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The legacy and failures of the US’ ‘liberal hour’ in the 1960s

Reading The Liberal Hour by G. Calvin Mackenzie and Robert Weisbrot, two professors at Colby College, is a bit like standing backstage at the opera and being told that the real action is taking place among the electricians, dressers and stagehands. Too many historians who write about the 1960s, the authors contend, have focused on the decade’s very visible rebellions and disruptions — all that sex, all those drugs, all that rock ‘n’ roll.

What is often ignored, they say, is the hard work of little-known politicians and bureaucrats who were methodically creating a 1960s revolution from within.

Bob Dylan sang:

Come senators, congressmen

Please heed the call

Don’t stand in the doorway

Don’t block up the hall

But Dylan was wrong, Mackenzie and Weisbrot write. Senators and congressmen weren’t blocking the hall, they were permanently transforming the country with a tsunami of social and economic legislation.

Granted, it’s more fun to read about late activist Abbie Hoffman than late US secretary of state Edmund Muskie, but Mackenzie and Weisbrot have a persuasive case to make, and even if much of their story has been told before, their overall argument is a valuable corrective to a lot of hackneyed thinking about the significance of the 1960s.

The “liberal hour” lasted only a few years, from 1963 to 1966, from the final days of John F. Kennedy’s presidency through the first three years of Lyndon B. Johnson’s, but in that brief period of time came two Civil Rights Acts that remade politics not only in the South but also across the entire country; the unassailable edifices of Medicare and Medicaid; pioneering environmental laws; education and immigration bills; stronger protections for consumers; a host of anti-poverty programs, including food stamps and Head Start; new federal departments of transportation and housing and urban development; and other reform measures — literally hundreds. Washington hadn’t seen such legislative energy since the New Deal.

If it was poverty and want that drove the New Deal, it was prosperity that provided the momentum for the 1960s, and with it the confidence to take on any challenge.

“In the early years of the 1960s,” Mackenzie and Weisbrot write, “national optimism reached epidemic levels.”

Inspired by Kennedy’s rhetoric and Johnson’s acumen, hundreds of inside-the-Beltway role players set about to change their country and the world.

Representative of them was the faceless Wilbur Cohen, a lifelong government bureaucrat who was a master of social policy. His fingerprints are all over the Medicare and Medicaid legislation. He has been called “one of the most effective public servants of the 20th century.”

Mackenzie and Weisbrot describe him as “invaluable to the liberal leadership of his era, almost indispensable.”

Two Republicans were also “invaluable” to liberals. The first was Barry Goldwater. Without his disastrous loss in the 1964 presidential election, the Democrats would never have achieved the overwhelming congressional majorities that enabled Johnson to ram through measure after measure. The other was Everett Dirksen, the gravelly voiced, flamboyantly coiffed minority leader of the Senate. A deep-dyed conservative, Dirksen nonetheless rose above party and partisanship to assure the passage of Civil Rights legislation and other bills favored by Democrats.

Expressing a sentiment not commonly heard in Washington these days, Dirksen declared: “The Senate is a public institution; it must work; it’s a two-way street and that requires the efforts of both parties.”

With Goldwater’s defeat, it seemed that liberals would be on top for a very long time — enjoying not a liberal hour but a liberal decade, even a liberal century. Yet their moment quickly passed. The Democratic majorities receded in 1966 and in 1968 Richard Nixon and George Wallace together captured 57 percent of the presidential popular vote.

With that election, Mackenzie and Weisbrot say, the contours of the nation’s politics were set for the next 40 years: “conservatives ascendant, liberals on the defensive, the broad center of American politics — where elections are won and lost — leaning to the right.”

What happened?

It’s not a question that lends itself to easy answers, but insofar as Mackenzie and Weisbrot feel they owe their readers a quick takeaway explanation, they come up with a powerful one: liberal overreaching. During the 1960s, liberals were certain they could solve any problem at home or abroad with the right expertise, appropriate government policies, application of reason and gobs of money.

“Do we have or can we develop a knowledge of human social relations that can serve as the basis of rational, ‘engineering’ control?” the eminent sociologist Talcott Parsons asked. “The answer is unequivocally affirmative.”

Officials puffed up with a sense of their own omnipotence spoke of a “world New Deal.”

Johnson himself exclaimed: “We’re the richest country in the world, the most powerful. We can do it all.”

Such arrogance led directly into the mire and jungles of Vietnam, the prime example of liberal overreaching and the destroyer of Johnson’s dreams. Suddenly, Americans were being called upon to make sacrifices, not only of money but also of blood — sacrifices that seemed endless.

It was little better at home. The legislation of the liberal hour was supposed to end poverty, heal racial divisions. Yet all at once, the cities were going up in flames. The primary beneficiaries of liberal largesse, it seemed, were ungrateful for the assistance, while Democratic leaders looked helpless in the face of riots and rising crime. Great Society solutions weren’t working and so voters turned elsewhere.

“By 1966,” Mackenzie and Weisbrot write, “more than half of northern whites had come to believe that government was pushing too fast for integration.”

Johnson had come to grief because, to use Mackenzie and Weisbrot’s word, he had “overpromised.” Not every problem had a solution. Reasoning together didn’t work in the urban ghettos or the Mekong Delta.

“The Liberal Hour” presents itself as a book about the brilliant legislative legacy of the 1960s, but by the end it has become a book about the legacy of the Johnson administration’s failings.

When Mackenzie and Weisbrot look closely at the man, what they see is a tragic hero, with a tragic hero’s flaws. More optimistic than most of his optimistic countrymen, more confident and overbearing too, Johnson seemed incapable of understanding the virtues of skepticism and caution, the wisdom of pessimism. He never appreciated the limits of good intentions, especially his own. Like many a tragic hero, Johnson was brought down by hubris. And Democrats, Mackenzie and Weisbrot tell us, are still paying the price.
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