Building the Great Society Read online

  To many Americans, however, the Job Corps quickly assumed a different character. Lifting very poor young men—black and white, urban and rural, unskilled and uneducated, often from tumultuous home environments—from their neighborhoods and placing them in strange settings together was a risky undertaking, and it generated ample cause for concern. At Camp Kilmer in New Jersey, newspapers reported that corpsmen were habitually high on illegal narcotics and often stoned cars that drove past the work site. At Camp Atterbury in Indiana, several young men were arrested on sodomy charges. At a camp in western Kentucky, fighting broke out between black and white corpsmen. Neither was it apparent a year into the program’s existence that the trainees left any better prepared to lead productive work lives than before they arrived. When a conservative senator scoffed that it would cost less to send a single corpsman to Harvard than to enroll him in the Job Corps for a year, Shriver quibbled with the math. In fact, he demonstrated, it cost the government just two-thirds the cost of a year at Harvard to train each corpsman. It was a well-intentioned rejoinder, but not one that was likely to quell the criticism.

  • • • • •

  Though community action would remain a lightning rod for criticism, perhaps the most enduringly popular of Johnson’s Great Society programs, Head Start, began life as part of the CAP initiative. It also owed its conception, as was so often the case with programs emanating from the Office of Economic Opportunity, to a quick impulsive flash of Shriver’s inspiration. Driving home to Timberlawn one evening in late 1964, Shriver pondered research that the Kennedy Foundation had funded into the use of early intervention to raise the IQs of children with intellectual disabilities. After consulting with Robert Cooke, a physician at Johns Hopkins University who worked closely with the foundation, Shriver concluded that the same early exposure to education might prepare poor children to capture the advantages available to them as they progressed through school and entered the workforce. Many economically disadvantaged “kids arrive at the first grade beaten or at least handicapped before they start,” he observed. “To use an analogy from sports, they stand 10, 20, and 30 feet back from the starting line; other people are way ahead of them. They don’t get a fair, equal start with everyone else when they come to school at the age of six.” By extending early childhood education to at-risk children, the government could level the playing field. It was a concept firmly rooted in opportunity theory and in the guiding principles that informed Great Society policy making. Over lunch at the Hay-Adams hotel, Shriver shared the idea with the widely syndicated columnist Joe Alsop, whom he considered “incorrigibly negativist” and therefore a likely skeptic. To his happy surprise, Alsop responded enthusiastically. “If Joe’s not knocking the idea,” thought Shriver, “it’s not likely to be knocked.”

  Shriver hoped that if his office moved with haste, it could prepare and launch a summer pilot program in 1965 with 25,000 children. He instructed Dick Boone to begin planning. Twice each week in January and February, a dozen outside advisers and CAP staff members met to hammer out what would ultimately be designated the Cooke Report. Notably, very few members of the working committee were professional educators; most were medical professionals and psychologists. Their report suggested a comprehensive program of early childhood education, medical care, and nutritional services and—in keeping with the spirit of community action—heavy involvement from the parents of poor children. Jule Sugarman, one of Boone’s deputies, recalled that the ad hoc committee far exceeded Shriver’s original ambitions when it suggested that the OEO launch a sizable pilot program in the summer of 1965 across three hundred communities, reaching 100,000 youngsters. The proposal immediately excited both LBJ, who instructed Shriver to triple the size of the program, and Lady Bird, who lent the initiative a much-needed early endorsement when she hosted a tea at the White House to raise visibility and support. In attendance was a “large representation” of journalists, leading women in government and business, the wives of governors and big-city mayors, and prominent actors and entertainers. The result was an outpouring of interest from communities across the country. Instead of 100,000 children, the pilot program that summer ultimately served 560,000.

  As with other OEO projects, Head Start posed enormous administrative challenges. Conceived in late winter, it would need to establish guidelines and curricula, process thousands of applications from local school districts and CAPs, hire thousands of staff members, and recruit half a million poor children in just a matter of months. Julius Richmond, a noted pediatrician and medical school professor, agreed to join the OEO as the first director of Head Start and quickly accepted Sugarman’s suggestion that the program lean heavily on substitute teachers who were likely to claim college degrees and pedagogical training and who would be out of work during the summer and in need of a paycheck. The organizers further agreed that the program should focus on both four-year-olds and five-year-olds, because scarcely half of American children had access to public kindergarten. The OEO deployed 125 college volunteers to visit poor communities and enlist local service organizations, community action programs, school districts, and civic groups to sponsor and administer Head Start programs. A bipartisan group of congressional wives phone banked their districts “until they found somebody who was willing to talk about Head Start,” Sugarman recalled. “Once they had that name then we’d send one or two of these young people off to sit down with them. They literally wrote the applications for most of these communities, and literally helped them to set up their centers even though they knew very little about it themselves.” To train the summer staff and faculty members, the administration enlisted the participation of two hundred colleges and universities that sponsored six-day orientation programs for over forty-four thousand Head Start employees; to ensure the program’s smooth operation and integrity, over two thousand health professionals, educators, and social workers formed an auxiliary “technical assistance corps” that fanned out across the country to help local organizations administer their programs effectively.

  Despite the harried and ad hoc way in which it was conceived, Head Start proved immediately popular and became one of the untouchable legacies of LBJ’s Great Society. Over thirty years later, the program served 900,000 poor children annually and in public opinion polls enjoyed the approval of over 90 percent of respondents. And of course, as early as 1969, there were critics who questioned the lasting value of early childhood education generally and Head Start specifically. Some studies have concluded that whatever educational gains poor children made through the program quickly eroded by the time they reached grade school and middle school. Though other studies challenge this finding, in the decades after Head Start’s launch, some consensus emerged that early intervention was not powerful enough in and of itself to reverse the combined challenges of single-parent households, persistent income and wealth inequality, neighborhood crime and deterioration, and failing public schools. Such criticisms implicitly call into question the underlying logic behind the War on Poverty—namely, that what was needed to break the cycle of poverty was opportunity, not cash transfers or income assistance.

  But these criticisms miss the mark in a critical way. Head Start endeavored to close the gap in educational achievement, but that was just one of its mandates. The program also provided poor children with hot, nutritious meals each day, as well as medical and dental care (often for the first time in their lives). They learned and played in a stable and nurturing environment where their parents could act as full partners in their care and development. A government study found that among Head Start pupils in 1969, roughly one-third had not received their complete diphtheria, pertussis, and tetanus immunizations; nearly 40 percent had not been vaccinated against polio; and very few had received dental or eye exams. In Jacksonville, Florida, 52 percent of Head Start children were anemic; 31 percent suffered from hearing defects and 25 percent from eye problems. In South Carolina’s Beaufort County, 90 percent of preschool-aged children had
hookworm or roundworm. In Boston, 31 percent of eligible students endured major physical or psychological issues. More than just an early education program, Head Start provided its students services that materially narrowed the yawning wellness gap between poor and nonpoor youngsters. Although, as Daniel Patrick Moynihan later noted, Head Start proved so generally popular that most Americans never realized or soon forgot that it began life within the controversial Community Action Program, many of CAP’s guiding principles were embedded in its playbook. Particularly in full-year Head Start programs, 90 percent of which were administered in the early years by local CAPs, parents and paraprofessionals from the community played an outsized role in staffing and maintaining local programs. Based on both firsthand knowledge and program data, Sugarman believed that “the non-professionals bring a different quality to the program than a program that’s purely professionally run . . . it brings a dimension of sensitivity and concern that’s better than you have in a purely professionally run program.”

  Julius Richmond would later recall one of his first encounters with Lyndon Johnson. In the spring of 1965, he accompanied Shriver to the White House for the announcement of the first round of Head Start grants. Entering the Oval Office, he shook the president’s hand and instantly “did a double take” when LBJ pulled him close and confided, “You know, this whole thing is where I came in.” Sensing Richmond’s confusion, LBJ continued, “Well, you know, I’m a schoolteacher. I was teaching Mexican American children. This program is designed to do what we were trying to do way back then.” Richmond observed that Johnson was “very intrigued and interested and very committed.” Two years later, he had occasion to attend a White House screening of a documentary film, Pancho, about a Mexican American child who benefited from the Head Start program. During the screening, which the young boy’s parents also attended, the president leaned over toward Richmond and “with tears in his eyes [said], ‘This is all of what I used to see when I was teaching school down there in south Texas.’”

  The brainchild of Sargent Shriver, it was up and running in a matter of months. It would later strike Richmond as remarkable that the administration never secured congressional approval to launch Head Start. It originated under the Community Action Program line in the OEO’s budget and, as such, needed no such authorization and only later won permanent status from Congress. “I don’t know of many other instances in the recent history of the United States . . . where anybody, anybody, anybody—I even include the president, almost—was ever able to start a program of national magnitude, involving, let’s say, $70 million, without asking anybody for permission to do any of it.”

  CHAPTER 5

  Frontlash

  In July 1964, not even weeks after Johnson signed the Civil Rights Act into law, the venerated pollster Lou Harris described for readers of Newsweek an emerging and in many ways alarming development: in recent surveys of white ethnic voters in northern and midwestern cities, two-thirds of respondents feared “that most Negroes want to take jobs held by whites” and tended “to feel that the pace of civil rights is too fast”—that “Negroes are getting too ‘uppity’ for their own good.” He warned that “the white backlash itself exists, lurking more or less menacingly in the background, but it is not yet a major force in the land.” Harris did not coin the term “white backlash.” That honor rested with the economist Eliot Janeway, who a year earlier forewarned that should automation and economic stagnation erode postwar gains in factory employment, white workers would perceive themselves in a zero-sum competition with African Americans and “lash back” in an ugly and potentially violent fashion. Though the concept—to say nothing of the phrase—was still unfamiliar to most casual students of current affairs, the savviest of politicians were already attuned to the shifting currents.

  During a visit to East Asia several weeks earlier, Richard Nixon called on Henry Cabot Lodge, the U.S. ambassador to South Vietnam, who had been his running mate four years earlier. Nixon perceived a simmering discontent among “low income urban white groups” that stood to lose—or thought they stood to lose—in the wake of economic and social advancements by African Americans. Writing to his son, Lodge—a blue-blooded patrician who served in the U.S. Senate before losing his seat to John F. Kennedy over a decade earlier—reported that Nixon also “spoke of the practice known as ‘bussing’ whereby the white child is transported by bus from his suburban home into the slums to go to the slum school, and the Negro is transported by bus from his home in the slums to the school in the suburbs.” In 1964, busing was still a new practice; it would not attract widespread adoption or scrutiny until later in the decade. But it testified to his limited political acumen that Lodge had not “read much about this in the papers.”

  Despite his recent string of victories—securing passage of the tax cuts, the Civil Rights Act, and the Economic Opportunity Act—Johnson was equally cognizant of the political headwinds he might face in the coming election. “If we aren’t careful,” he told George Reedy, “we’re just gonna be presiding over a country that’s so badly split-up that they’ll vote for anybody that isn’t us.” The president had good cause to worry. As early as January, George Wallace, Alabama’s arch-segregationist governor, began testing the waters for his own run for the Democratic nomination. In New England, skeptical audiences were startled to hear the southern populist speak in a calm and not altogether unconvincing tone about why “property rights are human rights, too.” In California, he charmed local civic organizations and reveled in delivering sharp ripostes to liberal hecklers; in Berkeley, whose otherwise progressive voters had recently defeated an open housing referendum, he reminded the crowd that “they voted just like the people in Alabama.” Though he attracted the scorn of Democratic officeholders during his swing through the Midwest’s industrial belt—in Ohio, Senator Steve Young derided him as a buffoon; in Madison, Wisconsin, left-wing activists used Kool-Aid to engrave the frozen pond outside his guest quarters with the greeting “FUCK WALLACE”—local elected officials soon began to worry that the rabble-rouser might very well animate the fears and resentments of working-class, ethnic white voters.

  They were right. After launching his campaign in Appleton, home to the late GOP senator Joseph McCarthy, Wallace canvassed the state’s blue-collar wards with tireless discipline. In Milwaukee, over seven hundred working men and women packed the local American Serb Memorial Hall to hear Wallace confirm their suspicions that the civil rights bill then still pending in Congress would imperil their jobs, neighborhoods, and safety. “A vote for this little governor will let people in Washington know that we want them to leave our houses, schools, jobs, businesses, and farms alone,” he roared to thunderous applause. The statute would “destroy the union seniority system and impose racial quotas.” It would be “impossible for a home owner to sell his home to whomever he chooses.” The crowd, which comprised mainly white residents of Serbian, Polish, Czechoslovakian, and Hungarian descent, had in recent years watched with guarded caution as the city’s black neighborhood pushed up against their insular community of small, tidy bungalows, community schools, and ethnic churches. When a black civil rights protester garbed in a clerical collar taunted, “Get your dogs out!” the event’s master of ceremonies, Bronko Gruber—a brawny military veteran and neighborhood bar owner—swept to his feet. “I’ll tell you something about your dogs, Padre,” he screamed. “I live on Walnut Street and three weeks ago tonight a friend of mine was assaulted by three of your countrymen, or whatever you want to call them. . . . They beat up old ladies eighty-three years old, rape our womenfolk. They mug people. They won’t work. They are on relief. How long can we tolerate this? Did I go to Guadalcanal to come back to something like this!?”

  Because initial polling had Wallace running at a negligible 5 percent, Johnson was rattled when Governor John Reynolds, his favorite-son proxy on the primary ballot, warned that Wallace might win as many as 175,000 votes, or over 15 percent of the projected turnout. Reynold
s, whose successful advocacy of a state open housing law rendered him anathema in blue-collar neighborhoods, was inflating his real estimate to rally regular Democrats to action. Yet even his overestimation fell far short of the mark. On primary day, Wallace won 265,000 votes, or one-quarter of those cast. He prevailed in the governor’s own district and took 30 percent of the vote in Milwaukee and 47 percent in the newly created Ninth Congressional District, which included some of the region’s most prosperous suburbs. “We won without winning!” he boasted, a deed that he replicated weeks later in Indiana, where he took 30 percent, and again in Maryland, where 43 percent of the state’s primary voters backed the outspoken segregationist. Disenchanted voters marched to the polls “with big grins on their faces,” a newspaper editor observed. “I never saw anything like it.” Senator Daniel Brewster, Johnson’s proxy on the ballot in Maryland, fumed that Wallace’s supporters had been hoodwinked by a “pack of mindless thugs,” but there was little doubting that something was darkly amiss in the nation’s heartland.

  Wallace’s speeches were laced with crude appeals to fear of crime (“If you are knocked in the head on a street in a city today,” he warned, “the man who knocked you in the head is out of jail before you get to the hospital”), class resentment (“They’re building a new bridge over the Potomac for all the white liberals fleeing to Virginia”), and race war (“Anyone here from Philadelphia? You know, they can’t even have night football games anymore because of the trouble between the races. And that’s the city of brotherly love!”).