The Power Game, Part Three
"I shall never forget the faces of the boys and the girls in that little Welhausen Mexican School, and I remember even yet the pain of realizing and knowing then that college was closed to practically every one of those children because they were too poor. And I think it was then that I made up my mind that this nation could never rest while the door to knowledge remained closed to any American."-- Lyndon Baines Johnson, 1965
Political scientists and historians-- or at least some of them-- enjoy defining watershed events, those events which forever transform a society, moments after which nothing can be the way it was before...
Other historians take delight in proving that the watershed events posited by academic rivals are not really that big a deal. Take the Norman Conquest of England in 1066. As children, many of us learned Guillaume le Conquerant's defeat of Harold Godwinson at the Battle of Hastings irrevocably changed the course of British history and European destiny. But revisionist scholars argue the main effect of The Conquest boils down to a simple change in ruling elites, with Anglo-Saxon nobles being displaced and replaced by Norman aristocrats, with little actual effect on the governmental structure of England or the daily lives of peasants...
The year 1964, in American politics, may or not be a watershed year. Historians can-- and will-- debate it for decades to come. But 1066, like 1964, didn't simply happen. A Norman duke did not wake up one morning, decide to assemble an army, row across the Channel, and add to his feudal holdings. Guillaume, aka William The Conqueror, asserted he'd been promised the kingdom by Edward the Confessor, who previously sat on the English throne. It is unlikely Edward (who died both childless and without a clear successor) had the desire to look down from Heaven and see Harold as king, given many years of bitter conflict he enjoyed with Godwinson's father, the Earl of Wessex...
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| U S Presidential Race Results: 1956-1968 |
A quick glance at maps for results of the presidential race show 1964 was a bit unusual: Democrats claimed 44 of 50 states and 90.5% of the electoral college. The six states won by Republicans were a slice of America's Deep South and Arizona, the home state of defeated conservative standard-bearer Barry Goldwater...
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| Lyndon Johnson takes the oath of office enroute to the nation's capital as Jacqueline Kennedy, of the slain President, stands by his side. |
Democrat Lyndon Johnson's victory at the polls had neither been a thing automatically guaranteed nor something totally unexpected. He had been the President for roughly a year at the time of the election, successor to John Fitzgerald Kennedy, assassinated in Johnson's native Texas on a November day that shocked the world...
Younger readers may have difficulty appreciating the impact of John Kennedy's murder on the nation. Few people my age or older can't tell you where they were or what they were doing when they first heard the news. It was an act of incomprehensible violence, those rifle shots punctuating the shouts and cheers of mid-day in Dallas. The aftermath was an America briefly suspended in time with all the trivialities and responsibilities of ordinary life temporarily becoming meaningless. The images that remained were stark black and white: a newsman shaking his bowed head in disbelief, a widow in black, a saluting son...
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| White post-Reconstruction Era Southerners were reminded, not very subtly, of which party had their interests in mind and which party had destroyed "the Natural Order" of things. |
[Americans were not the only people to react in horror to President Kennedy's death. FBI documents declassified in 1997 suggest the Soviet government informed its citizens almost immediately after learning of the assassination and, despite the state's official atheism, ordered church bells be tolled in respect for his memory. Kremlin officials suspected the murder was part of a conspiracy orchestrated by right-wing American extremists who wanted to see blame for the assassination placed on the Soviet Union and trigger war. Such thinking may explain language in Premier Khrushchev's official telegram to President Johnson which states Kennedy's death "evokes the indignation of the Soviet people against the perpetrators of this base crime." ]
This isn't to say JFK was universally loved or that he'd been the unanimous choice of American voters in 1960. Approximately 1/10th of a percent separated him from Vice President Richard Nixon in the popular vote total. Disgruntled Republicans hinted his electoral college victory had a lot to do with dead voters showing up in alphabetical order at the polls in Chicago and other large cities to demonstrate post-mortem loyalty to the Democratic party...
President Lyndon Baines Johnson, LBJ to news headline writers, would fare better in the 1964 popular vote than his predecessor by claiming over 60% of the ballot tally. A portion of Johnson's support came to down to voters expressing respect for the slain John F Kennedy and his vision of a New Frontier for America-- and Johnson's promise to continue and go beyond Kennedy's programs...
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| The American Independent Party emblem subtly incorparated Klan-like symbolism in its guise as a guardian of States Rights. |
The 36th President's vision for the United States was a Great Society spiritually fathered by Franklin D Roosevelt's New Deal and mothered by Johnson's own experiences as a young school teacher in the Texas towns of Cotulla, Pearsall, and Houston. A profound sense of frustration overwhelmed Johnson as he realized poverty and prejudice would prevent many of the children he taught from having opportunities for a better life through education. His own father, although a moderately successful man and state legislator, had been too poor in his youth to pay the tuition required to attend high school or to attain his goal of becoming a lawyer...
[Sam Ealy Johnson, Jr, Lyndon's father, refused to take bribes throughout his political career as a state legislator. His integrity would cost him financially after leaving office since he was not offered a patronage job (as was customarily offered to "cooperative lawmakers) in state government or with a railroad, bank, or oil company. He is also credited as "the man who saved the Alamo" by introducing legislation in 1905 which turned the management of the shrine over to the Daughters of the Republic of Texas after lawmakers balked at funding $65,000 in repair and restoration costs.]
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| Sam Ealy Johnson, Jr-- the man who saved the Alamo and refused to take bribes. |
Barry Goldwater and Lyndon Johnson stood across from one another on opposite ends of America's political spectrum. The Arizona Senator, unlike the incumbent President, hadn't been born with politics in his blood. Goldwater's father was a Phoenix merchant of Jewish descent who married outside his faith and raised his son as an Episcopalian. Goldwater became active in local politics in the late 1940s, running successfully for a seat on the City Council as a reformer who intended to do something about the rampant gambling and prostitution besmirching the town's reputation...
Like Johnson, Goldwater had a connection with a Depression Era President. He'd met Herbert Hoover in the 1930s after President Hoover had been defeated in his bid for re-election by Franklin Roosevelt. Johnson, as a U S Representative, knew Roosevelt and provided him with critical insight into Texas politics...
Goldwater and Johnson embodied two very different philosophies of government. Or to be more specific, two vastly divergent visions of the role government should play in our lives. Perhaps this was because each had been created by two very different American experiences. Senator Barry Goldwater was the child of assimilated immigrants who became urban department store owners. President Lyndon Johnson was a son of rural Anglo-America in its Southern incarnation...
Lyndon Johnson was born into a family inclined to Populist ideals and a sense that such powerful economic interests like large corporations were not the friend of the little man. His adult experience as a politician and teacher had convinced him that only the federal government had the resources to fully address the social problems posed by racism, poverty, and the lack of education...
Barry Goldwater, in contrast, was a successful businessman and a son of a successful businessman. His essentially libertarian views decried Big Government intrusions into economic matters and personal lives. He made exceptions to his minimalist political philosophy as a firm advocate of a strong national defense who believed the spread of Communism must be stopped, by force if need be...
This staunch anti-communism played into the rhetoric of political opponents waiting to label Goldwater as a trigger-happy extremist ready to drop atomic bombs any time he dropped his cowboy hat. It was a charge that struck fear into the hearts of Americans who remembered the Cuban Missile Crisis of October, 1962 . President Kennedy and Soviet Premier Nikita Khrushchev played a game of military and diplomatic chicken for 13 long days amidst growing world-wide terror that the eve of nuclear destruction was now at hand...
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| A little girl counts daisy petals in this 1964 campaign ad, blissfully unaware she is about to be incinerated in a nuclear holocaust. |
[President Johnson's campaign tapped into these fears with one of the most effective political ads ever created. The "Daisy Ad" (linked to below) was aired only once -- in early September during NBC's Monday Night Movie-- but it provided the Democratic incumbent with a good two month's worth of pre-election workplace conversation and dinner party debate:
Perhaps more devastating to Senator Goldwater was the fact his deeply held principles about the proper role of government brought him to oppose the Civil Rights Act of 1964. His reading of the Constitution led to an interpretation that Title 2 of the Act violated the provisions of the 10th Amendment which states "powers not delegated to the United States by the Constitution, nor prohibited by it to the States, are reserved to the States respectively, or to the people"...
Goldwater's opposition to the interstate commerce provisions of Title 2 of the1964 Civil Rights Act, has been interpreted as racist by many but this may be not be an entirely correct analysis. He supported anti-discrimination legislation in 1957 and 1960 and the 26th Amendment outlawing poll taxes used by southern states to keep blacks from voting. The Arizona Senator was also an important voice in pushing the Pentagon to support desegregation of the Armed Forces and service academies. Goldwater also ended racial discrimination in his family's stores and backed efforts to end it in Phoenix schools and restaurants...
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| Segregationist Governor George Wallace symbolically "stands in the schoolhouse door" as U S Attorney General Nicholas Katzenbach attempts to enforce court-ordered desegregation. |
Regardless of Senator Goldwater's motives, many voters in the Deep South interpreted his states' rights argument against the Civil Rights Act as support for their opposition to racial integration imposed by the federal government. "State's rights" had been a battle cry for Strom Thurmond of South Carolina and Leander Perez of Louisiana and their fellow white supremacist Dixiecrats, breakaway Democrats who bolted from the national party in 1948...
[Leander Perez, a particularly rabid segregationist, reportedly explained his opposition to black voters by observing that "Negroes are just not equipped to vote. If the Negroes took over the government, we would have a repetition here of what's going on in the Congo." Perez was also the epitome of financial corruption in a state famous for its crooked politicians, diverting tens of millions of dollars of oil lease revenues to firms he set up and controlled. Excommunicated by the Roman Catholic Church in 1962 for his actions in opposing the desegregation of local parochial schools, Perez responded by claiming the Church was "being used as a front" by "clever Jews."]
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| Judge Leander Perez of Plaquemines Parish, Louisiana, devout racist and pilferer of public monies. |
Whereas the rest of the nation save his home state rejected Goldwater's bid for the Presidency, five Deep South states did something they had not collectively done since the end of the hated Reconstruction imposed on them by the despised North and the party of Honest Abe Lincoln: their electoral college votes were tallied on the Republican side of the ledger...
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| 1948 "Dixiecrat" campaign poster |
Goldwater's victory in the five southern states should not be misinterpreted as a being a wholesale endorsement of the Republican Party by white supremacist or segregationist elements. The ease with which they shifted from Democrat to Dixiecrat back to Democrat to Republican to American Independent to Republican suggests racist views are politically fluid in the United States, parasitically latching onto a host and discarding it when it can no longer be used to combat "liberals" or "one-world Jew bankers" or "Negro lovers" or "socialists" or "mongrelizers" or "outside agitators"...
Many who voted for the Arizona Senator in 1964 cast their ballots in 1968 for George Wallace and Curtis Le May on the American Independent Party ticket. As Governor of Alabama, Wallace famously "stood in the schoolhouse door" in June 1963 as part of a failed attempt to halt the desegregation of the University of Alabama. Wallace publicly apologized for this and other racially charged acts in later life and asked forgiveness, saying he did not wish to face the judgment of God with unrepented sin...
The Deep South 1964 votes coincided with a major shift in power inside the Republican Party, one which led Barry Goldwater to humiliating defeat in 1964 and Richard Nixon, a man held in utter contempt by the Arizona senator, to victory four years later...
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| Voters tired of political ads in the fall of 1964 could at least enjoy Bewitched, a sitcom starring Elizabeth Montgomery as a suburban witch married to a not very bright ad agency executive. |
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Note: All photographs for this essay were located through Google Images or Wikipedia, without authoritative source or ownership information except as noted: Lyndon Johnson sworn in as President from lbjlibrary.org; cover art for Leander Perez: Boss of the Delta by Glen Jeansonne from upress.state.ms.us
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