The United States was the dominant military and economic power in the world from 1945-73, since World War II had left both its allies and opponents defeated and bankrupt. In this period, the American middle class was also growing at an unprecedented rate, and by the 1960s women, youth, blacks and other minorities were also demanding reforms and social changes, and sometimes even revolution. At the same time, though the Vietnam War was also a symptom of American decline, and in addition to derailing Lyndon Johnson’s Great society it also opened the door to the revival of conservatism and the politics of resentment, alienation and the white backlash that would dominate political and economic life in the next three decades.
During the period from World War II to the 1970s, the total victory over the Axis in 1945 was the most important turning point, since it left the United States the strongest military and economic power in the world by far, and it retained this status until the 1970s. Except for the Soviet Union, it had no major rivals, and even in the manufacturing and financial spheres it dominated the world until Germany, Japan and other rivals revived. This era was also described as the Affluent Society by economists like John Kenneth Galbraith, since the middle class, mass consumer economy expanded as it never had in the past, especially due to the influence of organized labor and the social welfare policies of the federal government. In the civil rights and feminist movements of the 1960s and 1970s, minorities and women also demanded improved economic and educational opportunities, and or blacks this period was a Second Reconstruction. Even at the apex of the American Empire, however, the Vietnam War and the massive protests and discontent associated with it turned out to be symptoms of imperial hubris, overstretch and ultimately decline. Even at the time, the riots in the cities, the endless, bloody war brought by television into American living rooms, and the assassinations of John and Robert Kennedy and Martin Luther King indicated that the Affluent Society was also a Sick Society.
In the 1930s, the U.S. was preoccupied with the internal social and economic problems resulting from the Great Depression, and combined with very negative memories of World War I this caused most of the public to oppose any involvement in foreign wars. Only the attack on Pearl Harbor on December 7, 1941 united most of the country in favor of intervention in the Second World, which had begun two years previously. America’ economic problems were extremely severe, with the Gross National Product falling by half in 1929-33, industrial production by 85% and the financial and agricultural sectors facing collapse. During this period, the New Deal administration of Franklin Roosevelt was focused on unemployment, poverty and economic recovery rather than international affairs (Clark 2009). While Germany and Japan were led by fascist governments and becoming increasingly aggressive towards the neighbors, the U.S. passed a series of Neutrality Acts in 1935-37 designed to prevent any participation in future wars. Unlike the years 1914-18, Congress forbade loans, credits and the sale of munitions to any countries at war, while American ships were banned from combat zones, to avoid the danger of them becoming targets for German submarines as they had been in World War I. After the German conquest of France in 1940, the Lend Lease program reversed many of these Neutrality Act provisions and provided billions of dollars in aid to Britain, and later the Soviet Union and other Allied countries.
As late as 1940, the U.S. had a smaller army and air force than Belgium and Romania, but after the attack on Pearl Harbor it effectively mobilized it military and civilian resources in the war effort against Germany and Japan. The policy of the U.S. government was to win a total and decisive victory over the Axis powers, accepting nothing less than unconditional surrender, and public opinion supported this policy (Mansoor 1999). Almost the entire population had to be mobilized for the war, including women, the elderly and minorities. Over 300,000 women enlisted in the military and millions took jobs in civilian industry in positions that simply would not have been open to them before the war. Women’s employment outside the home continued to increase after 1945, and public opinion polls showed that the overwhelming majority would no longer be satisfied only with traditional domestic roles (Goodwin 1994).
John F. Kennedy had not been successful in passing his reform program through Congress in 1961-63 due to the power of conservative Southern Democrats and Republicans in the Senate. Indeed, this conservative coalition had blocked most domestic reforms since the 1940s, including Harry Truman’s proposed national health insurance program. Lyndon Johnson was more successful in his goal of completing the New Deal, especially after his landslide victory over the conservative Republican Barry Goldwater in 1964. Although he opted not to attempt a national health insurance program, in 1965 Congress passed Medicare for the elderly population over 65 and Medicaid for those with low incomes, both of which are still in place today. The Elementary and Secondary Education Act provided federal funding for low-income school districts and the 1965 Immigration Act abolished the 1924 quota system that had favored immigrants from northern and western Europe. Most importantly, the Civil Rights Act and Voting Rights Act abolished disenfranchisement and segregation in the South and completed the Second Reconstruction in U.S. history.
Although the Supreme Court had outlawed segregated schools in Brown v. Board of Education (1954), only the ongoing protests and lawsuits of the civil rights movement led to the abolition of dual school systems in the South by the early-1970s. For many years, state and local leaders in the South engaged in a campaign of ‘massive resistance’ against integration, such as in Little Rock, Arkansas in 1957 when Gov. Orville Faubus closed Central High School rather than comply with federal court order mandating its integration. As late as 1964, only 2% of the schools in the South were integrated, although this rose to 25% in the three years after the passage of the 1964 Civil Rights Act (Gold, 2010). This law also led to the gradual extinction of segregation in public facilities and accommodations, at least of the type that had existed by law rather than the de facto variety, which still exists today. The Voting Rights Act of 1965, passed by Congress after the protests in Selma, Alabama led by Martin Luther King, the Southern Christian Leadership Conference (SCLC) and was Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC), was even more important politically in that it allowed blacks in many areas of the South to vote for the first time since the end of Reconstruction in 1877.
In the 1960s, the U.S. economy was more affluent than it had even been in the past and the middle class was still expanding rapidly, but as Martin Luther King put it blacks were living “on a lonely island of poverty in the midst of a vast ocean of material prosperity” (King 1963). Their income was only 50% of that of whites, and the majority lived in substandard housing and held low-paying jobs, while their rates of poverty and unemployment were much higher than that of whites (King 1967). Civil rights laws could only affect these social and economic problems indirectly, such as creating greater educational opportunities and allowing more blacks to enter the middle class, although structural discrimination in jobs and housing were still very common. Blacks did benefit from Great Society programs like Food Stamps, Medicaid and federal aid to education, although not nearly as much as the conservative opponents of these policies maintained. Nevertheless, conservative politicians like Richard Nixon, George Wallace and Ronald Reagan continually appealed to the white backlash in part by associating ‘welfare’ and the Great Society with blacks and other minorities. In one of history’s major political reversals, the Republicans gradually became the pro-Southern party of whites who opposed civil rights and expanded federal programs (Grofman, 2000). Because of the white backlash and the rising discontent over the Vietnam War, Johnson’s Great Society was undermined and domestic reforms were stalled again for a generation.
Johnson announced in March 1968 that he would no longer seek the nomination of the Democratic Party, although he continued his covert support for the campaign of Vice President Hubert Humphrey. McCarthy and Kennedy continued to battle each other in the primary states, and maintained considerable appeal among the politically aware youth of the Baby Boom generation, even those who had become increasingly radicalized and skeptical of the entire political system. Their optimism and hope for peaceful change was shattered by the assassination of Martin Luther King on April 1968 and that of Robert Kennedy in June, immediately after his victory in the California primary. At the Democratic National Convention in Chicago in August 1968, the police beat up thousands of young protesters in the streets while inside the convention hall the antiwar forces were in disarray and unable to block the nomination of Hubert Humphrey. He had minimal appeal to the youth and antiwar movements, and perhaps this was enough to ensure his narrow defeat by Richard Nixon in November 1968.
In retrospect, Lyndon Johnson was far more successful in domestic reforms than in foreign policy, and the Civil Rights and Voting Rights Acts passed during his term have stood the test of time. These did not turn out to be ephemeral like the Black Panthers, Students for a Democratic Society and other New Left organizations, nor did Johnson’s other accomplishments like Medicare and Medicaid. Were Martin Luther King still alive today, he would note the progress that has been made, while still pointing out that a lot more needs to be done, particularly in inner-city slums and ghettos, or with the majority of young black males being in prison or on probation. Thanks to the conservative backlash after 1968, of course, progress on most of these areas has been stalled, although the election of a black president in 2008 was definitely something that could never have happened in America before the civil rights movement. Throughout the 1970s, the U.S. also became less willing to intervene in the developing world because of the aftereffects of Vietnam and Watergate, although the lessons of the time also appear to have been largely forgotten. By historical standards, the 1964 Civil Rights Act and 1965 Voting Rights Act have been enormously successful, as far as they went, and indeed one of the few federal interventions in this area that has made a real difference in the lives of minorities. It did not end poverty, discrimination, police brutality or racism in general, but certainly made it impossible to allow these to continue as a matter of law and public policy in the United States—which they always had been prior to 1964.
REFERENCE LIST
Clarke, P. (2009). Keynes: The Rise, Fall and Return of the 20th Century’s Most Influential Economist. Bloomsbury Press.
Gold, S.D. (2010). The Civil Rights Act of 1964. Marshall Cavendish.
Goodwin, D.K. (1994). No Ordinary Time: Franklin and Eleanor Roosevelt: The Home Front in World War II. NY: Simon & Schuster.
Heinrichs, W. (1994), “Lyndon B. Johnson: Change and Continuity” in Warren I Cohen and Nancy Bernkopf Tucker (eds). Lyndon Johnson Confronts the World: American Foreign Policy, 1963-68. Cambridge, pp. 9- 31.
King, Marin Luther, “I Have a Dream” (1963/2010) in Sylvan Barnet and Hugo Bedau (eds). Critical Thinking, Reading, and Writing: A Brief Guide to Argument. Bedford/St. Martin’s, pp. 541-44.
King, Martin Luther. “Where Do We Go from Here?” (1967).
http://www.famous-speeches-and-speech-topics.info/martin-luther-king-speeches/martin-luther-king-speech-where-do-we-go-from-here.htm
Mansoor, P. R. (1999). The GI Offensive in Europe: The Triumph of American Infantry Divisions, 1941-45. University Press of Kansas.
McDermott, R. (2008). Presidential Leadership, Illness, and Decision Making. Cambridge University Press.
