert M. Packwood (Republican—Oregon), chair of the Senate Finance Committee, along with the Bradley–Gephardt proposal.74 At times, Reagan worked with both committee chairmen, calling reluctant conservative lawmakers to hold their noses and vote for reform. Packwood and Finance Committee chief counsel, William M. Diefenderfer III, determined to break through the competing interests, put their heads together at the Irish Times, a pub close by the Senate office buildings. Over a pitcher of beer, they hammered out a compromise package, which was put before the taxing committees. Any whisper of a change in the federal tax structure, in deductions, in exclusions, or any other matter that might impact corporate America meant that lobbyists and tax lawyers would come out of the woodwork. And in 1986, they came in droves. “Gucci Gulch,” is how two journalists described the Capitol corridors and rooms set aside for the well-paid, well-fed, and well-dressed lobbyists, clamoring to plead the case for their wealthy clients. After all, millions, even billions, were at stake.75 In July 1986, after both the House and the Senate had voted for their own versions of tax reform, eleven senators and eleven representatives began writing the conference report, ironing out the differences between the two bodies. The conference room was “overflowing with lobbyists from every conceivable commercial interest.”76 For four days, the conferees discussed, getting into occasional shouting matches as well. After returning from summer recess, both the House and Senate passed the complex legislation. Much of the credit for the Tax Reform Act belonged to Senator Bradley, who had been pushing for lower rates and fewer deductions. The new law lowered the top tax rates for ordinary income from 50 percent to 28 percent and raised the bottom tax rate from 11 percent to 15 percent (the first time in American history that the top rate was lowered and the bottom rate was increased at the same time). In addition, long-term capital gains maximum rates were raised from 20 percent to 28 percent. Certain tax shelters were eliminated, corporate tax reductions were reduced from 50 percent to 35 percent. More than 1,500 people gathered at the signing ceremony of the Tax Reform Act, on October 22, 1968. In signing the legislation, Reagan put his best positive spin on it. It was, he declared, “the best antipoverty bill, the best pro-family measure and the best job-creation program ever to come out of the Congress of the United States.” Joseph Bishop-Henchman summarized the personalities and politicking of the tax reform package: “The stars aligned for the Tax Reform Act of 1986, although it had to die and be resurrected several times along the way before its triumph.”77 The reforms could have been transformed to their advantage, observed Richard G. Darman, Reagan’s deputy secretary of the Treasury, if the business interested had banded together in opposition. “They were brought down by the narrowness of their vision,” Darman wrote. “Precisely because they defined themselves as representatives of single special interests, they failed to notice their collective power.”78 Significance of this Policy Former Carter senior aide Stuart E. Eizenstat noted that this tax reform act “was the first acrossthe-board tax reduction for everyone since the Kennedy tax cuts, and there have been none since.” The essence of this landmark legislation was to create a “fairer, simpler tax system, with lower rates and fewer tax breaks for the wealthy and corporations.”79

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Immigration Reform and Refugees Immigration reform was not a priority item for Ronald Reagan as he entered the White House; in fact, Reagan was rather disinterested in the subject. But since the passage of the Immigration Act of 1965 and the unprecedented flow of immigrants that followed, plus policy developments during the Carter administration, immigration soon became an important, controversial issue.80 The 1965 act set a ceiling of 290,000 immigrants annually, but the law did not count immediate family members of American citizens, such as spouses, non-adult children, and parents. When extended families were counted, the total number of eligible immigrants went up substantially. The ceiling for individual countries was 20,000 persons, but in many countries far more wanted to come to America. By 1981, some 596,000 legal immigrants were admitted, twice the number fixed by the 1965 law. Further, many others were coming in illegally; in 1981, a total of 975,789 unauthorized persons were apprehended by the Immigration and Naturalization Service; 90–95 percent were Mexican nationals. Concerned over mounting numbers of both legal and illegal immigrants, Congress passed amendments to the 1965 Immigration Act, which established a Select Commission on Immigration and Refugee Policy (SCIRP). The commission was headed by the Rev. Theodore M. Hesburgh, president of Notre Dame University. In its final report, issued less than two months after Reagan was inaugurated, SCIRP recommended increasing legal immigration from 290,000 to 350,000. It also recommended increasing funds and manpower for the Border Patrol and passing legislation to prohibit American employers from knowingly hiring illegals. But what about illegal immigrants living and working in the United States? The commissioners voted unanimously to recommend amnesty those unauthorized persons who had lived in the United States prior to January 1980. Immigration was now thrust onto the public agenda, not only because of the flow of illegal immigrants from Mexico, but because of the 140,000 refugees coming from Haiti and Cuba in recent years, and the influx of boat people, refugees from Vietnam and Southeast Asia. In response to the growing number of persons seeking refuge in the United States, Congress passed the Refugee Act (1980), permitting 50,000 persons annually to be admitted. Such persons had to demonstrate a “well-founded fear” of persecution based on race, religion, nationality, or membership in a social or political movement. The language incorporated the United Nations definition of a refugee, and for the first time provided for the admission of 5,000 “asylum seekers.” The Refugee Act, in the assessment of legal scholar and immigration expert Deborah E. Anker, was best known for its “antidiscrimination and humanitarian thrust.” It was not a “rushed product” crafted by a “panicked response of lawmakers to an extreme refugee crisis,” but, rather was one of the most “carefully considered” pieces of legislation during the post-War period.81 In early March 1981, Reagan appointed a President’s Task Force on Immigration and Refugee Policy, which spent four months reviewing options and making recommendations. In September of that year, Senator Alan K. Simpson (Republican—Wyoming) and Representative Romano L. Mazzoli (Democrat—Kentucky), the respective chairs of the Senate and House subcommittees on immigration and refugees, began crafting legislation.82 But it was not until five years later when the Simpson-Mazzoli Act, or more formally, the Immigration Reform and Control Act (IRCA) was passed in 1986. It was the first federal legislation to deal with unauthorized immigration. But the law barely passed, with lawmakers cobbling together a fragile compromise in the last few hours of the Ninety-ninth Congress.83 There were three major parts of the act. First, there were employer sanctions against “knowingly” hiring unauthorized workers. However, pressure from agriculture and other business interests weakened the sanctions to the point of being nearly ineffective. The second part

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of the act was the beefing up of funds and personnel for the Border Patrol. These funding and staffing changes, however, were far smaller than those that came in the 1990s. The third, and most controversial, section was amnesty for persons illegally in the country. Unauthorized immigrants who had been living continuously in the United States since 1982 became eligible for temporary legal status. They had to pay a fee of $185 and demonstrate “good moral character.” After eighteen months, they would be eligible for green cards, if they were in the process of learning English. Some 3 million persons applied, and 2.7 million were granted permanent residency, becoming the largest legalization effort in American history. But rather than containing new illegal immigration, however, the number of unauthorized immigrants continued to climb. A New York Times headline just three years after enactment captured the reality: “1986 Amnesty Law is Seen as Failing to Slow Alien Tide.” Indeed, the number of unauthorized immigrants rose from 5 million in 1986 to 11.1 million in 2013.84 Sociologist John D. Skrentny called the IRCA “one of the great policy failures of American history.” The “grand bargain”—the massive legalization coupled with tougher border enforcement—collapsed. Because borders were not secure, it taught those policymakers wanting immigrant restrictions a lesson which resonated decades later: no more such grand bargains.85 Congress tried again with the Immigration Reform Act of 1990, which was introduced by Senator Edward Kennedy.86 The new law increased the immigrant quotas from 500,000 to 700,000 during the first three years of the act, and then established a 670,000 ceiling for subsequent years. It created a new category of immigrants, “diversity” immigrants, aimed at applicants from countries that had not previously sent many immigrants. Persons from African countries, Indonesia, and several Asian countries were the beneficiaries. The new law also amended the medical exclusion section, removing “suspected homosexuals” from the list of persons barred from entry. Further, the law provided from 1,000 more Border Patrol personnel and increased the penalties for those who broke the law. Significance of these Policies These pieces of legislation once again demonstrated the difficulty of policymakers in confronting the realities of immigration: unabated flow of illegal immigrants, the continued need for migrant workers, the failure to adequately secure borders, and the pushback against transforming the cultural dynamics of the country. Three decades later, the problems continue to frustrate policymakers.

Civil Rights for the Disabled Hearings began in 1988 and the Americans with Disabilities Act (ADA) was signed into law in 1990. But the movement to protect persons with disabilities had a long history of grassroots involvement, parents and families fighting for recognition, and the development of the independent living movement. Those fighting to protect disabled citizens came up against the attitude, at all levels of government, of “out of sight, out of mind.” Disabled persons felt neglected, shunted aside, and generally not taken into consideration.87 An important legal precursor to the ADA was the Rehabilitation Act of 1973, Section 504, which banned discrimination on the basis of disability in programs receiving federal funds. Section 504 was, in a way, the Powell amendment, for those with disabilities. “For the first time,” noted Arlene B. Mayerson of the Disability Rights Education & Defense Fund, “the exclusion and segregation of people with disabilities was viewed as discrimination.” President Reagan established a taskforce for regulatory relief, looking for ways to cut regulatory measures that were considered to be burdensome, especially to business interests.

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Cutting “red tape” has always had an appeal, conjuring up irksome regulations put into place by unrealistic bureaucrats. Section 504 was one of those regulations scheduled to be eliminated. This threat became a rallying cry for those in the disability community, leading to letter writing, protests, marches, sit-ins, and other forms of grassroots efforts. Thanks largely to the pushback from disability activists, administration efforts to gut Section 504 protections were unsuccessful. At the same time, disability activists fought alongside other affected groups in the battle for the Civil Rights Restoration Act of 1988. Activists also engaged in a nationwide educational campaign, focusing on elected officials, giving them information on the hurdles, barriers, discrimination, and indignities faced in daily life by those who were blind, deaf, physically and mentally challenged. In 1981, Reagan chose Justin Dart, Jr., the son of one of the president’s wealthy informal advisers, to be vice-chair of the President’s Council on Disabilities. In his childhood, Dart suffered from polio and had to use a wheelchair. Dart and his Japanese-born wife Toshiko twice toured the United States, at their own expense, collecting information and stories from persons with disabilities. Thousands of people attended the public hearings held by the Congressional Task Force on the Rights and Empowerment of People with Disabilities, headed by Dart. On the presidential campaign trail, both Vice President Bush and Governor Dukakis endorsed disabilities protections. In May 1989, the legislation was introduced in the Senate by Thomas R. (Tom) Harkin (Democrat—Iowa) and David F. Durenberger (Republican—Minnesota) and in the House by Tony Coelho (Democrat—California) and Hamilton Fish, Jr. (Republican—New York). The lawmakers were assisted by a phalanx of lawyers and advocates who were aided by disability witnesses who came from all parts of the country. One of the principal goals of the ADA advocates was to protect all persons with disabilities. This meant protecting persons with AIDS, mental illnesses, or other conditions, and beating back amendments that would exclude those groups. “The underlying principle of the ADA,” observed Arlene Mayerson, “was to extend the basic civil rights protections extended to minorities and women to people with disabilities.”88 One of the key elements, noted Tony Coelho, who suffered from debilitating bouts of epilepsy, was that the disability community had a “hidden army”: one-sixth of all families in America had someone with a disability. “Disability,” Coelho noted, “impacts practically every family.”89 Opposition to ADA provisions came from the powerful National Federation of Independent Business, the US Chamber of Commerce, Greyhound Lines and the larger transportation industry, the National Restaurant Association, and conservative Republicans, like presidential hopeful Patrick Buchanan and Congressman Richard K. (Dick) Armey of Texas. But their objections were not enough to halt or substantially modify the legislation. After overwhelming passage in the Senate in September 1989, the ADA legislation was sent to four different House committees for consideration. Again, disability activists crammed the hearing rooms and helped fight back objections and amendments meant to cripple the legislation. The House likewise overwhelmingly approved the legislation. Guiding the legislation through the two chambers was Harkin in the Senate and Steny H. Hoyer (Democrat—Maryland) in the House. With differences ironed out between the House and the Senate, the landmark Americans with Disabilities Act was sent to the president for his signature. Bush, himself, was a strong advocate of the legislation. The ADA prohibited discrimination based on disability in private employment, state and local government, in public accommodations, commercial facilities, transportation, and telecommunications. Refreshingly, it also applied to the US Congress. The term “disability” meant an individual who has a physical or mental impairment “that substantially limits one or more major life activities, a person who has a history or record of such an impairment, or a person who is perceived by others as having such an impairment.” The ADA does not specifically name all the “impairments” that are covered.90

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On July 26, 1990, a crowd of some 2,000 disabled persons and their families—the largest ever to assemble during the Bush I White House years—watched under the summer heat. Some came in wheelchairs, others were accompanied by interpreters for the deaf, and some came with their seeing-eye dogs. Reporter Ann Devroy wrote, “With row upon row of disabled Americans cheering and sometimes weeping with happiness, President Bush yesterday signed landmark legislation banning discrimination against the disabled, declaring, ‘Let the shameful wall of exclusion finally come tumbling down.’”91 Significance of this Policy Three decades after its enactment, some 61 million persons with disabilities now are given protections enjoyed by others. Over the years, this landmark law has been strengthened by amendments, especially through the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act (Obamacare).

Clean Air Amendments When the original Clean Air Act was up for renewal in 1981, the discussion didn’t center on enhancing the law or making it tougher. The discussion, led primarily by industry opponents and endorsed by Reagan, was to cut back or weaken the law. During the 1988 presidential campaign, Vice President Bush stood on a boat in Boston harbor, declaring that he was going to be an environmental president, vowing to offer stronger clean air protections. After ten years of legislative logjam, several key lawmakers were able to cobble together the Clean Air Act Amendments of 1990.92 For years, the battle had been between the automobile industry, championed by Representative John D. Dingell, Jr. (Democrat— Michigan) and environmental activists, championed by Representative Henry A. Waxman (Democrat—California). Dingell was chairman of the House Energy and Commerce Committee while Waxman was chairman of its Subcommittee on Health and the Environment. They had locked horns over clean air policy, but now, in 1990, they were determined to work together, and ironed out the policy differences in their committee. Dingell, particularly, had been pressured by the White House and other congressional leaders. In a floor debate, Dingell said of Waxman, “It has not always been a pleasure to work with him, but in this instance we have been able to do quite well.”93 The amendments substantially revised and enhanced the earlier Clean Air Acts of 1963 and 1970. The five principal titles of the 1990 amendments regulated ambient air and ozone air pollution, carbon monoxide, create tighter automobile tailpipe emission standards, require cleaner fuels, control hazardous chemicals in the atmosphere, and drastically cut the emissions causing acid rain. There would be greater enforcement authority, a sweeping new permit program, and better opportunity for citizen engagement in enforcing the law. As Waxman observed, the amendments “dwarf” any previous environmental laws, and “any one of the 1990 Amendments’ five major titles would ordinarily be an act in itself.”94 Significance of this Policy The Clean Air Amendments, in the assessment of one journalist, were “the most comprehensive environmental statute ever enacted.”95 The results have been impressive. The EPA noted that since the enactment of the 1990 amendments, carbon monoxide (CO) concentrations have gone down 67 percent; nitrogen oxides (NOx) has gone down by 59 percent; sulfur dioxide (SO2) was down by 88 percent; other noxious air pollutants have decreased

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yearly. The reduction in air pollutants came at the same time the American economy had grown substantially and Americans were driving their automobiles more often.96

North American Free Trade During the 1980 presidential campaign, Ronald Reagan proposed a North American common market, so that Canada and the United States could better compete with the European Common Market and other markets around the world. A Canadian-US Free Trade Agreement was enacted in 1989, signed by Reagan and Canadian prime minister M. Brian Mulroney. Mexican president Carlos Salinas de Gotari requested a similar agreement to liberalize trade among the United States, Canada, and Mexico. The North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA) was signed by President Bush during his last year and, after some amendments were included, it was passed in both chambers of Congress. It was a contentious agreement. On the campaign trail in 1992, third party candidate Ross Perot warned of “a giant sucking sound” as American companies (and American jobs) would flee to Mexico. Many in organized labor and other elements of the Democratic Party opposed the arrangement, while most Republicans approved the measure. The implementing legislation was signed in December 1993 and went into effect in January 1994. NAFTA had several specific goals: to grant most-favored-nation status to each other, to eliminate trade barriers and facilitate cross-border movement of goods and services, to increase fair competition and investment opportunities, protect intellectual property rights, and create a system to resolve trade disputes and to work together to expand trade. The goals were by and large met, and NAFTA became the largest free trade zone in the Western hemisphere. Foreign investments tripled, and tariffs had been lowered or eliminated by the time the last measures in NAFTA went into effect in 2008.97 Ten years later, President Donald Trump, together with Canadian prime minister Justin Trudeau and Mexican president Enrique Peña Nieto, signed the United States-Mexico-Canada Agreement (USMCA). In a celebratory tweet, Trump wrote that NAFTA was a “terrible” treaty and the “worst trade deal ever made.” The USCMA, which was signed by Congress in early 2020, left NAFTA largely intact, and has been characterized as NAFTA 2.0.

The Court Weighs In Abortion Restrictions In 1989, the Supreme Court upheld a Missouri law which restricted abortion services, in Webster v. Reproductive Health Services.98 The preamble to the 1986 Missouri statute noted that “[t]he life of each human being begins at conception.” The law prevented the use of public facilities, employees, and state funds to assist in abortion counseling or services. There were also restrictions of physicians, who could not encourage or counsel women to have abortions. In addition, physicians were to perform viability tests in the twentieth week of pregnancy. Two lower courts had ruled the Missouri law unconstitutional. Before the Supreme Court was the central question: did the restrictive policies in the Missouri law infringe on the right of privacy or the Equal Protection Clause of the Fourteenth Amendment? The Court was split in many directions on this case, but ruled, through Chief Justice Rehnquist, that none of the challenged sections of the Missouri law was unconstitutional. The preamble, stating that life began at conception, Rehnquist noted, had not been applied in any concrete manner to restrict abortions, and thus did not present a constitutional question. The Court also determined that states were not required to enter into the business of providing abortions and abortion services, nor did the due process clause create an affirmative right to

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state assistance. There was also no case or controversy in relation to counseling provisions in the law. Further, Rehnquist wrote, the state could have an interest in protecting potential life and thus upholding the viability testing requirements. The majority opinion stressed that this opinion was not overturning or invalidating Roe v. Wade. The author of the Roe decision, Justice Blackmun could hardly agree: “Today, Roe v. Wade and the fundamental constitutional right of women to decide whether to terminate a pregnancy, survive, but are not secure.” The plurality of four justices along with Justice Scalia would overrule Roe, Blackmun argued, “(the first silently, the other explicitly)” and would return to the states “virtually unfettered authority to control the quintessentially intimate, personal, and life-directing decision whether to carry a fetus to term.” Blackmun chided the plurality decision: “Never in my memory has a plurality announced a judgment of this Court that so foments disregard for the law and for our standing decisions.” It is filled with “winks and nods and knowing glances” to those who would do away with Roe explicitly. “I fear for the future. I fear for the liberty and equality of the millions of women who have lived and come of age in the 16 years since Roe was decided,” Blackmun concluded.99 It wouldn’t be long before state legislatures began crafting restrictions on abortion rights and services, and before a string of Court decisions further chipped away at the fundamental decision in Roe v. Wade. One of those states was Pennsylvania, which in 1988 and 1989 tightened its abortion laws by requiring consent and imposing a twenty-four-hour waiting period. A minor would have to obtain consent from one parent (or through the courts) and an adult woman would have to indicate that she had notified her husband that she intended to have an abortion. Did these provisions violate the protections outlined in Roe? In a bitter five-to-four decision, the Supreme Court in Planned Parenthood v. Casey upheld most of the Pennsylvania law, but added a new standard, the “undue burden” test.100 In an unusual move, three justices—Sandra Day O’Connor, Anthony Kennedy, and David Souter—designated themselves as principal authors of the decision. The “undue burden” standard was defined as a “substantial obstacle in the path of a woman seeking an abortion before the fetus attains viability.” The Court struck down just the requirement that a woman notify her husband, because it was an “undue burden.” But more significantly, the Court upheld the basic principles of Roe. Five justices, all nominated by Republican presidents, decided to reaffirm Roe.101 Justice John Paul Stevens thought for sure that Roe would be overturned. He formed that opinion when in conference a draft opinion overturning Roe was circulated by Rehnquist. But what happened was that Anthony Kennedy, a Catholic appointed by Bush, had changed his mind, deciding not to overturn Roe. Justices O’Connor and Souter had persuaded Kennedy to change his mind, wrote journalist Robert Barnes, “convincing him that the court’s reputation would suffer if it toppled the landmark ruling.”102 The US Department of Justice, through Solicitor General Kenneth W. Starr, filed an amicus curiae brief, asking for the Court to overrule Roe v. Wade. This was the fifth time since Roe that the Department of Justice had asked that the decision be overturned.103 While Planned Parenthood v. Casey upheld the basic ruling of Roe, it also opened up the door for more restrictive state policies, with the abortion battles still looming today.

POLICIES DELAYED OR DENIED

Global Warming “A Dire Forecast for ‘Greenhouse’ Earth” was the headline of the Washington Post on June 11, 1986,104 following the testimony of Dr. James E. Hansen and others before Senate Environment

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and Public Works Committee Subcommittee on Environmental Pollution, chaired by Senator Claiborne Pell (Republican—Rhode Island). The two-day hearing was titled “Ozone Depletion, the Greenhouse Effect, and Climate Change.” In his opening statement, Pell warned of the “the buildup of greenhouse gases, which threaten to warm the Earth to unprecedented levels. Such a warming could, within the next 50 to 75 years, produce enormous changes in a climate that has remained fairly stable for thousands of years.”

Photo 9.3 James E. Hansen (b. 1941), climate scientist. National Aeronautics and Space Administration. Source: NASA.

Dr. Hansen of the Goddard Space Flight Center noted that, within fifteen years, global temperatures would rise “to a level which has not existed on Earth in the past 100,000 years.” Hansen was joined by Robert Watson, director of the upper atmosphere program at NASA, who later would go on to chair the United Nations Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC).105 Watson testified that “global warming is inevitable. It is only a question of magnitude and time. We can expect significant changes in climate in the next few decades.” The senators listened intently. Pell stated at the hearing, “This is not a matter of Chicken Little telling us the sky is falling. The scientific evidence … is telling us we have a problem, a serious problem.” He later stated, “[T]here is a very real possibility that man—through ignorance or indifference, or both—is irreversibly altering the ability of our atmosphere to perform basic life support functions for the planet.” Two years later, on a blistering hot day in Washington, DC, the Senate Energy and Natural Resources Committee convened hearings on climate change. Again, James Hansen was the principal science expert; he warned that “the greenhouse effect has been detected and is changing our climate now.” He stated that the first five months of 1988 were warmer than any comparable period of time during the past 130 years, when measurements were first taken. Up to this time, scientists had been cautious about stating that human activity caused the warming, but Hansen said it was 99 percent certain that the warming was not a natural variation, but caused by the build-up of carbon dioxide and other artificial gases in the atmosphere. “It is time to stop waffling so much,” Hansen argued, “the evidence is pretty strong that the greenhouse effect is here.”106

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Senator Timothy E. Wirth (Democrat—Colorado), who presided over the hearing, said, “As I read it, the scientific evidence is compelling: the global climate is changing as the earth’s atmosphere gets warmer. Now, the Congress must begin to consider how we are going to slow or halt that warming trend and how we are going to cope with the changes that may already be inevitable.”107 Vice President Bush, running for the presidency in August 1988, declared in a speech in Michigan, that if he were given the chance to lead the nation, he would tackle environmental problems, especially climate change: “Those who think we’re powerless to do anything about the greenhouse effect are forgetting about the White House effect.”108 Unfortunately, over the years, the “White House effect” and the “congressional effect,” for that matter, have been underwhelming. An exasperated James Hansen, thirty years after his 1988 testimony, summed up climate change efforts: All we’ve done is agree there’s a problem. We agreed that in 1992 [the Rio de Janeiro Earth Summit] and re-agreed it again in Paris [agreement on 2015 climate accord]. We haven’t acknowledged what is required to solve it. Promises like Paris don’t mean much, it’s wishful thinking. It’s a hoax that governments have played on us since the 1990s.109

Permanent Storage of Nuclear Waste In 1982, Congress tackled the problem of the storage of high-level radioactive waste, materials coming both from the federal government and from civilian nuclear reactors. The Nuclear Waste Policy Act (1982) created a timetable and procedure for creating a permanent, underground federal storage facility. In December 1987, the Nuclear Waste Policy Act was amended, designating a site at Yucca Mountain, Nevada, as the permanent nuclear waste site. Situated some ninety miles west of Las Vegas, in a desolate section of Eureka County, Yucca Mountain was considered geologically inert, with storage caverns 1,000 feet below the surface and 1,000 feet above the water table. This facility would be the spent nuclear fuel repository for tens of thousands—even millions—of years. But the decision to choose Yucca Mountain never sat well with many Nevadans, who to this day call the 1987 amendment the “Screw Nevada” bill.110 One of the provisions of the Nuclear Waste Policy Act allowed any state to veto the nuclear depository location. Nevada did just that, but it was overridden by Congress. Legal fights and court suits ensured. Then in 2009, with the new Obama administration, Energy secretary Steven Chu announced that Yucca Mountain would no longer be considered. About $7 billion had been collected in a nuclear waste depository fund, the great bulk of which was spent on Yucca Mountain, but in 2013, a federal appeals judge halted the required payments, noting that there no longer was a plan to have a single nuclear waste deposit site.111 A 2014 editorial in the Chicago Tribune noted that President Obama, citing safety concerns, had scrapped plans for the Yucca Mountain nuclear waste repository. The Tribune saw it differently: “Obama has Harry Reid concerns.”112 Reid, the Senate majority leader, happened to be from Nevada and opposed the project; Obama listened. A Nuclear Regulatory Commission study, nearly completed, showed that the site would be safe for storage and be protected from the threat of terrorists; nevertheless, politics prevailed. With Yucca Mountain shelved, tons of spent nuclear fuel were piling up at commercial sites. Illinois had 1,000 metric tons of spent nuclear fuel stored at the Exelon’s decommissioned Zion nuclear power plant, the largest stockpile of any state at the time.113 “Obama’s shortsighted decision has stranded 72,000 metric tons of spent nuclear fuel at 74 sites scattered in 34 states,” noted the editorial, citing a study of the Nuclear Energy Institute, a Washington-based nuclear industry trade group.

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When he took office, Donald J. Trump reversed the Obama waste repository decision. In three separate funding bills, President Trump urged that $120 million be put into reopening the Yucca Mountain site. But then in February 2020, Trump reversed himself, in a tweet: “Nevada, I hear you on Yucca Mountain and my administration will RESPECT you!” Trump barely lost Nevada in 2016 and was hoping to get back in the good graces of 2020 Nevada voters (still, he lost again).114 Nearly forty years after the creation of the Nuclear Waste Policy Act, there still is no permanent solution to safe and permanent disposal of nuclear waste.

Notes 1 “The History of Cable,” California Cable & Telecommunications Association, n.d., https://www. calcable.org/learn/history-of-cable/ (accessed March 16, 2020). 2 Ken Auletta, Three Blind Mice: How the TV Networks Lost Their Way (New York: Random House, 1991). 3 Population of United States in 1980: 236,542,199, having added 23.2 million, or 11.4 percent increase from 1970. 4 Population and Area (Historical Census), US Bureau of the Census, https://www2.census.gov/prod2/ statcomp/documents/1991-02.pdf (accessed March 19, 2020). Gaining one congressional district were these states: Arizona, Georgia, North Carolina, Virginia, and Washington; losing one were Iowa, Kansas, Kentucky, Louisiana, Massachusetts, Montana, New Jersey, and West Virginia; losing two were Illinois, Michigan, Ohio, and Pennsylvania. 5 Zita Arocha, “1980s Set to Set Mark As Top Immigration Decade,” Washington Post, June 23, 1988. 6 John David Marotta, “Volker’s Bear: The Bear Market of 1982,” Forbes, October 11, 2017, https:// www.forbes.com/sites/davidmarotta/2017/10/11/volkers-bear-the-bear-market-of-1982/# 590e4fc85a29 (accessed March 21, 2020). 7 Ben Carlson, “The Charts Show Just How Awful the Economy Was When Paul Volcker Took Over as Fed Chairman,” Fortune, December 9, 2019, https://fortune.com/2019/12/09/charts-1973-19174economy-paul-volcker-fed-chair/ (accessed March 21, 2020). 8 Patterson, Restless Giant, 246–48. 9 Lee E. Ohanian, “Competition and the Decline of the Rust Belt,” Federal Reserve Bank of Minneapolis, December 20, 2014, https://www.minneapolisfed.org/article/2014/competition-andthe-decline-of-the-rust-belt (accessed March 23, 2020). Permit me to tell a personal vignette in Rust Belt history. In the summer of 1963, I worked as a “punk” (apprentice) ironworker at the US Steel plant in Gary, Indiana. I worked with a civil engineer, who one day picked up a strange piece of metal. It was an 8-inch bolt. The engineer hit the bolt with his hammer. “Ping,” it sounded; a clean, distinct ring that only came from high-quality, high-tensile steel. “Japanese,” he said. “First one I ever saw. I knew they made better stuff than us. We’re so screwed up. Our plant is so inefficient, and we make such crappy stuff.” But then, he reassured this college kid, “but don’t worry, we’re too big to fail. We won’t be going anywhere.” 10 “Total Vehicle Manufacturers in US Market, 1961–2016,” Knoema, April 18, 2018, https://knoema. com/infographics/floslle/top-vehicle-manufacturers-in-the-us-market-1961-2016 (accessed March 24, 2020). 11 Anne Trubek, “Introduction,” in Anne Trubek, ed., Voices from the Rust Belt (New York: Picador, 2018), 1–2, Mondale quote at 1. 12 Seth Mydans, “Failures of City Blamed for Riot in Los Angeles,” New York Times, October 22, 1992. The quote is a summarization of the Williams-Webster report. Lou Cannon and Gary Lee, “Much of the Blame Is Laid on Chief Gates,” Washington Post, May 2, 1992. 13 “Timeline of HIV/AIDS,” US Department of Health and Human Services, HIV.gov website, https:// www.hiv.gov/sites/default/files/aidsgov-timeline.pdf (accessed February 26, 2020). 14 German Lopez, “The Reagan Administration’s Unbelievable Response to the HIV/AIDS Epidemic,” Vox, December 1, 2015, https://www.vox.com/2015/12/1/9828348/ronald-reagan-hiv-aids (accessed February 26, 2020). A short video, When Aids Was Funny, produced by Scott Calinico, showed White House press conference footage from 1982, 1983, and 1984. Journalist Richard Lawson described Speakes’s “snickering, homophobic jokes, and disturbing air of uninterest.” Richard Lawson, “The Reagan Administration’s Chilling Response to AIDS Crisis is Chilling,” Vanity Fair, December 1, 2015, https://www.vanityfair.com/news/2015/11/reagan-administration-response-to-aids-crisis; The press conferences on YouTube, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yAzDn7tE1lU.

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15 Walt Odets, “Ronald Reagan Presided Over 89,343 Deaths to AIDS and Did Nothing,” Literary Hub, July 22, 2019, https://lithub.com/ronald-reagan-presided-over-89343-deaths-to-aids-and-didnothing/ (accessed March 11, 2020); excerpted from Walt Odets, Out of the Shadows: Reimagining Gay Men’s Lives (New York: Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 2019). 16 Text of “President Reagan’s AmfAR Speech,” PBS Frontline: Age of AIDS, May 31, 1987, https:// www.pbs.org/wgbh/pages/frontline/aids/docs/amfar.html (accessed April 9, 2020). 17 Shilts quoted in Chris Geidner, “Nancy Reagan Turned Down Rock Hudson’s Plea For Help Nine Weeks Before He Died,” Buzzfeed, February 2, 2015; https://www.buzzfeednews.com/article/ chrisgeidner/nancy-reagan-turned-down-rock-hudsons-plea-for-help-seven-we (accessed March 13, 2020). Randy Shilts, And the Band Played On: Politics, People, and the AIDS Epidemic, rev. ed. (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 2007), 575–82. 18 Peter W. Huber, “Ronald Reagan’s Quiet War on AIDS,” CJ, City-Journal, August 2016, https:// www.city-journal.org/html/ronald-reagans-quiet-war-aids-14783.html (accessed February 26, 2020). 19 Philip M. Boffey, “Federal Efforts on AIDS Criticized as Gravely Weak,” New York Times, October 30, 1986. Institute of Medicine and National Academy of Sciences Confronting AIDS: Directions for Public Health, Health Care, and Research (Washington, DC: National Academies Press, 1986); https:// doi.org/10.17226/938 (accessed March 13, 2020). 20 Karen Tumulty, “Anthony Fauci Fights Outbreaks with Sledgehammer of Truth,” Washington Post, March 11, 2020; David Davis, “‘Understanding AIDS’—The National AIDS Mailer,” Public Health Reports 106 (6) (November–December 1991): 656–62; https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/ PMC1580336/?page=1 (accessed March 13, 2020). 21 HIV stands for human immunodeficiency virus. 22 “Today’s HIV/AIDS Epidemic,” Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, August 2016, https:// www.cdc.gov/nchhstp/newsroom/docs/factsheets/todaysepidemic-508.pdf (accessed April 9, 2020). 23 A later alumna of Mountain States Legal Foundation was Gale Norton, who became secretary of the Interior during the Bush II administration. 24 Bill Prochnau, “The Watts Controversy,” Washington Post, June 30, 1981. 25 Dale Russakoff, “Six GOP Senators Call for Watts’ Resignation,” Washington Post, September 23, 1983. Watt, as secretary of the Interior, decided to ban the Beach Boys from the Washington Mall during July 4 celebrations. They were for Watts, the “wrong element.” Instead, Las Vegas crooner Wayne Newton, a friend of Reagan’s, would take their place. Phil McCombs, “Watt Outlaws Rock Music on Mall for July 4,” Washington Post, Washington, DC, April 6, 1983. 26 Russakoff, “Six GOP Senators Call for Watts’ Resignation.” 27 Stephen R. Weisman, “Watt Quits Post; President Accepts ‘With Reluctance,’” New York Times, October 13, 1983. The President said Mr. Watt had done “an outstanding job as a member of my Cabinet and in his stewardship of the natural resources of the nation” in his two and a half years in the Cabinet. 28 Lavelle served a three-month jail sentence, was fined $10,000, and put on five years’ probation. Years later, in 2004, she was convicted of wire fraud and making false statements to the FBI, and served fifteen months in prison. Press release, US Department of Justice, Central District of California, January 10, 2005, “Former EPA Official Sent to Federal Prison for Defrauding Owner of Los Angeles Hazmat Site,” http://www.justice.gov/usao/cac/Pressroom/pr2005/002.html (accessed February 26, 2020). 29 Editorial, “Mrs. Gorsuch Pollutes the EPA,” New York Times, February 16, 1983. 30 Brady Dennis and Chris Mooney, “Neil Gorsuch’s Mother Once Ran the EPA. It Didn’t Go Well,” Washington Post, February 1, 2017. 31 Martin Tolchin, “The Troubles of Tip O’Neill,” New York Times, August 16, 1981. 32 Thomas P. O’Neill, Jr. with William Novak, Man of the House: The Life and Political Memoirs of Speaker Tip O’Neill (New York: Random House, 1987), 341. 33 Ibid., 345. 34 Ibid. 35 Lou Cannon, President Reagan: The Role of a Lifetime (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1991), 837. 36 Sean Wilentz, The Age of Reagan: A History, 1974–2008 (New York: Harper Collins, 2009), 1. 37 See Dennis W. Johnson, Democracy for Hire: A History of American Political Consulting (New York: Oxford University Press, 2017), 271–74. 38 Kathleen J. McInnis, “Goldwater-Nichols at 30: Defense Reform and Issues for Congress,” Congressional Research Service, R44474, June 2, 2016, https://fas.org/sgp/crs/natsec/R44474.pdf; Justin Johnson, “Define the Goldwater-Nichols Problem Before Trying to Solve It,” The Heritage Foundation, July 12, 2016, https://www.heritage.org/defense/report/2017-ndaa-define-the-goldwaternichols-problem-trying-solve-it (accessed March 12, 2020).

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39 Tolchin, “The Troubles of Tip O’Neill.” 40 Barbara L. Sinclair, Unorthodox Lawmaking: New Legislative Processes in the US Congress, 5th ed. (Washington, DC: Sage CQ Press, 2017), 6. 41 John A. Farrell, “What Today’s Democrats Can Learn from Tip O’Neill’s Reagan Strategy,” Politico, November 24, 2016, https://www.politico.com/magazine/story/2016/11/donald-trump-democrats-tipo-neill-214467 (accessed February 24, 2020); also John A. Farrell, Tip O’Neill and the Democratic Century (Boston: Back Bay Books, 2002). 42 Tolchin, “The Troubles of Tip O’Neill.” 43 Wright quoted in Adam Clymer, “Jim Wright Dies at 92: House Speaker Resigned Amid Ethics Charges,” New York Times, May 6, 2015. Wright, charged with sixty-nine counts by the Ethics Committee, was accused of improperly accepting $145,000 in gifts from a Fort Worth, Texas, developer, and for skirting House gift rules by accepting bribe money, disguised as royalties for the bulk sales of his memoirs. Gingrich was no slouch when it came to ethics violations. He was the first House speaker to be charged with ethics violations, was reprimanded by the House by a vote of 395–28, and forced to pay a $300,000 fine. 44 Julian E. Zelizer, Burning Down the House: Newt Gingrich, the Fall of a Speaker, and the Rise of the New Republican Party (New York: Penguin, 2020), 12. 45 Remini, The House, 458. 46 See various headline reactions, Patricia Murphy, “From Bush’s Lips to Our Ears: To Heck with Campaign Promises,” Roll Call, December 4, 2018, https://rollcall.com/2018/12/04/from-bushs-lipsto-our-ears-to-heck-with-campaign-promises/ (accessed February 2, 2020). 47 Regan, A Constitutional History of the US Supreme Court, 211–71. 48 For example, Bruce R. Bartlett, Reaganomics: Supply Side Economics in Action (Westport: Arlington House Publishers, 1981). 49 O’Neill, Man of the House, 343. 50 Paul Wiseman, “Derided by Critics, Trickle Down Economics Gets Another Try,” Associated Press, November 17, 2017, https://apnews.com/570b325ec810468c857cb09723ad1fe7 (accessed February 21, 2020). 51 Richard E. Cohen, Rostenkowski: The Pursuit of Power and the End of Old Politics (Chicago: Ivan Dee Publishers, 1999), 115–37; James L. Merriner, Mr. Chairman: Power in Dan Rostenkowski’s America (Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press, 1999). 52 Jodie T. Allen, “The Biggest Tax Increase in American History,” Slate, August 16, 1996, https://slate. com/news-and-politics/1996/08/the-biggest-tax-increase-in-history.html (accessed February 18, 2020). 53 Figures from Kimberly Amadeo, “US Budget Deficit by President,” The Balance, January 31, 2020, https://www.thebalance.com/deficit-by-president-what-budget-deficits-hide-3306151#the-fourpresidents-with-the-worst-deficits-so-far (accessed February 18, 2020). 54 John William Ellwood, “Congress Cuts the Budget: The Omnibus Reconciliation Act of 1981,” Public Budgeting and Finance 2 (1) (Spring 1982): 50–64. Gramm became a Republican in 1984. 55 O’Neill, Jr., Man of the House, 345–46. 56 Ibid. 57 Lawrence J. McAndrews, Presidents and the Poor: America Battles Poverty, 1964–2017 (Lawrence: University Press of Kansas, 2018), 133. 58 Bernard Weinraub, “Washington Talk: Briefing,” New York Times, September 28, 1981. A similar outcry came when the US Navy wanted to purchase $640 toilet seats against for its P3 Orion submarine-hunting aircraft. In 1985, Senator William S. Cohen (Republican—Maine) noted, “gives new meaning to the word ‘throne.’” Lockheed, the company that made the toilet seats acknowledged that $640.09 for each toilet seat was too much, noting that it should have been just $554.78; it planned to reimburse the Navy $4,606.74 for the overcharge. Fred Hiatt, “Now, the $600 Toilet Seat,” Washington Post, February 5, 1985. 59 Farrell, Tip O’Neill and the Democratic Century, 570–82, Gingrich and O’Donnell quotes at 580. 60 John A. Farrell, “What Today’s Democrats Can Learn from Tip O’Neill’s Reagan Strategy,” Politico, November 24, 2016, https://www.politico.com/magazine/story/2016/11/donald-trump-democrats-tipo-neill-214467 (accessed February 24, 2020). 61 Murray Weidenbaum, Rendezvous with Reality: The American Economy After Reagan (New York: Basic Books, 1988), 4. 62 David A. Stockman, The Triumph of Politics: How the Reagan Revolution Failed (New York: Harper & Row, 1986), 376, 385.

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63 John A. Svahn and Mary Ross, “Social Security Amendments of 1983: Legislative History and Summary of Provisions,” Social Security Bulletin 46 (7) (July 1983), https://www.ssa.gov/policy/docs/ ssb/v46n7/v46n7p3.pdf (accessed February 27, 2020). For a comprehensive listing of the 1983 amendment provisions, see “Summary of Social Security Amendments of 1983,” Social Security Administration, n.d., https://www.ssa.gov/history/1983amend.html (accessed February 27, 2020). 64 Juan Williams, “President, On a Note of Bipartisan, Signs Social Security Bill,” Washington Post, April 20, 1983. 65 Ibid. 66 Brenton Smith, “Social Security Deal of 1983 Was a Punt,” The Hill, December 19, 2014, https:// thehill.com/blogs/congress-blog/economy-budget/227610-sociel-security-deal-of-1983-was-a-punt (accessed February 27, 2020). 67 The official title is the Balanced Budget and Emergency Deficit Control Act of 1985. Harry S. Havens, “Gramm-Rudman-Hollings: Origins and Implementation,” Public Budgeting & Finance 6 (3) (September 1986): 4–24; John W. Ellwood, “The Politics of the Enactment and Implementation of Gramm-Rudman-Hollings: Why Congress Cannot Address the Deficit Dilemma,” Harvard Journal on Legislation 25 (1988): 553–76. Megan Suzanne Lynch, “Statutory Budget Controls in Effect Between 1985 and 2002,” US Congress, Congressional Research Service, July 1, 2011, R41901, https://fas.org/ sgp/crs/misc/R41901.pdf (accessed March 4, 2020). 68 Jackie Calmes, “Idea Rebounds: Automatic Cuts to Curb Deficits,” New York Times, May 15, 2011. 69 Bowsher v. Synar, 478 US 714 (1986), https://supreme.justia.com/cases/federal/us/478/714/#tabopinion-1956785. The Court ruled that as an official of the legislative branch, the Comptroller General, who was charged with making sequestrations, could not compel presidential action. This meant that no automatic mechanism was in effect to enforce the deficit targets. 70 The official title was the Balanced Budget and Emergency Deficit Control Reaffirmation Act (1987). 71 Richard Doyle and Jerry McCaffery, “The Budget Enforcement Act of 1990: The Path to No Fault Budgeting,” Public Budgeting & Finance 11 (1) (March 1991): 25–40. 72 Calmes, “Idea Rebounds.” 73 David E. Rosenbaum, “The Tax Reform Act of 1986: How the Measure came together; A Tax Bill for the Textbooks,” New York Times, October 23, 1986. 74 Packwood would later be expelled from the Senate for sexual harassment and other indiscretions. See Trip Gabriel, “The Trials of Bob Packwood,” New York Times, August 29, 1993. 75 Jeffrey H. Birnbaum and Alan S. Murray, Showdown at Gucci Gulch: Lawyers, Lobbyists, and the Unlikely Triumph of Tax Reform (New York: Vintage, 1988), 287. 76 Ibid. 77 Joseph Bishop-Henchman, “Back to the Future? Lessons from the Tax Reform Act of 1986,” Tax Foundation, September 28, 2012, https://taxfoundation.org/back-future-lessons-tax-reform-act-1986/ (accessed February 27, 2020). 78 Birnbaum and Murray, Showdown at Gucci Gulch, 287. 79 Stuart E. Eizenstat, “Back to the Future: Reagan, Trump and Bipartisan Tax Reform, Brookings Institution, September 27, 2017, https://www.brookings.edu/blog/fixgov/2017/09/27/back-to-thefuture-reagan-trump-and-bipartisan-tax-reform/ (accessed October 22, 2021). 80 Nicholas Laham, Ronald Reagan and the Politics of Immigration Reform (Westport: Praeger, 2000), xvii, 1–31. 81 Deborah Anker, “The Refugee Act of 1980: An Historical Perspective,” In Defense of the Alien 5 (1982): 89–94 at 89–90. 82 On the legislative history, see Alan K. Simpson, “The Politics of Immigration Reform,” The International Migration Review 18 (3) (1984): 486–501. 83 Peter H. Schuck, “Immigration Law and Policy in the 1990s,” Yale Law & Policy Review 7 (1) (1989): 1–19. 84 Roberto Suro, “1986 Amnesty Law Is Seen As Failing To Slow Alien Tide,” New York Times, June 18, 1989; Plumer, “Congress Tried to Fix Immigration Back in 1986,” citing Pew Research Center statistics. 85 John D. Skrentny, “Obama’s Immigration Reform: A Tough Sell for a Grand Bargain,” in Lawrence R. Jacobs and Theda Skocpol, eds., Reaching for a New Deal: Ambitious Governance, Economic Meltdown, and Polarized Politics in Obama’s First Two Years (New York: Russell Sage Foundation, 2011), 273–320, quote at 274.

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86 Warren L. Leiden and David R. Neal, “Highlights of the US Immigration Act of 1990,” Fordham International Law Journal 14 (1) (1990): 328–39. 87 Arlene Mayerson, “The History of the Americans With Disabilities Act: A Movement Perspective,” Disability Rights Education & Defense Fund, 1992, https://dredf.org/about-us/publications/thehistory-of-the-ada/ (accessed February 24, 2020). 88 Ibid. 89 Doris Zames Fleischer and Frieda Zames, The Disability Rights Movement: From Charity to Confrontation (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 2011), 88–109, quote at 92. 90 “A Guide to Disability Rights Law,” US Department of Justice, Civil Rights Division, Disability Rights Section, n.d., https://www.ada.gov/cguide.htm#anchor62335 (accessed February 28, 2020). 91 Ann Devroy, “In Emotion-Filled Ceremony, Bush Signs Rights Law for America’s Disabled,” Washington Post, July 27, 1990. 92 For an overview of the legislative history, see Henry A. Waxman, “An Overview of the Clean Air Act Amendments of 1990,” Environmental Law 21 (4) (The Clean Air Act Amendments of 1990: A Symposium) (1991): 1721–1816. 93 Dingell quoted in Richard L. Berke, “Debate in House on Clean Air Bill,” New York Times, May 22, 1990. 94 Waxman, “An Overview of the Clean Air Act Amendments of 1990,” 1724. 95 Keith Schneider, “The Environmental Impact of President Bush,” New York Times, April 25, 1991. 96 “Air Quality Trends Show Clean Air Progress,” Environmental Protection Agency, https://gispub. epa.gov/air/trendsreport/2019/#highlights (accessed March 9, 2019). 97 Kimberly Amadeo, “NAFTA’s Purpose and Its History,” The Balance, March 31, 2020, https://www. thebalance.com/history-of-nafta-3306272 (accessed April 4, 2020); Lael Brainard, “Trade Policies in the 1990s,” Brookings Institution, June 29, 2001, https://www.brookings.edu/research/trade-policy-inthe-1990s/ (accessed April 4, 2020). 98 Webster v. Reproductive Health Services, 492 US 490 (1989), https://www.law.cornell.edu/supremecourt/ text/492/490. For background, Carolina J. Abboud, “Webster v. Reproductive Health Services (1989),” Embryo Project Encyclopedia, February 26, 2017, http://embryo.asu.edu/handle/10776/13053 (accessed February 20, 2020). 99 492 US 490, at 538. 100 Planned Parenthood of Southeastern Pennsylvania v. Casey, 505 US 833 (1992); https://supreme.justia. com/cases/federal/us/505/833/#tab-opinion-1959105 (accessed March 10, 2020). 101 Those five: O’Connor (nominated by Reagan), Kennedy (Reagan), Souter (Bush), Stevens (Ford), and Blackmun (Nixon). 102 Robert Barnes, “The Last Time the Supreme Court Was Invited to Overturn Roe v. Wade, a Surprising Majority Was Unwilling,” Washington Post, May 29, 2019; John Paul Stevens, The Making of a Justice: Reflections on My First 94 Years (New York: Little, Brown, 2019) 280–82. 103 505 US 833, at 843. 104 Cass Peterson, “A Dire Forecast for ‘Greenhouse’ Earth,” Washington Post, June 11, 1986. 105 Chris Mooney, “30 Years Ago Scientists Warned Congress on Global Warming. What They Said Sounds Eerily Familiar,” Washington Post, June 11, 2016, https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/ energy-environment/wp/2016/06/11/30-years-ago-scientists-warned-congress-on-global-warmingwhat-they-said-sounds-eerily-familiar/?utm_term=.18167380733e (accessed February 21, 2017). 106 Philip Shabecoff, “Global Warming Has Begun, Expert Tells Senate,” New York Times, June 24, 1988. 107 Wirth quoted in Ibid. 108 Bush quoted in Schneider, “The Environmental Impact of President Bush.” 109 Hansen quoted in Oliver Milman, “Thirty Years On, Ex-NASA Scientist World is ‘Failing Miserably’ to Address Climate Change,” The Guardian, June 19, 2018, https://www.theguardian.com/ environment/2018/jun/19/james-hansen-nasa-scientist-climate-change-warning (accessed March 10, 2020). 110 James Conca, “Trump Rejects Yucca Mountain Nuke Dump in Bid for Nevada Votes,” Forbes, February 10, 2020, https://www.forbes.com/sites/jamesconca/2020/02/10/trump-dumps-nevadanuclear-dump-in-tweet/#446b0f0c492e (accessed March 12, 2020). 111 Matthew L. Wald, “Energy Dept. is Told to Stop Collecting Fee for Nuclear Waste Disposal,” New York Times, November 19, 2013. “Civilian Nuclear Waste Disposal,” Congressional Research

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Service, Report RL33461 (September 6, 2018). https://fas.org/sgp/crs/misc/RL33461.pdf (accessed March 12, 2020). 112 Editorial, “Harry Reid v. Yucca Mountain,” Chicago Tribune, October 31, 2014, https://www. chicagotribune.com/opinion/editorials/ct-yucca-nuclear-edit-1103-20141031-story.html (accessed March 12, 2020). 113 By 2020, the spent fuel stored in the decommissioned San Onofre nuclear power plant near San Diego, California, was 2,000 tons, and the total of 75,000 from 60 nuclear sites. Conca, “Trump Rejects Yucca Mountain Nuke Dump in Bid for Nevada Votes.” 114 Ibid.

Chapter 10

Coming Into the Twenty-first Century: 1993–2000

AMERICA DURING THIS ERA This was an era that brought prosperity and promise through a booming economy, the digital revolution and the dot.com boom and bust. For the first time in many years, the federal budget ran a surplus, thanks in large measure to the robust economy. But it was also a time of shifting cultural values, of increased disparity between the wealthiest and the rest of society, of the disturbances and rumblings of homegrown militias movements, continued racial tension, and explosive increases in both legal and illegal immigrants. It was also an era of rising political polarization and obstruction, of scandal and hubris engulfing the president and his administration. Traditional family values, many conservatives feared, were losing ground, and there was plenty of evidence that society and its norms were shifting. Divorce rates were high, young adults were waiting longer to get married, couples more often than before were living together unmarried, there was greater sexual freedom, and rising female employment. Television, the main source of entertainment, was becoming more daring in subjects explored and language used. A 2003 survey found that two-thirds of all television shows in prime time (7:00 to 11:00 p.m.) contained some sexual content.1 Racial tension abounded during this era. The Rodney King beating, the acquittal of the police by an all-white jury, and the ensuing rioting in Los Angeles were the prelude to the sensational trial of O.J. Simpson, the popular former football star and television pitchman. After a melodramatic eight-month trial from January to October 1995, Simpson was found not guilty. White viewers were generally astonished; blacks felt vindicated and many felt it was payback for the Rodney King police verdict. The digital world was opening up during this era. Text messaging was developed in 1992, the first compact-sized cell phone, the Nokia 1011, came on the market in 1994. Google, with its search engine capabilities, was launched in 1998. It was also the decade when the Internet and online communications were beginning to come into their own. Social media sites like MySpace, Facebook, Twitter, YouTube and many others were still a decade away. But Americans were getting a taste of news and opinion going viral. The scandals and subsequent impeachment trial of Bill Clinton coincided with the revolution in online communications. An online news aggregation site, called the Drudge Report, collected news, rumor, and gossip, and made them instantly available to an eager audience. Matt Drudge first reported that Newsweek had information about Clinton and his intern, Monica Lewinsky. Newsweek sat on the story, waiting to verify it before publication; Drudge had no such hesitation. Not surprisingly, his site was soon attracting millions of followers. Probably the first time many citizens ever downloaded on item from the Internet came when the Starr Report on President Clinton was released in September 1998. Congress made the DOI: 10.4324/9781003293538-14

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report available on seven government websites, America Online saw a 30 percent surge in traffic, and Associated Press had a twenty-fold increase. Altogether, it was estimated that 12 percent of adult Americans (and millions more throughout the world) downloaded the controversial report with its salacious findings. Around the same time, a husband–wife team of Wes Boyd and Joan Blades spent $89 and created a website called “Moveon.org,” hoping to rally citizens who were fed up with the impeachment proceedings against President Clinton. Some 2 million emails were sent to Congress from angry MoveOn.org followers. By the end of 2001, Congress was receiving 1 million email messages a day from disgruntled citizens of all political stripes on all kinds of subjects.2 Newspapers were about to experience life-threatening challenges, from loss of revenue to increased digital competition. One of the financial backbones of the newspaper business had been the revenue from classified ads. But in 1995, digital entrepreneur Craig Newmark developed a modest, even primitive, website called Craig’s List, where individuals and companies could sell and buy items free of charge. Soon Craig’s List became a nationwide (and worldwide) phenomenon, cutting into the heart of the newspaper industry’s classified ads revenue. In addition, newspapers saw news content competition coming from Google News (2002), Yahoo News (1996), the Drudge Report (1997), Huffington Post (2005), and other sources. It was also a time of extensive natural disasters. In 1992, Hurricane Andrew struck Florida and other states along the Gulf Coast, causing at least $26 billion in damages. Not until Katrina in 2005 would there be such a destructive and costly hurricane. The following year, the “storm of the century” hit the East coast, with blizzard-like conditions, costing 300 lives and some $6 billion in property damage. Also in 1993, flooding along the Mississippi River again wreaked havoc, with the loss of fifty lives and $15–20 billion in property damage. The Northridge, California earthquake in 1994 left seventy-two persons dead and $20 billion in damages. In 1995, a severe heat wave in Chicago killed 739 elderly and urban poor people. Then in 1999, a violent tornado in Oklahoma killed fifty people, causing $1 billion in damages. More and more, it seemed, unusual weather patterns, even hundred-year events, were becoming commonplace. In addition, 1998 was the hottest year in the hottest decade of the twentieth century. This era saw international terrorism impact on America. Historian George C. Herring observed that the Clinton administration was “the first to deal systematically” with the newest national security threat, international terrorism.3 First came the attack on the World Trade Center in 1993, then the US Air Force barracks in Saudi Arabia in 1996, the American embassies in Kenya and Tanzania, the bombing of the USS Cole right before the 2000 election. By 2000, it was estimated that Al Qaeda had agents and affiliates operating in some sixty countries.4

The Era by the Numbers Following the 2000 census, the United States had grown by 13.2 percent over the past decade. In 2000, there were 281,421,906 individuals living in America, while in 1990, there were 248,709,873. Every state increased in population, but the growth was most dramatic in the Sunbelt, with a 14.8 percent increase in the South, and a 10.4 increase in the West. California remained the most populous state (33.8 million residents, a 13.8 percent increase from 1990), followed by Texas (20.8 million, 22.8 percent increase), New York (19.0 million, 5.5 percent increase), Florida (16.0 million, 23.5 percent increase), and Illinois (12.4 million, 8.6 percent increase). Three western states had the biggest increases in population: Nevada (up 66.3 percent, with a 2000 population of 2.0 million), Arizona (up 40.0 percent, 5.1 million), and Colorado (30.6 percent, 4.3 million). Following the decennial census came the reapportionment of seats in the House of Representatives (and membership in the Electoral College). In the House, four states each

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gained two seats: Texas (now 32) and Florida (25), Georgia (13), and Arizona (8); four states each gained one seat: California (53), North Carolina (13), Colorado (7), and Nevada (3). Losing two House seats were New York (now 29) and Pennsylvania (19); eight other states lost one seat each. Even with increases in their population, Illinois and New York could not keep up with the greater increases in the Sunbelt. Immigration, both legal and illegal, exploded during this era. During the 1970s, there were 4.5 million legal immigrants admitted per year; in the 1980s, there were 7.3 million annually; in the 1990s, there were 9.1 million annually. Many millions more came to the United States illegally. Primarily the immigrants in this era came from Mexico, Central America, and the Caribbean, and they mostly settled in the same six states as they did in the 1970s and 1980: California, Texas, Florida, New Jersey, Illinois, and New York. By 2000, California’s population was 27 percent foreign-born, and more than half of its population was Hispanic, Asian, or black. Pushback came from settled, mostly white voters in California in 1994, when 59 percent of voters supported Proposition 187, which denied undocumented immigrants access to public schools, social services, and health care. The ballot issue was championed by Republican governor Pete Wilson. Within days, a federal judge halted the measure, and with a change in administration, the new governor Gray Davis, a Democrat, refused to press the issue. In 2014, Governor Jerry Brown signed legislation repealing the unenforceable provisions of Proposition 187.5 For most Americans, this was an era of good economic news. Homeownership reached 76.7 percent, the highest ever recorded. Over 18.6 million jobs were created during this time, unemployment dropped from 7.5 percent to 4 percent, the poverty rate dropped to 11.8 percent.6 In 1999, for the first time, the Dow Jones Industrial Average hit 10,000 (it topped 36,000 in 2022). As a study from the Brookings Institution pointed out, “between 1993 and 2000, the United States exhibited the best economic performance of the past three decades.” During the latter part of the 1990s, economic growth had averaged 4.5 percent a year and unemployment fell to 4 percent. During the early 1990s, the study noted, “economists would have considered these outcomes wildly unattainable.”7 The once-persistent federal budget deficits, consistently in the hundreds of billions of dollars annually during the 1980s and early 1990s, became a surplus during the rosy economic years in the late 1990s. A deficit of $290 billion (4.4 percent of gross domestic product) in Fiscal Year 1992, a record amount at the time, became a budget surplus in fiscal years 1998 through 2001, with a surplus of $236 billion (2.3 percent of GDP) in Fiscal Year 2000 alone. That would be the last year that the federal budget would enjoy a surplus of funds.8

Society Under Stress Growing Wealth Gap For wealthier families, the 1990s brought good news and financial rewards. But there was also clear evidence that the gap between the rich, the middle class, and the poor was widening. A 2000 report noted that the gap between the highest-income families and poor- and middleincome families had grown significantly between the early 1980s and 2000, remaining higher than any other in the post-World War II era.9 A detailed survey by the Federal Reserve showed that after the economic boom of the 1990s fizzled, economic disparity increased dramatically. The net worth of families in the top 10 percent jumped 69 percent, from $492,400 in 1998 to $833,600 in 2001; those families in the lowest fifth of earners rose to $7,900, just a 24 percent increase. Throughout much of the 1990s, the median accumulated wealth of the top families was about twelve times that of the

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lower- and middle-income families; but by 2001, the median net worth of top earners had jumped to twenty-two times that of the other families being compared.10 Dot.com Boom and Bust This was also the era of both the dot.com boom and the dot.com bust. Throughout the 1990s, venture capital firms poured money into Internet start-up companies, hoping for a big score. It was definitely the go-go times, with start-ups, often with hardly anything more than bright ideas and back-of-the-envelope business plans, and venture capitalists throwing money at them. To differentiate themselves from competing brands, some start-ups spent 90 percent of their budgets on advertising.11 If a start-up had a “.com” after its name, chances are venture money was chasing after it. Then in 2000 and early 2001, the dot.com bubble burst, with hundreds of start-ups filing for bankruptcy, thousands of smart money investors losing millions (even billions) of dollars. Kozmo, founded in 1998, promised to deliver small packages (six packs of beer, coffee, groceries) right to customers’ doors, free of charge. By 2001, it had burned through $250 million of investors’ money and was out of business. Pet.com launched in 1998, advertised extensively on television using a sock puppet dog; it raised $121 million, lost money on every transaction, and tanked two years later. Broadcast.com, created in 1998, claimed that it allowed people to listen to the radio over the Internet; the trouble was, few listeners at the time had the required broadband. The next year, Yahoo bought Broadcast.com for $5.7 billion; it soon went out of business. Probably the only winner was Broadcast.com owner Mark Cuban who walked away with a nice payday. Many more promising start-ups would crash, without the help of an angel investor like Yahoo. Even some of the strongest companies went through hard times. In March 2000, Amazon, selling for $107 a share in earlier months, plummeted to $7 a share; Cisco Systems would lose 86 percent of its market capitalization. Also launched in 1998, Google was soon in desperate shape, but wary investors, burned by other failures, shied away from acquiring the company, when it was up for sale at $750,000.12 Homegrown Militias, Terrorism, and Hate Crimes This era saw the capture of the Unabomber, Ted Kaczynski, a domestic terrorist and former mathematics professor, and the eleven-day siege at Ruby Ridge, Montana, at the home of white separatist, Randy Weaver, and subsequent Senate investigations of the armed federal response and fatalities. More was to follow. “Never before have so many heavily armed and totally committed individuals barricaded themselves in a fortified compound in a direct challenge to lawful federal warrants,” stated a Department of Justice report on the fifty-one-day siege of the Branch Davidian religious cult outside of Waco, Texas, in 1993.13 About 130 people—men, women, and children—lived on a seventy-seven-acre compound, followers of a man who called himself David Koresh. The federal Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, and Firearms (ATF) believed that the group had an enormous, illegal cache of arms, at least 250 guns and rifles, and hundreds of grenades. While attempting to arrest Koresh, ATF agents came under heavy fire, with four agents and six Branch Davidians killed. This led to a fifty-one-day standoff. The new US attorney general, Janet Reno, approved a raid on the compound, using tear gas. Some 600 federal agents, tanks, and armored vehicles surrounded the compound. A devastating fire started in the compound on April 19, 1993; only nine people remaining in the compound survived. Many of those dead, including children, died of close-range gunshot wounds.14 Later that day, Reno took full blame for the incident, stating “I’m accountable. The buck stops with me.”

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In response to Ruby Ridge and Waco, hundreds of Klansmen, Christian Identity adherents, and neo-Nazis met at Estes Park, Colorado, and the modern militia movement was born. Militia groups and paramilitary organizations soon sprung up in Montana, Idaho, Michigan, California, Florida, Ohio, and other states. By 1996, virtually every state had some elements of the militia movement. What motivated these movements? As the Anti-Defamation League noted, “The combination of anger at the government, fear of gun confiscation and susceptibility to elaborate conspiracy theories is what formed the core of the militia movement’s ideology.”15 Federal authorities responded, arresting members of the Arizona Viper Militia, the Washington State Militia, the West Virginia Mountaineer Militia, the Blue Ridge (Virginia) Hunt Club, the Georgia Republic Militia, the Tri-States Militia, the Montana Freemen, the Republic of Texas movement, the Michigan Militia, Western Illinois Militia, and others. Militia members had plotted (and at times attempted) to blow up power plants, nuclear facilities, federal buildings, and offices of civil rights organizations. Other right-wing extremist groups were also active: Posse Comitatus (the group that launched the “sovereign citizen” movement); Christian Identity (a virulent anti-Semitic organization); the Aryan Nation (a neo-Nazi group); the Ku Klux Klan, and others.16 In what has been described as the most deadly homegrown terrorism in American history, ex-Army sergeant and security guard Timothy McVeigh loaded a rental truck with explosives in front of the Alfred P. Murrah Federal Building in downtown Oklahoma City. The truck bomb exploded, a third of the federal building was reduced to rubble, dozens of cars were incinerated, and 300 nearby buildings were damaged or destroyed. One hundred sixty-eight people, mostly federal workers, were killed, including nineteen children in the building’s daycare facility; five hundred more were injured. Justice Department official Merrick Garland was in charge of bringing the perpetrators to justice. McVeigh and an accomplice, Terry Nichols, were quickly apprehended and prosecuted; McVeigh was executed and Nichols would serve a life sentence without parole.17 Terrorism on American soil was not confined to the homegrown variety. On February 26, 1993, a truck bomb exploded in the underground parking garage of the World Trade Center in New York, killing six people and injuring more than 1,000. Four months later, the socalled “blind sheikh,” Omar Abdel-Rahman, and several of his followers were arrested and later convicted of plotting assassinations, as well as planning to blow up the United Nations building, major federal buildings in New York, and tunnels and bridges linking the city to New Jersey. States began enacting laws that criminalized hate crimes in the 1980s and many more states enacted such laws during the 1990s. These state laws protected persons attacked because of their race, religion, or ethnicity, but few covered sexual orientation or gender expression. These laws were soon challenged, but the Supreme Court in Wisconsin v. Mitchell (1993)18 held that hate crime laws did not violate free speech so long as the laws prohibited conduct, and not mere speech. Two horrific events during this era finally brought about federal action on hate speech. In June 1998, James Byrd, Jr., a forty-nine-year-old African American man, well known and well liked in his small community of Jasper, Texas, accepted a lift in a pickup truck from three white men; Byrd had known the driver all his life. Byrd was beaten, urinated on, then tied to the back of a pickup truck and dragged for three miles; his decapitated body was dumped in front of an African American church. Four months later, near Laramie, Wyoming, Matthew Shepard, a student at the University of Wyoming, was tortured and murdered because he was gay. His body was discovered entangled in barbed wire fencing.

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In both episodes, the murderers were apprehended and convicted, but neither Texas nor Wyoming had hate crime legislation. In response to the Byrd murder, Texas enacted a hate crimes statute, but Wyoming did not. Eleven years later, in 2009, federal lawmakers stepped in with the Matthew Shepard and James Byrd, Jr., Hate Crimes Prevention Act, making it a federal crime to injure any person because of their race, religion, or national origin, or gender, sexual orientation, gender identity, or disability, if the defendant, victim, or murder weapon had crossed state lines or had a link to interstate commerce.19

THE NATIONAL GOVERNMENT

The Presidency Throughout this era, Bill Clinton was president. But unlike the disciplined and successful first year of the Reagan administration, Clinton’s first year was unfocused, at times chaotic, and soon met with fierce partisan opposition. Historian Patrick J. Maney wrote that “few presidents have observed a shorter honeymoon than Bill Clinton. No sooner had he taken office than he was swamped with controversy.”20 Coming into the White House, Clinton offered an ambitious set of policy proposals. He pledged to reform the welfare system, implement national health care for all, cut taxes for the middle class, and help working people climb out of poverty. His most prominent goal was reducing the federal deficit, pledging to cut the deficit in half by the end of his first term. Clinton’s policy agenda got off on the wrong foot by tackling a difficult and controversial issue: military service and homosexuals. Further, his ambitious plan to present a national health care proposal during the first hundred days was blunted by administration infighting, the insistence that First Lady Hillary Clinton lead it, the failure to reach out to allies, and by the utter complexity of it all. Clinton was also hobbled by missteps and scandal. Before he was even sworn into office, he had to back off a promised middle-class tax cut and clumsily retract a welcome to Haitian refugees desperate to come to America. Then came the first few weeks as president. Controversy over gays in the military was followed by “Travelgate,” where Clinton tried to fire the White House travel staff and replace them with friends of the First Lady. Later came Whitewater, the investigation into the Clintons’ involvement in a failed Arkansas land deal. Whitewater dragged on for years, and among the fifteen convictions were Clinton friends James and Susan McDougal, Arkansas governor Jim Guy Tucker, and former law partner of Hillary Clinton (and later associate attorney general), Webster L. Hubbell. Special prosecutors Robert B. Fiske, Jr., and then Kenneth W. Starr pursued the investigations; finally, they concluded that there was insufficient evidence to prosecute the Clintons.21 The road to impeachment started in 1994 with a lawsuit by a former Arkansas state employee Paula Jones, accusing Clinton of sexual harassment. The year 1998 was to be a re-set for the Clinton White House. Normally, this is the start of a lame duck presidency, where little is accomplished. But with so much wasted effort during the first six years, these last two years could be a time to refocus on policy matters. But the Monica Lewinsky episode, bursting onto the airwaves in early January 1998, totally derailed plans for a Clinton policy agenda. For the next eleven months, through subpoenas, news conferences, self-righteous politicians pontificating, and a dogged independent counsel, America’s attention was driven to sordid details of the president’s personal life and his shortcomings. It was, as two journalists described it, a “part morality tale, part soap opera, part high-stakes knife fight.”22

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The House of Representatives, Republican controlled, forged ahead with impeachment. Ultimately Clinton was impeached in the House on two counts: lying to a federal grand jury and obstruction of justice. But the Senate balked, and the president was easily acquitted on both counts. Sixty-seven senators were needed, but forty-five Democrats and ten Republicans found him not guilty on the first charge, and a 50–50 vote found him not guilty on the second. The charges were based on his conduct in the Lewinsky episode, not selling state secrets, colluding with another country, stealing funds, not inciting insurrection, or other charges that might be considered high crimes or misdemeanors. Clinton had publicly apologized to his wife, to his accuser, and to the nation. That, along with the still rising economy, was enough for most voters. During the whole episode, his approval ratings were among the highest that presidents have achieved, reaching 73 percent right after the House impeachment in December 1998.23 Just as the Senate impeachment trial was about to begin in early 1999, Clinton agreed to pay Ms. Jones $850,000 in return for her dropping the charges against him; Clinton neither acknowledged nor apologized for his alleged behavior.24 Altogether, the probes by independent counsels against the Clintons ($45.2 million) and administration officials ($32.9 million) lasted for years. Still, the most expensive probe came during the Reagan administration, with the eight-year probe of the Iran-Contra investigation conducted by Lawrence Welsh, costing $47.4 million. (During the probe of possible Russian involvement and Trump collusion in the 2016 election, the investigation, conducted by Robert S. Mueller III, cost an estimated $32 million.)25

The Congress This era saw the end of Democratic Party dominance in Congress. For decades, the Democrats controlled both the House and the Senate, and for the first two years of the Clinton administration, they increased their hold. For the new One Hundred Third Congress (1993–1995), there were 110 new House lawmakers—a full quarter of its membership—along with thirteen new senators. There were substantial gains among women and minorities. In the House, the number of women expanded from 29 to 48; in the Senate, from 2 to 6. African Americans went from 26 to 39 in the House, and Hispanic lawmakers went from 13 to 19. (In 2020, there were 101 women in the House, 26 in the Senate; 53 African Americans in the House and 3 in the Senate; 45 Hispanics in the House and 5 in the Senate; 4 Native Americans also served in the House.)26 The One Hundred Third Congress (1993–1995) was also one of the rare occasions when the White House, the House of Representatives, and the Senate were all controlled by the same party. For Democrats, this should have been the time to make political hay, and several key pieces of legislation were passed. But gridlocked became the order of the day, with a determined Republican minority doing its best to block anything that the Democratic majority tried to accomplish. Some good was accomplished during the first session: the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA) went into effect, budget deficits were reduced, and aid to the poor was increased. But altogether, the One Hundred Third Congress, which adjourned in October 1994, was, in the estimation of the Washington Post, “perhaps the worst Congress—least effective, most destructive, nastiest—in fifty years.”27 Much of this was the fault of obstructionist Republicans, the Post maintained, but Democrats were also to blame for blocking or delaying reforms on campaign finance, lobbying, trade, environmental issues, and most pointedly in national health care. Surely, things would have to improve. “The only good news as this mud

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fight finally winds down,” noted the Post in its October 7, 1994 editorial, “is that it’s hard to imagine much worse.” Contract with America On September 27, 1994, more than 300 Republican candidates for Congress stood on the US Capitol steps and, with television cameras rolling, signed the “Contract with America,” a tenpoint policy document that promised dramatic reforms if the GOP could seize the majority in the House. Newt Gingrich and other Republican reformers had been working on the Contract for months, polling members, using focus groups and surveys of the public, coming up their manifesto. Republicans spent $250,000 to place ads in TV Guide during the last weeks of the election cycle touting the Contract. Republicans won a smashing victory, gaining fifty-four seats in the House and eight in the Senate. Some would chalk the victory up to the Contract, but most voters didn’t know or understand what the Republican manifesto was about. The underlying reason for the November results was widespread dissatisfaction with Bill Clinton and congressional Democrats. For the first time in forty years, Republicans were in control of the House of Representatives.

Photo 10.1 Newt Gingrich (b. 1943), Georgia congressman, speaker of the House, conservative firebrand. Source: Gage Skidmore, photographer via Creative Commons.

Just like Franklin Roosevelt and his first one hundred days, Republicans at the beginning of the new Congress in January 1995 showed the same urgency in reforming government and putting a halt to Clinton excesses. During those first one hundred days, Republicans promised to bring about a constitutional amendment to balance the budget, cut taxes for

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businesses, families, and senior citizens, create term limits for lawmakers, enact welfare reform, get tougher on crime, and give the president a line-item veto. Gingrich pledged to reform the way Congress did business, to require lawmakers to live under the same laws that they passed for others, to cut down on committee staffs, to limit the tenure of committee chairs, and to require a three-fifths majority to raise taxes.28 Brought in to cheer on the new Republican members of Congress was Newt Gingrich’s friend and ally, Rush Limbaugh, who implored the new lawmakers to stick to their principles, never give in, and never compromise with lawmakers on the other side of the aisle. Leadership in the Senate During the One Hundred Third Congress (1993–1995), George J. Mitchell, Jr. (Democrat—Maine) was the majority leader and Robert J. Dole (Republican—Kansas) was the minority leader. Following the 1994 elections, the Republican Party gained the majority in both the House and the Senate. The Senate went from 53 Democrats and 47 Republicans in the previous congress, to 47 Democrats and 53 Republicans in the new One Hundred Fourth Congress (1995–1997). Republicans expanded their majority when Democrats Ben Nighthorse Campbell of Colorado and Richard Shelby of Alabama switched and joined the Republican Party. Dole became the majority leader and Thomas A. Daschle (Democrat—South Dakota) became the minority leader. George Mitchell decided not to seek re-election in 1994. Dole remained majority leader until June 1996, when he resigned in order to run full-time for the presidency. Taking his place as majority leader was C. Trent Lott, Sr. (Republican—Mississippi), serving throughout the remainder of this era in that position; Daschle remained the minority leader. The Republican leadership in the Senate, and in its Republican membership, while conservative, was not composed of the bomb-throwers found in the resurgent Newt Gingrich-led House. The Senate Republican leadership, particularly Dole, was less enthusiastic about the Contract with America and certainly more cautious about removing President Clinton from office. Leadership in the House During the first two years of this era, January 1993 until January 1995, the speaker of the House was Thomas S. (Tom) Foley (Democrat—Washington). Since 1981, Foley had been in a leadership role in the House and had been speaker since 1989. He was defeated for re-election in 1994 by newcomer George Nethercutt; this was the first time in history when the speaker of the House leader had been defeated for re-election. Later, Foley was appointed US ambassador to Japan by President Clinton. The majority leader was Richard A. (Dick) Gephardt (Democrat—Missouri), whose term as leader began in 1989 and ended in January 1995. With the Republican takeover, Newt Gingrich replaced long-serving, go-along-get-along Republican Robert Michel of Illinois as speaker of the House. Taking over as majority leader in January 1995 was Richard K. (Dick) Armey (Republican—Texas). Gingrich’s speakership brought energy and excitement; the old ways were being torn down, and the congressional revolution was on its way. Gingrich personally selected Republican leaders as chairmen of standing committees, he bypassed some committees altogether, and he imposed term limits on committee and subcommittee chairs. All this was done to weaken the power of committee heads and to enhance the speaker’s power. But Gingrich was also crippled. First, by persistent ethics charges for providing incomplete and misleading information involving tax-deductible contributions. Just two weeks after being unanimously selected as speaker, the House voted 395–28 to reprimand him for unethical

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conduct and fine him $300,000. Second, he managed to irritate, even infuriate, fellow Republicans with his demands and impulsive behavior. In March 1997, Republican Peter T. King of New York, a moderate, called for Gingrich to step down: “As roadkill on the highway of American politics,” he wrote, “Newt Gingrich cannot sell the Republican agenda.”29 The November 1998 congressional elections were the last straw. The House had just voted to begin impeachment proceedings and by this time the public was sick of hearing about Clinton’s personal life. But Gingrich insisted on a multi-million-dollar ad campaign against Clinton, further stoking the scandal. Votes were not in the mood, and instead of Republicans picking up seats in the wake of the scandal, they actually lost five. Gingrich’s long-time friend, Robert (Bob) Livingston (Republican—Louisiana) announced he would challenge Gingrich for the party’s leadership, then others jumped in to say they were also available. Gingrich immediately resigned as speaker, bitterly denouncing his fellow Republicans: “The ones you see on TV are hateful,” he told members. “I am willing to lead, but I won’t allow cannibalism.”30 He then resigned from the House in January 1999. Hustler magazine owner Larry C. Flynt, Jr. made many lawmakers nervous when he offered a $1 million bounty to expose congressional philanderers. Livingston quickly withdrew from House leadership consideration, confessing to extramarital affairs, and challenging President Clinton to resign as well. Clinton, still in the midst of the impeachment proceedings, declined. Finally taking up the role as speaker of the House was J. Dennis Hastert (Republican—Illinois), a reliable conservative, who had never served in a leadership role before. He would be the longest serving Republican speaker in history (January 1999–January 2007), and would ultimately face his own scandal and imprisonment. Under Gingrich and his allies, Congress became a toxic, dysfunctional chamber. Burning Down the House was the apt title of historian Julian Zelizer’s account of the Gingrich years.31 As journalist McKay Coppins described it: Gingrich “pioneered a style of partisan combat— replete with name-calling, conspiracy theories, and strategic obstructionism—that poisoned America’s political culture and plunged Washington into permanent dysfunction.”32 The House and the Senate were becoming more polarized, and the political center in the legislative branch was quickly evaporating. As political scientists Keith T. Poole and Howard Rosenthal found, in 1990, around one-third of lawmakers in both the House and Senate considered themselves as moderates. By 2000, the number of moderates had plummeted to about 12.5 percent in each chamber, and by 2005 would fall even further.33

The Judiciary The Rehnquist court continued during this era. Two justices retired and were replaced by Clinton appointees, who were both Democrats and liberals. Byron White announced his retirement in 1993, giving Clinton his first opportunity to appoint a justice. His choice was Ruth Bader Ginsburg, widely viewed as the foremost legal authority on discrimination issues affecting women. Ginsburg attended Harvard Law School, then, following her husband to New York, graduated from Columbia University Law School. When the dean of Harvard Law School recommended his star pupil to Justice Felix Frankfurter, the justice acknowledged Ginsburg’s brilliance but said it just wasn’t time for a woman to be a clerk at the Supreme Court. She taught at Columbia and Rutgers University law schools and from 1973 through 1976, Ginsburg argued six women’s rights cases before the Supreme Court and won five. At the time of her nomination, she was called the “Thurgood Marshall of gender equality law.”34 Before her appointment to the Supreme Court, Ginsburg had been a judge on the US Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia.

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Photo 10.2 Ruth Bader Ginsburg (1933–2020), Supreme Court associate justice, advocate for equal rights protections. Source: R. Michael Jenkins, photographer, CQ Roll Call Collection via Library of Congress.

When Harry Blackmun retired in 1994, his replacement was Stephen G. Breyer. A graduate of Stanford University and Harvard Law School, Breyer had been an assistant prosecutor in the Watergate scandal and chief counsel of the Senate Judiciary Committee. Before his appointment, Breyer had been a judge on the US Court of Appeals. Remaining on the Rehnquist Court were justices appointed by Ford (Stevens), Reagan (Kennedy, O’Connor, and Scalia), and Bush (Souter and Thomas). During this time, as well as in the late 1980s and into the 2000s, the Rehnquist court was a “fractured court.” In examining eighty-three significant decisions over the Rehnquist years, legal scholar Richard J. Regan noted that forty-seven (56 percent) involved 5–4 divisions. The divisions, during this period, usually involved the four conservatives (Rehnquist, Scalia, Thomas, O’Connor) on one side, with the more liberal justices (Stevens, Souter, Ginsburg, and Breyer) on the other; Kennedy was often the determinative vote.35

KEY POLICES ENACTED During this era, several important domestic policy items were enacted. One of the first measures was the Deficit Reduction Act (Omnibus Budget Reconciliation Act) of 1993, which raised the top income tax rate from 28 percent to 36 percent for persons earning more than $115,000, and 39.6 percent for incomes over $250,000. Corporate taxes were also increased

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from 34 percent to 36 percent, and certain corporate subsidies were eliminated. The law also expanded the Earned Income Tax Credit for those individuals with incomes under $30,000. Many states had complicated rules for voter registration, resulting in low participation rates. In 1993, Congress enacted the National Voter Registration Act, commonly called the “Motor Voter Act,” making it easier for Americans to register to vote and maintain their registration. All eligible citizens would be given the opportunity to vote when they applied for or renewed their driver’s license, or to register by mail, or at certain public assistance agencies. The number of temporary visas (H-1B nonimmigrant aliens) given to highly skilled foreign workers was increased from 65,000 in 1999 to 107,500 in 2001 through the American Competitiveness and Workforce Improvement Act (1998). Two years later, the H-1B visas were extended to 297,500. The H-1B visa allowed for greater portability and did not apply to universities and nonprofit research facilities. In 1998, Congress also passed a massive transportation infrastructure bill, the Transportation Equity Act for the Twenty-first Century (TEA-21). The legislation provided a much needed $217 billion for federal highways, public transit, and highway safety. This was the largest public works bill up to this point and it covered federal transportation funding from 1998 through 2003 (and later extended to 2005). In addition, Congress enacted the Crime Bill of 1994,36 legislation that brought about tougher federal sentencing and gave incentives to states to construct prison facilities. This was the opportunity for Clinton and Democrats to take control of the law-and-order narrative, showing the country that they were just as tough on crime as conservative Republicans. Voters were concerned about the rise in crime, especially with the new crack cocaine epidemic, and Democrats were determined to shed the label of being “soft on crime.” Incarceration rates, mostly from state and local jurisdictions, were already high in 1994, but this legislation led to even further punitive and harsher measures. Senator Joseph R. (Joe) Biden, Jr. (Democrat— Delaware) chaired the Judiciary Committee which wrote the legislation. At the time he bragged that there were now sixty new death penalties, seventy enhanced penalties, “100,000 cops,” and “125,000 new state prison cells.” The tougher sentencing and policing especially impacted racial minorities. Following the enactment of this law, incarceration rates jumped dramatically in state and local facilities, and somewhat in the federal system. Years later, however, the national conversation had changed. Speaking before the national convention of the NAACP in Philadelphia in 2015, Clinton stated that he regretted signing the legislation. “I signed a bill that made the problem worse and I want to admit it.” Minor felons, Clinton noted, were locked up “for way too long.”37 One non-controversial part of the Crime Bill was the Violence Against Women Act, which provided more resources to crack down on domestic violence and rape. Also enacted was the Health Insurance Portability and Protection Act (HIPPA), crafting the first national standards for the availability and portability of individual and group health insurance. The administration was unable to achieve national health care, and HIPPA was its bittersweet substitute. Nonetheless, it was the most far-reaching health care legislation since the passage of Medicare and Medicaid three decades earlier, affecting all employers and their workers, three federal agencies, and all fifty states.38 KEY POLICIES ENACTED

Medical Leave for Families In 1985, Representative Patricia S. Schroeder (Democrat—Colorado) introduced the first family medical leave legislation in the House of Representatives. At the time, few states had any

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such protections for families. During the next five years, there was growing support in Congress, and in early summer of 1990, lawmakers passed the Family and Medical Leave Act (FMLA). However, the measure was vetoed by President Bush. Similar legislation was enacted in 1992, and just a few weeks before the November election, Bush again wielded his veto pen. The president stated that in principle he was in favor of a system of family and medical leave, but he thought it should be voluntary, rather than through federal law. Democratic presidential candidate Bill Clinton criticized Bush, saying “This is another reason why I think people will vote for me on November 3.”39 At the beginning of the new session of Congress but before the inauguration of Clinton, both the House and Senate approved FMLA by comfortable margins. Even one of its biggest foes, Representative Henry Hyde of Illinois, now spoke out in favor of the legislation.40 But at the last minute, some Republican senators tried to throw a monkey wrench into the FMLA language. During his presidential campaign, Bill Clinton advocated allowing individuals to serve in the military without regard to their sexual orientation. A few days before the final vote on FMLA, Clinton ordered the military to stop asking recruits about their sexual orientation. Some Republican senators saw an opening and they attempted to squeeze language into the FMLA bill that would ban homosexuals from serving in the armed forces. The ploy was blunted, but lawmakers vowed to return for a “comprehensive review” of the issue at some later date. “Gridlock is over, after seven years and two vetoes” from President Bush, said Christopher J. Dodd (Democrat—Connecticut), the chief Senate sponsor of the legislation.41 The Family and Medical Leave Act, enacted in February 1993, went into effect six months afterwards. It required employers with fifty or more workers to provide up to twelve weeks of unpaid leave per year for the birth or adoption of a child, for the care of a seriously ill child, spouse, or parent, or for the worker’s own health. Employers were required to continue health benefits for the affected workers and guarantee their job, or an equivalent, when the worker returned. This applied only to the gainfully employed: those who had been employed for at least one year and working twenty-five hours a week. Significance of this Policy Looking at 2020 worldwide data, the United States is embarrassingly behind other industrialized countries in providing paid leave for new parents. Of forty-one countries surveyed by the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD), the United States is the only one without government-mandated paid leave. In other countries, most paid leave is focused on mothers, but in thirty-four of those forty-one countries, paid leave is also available to fathers. Government-mandated paid leave is most generous in Estonia, with eighty-three weeks (more than a one year and a half); nine other countries provide at least a year of paid leave.42 During the first year of the Biden administration, Democratic lawmakers tried, but without success, to enact an expanded federal family leave policy, under the umbrella of the Build Back Better agenda. With no federal action, some states have enacted their own paid leave programs. California, New Jersey, New York, Rhode Island, Connecticut, Washington, and the District of Columbia all have such state-mandated parental leave plans.

Gays in the Military and Same-sex Marriages Gays in the Military In October 1991, on the campaign trail, Bill Clinton pledged that, if elected president, he would issue an executive order lifting the ban on homosexuals serving in the military. Such

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bans had been in place since World War I.43 He repeated that pledge several times, but the matter was not a central issue in the campaign. General Colin L. Powell, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, had been grilled on the subject when he appeared before the House Budget Committee earlier in 1992. Later, in his memoirs, Powell characterized the issue of gays in the military as “the hottest social potato tossed at the Pentagon in a generation.”44 Of all the policy fights to launch a new presidency, Clinton began with gays in the military, an issue that had little support in Congress, less support from Sam Nunn (Democrat— Georgia), the chairman of the Senate Armed Services Committee and the Joint Chiefs of Staff. Even the new secretary of defense, Les Aspin, Jr., acknowledged that there would be little help in Congress. Senator Dole railed against Clinton: “If special interest groups and the president’s Hollywood elites know more about national security than Colin Powell, Norman Schwarzkopf, the joint chiefs … and our men and women in uniform, then the president should explain it all to the American people.”45 Clinton planned to lift the ban in a two-step phase: first by stopping the practice of asking recruits about their sexual orientation and then to halt the prosecuting and expelling of gay service men and women. There was to be a six-month cooling off period, a victory for Nunn and the Joint Chiefs of Staff. During those six months, legislative opponents to Clinton’s plans could hold hearings, highlighting witnesses and arguments that undercut his proposal. In April 1992, hundreds of thousands of gay and lesbian rights advocates descended on Washington. Like so many other aggrieved groups, they planned to make their presence and solidarity felt. But instead of knocking on the doors of lawmakers, expressing outrage in the Halls of Congress, they merely marched and demonstrated in the streets. The gay community “did the worst job on political lobbying on an important issue that I have ever seen. I was frustrated as hell at not being able to get people to do anything,” remarked Congressman Barney Frank (Democrat—Massachusetts), the most visible openly gay member of Congress.46 In Congress, support was coalescing around Nunn’s proposal of “don’t ask, don’t tell.” This would permit gays to serve in the military provided they did not reveal their sexual orientation. Barney Frank offered an alternative: “don’t ask, don’t tell, don’t listen, don’t investigate.” Under this plan, gays could serve in the military, live an openly gay lifestyle while off-duty and off-base without fear of reprisal, but not while on duty. Frank’s compromise pleased no one: military leaders and conservatives objected; gay activists were angry, accusing him of being a sellout. Significance of this Policy “Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell” became official Defense Department policy in December 1993 and went into effect in early 1994.47 But as senior White House aide George R. Stephanopoulos observed, no one was happy: “The military resented the intrusion. Democrats were furious, the public was confused, and the gay community felt betrayed.”48 “Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell” would remain military policy until September 20, 2011, when President Barack Obama, Secretary of Defense Leon Panetta, and the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, Admiral Mike McMullen, certified that the policy should end. Same-sex Marriages Federal legislation to “protect” traditional marriage was hastily drawn up in 1996. Called the Defense of Marriage Act (DOMA), the legislation was sponsored in the House by conservative congressman Robert L. (Bob) Barr, Jr. (Republican—Georgia), in reaction to a state lawsuit brought by three same-sex couples in Hawaii. The Hawaii state courts were “on the verge” of

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permitting such marriages. “The prospect of permitting homosexuals to ‘marry’ in Hawaii threatens to have real consequences both on federal law and on the laws (especially the marriage laws) of the various states,” noted the House report accompanying the Defense of Marriage Act.49 On the House floor, Barr declared, “The very foundations of our society are in danger of being burned. The flames of hedonism, the flames of narcissism, the flames of self-centered morality are licking at the very foundation of our society: the family unit.”50 Senator Edward Kennedy was having nothing of it. At a Senate Judiciary Committee hearing in July 1996, he retorted: “The bill before us is called the Defense of Marriage Act, but a more accurate title would be the Defense of Intolerance Act.”51 The law defined marriage as a “legal union between one man and one woman as husband and wife” and a “spouse” as “a person of the opposite sex who is a husband or a wife.” Significantly, DOMA barred federal recognition of same-sex marriages for well over 1,000 protections and privileges, including Social Security survivor benefits, next-of-kin status, tax filing, insurance benefits, immigration status, protection against domestic violence, the right to live together in military or college housing, and employment benefits. The law further prohibited states from recognizing same-sex marriages that might have been performed in other states. President Clinton signed the bill into law in September 1996, and it immediately went into effect. During the 1992 presidential campaign, Clinton came out against same-sex marriage, much to the dismay of gay activists and supporters whose votes he actively courted. Now, it was just weeks before the 1996 presidential election, the general public strongly favored DOMA and it was enthusiastically supported in the House, by a vote of 342–67, and in the Senate, by 85–14. Clinton had his misgivings, but nevertheless signed the bill into law in September 1996, and it immediately went into effect. But unlike most signing ceremonies, held in public before beaming lawmakers and advocates, with dozens of souvenir signing pens handed out, DOMA was signed into law a few minutes after midnight on a Saturday, with the president alone in the oval office. No press, no handshaking, and no celebration.52 Significance of this Policy Same-sex marriage was fairly unpopular in 1996; less than one-third of Americans supported such unions. Indeed, for many segments of American society, homosexuality alone, never mind same-sex marriage, was a sin, an abomination against conservative religious values. Senator Thomas A. (Tom) Coburn (Republican—Oklahoma) stated that folks in Oklahoma have “very profound beliefs that homosexuality is wrong.” They think it is “immoral, that it is based on perversion, that it is based on lust.”53 It was not until 2004 that the first state, Massachusetts, permitted same-sex marriages. At the same time, forty-two states had proscribed such unions. During the next decade, however, there was a sea-change in public attitudes and responses from lawmakers and the courts. DOMA was ruled unconstitutional by the Supreme Court in 2013. By that time, sixteen more states had joined Massachusetts in permitting same-sex marriages. Then in June 2015, the Supreme Court ruled unconstitutional state laws that did not recognize same-sex marriages performed in other states.54

Welfare Reform The federal welfare program underwent major controversial changes during this era. The longstanding program, Aid to Families with Dependent Children (AFDC) was replaced, eligibility and payments were severely restricted, and “welfare” would no longer be an entitlement. Created

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as a part of the original Social Security Act in 1935, Aid to Dependent Children (ADC) had been administered by the old Department of Health, Education, and Welfare; in 1962, the program was transformed into AFDC. The central issues in the debate about federal or state programs to aid the poor were threefold: how to provide support for poor children, how to aid single-parent families, and how to make sure that support went to those who deserved assistance.55 In his 1992 campaign policy book, Putting People First, Bill Clinton promised to “end welfare as we know it” and “to empower people with the education, training and childcare they need.” He also advocated a policy of “two years and you’re off” and to “make work pay” by preparing individuals for skilled, higher paying jobs. Welfare reform was appealing to many voters and Clinton was trying to reposition himself as a New Democrat, a more middle-of-the-roader, rather than a left-leaning ideologue. Early in his presidency, he did advocate an increase of $10 billion to help individuals obtain needed skills and he vetoed two Republican bills that drastically cut funds and programs for the poor. But with the Republican takeover of Congress, welfare reform became a key part of the Republican’s Contract with America. Much of the pressure for welfare reform was also coming from state governments, particularly those with Republican-led legislatures and governors, trying to scale back programs and payments to poor people. States were moving away from job and skills training programs to a more forceful and blunt approach: welfare recipients, just get a job, any job.56 Clinton was under considerable pressure to agree to some form of welfare reform, especially as the 1996 election year approached. The congressional response came from the newly empowered Republican majority and the Personal Responsibility and Work Opportunity Reconciliation Act, authored by Representative John R. Kasich, Jr. (Republican—Ohio). The legislation reduced the role of the federal government and gave more authority to the states. It ended AFDC as an entitlement and in its place created a program called Temporary Assistance for Needy Families (TANF).57 Eligibility for federal relief now meant that recipients had to begin working after two years of receiving aid; further, it sought to encourage two-parent families and discouraged out-of-wedlock births. At the signing ceremony, again on August 22, 1996, Clinton put his best spin on this tougher new program. The new welfare law “gives us a chance we haven’t had before to break the cycle of dependency that has existed for millions and millions of our fellow citizens, exiling them from the world of work. It gives structure, meaning, and dignity to most of our lives,” he said.58 This was election year, and Clinton’s opponent, Robert Dole, was not going to let him claim all the credit. “I am pleased the president has finally decided to support the Dole welfare reform proposal,” said Dole. “Until now, President Clinton has vetoed every bill and stymied every attempt to pass meaningful welfare reform.”59 One of the most vocal critics of this policy, Peter Edelman, an assistant secretary in the Department of Health and Human Services, resigned in protest after Clinton signed the legislation.60 Writing in The Atlantic, Edelman characterized the legislation as “the worst thing Bill Clinton has done.”61 Another vocal critic was Senator Edward Kennedy, who called it “legislative child abuse.” Worse, the administration was trying to cut the federal budget on the backs of poor people. As Edelman argued, that “after all the noise and heat over the past two years about balancing the budget, the only deep, multi-year budget cuts actually enacted were those in this bill, affecting low-income people.”62 Significance of this Policy The legislation was far more conservative and far tougher than Clinton and his team had hoped for. But the president swallowed hard and accepted the Republican-driven welfare reform. Clinton was, as journalists Peter T. Kilborn and Sam Howe Verhovek describe it,

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Photo 10.3 Robert J. (Bob) Dole (1923–2021), Kansas senator, Senator majority leader, presidential candidate. Source: US Senate.

“acquiescing in the most sweeping reversal of domestic social policy since the New Deal,” a remarkable turnabout from his earlier proposals.63 The welfare legislation cut $55 billion in spending and gave the states broad power to remove individuals from their welfare rolls.

Banking and Investments The Banking Act of 1933 (Glass-Steagall Act) and the Bank Holding Act of 1956 had established major boundaries between the banking, securities, and insurance businesses. Banks were not to delve into securities trading (1933) and there would be barriers between banking and the insurance business (1956). The Financial Services Modernization Act (1999), known as the Gramm-Leach-Bliley Act after its principal sponsors, repealed a portion of the Glass-Steagall Act of 1933.64 GlassSteagall was enacted to protect against added exposure associated with stock market volatility. Commercial banks were not permitted to offer financial service products, like investments and insurance-related services. In essence, Glass-Steagall put up a wall between banking and securities trading. The Gramm-Leach-Bliley Act was an attempt to update and modernize the financial industry, and its most visible effect was to repeal Glass-Steagall. In 1998, the banking giant Citicorp merged with Travelers Group, to form Citigroup. This new conglomerate offered commercial banking, insurance services, and securities services through its brands Citibank, Smith Barney, Primerica, and The Travelers. The merger, however, was in violation of both

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the Glass-Steagall Act and the Bank Holding Company Act. The Federal Reserve gave Citigroup a temporary waiver in September 1998, and soon thereafter, with considerable pressure from the banking industry, the Gramm-Leach Bliley Act was introduced in Congress. It quickly passed, with comfortable margins in both chambers. Financial institutions were now given the green light to combine banking, insurance, and securities services. The banking and finance industry became more concentrated in the hands of fewer institutions, and more and more was heard about banks “too big to fail.” In its headline, a 2019 analysis of American banking since 1950 encapsulated the trend: “Bigger, Fewer, Riskier: The Evolution of Banking Since 1950.”65 The new law also required that financial institutions explain their information-sharing practices. Customers who did not want their financial and other sensitive data sold to other banks and credit card companies would be given the right to opt-out.66 While Congress enthusiastically approved Gramm-Leach-Bliley, there were some misgivings. Senator Byron L. Dorgan (Democrat—North Dakota) was just one of eight senators to vote against final passage. A populist senator and former North Dakota state tax commissioner, Dorgan warned: “I think we will look back in ten years’ time and say we should not have done this, but we did because we forgot the lessons of the past.”67 Significance of this Policy “Too big to fail”? But fail they did, spectacularly. Did the repeal of Glass-Steagall cause the 2008 financial crisis? Journalist Andrew Ross Sorkin looked at the issue: A meme around Glass-Steagall has been created, repeated so often that it has almost become conventional wisdom: the repeal of Glass-Steagall led to the financial crisis of 2008. And, the thinking goes, has become almost religious for some people, that if the law were reinstated, we would avoid the next crisis. The facts—basic facts—just aren’t that convenient. While the repeal of Glass-Steagall has seemingly become the sine qua non of the financial crisis, it is pure historical revisionism.68

The Court Weighs In During this era, the Supreme Court made several key decisions involving the qualifications for running for federal office, the limits and balance of federalism, and the counting of presidential ballots in Florida. Term Limits for Members of Congress How long should an elective official serve? One simple answer was, until voters choose someone else; another answer came in the form of term limits. At the state level, term limits were nothing new. Thirty-six states limit governors’ terms, and fifteen states limit the length of time state legislators could serve.69 At the federal level, the president of the United States is term limited: the Twenty-second Amendment limits the chief executive to just two four-year terms, or if taking over upon the death or removal of a president, a total of ten years. Discontent with the government, especially the federal government during the early 1990s, led to a burst of activity in the states to limit the time that elected officials could serve. In November 1992, Arkansas voters adopted a “Term Limit Amendment” to their state constitution restricting the number of terms Arkansas lawmakers, both federal and state, could serve.

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But there was a significant constitutional question involved. The qualifications for Congress are clearly stated in the Constitution: a lawmaker must be twenty-five years old and a US citizen for seven years (House) or thirty years old and a US citizen for nine years (Senate) and all candidates must be inhabitants of the states they wish to represent. There is no mention in the federal constitution of how many terms a lawmaker can serve. Would this citizen-sponsored amendment in Arkansas pass constitutional muster? In 1995, the Supreme Court ruled, 5–4, in US Term Limits, Inc. v. Thornton, that states cannot adopt congressional qualifications that are different from those found in the US Constitution. It was a 157-page decision, noted journalist Linda Greenhouse, that revealed a Court “riven by profound differences over the very nature and sources of legitimacy of the national government.”70 Four conservative justices argued that the issue was a matter for the states to decide. This decision overturned federal term limits that had been enacted in twenty-three states. The irony is that members of Congress enjoy a very high re-election rate, often 95 percent or above; at the same time, Congress as an institution is held in low esteem by most citizens. Equal Protection and Homosexuals The court ruled in two important decisions concerning the rights of homosexuals. In 1992, Colorado voters through a state-wide referendum added Amendment 2 to the state constitution, precluding any judicial, legislative, or executive action that was designed to protect persons from discrimination based on their “homosexual, lesbian, or bisexual orientation, conduct, practices or relationships.” The hotly contested petition drive was in part a reaction against three municipalities—Aspen, Boulder, and Denver—which had created ordinances banning discrimination against gays and lesbians. Following the referendum, Colorado became known as the “Hate State,” and several well-known Colorado businesses and products were boycotted by gay rights activists. The question before the Supreme Court was, did this amendment to the Colorado constitutional amendment violate the equal protection clause of the Fourteenth Amendment? By a vote of 6–3, the Court ruled in Romer v. Evans71 that the amendment violated the federal constitutional protections. For the majority, Justice Kennedy concluded, “If the constitutional conception of ‘equal protection of the laws’ means anything, it must at the very least mean that a bare desire to harm a politically unpopular group cannot constitute a legitimate governmental interest.” Thus, Amendment 2 “classifies homosexuals not to further a proper legislative end but to make them unequal to everyone else. This Colorado cannot do. A state cannot so deem a class of persons a stranger to its laws.”72 Many gay rights advocates were surprised and pleased that the court, which had affirmed Georgia’s sodomy laws just ten years previously, had made such a forceful ruling. Denver mayor, Wellington Webb, declared “a day of celebration for our city, state and the nation.” Twenty-six years later in 2018, Coloradans elected Jared Polis, an openly gay married man with two children, as their governor. In 1992, the Boy Scouts of America revoked the adult membership of James Dale, a former Eagle Scout and an assistant scoutmaster. Dale was a homosexual and a gay rights activist. The Boy Scouts, a private, non-profit organization, argued that homosexual conduct was inconsistent with its values. Dale, however, sued the Scouts, alleging that it had violated New Jersey’s law prohibiting discrimination on the basis of sexual orientation in places of public accommodation. When the case reached the Supreme Court in 2000, the question was this: did New Jersey’s public accommodations law violated the Boy Scouts’s First Amendment right to expressive association in barring homosexuals from serving as troop leaders? In a 5–4 decision, in Boy

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Scouts of America v. Dale,73 the Court, through Chief Justice Rehnquist held that, yes, the New Jersey law violated the Boys Scouts’ First Amendment rights. Rehnquist wrote, “[t]he Boy Scouts asserts that homosexual conduct is inconsistent with the values it seeks to instill,” and that Dale’s presence “would, at the very least, force the organization to send a message, both to young members and the world, that the Boy Scouts accepts homosexual conduct as a legitimate form of behavior.”74 In 2019, the Boy Scouts of America filed for a $2.6 billion bankruptcy settlement in the wake in the wake of 88,000 claims of child sexual abuse perpetrated by scoutmasters; that figure easily outpaced the pedophilia scandal in the US Catholic Church.75 Racial Gerrymandering The state of North Carolina, because of its past racial voting discrimination, was required to comply with the pre-clearance section of the Voting Rights Act of 1965. Thus, any changes in its voting practices had to be cleared by the US Department of Justice. North Carolina submitted a plan that created one majority-black congressional district, out of its twelve districts. The US attorney general objected, stating that a second such district should also be drawn. To comply, North Carolina officials created a second majority-black district, but one that was unusual in its configuration. Instead of being compact, focused on political or geographic boundaries, the new district stretched 160 miles long, mostly along Interstate 85, and for much of the stretch, the district was no wider than the four lanes of highway. As the Supreme Court described it, the new black district “winds in snakelike fashion through tobacco country, financial centers, and manufacturing areas ‘until it gobbles in enough enclaves of Black neighborhoods.’”76 Ruth Shaw, a white voter, and others brought suit, claiming that the new redistricting scheme amounted to racial gerrymandering, in violation of the Fourteenth Amendment. In Shaw v. Reno,77 decided in 1993, the Court, in a 5–4 decision, ruled that the new districting scheme was unconstitutional. In writing the majority opinion, Justice O’Connor noted that the argument against the redistricting struck a “powerful historical chord: it is unsettling how closely the North Carolina plan resembles the most egregious racial gerrymanders of the past.” She applied the “strict scrutiny” test which required a compelling state interest to justify the racial gerrymandering. The four liberal justices dissented, arguing that the redistricting did not deny anyone access to the political process or deny them equal protection of the law.78 The case was sent back to a district court and the congressional district was reconfigured. Once again, the issue came back to the Supreme Court, and again, by a 5–4 margin, the justices decided the new plan was unconstitutional.79 Other racial gerrymandering cases came before the court during this era. Many more would come during the 2000s. Florida Recount of Presidential Ballots The 2000 presidential was the closest in American history. Al Gore won the nationwide popular vote by 544,000 votes (out of more than 102 million cast), but George W. Bush won the electoral vote, gaining 271 votes (one more than needed), to Gore’s 266. While Bush and Gore each won by razor-thin margins in several states, the drama centered on Florida. Campaign lawyers now took center stage, as they confronted the many weaknesses and irregularities found in Florida’s voting: hanging and dimpled chads, confusing butterfly ballots, lost absentee ballots, slipshod county election practices, partisan bickering and posturing. In the unofficial counts, Bush was leading; Gore, understandably, wanted a recount in several urban areas, and had many valid reasons for seeking one. The state board of elections announced

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that Bush had won by 1,784 votes. Because the margin was less than one-half of 1 percent, Florida law required that there be an automatic machine recount. The recount showed that Bush’s margin of victory was now just 537 votes. Gore asked for a manual recount in four traditionally Democratic-leaning counties. On December 8, 2000, one month after the election, but a week away from the certification process for the Electoral College, the Florida Supreme Court ordered the circuit court in Leon County to tabulate 9,000 contested ballots from Miami-Dade County. The Florida Supreme Court also ordered every one of Florida’s sixty-seven counties immediately to conduct a manual recount, examining the “under-votes” (that is, the votes that did not indicate a vote for president). Bush and his running mate, Richard Cheney, filed an emergency petition to the US Supreme Court to stop the Florida court’s order. The questions before the Supreme Court were these: did the Florida Supreme Court violate Article II, Section 1, Clause 2 of the US Constitution by making new election law? Further, do standardless manual recounts violate the equal protect and due process clauses of the Constitution? The case, Bush v. Gore,80 was argued on December 11 and decided the next day. In this most unusual and consequential of decisions, the Supreme Court, in a 7–2 per curiam opinion, ruled that Florida’s scheme for recounting was unconstitutional. Further, because the recount standards varied from precinct to precinct, from county to county, and the recount could not have been accomplished within the time allotted, the Court ruled, 5–4, that the recount had to be halted. Five Republican conservative justices voted to halt the process; four liberal Democratic justices argued against the halt. Historically, the Supreme Court has been chary of interfering with the election processes of states. But the majority in this decision said it had no choice. None are more conscious of the vital limits on judicial authority than are the Members of this Court, and none stand more in admiration of the Constitution’s design to leave the selection of the President to the people, through their legislatures, and to the political sphere. When contending parties invoke the process of the courts, however, it becomes our unsought responsibility to resolve the federal and constitutional issues the judicial system has been forced to confront.81 There would be no recount, and Bush was declared the winner of Florida’s twenty-five electoral votes, and with it, the presidency. The opinion drew considerable criticism and cast the Court further as a partisan instrument. Justice Stevens, in dissent, argued that the real loser in this episode was “the Nation’s confidence in the judge as an impartial guardian of the rule of law.”82 The next day, in his ceremonial office in the Eisenhower Executive Office Building, Gore stated that while he was deeply disappointed and sharply disagreed with the court’s decision, “partisan rancor must now be put aside.” Then he said, “I accept the finality of the outcome … and tonight, for the sake of our unity as a people and the strength of our democracy, I offer my concession.” Gore then telephoned George Bush and extended his congratulations.83

POLICIES DELAYED OR DENIED

Universal Health Care The most important policy initiative for the new Clinton administration was national health care. It turned out to be its biggest disappointment. The new president promised to send to

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Congress a comprehensive package within his first one hundred days. The President’s Task Force on National Health Care Reform was announced. Its chairman would be the first lady, Hillary Clinton, the president said. She “can bring people together around complex and difficult issues to hammer out consensus and get things done,” he assured Congress.84 The health care plan was complicated, undisciplined, and carved out in secret; over 500 people were recruited as task force members under the direction of health care consultant Ira Magaziner. Both Democratic and Republican leadership, and their key staff, were shunted aside. Senator Kennedy’s staff did participate, but Representative Dan Rostenkowski’s staff did not. Some of the ideas had originally been proposed by Republicans, but no Republican members or their staffs were invited to participate. During 1993, there was growing anticipation and broad public support for some kind of health care reform. The administration’s proposal, which was promised during the first one hundred days, wasn’t introduced to Congress until September 21, 1993. Hillary Clinton dazzled members of Congress with her command of the subject, winning praise from both advocates and skeptics. The plan offered to Congress for its approval was a complex, unwieldy 1,342-page document, which called for federal mandates for employers to provide health insurance for their employees through health maintenance organizations (HMOs). The plan also called for regional insurance purchasing cooperatives and spending caps. But delay was the enemy, giving opponents time to come up with their objections, alternatives, and plans to defeat whatever might come from the White House. Just like the extraordinary lobbying effort against national health care in 1948, opponents of what soon was called “Hillary Care” unleashed a lobbying and media blitz against the administration’s proposal. The Health Insurance Association of America (HIAA), under the leadership of former Republican congressman from Ohio, A. Willis (Bill) Gradison, Jr. took the lead. HIAA was composed of 270 private insurance companies, representing one-third of the health insurance industry. According to Gradison, HIAA wanted to work with Hillary Clinton, but the White House wouldn’t set up a meeting. HIAA’s tentative early support turned into opposition. As journalists Haynes B. Johnson and David S. Broder observed, HIAA and its allies “learned to use all the tools of modern politics and political communications for their specialinterest objectives.”85 HIAA launched a $14 million ad campaign, called “Harry & Louise,” featuring a forty-something white couple, sitting around their kitchen table, wondering whether the Clinton plan would help them. The tag line came from Louise: “There’s got to be a better way.” Other organizations, like the National Federation of Independent Business and the Alliance for Managed Competition (large insurance companies) launched an extensive grassroots campaign, with telephone banks, direct mail, letters to members of Congress from constituents, and television ads. Working for health care opponents, political consultant Jack Bonner was ecstatic about fighting against the administration’s proposal: “What a great thing to go up against. Mandatory health care alliances, I have to join it? It’s horrible! In America you don’t use the word ‘mandatory’ … If they [the Clintons] hadn’t used it, we would have. So that one was truly a walk in the park.”86 One of the best communicators to enter the White House, Bill Clinton, or his team just couldn’t convince the American people. The public was confused by the proposal and wary that it came from the Clinton administration. In one telling example, when focus group participants had the Clinton proposal described to them, 70 percent approved of it; but when the name “Clinton” was attached to it, the approval dropped by 30–40 percent.87 National health care, “Hillary Care,” was going nowhere. One year after its introduction, on September 26, 1994, Senate majority leader Mitchell pulled the plug and pronounced national health care dead.

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Professor Paul E. Starr, who advocated the Clinton program, later wrote a fitting autopsy: The collapse of health care reform in the first two years of the Clinton administration will go down as one of the greatest lost political opportunities in American history. It is a story of compromises that never happened, of deals that were never closed, of Republicans, moderate Democrats, and key interest groups that backpedaled from proposals they themselves had earlier co-sponsored or endorsed.88

Public Education Goals In 1989, President Bush, along with the nation’s governors, agreed to an education summit to set national goals. Bill Clinton, then governor of Arkansas, was a key participant in drafting the goals and setting up a panel on national education goals. In the end, six such goals for America’s public schools were established. But trying to get the goals codified into federal law proved to be too much; the effort was derailed by partisan politics. When he became president, Bill Clinton took up the mantle, drawing on his gubernatorial experience of education reform in Arkansas and that of Secretary of Education William Riley’s efforts when he was governor of South Carolina. In 1994, taking Clinton’s ideas and Bush’s earlier work on national education goals, Congress enacted Goals 2000: Educate America Act, setting out eight education goals that should be attained by the year 2000. An eighteenmember National Education Goals Board was established to oversee and report on the progress of achieving the eight goals. The goals were ambitious, lofty, and patently unachievable given the deadline of just six years.89 Goals 2000 called for these achievements: (1) By 2000, all children will start school, ready to learn; (2) 90 percent of the students will graduate from high school; (3) all students will demonstrate competency in English, math, science, foreign languages, civics, economics, the arts, history, and geography; (4) the United States would be first in the world in math and science; (5) all adults would be literate; (6) no school would have drugs, alcohol, firearms, or violence; (7) teachers would have the needed skills; and (8) all school would have parents involved. A centerpiece of the legislation was a series of grants to states and local communities totalling $400 million a year to adopt reform plans. On signing the legislation, at a magnet school in San Diego, California, Clinton praised it as “a new and different approach for the federal government,” which would help establish “world class” national education standards and rely on schools at the grassroots for implementation.90 Commenting on the original 1989 goals, journalist Richard Rothstein stated that “some ‘Goals 2000’ were ridiculous in the first place. Others required resources never provided. Still others required far more than eleven years to achieve.”91 Goals 2000 set the stage for nationwide education standards which were enacted with the amendments to the Elementary and Secondary Education Act (ESEA).92

Presidential Line-Item Veto In April 1996, Congress gave the president the authority to rescind individual spending items contained in an appropriations bill, unless both houses of Congress passed an identical “disapproval bill.” This was a critical concession to the presidency and was part of the Republican Party’s “Contract with America.” It was also the only provision in the Contract that President Clinton supported; understandably so, because it gave the president an important veto tool. Until this time, particularly in omnibus appropriations bills, special interest spending items could easily be tucked into a large package. The White House might endorse 95 percent of a

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bill, but would have to hold its nose on the other 5 percent. Through the Line-Item Veto Act (1996), the president gained leverage that many state governors already had, the ability to strike out objectionable spending items. Clinton was the first, and only, president to use the line-item veto, using it eighty-two times. Soon, however, the line-item veto was ruled unconstitutional by the Supreme Court. The Court, in a 6–3 decision, ruled in Clinton v. City of New York that under the Presentment Clause of Article I, legislation that passes both the House and the Senate must either be entirely approved or vetoed by the president.93 By cancelling just one or more sections, through the line-item provision, the president in effect “amended” the laws in question. This, the Court reasoned, violated the “finely wrought” legislative procedures found in Article I of the Constitution.

Climate Change While American scientists were at the forefront of climate science research, the United States was the world’s largest emitter of carbon dioxide; and throughout this era, policymakers and the public were largely indifferent to the threats of climate change. In addition, during this time, there was emerging a whole industry of climate change denial and delay, funded by the fossil fuel industry and conservative organizations. The window for progressive environmental reforms was a narrow one, embracing just the two years of the One Hundred Third Congress (1993–1994). The new vice president, Al Gore, Jr., had been one of the Senate’s leading environmental advocates and had written a well-received book, Earth in the Balance. Clinton had assembled a team intent on implementing environmental protections, with Carol M. Browner as administrator of the EPA, Kathleen A. (Katie) McGinty as head of the Council of Environmental Quality, and Bruce E. Babbitt as secretary of the Interior. Browner and McGinty had been staffers for Senator Gore and Babbitt had been governor of Arizona and head of the League of Conservation Voters. But environmental policy was of low priority during this first session of the Clinton administration. Only one piece of legislation was passed, the California Desert Protection Act, and disappointingly, Congress failed to reauthorize the Clean Water Act, the Safe Drinking Water Act, the Endangered Species Act, and Superfund.94 Then came the Republican takeover of the House following the 1994 congressional elections. Slashing budgets, stripping away environmental regulations, and inaction on climate change were now the order of the day. In 1992, the Earth Summit held at Rio de Janeiro, Brazil, resulted in the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change, and ultimately the 1997 Kyoto Protocol of 1997. In 1988, the UN International Panel on Climate Change (IPCG) had warned of global warming and climate change. Its next two reports, in 1995 and 2001, further emphasized the dangers of climate change. The evidence was in, the scientific consensus was overwhelming, but the policy response from the United States was simply missing.95 The Kyoto Protocol was adopted in December 1997, but because of its complex ratification process, the protocol did not enter into force until February 2005. The protocol legally bound industrialized countries to limit and reduce greenhouse gas emissions, in accordance with agreed upon individual state targets. On average, industrialized countries would cut greenhouse gas emissions by 5.4 percent, a goal to be met by 2010. Significantly, the protocol only bound developed countries and placed a bigger burden on them for targeted reductions; over one hundred developing countries, including India and China, were exempt. As of July 2001, eighty-four countries had signed the protocol and thirty-six had ratified or agreed to it. The United States, the largest emitter of greenhouse gases, some 25 percent of the world’s total, signed the protocol, but it was never adopted by the Senate. Rather, through the

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Byrd-Hagel resolution, adopted 95–0, the Senate warned the president against signing any climate change treaty that would economically harm the United States or exempt developing countries.96 On the campaign trail, it looked like George W. Bush would push for reduction of emissions from coal-fired plants. On September 29, 2000, in Michigan, Bush stated that [A]s we promote electricity and renewable energy, we will work to make our air cleaner. With the help of Congress, environmental groups and industry, we will require all power plants to meet clean air standards in order to reduce emissions of sulfur dioxide, nitrogen oxide, mercury and carbon dioxide within a reasonable period of time. But once elected, he received considerable push-back from conservative lawmakers. Bush then sent a letter to four influential Republican senators telling them that he had no plans to require carbon dioxide cutbacks from coal-fired plants. Shortly thereafter, EPA administrator Christine Todd Whitman announced that, as far as the Bush administration was concerned, the Kyoto Protocol was dead. This failure of American leadership brought loud protests from Japan and European countries.97

Notes 1 Patterson, Restless Giant: The United States From Watergate to Bush v. Gore (New York: Oxford University Press, 2005), 280. 2 Dennis W. Johnson, Congress Online: Bridging the Gap Between Citizens and Their Representatives (New York: Routledge, 2004), 1–4. 3 George Herring, America’s Longest War: The United States and Vietnam, 1950–1975 (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1986), 637. 4 Patterson, Restless Giant, 386. 5 Patrick McGreevey, “Gov. Brown Signs Bill Repealing Unenforceable Parts of Prop. 187,” Los Angeles Times, September 15, 2014; Patterson, Restless Giant, 292–301. 6 Kimberly Amadeo, “Bill Clinton’s Economic Policies,” The Balance, February 19, 2020, https://www. thebalance.com/president-bill-clinton-s-economic-policies-3305559 (accessed April 15, 2020). 7 Jeffrey Frankel and Peter R. Orszag, “Retrospective on American Economic Policy in the 1990s,” Brookings Institution, November 2, 2001, https://www.brookings.edu/research/retrospective-onamerican-economic-policy-in-the-1990s/ (accessed April 22, 2020). 8 Kimberly Amadeo, “US Budget Deficit by Year Compared to GDP, Debt Increase, and Events,” The Balance, March 2, 2020, https://www.thebalance.com/us-deficit-by-year-3306306 (accessed April 19, 2020). Office of Management and Budget. “Historical Tables,” Table 1.1—Summary of Receipts, Outlays, and Surpluses or Deficits: 1789–2021, https://obamawhitehouse.archives.gov/omb/budget/ Historicals. 9 Jared Bernstein, Elizabeth McNichol, and Karen Lyons, Pulling Apart: A State-by-State Analysis of Income Trends (Washington, DC: Economic Policy Institute and Center of Budget and Policies Priorities, 2000). Chauna Brocht, Jared Bernstein, and Lawrence Mishel, “Any Way You Cut It: Income Inequality On the Rise Regardless of How It’s Measured,” Economic Policy Institute, September 1, 2001, https://www.epi. org/publication/briefingpapers_inequality_inequality/ (accessed April 19, 2020). 10 Edmund L. Andrews, “”Economic Inequality Grew in 90 s Boom, Fed Reports,” New York Times, January 23, 2003. 11 Adam Hayes, “Dotcom Bubble,” Investopedia, June 15, 2019, https://www.investopedia.com/terms/d/ dotcom-bubble.asp (accessed April 1, 2020). 12 Jim Edwards, “One of the Kings of the 90 s Dot.com Bubble Now Faces 20 Years in Prison,” Business Insider, December 6, 2016, https://www.businessinsider.com/where-are-the-kings-of-the-1990s-dotcom-bubble-bust-2016-12 (accessed April 1, 2020). 13 “Report to the Deputy Attorney General on the Events of Waco, Texas,” US Department of Justice, updated February 14, 2018, https://www.justice.gov/archives/publications/waco/report-deputyattorney-general-events-waco-texas-introduction (accessed April 13, 2020).

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14 Melissa Chan, “The Real Story Behind the Waco Siege,” Time, January 24, 2018, https://time.com/ 5115201/waco-siege-standoff-fbi-david-koresh/ (accessed April 13, 2020). Koresh’s real name was Vernon Wayne Howell. 15 “The Militia Movement,” Anti-Defamation League, n.d., https://www.adl.org/education/resources/ backgrounders/militia-movement (accessed April 14, 2020). 16 “Christian Identity,” Anti-Defamation League, n.d., https://www.adl.org/resources/backgrounders/ christian-identity (accessed April 14, 2020). “Sovereign citizen” movement believes that they alone will decide which federal, state, or local laws to obey, or to defy, and do not have to pay taxes. During the mid-1990s, the IRS determined that there were about 250,000 tax protestors, though not all of them were in the “sovereign citizen” movement. “Sovereign Citizens Movement,” Southern Poverty Law Center, n.d., https://www.splcenter.org/fighting-hate/extremist-files/ideology/sovereign-citizensmovement (accessed April 14, 2020). 17 “Oklahoma City Bombing,” Department of Justice, Federal Bureau of Investigation, n.d., https://www. fbi.gov/history/famous-cases/oklahoma-city-bombing (accessed April 13, 2020). 18 Wisconsin v. Mitchell, 508 US 476 (1993), https://supreme.justia.com/cases/federal/us/508/476/. 19 Ave Mince-Didier, “Hate Crimes that Changed History,” Criminal Defense Lawyer, n.d., https://www. criminaldefenselawyer.com/resources/hate-crimes-changed-history.html (accessed April 22, 2020). 20 Patrick J. Maney, Bill Clinton: New Gilded Age President (Lawrence: University Press of Kansas, 2016), 72; John F. Harris, The Survivor: Bill Clinton in the White House (New York: Random House, 2006), 8–10. 21 See “Whitewater Special Report,” Washington Post, n.d., https://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-srv/ politics/special/whitewater/whitewater.htm (accessed April 24, 2020). 22 David A. Graham and Cullen Murphy, “The Clinton Impeachment, as Told by the People Who Lived It,” The Atlantic, December 2018, https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2018/12/ clinton-impeachment/573940/ (accessed April 27, 2020). 23 “Poll: Clinton’s Approval Rating Up in Wake of Impeachment,” CNN.com, December 20, 1998, https:// www.cnn.com/ALLPOLITICS/stories/1998/12/20/impeachment.poll/ (accessed April 27, 2020). 24 A little more than half of the money paid to Jones came from a personal civil liability insurance fund, the rest came from personal funds. Neil A. Lewis, “Clinton Settles Jones Lawsuit with a Check for $850,000,” New York Times, January 13, 1999. 25 “Independent Probes of Clinton Administration Cost Nearly $87 Million,” CNN.org, April 1, 1999, https://edition.cnn.com/ALLPOLITICS/stories/1999/04/01/counsel.probe.costs/ (accessed April 24, 2020).There were four other investigations during the Clinton era by independent counsel: a fouryear probe of former secretary of Housing and Urban Development Henry Cisneros ($8.7 million), acquittal of former Agriculture secretary Mike Espy ($19.2 million), Interior secretary Bruce Babbitt and Labor secretary Alexis Herman (less than $2 million), and Commerce secretary Ron Brown ($3 million, terminated following his death). Darren Samuelsohn, “Russia Probe Price Tag Nearly $32 Million, DOJ Reports,” Politico.com, August 2, 2019, https://www.politico.com/story/2019/08/02/ russia-probe-price-tag-32-million-1445269 (accessed October 21, 2021). 26 “Membership of the 116th Congress: A Profile,” Congressional Research Service, Report 45583, March 31, 2020, https://fas.org/sgp/crs/misc/R45583.pdf (accessed April 14, 2020). 27 Editorial, “Perhaps the Worst Congress,” Washington Post, October 7, 1994. 28 Dan Balz, “GOP ‘Contract’ Pledges 10 Tough Acts to Follow,” Washington Post, November 20, 1994; along with Gingrich, the authors of the Contract included Republicans Richard Armey (Texas), Bill Paxon (New York), Tom DeLay (Texas), Robert S. Walker (Pennsylvania). Most of the ten items were passed in the House (but not the term-limit measure); most were then passed by the Senate (but not the balanced budget amendment) and enacted into law. Clinton, however, did veto the Common Sense Legal Reform Act. Congressional Quarterly Almanac (Washington, DC: Congressional Quarterly, 1995), 1–10. 29 Peter King, “Why I Oppose Newt,” Weekly Standard, March 31, 1997, 23, https://www. washingtonexaminer.com/weekly-standard/why-i-oppose-newt (accessed April 20, 2020). 30 Guy Gugliotta and Juliet Eilpern, “‘Gingrich Steps Down in Face of Rebellion,” Washington Post, November 7, 1998. 31 Julian E. Zelizer, Burning Down the House: Newt Gingrich, the Fall of a Speaker, and the Rise of the New Republican Party (New York: Penguin Press, 2020). 32 McKay Coppins, “The Man Who Broke Politics,” The Atlantic, October 17, 2018, https://www. theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2018/11/newt-gingrich-says-youre-welcome/570832/ (accessed April 20, 2020).

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33 Keith T. Poole and Howard Rosenthal, “On Party Polarization in Congress,” Daedalus 136 (3) (Summer 2007): 104–107. Earlier, Keith T. Poole and Howard Rosenthal, “The Polarization of American Politics,” Journal of Politics, 46 (4) (November 1984): 1061–79. 34 Quote from Janet Benshoof, president, Center for Reproductive Law and Policy, in Neil A. Lewis, “Rejected as a Clerk, Chosen as a Justice: Ruth Joan Bader Ginsburg,” New York Times, June 15, 1993. 35 Richard J. Regan, A Constitutional History of the US Supreme Court (Washington, DC: Catholic University of America Press, 2015), 271. 36 The official name was the Violent Crime Control and Law Enforcement Act of 1994. 37 “Bill Clinton Regrets ‘Three Strikes’ Bill,” BBC News, July 16, 2015, https://www.bbc.com/news/ world-us-canada-22545871 (accessed March 12, 2020). See Michelle Alexander, The New Jim Crow: Mass Incarceration in the Age of Colorblindness (New York: New Press, 2010). 38 Brian K. Atchison and Daniel K. Fox, “The Politics of the Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act,” Health Affairs 16 (3) (1997): 146–50. 39 Douglas Jehl, “Bush Vetoes Family Leave Bill, Wants Voluntary Plan,” Los Angeles Times, September 23, 1992. 40 Steven K. Wisensale, “The White House and Congress on Child Care and Family Leave Policy: From Carter to Clinton,” Policy Studies Journal 75 (1) (1997): 75–86. 41 Dodd quoted Helen Dewar, “Congress Passes Family Leave,” Washington Post, February 3, 1993, 1. 42 The countries are Bulgaria, Hungary, Japan, Lithuania, Austria, Latvia, Slovakia, Norway, and Slovenia. Canada provides twenty-five weeks; Mexico, fifteen. Gretchen Livingston and Deja Thomas, “Among 41 Countries, Only US Lacks Paid Parental Leave,” Pew Research Center, December 16, 2019, https://www.pewresearch.org/fact-tank/2019/12/16/u-s-lacks-mandated-paid-parental-leave/ (accessed March 27, 2020). 43 Margot Canaday, The Straight State: Sexuality and Citizenship in Twentieth Century America (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2011), esp. chs. 2 and 5. 44 Powell quoted in Stuart E. Weisberg, Barney Frank: The Story of America’s Only Gay, Left-Handed, Jewish Congressman (Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 2009), 398. 45 Dole quoted in Dewar, “Congress Passes Family Leave.” 46 Frank quoted in Ibid., 401. Also, Barney Frank, Frank: A Life in Politics from the Great Society to SameSex Marriage (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2015), 146–69. 47 US Department of Defense, Directive No. 1304.26 (December 21, 1993), https://biotech.law.lsu.edu/ blaw/dodd/corres/html2/d130426x.htm (accessed March 27, 2020). 48 George Stephanopoulos, All Too Human: A Political Education (Boston: Little, Brown, 1999), 128. 49 Report, “Defense of Marriage Act,” US House of Representatives, 104th Congress, 2d. Report 104664, at 2; https://www.govinfo.gov/content/pkg/CRPT-104hrpt664/pdf/CRPT-104hrpt664.pdf (accessed March 26, 2020). 50 Barr quoted in Ariane De Vogue, “Congress Evolves on DOMA, Same-Sex Marriage,” ABC News, December 5, 2012. 51 Kennedy quoted in Ibid. 52 Maney, Bill Clinton, 175–76. 53 Coburn quotes in De Vogue, “Congress Evolves on DOMA, Same-Sex Marriage.” 54 “Same-Sex Marriage, State by State,” Pew Research Center, June 26, 2015, https://www.pewforum.org/ 2015/06/26/same-sex-marriage-state-by-state/ (accessed March 26, 2020). 55 Susan W. Blank and Barbara B. Blum, “A Brief History of Work Expectations for Welfare Mothers,” Welfare to Work 7 (1) (The Future of Children) (Spring 1997): 28-38. 56 Peter T. Kilborn and Sam Howe Verhovek, “Clinton’s Welfare Shift Ends Tortuous Journey,” New York Times, August 2, 1996. 57 Andrew Glass, “Clinton Signs ‘Welfare to Work’ Bill, August 22, 1996,” Politico, August 22, 2018, https://www.politico.com/story/2018/08/22/clinton-signs-welfare-to-work-bill-aug-22-1996-790321 (accessed April 16, 2020). Patterson, Restless Giant, 374–75. 58 “Text of President Clinton’s Announcement on Welfare Legislation,” New York Times, August 1, 1996. 59 “Dole’s Statement on Measure,” New York Times, August 1, 1996. 60 Two other assistant secretaries also resigned, Mary Jo Bane and Wendell Primus. 61 Peter Edelman, “The Worst Thing Bill Clinton Has Done,” The Atlantic, March 1997, https://www. theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/1997/03/the-worst-thing-bill-clinton-has-done/376797/ (accessed April 9, 2020). 62 Ibid.

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63 Kilborn and Verhovek, “Clinton’s Welfare Shift Ends Tortuous Journey.” 64 The principal sponsors were Phil Gramm (Republican—Texas), James A. (Jim) Leach (Republican—Iowa), and Thomas J. Bliley, Jr. (Republican—Virginia). 65 Alex J. Pollock, “Bigger, Fewer, Riskier: The Evolution of US Banking Since 19650,” The American Interest, February 25, 2019, https://www.the-american-interest.com/2019/02/25/bigger-fewer-riskierthe-evolution-of-u-s-banking-since-1950/ (accessed April 8, 2020). 66 Julia Kagan, “The Gramm-Leach-Bliley Act,” Investopedia, June 25, 2019, https://www.investopedia. com/terms/g/glba.asp (accessed April 8, 2020). 67 Dorgan quoted in David Leonhardt, “Washington’s Invisible Hand,” New York Times, September 26, 2008. 68 Andrew Ross Sorkin, “Reinstating an Old Rule is not a Cure for a Crisis,” New York Times, May 21, 2012. 69 Drew DeSilver, “Will Trump’s Backing Revive Moribund Term Limits Movement?” Pew Research Center, December 1, 2016, https://www.pewresearch.org/fact-tank/2016/12/01/will-trumps-backingrevive-moribund-term-limits-movement/ (accessed March 24, 2020). 70 Linda Greenhouse, “High Court Blocks Term Limits in a 5-4 Decision,” New York Times, May 23, 1995. 71 Romer v. Evans, 517 US 629 (1996), https://supreme.justia.com/cases/federal/us/517/620/#tab-opinion1959867. The Colorado governor, Roy Romer, was on record against Amendment 2, but in his official capacity he became a part of the suit, along with the state attorney general, and the state of Colorado. 72 517 US 629, at 635. 73 Boy Scouts of America v. Dale, 530 US 640 (2000), https://supreme.justia.com/cases/federal/us/530/ 640/#tab-opinion-1960803. 74 Ibid., at 644. 75 Wade Goodwyn, “Boys Scouts of America Sexual Abuse Victims Seek in Bankruptcy Court,” NPR, November 13, 2020, https://www.npr.org/2020/11/13/933924470/boy-scouts-of-america-sexual-abusevictims-seek-justice-in-bankruptcy-court (accessed January 3, 2021). 76 Shaw v. Reno, 505 US 630 (1993), 635–36, incorporating language from a lower court, https:// supreme.justia.com/cases/federal/us/509/630/#tab-opinion-1959331. 77 Majority opinion by Justice O’Connor, joined by Rehnquist, Scalia, Kennedy, and Thomas. 78 Dissenting opinion by Justice White, joined by Blackmun, Stevens, and Souter. 79 Shaw v. Hunt, 517 US 899 (1996), https://www.oyez.org/cases/1995/94-923. 80 Bush v. Gore, 531 US 98 (2000), per curiam; https://supreme.justia.com/cases/federal/us/531/98/#tabopinion-1960861. 81 Ibid., at 122. 82 Ibid., at 128–29. 83 Andrew Glass, “Gore Concedes Presidential Election to Bush, Dec. 13, 2000,” Politico, December 13, 2000, https://www.politico.com/story/2017/12/13/gore-concedes-presidential-election-to-bush-dec13-2000-287285 (accessed January 3, 2021). 84 Hillary Clinton quoted in Amy Goldstein, “How the Demise of Her Health Care Plan Led to the Politician Clinton Is Today,” Washington Post, August 25, 2016. 85 Haynes Johnson and David S. Broder, The System: The American Way of Politics and the Breaking Point (Boston: Little, Brown, 1996), 195. 86 Quoted in Ibid., 214. Also, Darrell M. West, Diane Heith, and Chris Goodwin, “Harry and Louise Go to Washington: Political Advertising and Health Care Reform,” Journal of Health Politics, Policy and Law 21 (1) (Spring 1996): 35–68; Dennis W. Johnson, Democracy for Hire: A History of American Political Consulting (New York: Oxford University Press, 2017), 346–49. 87 Robin Toner, “Harry and Louise and a Guy Named Ben,” New York Times, September 30, 1994. 88 Paul Starr, “What Happened to Health Care Reform?” The American Prospect 20 (Winter 1995): 20–31. 89 Richard Rothstein, “‘Goals 2000’ Scorecard: Failure Pitches a Shutout,” Economic Policy Institute, December 22, 1999, https://www.epi.org/publication/webfeat_lessons19991222/ (accessed April 6, 2020). 90 Mark Pitsch, “With Students’ Aid, Clinton Signs Goals 2000,” Education Week, April 6, 1994, https:// www.edweek.org/ew/articles/1994/04/06/28goals.h13.html (accessed April 6, 2020). 91 Rothstein, “‘Goals 2000’ Scorecard.” 92 See Robert B. Schwartz, Marian A. Robinson, Michael W. Kirst, and David L. Kirp, “Goals 2000 and the Standards Movement,” Brookings Papers on Education Policy 3 (2000), 173–214.

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93 Clinton v. City of New York, 524 US 417 (1998), https://supreme.justia.com/cases/federal/us/524/417/# tab-opinion-1960375. 94 Dennis W. Johnson, The Laws that Shaped America: Fifteen Acts of Congress and Their Lasting Impact (New York: Routledge, 2009), 386–88. 95 Kari Marie Norgaard, Living in Denial: Climate Change, Emotions, and Everyday Life (Cambridge: MIT Press, 2011), 177–206. 96 The resolution was named after its two principal sponsors, Robert Byrd (Democrat—West Virginia) and Chuck Hagel (Republican—Nebraska); there were sixty-three other co-sponsors. https://web. archive.org/web/20160809040037/https://www.nationalcenter.org/KyotoSenate.html (accessed April 7, 2020). 97 “US Rejection of Kyoto Political Process,” American Journal of International Law 95 (3) (July 2001): 647–50.

Chapter 11

Vulnerable America: 2001–2008

No one can say when the unwinding began—when the coil that held Americans together in its secure and sometimes stifling grip first gave way. Like any great change, the unwinding began at countless times, in countless ways—and at some moment the country, always the same country, crossed a line of history and became irretrievably different. (George Packer, 2014)1 As a nation, America was living beyond its means—and living off the savings of other countries. (Ben S. Bernanke, Timothy F. Geithner, and Henry M. Paulson, Jr., 2019)2

Writing in 2003, Senator Tom Daschle characterized the first three years of the twenty-first century as a head-spinning succession of critical turning points for America, one after another, crucible moments balanced on the edge of a razor, where the slightest shift in the winds of circumstance can alter the course of an entire nation, and one unthinkable blow can transform the fate of an entire planet.3 This era was shaped and transformed by the terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001, the fear and anxiety they provoked, growing xenophobia, the ramping up of the national security apparatus, and the costly, lengthy war that followed. America no longer was safe, distant from the horrors of terrorism and violence; America was now vulnerable. With the deadly Hurricane Katrina in 2005, Americans learned how unprepared and uncoordinated the federal, state, and local governments were for a major natural disaster. Then, with the pronounced economic meltdown in 2007–2008, Americans experienced how fragile the American and world economy could be, and why only massive federal assistance could partially repair the damage.

AMERICA DURING THIS ERA During this era, there was a profound shift in the digital revolution. Wikipedia, the online usercreated encyclopedia, was launched in 2001; by 2009, some 3 million articles were posted on the site. Social media sites began to flourish. One of the most successful was MySpace, created in 2003, and purchased by Rupert Murdoch’s News Corp. in 2005; by 2008 it was the dominant social network, even larger than Google. But its failure to adapt to new technologies, DOI: 10.4324/9781003293538-15

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bureaucratic inertia within News Corp., and the pressure to increase revenue resulting in questionable advertising, led to its demise. In 2008, the upstart platform Facebook grew rapidly and soon overtook MySpace as the favored social media site. YouTube was launched in December 2005 and was sold the next year to Google for $1.65 billion. By 2016, YouTube had added a streaming service, and approximately 5 billion videos were watched each day, with 300 hours of video uploaded each minute.4 Twitter was launched in 2007, and by 2020 it had 326 million active users and 500 million postings a day.5 Personal computers were becoming faster, cheaper, more available, and in 2007 the revolution in mobile phone technology came up with the first smartphone, the Apple iPhone. Blackberry and Nokia, once all the rage in mobile phones, were soon replaced by the extraordinary new technology. Individuals and organizations were rapidly developing websites, blogging, sending tweets, generating a torrent of online materials. Entrepreneurs began developing apps (“applications”) for use on smartphones; hundreds then tens of thousands of apps were being developed. Artificial intelligence was gaining in sophistication, and algorithms increasingly understood the habits, tastes, and dislikes of online users. Netflix, which began in 1997 as a mail-in movie renting service, grew during the 2000s, and had 5 million subscribers by 2006. In 2007, it introduced streaming services for movies and television shows. During the next decade, Netflix would become its own studio, generating hit series like House of Cards and Orange Is the New Black. By 2020, Netflix had 180 million subscribers worldwide, with 70 million in the United States, gobbling up 15 percent of the entire world’s bandwidth. The giant bricks-and-motor movie rental business, Blockbuster, once Netflix’s biggest rival, was unable to innovate, stumbled, and fell behind, declaring bankruptcy in 2010.6 Smartphones, iPads, personal computers, and Kindles were replacing regular television, cable television, newspapers, books, and other traditional forms of communication. Anyone could post a video on YouTube, become an “influencer” on Facebook or other sites, post serious, nonsensical, or offensive comments for all to see. One site would lead to another, views and predispositions were reinforced, and Americans would gather digitally in their own selffulfilling and affirming worlds. The digital transformation would soon have a major impact on politics, news gathering, the veracity of online information (years before President Trump’s “fake” news), and the way individuals and organizations communicated with one another.

The Era by the Numbers The US population following the 2000 census was 281,421,906, adding 32.7 million (13.2 percent) over 1990. Following the 2000 census, nine American cities had populations of more than 1 million, led once more by New York (8 million), Los Angeles (3.7 million), and Chicago (2.9 million). Three of these million-plus cities were in Texas—Houston, Dallas, and San Antonio. California (33.9 million) remained the largest state, gaining over 4 million residents from the previous census; it was followed by Texas (20.8 million), New York (18.9 million), Florida (16.0 million), Illinois (12.4 million), and Pennsylvania (12.3 million). The fastest growing states were all in the West and Mountain states: Nevada (66.7 percent in increase since 1990), Arizona (40 percent), Colorado (30.0 percent), Utah (29.6), and Idaho (28.5 percent). Except for Louisiana, all of the southern states, from Texas to Virginia, saw double-digit growth. No state recorded a loss in population. In 2005, the median US household income was $46,300 ($62,013 in 2020 dollars), a 31 percent increase over 1967, the first year that this figure was tabulated. But there was a wide

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variation in incomes throughout the country. The highest median incomes, by county, were found in the Washington, DC, suburbs. Fairfax County, Virginia, had a median household income of $98,483; four other DC-adjacent counties were in the ten wealthiest. By contrast, two Texas counties, Cameron and Hildalgo, were the poorest, with median incomes of just over $24,000.7 Union membership continued its steady decline. In 1945, at its peak, organized labor represented 33.4 percent of the workforce. That percentage had declined to 23.6 percent by 1980, and to 13.5 percent in 2000. By the end of this era, union membership embraced just one out of every eight workers, or 12.4 percent of the workforce.8 The number of immigrants living in the United States tripled from 9.6 million in 1970 to 28.4 million in 2000; and by 2000, immigrants accounted for 10.4 percent of overall US population. Roughly 12 million were believed to reside in the United States on a more or less permanent basis.9 From 2000 to 2010, the immigrant population grew by more than 8.8 million, bringing the total number to approximately 40 million.10 Five metropolitan areas—New York, Los Angeles, Chicago, Miami, and Houston—continued having the largest number of immigrants. But there has been significant immigrant growth in the other 100 largest metropolitan areas. In 1926, the US Census Bureau first published statistics on the number convicted criminals. That year, there were 96,000 federal and state inmates. At the beginning of the twenty-first century, there were over 1.25 million such prisoners. In proportion to the population, this was five times the figures in 1926.11

Society Under Stress 9/11 and Its Aftermath The terrorist attacks on the World Trade Center, the Pentagon, and Shanksville, Pennsylvania, shook the nation to its core. Americans no longer felt safe from the horrors they had seen on television, the conflagration in the Middle East, the growing network of terror cells, or the bombings in London subways. The central purposes of the terrorist attacks—the short-term and long-term psychological effects—were widespread and effective.12 As psychologist Roxane Cohen Silver observed, the 9/11 attacks went far beyond the killing of 3,000 or so innocent lives, the brief crippling of the economy, and the destruction of buildings. “They shattered a sense of security and perceptions of invulnerability among residents of the United States and the Western world.”13 On the tenth anniversary of the 9/11 attacks, Brian Michael Jenkins of the RAND Corporation wrote: “Preoccupation with terrorism, including the possibility of terrorist in its worst conceivable forms, has been the most obvious major consequence of 9/11.” It has also provided “a lightning rod for America’s broader anxieties, and it has held a mirror to many of America’s enduring characteristics.” The attacks have made a deep impact, influencing “the legal, social, military, psychological, and even spiritual aspects of life in America.”14 In ten years after the attacks, the mood of the country had changed profoundly. Above all, the terrorist attacks exposed the weaknesses, complacency, and the lack of coordination in American security systems. For the moment, lasting about six weeks, federal lawmakers, increasingly fixated with deadlock, finger-pointing, and non-action, responded with alacrity and near unity, and never mind the details of what they were about to sign into law, the USA Patriot Act. Adding to the anxiety, mysterious anthrax letters were sent to the offices of Senators Daschle and Patrick J. Leahy (Democrat—Vermont), and several media outlets a week after 9/11; twenty-two persons were infected and five died. Then in December, British terrorist Richard

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Reid (the “shoe bomber”) unsuccessfully tried to blow up a commercial airliner. Soon thereafter British authorities discovered terrorist attempts to blow up airplanes flying from London’s Heathrow Airport to the United States. Out of the 9/11 attacks came broad changes in the federal security apparatus, and this led to the creation of the Department of Homeland Security, now the third largest bureaucracy in the federal government. Many in Congress and the administration were itching for retaliation, and Iraq would be the target. Vice President Richard B. (Dick) Cheney, President George W. Bush, Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld and their teams tried their best to convince lawmakers and the public that Iraq possessed weapons of mass destruction. “A slam dunk,” proclaimed CIA director George J. Tenet, about evidence of Saddam Hussein’s mass destruction weapons. Before the United Nations, Secretary of State Colin L. Powell tried his best to convince himself and the world of an Iraqi nuclear threat. The evidence was thin and ultimately proved to be illusive, but no matter.15 In October 2002, Congress approved a joint resolution authorizing military force against Iraq. In the House, the vote was 296–133, with 126 Democrats voting against; in the Senate, the vote was 77–23, with 21 Democrats voting no. On March 19, 2003, President Bush addressed the nation, announcing the beginning of hostilities called Operation Iraqi Freedom. How long would this second Iraq war last? Six weeks, six months, perhaps, reckoned some policymakers. On May 1, 2003, on board an American aircraft carrier, President Bush, wearing a military flight jacket, declared “Mission Accomplished,” proclaiming that “In the battle for Iraq, the United States and its allies have prevailed.” But reality did not square with the cockiness and braggadocio. Like the Vietnam War, wartime images were burned into America’s memory: “shock and awe,” Abu Ghraib, the capture of a disheveled and confused Saddam Hussein, and the charred bodies of civilians and US private contractors. Eight years later, in a ceremony in Baghdad on December 15, 2011, the war was declared officially over. But then came further fighting in Afghanistan, against ISIS, and the collapse of Syria. By August 2020, some 5,000 American troops remained in Iraq, fending off ISIS fighters and training an unsteady Iraqi military.16 How much did these efforts cost? The Congressional Research Service estimated that for the first thirteen years (2001–2014), fighting against Middle East terrorism cost about $1.6 trillion.17 In 2019, political scientist Neta C. Crawford estimated that US wars in Afghanistan, Iraq, Syria, and Pakistan since 2001 had cost $6.4 trillion—$2 trillion more than all federal spending during Fiscal Year 2018.18 Growing Economic Inequality and the Great Recession In March 2001, the US economy sank into a recession, ending an historic streak of ten years of economic growth.19 Following the recession, which lasted until November 2001, the living standards of a vast majority of Americans had declined or stagnated while the wealthy reaped the economic rewards. Economist Joseph E. Stiglitz noted that from 2002 to 2007, the top 1 percent accumulated more than 65 percent of the gain in total national income. “While the top 1 percent was doing fantastically, most Americans were actually growing worse-off.”20 Wages for most ordinary American workers stood still or had grown only slowly, while those at the very top saw substantial growth in income. Journalist Barbara Ehrenreich wanted to investigate what it was like living on minimum wage. Her 2001 book, Nickel and Dimed: On (Not) Getting By in America, became a best–seller, portraying what trying to survive meant for the working poor. Ehrenreich worked as a waitress in Florida, a house cleaner in Maine, and a clerk at Wal-Mart in Minnesota, and described the ceaseless struggles of trying to cobble

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together enough money for food, rent, and transportation (it would have been even worse if she had to support a growing family).21 In 2006, the National Low-Income Housing Coalition estimated that a worker needed $16.31 an hour in order to afford a two-bedroom housing unit. At the same time, some employers, financial institutions and banks continued to devise schemes to prey on the poor: payday loans, with loan-shark interest rates; rent-to-buy furniture stores, and dodgy mortgage and refinancing schemes. Circuit City, the electronics retailer, laid off 3,400 long-time employees in 2007, because their wages had crept up from $10 to $20 an hour; those laid off were later permitted to reapply for their jobs, but at a far lower wage. Wal-Mart, which reluctantly agreed to pay full-time employees medical benefits, began increasing its part-time (and thus no benefits) workforce from 20 to 40 percent. So why are wages so low? Economist Paul Krugman observed in 2006: “Major employers like Wal-Mart have decided that their interests are best served by treating workers as a disposable commodity, paid as little as possible and encouraged to leave after a year or two. And these employers don’t worry that angry workers will respond to their war on wages by forming unions, because they know that government officials, who are supposed to protect workers’ rights, will do everything they can to come down on the side of the wage-cutters.”22 Then came the Great Recession, the devastating economic downturn that lasted eighteen consecutive months, from December 2007 through July 2009. Only the Great Depression of the late 1920s and 1930s, forty-three months in duration, was of greater magnitude and consequence.23 The unemployment rate stood at 5 percent in December 2007, but then rose dramatically to 9.5 percent in June 2009, hitting its peak, 10 percent, in October of that year. Home prices dropped 30 percent, and the net worth of US households and nonprofits fell from $69 trillion in 2007 to $55 trillion in 2009.24 There was an enormous accumulation of debt, not just by the government, but by ordinary families. Household debt ratio to GDP was growing so fast, that a chart used to track debt in New York Federal Reserve chairman Timothy F. Geithner’s office was labeled “Mount Fuji.” The biggest part of the private debt came from the US home mortgage market. Thanks to low interest rates, the housing market saw remarkable gains during the early 2000s. According to economists at the Federal Reserve Bank of Richmond, “average home prices in the United States more than doubled between 1998 and 2006, the sharpest increase recorded in US history.” Mortgage debt, which was 61 percent of GDP in 1998, rose to 97 percent in 2006.25 Financial institutions packaged and repackaged mortgages into complex securities, which were then sold to investors. Subprime borrowers, those persons with poor credit who ordinarily could not obtain loans, were enticed by the boom in housing values and the lure of adjustablerate mortgages. As in any economic bubble, there was excessive optimism; further, there was not enough regulatory oversight in the mortgage market. Countrywide Financial, the largest and most aggressive subprime mortgage lender, a “freewheeling mortgage machine,” collapsed in 2007 and was taken over by Bank of America in a fire sale.26 Where was the federal government? The entire federal financial regulatory system was “creaky and fragmented, a set of overlapping bureaucracies with tribal rivalries,” wrote Ben Bernanke, Timothy Geithner, and Henry Paulson.27 Commercial banks had the most formal oversight: the Federal Reserve, Office of the Comptroller of the Currency, Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation, Office of Thrift Supervision, state and local banking authorities, and foreign regulators who oversee US banks operating in their countries. Outside of commercial banks, the oversight was less stringent. The mortgage giants Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, the government-sponsored enterprises, had “their own mostly ineffectual Washington regulator.” The Securities Exchange Commission, the Commodities Futures Trading Commission, the Federal Trade Commission, and many others also had some responsibility.

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But the critical gap, argued Bernanke, Geithner, and Paulson, was this: no one was watching out for the system as a whole. “No one had the authority to step in to avoid a chaotic bankruptcy of a major non-bank during a crisis.”28 The Opioid Crisis Still below the radar screen was the growing crisis in opioid addiction, especially prevalent in poor, rural regions of Appalachia. To the larger world, the opioid crisis was first chronicled in a January 2001 article in the New York Times29 showing the misuse of the pain-killing drug OxyContin, which contained the active ingredient oxycodone, a morphine-like substance. OxyContin operated through a time-released formulation to control pain over a longer period of time. But chewing or crushing the pills would override the time-release feature, giving instant euphoria and deadly consequences to users. A safety officer in rural Kentucky noted in 2001, “Abuse of this drug has become unbelievable in the last year, with probably 85 to 90 percent of our field work now related” to it. Opioid use became rampant during this era. In 2006, two top federal government scientists, alarmed at the growing epidemic, tried to warn health officials and the public. There was a dramatic increase in the use of opioids, especially among teenagers, and the directors of the National Institutes of Health (NIH) and the National Institute of Drug Abuse (NIDA) requested that an urgent call to action be issued by the US Surgeon General, Richard Carmona. Such a message was the “most urgent and powerful” tool that could be sent out, and had been done earlier on the issue of auto safety belts and tobacco use. But it was never instituted. Politico noted that had the call to action succeeded, “it would have been the first major attempt by the federal government to counteract the aggressive marketing of pharmaceutical companies that had led doctors to liberally—too liberally, in retrospect—prescribe the painkillers.”30 The White House Office of National Drug Control Policy, in its 2006 National Strategy, also warned of the problem: “The abuse of prescription drugs, including OxyContin (oxycodone), has become the second most prevalent form of drug abuse.” Despite these reports, little was done at the federal level to address the problem. During 2006, some 216 million opioid prescriptions were written, growing steadily until 2012, when over 255 million were prescribed.31 Federal drug data, updated in 2020, showed that more than 100 billion doses of oxycodone and hydrocodone were shipped nationwide from 2006 through 2014.32 Cultural Fractures and Polarization Since the 1973 decision of Roe v. Wade, religious and cultural conservatives had been energized in their opposition to abortions. They had pressed elected officials to pile on restrictions, to limit access, and generally to make it far more difficult for women to have abortions. Their firm belief is that all life—beginning at the moment of conception—is sacred and must be protected. These conservative forces also focused on the selection judges, particularly federal judges, and especially nominees to the Supreme Court. For many, the qualifications for elected officials or judicial nominations rested on just one issue: will they do all they can to blunt or reject Roe v. Wade? Another concern for conservative activists has been the growing push for gay rights. In 2003, the Supreme Court ruled in Lawrence v. Texas that anti-sodomy laws, which made it a crime for two persons of the same sex to engage in certain sexual conduct, had violated the Due Process clause of the Fourteenth Amendment.33 Justice Anthony Kennedy wrote the majority opinion, and was joined by five other justices. Citing Lawrence, the Massachusetts Supreme Judicial Court later in 2003 ruled that the state law banning same sex marriages was unconstitutional.34

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In some conservative religious circles, the reaction to Lawrence was swift and sharp. James C. Dobson, Jr., head of Focus on the Family, called Kennedy, “the most dangerous man in America because of his determination to rewrite the Constitution.” Dobson, who previously kept away from politics, became increasingly active. His political stature increased, to the point of the New York Times describing him as “the nation’s most influential evangelical leader.”35 Dobson leveraged his anti-abortion, anti-gay marriage, pro-family stance to help conservatives defeat Daschle in his 2004 Senate re-election, and he vowed to back President Bush and target Democratic senators from red states who would not back Bush’s conservative judicial picks. American views on the value and worth of immigrants were also becoming sharply divided. In 1994, there was just a 2 percent differential between Republicans and Democrats on their responses to the question: “immigrants strengthen the country with their hard work and talents.” In 2020, there is a 42 percent differential: 42 percent of Republicans agree with that statement, while 84 percent of Democrats agree.36 Social scientists increasingly were studying polarization—the sharp divisions in belief and opinions—in American government and society.37 The 1990s saw clear evidence of polarization among lawmakers and policymakers. The question was whether polarization was confined to these elites or whether it was symptomatic of society as a whole. During this era, political scientist Morris P. Fiorina argued that the idea of a cultural war and polarization was a myth, not supported by a careful analysis of public opinion data;38 rather, the supposed polarization was perpetuated by politicians and the media. But that analysis was soon challenged. Writing in 2018, political scientist Alan I. Abramowitz argued that polarization was not confined to policymakers and elites: Its causes can be found in dramatic changes in American society and culture that have divided the public into two opposing camps—those who welcome changes and those who are threatened by them … [producing] an electorate that is increasingly mistrustful of anyone in the other camp.39 People were dug in, polarized by age, race, social status, ideology, religion, gender, and where they live, and elected officials reflected those divides. Corporate Collapses Two major corporate collapses occurred during the early part of this era. Enron Corporation, the $63.4 billion energy-trading company, declared bankruptcy in December 2001. It was a mighty fall. Six years in a row, between 1996 and 2001, Fortune magazine named Enron “America’s most innovative company.” Another casualty of Enron’s collapse was Arthur Anderson LLP, one of the Big Five national accounting firms, which offered its stamp of approval to Enron’s questionable accounting practices. The eighty-nine-year-old accounting firm was fined $500,000 and found guilty of destroying thousands of Enron documents, computer files, and emails. It went out of business in August 2002. As financial journalist Troy Segal observed: To this day, many wonder how such a powerful business [Enron], at the time one of the largest companies in the United States, disintegrated almost overnight. Also difficult to fathom is how its leadership managed to fool regulators for so long with fake holdings and off-the-books accounting.40 The Enron bankruptcy was the largest in American history until the 2002 collapse of WorldCom, the telecommunications giant, valued at $175 billion during the height of the

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dot.com boom. WorldCom engaged in the biggest accounting scandal in history, cooking the books to make massive debts look like profits. Arthur Anderson was also the outside auditor for WorldCom. MCI, one of WorldCom’s subsidiaries, survived, emerging from the bankruptcy and massive fraud. The toll in both corporate bankruptcies was immense: in Enron’s case, some 22,000 jobs were lost, $60 billion in stock and $2 billion in employee pension plans evaporated. Tens of thousands of WorldCom employees lost their jobs; billions were lost to shareholders. Senior officials were found guilty and sentenced to lengthy prison terms. Kenneth L. Lay, founder and former CEO of Enron, was found guilty of multiple charges but died of a heart attack before being sentenced. Jeffrey K. Skilling, Enron’s CEO, was sentenced to twenty-four years in prison, but was released in 2019, and compelled to forfeit $45 million in seized Enron monies.41 Bernard J. Ebbers, WorldCom’s CEO, was sentenced to twenty-five years in prison, but was released for health reasons after serving fourteen years; he died the following year. Mass Shootings Those readers who remember black and white television will recall one of the most horrific of mass murders, when on August 1, 1966, an engineering student (and ex-Marine), armed with six weapons, from atop the University of Texas Tower indiscriminately killed seventeen persons and wounded another thirty over a ninety-six-minute period of time. The next day, White House press secretary Bill Moyers read a statement from President Johnson: “What happened is not without a lesson: that we must press urgently for the legislation now pending in Congress to help prevent the wrong person from obtaining firearms.” A version of Johnson’s legislation, the Gun Control Act of 1968, passed two years later, though it was thoroughly watered down by gun advocacy organizations and their allies in Congress. Looking at the 1966 Texas massacre, the first of its kind, to the present, historian Tevi D. Troy observed in 2018 that “mass shootings occur with depressing regularity in contemporary American life.”42 The epidemic of mass shootings, like other social crises, could have been addressed by the president; but some chose to remain silent. Ronald Reagan, for example, said nothing after twenty-one persons were killed at a McDonald’s restaurant in San Ysidro, California in July 1984. George H.W. Bush generally failed to respond during his term of office, except when a disturbed man in October 1991 killed twenty-three people at a restaurant in Killeen, Texas. Altogether, the Congressional Research Service in 2013 identified seventy-eight public mass shootings since 1983, claiming 547 lives.43 Capturing the greatest attention during this era were the shootings in Blacksburg, Virginia, on the campus of Virginia Tech in 2007. A twentythree-year-old student killed thirty-three students and professors, wounding another seventeen others, before taking his own life. The DC sniper attacks terrorized the nation’s capital and nearby suburbs when, over the course of nine months in 2002, a man and a teenage companion killed seventeen and injured ten others. There were shootings in bars, in schools and universities, in youth centers, in nursing homes, in synagogues and churches, in shopping malls, on military bases, on Indian reservations, and at workplaces. The tragedies took place throughout America in rural Alabama, in downtown Los Angeles, in smalltown Mississippi, in a wealthy enclave in Seattle, in Pittsburgh, Binghamton, New York, and many other places. Katrina and Federal, State, and Local Unpreparedness The 1900 Galveston, Texas, hurricane claimed at least 8,000 lives and the 1928 Lake Okeechobee, Florida, hurricane caused over 2,500 fatalities. These tragedies occurred during

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times with no sophisticated advanced weather reporting and no coordinated federal-state-andlocal disaster relief programs. Seventy-seven years after the Lake Okeechobee devastation came Hurricane Katrina, with 1,500 deaths, 90,000 square miles of land (the size of the United Kingdom) destroyed, and economic damage topping $125 billion.44 Hurricane Katrina struck the Gulf Coast in Louisiana, Mississippi, Alabama, and surrounding areas. For days on end, tens of thousands of residents were without the basics of electricity, clean water, food, and shelter. There had been ample advance notice: the National Hurricane Center warned of an unprecedented direct hit on New Orleans nearly five days before it happened. But approximately 80,000 residents, one-fifth the New Orleans population, failed to evacuate. Two-thirds of those who did not leave believed that the storm would not be as bad as forecasters had predicted. The fierce winds and storm surge obliterated entire coastal communities. Thousands of New Orleans businesses and homes were destroyed by flooding, much of it coming after Mississippi River levees had been breached. Particularly hard hit were the low-lying, poorer, and predominantly black districts of the city, especially the Ninth Ward. Throughout the city, thousands “languished in the heat and squalor on islands of concrete, in darkened stadiums, in nursing homes, or on roof tops, waiting for rescue, sometimes during before help arrived.”45 What had state, local, and federal governments done to prepare for this disaster? The Senate Committee on Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs issued a report in 2006 titled “Hurricane Katrina: A Nation Still Unprepared,” outlining the depth of unpreparedness throughout the levels of government.46 In the cover letter to the report, Senators Susan M. Collins (Republican—Maine) and Joseph I. Lieberman (Democrat—Connecticut) wrote: We knew Katrina was coming. How much worse would the nightmare have been if the disaster had been unannounced—an earthquake in San Francisco, a burst levee near St. Louis or Sacramento, a biological weapon smuggled into Boston Harbor, or a chemical weapon terror attack in Chicago? Hurricane Katrina found us—still—a nation unprepared for catastrophe. The Senate report outlined four glaring deficiencies: (1) long-term warning went unheeded and government officials “neglected their duties” to prepare for the forewarned catastrophe; (2) officials took “insufficient actions or made poor decisions” immediately before, during, and after the hurricane and flooding; (3) systems in place that officials relied upon failed; and (4) government officials “at all levels failed to provide effective leadership.”47 Played again and again on television was President Bush’s fatuous praise of FEMA director Michael D. Brown, three days after the hurricane. “Brownie, you’re doin’ a heck of a job, working 24 hours a day,” Bush proclaimed, to the half-hearted applause of officials surrounding him.48 Brown, a political appointee with no prior expertise in disaster relief, resigned ten days later, and later admitted that Bush’s comment would be devastating: “I knew the minute he said that, the media and everybody else would see a disconnect between what he was saying and what I was witnessing on the ground.”49 After the 9/11 attacks, the federal government invested billions in disaster response, reorganized federal plans and organizations. But still, it was not prepared for Katrina, which caused far more damage than that caused by the 9/11 attacks.50 Bush biographer Jean Edward Smith noted that “The economic damage at the World Trade Center was enormous, but scarcely comparable to losses sustained in Hurricane Katrina or the subprime mortgage meltdown in Bush’s second term.”51 Even less prepared were the state and local governments in the path of the hurricane.

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In a reversal of roles, the United States became the recipient rather than the giver of humanitarian aid. Scores of countries volunteered to help. Qatar pledged $100 million in aid; China pledged $5 million; Nigeria offered $1 million; even Fidel Castro offered to fly 1,100 Cuban doctors to Houston to assist.52

THE NATIONAL GOVERNMENT

The Presidency George W. Bush was the president throughout this tumultuous era. From the start, Bush was on shaky ground, with no mandate and often only tenuous support in Congress. Throughout his presidency, Bush’s approval hovered around 50 percent, with plenty of critics both from the opposite party and from within his own.53 In the final months of his presidency, his approval rate was near rock-bottom, at just 28 percent. Only Harry Truman had scored lower (22 percent) in his final year of office. Ironically, Bush had scored the highest approval rating (90 percent) of any president immediately following the 9/11 terrorist attacks.54 Vice President Cheney played an outsized role in administration policymaking, especially in its domestic energy policy and in leading the effort to get the United States involved in war with Iraq. With the 9/11 crisis as the immediate impetus, Cheney strongly and effectively advocated an expanded role for presidential power, skirting congressional authority and opengovernment requirements. Given wide latitude and authority by Bush, Cheney would become one of the strongest, and most controversial, vice presidents in American history. The Executive Branch During this time, the new Department of Homeland Security was cobbled together, in response to the 9/11 terrorist attack. Its primary mission was “to prevent terrorist attacks within the United States [and] to reduce the vulnerability of the United States to terrorism.” It proved to be an unwieldly administrative task to combine long-standing agencies into a new coherent whole. Throughout the federal government, agency security plans were revamped, personnel shifted, and billions were poured into defense and security agencies.

The Congress In this era, the One Hundred Seventh Congress (2001–2003) through the One Hundred Tenth Congress (2007–2009), margins were thin and majorities were tenuous. House Republicans held ten to twenty seat majorities from 2001 to 2006, but following the 2006 congressional elections, Democrats won thirty-one seats and gained control of the House, with a margin of 233–202. The Republican Party held a 54–46 edge in the Senate prior to Election Day 2000. But then Republican Senate incumbents lost in Minnesota, Washington, Delaware, and Michigan. This was also the year that a deceased Democratic candidate—Missouri governor Mel Carnahan— defeated Republican incumbent John D. Ashcroft. Carnahan’s widow, Jean, took his place in the Senate.55 Further, it was an election where a sitting First Lady, Hillary R. Clinton, would be elected to the Senate from New York, and where Lisa Murkowski (Republican—Alaska) would be selected to fill a vacancy by her father, former senator and then governor of Alaska, Frank Murkowski. The end result was the Senate, deadlocked at fifty Republicans and fifty Democrats.

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With 9/11, the anthrax scare, along with the razor-thin majorities, Senator Tom Daschle rightly called the One Hundred Seventh Congress, “Like No Other Time.”56 Daschle of South Dakota, the Democratic leader, and Trent Lott of Mississippi, the Republican leader, worked out a shared arrangement for staff salary and office space, assignment of committee chairs, nominations, and appointments. When a vote would split evenly at 50–50, Vice President Cheney would cast the tie-breaking vote. Immediately, Harry M. Reid (Democrat—Nevada), the Senate minority whip, began a serious effort to recruit Republican senators to commit political apostasy: leave their party, and join the Democrats. One agreed. For twenty-six years, James M. (Jim) Jeffords of Vermont served as a Republican member of the House and then in the Senate. He was frustrated with the increasingly conservative policies coming from the White House, and in May 2001 cut a deal with Reid. Jeffords became an Independent but would caucus with Democrats. “Increasingly, I find myself in disagreement with my party,” Jeffords told a crowd of supporters in Burlington, “I feel as if a weight has been lifted from my shoulders.”57 Thus with that defection, Daschle became the new majority leader. Republicans recaptured the Senate in 2004, but following the 2006 elections, Democrats gained the majority with forty-nine members joined by two Independents (Bernie Sanders of Vermont and Joe Lieberman of Connecticut, the former Democratic vice-presidential candidate in 2004) who voted with the party. Leadership in the Senate Daschle served as majority leader following Jeffords’ defection, from May 2001 until January 2003, after which the Republicans recaptured the Senate, and Daschle became minority leader. In 2004, Daschle was narrowly defeated by Republican John R. Thune. This was the first time a Senate leader would lose a re-election bid since Republican Barry Goldwater defeated Democrat Ernest McFarland in Arizona. Harry Reid took over the leadership for Senate Democrats. On the Republican side, Trent Lott was briefly majority leader in 2001, then became minority leader. He later resigned that position, thanks in part to questionable remarks of praise he made about former segregationist senator Strom Thurmond.58 Lott resigned from the Senate altogether in late 2007 and immediately formed a lobbying firm with former senator John B. Breaux (Democrat—Louisiana). Following the 2006 congressional elections, Reid became the majority leader, the first Mormon to reach Senate leadership. Succeeding Lott as minority leader was Mitch McConnell (Republican—Kentucky) who served in the role from 2007 to 2015; after Republicans regained control of the Senate in 2015, he became majority leader, then minority leader in 2021. Leadership in the House During the first part of this era, J. Dennis Hastert (Republican—Illinois), became the longest serving Republican speaker in American history (January 1999–January 2007). After the 2006 congressional elections, Nancy P. Pelosi (Democrat—California) was chosen speaker for the One Hundred Tenth Congress (2007–2009), becoming the first woman and first Californian to be so elected. She remained speaker until Republicans recaptured the House in 2010. When the Democrat Party came into power in the House following the 2018 elections, Pelosi again was selected as speaker. Hastert retired in 2006 and joined a prominent law firm, but in 2015 he was indicted on federal charges for making false statements to federal investigators and evading banking reporting requirements. The following year, he was charged with, and subsequently admitted to,

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molesting four boys when he was a high school wrestling coach. Hastert became the highestranking elected official to have served a prison term. At the sentencing, federal judge Thomas M. Durkin said: “Nothing is more stunning than to have the words ‘serial child molester’ and ‘speaker of the House’ in the same sentence.”59 John A. Boehner (Republican—Ohio) was chosen as minority leader and remained in that position until 2011, when, after a change in the majority, he became speaker of the House. Four years later, under considerable political heat from conservatives within his own party, he resigned from Congress. Veteran congressional watchers Thomas E. Mann and Norman J. Ornstein labeled Congress during this era as the “broken branch.” The breakdown had been coming for years, they argued, with the arrogance and brashness of a Democratic majority during the 1950s–1980s, thinking after some forty years of dominance, that they would always be in charge.60 That was followed by the Republican takeover in the mid-1990s. For many Republicans, it was payback time, and the bitterness and heightened partisanship spilled over into both the House and the Senate. For a brief moment in congressional history, members of Congress banded together, without regard to party, assembling on the eastern steps of the Capitol, arm in arm, determined to persevere following the 9/11 terrorist attacks, and just weeks later, the anthrax scare in the Senate.61 But soon, Congress returned to twenty-first century normal: increased ideological polarization, strict partisanship, nastiness, and obstruction. Increasingly, after losing their majority in the Senate following the 2006 elections, Republicans resorted to the filibuster. This meant that Democrats would have to muster 60 votes, the number required to invoke cloture and halt a filibuster, rather than 51, a simple majority. The idea of a filibuster evokes the long-winded, exhausting speeches of Strom Thurmond during the 1950s or the seventy-five-day southern filibuster against the civil rights bill in 1964. But in modern times, the filibuster is silent. “A typical ‘filibuster’ occurs,” according to political scientist Gregory Koger, “when a senator refuses to agree to a time to hold a vote on a measure and, implicitly, threatens to drag out the debate indefinitely.”62 And it has become a commonplace tool of obstruction. During the One Hundred Tenth Congress (2007–2008), the Senate voted 111 times (or 16.9 percent of all votes) on whether to invoke cloture against a filibuster. Indeed, the Senate had become, for most important policy issues, the “sixty-vote Senate.”63

The Judiciary During this era, there were only two changes in the membership of the Supreme Court. At the end of the Court’s session in June 2005, Sandra Day O’Connor announced her retirement and President Bush nominated US court of appeals judge John G. Roberts, Jr. to take her place. But before Roberts could be confirmed, Chief Justice William Rehnquist died in early September. Bush then nominated Roberts to be chief justice and, to fill the O’Connor vacancy, nominated White House counsel Harriet Miers. The Miers nomination caused an uproar among conservative activists, and it was quickly withdrawn. Robert Bork, whose own nomination went up in flames in 1987, called her nomination a “disaster on every level” and “a slap in the face of the conservatives who’ve been building up a conservative legal movement for the past twenty years.”64 Bowing to the pressure, Bush sidelined Miers and chose US Court of Appeals judge Samuel A. Alito, Jr. to be the nominee. Roberts, born in Indiana, was educated at Harvard University and Harvard Law School. He worked in the Reagan administration from 1981–1986, was an assistant to Solicitor General Kenneth Starr, then served a decade in private practice before being nominated to the US Court of Appeals in 2003. He was fifty-one years old when he joined the Court.

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Photo 11.1 John G. Roberts, Jr. (b. 1955), Chief Justice of the United States. Source: Supreme Court of the United States.

Alito, a native of New Jersey, graduated from Princeton University and Yale Law School. Before joining the US Court of Appeals, he had served as assistant to the solicitor general, a US district attorney, and served in the Reagan office of legal counsel. Joining the Court at age fifty-six, Alito became a consistent conservative voice. Remaining on the Court from the previous era were Justices John Paul Stevens, Antonin Scalia, David Souter, Anthony Kennedy, Clarence Thomas, Ruth Bader Ginsburg, and Stephen Breyer. Three of these justices (Thomas, Ginsburg, and Breyer) would also serve through the 2019–2020 Court term. The Court often split five-to-four, with four conservative justices and four liberal justices. Anthony Kennedy, and increasingly David Souter and John Roberts, were the deciding vote.

KEY POLICIES ENACTED With Republicans capturing the White House and holding majorities in both the House and Senate (albeit a tentative hold), it was time for a far more conservative policy agenda. “For most Americans on the right,” observed historian Michael Kazin, “George W. Bush’s first term in office was the best of times.”65 Taxes and fiscal policy would be in the forefront, with quick passage of tax reduction legislation, generating serious implications for the federal budget as a result. But there was also serious money being obligated, especially for two expensive programs. One was the creation of Part D to Medicare, a $400 billion program, adding prescription drug coverage for millions of elderly persons. A second was a $286 billion program for funding of highways, rural and public transit. The sprawling transportation legislation, all 1,752 pages of it, was pork barrel spending on steroids, doling out funds for 6,371 projects throughout the states. But during this period, the basic funding for highways, the Highway Trust Fund, started running low on funds. The federal gasoline tax remained at 18.4 cents per gallon, where it had been last set in 1993. In 2008, Congress was compelled to put $8 billion in emergency funds to cover the short fall in the Highway Trust Fund.66 In addition, lawmakers transformed the basic federal education law, the Elementary and Secondary Education Act (1965) into No Child Left Behind; after many years, reformed campaign finance laws legislation in 2002. At the urging of the White House and fossil fuel

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interests, lawmakers crafted energy policies designed to promote traditional homegrown energy sources. Congress also addressed the scandals of Enron and WorldCom with legislation tightening accounting practices. In one if its most popular actions, Congress passed the Do Not Call Implementation Act, designed to curb unwanted commercial phone solicitations. Ten million people signed up during the first few days to get on the register list. The legislation momentarily stopped telemarketers but could not keep up with technology. By 2018, some 230 million phone numbers were listed on the Do Not Call Registry, and in 2020, some 45.9 billion robocalls were made, pestering millions of people every day.67 For the first time in its history, the US Senate apologized for its failure to pass anti-lynching legislation. Senators George F. Allen (Republican—Virginia) and Mary L. Landrieu (Democrat—Louisiana) led the effort. “There may be no other injustice in American history for which the Senate so uniquely bears responsibility,” Landrieu stated.68 Over the course of the years, some 200 attempts to enact anti-lynching legislation came up in the Senate, and each time they were bottled up by Democratic southern legislators and their allies. As the Senate voted on June 5, 2005, some 200 relatives and descendants of lynching victims were invited to watch the historic measure; but few senators were present when the vote occurred. There was no recorded vote, just a voice vote on the Landrieu-Allen Resolution 39. The resolution, which had no binding effect, had eighty-five sponsors and co-sponsors. Of the fifteen who did not co-sponsor the legislation, all were Republicans; later seven did sign after the voice vote, but still eight decided not to cosponsor this historic, albeit important symbolic apology.69 Two of those who didn’t sign the resolution, Mississippi senators W. Thad Cochran and Trent Lott, came from the state which had amassed the highest number of total lynchings. Cochran explained, “I am not in the business of apologizing for what someone else did or didn’t do. I deplore and regret that lynching occurred and that those committing them weren’t punished, but I’m not culpable.”70 Columnist William Raspberry noted that Cochran was a cosponsor on two bills offering Senate apologies, one for the treatment of Native Americans and the other for the internment of Japanese-Americans during World War II. (In 1989, Lott, Cochran, and the entire Mississippi delegation refused to vote for a joint resolution, passed by Congress, to honor the three civil rights workers—James Chaney, Andrew Goodman, and Michael Scherner—who were slain outside of Philadelphia, Mississippi in 1964.)71 Former Bush official John D. Graham contends that Bush’s success as a domestic policymaker was underappreciated. “It is remarkable in light of his tenuous standing with the public and the sharp partisan divisions in the Congress.”72 This era was bookended by two major laws, both hurriedly cobbled together, with little debate, and less scrutiny: the first in 2001 to confront the threat of terrorism and the second in 2008 to bolster a collapsing economy.

KEY POLICIES ENACTED

Reducing Taxes, Increasing the Deficit, Growing the Income Gap During his presidency, George W. Bush succeeded in getting several tax cuts enacted. Those cuts, meant to stimulate the economy, overwhelmingly benefited the wealthy, contributed to a mounting federal debt, and exacerbated the gap between the well-off and the rest of society. In the assessment of historian James T. Patterson, “this dramatic turn in fiscal policy was the most significant legacy of his presidency.”73 It was plainly evident during the Reagan era, that conservatives had abandoned one of their core beliefs: the sanctity of a balanced federal budget. The deficit spending during the 1980s

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was unprecedented during peacetime; but for many policymakers, cutting taxes, particularly for the wealthy, was a far more important goal than balancing the books. Cutting taxes, always a popular idea, became a core principle for conservative policymakers. And what better time to display that goal than during election season. Founded in 1985 by conservative activist Grover G. Norquist, the anti-tax group Americans for Tax Reform was most noted for its Taxpayer Protection Pledge, a written pledge put before federal and state candidates demanding that they “oppose any and all efforts to increase the marginal income tax rates.”74 Nearly every Republican candidate for office signed onto the pledge. “Read my lips, no new taxes,” was one of the most memorable pronouncements uttered by Bush I. When he reversed himself and agreed to a tax increase, Bush I paid a heavy political price from outraged supply-siders and other conservatives. Bush II was determined not to suffer the same fate. After nearly thirty years of budget deficits, the last three years of the Clinton administration yielded budget surpluses. The Congressional Budget Office in 2001 projected that if policies remained unchanged during the Bush administration, there would be a budget surplus of $5.6 trillion over the next decade—enough to wipe out the accumulated federal deficit.75 But that surplus became wishful thinking: the economy quickly began cooling down and the new administration was determined to cut taxes. One of the first legislative pieces enacted was a $1.35 trillion tax cut from 2001 to 2010, giving a variety of tax breaks, the most important (and controversial) of which was dropping the highest tax rate from 39 to 33 percent. At the time, the federal budget was running a surplus, thanks to the heady economic times of the late 1990s. But with the combination of the tax cuts, increased spending, and a slowing economy, the budget surpluses of soon evaporated.76 Two years later, Bush signed the third largest tax cut in American history, a $350 billion package, in an effort to boost the flagging economy. At the end of Bush’s second term in office, the federal budget was not running a surplus, but an unhealthy deficit—an accumulated total of $2 trillion. The liberal Center on Budget and Policy Priorities pointed to two culprits: the large tax cuts and the Iraq and Afghanistan war efforts that were not being paid for; they amounted to nearly $3.4 trillion over an eight-year period, accounting for nearly four-fifths of the fiscal deterioration.77 Significance of these Policies The beneficiaries of the tax reductions were the wealthiest Americans. One estimate of the 2001 tax reductions showed that 45 percent of the total tax reductions went to the top 1 percent of incomes, while just 13 percent of the reductions went to the bottom 60 percent.78 The new tax laws, giving nickels and dimes to the great majority of taxpayers, only exacerbated the growing disparity in wealth that had been occurring over the past twenty-five years. 9/11 and National Security The White House and Congress were under enormous pressure to do something after the September 11th terrorist attacks. The day after the attack, Assistant Attorney General Viet Dinh brought together a team of Justice Department lawyers and national security experts to determine what needed to be done. Journalist Robert O’Harrow, Jr., observed that over the next several weeks,

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behind a veneer of national solidarity and bipartisanship, Washington leaders engaged in pitched, closed-door arguments over how much new power the government should have in the name of national security. They were grappling not only with the specter of more terrorist attacks but also the chilling memories of Cold War red-baiting, J. Edgar Hoover’s smear campaigns, and Watergate-era wiretaps.79 As Congress deliberated, a coalition of 150 civil liberties organization prepared a manifesto, “In Defense of Freedom at a Time of Crisis,” warning Congress not to overreach during these uncertain times.80 Senator Patrick J. Leahy (Democrat—Vermont), chairman of the Senate Judiciary Committee, also urged the administration and his colleagues not to rush headlong into creating a law that they might later regret. The House and Senate agreed on anti-terrorism legislation, but the White House and Attorney General Ashcroft objected. They insisted that the administration-sponsored bill be substituted, that there would be no amendments, and that it had to be passed within a week’s time. Congress fell in line and, six weeks after the attack, enacted “perhaps the longest, broadest, most sweeping piece of legislation in American history.”81 Three days after it was introduced, the Patriot Act became law.82 There were no public hearings, no committee markups, very little floor debate, and no conference report. The final version of the bill did not reach lawmakers’ desks until minutes before the vote. No member from either the House or the Senate had a chance to read the full text, understand it, or could contemplate its lasting impact. It didn’t matter: who would dare vote against protecting the country? In the Senate, the vote was 98–1; in the House, 357–66, with mostly Democrats voting against it.83 There were ten titles in the Patriot Act, giving President Bush and his administration virtually every tool they asked for. The federal government was given broad authority to intercept terrorist communications, to increase its authority under anti-money-laundering laws, and to deny terrorists access to funds. International borders would be tightened; new federal crimes were promulgated to outlaw terrorist attacks on mass transportation, and a number of other changes were made to existing anti-terrorism laws. Leahy and Congressman Richard K. Armey (Republican—Texas) insisted on provisions safeguarding the monitoring of e-mail messages and grand jury disclosures. Further, Armey insisted that the Patriot Act would have a sunset provision, with the entire legislation coming up for reconsideration and reauthorization in four years.84 The law’s impact on American society was striking, especially with anti-terrorism measures aimed at air travel, immigration, banking, scientific research, higher education, and libraries.85 The American Civil Liberties Union described the law as a measure to turn “regular citizens into suspects,” and pointed to the massive efforts of the federal government, yielding, it argued, dubious results. Under the Patriot Act, FBI agents were authorized to issue National Security Letters (NSLs), without a judge’s approval, to surveil the banking and credit history, and phone and computer records of citizens. Between 2003 and 2005, there were 143,074 NSLs issued. The Patriot Act imposed a “gag order” on persons receiving an NSL: they were prohibited from telling anyone about the letter. Of the 143,074 NSLs, there were 53 criminal referrals: 17 for money laundering, 19 for fraud, 17 for immigration violations, and 0 for terrorist activities.86 The White House, however, touted the success of the anti-terrorism law, noting that the Patriot Act had helped law enforcement break up terror cells in Ohio, New York, Oregon, and Virginia. It also aided in the prosecution of terrorist operatives and supporters in California, Texas, New Jersey, Illinois, Washington state, and North Carolina.87 In March 2006, the Patriot Act was reauthorized, making nearly all of the original legislation permanent. This time, however, the debates were sharp, filibusters were threatened, there were

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two temporary extensions, and accusations by some Democrats that they were being left out of the important conference committee deliberations. The public overwhelmingly supported the Patriot Act when it was first adopted and when it was reauthorized in 2006. A CNN/USA Today poll of Americans in January 2006 found just 7 percent thought that the Patriot Act should be eliminated. There was also compelling evidence that most Americans did not know the measures contained in the Patriot Act.88 President Barack Obama in 2011 signed a four-year extension of three major provisions of the Patriot Act, allowing roving wiretaps, searching of business records, and the right to shadow “lone wolves”—those persons suspected of terrorist activities, but not related to any known terrorist organization. In the wake of the Edward Snowden data revelations, and mounting criticism of federal intelligence agencies collecting bulk data from American telephones, Congress passed the USA Freedom Act in 2015. Significance of these Policies Written in haste, voted on without knowing the content, nevertheless, the Patriot Act provided the federal government with a broad sweep of security measures and authority. With time passing and a measure of hindsight, policymakers (and the public) are far more comfortable with enhanced federal authority to meet terrorist threats. Perhaps in the 2020 s, such authority will be needed to meet domestic terror threats.

No Child Left Behind Up until the mid-1960s, the federal government basically stayed away from federal assistance or guidance for public schooling. Public schools were the province of state and particularly local control and authority. That changed dramatically with the Elementary and Secondary Education Act (ESEA) of 1965, which became the most significant federal program involving public education, with the intention of assisting poor children and ensuring educational equality. It had been reauthorized over the years, and in 1994, the Improving America’s Schools Act added new conditions for federal aid to schools.89 While ESEA created federal assistance and guidelines, the 2002 version of ESEA, called No Child Left Behind (NCLB), went even further. NCLB was both ambitious and controversial, mandating federal standards, establishing timetables, and imposing tough enforcement policies. NCLB represented nothing less than a “transformative shift in educational governance in the United States.”90 Education reform was one of the first measures that the Bush II administration tried to advance. It was a bipartisan bill, with Senators A. Lamar Alexander, Jr. (Republican—Tennessee) and Patty L. Murray (Democrat—Washington) taking the lead, and it was overseen by Senator Edward Kennedy of Massachusetts.91 In 1965, Lyndon Johnson ventured to his old schoolhouse in Stonewall, Texas to sign ESEA into law. On January 8, 2002, President Bush did something similar, flying to Hamilton, Ohio, along with several lawmakers. Hamilton was the home of House speaker John Boehner, and the signing ceremony took place amid high school students, education leaders, and elected officials. This law would be “historic,” the president noted, promising low-performing students and schools would have a new beginning. At the signing ceremony, Bush emphasized the underlying theme: “the fundamental principle of this bill is that every child can learn, we expect every child to learn, and you must show us whether or not every child is learning.”

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The president remarked that education decisions would remain local, and the federal government would not “micromanage” how schools were run. “And so,” he concluded, “the new role of the federal government is to set high standards, provide resources, hold people accountable, and liberate school districts to meet the standards.”92 Through NCLB, public schools would now be accountable for the progress of school children, how they were learning, and what they achieved. The goal was to provide a level playing field for disadvantaged students, and the principal measure of improvement and success came from annual test scores. Students in grades three through eight were tested every year, and students in grades ten through twelve were tested once. There would also be consequences for schools that failed to meet minimum educational standards. Bush’s speech and the broad outline of holding public schools accountable and improving children’s education immediately had broad appeal. For the first time in its sixty years of polling, wrote Bush biographer Jean Edward Smith, “Americans ranked the GOP above Democrats on education.”93 But criticism and complaint were not far behind. Public school children were subjected to frequent math and reading tests, and teachers and administrators, trying to bolster their students’ scores (and protect their own careers), were often accused of “teaching to the test,” neglecting other parts of the normal school curriculum to concentrate on achieving higher test scores in math and reading. The president of the National Education Association and the president of the National Parent–Teachers Association in 2015 faulted NCLB for its only measure of accountability, the results on standardized test scores. “The problem is,” they noted, “a single test score is like a blinking ‘check engine’ light on the dashboard. It can tell us something’s wrong but not how to fix it.”94 Other indicators of success for the whole child, they argued, such as “a critical, creative mind, a healthy body, and an ethical character” have to be included, and the standardized test told so little. NCLB required that all public school students become “proficient” in mathematics and reading by 2014. But, again, the bar was simply too high. In February 2012, President Obama permitted ten states to seek waivers from the NCLB academic standards, another eighteen states were lining up to also seek waivers. Eventually, NCLB allowed states to create their own academic standards, permitting them to lower their standards so that more students could pass the exams. One of the most important promises of NCLB was the delivery of highly trained teachers to every public school classroom; but the money wasn’t there for training, recruitment, and hiring.95

Photo 11.2 Edward M. (Ted) Kennedy (1931–2009), Massachusetts senator, progressive lawmaker, presidential candidate. Source: United States Senate.

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There was one significant achievement of NCLB, according to journalist Dana Goldstein: states were required, for the first time, to disaggregate student achievement, keeping data by race, class, and English language learner status. This would give policymakers a better understanding of the achievement gaps found among different cohorts.96 Significance of this Policy Since 2007, reauthorization had been delayed time and again. Senator Kennedy was furious that NCLB was never fully funded, as other domestic issues captured the attention of lawmakers. Many felt that NCLB just wasn’t achieving its core goals. In 2010, Randi Weingarten, the president of the American Federation of Teachers, AFL-CIO, wrote: “Visit any school in any community in America, and educators will tell you that the No Child Left Behind Act (NCLB) simply hasn’t lived up to its goal of leveling the playing field for all children.”97 In 2009, the National Governors Association, the Council of Chief State School Officers and others created a set of national education standards called the Common Core. That same year, President Barack Obama and education secretary Arne Duncan announced the Race to the Top initiative, competitive grants to spur innovation and reforms in public schools, from kindergarten through high school. In 2015, NCLB was replaced by Every Student Succeeds Act (ESSA), an initiative introduced by Kennedy, sending significant authority over education back to the states. The aspirational titles—No Child Left Behind and Every Student Succeeds—sadly belied the realities of providing quality public education to the broad range of American students.

Prescription Drugs It was the most expensive new entitlement program in forty years, a $400 billion program spread over a ten-year period. Unlike other entitlement programs in the past, such as the original Social Security or Medicare/Medicaid, this measure was pushed by Republicans, and opposed by a majority of Democrats. Bill Clinton had earlier proposed a prescription drug program for persons on Medicare; Nancy P. Pelosi (Democrat—California) and Tom Daschle had also come up with their own measures. But now, in the first years of the Bush presidency, prescription drug coverage became a priority. It turned out to be a gold mine for the pharmaceutical industry. The Medicare Prescription Drug, Improvement and Modernization Act (2003) illustrated the determination and power of what became known as Big Pharma: the trade association PhRMA (the Pharmaceutical Research and Manufacturers of America), individual drug companies, their lawyers and lobbyists. “The pharmaceutical lobbyists wrote this bill,” observed Congressman Walter B. Jones, Jr. (Republican—North Carolina). The bill was over 1,000 pages long, and it was given to lawmakers in the dead of night. Only sleep-deprived congressional staffers, over one hundred pharmaceutical lobbyists, members of the House, and a few reporters knew what was going on. The bill “got to the members that morning and we voted for it at about 3:00 a.m.,” said Jones. Was there a dire emergency that demanded a swift vote in the middle of the night? No, it was just the determination of Republican leaders and Big Pharma to push the legislation through. “Well, I think a lot of the shenanigans that were going on that night, they didn’t want on national television in primetime,” said Dan Burton (Republican—Indiana). Normally, members of the House have just fifteen minutes to complete a roll call vote, but here the vote was held open for nearly three hours. It dawned on many lawmakers that the legislation was going to cost far more than advertised and that it was basically a sell-out to the pharmaceutical

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industry. Soon, conservative Republicans were shifting over to join Democrats, and by the time the fifteen minutes had nearly elapsed, it looked like the bill would be defeated. For two hours and forty-five minutes, there were enough votes to defeat the bill, but the Republican leadership kept the final vote open, going to individual Republicans, like Burton and Jones, who had defected, pleading and cajoling with them to change their votes. Finally, they succeeded in twisting enough arms and getting the slim majority needed. “I’ve been in politics for twenty-two years,” said Jones, “and it was the ugliest night I have ever seen.” Representative John Dingell Jr., dean of the House, who by 2003 had served in the House for forty-eight years was equally as blunt: “Never have I seen such a grotesque, arbitrary, and gross abuse of power.”98 The pharmaceutical industry spent well over $10 million in campaign contributions in 2002, and through Washington’s revolving door, employed former senators Dennis W. DeConcini (Democrat—Arizona) and Steve Symms (Republican—Idaho), and former congressmen, including Tom Downey (Democrat—New York), Vic Fazio (Democrat—California), Bill Paxon (Republican—New York), and former minority leader Robert Michel (Republican—Illinois). Many Congressional staffers joined the parade, becoming lobbyists and advocates for the drug industry. On December 8, 2003, President Bush signed into law the Medicare Prescription Drug, Improvement and Modernization Act.99 Much of the credit for getting the bill passed in the House went to Billy Tauzin (Republican—Louisiana). Tauzin, in the assessment of investigative journalist Paul Blumenthal, became “the poster child of Washington’s mercenary culture.”100 Just a few months after the prescription drug legislation was passed, Tauzin announced he was retiring from Congress (with a 2005 salary of $158,100) and taking the job as head of PhRMA, for a salary of $2 million a year.101 Significance of this Policy The prescription drug industry came out the big winner. Medicare would be extended to 41 million Americans, adding 13 million who had not been covered before. Under long-standing rules, the Veterans Administration (VA) was permitted to negotiate drug prices. But under the new law, the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services, which administers Medicare, was prohibited from doing the same. This was the big prize: drug companies could charge their optimum price without facing competition. A report from Families USA, a nonpartisan healthcare watchdog group, found that Medicare patients were charged nearly 60 percent more for the top twenty drugs that patients in the Veterans Administration system paid. For example, Lipitor, a popular drug to control cholesterol, cost $785 a year for Medicare patients, but $520 for VA patients. Zocor, another cholesterol drug cost $1,4865 for Medicare patients, but just $127 under the VA’s program.102 Further, Medicare was prohibited from obtaining far less expensive versions of the drugs from other countries.

Securities Legislation The Enron and WorldCom scandals prompted Congress to enact the Corporate Fraud Accountability Act (2002), commonly called the Sarbanes-Oxley Act, after its co-sponsors Senator Paul S. Sarbanes (Democrat—Maryland) and Representative Michael G. Oxley (Republican—Ohio). “Rarely has an issue caught such bipartisan fire in Washington,” observed reporter Elisabeth Bumiller. On signing the legislation, President Bush described it as the “most far-reaching reform of American business practices since the time of Franklin Delano Roosevelt” and the Securities Act of 1933. “No more easy money for corporate criminals,” Bush proclaimed, “just hard time.”103

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The new law helped protect shareholders, employees, and the public from fraudulent auditing practices and errors. Sarbanes-Oxley also required new disclosures for public companies, tightened penalties for securities fraud, and gave wider protection for corporate whistleblowers. In addition, the chief executive officers and chief financial officers of corporations were required to review and vouch for all financial reports and to publish details about their internal accounting controls in their annual reports.104 Many in the business community were not pleased with this legislation. Between 2003 and 2004, over 300 corporations deregistered their stock and went private. While intended primarily for domestic purposes, the Sarbanes-Oxley legislation also has had international ramifications. Foreign audit firms, for example, were required to register with the Sarbanes-Oxley Public Company Accounting Oversight Board. Ten years after the act went into place, 2,400 accounting firms, 40 percent of which were located outside of the United States, were registered. One of the more challenging requirements concerned whistleblower provisions. Multinational firms found themselves in sometimes awkward positions: the need to set up whistleblower protections and the need to comply with local legislation and cultural differences. As financial analyst Paul Lanois noted, “This is no easy feat, as there are potential conflicts between Sarbanes-Oxley and foreign law (such as EU data protection and privacy legislation).”105 Significance of this Policy Economists Glenn Boyle and Eli Grace-Webb, looking at the economic and financial aftermath of Sarbanes-Oxley, note that while the law “appears to have had some beneficial effects it has also increased the cost of auditing governance and human capital and compliance more generally.”106

Campaign Finance Reform Congress enacted the Federal Election Campaign Act (FECA) in 1971with amendments in 1974. For the next thirty-one years, FECA set the basic requirements for giving and receiving money for federal campaigns. Buckley v. Valeo (1976) opened up unlimited spending by individual candidates and by independent expenditures. Individual contributors, political action committees, and independent expenditures all fell under the jurisdiction of the FECA, and journalists started referring to such funds as “hard money.” Soon, a new source of money was recognized, called “soft money.” These campaign funds came from sources other than those covered by the FECA. The Federal Election Commission (FEC) determined that national political parties, like the Republican National Committee or the Democratic National Committee, could spend money on “party-building activities” in their state and local affiliates, and that such money would not count against hard money spending ceilings. This meant national party money could help fund state party get-out-the-vote drives, registration activities, computer equipment and software, and other forms of party building. The FEC also determined that a state party could use corporate or union funds to finance a share of its voter registration drives, and such funds would not be subject to federal limits.107 By 1996 both national parties were aggressively courting corporations, unions, and wealthy individuals for soft money funds. It soon became a “tidal wave of money,”108 and gave new meaning to the old term “fat cat” contributor. Unchecked soft money was a growing issue; another was the vast sums of illegal foreign money from corporations and individuals funneled into the 1996 presidential campaign. A Republican-controlled Senate committee investigated alleged illegal fund-raising activities during the 1996 campaign and concentrated mostly on Democrats and the Clinton re-

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election team. The National Republican Senatorial Committee (NRSC) sent out its own fund-raising letter, demanding that Bill Clinton fully disclose all foreign money going to his campaign. To make its point, the letter included a fake Chinese one hundred yuan banknote. “Has Bill Clinton Sold Out America for Illegal Foreign Cash?” the letter asked. Signed by Senator Mitch McConnell (Republican—Kentucky), it warned of a “nightmare scenario” where the “most unethical administration in my lifetime” could funnel “millions in illegal foreign cash to Liberal Democrats.” The letter further implored: “Money laundering. Giving top-secret security clearances and sensitive intelligence to foreign donors and communist Chinese agents. Renting out the White House like a Motel Six. Schmoozing drug dealers and illegal arms dealers.” “Want to help Republicans fight back? Just send in $35,” McConnell’s letter concluded.109 There was a lot of talk, a lot of breast-beating, but no real action taken to reform campaign fundraising abuses. During the 1990s, there had been twenty-nine hearings, 522 witnesses, seventeen filibusters, and 113 votes on campaign finance reform—still no reform. Who would be against reform? Mitch McConnell, for one. In 1999, McConnell lamented: “take away soft money and we wouldn’t be in the majority in the House and the majority in the Senate and couldn’t win back the White House. … Hell is going to freeze over first before we get rid of soft money.”110 But hell did freeze over, when Congress approved campaign reform legislation in 2002, sponsored by senators John S. McCain III (Republican—Arizona) and Russell D. Feingold (Democrat—Wisconsin). The Bipartisan Campaign Reform Act (BCRA), or the McCainFeingold Act, didn’t drive all money out of politics, but it did make some substantial reforms. First, it banned unlimited soft money for national political parties, restricted soft money at the state party level, and restricted candidates and office holders from raising or spending soft money. This stopped millions of unreported dollars from being spent by corporations, labor unions, advocacy groups, and wealthy individuals.

Photo 11.3 John S. McCain, III (1936–2018), Arizona senator, presidential candidate; often a maverick voice in his party. Source: United States Senate.

The second reform required “electioneering” communications by corporations or unions to be restricted within sixty days of a general election or thirty days before a primary. This ban was primarily on television advertising, but significantly, it did not include a similar ban on newspaper or online advertising. Perhaps online advertising was just too new to lawmakers, who certainly

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did not understand its potential. The third reform was to increase the maximum amount of money that individuals could give, raising the contribution level to $2,000 (up from $1,000 set in 1971) for each election period, with a two-year election cycle maximum of $95,000. Immediately, the law was challenged in court. In December 2003, a deeply divided Supreme Court in McConnell v. Federal Election Commission111 affirmed the major provisions of BCRA. Now with millions of dollars of soft money no longer available, where could a candidate get enough money to mount a race? Campaign finance lawyers quickly came up with a solution: the Internal Revenue Code, section 527, which allows partisan political organizations to make contributions without paying taxes on them. So, with a little legal legerdemain, organizations could “thread the needle” between tax law and campaign finance law. The so-called 527 organizations, like Jones for President Committee, are “political for tax purposes, but not for purposes of campaign finance law.”112 The 527 organization became the new, shiny tool for the funneling of money to candidates and causes. By the 2004 presidential elections, twenty-five donors contributed $146 million (all tax deductible) to 527 groups, with the biggest contributor being the Service Employees International Union, which gave $51.4 million.113 Significance of these Policies Big money was back, and while the McCain-Feingold legislation helped reform federal campaign law, during the next era, the law and its impact would be almost completely eviscerated by Supreme Court decisions and by clever use of the tax code.

Energy Policy For the Bush administration, energy policy meant relying on traditional forms of energy, big oil, fossil fuels, and nuclear power. During his second week in office, President Bush created the National Energy Policy Development Group (NEPDG), a cabinet-level group, headed by Vice President Cheney. Before coming to the White House, Cheney had been chairman and CEO of Halliburton, one of the world’s largest oil and gas producers. The central task given to the group was to determine what to do about America’s heavy dependence on Middle East oil. The underlying goal, however, was to undo thirty years of environmental and energy policy through deregulation and tax breaks and then to open up new areas to gas and oil exploration.114 Cheney turned to those he knew and trusted best, energy industry executives. Over the next few months, Cheney and the NEPDG met with nearly 300 top energy producers, including eighteen energy oil, mining, and gas association executives (their names and affiliations were kept secret for the next six years). But excluded from the conversation were any of the many environmental and renewable energy organizations and interests. Finally, thirteen environmental leaders were invited to the Old Executive Office building for a briefing, but only after the report had been drafted. “They were just trying to be nice to us,” said one of the environmental leaders. The NEPDG produced a report warning that global production of oil would have to increase dramatically by 2025 or the United States and the world would face major economic instability. That meant an increase in global oil production and a diversification of foreign oil suppliers.115 Thus, access to foreign oil would continue to be a top national security priority. Four years later Bush signed the Energy Policy Act of 2005, the first omnibus energy legislation enacted in over a decade.116 This far-ranging law was meant to “ensure jobs for our future with secure, affordable, and reliable energy.” Four years in the making, the 1,724-page

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law provided $14.5 billion in tax breaks for producers of oil, natural gas, coal and nuclear power, and, according to its backers, a boost to future fuels, such as clean-burning coal and technological assistance for hybrid gasoline-electric vehicles. The new law exempted oil and gas industries from some clean water legislation requirements. The item that drew the most attention came to be known as the “Halliburton Loophole.” One sentence was inserted in the bill exempted hydraulic fracturing (“fracking”) water and chemical mixtures from the Safe Drinking Water Act (1972). The loophole came at the behest of Cheney and the end result was that it stripped the EPA of authority to regulate this critical component of fracking.117 Another provision repealed the Depression-era law, the Public Utility Holding Company Act (PUHCA), which had prevented the consolidation of public utilities. Since the OPEC crisis in 1973, American policymakers have been advocating energy independence, arguing that the United States should not be at the mercy of foreign producers. But the percentage of imported oil just kept going up. By 2005, the United States was importing 58 percent of its oil, and the US Energy Information Agency predicted that would climb to 68 percent by 2025. At the January 2006 State of the Union address, President Bush advocated affordable energy in order to keep America competitive. “And here we have a serious problem,” said the president, whose family wealth came largely from Texas oil wells, “America is addicted to oil, which is often imported from unstable parts of the world.”118 In order to break the addiction, he argued, the federal government needed to invest further in technology, for cleaner, cheaper, and more reliable alternative energy sources. In 2007, Congress enacted the Energy Independence and Security Act, an omnibus measure designed to increase efficiency and promote the availability of renewable energy. The New York Times described it as “the largest single steps on energy that the nation has taken since the Arab oil embargoes of the 1970s.”119 One of the key provisions was setting Corporate Average Fuel Economy (CAFE) standards for automobiles and trucks. The 2020 target would be thirtyfive miles per gallon for manufacturers combined fleet of automobiles and light trucks. The law also set Renewable Fuels Standards (RFS), federal assistance to replace fossil fuels with renewables, especially ethanol, starting at 9 billion gallons of replaced fossil fuel in 2008 and rising to 36 billion gallons by 2022. Energy efficiency also was an important component, with the law setting standards for residential lighting and residential and commercial appliances, such as refrigerators, freezers, halide lamps, and others. The law also repealed two oil and gasoline tax incentives but did not include tax incentives for energy efficiency and renewables and did not include a repeal of some $22 billion in gas and oil tax incentives. Also not included was a proposed Renewable Energy Portfolio Standard (RPS), which would have required electric utilities to provide a minimum amount, 15 percent, of electricity from renewable sources. House speaker Nancy Pelosi described the bill as groundbreaking because it would reduce oil imports, cut the production of greenhouse gases, and make automobiles much more efficient. But she and others criticized it for stripping away subsidies for wind, solar, geothermal, and other alternative energy sources that would have been paid for with supplemental taxes on oil companies.120 Significance of these Policies The Bush administration and lawmakers grappled with energy policy, but still within the context of protecting and advancing fossil fuels. Independence from foreign oil was far more important than addressing the issue of climate change and the role played by fossil fuels.

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Averting an Economic Meltdown When the financial markets closed on Friday, September 12, 2008, thirty Wall Street senior executives were summoned to the headquarters of the New York Federal Reserve Bank. There they met with Treasury Secretary Henry M. Paulson Jr., Ben S. Bernanke, chairman of the Federal Reserve System, and Timothy Geithner, president of the New York Fed. The Wall Streeters were told that Lehman Brothers was on the brink of bankruptcy and that Merrill Lynch might be next. The message was blunt: there would be no federal bailout of these institutions. “We would have rescued Lehman if we could have,” Bernanke, Paulson, and Geithner later wrote, but they could not find a bank with big enough financial clout to make the deal. They did not waver: no government bailout.121 The next day, the Bank of America partially came to the rescue by purchasing Merrill Lynch, but Lehman Brothers was still teetering. There was an unprecedented Sunday four-hour trading session to help Lehman Brothers unwind its holdings; on Monday Lehman Brothers declared bankruptcy. AIG (American International Group), one of the largest insurance companies in America, pleaded for a $40 billion federal bridge loan; by September 16, the federal government took an over 80 percent share of AIG with a $85 billion Federal Reserve loan, which later expanded to $143 billion. But more calamitous financial news was to come. For months, the Treasury Department secretly had been working on a bailout plan. Then on September 18, Bernanke and Paulson briefed congressional leaders with this sobering news: the entire economy “was on the brink of a heart attack.” To avoid perhaps a worldwide economic collapse, Congress had to act quickly, decisively, and come up with $700 billion in guarantees. “The meeting was one of the most astounding experiences I’ve had in my thirty-four years’ experience in politics,” remembered Senator Charles E. Schumer (Democrat—New York).122 Bernanke urged the stunned lawmakers to keep silent about the predicament. Presidential elections were just seven weeks away and the economy was collapsing. Republican candidate John McCain abruptly suspended his campaign, came back to Washington, vowing to take control of the crisis. It was campaign bravado, and predictably McCain’s efforts fell flat.123 President Bush, now the lamest of lame ducks, delivered his first prime-time television speech in over a year, declaring on September 24, that “America could slip into a financial panic,” and urging Congress to approve a $700 billion bailout plan. The massive financial assistance could have been sold to the public as necessary to help small banks and local businesses survive, but instead critics quickly labeled it a “Wall Street Bailout.” The public reaction was swift and angry: greedy, high-priced financial manipulators got into trouble, now they want taxpayers to bail them out and protect their multi-milliondollar bonuses. The House of Representatives email system collapsed, overwhelmed with blistering messages from folks back home, which ran 30–1 against the bailout. One senator told Bernanke that calls from his constituents were running 50/50: “It’s 50 percent ‘No,’ and 50 percent ‘Hell No.’”124 Bush recalled in his memoirs that “the last thing I wanted to do was to bail out Wall Street,” and that his friends were going to wonder “why we’re spending their money to save the firms that created the crisis in the first place.”125 Representative Barney Frank (Democrat— Massachusetts), the chairman of the House Financial Services Committee and a major player in crafting the legislation, summed up the dilemma: “The private sector got us into this mess. The government has to get us out of it.”126 “This is the slippery slope to socialism,” cried out Jeb Hensarling (Republican—Texas), one of the leaders of the far conservative wing of his party. To the surprise of many, the House turned down the bailout package by a vote of 228–205. Representative Joseph Crowley

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(Democrat—New York) yelled out, “The market’s down more than 600 points—700, 800? What’s it going to take?” The Dow Jones Industrial Average fell 777 points, marking the biggest one-day drop since the Great Depression. It was a hard sell and lawmakers were in a tough bind. Elections were just around the corner, and every seat in the House was up for grabs. The proposed bill, with its enormous price tag, was coming from a president with low approval ratings at the tail end of his time in office. It was asking many conservatives, believing firmly in free markets, minimal government regulation, and acolytes for Ronald Reagan’s “miracle of the marketplace,” to provide these funds. But the more voters heard about the bill, the more they disliked it; anger boiled over. Soon a whole movement called the Tea Party would spring up in reaction to this, and later to Obamaera, legislation. On Friday, October 3, one week after the president said the country absolutely needed to have this legislation, the House agreed to passage of the Emergency Economic Stabilization Act of 2008. The vote was 263–171. How did the vote shift so dramatically? Partly because pressure was put on by business-affiliated organizations, like the US Chamber of Commerce, partly by strong-arming from the White House, and partly from the realization that, with no action, the lawmakers would be courting an economic catastrophe. But along with the $700 billion in bailout money, there were additional “sweeteners”—$149 billion in tax breaks and special favors. These sweeteners, many of which had nothing to do with the bailout issue, certainly helped change some minds: a $109 million tax break for NASCAR racetrack builders; a $62 billion loss by not increasing the alternative minimum tax; $17 billion to promote alternative energy; $192 million to assist rum producers in Puerto Rico and the Virgin Islands, and on and on. What started out as a three-page proposal from the office of the secretary of the Treasury became, three weeks later, a 340-page $700 billion (or was it $850 billion?) bill, hurriedly signed by President Bush. The centerpiece of the legislation was the Troubled Asset Relief Programs (TARP), which allowed the US Treasury to buy up toxic financial assets and encouraged banks to lend at levels comparable to before the economic crisis. Indeed, this was the Mother of All Bailouts (until the American Recovery Act the following year, and then truly, the biggest Mother of Them All, the Coronavirus Aid, Relief, and Economic Security (CARES) Act in 2020 and its two follow-up relief packages). The stock market rallied, but difficult times still lie ahead, handing the next administration and Congress some very anxious moments, and leaving to the next administration and Congress difficult policy decisions and profound political implications. Should the Treasury or the Federal Reserve have been more aggressive, prosecuting those responsible for the economic collapse? Interviewed on National Public Radio, Timothy Geithner responded by saying that neither Paulson, Bernanke, nor he were “arbiters of justice on the criminal side. We couldn’t be. That wasn’t our role. And the scandal was what was legal, not so much what was illegal.”127 Significance of this Policy Despite being highly unpopular, the relief program was not nearly as expensive to taxpayers as originally perceived. Most of the funds were repaid, and by 2019, investments had “actually yielded a $96.6 billion profit to the US Treasury.” But tell this to the public. Americans were heavily against TARP, and as an exasperated Barack Obama, who inherited TARP and the economic downturn, later wrote, “Man, did folks hate TARP!”128

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The Court Weighs In Affirmative Action and College Admissions Three decisions focused on the admissions policies of the University of Michigan and the right of Michigan voters to determined affirmative action policy. In the first case, Grutter v. Bollinger,129 the question before the Supreme Court was whether the University of Michigan Law School’s use of racial preferences violated the equal protection clause of the Fourteenth Amendment or Title VI of the Civil Rights Act of 1964. In a 5–4 decision, Justice O’Connor ruled that there was no violation, and that the equal protection clause did not prohibit a law school from narrowly tailoring the use of race in its admission decisions to advance the goal of having a diverse student body. On the same day in June 2003, the Court ruled on the undergraduate admissions policy of the university, in Gratz v. Bollinger.130 In a 6–3 ruling, the Court determined that the admission policies of the undergraduate program violated the Equal Protection Clause and Title VI of the Civil Rights Act of 1964. The Court ruled that the undergraduate admissions policies were not sufficiently narrow, did not provide individual consideration, but instead admitted nearly every applicant of “underrepresented minority” status. In the third case, decided in 2014, the Court ruled that a Michigan referendum which ended affirmative action did not violate the equal protection clause. In a 6–2 decision, in Schuette v. Coalition to Defend Affirmative Action,131 the Court ruled that the amendment did not violate the Constitution. In a vigorous dissent, Justice Sotomayor, joined by Justice Ginsberg, argued that the democratic process does not in and of itself provide sufficient protection against the oppression of minority groups; that is why we have the equal protection clause. Then in 2016, the Court by the narrowest of margins and on the narrowest of grounds upheld the affirmative action practice of the University of Texas ruled in Fisher v. University of Texas. In his dissent, which he read out loud, Justice Samuel Alito excoriated the university and the majority on the Court: “This is affirmative action gone berserk.” But affirmative action, now with an increasingly conservative Court, may be in for rough times. As journalist Nicholas Lemann noted in 2021, “one thing has been true every time the Court has upheld a form of affirmative action in admissions: the swing vote in the decisions came from a moderate Justice appointed by a Republican president—a breed that no longer exists.”132 Guns and the Second Amendment From 1976, the District of Columbia had one of the most restrictive gun laws in the country. Rifles and shotguns had to be unloaded and trigger-locked; handguns were virtually outlawed. Dick Anthony Heller, a DC special police officer who was allowed to carry a gun at his workplace, could not have a gun at his home. He argued that the District’s law prevented him from properly defending himself at home; further, he argued that the law violated the Second Amendment.133 The challenge to the District of Columbia gun laws drew a record sixty-eight friend of the court briefs, representing all sides of the argument.134 The Court had not ruled on the meaning of the Second Amendment in nearly seventy years, since United States v. Miller (1939).135 In that case, the Court held that the Second Amendment did not guarantee an individual the right to keep and bear a sawed-off, doublebarrel, 12-guage shotgun. Justice McReynolds, one of the most conservative members of the Court, wrote the unanimous opinion, stating that possession of a sawed-off shotgun did not

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have a reasonable relationship to the preservation of a well-regulated militia; thus, the Second Amendment did not protect the possession of such a gun. Sixty-nine years later, came the District of Columbia ruling. In 2008, the Supreme Court, by 5–4, agreed with Heller, ruling in District of Columbia v. Heller136 that the District’s gun law was unconstitutional. The meaning of the Second Amendment, couched in late-eighteenthcentury language, has been particularly difficult to ascertain. The prefatory clause—“A wellregulated Militia, being necessary to the security of a free State”—could suggest that “the right of the people” to have weapons only meant in the context of military service; that is, a collective right. But in Heller, the majority interpreted the amendment as applying to the individual’s right to have weapons. The prefatory clause, wrote Justice Antonin Scalia for the majority, “does not suggest that preserving the militia was the only reason Americans valued the ancient right” of selfpreservation. The holder of the right “to keep and bear arms” is “the people.” And thus, “we start therefore with a strong presumption that the Second Amendment right is exercised individually and belongs to all Americans.” The right to own weapons for self-defense, Scalia wrote, is “inherent” and the Second Amendment states directly that it “shall not be infringed.”137 “Like most rights, the right secured by the Second Amendment is not unlimited,” wrote Scalia. “The Court’s opinion should not be taken to cast doubt on longstanding prohibitions on the possession of firearms by felons and the mentally ill, or laws forbidding the carrying of firearms in sensitive places such as schools and government buildings, or laws imposing conditions and qualifications on the commercial sale of arms.”138 In dissent, Justice Stevens argued that the Second Amendment was adopted to protect the right of the people to maintain a well-regulated militia. Neither the text of the Amendment nor the arguments advanced by its proponents evidenced the slightest interest in limiting any legislature’s authority to regulate private civilian uses of firearms. Specifically, there is no indication that the Framers of the Amendment intended to enshrine the common-law right of self-defense in the Constitution.139 This has been clear since the Miller decision and hundreds of judges since then have relied on that opinion, Stevens wrote. Further, there has been no new evidence to conclude that the meaning of the Second Amendment now limited the ability of Congress to regulate civilian use of weapons. Two years later, the Court extended the Heller provisions to apply to the states, in McDonald v. Chicago.140 Law professor Adam Winkler commented on the impact of this case: “We live in a world where, in part because of Heller, every single American has the right to own a gun in their own home for self-defense. [Heller’s] lawsuit paved the way for literally hundreds of other lawsuits. … His influence has really been quite huge.”141 Carbon Dioxide and Global Warming In 1999, several citizens groups and environmental organizations petitioned the federal government to use the Clean Air Act to control the emission of carbon dioxide, the principal cause of global warming. In 2003, the Bush administration specifically declined to regulate greenhouse gases coming from automobile emissions. The rationale: carbon dioxide, the main culprit, was not an “air pollutant” under the meaning of the Clean Air Act. California, where auto pollution was a major problem, decided to act on its own and create its own greenhouse gas air quality standards; by 2004, five other states had done the same. But

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the states required federal waivers for their proposed actions, and the EPA rejected their requests. This was an unusual twist, because for decades California had been granted environmental waivers; but not this time.142 Could the federal government be forced to recognize that carbon dioxide was included in the Clean Air Act (which ironically, was enthusiastically signed by President Bush I) and more importantly, could the federal government be forced to use the law to mitigate the damage to the atmosphere? In 2007, the Supreme Court decided the matter of environmental enforcement in a case brought by Massachusetts and other states and cities, along with a coalition of environmental organizations. Massachusetts argued that the EPA was required to regulate carbon dioxide, using the clear wording of the statute: Congress must regulate “any air pollutant” that can “reasonably be anticipated to endanger public health or welfare.” In Massachusetts v. Environmental Protection Agency (2007),143 the court cut through the “laundry list” of Bush administration and the EPA’s reasons for not addressing climate change pollution. “Greenhouse gases fit well within the Clean Air Act’s capacious definition of ‘air pollutant,’” wrote Justice Stevens, the EPA “has refused to comply with this clear statutory command.” This decision gave the EPA and the Bush administration the clarity on carbon dioxide emissions enforcement. All that was needed was the political will to aggressively go after carbon dioxide polluters.

POLICIES DELAYED OR DENIED

Gun Control Congressional action during this era did little to change existing law, and the battles in Congress resulted in victories, large and small, for the National Rifle Association, the firearms industry, and citizens advocating their right to own weapons. This was coupled with the Supreme Court’s decision in Heller affirming Second Amendment rights for individual gun ownership. In 1994, Congress enacted the Federal Assault Weapons Ban,144 with overwhelming support in the Senate, 94–5 and strong support in the House, 235–195. Three former presidents—Gerald Ford, Jimmy Carter, and Ronald Reagan—wrote to the House urging passage. While the bill had a number of weaknesses, such as grandfathering in currently owned assault weapons, it did ban certain weapons from civilian use. The law would be under review after ten years. Bush II had promised to support the extension of the assault weapons ban or to make it permanent, a position that upset many of his pro-gun supporters and the powerful National Rifle Association (NRA). The Republican-led Congress took no action to renew the assault weapons ban in 2004. Thus, the assault weapons ban was no longer in effect. Bush caught criticism from both sides: from gun rights advocates who accused him of caving in and from gun control forces who felt he had betrayed them.145 Bush and his attorney general John D. Ashcroft had been particularly close to the NRA. One top NRA official boasted in 2000 that the group’s relationship with Bush was “unbelievably friendly” that the NRA “could practically claim a seat at the White House,” in the assessment of one newspaper reporter.146 In 1996, Congress also banned the use of any funds from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) from being used to “advocate or promote gun control.” Backed by the NRA, this amendment to an appropriations bill was called the Dickey Amendment, after its sponsor Jay W. Dickey, Jr. (Republican—Arkansas). Congress went beyond the specific

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wording of the Dickey Amendment by cutting off all CDC funding for studying gun violence. (Years later, Dickey regretted this amendment, telling ABC News that he “wished he had not been so reactionary.”)147 In 2012, following the Sandy Hook Elementary School massacre, in which twenty-six children and school workers were killed, President Obama called on the CDC to investigate the root causes of gun violence. Congress refused to appropriate any funds. In 2005, Bush signed into law the Protection of Lawful Commerce in Arms Act, which, according to its chief backer, the NRA, would end “politically motivated lawsuits designed to bankrupt law-abiding American firearm manufacturers and retailers.” This was the number one priority of the NRA and the firearms industry, and a “monumental victory” for them. NRA executive director Wayne R. LaPierre, Jr. called it the “most significant piece of pro-gun legislation in twenty years.”148 This legislation prevented gun manufacturers from being named in federal or state civil suits by persons who were victims of crimes involving guns made by that company. The law also dismissed pending lawsuits. Following the Virginia Tech massacre and with the Congress now controlled by Democrats, the first significant federal legislation in many years to tighten gun laws was enacted.149 The law expanded the federal database that was used to screen gun buyers and would now include some 2 million more individuals, including felons and the mentally ill, who were ineligible to purchase firearms. The Brady Campaign to Prevent Gun Violence and the NRA supported the bill, which was sponsored by Carolyn McCarthy (Democrat—New York), who came to Congress after her husband was killed and her son injured by a gunman, and John D. Dingell, Jr. (Democrat—Michigan), a strong advocate of the NRA, who had fought against gun control legislation in the past. In order to obtain NRA support, lawmakers agreed to two concessions that the NRA had long sought: to loosen the government’s definition of “mentally defective” and allow the mentally ill to regain gun rights if they could prove in court that they had been rehabilitated.150 The law caused heartburn for gun control advocates. Kristen Rand, the legislative director of the Violence Policy Center, stated that there was “far more bad in this bill than good,” stating that “a provision could restore gun-owning privileges to some persons who were heretofore prevented from having guns.”151 The NRA called the legislation a victory for gun owners.

Environment Rollback This era saw a repeated, significant rollback in environmental efforts and policymaking. It began with President Bush renouncing the Kyoto Protocol, arguing that if the United States participated, it would hurt its economic well-being. Reluctantly, other countries pressed on, and the Kyoto Protocol went into force in 2005. As policy scholars Thomas Roberts and Liam Downey noted, by the beginning of the Bush II administration, “there was scientific consensus on the seriousness of climate change, ample evidence of the perils of petro-politics, and nearly two decades of experience with renewable and energy efficiency technologies.” The United States continued to emphasize oil and other fossil fuel sources, failing to tackle the reduction of greenhouse gas emissions.152 Political scientists Jacqueline Vaughn and Hanna J. Cortner catalogued the environmental and ecological retreat taken during the Bush II administration.153 Among other actions, Bush proposed opening up the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge to oil and gas drilling; permitting mining in the Florida Everglades; relaxing the acceptable levels of arsenic in drinking water; ending corporate taxes on polluters that fund the cleanup of toxic waste sites; opening up 300,000 acres of land for logging and development in the Tongass National Forest in Alaska; and failing to meet deadlines for tightening automobile emission standards. At the same time,

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however, the Bush administration reauthorized the North American Wetlands Conservation Act and approved adding 500,000 acres to the National Wilderness Preservation System. Increasingly, it became evident that global warming is caused by human activity. Globally, 2003 was the third hottest year ever recorded, and Europe experienced its hottest summer in over 500 years, with an estimated 30,000 heat-related fatalities. The year 2005 was even hotter than 2003. The fourth assessment report of the United Nation’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), issued in 2007, stated that the evidence for global warming is “unequivocal,” very likely caused by human activity, and that warming will continue in the decades to come. It was, in the opinion of the New York Times, a “bleak and powerful assessment of the future of the planet.”154 At the same time, former vice president Al Gore was lecturing before some 2,000 audiences, warning of the damages caused by global warming. His presentation became the basis for an Academy Award-winning documentary, Inconvenient Truth.155 Both Gore and the IPCC won the Nobel Peace Prize in 2007 for their efforts. Early in 2007, a House committee heard testimony from government scientists who said they were pressured by the White House to cast uncertainty on global warming. In October 2007, when Dr. Julie Gerberding, director of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, testified before a Senate committee on the health effects of global warming, whole sections of her testimony were removed to give what the White House characterized as a “balanced view” on the subject of global warming. Her testimony was “eviscerated,” said a CDC official familiar with both the Office of Management and Budget (OMB)-approved version and the original version.156 The nearest that lawmakers came to climate change legislation was a cap-and-trade bill sponsored by Senators Lieberman and John W. Warner (Republican—Virginia). It was a serious policy effort to tackle the causes of global warming, the strongest policy measure on this subject ever to reach the Senate floor. But it went down in flames: after what was described, in Hobbesian terms, as a “nasty, brutish and short” debate, it was pulled when its sponsors concluded they could not overcome a probable filibuster. Just about every senator acknowledged the need to reduce carbon in the atmosphere, but few were willing to state just how that should be accomplished. The carbon reductions would have been tougher than many businesses were willing to accept and fell short of what many environmentalists demanded. It offered a complicated, expensive scheme of auctioning global warming pollution permits. But the bottom line was that inevitably the price of gasoline and coal-powered electricity would go up, and for opponents, that was the message to hammer home. For Senator James M. Inhofe (Republican—Oklahoma), the lawmaker who once called global warming “the greatest hoax ever perpetuated on the American people,” the failure of the Lieberman-Warner bill was proof that Americans weren’t buying into climate change. “[Dr. James] Hansen, Gore, and the media have been trumpeting man-made climate doom since the 1980s. But Americans aren’t buying it.”157

Immigration Reform Former senior Bush administration official John D. Graham called immigration reform one of Bush’s “fascinating failures.”158 George W. Bush had long been more sympathetic to immigrants and reforming immigration policy than many of his fellow Republicans. As governor, he was against California’s immigrant-restrictive Proposition 187, and when he became president, he did not try to scuttle Clinton’s immigration policies. But increasingly his own party was coalescing around a hard-line, conservative approach. And those hard-liners were being aided by conservative talk show hosts, groups advocating English-only, and a wide range of other anti-immigrant voices. One of the key conservative voices in the House of Representatives was that of F. James (Jim) Sensenbrenner, Jr. (Republican—Wisconsin), who vigorously opposed the president’s immigration policies.

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Bush had advocated a guest worker program and a path to citizenship for illegal immigrants and foreign workers. His principal allies in this fight were senators John McCain and Edward Kennedy. The policy fight culminated in legislation in 2006. The Senate came up with a comprehensive measure, adopting administration efforts, and adding tough border security provisions. The House bill, which included money for a border fence, focused on cracking down on undocumented workers. The Department of Homeland Security had stepped up its enforcement efforts, the number of border security personnel was increased, and during the summer of 2006, the number of illegal crossings had dropped and the raids on American employers had substantially increased. Still, hard-liners were in no mood to compromise with the Bush immigration proposals, and House Republican leaders refused to join the Senate in crafting comprehensive legislation. The only immigration measure that passed was the authorization of $2.7 billion in funds for 700 miles of border fencing, supplemented by cameras and security technology. Speaker of the House Hastert and Senate majority leader William H. (Bill) Frist (Republican—Tennessee) praised the Secure Fence Act of 2006 for “stemming the tide of illegal immigration.” This was not part of the president’s original, more expansive, immigration reforms, but under considerable pressure from conservative Republicans, just weeks before the November congressional elections, Bush agreed to their demands. Vicente Fox, president of Mexico, and twenty-seven Organization of American States leaders urged Bush to veto the legislation. It was unclear just how much of a wall might be built, but it did give anti-immigration lawmakers some cover. Silvestre Reyes (Democrat—Texas), however, called the border fence legislation the “worst in election-year politics” and “an empty gesture for the sole purpose of sending a false message about the security of our nation.”159 By late 2008, some 500 miles of the border fence had been erected, but another $400 million would be needed to finish the construction. In 2007, senators Edward Kennedy and Jon L. Kyl (Republican—Arizona) crafted an immigration bill to address the issue of guest workers and enhanced border security. But the legislation pleased no one—from organized labor, to the business community, and especially from right wing groups and media personalities, screaming foul at “amnesty.” In sum, John Graham observed that Bush’s effort to pass immigration legislation “did more to further alienate his base and undermine his credibility as a policy maker than it accomplished in liberalization.”160

Notes 1 George Packer, The Unwinding: An Inner History of the New America (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2014), 4. 2 Ben S. Bernanke, Timothy F. Geithner, and Henry M. Paulson, Jr., Firefighting: The Financial Crisis and Its Lessons (New York: Penguin, 2019), 16. 3 Tom Daschle with Michael D’Orso, Like No Other Time: The 107th Congress and Two Years That Changed America Forever (New York Random House, 2003), 3. 4 Ace Exford, “The History of YouTube,” Engadget, November 10, 2016, https://www.engadget.com/ 2016-11-10-the-history-of-youtube.html# (accessed September 10, 2020). 5 Jack Meyer, “History of Twitter: Jack Dorsey and the Social Media Giant,” The Street, January 2, 2020, https://www.thestreet.com/technology/history-of-twitter-facts-what-s-happening-in-201914995056 (accessed September 10, 2020). 6 Christopher McFadden, “The Fascinating History of Netflix,” Interesting Engineering, July 4, 2020, https://interestingengineering.com/the-fascinating-history-of-netflix#:~:text=Netflix%20was %20first%20founded%20in,purely%20a%20movie%20rental%20service (accessed September 30,

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9

10 11 12 13 14 15

16 17 18 19 20 21 22 23 24 25 26 27 28

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2020). Netflix co-founder Reed Hasting approached Blockbuster in 2000, suggesting a merger. The cost: $50 million; Blockbuster owners laughed him off. “Money Income in 2005,” Census Bureau, n.d., https://www.census.gov/population/pop-profile/ dynamic/MoneyIncome.pdf (accessed June 28, 2020). Data from testimony of Elise Gould, Economic Policy Institute, “Decades of Rising Inequality in the United States,” House of Representatives, Ways and Means Committee, March 27, 2019, https:// www.epi.org/publication/decades-of-rising-economic-inequality-in-the-u-s-testimony-before-the-u-shouse-of-representatives-ways-and-means-committee/ (accessed June 24, 2020). John D. Graham, Bush on the Home Front: Domestic Policy Triumphs and Setbacks (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2010), 228. Audrey Singer of the Brookings Institution gives the immigrant population at 31.1 million, or 11.1 percent of the US total in 2000. Singer, “Immigrants in 2010 Metropolitan America: A Decade of Change,” Brookings Institution, October 24, 2011, https:// www.brookings.edu/on-the-record/immigrants-in-2010-metropolitan-america-a-decade-of-change/# :~:text=In%202000%2C%20immigrants%20numbered%2031.1,this%20country%20has%20ever %20experienced (accessed October 5, 2020). Singer, “Immigrants in 2020 Metropolitan America.” David E. Kyvig, Daily Life in the United States, 1920–1939: Decades of Promise and Pain (Westport: Greenwood Press, 2002), 151. “9/11: Ten Years Later,” American Psychologist, September 2011, a special edition on the psychological impact of the terrorist attacks. Roxane Cohen Silver, “An Introduction to ‘9/11: Ten Years Later,’” American Psychologist 66 (6) (September 2011), 427. Brian Michael Jenkins, “The Land of the Fearful, or the Home of the Brave?” in Brian Michael Jenkins and John Paul Godges, eds., The Long Shadow of 9/11: America’s Response to Terrorism (Santa Monica: RAND Corporation, 2011), 196. A useful timeline is found in Jonathan Stein and Tim Dickinson, “Lie by Lie: A Timeline of How We Got Into Iraq,” Mother Jones, September–October 2006, https://www.motherjones.com/politics/ 2011/12/leadup-iraq-war-timeline/ (accessed October 1, 2020). Among the many accounts of the Bush administration and the Iraq war, see Robert Draper, To Start a War: How the Bush Administration Took America Into Iraq (New York: Penguin, 2020). Eric Schmitt, “Top General in Middle East Says US Troop Levels Will Drop in Iraq and Syria,” New York Times, August 12, 2020. Amy Belasco, “The Cost of Iraq, Afghanistan, and Other Global War of Terror Operations Since 9/ 11,” Congressional Research Service, US Congress, December 8, 2014, https://fas.org/sgp/crs/natsec/ RL33110.pdf (accessed October 1, 2020). Neta C. Crawford, “United States Budgetary Costs and Obligations in Post-9/11 Wars Through FY2020: $6.4 Trillion,” Watson Institute, Brown University, November 13, 2019. David S. Langdon, Terence M. McMenamin, and Thomas J. Krolik, “US Labor Market in 2001: Economy Enters a Recession,” Monthly Labor Review, Bureau of Labor Statistics, February 2002, https://www.bls.gov/opub/mlr/2002/02/art1full.pdf (accessed October 6, 2020). Joseph E. Stiglitz, The Price of Inequality: How Today’s Divided Society Endangers Our Future (New York: Norton, 2013), 3. Barbara Ehrenreich, Nickel and Dimed: On (Not) Getting By in America (New York: Henry Holt, 2011, paperback edition). Paul Krugman, “The War on Wages,” New York Times, October 6, 2006. John D. Graham, Obama on the Home Front: Domestic Policy Triumphs and Setbacks (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2016), 66–69. Robert Rich, “The Great Recession: December 2007–June 2009,” Federal Reserve History, n.d., https:// www.federalreservehistory.org/essays/great_recession_of_200709 (accessed September 7, 2020). Quoted in “Will the Fed and Financial Policy Ever Get Back to Normal?” Knowledge@Wharton (University of Pennsylvania), May 30, 2017, https://knowledge.wharton.upenn.edu/article/will-fedu-s-monetary-policy-ever-get-back-normal/ (September 7, 2020). Gretchen Morgenson, “Countrywide Mortgage Devastation Lingers as Ex-Chief Moves On,” New York Times, June 24, 2016. Bernanke, Geithner, and Paulson, Firefighting, 23. Ibid.

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29 Francis X. Clines with Barry Meier, “Cancer Pain Killers Pose New Threat,” New York Times, February 9, 2001. 30 Brianna Ehley, “Federal Scientists Warned of Coming Opioid Crisis in 2006,” Politico, August 21, 2019, https://www.politico.com/story/2019/08/21/federal-scientists-opioid-crisis-1673694 (accessed June 20, 2020). The memo was written by Dr. Nora Volkow, director of the NIDA. 31 “US Opioid Prescribing Rate Maps,” Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, n.d., https://www. cdc.gov/drugoverdose/maps/rxrate-maps.html (accessed June 4, 2020). 32 Steven Rich, Scott Higham, and Sari Horwitz, “More than 100 Billion Pain Pills Saturated the Nation Over Nine Years, Washington Post, January 4, 2020. 33 Lawrence v. Texas, 539 US 558 (2003); https://supreme.justia.com/cases/federal/us/539/558/#tabopinion-1961304 (accessed October 2, 2020). 34 Goodridge v. Department of Public Health, 798 NE 2d 941 (2003), http://masscases.com/cases/sjc/440/ 440mass309.html (accessed October 5, 2020). 35 James Dobson, Marriage Under Fire: Why We Must Win This Battle (Colorado Springs: Multnomah Books, 2004); David D. Kirkpatrick, “Evangelical Leaders Threatens to Use His Political Muscle Against Some Democrats,” New York Times, January 1, 2005. 36 Nolan McCarthy, Polarization: What Everyone Needs to Know (New York: Oxford University Press, 2019), 14. 37 For example, John Sides and Daniel J. Hopkins, eds., Political Polarization in American Politics (New York: Bloomsbury Press, 2015); McCarthy, Polarization; Ezra Klein, Why We’re Polarized (New York: Avid Reader Press/Simon & Schuster, 2020). 38 Morris P. Fiorina with Samuel J. Abrams and Jeremy C. Pope, Culture War? The Myth of a Polarized America (New York: Longman, 2004). 39 Alan I. Abramowitz, The Great Alignment: Race, Party Transformation and the Rise of Donald Trump (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2018), 2; also Alan I. Abramowitz, The Polarized Public: Why American Government is so Dysfunctional (Upper Saddle River: Pearson Education, 2013). 40 Troy Segal, “Enron Scandal: The Fall of a Wall Street Darling,” Investopedia, May 4, 2020, https:// www.investopedia.com/updates/enron-scandal-summary/ (accessed May 5, 2020). Also, John Coffee, “What Caused Enron: A Capsule Social and Economic History of the 1990s,” Cornell Law Review 89 (2004): 269; William W. Bratton, “Enron and the Dark Side of Shareholder Value,” Tulane Law Review 76 (2002): 1275. 41 On the Enron collapse, Beth McLean and Peter Elkin, The Smartest Guys in the Room: The Amazing Rise and Scandalous Fall of Enron (New York: Penguin, 2004). 42 Tevi D. Troy, “Presidents and Mass Shootings,” National Affairs, Spring 2018, https://www. nationalaffairs.com/publications/detail/presidents-and-mass-shootings (accessed June 9, 2020). 43 Jerome P. Gjelopera et al., “Public Mass Shootings in the United States: Selected Implications for Federal Public Health and Safety Policy,” Congressional Research Service, US Congress, Report R43004, March 18, 2013, https://fas.org/sgp/crs/misc/R43004.pdf (accessed October 2, 2020). The definition of a public mass shooting used by the authors was “incidents occurring in relatively public places, involving four or more deaths—not including the shooter(s)—and gunmen who selected victims somewhat indiscriminately. The violence in these cases is not a means to an end—the gunmen do not pursue criminal profit or kill in the name of terrorist ideologies,” at ii. 44 Richard D. Knabb, Jamie H. Rhome, and Daniel P. Brown, “Tropical Cyclone Report: Hurricane Katrina, 23–30 August, 2005,” National Oceanographic and Atmospheric Administration, December 20, 2005, updated August 10, 2006, https://www.nhc.noaa.gov/data/tcr/AL122005_ Katrina.pdf (accessed June 18, 2020). 45 “Hurricane Katrina: A Nation Still Unprepared,” Senate Committee on Homeland Security and Government Affairs,” 109th Congress, 2nd Session (2006) https://www.govinfo.gov/content/pkg/ CRPT-109srpt322/pdf/CRPT-109srpt322.pdf (accessed June 15, 2020); Susan M. Collins and Joseph I. Lieberman, “Note to Readers.” 46 Ibid. 47 Ibid. 48 Video of Bush remarks, CNN, September 2, 2005, https://www.cnn.com/videos/politics/2017/10/26/ george-w-bush-hurricane-katrina-fema-michael-brown.cnn/video/playlists/president-george-w-bush/ (accessed June 15, 2020). 49 Brown quoted in Taegan Goddard’s Political Dictionary, “Heck of a Job,” https://politicaldictionary. com/words/heck-of-a-job/ (accessed June 15, 2020).

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50 Tevi Troy, Shall We Wake the President? Two Centuries of Disaster Management from the Oval Office (Lanham, MD: Lyons Press, 2016), 57–60. 51 Jean Edward Smith, Bush (New York: Simon & Schuster, 2017), 231. 52 “US Receives Aid Offers From Around the World,” CNN, September 4, 2005, http://edition.cnn. com/2005/US/09/04/katrina.world.aid/ (accessed June 18, 2020). 53 Graham, Bush on the Home Front, 1–3. 54 Jeffrey Jones, “Who Had the Lowest Gallup Presidential Approval Rating?” Gallup, December 26, 2019, https://news.gallup.com/poll/272765/lowest-gallup-presidential-job-approval-rating.aspx (accessed January 2, 2021). 55 Carnahan, his son Roger (Randy) Carnahan, and Chris Sifford, the campaign advisor and former chief of staff to Carnahan were killed when the twin-engine Cessna campaign plane, piloted by Randy Carnahan, crashed on October 16, 2000. By Missouri law, Carnahan’s name could not be removed from the ballot. 56 Daschle, Like No Other Time. 57 Jeffords quoted in Christopher Graff, “Jeffords Leaves Republican Party,” Washington Post, May 24, 2001; Paul Kane, “How Jim Jeffords Single-Handedly Bent the Arc of Politics,” Washington Post, August 18, 2014. 58 At a 100th birthday party for Thurmond, the Republican senator from South Carolina, Lott said, “When Strom Thurmond ran for president, we voted for him. We’re proud of it. And if the rest of the country had followed our lead, we wouldn’t have had all these problems over the years, either.” Lott had the same praise for Thurmond in 1980. At a rally in 1980, Thurmond said, “[We] want that federal government to keep their filthy hands off the rights of the states.” After that, Lott said, “You know, if we had elected this man 30 years ago, we wouldn’t be in the mess we are today.” Thomas B. Edsall and Brian Faler, “Lott Remarks on Thurmond Echo 1980 Words,” Washington Post, December 11, 2002. 59 Hastert resigned from Congress in 2007, then became a lobbyist for the Washington law firm, Dickstein Shapiro. In 2015, Hastert was indicted on federal charges of making false statements to investigators and evading bank reporting requirements, in association with hush money. The following year, federal prosecutors alleged that Hastert had molested at least four boys while he was a high school wrestling coach. Hastert was imprisoned in 2016 and released thirteen months later. Michael Tarm, “Dennis Hastert Sentenced to 15 Months in Prison,” Associated Press, April 27, 2016. 60 Thomas E. Mann and Norman J. Ornstein, The Broken Branch: How Congress Is Failing and How to Get It Back on Track (New York: Oxford University Press, 2008). Mann and Ornstein followed up with another book decrying lawmaking and extremism. Thomas E. Mann and Norman J. Ornstein, It’s Even Worse than It Looks: How the American Constitutional System Collided with the New Politics of Extremism (New York: Basic Books, 2016). 61 For insight into the attack of 9/11 and anthrax scare, see Jocelyn Jones Evans, One Nation Under Siege: Congress, Terrorism, and the Fate of American Democracy (Lexington: University Press of Kentucky, 2010). 62 Gregory Koger, Filibustering: A Political History of Obstruction in the House and the Senate (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2010), 3–4. 63 Ibid., 3. 64 “Bork Calls Miers’ Nomination a Disaster,” NBC News, October 14, 2005, http://www.nbcnews.com/ id/9623345#.XtVcuNNKii4 (accessed June 1, 2020). 65 Michael Kazin, “From Hubris to Despair: George W. Bush and the Conservative Movement” in Julian E. Zelizer, ed., The Presidency of George W. Bush: A First Historical Assessment (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2010), 286. 66 The laws were the Transportation Equity Act for the 21st Century (TEA-21) (1998) and the Safe, Accountable, Flexible, and Efficient Transportation Equity Act (SAFE-TEA) (2005). 67 Simon van Zuylen-Wood, “How Robo-Callers Outwitted the Government and Completely Wrecked the Do Not Call List,” Washington Post, January 11, 2018; Gail Collins, “The Robocall Rebellion,” New York Times, July 28, 2021. 68 Quoted in Avis Thomas-Lester, “A Senate Apology for History on Lynching,” Washington Post, June 14, 2005. 69 “The Eight GOP Senators Who Declined to Apologize for the Senate’s Historic Failure to Enact Anti-Lynching Legislation,” Journal of Blacks in Higher Education 48 (Summer 2005): 93–97. The eight senators who did not cosponsor were Lamar Alexander (Tennessee), Trent Lott (Mississippi), Thad Cochran (Mississippi), John Cornyn (Texas), Judd Gregg (New Hampshire), John Sununu (New Hampshire), Craig Thomas (Wyoming), and Mike Enzi (Wyoming).

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70 Cochran quoted in William Raspberry, “A ‘Sorry’ Excuse from Cochran,” Washington Post, June 20, 2005; Thomas-Lester, “A Senate Apology for History on Lynching.” 71 Brett Barrouquere, “Ex-Klansman Edgar Ray Killen May Be Dead, But This Small Mississippi Town Still Remembers His Crimes,” Southern Poverty Law Center, January 19, 2018, https://edit.splcenter. org/hatewatch/2018/01/19/ex-klansman-edgar-ray-killen-may-be-dead-small-mississippi-town-stillremembers-his-crimes (accessed January 26, 2018). Concurrent Resolution, Designation of Chaney, Goodman, and Schwerner Day, 103 Stat. 2560, June 23, 1989, https://www.gpo.gov/fdsys/pkg/ STATUTE-103/pdf/STATUTE-103-Pg2560.pdf (accessed January 26, 2018). 72 John D. Graham, Bush on the Home Front: Domestic Policy Triumphs and Setbacks (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2010), 3. 73 James T. Patterson, “Transformative Economic Policies: Tax Cutting, Stimuli, and Bailouts,” in Zelizer, ed., The Presidency of George W. Bush, 114. 74 The full pledge for federal candidates is this: to “oppose any and all efforts to increase the marginal income tax rates 1. for individuals and/or businesses; and oppose any net reduction or elimination of deductions and credits, 2. unless matched dollar for dollar by further reducing tax rates.” Americans for Tax Reform, n.d., https://www.atr.org/sites/default/files/assets/2020PledgeFederal.pdf (accessed May 31, 2020). 75 Office of Management and Budget, “A Blueprint for New Beginnings,” February 2001, Table S-15: Baseline Category Totals, 200; Congressional Budget Office, “The Budget and Economic Outlook: Fiscal Years 2002–2011,” January 2001, Summary Table 1, xiv. James R. Horney and Robert Greenstein, “Getting the Facts Straight: A Tale of Deficits Under Two Presidents,” Center on Budget and Policy Priorities, February 17, 2010, https://www.cbpp.org/research/getting-the-facts-straight (accessed May 31, 2020). 76 The tax cut came through the Economic Growth and Tax Relief Reconciliation Act of 2001; Richard Kogan and Robert Greenstein, “The Disappearing 2001 Surplus: Tax Cuts, Budget Increases, and the Economy,” Center on Budget and Policy Priorities, August 28, 2001, https://www. cbpp.org/archives/8-22-01bud3.hm (accessed May 13, 2020); James Mann, George W. Bush: The American Presidency Series (New York: Times Books, 2015), 42–52. 77 Richard Kogan and Gillian Brunet, “How Projected Surpluses Became Deficits,” Center on Budget and Policy Priorities, September 12, 2008, https://www.cbpp.org/research/how-projected-surplusesbecame-deficits?fa=view&id=640 (accessed May 31, 2020). 78 Patterson, “Transformative Economic Policies,” 121–22. 79 Robert O’Harrow, Jr., “Six Weeks in Autumn,” Washington Post, October 27, 2002, magazine section 6. 80 The manifesto was prepared by longtime civil liberties advocate Morton Halperin and James X. Dempsey and Marc Rotenberg from the Electronic Privacy Information Center. 81 Herbert N. Foerstal, The Patriot Act: A Documentary and Reference Guide (Westport: Greenwood Press, 2008), xvii. Dennis W. Johnson, The Laws That Shaped America: Fifteen Acts of Congress and Their Lasting Impact (New York: Routledge, 2009), 403–405. 82 In recent decades, it has somehow become fashionable to name legislation after, at times, clever acronyms. The USA PATRIOT Act stands for Uniting and Strengthening America by Providing Appropriate Tools Required to Intercept and Obstruct Terrorism Act. Throughout this section, it will simply be referred to as the Patriot Act. 83 The lone senator voting against was Russell Feingold (Democrat—Wisconsin). 84 On the history of government oversight of mass metadata surveillance, see Jake LaPerruque, “The History and Future of Mass Metadata Surveillance,” Project on Government Oversight, June 11, 2019, https://www.pogo.org/analysis/2019/06/the-history-and-future-of-mass-metadata-surveillance/ (accessed May 14, 2020). 85 Kam C. Wong, The Impact of USA Patriot Act on American Society: An Evidence Based Assessment (New York: Nova Science Publishers, 2007), 6. 86 “Surveillance Under the Patriot Act,” American Civil Liberties Union, n.d., https://www.aclu.org/ issues/national-security/privacy-and-surveillance/surveillance-under-patriot-act (accessed May 14, 2020). 87 “USA Patriot Act,” The White House, n.d., https://georgewbush-whitehouse.archives.gov/infocus/ patriotact/ (accessed May 14, 2020). 88 Wong, The Impact of USA Patriot Act on American Society, 351. 89 Jesse H. Rhodes, An Education in Politics: The Origins and Evolution of New Child Left Behind (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2012), 126–58.

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90 Patrick McGuinn, “Schooling the State: ESEA and the Evolution of the US Department of Education,” RSF: Russell Sage Foundation Journal of the Social Sciences 1 (3) (December 2015): 77–94, at 91. 91 Valerie Strauss, “Why It’s Worth Re-reading George W. Bush’s 2002 No Child Left Behind Speech,” Washington Post, December 9, 2015. At the signing ceremony, Bush also praised Representative George Miller (Democrat—California) and Speaker Boehner. 92 Bush message in Ibid. 93 Smith, Bush, 167. 94 Lily Eskelsen Garciá and Otha Thornton, “‘No Child Left Behind’ Has Failed,” Washington Post, February 13, 2015. Garciá was president of the NEA, Thornton was president of the NPTA. 95 Dana Goldstein, “Kennedy’s NCLB Legacy,” The American Prospect August 28, 2009, https:// prospect.org/article/kennedy-s-nclb-legacy./ (accessed May 8, 2020). 96 Ibid. 97 Randi Weingarten, “Picking up the Pieces of No Child Left Behind,” The Atlantic, April 9, 2012, https://www.theatlantic.com/national/archive/2012/04/picking-up-the-pieces-of-no-child-leftbehind/255571/ (accessed May 8, 2020). 98 Jones and Burton, quoted in “Under the Influence,” CBS 60 Minutes Report, March 29, 2007, Steve Kroft, reporter, transcript, https://www.cbsnews.com/news/under-the-influence/2/ (accessed May 14, 2020); Dingell quoted in Mann and Ornstein, The Broken Branch, 2. 99 Thomas R. Oliver, Philip R. Lee, Helene L. Lipton, “A Political History of Medicare and Prescription Drug Coverage,” Milbank Quarterly 82 (2) (June 2004): 283–354. 100 Paul Blumenthal, “The Legacy of Billy Tauzin: The White House-PhRMA Deal,” Sunlight Foundation, February 12, 2010, https://sunlightfoundation.com/2010/02/12/the-legacy-of-billy-tauzin-the-whitehouse-phrma-deal/ (accessed May 15, 2020). 101 Tauzin resigned from his role as top lobbyist for the drug industry in 2010, when drug makers complained that he had bargained away too much and misspent the industry’s $150 million advertising campaign in the policy fight leading up to the Affordable Care Act. David D. Kirkpatrick and Duff Wilson, “One Grand Deal Too Many Cost Lobbyist His Job,” New York Times, February 12, 2010. 102 Families USA report summarized in “Under the Influence.” 103 Elisabeth Bumiller, “Corporate Conduct: The President; Bush Signs Bill Aimed at Fraud in Corporations,” New York Times, July 31, 2002. 104 “Corporate Responsibility: Sarbanes-Oxley Act of 2002,” Congressional Research Service, August 27, 2002, RL31554; Brian Kim, “Recent Development: Sarbanes-Oxley Act,” Harvard Journal on Legislation 40 (2003): 235. 105 Paul Lanois, “The Legacy of the Sarbanes-Oxley Act, 15 Years On,” Columbia Law School Blue Sky Blog, February 9, 2017, https://clsbluesky.law.columbia.edu/2017/02/09/the-legacy-of-the-sarbanesoxley-act-15-years-on/ (accessed May 6, 2020); and Paul Lanois, “Between and Rock and a Hard Place: The Sarbanes-Oxley Act and Its Global Impact,” University of Pennsylvania Journal of International Law 5 (4) (2007): 1–19, https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=2894294 (accessed May 6, 2020). 106 Glenn Boyle and Eli Grace-Webb, “Sarbanes-Oxley and Its Aftermath: A Review of the Evidence,” Working Paper Series 3976, Victoria University of Wellington (2007), https://ideas.repec.org/p/vuw/ vuwcsr/3976.html (accessed October 22, 2021). The authors reviewed some 528 academic papers written on Sarbanes-Oxley. 107 Dennis W. Johnson, Political Consultants and American Elections: Hired to Fight, Hired to Win (New York: Routledge, 2016), 218–41. 108 Charles Babcock and Ruth Marcus, “A Hard-Charging Flood of ‘Soft Money,’” Washington Post, October 24, 1996, A1. 109 Johnson, Political Consultants and American Elections, 224. 110 Quoted in Terry M. Neal, “Fired-up and Financially Flush, Forbes Prepares to Run Ads in Key States,” Washington Post, April 11, 1999, A16. 111 McConnell v. FEC, 540 US 93 (2003), https://supreme.justia.com/cases/federal/us/540/93/#tabopinion-1961445. 112 Joseph E. Sandler and Neil P. Reif, “The ‘527’ Fuss Explained,” Campaigns and Elections, August 2004, 40. 113 Johnson, Political Consultants and American Elections, 228. 114 Meg Jacobs, “Wreaking Havoc from Within: George W. Bush’s Energy Policy in Historical Perspective,” in Zelizer, ed., The Presidency of George W. Bush, 139–69, at 140.

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115 National Energy Policy Development Group, “National Energy Policy,” The White House, May 2001, https://www.nrc.gov/docs/ML0428/ML042800056.pdf (accessed May 12, 2020). Thomas Roberts and Liam Downey, “When Bush and Cheney Doubled Down on Fossil Fuels: A Fateful Choice for the Climate,” Brookings Institution Planet Policy blog, July 7, 2016, https://www. brookings.edu/blog/planetpolicy/2016/07/07/when-bush-and-cheney-doubled-down-on-fossil-fuels-afateful-choice-for-the-climate/ (accessed May 12, 2020). 116 “Energy Policy Act of 2005: Summary and Analysis of Enacted Provisions,” Congressional Research Service, March 8, 2006, RL33302, https://www.everycrsreport.com/files/20060308_RL33302_ 5deb6e20eda4faa299d9f2b5ca6cdacf9c60c0b5.pdf (accessed May 12, 2020). 117 Editorial, “The Halliburton Loophole,” New York Times, November 2, 2009. Linda Poppenheimer, “Energy Policy Act of 2005—Fracking and Drinking Water,” Green Groundswell blog, https:// greengroundswell.com/energy-policy-act-of-2005-fracking-and-drinking-water/2015/03/12/ (accessed May 7, 2020). Jim VandeHei and Justin Blum, “Bush Signs Energy Bill, Cheers Steps to SelfSufficiency,” Washington Post, August 9, 2005. 118 Text of “President Bush’s State of the Union Address,” Washington Post, January 31, 2006. 119 John M. Broder, “Bush Signs Broad Energy Bill,” New York Times, December 19, 2007; “Energy Security and Independence Act of 2007: A Summary of Major Provisions,” Congressional Research Service, February 22, 2008, https://www.everycrsreport.com/files/20080222_RL34294_ c66ac6bf75f806cec8409be424e83d8210f7b279.pdf (accessed May 18, 2020). Sponsored in the House by Nick Joe Rahall (Democrat—West Virginia). 120 Broder, “Bush Signs Broad Energy Bill.” 121 Bernanke, Geithner, and Paulson, Firefighting, 70. 122 Roger H. Davidson, Walter J. Oleszek, Frances E. Lee, and Eric Schickler, Congress and Its Members, 17th ed. (Washington, DC: CQ Press, 2019), 455. 123 For presidential candidate Barack Obama’s perspective on the White House emergency meeting on the financial crisis, see Barack Obama, A Promised Land (New York: Crown Books, 2020), 185–90. 124 David Wessell, Central Banking After the Great Recession (Washington, DC: Brookings Institution, 2014), 10. 125 George W. Bush, Decision Points (New York: Crown Publishers, 2010), 439–72, at 460. 126 Eamon Javers, “What if the Bailout Passes but Doesn’t Work,” Politico, September 30, 2008. 127 “In 2008, Three Officials Were on the Front Line of the Financial Crisis,” NPR, April 19, 2019, interviewed by Steve Inskeep, https://www.npr.org/2019/04/19/715053806/bernanke-geithner-andpaulson-on-lessons-learned-from-2008-financial-crisis (accessed May 19, 2020). 128 Davidson et al., Congress and Its Members, 456; Obama, A Promised Land, 522. 129 Grutter v. Bollinger, 539 US 306 (2003), https://supreme.justia.com/cases/federal/us/539/306/#tabopinion-1961291; majority opinion by Justice O’Connor. 130 Gratz v. Bollinger, 539 US 244 (2003), https://supreme.justia.com/cases/federal/us/539/244/#tabopinion-1961289; majority opinion by Chief Justice Rehnquist. 131 Schuette v. Coalition to Defend Affirmative Action, 572 US 291 (2014), https://supreme.justia.com/ cases/federal/us/572/291/#tab-opinion-1970866. 132 Fisher v. University of Texas, 579 US ___ (2016), https://supreme.justia.com/cases/federal/us/579/14981/#tab-opinion-3589817. An earlier case, also Fisher v. University of Texas, went to the Supreme Court in 2012, with the Court holding that the appellate court had erred in not apply the strict standard policy of the University of Texas’s admissions policies. Nicholas Lemann, “The Diversity Verdict,” The New Yorker, August 2, 2021. 133 The Second Amendment (1789), “A well regulated Militia, being necessary to the security of a free State, the right of the people to keep and bear Arms, shall not be infringed.” For background on the District of Columbia law, Harry Jaffe, “DC Gun Rights: Do You Want This Next to Your Bed?” Washingtonian, March 1, 2008, https://www.washingtonian.com/2008/03/01/dc-gun-rights-do-youwant-this-next-to-your-bed/ (accessed April 30, 2020). 134 See Ilya Shapiro, “Friends of the Second Amendment: A Walk Through the Amicus Briefs in DC v. Heller,” Journal of Firearms and Public Policy 20 (2008), posted at Cato Institute, https://www.cato.org/ sites/cato.org/files/articles/DC_v_Heller.pdf (accessed April 30, 2020). 135 United States v. Miller, 307 US 174 (1939), https://supreme.justia.com/cases/federal/us/307/174/#tabopinion-1936361. 136 District of Columbia v. Heller, 554 US 570 (2008), https://supreme.justia.com/cases/federal/us/554/ 570/#tab-opinion-1962738. 137 Ibid., Justice Scalia, majority opinion, no page.

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138 Ibid., Justice Scalia. 139 Ibid., Justice Stevens, dissenting opinion. 140 McDonald v. Chicago, 561 US 742 (2010), https://supreme.justia.com/cases/federal/us/561/742/#tabopinion-1963368. 141 Winkler quoted in Mark Obbie, “He Won the Supreme Court Case that Transformed Gun Rights. But Dick Heller Is a Hard Man to Please,” The Trace, March 20, 2016, https://www.thetrace.org/2016/03/ dick-heller-second-amendment-hero-abolish-gun-regulation/ (accessed April 29, 2020). Adam Winkler, Gunfight: The Battle Over the Right to Bear Arms in America (New York: Norton, 2011). 142 Colin H. Cassedy, “Massachusetts v. EPA: The Causes and Effects of Creating Comprehensive Climate Change Regulations,” Journal of International Business and Law 7 (1) (2008): 145–66. 143 Massachusetts v. Environmental Protection Agency, 549 US 497 (2007), https://supreme.justia.com/ cases/federal/us/549/497/#tab-opinion-1962181. 144 The official title was the Public Safety and Recreational Firearms Use Protection Act, which was a part of the Violent Crime Control and Law Enforcement Act of 1994. 145 Ben Garrett, “Gun Rights Under President George W. Bush,” ThoughtCo.com, March 30, 2020, https://www.thoughtco.com/gun-rights-under-president-george-w-bush-721332 (accessed May 24, 2020). 146 Eric Lichtblau, “Irking N.R.A., Bush Supports Ban on Assault Weapons,” New York Times, May 8, 2003. “Unbelievably friendly” quote comes from the NRA leader. 147 Erin Dooley, “Here’s Why the Federal Government Can’t Research Gun Violence,” ABC News, October 6, 2017, https://abcnews.go.com/US/federal-government-study-gun-violence/story?id= 50300379 (accessed May 25, 2020). 148 Press release, “President Bush Signs ‘Protection of Lawful Commerce in Arms Act,’ Landmark NRA Victory Now Law,” NRA-Institute for Legislative Action, October 26, 2005, https://www.nraila.org/ articles/20051026/president-bush-signs-protection-of-br (accessed May 25, 2020). 149 National Instant Criminal Background Check System (“NICS”) Improvement Amendments Act of 2007. 150 Joaquin Sapien, “How the NRA Undermined Congress’s 2007 Gun Push,” Mother Jones, January 25, 2013, https://www.motherjones.com/politics/2013/01/how-nra-undermined-congress-gun-control/ (accessed May 25, 2020). 151 Richard Simon, “Bush Signs Bill Geared to Toughen Screening of Gun Buyers,” Los Angeles Times, January 8, 2008. 152 Roberts and Downey, “When Bush and Cheney Doubled Down on Fossil Fuels.” 153 Jacqueline Vaughn and Hanna J. Cortner, George W. Bush’s Healthy Forests: Reframing the Environmental Debate (Boulder: University Press of Colorado, 2005), 12–43. 154 Elizabeth Rosenthal and Andrew C. Revkin, “Panel Issues Bleak Report on Climate Change,” New York Times, February 2, 2007. 155 An Inconvenient Truth (2006), Paramount Classics and Participant Productions, directed by Davis Guggenheim; produced by Laurie David, Lawrence Bender, and Scott Z. Burns. 156 Rick Piltz, “White House ‘Eviscerated’ Centers for Disease Control on Climate Change Health Impacts,” Climate Science & Policy Watch, October 23, 2007, http://www.climatesciencewatch.org/ 2007/10/23/white-house-eviscerated-centers-for-disease-control-testimony-on-climate-changehealth-impacts/ (accessed May 31, 2020). 157 James B. Inhofe, “The Science of Climate Change,” floor statement, US Senate, July 28, 2003, from Senator Inhofe’s website, http://inhofe.senate.gov/pressreleases/climate.htm (accessed February 21, 2017); Inhofe quoted in David A. Farenthold, “Turning Up the Heat on Climate Issue,” Washington Post, June 23, 2008; Eric Pooley, “Why Climate Bill Failed,” Time, June 9, 2008. 158 Graham, Bush on the Home Front, 221. 159 Quotes from Michael A. Fletcher and Jonathan Weisman, “Bush Signs Bill Authorizing 700-Mile Fence for Border,” Washington Post, October 26, 2006. 160 Graham, Bush on the Home Front, 251.

Chapter 12

Polarized America: 2009–2016

The top 1 percent have the best houses, the best educations, the best doctors, and the best lifestyles, but there is one thing that money doesn’t seem to have bought: an understanding that their fate is bound up with how the other 99 percent live. Throughout history, this is something that the top 1 percent eventually do learn. Too late. (Joseph E. Stiglitz, 2011)1

This era began with the nation’s economy on the ropes: nothing short of the Great Depression compared to the devastation wrought in 2008 and beyond. The Big Three automakers were on the brink of bankruptcy, millions of consumers were overwhelmed by complicated and too easily obtained home mortgages only to see house values plummet, and financial institutions were shaken to their core. Yet, those at the very top of the economic pyramid fared much better than everyone else, only exacerbating the widening gap between the very well-off and the rest of society. For many, there was a great deal of hope and promise, with the election of Barack Obama as president. Others feared that America was slipping away: the continued erosion of American traditional values, the sense that Washington wasn’t paying attention to the backbone of white middle-class Americans but instead was focusing on immigrants, gays and lesbians, big-city dwellers, with visions of big government programs and the loss of freedoms. An ugly side of America was also on display, with the rise of hate groups, hate speech spilling out on multiple platforms of social media, increased racial tension, and a rash of gun violence.

AMERICA DURING THIS ERA

The Era by the Numbers Following the US Census of 2010, the population of the United States reached 308.7 million, a 9.7 percent increase over the 2000 census figures. With the new census figures came reapportionment, and, following a decades-old trend, states in the North and Midwest were losing population (and seats in Congress) while states in the South and West were gaining. Over the long haul, there were three big losers: New York, which went from 45 seats following the 1940 census to 27 following the 2010 census; Pennsylvania, which went from 36 seats following the 1910 census to 18 following the 2010 census; and Ohio, which went from 24 seats in 1960 to 16 in 2010. The states gaining the most were Florida, which went from 6 following the 1940 census to 27 in 2010; Texas, which went from 21 following the 1930 census to 36 in 2010; and California going from 20 in 1930 to 53 in 2010.2 DOI: 10.4324/9781003293538-16

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The number of both legal and illegal immigrants hit a record of 43.7 million in July 2016, an increase of 3.8 million from 2010, and an increase of 12.6 million since 2000. This meant that in 2016 one out of every eight residents were immigrants, the highest percentage in 106 years. In addition, there were a little more than 16.6 million US-born children of immigrant parents, bringing the total to 60.4 million immigrants and their children in 2016. By far the largest number of immigrants came from Mexico, approximately one out of eight new arrivals, or 1.1 million from 2010 to 2016. Texas, Florida, and California each absorbed more than 500,000 new immigrants from 2010 to 2016, while New York, New Jersey, Massachusetts, Washington, Pennsylvania, Virginia, and Maryland all had increases of at least 100,000 immigrants during this period.3 Government indebtedness grew significantly during this era. The debt-to-GDP ratio in Bush’s last year in office was 39.4 percent, and with the Great Recession jumped to 52.3 percent in Fiscal Year 2009, increasing each year until it reached 76.4 percent in Fiscal Year 2016.4 The opioid crisis continued unabated. Opioids were everywhere, but there was a definite concentration in some of the poorest, economically shattered areas of Appalachia. A virtual opioid belt of some ninety counties stretched from West Virginia, through southern Virginia, and eastern Kentucky. Eighteen out of the top twenty counties ranked by per-capita opioid deaths were found in this belt; and twelve out of the top twenty counties for opioid pills were found here.5

Society under Stress Widening Inequality In 2011, the Stanford University Center on Poverty & Inequality noted that wage inequality in the United States had “increased substantially, with the overall level of inequality now approaching the extreme level that prevailed prior to the Great Depression.”6 One indication was the enormous growth in the gap between the compensation of chief executive officers (CEOs) and the average worker. In 1965, CEOs made 24 times more than the average worker; in 2009, they made 185 times more. Since the 1980s, the ownership of wealth became more concentrated among the top 10 percent of households. In 2007, the top 10 percent held 73.1 percent of the country’s wealth, while the bottom 60 percent held just 4.2 percent. College graduates were the only group that had its median weekly earnings grow in real terms since 1979. High school graduates, on the other hand, had a 22 percent decline from 1979 to 2009. High school dropouts were highest among Hispanic students; college enrollment for African Americans fell far behind white students. There was also a steady decline in union membership, from 24 percent in 1973 to 12.4 percent in 2008. Further, the value of the minimum wage, set at $7.25 in July 2009, continued to fall. On any given night in 2007, there were 750,000 Americans who were homeless, one of five of whom were considered chronically homeless. Most affected by homelessness were males, African Americans, middle-aged, veterans, and the disabled. The number of Americans on food stamps climbed from 33.5 million in 2009 to 44.2 million in 2016.7 Child poverty in the United States was about 21 percent in the late 2000s, a rate higher than virtually all other industrialized countries in the world. In 2007, there were 8.1 million children under the age of eighteen without health insurance in the United States.8 Economic Downfall To make matters worse came the economic crisis of 2008, which erased $13 trillion in wealth from the United States economy, more than five times the rate of loss experienced during the

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Great Depression. The stock market declined nearly 50 percent, again outpacing the decline found in the Great Depression, and home prices had collapsed. Household wealth had dropped 16 percent, and some 2.3 million homes were foreclosed. Just twelve months earlier, the unemployment rate was 4.9 percent; by January 2009, 4.1 million more workers filed for unemployment, bringing the total to 11.6 million on unemployment, at a rate of 7.6 percent.9 The unemployment rate hit 10 percent in October 2009, then began decreasing steadily over the next seven years, until it reached less than 5 percent in 2016.10 Private sector jobs had plummeted in 2009, with a total job loss of 4.98 million. Not until March 2010 did private sector job gains appear, with 141,000 new jobs added that month. From March 2010 through the remainder of this era, seventy-five months, there was monthly job growth. At the end of the Obama administration, the unemployment rate was 4.7 percent. During the Obama era, the average monthly job growth was 109,000; during the recovery period beginning in March 2010, the jobs added averaged 199,000. This fell short of the 242,000 jobs added each month during the Clinton years (1993–2000) and the Reagan administration (1981–1989) of 166,000 per month. When Obama became president, the percentage of workers in the labor force was 65.7, but it steadily declined to 62.7 percent by the end of his administration.11 Significantly, the shape of the economy was also changing. Manufacturing, mining, logging, and construction continued their decades-long decline; service jobs, often paying just above minimum wage, were on the increase. The Continued Resurgence of Hate Groups and Racist Agitation The Southern Poverty Law Center (SPLC), which has been tracking hate groups and individuals for over thirty years, noted that, after Obama was elected, there was a spike in both the number and activity of hate groups. By 2011, the SPLC had identified 1,018 hate groups operating in the United States, with a “stunning” rise in the number of militia and “patriot” groups. These groups, whose members often toted military-style weapons, and wore bullet-proof vests and camouflage uniforms, exhibited great distrust of government and authority, and increased in number from 824 in 2010 to 1,274 in 2011. The “patriot” movement gained momentum after the Ruby Ridge and Waco confrontations in 1994, peaking after the 1995 Oklahoma City bombing. It then began to fade, only to re-emerge following Obama’s election.12 Especially on the rise were hate groups that targeted Muslims. Right-wing racial conspiracies abounded, but none had such resonance as the spurious claim that Barack Hussein Obama, with that peculiar name, a Kenyan father, and a black man to boot, was not born in the United States, and thus was ineligible to become president. Spread online and on conservative talk radio, and by the complicity of conservative lawmakers (who knew better) who failed to deny the accusations, the charge spread far and wide. In a Morning Consult poll in January 2016, among Republicans polled, 51 percent did not believe that Obama had been born in the United States; 19 percent of Democrats agreed.13 For five years businessman Donald Trump pushed the “birther” conspiracy, but in 2016 as a presidential candidate, he abandoned his crusade. But as Politico discovered at Trump rallies, “the birthers and non-birthers all seemed to think that Trump has privately agreed with them all along, and all praised his flip-flop as a shrewd political stratagem to change an inconvenient subject.”14 Many had thought that America had turned a corner on racial tolerance and justice, electing Barack Obama as president. The new president, himself, was optimistic. In a July 16, 2009 speech to the national conference of the NAACP, Obama declared, “There probably has never been less discrimination in American than is today. But make no mistake: the pain of discrimination is still felt in America.”15

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But political scientists Ronald W. Walters and Robert C. Smith argued that it was a “curious paradox,” the election of Obama in 2008. For African Americans, like themselves, it was a historic win in the fight for equality, but it also had “the potential to represent a loss.” They argued that by creating the mistaken perception that the doors of equal opportunity are now open to all, when in reality institutionalized discrimination remains an irrefutable fact of modern American life, Obama’s victory might have the effect of dampening the long-term effort to remedy the effects of centuries of racial discrimination. In other words, winning while losing—or at least not gaining—may be the outcome of the election of the first Black president.”16 In 2013, following the acquittal of George Zimmerman in the shooting of Trayvon Martin, three female Black organizers—Alicia Garza, Patrisse Cullors, and Opal Tometi—created an organization based on the social media hashtag #Black Lives Matter. The movement quickly picked up support following two other deaths of black men, Michael Brown in suburban St. Louis and Eric Garner in New York City.17 Following the 2020 deaths of George Floyd, Breonna Taylor, and others, the Black Lives Matter movement gained greater momentum, and became a force for racial justice not only in the United States, but in Canada, the United Kingdom, and elsewhere. During this era, there were repeated efforts to have Confederate flags and monuments removed from public spaces, along with equal push-back from citizens and groups defending those symbols. Prompting at least some change were the senseless murders of nine black churchgoers, killed by white supremacist Dylan Roof, a twenty-two-year-old ninth-grade dropout. On June 17, 2015, Roof was invited to join the members at Emmanuel AME Church in Charleston, South Carolina, for Bible study. After forty-five minutes of reading and prayer, Roof killed nine persons, but spared one person so that she could tell his story. For years, progressives had been trying to remove the Confederate flag from the South Carolina Statehouse; finally, it was done.18 The battle over history, symbols, and racial justice would find greater force in the era to come. Gun Violence Also following the election of Obama was a surge in firearm purchases. Gun advocates feared that a White House and Congress, both now controlled by Democrats, would push through restrictive firearms legislation; however, no such legislation was enacted. In 2009, collectively Americans owned 315 million firearms. (The estimated US population that year was 305 million.)19 Gun ownership once again increased following Obama’s re-election in 2012. While some Americans were arming themselves with semi-automatic pistols and militarystyle weapons, the country was hit with the devastating news of a series of mass murders, all too frequently involving young men, automatic weapons, and hundreds of rounds of ammunition. One of the most horrific episodes occurred on December 14, 2012, in Newtown, Connecticut. At the Sandy Hook Elementary School, twenty children, ages six and seven, along with six teachers and staff members, were killed by a mentally imbalanced twenty-yearold. Earlier that day, he had killed his mother, took her high-powered semi-automatic Bushmaster XM14-E2S rifle and ten magazines, holding thirty rounds each, along with two semi-automatic pistols, and forced his way into school. The first graders were shot at close range, some hit eleven times.20

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What would it take to force federal lawmakers into action? Surely the deaths of these children. There was plenty of hand-wringing and finger-pointing, plenty of thoughts and prayers; there was concern and action from the White House, but pleas for reform were stopped cold in Congress. Over 300 people were jammed into the Pulse nightclub in Orlando, Florida, for “Latin Night,” drawing a substantial number of Hispanic gays. On June 12, 2016, at closing time, 2:00 a.m., a twenty-nine-year-old man entered the building, armed with a semi-automatic rifle and a semi-automatic pistol, and caused mayhem. Forty-nine people were killed, another fiftyeight were injured; after a three-hour standoff, the shooter was also killed. The gunman, an American who was a Muslim and born of Afghan parents, apparently sought revenge for the US bombing in Iraq that killed an ISIS leader. The Pulse massacre was the deadliest shooting targeting LGBTQ persons, and the second deadliest terrorist attack since 9/11. Fifteen months later, a lone gunman, firing more than a thousand rounds, killed fiftyeight people and injured nearly 500 at a Las Vegas open-air concert. Sandy Hook, Orlando, and Las Vegas were outliers, both in the number of casualties and the mental state of the gunmen. Many more mass shootings occurred during this era. By one estimate, between 2009 and 2018, there were an average of nineteen mass murders each year, with a total of 1,121 Americans killed and 836 more wounded. Altogether during this time, there were 194 mass shootings. Sixty-one percent of these shootings occurred at home, with another 10 percent partially at home and partially in public spaces. Twenty-nine percent of the mass murders occurred entirely in public spaces, like schools, shopping malls, or more typically in restaurants or bars. One in three of the shooters were legally prevented from owning a gun, and over half (54 percent) had exhibited warning signs before the shooting. Beyond the mass shootings, every day in America over 100 persons were killed by gun violence.21 Conservative Backlash—the Tea Party The frustration against the Bush administration’s bailout of Wall Street, the election of a progressive African American president and his liberal agenda, and general anxiety over the collusion of big government and big business came to a boil in January 2009, just as Obama took the oath of office. Conservatives had been frustrated for decades by the seeming dominance of progressive and liberal trends in government and culture. They found sympathy and financial support from deep conservative pockets hoping to capitalize on the pent-up anger. Jeff Nesbit, who once worked as communications director for Vice President Dan Quayle, argued that the Tea Party owed its existence to the seemingly bottomless well of funds from Charles and David Koch. After the Bush team lost in 1992, Nesbit started a consulting business, and one of his first clients was a small outfit called the Citizens for a Sound Economy (CSE). There he saw the potential and the reach of the Koch brothers. In an “unholy alliance,” the Koch’s big-oil concerns were joined by Philip Morris’s big-tobacco interests to create anti-tax front groups through a number of states. R.J. Reynolds, another tobacco giant, joined in, and citizen groups like Get Government Off Our Back, Enough Is Enough, and Citizens Against Regressive Taxation were formed. “This, at its core, was the beginning of the American Tea Party revolt against the power of the government to pay for its programs,” Nesbit wrote. The Tea Party movement, which looked to the outside like it just emerged spontaneously, “looked an awful lot like the efforts the Koch’s CSE had led in the Clinton and Bush years—just with more money, broad state-based causes, better-trained leaders, and a willingness to integrate and coordinate more efficiently with each other.”22

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The spark that set off the formation of the Tea Party movement, in late January 2009, came from a financial reporter who was just about ready to explode in anger. CNBC television reporter Rick Santelli, in a tirade from the floor of the Chicago Mercantile Exchange, excoriated the new administration for the mortgage bailouts. The government is promoting bad behavior. … How ‘bout this president and new administration, why don’t you put up a website, have people vote on the Internet, as a referendum to see if we really want to subsidize the losers’ mortgages … President Obama, are you listening?!23 Santelli’s rant was amplified through social media and hyped by Fox News. Former congressman Dick Armey joined Citizens for a Sound Economy after leaving office in 2003. That organization split into Freedom Works and Americans for Prosperity the following year, and Armey became chairman of Freedom Works. Armey’s organization helped get Tea Party candidates, like Michael S. (Mike) Lee (Republican—Utah) and Timothy E. (Tim) Scott (Republican—South Carolina) elected to office. Armey, once the ultimate Washington insider, was bent on shaking up the establishment.24 Political consultants also got in on the act. Sal Russo, a Republican consultant based in California, created the Tea Party Express political action committee, raised $10.1 million in 2011–2012, and plowed a considerable amount of the funds raised to his consulting business and another one run by his wife.25 In their study of the Tea Party, social scientists Theda Skocpol and Vanessa Williamson asked, “What kind of mass rebellion is funded by corporate billionaires, like the Koch brothers, led by over-the-hill former GOP kingpins like Dick Armey, and ceaselessly promoted by millionaire media celebrities like Glenn Beck and Sean Hannity?”26 There were genuine grassroots elements of the Tea Party movement, thousands of people exasperated with the direction of government, the loss of economic control, the feeling that the country and the culture had moved beyond them. Tea Party activists and followers were angered at the prospects of national health care, the dreaded Obamacare, and came out in force during congressional summer recess in 2009. Dozens of Republican members of Congress voiced their support for the Tea Party, and in 2015, Tea Party activists were folded into the newly created Republican Freedom Caucus. Founded by Republican members James D. (Jim) Jordan of Ohio and Mark R. Meadows of North Carolina, the Freedom Caucus claimed some forty members. They were the far more conservative part of the increasingly conservative party and tended to be first or second termers. J. Michael (Mick) Mulvaney of South Carolina, also a founding member, became President Trump’s third chief of staff and lasted a little more than a year; Meadows replaced him in March 2020.

THE NATIONAL GOVERNMENT

The Presidency Barack Obama was president during these eight years. At the beginning, in January 2009, he was faced with discouraging economic reality: 8.3 percent unemployment rate, and a loss of 839,000 jobs that month. Citizens, however, gave him a nodding approval, with 63.5 approving, and just 19.3 percent disapproving of his performance. But the honeymoon was brief. The economy was slow to recover, and the expensive stimulus package rubbed many the wrong way, rewarding those who had made bad economic judgments and, above all, seen as a Wall

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Street bailout. Then came the highly controversial health care package, quickly dubbed Obamacare by its critics. The president’s approval slipped to the upper 40 s during the following years, and his disapproval rating was nearly identical.27

Photo 12.1 A. Mitch McConnell, Jr. (b. 1942), Republican Kentucky senator, majority and minority leader of Senate. Source: United States Senate.

Minority leader Mitch McConnell made it clear in October 2010: “the single most important thing we want to achieve is for President Obama to be a one-term president.” John A. Boehner (Republican—Ohio), soon to be the new speaker of the House, declared of Obama’s agenda: “We’re going to do everything—and I mean everything we can do—to kill it, stop it, slow it down, whatever we can do.”28 There would be no compromise and certainly no agreement with Obama and the Democrats, not an inch. Republicans had high hopes of defeating Obama in 2012, but the president persevered and defeated former Massachusetts governor Mitt Romney. Obama received 6.85 million fewer votes than he gained in 2008; while Romney received 808,000 fewer votes than John McCain did in 2008. After his first two years in office, Obama was not able to achieve substantial changes in public policy. With the House of Representatives majority captured by the Republicans and soon the Senate as well, it became impossible for Obama to exert his will through Congress. Historian Julian E. Zelizer described the opposition to Obama as the “Conservative-Industrial Complex,” entrenched in Congress and among interest groups. “[T]he once optimistic Obama found himself to be a president constantly playing partisan defense, presiding over a nation where his opponents had immense political power regardless of his approval ratings, popularity in the media, or reelection victory.”29 Joseph R. (Joe) Biden, Jr. served as vice president during the eight years of the Obama administration. Biden, long-time senator from Delaware, became a trusted adviser and significant player in the Obama administration, following in the Mondale tradition of being a strong and close confidant to the president.

The Congress At the beginning of the One Hundred Eleventh Congress (2009–2011), Democrats held a commanding lead in the House of Representatives, with a 257–178 edge over Republicans; in

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the Senate, Democrats held the majority, with 55, along with 2 Independents who caucused with them, with 41 Republicans. This gave the Democratic Party one of those rare opportunities: a majority in both chambers and in the White House. But, given the parliamentary rules in the Senate, Democrats did not have 60 votes, the magic number sufficient to overcome any Republican filibuster. But fortunes were dramatically reversed following the November 2010 congressional elections. Republicans won back the House majority (242–193) with a resounding gain of 63 seats, now claiming a 242–193 advantage over Democrats. Republicans surpassed their decisive victory in 1994 (54 new seats) and gained the most seats by one party since 1948, when Democrats gained 75 seats to retake the majority. It was, as Barack Obama conceded, a “shellacking.” Many blamed the unpopular Obamacare; others, the anemic economic recovery. A humbled Obama said, “In the rush of activity, sometimes we lose track of … the ways that we connected with folks that got us here in the first place.”30 For the rest of this era, Republicans remained in control of the House of Representatives. Democrats, however, retained the majority in the Senate, with 51 Democrats (and 2 Independents) and 47 Republicans until the 2014 congressional election, when Republicans regained the majority, 54 to 44 (and 2 Independents). With a bitterly divided government, lawmakers accomplished little. Republicans particularly went after Obama’s judicial nominees, gumming up the nomination process with filibusters. From 2009 through 2013, Obama’s judicial nominees faced eighty-six filibusters, more than all other presidents combined.31 As the parties adopted increasingly polarized positions, moderate views were drowned out, and major issues were at a stalemate.32 Deadlocked by partisan bickering, the polarization in the One Hundred Thirteenth Congress (2013–2015), reached an all-time high. Even the official historical summary provided by Congress itself acknowledged the legislative shortcomings: “Only the traditional flurry of appropriations bills during the lame duck period prevented this Congress from becoming the least productive in history.”33 No matter who was in the majority, Americans were not amused. In October 2011, the public’s opinion of Congress reached an all-time low. Just 9 percent of those surveyed approved of the way Congress was doing its business. President Obama’s own approval rating was mired in the forties.34 The American public was in a severe funk. Yet, incumbents were easily re-elected. Of the 386 incumbents running for re-election in 2014, 373 (or 96.6 percent) were re-elected. No matter how much citizens despise Congress, they like (or at least tolerate) their own member of Congress. Like it or not, the actions (or inactions) reflect the sentiment of the majority back home. Leadership in the Senate Harry Reid (Democrat—Nevada) became majority leader during the One Hundred Tenth Congress (2005–2007) and remained in the post until the beginning of the One Hundred Fourteenth Congress (2015–2017), when Republicans regained control of the Senate. Mitch McConnell was elected minority leader at the same time as Reid was chosen as majority leader, and served in that role until the beginning of the One Hundred Fourteenth Congress. When the Senate flipped, and Republicans became in charge, McConnell became the majority leader during the One Hundred Fourteenth through the One Hundred Sixteenth Congress (2019–2021). Reid then took the role as minority leader, and after he retired, Charles E. Schumer (Democrat—New York) was chosen minority leader at the beginning of the One Hundred Fifteenth Congress (2017–2019).

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The Democratic leadership team included Richard J. (Dick) Durbin of Illinois as second in command; for Republicans, the second in command was first Jon L. Kyl of Arizona (2008–2012), then John Cornyn III (2013–2018). Leadership in the House Nancy Pelosi became the Democratic leader in 2003, and was elected speaker of the House in 2006, staying in that position for two congressional terms. Throughout the same time, the second in command on the Democratic side was Steny H. Hoyer of Maryland. When Pelosi became speaker, Hoyer moved up to the position of majority leader. Republican John Boehner was chosen as the speaker of the House once his party regained control of that chamber in January 2011. But he faced repeated challenges from the right wing within his own party, particularly from the Freedom Caucus.

Photo 12.2 Nancy P. Pelosi (b. 1940), California representative, speaker of the House. Source: US House of Representatives.

One of the biggest challenges came during the partial shutdown of the federal government in October 2013: the far-right conservatives sought to deny funding for Obamacare, and Obama, in turn, refused to sign spending legislation. The shutdown lasted for sixteen days, leaving Congress deeply divided. By 2014, the Republicans had increased their majority, but many Freedom Caucus members were upset and restless. In September 2015, Boehner announced his decision to resign both his leadership post and his seat in the House. He was continually hounded by his own, and most unusually, Senator Ted Cruz (Republican—Texas), elected in 2013, challenged Boehner’s policies, even to the point of inviting rebellious House members to plot a strategy to overturn Boehner’s stratagems. That was such a serious breach of legislative norms: a senator interfering with the activities of the House, especially in his own party. There was definitely bad blood between them: at a Texas fundraiser, Boehner called Cruz a “jackass,” and during the following year at another event, labeled him “Lucifer in the flesh.” Exasperated by the personal and ideological infighting, moderate Republican House member Peter King said, “To me, this is a victory of the crazies.”35 Boehner had talked about retiring the year before. But the defeat of his ally, Eric I. Cantor (Republican—Virginia) in the 2014 primary scotched that plan. Next in line would have been Kevin McCarthy (Republican—California), but internal bickering prevented that from

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happening. Finally, Paul D. Ryan (Republican—Wisconsin), chairman of the powerful House Ways and Means Committee and former vice-presidential candidate, agreed to become speaker. Ryan would accept the job only if the Freedom Caucus would not oppose him; its members agreed, and in October 2015, he assumed this new, challenging role.

The Judiciary Several changes in court personnel came during this era. Chief Justice Roberts, Justices Scalia, Thomas, Ginsburg, and Breyer remained on the bench throughout this period, and the court remained closely divided ideologically. Justice David Souter, who began his service in 1990, retired in 2009. President Barack Obama nominated US Court of Appeals judge Sonia M. Sotomayor to be his replacement. John Paul Stevens, who began his service in 1975, retired the following year, and was replaced by Solicitor General Elena Kagan. Sotomayor graduated from Princeton University and Yale Law School. She was a federal district judge in Manhattan, and for a decade a judge on the US Court of Appeals. She was the first Supreme Court Justice of Hispanic heritage. Elena Kagan was a graduate of Princeton University and Harvard Law School. She had been a law school professor at the University of Chicago and later at Harvard, where she also was the first female dean of the law school. At the time of her appointment to the Supreme Court, she was the youngest justice (forty-nine years old) and the only justice then on the court with no prior judicial experience.

Photo 12.3 Sonia M. Sotomayor (b. 1954). Associate Justice of Supreme Court. Source: Supreme Court of the United States.

With the death of Antonin Scalia, on February 13, 2016, there was suddenly a vacancy on the court. In a highly controversial move, McConnell and Senator Charles E. Grassley (Republican—Iowa), chairman of the Senate Judiciary Committee, determined that no court nominee should be considered during a president’s last year in office. It has been “standard practice,” Grassley wrote, “over the last nearly eighty years that Supreme Court nominees are not nominated and confirmed during a presidential election year.” Given the “huge divide” in the country, and the fact that President Obama, “above all others, has made no bones about his goal to use the courts to circumvent Congress and push through his own agenda, it only makes sense that we defer to the American people” who will elect a new president.36 McConnell echoed Grassley’s statement, declaring that an Obama nominee would not be considered.

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Minority leader Reid cried foul, calling this “unprecedented” and a “shameful abdication” of the Senate’s responsibility.37 Nevertheless, Obama nominated US Court of Appeals judge Merrick B. Garland, but the nomination was ignored by the Senate Republican majority. In speaking to a crowd of supporters in Kentucky, McConnell said “One of my proudest moments was when I looked Barack Obama in the eye and I said, ‘Mr. President, you will not fill the Supreme Court vacancy.’”38

KEY POLICIES ENACTED With a convincing presidential victory and control of both houses of Congress, it was time for Democrats to grab the opportunity for major policy victories. The first years looked promising. Historian Julian E. Zelizer argued that Obama was a skilled policymaker, who had a keen sense of how the institutions of government worked, and that his policy output during 2009 and 2010 “was remarkable.”39 Most important during this time was the financial bailout through the American Recovery Act, national health care through the Affordable Care Act (ACA), and financial and consumer reform under the Dodd-Frank legislation. The policies were bold, controversial, expensive, and highly divisive. But when Republicans regained control of the House of Representatives in 2012, policy stalemate set in, and little was accomplished. Nine days after taking office, President Obama signed the Lily Ledbetter Fair Pay Act (2009) into law. The act amended Title VII of the 1964 Civil Rights Act. Now the 180-day statute of limitations for filing pay discrimination suits would reset with each paycheck affected by the discrimination. Lily Ledbetter, a production supervisor at a Goodyear tire plant in Alabama, had been discriminated against for years, but only near her retirement did she discover this. She filed a sex discrimination suit, but eventually the US Supreme Court decided that her suit could not go forward because Title VII stipulated that it must be filed within 180 days of the first instance of discrimination.40 The Ledbetter Act followed the reasoning of Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg in her dissenting opinion, and restarted the clock every time a discriminatory paycheck was issued. By 2008, some 12,000 military personnel had been discharged for publicly acknowledging their homosexuality. The Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell policy put into operation in 1993 during the Clinton administration was about to be replaced. In December 2010, Congress enacted the Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell Repeal Act, making it possible for gay and bisexual men and women to serve openly in the armed forces. The implementation of this policy was delayed until September 2011, awaiting a congressional review, and the need to train 1.9 million of the 2.2 million service personnel on the new policy.41 Writing in his memoirs, Barack Obama asserted that during his first two years in office, our administration and the Democrat-controlled Congress could rightly claim to have gotten more done, to have delivered more significant legislation that made a real impact of the lives of the American people, than any single session of Congress in the past forty years.42

Addressing the Financial Meltdown The Recovery Act In the waning days of the Bush II administration and the One Hundred Tenth Congress, lawmakers were attempting to craft legislation to bail out the crippled economy. The controversial $700 billion Troubled Asset Relief Program (TARP) called for federal money to be

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released in two chunks, the first was a $350 billion package released by the Bush administration; the second $350 billion to be released by the new president, with the consent of the new Congress. Just weeks after Obama took office in January 2009, the House approved an $819 billion recovery, economic stimulus package, the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act (soon called the Recovery Act). But it was hardly a bipartisan effort: all 177 Republicans (along with 11 Democrats) voted against it. After the House final vote, Eric Cantor of Virginia, the secondranking House Republican, called the Democratic package “a spending bill beyond anyone’s imagination.”43 In the Senate, the vote was 60–38, with just three Republicans voting for the bill. And the price for getting those three votes was to pare down the package from $935 billion to roughly $780 billion.44 It was close: Senator Sherrod C. Brown (Democrat—Ohio) had to fly back from his mother’s funeral on a government plane to assure that the bill would have sixty votes, thus preventing a filibuster attempt. Many Democrats complained that the legislation did too little: that it acceded to Republican demands, but then found few Republicans willing to support the pared down version. (Twelve years later, when the Biden administration’s American Rescue Plan (2021) was being debated, Democrats would not give in to the Republican demands; for Biden and Democratic legislative leaders, it was “go big,” to the tune of $1.98 trillion in the pandemic rescue package.) The White House described three immediate goals for this massive 2009 program: to create new jobs and hold on to existing ones, to spur the economic growth and invest in long-term growth, and to ensure transparency and accountability in government spending.45 What finally emerged was a lengthy (over 400 pages) and complex act with nearly $800 billion in mandatory and discretionary spending, spread over a wide variety of programs. The Recovery Act involved more than 100,000 projects, distributed to 28 federal agencies and 275 programs, while some of the monies would be distributed to state and local governments. Overseeing this massive endeavor was Vice President Biden. The Recovery Act provided funds for state and local governments for Medicaid reimbursements, aid to education, and funds for transportation needs. It also extended unemployment benefits and increased funds under the SNAP program (Supplemental Nutritional Assistance Program, formerly Food Stamps). It provided a wide variety of temporary tax relief for individuals and businesses, and provided funds for long-term construction projects. Former Bush II official John D. Graham argued that the Recovery Act was five landmark pieces of legislation wrapped into one. First, it involved the largest tax cuts since the presidency of Ronald Reagan. Second, it contained the largest investment in infrastructure since the Interstate Highway Act of the 1950s. Third, it was the biggest investment in education since the first federal program launched during the LBJ administration. Fourth, it was the largest research and development (R&D) infusion in forty years. Finally, it was the largest public investment in clean energy ever.46 Journalist Michael Grunwald wrote that the Recovery Act “update[d] the New Deal for a new era.”47 In his memoirs, Obama stated that “any one of these items, if passed as a stand-alone bill, would qualify as a major achievement for a presidential administration. Taken together, they might represent the successful work of an entire first term.”48 During January 2009, some 839,000 jobs vanished, and the unemployment rate stood at 7.8 percent; by the end of 2009, another 4.1 million jobs would be lost, and the unemployment rate would hit 10 percent.49 The Obama administration estimated that 3.5 million jobs would be saved through this act, but certainly recovery would take time. The Congressional Budget

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Office (CBO) calculated that at its peak in the third quarter of 2010, the Recovery Act funds increased employment anywhere from 700,000 to 3.6 million persons.50 The CBO also estimated that about 95 percent of the Recovery Act’s budgetary impact had been achieved by the end of 2014.51 One of the most important features was the requirement of transparency in the transfer of federal funds to states and other levels of government. The Recovery Act could have been seriously undermined if there were fraud and misuse in the billions of federal dollars now funneled to the states. States and local governments receiving stimulus funds were required to fill out reports containing ninety-nine fields of information, providing detailed data on how the money would be spent. A transparency portal was established, Recovery.gov, and a Recovery Operations Center was created to prevent fraudulent use of stimulus money. An audit found that just 0.2 percent of Recovery Act dollars had been improperly spent. The Recovery Act stimulus, in the estimation of Governing magazine, “has done more to promote transparency at almost all levels of government than any piece of legislation in recent memory” and has provided lessons and examples for states to implement their own transparency protocols.52 Significance of this Policy The recovery package was essential in bringing economic order out of chaos, but it also had lasting political repercussions. Big banks were bailed out and not held responsible for their reckless actions. Most galling was the news that American International Group (AIG), rescued with $170 billion in taxpayer bailout money, was going to reward its top executives with $165 million in bonuses. The Obama administration and members of Congress were outraged, but the bonuses had been contractually promised, and a deal was a deal. The reaction from newspaper editorials, Obama later reflected, was “scathing,” and the pent-up anger of voters reached an “uncontrolled boil.”53 This only added fuel to the fire among Tea Party activists on the right and the Occupy Wall Street movement on the left. Automobile Industry Rescue Another immediate problem for the Obama administration was the imminent collapse of the US automobile industry. One of the iconic symbols of American success and industrial leadership was the automobile, the Ford Model T, the sturdy Chevrolets and Plymouths, the hot rods, the muscle cars, and the pinnacle of success, the elegant and luxurious Cadillac. But in late 2008, the Big Three automakers—General Motors, Ford, and Chrysler—were in deep trouble: too many unsold cars, too few customers, too little cash reserve, and crippling employee pension obligations. Car manufacturing, sales, financing, and repair services were central to the American economy. Altogether, the auto industry (including foreign brands) accounted for 3.6 percent (about $500 billion) of America’s GDP, with 800,000 persons employed in the industry, along with 1.8 million employed in auto dealerships and repair services. The multiplier effect on jobs potentially impacted by auto bailout amounted to 7.25 million workers. During its last weeks of office, the Bush administration gave the US automakers $17.4 billion from TARP funds, but more would have to be done to save the industry. The Obama administration used additional TARP funds to assist General Motors ($49.5 billion) and Chrysler ($12.5 billion); Ford decided not to request a TARP bailout but did ask Congress for a $9 billion line of credit. In many circles, the bailout was enormously unpopular: once the details became evident, auto dealers and their employees discovered deep cutbacks in jobs, and many conservatives were upset that the federal government was interfering with the free

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market. Mitt Romney, Michigan native and son of the one-time president of American Motors, penned an op-ed in the New York Times, warning that “If General Motors, Ford and Chrysler get the bailout that their chief executives ask for yesterday [November 18, 2008], you can kiss the American automotive industry goodbye.” The headline for the op-ed, though not written by Romney, was even more provocative: “Let Detroit Go Bankrupt.”54 Ohio, a battleground state in presidential elections, heavily dependent on the automobile industry, remembered Romney’s sentiments and went for Obama in 2012. Significance of this Policy All three auto manufacturers restructured their health care and pension obligations, closed factories, and in the case of GM, stopped making the Hummer, Pontiac, Saturn, and Saab. In doing so, they dramatically lowered their break-even point, requiring sales of 10 million automobiles rather than 14 million before the bailout. The automakers bounced back, adding 640,000 jobs and record auto sales—18 million vehicles in 2015—and by 2015, GM and Chrysler had repaid the federally backed loans.55

Universal Health Care For decades, universal health care had been a policy goal of progressives. But each time it was introduced in Congress, it was squelched. In 1948, one of the most aggressive grassroots lobbying efforts led by the American Medical Association blocked Truman’s national health insurance plan. Federal health care was blocked during the 1950s, and using the only avenue available, progressives were able to graft Medicare and Medicaid onto the existing Social Security Act during the 1960s. Further attempts were defeated in the 1970s. During the early years of the Clinton presidency, national health care was the centerpiece policy effort; it too died on the vine. The Clinton health care policy was developed in secret, without broad congressional support, and without support from the health care industry. And it was presented to Congress as a take it or leave it proposition; and it fell on its face. As the Obama administration took over, the president’s team tried a different approach from the failed Clinton strategy: major players in the health care field were consulted, and eventually brought on board. The White House presented lawmakers with a broad outline of its policy goals, rather than a fixed and final product. The American Medical Association, a fierce opponent of national health care in 1948 and 1965, didn’t get all it wanted, but in the end supported the national health care proposal. So, too, did the American Hospital Association. Big Pharma got concessions from the White House, then agreed to the final package; so, too, did the Health Insurance Association of America. But the US Chamber of Commerce and the National Federation of Independent Business, and many individual companies flatly opposed the Obama policies of national health care.56 The policy questions were enormous and wide-ranging: should every American be covered? Should all employers be required to offer health insurance? Should there be a public option, an expansion of Medicare and Medicaid? What would be the savings? How much would this cost and how would it be paid for?57 The issue of a public option, in particular, was going to be a major point of contention. In 2007, filmmaker and activist Michael Moore released his latest documentary, Sicko, which contrasted the deeply flawed American health system with those of other industrial countries. Would Congress be tempted to copy the Canadian-style health care system, or some other model? Public option could mean a crippling blow to the American health insurance business, providing a cheaper form of insurance and protection than the private sector could muster.

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Wendell Potter, a corporate spokesman for the insurance company Cigna, later turned whistleblower, wrote that he and his counterparts at other big insurance companies met in secret, plotting to denigrate the health care systems in Canada, France, Britain, and even Cuba. Further, the American’s Health Insurance Plans, the industry trade association, spread disinformation about the Canadian system.58 If at all possible, Obama wanted to have bipartisan support; it became a frustrating and impossible task to accomplish. Charles E. Grassley of Iowa, the lead Republican on the Senate Finance Committee, appeared ready to cooperate, but balked at the proposal of a public option, and eventually, as Republican opposition stiffened, he was determined to vote against the health care package. So, too, did Olympia J. Snowe of Maine seem receptive to healthcare reform, but buckled under pressure from Republican leadership. Obama reached out many times, both publicly and privately, to Republican lawmakers, but ultimately, to no avail. Ironically, the health care proposals contained several ideas that originally came from Republican policymakers, especially the individual mandate and health insurance exchanges. It also adopted ideas from then-governor Mitt Romney’s health care plan for Massachusetts. National health care should have had an easier time in the House, but many conservative Democrats balked. The health care proposal was crafted by the Energy and Commerce Committee, under chairman Henry Waxman. It was a wide-ranging, expensive bill that pleased progressives, but caused heartburn among moderate Democrats and the very few Republicans who would even consider it. In July 2009, Speaker Nancy Pelosi introduced the 1,000-page, comprehensive (and complicated) health care proposal. Critics quickly dubbed it “Obamacare.” After much arm-twisting by Pelosi and the president, the measure passed with 219 Democrats and 1 Republican voting for it, with 176 Republicans and 39 Democrats voting against it. Many of the “Blue Dog” Democrats, conservatives mostly from the South, voted against the legislation, put off by the fear of “socialized medicine,” and “big government takeover” and the ultimate price tag of over a trillion dollars to implement the program. Two Senate bills were introduced, one by Max Baucus (Democrat—Montana), the longtime, moderate chairman of the Senate Finance Committee, and the other by Chris Dodd (Democrat—Connecticut) and Ted Kennedy. Majority leader Reid labored to combine the two bills and cobble together a compromise that would not offend strong public option advocates like Bernie Sanders, or moderates like Evan Bayh (Democrat—Indiana) or Joseph Lieberman, and satisfy all sixty Democrats. It was a daunting task, indeed. It was becoming evident that no Republicans would come on board. There simply was no margin in the Senate: to avoid a Republican-led filibuster, all fifty-eight Democrats and their two Independent allies (Sanders and Lieberman) would have to band together; the loss of one Democrat would doom the legislation. When health care champion Edward Kennedy died in August 2009, Senate Democrats sensed the legislation was a risk. When Congress broke for its summer recess in 2009, lawmakers were confronted with angry citizens at town hall meetings demanding that they vote against Obamacare. Their anger was stoked in part by former vice presidential candidate Sarah H. Palin’s posting on her Facebook account that, under the Democrats’ plan, the government would determine if the elderly and disabled were worthy of care. The charge of “death panels” soon spread through social media, conservative news media, and talk shows. (Politifact.com, the fact-checking website of the St. Petersburg Times selected Palin’s “death panels” as the “Lie of the Year.”59) Early polls taken showed that the majority of the public was against the legislation, with conservatives and Republicans strongly opposed. Obama gave a number of speeches and town hall events to try to counter the barrage of criticism, but with little effect.60 Then, in early November, Republican members of Congress, led by arch-conservative lawmaker Michelle M. Bachman of Minnesota and 10,000 Tea Party activists, rallied against the health care proposal,

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storming the US Capitol. As they marched up to the speaker’s suite, disgusted conservative activists shouted “Nan-cy, Nan-cy!!,” leaving hundreds of pages from the printed health care text scattered in front of Speaker Pelosi’s office. Death threats against Pelosi and other lawmakers increased dramatically.61 In the Senate, veteran Democrat Paul G. Kirk Jr. was chosen to fill Kennedy’s seat on an interim basis, enabling Democrats to hold onto their sixty-vote, filibuster-proof majority. Crafting the legislation in the Senate was an ugly, complicated process, with hundreds of amendments, back room deals, parliamentary tricks, and brute legislative force engineered by Majority Leader Reid. Finally, the Senate version came to a vote. In late December, Washington, DC was in the midst of a snow and ice storm, but the final vote was forced through, in an all-night session, ending at 7:00 a.m. on Christmas Eve. Wheelchair-bound Robert Byrd, ninety-two-years old, who had missed some 40 percent of all votes that year, braved the ice and snow to assure the sixtieth vote, and Democrats fought off Republican delaying tactics and last-minute amendments. The final vote, unsurprisingly, was 60 Democrats in favor, 39 Republicans against.62 However, the legislative business was not over, because the House and Senate versions, with considerable differences between them, had to be ironed out. But then the Democrats were handed a crippling blow. The special election to replace Kennedy took place in early 2010 and in a major upset, it was won by Republican Scott P. Brown, who made opposition to national health care his campaign centerpiece. “One thing is clear,” a beaming Scott Brown proclaimed on election night, Massachusetts “voters do not want the trillion-dollar health care bill that is being forced on the American people.”63 The slim Democratic filibuster-proof margin in the Senate had now been lost. It was becoming evident that neither the Democratic leadership nor Obama was going to persuade any Republicans to join them. The only thing left was to use some parliamentary legerdemain: despite the differences in the Senate and House versions, the House would accept the Senate version as written. Later, under the process of budget reconciliation, the two chambers could work out differences. The key here was that budget reconciliation required just a majority of votes, meaning the Senate could pass the reconciliation with only fifty-one votes rather than sixty. It was a tricky, controversial, and risky move; but it was the only option left to the Democratic leadership. Pelosi, Obama, and a raft of health care stakeholders lobbied wavering House Democrats. Pelosi took on the task herself, calling on sixty-eight lawmakers; Obama met with sixty-four. In his memoirs, Obama called Pelosi the “toughest, most skilled legislative strategist I’ve met.”64 The president also went public, through a series of speeches and campaign-style visits, exhorting the benefits of the health care proposal. His case was bolstered with the news that Anthem Blue Cross, a major health insurance company in California, had planned to raise its premiums by nearly 40 percent on March 1. This was an unexpected public relations gift. Look at the whopping increase in premiums, Obama’s supporters cried out. This was proof positive that a national health care plan was critically needed.65 Furthermore, about fifty groups, from the AARP to labor unions, coordinated their lobbying efforts, calling doctors, insurance agents, and business owners to urge three dozen lawmakers to vote for the Democrats’ plan. A group of pro-life Democrats, led by Bart T. Stupak (Democrat—Michigan) were finally persuaded to vote for the ACA when they were assured that Obama would issue an executive order affirming that the pro-life Hyde amendment would still be the law of the land. But the final vote in the House would be razor-thin, 219–212, with all Republicans and 34 Democrats voting against it. Republicans derided “Nancy Pelosi’s one-party rule” and John Boehner, House minority leader, said on the floor of the House, “Shame on you. Shame.” Pelosi retorted: “Well, you know, some people will do anything for the insurance companies.”66

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The reconciliation legislation was also enacted, again with a number of House Democrats and three Senate Democrats defecting. While politically bruised and battled, national health care now became a reality. President Obama signed the Affordable Care Act into law on March 23, 2010. At a festive, raucous ceremony, which included 300 persons, including over 200 Democratic lawmakers, Obama used twenty-two ceremonial pens, declaring that ACA enshrines “the core principle that everybody should have some basic security when it comes to their health care.” He was repeatedly interrupted by shouts of joy and standing ovations. Not everyone was exultant over ACA’s passage. “This is a somber day for the American people,” said Boehner. “By signing this bill, President Obama is abandoning our founding principle that government governs best when it governs closest to the people.”67 McConnell called it the “single worst piece of legislation that has been passed in modern times in this country.”68 The Content of the Affordable Care Act A central feature of the ACA is the Health Insurance Marketplace (the “Exchange”), an online, one-stop site where individuals and families can compare and purchase health insurance. Thirteen states have their own marketplaces, the remaining states partner with or are run by the federal HealthCare.gov exchange. The Exchange offered information on federal subsidies, tax credits, cost-sharing, and the variety of available plans. But the online shopping hit a snag right at the very beginning on October 1, 2013, as the website crashed, millions of individuals could not log on, or were frustrated with components that simply weren’t working. Twenty million persons visited the website in the first three weeks, but only 500,000 were able to complete insurance applications.69 One of the provisions that drew consistently heavy disapproval was the individual mandate, which required most Americans to buy health insurance or pay a penalty. The goal was to encourage younger and healthier persons to get insured, thus spreading out the cost associated with older and sicker persons who would enroll and use more of the ACA services. As seen below, the individual mandate was challenged, but upheld by the Supreme Court. But in 2017, as part of a tax overhaul bill, the penalty for failing to purchase health insurance was reduced to zero. The question before federal courts was then whether or not the individual mandate became unconstitutional after the penalty reduction; more on this in Chapter 13. The ACA expanded Medicaid coverage for most low-income adults to 138 percent of the federal poverty level. The Supreme Court ruled in 2012 that the federal government could not threaten the states with a complete cut-off of Medicaid funding if they did not participate in the expanded coverage found in ACA. By February 2020, thirty-nine states had adopted the Medicaid expansion; twelve states, mostly in the South (where significant numbers of poor people live) opted out of the Medicaid expansion, while three additional states joined the expansion, but had not implemented it.70 The ACA also prohibited insurance providers from denying coverage, setting lifetime limits on benefits, or charging higher premiums for persons with pre-existing conditions. This was a highly popular measure in ACA and affected a large percentage of the population. The Department of Health and Human Services estimated that between 50 and 129 million (19 to 50 percent) of non-elderly Americans had some kind of pre-existing condition.71 Another popular protection allowed young adults, up to age twenty-six, to remain as dependents on their parents’ coverage if the young persons were not covered by job-based insurance of their own. Further, health insurers could not deny these young adults because of pre-existing conditions. The ACA went into effect on January 1, 2014. When all the dust settled, who would benefit from the Affordable Care Act? Political scientists Lawrence R. Jacobs and Theda Skocpol

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summed up ACA in 2015: “The winners of health reform are the vast majority of Americans.” They go on: “senior citizens, the sick, and average Americans—including many families in the upper middle class—are now receiving wider and easier access to health insurance benefits protected from trickery by the insurance industry.”72 Before the 2009 health care battle began, there were nearly 44 million individuals without health care; by 2019, thanks to the ACA, that number had dropped by 20 million.73 Democrats paid a heavy price for supporting the relatively unpopular ACA. In the November 2010 elections, Democrats lost sixty-eight seats, and lost control of the House of Representatives. Shortly after Congress passed ACA, the National Federation of Independent Business, twenty-five state attorneys general, and others challenged the law, charging that it exceeded the powers of Congress under the commerce clause, that Medicaid expansions were unconstitutionally coercive, and that the individual mandate interfered with state sovereignty. Many conservative activists had anticipated that the Supreme Court would rule the controversial law unconstitutional. They were partially vindicated, but also deeply disappointed. Chief Justice Roberts proved to be the pivotal voice. In National Federation of Independent Business v. Sebelius,74 Roberts, along with four conservative justices, ruled that the individual mandate was not a valid exercise of congressional power under the commerce clause. But surprising many, Roberts, joined by the four liberal justices, wrote that the individual mandate was a form of taxation, and as such was within the constitutional powers of Congress to impose. Then Roberts, along with four conservative and two liberal justices, concluded that the Medicaid expansion was unconstitutionally coercive, writing that Congress did not have the power to threaten states with complete loss of federal Medicaid funds if the states refused to expand their Medicaid programs.75 Roberts, together with four liberal justices, then ruled that the rest of the Medicaid expansion, minus the threat of withdrawal of funds, was a valid exercise of congressional power under the spending clause of Article I.76 Lawsuits against the Affordable Care Act kept coming. In 2015, the Court ruled in King v. Burwell that insurance subsidies could be provided even in states relying of the federal Healthcare.gov website, instead of running their own marketplaces.77 The ink had not dried on the ACA when Republicans in Congress advanced plans to kill it. There were over sixty legislative attempts—all unsuccessful—to overturn the ACA. One Republican-led piece of legislation attempting to repeal several ACA provisions did reach the president’s desk in 2016, but it was vetoed, and Congress failed to override Obama’s action.78 The efforts to overturn or at least weaken ACA would intensify during the Trump administration and the One Hundred Fifteenth Congress (2017–2019). With Donald Trump as president and a Republican-dominated House and Senate, there would be another golden opportunity for the Republicans to scrap national health care, or as Republican lawmakers were keen to express but never put into action, to replace it with something better. Significance of this Policy The ACA has weathered many political and legal battles, has been pared down by the courts, and continues to be a target of conservative forces. Yet, it survives; by June 2021, a record 31 million individuals had enrolled in its programs.79 Although truncated and incomplete, the United States has now joined the rest of the industrialized world in providing national health care.

Reforming Wall Street Practices In reaction to the Wall Street financial crisis of 2008, Congress enacted the Dodd-Frank Wall Street Reform and Consumer Protection Act (2010), targeting banks, mortgage lender, and

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credit rating agencies. The legislation was sponsored by Senator Christopher J. Dodd (Democrat—Connecticut) and Representative Barney Frank (Democrat—Massachusetts). In the end, the act contained 845 pages, with 16 titles, covering 225 new financial rules that affected eleven federal agencies.80 The Obama White House called Dodd-Frank “the most far-reaching Wall Street reform in history,” which would prevent excessive risk-taking by banks, mortgage companies, and payday lenders. “These new rules will build a safer, more stable financial system—one that provides a robust foundation for lasting economic growth and job creation.”81 Economist Barry J. Eichengreen, however, took a more circumspect view of Dodd-Frank, writing that it contained “some modestly useful measures,” but the big banks were not broken up, and “little was done about the problem of too-big-to-fail.”82 A Consumer Financial Protection Bureau was created through Dodd-Frank to prevent predatory mortgage lending and help consumers better understand the terms of their mortgages. Another key component was the Volcker Rule (named after former Fed chairman Paul A. Volcker, Jr.), which restricts the way that banks can invest. Banks were barred from being involved in hedge funds or private equity firms. It also strengthened the Sarbanes-Oxley Act, giving stronger protections to the financial whistleblower program. Further, credit rating agencies had been accused of contributing to the financial crisis because they gave out misleading information about investment ratings, often becoming cheerleaders, and failing to warn potential investors of troubles. Dodd-Frank established an Office of Credit Ratings at the Securities and Exchange Commission to make sure that credit agencies gave out reliable information on businesses, municipalities, and other organizations that they evaluated. Significance of this Policy Criticism of Dodd-Frank was soon to come. The law put forth enhanced whistleblower provisions, giving bounties to whistleblowers, and had “created a monster,” when applied to the Foreign Corrupt Practices Act; it raised concerns about the viability of the Financial Stability Oversight Council; and others argued that the fundamental narrative about financial reform was wrong.83 In May 2018, major portions of the Dodd-Frank Act were rolled back. The Republicancontrolled Congress passed the Economic Growth, Regulatory Relief, and Consumer Protect Act. The new law eased restrictions on smaller banks, relaxed large bank capital requirements and mortgage requirements, and other measures.84

Protecting the Environment and Conservation It was not through one landmark piece of legislation, but through a series of Obama-generated rulemaking that a legacy of strong environmental and conservation policy was created. The environmental record here is the most comprehensive since the 1970s when a record number of environmental and conservation laws were passed. Deepwater Horizon Oil Spill One of the largest environmental disasters in American history began on April 21, 2010, when oil gushed from a broken well miles below the Gulf of Mexico. The oil rig, Deepwater Horizon, leased by the oil giant BP, exploded and sank, and for months oil spewed out of the ocean depths at unprecedented rates. Not until September 19, eighty-seven days later, were the wells sealed off. There was a massive clean-up of beaches, estuaries, and wetlands, involving federal, state, and

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local government resources. The Obama administration jumped quickly to assist state and local governments, not wanting Deepwater to become known as Obama’s Katrina. The administration had some egg on its face with the untimely announcement, just weeks before the explosion, of Obama’s decision to open up further offshore oil drilling and the revelations that the regulatory agency in charge of monitoring offshore oil drilling, the Minerals Management Service, the underfunded and understaffed subagency of the Department of the Interior, had a more than cozy relationship with oil companies. The disaster did not become greater than it was, particularly owing to the expertise and work of Energy secretary Steven Chu, who came up with a device to successfully cap the underground wells and the agreement that BP would be liable for the costs of clean up and the economic consequences of the oil spill. Still, some four million barrels of oil poured into the open waters of the Gulf of Mexico. BP was fined $4.525 billion by the US Justice Department, and later agreed to pay $18.7 billion in fines for its gross negligence and reckless conduct.85 Automobile Fuel Economy Probably the most consequential environmental action was the agreement in July 2011 with thirteen major automakers to increase Corporate Average Fuel Economy (CAFE) from 29.7 miles per gallon to 54.5 miles per gallon for cars and light trucks by 2025. It was praised by environmentalists. Bill Becker of the National Association of Clean Air Agencies stated that “There is not another air-pollution-control strategy that we know of that will produce as substantial, cost-effective, and expeditious emissions reductions.”86 Later, the Trump administration cut the CAFE requirements to 40 miles per gallon, but then the Biden administration reinstated the tougher Obama rules. “War on Coal” Obama stated that his energy policy was “all of the above,” meaning promotion of traditional fossil fuels (coal, natural gas, and oil), hydroelectric, nuclear, plus the renewables of wind and solar. But his policies did not sit well with the coal industry, which had been on the defensive for years. At one time, coal was reliably the cheapest form of fuel for the generation of electricity. But that is no longer the case. Fracking (hydraulic fracturing) technology has transformed the natural gas world, opening up gas veins that were once thought to be uneconomical, and driving down the cost of natural gas. Coal is also nasty stuff: the emissions are the leading cause of America’s global warming, and, in addition, they are the dominant source of dangerous mercury and other pollutants.87 The Clean Air Act of 1970, passed with widespread bipartisan approval, stated that all emissions that threatened public health and welfare should be eliminated. But the law also grandfathered in coal plants that were built before the act. This meant that any new coal plant would have to install expensive scrubbers and devices to capture the offending pollutants. But older plants could keep spewing out noxious effluents. Those plants, some dating back to the 1950s, became less efficient and, by the 2010s, less able to compete with natural gas. On top of this, in 2006 the Supreme Court ruled that carbon dioxide, the principal villain in global warming, indeed was included in the “all” emissions under the Clean Air Act and could now be monitored by the Environmental Protection Agency. In 2009, the EPA determined that greenhouse gas pollution had threatened Americans’ health and welfare and focused on carbon dioxide as the most prevalent cause. Then, in August 2015, President Obama and the EPA announced the Clean Power Plan “a historic and important step in reducing carbon pollution from power plants that takes real action on climate

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change.” The plan would call for significant reductions: carbon pollution would be 32 percent lower in 2030 when compared with 2005; sulfur dioxide from power plants would be reduced by 90 percent during that same period. The EPA boasted of the public health benefits—avoiding each year: 3,600 premature deaths; 1,700 heart attacks; 90,000 asthma attacks; and 300,000 missed work and school days.88 But the coal industry and its allies in the Republican Party accused the Obama administration of waging a “war on coal.” On top of previous rules limiting mercury, smog, and coal ash, came this plan to drastically cut carbon emissions. The Trump White House was intent on reversing as much of these executive actions as it could, with 100 Obama-era environmental rules being replaced or completely eliminated. In June 2019, the EPA issued the Affordable Clean Energy (ACE) rule, which replaced the “prior administration’s overreaching Clean Power Plan.”

The Court Weighs In Some of the most provocative policy decisions were made not by the president or Congress, but by the Supreme Court. Dismantling Campaign Finance Reform In 2008, a conservative advocacy group called Citizens United produced a documentary called Hillary: The Movie, a 90-minute film highly critical of Hillary Clinton, then the front-runner for the Democratic presidential nomination.89 The organization wanted to have this documentary available on cable television via video-on-demand during the last thirty days of the 2008 presidential primaries. Further, Citizens United wanted to run 10- and 30-second advertisements for the video on broadcast and cable TV during that time. The Federal Election Commission (FEC) refused to let Citizens United make the documentary available during this timeframe, citing the restrictions on advertising found in the McCain-Feingold Act. A federal district court agreed with the FEC, saying that the documentary or “movie” was in fact a campaign ad, and thus could be barred during this time. The issue wound up in the Supreme Court, and the justices were faced with this question: was it a violation of free speech for the McCain-Feingold law to prohibit Citizens United from advertising or showing Hillary: The Movie during the sixty days before a general election or thirty days before a primary election? By the time the case made it to the Supreme Court, the 2008 primaries were well over. It was not until January 2010 that the Court issued its decision, in Citizens United v. Federal Election Commission.90 The Court, in a 5–4 decision through Justice Kennedy, ruled that the federal government could not ban political spending by corporations (such as Citizens United) during elections. Such bans, wrote Kennedy, were “classic examples of censorship.” Wouldn’t big money lead to the corruption of elections? Kennedy didn’t see corruption as a problem: “Independent expenditures, including those made by corporations, do not give rise to corruption or the appearance of corruption.” But the dissenting justices had a much different take. Justice Stevens argued that the Court’s ruling “threatens to undermine the integrity of elected institutions across the Nation. The path it has taken to reach its outcome will, I fear, do damage to this institution.”91 Later, in his memoirs, Justice Stevens wrote that “[Kennedy’s] opinion was a disaster for our election law.”92 Senator John McCain, who had devoted so much of his energies to campaign finance reform, said, “What the Supreme Court did was a combination of arrogance, naiveté, and stupidity, the likes of which I’ve never seen.”93

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The decision came just days before Barack Obama delivered his 2010 State of the Union address. Seldom do presidents comment on court decisions, especially during State of the Union addresses, but Obama did so. Citizens United, the president declared, “reversed a century of law that I believe will open the floodgates for special interests—including foreign corporations—to spend without limit in our elections.” When Obama made those remarks, Justice Alito, sitting in the front row with his Supreme Court colleagues, in a break with decorum, mouthed the words, “Not true.” Perhaps he was talking about Obama’s whole statement or the comment about foreign interference. Nonetheless, the cameras caught Alito’s displeasure for all to see. Just two months later, a US Court of Appeals ruled in SpeechNow.org v. Federal Election Commission that the $5,000 contribution limit imposed on individuals who wanted to give to third party groups was unconstitutional. The Supreme Court decided to let this decision stand.94 Thus, in the span of two months, the judiciary fundamentally changed the federal election laws. Now corporations, unions, and others could spend as much money as they wished as independent spending, and independent expenditure organizations could raise as much money as they could. Soon, hundreds of new organizations were created, called “super PACs.” Then four years later, in 2014, the court added another twist. Shaun McCutcheon, a wealthy conservative businessman in Alabama, was frustrated that he couldn’t spend more money to help candidates in federal elections. The Republican National Committee agreed with McCutcheon that he should be able to spend as much as he wanted. In McCutcheon v. FEC, 95 the Court ruled that the ceilings imposed on individual giving (for example, a maximum of $123,200 during the 2013–2014 election cycle) were unconstitutional. In a blistering dissent, Justice Breyer wrote: “Taken together with Citizens United v. Federal Election Commission, today’s decision eviscerates our Nation’s campaign-finance laws, leaving a remnant incapable of dealing with the grave problems of democratic legitimacy that those laws were intended to resolve.” After McCutcheon, the sky was the limit, and individuals could spend as much as they wanted. The McCain-Feingold law was in tatters, and wealthy individuals, corporations, labor unions, and super PACs of all sorts, were able to flex their financial muscles.96 Removing Voting Rights Protections The Voting Rights Act of 1965, one of the most important pieces of legislation passed during the twentieth century, was key to assuring African Americans (and later Hispanics) the fundamental democratic right to vote. The Voting Rights Act had suspended for five years the voting registration requirements found in six southern states—Alabama, Georgia, Louisiana, Mississippi, South Carolina, and Virginia—along with several counties in North Carolina, Arizona, and Hawaii. Any new voting provisions had to be pre-cleared by the Justice Department. During the first four years, the number of African American voters in the South increased by a million, and the number of black elected officials doubled. From 1982 to 2006, some 700 voting changes were blocked by the Justice Department because they were deemed discriminatory.97 The Voting Rights Act was renewed several times. Recall the statement of Ronald Reagan as he signed its extension in 1981: “For this Nation to remain true to its principles, we cannot allow any American’s vote to be denied, diluted, or defiled. The right to vote is the crown jewel of American liberties, and we will not see its luster diminished.”98 Most recently, the Voting Rights Act was extended in 2006, and renamed in honor of three heroines of the civil rights movement, Fannie Lou Hamer, Rosa Parks, and Coretta Scott King. The extension kept the voting rights provisions in place until 2033. The pre-clearance requirement applied to nine states, most in the South, and for jurisdictions in seven other states, including Manhattan, Brooklyn, and the Bronx in New York.99 On signing the extension,

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which was passed unanimously in the Senate and overwhelmingly in the House, President Bush stated that he would commit his administration to “vigorously enforce the provisions of this law” and “defend it in court.”100 But in June 2013, the Supreme Court ruled that Congress had exceeded its authority when it reauthorized the pre-clearance section, Section 5. In Shelby County v. Holder,101 Chief Justice Roberts wrote that, while the stringent requirements had been the right thing to do back in 1965, “things have changed dramatically” since then. Congress had not made any updates to changing times, and thus the pre-clearance provisions—the heart of the Voting Rights Act enforcement—were ruled unconstitutional. Roberts concluded that the “current burdens” must be justified by “current needs.” Preclearance was fine for 1965, but not for 2013. “Coverage today is based on decades-old data and eradicated practices. … Racial disparity in those numbers was compelling evidence justifying the preclearance remedy and the coverage formula. There is no longer such a disparity.”102 Roberts was joined by the four conservative members of the Court, Justices Scalia, Kennedy, Thomas, and Alito. Clarence Thomas, the sole African American justice, concurred, and went further by arguing that Section 5 should be ruled unconstitutional. Justice Ginsburg, joined by Justices Breyer, Sotomayor, and Kagan argued that Congress should be the body to determine whether Section 5 remains justifiable. Congress was charged with the obligation to enforce post-Civil War Amendments “by appropriate legislation,” and “with overwhelming support in both Houses, Congress concluded that. … Section 5 should continue in force, unabated.” Attorney General Eric H. Holder, Jr. released a statement the day Shelby was announced stating that it “represents a serious setback for voting rights—and has the potential to negatively affect millions of Americans across the country.”103 Within two hours of the Shelby County decision, the backsliding began. Texas attorney general Greg W. Abbott announced that new state voter-identification restrictions would be immediately implemented. Before Shelby County, those restrictions had been blocked by federal court. Soon, states that had once been under pre-clearance restrictions—Alabama, North Carolina, and Virginia—took similar action.104 The Brennan Center for Justice at the New York University School of Law reported that in 2010, “state lawmakers nationwide started introducing hundreds of harsh measures making it harder to vote.” Altogether, twenty-three states have tightened up on voting; most of those restrictions, like voter-identification requirements and cutbacks on early voting, have been created by Republican-controlled legislatures.105 The public explanation for many of these laws was to take the federal burden away from local government and to combat voter fraud. However, the evidence for “massive voter fraud” was non-existent; the “burden” that state and local governments had to endure was to follow the law and not discriminate. The question has to be asked: if African Americans (and other minorities) did not overwhelmingly vote Democratic, but favored Republican candidates and policies, would there be such restrictive voting access laws? Defense of Marriage Act and Same-sex Marriage In 2013, the Court ruled unconstitutional a portion of the Defense of Marriage Act (DOMA). Edith (Edie) Windsor was the sole executor of her late spouse Thea Clara Spyer, who had died in 2009. After a long, committed relationship as domestic partners in New York, they married in Toronto, Canada, in 2007, then moved back to New York, where their marriage was recognized as valid. Spyer left her estate to Windsor, but because her marriage was not recognized under federal law, the government imposed $363,000 in taxes. Windsor paid the taxes, but when she sought a refund from the IRS was told that under DOMA, she was not considered a “surviving

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spouse.” If the marriage had been recognized by federal law, the estate would have qualified for a marital exemption, and Windsor would not have had to pay federal taxes on it. Until this time, the federal government’s response to DOMA was that it should be defended. But in 2011, President Obama and Attorney General Holder announced that they would not defend DOMA. Windsor, a prominent LGBTQ activist, sued asserting that DOMA was unconstitutional. When the case eventually reached the Supreme Court, in United States v. Windsor,106 Justice Kennedy, along Justices Ginsburg, Breyer, Kagan, and Sotomayor, declared unconstitutional Section 3 of DOMA, which defined “marriage” as a “legal union between one man and one woman as husband and wife” and the word “spouse” was defined as a “person of the opposite sex who is a husband or a wife.” DOMA, by denying same-sex couples the rights that come from federal recognition of marriage, imposed a “disadvantage, a separate status, and so a stigma” on same-sex couples. That was a violation of the Fifth Amendment’s guarantee of equal protection. Section 3 of DOMA (definition of “marriage” and “spouse”) was thus struck down, but Section 2 (states recognizing same-sex marriages from other states) was still the law. It was soon challenged. Jim Obergefell and John Arthur lived in a committed relationship for over twenty years, but in the last few months of John’s life, they decided to secure a legal marriage. Arthur was suffering from ALS, a debilitating neurological disorder. After the Windsor decision, they decided to marry. Obergefell and Arthur lived in Ohio, a state that did not permit same-sex marriages, so they flew to Maryland where such were marriages legal. Because of Arthur’s precarious health, they had to use a medical jet, with a nurse on board, and Arthur’s aunt, who went online to become an ordained clergy for a day, performed the wedding. Friends and family chipped in for the expense of the medical jet. The wedding was performed on the tarmac of the Baltimore-Washington International Marshall Airport.107 They returned to Ohio; John Arthur succumbed to ALS three months and eleven days after they were married. On Arthur’s death certificate, Obergefell wanted to be listed as the surviving spouse. Ohio refused, setting up the legal battle that ultimately ended in a landmark Supreme Court decision. In Obergefell v. Hodges, the court, through Justice Kennedy, made two decisions: first, that the Fourteenth Amendment required states to license marriage between persons of the same sex, and second, that the Fourteenth Amendment required states to recognize a same-sex marriage lawfully performed in another state. The court was deeply divided, with four liberal justices siding with Kennedy and four conservatives sharply dissenting. Chief Justice Roberts pointedly read his dissenting statement before the Court: From the dawn of human history until a few years ago for every people known to have populated this planet, marriage was defined as the union of a man and a woman. … But today five lawyers have ordered every state to change its definition of marriage to one that matches a new one that they favor, because those lawyers have in their words new insight and a better informed understanding of liberty, just who do we think we are. I have no choice but to dissent.108

POLICIES DELAYED OR DENIED

Immigration Reform In 2008, Barack Obama, campaigning for president, promised comprehensive immigration reform. Hispanic voters responded favorably, giving him a 67–31 percent edge over the Republican

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candidate, John McCain. The Hispanic vote helped Obama win Florida, Indiana, Nevada, and New Mexico—states that George W. Bush had carried during the 2004 election. But immigration reform faded as a priority as other issues—especially the economy and health care—took center stage.109 The DREAM Act (Development, Relief, and Education for Alien Minors Act) had its origins in 2001, with legislation sponsored by Luis V. Gutierrez (Democrat—Illinois). Several times during that next decade, this legislation, which would assist young immigrants in obtaining jobs and education, was debated, voted upon, but never enacted into law. The legislation was reintroduced in 2009, then 2010; while it managed to obtain approval in the House, it could not get past the threat of a Republican filibuster in the Senate. In June 2012, Obama used his executive authority to issue the Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals (DACA) program, which would allow young people born in another country, unlawfully brought to the United States, the temporary legal right to live, study, and work in America.110 Altogether, 740,000 individuals were aided by the end of the Obama presidency. Those applying for the program would be vetted, and deportation would be deferred for two years, with a chance of renewal on a rolling basis. This meant that the DACA recipients would be eligible for driver’s licenses, college enrollment, and work permits. But DACA was accomplished through executive action rather than through an act of Congress; it could be undone by the next president. Then in April 2016, in a one-line unsigned per curiam decision, the Court upheld a lower court ruling denying permanency for the DACA program. Obama reacted with disappointment: “Today’s decision is frustrating to those who seek to grow our economy and bring a rationality to our immigration system. It is heartbreaking for the millions of immigrants who have made their lives here.”111 Donald Trump several times used his authority to try to blunt the DACA program. The Obama administration sharply increased the number of illegal immigrants who were deported, focusing on those with criminal records, rather than those without. Between 2009 and 2016, some 2.7 million persons were deported, twice the number deported in the previous two administrations. Obama was labeled as the “Deporter in Chief” by critics in the immigration-rights community, while still being labeled as soft on unauthorized immigrants by others.112 Mitt Romney, the Republican presidential candidate in 2012, received just a quarter of all Hispanic votes, and it appeared time for Republicans to work on immigration reform, hopefully to gain back Hispanic votes. George W. Bush had received a substantial boost from Hispanic voters, and it was time to reclaim them. Following its defeat in 2012, the Republican National Committee (RNC) was determined to broaden its base of support, particularly reaching out to Hispanics and other minorities. In its 2013 report, Growth and Opportunity, the RNC stated that “We must embrace and champion comprehensive immigration reform. If we do not, our party’s appeal will continue to shrink to its core constituencies only.”113 Less than three years later, Republican presidential candidate Donald Trump would begin his frontal attack on immigrants, particularly Hispanics. So much for growth and opportunity. Just after the 2012 election, House speaker Boehner declared that immigration reform was “long overdue,” and that “I’m confident the president, myself, [and] others can find the common ground to take care of this issue once and for all.” The problem was acute: the current immigration system left some 11 million immigrants undocumented. Unexpectedly, there was no strong opposition against reform from outside groups. Congressman John A. Yarmuth (Democrat—Kentucky), one of a so-called Group of Eight, a bipartisan effort to get the bill passed, said: “It’s so bizarre when you have the business community, organized labor, the faith community, law enforcement, you name it, everybody’s for it. Come on—how can you have something everybody’s for and not get it passed?”114

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In 2013, the Senate and the White House worked on comprehensive reform legislation. Sixty-eight senators agreed on the legislation that would have doubled the number of border patrol agents but also giving undocumented immigrants a pathway to citizenship once they had paid a fine, started paying taxes, and went to the end of the line for permanent citizenship. But once the bill got to the House, Republican leaders refused to allow a vote. An immigration bill sponsored by Mario R. Diaz-Balart (Republican—Florida) had attracted 140 Republicans, and passage looked promising. But then came the shock of a primary election. For many Republicans, wary of immigration reform, the defeat of majority leader Eric Cantor in a Virginia Republican primary, was the final straw. Conservative Cantor was handily defeated by an even more conservative, Tea Party-backed economics professor David A. Brat, and much of the blame, fairly or unfairly, was placed on Cantor’s (reluctant) involvement in immigration reform. After Cantor’s defeat, there would be no immigration reform; no Republicans were willing to risk their necks. Boehner was frustrated. “Believe me,” he later told an audience at Stanford University after his resignation, “I tried a dozen times to bring immigration reform to the floor. I got slapped down by my colleagues, slapped down by other leaders.” The failure to pass immigration reform, he noted, was “one of my greatest disappointments.”115 Obama’s legacy would be as a president who consistently defended immigrants. As his term in office was to end, Obama declared that “Immigration is not something to fear. We don’t have to wall ourselves off from those who may not look like us right now or pray like we do, or have a different last name.”116

Climate Change When acid rain was a significant problem during the late 1980s and early 1990s, the Bush I administration pushed for a policy called cap and trade. Coal burning plants were given a limit (cap) by the government on how much pollutants could be emitted. If utilities cut back on emissions below the government-imposed limit, they could then sell permits (trade) to other utilities. This cap-and-trade policy was considered an effective method of reducing airborne sulfur dioxide pollution, the culprit in producing acid rain. In 2009, environmental organizations and others concerned about climate change sought to use the relatively simple cap-and-trade schema to address global warming. Henry Waxman in the House and Edward J. Markey (Democrat—Massachusetts) in the Senate introduced a bill to reduced carbon dioxide through cap and trade. The reduction of carbon dioxide was a far more complex and pervasive problem than reducing sulfur dioxide, but for the moment, in 2009, it seemed like the policy of choice. For environmental policy leaders “visions danced in their heads of a celebratory White House signing ceremony nicely times to tee up US leadership in the next international climate confab scheduled for December 2009 in Copenhagen.”117 In June 2009, the House passed legislation, which, for the first time, would limit carbon dioxide in the atmosphere. At the heart of the legislation was a cap-and-trade system, with limits set for emissions of heat-trapping gases. Utilities and other emitters could trade pollution government-issued permits, and the cap on emissions would grow tighter in subsequent years, making it far more expensive for industries to continue polluting. The goal was ambitious: to reduce greenhouse gases in the United States by 83 percent by 2050, and to have a national standard of 20 percent for the production of renewable energy by 2020. The 1,428-page bill contained complex exemptions and concessions to agribusiness, utilities, industries, and coal companies, and the original simplicity was lost, replaced by a “bazaar in which those with the most muscle got the best deals.”118 The House vote was razor-thin, 219 to 212, showing deep divisions among Democrats, with 44 voting against it. Only eight Republicans voted for the bill. President Obama praised the passage of the House bill as a “bold and necessary

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step.”119 If it became law, the Waxman-Markey bill would have been, in the assessment of historian Meg Jacobs, “the most significant environmental breakthrough since the 1970s.”120 But the bill went nowhere in the Senate, bogged down by competing interests. It was soon labeled “cap-and-tax” by conservative opponents. Why did cap and trade fail? Journalist John M. Broder gave a succinct answer: “it was done in by the weak economy, the Wall Street meltdown, determined industry opposition, and its own complexity.”121 An alternative, simple (just thirty-nine pages) bi-partisan bill introduced by senators Maria E. Cantwell (Democrat—Washington) and Susan M. Collins (Republican—Maine) was called the CLEAR Act (Carbon Limits and Energy for American Renewal Act). Under this system, licenses to pollute would be auctioned and three-quarters of the auction revenue would be returned to consumers in monthly checks to cover higher energy costs. This was nearly the same plan that Obama campaigned on when seeking the White House. It too failed to gain traction in the Senate and was never voted upon. With Republicans taking over the House following the 2010 elections, the growing clout of climate deniers among Tea Party Republicans, the opposition from the Koch brothers and their advocacy group Americans for Prosperity and others, and no urgency for change among the public—the chances for sweeping climate change policy were next to nothing. James B. Inhofe (Republican—Oklahoma), fierce opponent of climate change legislation had a simple lesson for his Senate colleagues. In February 2015, during a cold spell in Washington, DC, Inhofe brought a snowball to the floor of the Senate, to show, proof positive, that global warming was a hoax. “We keep hearing that 2014 has been the warmest year on record,” he said. Yet in a plastic bag, right on his desk, Inhofe had the common-sense evidence to demolish that claim. “I ask the chair, you know what this is? It’s a snowball, and that’s just from outside here, so it’s very, very cold out, very unseasonable.” Then he tossed the unexpected snowball to the unsuspecting presiding officer and returned to his prepared text with a self-satisfied, “Mm-hmm.”122 Inhofe was the chairman of the Senate Environment Committee. By 2016, Inhofe was digging in even further, stating on The Eric Mataxas Show, a conservative radio commentary show, that even his grandchildren were being “brainwashed” by all this “climate change nonsense.” “You know, our kids are being brainwashed? … My own granddaughter came home one day and said, ‘Popi, why is it you don’t understand global warming?’ I did some checking, and Eric, the stuff that they teach our kids nowadays, you have to un-brainwash them when they get out.”123 In fact, a whole industry of non-believers, of climate deniers, had sprung up in the past several decades to criticize, demean, and debunk legitimate scientific discovery and analysis.124 And they found their ultimate megaphone in presidential candidate Donald J. Trump. Well before his 2015 run for the presidency, Trump was spinning his own version of climate change. He tweeted on November 6, 2012 that “The concept of global warming was created by and for the Chinese in order to make U.S. manufacturing less competitive.” The Twitter message was shared over 104,000 times, and “liked” more than 66,000 times. Trump, like Inhofe before him, labeled climate change a “hoax.” Soon after the 2016 presidential election, Chinese president Xi Jinping, in a telephone call to Trump, pledged that China would continue to fight against climate change “whatever the circumstances.”125

Gun Control Within weeks after the Sandy Hook killings, both the White House and Congress responded with programs to prevent gun violence. The Obama administration offered a series of executive branch reforms, under the heading of “Now is the Time.” The January 2013 White House document declared that “the president strongly believes that the Second Amendment

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guarantees an individual the right to bear arms.” But “to better protect our children and our communities” from the tragedies like Sandy Hook or Aurora, the White House offered a series of actions, based on four principles: “closing background check loopholes to keep guns out of dangerous hands; banning military assault-style weapons and high-capacity magazines, and taking other common sense steps to reduce gun violence; making schools safer; and increasing access to mental health services.”126 Twenty-three executive actions were immediately signed by the president, and twelve proposals were sent to Congress. In 1994, Senator Dianne Feinstein (Democrat—California) introduced an assault weapons ban. The bill became law, but it expired in 2004 and was not renewed. One month after Sandy Hook, Feinstein, along with twenty-four cosponsors tried again, with the Assault Weapons Ban of 2013. This time the legislation would have no sunset provision, as did the 1994 law. Here, 157 assault-style weapons would be banned, including the Bushmaster XM14-E2S used to kill the children and teachers at Sandy Hook. As a concession to sportsmen and hunters, the bill exempted 2,258 shotguns, sport, and hunting guns. At an assembly of gun-control activists, which included seven survivors of mass shootings, Feinstein implored: “You are stronger than the gun lobby, you are stronger than the gun manufacturers. Only if you stand up and America rises up and people call every member of the House and every member of the Senate and say, ‘We have had enough’ … we can win this.”127 The pushback from gun rights advocates and red state lawmakers was predictable. Senator Ted Cruz (Republican—Texas) said he would lead the fight against the bill: “This proposal would have done nothing to prevent the horrible murders in Newtown, but it would limit the constitutional liberties of law-abiding citizens.”128 The National Rifle Association and Gun Owners of America swung into action to oppose the Feinstein legislation. Wayne R. LaPierre, Jr., executive vice president of the NRA, expressed sympathy for the victims and families of Sandy Hook, but retorted, “The only thing that stops a bad guy with a gun is a good guy with a gun” and that the assault ban legislation would be “nothing but a waste of effort.”129 Feinstein knew it would be an uphill battle, especially trying to get Democrats from typically red states to join in. For Feinstein, gun violence had dramatic, personal consequences. She became mayor of San Francisco in 1978 following the assassinations of George Moscone, the mayor, and Harvey Milk, the city supervisor. During the Senate deliberations, the New York Daily News on its front page showed a montage of the murdered children, and the headline shouted out: “Shame on Us!” On the Senate floor, with the Daily News front page displayed beside her, Feinstein implored her colleagues, “Show some guts.”130 But the Assault Weapons Ban was defeated in the Senate, gathering just forty votes, with fifteen Democrats and all but one Republican voting against it. The Brady Handgun Violence Prevention Act, passed in 1993, required all licensed gun dealers to perform background checks. The FBI had conducted more than 150 million such background checks, blocking gun purchases in more than 1.7 million instances. Following Sandy Hook, Senators Joe Manchin III (Democrat—West Virginia) and Patrick J. Toomey, Jr. (Republican—Pennsylvania) pushed for an amendment to expand background checks to include gun purchases made over the Internet and at gun shows. A majority of senators (54–46) favored it, but it fell short of the sixty votes needed to become filibuster proof; in March 2013, Majority Leader Reid pulled the plug. Forty-one Republicans and five Democrats, from states where gun ownership was high, voiced their disapproval. Speaking from the Rose Garden, a visibly angry Obama, said of the Manchin-Toomey defeat, “It came down to politics—the worry that that vocal minority of gun owners would come after them in future elections. All in all, this was a pretty shameful day in Washington.”131 Most action on gun legislation shifted to the states. A year after Sandy Hook, some 1,500 gun violence bills had been introduced in state legislatures, with 150 of them becoming law. In

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legislatures controlled by Democrats, a number of states mandated stronger background checks. In several Republican-controlled states, legislatures have loosened some gun restrictions and made it easier to have armed volunteers guarding schools.132 By 2019, twenty-one state legislatures had expanded background check requirements. In addition, seventeen states, with legislatures mostly controlled by Democrats, have passed red flag laws, which allow law enforcement to take guns away from individuals with mental problems or who might pose a threat to others. Twenty-eight states have enacted laws requiring persons convicted of domestic violence to have their guns taken away.133

Overdose from Deadly Drugs Both the Obama administration and Congress failed to heed the warnings of health officials that the use of the deadly synthetic drug fentanyl was becoming an epidemic. Just a few grains of the painkiller fentanyl, fifty times more potent that heroin, could kill an individual. From 2013 to the end of the Obama administration, thousands had died from using it. In May 2016, a group of national health experts urged the Obama administration to take immediate action, but in the end no action was taken. Between 2013 and 2017, some 67,000 persons died of synthetic opioid overdoses, the vast majority of which came from fentanyl. “This is a massive institutional failure, and I don’t think people have come to grips with it,” said John P. Walters, head of the White House Office of National Drug Control Policy during the Obama years. “This is like an absurd bad dream and we don’t know how to intervene or how to save lives.”134 In a series of investigative reports, the Washington Post noted that it wasn’t just the Obama administration that failed to combat the problem. Congress did not provide the funding necessary to combat either fentanyl or the larger opioid crisis. Shipments of fentanyl coming from China and Mexico weren’t being stopped because of the lack of border patrol personnel, trained dogs, or technological equipment to track the drugs. In addition, the Postal Service didn’t require electronic monitoring of international packages.135 The Drug Enforcement Administration tracked the path of every pain pill sold in America. Altogether, the largest drug manufacturers dumped 76 billion oxycodone and hydrocodone pain pills from 2006 through 2012. Just six drug companies distributed 75 percent of the pills during this period, and just three manufactured 88 percent of the opioids. Some areas, especially in Appalachia, were flooded with opioids. Over a period of a decade, nearly 21 million prescription painkillers were sent to two pharmacies just four blocks away from each other in a southern West Virginia hamlet of 2,900 persons.136 Senator Kelly A. Ayote (Republican—New Hampshire) introduced legislation to combat fentanyl in September 2015, soon after the Drug Enforcement Agency (DEA) issued a “nationwide alert” warning about the surge in fentanyl usage in New England and other parts of the country. Thomas J. Rooney (Republican—Florida) and Timothy J. (Tim) Ryan (Democrat—Ohio) pushed for a similar bill in the House. But their efforts went nowhere. Not until December 2017, four years after the first warnings of the crisis, did Congress pass a bill specifically focusing on fentanyl. Meanwhile, the fentanyl deaths continued to rise.137

Notes 1 Joseph E. Stiglitz, “Of the 1%, By the 1%, For the 1%,” Vanity Fair, May 2011, https://www. vanityfair.com/news/2011/05/top-one-percent-201105 (accessed October 10, 2019). Also, Joseph E. Stiglitz, The Price of Inequality: How Today’s Divided Society Endangers Our Future (New York: Norton, 2012).

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2 Harold W. Stanley and Richard G. Niemi, eds., Vital Statistics on American Politics, 2015–2016 (Sage Knowledge), Table 5-1: Apportionment of Members of the House of Representatives, 1789–2010, http://sk.sagepub.com.proxygw.wrlc.org/cqpress/vital-statistics-on-american-politics-2015-2016 (accessed December 9, 2019). 3 Steven A. Camarota and Karen Zeigler, “US Immigrant Population Hit Record 43.7 Million in 2016,” Center for Immigration Studies, October 16, 2017, https://cis.org/Report/US-ImmigrantPopulation-Hit-Record-437-Million-2016 (accessed October 15, 2020). 4 US Department of Agriculture data compiled in Heather Long, “The Trump vs. Obama Economy—in 16 Charts,” Washington Post, September 5, 2020. 5 “Drilling Into the DEA’s Pain Pill Database,” Washington Post, January 17, 2020. 6 “20 Facts About US Inequality that Everyone Should Know,” Stanford Center on Poverty & Inequality, 2011, https://inequality.stanford.edu/publications/20-facts-about-us-inequality-everyoneshould-know (accessed October 15, 2020). 7 Ibid. 8 Ibid., data from a variety of sources. Also, Timothy Noah, The Great Divergence: America’s Growing Inequality Crisis and What We Can Do About It (New York: Bloomsbury, 2012); Emmanuel Saez and Gabriel Zucman, “Wealth Inequality in the United States Since 1913: Evidence from Capitalized Income Tax Data,” Quarterly Journal of Economics 131 (2) (May 2016): 519–79, https://eml.berkeley. edu/~saez/SaezZucman2016QJE.pdf (accessed November 10, 2020). 9 Press release, “Seven Years Ago, the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act Helped Bring Our Economy Back from the Brink of a Second Great Depression,” The White House, February 25, 2016, https://obamawhitehouse.archives.gov/the-press-office/2016/02/25/fact-sheet-seven-years-agoamerican-recovery-and-reinvestment-act-helped (accessed July 30, 2020); “TED: The Economics Daily: Increase in Unemployment Rate in January 2009,” US Department of Labor, February 10, 2009, https://www.bls.gov/opub/ted/2009/feb/wk2/art02.htm?view_full#:~:text=Both%20the%20number %20of%20unemployed,risen%20by%202.7%20percentage%20points (accessed July 30, 2020). 10 “Unemployment Rate in the United States from 1990 to 2019,” Statistica, https://www.statista.com/ statistics/193290/unemployment-rate-in-the-usa-since-1990/ (accessed July 30, 2020). 11 Danielle Kurtzleben, “What Kind of ‘Jobs President’ has Obama Been—In 8 Charts,” NPR, January 7, 2017, https://www.npr.org/2017/01/07/508600239/what-kind-of-jobs-president-has-obama-been-in-8charts (accessed July 30, 2020); data from Bureau of Labor Statistics in “Unemployment Rate,” Federal Reserve Bank of St. Louis, https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/UNRATE# (accessed July 30, 2020). 12 Kim Severson, Number of US Hate Groups Is Rising, Report Says,” New York Times, May 7, 2012. 13 Kyle Dropp and Brendan Nyhan, “It Lives. Birtherism is Diminished, But Far from Dead,” New York Times, September 23, 2016. By September of that year, the belief in birtherism had dropped: 33 percent of Republicans believed it, and 10 percent of Democrats agreed. 14 Michael Grunwald, “Birther Nation: Alive and Well,” Politico (September 2016), https://www.politico. com/magazine/story/2016/09/trump-supporters-birther-2016-secret-214258 (accessed September 3, 2020). 15 Obama quoted in Ibram X. Kendi, Stamped from the Beginning: The Definitive History of Racist Ideas in America (New York: Bold Type Books, 2016), 498. 16 Ronald W. Walters and Robert C. Smith, “Civil Rights and the First Black President,” in Kenneth Osgood and Derrick E. White, eds., Winning While Losing: Civil Rights, the Conservative Movement, and the Presidency from Nixon to Obama (Gainesville: University of Florida Press, 2014), 262. 17 Christopher J. LeBron, The Making of Black Lives Matter: A Brief History of an Idea (New York: Oxford University Press, 2018). 18 Roof was convicted of federal hate crime charges and sentenced to death; he was also convicted on state crimes as well. In January 2020, his attorneys presented a 321-page brief before a federal appeals court in Richmond, Virginia, arguing that his trial was tainted, and that Roof had been diagnosed with “schizophrenia-spectrum disorder, autism, anxiety, and depression,” but then “jettisoned” his experienced trial lawyers in an effort to stop them from showing evidence of his mental state. “Dylan Roof Appeals Death Penalty in South Carolina Church Massacre,” Associated Press, January 29, 2020, https://www.nbcnews.com/news/us-news/dylann-roof-appeals-death-penalty-south-carolinachurch-massacre-n1125341 (accessed October 12, 2020). 19 David Cay Johnston, It’s Even Worse Than You Think: What the Trump Administration is Doing to America (New York: Simon & Schuster, 2018), 232. 20 James Barron, “Children Were All Shot Multiple Times with a Semi-Automatic, Officials Say,” New York Times, December 15, 2012.

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21 “Ten Years of Mass Shootings in the United States,” Everytownresearch.org, November 21, 2019, https://maps.everytownresearch.org/massshootingsreports/mass-shootings-in-america-2009-2019/ (accessed October 15, 2020). Using FBI statistics, this organization uses the following wellestablished definition of “mass shooting”: “an incident in which four or more people, not including the shooter, are killed with a firearm.” 22 Jeff Nesbit, “The Secret Origins of the Tea Party,” Time, n.d., https://time.com/secret-origins-of-thetea-party/ (accessed September 3, 2020). The essay was excerpted from Jeff Nesbit, Poison Tea: How Big Oil and Big Tobacco Invented the Tea Party and Captured the GOP (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 2016). 23 “Rick Santelli and the ‘Rant of the Year,” YouTube, February 19, 2009, https://www.youtube.com/ watch?v=bEZB4taSEoA (accessed October 15, 2020). 24 Sonia Smith, “Dick Armey Breaks Up His Tea Party Group as a Matter of Principle,” Texas Monthly, January 21, 2013, https://www.texasmonthly.com/politics/dick-armey-breaks-up-with-his-tea-partygroup-over-matters-of-principle/ (accessed October 15, 2020). Armey resigned from Freedom Works in 2013. Kate Zernicke and Jennifer Steinhauer, “Years Later, Armey Once Again a Power in Congress,” New York Times, November 14, 2010. 25 Janie Lorber and Eric Lipton, “GOP Insider Fuels Tea Party and Suspicion,” New York Times, September 18, 2010; Dennis W. Johnson, Democracy for Hire: A History of American Political Consulting (New York: Oxford University Press, 2017), 296. 26 Theda Skocpol and Vanessa Williamson, The Tea Party and the Remaking of the Republican Party, rev. ed. (New York: Oxford University Press, 2016), 14; Burdett A. Loomis, “The Tea Party as an Interest Movement? Group? Brand? Faction?” in Allan J. Cigler, Burdett A. Loomis, and Anthony Nownes, eds., Interest Group Politics, ninth ed. (Washington, DC: CQ Press, 2016), 115–34. 27 “President Obama Job Approval, 2009-2012,” Real Clear Politics, http://www.realclearpolitics.com/ epolls/other/president_obama_job_approval-1044.html; “Labor Force Statistics from Current Population Survey,” US Department of Labor, Bureau of Labor Statistics, http://data.bls.gov/ timeseries/LNS14000000 (accessed August 3, 2020). 28 McConnell and Boehner quoted in Andy Barr, “The GOP’s No Compromise Pledge,” Politico, October 28, 2010. 29 Julian E. Zelizer, “Tea Partied: President Obama’s Encounters with the Conservative-Industrial Complex” in Julian E. Zelizer, ed., The Presidency of Barack Obama: A First Historical Assessment (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2018), 12. 30 Obama quoted in Lucy Madison, “Obama’s 2010 ‘Shellacking’ is Like Bush’s 2006 ‘Thumping,’” CBS News, November 3, 2010, https://www.cbsnews.com/news/obamas-2010-shellacking-is-like-bushs2006-thumping/ (accessed August 28, 2020). 31 Adam Jentleson, Kill Switch: The Rise of the Modern Senate and the Crippling of American Democracy (New York: Liveright, 2021). 32 See, for example, Binder, “How Political Polarization Creates Stalemate and Undermines Lawmaking”; Sarah A. Binder, Stalemate: Causes and Consequences of Legislative Gridlock (Washington, DC: Brookings Institution Press, 2003). 33 “113th Congress,” US House of Representatives, n.d., https://history.house.gov/CongressionalOverview/Profiles/113th/ (accessed July 29, 2020). Washington Post “Monkey Cage” series on political polarization. David W. Brady and Hahrie Han, “Our Politics May Be Polarized. But That’s Nothing New,” Washington Post, January 16, 2014; Nolan McCarthy, “What We Know and Don’t Know About Our Polarized Politics,” Washington Post, January 8, 2014; Frances E. Lee, “American Politics is More Competitive Than Ever. That’s Making Partisanship Worse,” Washington Post, January 9, 2014; Christopher Hare, Keith T. Poole, and Haward Rosenthal, “Polarization in Congress Has Risen Sharply. Where Is It Going Next?” Washington Post, February 13, 2014; and Sarah A. Binder, “How Political Polarization Creates Stalemate and Undermines Lawmaking,” Washington Post, January 13, 2014. The Monkey Cage is a forum for academics to use their research to reach a broader audience. 34 Thomas E. Mann and Norman J. Ornstein, It’s Even Worse Than It Looks: How the American Constitutional System Collided with New Politics of Extremism (New York: Basic Books, 2012), xii. 35 “House Speaker to Resign After Battle with Conservatives,” The Guardian, February 25, 2015, https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2015/sep/25/house-speaker-john-boehner-to-resign (accessed August 29, 2020). 36 Press release, Office of Senator Charles Grassley, February 13, 2016, https://www.grassley.senate.gov/ news/news-releases/grassley-statement-justice-scalia (accessed July 20, 2020).

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37 Quoted in Harper Neidig, “McConnell: Don’t Replace Scalia Until After the Election,” The Hill, February 13, 2016, https://thehill.com/homenews/senate/269389-mcconnell-dont-replace-scalia-untilafter-election (accessed July 20, 2020); Stephen Levitsky and Daniel Ziblatt, How Democracies Die (New York: Penguin, 2019), 145–76. 38 McConnell quoted in Jason Silverstein, “Here’s What Mitch McConnell About: Not Filling a Supreme Court Vacancy During an Election Year,” CBS News, September 9, 2020. 39 Julian E. Zelizer, “Policy Revolution without a Political Transformation: The Presidency of Barack Obama,” in Zelizer, ed., The Presidency of Barack Obama, 4. 40 Ledbetter v. Goodyear Tire & Rubber Company, 550 US 618 (2007), https://supreme.justia.com/cases/ federal/us/550/618/#tab-opinion-1962370 (accessed July 29, 2020). Justice Alito, joined by Chief Justice Roberts, Justices Thomas, Scalia, and Kennedy. Dissenting opinion by Justice Ginsburg, joined by Justices Stevens, Souter, and Breyer. 41 Elisabeth Bumiller, “Obama Ends ‘Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell’ Policy,” New York Times, July 22, 2011. 42 Barack Obama, A Promised Land (New York: Crown Books, 2020), 590. 43 Cantor quoted in Jackie Calmes, “House Passes Stimulus Plan with No GOP Votes,” New York Times, January 28, 2009. 44 Gregory Koger, Filibustering: A Political History of Obstruction in the House and the Senate (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2010), 4. The three Republican senators were Susan Collins and Olympia Snowe of Maine and Arlen Specter of Pennsylvania. 45 “The Recovery Act,” The Obama White House, n.d., https://obamawhitehouse.archives.gov/ recovery (accessed August 10, 2020). 46 Graham, Obama on the Home Front, 79. 47 Michael Grunwald, The New New Deal: The Hidden Story of Change in the Obama Era (New York: Simon & Schuster, 2013), 12. 48 Obama, A Promised Land, 265. 49 Bureau of Labor Statistics data, in Henry Sun and Dennis W. Johnson, “Jobs and the Economy,” in Dennis W. Johnson, ed., Campaigning for President: 2012 (New York: Routledge, 2013), 123–24, 131. 50 “American Recovery and Reinvestment Act of 2009: Summary and Legislative History,” Congressional Research Service, Report 4-537, April 20, 2009, https://www.everycrsreport.com/files/ 20090420_R40537_a1503e3574a2de62116a36d3e48239d778e8b824.pdf (accessed August 7, 2020). See Burt S. Brown and Richard A. Hobbie, eds., The American Recovery and Reinvestment Act: The Role of Workforce Programs (Kalamazoo, MI: The Upjohn Institute for Employment Research, 2013). 51 “Estimated Impact of the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act on Employment and Economic Output in 2014,” Congressional Budget Office, February 20, 2015, https://www.cbo.gov/publication/ 49958 (accessed August 12, 2020). 52 Obama, A Promised Land, 521; Tina Trenker, “Did the Stimulus Program Do Anything for Transparency?” Governing, February 2012, https://www.governing.com/topics/mgmt/gov-did-thestimulus-do-anything-for-transparency.html (accessed August 10, 2020). 53 Edmund L. Andrews and Peter Baker, “AIG Planning Huge Bonuses After $170 Billion Bailout,” New York Times, March 14, 2009; Obama, A Promised Land, 294–95. 54 Steve Rattner, “The Auto Bailout: How We Did It,’ CNN Money, October 21, 2009, http://money. cnn.com/2009/10/21/autos/auto_bailout_rattner.fortune/ (accessed August 7, 2020); Mitt Romney, “Let Detroit Go Bankrupt,” New York Times, November 18, 2008; Sun and Johnson, “Jobs and the Economy,” 123–24, 131. 55 David Kiley, “As Obama Takes Victory Lap Over Auto Industry Rescue, Here Are the Lessons of the Bailout,” Forbes, January 20, 2016, https://www.forbes.com/sites/davidkiley5/2016/01/20/obamastakes-victory-lap-over-auto-industry-rescue/#2d2318a43e83 (accessed August 10, 2020). The GM Hummer was resurrected in 2021 as an electric vehicle. 56 Graham, Obama on the Home Front, 141–43. Daniel Béland, Philip Rocco, and Alex Waddan, Obamacare Wars: Federalism, State Politics, and the Affordable Care Act (Lawrence: University Press of Kansas, 2016), 40–60. 57 Graham, Obama on the Home Front, 145; Lawrence R. Jacobs and Theda Skocpol, “Hard-Fought Legacy: Obama, Congressional Democrats, and the Struggle for Comprehensive Health Care Reform,” in Lawrence R. Jacobs and Theda Skocpol, eds., Reaching for a New Deal: Ambitious Governance, Economic Meltdown, and Polarized Politics in Obama’s First Two Years (New York: Russell Sage Foundation, 2011), 53–104. 58 Wendell Potter, “The Health Care Scare,” Washington Post, August 6, 2020.

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59 Angie Drobnic Holan, “Politifact’s Lie of the Year: ‘Death Panels,’” Politifact.com, December 18, 2009, https://www.politifact.com/article/2009/dec/18/politifact-lie-year-death-panels/ (accessed August 31, 2020). 60 For example, “Obama Health Care: Where Does the Public Stand? Pew Research Center, June 15, 2012, https://www.pewresearch.org/politics/2012/06/15/obama-health-care-law-where-does-thepublic-stand/ (accessed August 17, 2020). 61 Jonathan Allen and Meredith Shiner, “Tea Partiers Descend on the Capitol,” Politico, November 6, 2009, https://www.politico.com/story/2009/11/tea-partiers-descend-on-capitol-029183 (accessed August 17, 2020); Sari Horwitz and Ben Pershing, “Anger over Health-Care Reform Spurs Rise in Threats Against Congress Members,” Washington Post, April 9, 2010. 62 Glenn Kessler, “History Lesson: How the Democrats Pushed Obamacare Through the Senate,” Washington Post, June 22, 2017. The fortieth Republican senator, Jim Bunning of Kentucky, did not vote on the legislation. Byrd would die just months later, in June 2010. 63 Brown quoted in Sheryl Gay Stolberg, Jeff Zeleny, and Carl Hulse, “Health Care Vote Caps Journey Back from the Brink,” New York Times, March 20, 2010. 64 Obama, A Promised Land, 420–21; quote from photo CAPTION ABOUT, following p. 560. 65 Stolberg, Zeleny, and Hulse, “Health Care Vote Caps Journey Back from the Brink.” 66 Margaret Aro and Mark Mooney, “Pelosi Defends Health Care Fight Tactics,” ABC News, March 22, 2010, https://abcnews.go.com/WN/Politics/house-speaker-nancy-pelosis-exclusive-interview-dianesawyer/story?id=10172685 (accessed August 27, 2020). 67 Boehner quoted in Sheryl Gay Stolberg and Robert Pear, “Obama Signs Health Care Overhaul, With a Flourish,” New York Times, March 23, 2010. 68 McConnell quoted in Béland, Rocco, and Waddan, Obamacare Wars, 40. 69 Clay Johnson and Harper Reed, “Why the Government Never Gets Tech Right,” New York Times, October 24, 2013. 70 “Status of State Medicaid Expansion Decisions,” Kaiser Family Foundation, August 5, 2020, https:// www.kff.org/medicaid/issue-brief/status-of-state-medicaid-expansion-decisions-interactive-map/ (accessed August 13, 2020). States not joining the Medicaid expansion: North Carolina, South Carolina, Georgia, Florida, Tennessee, Alabama, Mississippi, Texas, Kansas, Wyoming, and Wisconsin. States joining, but not yet implementing: Oklahoma, Missouri, Nebraska. Many of the participating states joined on the first day of ACA’s operations, January 1, 2014. 71 “At Risk: Pre-existing Conditions Could Affect 1 in 2 Americans,” Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services, n.d., https://www.cms.gov/CCIIO/Resources/Forms-Reports-and-OtherResources/preexisting (accessed August 13, 2020). 72 Lawrence R. Jacobs and Theda Skocpol, Health Care and American Politics: What Everyone Needs to Know, 3rd ed. (New York: Oxford University Press, 2015), 123–24. 73 Press Release, “Nearly 44 Million in the United States Without Health Insurance in 2008,” National Center for Health Statistics, Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, July 1, 2009, https://www. cdc.gov/media/pressrel/2009/r090701.htm (accessed August 31, 2020); “Accomplishments of the Affordable Care Act,” Center of Budget and Policy Priorities, March 19, 2019, https://www.cbpp.org/ research/health/chart-book-accomplishments-of-affordable-care-act (accessed August 31, 2020). 74 National Federation of Independent Business v. Sebelius, 567 US___(2012). On commerce clause: Roberts, joined by Scalia, Kennedy, Thomas, and Alito; on the taxing power, Roberts, joined by Ginsburg, Breyer, Sotomayor, and Kagan. 75 Roberts was joined by Scalia, Kennedy, Thomas, Breyer, Alito, and Kagan. 76 Roberts was joined by Ginsburg, Breyer, Sotomayor, and Kagan. 77 King v. Burwell, 576 US 988 (2015), https://supreme.justia.com/cases/federal/us/576/14-114/#tabopinion-3426538. Opinion by Chief Justice Roberts, joined by Justices Kennedy, Ginsburg, Breyer, Sotomayor, and Kagan. 78 C. Stephen Redhead and Janet Kinzer, “Legislative Actions in the 112th, 113th, and 114th Congresses to Repeal, Defund, or Delay the Affordable Care Act,” Congressional Research Service, February 7, 2017, https://fas.org/sgp/crs/misc/R43289.pdf (June 12, 2020). 79 “Health Care Coverage Under the Affordable Care Act: Enrollment Trends and State Estimates,” Office of Health Policy, US Department of Health and Human Services, June 5, 2021, https://aspe. hhs.gov/sites/default/files/private/pdf/265671/ASPE%2520Issue%2520Brief-ACA-Related %2520Coverage%2520by%2520State.pdf (accessed November 12, 2021).

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80 Viral V. Archarya and Matthew Richardson, “The Implications of the Dodd-Frank Act,” Annual Review of Financial Economics 4 (2012): 1–38. Paul H. Schultz, ed., Perspectives on Dodd-Frank and Finance (Cambridge: MIT Press, 2014). 81 “Wall Street Reform: The Dodd-Frank Act,” The White House, n.d., https://obamawhitehouse. archives.gov/economy/middle-class/dodd-frank-wall-street-reform (accessed August 5, 2020). 82 Barry J. Eichengreen, Hall of Mirrors: The Great Depression, the Great Recessions, and the Use—and Misuses—of History (New York: Oxford University Press, 2016), 11. 83 Heidi L. Hansberry, “In Spite of Its Good Intentions, the Dodd-Frank Act Has Created a FCPA Monster,” Journal of Criminal Law and Criminology 102 (1) (Winter 2012): 195–226; Daniel Schwarcz and David Zarring, “Regulation by Threat: Dodd-Frank and the Nonbank Problem,” University of Chicago Law Review 84 (4) (Fall 21017): 1813–81. Also, Peter Wallison, Bad History, Worse Policy: How a False Narrative About the Economic Crisis Led to the Dodd-Frank Act (Washington, DC: AEI Press, 2013). 84 “Economic Growth, Regulatory Relief, and Consumer Protection Act,” Congressional Research Service (June 6, 2018), Report R45073; https://fas.org/sgp/crs/misc/R45073.pdf (accessed August 5, 2020). 85 Obama, A Promised Land, 557–75; “BP Gulf Oil Spill: 5 Years Later,” Scientific American, April 20, 2015, scientificamerican.com/report/bp-gulf-oil-spill-5-year-later/ (accessed December 4, 2020). 86 Angela Nelson, “Fifteen Things Obama Has Done for the Environment,” Treehugger, June 5, 2017, https://www.treehugger.com/things-obama-has-done-environment-4863938 (accessed August 10, 2020). 87 Richard L. Revesz and Jack Lienke, Struggling for Air: Power Plants and the “War on Coal” (New York: Oxford University Press, 2016); Daniel Yergin, The New Map: Energy, Climate, and the Clash of Nations (New York: Penguin Press, 2020), 14–24. 88 “Overview of the Clean Power Plan,” Environmental Protection Agency, n.d., https://archive.epa. gov/epa/cleanpowerplan/fact-sheet-overview-clean-power-plan.html (accessed September 4, 2020). 89 One of the founders of Citizens United was David Bossie, who in 2016 became deputy campaign manager for the Trump for President campaign. 90 Citizens United v. Federal Election Commission, 588 US 310 (2010), https://supreme.justia.com/cases/ federal/us/558/310/#tab-opinion-1963051. 91 Justice Stevens, concurring in part, dissenting in part, 1, slip opinion. 92 John Paul Stevens, The Making of a Justice: A Reflection on My First 94 Years (Boston: Little, Brown, 2019), 501. 93 McCain quoted in Alina Selyukh, “McCain Predicts ‘Huge’ Campaign Finance Scandals,” Reuters, March 27, 2012, https://www.reuters.com/article/us-usa-campaign-money/mccain-predicts-huge-u-scampaign-finance-scandals-idUSBRE82Q13P20120327 (accessed July 27, 2020). 94 SpeechNow.Org v. Federal Election Commission, US Court of Appeals, March 26, 2010, https:// caselaw.findlaw.com/us-dc-circuit/1521355.html 95 McCutcheon v. Federal Election Commission, 572 US 185 (2014), https://supreme.justia.com/cases/ federal/us/572/185/#tab-opinion-1970859. Justice Scalia delivered the majority opinion; dissenting opinion by Justice Breyer. 96 Dennis W. Johnson, Campaigns and Elections: What Everyone Needs to Know (New York: Oxford University Press, 2020), 93–96; Paul S. Herrnson, Christopher J. Deering, and Clyde Wilcox, eds., Interest Groups Unleashed (Washington, DC: CQ Press, 2012). 97 Kevin J. Coleman, “The Voting Rights Act of 1965: Background and Overview,” Congressional Research Service, Report R443626, July 20, 2015, 11–12. Dana Liebelson, “The Supreme Court Gutted the Voting Rights Act. What Happened Next in These 8 States Will Not Shock You,” Mother Jones, April 8, 2014, https://www.motherjones.com/politics/2014/04/republican-votingrights-supreme-court-id/ (accessed June 29, 2020). 98 Text of the President’s Statement,” New York Times, November 7, 1981. 99 Carl Hulse, “By a Vote of 98-0, Senate Approves 25-Year Extension of the Voting Rights Act,” New York Times, July 21, 2006. 100 Press release, “President Bush Signs Voting Rights Act Reauthorization and Amendments of 2006, The White House, July 27, 2006, https://georgewbush-whitehouse.archives.gov/news/releases/2006/ 07/20060727.html (accessed July 27, 2020). 101 Shelby County v. Holder, 570 US 529 (2013), https://supreme.justia.com/cases/federal/us/570/529/# tab-opinion-1970750

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102 Ibid., 18 of the slip opinion; also Van R. Newkirk II, “How Shelby County v. Holder Broke America,” The Atlantic, July 10, 2018, https://www.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2018/07/howshelby-county-broke-america/564707/ (accessed June 29, 2020). 103 Press release, “Attorney General Eric Holder Delivers Remarks on the Supreme Court Decision in Shelby County v. Holder,” US Department of Justice, June 25, 2013, https://www.justice.gov/opa/ speech/attorney-general-eric-holder-delivers-remarks-supreme-court-decision-shelby-county-v (accessed July 27, 2020). 104 Liebelson, “The Supreme Court Gutted the Voting Rights Act.” 105 “New Voting Restrictions in America,” Brennan Center for Justice, New York University School of Law, n.d., http://www.brennancenter.org/new-voting-restrictions-america (accessed June 29, 2020); Dennis W. Johnson, Campaigns and Elections: What Everyone Needs to Know (New York: Oxford University Press, 2020), 6–8. 106 United States v. Windsor, 570 US 744 (2013), https://supreme.justia.com/cases/federal/us/570/744/# tab-opinion-1970765. For background on Windsor, see Peter Applebome, “Reveling in Her Supreme Court Moment,” New York Times, December 10, 2012. 107 Michael S. Rosenwald, “How Jim Obergefell Became the Face of the Supreme Court Gay Marriage Case,” Washington Post, April 6, 2015. 108 Dissenting oral statement by Chief Justice Roberts, June 26, 2015, https://www.oyez.org/cases/2014/ 14-556 109 American Immigration Council, “President Obama’s Legacy on Immigration,” January 20, 2017; John D. Skrentny, “Obama’s Immigration Reform: A Tough Sell for a Grand Bargain,” in Jacobs and Skocpol, eds., Reaching for a New Deal, 273–320. 110 John D. Skrentny and Jane Lilly López, “Obama’s Immigration Reform: The Triumph of Executive Action,” Indiana Journal of Law and Social Equality 2 (1) (Fall 2013): 62–79. 111 United States v. Texas, 579 US____(2016), https://supreme.justia.com/cases/federal/us/579/15-674/# tab-opinion-3589827. Obama quoted in Adam Liptak and Adam D. Shear, “Supreme Court Tie Blocks Obama Immigration Plan,” New York Times, June 23, 2016. 112 Mazaffar Chisti, Sarah Pierce, and Jessica Bolter, “The Obama Record on Deportations: Deporter in Chief or Not?” Migration Policy Institute, January 26, 2017, https://www.migrationpolicy.org/article/ obama-record-deportations-deporter-chief-or-not (accessed September 1, 2020). 113 Republican National Committee, Growth and Opportunity Project Report, Spring 2013, 10, http:// apps.washingtonpost.com/g/documents/politics/republican-national-committees-growth-andopportunity-project-report/380/?itid=lk_inline_manual_1 (accessed August 24, 2020). 114 Boehner and Yarmuth quoted in Alex MacGillis, “How Washington Blew Its Best Chance to Fix Immigration,” ProPublica, September 15, 2016, https://www.propublica.org/article/washingtoncongress-immigration-reform-failure (accessed August 24, 2020). 115 Ibid. 116 “Remarks by President Obama on the Supreme Court Ruling on Immigration,” The White House, June 23, 2016, https://obamawhitehouse.archives.gov/blog/2016/06/23/president-obama-supremecourt-ruling-immigration-reform (accessed September 4, 2020). 117 An extensive analysis of the failure of cap-and-trade, see Theda Skocpol, “Naming the Problem: What Will It Take to Counter Extremism and Engage Americans in the Fight Against Global Warming,” Columbia School of Journalism and the Scholars Strategy Network on The Politics of America’s Fight Against Global Warming, February 14, 2013, https://scholars.org/sites/scholars/files/ skocpol_captrade_report_january_2013_0.pdf (accessed September 21, 2020). Quote from p. 2. 118 John M. Broder, “‘Cap and Trade’ Loses Its Standing As Energy Policy of Choice,” New York Times, March 25, 2010. 119 John M. Broder, “House Passes Bill to Address Threat of Climate Change,” New York Times, June 26, 2009. 120 Meg Jacobs, “Obama’s Fight Against Global Warming,” in Zelizer, ed. The Presidency of Barack Obama, 62–77 at 66. 121 John M. Broder, “‘Cap and Trade’ Loses Its Standing As Energy Policy of Choice,” New York Times, March 25, 2010; Skocpol, “Naming the Problem”; Judith A. Layzer, “Cold Front: How the Recession Stalled Obama’s Clean Energy Agenda,” in Jacobs and Skocpol, eds., Reaching for a New Deal, 321–85. 122 Jeff Kluger, “Senator Throws Snowball! Climate Change Disproven!” Time, February 27, 2015, http://time.com/3725994/inhofe-snowball-climate (accessed February 10, 2017). For an elaboration in his views, James M. Inhofe, The Greatest Hoax: How the Global Warming Conspiracy Threatens Your Future (New York: WND Books, 2012).

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123 Inhofe on The Eric Metaxas Show, https://soundcloud.com/the-eric-metaxas-show/penny-nancejerry-mollen-senator-inhofe (accessed February 10, 2017). See Zoë Schlanger, “Senator Inhofe Declares Kids ‘Brainwashed’ After Granddaughter Asks About Climate Change,” Newsweek, July 27, 2016, http://www.newsweek.com/inhofe-declares-kids-brainwashed-after-granddaughter-asks-aboutclimate-change-484651 (accessed February 10, 2017). 124 See, among others, Eric Pooley, The Climate War: True Believers, Power Brokers, and the Fight to Save the Earth (New York: HarperCollins, 2010), 31–52. 125 Jess Shankleman, “China Tells Trump That Climate Change Is No Hoax It Invented,” Bloomberg News, November 16, 2016, https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2016-11-16/china-tells-trumpthat-climate-change-is-no-hoax-it-invented and Edward Wong, “Trump Has Called Climate Change a Chinese Hoax. Beijing Says It Is Anything But,” New York Times, November 18, 2016, https://www. nytimes.com/2016/11/19/world/asia/china-trump-climate-change.html?_r=0 (both accessed February 22, 2017). 126 “Now Is the Time: The President’s Plan to Protect Our Children and Communities by Reducing Gun Violence,” The White House, January 16, 2013, https://obamawhitehouse.archives.gov/sites/ default/files/docs/wh_now_is_the_time_full.pdf (accessed September 1, 2020). 127 Chris Cillizza, “Who Had the Worst Week in Washington? Sen. Dianne Feinstein (D-Calif.),” Washington Post, June 22, 2013. 128 Feinstein and Cruz quoted in Dan Freedman, “Feinstein Offers New Assault Weapons Ban,” Houston Chronicle, January 24, 2013, https://www.chron.com/default/article/Feinstein-offers-new-assaultweapons-ban-4221873.php (accessed September 1, 2020). 129 “Transcript from Remarks from the NRA Press Conference on the Sandy Hook School Shooting, Delivered on December 21, 2012,” Washington Post, December 21, 2012, https://www.washingtonpost. com/politics/remarks-from-the-nra-press-conference-on-sandy-hook-school-shooting-delivered-on-dec-212012-transcript/2012/12/21/bd1841fe-4b88-11e2-a6a6-aabac85e8036_story.html (accessed September 1, 2020). 130 James Warren, “Sen. Dianne Feinstein Says Daily News ‘Shame on U.S.’ Front Page Carries the Message of Assault Weapons Ban,” New York Daily News, April 17, 2013, https://www.nydailynews. com/news/national/sen-dianne-feinstein-daily-news-shame-u-s-front-page-carries-message-assaultweapons-ban-article-1.1319174 (accessed September 1, 2020). 131 Gregory Korte and Catalina Camia, “Obama on Senate Gun Vote: ‘A Shameful Day,’” USA Today, April 17, 2013, https://www.usatoday.com/story/news/politics/2013/04/17/guns-background-checksmanchin-senate/2090105/ (accessed September 1, 2020). Neera Tanden, Winnie Stachelberg, Arkady Gerney, and Danielle Baussan, “Preventing Gun Violence in Our Nation,” Center for American Progress, January 12, 2013, https://www.americanprogress.org/issues/courts/reports/2013/01/ 12/49510/preventing-gun-violence-in-our-nation/ (accessed September 1, 2020). 132 Daniel Luzer, “How State Gun Laws Have Changed Since Newton,” Governing, December 13, 2013, https://www.governing.com/news/headlines/How-State-Gun-Laws-Have-Changed-Since-Newtown. html (accessed September 1, 2020). 133 Reid Wilson, “Seven Years After Sandy Hook, the Politics of Guns Has Changed,” The Hill, December 14, 2019, https://thehill.com/homenews/state-watch/474479-seven-years-after-sandyhook-the-politics-of-guns-has-changed (accessed September 1, 2020). 134 Scott Higham, Sari Horwitz, and Katie Zezima, “The Fentanyl Failure,” Washington Post, March 19, 2019. 135 Ibid. 136 Scott Higham, Sari Horwitz, and Steven Rich, “76 Billion Opioid Pills: Newly Released Federal Data Unmasks the Epidemic,” Washington Post, July 16, 2019. The biggest distributors of opioids, from 2006–2012, were McKesson Corp. (14.1 billion pills, 18.4% of market share), Walgreens (12.6 billion, 16.5%), Cardinal Health (10.7 billion, 14.0%), Amerisource Bergen (8.9 billion, 11.7%), CVS (5.9 billion, 7.7%), and Walmart (5.2 billion, 6.9%). Four top manufacturers were SpecGx, Actavis Pharma, Par Pharmaceutical, and Purdue Pharma. Eric Eyre, “Drug Firms Shipped 20.8 Million Pain Pills to WV Town with 2,900 People,” Charleston Gazette-Mail, January 29, 2018, https://www. wvgazettemail.com/news/health/drug-firms-shipped-20-8m-pain-pills-to-wv-town-with-2-900people/article_ef04190c-1763-5a0c-a77a-7da0ff06455b.html (accessed November 4, 2020). 137 Katie Zezima and Colby Itkowitz, “Flailing on Fentanyl,” Washington Post, September 20, 2019.

Chapter 13

Democracy Challenged: 2017–2022

The Trump presidency is about Trump. Period. Full stop. (David Cay Johnston, 2018)1 Is our democracy in danger? It is a question we never thought we’d be asking. (Stephen Levitsky and Daniel Ziblatt, 2019)2 How did it come to this? A virus a thousand times smaller than a dust mote has humbled and humiliated the planet’s most powerful nation. (Ed Yong, 2020)3

The years 2017 through 2020, the Trump years, were some of the most contentious in recent American history. In a stunning upset, Donald Trump defeated Hillary Clinton for the presidency in 2016, gaining 306 electoral votes to her 232 (while losing to her in the popular vote by nearly 3 million voters), and crucially winning the formerly Democrat states of Wisconsin, Michigan, Pennsylvania, Ohio, and Florida. The shock and agony of Clinton supporters were palpable, with frustrated and outraged citizens, many of whom were women, marching in anger and protest at state capitols and in Washington. Trump supporters were thrilled, awaiting the president-elect who would cast aside political correctness, “drain the swamp” in Washington, build a wall that Mexico would pay for, and “Make America Great Again.” American small-town values and bluecollar jobs would be restored, and, finally, we would cut our ties to the rest of the world that has shown so little respect for America’s power and authority. The Trump years proved to be non-stop “breaking news,” with at times jaw-dropping tweets, norm defying actions, visceral threats to democratic values, the resurgence of hate crimes and racial tensions, the transformation of both the Republican Party into the Trump Party along with the leftward movement of the Democratic Party, and the silence and complicity of Trump’s partners in Congress. There were two years of investigations by a special prosecutor investigating the interference of Russia in the 2020 president campaign, an impeachment of the president for attempting to coerce a foreign power in ruining the reputation of a potential presidential rival, followed by a second, unprecedented, impeachment for inciting insurrection at the US Capitol. On top of it all was the invisible, yet deadly coronavirus. Its threat was brushed off by the president in its earliest stages, the advice of the medical and scientific community was not taken seriously, the pandemic became politicized—a measure of political allegiance to or defiance of the president. The economy was ravaged, lives and livelihoods were disrupted, work and school became fixated on a computer screen rather than a job site or classroom, with untold damage to mental and physical health. Most affected, as usual, were those on the margins, especially persons of color and of modest means; working mothers were particularly DOI: 10.4324/9781003293538-17

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impacted, forced to choose between a paycheck and children isolated at home. By the time of the 2020 election, some 250,000 Americans had died; by the end of Trump’s term, the death toll had surpassed 400,000. By early 2022, COVID deaths surpassed a million. Despite all the turmoil and wreckage of his presidency, the 2020 elections demonstrated once again the fervent support enjoyed by Trump. In 2016, some 55.7 percent of adults cast votes; in 2020, the figure reached record highs, with 66.7 percent of adults voting. Over 11.3 million more voters chose Trump in 2020 than voted for him in 2016. In 2020, Donald Trump received more votes (74.2 million) than any presidential candidate in American history—surpassed only by Joe Biden, who gained seven million more (81.2 million). But most shocking was the assault on the most basic of American democratic principles. Trump, along with his enablers in the right-wing media and in Congress, perpetuated the Big Lie, that the 2020 presidential election had been stolen. The consequences were predictable: pumped up by Trump’s inflammatory rhetoric, fervent supporters, urged to come to Washington on the day of the Electoral College certification, stormed the Capitol, frightening and angering lawmakers and citizens alike, embarrassing this beacon of democracy throughout the world. Once again, Trump was impeached; once again, enough Republican senators stood by his side and he was not convicted. The year 2020, with all its turmoil, was a year “of non-stop awfulness,” observed humorist Dave Barry, “a year when we kept saying it couldn’t possibly get worse, and it always did.”4

AMERICA DURING THIS ERA

The Era by the Numbers From 2010 to 2020, the United States population had grown by 22 million, a 7.4 percent increase, just slightly more than the smallest increase experienced during the 1930s. In December 2020, the estimated population was 331,449,281. The country has become more diverse during the decade. Since 2010, the non-Hispanic white population had declined 2.6 percent, while the African American population rose 5.6 percent, the Hispanic population grew by 23 percent, and the Asian population increased by 35 percent. In 2000, the non-Hispanic white population was 69 percent of the total; after the 2020 census, that dropped to 58 percent.5 California remained the largest state, with over 39.7 million, but its population increase was just 6.1 percent, less than the national average of 7.4 percent. Next were the fast-growing states of Texas with 29 million and Florida with 21.6 million. The fourth largest state, New York, with 19.4 million, grew, but at a rather anemic rate. Following the 2020 census, several states expanded their representation in Congress and, correspondingly, in the Electoral College. Five states (Colorado, Florida, Montana, North Carolina, and Oregon) each gained one seat in the House of Representatives and an additional electoral vote. Seven states (California, Illinois, Michigan, New York, Ohio, Pennsylvania, and West Virginia) each lost one representative and one electoral vote. Texas gained 3.8 million people (more than the combined populations of Wyoming, Vermont, Alaska, North Dakota, and South Dakota), two congressional seats and two electoral votes.6 For California, it was the first time in its 170-year history that it would lose a seat, going from 53 to 52 in the House of Representatives, and from 55 to 54 in the Electoral College. Income, Wealth, and Growing Inequality Median household income in 2018 topped $63,000 for the first time; but adjusted for inflation it was no better than twenty years earlier. For non-Hispanic white households, the median

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income was $70,642; for Asian households, $87,194; for African American households, $41,361; and for Hispanic households, $51,450.7 While income and wealth gains by the top 1 percent continued to receive much attention, not all economic growth went to the very top. Economist Stephen Rose noted that there was considerable growth in the upper middle class (incomes of $108,500 to $380,500) along with a decline in middle-class growth. In 1967, some 47 percent of individuals were considered middle class, dropping to 36 percent in 2016 ($54,000–$108,000) in 2020.8 But one of the reasons for the decline was the increase in the number of persons who moved up to the upper-middle-class bracket. For example, in 1967 just 6 percent of individuals were in the upper middle class; that jumped to 33 percent in 2016. Philosopher Matthew Stewart turned his attention to wealth, rather than income, and wrote about the 9.9 percenters, those Americans at the near top of the economic and social ladder, with a median wealth of $2.2 million in 2018. We 9.9 percenters live in safer neighborhoods, go to better schools, have shorter commutes, receive higher-quality health care, and, when circumstances require, serve time in better prisons. We also have more friends—the kind of friends who will introduce us to new clients or line up great internships for our kids.9 Furthermore, today in America, a child’s future ability to earn is closely tied with the socioeconomic standing of its parents. The measurement of inequality transmitted between generations, “intergenerational earnings elasticity,” for Americans is higher than in almost every advanced country. “The game is half over,” wrote Stewart, “once you’ve selected your parents.” Wealth accumulation was heavily skewed toward those at the top of the economic ladder. The Federal Reserve in a mid-2020 report noted that the top 1 percent of Americans accumulated $34.23 trillion in wealth; the next 9 percent had $43.09 trillion; the 50–90 percentile had $32.65 trillion; and the bottom 50 percent had $2.08 trillion.10 A worrisome economic reality has been the growth of income inequality. In 2018, income inequality reached its highest levels since the US Census Bureau began tracking it in 1967. The lengthy economic recovery since 2008 helped reduce poverty and unemployment, yet the separation between rich and poor has become greater than ever before. The 2020 pandemic only exacerbated the growing inequality, hitting women and minorities especially hard. Political scientists Jacob S. Hacker and Paul Pierson noted that, while many countries experience rising inequality, America is distinctive: “Not only has inequality grown spectacularly; it has grown in precisely the manner most likely to worsen the tensions at the heart of democracy.” Which countries come closest to our distribution of income and wealth? “Autocracies, such as China and Russia.”11 Minimum Wage, Poverty and Access to Health Care By the end of this era, the federal minimum wage continued to be $7.25, the same as it was in 2009. Seven states (mostly in the Deep South) had no state minimum wage or a wage lower than the federal minimum, and fourteen states followed the federal minimum. But twenty-nine states, the District of Columbia, and a number of cities and counties have increased the minimum wage above the federal level.12 Thus, the average of all the minimum wages is $11.89 an hour in 2019. Eighty-nine percent of the nation’s 6.8 million low wage employees have a minimum wage higher than $7.25 per hour. Those impacted most directly by the minimum wage were service industry employees, and the largest cohort were white women (47.2 percent).13 Attempts to raise the federal minimum wage during this era all have been stymied. The Democratic-controlled House

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passed a $15 an hour minimum wage in 2018, but the legislation was tabled in the Senate. A 2019 study by the Congressional Budget Office noted that an increase nationwide to $15 by 2025 would increase paychecks for 27 million workers and lift 1.3 million out of poverty.14 But as the economy rebounded from the pandemic year, employers were finding it difficult to secure low-wage workers. Signing bonuses and other enticements, along with higher minimum wages, were needed to lure workers back; many did not come and the labor force underwent a fundamental shift. Some 9 million Americans gained health care coverage in 2013–2014, thanks to Medicaid expansion and ACA marketplaces for individuals and families who could not afford health care. By 2018, however, state support for public insurance for the poor had decreased, and Medicaid enrollment had dropped 0.7 percent. By 2018, the economy was strong, pushing down the poverty level to its lowest level since 2001. Despite fewer people in poverty, some 27.5 million (or 8.5 percent) Americans still did not have health care coverage in 2018; just the year before, the figure was 7.9 percent. The hardest hit adults were Hispanics and recent naturalized citizens.15 These figures predate the COVID crisis, which devastated workers at the economic margins who had lost both their jobs and health care benefits.

Society Under Stress Threats to Democratic Values and Institutions This era experienced extraordinary damaging and long-lasting threats to democratic values and institutions. The underlying tensions had long been simmering, but they were amplified by Donald Trump. Above All, Defying the Will of the People and Attacking the Legitimacy of Elections Voters caught a glimpse of this in 2016, when candidate Trump was asked during the final presidential debate whether he would abide by the election results (itself a question that would have been unthinkable in elections past). In a startling admission, Trump replied that he might not accept the results. Then at a rally the next day he said, “I will totally accept the results of this great and historic presidential election, if I win.” If I win. That audacious declaration struck at the very core of electoral legitimacy; voters decide, not candidates. The Trump conceit was that the elections were riddled with fraud, caused, of course, by his opponents. Early in his presidency, Trump set up a voter fraud commission, but it was disbanded the next year without finding any evidence of voter fraud. In March 2020, Democratic leaders were discussing mail-in voting, same day registration, and early voting systems as necessary adjustments in the wake of the COVID crisis. Trump, appearing on “Fox & Friends,” said that the things they had in there were crazy. They had things, levels of voting, that if you’d ever agreed to it, you’d never have a Republican elected in this country again. … They had things in there about election days and what you do and all sorts of clawbacks.16 This was an extraordinary admission: let everyone vote, and we’d lose the election. The corollary was this: keep the wrong people from voting, and we’ll have a chance of winning.17 Many states rushed to adopt mail-in voting as a safe alternative to in-person voting during pandemic times. Four or five months before the election, Trump primed his supporters with reckless and false assertions that mail-in voting would be corrupt. He argued that the election should be postponed, tweeting that if mail-in ballots were allowed, the results would be the “most

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INACCURATE & FRAUDULENT” Election in history.” Millions of counterfeit ballots would be printed by foreign countries, the president tweeted, resulting in a rigged election. And, it would go without saying that the fraud and inaccuracy all would be perpetrated in favor of the Democrats. FBI director Christopher A. Wray warned about the “steady drumbeat of misinformation” about mail-in voting (not mentioning Trump specifically), stating that it would erode confidence in the election system; election experts called Trump’s bald assertions “farcical.”18 But Trump persisted in hawking this false and dangerous narrative; and his fervent supporters, following his tweets and watching Fox News, were lapping it up, convinced that the election had been stolen. Biden beat Trump by about 7 million votes, and, ironically, beat him in the Electoral College by the same margin as Trump won in 2016, 306–232. After Biden won, Homeland Security head of cybersecurity Christopher C. Krebs stated that the election had been “the most secure in American history.” Krebs was in charge of rooting out disinformation about American elections; he found false information coming not from Russia, but from the White House. Krebs was promptly fired by Trump. This led to an uproar on Capitol Hill. “Of all the things this president has done, this is the worst,” said Senator Angus S. King, Jr. (Independent—Maine). “To strike at the heart of the democratic system is beyond anything we have seen from any politician.”19 (No, the worst was yet to come.)

Photo 13.1 Christopher C. Krebs (b. 1977). Homeland Security head of cybersecurity. Source: US Department of Homeland Security.

Trump’s election fraud fabrications were aided and abetted by a shrill chorus of high-profile media supporters. As just one example, Fox News anchor Sean Hannity, Trump’s go-to media apologist, days after the November election, set the tone: While the very frail, the very weak, cognitively struggling Joe Biden is probably fast asleep in his basement bunker, dreaming of picking out drapes for the Oval Office, well, investigations continue in multiple key states—where hundreds now of sworn affidavits are being filed, lawsuits are being filed, alleging serious election misconduct.20 Millions of Trump hard-core supporters, chanting “Stop the Steal!”, soaked in reports from right-wing media about alleged massive fraud, were convinced that Trump had been wronged and the election had been rigged. How could Trump loyalists come to this conclusion? First, for

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months they were fed with assertions by Trump and his enablers that mail-in ballots would corrupt the system. Second, on election night, Trump was indeed ahead of Biden in several key battleground states. Republicans tend to vote on Election Day; Democrats tend to favor mail-in ballots, and those ballots had not been fully counted. Thus, what might have appeared as a victory for Trump on election night turned into a Biden victory when all the mail-in votes were counted days later. Third, was the constant barrage of voter fraud accusations by Fox News and others after the votes were counted. Media Matters for America, a liberal-oriented media watchdog, counted 774 times that Fox network hosts and their guests asserted that the election was rigged or cast doubt on the results, even after Fox called the win for Biden.21 Despite losing over fifty lawsuits that alleged voter fraud, despite the certification and recount of votes by state officials, despite the Electoral College vote, despite his own attorney general admitting there was no widescale fraud, Trump carried on, grasping for more and more outlandish voter fraud conspiracies pushed by advisers on the far-right fringe.22 In one last desperate move, 126 Republican lawmakers, cowered by the president’s ire and the fervent support of his base, joined in a lawsuit brought by the Texas attorney general and seventeen other Republican state attorneys general, challenging the election outcome in several states. It was more a publicity stunt (and loyalty test) than a solid case. The Supreme Court summarily dismissed the case, noting that Texas had lacked standing. Then came the storming of the Capitol on January 6, 2021, the day that the Electoral College votes would be certified and officially be announced, and a new president recognized. The sight of outraged Trump supporters and provocateurs breaking into the Capitol and threatening lawmakers shook America and the world. The images of a besieged Capitol, overrun police forces, and lawmakers scurrying for cover will remain some of the most damaging impressions of the world’s leading democracy gone astray. Trump displayed no contrition for instigating the assault on the Capitol. “People thought what I said was totally appropriate,” he told reporters the next day as he left to visit the border wall in Texas. The “real problem,” Trump asserted, was the racial justice protests that occurred during the summer of 2020.23 Immediately following the insurrection, Senator Mitt Romney (Republican—Utah) gave a thundering speech to sustained applause stating that lawmakers should respect voters by telling them the truth: We gather due to a selfish man’s injured pride and the outrage of supporters who he has deliberately misinformed for the past two months and stirred to action this very morning. What happened here today was an insurrection incited by the president of the United States. Following the riot, the House and the Senate reassembled, and among Trump loyalists in both chambers, the Big Lie persisted. One hundred forty-seven Republicans in the House voted against certifying Biden’s victory; in the Senate, senators Ted Cruz and Josh Hawley (Republican—Missouri), joined by six other Republican senators, pushed the Big Lie. Finally, around 4:00 a.m., Biden’s victory was certified. Trump tweeted that he promised an orderly transition, noting that the vote in Congress “represents the end of the greatest first term in presidential history.”24 On the last day of Trump’s presidency, Mitch McConnell, from the floor of the Senate, delivered a stinging public rebuke of the president and the violence at the Capitol. “The mob was fed lies,” McConnell charged. “They were provoked by the president and other powerful people, and they tried to use fear and violence to stop a specific proceeding of the first branch of the federal government which they did not like.”25 For the moment, McConnell had challenged Trump and his falsehoods.

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The damage was done, permanently embedded in the memories and worldview of millions of Trump supporters. It was impossible for Trump to admit defeat, to admit to his followers that the allegations of fraud and rigged elections were all a big lie. It was difficult to ignore that his cries of voter fraud centered on Detroit, Milwaukee, Philadelphia, and Atlanta—all big urban areas with significant African American populations. Millions were convinced that Biden was an illegitimate president, and as long as former president Trump failed to counsel them otherwise, that poison would remain. Crippling the Institutions of Government Trump promised to “drain the swamp” in Washington, to rid the country of lazy, inept, corrupt bureaucrats, to give the government backbone as it faced countless problems at home and abroad. For Trump, the federal bureaucracy and federal institutions were the enemy. He excoriated the intelligence services, the military, the diplomatic corps, demanded that the Justice Department serve his personal needs, tossed aside experienced, long-serving non-partisan policy experts, vilified those who dared speak out against him, fired those who disagreed with him, even his own political appointees whom he had praised just months before. Federal agencies were hollowed out: thousands of senior level positions were left unfilled, agencies were often leaderless or faced with unprecedented turmoil at the top. Probably the most egregious action against the “deep state” was Trump’s October 2020 executive order stripping job protections from civil servants who had policy roles. The Washington Post called the order “the most significant assault on the nonpartisan civil service in its 137-year history.”26 It was four years in the making, and a top goal of conservative policy organizations, and would make senior levels of the civil service far more vulnerable to the whims of the White House. Through a series of executive orders, Trump curtailed the ability of labor unions to represent employees, halted diversity training, and allowed agencies to fire workers quicker. Representative Gerald E. Connolly (Democrat—Virginia), whose district has thousands of federal employees, stated that the Trump legacy was “one of the most wretched in the history of civil service and the federal government. I mean, very hostile.”27 Then came the months-long, undetected 2020 cyberattack on federal agencies; immediate damage and long-term consequences will be assessed for years to come. All fingers pointed to Russian agents; Trump, true to form, downplayed the consequences, tweeting that it probably was China, not Russia, who might be blamed. Mainstream Media as the “Enemy of the People” Presidents historically have had a rough time with the press, but none had gone so far as Trump in vilifying it. Particular targets were the nation’s leading newspapers, the New York Times, the Washington Post, the Wall Street Journal, the wire services, or network television news such as CBS, MS-NBC, CNN, and PBS—the reviled “mainstream media.” Even his favorite news source, Fox News, fell out of favor when on the rare occasion it was not his cheerleader, but his critic. One of the pillars of democratic society is a free and open press, able to praise, criticize, and accurately report on the comings and goings of government without fear of retaliation. One of Trump’s key strategies was to debunk the traditional press, dismissing critical coverage as “fake news,” denying reporters access, threatening journalists and news organizations with denial of press privileges, and labelling them “enemies of the people.” Dictators and autocrats throughout the centuries, going back to Roman times, had used that phrase to delegitimize those opposed to them. In his memoirs, Nikita Khrushchev wrote that Joseph Stalin “referred to everyone who disagreed with him as an ‘enemy of the people.’”28

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Give Trump his due: he is a master at drawing attention to himself, daily, hourly, through both traditional news outlets and social media, while using Twitter to go directly to his 89 million followers, raging against his enemies, stoking his own agenda, retweeting often inflammatory statements of others, and creating his own media ecosystem. Trump, however, never reached the 135 million Twitter followers enjoyed by Barack Obama, and soon after the Capitol Hill insurrection, he was permanently banned from Twitter. Four months after he left office, Trump had lost 36 million Twitter followers.29 Social Media, Lies, Disinformation, and Conspiracies For well over a decade, social scientists have written on the social, psychological, and political impact of social media. In 2020, a documentary, The Social Dilemma, gave the public sobering insights into the power of social media, data mining, and the use of artificial intelligence to reconfigure how we view reality and society.30 Millions, even billions, of social media users upload pictures, update their activities, spout off opinions—innocent and harmless communication. But the darker side of social media has individuals and groups spreading falsehoods, conspiracy theories, alternative reality, and often malicious takes on events and truth. Outrage, misinformation, conspiracies, blatant lies abound on social media, and for many citizens, social media is their main source of information. All this is abetted by algorithms, designed by a small number of software engineers, developed to enhance narratives, to quickly and conveniently capture information that reinforces one’s own reality. Former design ethicist at Google, Tristan Harris, observed that “Never before in history have fifty designers made decisions that would have an impact on two billion people.” Even the most popular social media platforms were ripe for exploitation. Russia didn’t hack Facebook, it merely used this social media platform to spread disinformation, sow social discord, and watch how it spread to like-minded viewers.31 Online provocateurs were further abetted by a president who was notorious for his “assault on truth,” his misleading statements, exaggerations, and outright lies. Throughout his administration the Washington Post, among others, kept a running tally of Trump’s false and misleading statements. As of August 27, 2020, having served 1,316 days, Trump lied or mislead through his tweets and statements, 22,247 times.32 By election day in November 2020, Trump’s lies and misstatements went into overdrive, averaging over fifty a day, topping 25,000, and reached a total of 30,573 by the end of his term. The essence of conspiracy theory is the belief that “a small group of people are working in secret against the common good, they create harm, to effect some negative change in society, to seize power for themselves, or to hide some deadly or consequential secret.”33 Conspiracy theories appeal particularly to people who feel locked out of the political system, marginalized, and overlooked, with their way of life and cultural values challenged and slipping away. There is a profound distrust of elites, fear of outsiders, xenophobia, and an eagerness to give a collective middle finger to the establishment. Conspiracy theories have a long history in American politics, but during this era, a new cottage industry of conspiracy theorists has emerged. A Lot of People Are Saying, the title of a book on the new conspiracism in America, captures this phenomenon. Political scientists Russell Muirhead and Nancy L. Rosenblum note that the new conspiracism has moved “from the fringe and has taken up residence in the highest levels of government, and it makes an appearance in day-to-day political life.” Its primary goal is to delegitimize democratic institutions, by spouting about “rigged elections, plans to impose martial law, depictions of political opponents as criminals, a Department of Justice planning a coup against the president.”34

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Long-time commentators on the ideological right, like Rush Limbaugh, Sean Hannity, and Glenn Beck were being supplemented by new voices, whispering and shouting “conspiracy.”35 For example, Alex Jones, infamous for his contention (since retracted) that the massacre at Sandy Hook did not happen, was called by the Southern Poverty Law Center the “most prolific conspiracy theorist in contemporary America.” His radio show, syndicated nationally on sixty stations, attracted 2 million weekly listeners, and through his conspiracy-themed websites, InfoWars.com and PrisonPlant.com, Jones peddled “documentaries” about secret government camps, the “New World Order,” conspiracies about the 9/11 terrorist attacks, among other diatribes. “Obama is hard-core Wahabist; he is al-Qaeda,” Jones proclaimed in 2016.36 In late 2017, “Q” (an anonymous person or persons) began posting conspiracy theories online, alleging criminal collusion by child-molesting Democrats, Hollywood elites, and their Deep State allies. The postings of followers are littered with racist and anti-Semitic statements. Q claims to be a high-level government figure who has special security clearance, giving him (her) access to secret information about the plots. Trump is the heroic figure who is leading the fight, cleaning up the deep-rooted corruption. At least six 2020 candidates for Congress, all Republicans, subscribed to QAnon theories, and two, Marjorie Taylor Greene of Georgia and Lauren Boebert of Colorado, were elected to office. House Minority Leader Kevin McCarthy denounced QAnon in August 2020, stating that “There is no place for QAnon in the Republican Party,” and called Greene’s comments “appalling”; yet remained neutral during her primary run. President Trump praised Greene, calling her a “future Republican star” who is “strong on everything.”37 At the fateful January 6, 2021 electoral college vote meeting in the House of Representatives, both Greene and Boebert—just days into their new office—were given opportunities to defend the president and push the baseless election fraud conspiracy. Just three weeks after arriving in Congress, Greene filed specious articles of impeachment against Biden on his second day in office. Later, the majority of Republican House members stood up for her when she was kicked off the Education committee. Defiance of Authority “Massive resistance” was the defiant stance of southern politicians and white citizens during the 1950s against public school desegregation; anti-Vietnam war rallies sprung up all over America during the 1960s and early 1970s. During this era, 2017–2020, defiance and protest were evident, from citizens and government officials both on the right and the left. One such movement was called the “constitutionalist sheriffs”: local law enforcement officials who took it upon themselves to assess state and federal law and the constitution. Some sheriffs refused to enforce federal or state gun control regulations, federal land-use provisions, or federal tax requirements, or, on the other end of the ideological spectrum, refused to enforce Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) demands to cooperate in arresting illegal immigrants. Sheriffs are locally elected, beholden directly by the people, and when a state or federal policy is unpopular, constitutional sheriffs argue that they have the authority to buck the law or policy. During the coronavirus pandemic, some constitutionalist’s sheriffs refused to enforce lockdown orders coming from the state government. Most constitutional sheriffs are in rural parts of states, and they balked at restrictions on firearms. Following the 2012 Sandy Hook massacre, some 100 sheriffs went on record opposing, and refusing to enforce, any new gun restrictions that the Obama administration would create. In 2018, voters in Washington state through a ballot initiative passed stricter gun laws; many rural sheriffs refused to comply with the law.38

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Some rural communities, calling themselves “Second Amendment Sanctuaries,” fueled by deep cultural rifts, were refusing to enforce new restrictions on gun ownership. In Virginia, urban-based Democrats regained control of state legislature and rural folks increasingly felt that their way of life was threatened, and demanded sanctuary status. In New Mexico, 25 of 33 counties declared themselves Second Amendment sanctuaries; in Illinois, two thirds of the counties had done the same. Their actions were fanned by the National Rifle Association, Virginia Citizens Defense League, and others.39 On the other side of the ideological spectrum, several cities have declared themselves to be sanctuary cities for undocumented immigrants. Shortly after taking office, President Trump issued an executive order bolstering immigration enforcement and punishing local governments that did not comply with federal authorities. The order, however, was blocked in November 2017 by a federal court. In “sanctuary cities,” officials have refused to hand over illegal immigrants for federal authorities for deportation. An ICE report noted in 2017 that in the 168 counties where a great majority of immigrants live, 69 counties refused ICE requests to hold arrestees in jail because of their immigration status.40 Immigrants, Xenophobia, and Border Walls When the Immigration and Naturalization Act of 1965 went into effect, 9.6 million immigrants lived in the United States; since then, the foreign-born population has grown dramatically. In 2017, there were 44.8 million immigrants living in the United States and that number is expected to reach 78.2 million by 2065, according to the Pew Research Center. During this era, the focus and the tension in immigration policy was primarily on migrants from Mexico and Central America, as well as from countries with significant Muslim populations. Yet, a Brookings Institution study found that since 2010, legal immigrants from Southeast Asia came in greater numbers (41 percent) than those from Latin America (35 percent), and that 45 percent of those entering the United States were college educated.41 Nearly half of all immigrants live in three states: California, Texas, and Florida. Refugees—those fleeing their home countries because of well-founded fear of persecution, war, or violence—form a much smaller set of those seeking to come to the United States. Each year, the president, in consultation with Congress, sets the limit on the number of refugees who can be admitted to the United States. There are an estimated 26 million refugees worldwide. During the last year of the Obama administration, the United States admitted just 85,000 refugees, most of whom were escaping turmoil in the Democratic Republic of Congo. But that number was drastically reduced during the Trump years, with the president asking for a ceiling of only 15,000 for Fiscal Year 2021.42 Thousands of asylum seekers, many coming from Central America, had been turned away by the Trump administration, which adopted a “metering” system, requiring those individuals to wait in Mexico and put their names on an ever-growing list. In previous years, asylum seekers had to appear before US Customs and Border Patrol officials and go through a series of steps to demonstrate that they met the traditional standards of having a credible fear of persecution if they were forced to return to their home country. The backlog of asylum cases in immigration courts had reached 1.7 million as of April 2020. Persons going through the vetting process had to wait on average more than 930 days, or two and a half years (1,300 days in Illinois and Virginia) before they were granted relief. While most attention has come from asylum seekers from Central America, the largest percentage of those granted asylum came from China (18 percent) and Venezuela (16 percent) in the latest reporting period.43 Anti-immigrant sentiment was stoked by Trump and his complicit legislative allies. Not only were everyday immigrants berated and ridiculed, but so too were members of Congress. In a

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blatant lie, President Trump chastised Ilhan Omar, a member of Congress from Minnesota, born in Somalia, and one of just two Muslim women in Congress, for professing her “love” of al Qaeda. The president charged that Omar and three other first-term female lawmakers (“The Squad”)—all American citizens and representing collectively several million constituents— “hate America” and should “go back and help fix the totally broken and crime-infested [countries] from which they came.”44 Struggles of the White Working Class The alarming rate of deaths among middle-aged White working-class Americans has been chronicled by a number of writers, including economists Anne Case and Angus Deaton, who coined the phrase “deaths of despair.”45 They wrote that there are three leading causes of deaths of despair among middle-aged people: alcohol, suicide, and opioid addiction. While suicide and alcohol are more prevalent, opioid overdoses are the “largest and fastest growing” of the deaths of despair.46 There was a marked increase in opioid addiction during the 2020 pandemic. “Our story of deaths of despair; of pain; of addiction, alcoholism, and suicide; of worse jobs with lower wages; of declining marriage; and of declining religion is mostly a story of non-Hispanic White Americans without a four-year degree,” they wrote. The four-year college degree is “increasingly dividing America.”47 Recent studies have emphasized the political and social consequences of the deterioration of many in the white working class. Sociologist Robert J. Wuthnow argued that the “outrage of rural America that surprised so many observers during the 2016 presidential election was there well before and would have been evident had anyone bothered to look. It did not happen overnight and is unlikely to diminish anytime soon.”48 How have federal policymakers responded to the needs and concerns of these Americans? In her study of the white working class, law professor Joan C. Williams argued that “during an era when wealthy White Americans have learned to sympathetically imagine the lives of the poor, people of color, and LGBTQ people, the White working class has been insulted or ignored during precisely the period when their economic fortunes tanked.”49 From the years of the Great Depression, white working-class people mostly turned to the Democratic Party. But in 2016, and again in 2020, they found their champion in Donald Trump.50 State of Black Economic Progress When measuring wealth, rather than income, there are enormous disparities between white and black families. Today, the median wealth of white families ($171,000) is about ten times that of black families ($17,000). A 2020 report by the Joint Economic Committee of Congress noted that many Americans were unaware of the “very deep” inequities. In many years, Blacks experience recession-like conditions even in an economy in which others were thriving. Blacks suffer about twice the unemployment rate as Whites. The typical Black household earns about $29,000 less annual income than its White counterpart. Black children are three times as likely as White children to grow up in poverty, and they are much more likely to remain there.51 Then came the COVID pandemic, with its devastating impact on persons of color. The Ugly Specter of Mass Shootings, Hate Crimes, Police Actions, and Racism This era experienced six of the most deadly mass shootings in American history. Just the year before this era began, forty-nine persons were killed at the Pulse Night Club in Orlando,

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Florida, in 2016. Then at the Mandalay Bay Hotel in Las Vegas, in 2017, fifty-eight people attending a country music festival were murdered and hundreds more were injured. In 2017, twenty-six persons, including a 17-month-old baby, were murdered at a rural church in Sutherland Springs, Texas. At the Tree of Life synagogue in Pittsburgh in 2018, eleven persons were killed during Shabbat service. That same year, at the Marjorie Stoneman Douglas High School in southeastern Florida, seventeen students and staff were killed and dozens were injured. In 2019, twenty-two persons were murdered at a Walmart store in El Paso, Texas; twelve were murdered in Dayton, Ohio; twelve persons were killed at a municipal center in Virginia Beach, Virginia; and ten were killed at a high school in Santa Fe, New Mexico. “God bless the people of El Paso, Texas. God bless the people of Dayton, Ohio,” President Trump tweeted. While much attention has been paid to mass shootings, a far greater number of deaths are caused by gun-related suicides. In 2018, some 24,432 Americans used guns to kill themselves; this is an increase from 19,392 in 2010. With the pandemic, there has been a steady increase in gun sales, along with the stress and tensions of life, job losses, overall trauma, and suicides.52 The FBI reported that hate crimes—personal attacks motivated by prejudice or bias—hit a sixteen-year high in 2018, with a big uptick in violence against Hispanics, and a drop in crimes against Muslims and Arab-Americans. State and local governments are not required to report such crimes, and many individuals are reluctant to report them as well. But the best estimate is that 2018 had 7,100 hate crime incidents throughout the United States; around 60 percent of the hate crimes were motivated by race.53 It was not a hate crime, but a police action, that sparked an extraordinary reaction. Captured on video, the nine and a half excruciating minutes leading to the death of George Floyd in Minneapolis in May 2020, sparked immediate outrage and pleas for police reform. There were protests throughout the nation and the world, igniting long-simmering complaints against police treatment of minorities. Floyd, a forty-six-year-old African American, was just the most visible victim of a string of police-related deaths, caught on cellphones, and spread throughout virtual world. His death, and the acquittal of police officers in the reckless fatal shooting of Breonna Taylor in Louisville, brought people to the streets, shut down neighborhoods, sparked violence, and led to calls for defunding the police. Democrats in the House proposed a sweeping package of police reform, the Justice in the Justice in Policing Act. Before introducing the bill in the Capitol’s Emancipation Hall, Speaker Pelosi and twenty other Democrats knelt for a lengthy time, emphasizing the long minutes that the Minneapolis policeman knelt on the neck of the handcuffed Floyd. Weeks later, President Trump spoke in the Rose Garden about how the economy was coming back “like a rocket ship” and noted the nationwide protests against racism and police brutality. “Hopefully, George is looking down right now and saying this is a great thing that’s happening for our country. … This is a great day for him.” One commentator noted Trump’s “breathtaking disconnect from the pain and tumult that has unfolded in this country.” Hours later, Trump retweeted a comment by conservative commentator Candace Owens, “The fact that [Floyd] has been held up as a martyr sickens me.”54 The resurfacing of racial trauma during the Trump era has led to an outpouring of bestselling and award-winning books from academics and journalists on the state of poverty, racism, and culture. Journalist Ta-Nehisi Coates argued forcefully for reparations; psychologist Jennifer A. Richeson wrote about the mythology of racial progress; sociologist Matthew Desmond described the trauma and cruelty of marginal people evicted from their housing; consultant Mary-Frances Winters examined how racism eroded the mind, body, and spirit; author Ijeoma Oluo wrote frankly about blunt truths of racial oppression and ways forward; historian Ibram X. Kendri wrote about the history of racist ideas and in a separate study how to become an anti-racist; professor Robin J. DiAngelo wrote about how difficult it is for white

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people to talk about race. In separate studies professor Carol Anderson and historian Richard Rothstein chronicled the long history of government involvement in racial discrimination; and author Isabel Wilkerson wrote about the epic African American Great Migration and the pernicious reality of a racial caste system both in America and in India.55 The Majority/Minority America, the Culture Wars, and Christian Nationalism Donald Trump was not the first politician to foment the culture wars. In recent memory, there was Jesse A. Helms Jr., the one-time broadcaster and then senator from North Carolina, who appealed to rural and small town White blue-collar workers and evangelical Christians, fighting against cultural liberalism (LGBTQ and abortion rights), attacking “liberal bias” in newspapers and “liberal elites” in big cities who supported busing and desegregation.56 In the current era, many elements of the cultural war still reverberate. Two significant long-term demographic trends are being played out in national politics and party identification. First, is the fact that within just a little more than two decades, white people will be in the minority. Second, that there is a growing trend, especially among young adults, to be affiliated with no religion. Census projections indicate that the United States will be “minority White” by the year 2045. That year, whites will constitute 49.7 percent of the population, Hispanics will comprise 24.6 percent, blacks 13.1 percent, Asians 7.9 percent, and 3.8 percent will be multi-racial. Racial minorities will continue to expand and the aging white population will experience a long-term decline.57 In a 2019 study, the Pew Research Center noted that the religious landscape in the United States “continues to change at a rapid clip.”58 About 65 percent of American adults described themselves as Christians, down 12 percentage points from a decade earlier. At the same time, persons identifying as unaffiliated, atheist, agnostic, or “nothing in particular” went up to 26 percent, from 17 percent in 2009. The majority of white evangelicals believed that Trump understood and supported them. Given Trump’s character flaws—everything from illicit affairs, dubious business dealings, to blatant lying—how could conservative Christians tolerate such behavior? Journalist Katherine Stewart argued that such tolerance is “proof enough that the religious-nationalist end of the right-wing information bubble has gotten more, not less, resistance over time.”59 They felt, according to a 2020 Pew survey, that the Trump administration had helped (59 percent) rather than hurt (7 percent) their interests. Three out of four white evangelicals say that they agree with Trump on “many,” “nearly all,” or “all” important issues facing the country. Fully two-thirds of white evangelicals believed that Christianity’s influence in American life is decreasing, and that Trump, despite his flaws, was their best hope for protecting their way of life. In a 2019 Fox News poll, 55 percent of evangelicals believed that God wanted Trump to be president.60 White evangelicals came out in large numbers during the 2020 election, giving Trump their overwhelming endorsement. Some of the cultural battles have softened; others have not. In 2019, roughly 60 percent of Americans said they supported same-sex marriage, double the approval found in 2004. Among Republicans and those leaning Republican, 44 percent supported same-sex marriage, up from 19 percent in 2004.61 Further, there is broad support for LGBTQ rights across the fifty states, and are “almost universally popular, even among traditional conservative groups.”62 According to Robert Jones, founder of the Public Religion Research Institute (PRRI), “whether you’re talking about marriage equality, nondiscrimination protection—everybody has moved. Seniors have moved, White evangelicals have moved, base Republicans have moved.”63 Since Roe v. Wade in 1973, the issue of a woman’s right to have an abortion and a state’s right to protect the unborn has been center-stage in the culture wars. Over the fifty years since

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Roe, public opinion has been remarkably consistent: around 30 percent of adults believe abortions should be legal under all circumstances, 50 percent think abortions should be legal but only under certain circumstances, and 20 percent state that abortions should be illegal in all circumstances. When asked by the Gallup organization to label themselves “pro-choice” or “pro-life,” Americans in 2020 split almost evenly, with pro-choice at 48 percent and pro-life at 46 percent. Conservatives (77 percent) and Republicans (68 percent) strongly consider themselves pro-life, while Liberals (78 percent) and Democrats (72 percent) consider themselves pro-choice.64 The new culture war, according to Jones, “is about preserving a White, Christian America.” In a 2019 PRRI poll, 69 percent of Republicans said they thought discrimination against white people was just as much a problem as discrimination against racial minorities.65 The movement has been called “Christian nationalism,” and according to sociologists Andrew L. Whitehead and Samuel L. Perry, its adherents believe that “America has been and should always be distinctively Christian … from top to bottom—in its self-identity, interpretations of its own history, sacred symbols, cherished values, and public policies—and it aims to keep it that way.”66 The Christian nationalist movement has been funded by conservative wealthy donors, like the Prince-DeVos family, the David Green family of Hobby Lobby fame, and Dan and Farris Wilks, the fracking billionaire brothers, by fundamentalist mega churches, and by an army of so-called “values voters.”67 Coronavirus Pandemic America had been caught off guard before. The 2008 financial crisis led to near panic and lastminute congressional actions. The terrorist attacks on September 11, 2001, were met with anxiety and confusion, ignoring earlier warning signs, and leading to a heavy-handed, panicked response from Congress. Hurricane Andrew in 1992 and Hurricane Katrina in 1995 showed how ill-prepared the federal government’s response was to natural disasters. Then came the coronavirus. Bush II homeland security advisor Frances (Fran) Townsend, who had read about the 1918 influenza pandemic, urged the Bush administration to be prepared for a similar outbreak. Despite pushback from others, she was, with Bush’s support, able to assemble a pandemic strategy, which was later handed off to the Obama administration. During the Obama years, the country was faced with the deadly virus threats from H1N1, Zika, and, most frightful of all, Ebola. Philanthropist Bill Gates gave a 2015 TED talk, “The Next Outbreak? We’re Not Ready,” warning that a worldwide pandemic could be coming, and that we would not be ready. “If anything kills over 10 million people in the next decade, it is likely to be a highly infectious virus. … Not missiles, but microbes.” By November 2020, over 31 million viewers had viewed his stark prediction on YouTube.68 In 2016, the Obama administration produced a comprehensive report on the lessons learned from combatting Ebola.69 During the transition from the Obama to Trump administrations, Lisa Monaco, Obama’s homeland security adviser, briefed the new Trump homeland security officials. She included in the discussion, as journalist Dan Balz described it, a “nightmare scenario: a new strain of flu that was a respiratory illness for which there was no vaccine and that because of globalization and travel patterns would be nearly impossible to contain.”70 Several months before the coronavirus hit America, the Johns Hopkins University school of public health issued a first-ever report on pandemic preparedness throughout the world. The Global Health Security Index, issued in October 2019, ranked 195 countries on their preparedness. “No country is fully prepared for epidemics or pandemics, and every country has important gaps to address,” the report noted. But the United States ranked number one in the

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six categories measured: prevention, early detection and reporting, rapid response and mitigation, sufficient and robust health system, and compliance with international norms.71 That same month, the Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) released a draft report, Crimson Contagion, that played out a secret scenario of a world-wide influenza outbreak. Trump administration leaders were warned, America seemingly was best prepared for a potential pandemic, but federal policymakers, particularly the president himself, failed in their response to this extraordinary crisis. American intelligence agencies had issued classified, ominous warnings in January and February 2020 about a global pandemic; but Trump and lawmakers, still in the thick of the impeachment hearings, ignored the warnings. “Donald Trump may not have been expecting this, but a lot of other people in the government were—they just couldn’t get him to do anything about it,” said an intelligence official. “The system was blinking red.”72 On February 14, 2020, Trump said, “We have a very small number of people in the country, right now, with it. It’s like around twelve. Many of them are getting better. Some are fully recovered already. So we’re in very good shape.”73 Trump acknowledged to investigative reporter Bob Woodward that the virus was dangerous. “It’s also more deadly than your—you know, your—even your strenuous flus.” But Trump wanted to “always play it down. I still like playing it down, because I don’t want to create a panic.”74 Then later, Trump publicly said, “I think it’s going to work out fine. I think when we get into April, in the warmer weather, that has a very negative effect on that and that type of a virus.” Five days later, he tweeted, “The Coronavirus is very much under control in the USA. Stock Market starting to look very good to me!” “One day—it’s like a miracle—it will disappear.” Seven weeks later, at least 30,000 persons had died in the United States, and jobless claims reached 22 million. Lives and workplaces were disrupted, public gatherings shut down, schools transformed to online education, and COVID-19, as it was now called, became not just a public health concern, but also a political litmus test. If you believed health experts, if you believed Dr. Anthony Fauci, you took the pandemic threat seriously, wore a mask, social distanced, and took special precautions. If you believed Trump, you dismissed the health experts, disdained wearing masks or social distancing, proclaimed your right to personal freedom, and assured yourself that you’d never get sick.

Photo 13.2 Anthony S. Fauci, MD (b. 1940). Health adviser to seven presidents and lead government scientist on the COVID pandemic. Source: National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases via Creative Commons Attribution 2.0 Generic License.

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In the Fall, just weeks away from the presidential election, COVID cases continued to surge. Democratic candidate Joe Biden focused his campaign on the failures of the Trump administration in tackling the pandemic. No other country had seen such a spread of the virus, nor the death toll experienced in the United States. In October, Trump fought back: “People are tired of hearing Fauci and all these idiots.” Then later at a campaign rally in North Carolina, he told his cheering followers, “COVID, COVID, COVID, COVID, COVID, COVID! We’re doing great. Our numbers are incredible.”75 The crowd cheered him on. By the end of 2020, more than 300,000 Americans had died, COVID infections were surpassing 200,000 a day, hospital facilities in many states were overwhelmed, and public health officials were bracing for the predicted bounce in infections coming from the holiday season. On the last day of Trump’s presidency, January 19, 2021, more than 400,000 Americans had died, and the country was witnessing a COVID-related death every 26 seconds; five weeks later, a total of 500,000 had died.76 By early 2022, America reached the grim figure of over one million deaths. The Polarization of the Political Parties There was no doubt that the leader of the Republican Party throughout this period was Donald Trump. Not that he was a long-time, dyed-in-the-wool party man. Before becoming president, Trump was a Republican (1987), then an Independent (1999), a Democrat (2001–2009), then a Republican (2010), then registered as No Party affiliation (2011), and finally a Republican (2012). Trump ran against established lukewarm party regulars in the 2016 presidential primaries, defeating them all, and claiming the mantle. Bolstered by fervent support from his base of supporters, Trump’s hold on the Republican Party has been extraordinary. “Never Trumpers” had all but been vanquished, but some fought back. Veteran Republican political consultant, Stuart Stevens, lamented the destruction of what he and many others had known as the Republican Party. In his book, It Was All a Lie, Stevens blamed himself, and other Republicans, for succumbing to the Trump’s toxic lure. “Hold Donald Trump up to the mirror and that bulging, grotesque orange face is today’s Republican Party.”77 Stevens joined a number of prominent Republican consultants, creating the Lincoln Project, an organization dedicated to removing Trump from office. Throughout the 2020 presidential campaign, the Lincoln Project hammered Trump with caustic, provocative negative advertising. The Republican Party represented an amalgam of interests. Political scientists Jacob S. Hacker and Paul Pierson answered the perplexing question: does the Republican Party represent the superrich or does it represent the “forgotten” American? It does both, in what they characterize as “plutocratic populism,” with tax cuts and elimination of regulations for the rich and xenophobia, resentment, and race-baiting for right-wing populists.78 It is the party of sometime moderates Mitt Romney and Lisa Murkowski, as well as hard-liners like the forty or so members of the House Freedom Caucus. Writing in early 2020, congressional scholars Thomas E. Mann and Norman J. Ornstein noted that “Today, Republicans are one of the most extreme (even radical) conservative parties in the democratic world, with no members in the House and arguably barely one in the Senate who would qualify as moderates or traditional conservatives.”79 It certainly is not the party of Nelson Rockefeller, Gerald Ford, or even Ronald Reagan and Barry Goldwater. The Democratic Party has also been transformed. As journalist Thomas B. Edsall observed, over the past three decades, “Democrats have become decisively more liberal, especially on cultural issues; more dependent on states on the East and West Coasts; more diverse; more ideologically orthodox, less religious, less White; and in many cases more highly educated.”80 It is the party of centrists Joe Biden, Barack Obama, and Nancy Pelosi, party-builder Stacey

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Abrams, as well as the party of reformist and left-leaning Bernie Sanders and Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez. Once the dominant party in the South, its strength in that part of the country relies heavily on African American supporters. Race and religion have become prominent factors in how the parties have changed in recent decades. The Republican Party in 1988 was about 88 percent white Christians; by 2018, the party was still about 75 percent. By contrast, the Democratic Party in 1984 was 68 percent white Christians, but today is just 38 percent. Further, the percentage of Democrats who consider themselves as religiously unaffiliated has jumped from 10 percent in 1991 to 38 percent in 2020.81

THE NATIONAL GOVERNMENT

The Presidency Throughout this tempestuous era, Donald J. Trump was president, with Mike Pence serving as vice president. It was an era of non-stop controversy, with increasing political turmoil and polarization. Trump throughout was aided and abetted by a complicit Republican leadership, who were either cowed by presidential threats, afraid that his fervent base would turn on them, or genuinely believed that Trump’s bull-in-the-china-shop wreckage was good for the country. For nearly two years, Trump was under the cloud of the Mueller investigation, and, despite reams of evidence to the contrary, able to convince his loyalists that he had done nothing wrong. He was impeached twice but was defended vigorously by see-no-evil Republican senators. In many ways, he was his own worst enemy, and his perpetuation of the Big Lie (that the 2020 election was stolen from him) will undoubtedly go down in history as his most egregious action, but also might be his lifeline to a political future beyond 2020. His antics, motivations, and actions provided critics and enemies fertile ground and juicy material. The anti-Trump books rolled off the presses, first a trickle, then it seemed every month another dozen or so would appear, bringing about damning evidence, only to be instantly frozen in time as other misdeeds, actions, and misstatements tumbled out of the Oval Office. In 2020, journalist Carlos Lozada wrote What Were We Thinking: A Brief Intellectual History of the Trump Era, in which he read and reviewed 150 books that had been written about Trump, about racism and political extremism, white working-class angst, foreign interference, the state of the economy, threats to democracy, and life in America. Even at 150, Lozada cautioned that this was “just a fraction of the Trump canon.” Indeed, by the end of 2020, there were some 1,200 unique titles about Trump published from 2016 to 2020.82 Journalists, television talking heads, politicians, comedians, relatives, and critics of all stripes commented on Trump’s erratic behavior. The often unspoken question was this: was he mentally imbalanced? For decades, professional psychologists and psychoanalysts have followed the Goldwater Rule of the American Psychiatric Association, stating that, without personally analyzing an individual (particularly a public figure), professionals should not comment. But that did not keep some from raising their concern. Psychotherapist Justin A. Frank observed that “Like some of the most disturbed patients I’ve worked with, Trump is so erratic—changing the topic, elevating the stakes, and raising the volume—that one doesn’t know what to expect from him next.”83 Psychologist Jerrold M. Post, who for decades analyzed the psychological profiles of world leaders such as Saddam Hussein, Idi Amin, Joseph Stalin, and Bill Clinton, wrote about Trump’s traits of a classic narcissist—grandiosity, lack of empathy, hypersensitivity to criticism, and no constraints of conscience.84 In an interview with the Washington Post in 2019, Post

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noted that if Trump were to lose in 2020, “I think we can be assured that he will not concede early. Trump may not even recognize the legitimacy of the election.”85 Philosopher Jason Stanley, in his book How Fascism Works, warned about such behavior, arguing that “fascism is not a new threat, but rather a permanent temptation.” The great danger is not hyperbole, but the normalization of outrage.86 In the end, Trump claimed that he had won by a landslide and boasted that his administration’s record was superlative. Trump skipped the inauguration of Biden (another normshattering behavior). Just before boarding Air Force One at Joint Base Andrews, Trump gave his own assessment of his years in office: “amazing, by any standard.”87 Historian Jean Edward Smith opened his biography of George W. Bush with these words: “Rarely in the history of the United States has the nation been so ill served as during the presidency of George W. Bush.”88 Smith, the distinguished biographer of Ulysses Grant, Franklin Roosevelt, and Dwight Eisenhower, died in 2019, never having had the chance to write about Donald Trump.89 The Executive Branch The most apt characterizations of the executive branch as a whole during this era were “dysfunctional,” “chaotic,” and “destructive.” Hundreds of key appointments in federal agencies were left vacant, and in others, there was a bewildering game of musical chairs. Political scientist Katherine Dunn Tenpas examined the turnover in “A” Team political appointments, those at the very top of the executive branch. She found in 2018 that the Trump administration’s turnover “is record-setting—double the previous leader (Reagan), and more than triple his immediate predecessor (Obama).” At the end of his term, Dunn Tenpas noted that the “A” Team turnover was 92 percent, compared to the next highest, Reagan, at 78 percent.90 Dysfunction seemed to be the order of the day, with reports, accounts, and books written by and about disgruntled staffers. The assault on non-political civil servants was hostile and demoralizing. During this era, the federal deficit ballooned, partially because of the extraordinary demands of COVID relief along with the shrinking of the economy, but also through the generous tax reductions enacted in 2017. The federal budget deficit went from $984 billion in Fiscal Year 2019 to $3.1 trillion in Fiscal Year 2020. It was many years ago, back in the late 1990s, when the economy was booming and the federal budget actually achieved a surplus three years in a row. A new branch of the US military was created in December 2019, the US Space Force, and when fully established would be under the direction of the Department of the Air Force.

The Congress During the One Hundred Fifteenth Congress (2017–2019), Republicans were firmly in control of both chambers, having a 52–48 margin in the Senate and a 241–194 margin in the House.91 As in previous eras, when one party controls the House, Senate, and White House, it should have had the political muscle to achieve its policy goals. But that wasn’t the case, with just one major piece of legislation, the tax bill, becoming law. Then came the 2018 mid-term congressional elections, and a major gain of forty-one seats for Democrats in the House, giving them a majority, 235–200. Republicans remained in control in the Senate, 53–47. The Democratic wave in the House brought a substantial number of woman and progressives into the House. It also meant that any Trump initiatives would have a difficult time passing.

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Leadership in the Senate Throughout this period, Mitch McConnell was the majority leader, a role he had maintained since January 2015. John Thune (Republican—South Dakota) was the majority whip. Charles Schumer was the minority leader and Richard (Dick) Durbin (Democrat—Illinois) served as minority whip. Throughout, McConnell has been the chief and most successful enabler of Trump. Investigative journalist Jane Mayer observed that “under McConnell’s leadership, far from providing a check on the Executive Branch, has been an accelerant.” McConnell, “the master of the money machine,” brought in boatloads of conservative money, focused on packing the federal courts with conservative judges, and largely remained silent as Trump bulldozed his way through the presidency. Only after the 2020 election and the January 6 insurrection did McConnell publicly criticize Trump, bringing immediate rebuke from the president.92 Leadership in the House During the One Hundred Fifteenth Congress, Paul Ryan (Republican—Wisconsin) continued to serve as speaker of the House, while Kevin O. McCarthy (Republican—California) continued to be majority leader. Nancy Pelosi was the minority leader and Steny H. Hoyer was the minority whip. When the Democratic Party regained control of the House following the 2008 elections, Pelosi once again became speaker (she had been speaker from 2007–2011); Hoyer again became majority leader, having also served from 2007–2011 in that capacity. (Pelosi, originally from Baltimore, and Hoyer, from the Maryland suburbs of Washington, had a long history together: they both were interns for Maryland senator Daniel Brewster during the 1960s.) Pelosi was particularly adept at upsetting President Trump, getting under his skin. Senator Amy J. Klobuchar (Democrat—Minnesota) once quipped, “If you think a woman can’t beat Donald Trump, Nancy Pelosi does it every single day.”93 The Democratic leadership also included James E. Clyburn from South Carolina, the majority whip. By the beginning of the One Hundred Seventeenth Congress in 2021, the Democratic leadership was showing its age: Pelosi, Hoyer, and Clyburn were all in their eighties. With the change in power during the One Hundred Sixteenth Congress (2019–2021), McCarthy became the minority leader and Steven J. Scalise (Republican—Louisiana) became the minority whip. When the 1964 Civil Rights Act was passed, there were only five African American members of Congress; in 2020, there were fifty-six African Americans in the House of Representatives, representing 12 percent of that body’s number. That same year, 1964, there were fourteen women serving in Congress. During the 2020 election cycle, 643 women filed to run for a seat in either the House or the Senate, a 20 percent increase since 2018, and that year set a record. Altogether, 146 women served in Congress during the One Hundred Seventeenth Congress (2021–2023).94

The Judiciary The Roberts Court continued during this era, and at the beginning was composed of the chief justice, and associate justices Anthony Kennedy, Clarence Thomas, Samuel Alito, Ruth Bader Ginsburg, Stephen Breyer, Elena Kagan, and Sonia Sotomayor. There was one vacancy, with the death of Antonin Scalia, on February 13, 2016, and McConnell was determined that President Obama would not fill that vacancy. Republicans got

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their wish, with Trump nominating Neil M. Gorsuch, who since 2005 had been serving as a judge on the US Court of Appeals, Tenth Circuit, based in Denver, Colorado. Gorsuch, who grew up in Denver, was the son of Anne Gorsuch Burford, the controversial EPA administrator during Reagan’s first term. He graduated from Harvard Law School and had previously served in the Bush II administration. When Anthony Kennedy retired in July 2018, President Trump was given the opportunity to nominate another justice. He chose Brett M. Kavanaugh, a Yale law graduate, who had been a judge on the US Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia. Unlike the relatively smooth confirmation process for Gorsuch, Kavanaugh’s confirmation was reminiscent of the bruising confirmation of Clarence Thomas in 1991, with Kavanaugh being accused of sexual misconduct during his high school years. The two replacements, Gorsuch and Kavanaugh, were judicial conservatives, and with their replacement it seemed that a 5–4 conservative court was assured, even enhanced. But in several instances that was not the case, with the chief justice siding with the progressive faction. Then came the unexpected, last-minute opportunity for Trump and his conservative allies. Just six weeks before the 2020 presidential election, Ruth Bader Ginsburg died. She had weathered several debilitating illnesses but succumbed to pancreatic cancer at the age of eighty-seven. It was her hope to outlast the Trump administration, which, in her sense of justice and integrity, had flagrantly violated the spirit and propriety of the laws and the Constitution. On her deathbed, she told her granddaughter: “my most fervent wish is that I will not be replaced until a new president is installed.”95 Trump immediately wanted to name a successor; McConnell, going against his very public and controversial stance when Obama tried to submit a nomination during his last year in office, agreed that this time around, raw politics would stand before principle. Judiciary Committee chairman Lindsey Graham (Republican—South Carolina), commented on his 2016 refusal to consider Merrick Garland for a Supreme Court vacancy: “I want you to use my words against me. If there’s a Republican president in 2016 and a vacancy occurs in the last year of the first term, you can say Lindsey Graham said let’s let the next president whoever it might be, make that nomination.”96 Graham, characteristically, changed his tune in 2020. Amy Coney Barrett, a former University of Notre Dame law professor and judge on the US Court of Appeals, was sworn in just days before the November elections. At forty-eight years old, Barrett, a protégé of Antonin Scalia, became the third choice of President Trump, and assured that the Court would now have six conservative-leaning justices. Democrats groused about the unfairness of the hasty nomination in an election year, Barrett’s noncommittal answers to key constitutional issues concerning abortions, the fate of the Affordable Care Act, the 2020 Census, immigration, the rights of same-sex couples, and her possible role in determining the outcome of a contested presidential election. All that was in vain, as Republicans voted together (with the exception of Maine senator Susan Collins) to confirm her appointment; no Democrats voted for her. This was the first time in 151 years that a Supreme Court nominee received no votes from the opposition party.97 This was probably Trump’s most significant and lasting achievement: three conservative justices, all relatively young, to serve lifetime appointments. Ronald Reagan was the last president who was able to choose three Supreme Court justices. Trump’s achievement was bolstered by a near-record number of conservative federal judges appointed during his tenure as president. Trump appointed 226 federal judges in four years; while Obama over the span of eight years appointed 320, Bush II appointed 322, and Clinton appointed 367. At the federal court of appeals level, Trump was able to appoint fifty-four judges, the same number as Obama, Bush II, and Clinton.98

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KEY POLICIES ENACTED During the first decades of the twenty-first century, societal stresses were overshadowing policy triumphs. For decades, these stresses had been mounting: immigration reform, inequality, gun violence, the rise of white nationalism, racial justice, the challenges of climate change, the crumbling national infrastructure. These long-standing and difficult problems should have been addressed with vigorous policy actions; but they were not. Rather, this era saw continued raw partisan division and a refusal to work together. In early February 2020, in the wake of Trump’s first impeachment trial, Mitch McConnell stated that 395 House bills were waiting on his desk, and not one would be considered. Democrats “have been on a full left-wing parade over there [in the House], trotting out all of their left-wing solutions that are going to issues in the fall campaign,” McConnell acknowledged: “They’re right. We’re not going to pass those.”99 Neglect and denial came far easier; it was so much more convenient to dodge difficult and controversial issues than face them head on. Gridlock and refusal became the legislative norms, rather than cooperation and problem solving.100 The unprecedented challenges of the COVID pandemic, bringing new and unexpected stresses to society, were addressed with extraordinary relief packages, but also saw the biggest administrative leadership failure in modern times. Much of what the Trump administration accomplished came through executive orders, changes in regulations, and other actions that did not require the approval of the Congress. Many of Trump’s actions, however, were overruled by federal courts, especially those involving immigration issues. Two pieces of landmark of policy stand out during this era: tax reductions and COVID relief and stimulus.

Tax Reform Like Ronald Reagan in 1981 and George W. Bush in 2001 and 2003, one of President Trump’s first priorities was a tax cut for corporations and the wealthy. The Tax Cuts and Jobs Act (2017) was the largest readjustment of the tax code in thirty years. Once again, a landmark piece of legislation was passed on a strictly party-line vote, with all fifty-one Republican senators in favor, and all forty-eight Democrats opposed.101 In the House, no Democrats supported the bill and just twelve Republicans voted against it. The dissenting Republicans came from high-tax states, like California, New York, and New Jersey, that would be hurt by the changes in the bill’s cuts to state and local tax deductions. The Trump tax cut was unpopular, with just 32 percent of Americans in favor and 48 percent opposed.102 It’s hard to like a tax hike, but even some tax hikes, such as the Bush I and Clinton hikes, were more popular. Citizens sensed that the Trump tax cut would benefit the wealthy and big business, and would just throw scraps to average wage earners. Despite all the assurances from administration officials, their suspicions proved correct. The principal feature of the tax bill was to create a single corporate tax rate of 21 percent, lowering it from 35 percent. As economics journalist David Floyd observed, “for the wealthy, banks, and other corporations, the tax reform package was considered a lopsided victory given its significant and permanent tax cuts to corporate profits, investment income, estate tax, and more.”103 In a series of investigations on the impact of the Tax Reform legislation, Pro Publica found that “82 ultrawealthy households collectively walked away with more than $1 billion in total savings. … Republican and Democratic tycoons alike saw their tax bills chopped by tens of millions.”104 In the meantime, average families gained about $1,200, based on the returns processed by the tax preparation firm, H&R Block. The corporate tax reductions were permanent, but many of the reductions for individuals and families would expire in 2025.

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On signing the legislation, Trump boasted that this was the “largest tax cut in our country’s history” and it will “protect low-income and middle-income households, not the wealthy and well-connected.” And he added, the plan is “not good for me, believe me.”105 Another feature of the legislation was the permanent elimination of the individual mandate found in the Affordable Care Act. That would probably raise insurance premiums and reduce the number of persons who would receive medical coverage. How much would these tax cuts cost? The forecast was for the tax deduction to increase the federal deficit to around $1.5 trillion over the following decade, but no one knew for sure. The Trump administration’s optimistic forecast was that with robust growth of the economy, the tax cut would pay for itself, through higher employment, and more people contributing to the tax base. All this optimism was stymied, however, by the economic turbulence and extraordinary demands on the federal budget caused by the 2020 pandemic. The national debt was $21 trillion when Trump took office. By the time he left in January 2021, the national debt had risen nearly $7.8 trillion, leaving the country with a total accumulated debt of $28 trillion. President Trump, self-styled as the businessman’s “King of Debt,” had vowed to eliminate the federal debt “over a period of eight years” by taking advantage of economic growth and renegotiating trade deals. He, of course, was taking for granted that he would be re-elected. Private citizen Donald Trump lambasted the cumulative federal debt in 2013, which had reached $16.7 trillion. “Obama is the most profligate deficit & debt spender in our nation’s history,” he tweeted. Trump was banking on the 2017 tax cut to boost the economy, and bragged on Fox News in 2018 that “when [it] kicks in, we’ll start paying off that debt like it’s water.” The national debt-to- GDP ratio at the end of 2020 hit 98 percent, a level not seen since World War II, when at its height, the national debt was 106.1 percent of GDP. The 2020 economic downturn and the federal government’s infusion of trillions of dollars into the economy could only mean even more staggering deficits and accumulated debt.106 Deficit spending and the accumulated national debt meant mounting interest payments. Interest on the national debt in 2019, even at historically low interest rates, was $380 billion annually, roughly the same amount spent on Medicaid.107 What would happen in future years if the interest rate climbed to 4, 5, or 6 percent? Significance of this Policy Once more, massive tax breaks were meted out, heavily in favor of the wealthy and corporate interests. The rationale for the taxes was to stimulate the economy, thus benefiting all. With the pandemic, however, came an extraordinary downturn in the economy, mounting indebtedness, leaving the country with a much bigger national deficit.

Financial Bailout During the Pandemic, CARES, and Stimulus The 2020 COVID bailout measures made the funds spent on the Recovery Act of 2009 pale in comparison. On March 27, 2020, Congress passed the $2 trillion CARES Act (Coronavirus Aid, Relief, and Economic Security Act) in an attempt to mitigate the sharp economic downturn caused by the pandemic. The legislation was hastily drawn up, with lawmakers uncertain of what they were voting on. Senator Christopher A. (Chris) Coons (Democrat— Delaware) said “We went from ‘We don’t know what to do’ to 900 pages and $2.2 trillion in about ten days. I’ve never seen anything like it.”108 This staggering, unprecedented package represented approximately 45 percent of all expenditures ($4.45 trillion) in the previous year. Economics reporter Robert J. Samuelson dubbed it the “mother of all bailouts.”109 (It would soon have relatives.)

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Some $500 billion went to distressed businesses, such as loans for airlines and money for the Federal Reserve to expand loans and purchase government-backed securities. Another $350 billion went to businesses with fewer than 500 employees (deemed small businesses), mostly through the Paycheck Protection Program to help companies make payroll and pay for operating expenses. Some 58.9 million persons work at small businesses, representing 47 percent of all employees. Another $300 billion was given to individuals, with a tax rebate of $1,200 (or $2,400 per couple) plus $500 for each child (but not other dependents). Further, a $250 billion was provided for Pandemic Unemployment Assistance, adding $600 a week to existing unemployment benefits. The extra $600 funds would expire on July 31, 2020. Also, $150 billion was allocated for states, local governments, and tribal units, and $140 billion was allocated to a variety of health care programs.110 At the same time, the Federal Reserve lent $2.3 trillion to support households, financial markets, state and local governments, and employers. Many of the steps the Fed had taken were first tried when coping with the 2008 Great Recession crisis.111 It cut the federal funds rate, the rate that banks pay to borrow from each other, bringing it down to 0 or 0.24 percent. The Fed also signaled that interest rates would remain low. Further, the Fed stated that it would purchase hundreds of billions of dollars’ worth of Treasury securities and government-guaranteed mortgage-backed securities. Between mid-March and mid-June 2020, the Fed’s portfolio of securities went from $3.9 trillion to $6.1 trillion. It encouraged banks to lend, and temporarily relaxed certain regulatory requirements. The Fed created new programs to lend directly to major corporate employers, supporting loans to small and medium-sized businesses and non-profit institutions, and has been lending money directly to state and municipal governments and the backstop municipal bonds. In their summation of the Fed’s recovery activities, economists Jeffrey Cheng, Dave Skidmore, and David Wessel noted that the Fed “is trying to ensure that credit continues to flow to households and businesses during this difficult time and that the financial system doesn’t amplify the shock to the economy.”112 It quickly became evident that more federal relief was needed. In May 2020, House Democrats unveiled a 1,815-page, $3 trillion relief bill, which would have been bigger than all 2020 COVID relief monies to date. Republicans quickly rejected it as too large and far reaching. McConnell balked in the Senate; Trump hesitated, then did a complete turn-around demanding relief; then after the election he lost interest, only to interject himself once again at the last minute. Lawmakers were hung up on liability protection for businesses, aid to state and local governments, direct cash payments to individuals, and at the very end, restraints on the authority of the Federal Reserve to intervene. For eight months, as the pandemic grew worse, Congress could not reach a compromise on the next relief package. Not until the last days of the 2020 lame duck session did Congress agree to a $900 billion relief bill. The legislation, in a record-breaking length of nearly 5,593 pages, extended $600 per person stimulus checks to households making less than $75,000 per year (a family of four would receive $2,400). It enhanced federal unemployment benefits by $300 per week, extended coverage until mid-March 2021 (20.6 million persons were on unemployment aid). The bill provided $284 billion to small businesses, nonprofits, and restaurants, through the Paycheck Protection Program loans. Colleges and schools would receive $82 billion for HVAC (heating, ventilation, and air conditioning) repair and replacement to reduce the risk of COVID infections, and $10 billion would be made available for child-care assistance. There would be $20 billion for the purchase of vaccines, $8 billion for vaccine distribution, and $20 billion to assist states with testing. It also repurposed $429 billion in unused CARE Act funds run by the Federal Reserve. Inevitably in a bill this enormous, there were plenty of special breaks tucked away, having little to do with COVID. There was over

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$110 billion in such breaks, everything from tax cuts for beer and liquor producers, motorsports entertainment, to the manufacturers of electric bicycles. While Democrats had pushed for $1 trillion in aid to state and local governments, the legislation provided no such funds.113 Also tucked into the relief package were requirements to phase out harmful chemicals and provide billions of dollars for renewable energy and carbon capture development. The legislation cut one of the worst climate harming pollutants, hydrofluorocarbons (HFCs), which are hundreds of times more damaging than carbon dioxide. HFCs are found in air conditioners and refrigerators. In addition, billions of dollars would be funneled to renewable energy research for solar, wind, and energy storage, along with upgrades for the electric grid and other measures. “Let’s be clear,” stated Senate minority leader Charles Schumer, “Are these provisions enough to meet the demands of the science? No. But are they a significant step in the right direction? Yes.”114 At the last minute, Trump threw a monkey wrench into the already delicate negotiations. Most members of Congress had already headed for the airport, hoping to get home for the holidays, assured that they had at last done their job. But that night, December 22, unbeknownst to Republican congressional leaders, Trump in a video insisted that families should receive $2,000 rather than $600 stimulus checks, calling the compromise legislation a “disgrace.” One dismayed senior Republican official said, “Only Trump could take a final big win for his administration and in a fit of illogical madness disown any credit he’ll ever get for it.”115 Vice President Pence was in charge of Operation Warp Speed, a public–private partnership designed to produce effective COVID vaccinations and to ensure that 80 percent of the country’s 330 million people (or 264 million) would be vaccinated by late June 2021. Billions of government funds were poured into COVID research and through the cooperation of federal scientists, university research laboratories, and private drug companies, vaccines were approved by November 2020. The efforts by scientists and pharmaceuticals were extraordinary, achieving safe, effective vaccines in record time. Of all the challenges facing the nation and the world during the pandemic, this was the most successful. The Trump administration turned to the US Army’s chief logistics officer, Gustave (Gus) Perna, a four-star general, to lead the unprecedented and complicated distribution of the vaccines. In September 2020, Trump promised that 100 million doses of COVID vaccine would be available by year’s end; then Operation Warp Speed’s top scientist cut that figure to 20 million. In fact, however, just 2 million doses were shipped to states by the end of 2020. This led critics to charge that, at that slow pace, it would take ten years to vaccinate every American. The much-anticipated distribution of vaccines became bogged down, optimistic promises were not kept, the delivery of vaccine doses was far short of what had been projected and reserve supplies were exhausted. In the final months of the Trump administration, the distribution of vaccines stumbled, with lack of coordination, focus, and commitment. In his final days, President Trump could have somewhat burnished his reputation by visiting vaccination sites and clinics, touting the new vaccination, assuring citizens that help was on the way. Instead, as Utah senator Mitt Romney stated, “he’s seen as promoting conspiracy theories and evidence-free accusations of fraud, which lead to a color of a sore loser.”116 Three weeks after this comment came the insurrection at the Capitol. Significance of these Policies The amount of funds was unprecedented; and lawmakers could hardly know if the amount was sufficient, if the monies would bring the economic out of its pandemic torpor. More would be added during the first months of the Biden administration.

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The Court Weighs In During this time, the Supreme Court handed down several important decisions. Presidential Assertion of Absolute Authority Two Supreme Court decisions, issued during the last days of the 2020 Court term, dealt with President Trump’s assertion that he had an absolute right to block the release of his financial records. The president’s lawyers argued that he had immunity from all criminal proceedings and investigations so long as he remained in office, and that Congress could not obtain the records because it had no need for them. In April 2019, three committees in the House of Representatives issued four subpoenas to Trump’s accounting firm seeking information about the financial dealings of President Trump, his children, and his related business. The question before the Court, in Trump v. Mazars USA LLP,117 was whether the subpoenas exceeded the authority of the House under the Constitution. In a companion case, the district attorney for New York County, Cyrus R. Vance, Jr., issued a grand jury subpoena to the same accounting firm for eight years of the president’s financial records. Here, the question, in Trump v. Vance,118 was does the Constitution permit a county prosecutor (Vance) to issue a subpoena to the accounting firm for the financial records of a sitting president, over which the president has no claim of executive privilege? President Trump was handed a stunning defeat when the court ruled in the two related cases, both decided by 7–2, rejecting his bold assertion that he had an absolute right to block the release of his financial records. What was particularly significant was that the two Trump appointees to the court, Justices Gorsuch and Kavanaugh, joined the majority opinion.119 Chief Justice Roberts, who authored both opinions, stated: “Two hundred years ago, a great jurist of our court [John Marshall] established that no citizen, not even the president, is categorically above the common duty to produce evidence when called upon in a criminal proceeding.” In Trump v. Vance, Roberts wrote that “We reaffirm that principle today and hold that the president is neither absolutely immune from state criminal subpoenas seeking his private papers nor entitled to a heightened standard of need.” Justice Kavanaugh in a concurring opinion in Trump v. Vance echoed Roberts’ key finding: “In our system of government, as this court has often stated, no one is above the law. That principle applies, of course, to a president.” In the congressional subpoena case, however, the Court ruled that, for the moment, lawmakers could not see many of the financial records. Rather, the case should go back to lower courts to determine if Congress should narrow the scope of information it sought. Forty-six years earlier, the Supreme Court struck down President Nixon’s claim of absolute executive privilege. Then in 1997, the Court rejected President Clinton’s argument that the risk of being “distracted by the need to participate in litigation” entitled him to absolute immunity from civil liability, not just for official acts, but also for private conduct.120 Once again, the claim of absolute immunity was struck down. Immediately afterwards, Trump attacked the decisions: “This is all a political prosecution,” he wrote on Twitter. “I won the Mueller Witch Hunt, and others, and now I have to keep fighting in a politically corrupt New York. Not fair to this Presidency or Administration!” Title VII and Discrimination Based on Sexual Orientation On the day of its announcement, the Supreme Court website crashed with so many persons trying to download the decision, and it was instantly labeled a “landmark” ruling throughout the press. The Court answered an important societal and cultural question: does Title VII of

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the 1964 Civil Rights Act, which prohibits discrimination “because of sex” apply as well to sexual orientation? Gerald Bostock, who had worked as a child welfare advocate for twenty years, was fired from his job in 2013 soon after he joined a gay recreational softball league. He was fired for “conduct unbecoming” of a Clayton County, Georgia, employee. Donald Zarda worked as a sky-diving instructor in New York. Days after mentioning he was gay, he was fired. Aimee Stephens was hired at a funeral home in Michigan. During the first six years of employment, Stephens presented as a male, but after bouts of despair and loneliness, she was diagnosed with gender dysphoria. Before taking a vacation, Stephens announced plans to live and work full-time as a woman. The funeral home promptly fired her. In separate cases, Bostock, Zarda, and Stephens brought suit under Title VII of the 1964 Civil Rights Act, alleging sex discrimination. In June 2020, the Court ruled in Bostock v. Clayton County, Georgia,121 that an employer who fires an individual “merely for being gay or transgender violates Title VII.” Surprisingly, conservative Justice Gorsuch delivered the 6–3 opinion, and was joined by the four liberal justices and Chief Justice Roberts. In plain and direct language, Gorsuch focused on the question of whether an employer can fire a worker simply for being homosexual or transgender. “The answer is clear. An employer who fires an individual for being homosexual or transgender for traits or actions it would not have questioned in members of a different sex. Sex plays a necessary and undisguisable role in the decision, exactly what Title VII forbids.” The drafters of Title VII may not have thought of all the consequences, but “the limits of the drafters’ imagination supply no reason to ignore the law’s demands.” Justice Alito, in a lengthy dissenting opinion, focused on this central contention: “Title VII of the Civil Rights Act of 1964 prohibits employment discrimination on any of five specified grounds: ‘race, color, religion, sex and national origin.’ Neither ‘sexual orientation’ nor ‘gender identity’ appear on that list.”122 Gerrymandering It had been common practice—by both Democrats and Republicans—to reconfigure election districts to favor those in the majority and to disadvantage those in the minority. Nearly all states configure their election districts through plans drawn up in the state legislatures. In recent decades, however, the partisan nature of the redistricting became more and more egregious: districts were drawn with no other goal in sight than to protect an incumbent or to advantage one party over the other. The legislators have been aided by sophisticated software that can pinpoint, block by block, house by house, the voting history of the occupants. Those who draw the maps can finely configure their outcome, very often leading to complicated and strange looking districts. During recent years, with Republicans in control of a majority of state legislatures, they eagerly took advantage of partisan gerrymandering. Is it possible that partisan gerrymandering would go too far? Could rigging the district lines unconstitutionally dilute voting strength of one party or another? In two 2019 consolidated cases, one involving charges of Republican gerrymandering in North Carolina (Rucho v. Common Cause) and the other involving charges of Democratic gerrymandering in Maryland (Lamone v. Benisek), the Supreme Court, through Chief Justice Roberts, determined that the practice of partisan gerrymandering of election districts was “beyond the reach of federal courts.”123 By a 5–4 vote, Roberts, joined by the four conservative members, argued that the judicial branch could not second-guess state lawmakers’ judgments. Roberts conceded that the gerrymandering plans were highly partisan, by any measure. But did the lower courts “appropriately exercise judicial power when they found them unconstitutional as well?”124

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The majority reasoned that while federal courts can resolve a number of questions involving districting, including racial gerrymandering, “it is beyond their power to decide the central question: when has political gerrymandering gone too far.” In an impassioned dissent, Justice Elena Kagan, joined by the other three liberals, charged that the majority was sidestepping a controversy involving “the most fundamental of … constitutional rights: the rights to participate equally in the political process, to join with others to advance political beliefs, and to choose their representatives.” Through its decision not to intervene, she argued, the Court “encourages a politics of polarization and dysfunction.” For the first time in American history, she wrote, “the majority declares that it can do nothing about an acknowledged constitutional violation because it has searched high and low and cannot find a workable legal standard to apply.”125 Native American Lands In the most significant decision in decades affecting Native Americans, McGirt v. Oklahoma (2020),126 the Court ruled, 5–4, that much of the land in eastern Oklahoma was, and continues to be, Indian Country. The case was brought by a Seminole man, Jimcy McGirt, who had been found guilty of three sex crimes by an Oklahoma state court. The offenses occurred on land guaranteed to the Muscogee Creek Nation in an 1866 treaty, a treaty that had never been overturned. McGirt contended that he should have been tried by federal authorities and that the state of Oklahoma had no jurisdiction on Indian land. Justice Gorsuch, from Colorado, who had often sided with tribes in earlier cases while he was on the Tenth Circuit Court of Appeals, delivered the opinion and was joined by the four liberal justices. In simple, straightforward language, Gorsuch began his ruling: On the far end of the Trail of Tears was a promise. Forced to leave their ancestral lands in Georgia and Alabama, the Creek Nation received assurances that their new lands in the West would be secure forever. … Today we are asked whether the land these treaties promised remains an Indian reservation for purposes of federal criminal law. Because Congress has not said otherwise, we hold the government to its word.127 Congress had enacted some 370 treaties with Indian tribes over the years, and nearly all had been broken by the federal government. Following McGirt, however, some 19 million acres, 47 percent of the state of Oklahoma, was ruled to be Native American land.128 Chief Justice Roberts, in dissent, warned that the decision would wreak havoc and confusion in Oklahoma’s criminal justice system.

POLICIES DELAYED OR DENIED

The Pandemic This could have been Trump’s finest moment: the opportunity to exert executive leadership, to rally the impressive resources of America’s public health system, to push through national pandemic prevention standards, to marshal resources to businesses and individual citizens, to reassure Americans, and to lead by example. But that was not to be. Instead, through a lack of presidential leadership, America suffered one of the worst, certainly most deadly, policy failures in its history. From the beginning, the pandemic became politicized, seen by the White House as a threat to Trump’s re-election and his psyche. Trump ignored public health warnings, dismissed the

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findings of Dr. Anthony Fauci, the CDC, and other major public health experts. He blamed others and pushed the responsibility to the states. The president refused to wear a mask in public, encouraged protest against state lock-down orders (“LIBERATE MINNESOTA!, LIBERATE MICHIGAN!, LIBERATE VIRGINIA” he tweeted in successive messages), urged rapid opening of churches, schools, and businesses against the advice of experts, and dismissed the pandemic threat as fake news.129 At crowded political rallies, Trump and his followers refused to wear masks, exhibiting nothing more than “reckless acts of effrontery.”130 In late June 2020, the Washington Post had tallied more than sixty times that the president had downplayed the coronavirus threat, through his tweets and public comments.131 More denial and delay was yet to come, and with it came criticism, certainly from progressives and Democrats, but also from the scientific community, health experts, and Washington policy veterans. In a scathing editorial, the New England Journal of Medicine decried the actions of the Trump administration: “Here in the United States, our leaders have failed that test. They have taken a crisis and turned it into a tragedy. The magnitude of this failure is astonishing.”132 This was the first time in its 208-year history that all thirty-four American editors of the NEJM spoke out against a president. The journal Scientific American also weighed in, endorsing Joe Biden for president. “Scientific American has never endorsed a presidential candidate in its 175-year history. This year we are compelled to do so. We do not do this lightly.” Trump’s rejection of scientific evidence and public health measures “have been catastrophic.” And the most devastating example is the president’s “dishonest and inept response to the COVID-19 pandemic.”133 In a major report on the COVID pandemic, Washington Post reporters noted that Trump’s early refusal to take the pandemic seriously was compounded over time by a host of damaging presidential traits—his skepticism of science, impatience with health restrictions, prioritization of personal politics over public safety, undisciplined communications, chaotic management style, indulgence of conspiracies, proclivity toward magical thinking, allowance of turf wars and flagrant disregard for the well-being of those around him.134 In March 2021, in a special CNN report, Dr. Deborah L. Birx, the chief coronavirus coordinator during the Trump administration, suggested that hundreds of thousands of Americans may have died needlessly. Admiral Brett P. Giroir, overseeing the testing effort, said the Trump administration had lied to the public about the availability of COVID testing, boosting numbers to make the administration look better.135 The job losses stemming from the pandemic hit minority workers in low wage jobs (often those described as “essential workers,” such as bus drivers, hospital aides, grocery store clerks), mothers, and persons without college degrees. Black women and men, and mothers with school-aged children were taking the longest time to recover. Between February and April 2020, 10 percent of Americans aged 25 to 54 lost their jobs; by August employment had rebounded to the same level found in November 2011, with approximately 75 percent of workers employed. Young persons, aged 20–24, had the greatest initial job loss toll. Mothers lagged behind fathers in employment recovery, especially those mothers who had children 6–12 years old. The Washington Post labeled the COVID pandemic recession as the most unequal in modern history. “No other recession in modern history has so pummeled society’s most vulnerable.”136 Economists David Cutler and Lawrence Summers estimated that the economic cost of the pandemic would be $16 trillion, or about $125,000 per family—far above the median family

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income.137 While millions of Americans lost their jobs or were severely impacted economically by the pandemic, the wealthiest did just fine. On November 24, 2020, the Dow Index crossed the 30,000 mark for the first time. At that moment, the wealth of the 650 American billionaires approached $4 trillion (the size of recent US federal budgets), with more than $1 trillion in growth since March 2020, the beginning of the pandemic.138

Failed Repeal of Obamacare For years, Republicans have tried and failed to repeal the Affordable Care Act. By the beginning of 2014, Republicans tried forty-eight times to repeal, dilute, or amend the ACA. Trump railed against it in his 2016 presidential campaign and it was uppermost on the policy agenda of the new administration. Republicans were in charge of the executive and legislative branches, still they could not overturn Obamacare; by 2017, the number of failed attempts reached seventy. Speaker Paul Ryan pushed his own version, the American Health Care Act, but conservative Republicans in the House Freedom Caucus balked, unwilling to support the legislation. Trump, who didn’t really understand the policy details, just wanted a win, and was furious when Ryan finally pulled the bill from consideration in March 2017.139 A revised version barely passed the House, 217–213, but Republican senators were not impressed. They came up with their own version, commonly called the “Skinny Repeal” of Obamacare. This version would have increased the number of uninsured persons by 15 million during the next year and premiums would go up roughly by 20 percent.140 The eighteen-page bill did not go before any committee but was presented on the floor of the Senate late at night, given two hours for debate (Republicans hogged the time), and Democrats were basically told: take it or leave it. The bill was still being drafted by staffers around lunchtime that day. During debate, Senator Mazie Hirono (Democrat—Hawaii) recalled her own struggle with kidney cancer and the many get-well calls she received from fellow senators from both sides of the aisle. “You showed me your care. You showed me your compassion. Where is that tonight?”141 But Republican senators Lisa Murkowski of Alaska and Susan Collins of Maine would not go along with their leadership: they would not vote for repeal. On July 28, 2017, around 1:30 in the morning, it came down to the dramatic, deciding vote of Senator John McCain. Republican leaders in the Senate, the governor of Arizona, Vice President Pence, even President Trump in a last-minute phone call tried to convince McCain, but to no avail. McCain emerged from the cloakroom where he talked with Trump; all eyes were on the senator and he immediately signaled to the recording clerk, with a thumbs down vote. Minority leader Charles Schumer, in the background, thrust his arm out to muffle the cheers and delighted gasps coming from his Democrat colleagues; McConnell stared at McCain in disbelief. McCain’s “no” vote dashed Republican hopes for a repeal. This would be one of the final critical votes cast by McCain, who, on August 25, 2018, would die of brain cancer; nine years earlier, health care champion Edward Kennedy died on the same day, with the same form of brain cancer. The Republican House and Senate versions were highly unpopular with the public and more and more people were getting used to, and availing themselves of, the benefits of the Affordable Care Act.142 There were clear consequences for many of those Republican members of Congress who voted for Ryan’s plan and were defeated in the 2018 midterm elections.143 After these legislative defeats, the Trump administration and Republican lawmakers were determined to weaken the law, chipping away at its effectiveness. Taking advantage of a loophole in the ACA, Trump issued an executive order allowing consumers to buy noncompliant health plans. “These plans aren’t for everyone,” stated HHS secretary Alex M. Azar, Jr., in August 2018, “but they can provide a much more affordable option for millions of the

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forgotten men and women left out of our current system.” Soon, such non-compliant plans flooded the market.144 At the beginning of the coronavirus pandemic, the Republican criticism of the ACA temporarily was muted, but then in May 2020, Trump stepped in. He announced once again that his administration wanted to “terminate health care under Obamacare.” He bragged about how well his administration ran the ACA, despite its flaws: “Obamacare, we run it really well. … But running it great, it’s still lousy health care.”145 Then one month later, in the midst of the pandemic, the Trump administration asked the Supreme Court to overturn the ACA, stating that the “entire ACA must fall.” The reaction against this pronouncement was swift, immediate, and blistering: the Center for American Progress, a liberal-leaning think tank, noted that if the ACA were to be declared void, 23 million persons would be without health care. House Speaker Nancy Pelosi declared that there was “no moral excuse” for the Trump administration to advocate overturning the ACA, and that to do so in the midst of the pandemic was “an act of unfathomable cruelty.”146 Ironically, the more Trump railed against the ACA, the more popular it became. With the addition of Amy Coney Barrett to the Supreme Court, conservatives were again hopeful that the Affordable Care Act would be repealed.

Immigration Reform The Trump administration dramatically reshaped the US immigration system.147 Over 450 actions—through executive orders, revisions of regulations, and other steps—had been enacted by the Trump administration through the various federal departments. Journalist Catherine Rampell noted that the rule changes “have disfigured” the immigration system “almost beyond recognition.” The Trump immigration wall wasn’t built out of steel, it was built out of paper, she argued.148 The result has been for immigration to fall by almost one half from 2016 to 2019, to about 600,000 persons per year. With COVID restrictions, that number was sure to be decreased even more. In an editorial, the New York Times characterized Trump’s immigration policies for their “racism, cruelty and xenophobia.”149 “Are you having a good time with your refugees?” Trump smirked to a roaring 2020 campaign crowd in Minnesota. Trump discovered a crowd-pleasing selling point on the 2016 campaign trail: he promised to keep Mexican “rapists” and “criminals” from entering the country, promised a “big, beautiful” wall on the southern border (with Mexico paying for it), and a “total and complete shutdown of Muslims entering the United States.”150 The Obama policy focus was to punish or deport unauthorized immigrants who had committed crimes. But as soon as he entered office, President Trump overrode that policy of going after immigrants with criminal records and made any unauthorized immigrants fair game. Trump ended “temporary protected status” for 400,000 persons from El Salvador, Haiti, Sudan, and other countries who had lived and worked in the United States for decades and came to America as a haven from war or natural disasters. Asylum seekers from Central America were forced to wait for weeks along the Mexican border simply to approach the border and seek protection. New Trump-appointed immigration appeals board members rejected the overwhelming number of petitions. Attorney General Jeff Sessions (along with his protégé Stephen Miller in the White House)151 had hoped to frighten families, dissuading them from attempting to seek asylum. “We need to take away children,” Sessions volunteered, and later, back-tracking, stated that the government “never really intended” to separate families. The results were several thousand children kept in cages, wrapped in Mylar blankets, stripped away from their parents or guardians. This was the Trump administration’s “zero tolerance” policy; a policy, the consequences of which, the Justice

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Department earlier warned, the administration was not prepared for. Such cruel separation had been avoided in previous administrations. All this brought about widespread outrage from across the nation and world.152 The Protection for the Dreamers program, the thousands of immigrants brought to the US as children without authorization, was cancelled by Trump. In June 2020, the Supreme Court ruled that the Homeland Security Department’s action rescinding DACA was “arbitrary and capricious,” in violation of federal law.153

Environment and Climate Change During the last week of the 2020 presidential election, Trump asserted that he was the best steward of the country’s environment. “Who would have thought,” he boasted in Florida, “Trump is the great environmentalist.” In late October 2020, the Washington Post catalogued 125 environmental rules that Trump either weakened or removed, along with 40 rollbacks still to come. Eighty-nine rollbacks have faced lawsuits, with 17 rulings in Trump’s favor, 37 against.154 His deregulations were for the most part designed to make it easier for businesses to pollute. Trump championed himself as the defender of fossil fuels, particularly of the coal fields and coal miners. But the coal industry continued its long decline. Roughly 15 percent of the US coal-fired electricity plants shuttered during the Trump administration; demand for coal dropped precipitously because of cheaper natural gas and lower cost renewable energy. In addition, Bloomberg Philanthropies and Sierra Club’s US Beyond Coal legal campaign was successfully forcing coal-fired electricity plants to shut down. Of the 530 coal-fired plants it had targeted, by 2020 around 318 such plants (60 percent) had closed, with the remainder expected to retire by 2030.155 Climate Change In 1988, scientist James Hansen warned Congress on the dangers facing the country and the world in decades to come if climate change was not addressed. His warnings, noted journalist Elizabeth Kolbert, proved to be “spectacularly accurate.” Writing at the thirtieth anniversary of Hansen’s testimony, Kolbert noted that In the intervening three decades, nearly half of the Arctic ice cap has melted away, the oceans have acidified, much of the American West has burned, lower Manhattan, South Florida, Houston, and New Orleans have flooded, and average temperatures have continued to climb.156 Indeed, thanks in large part to the impact of climate change, 2020 recorded at least $95 billion in hurricanes, wildfires, and other disasters—twice the amount recorded the year before.157 One of the most visible actions by the Trump administration was leaving the Paris Climate Accord. “It’s time to put Youngstown, Ohio, Detroit, Michigan, and Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, along with many, many other locations within our great country, before Paris, France,” Trump said in 2017, appealing to traditional industrial centers, reliant on fossil fuels, with some xenophobia mixed in. The world was on its own, and the United States would abandon its leadership role. There were many rollbacks affecting climate change. One estimate, by the Rhodium Group, determined that together the environmental rollbacks would result in an additional 1.8 billion metric tons of greenhouse gases in the atmosphere by 2035—more than the combined energy

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emissions of Germany, Britain, and Canada for a single year.158 The Trump administration proved adept, just as it did with immigration policy, at using regulatory measures to severely undermine climate change policy. Yet at the tail end of the Trump administration and the One Hundred Sixteenth Congress, billions were added into the COVID stimulus bill to phase out HFCs and give money to renewable energy research, as noted above.

Rebuilding the Infrastructure On election night 2016, Donald Trump, flushed with victory, proclaimed, “We are going to fix our inner cities, and rebuild our highways, bridges. Tunnels, airports, schools, hospitals.” He vowed to spend $1 trillion on fixing crumbling infrastructure. Millions of people, he proclaimed, would be put to work thanks to his infrastructure initiative. Look how far we’ve fallen, he said. “We used to have the greatest infrastructure anywhere in the world, and today we’re like a third-world country. We’re literally like a third-world country,” he stated in 2017. But even before Trump, Vice President Biden lamented in 2014, “If I took you blindfolded and took you to LaGuardia Airport in New York, you must think ‘I must be in some third-world country.’”159 For decades, bridges, tunnels, highways, mass transit of all kinds were neglected, and in the case of the Interstate highway system, there was significant reluctance to raise the 18.4 cents per gallon highway tax that had not been increased since 1993, when gasoline averaged $1.00 per gallon. Highway construction and repair were in a major bind: not enough revenue coming in, increased labor costs, and a greater fuel efficiency of automobiles. The Recovery Act of 2009 was the most recent attempt to provide economic stimulus through transportation infrastructure funding, with $84 billion devoted to programs under the jurisdiction of the Department of Transportation. But during this era, despite Trump’s hectoring, no legislation was forthcoming, until 2020, when the Democratic-controlled House passed a climate-friendly, massive bill that would infuse $1.5 trillion into everything from highways to broadband. The bill, which passed 233–188 in the House, covered a variety of areas, including schools, hospitals, broadband, drinking water, the energy grid, and vehicle safety. House Republicans complained that their views were virtually ignored, and Senate majority leader McConnell said the bill was “nonsense, “absurd,” and “pure fantasy.” The legislation downplayed the building of new roadways and emphasized urban transit systems and electric vehicle charging stations. President Trump vowed to veto any such Democratic-driven infrastructure legislation.160 Cities, struggling with lost revenue during the pandemic, had estimated that they would need at least $500 billion for their infrastructure projects alone.

Mass Shootings, Gun Restrictions Since the Sandy Hook massacre in 2012 and up until February 2018, more than 1,600 shootings had taken place with four or more people having been killed or injured. Federal lawmakers introduced measures to prevent further gun violence: expanded background checks; closing the “Charleston” loophole (allowing gun dealers to complete gun sales if a background check takes more than three days); improving record reporting, closing the “terror gap” (preventing terrorist suspects from buying firearms); closing the “boyfriend loophole” (allowing domestic abusers to possess guns if they are not married to their victims); creating a “red flag” funding process (to fund state laws for people who pose a risk to themselves or others). All these measures, minor and at the margins of the problem, were brushed aside. Only a section tucked into an omnibus spending package in 2018 would improve record reporting for the existing background system.161

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Notes 1 David Cay Johnston, It’s Even Worse Than You Think: What the Trump Administration Is Doing to America (New York: Simon & Schuster, 2018), 5. 2 Stephen Levitsky and Daniel Ziblatt, How Democracies Die (New York: Penguin, 2019), 1. 3 Ed Yong, “Anatomy of an American Failure,” The Atlantic, September 2020, 34. 4 Dave Barry, “Dave Barry’s Year in Review 2020,” Washington Post, December 27, 2020. 5 “Census Live Updates: US Grew More Diverse in Past De4cade; Most Counties Lost Population,” New York Times, August 12, 2021. 6 Ally Mutnick, “Census Surprise: Texas Gains 2 Seats as Power Shifts South and West,” Politico, April 26, 2021. 7 “Income, Poverty, and Health Insurance Coverage in the United States: 2018.” 8 Stephen Rose, “Squeezing the Middle Class: Income Trajectories from 1967 to 2016,” Economic Studies at Brookings Institution, August 2020, https://www.brookings.edu/wp-content/uploads/2020/ 08/Squeezing-the-middle-class_Report.pdf (accessed September 10, 2020). Robert J. Samuelson, “The Rise of the Upper Middle Class,” Washington Post, August 16, 2020. 9 Matthew Stewart, “The 9.9 Percent is the New American Aristocracy,” The Atlantic, June 2018, https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2018/06/the-birth-of-a-new-american-aristocracy/ 559130/ (accessed November 12, 2020). Also, Raj Chetty, “Socioeconomic Mobility in the United States: New Evidence and Policy Lessons,” in Susan M. Wachter and Lei Ding, eds., Shared Prosperity in American Communities (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2016), 7–19. 10 “Distributional Financial Accounts: Distribution of Household Wealth in the US Since 1989,” Federal Reserve System, December 18, 2020, https://www.federalreserve.gov/releases/z1/dataviz/dfa/ distribute/table/; Chuck Collins, “US Billionaire Wealth Surges Past $1 Trillion Since Beginning of Pandemic,” Inequality.org, November 25, 2020, https://inequality.org/great-divide/u-s-billionairewealth-surges-past-1-trillion-since-beginning-of-pandemic/ (accessed December 20, 2020). 11 Jacob S. Hacker and Paul Pierson, Let Them Eat Tweets: How the Right Rules in an Age of Extreme Inequality (New York: Liveright, 2020), 39. 12 Ernie Tedeschi, “Americans Are Seeing Highest Minimum Wage in History (Without Federal Help),” New York Times, April 24, 2019. Nicholas D. Kristof and Sheryl WuDunn, “Who Killed the Knapp Family?” New York Times, January 9, 2020. See also, Kristof and WuDunn, Tightrope: Americans Reaching for Hope (New York: Knopf, 2020). 13 “Characteristics of Minimum Wage Workers, 2018,” Bureau of Labor Statistics, US Department of Labor, March 2019, https://www.bls.gov/opub/reports/minimum-wage/2018/home.htm#cps_mw_ whe_hist.f.1 (accessed December 12, 2020). 14 “The Effects on Employment and Family Increasing of Increasing the Federal Minimum Wage,” US Congress, Congressional Budget Office (2019), www.cbo.gov/publication/55410 (accessed December 15, 2020). 15 Amy Goldstein and Heather Long, “More Americans Go Without Health Coverage, Despite Strong Economy, Census Bureau Finds,” Washington Post, September 10, 2019; Press Release, “Income, Poverty, and Health Insurance Coverage in the United States: 2018,” US Bureau of the Census, September 10, 2019, https://www.census.gov/newsroom/press-releases/2019/income-poverty.html (accessed June 25, 2020); Jeanna Smialek, Sarah Kliff, and Alan Rappeport, “US Poverty Hit a Record Low Before the Pandemic Recession,” New York Times, September 19, 2020. 16 Trump quoted in “Trump says Republican Could ‘Never’ Be Elected if Voting Were Made Easier,” The Guardian, March 30, 2020, https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2020/mar/30/trump-republicanparty-voting-reform-coronavirus; Trump comments on Fox & Friends, https://www.youtube.com/ watch?v=_r6qXQX5Fnk (all accessed April 3, 2020). 17 Trump wasn’t the first to publicly acknowledge that voter suppression would be beneficial. In 1980, before a gathering of Religious Right leaders in Dallas, Texas, conservative activist Paul Weyrich said, “I don’t want everyone to vote. … As a matter of fact, our leverage in the elections quite candidly goes up as the voting populace goes down.” Segments of Weyrich’s speech on YouTube.com, https://www. youtube.com/watch?v=8GBAsFwPglw&feature=youtu.be. 18 Eugene Kiely and Rem Rieder, “Trump’s Repeated False Attacks on Mail-In Ballots,” Factcheck.org, September 25, 2020, https://www.factcheck.org/2020/09/trumps-repeated-false-attacks-on-mail-inballots/ (accessed December 22, 2020). 19 King quoted in David E. Sanger and Nicole Perlroth, “Trump Fires Christopher Krebs, Official Who Disputed Election Fraud Claims,” New York Times, November 17, 2020.

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20 Eric Wemple, “Sean Hannity, America’s No. 2 Threat to Democracy: An A to Z Guide,” Washington Post, December 14, 2020. 21 Lis Power, “In 2 Weeks After It Called the Election, Fox News Cast Doubts on the Results Nearly 800 Times,” Media Matters for America, January 14, 2021, https://www.mediamatters.org/fox-news/2weeks-after-it-called-election-fox-news-cast-doubt-results-nearly-800-times (accessed January 20, 2021). Media Matters for America, according to its website, is a not-for-profit “progressive research and information center dedicated to comprehensively monitoring, analyzing, and correcting conservative misinformation in the US media.” Erik Wemple, “Never Forget Fox News’ Promotion of the ‘Big Lie,’” Washington Post, January 19, 2021. 22 On the efforts of Trump and his allies after the election, see Jim Rutenberg et al., “77 Days: Trump’s Campaign to Subvert the Election,” New York Times, January 31, 2021. 23 Trump quoted in James Dobbins and Annie Karni, “In First Appearance Since Capitol Siege, Trump Expresses No Contribution in Inciting Mob,” New York Times, January 12, 2021. 24 Romney and Trump quoted in Rosalind S. Helderman, Karoun Demirjian, Seung Min Kim, and Mike DeBonis, “Congress Affirms Biden’s Presidential Win Following Riot at US Capitol,” Washington Post, January 7, 2021. Voting against certification in the Senate, along with Cruz and Hawley were Republican senators Cindy Hyde-Smith (Mississippi), Tommy Tuberville (Alabama), Rick Scott (Florida), Roger Marshall (Kansas), Cynthia Lummis (Wyoming), and John Kennedy (Louisiana). 25 McConnell quoted in Lisa Mascaro and Mary Clare Jalonick, “McConnell Blames Trump,” Denver Post, January 20, 2021. 26 Lisa Rein, Josh Dawsey, and Toluse Olorunnipa, “Trump’s Historic Assault on the Civil Service Was Four Years in the Making,” Washington Post, October 23, 2020. 27 Connolly quoted in Joe Davidson, “Trump Went to War with His Own Government. Biden Now Has to Repair It,” Washington Post, January 21, 2021. 28 Khrushchev quoted in David Remnick, “Trump and the Enemies of the People,” The New Yorker, August 15, 2018. 29 Twitter data from Tommy Beer, “Trump Suddenly Loses 220,000 Twitter Followers—First Drop in Five Years,” Forbes, December 5, 2020, https://www.forbes.com/sites/tommybeer/2020/12/05/trump-suddenlyloses-220000-twitter-followers-first-big-drop-in-5-years/?sh=7ab2f66c7f2c (accessed December 28, 2020). 30 The Social Dilemma, Netflix release, directed by Jeff Orlowski, September 2020. 31 Harris and MacNamee quoted in Devika Girish, “‘The Social Dilemma’ Review: Unplug and Run,” New York Times, September 9, 2020. 32 “In 1,316 Days, President Trump Has Made 22,247 False or Misleading Claims,” Washington Post, August 27, 2020. The Washington Post Fact-Checking Team, Glenn Kessler, Salvador Rizzo, and Meg Kelly, Donald Trump and His Assault on Truth: The President’s Falsehoods, Misleading Claims and Flat-Out Lies (New York: Scribners, 2020). Kessler, Rizzo, and Kelly, “Trump is Averaging More Than 50 False or Misleading Claims a Day,” Washington Post, October 22, 2020. 33 Anna Merlan, Republic of Lies: American Conspiracy Theorists and Their Surprising Rise to Power (New York: Henry Holt, 2019), 14. 34 Russell Murihead and Nancy L. Rosenblum, A Lot of People Are Saying: The New Conspiracism and the Assault on Democracy (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2019), 167–68. 35 For earlier generations of right-wing voices, such as Clarence Manion, Henry Regnery, William A. Rusher, see Nicole Hemmer, Messengers of the Right: Conservative Media and the Transformation of American Politics (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2016). 36 “Alex Jones,” Southern Poverty Law Center, https://www.splcenter.org/fighting-hate/extremist-files/ individual/alex-jones (accessed December 29, 2020). 37 Katherine Tully McManus, “QAnon Goes to Congress: Two Supporters Win Seats in Congress,” Roll Call, November 5, 2020, https://www.rollcall.com/2020/11/05/qanon-goes-to-washington-twosupporters-win-seats-in-congress/ (accessed December 21, 2020). 38 Zoe Nemerever, “Why ‘Constitutionalists Sheriffs’ Won’t Enforce Coronavirus Restrictions,” Washington Post, April 23, 2020; Julia Harte and R. Jeffrey Smith, “’The Army to Set Our Nation Free,’” Center for Public Integrity, May 24, 2016, https://publicintegrity.org/national-security/thearmy-to-set-our-nation-free/ (accessed November 16, 2020). 39 Gregory S. Schneider, “In Virginia, and Elsewhere, Gun Supporters Prepare to Defy New Laws,” Washington Post, November 23, 2019.

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40 Darla Cameron, “How Sanctuary Cities Work, and How Trump’s Blocked Executive Order Could Have Affected Them,” Washington Post, November 21, 2017. Executive Order, “Enhancing Public Safety in the Interior of the United States,” Office of the President, January 25, 2017, https://www. whitehouse.gov/presidential-actions/executive-order-enhancing-public-safety-interior-united-states/ (accessed December 21, 2020). 41 Abby Budiman, “Key Findings About US Immigrants,” Pew Research Center, n.d., https://www. pewresearch.org/fact-tank/2020/08/20/key-findings-about-u-s-immigrants/ (accessed August 20, 2020); Brookings study in Sabrina Tavernise, “US Has Highest Share of Foreign-Born Since 1910, With More Coming from Asia,” New York Times, September 13, 2018. 42 “US Refugee Resettlement,” National Immigration Forum, November 2020, https://immigrationforum. org/article/fact-sheet-u-s-refugee-resettlement/ 43 “Asylum in the United States,” American Immigration Council, June 11, 2020, https://www. americanimmigrationcouncil.org/research/asylum-united-states (accessed January 21, 2021). In Fiscal Year 2018, asylum granted to persons from El Salvador represented 8 percent of the total, Guatemala (6 percent), Honduras (5 percent), and Mexico (3 percent). 44 Robert Farley and Lori Robertson, “Trump’s False Claims About Rep. Ilhan Omar,” FactCheck.org, July 16, 2019, https://www.factcheck.org/2019/07/trumps-false-claims-about-rep-ilhan-omar/ (accessed October 1, 2020). The “Squad” consisted of Omar, and Democratic representatives Alexandria OcasioCortez (New York), Ayanna Pressley (Massachusetts), and Rashida Tlaib (Michigan). 45 Anne Case and Angus Deaton, Deaths of Despair and the Future of Capitalism (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2020). 46 Ibid., 111. 47 Ibid., 4. Hilary Swift and Abby Goodnough, “‘The Drug Became His Friend:’ Pandemic Drives Hike in Opioid Deaths,” New York Times, September 29, 2020. See, however, Michael J. Sandel, The Tyranny of Merit: What’s Become of the Common Good? (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2020), chapter 4: “Credentialism: The Last Acceptable Prejudice.” 48 Robert Wuthnow, The Left Behind: Decline and Rage in Small-Town America, 2nd ed. (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2018), 11–12. 49 Joan C. Williams, “What So Many People Don’t Get About the U.S. Working Class,” Harvard Business Review (November 10, 2016), https://hbr.org/2016/11/what-so-many-people-dont-getabout-the-u-s-working-class (accessed December 13, 2017), and Joan C. Williams, White Working Class: Overcoming Class Cluelessness in America, rev. ed. (Cambridge: Harvard Business Review Press, 2019, 2008). Other works have included Arlie Russell Hochschild, Strangers in Their Own Land: Anger and Mourning on the American Right (New York: The New Press, 2016); Nancy Isenberg, White Trash: The 400-Year Untold History of Class in America (New York: Penguin, 2016); J.D. Vance, Hillbilly Elegy: A Memoir of a Family and Culture in Crisis (New York: HarperCollins, 2016); Anthony Harkins and Meredith McCarroll, eds., Appalachian Reckoning: A Region Responds to Hillbilly Elegy (Morgantown: West Virginia University Press, 2019); Joe Bogeant, Deer Hunting with Jesus: Dispatches from America’s Class War (New York: Three Rivers Press, 2008). 50 Journalist Thomas Frank chastises the Democratic Party for abandoning blue-collar, working-class Americans in Listen, Liberal: Or, Whatever Happened to the Party of the People? (New York: Metropolitan Books, 2016). He is equally harsh on the Republican Party in What’s the Matter with Kansas? How Conservatives Won the Heart of America (New York: Henry Holt, 2004); The Wrecking Crew: How Conservatives Ruined Government, Enriched Themselves, and Beggared the Nation (New York: Henry Holt, 2008); also Williams, “What So Many People Don’t Get About the Working Class;” and Joan C. Williams, “How Biden Won Back (Enough of) the White Working Class,” Harvard Business Review, November 10, 2020, https://hbr.org/2020/11/how-biden-won-back-enoughof-the-white-working-class (accessed February 24, 2021). 51 Donald S. Beyer Jr., Vice Chairman, “The Economic State of Black America in 2020,” US Congress, Joint Economic Committee, n.d., 1, 33, https://www.jec.senate.gov/public/_cache/files/ccf4dbe2-810a44f8-b3e7-14f7e5143ba6/economic-state-of-black-america-2020.pdf (accessed August 20, 2020). 52 Roni Caryn Rabin, “‘How Did We Not Know?’ Gun Owners Confront a Suicide Epidemic,” New York Times, November 17, 2020; Hai Le, Burhan Ahmed Khan, Syed Murtaza, Asim A. Shah, “The Increase in Suicide During the COVID-19 Pandemic,” Psychiatric Annals 50 (12) (December 2020): 526–30, https://www.healio.com/psychiatry/journals/psycann/2020-12-50-12/ %7B60567d09-854d-4092-b3fe-11d040f2c92c%7D/the-increase-in-suicide-during-the-COVID19-pandemic (accessed February 2, 2021).

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53 “2018 Hate Crime Statistics,” Federal Bureau of Investigation, Criminal Justice Information Services Division, n.d., https://ucr.fbi.gov/hate-crime/2018/hate-crime (accessed September 15, 2020). Adeel Hassan, “Hate Crimes Violence Hits 16-Year High, FBI Reports,” New York Times, November 12, 2019; Mark Potok, “The Year in Hate and Extremism,” The Intelligence Report, Southern Poverty Law Center, February 15, 2017, https://www.splcenter.org/fighting-hate/intelligence-report/2017/yearhate-and-extremism (accessed October 8, 2020). The FBI defines a hate crime as a “criminal offense against a person or property, motivated in whole or in part by an offender’s bias against a race, religion, disability, sexual orientation, ethnicity, gender, or gender identity.” 54 Maeve Reston, “With a Shocking Invocation of George Floyd, Trump Shows His Disconnect from Nation’s Pain,” CNN, June 6, 2020, https://www.cnn.com/2020/06/06/politics/trump-george-floydmaine/index.html (accessed December 30, 2020). 55 Ta-Nehisi Coates, “The Case for Reparations,” The Atlantic, June 2014, https://www.theatlantic. com/magazine/archive/2014/06/the-case-for-reparations/361631/; Ta-Nehisi Coates, Between the World and Me (New York: Random House, 2015); Jennifer A. Richeson, “Americans Are Determined to Believe in Black Progress,” The Atlantic, September 2020, https://www.theatlantic. com/magazine/archive/2020/09/the-mythology-of-racial-progress/614173/; Matthew Desmond, Evicted: Poverty and Profit in the American City (New York: Broadway Books, 2017); Mary-Frances Winters, Black Fatigue: How Racism Erodes the Body, Mind, and Spirit (New York: Berrett-Koehler, 2020); Ijeoma Oluo, So You Want to Talk About Race (New York: Seal Press, 2019); Ibram X. Kendi, Stamped from the Beginning: The Definitive History of Racist Ideas in America (New York: Bold Type Books, 2016); Ibram X. Kendi, How to be an Anti-Racist (New York: One World, Penguin Random House, 2019); Robin J. DiAngelo, White Fragility: Why It Is So Hard for White People to Talk About Racism (Boston: Beacon Press, 2018); Carol Anderson, White Rage: The Unspoken Truth of Our Racial Divide (New York: Bloomsbury, 2017); Richard Rothstein, The Color of Law: The Forgotten History of How Our Government Segregated America (New York: Norton, 2017); Isabel Wilkerson, The Warmth of Other Suns: The Epic Story of America’s Great Migration (New York: Vintage, 2010) and Isabel Wilkerson, Caste: The Origins of Our Discontent (New York: Random House, 2020). 56 William A. Link, Righteous Warrior: Jesse Helms and the Rise of Modern Conservatism (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 2008). 57 William H. Frey, “The US Will Become Minority White in 2045, Census Projects,” The Brookings Institution, March 14, 2018, https://www.brookings.edu/blog/the-avenue/2018/03/14/the-us-willbecome-minority-White-in-2045-census-projects/ (accessed December 14, 2020). Also, William H. Frey, Diversity Explosion: How New Racial Demographics Are Remaking America (Washington, DC: The Brookings Institution, 2018, 2015). 58 “In US, Decline in Christianity Continues at Rapid Pace,” Pew Research Center, October 17, 2019, https://www.pewforum.org/2019/10/17/in-u-s-decline-of-christianity-continues-at-rapid-pace/ (accessed December 14, 2020). 59 Katherine Stewart, “Trump or No Trump, Religious Authoritarianism is Here to Stay,” New York Times, November 16, 2020; Katherine Stewart, The Power Worshippers: Inside the Dangerous Rise of Religious Nationalism (New York: Bloomsbury, 2020). 60 “White Evangelicals See Trump Fighting for Their Beliefs, Though Many Have Mixed Feelings About His Personal Conduct,” Pew Research Center, March 12, 2020, https://www.pewforum.org/ 2020/03/12/White-evangelicals-see-trump-as-fighting-for-their-beliefs-though-many-have-mixedfeelings-about-his-personal-conduct/ (accessed December 14, 2020); Philip Bump, “Nearly Half of Republicans Think God Wanted Trump to be President,” Washington Post, February 14, 2019. 61 “Attitudes on Same-Sex Marriage,” Pew Research Center, May 14, 2019, https://www.pewforum.org/ fact-sheet/changing-attitudes-on-gay-marriage/ (accessed August 20, 2020). 62 Ian Huff, “Half of US States Have Enacted Non-Discrimination Protections for LGBT Residents—Will Others Follow?” Public Religion Research Institute, June 1, 2020, https://www.prri.org/ spotlight/half-of-u-s-states-have-enacted-nondiscrimination-protections-for-lgbt-residents-willothers-follow/ (accessed August 20, 2020). 63 Jones quoted in Lisa Lerer, Giovanni Russonello, and Isabella Grulón Paz, “On LBGTQ Rights, a Gulf Between Trump and Many Republican Voters,” New York Times, June 21, 2020; Robert P. Jones, Jr., The End of White Christian America (New York: Simon & Schuster, 2016). 64 Lydia Saad, “Americans’ Abortion Views Steady in Past Year,” Gallup, June 29, 2020, https://news.gallup. com/poll/313094/americans-abortion-views-steady-past-year.aspx (accessed December 17, 2020). 65 Jones quoted in Lerer et al., “On LBGTQ Rights, a Gulf Between Trump and Many Republican Voters.”

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66 Andrew L. Whitehead and Samuel L. Perry, Taking American Back for God: Christian Nationalism in the United States (New York: Oxford University Press, 2020), 10. Also, Thomas B. Edsall, “‘The Capitol Insurrection Was as Christian Nationalist as It Gets,’” New York Times, January 28, 2021. 67 Catherine Brown and Ulrich Boser, “The DeVos Dynasty: A Family of Extremists,” Center for American Progress, January 23, 2017, https://www.americanprogress.org/issues/default/news/2017/01/ 23/296947/the-devos-dynasty-a-family-of-extremists/; “5 Things to Know About Hobby Lobby’s Owners,” Seattle Times, July 1, 2014, https://www.seattletimes.com/nation-world/5-things-to-knowabout-hobby-lobbys-owners/; Peter Montgomery, “Meet the Billionaire Brothers You Never Heard of Who Fund the Religious Right,” American Prospect, June 13, 2014, https://prospect.org/power/meetbillionaire-brothers-never-heard-fund-religious-right/ (accessed January 22, 2021). 68 Bill Gates, “The Next Outbreak? We’re Not Ready,” Ted.com, YouTube, https://www.youtube.com/ watch?v=6Af6b_wyiwl (accessed November 12, 2020). 69 David E. Sanger, Eric Lipton, Eileen Sullivan, and Michael Crowley, “Before Virus Outbreak, a Cascade of Warnings Went Unheeded,” New York Times, March 19, 2020. The report: Memorandum from Christopher Kirchhoff to Ambassador Susan E. Rice, “Lessons Learned Study on Ebola,” July 11, 2016, https://int.nyt.com/data/documenthelper/6823-national-security-counci-ebola/ 05bd797500ea55be0724/optimized/full.pdf#page=1 (accessed April 6, 2020). 70 Sanger, Lipton, Sullivan, and Crowley, “Before Virus Outbreak, a Cascade of Warnings Went Unheeded.” 71 GHS Index: Global Health Security Index, Bloomberg School of Public Health, The Johns Hopkins University, October 2019, https://www.ghsindex.org/wp-content/uploads/2019/10/2019-GlobalHealth-Security-Index.pdf (accessed October 26, 2020). The Index leaders were Elizabeth E. Cameron, Jennifer B. Nuzzo, and Jessica A. Bell. 72 Shane Harris, Greg Miller, Josh Dawsey, and Ellen Nakashima, “US Intelligence Reports from January and February Warned About a Likely Pandemic,” Washington Post, March 20, 2020. 73 Epigraph quote from Trump in Shane Harris, Greg Miller, Josh Dawsey, and Ellen Nakashima, “US Intelligence Reports from January and February Warned About a Likely Pandemic,” Washington Post, March 20, 2020. 74 Bob Woodward, Rage (New York: Simon & Schuster, 2020). The transcript of one of the Woodward interviews with Trump, from “Trump Tells Woodward that He Deliberately Downplayed Coronavirus Threat,” NPR, September 10, 2020, https://www.npr.org/2020/09/10/911368698/trump-tellswoodward-he-deliberately-downplayed-coronavirus-threat (accessed January 2, 2021). 75 Trump quoted in Wright, “The Plague Year.” 76 “As Death Rates Accelerate, US Records 400,000 Lives Lost to the Coronavirus,” NPR, January 19, 2021, https://www.npr.org/sections/health-shots/2021/01/19/957488613/as-death-rate-accelerates-us-records-400-000-lives-lost-to-the-coronavirus (accessed January 23, 2021). 77 Stuart Stevens, It Was All a Lie: How the Republican Party Became Donald Trump (New York: Random House, 2020), prologue, Kindle version. 78 Hacker and Pierson, Let Them Eat Tweets. 79 Thomas E. Mann and Norman J. Ornstein, “Five Myths About Bipartisanship,” Washington Post, January 17, 2020. 80 Thomas B. Edsall, “Trump vs. Biden is an American History Rerun,” New York Times, August 19, 2020. 81 Ibid., demographic information from political scientist Ryan Burge cited in this article. 82 Carlos Lozada, What Were We Thinking: A Brief Intellectual History of the Trump Era (New York: Simon & Schuster, 2020); Alexandra Alter, “The ‘Trump Bump’ for Books Has Been Significant. Can It Continue?” New York Times, December 24, 2020. There were 500 books written about the Obama administration. 83 Justin A. Frank, Trump on the Couch: Inside the Mind of the President (New York: Avery/Penguin Random House, 2018), xx. 84 Jerrold M. Post with Stephanie R. Doucette, Dangerous Charisma: The Political Psychology of Donald Trump and His Followers Obituary (New York: Pegasus Books, 2019); quote cited in Clay Risen, “Jerrold M. Post, Specialist in Political Psychology, Dies at 81,” New York Times, December 12, 2020. 85 Obituary, Sydney Trent, “CIA Psychological Profiler Who Labeled Trump ‘Dangerous’ Dies of COVID at 86,” Washington Post, December 5, 2020. 86 Jason Stanley, How Fascism Works: The Politics of Us and Them, rev. ed. (New York: Random House, 2020), xxi.

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87 Trump quoted in Greg Sargent, “Trump Ends It All with One Final Scam: And It Bodes Badly for Trumpism’s Future,” Washington Post, January 21, 2021. 88 Jean Edward Smith, Bush (New York: Simon & Schuster, 2016), xvi. 89 In 2021, C-SPAN polled 142 presidential historians; Franklin Pierce, Andrew Johnson, and James Buchanan (1857–1861) ranked at the bottom. Right above Pierce was Donald Trump. “Presidential Historians Survey 2021,” C-SPAN, https://www.c-span.org/presidentsurvey2021/ (accessed July 5, 2021). 90 Kathryn Dunn Tenpas, “Why Is Trump’s Turnover Higher than the Five Previous Presidents?” Brookings Institution, January 19, 2018, https://www.brookings.edu/research/why-is-trumps-staffturnover-higher-than-the-5-most-recent-presidents/; Dunn Tenpas, “Tracking Turnover in the Trump Administration,” Brookings Institution, January 2021, https://www.brookings.edu/research/ why-is-trumps-staff-turnover-higher-than-the-5-most-recent-presidents/ (accessed January 27, 2021). 91 During the 113th, 114th and 115th Congresses, Angus King (Independent—Maine) and Bernie Sanders (Independent—Vermont) caucused with the Democrats. 92 Jane Mayer, “How Mitch McConnell Became Trump’s Enabler-in-Chief,” The New Yorker, April 12, 2020. 93 Klobuchar quoted in Molly Ball, Pelosi (New York: Henry Holt, 2020), frontispiece. 94 Cornelia Powers, “100 Years Ago, These Congresswomen Broke Barriers. But Their Legacy Is a Cautionary Tale for Today,” The Lilly, Washington Post, August 28, 2020. “Women Members of Congress, By Session 1917–Present,” History, Art & Archives, US House of Representatives, n.d., https://history. house.gov/Exhibitions-and-Publications/WIC/Historical-Data/Women-Representatives-and-Senatorsby-Congress/ (accessed January 27, 2021). 95 Quoted in Matthew Choi and Josh Gerstein, “Ginsburg’s Wish: ‘I Will Not Be Replace Until a New President is Installed,’” Politico, September 18, 2020, https://www.politico.com/news/2020/09/18/ ginsburg-rbg-dying-wish-418108 (accessed September 20, 2020). 96 Graham quoted in Benjamin Fearnow, “Lindsey Graham Earlier Vowed a President in Their Last Year of Term Shouldn’t Fill a Supreme Court Vacancy,” Newsweek, September 19, 2020. 97 Nicholas Fandos, “The Senate Confirms Barrett on Nearly Party-line Vote, Delivering a Win for Trump That Tips the Supreme Court to the Right,” New York Times, October 27, 2020. 98 John Gramlich, “How Trump Compares with Other Recent Presidents in Appointing Federal Judges,” Pew Research Center, January 13, 2021, https://www.pewresearch.org/fact-tank/2021/01/13/ how-trump-compares-with-other-recent-presidents-in-appointing-federal-judges/ (accessed February 23, 2021). 99 James Crowley, “‘Grim Reaper’ Mitch McConnell Admits There Are 395 House Bills Sitting in the Senate: ‘We’re Not Going to Pass Those,’” Newsweek, February 14, 2020, https://www.newsweek. com/mitch-mcconnell-grim-reaper-395-house-bills-senate-wont-pass-1487401 (accessed December 30, 2020). 100 Steven Greenhouse, “Biden’s Plan to Winning Back Blue-Collar Workers,” The New Yorker, January 13, 2021. 101 Senator John McCain was absent for medical reasons and did not vote. 102 Harry Enten, “The GOP Tax Cuts Are Even More Unpopular Than Past Tax Hikes,” fivethirtyeight.com, https://fivethirtyeight.com/features/the-gop-tax-cuts-are-even-more-unpopularthan-past-tax-hikes/ (accessed November 5, 2020). The average results from five different surveys, from Quinnipiac University, ABC News/Washington Post, CNN, Morning Consult, and YouGov. 103 David Floyd, “Trump’s Tax Reform Plan Explained,” Investopedia.com, https://www.investopedia. com/taxes/trumps-tax-reform-plan-explained/ (accessed November 6, 2020). 104 Justin Elliott and Robert Faturechi, “Secret IRS Files Reveal How Much the Ultrawealthy Gained by Shaping Trump’s ‘Big, Beautiful Tax Cut,” Pro Publica, August 11, 2021, https://www.propublica.org/ article/secret-irs-files-reveal-how-much-the-ultrawealthy-gained-by-shaping-trumps-big-beautifultax-cut?utm_source=sailthru&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=majorinvestigations&utm_ content=feature (accessed August 11, 2021). 105 “Remarks by President Trump at Tax Reform Event,” White House, September 27, 2017, https:// www.Whitehouse.gov/briefings-statements/remarks-president-trump-tax-reform-event/ (accessed November 5, 2020). 106 Allan Sloan and Cezary Podkul, “Trump’s Most Enduring Legacy Could be the Historic Rise in the National Debt,” Washington Post, January 14, 2021, citing data from the Federal Reserve Bank of New York, newyorkfed.org/microeconomics/hhdc.htm (accessed February 24, 2021).

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107 Heather Long and Jeff Stein, “The US Deficit Hit $984 Billion in 2019, Soaring During Trump Era,” Washington Post, October 25, 2019. 108 Coons quoted in Wright, “The Plague Year.” 109 Samuelson, “The Mother of All Bailouts Isn’t Finished Yet.” 110 “The $2 Trillion CARES Act, a Response to COVID-19, is Equivalent to 45 Percent of all 2019 Federal Spending,” USAFacts, April 5, 2020, https://usafacts.org/articles/what-will-cares-act-andother-congressional-coronavirus-bills-do-how-big-are-they/; Sharon Parrott, et al., “CARES Act Includes Essential Measures on Budget and Policy Priorities,” Center on Budget and Policy Priorities, March 27, 2020, https://www.cbpp.org/research/economy/cares-act-includes-essential-measures-torespond-to-public-health-economic-crises (accessed November 2, 2020). 111 Jeffrey Cheng, Dave Skidmore, and David Wessel, “What’s the Fed Doing in Response to the COVID-19 Crisis? What More Could It Do?” Brookings Institution, July 17, 2020, https://www. brookings.edu/research/fed-response-to-covi19/ (accessed October 28, 2020). 112 Ibid. 113 Rachel Siegel, Jeff Stein, and Mike DeBonis, “Here’s What’s in the New $900 Billion Stimulus Package,” Washington Post, December 20, 2020; Yeganeh Torbati, “Tucked into Congress’ Massive Stimulus Bill: Tens of Billions in Special Interest Tax Giveaways,” Washington Post, December 22, 2020. 114 Schumer quoted in Sarah Kaplan and Dino Grandoni, “Stimulus Deal Includes Raft of Provisions to Right Climate Change,” Washington Post, December 21, 2020. 115 Seung Min Kim, Josh Dawsey, and Mike DeBonis, “Trump’s Last-Minute Tantrum Throws Pandemic Relief Effort into Chaos,” Washington Post, December 23, 2020. 116 Romney quoted in Alexander Burns and Jonathan Martin, “A President Who Can’t Put Aside Grudges, Even for Good News,” New York Times, December 20, 2020. 117 Trump v. Mazars USA LLP, 591 US ____ (2020), https://supreme.justia.com/cases/federal/us/591/19715/#tab-opinion-4271585 (accessed July 21, 2020). 118 Trump v. Vance, 591 US___(2020), https://supreme.justia.com/cases/federal/us/591/19-635/#tabopinion-4271581 (accessed July 21, 2020). 119 Roberts delivered the majority opinion in both cases. He was joined by Justices Ginsburg, Breyer, Kagan, Sotomayor, Gorsuch, and Kavanaugh. Dissenting in both were Justices Alito and Thomas. 120 United States v. Nixon, 418 US 683 (1974), https://supreme.justia.com/cases/federal/us/418/683/#tabopinion-1950928; Clinton v. Jones, 520 US 681 (1997), https://supreme.justia.com/cases/federal/us/ 520/681/#tab-opinion-1960128 (accessed July 21, 2020). 121 Bostock v. Clayton County, Georgia, 590 US___(2020), https://supreme.justia.com/cases/federal/us/ 590/17-1618/#tab-opinion-4261584 (accessed July 23, 2020). Gerald Bostock, who had fought for seven years to regain his rights, was the only one of the three to survive. Zardo died in a BASEjumping accident in 2014 and Stephens died of kidney disease a month before the decision. 122 In a much-anticipated decision, the Court ruled that members of the Colorado Civil Rights Division had violated the First Amendment Freedom of Religion clause by making disparaging comments against the owner of a bakeshop who refused to sell a wedding cake to a gay couple. Masterpiece Cakeshop Ltd. v. Colorado Civil Rights Commission, 584 US___(2018); https://supreme.justia.com/ cases/federal/us/584/16-111/#tab-opinion-3910082 (accessed July 20, 2020). 123 Rucho v. Common Cause together with Lamone v. Benisek, 588 US ___ (2019), https://supreme.justia. com/cases/federal/us/588/18-422/#tab-opinion-4114540. 124 Roberts was joined by Justices Thomas, Alito, Gorsuch, and Kavanaugh. 125 Kagan dissent, joined by Justices Ginsburg, Breyer, and Sotomayor; https://supreme.justia.com/cases/ federal/us/588/18-422/#tab-opinion-4114538. 126 McGirt v. Oklahoma, 591 US____(2020), https://supreme.justia.com/cases/federal/us/591/18-9526/# tab-opinion-4271575; joining Gorsuch were Justices Ginsburg, Breyer, Kagan, and Sotomayor. 127 Ibid. 128 Julian Brave Noisecat, The McGirt Case Is a Historic Win for Tribes,” The Atlantic, July 12, 2020, https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2020/07/mcgirt-case-historic-win-tribes/614071/ (accessed August 4, 2020). 129 On the White House interference with the CDC, Noah Weiland, “‘Like a Hand Grasping:’ Trump Appointees Describe the Crushing of the CDC,” New York Times, December 16, 2020. 130 Wright, “The Plague Year.” 131 Aaron Blake and JM Rieger, “Timeline: The More Than 60 Times Trump Has Downplayed the Coronavirus Threat,” Washington Post, June 24, 2020.

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132 Editorial, “Dying in a Leadership Vacuum,” New England Journal of Medicine, https://www.nejm.org/ doi/full/10.1056/NEJme2029812 (accessed October 8, 2020). 133 Editors, “Scientific American Endorses Joe Biden,” Scientific American, October 2020, https://www. scientificamerican.com/article/scientific-america-endorses-joe-biden1 (accessed October 8,2020). 134 Yasmeen Abutaleb, Ashley Parker, Josh Dawsey, and Philip Rucker, “The Insider Story of How Trump’s Denial, Mismanagement, and Magical Thinking Led to the Pandemic’s Dark Winter,” Washington Post, December 19, 2020. 135 Sheryl Gay Stolberg, “Trump’s Former Pandemic Coordinator Suggests that a Restrained Response May Have Cost Hundreds of Thousands of Lives,” New York Times, March 28, 2021. 136 Heather Long, Andrew Van Dam, Alyssa Fowers, and Leslie Shapiro, “The COVID-19 Recession Is the Most Unequal in Modern US History,” Washington Post, September 30, 2020. 137 Quoted in Nicholas Kristof, “America and the Virus: ‘A Colossal Failure of Leadership,’” New York Times, October 22, 2020; Nicholas A. Christakis, Apollo’s Arrow: The Profound and Enduring Impact of Coronavirus on the Way We Live (Boston: Little, Brown Spark, 2020). 138 Collins, “US Billionaire Wealth Surges Past $1 Trillion Since Beginning of Pandemic.” 139 Robert Pear, Thomas Kaplan, and Maggie Haberman, “In Major Defeat for Trump, Push to Repeal Health Law Fails,” New York Times, March 24, 2017. 140 “Repeal of Individual Health Insurance Mandate,” Congressional Budget Office, December 8, 2016, https://www.cbo.gov/budget-options/2016/52232 (accessed December 2, 2020). 141 Hirono in “How Obamacare Repeal Failed, in Two Minutes,” Washington Post, https://www.youtube. com/watch?v=YnkNVuRmbCo (accessed December 2, 2020). 142 Lawrence R. Jacobs, Suzanne Mettler, and Ling Zhu, “Affordable Care Act Moving to New Stage of Public Acceptance,” Journal of Health Policy, Politics and Law, 44 (6) (2019): 911–17, https://doi.org/ 10.1215/03616878-7785811 (accessed November 22, 2020). 143 Austin Bussing, Will Patton, Jason M. Roberts, Sarah A. Truel, “The Electoral Consequences of Roll Call Voting: Health Care and the 2018 Election,” Political Behavior (May 2020), https://link.springer. com/article/10.1007/s11109-020-09615-4 (accessed November 20, 2020). 144 Zeke Faux, Polly Mosendz, and John Tozzi, “Health Insurance that Doesn’t Cover the Bills Has Flooded the Market Under Trump,” Bloomberg News, September 17, 2019, https://www.bloomberg. com/news/features/2019-09-17/under-trump-health-insurance-with-less-coverage-floods-market (accessed November 23, 2020). 145 Devlin Barrett, “Trump Vows Complete End of Obamacare Law Despite Pandemic,” Washington Post, May 6, 2020. 146 Press release, “Pelosi Statement on Trump Brief Asking Supreme Court to Strike Down Affordable Care Act Amid Coronavirus,” Office of the Speaker, June 25, 2020, https://www.speaker.gov/ newsroom/62520-3 (accessed September 11, 2020); Meagan Flynn and Tim Elfrink, “Trump Administration Asks Supreme Court to Strike Down Obamacare,” Washington Post, June 25, 2020. 147 Sarah Pierce and Jessica Bolter, “Dismantling and Reconstructing the US Immigration System: A Catalog of Changes Under the Trump Presidency,” Migration Policy Institute, July 2020, https://www. migrationpolicy.org/research/us-immigration-system-changes-trump-presidency (accessed December 23, 2020). 148 Catherine Rampell, “Trump Didn’t Build His Border Wall with Steel, He Built It Out of Paper,” New York Times, October 29, 2020; Sarah Pierce and Jessica Bolter, “Dismantling and Reconstructing the US Immigration System: A Catalog of Changes Under the Trump Presidency,” Migration Policy Institute, July 2020, https://www.migrationpolicy.org/research/us-immigrationsystem-changes-trump-presidency (accessed December 23, 2020). 149 “Trump’s Overhaul of Immigration Is Worse Than You Think.” 150 Quoted in Editorial, “Trump’s Overhaul of Immigration Is Worse Than You Think,” New York Times, October 10, 2020. 151 Jason DeParle, “How Stephen Miller Seized the Moment to Battle Immigration,” New York Times, August 17, 2019; on Miller, Jean Guerrero, Hatemonger: Stephen Miller, Donald Trump, and the White Nationalist Agenda (New York: William Morrow, 2020). 152 Session quoted in Nick Miroff and Matt Zapotosky, “Trump’s ‘Zero Tolerance’ Border Policy Was Pushed Aggressively by Jeff Sessions, Despite Warnings, Justice Dept. Review Finds,” Washington Post, January 14, 2021 l; Robert Draper, “Democrats Have an Immigration Problem,” New York Times, October 10, 2018; Review of the Department of Justice’s Planning and Implementation of Its Zero Tolerance Policy and Its Coordination with the Departments of Homeland Security and Health and Human Services, Office of Inspector General, US Department of Justice, January 14, 2021, https://oig.justice.

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Polarization, Growing Inequality, and Difficult Choices gov/reports/review-department-justices-planning-and-implementation-its-zero-tolerance-policy-andits (accessed January 14, 2021). Department of Homeland Security v. Regents of the University of California, 591 US___(2020), https:// supreme.justia.com/cases/federal/us/591/18-587/#tab-opinion-4263242. Juliet Eilperin, Brady Dennis, and John Muyskens, “Trump Rolled Back More Than 125 Environmental Safeguards. Here’s How,” Washington Post, October 30, 2020. Daphne Wang and Jeff Shaw, “Bloomberg Philanthropies and Sierra Club’s Beyond Coal Campaign Reaches Landmark Closure of 318th US Coal Plant, On Track to Retire All Coal Plants by 2030,” Sierra Club, September 15, 2020, https://www.sierraclub.org/press-releases/2020/09/bloombergphilanthropies-and-sierra-clubs-beyond-coal-campaign-reaches (accessed November 2, 2020). Elizabeth Kolbert, “Listening to James Hansen on Climate Change, Thirty Years Ago and Now,” The New Yorker, June 20, 2018, https://www.newyorker.com/news/daily-comment/listening-to-jameshansen-on-climate-change-thirty-years-ago-and-now (accessed November 12, 2020). Christopher Flavelle, “US Disaster Costs Doubled in 2020, Reflecting Cost of Climate Change,” New York Times, January 7, 2021. Hannah Pitt, Kate Larsen, and Maggie Young, “The Undoing of US Climate Policy: The Emissions Impact of Trump-Era Rollbacks,” Rhodium Group, September 17, 2020, rhr.com/research/therollback-of-us-climate policy/ (accessed January 12, 2021). A complete list of the more than 100 environmental rules is found in Nadja Popovich, Albeck Ripa, and Kendra Pierre-Louis, “The Trump Administration Is Reversing More Than 100 Environmental Rules. Here’s the Full List,” New York Times, November 10, 2020. Trump and Biden quoted in Sophie Tatum, “Trump Compares US Infrastructure to a ‘Third World Country,’” CNN, August 15, 2017, https://www.cnn.com/2017/08/15/politics/donald-trump-thirdworld-country/index.html (accessed February 8, 2021). Tanya Snyder, “House Sends Massive Infrastructure Bill to the Senate, Where It Has No Path Forward,” Politico, July 1, 2020, https://www.politico.com/news/2020/07/01/house-infrastructure-bill347355; William J. Mallett, “Transportation Infrastructure Investment as Economic Stimulus: Lessons from the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act of 2009,” Congressional Research Service, Report R46343, May 5, 2020, https://crsreports.congress.gov/product/pdf/R/R46343 (accessed February 1, 2021). Editorial Board, “How Congress Has Dithered as the Innocent Get Shot,” New York Times, February 15, 2018. A “mass shooting” involves four or more persons injured or killed at a single event at the same time and location.

Chapter 14

The Arduous Road Ahead

Let this grim era of demonization in America begin to end here and now! (Biden victory address, November 7, 2020) The data paint an alarming picture of the state of our nation, and we hope it will be a call to action. It’s like we’re a developing country. (Michael Porter on America’s standing in the 2020 Social Progress Index, 2020)1

This concluding chapter is written during the early months of 2022, in a new era, with a new president and administration, a fractured House and Senate close to deadlock, a more conservative Supreme Court, a pandemic with new highly contagious variants spreading throughout the country, extraordinary domestic policy challenges, pleas for unity but sharp partisan divisions, and a significant minority of Americans convinced that the presidential election was stolen and the Biden presidency is illegitimate. In recent memory are the horror of the US Capitol insurrection, the second impeachment of Donald Trump, and the hear-no-evil, see-no-evil response of the great majority of Republican elected leaders who lack the political and moral courage to confront Trump’s Big Lie. In 1933, with the country in deep economic turmoil and the banking system about to collapse, Franklin Roosevelt and Congress embarked on 100 days of bold policymaking. Fifteen laws were passed during this storied period and there was more to come during the first and second rounds of the New Deal. Since then, the First Hundred Days has been used as a measuring stick for new presidents as they confronted domestic crises. During the first 100 days, Lyndon Johnson, an acolyte of FDR, vowed to fulfill the Kennedy agenda, and later through his full four-year term aspired to complete the work done by Roosevelt. Ronald Reagan successfully pushed sweeping tax cuts and spending legislation, but Bill Clinton, with high hopes and campaign promises, accomplished far less. During his first 100 days, Barack Obama inherited a crippled economy and staggering job losses, but passed the significant Recovery Act and laid the groundwork for the Affordable Care Act (ACA). Roosevelt had the backing of Congress, with extraordinary partisan majorities in Congress, along with many Republican leaders willing to go along with New Deal reforms. He also had the hopes of the American people riding on his shoulders. Lyndon Johnson, too, had extraordinary partisan advantages in Congress, despite the reluctance of southern Democrats to even consider civil rights reform. Not so Joe Biden. In 2021, again, it was one of those advantageous times when the White House, Senate, and House of Representatives were controlled by one party; but the margins were tenuous, razor-thin at best. Eighteen months into the One Hundred Seventeenth Congress (2021–2023), Democrats held a slim majority in the House, 220–210, along with DOI: 10.4324/9781003293538-18

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seven vacancies. For Speaker Nancy Pelosi and her leadership team, the struggle was to maintain party discipline and keep every Democrat on board. In the Senate, there was a 50-50 division, with Vice President Kamala Harris the tie-breaking vote. Maintaining party discipline in the Senate was much more difficult for Majority Leader Charles Schumer. Every Democrat, including moderate-conservatives Joe Manchin III (West Virginia) and Kyrsten Sinema (Arizona) had to be on board. The further difficulty in the Senate was overcoming the threat of a filibuster, requiring sixty votes to override this distinctive Senate parliamentary hurdle. Finding ten Republicans to defy party loyalty and discipline would be a near impossible order; compromising policy choices in order to secure those votes would only frustrate left-leaning Democratic senators. Budget reconciliation, the tool used in passing Obamacare in 2010, requires just a simple majority, but it can only be used in special circumstances, when budgetary considerations are the principal factors. Just weeks into the new congressional session, Democratic liberals and progressives were putting enormous pressure on the party leadership to fundamentally alter or even discard the filibuster. From their point of view, Republicans would simply not cooperate and, given the bitter divisions, progressive legislation would be stopped cold. Republicans saw their lockstep unity and the filibuster with its sixty-vote requirement as their best line of defense against overly ambitious and expensive legislation. The Biden policy agenda was robust, bursting with comprehensive and much needed plans to tackle key domestic problems. The plans were also expensive and complex, challenging once again the ability of policymakers to enact such massive programs. In the wake of the most expensive pieces of legislation in US history, starting with the $700 billion Recovery Act (2009), the $2.2 trillion CARES Act (2020), the $900 billion Stimulus Act (2020), and the $1.9 trillion American Rescue Plan (2021), could lawmakers and policymakers swallow future price tags of hundreds of billions, even trillions, of dollars? In his first month in office, Biden undid some of the most controversial policy decisions made by Donald Trump, signing thirty-four executive orders and other executive actions, ranging from extending the enrollment period for Medicaid and the Affordable Care Act, proclaiming that the climate crisis considerations shall be foremost in foreign policy and national security, and revoking Trump policies of immigration enforcement. These policy statements were all made with the stroke of a pen, without the need of congressional approval.2 In policymaking terms, this was the easy work, the low-hanging fruit of much deeper problems.

STRESSES ON SOCIETY While every era has experienced significant stresses on society, the first two decades of the twenty-first century have seen extraordinary challenges. Some of those stresses have been unique; others have been long-standing. The 9/11 attacks sharply and profoundly demonstrated the nation’s vulnerability to foreign terrorism on American soil. The vicious attack on the US Capitol on January 6, 2021 showed, once again, America’s vulnerability; this time, to domestic terrorism. Throughout this era, year by year, the gap widened between the richest and the rest of society, with growing disparities in both income and wealth accumulation, exacerbated by the Great Recession and economic devastation brought about by the coronavirus pandemic. Much of the negative economic impact has been on minority workers, but also deeply affected were white working-class families. Once secure in steady-paying jobs that required no more than a high-school education and a willingness to work, over the decades working-class

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families saw their jobs lost to globalization, technology, and robotics. China, Southeast Asia, and Mexico became the new homes of American manufacturing and industrialization. Whole communities had been hollowed out, as factories that were once the anchors of local prosperity left town, seeking cheaper workforces abroad. For American workers, of whatever background, the losses went far beyond the loss of wages: despair, loss of self-respect, loss of community, often leading to dependency on drugs and alcohol, particularly addiction to opioids. American security unpreparedness was painfully evident during times of crisis. In the months leading up to the 9/11 terrorist attacks, there were warning signs that should have been evident to law enforcement, terrorism, defense and military experts. The federal, state, and local responses to Hurricane Katrina in 2005 were fumbled, despite ample warning that the impending storm damage would be devastating. More consequentially was the botched 2020 federal response to the COVID crisis, with the impact on an untold number of lives and livelihoods. Further, federal law enforcement resources were focused more on left-wing activism and protest, thanks to the mandate from President Trump, than on the far more deadly and consequential right-wing domestic terrorism. Another episode, with its full impact yet unknown, was the immense cybersecurity damage caused by months-long undetected Russian hacking of federal computers during the last months of the Trump administration. These early years of the twenty-first century have seen an extraordinary increase in mass shootings, with guns and ammunition freely available, with military-style weapons, locked and loaded. The frightful, random killing of school children, the latest in Uvalde, Texas, has been joined by shootings at night clubs, taverns, and outdoor concerts. In 2020, the FBI reported that murders, many of them committed with guns, rose 30 percent over the previous year.3 For some Americans, life has been good and generous: steady jobs, money in the bank, a booming stock market, safe neighborhoods, great schools, choices and opportunities galore. Their world view is reflected in the Wall Street Journal, the Washington Post, the PBS Newshour, and opinion columns by David Brooks, Ruth Marcus, and E.J. Dionne, Jr. They are, for the most part, insulated from the ravages of the pandemic. For others, plenty of others, life has become increasingly harsh: the struggle to save money or even pay monthly bills, layoffs and downsizing, the mental and physical toll of the pandemic, and the loss of trust in institutions, whether it be government, churches, or even democracy itself. For many, the world was changing far too rapidly, cultural touchstones were being challenged or mocked, and no one in authority seemed to care. They felt passed over and ignored, even humiliated, with collegeeducated know-it-alls more worried about transgender sensitivities and knocking down statues of Confederate heroes than in listening to their concerns. They were amused, exasperated, and called to arms by conservative icons like the late Rush Limbaugh, Tucker Carlson, Sean Hannity, and a raft of other Fox News commentators, and, at the extremes, by hawkers of conspiracy theories like Alex Jones, Dan Bongino, and QAnon.4 America—this land of opportunity, this land of enormous wealth bursting with talent and energy, this beacon of hope for millions around the world—this America was in trouble. Problems abounded, long festering and eating at the core of American society. Certainly not every problem has a policy solution; not every issue can be resolved by a landmark piece of legislation, an executive order, or a court ruling. But many should have been resolved. Instead, they faced delay or denial. And now comes the critical question that faces America today and for the next eras of government and policy: will federal policymakers be able to meet the pressing challenges and help mitigate the stresses on society? The Biden administration and Congress are faced with a multitude of complex, expensive, and ultimately controversial issues that need to be tackled. Does America have the political will, the sense of urgency, and the resources to craft policies to meet those challenges?

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KEY POLICIES ENACTED AND KEY POLICIES DENIED During the first year of the Biden administration, policymakers have enacted two significant, and expensive, landmark policies.

Battling Against the Pandemic The 1918–1919 pandemic took about 675,000 American lives, an unthinkable number to anyone reading about it one hundred years later. But just two months into the Biden administration, the number of COVID fatalities in the United States crossed the 525,000 figure, and the total US cases topped 28.4 million.5 By the end of 2021, thanks mainly to the Delta and the Omicron variants, the number of COVID deaths exceeded 800,000; by May 2022, that figure exceeded one million.6 No other country had endured such raw numbers of deaths or total cases. Foremost among the pressing challenges was to get vaccines to as many people as possible as soon as possible, and in the meantime to prop up the economy and people’s lives. In 2020, the unprecedented $2.2 trillion CARES Act was quickly passed with near unanimous support. But it took another nine months to pass the $900 billion Stimulus package, and little Republican support. Republican leaders asserted that it was too expensive, not sufficiently targeted, and funds should not have gone to state and local governments. Then came a third bill, nearly as expensive as the CARES Act, during the Biden administration’s first months in office. Biden, promising to seek unity, rebuffed a Republican plan that was only one-third the size of his bill, and decided to “go big,” following the advice of Democratic leaders in both the political and financial world. Signed into law in early March 2021, the American Rescue Plan, a $1.9 trillion relief package, clearly stood out as landmark legislation, and the first major victory of the Biden administration. The targets of relief in this legislation were households, state and city governments, and vaccine distribution; far less money was allocated to businesses than in the previous two major COVID bills. There were four key parts to the Act: first, aid to individuals ($960 billion) in the form of stimulus checks ($1,400 checks to households), additional unemployment benefits, expanded health care coverage, nutrition, housing and child-care, and tax credits for lower income individuals. Journalist Catherine Rampell argued that the “single most important” part of the new law was its expansion and transformation of the child tax credit. Eligible families, including, significantly, the poorest who have no tax liabilities, would receive $3,000 annually per child, or $3,600 annually for each child under age six.7 In total, these items account for more than half of the entire $1.9 trillion measure. The second key part was aid to state and local governments ($510 billion); third, aid to businesses ($65 billion); and fourth, other health care needs, including vaccine distribution ($100 billion). Another $140 billion falls in the category of “other aid.” Those individuals in the bottom 20 percent (making $25,000 or less) should have a 20 percent boost in their incomes. It was predicted that the percentage of persons living in poverty could drop in 2021 by as much as a third. Nearly 70 percent of the tax benefits would go to low- to moderate-income families (making $91,000 or less). This was in sharp contrast to the 2017 Tax Cuts and Jobs Act where nearly 50 percent of all tax cuts went to the top 5 percent of households (those making $308,000 and above).8 There was no Republican support for this $1.9 trillion legislation, with many Republicans arguing that too much money was already being spent, and that money went to governments and entities that simply didn’t need the funds. Writing in the Wall Street Journal, Senator Mitt Romney called the bill a “clunker,” “unsound economic policy,” badly targeted, “filled with bad

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policies and sloppy math.” The legislation “wastes hundreds of billions of dollars, does nothing meaningful to get kids back to school, and enacts policies that work against job creation.”9 Altogether, these three COVID-related enactments (along with three smaller bills) have been the largest outlays of federal dollars in American history, topping nearly $6 trillion. Even before the American Rescue Plan became law, some centrist Democrats and their allies were grousing over the cost, and the potential impact of higher interest rates down the road. “At some point we’ve got to start paying for things,” said Senator Angus King (Independent—Maine), “It’s got to be paid for. … Are we going to pay or our kids going to pay?”10 Distribution of vaccines had proven to be complex and time-consuming, though the administration had pushed for faster, more equitable distribution of the available vaccines. Biden promised 1 million vaccines a day; but soon, over 2 million were being administered daily. It also has been a challenge to convince a determined anti-vaccination minority that the vaccines are safe and effective. Another challenge was to convince state leaders and locales not to relax restrictions too soon, and for the general population not to become too complacent and careless about social distancing and mask wearing. Overt resistance came from some states and localities, with Florida and its governor Ron DeSantis providing the most visible opposition to masking, vaccinations, and mandates. Unless and until the pandemic was checked and the economy and lives got back to some semblance of normalcy, it would be difficult to accomplish the other long-festering policy goals. Continued resistance to COVID restrictions and the emergence of the fast-spreading Delta and Omicron variants complicated recovery and further strained trust in government.

Fixing the Crumbling Infrastructure America has gone through decades of underinvesting in highways, bridges, electricity transmission, airports, bus terminals, and other infrastructure needs. “Many of our roads, bridges, water systems, and out national electrical grid were put into place over fifty years ago, and these systems are simply overwhelmed or worn out,” wrote Gregory E. DiLoretta, president of the American Society of Civil Engineers (ASCE) in 2013. Matters had only gotten worse since then. Year after year, ASCE has published a report card on American infrastructure, with governments, state, local, and federal, achieving miserable grades, such as the most recent overall grade of D+. The engineering society noted that one in five miles of highway were in poor condition; the electricity grid system was well beyond its fifty-year life expectancy; there were 2,170 high-hazard potential dams; and 46,100 structurally deficient bridges. ASCE estimated that from 2016 to 2025, there will be a $2 trillion under investment in infrastructure. The downturn in the economy following COVID only made things worse, with people driving less (resulting in a drop in revenue for the Highway Trust Fund), declines in airport (95 percent) and port (20–30 percent) revenue, and declines in transit system funds.11 In addition, the National League of Cities reported that because of the pandemic some 700 cities had stopped buying new equipment and halted plans for roadway improvements, or to upgrade a wide variety of infrastructure projects.12 COVID underscored the importance of reliable broadband service, with so many persons working remotely from home, and children and schools, colleges and universities relying on Internet services. In 2017, the Federal Communications Commission (FCC) estimated that 20 million households did not have access to broadband Internet; but the advocacy organization Broadband Now puts the figure at 42 million, mostly black and Latino households.13 Addressing America’s crumbling infrastructure was a key feature of Biden’s “Build Back Better” campaign slogan. First introduced at the beginning of 2021, it was pared down considerably from an initial $2.3 trillion in expenditures to accommodate concerns from moderate

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Democrats and the few Republicans who would ultimately agree. The 2,700-page bill, retitled the Infrastructure Investment and Jobs Act, was agreed to in the Senate in August and then by the House in November 2021. It called for $550 billion in new infrastructure spending over the next five years. Critics and supporters often referred to it as a $1.2 trillion package, a sum they arrived at by adding future spending that had already been in place before this legislation was enacted. Roads and bridges received the biggest portion of the funding, $110 billion. Passenger rail service received $66 billion, although there was not funding for developing a high-speed rail service. Another $65 billion would go to improving the nation’s electrical power grid; the same amount, $65 billion, would go to improving broadband accessibility and service. Another significant portion, $55 billion, would go to improve water pipelines, especially targeting the problem of lead found in older water systems. Smaller, but significant, amounts of funding would address cybersecurity and climate change mitigation, public transit, airports, Superfund cleanup, ports, Western water projects, electric school buses and electric vehicle charging stations. With legislation this all-encompassing, a variety of smaller items were inevitably tucked in: research monies for wildlife crossing safety, funds for salmon recovery, and an item that would undoubtedly please its most prominent passenger, Biden himself, the law that encouraged Amtrak to provide a better food and beverage service, even if such improvement might not be profitable.14 One of the key selling points of this package was the job-making potential, especially for workers in the construction trades. Economist Mark Zandi estimated that 660,000 jobs could be created by 2025. The law further provides for job training and encouraging more women to join the construction and trucking industries.15 This landmark legislation was bipartisan: in the Senate, nineteen Republicans, including Mitch McConnell, voted for the bill; in the House, thirteen Republicans joined in. Former president Trump urged a vote against the bill, calling it a “disaster for America,” and trashed McConnell as a “broken old crow.”16

Build Back Better The Biden administration’s most ambitious plan, called Build Back Better, was a determined, expensive, and far-reaching set of policies drives. For months, congressional Democrats battled among themselves on the timing and scope of the package. In October 2021, the most recent version of Build Back Better was released by the White House.17 The enormous policy package was couched in superlatives. It would be the “most transformative” investment in children and caregiving in generations, with two years of free preschool for threeand four-year-olds along with a tax break for more than 35 million families by extending the Child Tax Credit. The act would be the “largest effort” to combat climate change in American history, it would be the “biggest expansion” of affordable health care coverage in a decade. The act would be the “most significant effort” to bring down costs for middle income families in generations, through the “largest and most comprehensive” investment in affordable housing, expansion of high-quality education, cutting taxes for 17 million low-wage earners, among other programs. It would also be extraordinarily expensive: an estimated $2.2 trillion. But the White House assured that the program would be “fully paid for and will reduce the deficit” by making sure that corporations “can’t zero out their tax bills, no longer rewarding corporations that shift jobs and profits overseas, asking more from millionaires and billionaires, and stopping rich Americans from cheating on their tax bills.”

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Democrats were counting on passing one massive bill, rather than separating them into several smaller packages. It has been a tried-and-true legislative strategy to lump everything into an omnibus spending package, hoping that lawmakers (or the president) with objections to some part of the bill would see the larger picture, swallow their objections, and vote for the entire bill. Not a single Republican lawmaker, in either chamber, was willing to go along with this legislation. This meant that all fifty Democratic senators had to agree, and that the measure could be categorized as a budget reconciliation bill. But it would be a tough sell, as Senators Sinema and Manchin continued to raise objections. The White House stated that it had “negotiated in good faith” with the two senators and urged quick passage. In late November 2021, the legislation passed in the House on a strictly party-line vote, 220–213, following weeks of “cajoling, arm-twisting, and political legerdemain.” House Democrats—moderates and progressives alike—crowed about how transformative this legislation would be. Republicans were characteristically negative, lashing out at Pelosi and Democratic lawmakers. “Every page of all this new Washington spending shows just how irresponsible and out of touch the Democrats are to the challenges that America faces today,” charged Republican leader Kevin McCarthy.18 As the scene shifted to the Senate, Senator Manchin in mid-December announced that he could not support the legislation. “If I can’t go home and explain to the people of West Virginia, I can’t vote for it. And I cannot vote to continue with this piece of legislation. I just can’t,” Manchin announced on Fox news. The White House and many Democrats were furious; Republicans praised him, even encouraged Manchin to switch parties. Biden and Democratic leaders vowed not to give up and promised to pursue the legislation before the 2022 midterm elections.

THE POLICY CHALLENGES FACING THE UNITED STATES

Education The public pronouncements and warnings had been coming for nearly forty years. “Our Nation is at risk,” noted the National Commission on Excellence on Education in 1983, “Our once unchallenged preeminence in commerce, industry, science, and technological innovation is being overtaken by competitors throughout the world.” In 2001, President Bush II implored: “We must address the low standing of American test scores amongst industrialized nations in math and science, the very subjects most likely to affect our future competitiveness.” In 2010, Barack Obama stated, “Education is a prerequisite for prosperity. And yet, we’ve tolerated a status quo where America lags behind other nations.”19 At one end of the education continuum, the United States remains the envy of much of the world. A 2014 worldwide survey by US News found that elite American universities dominated higher education.20 Among the top twenty universities in the world, sixteen were located in the United States; among the 500 top universities, 134 were in the United States. The pandemic has roiled higher education, particularly those institutions lacking a robust online infrastructure, those which depended heavily on tuition dollars and international students, and those without substantial endowment funds. Compounding this was the demographic reality that, in the next several years, there would be fewer American students graduating from high school, and the probability that fewer international students would return to American schools. There were credible estimates that perhaps one in five American

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colleges, typically second- or third-tier schools, with high tuition and minimal endowments, will not long survive.21 On the student side, one of the persistent issues has been the extraordinary student debt accumulated and what, if anything, the federal government could, or should, do to alleviate this burden. The Federal Reserve estimated that at the end of the third quarter, 2020, student loan debt stood at $1.7 trillion.22 Often overlooked in the public discourse was the potential of community colleges and vocational education. The United States was faced with the growing need for a trained and educated workforce, demanding skills in health care, plumbing, air conditioning, renewable energy technologies, and a host of other areas. A recent survey by the Manpower Group showed that nearly seven out of ten employers reported a shortage of worker talent in 2019. This was the worst level in the history of its reporting and the shortage was three times higher than just ten years ago.23 A 2018 study by Deloitte and the Manufacturing Institute noted a widening gap between jobs that need to be filled and the available skilled workforce. Between 2018 and 2028, an estimated 2.4 million positions would be unfilled, with a potential negative impact of $2.5 trillion.24 One of the efforts to remedy this shortfall was to focus on skills-based hiring: corporations seeking new workers with skills, rather than degrees. About 30 million American workers, without four-year college degrees, could be earning substantially more by acquiring specific skills, offered at trade or vocational schools or at in-house corporate training programs.25 Federal policymakers could develop a clear vision for a national program, provide funding, ensuring equity in the delivery of such programs, ensure that credentials earned would be portable, and match training programs to the labor market needs.26 During the Trump administration, federal education policy was under the jurisdiction of Betsy DeVos, who argued for less federal money for education and the consolidation of programs, brushed aside Obama administration education policies, pushed for school choice and alternatives to public school education, and advocated increased roles for for-profit educational institutions. Often proclaiming that education was a state and local matter, pledging that the federal government should not interfere, she nevertheless stood shoulder-to-shoulder in July 2020 with President Trump on insisting that local schools reopen in the Fall, regardless of the ability to meet CDC COVID safety guidelines.27 The New York Times characterized the Education Department as “lying in ruins,” and DeVos is remembered “as perhaps the most disastrous leader” in the department’s history.28 Despite Obama-era education programs, like Race to the Top, programs emphasizing Science, Technology, Engineering, and Math (STEM), efforts toward equal opportunity for students, affordability of college education, and despite efforts by leading progressive lawmakers, like Bernie Sanders, to push for federal assistance for college student loans—despite all this, the efforts to provide quality education were complex, costly, and difficult to achieve. Many public school districts were in trouble, struggling with drugs, alcohol, and the looming threat of gun violence. Far too many schools were poorly funded, with far too many teachers underpaid, unappreciated, and ready to strike for better conditions. To make matters even worse, the 2020–2022 COVID pandemic wreaked havoc on an already fragile public education. Federal policymakers, if they were serious about boosting education, equality, and workforce opportunity, had their work cut out for them.

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Health Care To many policymakers, the COVID pandemic clearly demonstrated the need for affordable health care for all. Before the pandemic, some 30 million individuals were without health care protection, and the number of uninsured had been trending upward in the past several years. Nearly 75 percent of those individuals stated that they did not have health insurance because they could not afford it. Furthermore, the Commonwealth Fund estimated that 15 million workers may have lost their employer-sponsored health insurance during the pandemic.29 One of Biden’s first steps was to reopen the federal marketplaces for the Affordable Care Act operating in thirty-six states and to lower barriers for joining Medicaid. By late January 2021, millions of Americans had gained access to health care insurance through expanded Medicaid coverage, but twelve states, mostly in the South, had decided not to expand Medicaid. The decision not to expand coverage, called the “coverage gap” in these states (especially Texas, Florida, North Carolina, Georgia), “disproportionately affect people of color, particularly Black Americans,” noted a report by the Kaiser Family Foundation.30 The Biden plan would expand the ACA, including approximately 5 million persons living in the states that had not increased Medicaid coverage. The target would be those individuals who earned too much money to be eligible for Medicaid, but did not have enough money to afford insurance on their own.31 One of the campaign themes from progressive Democrats was to introduce Medicare for All, using the Medicare foundation to provide widespread coverage, regardless of age. Biden has taken a more modest approach, called Medicare for More, which would lower Medicare eligibility from age sixty-five to sixty. Still looming was a case before the Supreme Court, again challenging the constitutionality of the Affordable Care Act. But in June 2021, the Supreme Court brushed aside this third attempt to overturn the law.32 Given the history of Republican opposition to any form of the Affordable Care Act, and the looming price tag to accomplish further reforms, it was highly unlikely that a full-blown Biden health care package could survive in the Senate.

Inequality Growing inequality, a corrosive feature of American life for decades now, need not be a permanent reality. Public policy scholar Donald F. Kettl, writing in 2020 before the pandemic, observed: “There is no escaping the basic point: in spite of how substantial inequality in the United States is, we could reduce it if we wanted to.”33 The first order of business could be the most profound: restoring the economy by defeating COVID, regaining lost jobs, reinvigorating opportunity. But there were also specific, targeted federal policy measures that could help reduce the inequality gap. The Peterson Institute for International Economics (PIIE), a non-partisan economics think tank, advocated several policies and actions to mitigate the inequalities; several of which had already been adopted by the Biden administration.34 The PIIE policies included: expanding access to the Affordable Care Act, through Medicaid, Medicare, or subsidized COBRA health insurance plans; removing the 2019 Trump administration work requirements for eligibility to food stamps through the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP), so that the poorest of poor families with children can access those benefits; expanding housing vouchers, unemployment benefits, Supplemental Security Income (SSI), and Social Security Disability Insurance (SSDI); beefing up unemployment administrative services, especially in response to the COVID crisis; providing a guaranteed universal basic income for all individuals, involving a cash transfer every month; or expanding the Earned Income Tax Credit (EITC).

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In the area of labor policy, PIIE suggestions: raising the minimum wage and wages for essential low paying jobs (those persons employed in childcare, nursing, home health care, food services, elder care); enforcing existing minimum wage laws; increasing federal job programs, particularly associated with infrastructure project, but also programs similar to those during the Great Depression. Other ideas included offering greater protection to workers in the “gig” economy and increasing power and leverage of labor unions; further, the federal government may have to be the employer of a “last resort” through a National Investment Employment Corps.

Election Reform The presidential elections of 2016 and 2020, as well as the 2000 election, amply demonstrated the fragility of the American election system. Nothing can be more foundational than the integrity of the electoral process. Elections must be transparent, fair, honest, and open to all who are eligible to vote. Yet, the election system has been degraded in a number of significant ways. First, in Florida in 2000, there was the vulnerability of the ballot box: different counties using different systems—paper ballots, electronic ballots, some with confusing design, with hanging chads, and other peculiarities. Afterwards, some federal help was given, but the state and local government-based system still had many challenges. The 2016 elections demonstrated the vulnerability of our election systems, with the attempted hacking of voter databases and the online mischief caused by Russia and others. The 2020 elections saw the unprecedented use of mail-in ballots, the drumbeat of Trump and his allies claiming falsely both before and after the election that it had been stolen, and the subsequent attempts by Republican-dominated state legislatures to tighten up on voting procedures. In early 2021, the Brennan Center for Justice at New York University tallied 253 bills in forty-three states that sought to tighten voting rules. At the same time, however, there were 704 bills introduced in state legislatures to improve voting access.35 Four critical voting and election issues stand out. Who gets to vote? The integrity of the election systems. Campaign financing. The Electoral College. Who Can Vote? The right to vote in America has been a long-fought, difficult struggle, spanning centuries. Despite the tortuous path, policymakers (and society as a whole) should acknowledge and encourage the foundational democratic imperative: all adults eligible to vote should have unfettered access to the voting process and the voting booth, without impediments, without hesitation, without tests, hindrances, or barriers. No broken voting machines, no last-minute changes in polling venues, no undermanned polling stations, no hours-long lines to vote, no breakdown in the accuracy of voting records. The ugly truth, however, was that for much of American history, and certainly today, we are dangerously on the edge of a new Jim Crow era of voting, with tightened voting restrictions, shortened early voting opportunities, cutting back on Sunday voting, identification requirements, and other roadblocks. All such impediments are known to particularly impact minority voters, who, coincidentally vote heavily for Democratic candidates and causes. Republican-dominated state legislatures, before the Trump era and certainly afterwards, have actively and aggressively pursued voter suppression. In June 2021, the Supreme Court, in Brnovich v. Democratic National Committee, issued its ruling on restrictive voting legislation passed by the Arizona state legislature. In a 6–3 decision, the Court, through Justice Samuel Alito, ruled that the new voting law could stand. Alito

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wrote that the law required “equal openness,” and that “mere inconvenience cannot be enough to demonstrate a violation.” Election lawyer Rick Hasen rejoined, saying that “minority groups will now have to meet a much higher standard beyond showing that a change presents a burden on voting. It puts a thumb on the scale for the states.” President Biden weighed in, stating that he found the decision “deeply disappointing.”36

Photo 14.1 John R. Lewis (1940–2020), civil rights leader and later US congressman. Source: US House of Representatives.

In 2021, House Democrats introduced the John Lewis Voting Rights Advancement Act, designed to restore and protect sections of the 1965 Voting Rights Act that were stripped away by the Supreme Court in the 2013 Shelby County and the 2021 Brnovich decisions. However, the bill, named after the civil rights hero John Lewis, has been met with unified opposition from Republicans both in the House and in the Senate. In previous decades, the 1965 Voting Rights Act had been reauthorized with near unanimous support from both Democrats and Republicans. Forty years ago, President Reagan called the right to vote “the crown jewel of American liberties.” When the Voting Rights Act was reauthorized in 2006, by a 98–0 vote, Senator Mitch McConnell praised the law. But no longer. The Republican Party of today, turning a blind eye to continued voting rights abuses and hiding behind the false claims of voter fraud and fears of federal government takeover, is determined to oppose the restoration of federal voting rights protections. The seventeen Republican senators, including McConnell, who voted for the 2006 reauthorization now oppose it, and without Republican support in the Senate, the John Lewis bill will fail. The Integrity of the Election Systems During the 2020 elections, many states resorted to mail-in balloting for the first time, raising all kinds of objections and false cries of voter fraud by President Trump. Five states have had a long history of mail-in balloting, without any measurable instance of fraud. But the simple fact that the president and his allies loudly and persistently cried foul, charging that the vote had been rigged (by Democrats, of course, not by Republicans), had gotten us into the situation

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faced today: little faith in the election process, in the institutions of voting, in the fundamental business of democracy. State and local elections offer a hodge-podge of voting systems, often with antiquated system, security flaws, and not enough manpower to meet the demands of voting, auditing, and verification. Surely federal policy could insure the integrity of voting systems better, through national standards and requirements for voting machines, election staff, election infrastructure, and better audit and verification methods.37 In the background looms the continued threat of election interference by Russia and other bad actors, from spreading disinformation, stirring up controversy, to meddling with the mechanics of elections. Do voters trust the election system? It depends on if a voter buys into Donald Trump’s fabrications. As of January 25, 2021, some 60 percent of all voters stated that they trust the US election system “a lot” or “some.” (Pretty much the same percentage as in September 2020, weeks before the election.) But Republican voters dropped from 77 percent (in September) to just 33 percent in January, while Democratic voters went from 62 percent trust (in September) to 82 percent in January. Clearly, Trump’s falsehoods had a significant effect on his supporters.38 Campaign Financing While Congress finally was able to craft new campaign finance legislation in 2002, it did not take more than a nanosecond for campaign lawyers to figure out other ways of soliciting funds. Then in 2010, the Supreme Court stepped in and, through a series of cases, eviscerated the federal campaign law. Now, individuals, super PACs, dark money fat cats, and others can essentially spend as much as they want trying to influence elections. Any federal law revisiting campaign finances would have to please elected officials; and both parties are dependent on large amounts of cash from mega-donors. That could be an insurmountable hurdle. What could be better than the current system that hides contributions (“dark money”), shields those who gave money, offers tax breaks for certain contributions, and invites unlimited spending to influence campaigns? The Supreme Court accomplished what would otherwise have been a lengthy, heated fight in Congress; perhaps any changes will have to come from the judicial branch. For now, the stakes are high, the partisanship intense, millions of dollars pour in, and political consultants and the rest of the election industry profit handsomely. The Electoral College The antiquated Electoral College system dodged another bullet in 2020, but it was severely tested. Over the years, lawmakers have introduced Electoral College reform over 700 times; each time it failed. In the 1970s, a constitutional amendment to eliminate the Electoral College came close, but could not surmount a southern filibuster. The winner-take-all method, used by every state except Nebraska and Maine, distorts the popular vote and penalizes the losing side in each state. Republicans complained that the winner-take-all system means that all 55 electors in California went to Biden, while some 6 million Californians who voted for Trump didn’t seem to matter at all; Democrats had the same complaint in Texas, with some 5.3 million Democratic votes not mattering when the state and all of its 38 electors went for Trump. Democrats often complain that small states have a disproportionate sway in the electoral college system. But the Democratic candidates received more electoral votes from small states than did the Republican candidates. (In 2020, six states each with just 3 or 4 electors voted for Trump: Alaska—3, Idaho—4, Wyoming—3, Montana—3, North Dakota—3, South Dakota—3,

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for a total of 19 electoral votes; six such states voted for Biden: Vermont—3, New Hampshire—4, Rhode Island—4, Delaware—4, Hawaii—4, and Maine—3 plus 1 for Trump, for a total of 22 electoral votes.) There is a simple solution for both Democrats and Republicans. Democrats, if you are afraid that rural areas and blue-collar constituencies will never vote for you, why not try appealing to their concerns, their cultural values, their policy priorities? Republicans, instead of trying to suppress the vote of minorities, claiming falsely that there is widespread cheating, go after their vote, have a package of policies that would appeal to them, rebrand your party as the Party of Lincoln, not George Wallace. Here’s a simple question: if 50 percent or so of African American voters chose Republicans, would Republican-dominated state legislatures be so intent on making it harder for them to vote? The straight-forward solution of a direct nationwide popular election seems an attractive reform: an up or down vote of the people, without regard to where they live, with no concern about “faithless electors,” or winner-take-all electoral systems. For Republican leaders and strategists, this sends shivers down their spines: in the last eight presidential elections, the Republican candidate received the majority of popular votes just once, in 2004. Donald Trump lost the popular vote by 3 million in 2016 and 7 million in 2020. In March 2021, the House of Representatives passed the “For the People Act,” a measure that would expand voting rights, guarantee no-excuse mail voting by mail, allow at least fifteen days for early voting, restore the rights of former felons who have completed their prison sentences, limit partisan gerrymandering, restrict the influence of private donor money, create national voting standards, and require presidential candidates to publish their tax records upon filing for office. It was given the title “HR 1,” suggesting its importance to the Democratic Party. Predictably, Republicans stood in opposition. Former vice president Mike Pence wrote “Every single proposed change in HR 1 serves one goal, and one goal only: to give leftists a permanent, unfair, and unconstitutional advantage in our political system.”39 Its chances in the Senate, where it would need sixty votes, were next to nothing. The more perplexing question is, what to do with a presidential candidate who outright lies that the election was stolen and insists long after the election was over that he won, despite clear and convincing evidence to the contrary. One thing should be clear: even if there is no change in the Electoral College system, there needs to be an update of the 1887 Electoral Count Act, so to eliminate the possibility that an overtly partisan Congress could reject the properly certified electoral votes, as some Trump allies blatantly advocated in January 2021. Immigration Reform Landmark immigration legislation goes back to the Johnson-Reed Immigration Act of 1924, which set quotas for entry, weighing heavily against persons from Asia, followed by the McCarran-Walter Immigration Act of 1952, which removed the Asian restrictions, but kept controversial quotas. The seminal law was the Hart-Celler Act of 1965, which eliminated immigration quotas, followed by the Simpson-Mazzoli Act of 1986, which offered legal immigrant status to over 3 million persons. Since that time, immigration surged in the 1980s, peaking in the early 2000s. Nearly all our attention recently has been focused on the Mexican border, yet from 2010 through 2019, more legal immigrants came from Asia than from Latin America.40 In 2006, 2007, and 2013, the Bush II and Obama administrations pushed for comprehensive immigration policy, which would offer a path to citizenship for millions of unauthorized immigrants. Those efforts ran into stiff opposition and were not enacted into law. Since then, Congress has failed to come up with a comprehensive policy, to be filled by executive orders by Obama, and restrictive, controversial executive actions by Trump.

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With the election of Biden and Harris, there has been a surge in illegal border crossings, with as many as 4,000 attempted illegal crossings a day in January 2021. Obama’s Homeland Security secretary Jeh Johnson stated that 1,000 illegal entries a day would be more than border security could handle. This has cause great concern, particularly among Republicans who fear the worst in unauthorized entry.41 In his first weeks, Biden issued eight executive actions related to immigration: including the revoking of Trump’s punishment of “sanctuary cities,” ending the Muslim ban, ending the Trump national emergency on the Mexican–US border, ending child separation from immigrant parents, and preserving and strengthening the DACA program. The Biden plan, announced just weeks after he took office, was labeled the “boldest” immigration reform in decades, offering an eight-year path to citizenship for some 11 million unauthorized (or illegal) individuals, eliminated restrictions on family-based immigration, and expanded the worker visa program. Again, it was doubtful that the Biden bill, introduced by Robert Menendez (Democrat—New Jersey) in the Senate and Linda T. Sánchez (Democrat— California) would be able to gain the sixty votes needed in the Senate. In addition, Biden announced in early February that he would seek to raise the annual refugee cap to 125,000; it stood at 110,000 during the last year of the Obama administration but was whittled down to just 15,000 during the last year of the Trump administration.

Climate Mitigation Beginning on May 16, 2013, Senator Sheldon Whitehouse (Democrat—Rhode Island) would come to the floor of the Senate, to implore his colleagues to get serious about climate change. His favorite prop was a hand-made poster, with a picture of the Earth taken from outer space, on an easel, with the message “Time to Wake Up.” “It is time—indeed, it is well past time—for Congress to wake up to the disastrous effects of global climate change.”42 By the end of January 2021, Whitehouse had dragged his beaten-up sign to the Senate floor, placed it on an easel, for the 279th time, still arguing for lawmakers to do something before it was too late. During the four years of the Trump administration, the Rhode Island senator’s pleas fell on deaf ears. Environmental policies were eviscerated through the rule-making process, Trump environmental/climate change policy meant protecting and boosting the fossil fuel industries, rather than any measure of protecting the environment; the Trump legacy was that of denigrating the clear scientific evidence. For Biden, climate mitigation was a priority in his presidential campaign. He embraced key elements of the Green New Deal, and issued extensive environmental/climate change policy goals, in what he described as the Clean Energy Revolution. His overall goal was to achieve net zero emissions by the year 2050 and to emphasize environmental justice.43 In his first days in office, President Biden signed a series of executive orders to reverse much that had been done during the Trump years. One of Biden’s first actions was to rejoin the Paris Climate Agreement; he then halted oil and gas drilling in the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge and federal subsidies to the fossil fuel industry. To emphasize the importance of the environment and climate change, Biden appointed former secretary of state and senator John F. Kerry as his international climate envoy and created within the White House the first national climate adviser, choosing former Obama administration EPA director Gina McCarthy. The new administration also emphasized the problems associated with environmental justice, developing an interagency group to deal with the issue. The destruction caused by historic wildfires, devastating storms, rising sea levels, extraordinary melting of the polar ice caps—all these added urgency to the perils of climate change.

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Restoring environmental regulations and executive orders alone cannot fundamentally solve the climate crisis. The problems are extraordinary and complex, involving fundamental changes in American life that embraces fossil fuels. As Biden administration environment legislation rolls out, it will again face the hurdle of trying to convince not only West Virginia’s Joe Manchin, who comes from one of the reddest states and an economy steeped in the coal industry, but also enough Republican senators to overcome a possible filibuster. That challenge is steep.

Assuring the Solvency of Social Security It is a potential time bomb, but now receives little attention from policymakers: the long-term solvency of the Social Security system. For three decades, Social Security brought in more payroll tax revenue than it was spending in monthly benefits and administrative costs. The revenue, in the Social Security Trust Fund, accumulated to a total of $2.9 trillion. In the meantime, with the increased number of Baby Boomers eligible for support without a corresponding increase in younger workers paying into the system, in 2021 Social Security would have to tap into the surplus fund to meet expenses. By 2035, Social Security revenue will be able to pay for only 79 percent of the benefits. That year, the number of Americans over sixty-five will have increased to nearly 78 million from 56 million in 2019.44 Social Security was originally designed to be part of a “three-legged stool”—that is, a retiree would rely on Social Security, personal savings, and a company pension. But according to the Federal Reserve, one-quarter of working Americans have nothing saved for retirement, pensions are a relic of past generations, and for half of retired Americans, Social Security payments constitute the bulk of their income. For people planning for retirement, 2035 isn’t that far away. If there is no congressional action and if benefits have to be cut, tens of millions of individuals living on the economic margins will be harmed.

The Federal Budget In Fiscal Year 1969, during the last years of the Johnson administration, there was a budget surplus of $3.2 billion (the total federal budget was $183.6 billion). Throughout the 1970s, there were budget deficits, but rather small in scope. During the 1980s, fiscal restraint was abandoned and in each of the Reagan administration years, the annual budget deficit was $100 billion to nearly $300 billion (at the end of Reagan’s final year, Fiscal Year 1989, the federal budget was $1.1 trillion). Then came the boom times of the mid-1990s. During the last four years of the Clinton administration, from Fiscal Year 1998 through Fiscal Year 2001, there were surpluses of between $69 billion and $236 billion (at the end of Clinton’s administration, Fiscal Year 2001, the federal budget was $1.83 trillion). During the 2000s, the Bush II years, there were two major tax cuts and periods of difficult economic times; deficits soared and were routinely in the $200–$400 billion range each year, but during his last year, it reached $1.4 trillion (at the end of Bush II’s final year, Fiscal Year 2009, the federal budget was $3.52 trillion).45 In 2010, President Obama, concerned about the growing deficits, selected a bipartisan commission, headed by Erskine B. Bowles, former chief of staff for President Clinton, and former senator Alan K. Simpson (Republican—Wyoming) to come up with solutions for the budget deficit and for propping up Social Security. The final report of the Simpson-Bowles Commission, “Moment of Truth,” laid out tough suggestions on spending and taxing. But lawmakers didn’t want to touch it: too much of a hot potato.46

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“Throughout our nation’s history,” the Simpson-Bowles report noted, Americans have found the courage to do right by our children’s future. Deep down, every American knows we face a moment of truth once again. We cannot play games or put off hard choices any longer. Without regard to party, we have a patriotic duty to keep the promise to America to give our children and grandchildren a better life. The warnings of the Simpson-Bowles report were unheeded. Deficits in Fiscal Year 2010 were $1.3 trillion, $1.65 trillion in Fiscal Year 2011, and $1.1 trillion in Fiscal Year 2012. By the end of the Obama era, the total indebtedness had climbed to $20.24 trillion. The COVID year of 2020 was expected to hit $1.08 trillion in deficits.47 In September 2020, the Congressional Budget Office (CBO) gave its projections for the next thirty years, under the assumption that current laws governing taxes and spending did not change.48 Here’s what the CBO projects: Deficits (the annual difference between spending and revenue) would increase from 5 percent of gross domestic product (GDP) in 2030 to 13 percent of GDP by 2050. National Debt (the accumulated deficits): by the end of 2020, the national debt was projected to be 98 percent of GDP; by 2023 the projection would be 107 percent of GDP, which would be the highest in American history, including the enormous amount of borrowing during World War II. By 2050, of current patterns do not change, the national debt would be 195 percent of GDP. In 2021, interest rates were at historic lows, but when they inevitably rise, the economy could be more vulnerable to higher interest rates and inflation. Interest payments would become larger and larger slices of the federal budget pie, and there could be a gradual decline in the value of Treasury securities. One of the biggest drivers of increased spending would be the increased cost of paying for interest on the deficit. In addition, the costs of Social Security, Medicare, and other social programs will continue to go up. In 2019, the combined cost of Social Security and health care programs was 10.8 percent of GDP; by 2050, those programs would reach 17 percent of GDP. Once the economy recovers from the COVID pandemic, revenues are expected to rise, but not at the same level as spending. CBO projects revenues would increase to an average of 18.4 percent of GDP in 2041–2050 from 16.4 percent average in 2010 to 2019. Policymakers must face some difficult but fundamental choices: raise taxes, cut spending, or continue borrowing money. With the extraordinary costs of Biden administration proposals—into the hundreds of billions, even trillions of dollars—the federal budget will be further and further into deficit spending and borrowing from those children and grandchildren that SimpsonBowles wanted to protect.

Gun Violence On the third anniversary of the Marjorie Stone Douglas High School shootings in Florida, where fourteen students and three teachers were murdered, President Biden sent a message to Congress, calling for “common-sense gun law reforms, including background checks, banning assault weapons and high-capacity magazines, and eliminating immunity for gun manufacturers who knowingly put weapons on our streets.”49 The sickening record of mass shootings, from Virginia Tech, Sandy Hook Elementary School, the Pulse Nightclub in Orlando, the Las Vegas outdoor concert, Robb Elementary School in Uvalde, indeed to the hundreds, even thousands, of mass shooting that have occurred during the past several decades—has led to federal lawmaker outrage, breast beating, thoughts and prayers, but no significant action to address the problem. If federal lawmakers cannot be spurred to action after two dozen first-graders are massacred, when will policy changes ever come?

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The irony is, the more gun violence, the less support there has been among Americans for gun reform. The Gallup organization has been tracking public opinion on gun control since 1990. That year, support for stricter gun control was 78 percent of the adult population, with just 2 percent wanting to have laws less restrictive. By 2020, with the long list of mass shootings since then, 57 percent now favor stricter gun controls, and 9 percent was less restrictive laws. Just 22 percent of Republicans in 2020 want stricter gun controls, the lowest level over the past twenty years; 85 percent of Democrats want stricter gun controls. Most of that support for gun restrictions comes for assault rifles and military-style equipment. Support for a federal ban on handguns has always been weak, with just 25 percent now supporting it.50 In 2020, gun sales exploded, up 64 percent from 2019. Indeed, there had been a surge in firsttime gun buyers, even those who were stoutly anti-gun. The George Floyd episode, the pandemic, police violence, and the “defund the police” movement spurred the rush to buy weapons. There were an estimated 393 million guns in America, a country with roughly 210 million adults, age eighteen and older. In all, some 39 percent of American households owned guns, representing 46 percent of all firearms in the world.51 In 2020, Americans witnessed armed militias, with flak jackets and military grade weapons strapped to their shoulders, patrolling the capitol building in Lansing, Michigan, and others strutting their manhood and freedom to carry lethal weapons in protest marches and gatherings. Opinion writer E.J. Dionne, Jr. called these, and others, the “gun imperialists”—those extremists who place the Second Amendment gun rights over everything else.52 Tragically, gun violence and mass shootings have become normalized. They make the news just for a brief moment, with a yawn and a shrug from policymakers. No matter the threat or tragedy, it is extremely unlikely that federal policymakers will do anything. Two months into his administration, President Biden announced several executive actions, including a ban on homemade firearms (so-called “ghost guns”), restrictions on the use of arm braces for semiautomatic weapons, and model state legislation designed to enact “red flag” laws which would identify individuals with mental health issues who might want to use firearms.53 Such initial reforms just nip around the edges and were couched as “gun violence public health epidemic,” yet they are seen as a fundamental Second Amendment threat among gun enthusiasts. Responses from Republican-dominated state legislatures have been swift and provocative: new laws in Texas, Iowa, and Tennessee allow nearly all adults to carry firearms without a permit; nine states in 2021 passed laws to discourage or prohibit local law enforcement officers from enforcing federal gun statutes. The Missouri law threatened a $50,000 fine against any local police agency that enforced certain federal gun laws that were considered “infringements” of Second Amendment gun rights.54 The world looks on, wondering why the United States is such an outlier in gun violence. Indeed, there is wide gap—perhaps a chasm—in the history, civic culture, gun-owning tradition, and political pressures, between the United States and other countries, but three examples illustrate that, when tragedy strikes, it is possible for governments to react. In 1996, at the Dunblane Primary School near Stirling, Scotland, sixteen children and one teacher were murdered, and eighteen others were injured by a gunman, who then killed himself. A Conservative Party government in 1997 and then a Labour Party government later that same year adopted legislation that outlawed most private ownership of guns throughout the United Kingdom. Just three weeks later, after thirty-five people were massacred in Port Arthur, Australia, there were quick changes in gun laws, as the center-right Liberal Party, joined by a wide variety of groups, fought off heated opposition and vastly restricted the availability of guns. In 2019, Jacinda Ardern, prime minister of New Zealand, received worldwide praise for swiftly and effectively banning semi-automatic weapons after fifty-one persons were killed in two Christchurch mosques. Ardern remarked: “Australia experienced a massacre

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and changed their laws. New Zealand had its experience and changed its laws. To be honest with you, I do not understand the United States.”55

Confronting Domestic Terrorism In 2019, federal law enforcement shifted its resources from monitoring right-wing extremism to focusing on the radical left. This was at the insistence of Donald Trump, who saw this as a winning campaign theme: the radical left was the real domestic terrorist threat. This assertion went contrary to the conclusions of law enforcement which saw the threat as coming from the far right. As the New York Times noted, the “effect of [Trump’s] direction was nonetheless substantial … diverting key portions of the federal law enforcement and domestic security agencies at a time when the threat from the far right was building ominously.”56 Radical voices and far-right extremists have been long been part of the political landscape. They once haunted the Democratic Party with racial hatred, Klan hoods, and cross burnings. In more recent times, the Republican Party has harbored extreme voices. Political historian Matthew Dallek noted that: Just as QAnon followers see a deep-state conspiracy to destroy Trump, some John Birch Society members viewed liberals as communist agents and dupes. The armed Militiamen of the 1960s echo in the gun-toting pro-Trump extremists in Charlottesville and Lansing, Michigan. … The Proud Boys share a sensibility with the white supremacists who formed Citizens’ Councils in reaction to the Supreme Court’s Brown decision desegregating schools.57 The day after the storming of the Capitol, conservative commentator Rush Limbaugh, just weeks away from his death, compared the invaders to Revolutionary War patriots. On his radio show, he declared, There’s a lot of people calling for the end of violence. There’s a lot of conservatives, social media, who say that any violence or aggression at all is unacceptable. Regardless of the circumstances. I’m glad Sam Adams, Thomas Paine, the actual tea party guys, the men at Lexington and Concord didn’t feel that way.58 Limbaugh is gone, but his central message resonates with many conservatives. Following the insurrection, some Republican-elected officials tried to blame leftist agitators. “This has all the hallmarks of Antifa provocation,” tweeted Representative Paul A. Gosar (Republican—Arizona), a leader in the false election story. Right-wing radio, commentary, tweets, and other social media quickly tried to rewrite history, blaming “false flags” Antifa for actually provoking the riotous behavior. Millions of Trump supporters now believed that leftwing agitators caused the rioting. Law enforcement investigations and the director of the FBI found no evidence of a role of left-wingers or Antifa. Yet in one survey, more than 50 percent of Trump supporters believed that the riot was “mostly an antifa-inspired attack.”59 The threat is that far-right militants, armed and ready, will again terrorize lawmakers in Lansing, Springfield, Santa Fe, Tallahassee, or any other state capitol, or once again attempt an assault on the US Capitol. Sadly, even months after the January 6 incident, barbed wire and high fences still surrounded the seat of American democracy. Domestic terrorism was brought home sharply in 1995 with the Oklahoma City bombing of the federal building; domestic terrorism on January 6, 2021 at the US Capitol underscored the persistent and real threat of militiamen, radicalized groups, and domestic insurrectionists. The Biden administration attorney general, Merrick Garland, had been the chief prosecutor in

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Oklahoma City (as well as the Atlanta Olympic bombing and the Unabomber, Ted Kaczynski, cases). At his confirmation hearings, Garland pledged that his highest priority would be to investigate and bring to justice those responsible for the Capitol insurrection. The director of the FBI, Christopher A. Wray, testified before Congress in early March 2021, noting that his agency was pursuing some 2,000 extremist cases, related to and going beyond the Capitol insurrection.60

WHAT HOLDS US BACK? In 2021, there was little mood in Congress to cooperate across the aisle. The bitterness of the second Trump impeachment, with so many Republicans in the House and Senate unwilling to condemn Trump’s actions, left little room for legislative comity and reconciliation. Despite appeals for unity, it quickly became evident that polarization and obstruction were still the dominant sentiments. Trench warfare and acrimony seemed the only way to describe the Congress of 2021. One thing is evident throughout this entire study: no era with a razor-thin partisan split in Congress was able to craft a series of major reforms and programs. Unless the filibuster rules were changed, the extraordinary challenges facing the country simply will be met with stalemate. The more severe the problems, the more they tap into the public treasury, the more they hit at core sensitivities, the far more difficulty it will be to gain enough support for passage. Why do lawmakers act the way they do? Why did southern Democratic lawmakers during the twentieth century resist civil rights reforms, disparage African American constituents, deny them the right to vote, and other measures of citizenship? Why do Republicans in the twentyfirst century fight so hard against legislation aimed at reforming immigration, tackling climate change, and providing health care for all? When eighteen southern Senators carried out a seventy-five-day filibuster against the civil rights bill in 1964, they did it because white southern voters wanted them to do so. When Republican leaders called Obamacare the worst legislation ever enacted, they did so knowing that many of their most ardent constituents felt the same way. Lawmakers reflect their base, reflect the attitudes, opinions, and prejudices of those who brought them to power.

The Chasm The day after the 2004 presidential elections, the left-leaning British tabloid the Daily Mirror bemoaned the results: on its front page, over a picture of George W. Bush, the paper lamented: “How can 59,054,087 people be so DUMB?” In 2020, that same question was undoubtedly asked by both liberals and conservatives. American liberals and progressives surely were stunned at the turnout and enthusiasm of Trump voters: how could this happen? The liberal-progressive narrative was that enough people in the middle—the independents, the undecideds, those who perhaps once voted for Obama but then turned to Trump—would be repulsed by Trump’s conduct, his lying, his name calling, his wholesale attack on democratic institutions and values, his instability, and his wreckage of America’s standing in the world. They were encouraged by late October polling showing Biden with comfortable nationwide leads; but they also had the nagging sense of déjà vu: the enthusiasm of pollsters and the sure-fire cockiness of the political cognoscenti in 2016 projecting a clear Hillary Clinton win. The reality was that Trump gained 10 million more voters in 2020 than he had in 2016. This extraordinary turnout for Trump was fueled in part by a highly effective below-the-radar getout-the-vote drive by the Republican Party apparatus and an aggressive turnout by Christian

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conservatives. The red states grew redder, with a deeper allegiance to Trump; urban areas became bluer, with equally fervent antipathy against Trump. But then, Trump supporters were equally astonished: How could so many people be fooled by the leftist, indeed socialist, wacky ideas of Democrats, who were intent on spending us into oblivion, mocking our way of life, contemptuous of our religion, and embracing crazy ideas like a Green New Deal. Why would anyone support such a woke culture, intent on cancelling America’s heritage, and supporting radical movements like Black Lives Matter and Antifa? How could anyone believe the rants by mainstream media and their relentless attempts to denigrate President Trump? Everyone knows, their thinking went, that the election was rigged against the president. And everyone knows that Joe Biden is an illegitimate president, unworthy of the title, unworthy of our respect. Hillary Clinton had a difficult time with white working-class voters; candidate Joe Biden, introducing himself as the blue-collar kid from Scranton, did a better job. Early polls on the American Rescue Plan showed a significant percentage of white working-class voters supporting the measures. It will be a key task of Biden and his allies to convince white workingclass voters, in cities as well as in rural areas, of the benefits of the relief programs, but most importantly, that the economy is coming back to life, offering economic growth and opportunity. What legal scholar Joan C. Williams observed following the 2016 presidential campaign applied equally in 2021. Working-class voters were far more concerned about jobs than leftleaning cultural issues: “I fully understand why transgender bathrooms are important,” Williams wrote, “but I also understand why progressives’ obsession with prioritizing cultural issues infuriates many Americans whose chief concerns are economic.”61 The last several years have also highlighted another problem: widespread susceptibility to lies and false narratives. In recent years Americans have been subjected to an extraordinary level of lies, falsehoods, and hyperbole, amped up by the serial lying and falsehoods of President Trump, and carried further by his allies. Corporate America also had its hand in spreading falsehoods. All this is nothing new, but the extent to which it has been done, and the immediacy of which the lies can be spread, are startling. Of all the thousands of falsehoods and misdirections, four stand out. Each was peddled by Trump and his media cheerleaders, accepted as gospel by his followers, and each was false—demonstrably false. Lie Number One: Obama wasn’t born in America (and thus Obama was not a legitimate president);62 Lie Number Two: climate change isn’t real, and certainly not caused by human activity (so why try to tackle a non-problem, a “hoax”?);63 Lie Number Three: COVID was not a big problem and would soon disappear (and thus Trump and his team could not be held responsible);64 and Lie Number Four: the 2020 election was stolen (and thus Biden was not the legitimate president).65 What accounts for the broad-based acceptance of these lies by Trump’s ardent supporters? Journalist Chris Cillizza speculated on three possibilities: there are enough people who believe anything Trump says (and disbelieve the “mainstream media”), the swirl of conspiracy theories and falsehoods thriving on social media, and erosion in faith in institutions—including, now, the election system.66 Social scientists, philosophers, and communications specialists will spend years trying to come to grips with our current dysfunctions.67 Harder still will be the role of elected officials, determined to allay fears, stamp out conspiracies, work toward the common good, and meet the many perplexing challenges and stresses on society. Restoring trust in government institutions, in the electoral process, in the news media, in elected officials will not be easy. The solutions, as perplexing and confounding they may be, may take decades to unfold. Meeting the immediate challenges might be a first step to restoring faith in government. For many, Ronald Reagan’s 1981 quip still resonates: “government is not the solution to our

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problem, government is the problem.” But the enormity of the pandemic, its social and economic devastation, and the desperate need for a successful rollout of the vaccines, all presented the federal government with an extraordinary challenge and opportunity. Could the federal government deliver? Would it in some small measure restore faith and trust in its institutions and policies? Apart from the pandemic, can federal policymakers meet the challenges, the stresses, gnawing away at America? Policies neglected or ignored, landmark legislation denied or delayed, can only further harm America, diminishing its way of life and its standing in the world.

HOW WE COMPARE It is axiomatic that political leaders don’t appreciate outsiders coming in and criticizing their people and policies. In 1967, Senators Robert F. Kennedy and Joseph Clark toured rural Mississippi, exposing stunning levels of malnutrition and poverty in children and adults alike. Mississippi political leaders protested loudly, accusing the investigators as being “socialistminded” outsiders, meddling in the affairs of their state. Fifty years later in 2017, at the invitation of the Trump administration, Philip G. Alston, the United Nations Special Rapporteur on Extreme Poverty and Human Rights, toured American cities and rural areas, with the mandate of determining whether extreme poverty undermined the enjoyment of human rights. Alston’s report was highly critical and controversial: The United States is one of the world’s richest, most powerful and technologically innovative countries; but neither its wealth nor its power nor its technology is being harnessed to address the situation in which 40 million people continue to live in poverty.68 The report took particular aim at the recently passed $1.5 trillion in tax cuts, which it noted “overwhelmingly benefited the wealthy and worsened inequality.” Just as Mississippi’s governor and senators rebuked the 1967 findings of poverty, so too did the Trump administration rebuke Alston in 2017. “It is patently ridiculous for the United Nations to examine poverty in the United States,” charged Nikki Haley, US ambassador to the United Nations, stating further that the Alston was “politically motivated.” Her office stated that “accusations that the United States shows ‘contempt and hatred’ for the poor, including accusations of a criminal justice system designed to keep low-income persons in poverty while generating public revenue, are inaccurate, inflammatory, and irresponsible.” The UN report stated that some 18.5 million Americans were in extreme poverty; Haley retorted that that figure was way overstating the problem, that a more accurate number was 250,000 in “extreme poverty.”69 The US Mission countered that more than $1 trillion in means-treated benefits was provided to poor people each year by federal and state governments. However, what went unmentioned, observed journalist Van R. Newkirk II, was “that one of the only coherent policies of the [Trump] administration from early 2017 to now has been across-the-board slashes to each of those programs.”70 Whatever the judgment might be on the UN calculation of US poverty, the report did highlight some disturbing, and uncontroverted, findings: in 2013 the US infant mortality rate was the highest in the developed world; in terms of poverty and inequality, the United States ranked thirty-fifth out of thirty-seven OECD (Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development) countries; the United States had the highest rate of obesity in the world; that the youth poverty rate in America was the highest among the thirty-six OECD countries; for access to water and sanitation, the United States ranked thirty-sixth in the world.

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The Stanford Center on Inequality and Poverty ranked the most prosperous countries, measuring them in terms of labor market, poverty, social safety nets, wealth inequality, and economic mobility. The United States came in last among the ten wealthiest countries and eighteenth among the top twenty-one countries.71 One comparative analysis noted that “for five decades now, the United States has been a clear and constant outlier in the child poverty league,” having significantly higher child poverty rates than ten other wealthy countries, including Norway (5 percent), the United Kingdom (10 percent), and Italy (18 percent). The United States had a 21 percent rate, higher than the OECD average of 13 percent. The United States, through its tax and spending policies, spent considerably on social spending, comparable to some European countries, but had a “very low impact on overall income inequality and health care outcomes,” according to a study by the Petersen Institute.72 The Downward Trend The Social Progress Imperative, an organization launched by economics professor Michael Porter, created the Social Progress Index which collects data from around the world, measuring a country’s well-being. Rather than ranking countries based on GDP, it takes into account fifty measures of nutrition and basic medical care, water and sanitation, shelter, personal safety, access to basic knowledge, access to communications and information, health and wellness, environmental quality, personal rights, personal freedom and choice, inclusiveness, and access to advanced education. Topping the list of countries were Norway, Denmark, Finland, and New Zealand; coming in at the very bottom were South Sudan, Chad, Central African Republic, and Eritrea. In 2011, the United States ranked nineteenth; by 2020, it had fallen to twenty-eighth. The United States was on par with Estonia, Czech Republic, Cyprus, and Greece. But there were also great disparities in America’s standing. The United States is No. 1 in medical technology, but ninety-seventh in access to quality health care. In discrimination against minorities, the United States ranked one hundredth out of 163 countries.73 While the United States was No. 1 in the world for quality of its universities, it ranked ninety-first in access to quality basic education. Looking back from our current perspective, American public schools were far from achieving those goals established in the 1990s and later. Math and science literacy were particularly unimpressive. The Programme for International Student Assessment (PISA) in 2015 found the United States at thirty-eighth among seventy-one countries in math and twenty-fourth in science. The OECD ranked the United States thirtieth in math and nineteenth in science out of its thirty-five members.74 The United States held the dubious title of the deadliest of all high-income countries. Looking at World Health Organization 2010 mortality data for populous, high-income countries, a study in the American Journal of Medicine noted how unusual the American mortality rate was. The homicide rate in the United States was seven times higher than in other high-income countries, while the homicides caused by guns was 25.2 times higher. Covering the years 2003 through 2010, the study found that 90 percent of women, 91 percent of children (0 to 14 years old), 92 percent of youth (15 to 24 years old), and 82 percent of all persons killed by firearms were from the United States.75

THE WAY AHEAD An earlier generation well understood that they were living in the “American Century”; later they knew that America was the “shining city on the Hill.” But over the years, policymakers

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have somehow lost their way. The stresses on society have compounded, leaving policymakers the extraordinary job of tackling (or ignoring) the extraordinary difficulties of the day. These international studies highlight the embarrassing underbelly of America: its poverty, inequality, its unwillingness to take care of its own; and underlying it all, its unwillingness to work together to create and implement policy solutions. Not all dysfunctions and stresses can be relieved or even partially resolved by federal government policy. But so many can. America has the resources, the talent, and the ability to do extraordinary things. Americans may dig their way out, but it will take untold billions (and trillions) of federal dollars, ingenuity and cooperation across the political and ideological chasm, a rebuilding of trust in institutions and leaders, and the will of Americans to look toward the good of the whole, to tackle common problems, in seeking a better life for all. Understanding the public policy history of America to date can contribute positively to these worthy—in fact, necessary—goals.

Notes 1 Nicholas Kristof, “We’re No. 28! And Dropping!” New York Times, September 9, 2020. Porter, a professor at the Harvard Business School, chaired the advisory panel for the Social Progress Index. 2 “2021 Joe Biden Executive Orders,” Federal Register, n.d., https://www.federalregister.gov/ presidential-documents/executive-orders/joe-biden/2021 (accessed March 2, 2021). Extending the enrollment period for Medicaid and the Affordable Care Act (EO 14009); climate crisis considerations and foreign policy (EO 14008); revoking the Trump policies of immigration enforcement (EO 13993, terminating Trump’s EO 13768. 3 Devin Barrett, David Nakamura and John D. Harden, “FBI: Killings Soared Nearly 30 Percent in 2020, with More Slayings Committed with Guns,” Washington Post, September 27, 2021. 4 See, for example, Thomas B. Edsall, “White Riot,” New York Times, January 13, 2021; Michael J. Sandel, The Tyranny of Merit: What’s Become of the Common Good? (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2020); Joan C. Williams, White Working Class: Overcoming Class Cluelessness in America (Boston: Harvard Business Review Press, 2020). 5 Henrick Pettersson, Byron Manley, and Sergio Hernandez, “Tracking COVID-19’s Global Spread,” CNN, February 25, 2021, https://www.cnn.com/interactive/2020/health/coronavirus-maps-and-cases/ (accessed February 26, 2021). 6 “COVID Data Tracker,” Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, https://covid.cdc.gov/coviddata-tracker/#datatracker-home (accessed November 18, 2021). 7 Catherine Rampell, “The Oldest President Ever Just Handed a Landmark Triumph to the Youngest Americans,” Washington Post, March 11, 2021. 8 Alyssa Flowers, Heather Long, and Kevin Schaul, “How Big Is the Biden Stimulus? And Who Gets the Most Help? Washington Post, March 10, 2021; Howard Gleckman, “Pandemic Bill Would Cut Taxes by an Average of $3,000, with Most Relief Going to Low- and Middle-Income Households,” Tax Policy Center, March 8, 2021, https://www.taxpolicycenter.org/taxvox/pandemic-bill-would-cuttaxes-average-3000-most-relief-going-low-and-middle-income-households (accessed March 11, 2021). 9 Mitt Romney, “Biden’s Stimulus Bill Is a $1.9 Trillion Clunker,” Wall Street Journal, February 23, 2021. 10 King quoted in Sarah Ferris and Burgess Everett, “Democratic Centrists Balk at More Red Ink After COVID Spending Spree,” Politico, March 11, 2021. 11 “COVID-19’s Impacts on America’s Infrastructure,” American Society of Civil Engineers, June 2020, https://www.infrastructurereportcard.org/wp-content/uploads/2020/06/COVID-19-InfrastructureStatus-Report.pdf (accessed January 12, 2021). 12 Tony Romm, “Over 700 Cash-Strapped Cities Halt Plans to Repair Roads, Water Systems, of Make Other Key Investments,” Washington Post, June 23, 2020. 13 John Busby, Julia Tanberk, and Broadband Now Team, “FCC Reports Broadband Unavailable to 21.3 Million Americans, Broadband Now Study Indicates 42 Million Do Not Have Access,” Broadband Now, February 3, 2020, https://broadbandnow.com/research/fcc-underestimates-unserved-by-50-percent (accessed January 18, 2021).

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14 Heather Long, “Here’s What’s in the $1.2 Trillion Infrastructure Law,” Washington Post, November 5, 2021, updated November 16, 2021. 15 Ibid. 16 Trump’s Save America Pac, quote in Alexander Bolton, “Trump Gives McConnell Insult-Filled Ultimatum on Biden Agenda,” The Hill, November 17, 2021, https://thehill.com/homenews/senate/ 582006-trump-gives-mcconnell-insult-filled-ultimatum-on-biden-agenda (accessed November 18, 2021). 17 “President Biden Announces the Build Back Better Framework,” White House, October 28, 2021, https://www.whitehouse.gov/briefing-room/statements-releases/2021/10/28/president-bidenannounces-the-build-back-better-framework/ (accessed December 28, 2021). 18 McCarthy quoted in Emily Cochrane and Jonathan Weisman, “House Narrowly Passes Biden Social Safety Net and Climate Bill,” New York Times, November 19, 2021. 19 National Commission on Excellence in Education, A Nation at Risk (Washington, DC: Government Printing Office, 1983, https://www2.ed.gov/pubs/NatAtRisk/risk.html; Bush quoted in James Gerstenzang and Nick Anderson, “Bush Delivers Plan for School Accountability,” Los Angeles Times, January 24, 2001; President Obama, “Remarks by the President on Higher Education and the Economy at the University of Texas at Austin,” The White House, August 9, 2010, https:// obamawhitehouse.archives.gov/the-press-office/2010/08/09/remarks-president-higher-education-andeconomy-university-texas-austin (accessed March 2, 2021). 20 “Best Global Universities Rankings,” US News, October 2014, http://www.usnews.com/education/ best-global-universities/rankings (accessed January 2, 2021); Nick Anderson, “US News Rolls Out Global University Rankings, with Some Surprises,” Washington Post, October 28, 2014. Among the 500 best universities, 42 were in Germany, 38 in the United Kingdom, and 27 in China (along with 5 in Hong Kong). 21 Michael B. Horn, “Will Half of All Colleges Close in the Next Decade?” Forbes, December 13, 2018, https://www.forbes.com/sites/michaelhorn/2018/12/13/will-half-of-all-colleges-really-close-in-thenext-decade/?sh=677de31552e5 (accessed February 24, 2021). 22 “Student Loans Owned and Scrutinized, Outstanding,” Federal Reserve Bank of St. Louis, February 5, 2021, https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/SLOAS (accessed February 24, 2021). 23 Manpower study reported in Jeff Cox, “It’s Never Been this Hard for Companies to Find Qualified Workers,” CNBC, February 19, 2020, https://www.cnbc.com/2020/02/19/its-never-been-this-hard-forcompanies-to-find-qualified-workers.html (accessed February 2, 2021). 24 “Skills Gap and Future of Work Study,” Deloitte and Manufacturing Institute, 2018, https://documents. deloitte.com/insights/2018DeloitteSkillsGapFoWManufacturing (accessed February 3, 2021). 25 Steve Lohr, “Up to 30 Million in US Have Skills to Earn 70 Percent More, Researchers Say” New York Times, December 3, 2020). 26 Laura Jimenez, “Building a Strong Middle Class Through Career Pathway Programs,” Center for American Progress, May 18, 2020, https://www.americanprogress.org/issues/education-k-12/reports/2020/ 05/18/485130/building-strong-middle-class-career-pathways-programs/ (accessed February 4, 2021). 27 Corey Turner, “How Education Secretary Betsy DeVos Will Be Remembered,” NPR, November 19, 2020, https://www.npr.org/2020/11/19/936225974/the-legacy-of-education-secretary-betsy-devos (accessed February 12, 2021). 28 Editorial, “The Wreckage Betsy DeVos Leaves Behind,” New York Times, January 2, 2021. 29 “How Many Americans Have Lost Jobs with Employer Health Coverage During the Pandemic? The Commonwealth Fund, October 7, 2020, https://www.commonwealthfund.org/publications/issue-briefs/ 2020/oct/how-many-lost-jobs-employer-coverage-pandemic; Daniel McDermott, Cynthia Cox, and Gary Claxton, “Marketplace Eligibility Among the Uninsured: Implications for a Broader Enrollment Period and ACA Outreach,” Kaiser Family Foundation, January 27, 2021, https://www.kff.org/privateinsurance/issue-brief/marketplace-eligibility-among-the-uninsured-implications-for-a-broadenedenrollment-period-and-aca-outreach/ (accessed March 2, 2021). 30 Rachel Garfield, Kendal Orgera, and Anthony Damico, “The Coverage Gap: Uninsured Poor Adults in States that Do Not Expand Medicaid, Kaiser Family Foundation, January 21, 2021, https://www.kff. org/medicaid/issue-brief/the-coverage-gap-uninsured-poor-adults-in-states-that-do-not-expandmedicaid/ (accessed February 15, 2021). 31 Joshua Cohen, “Biden’s Healthcare Agenda in 2021: Shoring Up the Affordable Care Act,” Forbes, February 1, 2021, https://www.forbes.com/sites/joshuacohen/2021/02/01/bidens-healthcare-agenda-in2021-shoring-up-the-affordable-care-act/?sh=515fa64839a4 (accessed March 2, 2021).

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32 California v. Texas, No. 19-840, June 16, 2021. Seven justices determined that the plaintiffs did not have standing to sue. 33 Donald F. Kettl, The Divided States of America: Why Federalism Doesn’t Work (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2020), 140. 34 “How to Fix Economic Inequality? Peterson Institute for International Economy, 2020, https://www. piie.com/microsites/how-fix-economic-inequality (accessed February 3, 2021). 35 Michael Wines, “In Statehouses, Stolen Election Myth Fuels GOP Drive to Rewrite Rules,” New York Times, February 27, 2021. 36 Brnovich, Attorney General of Arizona v. Democratic National Committee, July 1, 2021, https:// www.supremecourt.gov/opinions/20pdf/19-1257_g204.pdf; Hasen and Biden quoted in Pete Williams, “Supreme Court Upholds Restrictive Arizona Voting Laws in Test Case of Voting Rights Act,” NBC News, July 1, 2021. 37 Editorial, “The US Needs a Democracy Overhaul. Here’s What Biden’s First Step Should Be,” Washington Post, January 2, 2021; Dennis W. Johnson, Campaigns and Elections: What Everyone Needs to Know (New York: Oxford University Press, 2020). 38 Nick Laughlin and Peyton Shelbourne, “How Voters’ Trust in Elections Shifted in Response to Biden’s Victory,” Morning Consult, January 27, 2021, https://morningconsult.com/form/trackingvoter-trust-in-elections/ (accessed March 2, 2021). On the fomenting of distrust of government, Amy Fried and Douglas B. Harris, At War with Government: How Conservatives Weaponized Distrust from Goldwater to Trump (New York: Columbia University Press, 2021), and from a different perspective, Paul Sabin, Public Citizens: The Attack on Big Government and the Remaking of American Liberalism (New York: Norton, 2021). 39 Pence quoted in Mike DeBonis, “House Democrats Pass Sweeping Elections Bill as GOP Legislatures Push to Restrict Voting,” Washington Post, March 3, 2021. 40 Asian immigrants have much higher levels of education, with those from India, 78 percent having attained at least a bachelor’s degree; Korea (54 percent), China (52 percent), and Philippines (50 percent). Those from Latin America were far less educated: Cuba (23 percent), El Salvador (7 percent), and Mexico (6 percent). Altogether by 2016, 31.6 percent of US born individuals had attained a bachelor’s degree or higher, while 30.0 percent of all immigrants ages twenty-five or higher had that educational level. Jens Manuel Krogstad and Jynnah Radford, “Education Levels of US Immigrants are on the Rise,” Pew Research Center, September 14, 2018, https://www.pewresearch.org/ fact-tank/2018/09/14/education-levels-of-u-s-immigrants-are-on-the-rise/ (accessed February 13, 2021). 41 Nolan Rappaport, “Biden’s Immigration Bill Has Problems—Lots of Them,” The Hill, March 3, 2021. 42 Whitehouse quoted in Elizabeth Kolbert, “A New Day for the Climate,” The New Yorker, January 31, 2021. 43 “The Biden Plan for a Clean Energy Revolution and Environmental Justice,” https://joebiden.com/ climate-plan/ (accessed February 12, 2021). 44 Jeff Sommer, “Social Security Faces a Shortfall. Your Future May Depend on Demanding a Fix,” New York Times, June 21, 2019; “Report on the Economic Well-Being of US Households in 2018,” Federal Reserve, Board of Governors, May 2019, https://www.federalreserve.gov/publications/2019-economicwell-being-of-us-households-in-2018-preface.htm; “Fact Sheet on Social Security,” Social Security Administration, June 2020, ssa.gov/news/press/factsheets/basicfact-alt.pdf (accessed January 14, 2021). 45 Historic Tables, “Table 1.1: Summary of Receipts and Outlays, and Surpluses and Deficits, 1789–2025,” Office of Management and Budget, The White House, n.d., https://www.whitehouse. gov/omb/historical-tables/ (accessed October 30, 2020). 46 “The Moment of Truth,” National Commission on Fiscal Responsibility and Reform, December 2010, 47 Historic Tables, “Table 1.1: Summary of Receipts and Outlays, and Surpluses and Deficits, 17892025,” Office of Management and Budget, The White House, n.d., https://www.whitehouse.gov/omb/ historical-tables/ (accessed October 30, 2020). 48 “2020 Long-Term Budget Outlook,” Congressional Budget Office, September 2020, https://www.cbo. gov/publication/56598#:~:text=Over%20the%20past%2050%20years%2C%20debt%20has%20averaged%2043%20percent,result%20of%20World%20War%20II (accessed October 30, 2020). 49 Biden quoted in E.J. Dionne, “We Can’t Let Gun Imperialist Win Again,” Washington Post, February 22, 2021. 50 Megan Brenan, “Support for Stricter US Gun Laws at Lowest Levels since 2016,” Gallup, November 16, 2020, https://news.gallup.com/poll/325004/support-stricter-gun-laws-lowest-level-2016.aspx (accessed February 22, 2020).

490

Polarization, Growing Inequality, and Difficult Choices

51 Sabrina Tavernise, “An Arms Race in America: Gun Buying Spiked During the Pandemic. It’s Still Up,” New York Times, May 29, 2021; Marc Fisher, Amanda Green, Kelly Glass, Andrea Eger, “‘Fear on Top of Fear’: Why Anti-gun Americans Joined the Wave of New Gun Owners,” Washington Post, July 10, 2021. 52 Dionne, “We Can’t Let Gun Imperialist Win Again.” 53 “Biden–Harris Administration Announces Initial Actions to Address the Gun Violence Public Health Epidemic,” The White House, April 7, 2021, https://www.whitehouse.gov/briefing-room/ statements-releases/2021/04/07/fact-sheet-biden-harris-administration-announces-initial-actions-toaddress-the-gun-violence-public-health-epidemic/ (accessed June 18, 2021). 54 Glenn Thrush and Nicholas Bogel-Burroughs, “Why GOP-Led States Are Banning the Police From Enforcing Federal Gun Laws,” New York Times, June 18, 2021. 55 Rick Noack, “Why Won’t the US Change Its Gun Laws? New Zealand’s Jacinda Ardern Says: ‘I Do Not Understand’,” Washington Post, May 15, 2019; Krishnadev Calamur, “Australia’s Lessons on Gun Control,” The Atlantic, October 2, 2017, https://www.theatlantic.com/international/archive/2017/10/ australia-gun-control/541710/ (accessed March 3, 2021). 56 Adam Goodman, Katie Benner, and Zolan Kanno-Youngs, “How Trump’s Focus on Antifa distracted Attention from the Far-Right Threat,” New York Times, January 30, 2021. 57 Matthew Dallek, “Forcing Out the Fringe,” Washington Post, January 30, 2021. 58 Quoted in Marty Steinberg, “Rush Limbaugh, the Incendiary Radio Host, Dies at Age 70,” CNBC, February 17, 2021, https://www.cnbc.com/2021/02/17/rush-limbaugh-self-proclaimed-doctor-ofdemocracy-dies-at-age-70.html (accessed February 21, 2021). 59 Michael M. Grynbaum, Davey Alba and Reid J. Epstein, “How Pro-Trump Forces Pushed a Lie About Antifa at the Capitol Riot,” New York Times, March 1, 2021. 60 Devlin Barrett and Matt Zapotoski, “FBI Director Says Domestic Terrorism Cases Have Soared to 2,000 in Recent Months,” Washington Post, March 2, 2021. 61 Joan C. Williams, “What So Many People Don’t Get About the US Working-Class, Harvard Business Review, November 10, 2016, https://hbr.org/2016/11/what-so-many-people-dont-get-about-the-u-sworking-class (accessed February 24, 2021). 62 Gregory Krieg, “14 of Trump’s Most Outrageous ‘Birther’ Claims—Half from After 2011,” CNN, February 16, 2016, https://www.cnn.com/2016/09/09/politics/donald-trump-birther (accessed February 21, 2021). Here’s just one example from the NBC Today show in 2011: “I have people that have been studying [Obama’s birth certificate] and they cannot believe what they’re finding. … I would like to have him show his birth certificate, and can I be honest with you, I hope he can. Because if he can’t, if he can’t, if he wasn’t born in this country, which is a real possibility … then he has pulled one of the great cons in the history of politics.” Josh Clinton and Carrie Roush, “Persistent Partisan Divide Over the ‘Birther’ Question,” August 10, 2016, https://www.nbcnews.com/politics/2016-election/pollpersistent-partisan-divide-over-birther-question-n627446; Kaleigh Rodgers, “The Birther Myth Stuck Around for Years: The Election Fraud Myth Might, Too.” FiveThirtyEight, November 23, 2020, https://fivethirtyeight.com/features/the-birther-myth-stuck-around-for-years-the-election-fraud-mythmight-too/ (accessed February 22, 2021). 63 Louis Jacobson, “Yes, Donald Trump Did Call Climate Change a Chinese Hoax,” Politifact, June 3, 2016, https://www.politifact.com/factchecks/2016/jun/03/hillary-clinton/yes-donald-trump-did-call-climatechange-chinese-h/ (accessed January 22, 2021). Stephen Coll, Private Empire: ExxonMobil and American Power (New York: Penguin, 2012), 67–92; Naomi Oreskes and Erik M. Conway, Merchants of Doubt: How a Handful of Scientists Obscured the Truth on Issues From Smoking to Global Warming (New York: Bloomsbury Press, 2010); James Hoggan with Richard Littlemore, Climate Coverup: The Crusade to Deny Global Warming (Vancouver: Greystone Books, 2009); George Marshall, Don’t Even Think About It: Why Our Brains Are Wired to Ignore Climate Change (New York: Bloomsbury Press, 2014). Anthony Leiserowitz et al., “Global Warming’s Six Americas in 2020,” Yale University Program on Climate Change Communication, October 10, 2020, https://climatecommunication.yale.edu/publications/global-warmings-six-americas-in2020/ (accessed February 23, 2021). Abel Gustafson et al., “Changes in Awareness of and Support for the Green New Deal,” Yale University Program on Climate Change Communication, May 8, 2019, https:// climatecommunication.yale.edu/publications/changes-in-awareness-of-and-support-for-the-green-newdeal-december-2018-to-april-2019/ (accessed February 23, 2021). 64 Amina Dunn, “Only 24 Percent of Trump Supporters View the Coronavirus Outbreak as a ‘Very Important’ Voting Issue,” Pew Research Center, October 21, 2020. 65 Chris Cillizza, “Three-quarters of Republicans Believe a Lie About the 2020 Election,” CNN Politics, February 4, 2021, https://www.cnn.com/2021/02/04/politics/2020-election-donald-trump-voter-fraud/ index.html (accessed March 1, 2021).

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66 Ibid. See also, Thomas E. Patterson, How America Lost Its Mind: The Assault on Reason That’s Crippling Our Democracy (Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 2019). 67 Good discussions are found in Jonathan Haidt, The Righteous Mind: Why Good People Are Divided by Politics and Religion (New York: Vintage, 2012); Sandel, The Tyranny of Merit; and Adam Grant, Think Again: The Power of Knowing What You Don’t Know (New York: Viking, 2021). 68 Philip Alston, Report of the Special Rapporteur on Extreme Poverty and Human Rights on his Mission to the United States of America (United Nations Human Rights Council, 2018), https://documents-dds-ny. un.org/doc/UNDOC/GEN/G18/125/30/PDF/G1812530.pdf?OpenElement (accessed February 15, 2021). Alston, an Australian international law and human rights scholar, was also a professor at New York University Law School. 69 Jeff Stein, “Nikki Haley: ‘It Is Patently Ridiculous for the United Nations to Examine Poverty in the America,’” Washington Post, June 21, 2018. 70 Van R. Newkirk II, “Donald Trump’s Poverty Denial,” The Atlantic, June 28, 2018, https://www. theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2018/06/donald-trumps-poverty-problem/563960/ (accessed February 15, 2021). 71 Alston, Report of the Special Rapporteur on Extreme Poverty and Human Rights in the United States of America. 72 Timothy Smeeding and Céline Thévenot, “Addressing Child Poverty: How Does the United States Compare with Other Nations?” Academic Pediatrics 16 (3 Suppl) (April 2016), https://www.ncbi.nlm. nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC6087662/pdf/nihms-982833.pdf; Jacob Funk Kirkegaard, “The True Level of Government and Social Expenditures in Advanced Economies,” Peterson Institute for International Economics, March 2015, https://www.piie.com/sites/default/files/publications/pb/pb15-4.pdf (accessed Mar 1, 2021). 73 “2020 Social Progress Index,” Social Progress Imperative, n.d., https://www.socialprogress.org/static/ 37348b3ecb088518a945fa4c83d9b9f4/2020-social-progress-index-executive-summary.pdf (accessed January 19, 2021). 74 Drew Desilver, “US Students’ Academic Achievement Still Lags That of Their Peers in Many Other Countries,” Pew Research Center, February 15, 2017, https://www.pewresearch.org/fact-tank/2017/02/ 15/u-s-students-internationally-math-science/ (accessed April 6, 2020). 75 Erin Grinshteyn and David Hemenway, “Violent Death Rates: The US Compared with Other HighIncome OECD Countries, 2010,” American Journal of Medicine, November 6, 2015, https://www. amjmed.com/article/S0002-9343(15)01030-X/fulltext (accessed October 15, 2020).

Appendix A

Stresses on Society

CHRONOLOGICALLY AND BY CATEGORY

Chronologically 1901–1912: The Progressive Era Begins Exposing corruption and greed Bank Panic of 1907 Supremacy of Jim Crow Tenement houses, working conditions, and immigrants 1913–1920: Progressive Policy: Success and Backlash Entering the Great War Working conditions and labor strikes The Red Scare The influenza pandemic The “Red Summer” 1921–1932: The Return to “Normalcy” and the Onset of the Depression Depression in agriculture The 1927 Mississippi flooding Racial violence The “Invisible Empire” and 100 percent Americanism Labor relations The Great Depression begins 1933–1941: The New Deal The grinding desperation of poverty The clash in the workplace Turn to radical voices Race, politics, and southern separation Rise of anti-Semitism

Appendix A: Stresses on Society

1941–1952: War, Recovery, and Readjustment Labor unrest and adjustment to the post war McCarthyism and “Soft on Communism” Japanese American internment Racial unrest Detroit and Harlem riots The right to vote Double V 1953–1960: America at Mid-Century McCarthy and “soft on communism,” part2 Organized crime and union corruption Racial tensions 1961–1968: New Frontier and Great Society Poverty, urban and rural Kennedy assassination and public trust Cuba, Vietnam, and discontent Racial tensions and struggle 1968 1969–1980: Watergate, Distrust, and Malaise The Vietnam War Environmental consciousness Oil crisis and economic turmoil The rise of feminism, Native American consciousness, Hispanic and gay activism 1981–1992: Conservative Dominance Rustbelt America Police brutality and urban unrest AIDs epidemic Environmental backlash 1993–2000: Coming into the Twenty-First Century Growing wealth gap Dot.com boom and bust Home-grown militias, terrorism, and hate crimes 2001–2008: Vulnerable America 9/11 and its aftermath Growing economic inequality and the Great Recession The opioid crisis

493

494

Appendix A: Stresses on Society

Cultural fractures and polarization Corporate collapses Mass shootings Katrina hurricane and federal, state, and local unpreparedness 2009–2016: Polarized America Widening inequality Economic downfall The resurgence of hate groups and racists’ agitation Gun violence Conservative backlash—the Tea Party 2017–2020: Democracy Challenged Threats to democratic values and institutions Above all, defying the will of the people and the legitimacy of elections Crippling the institutions of government Mainstream media as the “enemy of the people” Social media, lies, disinformation, and conspiracies Defiance of authority Immigrants, xenophobia, and border walls Struggles of the white working class State of black economic progress The ugly specter of mass shootings, hate crimes, police actions, and racism The majority/minority America, the culture wars, and Christian nationalism Coronavirus pandemic The polarization of the political parties

By Category Financial and Economic Problems Bank Panic of 1907 (Chapter 1) Depression in agriculture in 1920s (Chapter 3) Great Depression begins (Chapter 3) Grinding desperation of poverty in 1930s (Chapter 4) Oil crisis, economic turmoil in 1970s (Chapter 8) Rustbelt America of 1980s (Chapter 9) Dot.com boom and bust of 1990s (Chapter 10) Economic meltdown of 2007–2008 (Chapter 11) Economic collapse of 2020 (Chapter 13) Racial Strife, Race Relations Supremacy of Jim Crow in 1900s (Chapter 1) Red Summer of 1918 (Chapter 2) Racial tensions during 1920s (Chapter 3) Race, politics, and southern separation in 1930s (Chapter 4)

Appendix A: Stresses on Society

Japanese American internment in 1940s (Chapter 5) Racial unrest; right to vote during 1940s (Chapter 5) Desegregation and massive resistance in 1950s (Chapter 13) Racial tensions in 1960s (Chapter 7) Police brutality and urban unrest (Chapter 9) Racial turmoil in 2020 (Chapter 13) State of black economic progress (Chapter 13) Poverty and Inequality Tenement housing in 1900s (Chapter 1) Grinding desperation of poverty in 1930s (Chapter 4) Urban and suburban living in 1950s (Chapter 6) Life without a safety net in 1950s (Chapter 6) Poverty, urban and rural in 1960s (Chapter 7) Growing wealth gap in 1990s (Chapter 10) Growing disparity in income in 2000s (Chapter 11) Labor Relations Working conditions and labor strife in 1910s (Chapter 2) Labor relations in 1920s (Chapter 3) Clashes in the workplace in 1930s (Chapter 4) Labor unrest and adjustment in 1940s (Chapter 5) Organized crime and union corruption in 1950s (Chapter 6) Social Agitation Red Scare in 1919 (Chapter 2) McCarthyism, soft on Communism in 1940s and early 1950s (Chapter 5) Cold war and atomic age in 1950s (Chapter 6) Threats to democratic values and institutions (Chapter 13) Defying the will of the people and the legitimacy of elections (Chapter 13) Mainstream media as the “enemy of the people” (Chapter 13) Social media, lies, disinformation, and conspiracies (Chapter 13) Polarization of the political parties (Chapter 13) War and Foreign Terrorism Entering the Great War in 1917 (Chapter 2) Entering World War II in 1941 (Chapter 5) Cuba, Vietnam, and discontent in 1960s (Chapter 7) Vietnam war in 1970s (Chapter 8) 9/11, threats of terrorism and war (Chapter 11) Natural Disasters Mississippi flooding of 1927 (Chapter 3) Katrina hurricane of 2005 (Chapter 11)

495

496

Appendix A: Stresses on Society

Health Concerns Spanish flu of 1918–1919 (Chapter 2) AIDs epidemic of 1980s (Chapter 9) Opioid crisis of 2010s (Chapter 12) COVID pandemic of 2020 (Chapter 13) Immigration, Nativism Immigrants, xenophobia, and border walls (Chapter 13) Social Disruption, Hate Groups, Domestic Terrorism Invisible empire, 100 percent Americanism of 1920s (Chapter 3) Rise of anti-Semitism in late 1930s, early 1940s (Chapter 4) 1968 (Chapter 7) Homegrown militias, hate crimes of 1990s (Chapter 10) 9/11. Threats of terrorism of 2000s (Chapter 11) The ugly specter of mass shootings, hate crimes, police actions, and racism (Chapter 13) Environmental Consciousness Environmental consciousness of 1970s (Chapter 8) Environmental backlash of 1980s (Chapter 9) Climate change denial of 2000s (Chapter 11) Loss of Trust In Government, Polarization Growing polarization in 2000s (Chapter 11) Defiance of authority (Chapter 13) Crippling the institutions of government (Chapter 13) Cultural Strains Trial of the Century-Scopes in 1920s (Chapter 3) Rise of feminism, Native Americans, Hispanics, gays in 1970s (Chapter 8) Struggles of the white working class (Chapter 13) The majority/minority America, the culture wars, and Christian nationalism (Chapter 13)

Appendix B

Key Policies, 1900–2021

CHRONOLOGICALLY AND BY CATEGORY

Chronologically 1901–1912: The Progressive Era Begins Conservation and Protection of Public Lands Newlands Reclamation Act (1902) Antiquities Act (1906) Trust-Busting (Northern Securities Company v. United States, 1904) Pure Food and Drugs: Pure Food and Drug Act (1906); Meat Inspection Act (1906) Sixteenth Amendment: Federal Income Tax (1913) Seventeenth Amendment: Popular Election of Senators (1913) Affirming State Power to Regulate Working Conditions (Lochner v. New York, 1905; Muller v. Oregon, 1908) 1913–1920: Progressive Policy: Success and Backlash Federal Reserve System: Federal Reserve Act (1913) Prohibition: Eighteenth Amendment (1919); Volstead Act (1919) Nineteenth Amendment: Woman Suffrage (1920) Protecting Children in the Labor Market: Keating-Owen Child Labor Act (1916) 1921–1932: The Return to “Normalcy” and the Onset of the Depression The Problems with Prohibition Immigration Reform: Johnson-Reed Immigration Act (1924) Ill-Fated Protective Tariff: Smoot-Hawley Tariff (1930) Maternity and Infant Protection: Sheppard-Towner Maternity and Infancy Act (1921) Outlawing “Yellow Dog” Contracts and Federal Court Labor Injunctions: Norris-La Guardia Act (1932) Twentieth Amendment: the “Lame Duck” amendment (1933)

498

Appendix B: Key Policies Enacted

1933–1941: The New Deal One Hundred Days Stabilizing the Banking and Financial System: Glass-Steagall Act (1933) Electricity, Flood Control, and Economic Support for the Tennessee Valley and Rural America: TVA and Rural Electrification (1933) Protecting the Working Family and Union Democracy: Wagner Act (1935) Assistance for the Elderly: Social Security Act (1935) Establishing a Federal Minimum Wage and Prohibiting Child Labor—National Labor Standards Act (1938) 1941–1952: War, Recovery, and Readjustment Protecting the Returning Veteran: GI Bill (1944) Hospital Construction: Hill-Burton Act (1946) Migrant Workers, Immigrants, and Refugees: Braceros program; repeal of Chinese immigration ban (1943); Displaced Persons Act (1948) Immigrants and National Security: McCarran Internal Security Act (1950); Immigration and Nationality Act (McCarran-Walter) (1952) Fighting Racial Discrimination Through Executive Orders and Court Decisions Preventing racial discrimination in federal job training programs: Executive Order 8802 Desegregating the armed services: Executive Order 9981 Prohibiting the White primary (Smith v. Allwright, 1944) Desegregating interstate buses (Morgan v. Virginia, 1945) Prohibiting restrictive covenants (Shelley v. Kraemer, 1948) Twenty-second Amendment: Limiting president’s term of office (1951) Revamping Labor–Management Relations: Taft-Hartley Act (1947) Public Housing, Slum Clearance, Redlining and Discrimination: National Housing Act (1949) 1953–1960: America at Mid-Century Immigrants and refugees: Operation Wetback; Refugee relief Racial Justice (Brown v. Board, 1954, 1955; Cooper v. Aaron, 1958) Ribbons of Highway: Interstate Highway Acts (1956) Protecting the Elderly and Those with Disabilities: Social Security Amendments (1958) Federal Aid to Education: National Defense Education Act (1958) Restraining Union Corruption and Union Democracy: Landrum-Griffin Act (1959) 1961–1968: New Frontier and Great Society Twenty-third Amendment: DC citizens gain the presidential vote (1961) Twenty-fourth Amendment: outlawing poll tax in federal elections (1964) Twenty-fifth Amendment: presidential succession (1967)

Appendix B: Key Policies Enacted

499

Protecting the Rights of Minorities (Civil Rights Act, 1964; Heart of Atlanta Hotel v. US, 1965; Katzenbach v. McClung, 1965; Voting Rights Act, 1965; South Carolina v. Katzenbach, 1966) Health Care Assistance for Seniors and the Indigent: Medicare and Medicaid (1965) The “War on Poverty”: Food stamps; Head Start Immigration Reform: Immigration and Nationality Act Amendments (1965); (Hart-Celler Act) Federal Education Assistance: Elementary and Secondary Education Act (1965) Higher Education Assistance Act (1965) Protecting the Wilderness and Environment: Wilderness Act (1964) Expanded rights of persons accused of crimes (Mapp v. Ohio, 1961; Gideon v. Wainwright, 1963; Escobedo v. Illinois, 1964; Miranda v. Arizona, 1966) Prayer and Bible Reading in Public Schools (Engel v. Vitale, 1962; Abington v. Schempp, 1963) The Right to Privacy (Griswold v. Connecticut, 1965) Freedom of the Press (New York Times v. Sullivan, 1964) Interracial Marriages (Loving v. Virginia, 1966) Redistricting and Equal Representation (Baker v. Carr, 1962; Reynolds v. Sims, 1964; Wesberry v. Saunders, 1964) 1969–1980: Watergate, Distrust, and Malaise Twenty-sixth Amendment: Eighteen-year-olds’ Right to Vote (1971) The Decade of the Environment: National Environmental Policy Act (NEPA) (1969) Clean Water Act Amendments (1965, 1977); Clean Air Act Amendments (1970, 1977) Other environmental laws Educational Equality for Women: Title IX Education Amendments (1976) Campaign Financing: Federal Election Campaign Act (1971), amended 1974; Buckley v. Valeo (1976) The Right to Have an Abortion (Roe v. Wade, 1973) Executive privilege and wrongdoing (US v. Nixon, 1974) Desegregation of Public Schools and Busing (Swann v. Charlotte-Mecklenburg Board of Education, 1971; Milliken v. Bradley, 1974) Inequality in Public School Financing and the Right to Education (San Antonio School District v. Rodriquez, 1973) Affirmative Action (Regents of University of California v. Bakke, 1978) 1981–1992: Conservative Dominance Tax Policy and Budget Cuts: Economic Recovery Tax Act (1981); Tax Equity and Fiscal Responsibility Act (1982) Domestic Budget Cuts: Omnibus Reconciliation Act (1981) (Gramm-Latta) Making Social Security Solvent: Social Security Amendments (1983) Attempts to Balance the Budget: Gramm-Rudman-Hollings I & II (1985, 1986); Budget Enforcement Act (1990) Tax Reform: Tax Reform Act (1986) Immigration Reform: Immigration Reform and Control Act (1986); (Simpson-Mazzoli Act) Civil Rights for the Disabled: Americans with Disabilities Act (1990) Clean Air Amendments: Clean Air Amendments (1990) North American Free Trade (1992) Abortion Restrictions (Webster v. Reproductive Health Services, 1989; Planned Parenthood v. Casey, 1992)

500

Appendix B: Key Policies Enacted

1993–2000: Coming into the Twenty-First Century North American Free Trade: North American Free Trade Agreement (1993) Medical Leave for Families: Family and Medical Leave Act (1993) Same-sex Marriages and Gays in the Military: Defense of Marriage Act (1996); “Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell” (1993) Welfare Reform: Personal Responsibility and Work Opportunity Reconciliation Act (1996) Banking and Investments: Financial Services Modernization Act (Gramm-Leach-Bliley Act) (1999) Term limits for members of Congress (US Term Limits v. Thornton, 1995) Limits on congressional use of the commerce clause (US v. Lopez, 1995; US v. Morrison, 2000) Equal protection and homosexuals (Romer v. Evans, 1996); Boy Scouts of America v. Dale, 2000) Racial gerrymandering (Shaw v. Reno, 1993) Florida recount of presidential ballots (Bush v. Gore, 2000) 2001–2008: Vulnerable America Reducing Taxes, Increasing the Deficit, Growing the Income Gap; Economic Growth and Tax Relief Reconciliation Act (2001) 9/11 and National Security: USA Patriot Act (2001) No Child Left Behind: No Child Left Behind Act (2001) Prescription Drugs: Medicare Prescription Drug Improvement and Modernization Act (2003) Securities Legislation: Corporate Fraud Accountability Act (Sarbanes-Oxley) (2002) Campaign Finance Reform: Bipartisan Campaign Reform Act (McCain-Feingold Act) (2002) Energy Policy: Energy Policy Act (2005) Averting an Economic Meltdown: Emergency Economic Stabilization Act (2008) Affirmative action and college admissions (Grutter v. Bollinger, Gratz v. Bollinger, 2003) Guns and the Second Amendment (District of Columbia v. Heller, 2008) Carbon dioxide and global warming (Massachusetts v. EPA, 2007) 2009–2016: Polarized America Addressing the Financial Meltdown; The Recovery Act (2009); Automobile Industry rescue Universal Health Care: Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act (Obamacare) (2010); National Federation of Business v. Sibelius (2012); Burwell v. Hobby Lobby Stores (2014) Reforming Wall Street Practices: Wall Street Reform and Consumer Protection Act (DoddFrank) (2010) Protecting the Environment and Conservation: Deepwater Horizon oil spill; Automobile fuel economy; “War on coal” Dismantling Campaign Finance Reform (Citizens United v. Federal Election Commission, 2010) Removing Voting Rights Protections (Shelby v. Holder, 2013) Defense of Marriage Act and Same-sex Marriage (United States v. Windsor, 2013; Obergefell v. Hodges, 2015) 2017–2020: Democracy Challenged Tax Reform: Tax Cut and Jobs Act (2017) Financial Bailout During the Pandemic, CARES and Stimulus: Coronavirus Aid, Relief, and Economic Security Act (2020); Federal Reserve action; COVID Relief Bill (2020)

Appendix B: Key Policies Enacted

501

Presidential Assertion of Absolute Authority (Trump v. Mazars USA LLP, 2019; Trump v. Vance, 2019) Title VII and Discrimination Based on Sexual Orientation: Bostock v. Clayton County, Georgia (2020) Gerrymandering (Rucho v. Common Cause and Lamone v. Benisek, 2019) Native American Lands (McGirt v. Oklahoma, 2020) 2021: The Arduous Road Ahead Battling Against the Pandemic: American Rescue Plan (2021) Fixing the Crumbling Infrastructure: Infrastructure Investment and Jobs Act (2021)

By Category Conservation and Environmental Protection Conservation and Protection of Public Lands—Newlands Reclamation Act (1902); Antiquities Act (1906) Wilderness Act (1964) National Environmental Policy Act (NEPA) (1969) Clean Water Act Amendments (1965, 1977); Clean Air Act Amendments (1970, 1977) Other environmental laws (1970s) Clean Air Amendments (1990) Global warming (Massachusetts v. EPA, 2007) Environmental Protections—Obama executive orders and actions Protecting the National Park and Conservation System: Great American Outdoors Act (2020) Energy Policy Energy Policy Act (2005) Food and Drugs Safety Pure Food and Drugs—Pure Food and Drug Act (1906); Meat Inspection Act (1906) Monopolies, Anti-Trust Trust-Busting (Northern Securities Company v. United States, 1904) Labor Relations, Working Conditions Affirming State Power to Regulate Working Conditions (Lochner v. New York, 1905; Muller v. Oregon, 1908) Labor Relations—Norris-La Guardia Act (1932) Protecting the Working Family and Union Democracy—Wagner Act (1935) Establishing a Federal Minimum Wage and Prohibiting Child Labor—National Labor Standards Act (1938) Revamping Labor-Management Relations—Taft-Hartley Act (1947) Union Corruption and Union Democracy—Landrum-Griffin Act (1959)

502

Appendix B: Key Policies Enacted

Taxation, Finance, Trade, and Banking System Sixteenth Amendment: Federal Income Tax (1913) Federal banking system—Federal Reserve Act (1913) Ill-Fated Protective Tariff—Smoot-Hawley Tariff (1930) Stabilizing the Banking and Financial System—Glass-Steagall Act (1933) Economic Recovery Tax Act (1981) Tax Equity and Fiscal Responsibility Act (1982) Tax Reform Act (1986) North American Free Trade Agreement (1993) Financial Services Modernization Act (1999) (Gramm-Leach-Bliley Act) Economic Growth and Tax Relief Reconciliation Act (2001) Tax Reform: Tax Cut and Jobs Act (2017) The Right to Vote Seventeenth Amendment: Popular Election of Senators (1913) Nineteenth Amendment: Woman Suffrage (1920) Twenty-third Amendment (1961) (DC citizens the presidential vote) Twenty-fourth Amendment (1964) (Outlawing poll tax in federal elections) Voting Rights Act (1965); South Carolina v. Katzenbach (1966) Twenty-sixth Amendment: Eighteen-year-olds’ vote (1971) Curbing the Voting Rights Act—Shelby v. Holder (2013) Campaigns and Elections Federal Election Campaign Act (1971), amended 1974; Buckley v. Valeo (1976) Racial gerrymandering (Shaw v. Reno, 1993) Florida recount of presidential ballots (Bush v. Gore, 2000) Bipartisan Campaign Reform Act (McCain-Feingold Act) (2002) Citizens United v. Federal Election Commission (2010); and other cases Gerrymandering (Rucho v. Common Cause and Lamone v. Benisek, 2019) Social Welfare Protecting Children in the Labor Market (1910s) Maternity and Infant Protection—Sheppard-Towner Maternity and Infancy Act (1921) Assistance for the Elderly—Social Security Act (1935) Protecting Those with Disabilities—Social Security Amendments (1956) The “War on Poverty”: food stamps, Head Start Social Security Amendments (1983) Family and Medical Leave Act (1993) Personal Responsibility and Work Opportunity Reconciliation Act (1996) Health Care Medicare and Medicaid (Social Security Amendments of 1965) Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act (1996) Medicare Prescription Drug Improvement and Modernization Act (2003)

Appendix B: Key Policies Enacted

503

Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act (Obamacare) (2010); National Federation of Business v. Sibelius (2012); Burwell v. Hobby Lobby Stores (2014) Civil Rights for All Americans with Disabilities Act (1990) Defense of Marriage Act (1996) “Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell” Policy (1993) Equal protection and homosexuals (Romer v. Evans, 1996; Boy Scouts of America v. Dale, 2000) Same-sex Marriages (US v. Windsor, 2013; Obergefell v. Hodges, 2015) Title VII and Discrimination Based on Sexual Orientation (Bostock v. Clayton County, Georgia, 2020) Native American Lands (McGirt v. Oklahoma, 2020) Prohibition and Repeal Eighteenth Amendment (1919) and the Volstead Act (1919) Implementation of Prohibition Twenty-first Amendment (1933), repeal of Eighteenth Presidential Authority Twentieth Amendment: “Lame Duck” (1933) Twenty-second Amendment: Limiting the President’s Term (1947) Twenty-fifth Amendment (1967) (presidential succession) Executive privilege and wrongdoing (US v. Nixon, 1974) Presidential Assertion of Absolute Authority (Trump v. Mazars USA LLP, 2019; Trump v. Vance, 2019) Immigration Reform Immigration Reform—Johnson-Reed Immigration Act (1924) Braceros program; repeal of Chinese immigration ban (1943); Displaced Persons Act (1948) McCarran Internal Security Act (1950); Immigration and Nationality Act (McCarran-Walter) (1952) Immigrants and refugees (1950s) Immigration and Nationality Act Amendments (Hart-Celler Act) (1965) Immigration Reform and Control Act (Simpson-Mazzoli Act) (1986) Federal Budgeting Omnibus Reconciliation Act (Gramm-Latta) (1981); Gramm-Rudman-Hollings I & II (1985, 1986) Budget Enforcement Act (1990) Economic Recovery One Hundred Days (1933) Emergency Economic Stabilization Act (2008)

504

Appendix B: Key Policies Enacted

Financial Bailout During the Pandemic, CARES and Stimulus: Coronavirus Aid, Relief, and Economic Security Act (2020); Federal Reserve action; COVID Relief Bill (2020); American Rescue Plan (2021) Economic Regulation Electricity, Flood Control, and Economic Support for the Tennessee Valley and Rural America—TVA and Rural Electrification (1933) Regulating Public Utility Holding Companies—Public Utilities Holding Act (1935) Corporate Fraud Accountability Act (Sarbanes-Oxley) (2002) Combatting Racial Discrimination EO 8802 (prohibiting racial discrimination in job training); EO 9981 (ending racial segregation in armed services) Fighting racial discrimination through Supreme Court decisions (Smith v. Allwright, 1944; Morgan v. Virginia, 1945; Shelley v. Kraemer, 1948) Racial Justice in education (Brown v. Board, 1954, 1955; Cooper v. Aaron, 1958; Civil Rights Act, 1964; Heart of Atlanta Hotel v. US, 1965; Katzenbach v. McClung, 1965) Desegregation of public schools and busing (Swann v. Charlotte-Mecklenburg Board of Education, 1971; Milliken v. Bradley, 1974) Housing Public Housing, Slum Clearance, Redlining and Discrimination—National Housing Act (1949) Protecting the Military Veteran GI Bill (1944) Education Assistance Federal Aid to Education—National Defense Education Act (1958) Elementary and Secondary Education Act (1965) Higher Education Assistance Act (1965) Title IX Education Amendments (1976) No Child Left Behind Act (2001) Transportation and Infrastructure Ribbons of Highway—Interstate Highway Act (1956) Infrastructure Investment and Jobs Act (2021) Arts and Culture National Foundation on the Arts and Humanities Act (1965)

Appendix B: Key Policies Enacted

505

Protection of Rights and Freedoms Expanded rights of persons accused of crimes (Mapp v. Ohio, 1961; Gideon v. Wainwright, 1963; Escobedo v. Illinois, 1964; Miranda v. Arizona, 1966) Prayer and Bible reading in public schools (Engel v. Vitale, 1962; Abington v. Schempp, 1963) The right to privacy (Griswold v. Connecticut, 1965) Freedom of the press (New York Times v. Sullivan, 1964) The right to travel (Shapiro v. Thompson, 1969) Interracial marriages (Loving v. Virginia, 1966) Redistricting and equal representation (Baker v. Carr, 1962; Reynolds v. Sims, 1964; Wesberry v. Saunders, 1964) Affirmative action (Regents Univ. California v. Bakke, 1978) Inequality in public school financing and the right to education (San Antonio School District v. Rodriquez, 1973) The right to have an abortion (Roe v. Wade, 1973) Abortion restrictions (Webster v. Reproductive Health Services, 1989; Planned Parenthood v. Casey, 1992) Term limits for members of Congress (US Term Limits v. Thornton (1995) Limits on congressional use of the commerce clause (US v. Lopez, 1995; US v. Morrison, 2000) Second Amendment Rights (District of Columbia v. Heller, 2008) Affirmative action (Fisher v. University of Texas, 2016) National Security USA Patriot Act (2001)

Appendix C

Policies Delayed or Denied

CHRONOLOGICALLY AND BY CATEGORY

Chronologically 1901–1912: The Progressive Era Begins Protecting Children in the Workplace Worker Rights and Contracts Woman’s Suffrage 1913–1920: Progressive Policy: Success and Backlash Anti-lynching legislation Reversal of child labor protections (Hammer v. Dagenhart, 1918) Government failure to plan demobilization 1921–1932: The Return to “Normalcy” and the Onset of the Depression Child labor Anti-lynching legislation Assistance to farmers Triumph of freedom of contract Failure to combat the Depression 1933–1941: The New Deal The court weighs in on New Deal: Panama Refining Company v. Ryan (1935); Schechter Poultry Corp. v. United States (1935); Louisville Joint Stock Land Bank v. Radford (1935); Humphrey’s Executor v. United States (1935); Carter v. Carter Coal Company (1936); West Coast Hotel v. Parrish (1937) Failure of anti-lynching legislation 1941–1952: War, Recovery, and Readjustment Failure to eliminate the poll tax National health insurance Executive order to seize steel industry and court rebuff (Youngstown Sheet & Tube v. Sawyer, 1952)

Appendix C: Policies Delayed or Denied

1953–1960: America at Mid-Century Medical Insurance for the Elderly Poor Watered-down Civil Rights Protections 1961–1968: New Frontier and Great Society A whirlwind of legislation passed during this era 1969–1980: Watergate, Distrust, and Malaise Universal childcare Equal Rights Amendment Abolishing the Electoral College Full voting participation in Congress for District of Columbia Climate change 1981–1992: Conservative Dominance Global warming Permanent storage of nuclear waste 1993–2000: Coming into the Twenty-First Century Universal health care Public education goals Presidential line-item veto Climate change 2001–2008: Vulnerable America Gun control Environmental rollback Immigration reform 2009–2016: Polarized America Immigration reform Climate change Overdose from deadly drugs 2017–2020: Democracy Challenged The coronavirus pandemic Failed repeal of Obamacare Immigration reform Environment and climate change Rebuilding the infrastructure Mass shootings and gun restrictions

507

508

Appendix C: Policies Delayed or Denied

By Category Workers’ Rights and Contracts Workers rights and contracts, 1900s Upholding Freedom of Contract in 1920s Voting Rights Defeat of Woman’s Suffrage during 1900s, 1910s Failure to eliminate the Poll Tax in 1940s Defeat of full voting participation in Congress for District of Columbia in 1970s Rollback of voting protections through Shelby County v. Holder Social Welfare Failure to protect children in the workplace 1900s Ruling Against Child Labor (Hammer v. Dagenhart, 1918) Failure of Child Labor Amendment in 1920s Defeat of universal childcare in 1970s Equal Rights Defeat of Equal Rights Amendment in 1970s Racial Strife and Justice Defeat of anti-lynching legislation in 1910s Defeat of anti-lynching legislation in 1920s Failure of anti-lynching legislation in 1930s Watered-down Civil Rights Protections in 1950s War Demobilization Government Failure to Plan Demobilization after World War I Combatting Economic Collapse Failure to assist farmers in 1920s Failure to combat the Depression in 1920s High Court strikes down New Deal legislation in 1930s Health Care Defeat of National Health Insurance in 1940s Defeat of Medical Insurance for Elderly in 1950s Collapse of universal health care proposal in 1990s

Appendix C: Policies Delayed or Denied

509

Global Warming and Climate Change Lack of leadership and denial of global warming in 1980s, 1990s Lack of climate change policy in 1990s Lack of climate change policy in 2000s Environmental rollback in 2000s Defeat of climate change legislation in 2010s Attack on climate change policies in 2020 Energy Policy Failure to provide permanent storage of nuclear waste in 1980s Presidential Power Executive Order to Seize Steel Industry and Court Rebuff (Youngstown Sheet & Tube v. Sawyer, 1952) Presidential line-item veto denied by Supreme Court in 1990s Public Education Defeat of public education goals in 1990s Gun Control Defeat of gun control in 1990s Failure to adopt gun control legislation in 2010s Failure to adopt gun control legislation in 2020s Immigration Reform Failure to adopt immigration reform in 2010s Failure to adopt immigration reform in 2020s Health Failure to fight the 2020 pandemic AIDS Opioid crisis and overdose of deadly drugs Infrastructure and Transportation Failure to adopt infrastructure policies in 2020s

Index

9/11 terrorist attacks 363–65 Abernathy, Ralph David 183, 285 Abortion policy 272, 310, 311, 354–55, 436–37 Adams, Samuel Hopkins 12, 23–24 Agriculture, US Department of 18, 21, 24–25, 154, 235, 317 Ahamed, Liaquat 75 AIDS epidemic 290–92, 308 Aid to Families with Dependent Children (AFDC) 334–35 AIG (American International Group, Inc.) 373, 400 Alabama 164, 169, 183, 213–16, 223, 228–30, 242, 244, 409–10 Alabama, University of 224–25 Albert, Carl B. 262 Aldrich, Nelson W. 18, 26, 50 Alito, Samuel A., Jr. 360–61, 375, 409–10, 474 Alston, Philip G. 485 Amendments, US Constitution: Fifteenth (Suffrage for Former Male Slaves, 1870) 5, 13, 32, 56, 195 Sixteenth (Income Tax, 1913) 25–26, 48 Seventeenth (Direct Election of Senators, 1913) 12, 18, 20, 26–27 Eighteenth (Prohibition, 1919) 82–83, 113 Nineteenth (Woman Suffrage, 1920) 54–57 Twentieth (Lame Duck, 1933) 88, 113 Twenty-first (Repeal Prohibition, 1933) 113–14 Twenty-second (Presidential Term Limit, 1951) 165, 337 Twenty-third (Electoral votes to District of Columbia, 1961) 223, 278 Twenty-fourth (Repeal Poll Tax in Federal Elections, 1964) 169, 223 Twenty-fifth (Presidential Succession, 1967) 223–24, 260 Twenty-sixth (18-year-old Vote, 1971) 266, 276 American Federation of Labor (AFL) 30, 48, 101, 119, 166 American Legion 146, 156

American Medical Association (AMA) 86, 169, 231–32, 401 Americans for Prosperity 393, 414 American Society of Civil Engineers (ASCE) 469 Anthony, Susan B. 32, 54 Anti-lynching legislative attempts 58–60, 89, 128–30, 362 Anti-Saloon League (ASL) 52, 82 Anti-suffragists 32, 55 Ardern, Jacinda 481–82 Arkansas: Elaine massacre 44; poll taxes 169, 223; Little Rock desegregation 183, 185, 193–94; term limits 337–38 Armey, Richard K. (Dick) 328, 364, 393 Arthur, John 411 Arthur Anderson, LLP 355–56 Ashcroft, John D. 358, 364, 377 assault weapons bans 377, 415, 480 asylum seekers 306, 433, 453 Bailey, Josiah 109, 130 Baker, Howard H., Jr. 262, 296, 302 Ball, Robert M. 231, 233 bank failures 76, 115 Barnett, Ross 213 Barr, Robert L. (Bob), Jr. 333–34 Barrett, Amy Coney 443, 453 Baruch, Bernard 75–76 Bayh, Birch E.: 220 223, 295; Equal Rights amendment 272; Title IX 269–70; Twentysixth Amendment 266; abolish Electoral College 277–78 Bernanke, Ben S. 76, 349, 353–54, 373–74 Bernstein, Irving 101, 119 Beveridge, Albert J. 18; meat inspection 24–25; child labor 29–30, 57 Biden, Joseph R. (Joe), Jr. 331, 394, 399; pandemic relief 451, 468–69, 480; 2020 presidential election 92, 425, 428–30, 439, 465 Biden administration 332, 407 Biden policy goals 466–47, 473; infrastructure 455, 470; electoral system 475–77; Build Back

Index Better 470–71; immigration reform 477–78; climate mitigation 478–79; gun control 480–82 “Big Lie, The” 425, 429, 440, 465 Bilbo, Theodore 164 Birmingham, Alabama, racial violence 71, 106, 213–14, 225 “Birth of a Nation” (Griffin) 41, 46, 107 Black, Hugo L. 112, 118, 126, 168, 241 Blackmun, Harry A. 263, 274, 275, 327; Roe v. Wade, 272 Boehner, John A. 360, 394, 396, 412, 443; Obamacare 403–404 Boggs, T. Hale 196, 221 Bonus Expeditionary Army 91–92 Borah, William E. 18, 26, 47, 80 Bork, Robert H. 273–74, 298, 360 Boy Scouts of America 338–39 Braceros program 159 Brademas, S. John, Jr. 185, 275 Bradley, William W. (Bill) 304–305 Brandeis, Louis D. 17, 28, 111, 127 Brennan, William 188, 221, 241–42, 244 Brennan Center for Justice, New York University 410, 474 Breyer, Stephen G. 397, 409–10, 442 Brookings Institution 322, 433 Brown, Edmund G. (Jerry), Jr. 260, 322 Brown, Victoria Bissell 56 Brownell, Herbert 189, 200 Bryan, William Jennings 17, 25, 51, 73 Buchanan, Patrick J. 254, 275, 308 budget, federal deficits 143; Reagan era 299–300, 303–304, 322; Biden era 479–80 budget, federal surpluses 363 “Build Back Better” 276, 332, 469, 470–71 Burger, Warren 263–64, 273 Bush, George H.W. 287, 293–95, 322, 342 Bush I administration policies: taxes 299; ADA 308–09; NAFTA 310 Bush, George W. 358, 339–40 Bush II administration policies: climate mitigation 344, 376–67; taxes 362–64; No Child Left Behind 365–66; prescription drugs 368; energy 371–72; environmental rollback 378–79; gun control 377–78; immigration 379–80 Byrd, Harry Flood, Sr. 183, 196 Byrd, James Jr. 324–35 Byrd, Robert C. 227, 262, 296, 403 Caldwell, Lynton K. 266–67 Califano, Joseph A., Jr. 219, 233 campaign finance reform 370–71, 408–409, 476; “soft money” 370–71 Cannon, Joseph G. 19, 63, 79, 81 Cantor, Eric I. 396, 399, 429

511

cap and trade proposals 379, 413–14 Cardozo, Benjamin N. 81, 111, 127 Caro, Robert 186, 201 Carter, James E. (Jimmy) 253, 258, 260–61, 265, 289, 299 Catt, Carrie Chapman 54–56 Celler, Emmanuel 225, 229; immigration reform 236–37; ERA 276–77 Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), US: AIDS 290; gun control 377–78; COVID 379, 451, 472 Chavéz, César 259–60 Cheney, Richard B. (Dick) 340, 356; Iraq War 352; energy policy 371–72 Chrysler Corporation 265, 400–401 child labor legislative attempts 28–30, 57–58, 60–61, 88, 125–27 Chinese immigrants 20, 49, 154, 159 Christian nationalism 436–37 Citizens United 408 Civilian Conservation Corps 101, 113 Clark, Beauchamp (Champ) 17, 19, 47 Clark, Joel Bennett 154, 156 Clark, Joseph S., Jr. 210, 235, 410 Clark, Kenneth 192 Clark, Tom 146, 148, 153, 188, 191, 241 Climate change 343–44, 378–79; 1988 hearings 311–13; Biden era 454–55, 478; Bush II era 414–15 Clinton administration 300, 321, 342, 363, 398, 479 Clinton, Hillary R.: health care fight 325, 341; 2016 election 424, 484 Clinton, William J. (Bill) 343; gays in military 332–34; impeachment and scandals 320–21; judicial appointees 329; presidency 325–26; Republican challenges 327 Coelho, Anthony L. (Tony) 308 Cohen, Adam 99, 107 Cohen, Wilbur J. 200, 231–33 Cohn, Roy 180–81 Collins, Susan 357, 414, 443, 452 Colorado: gay rights 337–38; Klan activity 72; militia movement 324 computer revolution 142, 288 Congress of Industrial Organizations (CIO) 102, 110, 182 Connor, Eugene (Bull) 213 Contract with America 327–27, 335, 342 Coolidge, Calvin: Boston police strike 42; presidential election 73, 76–77; policies 78, 83–84, 89 Coolidge Prosperity 75 coronavirus pandemic, see COVID-19 Costigan, Edward P. 110, 129 “court packing” scheme, see Supreme Court, US

512

Index

COVID-19 (COVID) 437–39; Biden era policy 468–69, 473, 480; Trump era policy 445–47, 451 Cruz, R. Ted 396, 415, 429 Dallek, Matthew 482 Dallek, Robert A. 152, 210, 222 Dart, Justin Jr. 308 Daschle, Thomas A. 328, 349, 351, 355, 359, 367 Davis, John W. 73, 77, 191 Deaton, Angus 434 “Deaths of Despair” 434 Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals (DACA) program 412, 454, 478 Defiance of authority 432–33 Democratic Party: current allegiance 439, 40; southern dominance 150, 218, 230; split in 148–50; woman’s suffrage 56; working class 254, 434 Denver, Colorado 72 De Priest, Oscar 141 Detroit 147–48, 214, 274 Development, Relief, and Education for Alien Minors Act (DREAM Act) proposal, 2009 412 DeVos, Betsy 472 DiLoretta, Gregory E. Dickey, Jay W., Jr. 377–78 Dingell, John D., Sr. 151, 169 Dingell, John D., Jr. 309, 368, 378 Dirksen, Everett M. 219, 226, 227, 228 disenfranchisement of African American men 13, 56 District of Columbia 46; labor laws 40, 90; guns 375–76; voting 223, 278 Dodd, Christopher J. 332, 402, 405 Dole, Robert J. (Bob) 296, 328, 333, 335 “Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell” 333 Dorgan, Byron L. 337 Dot.com boom and bust 320, 323, 356 Douglas, Paul H. 152, 202, 256 Douglas, William O. 112, 118, 221, 242 Drehle, David von 16 Dunn Tenpas, Katherine 441 Dyer, Leonidas C. 59–60, 89 Earth Day 1970 256 East St. Louis, Illinois, race riots 39, 44–45 Eastland, James O. 163, 201, 215, 224, 226–27 economic inequality 352 Edelman, Peter 335 Eisenhower, Dwight D.: aid to education 198–99; Brown cases 194; desegregation of schools 194, 200–201; integrating armed forces 163; Little Rock 192–94; McCarthy investigations 145, 180; presidency 184; relations with Congress 186–87; Social Security 197

Electoral College reform 277–78, 476–77 Emergency Migration Program (1952) Engle, Clair 227 Enron Corporation 355–56 environmental rollbacks: under Bush II 378–79; under Trump 454–55 Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) 261; carbon dioxide 407–408; creation of 267–68; Reagan era 293–94 Equal Rights Amendment 220, 253, 266, 276–77 eugenics and immigration 68, 83–85 Executive Orders (EO): EO8802 (prohibit racial discrimination, 1941) 162; EO9981 (racial integration of Armed Services, 1948) 163; EO10340 (seizure of steel mills, 1952) 170; EO12335 (National Commission on Social Security Reform, 1982) 302; EO13769 (ban refugees and citizens from several Muslim countries, 2016) 161 Fair Deal program 155, 166 Fairness Doctrine 287 Faubus, Orval 193–94 Fauci, Anthony S. 291, 438–39, 451 Federal Communications Commission (FCC) 114, 287 Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation (FDIC) 52, 116 Federal Election Commission (FEC) 271, 369, 408 Federal Reserve System: COVID response 446; creation 49–52; 2008 crisis 353, 373–74; Feinstein, Dianne 415 feminism, rise of 258–60 Ferrell, Robert E. 61, 90 Filibuster: 229 296, 299, 360, 399, 403; against civil rights legislation 201, 225, 227, 229 Fite, Gilbert 193, 220 Florida: 2000 presidential election 340, 474 Floyd, George 391, 435, 481 Foley, Thomas S. 268, 297, 328 Food and Drug Administration (FDA) 25 Food stamp program 234–35, 264, 399 “For the People” bill 477 Forand, Aime J. 231 Ford, Gerald R. 258, 260 Ford Motor Company 12, 40, 121, 142 Forest Service, US 21 Fortas, Abraham (Abe) 221–22, 263 Fox News 428–30, 467 Frank, Barney 7, 333, 373, 406 Frank, Leo 71–72 Frankfurter, Felix 87, 108, 112, 153, 329 Franklin, John Hope 14 Freedom riders 212 Friedan, Betty 252, 259 Fulbright, J. William 226

Index Fuller, Melville Weston 19 Fuller Court 20 Garner, John Nance 81, 92, 107, 112 Garland, Merrick B. 324, 398, 443, 482–83 Gates, William H. (Bill), III 437 Geithner, Timothy F. 349, 353–54, 373–74 Gephardt, Richard A. 304–305, 328 General Motors Corporation (GM) 102, 121, 141, 289, 400 Gerrymandering: racial 339; partisan 449–50 Gillett, Frederick H. 79, 81, 89 Gingrich, Newt 261–62, 297, 301; Contract with America 327–28; leadership 328–29 Ginsburg, Ruth Bader 329–30, 397–98, 410, 442–43 Glass, Carter 13, 116, 50–52 Goldberg, Arthur 221 Goldwater, Barry 186, 219, 231–32; 1964 presidential election 211, 215–16 Gore, Albert A., Sr. 196 Gore, Albert A., Jr. 262; 2000 presidential election 339–40; climate policies 343, 379 Gorsuch, Ann (Burford) 293 Gorsuch, Neil M. 443, 448, 449, 450 Gramm, W. Philip (Phil) 301–304 Grassley, Charles E. 397, 402 Great Depression: agriculture 85, 89; beginning 68, 75–76; compared to 2008 353, 388, 390 failure to combat 90–92; FDR and 99, 100–101, 112–15 Great Recession 352, 389, 446, 466 Green, Edith 269, 276 Green New Deal 478, 484 Greene, Marjorie Taylor 432 greenhouse gases 311–13, 343, 376–77, 407, 413 Greenhouse, Linda 338 Greenspan, Alan 302 Greenspan Commission 302 Griffiths, Martha W. 226, 276 Hacker, Jacob S. 426, 439 Halberstam, David 1787 186 Hamer, Fannie Lou 215, 228, 409 Hansen, James E. 311–13, 454 Harding, Warren G. 68, 71, 76, 78–79, 82, 89 Harding administration 74–75 Harlan, John Marshall I 19, 31 Harlan, John Marshall II 188, 263 Harris, Kamala D. 466 Harrison, Byron Patton (Pat) 71, 122 Hart, Philip D. 185, 237 Hastert, J. Dennis (Denny) 329, 359–60, 380 Head Start Program 234–36 Helms, Jesse A., Jr. 295, 436

513

Heflin, James Thomas (Cotton Tom) Hill, J. Lister 158, 199 Hitchcock, William I. 192, 201 Hoffa, James R. (Jimmy) 182 Holder, Eric H., Jr. 410–11 Holmes, Oliver Wendell, Jr. 31, 42, 48, 61, 83, 125 Hoover, Herbert C.: Great Depression 76; policies 82, 84–85, 87, 115; president 78–79; 1932 presidential election 91; Secretary of Commerce 70, 74–75 Hoover, J. Edgar 43, 82, 146, 182 Hospital construction, federal 158–59 House of Representatives, leadership 18; (1901–1913) 47; (1913–1920) 81; (1921–1932) 110; (1933–1940) 152; (1941–1952) 187; (1953–1960) 220; (1961–1968) 262; (1969–1980) 296; (1981–1992) 328; (1993–2000) 359; (2001–2008) 396; (2009–2016) 442; (2017–2020) Hughes, Charles Evans 19, 45, 59; support of woman’s suffrage 55, 58; New Deal decisions 111–12, 120, 127 Humphrey, Hubert H. 149; 1964 Civil Rights Act 219–20, 226–27; 1968 presidential campaign 217, 277 Hyde, Henry J. 332, 403 Hyde Amendment 272 Indiana: Klan activity 73 Inhofe, James M. 379, 414 Ippolito, Dennis 86 Jackson, Henry (Scoop) 257, 267 Jacobs, Lawrence R. 404 Jeffords, James M. (Jim) 359 Jim Crow laws 13–15, 20, 106, 157, 474; Jim Crow Congress 110 Johnson, Haynes B. 180, 341 Johnson, Lyndon: Senate majority leader 186, 201–202; presidential ambitions 201–202; Civil Rights Act (1964) 225–26; Voting Rights Act (1965) 228–30; immigration reform 236–37; War on Poverty 234; Education 238–39; Medicare/Medicaid (1965) 231–33 Jones, Alex 432 Jones, Mary Harris (Mother) 28 Jones, Robert 436–47 Jones, Walter B., Jr. 367–68 Katrina, Hurricane 357–58 Katzenbach, Nicholas 214, 225, 228–29, 237 Katznelson, Ira 110, 128, 146, 157 Kavanaugh, Brett M. 443, 448

514

Index

Kazin, Michael 144, 361 Kefauver, C. Estes 181–82, 186 Kennedy, Anthony 298, 311, 338, 354, 408, 411, 443 Kennedy, David M. 76, 92, 118, 141 Kennedy, Edward M. (Ted) 260, 264–65, 307, 334, 365–67, 402 Kennedy, John 152; assassination 210; 1960 election 210; civil rights legislation 213, 224–25; Cuba and Vietnam 211–13; medical care legislation 234–35; presidency 218 Kennedy, Robert F. 180, 182, 202, 217 Kern, John Worth 47 King, Angus S., Jr. 428, 469 King, Martin Luther, Jr. 179, 183, 202, 211, 213–14, 217, 224 Knowland, William F. 181, 186 Koch brothers 392–93, 414 Koop, C. Everett 291 Krebs, Christopher C. 428 Ku Klux Klan: 41, 68, 71, 79, 129; Colorado 72; Oregon 73; Indiana 74; Washington rally 73–74 Kyvig, David E. 26, 52 Labor relations 74–75 (1910s); injunctions 86–88; (1930s) 101–102, 118–21; union corruption 181–82 La Follette, Robert M. 18, 23, 47, 77, 79, 80–81, 102 La Follette, Robert M., Jr. 110, 120, 144 La Guardia, Fiorello 80, 82, 87, 91, 148 Laws, federal landmark Affordable Care Act (2010) see Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act Americans with Disabilities Act (1990) 307–309 American Recovery and Reinvestment Act (2009) (Recovery Act) 399–400 American Rescue Plan (2021) 466, 468–69 Antiquities Act (1906) 21 Balanced Budget and Emergency Deficit Control Act (1985) (Gramm-RudmanHollings) 303–304 Banking Act (1933) 115–16 Bipartisan Campaign Reform Act (BCRA) (2002), McCain-Feingold Act 369–71 Civil Rights Act (1964) 224–28 Clean Air Act Amendments (1990) 309 Clean Water Act (1972) 268 Coronavirus Aid, Relief, and Economic Security (CARES) Act (2020) 445–47 Corporate Fraud Accountability Act (2002) (Sarbanes-Oxley Act) 368–69 Defense of Marriage Act (1996) 334 Dodd-Frank Wall Street Reform and Consumer

Protect Act (2009) 406–407 Economic Opportunity Act (1964) 234 Economic Growth and Tax Relief Reconciliation Act (2001) 362–63 Economic Recovery Tax Act (ERTA) (1981) (Kemp-Roth) 299–300 Elementary and Secondary Education Act (1965) 238–39 Emergency Banking Relief Act (1933) 115 Emergency Economic Stabilization Act (2008) 373–74 Energy Independence and Security Act (2007) 372 Energy Policy Act (2005) 299 Fair Labor Standards Act (1938) 125–27 Family and Medical Leave Act (1993) 332 Federal Election Campaign Act Amendments (1974) 379 Federal Reserve Act (Owen-Glass Act) (1913) 49–52 Financial Services Modernization Act (1999) (Gramm-Leach-Bliley Act) 336–37 Food Stamp Act (1964) 234–35 GI Bill (1944) (Servicemen’s Readjustment Act) 156–58 Glass-Steagall Act (1933), see Banking Act (1933) Gramm-Leach-Bliley Act (1999), see Financial Services Modernization Act (1999) Gramm-Rudman-Hollings Act (1985), see Balanced Budget and Emergency Deficit Control Act (1985) Head Start (1964) 235–36 Highway Act (1956) (Interstate Highway Act) 195–97 Hospital Survey and Construction Act (1946) (Hill-Burton Act) 158 Immigration and Nationality Act (1952), see McCarran-Walter Act (1952) Immigration and Nationality Act Amendments (1965) (Hart-Celler Act) 236–38 Immigration Reform and Control Act (IRCA) (1986) (Simpson-Mazzoli Act) 306–307 Infrastructure Investment and Jobs Act (2021) 470 Johnson-Reed Immigration Act (1924) 83–85 Labor-Management Relations Act (1947), see Taft-Hartley Act (1947) Labor-Management Reporting and Disclosure Act (1959), see Landrum-Griffin Act (1959) Landrum-Griffin Act (1959) 165–66 McCarran-Walter Act (1952) 160–61 Meat Inspection Act (1906) 24–25 Medicaid (Social Security Amendments of 1965) (1965) 231–34 Medicare (Social Security Amendments of 1965) (1965) 231–34

Index Medicare Prescription Drug, Improvement and Modernization Act (2003) 367–68 National Defense Education Act (1958) 198–200 National Environmental Policy Act (1970) 266–67 National Housing Act (Taft-Ellender-Wagner Act) (1949) 166–67 National Labor Relations Act (1935) 118–21 No Child Left Behind Act (2002) 365–67 Norris-La Guardia Act (1932) 86–87 North American Free Trade Agreement (1992) (NAFTA) 310 Omnibus Reconciliation Act (1981) (GrammLatta) 300–302 Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act (2010) (Obamacare) 401–405 Patsy T. Mink Equal Opportunity in Education Act (1972), see Title IX Personal Responsibility and Work Opportunity Reconciliation Act (1996) 334–35 Public Utility Holding Company Act (1935) 114 Pure Food and Drug Act (1906) 23–25 Refugee Relief Act (1953) 306 Rural Electrification Act (1936) 117–18 Servicemen’s Readjustment Act (1944), see GI Bill (1944) Sheppard-Towner Maternity and Infancy Act (1921) 86 Simpson-Mazzoli Act (1986), see Immigration Reform and Control Act (IRCA) (1986) 306–307 Social Security Act (1935) 121–25; Disability Amendments (1956) 197–98 Amendments (1965), see Medicare/Medicaid Act; Amendments (1983) 302–304 Taft-Hartley Act (1947) (Labor-Management Relations Act of 1947) 155–565, 165–66 Tax Cuts and Jobs Act (2017) 444–45 Tax Equity and Fiscal Responsibility Act (TEFRA) (1982) 300–301 Tax Reform Act (1986) 304–305 Tennessee Valley Authority Act (1933) 117–18 Title IX (1972) (renamed Patsy T. Mink Equal Opportunity in Education Act) 268–69 Troubled Assets Relief Program (TARP) (2008) 374, 398 USA Patriot Act (2001) 363–65 Volstead Act (1919) 53–54 Voting Rights Act (1965) 228–31 Wagner Act (1935), see National Labor Relations Act Walsh-Healey Public Contracts Act (1936) 114 Wheeler-Rayburn Act, see Public Utility Holding Company Act Wilderness Act (1964) 240 Ledbetter, Lily 398 Lee, R. Alton 181–82

515

Lewis, John L. (union leader) 101, 143–44 Lewis, John R. (civil rights leader and congressman) 212, 214, 228, 475 Line-item veto 328, 342–43 Little Rock, Arkansas school desegregation 193–94 Lodge, Henry Cabot 18, 29, 47, 77, 80 Longworth, Nicholas, III 81 Lynchings 44, 58–60 (1910s); 89 (1920s); 129–30 (1930s) McCarran, Patrick A. 160–61, 190 McCarthy, Joseph 144–47, 180–81 McCarthy, Kevin O. 396, 432, 442, 471 McClellan, John L. 182 McConnell, A. Mitchell (Mitch), Jr. 370, 394, 397, 470; Obamacare 404, 443, 446; leadership 359, 395, 442 McCormack, John 152, 221, 232, 238 Manchin, Joe, III 415, 466, 471, 479 Mansfield, Michael J. (Mike) 219, 226, 228, 255 Marshall, Thurgood 148, 191–92, 222, 274 mass shootings 356, 392, 415, 434–35, 455, 467, 480–81 “massive resistance” 183–84, 193, 432 Michel, Robert H. 297, 328 militias 323–25 Mills, Wilbur D. 231–32 Mink, Patsy T. 269–70 Mississippi Delta hunger investigation 210, 235 Mississippi Freedom Democratic Party (MFDP) 215 Mississippi River flooding 70 Mitchell, Clarence 227–28 Mitchell, George J. Jr. 296, 328, 341 Murrow, Edward R. 178, 180, 184 Muskie, Edmund S. 257, 267 National American Woman Suffrage Association (NAWSA) 54–56 National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP) 15; anti-lynching campaign 59, 89, 123, 129–30; lawsuits 165, 190; racial justice 222, 274 National Organization for Women (NOW) 259 National Rifle Association (NRA) 377–78 National Woman’s Christian Temperance Union (WCTU) 52 Neal, Claude 128 Nelson, Gaylord 266 Nixon, Richard M. 178, 180, 252–53; campaign finance 269–70; election (1968) 217–218; environmental protection 267; executive privilege 273; judicial appointments 262–63; race relations 202, 273; Southern strategy 253–55; universal childcare 275–76; Watergate 260

516

Index

Norris, George W. 19, 47, 80, 110; constitutional amendment 88; labor legislation 82, 87, 118; Tennessee Valley Authority 117–18 O’Connor, Sandra Day 298, 311, 330, 360, 375 Obama, Barack H.: ACA (Obamacare) 401–404; auto rescue 400–401; conservative reaction 390–91; environmental protection 406–408, 413–14; immigration 411–13; nuclear storage site 313–14; presidency 393–94; Recovery Act 398–400 “One Hundred Percent Americanism” 42, 68, 71–73, 82, 145 O’Neill, Thomas O. (Tip) 187, 262; leadership 296–97; Reagan policies, reaction to 293–94, 296, 299, 301–303 Opioid crisis 354, 389, 416, 434 Organized crime and union corruption 181–82 Packer, George 349 Packwood, Robert M. 305 Palmer, A. Mitchell 42, 59 Paris Climate Accord 454, 478 Patterson, James T. 148, 153, 191, 210, 210, 254, 255, 362 Paul, Alice 55, 276 Pelosi, Nancy P.: ACA 402–403; leadership 359, 367, 396, 442 Pence, Michael (Mike) 440, 447, 452 Perkins, Frances 16, 99, 108, 119, 122, 123, 125 Peterson Institute for International Economics (PIIE) 473 Pharmaceutical Research and Manufacturers of America (PhRMA) 367–68 “Poison Squad” 24 Policy Challenges in Future: climate mitigation 478; confronting domestic violence 482; education 471–72; election reform 474–77; federal budget 479; gun violence 480; health care 473; immigration reform 477; inequality 473; solvency of Social Security 479 Policies, Landmark 9/11 and National Security (2001) 363–64 Abortion Rights [Roe v. Wade (1973)] 272; [Webster v. Reproductive Health (1989); Planned Parenthood v. Casey (1992)] 310–11 Addressing the Financial Meltdown (2009) 399–400 Affirmative Action and College Admissions [Regents v. Bakke (1978) 275; [Grutter v. Bollinger, Gratz v. Bollinger (2003)] 375 Assistance for the Elderly (1935) 121–25 Auto Industry Rescue 400–401 Averting an Economic Meltdown (2008) 373–74 Banking and Investments (1999) 336–37

Budget, Attempts to Balance the (1985) 303–304 Campaign Financing 270–71; (1970s) (2002) 369–71; [Citizens United v. FEC (2010)] 408–409 Carbon Dioxide and Global Warming [Massachusetts v. EPA (2007)] 376–77 Civil Rights for the Disabled (1990) 307–309 Civil Rights Act (1964) 224–28 Clean Air Amendments (1990) 309 Conservation and Protection of Public Lands (1902–1906) 21–22 COVID Financial Bailout During the Pandemic, CARES and Stimulus (2020, 2021) 445–47, 450–52, 468–69 Desegregating Interstate Buses [Morgan v. Virginia (1945)] 164 Desegregating Public Schools [Swann v. Charlotte-Mecklenburg (1971); Milliken v. Bradley (1977) 273–74 Educational Equality for Women (1976) 269–70 Eighteen-year-olds Right to Vote (1971) 266 Electricity, Flood Control, and Economic Support for the Tennessee Valley and Rural America (1933) 117–18 Energy Policy (2005) 371–72 Environmental Protection (1970s) 266–68; (2010s) 406–408 Equal Protection and Homosexuals [Romer v. Evans (1996); Boy Scouts v. Dale (2000)] 338–39 Executive Privilege [US v. Nixon (1974)] 273 Federal Education Assistance (1960s) 238–39 Federal Income Tax (1913) 25–26 Gerrymandering, partisan [Rucho v. Common Cause, Lamone v. Benisek (2019)] 450–51 Gerrymandering, racial [Shaw v. Reno (1993)] 339 Gun Rights [District of Columbia v. Heller (2008)] 375–76 Health Care Assistance for Seniors and the Indigent (1965) 231–34 Hospital Construction (1948) 158 Ill-Fated Protective Tariff (1930) 85–86 Immigration Reform: (1920s) 83–85; (1950s) 159–61, 189–90; (1960s) 236–38; (1980s) 306–307 Implementation of Prohibition (1920s) 82–83 Infrastructure Reinvestment (2021) 469–70 Federal Aid to Education (1958) 198–200 Federal Education Assistance (1965) 238–39 Federal Minimum Wage and Prohibiting Child Labor (1938) 125–27 Federal Reserve System (1912) 49–52

Index Florida Presidential Recount [Bush v. Gore (2000)] 339–40 Gays in the Military and Same-Sex Marriages (1990s) 332–34 Maternity and Infant Protection (1921) 86 Medical Leave for Families (1993) 332 Native American lands [McGirt v. Oklahoma (2019)] 450 No Child Left Behind (2003) 365–67 North American Free Trade (1994) 310 Outlawing “Yellow Dog” Contracts and Federal Court Labor Injunctions (1932) 86–88 Poll Tax (1960s) 223–24 Popular Election of Senators (1913) 26–27 Prescription Drugs (2003) 367–68 Presidential Assertion of Absolute Authority [Trump v. Mazars; Trump v. Vance (2020) 448 Presidential Term Limits (1951) 165 Prohibition (1919) 52–54 Protecting Children in the Labor Market (1920, 1930) 57–58 Protecting the Elderly and Those with Disabilities (1950s) 197–98 Prohibiting Restrictive Covenants [Shelley v. Kraemer (1948)] Protecting the Returning Veteran (1944) 155–58 Protecting the Wilderness and Environment (1964) 240 Protecting the Working Family and Union Democracy (1935) 118–21 Public School Financing [San Antonio v. Rodriguez (1973) 274 Public Housing, Slum Clearance, Redlining and Discrimination (1940s) 166–67 Pure Food and Drugs (1906) 23–25 Racial Justice [Brown cases (1954, 1955) Cooper v. Aaron (1958)] 190–905 Reforming Wall Street Practices (2010) 406 Revamping Labor Management Relations (1947) 165–66 Ribbons of Highway (1956) 195–97 Same-sex Marriages and Gays in the Military (1996, 1993); 2010s 213–24 Securities Legislation (2002) 368–69 Social Security, Making It Solvent (1983) 302–303 Stabilizing the Banking and Financial System (1933) 115–16 State Power to Regulate Working Conditions [Muller v. Oregon, 1908)] 28 Tax Policy and Budget Cuts (1980s) 299–302; (2000s) 362–63 Tax Reform (1986) 304–306; (2017) 444–45 Term Limits for Congress (US Term Limits v. Thornton, 1995) 337–38

517

Title VII and discrimination based on sexual orientation [Bostock v. Clayton County (2020)] 449–50 Trust-Busting (1902–1908) 22–23 Universal Health Care (2010) 401–405 Voting Rights Act (1965) 228–31; Shelby County v. Holder (2013) 409–410 “War on Poverty” (1960s) 234–36 Welfare Reform (1996) 335–36 White Primary, Ending of [Smith v. Allwright (1944)] 163–64 Woman Suffrage (1920) 54–57 Policies Delayed or Denied, Landmark Anti-Lynching Legislation: (1913–1920) 58–60; (1921–1932) 89–90; (1933–1941) 128–30 Anti-New Deal Court decisions (1933–1941) 127–28 Assistance to Farmers 89–90 Child Labor Protection, Reversal [Hammer v. Dagenhart (1918)] 60–61 (1920s) 88 Civil Rights Protections, Watered Down (1957, 1960) 200–202 Climate Change and Global Warming (1980s) 312–13; (1990s) 343–44; (2009–2016) 413–14; (2017–2020) 454–55 COVID Pandemic (2020) 450–52 District of Columbia, Full Voting Participation (1970s) 278 Drug Overdoses (2009–2016) 416 Electoral College, Constitutional Amendment Failure (1970s) 277–78 Environmental Rollback (2001–2008) 378–79 Equal Rights Amendment (1970s) 276–77 Executive Order to Seize Steel Industry and Court Rebuff (1952) 170–71 Failure to Combat the Depression (1929– 1932) 90–92 Failure to Plan for Demobilization (1920) 61 Gun Control: (2001–2008) 377–78; (2009–2016) 415–16; (2017–2020) 455 Immigration Reform: (2001–2008) 379–80; (2009–2016) 411–13; (2017–2020) 453–54 Infrastructure, Rebuilding of (2017–2020) 455 Medical Insurance for the Elderly (1950s) 200 National Health Insurance (1941–1952) 169–70 Nuclear Waste, Permanent Storage (1981–1992) 313–14 Obamacare, Failed Repeal (2017–2020) 452–53 Poll Tax, Failure to Eliminate (1940s) 169

518

Index

Presidential Line-Item Veto (1990s) 342–43 Protecting Children in the Workplace (1900s-1912) 28–30 Public Education Goals (1990s) 342 Triumph of Freedom of Contract (1921–1932) 90 Universal Childcare (1969–1980) 275–76 Universal Health Care (1993) 341–42 Woman’s Suffrage (1900–1912) 31–33 Worker Rights and Contracts (1901–1912) 30–31 Poll tax 169, 223, 229 Porter, Michael 465, 486 Post, Jerrold M. 440 Powell, Adam Clayton 238, 307 Powell, Lewis F., Jr. 263, 275 Prohibition 52–54, 82–83 Pruitt-Igoe public housing 167 Pujo, Arsène P. 50–51, 116 QAnon 432, 467, 482 Race riots 15, 44, 147 Rampell, Catherine 453, 468 Randolph, A. Philip 162–63, 214, 228 Rayburn, Sam 118; leadership 81, 152, 187, 220–21 Reagan, Ronald W. 293–95; AIDS epidemic 290–92; budget cuts 300–302; environmental protection 292–93; judicial appointments 298; tax policy 299–300; tax reform 304–305 “Reagan Revolution” 298–99 Refugees 159–60, 190, 306 Rehnquist, William H. 263, 274, 297–98, 310–11, 329–30 Reid, Harry M. 313, 359, 395, 402–403 Remini, Robert V. 109, 187, 220 Republican Party 182, 186, 187, 253, 475, 482; Trump takeover 424, 439–40 Roberts, John, Jr. 360, 361, 397; ACA decisions 405; gerrymandering 449; Shelby County 410; presidential assertion of authority 448 Roberts, Owen 111, 112, 128, 153 Robinson, Joseph T. 80, 109, 151 Rogers, Will 75, 76, 300 Romney, W. Mitt 394, 401, 412, 429, 447, 468 Roosevelt, Eleanor 129, 259 Roosevelt, Franklin 107–109, 149; 100 Days 112–15; anti-lynching 129–30; banking system 115–16; Chinese immigration 159; electricity and TVA 117–18; GI Bill 156–58; judicial relations 111–12, 127–28, 153–54; labor 118–21, 143–44; minimum wage and child labor 125–27; social security 121–25; war preparation 141–42 Roosevelt, Theodore: child labor 28–29; conservation policy 20–22; meat inspection 24;

presidency 16–18; trust-busting 22–23; woman suffrage 32–33 Ruckelshaus, William D. 267, 273, 293 Rudman, Warren B. 304–305 Rustbelt 289–90 Russell, Richard B. 154, 229; desegregation of schools 193, 201; Civil Rights Act (1964) 220, 226 Russian hacking of elections 326, 430, 467 Ryan White Story, The (movie) 292 Sabath, Adolph J. 84, 166 sanctuary cities 433, 478 Sanders, Bernie 402, 440, 472 Sandy Hook Elementary School massacre 378, 391–92, 414–15, 432, 455, 480 Santa Barbara, Calif., oil spill 256 Scalia, Antonin G. 298, 311, 376, 397 Schroeder, Patricia 331 Schumer, Charles 373, 395, 442, 447, 452 Senate, US, leadership 18; (1901–1913) 47; (1913–1920) 81; (1921–1932) 110; (1933–1940) 152; (1941–1952) 187; (1953–1960) 219–20; (1961–1968) 262; (1969–1980) 296; (1981–1992) 328; (1993–2000) 359; (2001–2008) 395–96; (2009–2016) 442; (2017–2020) Sessions, Jeff 453 Simpson, Alan K. 306, 477, 479–80 Simpson-Bowles Commission report 477, 479–80 Sinclair, Barbara L. 187 Sinclair, Upton 24, 103 Skopcol, Theda 393, 404 Smith, Alfred E. (Al) 16, 78–79, 107 Smith, Howard W. (Judge) 221, 230 Smith, Jean Edward 184, 225–26, 357, 366, 441 Souter, David H. 298, 311, 397 Southern Christian Leadership Conference 179, 213, 228 “Southern Manifesto” 193, 200 Southern Poverty Law Center 73, 390, 432 Stapleton, Benjamin 72 Starr, Kenneth W. 311, 325, 360 Steagall, Henry 116 Stevens, John Paul 31, 264, 311, 340, 376, 377, 408 Stevens, Stuart 455 Stiglitz, Joseph E. 352, 388 Stone, Harlan Fiske 81, 111, 153 Stresses on society 9/11 and its aftermath (2001–2005) 351–52 1968 216–18 AIDS epidemic (1980s) 290–92 Bank Panic of 1907 13 Clash in the workplace (1933–1941) 101–102 Conservative backlash—the Tea Party (2009–2016) 392–93

Index Coronavirus pandemic (2020–2021) 437–39 Corporate collapses (2001–2008) 355–56 Cuba, Vietnam, and discontent (1961–1968) 211–12 Cultural fractures and polarization (2001–2008) 354–55 Defiance of authority (2017–2020) 432–33 Depression in agriculture (1921–1932) 70–71 Detroit and Harlem riots (1940s) 147–48 Dot.com boom and bust (1998–2000) 323 Economic downfall (2009–2016) 390 Entering the Great War (1916–1918) 41 Environmental consciousness (1969–1980) 255–57 Environmental backlash (1981–1992) 292–94 Exposing corruption and greed (1901–1912) 12–13 Great Depression begins (1929–1932) 75–76 Grinding desperation of poverty (1933–1941) 100–101 Growing economic inequality and the Great Recession (2001–2008) 352–54 Growing wealth gap (1993–2000) 322–323 Gun violence (2009–2016) 391–92 Homegrown militias, terrorism, and hate crimes (1993–2000) 323–25; (2009–2016) 390–91 Immigration, xenophobia, and border walls (2017–2020) 433–34 Influenza pandemic, the (1918–1919) 43 “Invisible Empire,” and 100 percent Americanism (1921–1932) 71–74 Katrina and federal, state, and local unpreparedness (2005) 356–58 Kennedy assassination and public trust (1963–1965) 210–11 Labor relations (1921–1932) 74–75 Labor unrest and adjustment to the post war (1941–1952) 143–44 McCarthyism and “Soft on Communism” (1948–1952) 144–47; (1953–1954) 180–81 Majority/minority America, culture wars, and Christian nationalism (2017–2020) 436–37 Mass shootings (2001–2008) 356 Mississippi River flooding (1927) 70 Oil crisis and economic turmoil (1973–1980) 257–58 Opioid crisis (2001–2008) 354 Organized crime and union corruption (1953–1960) 181–82 Polarization of the political parties (2017–2020) 439–40 Police brutality and urban unrest (1980s) 290 Poverty urban and rural (1961–1968) 210 Race, politics, and southern separation (1933–1941) 105–107

519

Racial tensions (1953–1960) 183–84 Racial tensions and struggle (1961–1968) 212–16 Racial unrest (1941–1952) 147–48 Racial violence (1921–1932) 71 Red Scare (1919–1920) 42–43 “Red Summer,” the (1919) 43–44 Resurgence of hate groups and racists agitation (2009–2016) 390–91 Right to vote, the (1941–1952) 148 Rise of anti-Semitism (1933–1941) 107 Rise of feminism, Native American consciousness, Hispanic and gay activism (1969–1980) 259–60 Rustbelt America (1981–1992) 289–90 Social media, lies, disinformation, and conspiracies (2017–2020) 431–32 State of black economic progress (2017–2020) 434 Struggles of the White working class (2017–2020) 434 Supremacy of Jim Crow (1901–1912) 13–15 Tenement houses, working conditions, and immigrants (1901–1912) 15–16 Threats to democratic values and institutions (2017–2020) 427–31 Turn to radical voices (1933–1941) 102–104 Ugly specter of mass shootings, hate crimes, police actions, and racism (2017–2020) 435–36 Vietnam War (1969–1980) 254–55 Widening inequality (2009–2016) 389 Working conditions and labor strikes (1913–1920) 41 Supreme Court decisions Abingdon School District v. Schempp (1963) 241 Adair v. United States (1908) 31 Adkins v. Children’s Hospital (1923) 90 Ashwander v. Tennessee Valley Authority (1936) 128 Bailey v. Drexel Furniture (1922) 61 Baker v. Carr (1962) 244 Bostock v. Clayton County, Georgia (2020) 449 Boys Scouts of America v. Dale (2000) 338–39 Browder v. Gail (1956) 183 Brown v. Board of Education (1954, 1955) 167, 183, 188, 190 Buckley v. Valeo (1976) 271, 369 Bush v. Gore (2000) 340 Carter v. Carter Coal Company (1936) 128 Citizens United v. Federal Election Commission (2010) 408–409 Cooper v. Aaron (1958) 188, 194 District of Columbia v. Heller (2008) 376 Engel v. Vitale (1962) 241

520

Index Escobedo v. Illinois (1964) 241 Gideon v. Wainwright (1963) 241 Griswold v. Connecticut (1965) 242 Grove City College v. Bell (1984) 269 Hammer v. Dagenhart (1918) 60, 127 Heart of Atlanta Motel v. United States (1964) 227 Helvering v. Davis (1937) 124 Hitchman Coal and Coke Company v. Mitchell (1917) 31 Humphrey’s Executor v. United States (1935) 127–28 Katzenbach v. McClung (1964) 227 King v. Burwell (2015) 405 Lamone v. Benisek (2019) 449 Lochner v. New York (1905) 28, 30 Lawrence v. Texas (2003) 354 Loewe v. Lawlor (1908) 30 Louisville Joint Stock Land Bank v. Radford (1935) 127 Loving v. Virginia (1966) 243 Mapp v. Ohio (1961) 241–42 Massachusetts v. Environmental Protection Agency (2007) 377 McConnell v. Federal Election Commission (2003) 371 McCutcheon v. Federal Election Commission (2014) 409 McGirt v. Oklahoma (2020) 453 Milliken v. Bradley (1974) 195, 274 Miranda v. Arizona (1966) 241 Morgan v. Virginia (1946) 164 Muller v. Oregon (1908) 30 New York Times v. Sullivan (1964) 242–43 National Federal of Independent Business v. Sebelius (2012) 405 NLRB v. Jones & Laughlin Steel Corporation (1937) 136 Northern Securities Company v. United States (1904) 21–22 Obergefell v. Hodges (2015) 410–11 Panama Refining Co. v. Ryan (1935) 127 Plessy v. Ferguson (1896) 183, 192 Regents of the University of California v. Bakke (1978) 275 Reynolds v. Simms (1964) 244 Roe v. Wade (1973) 195, 272, 311, 354, 436 Romer v. Evans (1996) 338 Rucho v. Common Cause (2019) 449 San Antonio Independent School District v. Rodriguez (1973) 274 Schechter Poultry Corp. v. United States (1935) 127–28 Shaw v. Reno (1993) 339 Shelby County v. Holder (2013) 410 Shelley v. Kraemer (1948) 164 Smith v. Allwright (1944) 163–64

SpeechNow v. Federal Election Commission (2010) 409 Swann v. Charlotte-Mecklenburg Board of Education (1971) 273–74 Trump v. Mazars USA LLP (2020) 448 Trump v. Vance (2020) 448 United States v. Butler (1936) 128 United States v. Darby Lumber Co. (1941) 126–27 United States v. Miller (1939) 375 United States v. Nixon (1974) 273 United States v. Windsor (2011) 411 US Term Limits, Inc. v. Thornton (1995) 338 Webster v. Reproductive Health Services (1989) 310 Wesberry v. Saunders (1964) 244 West Coast Hotel v. Parrish (1937) 106, 112, 127–28 Youngstown Sheet & Tube v. Sawyer (1952) 170 Taft, Robert A. 145, 151–52, 155, 165, 169 Taft, William Howard 16, 17, 81 Term limits for members of Congress 337–38 Thomas, Clarence 298, 443 Till, Emmett 183 Townsend, Francis E. 103, 104, 122 Townsend Plan 103, 104, 121, 122, 125 Triangle Shirtwaist Fire 15, 16 Troy, Tevi D. 356 Truman, Harry S. 149, 150; health insurance 169–70; hospital construction 158; immigration 160–61; labor relations 165–67; Marshall Plan 155; steel seizure 170–71 Trump, Donald J.: assertion of ab solute authority 448; Big Lie 427–30; crippling government institutions 430; COVID response 437–39, 450–52; COVID legislation 447; environmental rollback 454–55; immigration 433, 453–54; infrastructure 455; judicial appointments 442–43; media relations 430–31; Obamacare 452–53; presidency 440; tax reform 445 United Auto Workers (UAW) 102, 121 United Farm Workers (UFW) 259–60 United States Steel Corporation 12, 22, 42, 84, 102, 121 Uvalde, Texas, mass shooting 480 Van Devanter, Willis 111, 112 Vardaman, James K. 14, 56 Virginia 183–84 Volcker, Paul A., Jr. 289 Volstead, Andrew J. 53 Wagner, Robert F. 92, 109–10, 113, 118–20, 129, 166

Index Wallace, George C. 213–14, 217–18, 226, 230, 253, 277 War on Poverty 234–36 Warren, Earl 210–11, 241, 244; Brown decisions 191–92 Watergate scandal 224, 273 Watt, James G. 292–93 Waxman, Henry A. 290, 309, 402, 413 Wheeler, Wayne 52–53 Whitaker, Clem 170 White, Ryan 292 White, Walter 129–30 White nationalism 444 White supremacy 14, 44, 89, 130, 163, 164 Whitehouse, Sheldon 478 Wiley, Harvey 23–24 Wilkins, Roy 147, 214, 228 Williams, Joan C. 434, 484

521

Wilson, T. Woodrow 45–46, 51, 57, 59; woman’s suffrage 54–56 Wright, James C. (Jim), Jr. 262, 297, 301 Wright, Marian 235 woman suffrage 32–33, 54–57 Woods, Randall B. 222, 238 Worldcom Corporation 355–56, 362, 368 Wuthnow, Robert J. 434 Year 1968 216–18 “Yellow Dog” contract 30–31, 86–87 Yergin, Daniel 257 Yong, Ed 424 Yucca Mountain nuclear waste repository 313–14 Zahniser, Howard C. 240 Zelizer, Julian E. 209, 297, 394, 398