1. CHAPTER 28 Reform, Rebellion, and Reaction 1960–1974

2. Liberalism at High Tide
The Unrealized Promise of Kennedy’s New Frontier
John F. Kennedy’s record in Congress unremarkable - powerful political machine, family fortune, and handsome and dynamic appearance, won Democratic presidential nomination in 1960.
Defeated Republican Vice President Richard M. Nixon, in close election.
Administration projected energy, idealism, and glamour - Kennedy was a cautious, pragmatic politician – “new generation” assuming leadership - Americans to cast off complacency and self-indulgence and serve the common good.
Kennedy’s idealism inspired many - failed to redeem campaign promises to expand the welfare state.
Pushed poverty on to the national agenda.
Won support for $2 billion urban renewal program – legislation offered incentives to businesses to locate in depressed areas, and established a training program for the unemployed. 2

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4. Johnson Fulfills the Kennedy Promise
Economic growth key objective - Congress passed tax cut bill in greatest economic boom since World War II - liberal critics claimed it favored wealthy - economic growth alone would not eliminate poverty.
Kennedy’s victim to assassin’s bullet on November 22, 1963.
President Lyndon B. Johnson appointed commission - Chief Justice Earl Warren - concluded in September 1964 that Lee Harvey Oswald, acting alone, assassinated Kennedy, and that Jack Ruby, who killed Oswald two days later - acted alone.
Debate continued over how to assess Kennedy’s domestic record, which had been unremarkable in his first two years, but had suggested an important shift in 1963 with his proposals on taxes, civil rights, and poverty.
Johnson Fulfills the Kennedy Promise
Lyndon B. Johnson - political experience and fierce ambition, but coarse wit, extreme vanity, and Texas accent repulsed those who preferred the sophisticated Kennedy style.

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6. Policymaking for a Great Society
Johnson excelled behind the scenes - threaten legislators into support of his objectives.
Fulfill Kennedy’s vision for America - secured the passage of Kennedy’s proposed tax cut and the Civil Rights Act of 1964, the strongest such measure since Reconstruction.
Johnson’s call for “an unconditional war on poverty.”
The Economic Opportunity Act of ten programs under a newly created Office of Economic Opportunity - $800 million for the first year.
Novel and controversial part of the law, the Community Action Program (CAP), required “maximum feasible participation” of the poor themselves in antipoverty programs - organizing by the poor in order to take control of their neighborhoods.
Policymaking for a Great Society
Having steered nation through trauma of President Kennedy’s assassination - Johnson projected stability and security in a booming economy and easily won the election of 1964.

7. Johnson wanted to usher in “Great Society,” – succeeded with new laws passed during his administration.
The Economic Opportunity Act of first step in the War on Poverty.
Targeting depressed regions that general economic boom had bypassed sought to help poor indirectly by stimulating economic growth and providing jobs through road building and other public works programs.
New food stamp program and rent supplements - direct aid.
Elementary and Secondary Education Act and Higher Education Act of equip poor with skills necessary to find jobs.
Medicare and Medicaid - elderly and poor medical care.
Great Society programs fulfilled New Deal and Fair Deal promises but also broke with tradition - expanding liberalism to address the rights and needs of racial minorities; the Civil Rights Act of 1964 made discrimination illegal in employment, education, and public accommodations while the Voting Rights Act of 1965 banned literacy tests and ensured federal intervention to protect black voting rights.

8. Assessing the Great Society
Immigration and National Act of abolished quotas for immigrants from regions outside northern and western Europe.
Great Society benefits - well beyond the poverty-stricken and victims of discrimination – addressed needs of elderly and consumers, funded the work of artists and musicians, and obtained measures to control pollution.
1966 – trimmed Democrats’ majorities in Congress - backlash against government programs arose – fewer new laws.
In civil rights law that banned discrimination in housing and jury service, and National Housing Act of 1968 – authorized enormous increase in construction of low income housing for the poor.
Assessing the Great Society
1960s reduction in poverty considerable - certain groups faired much better - large numbers of aged and male-headed families out of poverty - African Americans escaped poverty at slower rate than whites - female-headed families worsened.

9. The Judicial Revolution
Conservative critics - Great Society programs discouraged initiative giving poor “handouts”; liberal critics - emphasis on training and educational placed responsibility for poverty on the poor.
Government funds allotted for medical care, urban renewal, and housing greatly benefited physicians, construction contractors, real estate developers and investors, and moderate income families as well.
Critics argued ending poverty requires a redistribution of income - raising taxes to create jobs, overhaul social welfare systems, and rebuild slums.
The Judicial Revolution
A key element of liberalism - Supreme Court under Chief Justice Earl Warren (1953 to 1969).
In 1960s Supreme Court expanded Constitution’s promise of equality and individual rights - decisions supporting an activist government to prevent injustice, new protections to disadvantaged groups and accused criminals.

10. Chief Justice Warren in Baker v
Chief Justice Warren in Baker v. Carr (1963), established the principle of “one person, one vote,” his most important decision.
The egalitarian thrust of the Warren Court touched the criminal justice system - right to public counsel when the accused could not afford to hire lawyers, tightening police procedures to conform to rights guaranteed to the accused under the Fourteenth Amendment of the Constitution.
As Supreme Court decisions overturned judicial precedents and ahead of public opinion critics accused justices of obstructing law enforcement and letting criminals go free.
The Court’s decisions on prayer and Bible reading in public schools provoked even greater outrage.
Two or three justices who believed that the Court was overstepping its authority often issued sharp dissents, but the Court’s major decisions stood the test of time.

11. The Second Reconstruction
The Flowering of the Black Freedom Struggle
Montgomery bus boycott - racial issues national visibility, a leader in Martin Luther King Jr., and effectiveness of mass organization.
Massive direct action in February four African American students in Greensboro requested service at whites-only lunch counter at a Woolworth’s store.
Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC) embraced civil disobedience and nonviolence of Martin Luther King Jr.
In May 1961, the Congress of Racial Equality (CORE) organized Freedom Rides to integrate interstate transportation in the South.
Voter registration less controversial than civil disobedience - benefit for the Democratic Party, SNCC and others began Voter Education Project in summer 1961.
Violence in King’s 1963 campaign in Birmingham, AL, to integrate public facilities and open jobs to African Americans. 11

12. The Response in Washington
250,000 blacks and whites in Washington, D. C. in August 1963 King’s “I have a dream” speech.
The euphoria of March on Washington faded - violence in the South.
In 1964, Mississippi Freedom Summer Project mobilized more than thousand northern black and white college students - voter education and voter registration – fierce resistance - movement persisted.
In March 1965, Alabama troopers used force to turn back a march from Selma to state capitol in Montgomery - “Bloody Sunday” - President Johnson called up Alabama National Guard to protect marchers.
The Response in Washington
Kennedy and Johnson administrations acted in response to black freedom.
In June 1963, Kennedy – pledged strong antidiscrimination legislation.

13. Black Power and Urban Rebellions
Civil Rights Act of 1964 guaranteed access for all Americans to public accommodations, public education, employment, and voting - death knell of South’s system of segregation and discrimination.
In August 1965, Johnson signed Voting Rights Act – empowered federal government to enable African Americans to register and vote, transforming southern politics.
Johnson issued executive order (1965) that required employers with government contracts to take affirmative action to ensure equal opportunity.
Civil Rights Act of 1968 banned racial discrimination in housing and jury selection, authorized federal intervention when states failed to protect civil rights workers from violence.
Black Power and Urban Rebellions
By 1966, black protest in the entire nation - not just legal equality but economic justice, nonviolence not its basic principle.

14. New emphases resulted from a combination of heightened activism and unrealized promise.
Integration and legal equality did not improve material conditions of blacks - black rage at oppressive conditions erupted in waves of riots from 1964 to 1968.
Malcolm X and long tradition of black nationalism - powerful new challenge to the ethos of nonviolence - younger activists.
SNCC chairman Stoklely Carmichael - “black power,” which quickly became the rallying cry in SNCC and CORE.
Carmichael rejected integration and assimilation because both implied white superiority.
Nonviolence only brought more beatings and killings.
After police killed unarmed black teenager in San Francisco in 1966, Huey Newton and Bobby Seale organized the Black Panther Party for Self- Defense and armed its members for self-defense against police brutality.
Press paid considerable attention to black radicals - civil rights movement encountered a severe white backlash.

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16. A Multitude of Movements
Martin Luther King Jr. agreed with black power advocates on the need for “a radical reconstruction of society,” yet he clung to the ideals of nonviolence and integration; on April 4, 1968, Dr. King was assassinated.
Although black power organizations made headlines, they failed to capture the massive support that African Americans gave King and other earlier leaders.
A Multitude of Movements
Native American Protest
Native American activism - fresh militancy and goals in 1960s.
Militant generation of Native Americans expressed growing discontent with government and older Indian leadership, forming the National Indian Youth Council (NIYC) – demonstrated and occupied land and public buildings - rights to natural resources and territory they owned collectively before European settlement.
In Minneapolis in 1968, two Chippewa, Dennis Banks and George Mitchell, founded American Indian Movement (AIM) to attack problems in cities, where about 300,000 Indians lived.

17. Latino Struggles for Justice
AIM - to protect Indians from police harassment, antipoverty funds, and “survival schools” to teach Indian history and values.
AIM leaders - helped to organize the “Trail of Broken Treaties” caravan to the capitol – some activists took over Bureau of Indian Affairs to express their outrage at the bureau’s policies.
Longer siege in the Lakota Sioux reservation in South Dakota - conflicts between AIM militants and older tribal leaders led AIM to take over the village of Wounded Knee.
Failed to achieve their specific goals – end of relocation and termination policies; greater tribal sovereignty and control over community services; enhanced health, education, and other services; and protection of Indian religious practices.
Latino Struggles for Justice
Mexican, Puerto Rican, Caribbean, and other Latin American: Latinos, or Hispanic Americans - fastest-growing minority group in 1960s - organizing dated back to 1929 but, in the 1960s, young Mexican Americans, such as African Americans and Native Americans, increasingly rejected traditional polices in favor of direct action.

18. Student Rebellion, the New Left, and the Counterculture
Chicano protest drew national attention to California - Cesar Chavez and Dolores Huerta organized movement to improve wretched conditions of migrant agricultural workers.
United Farm Workers (UFW) founded in 1962 – labor union was the key to progress.
UFW strikes gained widespread support, - national boycott of California grapes - wage increase for the workers in 1970.
Chicanos mobilized to end discrimination in employment and education, gain political power, and combat police brutality.
With blacks and Native Americans, Chicanos continued to be overrepresented among the poor but gradually won more political offices, more effective enforcement of antidiscrimination legislation, and greater respect for their culture.
Student Rebellion, the New Left, and the Counterculture
Materially and legally more secure than their African American, Indian, and Latino counterparts, white youth joined in supporting black freedom struggle, launching student protests, the antiwar movement, new feminist and environmental movements.

19. Student movements in Mexico, Germany, Turkey, Czechoslovakia, Japan, and other nations across the globe.
Central organization of white student protest - Students for a Democratic Society (SDS) - formed in 1960 from remnant of an older socialist oriented student organization.
First large-scale protest at University of California, Berkeley, in 1964 – in response to university officials banning student organizations recruiting support for various causes.
Hundreds of student rallies and building occupations on campuses across the country - opposition to Vietnam War, demanded and won several college-related reforms such as a larger voice in campus decision making.
Student rebels – from “baby boom” generation, middle class luxury - attacking the system that made their rebellion possible.
Overlapping New Left and student movements was counterculture - drew on the ideas of the Beats of the 1950s.
Cultural radicals - “hippies,” rejected mainstream values, such as work ethic, materialism, rationality, order, and sexual control.

20. Gay Men and Lesbians Organize
Rock and folk music – in the 1960s carried insurgent political and social messages, defined both the counterculture and the political left.
Hippies faded away in the 1970s, but many elements of the counterculture— from rock music to jeans and long hair— filtered into the mainstream.
Gay Men and Lesbians Organize
More permissive sexual norms – no tolerance of homosexuality - many gay men and lesbians kept their sexuality hidden.
1950s - beginning of gay and lesbian organization - in 1965, a picket line outside the White House with signs calling discrimination against homosexuals “as immoral as discrimination against Negroes and Jews.”
A routine police raid at The Stonewall Inn, a Greenwich Village gay bar in 1969 sparked resistance - ignited a larger movement.
After Stonewall - National Gay and Lesbian Task Force founded in 1973 – for sustained professional and national attention to gay issues.

21. A New Movement to Save the Environment
The gay rights movement struggled longer and harder - decades to improve conditions for most homosexuals - mid-1970s gay men and lesbians had established a movement through which to claim equal rights and express pride in their sexual identities.
A New Movement to Save the Environment
Environmentalism contributed to redefinition of liberalism in 1960s.
Environmentalists dramatically broadened agenda of conservationists - ravaging effects of industrial development on human life and health.
In 1962, biologist Rachel Carson drew national attention to environmental concerns - Silent Spring - harmful effects of toxic chemicals, particularly the pesticide DDT.
Federal government in the 1960s, created the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) and in 1970s passed the Occupational Safety and Health Act (OSHA) and the Clean Air Act.
In late 1970s - antigovernment sentiment rose and economy slumped - trump in environmental concerns - Americans came to recognize humans had developed power to destroy life on earth. 21

22. The New Wave of Feminism
A Multifaceted Movement Emerges
Beginning in 1940s demographic changes laid preconditions for a resurgence of feminism.
Efforts of small bands of women’s rights activists in the1940s and 1950s.
Kennedy’s President’s Commission on the Status of Women (PCSW) in 1961 – highlighted the age-old custom of paying women less than men for the same work.
Black freedom struggle gave immense boost to rise of a new women’s movement - a moral climate sensitive to injustice and providing precedents and strategies that feminists followed.
In 1966, Betty Friedan and others founded National Organization for Women (NOW), a “civil rights organization for women”; simultaneously, a more radical feminism grew among civil rights and New Left activists. 22

23. Women’s liberation movement gained public attention with picketing of the Miss America beauty pageant in protest of being forced “to compete for male approval [and] enslaved by ludicrous ‘beauty’ standards.”
Radical feminists different from those in NOW - emphasized ending women’s subordination in the family and other personal relationships - NOW focused on equal treatment for women in the public sphere.
NOW - integrate women into existing institutions, while radical groups insisted that women would never achieve justice until economic, political, and social institutions totally transformed.
New feminism’s leadership and constituency were predominantly white and middle class; black feminists, American Indian feminists, Mexican American feminists and Asian American feminists formed and worked through their own feminist groups.
Support for feminism extremely multifaceted, but common threads underlay the great diversity of organizations, issues, and activities.

24. Feminist Gains Spark a Countermovement
Feminism effect than cause of women’s rising employment lifted aspirations and lowered barriers to male jobs and offices.
During the 1970s, feminist activism produced the most sweeping changes in laws and policies affecting women since they had won the right to vote in 1920, but the Equal Rights Amendment (ERA) fostered a strong countermovement led by Phyllis Schlafly and fell short of ratification by three states.
Feminists also pressured state legislatures to end restrictions on abortion; Roe v. Wade in 1973 spurred even more opposition than the ERA.
Notwithstanding resistance, feminists won many gains, including the passage of Title IX of the Education Amendments Act of 1972, which banned sex discrimination in all aspects of education.
At the state and local levels, radical feminists won passage of laws forcing police departments and the legal system to treat rape victims more justly and humanely.

25. Liberal Reform in the Nixon Administration
Extending the Welfare State and Regulating the Economy
Liberal policies of Nixon administration reflected number of factors - Democrats’ control of Congress, Nixon’s desire to preserve support from moderates in his party, and increase Republican ranks by attracting some traditional Democrats.
Government assistance programs - Pell grants for low-income students to attend college, subsidies for low-income housing, food stamp programs, and Social Security benefits.
Economic crises and energy shortages induced him to increase the federal government’s power in the marketplace.
Fall 1973 – U. S. faced first energy crisis when Arab nations, furious at the nation’s support of Israel during the Yom Kippur War, cut off oil shipments to the United States.
Temporary emergency measures allocating petroleum, 55 mile-per-hour speed limit to save gasoline. 25

26. Responding to Demands for Social Justice
Soaring energy prices worsened economic problems, including high rates of inflation and unemployment.
Short term improvement - Nixon won easy reelection in 1972, but by 1974, nation faced severe economic crisis since the 1930s.
Nixon expanded government’s regulatory role with a host of environmental protection measures.
Responding to Demands for Social Justice
1968 campaign exploited black protest and new civil rights policies to woo white Southerners and northern workers from Democratic Party.
Nixon reluctant to use federal power to integrate southern schools - Supreme Court overruled delays to court-ordered desegregation and compelled administration to enforce the law.
Began to implement affirmative action among federal contractors and unions - more government contracts and loans to minority businesses.
Women and minority groups benefited from affirmative action and the strengthened Equal Employment Opportunity Commission (EEOC) - attacked sex discrimination.
President Nixon gave more public support for justice for Native Americans than for any other protest group.

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