The Meaning of Box 722

Rick Perlstein is a national treasure. Buy his Nixonland. Buy it now:

The Meaning of Box 722 | OurFuture.org: art of the narrative. They'd never really been examined in-depth before, but by my reckoning they were the crucial hinge that formed the ideological alignment we live in now. In 1964, Lyndon Johnson—and, apparently, liberalism—achieved such a gigantic landslide victory that it appeared to pundits the Republican Party would be forever consigned to the outer darkness if they ever entertained a Goldwater-style conservative law-and-order platform again. Two years later, most of the new liberal congressmen swept in on LBJ's coattails—the congressional class that gave us Medicare and Medicaid, the first serious environmental legislation, National Endowments for the Humanities and Arts, Head Start, the Voting Rights Act, the Department of Housing and Urban Development, the end of racist immigration quotas, Legal Aid, and more—was swept out on a tide of popular reaction. That reaction, I hope I demonstrate effectively in NIXONLAND, rested on two pillars: terror at the wave of urban rioting that began in the Watts district of Los Angeles; and terror at the prospect of the 1966 civil rights bill passing, which, by imposing an ironclad federal ban on racial discrimination in the sale and rental of housing—known as "open housing"—would be the first legislation to impact the entire nation equally, not just the South. (What that reaction most decidedly did not rest on: fear and loathing of "hippies," which were unknown, except in California, to most of the nation until 1967; or anti-war activists, which were not associated with either party, because Republicans and Democrats had about an equal number of hawks and doves in 1966.)

When I learned that the papers of Senator Paul Douglas were at the Chicago Historical Society (as it was known then; now it's cursed with the decidedly more prosaic name the Chicago History Museum), I decided to make Douglas's 1966 loss to Republican Charles Percy a key case study for my hypothesis. Douglas was a popular liberal lion first elected in 1948 and a civil rights champion, whose wife Emily Taft Douglas (a one-term congresswoman herself) had strode proudly across Edmund Pettus Bridge in 1965 arm in arm with Martin Luther King. He was also, as an economist, one of the architects of many of the New Deal ideas and programs that created the world's first mass middle class.

In the summer of 1966, as debate over open housing raged in Congress, King marched not in Alabama but in Chicago, to implore the city to enforce its own open housing ordinance, passed in 1963—which, if Chicago did, would be a first. It was the most segregated city in the north. As I put it in NIXONLAND (drawing on this classic study):

You could draw a map of the boundary within which the city's seven hundred thousand Negroes were allowed to live by marking an X wherever a white mob attacked a Negro. Move beyond it, and a family had to face down a mob of one thousand, five thousand, or even (in the Englewood riot of 1949, when the presence of blacks at a union meeting sparked a rumor the house was to be "sold to niggers") ten thousand bloody-minded whites. In the late 1940s, when the postwar housing shortage was at its peak, you could find ten black families living in a basement, sharing a single stove but not a single flush toilet, in "apartments" subdivided by cardboard. One racial bombing or arson happened every three weeks.... It neighborhoods where they were allowed to "buy" houses, they couldn't actually buy them at all: banks would not write them mortgages, so unscrupulous businessmen sold them contracts that gave them no equity or title to the property, from whcih they could be evicted the first time they were late with a payment.

And in 1966, a teenager answering a job ad walked over the border from Chicago into the all-white city of Cicero, and for that sin and no other was beaten to death. That was what Martin Luther King came to fight in Chicago.

At the Chicago History Museum, the Douglas collection covers seven hundred "linear feet".... I stumbled upon Box 722, which contained all the letters Senator Paul Douglas received about open housing and Martin Luther King's presence in Chicago....

Republican Charles Percy had gone into the race a civil rights liberal: "Chuck, do you have to talk so much about open housing?" one suburban Republican official complained to him. But by October, following Jerry Ford's talking points to the letter, he went on ABC's "Face the Nation" and said that while he still supported the "principle" of open housing, he disagreed with Senator Douglas on one thing: including "single-family dwelling" would be "an unpassable and unenforceable" attack on property rights. "Right now, we aren't ready to force people to accept those they don't want as neighbors," he said in tones of rue.

Long story short: Douglas soldiered on, imploring his constituents to remember the favors they had received from the Democratic Party—entree, for one thing, into the world's first mass middle class of factory workers. To no avail. Percy won in an upset. Pundits said it was because Percy's daughter had just been brutally murdered; it was a sympathy vote. But if people voted for Percy because he was a grieving father, the ratio of the sympathetic to the callous was suspiciously high in the Bungalow Belt neighborhoods where Martin Luther King had marched. A ward analysis demonstrated that in Chicago neighborhoods threatened by racial turnover, new Percy voters were enough to account for Douglas's 80 percent decline in the city since 1960. Pundits also pointed to people's unwillingness to vote for such an old man. But in the backlash wards younger Democrats declined almost as significantly.

No, it was voters like this, from 4315 W. Crystal:

A few years ago I had written you a letter stating how I and my family would welcome the opportunityy to vote fyou in to the highest office in the land--The Presidency. Since that time however your support of the open occupancy bill has caused me to change my support of your candidacy for senator of Illinois, and believe me sir there are many more in my category who are changing in their support of you.

Here is the fundamental tragedy of the backlash: voters like this empowered a party that decided they didn't need protection against predatory subprime mortgage fraud. Didn't need affordable, universal health insurance; made it easier for companies to rape their pensions; kept on going back to the well to destroy their social security; worked avidly to shred their union protections. Fought, in fact, every decent and wise social provision that made it possible in the first place for mere factory workers to live in glorious Chicago bungalows, or suburban homes, in the first place.

Now a black man from the city King visited in 1966 and called more hateful than Mississippi is running for president, fighting for all those things that made the midcentury American middle class the glory of world civilization, but which that middle class squandered out of the small-mindedness of backlash.

This post is for Chicago. This post is for America. This post is for our future. This post is for our history—that we may, this November, redeem it. This post is for a man who, had he walked down the wrong street in his own city 42 years ago, might well have been beaten to death.

Comments

[save_the_rustbelt]

I don't suppose Viet Nam had anything to do with Democrats losing office?

[Kate G.]

I'm reading it too, Brad. Its tough going because its so detailed and so painful. My family was intimately involved in lots of this stuff, from the left anyway, and its weird to see so much stuff that I dimly heard about or perceived as a very young child and a young teen get rehashed from a different more distanced perspective. Its a stunning book but I can only read about ten pages a day and then I have to lie down.

Kate g.

[Kate G.]

I'm reading it too, Brad. Its tough going because its so detailed and so painful. My family was intimately involved in lots of this stuff, from the left anyway, and its weird to see so much stuff that I dimly heard about or perceived as a very young child and a young teen get rehashed from a different more distanced perspective. Its a stunning book but I can only read about ten pages a day and then I have to lie down.

Kate g.

[Kate G.]

I'm reading it too, Brad. Its tough going because its so detailed and so painful. My family was intimately involved in lots of this stuff, from the left anyway, and its weird to see so much stuff that I dimly heard about or perceived as a very young child and a young teen get rehashed from a different more distanced perspective. Its a stunning book but I can only read about ten pages a day and then I have to lie down.

Kate g.

[Googlebot]

Hi Kate G. Following some threads at Washington Monthly started by Neal the Ethical Werewolf, it seems possible that you know Rick Perlstein better than most people. Is that true? Is that what you meant by intimately involved in lots of this stuff, or is there more you could tell us?

[Kate G.]

good god no, I don't know Rick perlestein at all, I'm just reading nixonland. But you know there were a lot of people "on the left" during the sixties. I'm just related to some of them.

Kate g.

[Googlebot]

Okay, well there would probably be worse people to know. There is a Rick Perlstein and a Kate G that google claims are pretty close. But I know how many people have *my* name so it's not terribly surprising.

[Denis Drew]

Of course the one thing (automatically) left out in the long list of LBJ's accomplishments (automatically and always by your typical academic liberal) is his $10/hr minimum wage -- at half of today's average income yet (all below 50 percentile income seem forever invisible to such).

Also left out of the the equation of Nixon's election is the Democrats running an extremely pacifist-left winger at a time when some of the rubble from WWII was still being cleared, when our new (scary) adversary was graduating twice as many engineers and scientists as we were, whose militarized economy that had buried Nazi Germany was growing more than twice the rate that our was (7%/3% annually), and whose leadership had but recently promised to bury us.

[Denis Drew]

Chicago is (was) not America. Just before I took my first job in Lilly white Manhattan in 1962 the feeling I sensed was that everybody knew they were doing something wrong by discriminating but (here seemed to be the crux as I sensed it) nobody wanted to be the first to break the ice.

This made it relatively easy (on my 18 year old radar) for Martin Luther King to initiate integration. I remember he just blocked up some vital intersections a few times and peace was made forthwith (my firm hired black page boys for starters). Seemed more a matter or social inertial than anything else in New York City.

When I moved into my brother's half-black, upper income housing project in Yonkers (just north of the Bronx) in 1979, I did not notice it was half-black for a year -- because they did not notice me: that's color blind New York.

The economic problems of African Americans today are not to my mind primarily racial. The are the American problem: Americans, from sea to shining sea, are about as up on labor economics as your typical Rent-A-Center customer -- and equally taken to the cleaners.

There is no thought of the absolute necessity in this fierce, bean counting management day-in-age of not simply being unionized but (THE GREAT LABOR FORCE MULTIPLIER) working under some form of SECTOR-WIDE labor agreements (collective-collective bargaining). Sector-wide just chased 88 WalMart big-boxes out of Germany -- Walmart's business model not working out under equalized pay and benefits. The French Canadian version is probably the one we should first consider here -- if labor ever expects to get the upper hand again.

American supermarket workers and airline employees would kill for sector-wide agreements.

[harold]

Nicholas Lehmann's excellent book, The Promised Land, details some of the dreadful blunders made by the city of Chicago (and northern liberals generally) in handling the dislocations wrought by the migration of five million destitute, displaced agricultural workers from the Mississippi Delta that took place in the 1960s -- one of the largest internal migrations in history. Basically, the white government averted its eyes from the problem, refusing to open its pocket book, just as happened later with Katrina. Then Robert Kennedy's best and brightest entourage had the brilliant, "realist" "macho" idea of solving it by giving grants to young black gang leaders, as "the natural leaders" of the ghetto community. In their own words, no more of the effeminate "lady bountiful" approach of Eleanor Roosevelt and the New Dealers with their settlement houses and aid to women and children. That was so old-fashioned. The results were predictable. Lehmann judges the famous "Woodlawn" project, supported by the Catholic Church and the University of Chicago, to have been, contrary to the official narrative, an almost complete failure.

Then, in Boston, it was decided to integrate on the backs of urban blue collar whites, while the suburbs still remained segregated. Bussing. Another on-the-cheap solution. (When, in the boroughs of NY in the 1980s, my own son was bussed to a school with a program for the handicapped a mile distant -- which took an hour and a half because of stops at different schools and used Mafia-controlled bus companies with inexperienced, ill-paid, sometimes alcoholic drivers, I finally understood the reaction of the Boston community.)

[Dean Scourtes]

I grew up on the south side of Chicago and was a young boy during the period that Perlstein recounts. The racial attitudes of the white-ethnic population I remember are exactly as described in those letters ro Senator Douglas.

I remember guys from the neighbrohood telling me about African-Americans youths they had beaten bloody for daring to ride the CTA bus west of Kedzie Avenue, then the racial dividing line. My father once invited an African-American friends over to the house, and was seriously worried that the neighbors might think he was trying to sell the house to a black family and attack them.

I remember a friend telling me how he saw white residents of the Marquette Park neighbrohood go wild during an African-American civil rights march. White residents lifted sewer covers and heaved them through the windshields of passing African-American motorists. An African-American bus driver departed from his route so he could pick up as many other African-Americans as he could find and drive them to safety.

Another buddy described to me how on another occasion a wayward softball bouncing off a windshield at a Forest Preserve picnic area led to a wild racial brawl involving bats, chains and gunfire.

Our neighbrohoods were named after the closest Catholic parishes in each, St.Bede, St.Dennis, St.Thomas More. My own brother, a blond-haired Greek-American, was once beaten by some local hoodlums. One of their parents apologized to my mother saying, "I told my boys: It's not your son's fault that he's not Catholic."

[harold]

Dennis Drew: The Taft Hartley amendment has kept us in the stone age!

[Maynard Handley]

"Here is the fundamental tragedy of the backlash: voters like this empowered a party that decided they didn't need protection against predatory subprime mortgage fraud. Didn't need affordable, universal health insurance; made it easier for companies to rape their pensions; kept on going back to the well to destroy their social security; worked avidly to shred their union protections."

Umm, sorry, but how is this a tragedy? Isn't this karma?
These people behaved like a*holes, refused to share, and got what they damn well deserved. This is what I call justice, not a tragedy.

It's a tragedy that other people got caught up in this, but I'm not going to weep any tears for those voters described here, and their counterparts across the country.

[gnrei]

Well, see, none of those fancy pants civil liberties matter. Because Obama is really a Muslim. And a Commie. People in the know know.

DeLay: 'Unless Obama Proves Me Wrong, He Is a Marxist'
http://briefingroom.thehill.com/2008/06/05/delay-unless-obama-proves-me-wrong-he-is-a-marxist/

[bob]

Rusty: Perlstein is writing about the 1966 election. As I remember it, Vietnam played no significant part in that election.

Maynard: What you call "bad karma" hit everyone in lower and middle income groups, whether or not they were part of the backlash.

[Matt]

Perstein in younger than I am, and probably can't remember things in the same way. Two of my earliest concrete memories: MLK being short; RFK being shot. (My father idolized them both; I remember him crying. I was eight.) Better days are here, I hope.

[smaug]

"Here is the fundamental tragedy of the backlash: voters like this empowered a party that decided they didn't need protection against predatory subprime mortgage fraud. Didn't need affordable, universal health insurance; made it easier for companies to rape their pensions; kept on going back to the well to destroy their social security; worked avidly to shred their union protections."

Handley is right; it is not a tragedy if racist voters undermine their own economic interests.

Perlstein does good work, but the white backlash was recognized at the time, as contemporaneous NYT reports cite it and Douglas' age as factors in his loss. But the issues that Perlstein raises are a long way from 1966 -- these were hot-button items from the mid-80s (on Soc. Sec.) to the present day. It does not explain why the Democratic party could not repair its base later -- in the 1970s. It is worth considering the tight 1978 race, in which Alex Seith, a supposedly liberal Democratic running as a conservative and a foreign policy hawk, almost unseated Percy, who was a liberal Republican (a set that includes almost no one of any prominence in the party today).