The Legacy of the Sixties

excerpted from the book

The Paradox of American Democracy

by John B. Judis

Routledge Press, 2001, paper

p81
The Triple Revolution

Like most periods described by the name of a decade, the 1960s don't strictly conform to their time span. You could make a good case that the sixties began in December 1955 when Rosa Parks refused to give up her seat in a segregated Montgomery, Alabama, bus and only ended in August 1974 when Richard Nixon resigned. Probably the best way to understand the sixties is to divide it into two periods. The first period- running from the mid-1950s to 1965-spans the rise of the Southern civil rights movement and of Martin Luther King, Jr., the founding of Students for a Democratic Society (SDS) in 1962, the achievement of a liberal Democratic Congressional majority in 1964, the passage of the civil rights bills and Medicare, and the initiation of the Great Society and the War on Poverty.

The first period looks like a belated continuation of the Progressive Era and the New Deal. A recession in 1958 helped Democrats to increase their margin in the House from 35 to I29 and to replace eight conservative Republican senators. Another recession only two years later helped Kennedy win the White House. By the early 1960s, the Southern civil rights movement enjoyed enormous support in the North, financial backing from the Ford Foundation, the Rockefeller Brothers Fund, the Field Foundation, and the Stern Family Fund, and editorial support from the major political magazines, newspapers, and television networks. In I964, President Lyndon B. Johnson, facing Barry Goldwater, an opponent identified with Southern segregationists and with a trigger-happy foreign policy, won a landslide victory, and liberal Democrats gained control of Congress for the first time since I936.

Business leaders, buoyed by prosperity after having endured six recessions in a decade, accepted Johnson and the administration's major legislative initiatives with equanimity. Businesses paid for three-fourths of Lyndon Johnson's I964 campaign. They didn't oppose Medicare (only the AMA lobbied against it), and they actively backed the Great Society and War on Poverty programs, which they saw, correctly, as creating demand for new private investment. When Johnson's Model Cities program, part of the War on Poverty, faced difficulty in Congress, twenty-two leading corporate executives came to its defense. "Our cities are being submerged by a rising tide of. . . disease and despair, joblessness and hopelessness," they declared. "America needs the demonstration cities act."

There was also cooperation between business and labor within elite policy groups and commissions. In December I964, Johnson appointed a National Commission on Technology, Automation and Economic Progress. Its members included the UAW's Walter Reuther, Communications Workers of America president Joseph Bierne, IBM chairman Thomas J. Watson, Jr., utility executive Philip Sporn, sociologist Daniel Bell, and Urban League president Whitney Young. The commission issued a report eighteen months later recommending a guaranteed annual income and a massive jobs training program.

It is hard to imagine a report with this kind of conclusion being issued any time except during the mid-1930s, and at that time most business leaders probably would have dissociated themselves from any far-reaching conclusions. During the I9505, of course, relative harmony also existed between business and labor at the top levels of policy, but business clearly held the upper hand. American pluralism, as Schattschneider quipped, sang with an "upper-class accent." In the early Johnson years, harmony still prevailed, but the voices of the civil rights movement, the AFL-CIO, and liberal Democrats could be heard much more clearly. America was as close as it would ever come to Galbraith's pluralist ideal of countervailing power.

There was not only a creative equilibrium between interest groups, but there was also ferment among voters. In the early sixties, students, who had been relatively quiescent during the fifties-"apathetic" was the most commonly heard description-began to awaken. SDS's Port Huron Statement from I962 proclaimed the importance of "participatory democracy." "Politics," the manifesto declared, "has the function of bringing people out of isolation and into community.'' Activity was not limited to the political left. In I962, student conservatives founded the Young Americans for Freedom. And Goldwater's nomination in 1964 was the work of a draft committee organized by dissident Republicans.

Many of the key leaders of the sixties, including Martin Luther King, Jr., George McGovern, Hubert Humphrey, and Walter Mondale, were raised on the Protestant social gospel's faith in the creation of a kingdom of God in America. King, the major figure of this period, read Christian socialist Walter Rauschenbusch's Christianity and Social Crisis at Crozer Theological Seminary and would frequently cite his influence. McGovern's biographer says the future senator "gorged himself" with Rauschenbusch's work while he was at Dakota Wesleyan. The political-economic premise of this optimistic vision, enunciated in Galbraith's The Affluent Society and Michael Harrington's The Other America, was that American industry, which was becoming highly automated, was capable of producing great abundance but that archaic political and economic arrangements were preventing many Americans from enjoying its fruits. The goal of such programs as Medicare, the Great Society, and the War on Poverty was to allow the poor, the aged, and the disadvantaged to share in this abundance.

The crowning document of the early sixties-one that combined the spirit and the economic thought of the era-was issued in March I964. A group of thirty-two social scientists, labor officials, businessmen, and political activists delivered to President Johnson a manifesto called "The Triple Revolution." The group itself was a perfect mix of new left and policy elite, new middle class and old upper class. It was convened by W. H. Ferry, the son of the owner of Packard Motors and a protégé of Paul Hoffman and Robert Hutchins. Ferry recruited, among others, Ralph Helstein, the president of the United Packinghouse Workers; socialist Michael Harrington; economist Robert Theobald; civil rights leader Bayard Rustin; scientist Linus Pauling; and Tom Hayden, the author of SDS's I962 founding manifesto, the Port Huron Statement.

The document declared that "three separate and mutually reinforcing revolutions" were taking place: a "cybernation revolution" that had brought about "a system of almost unlimited productive capacity which requires progressively less human labor," a "weaponry revolution" that has "eliminated war as a method for resolving international conflicts," and a "human rights revolution" that had created a "universal demand for full human rights." "The Triple Revolution" held out the possibility of a "potential abundance of goods and services" that could transform the United States and the world, but the signatories warned that this potential could not be realized without "a fundamental change in the mechanisms employed to insure consumer rights."

p91
Visions of Armageddon

The second period of the sixties began with the Watts riot and President Johnson's escalation of the Vietnam War in I965. These events signified and helped to precipitate a darker, more frenzied and violent period of protest. The escalation of the war threw into question the purpose of American foreign policy. Students who entered college in the I9605 had been imbued with the idea that America's mission was to create a democratic world after its own image. But in Vietnam, the United States appeared to be backing a corrupt dictatorship, which, at our urging, had ignored the I954 Geneva agreements to hold elections in Vietnam. The seeming contradiction between U.S. intervention and American ideals, Johnson's dishonesty and betrayal, and the rising list of casualties on both sides of the war inspired a growing rage against Johnson and the government. The antiwar movement split into a moderate wing that sought a negotiated withdrawal and a violent pro-North Vietnamese wing that threatened to "bring the war home." As the conviction grew that U.S. intervention was not an unfortunate blunder but reflected the priorities of American corporations and the country's power elite, many antiwar militants began to see the United States itself as the enemy. SDS, the leading student organization, imagined itself by I969 to be the vanguard of a violent revolution against the United States.

The first ghetto riots took place in the summer of I964 and then grew in size and strength over the next three summers. In the Watts riot of I965, I,072 people were injured, 34 were killed, 977 buildings were damaged, and 4,000 people were arrested. In July I967, there were I03 disorders, including five full-scale riots. In Detroit, 43 persons were killed and 7,200 were arrested. Some 700 buildings were burned and 4I2 were totally destroyed. The riots were spontaneous, but they were invariably triggered by black perceptions of unequal treatment, particularly at the hands of white police forces.

At the same time that the riots began, Martin Luther King, Jr., attempted to take the civil rights movement northward to Chicago. King never saw political and civil equally as ends in themselves, but as part of a longer struggle for full social and economic equally. King wanted to desegregate housing in the North (which was the key to de facto school segregation), improve city services for blacks, and gain higher wages and better jobs for blacks. He failed abysmally in Chicago. The combination of the ghetto riots and King's failure contributed to the radicalization of the black movement. By I968, when King was assassinated in Memphis while trying to support striking black garbagemen, much of the black movement had turned toward insurrectionary violence. They saw the Northern ghettos as Third World colonies that had to be liberated from their white imperialist oppressors.

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p98
Nader and the New Movements

While the later sixties are remembered mainly for the violent antiwar and black power movements, their most enduring legacy was the environmental, consumer, and women's movements. These movements largely continued the spirit of the earlier part of the sixties. The women's and gay movements took their cue from the earlier civil rights organizations, just as environmental groups mimicked the moderate antiwar movement. (Earth Day in I970 was modeled on the antiwar teach-ins.) Like the antiwar movement, these new movements were usually led by students or recent college or law school graduates. The National Organization for Women (NOW), founded in I964, had 200 chapters by the early I9705 and had been joined in its efforts by the National Women's Political Caucus, the National Association for the Repeal of Abortion Laws (NARAL), and hundreds of small local and national women's organizations. The movement enjoyed remarkable success in shaping the era's political agenda. In I972, the year Ms. magazine was founded, Congress approved the Equal Rights Amendment to the Constitution, strengthened and broadened the scope of the Equal Economic Opportunity Commission, and included a provision in the new Higher Education Act ensuring equal treatment of men and women. In I973 the Supreme Court granted women the right to abortion.

The consumer and environmental movements enjoyed equally spectacular success. Organizations like the Sierra Club, the Wilderness Society, and the Audubon Society expanded their purview and quadrupled their membership from I960 to 1969. They were also joined by new groups, including Environmental Action, the Environmental Defense Fund, and Friends of the Earth. The Consumer Federation of America, a coalition of I40 state and local groups, was founded in I967, and the Consumers Union, which had published a magazine since I936, established a Washington office in I969. These groups got the Nixon administration and Congress to adopt a raft of reforms, from establishing the Environmental Protection Agency and the Consumer Product Safety Commission to major revisions of the Clean Air and Clean Water Acts.

The key individual behind these movements was Ralph Nader. The son of Lebanese immigrants who settled in Winstead, Connecticut, Nader graduated from Princeton and Harvard Law School. He was a classic progressive who defined his role as being above party and faction. Very much in the tradition of Brandeis, whom he read and admired as a teenager, he saw his mission as using the law to further the public interest. Like Brandeis, he sought to defend popular democracy against the unchecked power of large corporations and banks. "I thought of myself as a lawyer for unrepresented and unorganized constituencies," Nader explained. But where Brandeis was interested in the rights of organized labor and the establishment of industrial democracy, Nader was singlemindedly devoted to defending the rights of the consumer against the large corporation.

Nader didn't dissociate himself from the other parts of the new left, but he saw himself as broadening its horizon. "I extended it into the corporate accountability issue," he recalls. "Into corporate crime and corporate fraud. Long ago I knew that the issue was corporate power." Nader's views reflected the transformation of democratic ideals in the twentieth century. He accepted the corporation as a given, but vigorously endeavored to hold it publicly accountable on a broad range of activity. He rejected the late nineteenth-century and modern conservative view that the corporation was an individual who, like the early entrepreneur, should be allowed to maximize his profits without government interference.

In I965, Nader published Unsafe at Any Speed, an expose of General Motors' laxity in building cars that could withstand collisions. When GM got caught hiring a private investigator to shadow him, Nader became famous and his book a best-seller. Over the next five years he used his fame and rising income-he began receiving fifty speaking invitations a week at $2,500 a speech-to help build a consumer movement. Nader understood the growing role of television in politics: how even a lone individual could bring about far-reaching changes by creating incidents that dramatized injustice or hypocrisy. He became, in his own term, a "civic celebrity." In I974 a U.S. News and World Report survey found Nader to be the fourth-most influential American.

Nader also started hiring young lawyers, called "Nader's raiders," in I968, and founded his first campus-based Public Interest Research Group (PIRG) in 1970. By the mid-1970s he had founded the Center for Responsive Law, Congress Watch, the Public Citizens Litigation Group, the Health Research Group, the Corporate Accountability Project, the Tax Reform Research Group, the Center for Auto Safety, and the Airline Consumer Action Project. Nader's and the other consumer organizations played an important role in the passage of new legislation, including the Wholesale Poultry Products Act, the Wholesale Meat Act, the Radiation Control Act, the Natural Gas Pipeline Safety Act, the Coal Mine Health and Safety Act, and the Occupational Health and Safety Act.

If Nader was the key individual, the key institution behind the environmental and consumer movement was the ubiquitous Ford Foundation. In I967, a Long Island lawyer, Victor Yannacone, influenced by Rachel Carson's Silent Spring, won a suit against DDT spraying in a local marsh and pond. Yannacone decided to found a group that would sue business and government to force their compliance with environmental laws. He asked for funding from the Audubon Society, but was turned down-perhaps because of the society's ties to chemical companies. But the Ford Foundation provided the startup money for the Environmental Defense Fund. It also gave generous grants to the Sierra Club Legal Defense Fund and the Los Angeles-based Center for Law in the Public Interest. Ford put up the money for the environmental movement's foray into consumer and environmental public interest law. By I972, Ford was providing 86 percent of the grants to environmental and consumer public interest firms. Without Ford's generous assistance, these movements would have been far less visible and successful.

Unlike the later antiwar and black power movements, the environmental and consumer movements inspired enormous popular support rather than fear and opposition. Republican and Democratic politicians vied to sponsor environmental and consumer legislation. In I970, Nixon and Edmund Muskie, who was planning to run for president in 1972, got into a bidding war for the movement's support, with each championing successfully tougher revisions to the Clean Air Act. The environmental and consumer movements also enjoyed significant support from elite organizations. In addition to receiving grants from Ford, they also received money from the Rockefeller, Stern, Field, and Carnegie foundations. And they also had the leading newspapers and magazines on their side.

Businesses were initially sympathetic because of the buoyant economy. From February 1961 to September 1969, the country enjoyed the longest continuous boom on record. The economy grew by 4.5 percent a year, compared to 3.2 percent in the I9505. Secure in their standing, only fifty corporations had registered lobbyists stationed in Washington in the early I9605.* Then, in the mid-1960s, as the country's mood darkened, the public's opinion of business began to fall precipitously. In a National Opinion Research Corporation survey, those expressing "a great deal of confidence" in the people running "major companies" fell from 55 percent in 1966 to 27 percent in 1971.45 In another study, those agreeing that "the profits of large companies help make things better for everyone" fell from 67 percent in 1966 to 51 percent in 1971. Students echoed these sentiments. In I969, pollster Daniel Yankelovich found that 99 percent of college students thought that "business is too concerned with profits and not with public responsibility."

Instead of attacking their critics, businesses, as David Vogel recounts in Fluctuating Fortunes, sought to accommodate the demands of the consumer and environmental movements by stressing social responsibility. While the auto and tobacco companies took umbrage at regulations targeted at them, business as a whole thought it could adapt the new environmental and consumer legislation to its own ends just as it had done earlier with the Interstate Commerce Commission (dubbed by a Nader study the "Interstate Commerce Omission") and the Federal Trade Commission. By backing national regulation, it hoped it could prevent a chaotic patchwork of different state regulations and create a single board that it could control. A Fortune survey in February I970 found 53 percent of Fortune 500 executives in favor of a national regulatory agency and 57 percent believing that the federal government should "step up regulatory activities." In a spirit of social responsibility, 85 percent of the executives thought that the environment should be protected even if that meant "reducing profits."

But the executives soon discovered that they were sanctioning a major expansion of government regulation of corporations. The new regulatory bodies, housed in the executive branch and more immediately responsible to elected officials and voters, proved to be guardians of the public interest rather than tools of the corporations they were supposed to regulate. They forced corporations to be accountable to more than their own stockholders. They represented a return to the activist state and the democratic pluralism of the New Deal.

The success of the environmental, consumer, and women's movements, along with that of the antiwar and civil rights movements, permanently altered the nature of politics by extending democratic principles to a range of activities and concerns that had previously been thought to be outside the purview of government and public policy. These ranged from police brutality against blacks to sexual harassment on the job to auto safety to toxic waste dumps. Like the New Deal, these movements established legislative precedents that it would be difficult for later political generations to repudiate or ignore. Americans would continue to support auto safety legislation, OSHA, and the Clean Air and Water Acts. Conservatives as well as liberals would come to accept the Civil Rights Act of I964 and the Voting Rights Acts of I965.

Many of the theories of pluralism had assumed a passive citizenry who would be represented by large organizations that, like the members of a corporate board of directors, would vote their proxy in determining the course of government. These political organizations would most closely resemble the AFL-CIO, the Chamber of Commerce, the American Farm Bureau, and other behemoths of the I9505. But the experience of the sixties undercut these theories. The students and other citizens who participated in civil rights and antiwar demonstrations or in Earth Day were anything but passive, and the movements of the sixties displayed a far more diverse model of political organization-blending large and small, and featuring the "civic celebrity" like Nader who could dramatize the movement's cause not only through public speaking but also on television. The organizations themselves could vanish and reappear in different guise and name without the movement itself losing its force and power.

What underlay this model of pluralism as participatory democracy was the social commitment of the protestors and demonstrators. Like the progressives at the turn of the century and labor organizers of the 1930s, the student protestors saw themselves as trying to create a higher good. In this sense, they were strikingly different from the narcissistic, self-absorbed generation that would follow. As surveys from the late 19605 showed, all students of that era, and not simply protestors, displayed an idealism about their lives and their objectives. The kind of beliefs that thirty years before had inspired Frankfurter's Harvard law students had filtered downward to the state universities and junior colleges.

Beginning in I966, the UCLA Cooperative Institutional Research Program conducted annual surveys of the attitudes of American college freshmen. That first year, for instance, they found that 57.8 percent of incoming freshmen thought it was essential to "keep up to date with political affairs," 68.5 percent to "help others who are in difficulty," and only 43.5 percent to "be very well-off financially." When Yankelovich conducted a survey for CBS in I969, he found similar results. He asked college students what values were important to them. Eighteen percent said money was "very important," 5I percent said "service to others" was "very important."

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