Rivalry and Reform: Presidents, Social Movements, and the Transformation of American Politics 2018021915, 9780226569253, 9780226569390, 9780226569420

Citation preview

Rivalry and Reform

Rivalry and Reform Presidents, Social Movements, and the Transformation of American Politics

Sidney M. Milkis and Da n i e l J . T i c h e n o r

The University of Chicago Press Chicago and London

The University of Chicago Press, Chicago 60637 The University of Chicago Press, Ltd., London © 2019 by The University of Chicago All rights reserved. No part of this book may be used or reproduced in any manner whatsoever without written permission, except in the case of brief quotations in critical articles and reviews. For more information, contact the University of Chicago Press, 1427 E. 60th St., Chicago, IL 60637. Published 2019 Printed in the United States of America 28 27 26 25 24 23 22 21 20 19   1 2 3 4 5 ISBN-­13: 978-­0-­226-­56925-­3 (cloth) ISBN-­13: 978-­0-­226-­56939-­0 (paper) ISBN-­13: 978-­0-­226-­56942-­0 (e-­book) DOI: https://doi.org/10.7208/chicago/9780226569420.001.0001 Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Names: Milkis, Sidney M., author. | Tichenor, Daniel J., 1966– author. Title: Rivalry and reform: presidents, social movements, and the transformation of American politics / Sidney M. Milkis and Daniel J. Tichenor. Description: Chicago; London: The University of Chicago Press, 2019. | Includes bibliographical references and index. Identifiers: LCCN 2018021915 | ISBN 9780226569253 (cloth: alk. paper) | ISBN 9780226569390 (pbk: alk. paper) | ISBN 9780226569420 (e-book) Subjects: LCSH: Presidents—United States. | Social movements—Political aspects—United States. | Civil rights movements—United States. | Christianity and politics—United States. | United States—Politics and government. Classification: LCC JK516 .M476 2018 | DDC 303.48/40973—dc23 LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2018021915 ♾ This paper meets the requirements of ANSI/NISO Z39.48-­1992

(Permanence of Paper).

C o n t e n ts

Acknowledgments / vii One

T wo

/ Presidents, Social Movements, and Contentious Change: Some Theoretical Foundations / 1 / The Crucible: Lincoln and the Abolitionist Movement / 41

Three

/ The Wayward Path: Presidents and Civil Rights, 1901–­1945 / 80

Four

Five

/ “Joining the Revolution”: Lyndon Johnson and the Civil Rights Movement / 135

/ Protestant Rearguard: Presidents, Christian Conservatives, and the Modern State / 183 Six

Seven

/ Building a Movement Party: Ronald Reagan and the New Christian Right / 225

/ Executive Power, Social Movements, and American Democracy in a Polarized Age / 279 Notes 319 Index 369

A c k n o w l e d g m e n ts

Our collaboration for this book springs from an indelible friendship and a brief intellectual rivalry. We have been discussing presidents, social movements, and change in American politics since Sid was an assistant professor and Dan was a graduate student at Brandeis University. Early on, we wrote two conference papers and a journal article together on topics related to the Progressive Era, and then cheered each other on as we pursued separate research projects. Years later we independently were invited by our valued colleague and friend Stephen Skowronek to write something innovative for a Yale conference, “Political Action and Change.” Unbeknownst to the other, we each seized on a subject that struck us as both fresh and highly significant: the relationship between US presidents and social movements, a fraught but potentially formative partnership we both had come to recognize as an important dimension of American political development. The two of us chuckled when we figured out that we had stolen each other’s fire. We also soon discovered that our papers clashed, advancing competing claims about how forthcoming presidents have been in forming alliances with social activists, what historical patterns characterized these alliances, and whether the confluence of top-­ down and bottom-­up politics had changed over time. This intellectual rivalry proved short-­lived. After reading our chapters in the volume that grew out of the Yale conference, Formative Acts: American Politics in the Making (University of Pennsylvania Press, 2008), which Steve and Matthew Glassman edited, colleagues and students told us what we already knew: each of our initial studies was incomplete without addressing key insights of the other. Thus began a rewarding journey that has culminated in Rivalry and Reform. After years of researching and writing together, it is hard for us to imagine a more rewarding intellectual partnership.

viii / Acknowledgments

We received extraordinary support, guidance, and encouragement from many generous people and institutions as we wrote this book. Primary sources were critical to the discoveries of this project—­research adventures made possible by the generous help of the Library of Congress; the National Archives; the Wisconsin Historical Society; the American Heritage Center at the University of Wyoming; Harvard’s Schlesinger Library; the Dwight D. Eisenhower, John F. Kennedy, Lyndon B. Johnson, Ronald Reagan, and Harry S. Truman Presidential Libraries; and the Falwell Papers at Liberty University. The fruits of our labor were deeply enriched by the opportunity to present our work at a number of highly stimulating academic and public venues: American Politics Workshops at the University of Pennsylvania, Notre Dame, Columbia University, Boston College, the University of Massachusetts Amherst, and the University of Virginia; conferences at Yale, Princeton, the Sorbonne, Northumbria University, and the University of Oregon; and lectures delivered before audiences at Ohio University, the University of Southern Denmark, Rhodes College, Williams College, and Oxford University. We also are immensely grateful to the Rothermere American Institute and Nuffield College of Oxford University, which cosponsored a workshop in June 2017, “The State and Social Movements.” This enabled us to convene a distinguished group of scholars for a stimulating and wide-­ranging two-­day discussion of the issues addressed in the book. From these colleagues, we gained inspiration and new perspective at a crucial time of the manuscript’s development. We are very fortunate to have many friends and colleagues who have generously offered us detailed comments that pushed us to keep improving the manuscript. Special thanks are owed to Richard Ellis, Marie Gottschalk, Desmond King, Thomas Langston, Cathie Martin, Bruce Miroff, and James Morone, each of whom offered constructive commentaries that were brilliant and invaluable acts of tough love. Tom’s penetrating advice on an early portion of this work was offered when he was waging a courageous fight against cancer, and we are saddened by his loss. We also benefited enormously from the anonymous readers enlisted by the University of Chicago Press. Those reviews were solicited by our gifted editor, Charles Myers, who guided us through the final, sometimes wrenching stages of Rivalry and Reform. His enthusiasm for the book was reassuring, and his insightful comments and criticisms showed us where our prose was prolix and our analysis was obscured. Although making important cuts meant we had to “break [our] egocentric little scribblers’ hearts,” as Stephen King aptly puts it, Chuck expertly led us to a better place. Throughout the pursuit of this elusive finish line, we have been offered the warm friendship and unstinting encouragement of our colleagues and students. Sid has the good fortune to work in the rich intellectual setting of

Acknowledgments / ix

the University of Virginia, where his colleagues in the Department of Politics and the Miller Center have encouraged him to pursue important questions rigorously while reaching out to other disciplines and communicating with public audiences. Particularly engaging were conversations with William Antholis, Lawrie Balfour, Brian Balogh, James Ceaser, Dale Copeland, John Echeverri-­Gent, William Hitchcock, George Klosko, Melvyn Leffler, Guian McKee, Michael Nelson, Barbara Perry, Russell Riley, Lynn Sanders, James Savage, Denise Walsh, Vesla Weaver, Stephen White, and Brantly Womack. Special thanks go out to two of Sid’s talented graduate students—­ Laura Blessing (now at Georgetown University) and Nicholas Jacobs—­who helped enormously, not only with the hard work of mining evidence and fascinating stories from the archives but also with the task of solving the puzzle of how all these detailed parts could be organized into a compelling and persuasive whole. Dan is indebted to the Carnegie Corporation for an Andrew Carnegie Fellowship and to the Philip H. Knight Chair at the University of Oregon for making this research and writing possible. He is very grateful to be part of an amazing team of coworkers at the University of Oregon’s Wayne Morse Center for Law and Politics who are dedicated to students, lifelong learning, and social justice, especially his partner in crime Margaret Hallock, and Thea Chroman, Rebecca Flynn, Sally Frisella, Ellen Herman, Val Hoyle, and Abbie Stillie. He also thanks his lucky stars for Oregon departmental colleagues who are kind, fun, and endorse his love of politics and history: Erin Beck, Gerry Berk, Anita Chari, Jane Cramer, Craig Kauffman, Joe Lowndes, Craig Parsons, Debra Thompson, Priscilla Yamin, and especially Alison Gash, a gifted coauthor and thoughtful friend. Two impressive University of Oregon PhD students were particularly helpful at stages of this project: Jeremy Strickler assisted with archival research at the Truman and Eisenhower Libraries, and Angelita Chavez collaborated on interviews with Dreamers movement leaders. Dan learned important lessons about both democratic leadership and generosity from several former Rutgers colleagues: Mike Aronoff, Dennis Bathory, Sue Carroll, Milton Heumann, Jan Kubik, Richard Lau, Susan Lawrence, Wilson Carey McWilliams, Gerry Pomper, and his favorite boss, Ruth Mandel. He also thanks his brilliant pal Janice Fine for patiently letting him finish this project before returning to their book on immigration and the labor movement. His parents, Ruth and Jay Tichenor, are unfailingly supportive and models of how to “do justice, love mercy, and walk humbly.” Although authors routinely save the last words of their acknowledgments section for family, we insist that there is nothing routine about the love and support of our families. They persevered as we took off on research

x / Acknowledgments

trips; showed genuine interest as we talked endlessly about race, religion, movements, and presidents; and gave us room to finish writing Rivalry and Reform. We lovingly dedicate this work to them: Carol, Lauren, David, and Jonathan Milkis (and the family’s remarkable beagle, Iverson); and Elaine Replogle and Natalie, Eric, and Isaiah Tichenor (and our intrepid cats, Autumn and Lucy).

One

Presidents, Social Movements, and Contentious Change: Some Theoretical Foundations Poem for a man Who plays the checkered game Of king jumps king And jumps a President That order 8802 For me and you —­Langston Hughes

For many foot soldiers of the immigrant and gay rights movements, the en­ ergy and excitement with which they greeted the new presidency of Barack Obama gave way to exasperation when the administration clarified that im­ migration reform and marriage equality were secondary to economic recov­ ery, health care policy, and international relations. It was a familiar barrier for US political insurgents; even friendly presidents regularly evade con­ tentious social movement goals in favor of other agenda items. Unfriendly ones can inflict far greater damage. As several leaders of the immigrant and gay rights movements told us as we researched this book,1 however, they re­ mained undaunted and drew inspiration from the iconic efforts of an earlier civil rights organizer to enlist presidential support for his cause: A. Philip Randolph and the March on Washington movement. As we will discuss in chapter 3, Randolph, president of the Brotherhood of Sleeping Car Porters and head of the National Negro Congress, played a leading role for more than two decades in the struggle for the rights of Afri­ can American workers. His enduring lesson to social activists was that even sympathetic presidents like Obama would be unlikely to join arms with them unless they could mobilize not only conventional political pressure,

2 / Chapter One

but also grassroots support and direct action that would “force” the White House to advance fundamental reforms against the injustices they fought to remedy. For months, the administration of Franklin Roosevelt gave vague assur­ ances that it would do something about discrimination against African Amer­ icans in a defense industry that had mobilized with the approach of World War II. Weary of inaction, Randolph organized support throughout the country for a march of one-­hundred thousand supporters on the nation’s capital. The most important objective of the “mobilization and coordination of their mass power,” Randolph’s call to arms proclaimed, was that it could “cause President Roosevelt to Issue an Executive Order Abolishing Discrimi­ nation in All Government Departments, Army, Navy, Air Corps, and National Defense Jobs.”2 Roughly a quarter century earlier, Woodrow Wilson felt com­ pelled to address similar pressure during World War I from Alice Paul and her “Silent Sentinels” of the woman’s suffrage movement, though he was deeply offended by their “unladylike” picketing of the White House.3 Dur­ ing another tumultuous world war, Roosevelt initially tried to resist Ran­ dolph’s demands. Yet when faced with a large demonstration that might prove embarrassing to the White House and risk violence in the capital, the president relented and issued Executive Order 8802, which forbade dis­ crimination in defense industries or government. In pursuance of this ac­ tion, Roosevelt established the Fair Employment Practices Committee to enforce it. Although the White House prohibition on discrimination in the “arsenal of democracy” never lived up to Randolph’s expectations, it marked a major step forward in the long struggle for African American rights and a signifi­­ cant development in the critical but fraught relationship between presidents and social movements. As we show in chapter 2, formative relationships in­­ volving America’s national leader and grassroots insurgents did not start with Franklin Roosevelt: Abraham Lincoln’s constructive and contentious alliance with abolitionists marks the crucible that foretold of such unlikely partnerships throughout the twentieth and twenty-­first centuries. But never before had a mass demonstration focused so directly on the White House; never before had a social movement forced a president to executive action to serve its cause. As Langston Hughes exulted in a poem honoring Randolph on his seventieth birthday: “[He] plays the checkered game of king jump king. And jumps a President.”4 Furthermore, the March on Washington movement’s high-­stakes checkers game with the White House revealed that the consolidation of the modern executive office during Roosevelt’s long tenure began, in effect, the process

Presidents, Social Movements, and Contentious Change  /  3

of institutionalizing the relationship between movement activists and presi­ dents. Roosevelt’s advance of the rhetorical and administrative capacities of the presidency allowed his administration to circumvent the resistance of his party and Congress to civil rights reform and to respond directly to the amplified protest of African Americans. To be sure, the Roosevelt adminis­ tration was a reluctant partner in the pursuit of racial progress; nevertheless, civil rights activists’ demand for the attention and action of the White House anticipated the more fruitful relationship between Lyndon Johnson and the advocates of racial justice during the 1960s. More broadly, the tempestuous ties between the March on Washington movement and the White House, which continued up to the 1963 demonstration during the Kennedy admin­ istration, set the stage for a more ritualized connection between presidents and social movements that none could miss during the Obama presidency. Even as he responded to some of their demands, Roosevelt bristled at the pressure civil rights activists brought to bear on him. Obama also resented relentless pressure from immigration and LGBTQ activists; at the same time, he shared memories of Randolph’s accomplishment in counseling move­ ment leaders to force him to take action that served their causes.5

Presidents, Social Movements, and American Political Development This book tells the story of how the collisions and uneasy alliances between presidents and social movements have been central to some of the most important developments in American politics and government. Few sub­ jects are more captivating to American social scientists and historians (not to mention journalists, officials, activists and even casual observers) than major political change. This may seem ironic for a US polity whose design betrays a bias toward countervailing powers and structural veto points that have in the long run regularly frustrated significant political and policy in­ novation. Yet it is precisely the long odds against bold reform and durable shifts in the political order that make them so fascinating. And two actors loom larger than most in dramatic alterations of American political life over time: presidents and social movements. As Alexander Hamilton predicted, the presidency long has attracted ambitious leaders inclined to “undertake extensive and arduous enterprises for the public benefit,” to shake up the political status quo so as to leave a distinctive mark. In turn, just as Frederick Douglass insisted that “power concedes nothing without a demand,”6 social movements are driven to upend the social, economic, and political orders in pursuit of attention and redress for their causes. Usually these disruptive

4 / Chapter One

aspirations clash, setting presidents and social movements on a collision course. Even when their political agendas dovetail, these two actors compete to control the timing and conditions of political change. During rare his­ torical moments, however, presidents and movements have forged uneasy partnerships that profoundly recast the ideals, institutions, and policies of American government. Despite their historical importance, surprisingly little focused research has been done on the contentious and sometimes creative interactions be­ tween presidents and social movements. The shelves of popular and aca­ demic bookstores and the lists of online booksellers are packed with a seem­ ingly endless supply of works on the lives and legacies of past presidents or on the nature and challenges of modern presidential leadership.7 An equally impressive mountain of books can be found on the struggles and triumphs of grassroots social movements in the United States over time, or on the meaning and importance of collective protest.8 Yet rarely do these two worlds of scholarship meet. In the discipline of political science, prevailing divisions of labor largely separate the study of the American presidency and protest movements. Sociology long has set the standard for sophisticated movement research, but typically pays little or no heed to the development of the presidency and other formal governing institutions. US historians used to devote enormous energy to chronicling presidents and conventional political history, yet in recent decades many have rejected the study of “pow­ erful men” in favor of “a new emphasis on history from the bottom up, spotlighting the role of social movements in shaping the nation’s past.”9 These intellectual norms (both past and present) have obscured a pivotal and revealing relationship in American political development. The frequent conflicts and tense collaborations between presidential administrations and social movements capture major political change that is neither top down nor bottom up, but instead reflects a crucial interplay of the two. Indeed, the epic clashes and contentious partnerships between insur­ gents and the White House represent some of the most dramatic conflicts in US history. American presidents are living symbols of the nation’s power and unity, and they loom as formidable defenders of the country’s eco­ nomic, political, and social establishment. Little wonder that social move­ ments fighting the status quo are regularly on a collision course with the White House. More than a few commanders in chief have had little tol­ erance for social movement disruptions. From Grover Cleveland sending federal troops to put down the Pullman strike in 189410 to Richard Nixon launching an all-­out (and unsuccessful) campaign to sabotage the sweeping October 15 moratorium against the Vietnam War in 1969,11 most presidents

Presidents, Social Movements, and Contentious Change  /  5

have tried to block people’s voting with their feet to undermine social order or administration policies. In turn, insurgents usually have scorned presi­ dents for failing to employ their enormous clout to address glaring social problems or for using their office to reinforce entrenched interests. To 1980s activists in the AIDS Coalition to Unleash Power (ACT UP), for instance, Ronald Reagan was a “monster” who was “irrevocably opposed to anything having to do with homosexuality” and thus undertook “no work of any urgency” to prevent the deaths of “many millions of gay men.”12 More than two decades later, when Barack Obama came to New York for a fund-­raising event in 2011, Occupy Wall Street protesters held signs that read, “Obama is a corporate puppet” and castigated him for “coming to town solely to raise money from the richest of the rich.”13 The fact that Obama took pains weeks earlier to express support for the Occupy movement, telling activists that “we are on your side,” failed to buffer him from charges of catering to the nation’s wealthiest 1 percent.14 Presidents and insurgents are hardly a match made in heaven. Yet for all of their differences, most presidents and social movements share something crucial: a gnawing desire to recreate the political order. We know this well about movements. As numerous scholars have noted, social movements at their core are sustained “collective challenges” by people or groups “engaged in a political or cultural conflict,” who employ “repertoires of contention” (petition drives, strikes, sit-­ins, marches, rallies, traffic block­ ing, pamphleteering, boycotts, etc.) in order to change “some elements of the social structure and/or reward distribution of a society.”15 For their part, as Alexander Hamilton anticipated, presidents are not always as hidebound as most insurgents (and the rest of us) presume. “The presidency is a bat­ tering ram, and the presidents who have succeeded most magnificently are those who have been best situated to use it forthrightly as such,” Stephen Skowronek famously observed. “[I]t has functioned best when it has been directed toward dislodging established elites, destroying the institutional ar­ rangements that support them, and clearing the way for something entirely new.”16 In truth, social movements and presidents are two of the most crucial catalysts for change—­“battering rams”—­in an American polity structured to make large-­scale reform difficult. When these actors pursue rival agen­ das, their clashes can be explosive. But when movements and presidents are drawn to the same causes and reform aspirations, their uneasy collaboration can be one of the most important forces of transformation in American political life. While the extensive respective literatures on the American presidency and social movements rarely intersect, the few salutary works that do address the

6 / Chapter One

relationship between these two compelling political forces emphasize the inherent conflicts between a centralizing institution tasked with conserving the constitutional order, and grassroots associations dedicated to structural change.17 Yet there is a hint of caricature here, with presidents cast as regu­ larly indifferent, resistant, or openly repressive toward insurgent causes, and social movements deemed too hamstrung by radical visions or noninstitu­ tionalized tactics to engage effectively in the art of political compromise. Lost amid the narrative of inherent conflict are the key moments in Ameri­ can political development when presidents and social movements have worked together in advancing major legal, policy, and political innovation. In the chapters that follow, we focus on the tense alignments and politi­ cal reconstructions authored by Lincoln and the abolition movement, Lyn­ don Johnson and the civil rights movement, and Reagan and the Christian Right. Before examining these transformative collaborations, however, we aim to place them in a broader analytical context by exploring the nature of executive-­movement interactions in United States over time. In particular, our goal in this introduction is to map out both durable patterns of interac­ tion based on defining features of the presidency and social movements, and historical dynamics of the relationship as presidential and movement politics have developed longitudinally in the United States. We begin by taking stock of the distinct presidential and movement world­ views, resources, and strategies, as well as the natural conflicts and rivalries between these restless political actors. We also explore the uneasy yet essential bond that sometimes has joined presidents and social movements, consider­ ing key incentives and openings for collaboration. As a means of concep­ tualizing a broad variety of interactions between presidents and insurgents, we develop an analytical framework of executive responses to movements with varying political ideals, methods, resources, and goals. This discussion also will highlight the dynamism of presidential-­movement interactions with an eye toward certain “long” social movements over multiple generations that move from the fringes to the center of American politics over time.18 We next move from this theoretical foundation to the historical development of presidential-­movement relations. This discussion will take stock of traditional interactions during the nineteenth century, and then explore innovations in the presidency and social movements from the Progressive Era onward that reshaped relational dynamics. These innovations made modern presidents a more prominent and regular target of insurgents and, in turn, gave the White House fresh incentives to stay on top of potent social movements, to try to control them, and sometimes to partner with them. Along the way, the worlds

Presidents, Social Movements, and Contentious Change  /  7

of these often distant actors increasingly overlapped as the size and scope of presidential power and particular movements grew. Understanding the durable patterns and historical developments of presidential-­movement interactions is a useful foundation for grasping the uneasy yet pivotal bonds that joined abolitionists to Lincoln’s “new birth of freedom,” the civil rights movement to Johnson’s Great Society, and the Christian Right to the Reagan Revolution. These presidents and social move­ ments coauthored not only profound political transformation, but also forged a volatile marriage of presidential and movement politics that has fueled unprecedented forms of political polarization and executive aggran­ dizement since the 1960s.

Defining Features of Presidential-­Movement Politics Before we delve into the long-­term patterns of rivalry and collaboration be­ tween US presidents and social movements, let us begin by taking inventory of their respective orientations and ideals, as well as the reasons why each protagonist may be drawn to or repelled by the other. Bear in mind as we do so, that individual presidents and their administrations of course may vary dramatically and social movements even more so. Yet this starting point provides useful groundwork for understanding their core perspectives, their distinct sources of potential power, and the roots of their frequent conflicts and uneasy alliances. US Social Movements: Core Perspectives and Power Resources American social movements are quite diverse in terms of their ideolo­ gies, resources, tactics, and ultimate goals. Consider John Wilson’s classic definition of social movements as “conscious, collective, organized attempts to bring about or resist large-­scale change in the social order by noninsti­ tutionalized means.”19Among the core qualities of movements that this definition captures, it crucially highlights how organized collective insur­ gency may champion or resist major social, economic, or political change. Two movements at the heart of this book—­the civil rights movement and the Christian Right—­advanced decidedly different conceptions of national identity, human freedom, and moral regeneration. Civil rights insurgents called for radical social change that demanded government action on be­ half of racial justice, social welfare, and greater democratic inclusion. By contrast, Christian Right activists sought to guard the nation from countless

8 / Chapter One

enemies—­socialists, communists, homosexuals, feminists, secularists, por­ nographers, drug dealers, and other threats to “family values”—­by mobiliz­ ing government on behalf of traditional family values at home and military strength abroad. Despite the ideological chasm between them, these two movements, like other progressive and conservative insurgencies, offered searing critiques of American society that energized supporters. One of the most important potential resources of movements is the power to deploy ideas, even from the margins of the US mainstream, that resonate with key constituencies and inspire collective challenges to the political status quo. More than half a century ago, William Kornhauser noted that mass movements usually (but not always) “mobilize people who are alienated from the going system, who do not believe in the legitimacy of the established order, and who therefore are ready to engage in efforts to destroy it.”20 As we shall see in chapter 2, this was certainly true of many abolitionists before and during the Civil War, inspired by militants like John Brown and William Lloyd Garrison who openly scorned the Constitu­ tion and placed antislavery aspirations before preservation of the Union. The power of penetrating reform ideas has fueled crusades and movements on both the American political left and right—­from Martin Luther King’s dream of a “beloved community” to Jerry Falwell’s jeremiad to bring the country “back to basics, back to biblical morality, back to patriotism.”21 In their pursuit of progressive or conservative reform, most social move­ ments try to shape national debate and opinion by dramatizing their collec­ tive claims through what Charles Tilly described as public representations of “worthiness, unity, numbers, and commitment.”22 This brings us to the diverse political resources, strategies, and tactics that movements employ to achieve their ends. Some scholars, like John Wilson above, suggest that disruptive outsider tactics—­“noninstitutionalized means”—­are crucial el­ emental features of social movements.23 Yet others offer a more capacious view. Sidney Tarrow, for example, argued that not all movements are radi­ cal, reject mainstream or institutionalized forms of political contention, or favor wholesale social change. “Rather than seeing social movements as expressions of  extremism, violence, and deprivation,” he notes, “they are bet­ ter defined as collective challenges, based on common purposes and social solidarities, in sustained interaction with elites, opponents, and authori­ ties.”24 In short, whereas some social movement leaders and organizations champion disruptive protest and militancy, others favor relatively conven­ tional political methods. The “noninstitutional” methods employed by social movements reflect a range of disruptive resources and tactics designed to challenge or exert

Presidents, Social Movements, and Contentious Change  /  9

pressure on government officials and powerful opponents. For the aboli­ tionists discussed in chapter 2, these tactics included petitions, antislavery mailings and newspapers, speech tours, marches, an “underground railroad” to liberate slaves, and at its most militant, Brown’s raid at Harpers Ferry to initiate an armed slave revolt in 1859. Chapters 3 and 4 capture a civil rights movement engaged in massive nonviolent confrontation through boycotts, sit-­downs at segregated lunch counters, freedom rides, and mass marches. As we shall see in chapters 5 and 6, the Christian Right staged large public demonstrations such as rallies and marches, but generally steered clear of disruptive, unconventional tactics. This reminds us that a full inventory of movement tactics also includes conventional political resources and meth­ ods for pressing demands. Each of the movements examined at length in this book engaged in voter registration and mobilization, various forms of party building or influence, political advertising, litigation, and legislative lobbying, as well as nurturing alliances with public officials at the centers of power. Movements on Presidential Power: Forces of Aversion and Attraction To most social movements, 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue serves as a potent sym­ bol of the very political establishment that they seek to upend. Presidents routinely elicit hostility from movement leaders and activists who associate the Oval Office with three significant threats to their causes: fierce repres­ sion, untenable compromise, or official indifference. Let us consider each in turn. One of the chief reasons that social movements scorn occupants of the Oval Office is because they loom as menacing ideological enemies who can and will repress movements they consider nettlesome. From the earli­ est days of the American republic, presidents have wielded executive power to crush insurgencies deemed as radical and threatening. George Washing­ ton personally led thirteen thousand troops to quash a whiskey rebellion of tax resisters in western Pennsylvania and Virginia, an insurgency led by war veterans who believed they were fighting for principles of the American Revolution, particularly the ideal of “no taxation without representation.”25 More than a century later, the Palmer Raids during Woodrow Wilson’s ad­ ministration targeted socialist labor leaders, anarchists, and other politi­ cal radicals for mass arrests and deportations.26 Presidents throughout the twentieth century unleashed J. Edgar Hoover’s FBI to surveil, infiltrate, and undermine civil rights organizations.27 Executive repression can also take rhetorical forms. Not long into office, Donald Trump’s speeches took “aim

10 / Chapter One

at Black Lives Matter” and his White House website “put Black Lives Mat­ ter on notice” by denouncing an “anti-­police atmosphere” and adding that “our job is not to make life more comfortable for the rioter, the looter, or the violent disrupter.”28 His administration also left little doubt that he en­ dorsed backing up these words with strong-­arm tactics, rolling back limits on the militarization of local police to give them access to armored vehicles, grenade launchers, high-­caliber weapons, and other equipment to put down unrest.29 Presidents have significant capacities at their disposal to openly or surreptitiously thwart movement causes and activities. Even when presidents share key ideals and goals with social movements or are willing to grant them important concessions, many insurgents re­ main hostile to the White House. As radical activists, many simply cannot stomach finding common cause with an elected leader who sits atop what they perceive as a corrupt US political establishment. More fundamentally, however, occupants of the White House face political constraints that make them far more eager to maintain or expand mainstream support than their insurgent counterparts. Indeed, movement leaders and activists typically are repelled by what they see as untenable political compromises that presidents either demand or accept. As we shall see in chapter 4, courageous mem­bers of the Mississippi Freedom Democratic Party saw only moral bankruptcy in Lyndon Johnson’s insistence that they accept a few token seats at the Demo­ cratic National Convention in the name of electoral expediency. Less than two decades later, as discussed in chapter 6, key Christian Right activists expressed outrage that the Reagan administration failed to expend political capital on cultural issues that they considered important but that lacked majority public support. Ultimately many insurgents distrust presidents due to their propensity to negotiate core principles and to serve as forces of political moderation. A final major reason why movements often despise the White House is because it so often ignores their grievances and demands. “The whole world is watching!” chanted thousands of antiwar protesters as news cam­ eras broad­cast images of Chicago police beating them with nightsticks out­ side the Democratic National Convention in August 1968.30 But what if no one is watching? For insurgents who yearn to draw attention to their ideas and reform goals, obscurity and neglect can be more lethal than direct re­ pression. Even assaults on movements have the potential to mobilize old and new defenders and to expand their resources, as environmental and abortion rights groups discovered during the Reagan, Bush, and now Trump years.31 Yet for most movements the key question is not how presidents respond to their challenges, but whether they respond at all. Presidential

Presidents, Social Movements, and Contentious Change  /  11

indifference is par for the course for the vast majority of insurgents. Most may simply lack the political traction to elicit a White House response. Gen­ erations of women suffragists, for instance, were largely ignored by the na­ tion’s top elected leader.32 Yet presidents also have strong incentives to divert attention away from reform causes that pose political dilemmas, seeking to reduce the salience of issues that present risks or vulnerabilities. Franklin Roosevelt candidly told the NAACP’s Walter White in 1934 that he would not support federal legislation that imposed penalties on participants in lynch mobs because doing so would incur the wrath of southern Demo­ cratic senators and voters.33 The significance of presidential indifference for movements underscores three dimensions of political power. Repression and compromise speak to the first “face” of power, associated with Robert Dahl’s pluralist formulation, which roots power in the ability to prevail in political struggles over govern­ ing choices.34 Official indifference reflects what Peter Bachrach and Morton Baratz described as a second “restrictive face of power,” in which influence is used to exclude certain issues and problems from the public agenda and to thereby limit the scope of decision-­making.35 It also finds expression in a third dimension of power characterized by John Gaventa as the capacity of victors in the first two dimensions to foster over time “an unconscious pat­ tern of withdrawal” among those unable to control the agenda or win politi­ cal contests.36 Put another way, movements curse the White House not only for ignoring problems that energize them, but also for nurturing a sense of apathy or powerlessness among constituencies whom they hope to uplift. Ironically, it is also precisely the role of American presidents as the polity’s chief agenda setters that draws many movements inexorably toward them. As much as insurgents loathe being ignored by the White House, they also crave presidential attention when it shines a spotlight on the problems they seek to dramatize and helps win over new followers, patrons, and public backing. Sometimes movement leaders and followers, like many conservative evan­ gelical Christians discussed in chapter 6, look to the White House mostly for genuine political recognition. Yet the rhetorical presidency, especially when deployed by gifted communicators and artful speechwriters, can elevate the most forceful ideas of movements and give them political legitimacy. Indeed, at their most stirring during critical moments, presidential words like Lin­ coln’s Gettysburg Address have the potential to redefine the national iden­ tity and justify major political transformation.37 Less majestically, executive power is magnetic to most insurgents not because they admire presidential leadership but because they hope to harness some of its energy to advance their political and policy aspirations. The abolitionist Frederick Douglass,

12 / Chapter One

woman suffragist Alice Paul, labor firebrand John L. Lewis, and transcendent civil rights leader Martin Luther King sought to influence the White House not because they were enamored with particular occupants of the Oval Office but because they saw them as the most powerful actors in the American po­ litical system.38 Or, to be more precise, their movements saw the presidency as possibly the most promising catalyst for nonincremental change within a governmental structure that regularly bedevils significant reform. The American Presidency: Core Perspectives and Power Resources Two competing views of the US presidency’s relationship to stability and change in American politics capture key features of the orientation and power resources of the institution. First, studies old and new portray the presidency as a potent agent of change in a labyrinthine US political system that regularly frustrates innovation. “In presidential government, Amer­icans have established one of the most powerful institutions in the free world,” James MacGregor Burns noted in classic fashion. “They have fashioned, sometimes unwittingly, a weapon that has served them well in the long struggle for freedom and equality at home.”39 It is a refrain that we can trace back to Hamilton’s famous depiction of executive power in the Federalist Papers as the critical source of energy in constitutional government, derived from the office’s unitary character that bestowed many virtues on the presi­ dency: “decision, activity, secrecy, and dispatch . . . vigor and expedition.”40 In contrast to James Madison, Hamilton believed that the constitutional blueprints permitted presidents to do much more than fend off foreign and domestic threats; it empowered them to serve as a force for advancing the country’s economic, social, and political strength. In truth, the Framers were exceptionally vague about the nature and limits of executive power.41 As an influential Treasury secretary, Hamilton gave eloquent expression to the views of his longtime mentor, George Washington, that the ambigui­ ties of Article II provided room for the country’s first president to act force­ fully without explicit legal authorization when needed.42 It is a model of executive power that has been fully institutionalized by the modern presi­ dency. Yet Stephen Skowronek reminds us that older, recurrent patterns of presidential authority help make the American executive a “blunt disruptive force” whose “deep-­seated impulse to reorder things routinely jolts order and routine elsewhere.” Skowronek avoids the normative claims of a heroic presidency described by Burns and others; instead, he focuses on the presi­ dency as an institution that “routinely disrupts established power arrange­ ments and continually opens new avenues of political activity for others.”43

Presidents, Social Movements, and Contentious Change  /  13

Rejecting conceptions of the presidency as an agent of reform, a second leading view of the office posits that it is naturally inclined to oppose insur­ gency and contentious change. Article II of the Constitution, for example, stipulates that one of the chief duties of the presidency is to “take care that the laws be faithfully executed.” The take care clause and other elemental features of the presidency reinforce an executive obligation to guard law and order and to promote consensus over conflict. According to scholars such as Russell Riley and Thomas Langston, executive caution and resis­ tance on many of the controversial questions raised by movements reflect the presidency’s role as a “nation-­maintaining institution” whose occupants “portray themselves . . . as the embodiment of the whole nation.”44 From this perspective, social movements that seek to disrupt existing social, eco­ nomic, or political arrangements clash with executive imperatives to secure “domestic tranquility” and national unity. Moreover, presidential responses to social movements are closely tied to their electoral implications; when a movement’s activists and supporters are not a crucial portion of a presi­ dent’s real or potential voter base, then incentives to dismiss or repress these insurgents are strong. In his historical study of the presidency and race, Kenneth O’Reilly argues that the imperatives of elections and majoritarian politics in the United States made nearly all incumbents reactionary adver­ saries of civil rights reform. “At root, it is nothing more than a belief that presidential elections can be won only by following the doctrines of white over black,” he notes. “The pecking order has stayed that way through the death of slavery and Jim Crow, and notwithstanding Lincoln and Johnson, our presidents have in nearly every other case made it their job to keep that order.”45 Elizabeth Sanders adds that the modern executive’s responsibilities for economic management, global diplomacy, and warfare has reinforced an “institutional logic” pushing the presidency “in a conservative direction” when responding to social movements.46 Overall, whereas most insurgents have strong incentives to stir and exploit social disorder and government vulnerability, scholars like Riley conclude that the presidency “is fundamen­ tally a change-­resistant institution” predisposed to favor national calm, to meet national crises with a firm hand, and to suppress various forms of social agitation.47 Presidents on Movement Power: Forces of Aversion and Attraction Presidents have many reasons to maintain a strained, if not openly hostile, relationship toward insurgents. Indeed, the core qualities of social move­ ments give most presidents and their advisers plenty to worry about. To

14 / Chapter One

begin with, the issues that mobilize insurgents usually polarize society and have the potential to upend White House efforts to solidify or expand a president’s electoral base. In the process, these insurgent efforts to com­ mand the political spotlight challenge the power of presidential spectacles and the clout of the “bully pulpit.”48 In their pursuit of or opposition to large-­ scale change, movements also pose potential hurdles for executive agenda setting, threatening to interrupt, if not ruin, the best-­laid White House plans. Additionally, their “noninstitutional” methods take presidents out of their political comfort zone. As Bruce Miroff so aptly described a few decades ago, from “the standpoint of presidential politics, what is distinctive—­and troublesome—­about social movements is their preference for mass mobi­ lization over elite negotiations, their propensity to confront issues directly rather than exerting pressure through Washington lobbying, and their desire for public attention and controversy rather than quiet coalition-­building.”49 More fundamentally, movements collide with presidents most dramatically when their extra-­institutional methods disturb the social, economic, and political order. These defining features reinforce an earlier point: both presidents and social movements have the potential to be major vehicles of change in American politics, compelled to persistently challenge and remake the ex­ isting political order. Yet herein lurk several crucial challenges for the na­ tion’s chief executives. One of the most obvious is the fact that large-­scale reforms pursued by social movements may conflict with or distract from those envisioned by the White House. Presidents generally want to control the national public agenda, and highly effective social movements can un­ dermine that role. Equally telling, however, are the profound struggles that emerge even when a movement and an administration agree on the same broad objectives. As we have discussed, differences regularly emerge over the means of obtaining shared objectives, with presidential calls for moderation and patience routinely scorned by movement activists as compromising cherished ideals in the name of political expediency. At the heart of these conflicts are widely divergent conceptions of how far reform should reach. Even the most ambitious and successful reformers in the White House—­ including so-­called presidential “greats”—­were “conservative revolutionar­ ies” who reconciled dramatic regime change with constitutional traditions and political realities.50 Whereas even the most reform-­minded presidents take pains to balance the demands of innovation and conservation, Mary Fainsod Katzenstein and Carol McClurg Mueller remind us that often what the insurgent agenda

Presidents, Social Movements, and Contentious Change  /  15

“entails is nothing less than the reformulation of public life, the educa­ tional sphere, the workplace, and the home—­that is, a total transformation of society.”51 Accordingly, even those presidents who share the goals of a particular movement will be vilified by rank-­and-­file activists as too timid and uncommitted. For administration officials, these insurgents are at best politically naïve and at worst dangerously militant. In truth, presidents have strong incentives to pay little or no attention to most social movements with whom they share little ideological affinity and which typically command limited resources and influence. The political risks of engaging social move­ ments is nearly always far greater than the potential rewards for presidents. Avoidance is a safe strategy in most cases. For movements, as we have dis­ cussed, the political calculations are usually quite different, as they look to the White House to draw attention to their issues and to spur government action. In this way, social movements usually need presidents more than presidents need movements. Presidents are not, however, invulnerable to movement pressure. To be sure, they are the commanders in chief of a US military, national-­security, and law-­enforcement establishment that has demonstrated the capacity to crush domestic insurgencies since Washington melodramatically donned his Revolutionary uniform and led troops to put down the fledgling whis­ key tax rebellion in western Pennsylvania. Movements ultimately may have more reason to fear presidents than vice versa. Still, insurgents are far from powerless. Consider Jimmy Carter and George H. W. Bush, two chief execu­ tives of rival parties with distinct political interests and contrasting goals in domestic and foreign policy. Despite their differences, both Carter and Bush won office with the help of white evangelical voters. Yet both also considered the strident Christian Right leaders and their cultural agenda on issues like abortion, homosexuality, and school prayer to be irritating. In the end, each chose to keep conservative evangelical activists mostly at arm’s length during their administrations. Leaders of the Christian Right responded by mobilizing legions of rank-­and-­file supporters in primary and general election campaigns, playing a pivotal role in rendering Carter and Bush one-­term presidents. The ability of some movements to exert electoral pressure is clearly only one source of insurgent power. Others have compelled reluctant, even op­ posing, presidents to respond to their demands by effectively deploying protest strategies that reach beyond conventional or institutionalized po­ litical methods. Alice Paul and other militant women suffragists initially elicited little more than disdain from Wilson for their “unladylike” tactics

16 / Chapter One

when they picketed the White House during the First World War.52 Yet their challenge to wartime unity, and particularly their insistence that any na­ tion that disenfranchised more than half of its adult population could not claim to be on a crusade to “make the world safe for democracy,” ignited violent reactions from onlookers and eventually arrests. Pressure on the White House mounted when the public learned that imprisoned suffrag­ ists were subjected to brutal treatment by their jailors amid courageous hunger strikes.53 Power for Paul and other picketers derived from their abil­ ity to upset the status quo, draw attention to their cause, and agitate pub­ lic opinion. During the New Deal era, Roosevelt faced a similar challenge from a burgeoning industrial labor movement. Roosevelt understood that the labor movement was a crucial element of his electoral and governing coalition, yet his own Labor secretary Frances Perkins noted that he failed to grasp that unions gave industrial workers “power and status to deal with their employers on equal terms.”54 Labor leaders like John L. Lewis were well aware of Roosevelt’s efforts to distance himself from the political goals of the industrial workers movement, and they responded with increased militancy. Strikes, sit-­downs, and other labor disputes more than doubled between 1932 and 1935, and were punctuated by bloody clashes between workers and company police. The Roosevelt administration, rattled by the labor agitation that raged across the country in the spring and summer of 1935, felt compelled to support the Wagner Act—­hailed as labor’s “Magna Carta”—­which gave industrial workers newly enforced rights to form unions and collectively bargain.55 Finally, it was the enormously disruptive capacity and moral resonance of the civil rights movement’s mass nonviolent campaigns of the 1950s and 1960s that compelled Dwight Eisenhower to uphold the Supreme Court’s Brown decision, even as he refused to express support for desegregation, and John Kennedy, who was determined to keep his distance from racial conflict, to advocate sweeping reform. The civil rights movement, especially, testified dramatically to the potential power of social movements to exert significant force that even recalcitrant presidents cannot disregard.

Durable Patterns of Rivalry and Collaboration Based on the analysis so far, there is considerable reason for us to expect frequent acrimony and struggle between social movements and presidents. Elemental features of social movements—­including their propensity to raise controversial issues, to compete with policy-­makers in terms of agenda

Presidents, Social Movements, and Contentious Change  /  17

setting and public spectacle, and to employ extra-­institutional methods of mass mobilization and disruption that upset the status quo—­seem to pre­ ordain constant warfare with the White House. In turn, it also seems to matter little whether one is drawn more to transformational or reaction­ ary conceptions of the presidency: both views place administrations on a collision course with insurgents. It is hardly surprising that models of the reactionary or moderating executive underscore constitutional, electoral, economic, and geopolitical incentives for presidents to derail formidable social movements. Even portraits of the presidency as a crucial source of reform in American politics emphasize rivalry between insurgents and the White House over the means and ends of large-­scale change. Given these defining qualities of social movements and the American presidency, we should expect recurrent tensions and, at times, harsh struggles to charac­ terize their relationship. Indeed, as noted above, profound conflict and pitched battles are dominant realities of presidential-­movement interac­ tions over the course of US history—­and a key pattern we highlight in sub­ sequent chapters. But this is only part of the story. An adequate theoretical and historical treatment of the relationship between presidents and social movements should take stock of not only conflict but also collaboration between these actors. The respective literatures on executive power and insurgency rarely intersect, and as noted, scholars who have probed the subject have tended to emphasize the inherent divide between presidents and social activists. However, these agents of change in American political life have at times forged an uneasy alliance to champion major legal, policy, and political in­ novation. Some presidents have found themselves at the center of national crises where conserving the Constitution requires a redefinition of the social contract—­disruptive constitutional politics that includes an uneasy partner­ ship with movement leaders and activists. Social movements at times seek to secure the rights of the dispossessed and to advance moral causes not merely by opposing the existing order of things but through a principled commitment to reconstituting it with the help of powerful allies in govern­ ment. Despite their elemental differences, under certain conditions presi­ dents and social movements sometimes have needed each other to realize shared aspirations to transform the political order. To better understand tense yet formative collaborations between move­ ments and administrations, it is important to reiterate how diverse social movements can be in terms of  their identities, resources, tactics, and ultimate goals. Not all movements are radical, reject mainstream or institutionalized

18 / Chapter One

forms of political contention, or favor wholesale social change. Indeed, some of the most fervent internal struggles for movements have revolved around political resources, strategies, and tactics. Interestingly, one also can discern important divisions in how social movement scholars explain how activists achieve “success.” For example, Frances Fox Piven and Richard Cloward in their classic work on the sub­ ject contend that poor people’s movements are most successful when they pose major disruptive threats and that more conventional organizational efforts are doomed to fail.56 By contrast, Ann-­Marie Szymanski’s impressive study of temperance campaigns during the nineteenth and twentieth cen­ turies finds that moderate mobilization strategies were far more successful than radical activism.57 Still other scholars, such as Sidney Tarrow, stress the efficacy of movements that blend “institutional and noninstitutional politics.”58 In a similar vein, Herbert Haines has analyzed the positive and negative effects of radical flanks on mainstream movement efforts.59 This study generally reinforces the conclusions of scholars like Haines and Tarrow; in fact, we find that pinning down precisely the nature of move­ ment “success” can be a chimera. Scholars like Piven and Cloward as well as Szymanski straightforwardly point to major constitutional, legal, and policy breakthroughs as the ultimate measures of success. Abolitionists suc­ ceeded when slavery was finally abolished; nativists carried the day when they secured Chinese exclusion and racist national-­origins quotas; women suffragists won when the Nineteenth Amendment was ratified; and civil rights reformers triumphed with the passage of the Civil Rights and Voting Rights Acts. Yet for a surprising number of Christian Right activists in the early 1980s, success came with full-­throated recognition by President Rea­ gan for people who had considered themselves politically marginalized and isolated for generations. In our view, one can gain stronger analytical purchase on varied presidential-­insurgent interactions—­including durable patterns of con­­ flict and collaboration—­by focusing on strategic and resource distinctions among movements. As we have seen, many definitions of social movements concentrate on their “noninstitutional” methods in which activists exert pres­ sure on government officials or powerful opponents through disruptive, un­ conventional means, such as large public demonstrations, marches, street theater, vigils, boycotts, strikes, destruction of property, or planned violence. However, we also have argued that a more complete inventory of movement resources and tactics should include conventional political methods of pressing demands through voter mobilization, petitions, campaign finance, lobbying, political advertising, and litigation, as well as nurturing alliances

Presidents, Social Movements, and Contentious Change  /  19 Table 1.  Movement challenges and presidential responses: linking conventional and disruptive capacities

Significant conventional political leverage

Insignificant conventional political leverage

Significant tactical challenge to social, economic, or political order

Insignificant tactical challenge to social, economic, or political order

Formative movements: forceful presidential response (uneasy collaboration)

Institutionalized movements: co-­optative presidential response (recognition, access, and collaboration)

• Abolitionist movement, 1860s • Woman’s suffrage move­ ment, 1910s • Labor movement, 1930s • Civil rights movement, 1950s/1960s • LGBTQ rights, 1987–­ • Immigrant rights and Dreamers, 2006–­

• Conservation movement, 1880s–­1908 • Labor movement, 1917–­28, 1941–­80 • Environmental movement, late 1970s–­ • New Christian Right, 1980s–­ • Tea Party, 2009–­

Militant movements: forceful presidential response (surveillance and repression)

Marginal movements: cursory presidential response (indifference or tepid reaction)

• Anarchists and Industrial Workers of the World, 1910s/1920s • Weather Underground, 1960s/1970s • Militia movement, 1990s • Earth Liberation Front, 1990s–­ • Animal Rights Militia, 2000s–­

• Utopian movement, 1840s • Anti-­Imperial League, 1890s • Poor People’s Campaign, 1968 • 9/11 Truth movement, 2001–­ • Occupy movement, 2011–­

with public officials at the centers of power. As table 1 illustrates, we can identify four kinds of movement challenges and presidential responses by concentrating on two dimensions. One dimension takes stock of the dis­ ruptive capacities of a movement and whether it poses a significant or in­­ significant tactical challenge to social, economic, or political order, based on its resources and methods. The second dimension centers on whether a movement exercises significant or insignificant conventional political lever­ age via electoral mobilization, lobbying access, litigation, or formal institu­ tional allies. Mapping social movements along these dimensions illuminates four types of movement challenges and presidential responses: marginal movements that elicit executive indifference; militant movements that trigger executive

20 / Chapter One

repression; institutionalized movements that facilitate official recognition, ac­ cess, and incremental policy gains; and formative movements whose lever­ age and intractability evoke forceful presidential responses to their reform agenda. It is crucial to underscore that movements are not necessarily locked in one category in terms of the political capacities and challenges they pre­ sent to presidents and other public officials. When social movements are studied carefully over time, one can discern their potential to develop new resources and strategies, and for political barriers to their agendas to sink or rise in changing contexts. Put another way, broader temporal horizons reveal the possible dynamism of movements as they move from the margins of US political life to contention, and to later stages of decline, militancy, or institutionalization in the corridors of power. This is not to say that move­ ments follow a preset cycle of stages the longer they endure. Rather, as we shall discuss later in this chapter, tracking movements over time captures their ability to assume new political incarnations, to adapt as the larger polity evolves, and to confront a shifting set of constraints and openings in pursuit of their goals. This underlying dynamism is particularly true of the long movements studied in this book. To gain a better understanding of the marginal, militant, institutionalized, and formative categories, however, let us freeze a variety of movements in time for a moment as a means of highlight­ ing distinctive types of movement challenges and presidential responses. At the Periphery: Marginal Movements and Presidential Avoidance Public policy scholars for several generations have shown that only a small fraction of social problems find their way onto the national government agenda, and even fewer inspire tangible policy innovation. 60 The same can be said of social movements over the course of US history, of which most labored in relative political obscurity and left little or no mark on the policy-­making process. The White House has usually been indifferent or lukewarm in its response to marginal movements that have little capacity or inclination to be disruptive or to flex conventional political muscle. If they even know a marginal movement exists, presidents have good reason to ignore it, and most do. Repression is unlikely but always an option if a mar­ ginal movement gets under a president’s skin for some reason, as is sponsor­ ship if an executive has reasons to support a cause and wants to nurture its growth. But most of these movements struggle to get even recognition from presidents and other officials, let alone strong media attention or public identification. Take the case of the Anti-­Imperial League (AIL), a movement

Presidents, Social Movements, and Contentious Change  /  21

that sought to mobilize peace activists and isolationists in response to the Spanish-­American War in 1898. AIL activists organized public meetings and publicity campaigns demanding the withdrawal of US troops from the Phil­ ippines. In time, AIL leaders articulated broader constitutional, cultural, and economic objections to what they deemed imperialist American policies. Yet the AIL later failed in its campaign to block ratification of the Treaty of Paris in 1899, which granted US control of the Philippines, Puerto Rico, and Guam, and permitted a military occupation of Cuba. The AIL then concen­ trated its energies on defeating William McKinley in the 1900 presidential campaign, yet the Republican candidate never felt compelled to address AIL attacks. Tellingly, the candidate the AIL endorsed, Democratic challenger William Jennings Bryan, supported the Treaty of Paris, thus compromising his embrace of the party’s anti-­imperialist platform. Moreover, he kept his distance from the AIL on the campaign trail because he concluded that it would not attract voters and threatened to divide his party.61 Unable to mo­ bilize mass support for its cause, the AIL and the anti-­imperialist movement it spearheaded gradually faded after William McKinley’s decisive reelection. Sometimes presidents pay close attention to new insurgencies until they determine that activists lack political leverage. For example, the Johnson administration kept close tabs on the Poor People’s Campaign of 1968 and did not relax until it was clear that organizers were ill-­equipped to mar­ shal either significant conventional or extra-­institutional pressures on the government. Initiated by Martin Luther King and the Southern Christian Leadership Conference (SCLC) in the spring of 1968, the campaign was de­ signed to force the White House and Congress to take more decisive action to alleviate poverty in America. To this end, the Poor People’s Campaign organized three thousand indigent people to live in a shantytown on park­ land next to the Lincoln Memorial. The Johnson administration readied for an attempt to take over the nation’s capitol, but the disruptive threat never materialized. Just weeks before the campaign began, King was assassinated, which left leadership of the protest effort to less prominent SCLC figures. Days of torrential rains drenched the campsite, many of the fragile wooden shanties fell apart, trash piled up, violence broke out among activists, and most protesters went home early. Only weeks after its start, the Poor Peo­ ple’s Campaign fell apart. The few protesters who remained at the campsite at the end of June were evicted or arrested, with little public scrutiny and no White House comment.62 More recently, the Occupy movement helps capture some of the ebb and flow (or, to be precise, the flow and ebb) of presidential attention to an in­ surgent cause that enters the public arena with great fanfare but may have a

22 / Chapter One

limited political impact. Drawing on the California student movement’s slo­ gan “Occupy Everything, Demand Nothing” and inspired by anti-­austerity insurgency in Spain, Occupy Wall Street (OWS) began on September 17, 2011, as a protest against the enormous wealth and power of the nation’s top 1 percent. For more than a month, protesters in this peaceful move­ ment staged an iconic occupation of downtown New York’s Zuccotti Park, two blocks from the Wall Street financial district. Their battle cry, “We are the 99%,” resonated broadly as a critique of economic inequality and the concentrated power of the nation’s privileged few. Occupy protests spread to more than six hundred communities in the United States and dozens of other countries in the weeks that followed. Soon after their first demonstra­ tion, President Obama sided with OWS in its challenge to corporate power and politics-­as-­usual. “I think it reflects the frustration that the American people feel,” he told reporters,63 while the White House issued statements that it was fighting to make sure that “the interests of 99% of Americans are well represented.”64 Less than a year later, however, the West Wing had distanced itself from the movement. In contrast to the Tea Party movement on the Right, Occupi­ ers never articulated a unified set of political demands and never recruited or mobilized on behalf of candidates at election time. Whereas Tea Party activists filled seats at the Republican National Convention of 2012, heard Tea Party–­elected politicians give speeches from the dais, and successfully pressed for Tea Party ideas to be included in the GOP platform, Occupy pro­ testers demonstrated outside the Democratic convention hall and told re­ porters that they endorsed “Nobody 2012.”65 In truth, the Obama campaign wanted little to do with the movement after 2011 and the forcible closing of Occupy camps in cities across the country. Even though its focus on eco­ nomic inequality and “the concentrated political power of the 1%” contin­ ues to reverberate in US political discourse, Occupiers struggled to translate “what was going on in the park and in the financial centers” into practical political leverage.66 In its disavowal of traditional political methods—­“we don’t want to associate with politicians because that would just divide the people”67—­and the limits of its disruptive capacities, the Occupy insurgency became a movement that the White House could ignore or repress. In the end, it did both. Administration officials said little or nothing about the Oc­ cupy movement one year after it emerged, but federal documents show that the Federal Bureau of Intelligence and the Department of Homeland Se­ curity counterterrorism agents carefully monitored and investigated camps and protests.68

Presidents, Social Movements, and Contentious Change  /  23

Collision Course: The White House, Militant Movements, and Social Order Presidents typically pay very close attention to social movements with the motivation and capacity to significantly disrupt US social, economic, and po­ litical order. When these same movements espouse unpopular political be­ liefs and show little interest in (if not contempt for) conventional political processes, they become prime targets for repression by presidents and other government officials. Indeed, militant social movements are the most likely forms of insurgency to evoke strong crackdowns from the White House to guard domestic tranquility. President James Buchanan is deservedly con­ sidered one of the nation’s worst presidents for his anemic response to the Southern secession crisis in 1860, but his administration tried to forcefully end the violent brand of abolitionism advanced by John Brown’s League of Gileadites during the 1850s by posting substantial rewards and mobilizing federal troops to subdue Brown well before his fateful raid at Harpers Ferry.69 Nonviolent insurgencies employing unconventional and disruptive tactics also can fall in this category of militant movements that draw the ire of US commanders in chief. At its peak of protest activism and occupation of sites in communities across the country in late 2011, one could argue that the Occupy movement was more of a militant than marginal movement for executive officials, thereby eliciting coordinated surveillance, removal, and arrests. Yet protest groups engaged in illicit or violent activism—­such as the destructive tactics of the Environmental and Animal Liberation Fronts or violent anti-­ globalization protests—­clearly draw the most forceful reactions from govern­ ment officials determined to maintain law and order.70 It is important to rec­ ognize, however, that official views of militancy and presidential perceptions of domestic threat are deeply influenced by historical context. Three insurgent challenges generations apart—­Coxey’s Army and striking railroad workers in 1894, the Industrial Workers of the World (IWW) of the 1910s, and the militia movement of the 1990s—­capture this pattern well. During an 1894 depression that left one in five Americans out of work (and one-­third of all manufacturing workers off the job), second-­time Dem­ ocratic president Grover Cleveland had little patience for any significant insurgency inspired by the economic unrest. Ohioan Jacob Coxey rallied unemployed workers across the country to march on Washington, DC, to de­ mand that the federal government create public works jobs and to offer other forms of relief. After several thousand jobless men forming “Coxey’s Army” encamped at a farm site near the nation’s capitol in April 1894, Cleveland refused a request by movement leaders to meet with him. On orders from

24 / Chapter One

the White House, fifteen hundred soldiers and policemen greeted members of Coxey’s Army when they assembled to hear a speech by Coxey on the steps of the Capitol. Before they could speak, Coxey and movement leaders were arrested for trespassing on the grass while soldiers dispersed the assem­ bled crowd.71 “We choose this place of assemblage because it is the property of the people,” Coxey protested.72 The Topeka Advocate was more outraged: “These men have as much right to go to Washington and demand justice at the hands of Congress as bankers, railroad magnates, and corporation lawyers have to go and lobby for measures by which to plunder the pub­ lic.”73 Another “army” of five hundred Coxeyites took control of a Pacific Northwest Railway train that they hoped would take them to Washington, DC, to air their demands. Thanks to popular support along the way, they were able to fight off federal marshals until finally stopped by federal troops in Montana.74 A few months later, several thousand workers of the Pullman Company walked off their jobs in a small company town outside of Chicago when their wages were cut for a fifth time, without reductions in fees the company charged them for rent, utilities, and other expenses. In sympathy, more than 150,000 railroad workers in twenty-­seven states joined a strike designed to stop the movement of any train that carried a Pullman car. The president’s response was swift: over the objections of Illinois governor John Altgeld (a fellow Democrat), Cleveland sent federal troops to break the strike, stop interference with railroad lines, and remove obstruction to the US mails.75 “If it takes the entire army and navy to deliver a postcard to Chicago, that card will be delivered,” Cleveland bellowed. Well after the Pullman crisis was over, Cleveland explained that he had no choice but to respond force­ fully to what had become “a tremendous disturbance, paralyzing the most important business interests, obstructing the functions of the Government, and disturbing social peace and order.”76 National security jitters informed a similar crackdown on political radi­ calism and labor agitation during World War I. Despite his Progressive cre­ dentials and alliances with mainstream unions, Woodrow Wilson favored harsh treatment of the IWW, commonly known as the Wobblies, which was founded in 1905 to organize unskilled, factory, and migrant workers largely ignored by the American Federation of Labor (AFL) and craft unions. Its leadership included anarchists, socialists, and communists who embraced radical visions of class struggle and revolution. Many of its campaigns, like the “free speech fights” in Spokane (1909–­10), were models of nonviolent resistance.77 Yet the provocative rhetoric and labor unrest associated with the

Presidents, Social Movements, and Contentious Change  /  25

IWW was viewed as unacceptably dangerous by employers and government officials. After the outbreak of World War I, the IWW threatened strikes in industries like copper mining and logging. In response, vigilantes in western states targeted members of the IWW for punishment. In Arizona, roughly one thousand copper miners who belonged to the IWW were placed in cat­ tle cars and left in the desert without food or water; in Montana, IWW or­ ganizer Frank Little was lynched by a mob.78 Wilson denounced anti-­IWW lawlessness by vigilantes, but he also authorized US Department of Justice agents to raid IWW offices nationwide, searching for treasonous material. The raids were followed by mass arrests charging all movement leaders and many rank-­and-­file members with various crimes. Deportations and impris­ onment soon followed for these IWW activists. While lauding “patriots” in the labor movement like AFL president Samuel Gompers, who adhered to a voluntary no-­strike agreement during the war, the Wilson administration was adamant that “we must oppose at home the organized and individual efforts of those dangerous elements who hide disloyalty.”79 The citizen militia movement of the 1990s illustrates similar dynamics. Movement activists subscribed to right-­wing conspiracy theories that por­ trayed the federal government as tyrannical and warned of an impending takeover of the country by the United Nations. Organized in rural areas across thirty-­four states, citizen militias focused their energies on paramili­ tary training in preparation for an eventual federal or international assault on their freedoms.80 Their activities and radical beliefs did not escape notice of the Clinton administration. Going off-­script in an address to Democratic supporters in Washington, DC, President Bill Clinton expressed open dis­ gust with militia movement activists: “People who say, ‘I love my coun­ try but I hate my government.’ These people—­who do they think they are, saying that their government has stamped out human freedom?”81 In April 1995, the bombing of the Murrah Building in Oklahoma City resulted in 168 deaths at the hands of two domestic terrorists with ties to the militia movement. Under direction from the White House, the response at all lev­ els of government was swift. Militia groups and their members became the target of intense government surveillance, infiltration, and arrests.82 From a broad historical perspective, therefore, it is clear that both radi­ cal left-­wing and right-­wing movements can inspire strong government crackdowns when perceived as threatening social, economic, or political well-­being. Movement militancy often catches presidential attention, but significant disruptions without conventional political engagement almost always yield confrontation and repression.

26 / Chapter One

In the Mainstream: Institutionalized Movements and Presidential Co-­optation Another opening for presidential-­movement alignment presents itself  when activists identify with an administration or its party and demonstrate politi­ cal muscle in elections, litigation, or legislative wrangling. Social movement organizations that demonstrate significant conventional political leverage but pose little challenge to domestic tranquility usually have notable stra­ tegic advantages not shared by their marginal and militant counterparts.83 These institutionalized movements may enjoy political recognition, access to the cen­ters of power, and a secure role in regular policy-­making. At the same time, institutionalized movements typically lack either the capacity or the will to employ disruptive tactics that significantly threaten social, economic, or political order; radical strategies of confrontation and disrup­ tion may also lie outside their ideological or practical conceptions of how best to advance their cause. In contrast to those lacking conventional politi­ cal clout, mainstream social movement organizations may win incremental policy gains, but they are unlikely to shatter the status quo in favor of sweep­ ing reforms. The relatively harmonious and often collaborative relations that developed between the White House and the conservation and labor movements during specific periods of US history are instructive. During the late 1880s, decades before he became president, Theodore Roosevelt helped found an organization that would prove influential in advancing a new conservation movement: the Boone and Crockett Club. Although it may seem ironic to contemporary environmentalists, Roosevelt and his cofounders were avid big-­game hunters who worried that unre­ strained mining, timber cutting, and hunting in the Gilded Age threatened the survival of animal species and natural resources. The Boone and Crock­ ett Club worked particularly hard in the 1890s to safeguard Yellowstone National Park, which was not protected from commercial interests under federal law. Troubled that railroad and mining companies were exploiting Yellowstone to a point that threatened its long-­term well-­being, Roosevelt and other Boone and Crockett members launched speaking tours, wrote prominent editorials, and lobbied in Washington to save Yellowstone. Their efforts paid off in 1894, when President Grover Cleveland signed legislation that imposed special protections against commercial exploitation for Yel­ lowstone National Park.84 Once he ascended to the White House, Theodore Roosevelt’s relationship with conservation movement activists became more contentious. Roosevelt and his administration’s Bureau of Forestry chief, Gifford Pinchot, pursued

Presidents, Social Movements, and Contentious Change  /  27

a notion of conservation that called for scientific management of natural resources such as timber and the construction of dams and irrigation to expand national farmland. Conservationists like the Sierra Club’s John Muir vehemently disagreed with the Roosevelt administration’s “wise-­use” tim­ ber policies, advocating instead that the nation’s forests be kept completely off limits to commercial interests. Nevertheless, leaders in the conservation movement, including Muir, remained friends and allies of the president, and pursued collaborative, “insider” strategies to advance their goals.85 The influential Muir, for instance, persuaded Roosevelt during a well-­publicized camping trip to significantly expand Yosemite National Park.86 Yet the na­ tion’s twenty-­sixth president needed little convincing to advance the conser­ vationist cause on his own terms. “It is . . . vandalism wantonly to destroy or to permit the destruction of what is beautiful in nature, whether it be a cliff, a forest, or a species of mammal or bird,” Roosevelt noted. “Here in the United States we turn our rivers and streams into sewers and dumping-­ grounds, we pollute the air, we destroy the forests, and exterminate fishes, birds and mammals. . . . But at last it looks as if our people are awakening.”87 Although conservation activists were uncomfortable with the Roosevelt ad­ ministration’s timber and reclamation policies, they praised White House leadership in establishing 4 national game preserves, 5 national parks, 51 federal bird preserves, 150 national forests, and the US Forest Service. Roosevelt is credited with protecting wildlife and forests on roughly 230 mil­ lion acres of public land.88 Although Roosevelt co-­opted the conserva­tion movement in significant fashion, conservationists could point to sig­­nificant policy gains during his tenure. The bureaucratization of much of the American labor movement during World War II offers another important example of executive-­movement col­ laboration, albeit one that was far less fruitful for labor organizers than it had proven for conservationists during the Progressive Era. In 1940, labor leaders of the Congress of Industrial Organizations (CIO) elected to discard earlier radical tactics in favor of a more pragmatic role in Washington and a firmer alliance with Democratic leaders. CIO “labor statesmen” like Sid­ ney Hillman forged close ties with the Roosevelt White House, and oversaw the creation of the CIO’s political action committee, which cemented ties between organized labor and the Democratic Party.89 After Pearl Harbor, war imperatives called for extraordinary industrial production and coor­ dination. Labor leaders such as Philip Murray, the new CIO president, and Walter Reuther of the United Auto Workers proposed “industrial councils” that would facilitate efficient wartime production while giving organized labor real influence—­along with business and government—­in supervising

28 / Chapter One

industries and the work force. The Roosevelt administration eschewed such ideas. In the end, the AFL, the CIO, and various unions agreed to a “no-­ strike pledge” during the war and grew dependent on the war agencies to ex­ ercise their power over industrial workers benevolently. “Instead of an active participant in the councils of industry,” historian Alan Brinkley notes, “the labor movement has become, in effect, a ward of the state.”90 Co-­optation was the price of labor’s programmatic partnership, as union radicalism and independence gave way to a more moderate, bureaucratic style of labor or­ ganization that lasted until the weakening of the New Deal political order in 1980.91 Not all presidential collaborations with institutionalized movements fit this pattern described by Brinkley. As the ties between Theodore Roosevelt and the conservationist leaders reveal, the relationship between mainstream movements and the White House does not necessarily stymie meaningful political and policy shifts. Indeed, as we will see in chapters 5 and 6, collab­ oration between presidents and more conservative movements focused on institutional (rather than “noninstitutional”) forms of political participation can produce major political change. Until Reagan’s ascendance to the White House, this collaboration was limited due to tepid presidential support. The alliance between the Reagan White House and the “new” Christian Right that had emerged by the late 1970s spurred a profound transformation of American political life over the next three decades. At the same time, Chris­ tian conservatives’ frustration with the Reagan administration reveals how the absence of significant disruptive capacities (or little will to challenge the existing order) can significantly limit the bargaining power of institutional­ ized movements with the president and other officials. Leverage for Change: Formative Movements and the White House As we have noted thus far, politically active social movements can fall on a spectrum that ranges from mainstream efforts to influence government decision-­makers through conventional tactics, such as lobbying or getting out the vote, to militants determined to upend the dominant social, eco­ nomic, and political order. The relationships between the White House and purely militant movements are routinely grim. Yet more diversified move­ ments featuring both radical and conventional political organizations and tactics, which we call formative movements, generally elicit strong reactions from presidents who cannot ignore their formidable pressure campaigns in the way they dismiss marginal movements. Some presidents may be in­ clined to use various tactics to repress these confrontational movements,

Presidents, Social Movements, and Contentious Change  /  29

but these insurgent challenges typically have considerably more clout than strictly militant movements in terms of political allies, media attention, and public opinion. In fact, as social movement scholars like Aldon Mor­ ris and Harold Haines observe, these diversified movements can benefit enormously from positive radical-­flank effects that strengthen the leverage of more mainstream leaders in their negotiations with the White House and other government actors.92 “The bargaining position of moderates is strengthened by the presence of more radical groups,” Haines writes. “This happens in either (or both) of two ways. The radicals can provide a militant foil against which moderate strategies and demands are refined and normal­ ized—­in other words treated as ‘reasonable.’ Or, the radicals can create crises that are resolved to the moderate’s advantage.”93 The relationship between presidents and formative movements can be quite strained, if not volatile, but it also can produce dramatic political change. Consider the examples of the abolitionist, woman’s suffrage, and indus­ trial workers movements of the 1860s, 1910s, and 1930s, respectively. As we discuss in chapter 2, while Garrisonian abolitionists agitated outside the tra­ ditional institutional arenas of American politics during the Civil War, other abolitionists, thanks to successful electoral and partisan efforts, advanced their cause through an “insider” strategy of increased clout in the nation’s capital and especially within the halls of Congress. The repertoire of the woman’s suffrage movement in the 1910s contrasted the antagonistic pro­ tests of Alice Paul and her radicalized National Woman’s Party, on the one side, and the conciliatory lobbying of Carrie Chapman Catt and her more moderate National American Woman’s Suffrage Association (NAWSA), on the other.94 During the 1930s, the CIO recognized the value that rising mili­ tancy among rank-­and-­file industrial workers might offer the US labor move­ ment, pressing their causes in dramatic showdowns such as the 1936–­37 takeover of General Motors plants in Flint, Michigan, by autoworkers loyal to the CIO.95 At the same time, the AFL and CIO were effective players in Wash­ ington negotiations, congressional lobbying, and electoral and partisan poli­ tics. Paradoxically, the insurgent goals of these movements were well served by internal leadership rivalries that produced moderate and militant wings. Whereas militancy alone may routinely produce a repressive response from state actors, it has potential to give social movements mercurial political le­ verage by equipping them with different repertoires of collective action and organization to which governing elites—­often presidents—­usually must respond. To be sure, determined and reactionary administrations can always choose to resist and even suppress these movement pressures. However,

30 / Chapter One

in contrast to crackdowns on purely militant movements, political risks abound for presidents when they wage war on formative movements equipped with varied weapons and backed by broader constituencies. For their part, movements have proved most viable in their pursuit of conten­ tious change when they have combined conventional political leverage with credible disruptive threats to orderly politics. Initially, for instance, Abra­ ham Lincoln and Franklin Roosevelt were decidedly reluctant to serve as an agent of sweeping reform for African American freedom and labor rights, re­ spectively. Yet in both of these cases, insurgents recast executive calculations and aspirations about how to restore order on new terms. As we shall see, the creative tensions and political consequences of collaboration between a formative movement and a president have never been greater than those generated from the strained partnership of Lyndon Johnson and the civil rights movement. The Historic Dynamism of Long Movements and Presidential Responses As we discussed in our introduction of this typology of marginal, militant, institutionalized, and formative movements, it would be a mistake to as­ sume that movements are locked into one category of political capacities and challenges, or that they always elicit the same presidential responses. When we study social movements over time, the potential for them to shift across categories emerges, as does a changing set of political opportunities and constraints.96 This dynamism is particularly evident when a spotlight is trained on long movements in American political development. For genera­ tions antislavery agitators were deemed to be fringe radicals whose egalitar­ ian ideas were rejected by most Americans; they either languished at the margins of national politics or fled violent reaction from mobs or officials who denounced their militancy. During the 1850s, however, they made in­ roads in party building and at the ballot box, they won new allies among elected politicians, and their speeches and newspapers gained larger and more approving audiences. “There is one thing stronger than all the armies of the world,” Victor Hugo observed in Histoire d’un Crime in 1852, “and that is an idea whose time has come.”97 Over decades of struggle, abolition­ ists moved from the periphery to center stage in American politics. This re­ minds us that a protest movement like Occupy Wall Street that appears to be marginal at a particular moment may prove to be far more influential and to find a second life at another. Occupiers injected forceful critiques of eco­ nomic inequality into national (and global) political discourse, and their ideas arguably energized Democratic progressives who turned the populist

Presidents, Social Movements, and Contentious Change  /  31

campaign of Bernie Sanders into a surprising electoral juggernaut.98 The ef­­ ficacy and success of protest movements can be more fluid than many ob­ servers appreciate. The other long movements studied in this book also capture the varie­ gated resources, strategies, and presidential responses that we can associ­ ate with a single social movement when we track it over time. During the early twentieth century, for example, African American leadership and or­ ganization assumed mainstream, radical, and marginal forms. Booker T. Washington, popular director of the Tuskegee Institute in Alabama, was an influential proponent of economic nationalism and architect of the Atlanta Compromise, which called for blacks to “dignify and glorify common la­ bor” rather than agitate for social equality.99 By contrast, W. E. B. Du Bois, William Monroe Trotter, and other African American civil rights activists established the Niagara Movement in 1906, which denounced Washing­ ton’s Atlanta Compromise in favor of unflinching attacks on racism and discrimination. “Two classes of Negroes are standing at the parting of the ways,” movement leaders declared. “The one counsels patient submission to our present humiliations and degradations. . . . The other class believes that it should not submit to being humiliated, degraded, and remanded to an inferior place.”100 Embracing the traditions of militant abolitionism, the Niagara Movement scheduled its second conference on the hundredth anniversary of John Brown’s birth at the site of his Harpers Ferry raid.101 On the political fringes, Marcus Garvey created the United Negro Improvement Association in 1914 to spearhead an African American exodus from the United States to ancestral lands.102 As chapter 3 details, the civil rights movement deployed both conven­ tional tactics and direct action in pushing Theodore Roosevelt, Woodrow Wilson, and Franklin Roosevelt, all of whom sought to avoid taking action against Jim Crow laws, to use the new rhetorical and administrative powers that accrued to the “modern” executive office to endorse, albeit modestly, racial reform. This pull between civil rights activists and modern presidents during the first four decades of the twentieth century marked an important step in the development of the long civil rights movement; it helped set the stage for the critical developments in the 1950s and 1960s, which saw organizations dedicated to fighting against white supremacy evolve into a potent formative movement wielding significant conventional and dis­ ruptive political clout. Yet the movement assumed new forms in the years following the monumental Civil Rights and Voting Rights Acts, decisively breaking with the Johnson administration and moving toward marginal­ ity with the Poor People’s Campaign and toward militancy with the black

32 / Chapter One

power movement. Before long, civil rights activists also shifted resources from gaining the right to vote to winning elective offices up and down the ballot. The founding of the Congressional Black Caucus in 1971 and the development of Washington-­based advocacy groups during the ensuing decade signaled a fresh emphasis on institutionalized politics, as many civil rights leaders sought to translate hard-­won recognition and rights into rep­ resentation in state structures and conventional political benefits for Afri­ can Americans. The political development of the new Christian Right reveals its own variety of capacities, tactics, and presidential responses over time. During the 1970s, conservative Christian activists occasionally flirted with militant resistance but mostly pursued conventional political mobilization. The con­ siderable mainstream political influence exerted by the new Christian Right in the Reagan years won them historic White House recognition and access, in exchange for significant presidential co-­optation. In the years that fol­ lowed, however, conservative evangelical insurgents grew less satisfied with symbolic forms of recognition, absent more substantive political and policy commitments. They eagerly supported the outsider campaign of televange­ list Pat Robertson and later turned on Reagan’s successor by backing the pri­ mary challenge of conservative iconoclast Patrick Buchanan. Moreover, con­ servative Christian activists, most notably Randall Terry’s Operation Rescue, embraced aggressive noninstitutional means to prevent abortions.103 Most important, rather than finding itself permanently captured and co-­opted, the new Christian Right became more adept at playing the insider game, altering its strategies to demand a heavy political price for its formidable support. By the time the first President Bush was succeeded by his son, this conservative movement exercised remarkable influence in every branch and at every level of American government.104 Therefore, as we shall see in the chapters that follow, the study of move­ ments and their interactions with presidents over the longue durée reveals a rich variety of tactics, resources, and presidential responses. The dynamism of movement forms and White House responses comes into even sharper relief when we take stock of how presidential-­movement relations expanded as executive power and key movements grew in size and strength. This is the subject of our next section.

The Development of Presidential-­Movement Relations In this chapter, we have explored crucial defining features of both the US presidency and social movements that underscore why frequent conflict

Presidents, Social Movements, and Contentious Change  /  33

and rivalry between these political actors are the norm. To help conceptual­ ize a broad variety of interactions between presidents and insurgents, we also have considered an analytical framework that highlights distinctive executive responses to marginal, militant, formative, and institutionalized movements. In this vein, we have found that as much as executive indifference and repres­ sion are predictable reactions to many insurgency campaigns, an essential bond has sometimes joined presidents to formative or institutionalized move­ ments in pursuit of transforming American politics and governance. Equally important, the relationship between presidents and social movements has been anything but static over time. As will become abundantly clear in the chapters to follow, the parallel development of the American presidency and social movements over the course of US history has influenced the dynamics of conflict and collaboration in presidential-­movement relations that we have examined in this chapter. To borrow Skowronek’s apt theoretical framing of institutional politics in American political development, recurrent patterns of presidential-­movement interactions have been layered atop emergent ones.105 Before the twentieth century, numerous US social movements experienced po­ litical success or failure with little or no presidential involvement (either posi­ tive or negative). Reform-­minded activists and groups often concentrated their resources and energies on political parties, state governments, or Congress. For example, the Chinese Exclusion Leagues of the Gilded Age spearheaded a formative movement that won sweeping and draconian policy changes at the state and national levels through a combination of demonstrations, strikes, targeted violence, party building, voter mobilization, and legislative lobby­ ing. Tellingly, presidents were largely peripheral to this successful populist campaign to exclude Chinese newcomers, or simply followed the prevailing Sinophobic political tides.106 When the White House did respond vigorously to movements during the nineteenth century, it was usually to put down disruptive insurgencies and to restore order in a manner similar to Grover Cleveland’s use of federal troops to end the Pullman strike. The most important and revolutionary exception to these undeclared nineteenth-­century rules for presidential-­movement engagement is the fo­ cus of chapter 2: the stormy collaboration of Lincoln and the antislavery movement. Lincoln and the antislavery movement could not have formed an alliance in the service of transformative change if it were not for a major wartime crisis that empowered insurgents and gave the presidency extraor­ dinary prerogative power. Yet these conditions that shaped the opportunity structure of the Civil War, although necessary, were not sufficient for an effec­ tive executive-­activist nexus. Such an uneasy yet productive partnership also required a powerful social movement that could both mobilize grassroots

34 / Chapter One

activists capable of considerable societal disruption and movement prag­ matists who could exploit these pressures to lobby effectively for enduring reform. This was the case with the abolitionists during the Civil War. To be sure, their divergent mixture of conventional and militant political activ­ ism was bound to yield a tense relationship with the executive office. Nev­ ertheless, Lincoln and the abolitionists ultimately shared a commitment to condemn slavery to extinction. Moreover, the relationship between Lin­ coln and the antislavery movement was mediated, and to a point rendered less contentious, by an intensely mobilized and highly decentralized party and a strong Congress. These forces enabled Lincoln and the abolitionists to form an uneasy alliance that forged a strong Republican coalition and brought dramatic constitutional reform—­the Thirteenth, Fourteenth, and Fifteenth Amendments. Even at this monumental juncture, however, the limits of the Lincoln and abolitionist partnership were evident. Public ad­ ministration was too decentralized to adequately enforce these reforms; the powerful, decentralized “state of courts and parties” of this era made im­ practical the expansion of national administration that might ensure the enforcement of the rights embodied by these landmark amendments.107 Once Reconstruction collapsed, the decentralized party state would severely constrain presidential authority for decades to come. Not surprisingly, few late-­nineteenth-­century movements looked to the White House to advance their cause. Indeed, the populist movement that emerged at the end of the nineteenth century, suffering a combination of indifference and repression from the executive mansion, proposed a constitutional amendment that would limit the president and vice president to one term.108 Yet despite the failure of Reconstruction—­indeed, partly as a conse­ quence of the collapse of national reform—­many Progressive Era reformers thought it was necessary to revisit the lessons of the Civil War. Like many reformers, Theodore Roosevelt, the leading political figure of his age, greatly admired Lincoln, who in seeking to purge slavery from the American Con­ stitution, modified the meaning of national community in the United States, investing it with a sense of purpose, even religiosity, which signaled a change in the relationship between the individual and the government. By bestowing national prominence on Progressive objectives, Roosevelt’s presi­ dency ushered in a new form of leadership—­one that transformed the chief executive into the “steward of the people,” tasked with giving expression and effect to the nation’s aspirations for economic and social improvement. Roosevelt’s path-­breaking presidential tenure and his visionary 1912 Pro­ gressive Party campaign suggested to these reformers that the president, not Congress or political parties, was the principal instrument of popular rule.

Presidents, Social Movements, and Contentious Change  /  35

250  

200  

150  

private  firms   interest  groups  

100  

50  

0  

1830-­‐1869  

1870-­‐1889  

1.  Organized interests testifying before Congress, 1830–­89. (Data compiled from Congressional Information Service, US Congressional Committee Hearings Index (Washington, DC: Government Printing Office, 1985).

The late nineteenth century also saw an unprecedented number of orga­ nized interests—­including many reform movements—­descend upon Wash­ ington to pursue their political and policy goals (see figure 1).109 With the advent of the modern executive, leaders of social movement organizations were more likely to view occupants of the Oval Office as criti­ cal political agents capable of either advancing or derailing nonincremental change. As noted briefly above, Alice Paul of the woman’s suffrage move­ ment captured this new preoccupation well when she and her supporters made newly elected Woodrow Wilson the focus of regular protest activities throughout his administration. These efforts began with controversial pro­ test marches coordinated with his inauguration and reached a crescendo with high-­profile pickets at the White House by Paul and her “Silent Senti­ nels” during World War I. Paul explained that these efforts reflected a new conviction that winning the services of the energetic presidency established by Theodore Roosevelt was essential. “We knew that [presidential support], and perhaps it alone, would ensure our success,” she noted. “It means to us only one thing—­victory.”110 While pursuing every structural opportunity afforded them by federalism, judicial activism, and legislative entrepreneur­ ship, social movements increasingly focused their political energies on the

36 / Chapter One

White House. In the wake of the Great Depression and World War II, cri­ ses that consolidated executive obligations to manage the economy and to exercise leadership on a world stage, the modern presidency was invested with powers and public expectations that made it a critical agent of social and economic reform. Once the White House became the center of growing government commitments, social movements increasingly saw their political fortunes as contingent upon executive power and support. Nevertheless, chapters 3 and 4 underscore that until the presidency of Lyndon Johnson, the idea that the executive office might act as a spearhead for social justice—­a rallying point for democratic reform movements—­was more aspiration than reality. As noted, the nation received glimpses of the transformational possibilities of presidential-­movement collaborations dur­ ing the presidencies of Theodore Roosevelt, Woodrow Wilson, and Franklin Roosevelt. But they also demonstrated the deep conflicts of interest and ideol­ ogy that inherently divided presidents and movements. Only with Johnson was the full panoply of modern presidential powers—­political, administrative, and rhetorical—­deployed on behalf of insurgent interests and demands. John­ son claimed broad authority to transform domestic policy on his own terms at a time when Congress and parties were subordinate to a “modern” presidency at high tide and a national administration unprecedentedly expansive. This also was a period when the civil rights movement’s ability to blend and bal­ ance disruptive collective action and conventional political pressure was at its zenith. Consequently, Johnson and the civil rights movement formed a more direct, combustible, and transformative relationship than was true of previ­ ous collaborations between presidents and social movements. The result was a historic body of civil rights reforms, enormous political fallout for Johnson, and the transformation of national party politics. As we discuss in chapters 5 and 6, Reagan and the new Christian Right offer a markedly different perspective on the relationship between presi­ dents and social movements. Like the formative relationship between John­ son and the civil rights movement, the constructive partnership that Reagan formed with Christian Right leaders built on previous relations between the White House and social activists. As we discuss in chapter 5, however, the long Christian Right movement did not parallel the development of civil rights activism. For years after the Scopes trial and the repeal of Prohibi­ tion, many evangelical Protestants largely retreated from the political sphere into a separate subculture of churches and sectarian educational and social institutions.111 Still, although most fundamentalists and many other evan­ gelicals played a marginal role in the political realm and other aspects of the dominant culture from the late 1920s to the 1970s, an important segment

Presidents, Social Movements, and Contentious Change  /  37

of the religious Right stayed engaged. Christian libertarians like Billy Sun­ day, James Fifield, Jr., Howard Kershner, and Norman Vincent Peale coupled with the high-­profile evangelism of Billy Graham, who established close relationships with Dwight Eisenhower and Richard Nixon, helped pave the way for the new Christian Right, discussed in Chapter 6, which became a strong presence on the US political scene in the 1970s and formed an im­ portant institutional partnership with Ronald Reagan. The evolution of the relationship between the modern presidency and the Christian Right allows us to examine how the executive-­insurgency alliance plays out as part of a national conservative offensive. Reagan, like Johnson, commanded a strong and active presidency that reshaped national law and policy commitments, but he sought to deploy modern executive power to achieve conservative objectives. Some of these purposes, most notably the pursuit of a more aggressive anticommunist agenda and the protection of “family values,” required the expansion rather than the rolling back of the national government’s responsibilities. Indeed, Reagan contributed signifi­ cantly to the development of an executive-­centered, nationalized party sys­ tem that abetted rather than impeded centralized administration. Religious conservatives embraced Reagan’s foreign and social policies; however, the new Christian Right’s formidable capacities to press its cause through con­ ventional political means stood in sharp contrast to its very modest deploy­ ment of disruptive tactics. In this regard, the Christian Right became quite skilled at institutionalized forms of politics yet never mounted the kind of fundamental, insurgent challenges to social and political order marshaled by abolitionists and civil rights activists. Still, with their impressive march through American political institutions, the Christian Right contributed vi­ tally to the emergence of a conservative Republican Party, and the advance­ ment of Reagan’s core economic and foreign policy initiatives. At the end of the day, the new Christian Right’s relationship with the White House cannot be simply characterized as “institutional.” Indeed, their relationship with Reagan was forged on the anvil of a centralized, polarized, and program­ matic party system that defied national consensus and enduring reform; instead, it appeared to instigate a rancorous contest between conservatives and liberals for control of national administration power. The Reagan–­new Christian Right alliance, therefore, bespoke important developments that significantly changed not just presidential-­activist relations but also the na­ ture of American politics. Running through each of these chapters is a common dynamic that shows how presidents and social movements can form an alliance in the pursuit of fundamental change in an American polity that often frustrates

38 / Chapter One

nonincremental reform ambitions. But as the collaboration between the White House and the religious Right illustrates, this enduring pattern has been profoundly affected by developments that have over time made associa­ tion between executive power and social activists more commonplace. These developments of the 1980s, however, were connected in important ways to the rage of the 1960s. Because the social movements of the 1960s grew out of an unprecedented clash between America’s oppositional culture and the modern executive establishment, which presumed to embody its aspirations, Johnson became the focus of the activists’ sense of national betrayal.112 Yet civil rights organizations and the other movements these associations helped inspire—­feminists, environmentalists, consumer advocates, and LGBTQ rights activists—­believed they had no recourse but to forge ties with the modern executive. The new public interest movements of the 1970s, Jeffrey Berry has observed, followed from their leaders’ desire “to transcend ‘movement politics’ with organizations that could survive beyond periods of intense emotion.”113 They championed statutes and court rulings that would make administrative agencies more responsive to social causes than they had been in the past. But participation in administrative politics has come at a cost: since the 1960s, advocacy organizations formed to participate in the details of administration have taken an increasingly prominent part in advancing social causes, a strat­ egy that may deprive activists of a vital connection with grassroots politics.114 During the past three decades, both conservative and liberal activists have taken steps to respond to this criticism. Recognizing that their alliance with Ronald Reagan had left them too far removed from their rank-­and-­file sup­ porters, conservative evangelical and fundamentalist Christian leaders at the end of the 1980s refocused their organizing talents on forming a strong grass­ roots political movement. During the presidency of George W. Bush, saved from alcoholism by a born-­again experience, the president’s top political strategist, Karl Rove, who had a long-­standing close relationship with con­ servative evangelical leaders, firmly established the Christian Right grassroots network as a central part of a national Republican “machine” that success­ fully mobilized support for the 2004 election.115 In contrast to the civil rights movement of the 1960s, the Christian Right thus set about from the start to build and remake the party with which they were most closely aligned. As we will see in chapter 7, this emphasis on party building would be adopted by progressive candidates and activists intent on imbuing the Dem­ ocrats with more moral fervor. Improving on the innovative techniques that the Bush-­Cheney campaign developed in 2004, Barack Obama built an information-­age grassroots organization that sought to transform his

Presidents, Social Movements, and Contentious Change  /  39

presidential candidacy into a movement. Significantly, Obama’s campaign organization was kept intact after the 2008 election and ensconced in the Democratic National Committee, where the president and key White House advisers, such as David Plouffe, envisaged Organizing for America (OFA) as the grassroots arm of the party. Although OFA, facing an uphill battle amid the controversy aroused by the president’s health care bill and the stubborn persistence of the Great Recession, could not fend off a Republican landslide in the 2010 congressional elections, it played a key part in mobilizing sup­ port for the administration’s Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act and Obama’s 2012 reelection campaign.116 After the 2012 election, it was rechris­ tened Organizing for Action and spun off as a 501(c)(4) social welfare group explicitly committed to forming alliances with social movement organiza­ tions that supported the president’s signature policy, the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act; immigration reform; climate-­change legislation; the advance of LGBTQ rights; and reform of the criminal justice system.117 Just as the relationship between Lyndon Johnson and the civil rights movement gave impetus to a new progressive politics during the 1960s, so the Obama White House and OFA forged an uneasy but effective alliance with the immigration rights and LGBTQ movements in the hope of consoli­ dating the insurgent partisanship born of the Great Society. Obama’s efforts to extend and elaborate the progressive tradition in the wake of Reagan in­ surgency, now newly invigorated by the Tea Party, fueled a polarized debate over national health care reform, undocumented immigrants, and same-­sex marriage, suggesting how the polarized politics spawned by the Johnson and Reagan years had become a ritual observance of American politics. That the intensification of the battle between progressives and conservatives cen­ tered on a program that both camps called Obamacare makes clear just how executive-­centered the partisan conflict has become. Yet no sooner had Obama entered the White House than his effort to establish himself as the leader of a new progressive movement was challenged by fervent activists, whose resistance to White House co-­optation revealed that the inherent ten­ sion between executive politics and social activism endures. Indeed, the per­ sonal nature of presidential partisanship helps explain why the attacks from the left were hardly less condemning than those from the right. Obama’s dogged leadership in the fight over national health reform failed to win a single Republican vote in Congress; at the same time, the compromises he was willing to accept—­especially his willingness to jettison the most am­ bitious feature of his plan, the “Public Option”—­incited many leaders of progressive social movement organizations to dismiss him as a trimmer.

40 / Chapter One

At the dawn of the twenty-­first century, then, a new politics emerged that combines executive prerogative, party politics, and social movement activism. Our account of Obama’s relationship to the immigration rights and LGBTQ communities in the final chapter of the book reveals that social movement organizations can be demanding partners—­their objectives can force presidents to pursue potentially destabilizing positions and policies. At the same time, this is a risk that ambitious modern executives are ulti­ mately willing to assume, not only for activists’ support in elections and policy fights, but also to establish an enduring legacy. Animated by moral imperatives and large ambitions no less than partisan strategy, the tense partnership between presidents and social movements can result in stun­ ning policy change, but such collaboration can also be a divisive force that sharpens political conflict and rattles national resolve. Indeed, as we will discuss in the final pages of this book, the 2016 elec­ tion, pitting the iconoclastic mogul, Republican Donald Trump, against the first woman nominated by a major party for the presidency, Democrat Hillary Clinton, appeared to bring this new form of partisanship to a troubling cli­ max. The first year of the Trump presidency confirmed that American poli­ tics now centered on fierce battles between liberalism and conservatism—­ competitors in a partisan politics that has been remade by the ritual, but still unsettling, clashes and alliances between the White House and social activists.

Two

The Crucible: Lincoln and the Abolitionist Movement

At the close of the nineteenth century, Vita Dutton Scudder, a Wellesley professor who became an influential Progressive thinker and activist, paid homage to the Civil War in an acclaimed book, Social Ideals in English Letters. Her tribute was motivated by more than historical fascination. Hoping to inspire reformers of her own time who were tasked with combating the “industrial bondage that held . . . laboring classes in a spiritual deprivation as complete in some ways as that of the slave,” Scudder looked back to the Civil War as a “great symbol”—­“a limited and clear cut struggle” that might awaken her generation. The war’s chief lesson, she argued, was the uncomfortable but essential alliance between two potent forces. On one side were zealous abolitionists who saw, as the poet and antislavery activist Russell Lowell put it, “Truth forever on the scaffold, / Wrong forever on the throne.” On the other side of the alliance was a pragmatic politician, Abraham Lincoln, who cautiously maneuvered his way through the treacherous path of sectional and racial animosity to become the leader of the “plain people” who fought the Civil War. The antislavery conflict, Scudder noted, was an occasion of severe national trial that might serve as a crucial “prelude” for the “vaster” challenges that “were slowly gathering” to test the mettle of Americans in the twentieth century. “We need all the courage the past can give us,” Scudder concluded. “We need all the consecration it can inspire.”1 Viewing the nineteenth century more broadly, however, there was little to encourage Progressive reformers to seek an alliance with presidents. Indeed, as we noted in chapter 1, the “state of courts and parties” that prevailed from the 1830s to the 1890s so constrained executive power that it generally proved to be a potent obstacle to presidential alliances with social movements.2 Indeed, many nineteenth-­century US movements experienced

42 / Chapter Two

political success or failure with little or no presidential involvement (either positive or negative). From temperance campaigns to the Chinese exclusion movement, reform-­minded activists and groups often concentrated their resources and energies on state governments or Congress.3 Just as the success of these early movements did not hinge on White House support, so we also can discern that the most common executive responses to insurgent pressures were indifference, resistance, or open repression. Yet presidential-­ movement relations during the nineteenth century also feature one of the most important sources of conflict and, ultimately, revolutionary collaboration in the nation’s history. As Scudder recognized, the quest to end slavery became a crucible that began to redefine the relationship between top-­down and bottom-­up politics. The antislavery movement and the White House engaged in epic struggles, but their need for each other during the Civil War ultimately transformed the nation. The pivotal relationship between Lincoln and the abolitionists was among the first to reveal that presidential-­movement alliances, no matter how uneasy, could be a critical dimension of American political development. It thus began a transformation of relations between presidents and insurgents that anticipated Johnson and the civil rights movement and Reagan and the new Christian Right a century later. This is not to say that the mating dance between Lincoln and the abolitionists was simply a forerunner of the presidential partisanship that first took flight during the Progressive Era and was institutionalized by the Johnson and Reagan presidencies. Modern executive-­centered partisanship has drawn presidents and social movements into direct relationships—­with profound consequences for both. Unlike Johnson and Reagan, Lincoln is best viewed as a savvy statesman who navigated the localized parties of the nineteenth century to form a fraught but ultimately consequential relationship with a social movement. Moreover, unlike the civil rights and Christian Right activists, the abolitionists tended to view the presidency with general disinterest until the outbreak of warfare. Characteristic of long movements that develop into formative movements after years on the periphery, abolitionists rose to national prominence through a combination of direct action, infused by the evangelical fervor of the Second Great Awakening, and the effective deployment of conventional political capacities within the councils of power.4 Until the Civil War, however, these tactics targeted Congress, state legislatures, and party politics rather than the White House. Consequently, the Republican Party and its congressional membership mediated the relationship between Lincoln and the antislavery crusade

The Crucible / 43

in critical ways, thus distinguishing Lincoln’s reform ambition and strategy from those of future modern executives. Nevertheless, the emergency powers Lincoln accrued during the Civil War5 and the insurgent nature of the GOP—­the only third party to become a constituent of the two-­party system—­made the conflict and resolution of the slavery controversy a critical precursor to the transformation of the relationship between presidents, social movements, and parties. As Stephen Skowronek has written, “Lincoln introduced into American politics a new conception of political change, one that was far more open in its programmatic entailments than anything that had been articulated before.” Although Skowronek views Lincoln’s “reconstructive” leadership as the defining ingredient of this change, we argue that the first Republican president’s fragile alliance with the abolitionist movement was a critical factor in spurring and fulfilling his reform ambition.6 Accordingly, this compelling and instructive case deserves special attention.

Activism and Repression in Jacksonian America The US campaign against slavery can be traced back to the earliest days of the republic, and abolitionists agitated at the fringes of American politics as a marginal movement (as described in chapter 1) for decades. However, developments in the 1820s—­mass migration to the Southwest, the cotton boom, and the emergence of a national debate over whether new states should enter the Union as slave or free—­transformed the antislavery insurgency into a militant movement that presidents felt they could no longer ignore. These conditions awoke voices calling for immediate emancipation as well as brutal reactionary efforts, supported by President Andrew Jackson, to mute these cries of freedom. In one of the most significant antebellum antislavery tracts, Appeal in Four Articles, published in 1829 by David Walker, a black activist living in Boston, expressed many of the themes that would animate the abolition movement: rejection of colonization plans that dominated how most Anglo reformers sought to resolve slavery, a call for African Americans to play a major part in their own liberation, and the view that God was on the side of the oppressed.7 Employing jeremiads that would frighten slavery’s champions and jolt its opponents, Walker pressed for active resistance to slavery and ultimately violent rebellion against it: I am fully aware, in making this appeal to my much afflicted and suffering brethren, that I shall not only be assailed by those whose greatest earthly desires are, to keep us in abject ignorance and wretchedness, and who are of

44 / Chapter Two the firm conviction that Heaven has designed us and our children to be slaves and beasts of burden to them and their children. . . . I will ask one question here—­Can our condition be any worse? Can it be more mean and abject? If there are any changes, will they not be for the better, though they may appear for the worst at first? Can they get us any lower? . . . [A]gainst all accusations which may or can be preferred against me, I appeal to Heaven for my motive in writing—­who knows that my object is, if possible, to awaken in the breasts of my afflicted, degraded and slumbering brethren, a spirit of inquiry and investigation respecting our miseries and wretchedness in this Republican Land of Liberty!!!!!!8

Walker’s pamphlet and his participation in organizations such as the Massachusetts General Colored Association contributed significantly to the strengthening of the nascent abolition movement by spreading the influ­­ ence of the black press in the North and his own militant position throughout the country. Walker, along with other antebellum African American antislavery agitators such as Martin Delany and James McCune Smith, helped pave the way for iconic black abolitionists like Frederick Douglass and Sojourner Truth to exert their powerful influence over what had become a formative antislavery movement during the 1850s and 1860s. No less sig­­ nificant, however, was Walker’s influence on his fellow Bostonian, William Lloyd Garrison. Garrison started his antislavery career advocating colonization and gradual emancipation, yet by 1831 he echoed the Appeal’s call for immediate abolition. Moreover, Garrison’s opening editorial in his widely read newspaper the Liberator revealed the important influence that Walker had on his thinking and the growth of abolitionism: “I am aware that many object to the severity of my language, but is there not a cause for severity? I will be as harsh as truth, and as uncompromising as justice.”9 In 1833, Garrison joined with Arthur and Lewis Tappan of New York to form the first national abolitionist organization—­the American Anti-­ Slavery Society (AASS)—­that, with support from relatively well-­educated and prosperous abolitionists, pressured state legislatures and Congress for reform.10 Garrison and his supporters focused their efforts on delivering speeches and producing and distributing confrontational antislavery literature designed to elicit moral outrage toward human bondage in both the North and South.11 Yet most of the hostility they provoked was directed against their urgent demands for the immediate, uncompensated emancipation of slaves. Significant levels of mob violence greeted abolitionist agitation in the North during the antebellum decades, reaching their zenith in

The Crucible / 45

the years just following Garrison’s formation of the AASS and the introduction of aggressive movement tactics associated with “immediatism.” At a fall 1835 event organized by the Boston Female Anti-­Slavery Society, for instance, a local mob stormed the gathering and assaulted Garrison, who was the featured speaker. Black and white women abolitionists joined arms and marched past the angry mob, however, escaping unharmed. In other Northern states, mobs set ablaze the offices of abolitionist newspaper publishers and destroyed their printing presses.12 The AASS took its crusade to a new level in 1835 by mailing abolitionist newspapers and other publications to religious and civic leaders throughout the South, launching what was in effect one of the nation’s first direct-­mail campaigns. The reaction was immediate and fierce. In Charleston, South Carolina, for example, the vexed city postmaster chose to set aside mail sacks filled with antislavery materials addressed to area residents. Before long, a local vigilance committee named the “Lynch Men” stole the mailbags and burned the abolitionist materials before a rally of several thousand Charleston residents. But the AASS printed more than one million abolitionist tracts, and a new supply of publications arrived in Charleston shortly after the first batch was destroyed. The Charleston postmaster placed these mailings under quarantine, and appealed to Andrew Jackson’s postmaster general Amos Kendall for approval. Kendall quickly granted his blessing to Southern postmasters who refused to deliver antislavery mailings, noting that “we owe an obligation to the laws, but a higher one to the community in which we live and, if the former be perverted to destroy the latter, it is patriotism to disregard them.” Vigilance committees formed throughout the South in the summer of 1835, and they laid out plans to stop the distribution of abolitionist mailings and to punish local individuals who sought to read or circulate the materials.13 By December, Jackson, himself a slave owner, focused on the crisis in his annual message. After castigating “misguided” abolitionists for their “wicked attempts” to undermine the security and welfare of Southern communities, he urged Congress to pass legislation that “will prohibit, under severe penalties, the circulation in the Southern States, through the mail, of incendiary publications intended to instigate the slaves to insurrection.” AASS leaders protested that Jackson and Kendall denied them basic First Amendment rights, but their arguments fell on deaf ears. Reflecting the tendency of nineteenth-­century presidents to repress movements that threatened social and political order, the Jackson administration had vigorously and unapologetically suppressed AASS efforts to distribute provocative antislavery materials in the South.14

46 / Chapter Two

A Variegated Movement Emerges: Internal Conflict and Multiple Capacities However out-­of-­step abolitionists were with both the nation’s dominant political leaders and its enfranchised majority, their spirited activism helped AASS membership rolls to swell above five hundred thousand in 1836. The exceptional breakthroughs that Garrison and the abolitionist movement eventually achieved turned on a paradox characteristic of all formative movements: insurgent goals were well served by internal leadership rivalries that produced strong moderate and militant wings. Rivalry within the abolitionist movement emerged early on. Garrisonian abolitionists were hostile to conventional forms of political activism, devoted to the purity of their principles, and unwilling to compromise. Their hostility toward a constitutional system they viewed as explicitly supportive of slavery heightened their disdain for mainstream politics.15 To Garrison and his abolitionist allies, the Constitution—­with provisions that codified the slave trade, the hunting down of fugitive slaves, and a shameful compromise that allowed Southern states to count slaves as three-­fifths of a person in determining their representation in Congress (and, therefore, the Electoral College)—­desiccated the promise of the Revolution, embodied by the Declaration of Independence’s dedication to the proposition that “all men are created equal.” Garrison dramatically expressed his hostility toward this “sacred compact” during an 1854 July Fourth celebration of the Massachusetts Anti-­Slavery Society. Setting a match to a copy of the Constitution before the enraptured supporters, Garrison branded it as “the source and parent of all the other atrocities—­a covenant with death, and an agreement with hell.” As the nation’s founding document burned to ashes, he cried out, “So perish all compromises with tyranny!” Some of the audience hissed at this brazen action, but most responded, loudly and reverently, “Amen.”16 At the same time, many abolitionists dissented from Garrison’s condemnation of the Constitution and his disavowal of a more conventional politics, dedicated to reform that would reconcile the Declaration of Independence and the law. At the close of the 1830s, a sizeable wing of the abolitionist movement parted ways with Garrisonian radicals in the belief that a strategy of advancing their cause through elections and party politics was far more likely to secure meaningful legal change.17 During the 1840s, two old friends who were prominent abolitionist leaders, Wendell Phillips and Charles Sumner, engaged in a heated debate that captured the creative tensions within the movement. A staunch Garrisonian and electrifying orator, Phillips told audiences that America and its

The Crucible / 47

constitutional system were so riddled with sin that Christian reformers had little choice but to “seek to be in this country like an alien, like a traveler.”18 Sumner responded by scolding Phillips for such utopian thinking. The only solution to evils like slavery, he averred, was to boldly enter the political fray: “Take your place among citizens, and use all the weapons of a citizen in this just warfare.”19 Phillips fired back that even when a person of impeccable ethics entered conventional political life, such as Sumner himself, the reformer would be corrupted by countless political maneuvers and compromises.20 Over the next two decades, antislavery activists gained increasing influence in party politics, elections, and ultimately the composition and work of Congress. The number of Northern lawmakers opposed to slavery grew markedly in these years. Harriet Beecher Stowe’s Uncle Tom’s Cabin, a best seller that illuminated the evils of slavery by capturing a slave family torn apart, created a national sensation. More than three hundred thousand copies of the book were sold in 1852 alone. Stowe never formally associated herself with one of the major antislavery movements. But when her brother, Henry Ward Beecher, began the pro-­abolitionist Independent, she used her notoriety to pen an influ­­ ential weekly column in favor of the antislavery cause.21 Stowe’s importance to the abolitionist movement testifies both to the force of ideas and to the powerful role women played in the fight to abolish slavery. Encouraged by Garrison, women who were more central to the abolitionist movement such as Anna Dickinson, Lydia Maria Child, Sarah and Angelina Grimké, Elizabeth Cady Stanton, and Susan B. Anthony exploited a “cult of true womanhood” to exert significant political pressure as the moral teachers of their families, husbands, congregations, and larger society. To be sure, these white middle-­class women did not share the experiences or moral perspectives of former slaves like Frederick Douglass and Sojourner Truth, perhaps the most influential black female abolitionist. But white woman activists believed that the quest for women’s rights, especially the right to vote, made them natural allies of African Americans. As Stanton argued in a widely publicized speech, a woman was “more fully identified with the slave than [a man] could possibly be, for she can take the subjective view. She early learns the misfortune of being born an heir to the crown of thorns, to martyrdom, to womanhood. For while the man is born to do whatever he can, for the woman and the negro there is no such privilege.” This “subjective” link between women and slaves suggested that the transformative potential of the abolitionist movement not only threatened the institution of slavery but also traditional notions of domesticity that proscribed the “woman’s sphere.”22 Because of the unique place they occupied

48 / Chapter Two

in American life, woman abolitionists embodied the dual objectives—­stir­ ring mainstream opinion and disrupting existing cultural and political norms—­that imbue a social movement with formative potential. Nevertheless, not all antislavery activists welcomed women into the fold. In 1840 the annual meeting of the AASS elected Abby Kelley Foster to the executive committee over the strong objections of a large minority. The organization’s wealthy patron, Lewis Tappan, denounced the selection, judging it “immoral for a lady to sit behind closed doors with gentlemen.” He led hundreds of delegates out of the meeting and into a rival organization. Even some more sympathetic abolitionists such as Douglass—­one of the few men to attend the 1848 Seneca Falls Convention, the first American political meeting focusing on women’s rights—­were concerned that the simultaneous push for the rights of women and African Americans would undermine the “already too heavily laden . . . slave’s cause.” Nevertheless, despite this tension between antislavery and women’s rights activists, which would reverberate through the next century, there was no prospect that the talented feminist abolitionists would be silenced or ostracized. Not only were woman activists determined to stay in the fray, but Garrison and many other leading abolitionists recognized that their words and actions made the antislavery cause more resonant. The variegation of formative grassroots organizations, although a serious challenge to sustaining purposeful action, demonstrates the ability of activists to reach beyond those immediately affected by the injustices that aroused their movement. Women’s participation in the antislavery crusade, therefore, did not compete with but added valued allies to the abolitionists’ fundamental struggle to redefine the “nature of America itself.”23 As James Morone observes, the profound conflict over slavery in the antebellum years showed Jacksonian democracy to be “open, egalitarian, tumultuous, and frightening.”24 As the abolitionist movement became more influential and disruptive, a succession of presidents who followed Jackson tried mightily to keep slavery off the public agenda. When Franklin Pierce entered the Oval Office in 1853, for example, he offered hollow assurances that the controversial Compromise of 1850 and vigorous enforcement of fugitive slave laws would quiet the slavery controversy. “I fervently hope the [slavery] question is at rest,” he declared in his inaugural address.25 Yet as Pierce spoke wistfully of the virtues of national harmony, the electoral environment and the legislative branch were being transformed by the abolitionist movement. Moderate abolitionists defied the “corruption” Phillips feared by participating in antislavery third-­party movements. They formed the Liberty Party, which nominated the abolitionist James Birney

The Crucible / 49

for president. Birney garnered only seven thousand votes in the 1840 presidential election, but his campaign succeeded in placing the slavery debate on the national agenda; nominated again in 1844, Birney won sixty-­two thousand votes, which may have cost the Whig candidate, Henry Clay, the election. In 1848, many abolitionists, including Sumner, supported the Free Soil Party candidate, former president Martin Van Buren, who received over three hundred thousand votes, about 10 percent of the total. The Free Soil campaign spurred grassroots organizing that led to the creation of the Republican Party in 1854, with abolitionists forming a principal part of the new party’s coalition. As Sumner presciently stated in a speech during the 1848 campaign, only a new party could reconcile abolitionism and fealty to the American Constitution: The important sentiment of hostility to the Slave Power, to the extension of Slavery, and to its large continuance under the Constitution wherever the National Government is responsible for it, though recognized by individuals, and by a small, but respectable, political organization, was never till now put forth as the paramount principle of a large and national party. It is true, indeed, that here is no new idea. It is as old as the Revolution—­as old as Washington, Jefferson, and Franklin; but it is an idea neglected by both the great parties which have recently swayed the country. Were it recognized by either, there would be no occasion for the new party whose existence has so auspiciously begun.26

The hopes of Sumner and other political insurgents were realized by the Republican Party, which, animated by the national outrage over the Kansas-­ Nebraska Act, quickly replaced the Whigs as the Democrats’ major rival in a realigned two-­party system. As historian David Potter writes of this period, “the antislavery bloc in Congress, strengthened by militant recruits like Sumner and [Benjamin] Wade, was no longer a little handful of isolated men.”27 As Garrisonian abolitionists continued to agitate outside the traditional institutional arenas of American politics, other abolitionists—­dubbed “radical Republicans”—­were advancing a promising “insider” strategy that won them increasing clout in the nation’s capital, and especially within the halls of Congress. Diversity in the movement was accentuated further by a consequential split among militant insurgents loyal to Garrisonian nonviolence and those committed to far more aggressive confrontations, as John Brown and his followers dramatically illustrated in their raid at Harpers Ferry. Militant antebellum abolitionism ensured that the slavery conflict dominated the public agenda, despite the best efforts of political leaders like Pierce, Stephen

50 / Chapter Two

Douglas (the principal promoter of the Kansas-­Nebraska legislation), and James Buchanan to change the subject. In turn, moderate abolitionists were gaining Northern support and electing allies to Congress who would be well positioned to assist the cause when the time was ripe.28

Crisis, Movement Activism, and Presidential Caution The crisis of the Civil War provided abolitionists with unprecedented opportunities. Abraham Lincoln’s victory in 1860 brought to the executive office for the first time a Republican president who was hostile to the institution of slavery and dedicated to halting its expansion into new territories, itself a partial triumph of abolitionist electioneering. Indeed, abolitionists had been coveting Lincoln’s support since hearing him denounce the Kansas-­Nebraska Act at Springfield and Peoria, Illinois, in the fall of 1854. The Springfield address was not published, but Lincoln gave essentially the same speech in Peoria, which he wrote out for an issue of the Illinois State Journal, so that it would be widely read throughout the state. Listening to Lincoln condemn the opening of the Kansas and Nebraska territories to slavery and Stephen Douglas’s doctrine of “popular sovereignty”—allowing settlers a new territory to decide whether slavery should be allowed within a new state’s borders—in terms that appeared to embrace the principles of the fledgling Republican Party, key abolitionists were encouraged. Owen Lovejoy and Ichabod Codding, both instrumental in the grassroots movement to form a Republican organization in Illinois, thought they had found a savvy Whig politician who could make their cause effective. Yet Lincoln, assuming a cautious position that typified his minuet with antislavery activists for much of the next decade, declined the invitation of Lovejoy and Codding to join the Illinois Republican central committee. “I suppose my opposition to the principle of slavery is as strong as that of any member of the Republican Party,” he wrote Codding, “but I had also supposed that the extent to which I feel authorized to carry that opposition, practically, was not all that satisfactory to the party.”29 Indeed, Lincoln’s famous Peoria address made clear that even as he strongly opposed the Kansas-­Nebraska Act’s repeal of the 1820 Missouri Compromise, which would allow slavery to expand above the boundary that proscribed forced servitude in northern portions of the Louisiana Territory, he was no abolitionist. Tellingly, he would not even go so far as to condemn the hated fugitive slave law. Despite the speech’s soaring rhetoric, which Lovejoy and Codding praised as a “glorious abolition speech,” Lincoln’s message was a moderate one that sought to command the fragile center in the polarizing struggle over slavery. He was willing to cooperate with, but not join, the

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abolitionist movement or the party that their more moderate wing helped found. Lincoln’s rejection of “extremes” on the issue is crystal clear in his address: Some men, mostly Whigs, who condemn the repeal of the Missouri Compromise, nevertheless hesitate to call for its restoration, lest they be thrown in company with the abolitionists. Will they allow me as an old whig to tell them good humoredly, that I think this is very silly? . . . Stand WITH the abolitionist in restoring the Missouri Compromise; and stand AGAINST him when he attempts to repeal the fugitive slave law. . . . In both cases you are right. In both cases you oppose the dangerous extremes. In both you stand the middle ground and hold the ship level and steady. In both you are nothing less than national. This is good old whig ground. To desert such ground . . . is to be less than a whig—­less than a man—­less than an American.30

Lincoln did not abandon his conservative Whig principles once he fi­­ nally joined the Republican Party in 1856. Indeed, his relative moderation on the slavery issue helped him wrest his party’s 1860 presidential nomination from the avowedly pro-­emancipation William H. Seward, the former governor of New York and the most prominent national Republican leader. In part, Lincoln’s nomination signified that the Republicans’ abolitionist wing did not have a stranglehold on the party. Moreover, although Lincoln earned his victory in the general election by sweeping every Northern state but New Jersey with 54 percent of the North’s popular vote, his inaugural address reaffirmed his opposition to any efforts “to interfere with the institution of slavery in the states where it already exists.”31 The new president believed that the “only substantial dispute” was whether slavery could be extended to new territory. Still, Lincoln insisted, as he had since the Peoria address, that this conflict was linked to fundamental principles. “One section of the country believes slavery is right and ought to be extended,” he said, “while the other believes it is wrong and ought not to be extended.” This moral dispute was not a matter that could be settled by “legal right,” despite the Supreme Court’s Dred Scott ruling that Congress could not prohibit slavery in the territories. Rather, it was a matter to be decided by ordinary voters and their representatives. Otherwise, “the people will have ceased to be their own rulers, having to that extent practically resigned their government into the hands of an eminent tribunal.”32 Lincoln’s election thus appeared to empower a president and a party who were prepared to prevent the expansion of slavery, and perhaps condemn it to ultimate extinction, but were not ready to end forced servitude in the

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confederate states. Some abolitionists were disdainful of Lincoln’s adherence to Whig principles that, at best, prescribed gradual emancipation. Edmund Quincy, editor of the Anti-­Slavery Standard, despaired during the campaign that its result would be “the election of a new administration pledged to the support of slavery in our Southern states . . . whether success be to the Democrats or Republicans.” But most abolitionists were more hopeful. “We are aware that the Republican Party is far from being up to full measure of what ought to be thought and felt on the slavery question,” Harriet Beecher Stowe wrote in the Independent soon after the election was decided. “But they are for stopping the evil—­and in this case to arrest is to cure. Already the discussions of this election have purified the air, and reversed the fashion of the large float­­ ing class who are formed in their opinion by atmosphere and fashion.”33 Even Garrison, who had harsh words for Republicans, especially the more temperate wing of the party that Lincoln represented, was cautiously optimistic that the 1860 election would advance the abolitionist cause. He argued that Republicans could “create such a moral and religious sentiment against slavery as shall mould all parties and sects to effect its overthrow.” Despite Lincoln’s egregious compromises with America’s peculiar institution, Garrison sensed that his party’s ascendance revealed “a marked division between the political forces of the North and the South; and though it relates, ostensibly, solely to the question of the further extension of slavery, it really signifies a much deeper sentiment in the breasts of the people of the North, which, in process of time, must ripen into more decisive action.”34 The secession of Southern states clearly made decisive action far more likely. As soon as secession became violent and irrevocable, Lincoln believed that his oath of office compelled him to take extraordinary measures, including the suspension of the writ of habeas corpus, to preserve the Union. Abolitionists hoped that the president’s grasp of prerogative power to put down the domestic rebellion would include emancipating the slaves. The day after the North’s surrender of Fort Sumter, the White House and Congress were flooded with abolitionist petitions, letters, and personal confrontations demanding immediate emancipation. Abolitionists understood well that the crisis of Southern secession presented openings for reform that were almost unimaginable in quieter times when American constitutional democracy regularly frustrated ambitious reform. “If slaveholders had staid [sic] in the Union they might have kept the life in their institution for many years to come,” one prominent abolitionist observed. “That what no party and no public feeling in the North could ever have hoped to touch they had madly placed in the path of destruction.”35 Radical Republicans were quick to take up the cause of their more militant brethren. More precisely, they

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were the first to see the link between righteousness and necessity that would ultimately persuade Lincoln to issue the Emancipation Proclamation. Sumner, representing Massachusetts in the Senate, argued in October 1861 that the Civil War had transformed emancipation into a “weapon” that all true patriots should be eager to deploy: It is often said that war will make an end of slavery. This is probable. But it is surer still that the overthrow of Slavery will make an end of the war. If I am correct in this averment, . . . then do reason, justice, and policy unite, each and all, in declaring that the war must be brought to bear directly on the grand conspirator and omnipresent enemy. Not to do so is to take upon ourselves all the weakness of Slavery, while we leave the Rebels its boasted resources of military strength. . . . If you are wise, prudent, economical, conservative, practical, you will strike quick and hard,—­strike, too, where the blow will be most felt,—­strike at the mainspring of the rebellion.36

Lincoln, however, was slow to accept the necessity of abolishing slavery by executive action. On July 4, 1861, the president once again assured the nation that he had no intention of disturbing slavery in states where it existed. Three weeks later he told Congress that “this war is not waged . . . for any purpose . . . of overthrowing or interfering with the rights or established institutions of . . . Southern states.”37 The use of the broad prerogative powers of the presidency, he argued, could be justified only by the exigencies of war and not as an instrument of either his party’s or his own personal policy preferences. When meeting in June 1862 with the Religious Society of Progressive Friends, a Pennsylvania abolitionist society, Lincoln expressed sympathy for their cause but made clear that he was not yet prepared to embrace the method they and their radical Republican allies proposed to fulfill it. “If a decree of emancipation could abolish Slavery,” he told his visitors, “John Brown would have done the work effectually. Such a decree surely could not be more binding upon the South than the Constitution, and that cannot be enforced in that part of the country now. Would a proclamation of Freedom be any more effective?”38 To the contrary, Lincoln feared that an emancipation edict would weaken the Union by alienating the border states. With these concerns in mind, he frustrated abolitionists by revoking an emancipation order by General John C. Frémont. Frémont had originally issued the order in August 1861 in order to confiscate the property and free the slaves of all Confederate activists in Missouri. Lincoln’s slap-­down of Frémont, the crusading standard bearer of Republicans in the 1856 presidential election, elicited strong rebukes from

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abolitionists. Lydia Maria Child, an influential member of the AASS, wrote a public letter to the president, which was published in several abolitionist papers, urging Lincoln to use the full powers that the domestic rebellion afforded his office to smite the sin of slavery. This fervent position, Child insisted, once confined to militant abolitionists, now expressed the strong sentiments of Northern public opinion: That you sincerely wish to save the Republic the people do not doubt for a moment; and your scruples about constitutional obligations have commanded their respect. But events have educated them rapidly, and they now deny that any constitutional obligation exists towards rebels who have thrown off the Constitution, spit upon it, and trampled it under their feet. . . . God has placed you at the head of a great nation . . . when its free institutions are in extreme peril from enemies within and without. Lay your right arm on the buckler of the Almighty, and march fearlessly forward to universal freedom in the name of the Lord.”39

Although the support for an emancipation proclamation might not have transcended parties, as Child claimed, Lincoln’s forbearance had certainly become unpopular with most Republicans. Even Orville Browning, conservative senator from Illinois and Lincoln’s close friend, grasping the logic of radical Republicans that an emancipation order united principle and necessity, criticized the revocation of Frémont’s edict. “Astonished” that even old Whigs like Browning were now urging such an extraordinary use of executive power, Lincoln insisted that Frémont’s proclamation was “simply dictatorship.” It assumed that the general could “do anything he pleases—­confiscate the lands and free the slaves of loyal people, as well as disloyal ones.” Rather than save the government, Lincoln insisted, actions like Frémont’s would signify the surrender of it: “Can it be pretended that it is any longer the government of the United States—­any government of Constitution and laws—­wherein a General, or a President, may make permanent rules of property by proclamation?” Compounding this perversion of principle, Lincoln feared, was that it was likely to fail as a policy. “I was assured,” Lincoln informed Browning, “that [letting Frémont’s order stand meant that] the very arms we had furnished Kentucky would be turned against us. I think to lose Kentucky is nearly the same as to lose the whole game. Kentucky gone, we cannot hold Missouri, nor, I think, Maryland.” Invoking the carefully modulated pledge their party had made in 1860—­to prevent the expansion of slavery, and no more—­Lincoln pleaded with his old friend to give up his “restlessness for new positions,” and back him

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“manfully on the ground upon which you and other kind friends gave me in the election, and have approved in my public documents.”40 Lincoln’s invocation of the Republican platform was not disingenuous. Holding firmly to its pledge, he rejected his secretary of state–­designate William Seward’s importunities immediately after the 1860 election that, while still the president-­elect, he seek a compromise on the extension of slavery into the territories. When word leaked that Congress was considering a plan presented by Senator John J. Crittenden of Kentucky that would protect and allow for the expansion of slavery south of the Missouri Compromise’s 36°30´ line, Lincoln intervened to defeat it. To surrender under threat political ground that Lincoln defined as the Republican bedrock would have been disastrous not only for his party, but also for American democracy. His fellow Republicans in Congress agreed. Despite Seward’s talk of a negotiated settlement, not a single Republican in Congress voted for the Crittenden plan. Moreover, Lincoln’s moral aversion to slavery and his eagerness to assuage moderate abolitionists in Congress led him to distance himself from the proslavery positions of earlier presidents. In defiance of the Dred Scott decision, Lincoln signed legislation barring slavery from all the national territories. He also supported a new treaty with Great Britain aimed at better attacking the Atlantic slave trade and, at the urging of Senator Sumner, he refused to commute the death sentence of the first American convicted of participating in the slave trade. Even as he took these measures, Lincoln remained unwilling to endorse “radical and extreme measures.” Nonetheless, as the president acknowledged in defending his slouch toward emancipation, “I claim not to control events, but confess that events have controlled me.”41 Undaunted by Lincoln’s unyielding defense of the “middle ground,” militant and moderate abolitionists pressed strongly for a decidedly bolder course. In the end, Lincoln was persuaded to lend critical support to their cause.

Radical Agitation and Collective Responsibility Movement radicals launched provocative publicity campaigns and rallies meant to unravel Lincoln’s gradualism. They firmly rejected Lincoln’s claims that national preservation, principles of popular rule, and constitutional requirements trumped emancipation. “The conviction that SLAVERY IS A SIN is the Gibraltar of our cause,” declared Phillips.42 This was the same point that Garrison had made graphically in publicly burning the US Constitution, which shielded slavery. In November 1861, the Emancipation League was formed by Phillips, Garrison, and Douglass to coordinate a vigorous

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publicity campaign of public speeches, writings, and demonstrations aimed at “urging upon the people and the Government emancipation of the Slaves, as a measure of justice, and military necessity.”43 Garrisonian abolitionists saw their militancy as playing a critical role. “I do not believe that [Lincoln] has the boldness to declare an emancipation policy, until, by a pressure which we are to create, the country forces [him] to do it,” Phillips reasoned. “I must educate, arouse, and mature a public opinion which shall compel the administration to adopt and support [abolition]. . . . My criticism is not, like that of the traitor presses, meant to paralyze the administration, but to goad it to more activity and vigor.”44 These efforts drew unprecedented attention. The New York Tribune estimated that during the winter and spring of 1861–­62 more than five million people heard or read antislavery speeches of Phillips and other Emancipation League agitators.45 “Keep pounding the rock,” Douglass urged his colleagues, while his own speeches assailed Lincoln’s “vacillation, doubt, uncertainty, and hesitation.”46 The league was not alone in its efforts to instigate change. The White House also was beleaguered by a steady stream of antislavery petitions, letters, and delegations of indignant abolitionists.47 Yet this deluge was mediated in critical ways by the Republican Party, which lent authority and effective organization to the abolitionist cause. Moderate abolitionists at the center of power recognized the moral and practical strains that these publicity and protest activities placed on Lincoln, and they sought to capitalize on them in two ways. First, reform-­minded lawmakers and cabinet members, most notably Senator Sumner, conferred with the president several times a week on how to address both abolitionist demands and the moral obligations to end slavery.48 Sumner and others gave more respectable voice to militants’ arguments that freeing slaves served an immediate military purpose. Second, abolitionists in Congress (including prominent members of the influential joint congressional Committee on the Conduct of the War) worked to force the president’s hand amid the constant drumbeat of external abolitionist criticism.49 The radical Republicans’ commitment to pushing Lincoln toward emancipation was especially evident in how Congress responded to the issue of how to deal with thousands of slaves who fled behind the lines of Union armies in pursuit of freedom. Some Union officers followed the Fugitive Slave Act and permitted slave masters to reclaim these fugitives, while others refused to return the slaves on the grounds that they were contrabands of war. Lincoln made no public comment on the subject in the summer of 1861, but he privately resolved that these fugitives ought not to be returned to bondage.50 Still, he faced a nettlesome dilemma: most people living in

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the border states crucial to the Union cause supported the return of these fugitives and those in Northern states resisted the resettlement of large numbers of freed slaves who now resided in Union-­controlled territory.51 As the White House responded slowly, movement allies in Congress seized the ini­­ tiative. When numerous fugitive slaves sought haven at a Union fort in Vir­­ ginia, abolitionists in Congress persuaded their colleagues to adopt a Con­­ fiscation Act in the summer of 1861 that allowed Union forces to seize all property used to aid the Confederacy. The measure was carefully designed to provide relief for fugitive slaves behind Union lines, and Lincoln reluctantly signed the legislation.52 The law fell far short of the broad emancipation that Phillips and Douglass were championing—­the contrabands were no longer slaves only if they had been employed directly by the Confederate army—­ but it was too strong for Democrats and a few border-­state Republicans. As James McPherson has noted, “this was the first breach of bipartisan support for Union measures.” More to the point, it marked a critical turning point, signifying that “the conflict was being transformed into a Republican and antislavery war.”53 Such a development worried Lincoln, especially as he feared it encouraged Frémont’s edict, which went well beyond the letter of the law. Even as the pressure for emancipation grew in the spring of 1862, Lincoln continued to prescribe gradualism. To resolve the puzzle of what to do with fugitive slaves who escaped into Union encampments, Lincoln considered colonization and instructed administration officials to investigate the prospects of resettling runaway slaves overseas. He also developed an emancipation plan intended to address abolitionist demands for dismantling slavery without alienating the majority of citizens in both border and Northern states. Unveiled in his annual message to Congress in December 1861, Lincoln’s proposal called for abolition to be voluntary on the part of loyal slave states, for compensation to be made to the slave owners, and for freed slaves to be colonized.54 As Eric Foner has noted, the idea of colonization showed dramatically that America’s “fiery trial” over slavery was exceptional. Nowhere else in the Western world, Harper’s Weekly pointed out, was it seriously proposed “to extirpate the slaves after emancipation.”55 Yet the idea had deep historical roots. It was first prescribed by leaders of the early republic like Jefferson who believed slavery an evil, yet considered blacks inferior to whites and found the idea of their living side by side as free citizens unthinkable. Lincoln himself would not give up on colonization until 1864. As he told a group of African Americans he invited to the executive mansion in August 1862 to discuss plans to colonize emancipated men and woman outside the

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United States: “You and we are different races. We have between us a broader difference than exists between almost any two races. Whether it is right or wrong I need not discuss, but this physical difference is a great disadvantage to us both, as I think your race suffers very greatly, many of them by living among us, while ours suffers from your presence. In a word we suffer on each side. If this is admitted, it affords a reason at least why we should be separated.”56 As offensive as Lincoln’s gradualism sounds when viewed through the lens of subsequent events, it was meant to be a compromise plan that spoke to abolitionist demands. In fact, at the time this plan was first broached to Delaware in November 1861, Foner acknowledges, “when no significant military action had yet taken place, it was a bold initiative. Never before had a president committed the federal government to promoting abolition.”57 Some of Lincoln’s reform-­minded contemporaries agreed. “If the President has not entered Canaan,” Phillips proclaimed, “he has turned his face Zionward.”58 But other abolitionists castigated the president’s blueprints as “diluted milk and water gruel.” “I would respectfully ask,” Child declared in her public letter to the president, “how much longer the nation is to wait for the decision of the Border States, paying, meanwhile, $2,000,000 a day, and sending many of its best and bravest to be stabbed, hung and shot by the rebels, whose property they are employed to guard.” Urging Lincoln to take direct responsibility for emancipation, she added, “How much longer will pro-­slavery officers be permitted to refuse obedience to the laws passed of Congress, saying ‘ We will continue to send back fugitives to their masters until we receive orders from the President to the contrary.’ ”59 As Child and other militant abolitionists warned, Lincoln’s careful designs for compensated emancipation ultimately went nowhere, as none of the loyal slave states agreed to the plan. But his efforts, although halting, speak to abolitionist influence both inside and outside the councils of government, as well as to the important role the Republican Party played in reconciling insurgency and executive power. This “dialogue” between Lincoln and antislavery activists would continue, gradually moving the president to forge more direct ties with the abolitionists.

The Final Push: Sustained Pressure and Executive Action With no end to border-­state recalcitrance in sight, militant and moderate abolitionist pressures had an unmistakable impact on the White House. Lincoln warned centrists in his own party that antislavery sentiment in the North “is still upon me, and is increasing.”60 Indeed, as Lincoln grew impa-

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tient with Northern resistance to the war and the Democratic inclinations of some Union generals, he came to accept, if not welcome, some of this pressure. Even the Committee on the Conduct of the War, the oversight body formed in January 1862 and often a thorn in the president’s side, served Lincoln’s ultimate objective of crushing the Southern rebellion and gradually bringing an end to forced servitude. Lincoln did not cooperate directly with the radical Republicans who controlled this committee, and he sometimes resisted their most zealous abolitionist tendencies. Nonetheless, he allowed his secretary of war, Edwin Stanton, to collaborate with its members in pressuring circumspect Union generals, such as George B. McClellan, whose cautiousness in battle and indifference to slavery antagonized the president.61 Early in 1862, the abolitionist leaders of the Emancipation League noted a significant change in how Northern audiences greeted their fiery demands for immediate emancipation. Douglass marveled that earlier jeers and mob violence against abolitionist speeches had been replaced by hearty applause and cheers from packed audiences, but he was quite certain that the change in public sentiment was driven by the belief that abolition would hasten Union victory rather than any faith in racial justice.62 Following Sumner, abolitionists also grew adroit at framing emancipation as consistent with Lincoln’s self-­proclaimed duty to do whatever was necessary to preserve the Union. “We are fighting the rebels with only one hand,” Douglass told an enthusiastic audience in Philadelphia. “We are recruiting our troops in the towns and villages of the North, when we ought to be recruiting them on the plantations of the South. We are striking the guilty rebels with our soft white hand, when we should be striking with the iron hand of the black man, which we keep chained behind us.”63 As another movement leader put it in more strategic terms, an emancipation order by the president “would compel every fighting [Confederate] man to remain at home and look to their negroes instead of going into the army to kill our friends.”64 In March, Phillips brought his rhetorical campaign directly to Washington, where “he took the town by storm.” Phillips’s celebrity as an eloquent agitator led Lincoln to grant him an interview, during which he counseled the president on his moral duty to liberate slaves. While militants like Phillips were gaining mainstream appeal and recasting Northern views, Sumner and other abolitionist insiders advanced the Emancipation League’s arguments through private lobbying and public action. Radicals derailed re-­adoption of the so-­called Crittenden-­Johnson resolution that originally disavowed the abolition of slavery as a central war aim of the Union. They subsequently won passage of an article of war prohibiting US troops from

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returning fugitive slaves to slaveholders, followed by legislation in April 1862 that abolished slavery in the District of Columbia.65 By the summer of 1862, the Republican Party was united in the view that Lincoln and the military should take all action, including emancipation, to put down the rebellion. Even moderate Republicans supported the enactment of two laws that made all but inevitable the link between restoration of the Union and emancipation. The Militia Act not only called for a draft of soldiers for nine-­month tours of duty, but also empowered the president to enroll “persons of African descent” for any “war service for which they may be found competent,” including service as soldiers, a step that Lincoln was not yet prepared to take.66 This revolutionary provision was underscored with Congress’s enactment of a second Confiscation Act, which punished “traitors” by confiscating their property, including slaves who were “deemed captives of war . . . and forever free.”67 Lincoln received numerous letters, even from self-­proclaimed opponents of slavery, urging him to veto the second Confiscation Act, arguing, as the president once had against Frémont’s proclamation, that it would undermine rather than strengthen the Union effort. As one such missive warned, “By adopting the policy of this bill, you will no longer be considered by the American people, as the President of the mighty republic of the United States; but as the head of the Abolition faction, warring for the destruction of slavery. . . . It is high time, that a stop be put, to the Jacobin cant, ‘slavery must die, that the republic may live.’ ”68 Lincoln also had deep reservations about the sweeping powers the bill bestowed on the military; he ultimately signed the legislation, but took the extraordinary step of sending back to Congress a draft veto message that detailed his concerns about its failure to clearly stipulate the meaning of treason and to distinguish between Confederates’ real property and slaves. Nevertheless, recognizing that to resist the rising sentiment for abolition would unite his partisan brethren in Congress against him, Lincoln not only signed the Confiscation Act, but also made no effort to resist the pressure that the Committee on the Conduct of the War put on generals to aggressively enforce it. Spurred by the radicals of his party and frustrated by the border states’ adamant rejection of his plan for compensated emancipation, Lincoln finally tilted toward the abolitionist position. He privately consulted with various confidantes, including moderate abolitionists, about issuing an emancipation proclamation as a military measure liberating slaves behind Confederate lines. A draft of a proclamation was soon prepared and locked in his desk drawer. When Sumner persistently urged Lincoln to issue the proclamation, the president firmly explained, “We mustn’t issue it till after a victory.” To begin

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preparing Northern sentiment for such an order, he resuscitated his colonization proposal as a way of assuaging popular fears that emancipation would lead freed slaves to resettle en masse in Northern states.69 He also issued his famous public response to Horace Greeley’s New York editorial, titled “The Prayer of Twenty Millions,” that criticized the president’s lethargy on emancipation. Lincoln’s open letter clarified what he saw as his official obligation to subordinate the slavery question to preserving the Union. If carrying out these official duties frustrated the abolitionist cause, they represented “no modifi­ cation of my oft-­expressed personal wish that all men every where could be free.”70 His open letter was designed to reassure Northerners “who did not want to see the war transformed into a crusade for abolition,” and alert “antislavery men that he was contemplating further moves against the peculiar institution.”71 Lincoln continued to fret in coming days about whether the emancipation order was too radical for public opinion or might drive border states into the Confederate fold. He confessed to a delegation of Chicago abolitionists that it was his “earnest desire to know the will of Providence in this matter.” To his cabinet, Lincoln explained that he had “made a vow, a covenant, that if God gave us a victory in the approaching battle,” he would consider it “an indication of Divine will” that he issue the proclamation. That the will of God now became a consideration in the president’s actions over slavery “was an odd situation for a man like Lincoln whose religious views were, to say the least, unorthodox.”72 In truth, as Lincoln would later suggest in his magisterial second inaugural, he believed that divine intention was inscrutable. Yet the defense of his proclamation as a religious covenant more than likely expressed Lincoln’s recognition that the antislavery jeremiads of activists like Garrison—­the view that the war was a reckoning for the sin of slavery and that God intended the president to free the slaves—­now resonated powerfully in the North. Abolitionists, even as they celebrated the “wonderful, wonderful, wonderful change that had taken place in national affairs . . . under the pressure of irresistible necessity,” vowed to encourage the president in his divine inspiration. As the delegates to the Convention of the New England Anti-­ Slavery Society pledged in June 1862, “Whatever may be the providential advancement of our cause, however emancipation might come, more or less extensively as military necessity, or as a work of political expedience, our work is the preaching of righteousness to it.”73 Abolitionists thus prepared the moral ground that would burnish Lincoln’s appeal to the exigencies of war. When military victory finally came at Antietam in September, Lincoln issued a “Preliminary Emancipation

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Proclamation” followed by a permanent proclamation a few months later. The centerpiece of the executive order was its declaration of presidential intent to emancipate all slaves in areas failing to return to the Union by January 1, 1863. Using language consistent with his constitutional role as commander in chief, Lincoln defined emancipation in terms of military imperative; the proclamation was to be applied essentially in unconquered sections of the Confederacy. Slaves also were described in martial terms as commodities of war; their freedom was “not a question of sentiment or taste, but one of physical force, which may be preserved and estimated as horsepower, and steampower, are measured and estimated.”74

After Emancipation: The Quest for Constitutional Reform Despite the limited scope of the proclamation’s language and spirit, abolitionists, who had artfully joined their moral suasion to the practical imperatives of a full-­scale domestic rebellion, regarded it as a tremendous breakthrough. Lincoln had finally made the connection between abolitionism and military necessity that they had been urging on him since the start of the war. Confessing that her “gratitude to God” was mixed with “an undertone of sadness that the moral sense of the people was so low that the thing could not be done nobly,” Child acknowledged that she “was truly thankful for the proclamation.” Not only was it an important step that would allow African Americans to fight bravely on the battlefield; it also helped persuade Europe, especially Great Britain, which was wavering in its support of the Union, to ally with the North’s cause.75 More unreserved joy was expressed at a New Year’s celebration, held at the hallowed Tremont Temple in Boston, to honor the president’s proclamation and the new purpose of the war. Speaking to the enthusiastic gathering, Douglass “thanked God that today he saw a bright light, and if he did not see the abolition of the curse, he saw the beginning of the end.” Douglass’s sentiment was echoed throughout the North. Greeley hailed the president’s order as “the beginning of the new life of the nation,” and Garrison described it as “an act of immense historic importance.”76 Indeed, abolitionists, most notably Sojourner Truth and Douglass, played an important part in recruiting black soldiers. Douglass was especially active in this cause, helping to enlist soldiers for the Massachusetts Fifty-­Fourth Infantry, the first regiment of northern blacks, which his sons, Lewis and Charles, as well as Truth’s grandson, James Caldwell, joined. Although he fought for equal pay and treatment for black soldiers, Douglass urged African Americans to join the Union cause, even in the face of unequal conditions.

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“For my part,” he told an audience that included potential African American recruits, “I hold that if the Government of the United States offered nothing more . . . than bare subsistence and arms, considering the moral effect of compliance upon ourselves, it would be the wisest and best thing for us to enlist. There is something ennobling in the possession of arms, and we of all other people in the world stand in need of their ennobling influence.”77 Fortified by wide reports that black soldiers took full advantage of this opportunity for honor, both militant and moderate antislavery leaders soon urged more sweeping emancipation. Woman abolitionists were especially forceful in their demands for further action. Since they organized the landmark meeting in Seneca Falls, where Douglass joined arms with them to proclaim an understanding of the Declaration of Independence that would uphold the universal rights of men and women, Elizabeth Cady Stanton and Susan B. Anthony had viewed their work in the abolitionist movement as inextricably joined to woman’s suffrage. But with the momentum created by Lincoln’s proclamation, they felt it necessary, as Douglass had been gently urging since the breaking apart of the AASS, to collect and clarify the abolitionist voice demanding immediate emancipation for slaves in the Confederacy. To this end, Stanton and Anthony created the Woman’s National Loyal League, launched by a major convention in New York on May 14, 1863. The purpose of their new league was to join the pressure of outside agitation with an explicit campaign for a constitutional amendment abolishing slavery. The most important tactic of this campaign was a mammoth petition drive, a favorite weapon of the abolitionist movement—­one that Stanton and Anthony believed was especially suited to enhancing the political clout of woman activists. As Anthony stated in an 1863 address to the AASS, “Women can neither take the ballot nor the bullet, therefore to us, the right to petition is the one sacred right which we ought not to neglect.”78 Although the feminist abolitionists recognized that a constitutional amend­ ment would require winning over Congress and the states, the growth of presidential power during the Civil War and the Emancipation Proclamation focused their attention on the importance of Lincoln’s leadership in achieving such a change in the founding document. Their appeal to Lincoln was spelled out in a lengthy letter to the president, which the convention ratified. Anticipating, and perhaps encouraging, the Gettysburg Address that would be delivered a few months later, the missive insisted that the woman abolitionists did not convene in New York “to criticize or complain.” Rather, their task was to strengthen the power of the president’s convictions: “We come to thank you for your proclamation, in which the XIXth Century seems to echo back the Declaration of 1776. Our fathers had a vision of the sublime

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idea liberty, equality, and fraternity; but they failed to climb the hights [sic] that with anointed eyes they saw. To us, the children belongs the work to build up the living morality of what was conceived and uttered.”79 At this early stage of their fight to transform military necessity into the complete abolition of slavery, the league, even as it sought to “collect and clarify the abolitionist voice,” emphasized the imperative of Lincoln’s extending the reach of his proclamation to the emancipation of African American women. Emphasizing the double indemnity from which woman slaves suffered, the letter continued: “By a mere stroke of the pen you have emancipated millions from a condition of wholesale concubinage. We ask now that you finish the work by declaring that nowhere under our national flag shall the motherhood of any race plead in vain for justice and protection.” What the league most expected from the president, however, was a clearer declaration of principles than the proclamation ordained—­a more direct statement that would unequivocally establish abolitionism as the purpose of the war. As the appeal to Lincoln concluded, “At this time our greatest need is not men or money, valiant generals or brilliant victories, but a consistent policy based on principles that ‘all governments derive their just powers form the consent of the governed.’ And the nation waits for you to say there is not power under our declaration and rights, nor under any laws, human or divine, by which free men can be made slaves; and therefore that your pledge to the slaves is irrevocable, and shall be redeemed.”80 Toward the end of 1863, Lincoln began to answer this call for decisive moral leadership. As he made clear at Gettysburg, Lincoln had come to sense a historic opportunity to join abolitionists in assuring that the “nation, under God, [would] have a new birth of freedom.” Still, abolitionists kept the pressure on the president and Congress to translate Lincoln’s solemn words into legal action. When Stanton and Anthony reconvened the Women’s National Loyal League on its anniversary—­May 12, 1864—­they were joined by Wendell Phillips and other leading abolitionists to celebrate their impressive petition drive that would accumulate four hundred thousand signatures of men and women—­from every Northern state—­who supported the adoption of “measures for so amending the Constitution, as forever to prohibit [the existence of slavery] in any portion of our common country.”81 The league’s petition drive, championed by Sumner on the Senate floor, played prominently in the upper chamber’s passage of the Thirteenth Amendment on April 8, 1864. Yet while Sumner and abolitionists kept up the pressure, the House had not followed suit when Congress recessed in the summer of 1864. Ultimately, therefore, the fate of the emancipation amendment would be resolved by the approaching 1864 election. Previously divided over

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whether the condemnation of slavery was best achieved through moral suasion or political action, abolitionists, encouraged by the success of Stanton and Anthony in bringing grassroots pressure to bear on Congress during the fall and spring of 1864, became deeply involved in the issues of the presidential campaign. As activists at the league’s anniversary gathering resolved: “when the men of a nation, in a political party, consecrate themselves to ‘Freedom and Peace’ and declare their high resolve to found a Republic on the principles of justice, they have lifted politics into the sphere of morals and religion, where it is the duty of women to be co-­workers with them in giving immortal life to the new nation.”82 The abolitionists’ support for the Republican Party was dramatically captured by the popular and highly publicized speaking tours of Anna Dickinson, a young Philadelphia Quaker. Her unrelenting criticisms of McClellan’s lack of forceful military command and powerful battle cries for Lincoln to deploy the Union Army in the service of emancipation led the press to christen her a “Second Joan of Arc.”83 While she had been very critical of Lincoln’s constitutional forbearance, Dickinson was moved by the Emancipation Proclamation—­she joined with Frederick Douglass at Tremont Temple in celebrating the order—­and consequently campaigned for the GOP in the off-­year 1863 elections. As the historian Wendy Venet observes, “Republican state chairmen, first in New Hampshire and later in Connecticut and other states, took a careful look at Anna Dickinson and concluded that a young female orator might add a charismatic element to their campaigns.”84 How much Dickinson’s appearances in New England, Pennsylvania, and New York actually affected Republican victories cannot be determined, but her dramatic and eloquent infusion of partisan politics with the uncompromising spirit of abolitionism captured the attention of Lincoln and other leading national officials. Dickinson played no small role in moving the protracted, troubled courtship between abolitionists and the president to a successful end. Her influ­­ ence is captured well by an extraordinary invitation to deliver a lecture in the “Hall of Representatives.” Nearly a hundred congressmen, including Thaddeus Stevens and Sumner, signed the invitation, which was hand-­delivered by Republican congressman W. D. Kelley of Philadelphia and one of Lincoln’s secretaries, J. G. Nicolay. Dickinson’s speech of January 16, 1864, was given a rousing introduction by Vice President Hannibal Hamlin. The speech itself, titled “Words for the Hour,” was delivered before a packed and distinguished audience, including members of the Supreme Court, Lincoln’s cabinet, the Senate, and the House of Representatives. In this atmosphere, which simulated that of a modern State of the Union address, Dickinson issued a

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forceful attack on Lincoln’s lenient plan of reconstruction, which had been announced a month earlier.85 Yet the tone changed when the president and his wife entered the hall. “Warmed and flattered by the President’s entrance, with the possible hope that such a blessing coupled with her criticism might help work a desirable change in his [reconstruction] policies,” Dickinson, in a gesture that thrilled Republicans and enraged Democrats sitting in the packed chamber, endorsed Lincoln’s reelection: “This was pre-­eminently a people’s war. It was guided by the man of the people, who never had been behind the great heart of the people. We had done much, and all was hopeful before us. Granted that we had much yet to do, we had the man to complete the grand and glorious work, and that work was left for his second term of office.”86 Dickinson’s surprising endorsement of Lincoln’s reelection, although praised by most abolitionists and radical Republicans, did not end the battle between the president and militants over Reconstruction. Arousing the ire of radical Republicans, Lincoln pocket vetoed the 1864 Wade-­Davis bill, which included the sort of comprehensive emancipation and Reconstruction mea­ sures that he still believed the federal government had no constitutional right to impose on the states.87 Lincoln’s Proclamation of July 18, 1864, did not explicitly reject the law’s much harsher measures for restoring the Confederate states to the Union than he had prescribed. But the president’s insistence that reunification was an executive function provoked Republican leaders in Congress to issue the Wade-­Davis Manifesto, which insisted that Lincoln “confine himself to his executive duties to obey and execute, not make the laws—­to suppress by arms armed Rebellion, and leave political reorganization to Congress.”88 The constitutional debate between Lincoln and Congress over emancipation and the appropriate rules of reunification threatened to fracture the Republican Party. The abolitionist movement split along similar lines. One camp of abolitionists including Douglass, Phillips, Stanton, and Anthony supported a group of dissenters—­anointing themselves the Radical Democracy Party—­who convened in Cleveland, Ohio, on May 31 to nominate Frémont for president. Frémont’s controversial emancipation edict early in the war made him a hero to most abolitionists. However, another group of abolitionists led by Garrison and Child joined the pro-­Lincoln forces, who held a “National Union Convention” in early June to nominate the president for reelection. Feeling caught between these camps, Dickinson sought and was granted a private audience with Lincoln in April, where she repeated her harsh criticisms of the president’s lenient terms for Reconstruction. Lincoln’s response apparently was cordial but firm. He ended the conversation,

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according to Dickinson’s account, by remarking, “All I can say is, if the radicals want me to lead, let them get out of the way and let me lead.”89 At the same time, Lincoln made clear during this period of Republican contestation that he had moved significantly in the abolitionist direction. He conceded that it was unthinkable to return blacks to slavery, especially since African American soldiers performed as bravely and effectively as abolitionists had told a skeptical president they would. When urged to do so by some Northern Democrats, who argued that the coupling of emancipation with the Union was the only stumbling block to peace negotiations with the Confederacy, Lincoln countered that “as a matter of policy, to announce such a purpose, would ruin the Union cause itself.” Why would black soldiers risk their lives for the Union, he asked, “with the full notice of our purpose to betray them.” Even more troubling, the president insisted, was the morality of such an act. If he were “to return to slavery the black warriors,” Lincoln stated plaintively, “I should be damned in time and eternity for doing so.”90 Moreover, Lincoln asserted in the Wade-­Davis proclamation that, although he did not believe Congress had the authority to abolish slavery in the states, he was “sincerely hoping and expecting that a constitutional amendment, abolishing slavery throughout the nation, may be adopted.” Indeed, allying with radical members of his party and embracing the petition drive of the Loyal Women of the Republic, the president persuaded the chairman of the Republican National Committee, New York senator E. D. Morgan, to make an emancipation amendment the “key-­stone” of the 1864 campaign platform. Because slavery was “hostile to the principles of republican government, justice and national safety,” the platform declared, the Republican Party vowed to accomplish its “utter and complete extirpation from the soil of the Republic.”91 The president also showed his resolve by plotting with Frederick Douglass in August 1864 to form a group of agents who would penetrate rebel territory and encourage slaves to move within Union lines as soon as possible. Lincoln and Douglass worried that many slaves would be trapped in the Confederacy without the prospects of emancipation if the Republicans, as he thought probable, lost the election and thus any opportunity to end forced servitude constitutionally. The Democratic candidate, the indecisive General McClellan, disavowed his party’s “peace before reunion” plank but also opposed the Emancipation Proclamation and wanted the Union to continue fighting only until the pre-­secession status quo could be restored.92 As the military and political situation soon improved, nothing came of the plot hatched by Douglass and the president to hasten slaves caught below the Mason-­Dixon Line into the Union’s ranks. Yet this bold overture

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persuaded Douglass that the president’s antislavery convictions had hardened. During the planning stages of their plot, Douglass wrote that Lincoln “showed a deeper moral conviction against slavery than I had ever seen be­ fore in anything written or spoken by him.”93 The clear electoral choice between Lincoln and McClellan, as well as the Union’s critical military victories during the summer, ultimately persuaded Frémont to withdraw from the presidential race in September. The radical “pathfinder’s” decision was made easier by Lincoln’s agreement to remove Montgomery Blair, whose Jacksonian states’ rights sympathies offended abolitionists, from his cabinet position of US postmaster general. With Lincoln’s overtures to antislavery sentiments, most abolitionists came out strongly for the president’s reelection. As Douglass wrote Garrison on September 17: I, like many other radical men, fiercely criticized, in private and in public, the actions and utterances of Mr. Lincoln, and withheld from him my support. That possibility is no longer conceivable; it is now plain that this country is to be governed or misgoverned during the next four years, either by the Republican Party represented in the person of Abraham Lincoln, or the (miscalled) Democratic Party, represented by George B. McClellan. With this alternative clearly before us, all hesitation ought to cease, and every man who wishes well to the slave and to the country should at once rally with all the warmth and earnestness of his nature to support Abraham Lincoln.94

Energized by the productive tension that eventually aligned president, insurgents, and party, the Republicans ran a spirited campaign. As important as the conflict over the war aims and slavery were, however, General William Tecumseh Sherman’s timely capture of Atlanta may have turned the tide in the Republicans’ favor. But the firming of the alliance between the president and abolitionists ensured that the promised push for emancipation would not be forgotten amid the celebration of Sherman’s conquests. Reelected by large majorities, Lincoln and Republican leaders persuaded the House to join the Senate in proposing by the necessary two-­thirds majority an amendment to end slavery everywhere in the United States. More than three decades after Garrison founded the AASS, therefore, the complete abolition of slavery finally was achieved with congressional passage and ultimate ratification of the Thirteenth Amendment in 1865. Yet this grand accomplishment also owed significantly to a Whig politician who first reluctantly, but later decisively, formed an alliance with a social movement. An

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abolitionist friend of Dickinson saw divine work in uniting a pragmatic reformer and a movement dedicated to fundamental structure change, an alliance that abetted considerably Lincoln’s reelection: “[T]he wise one means to make the people of America save their own cause and so he is going to give them a President once more who jogs along as fast as they do—­no faster, no slower.”95 Once the House and Senate had passed the amendment, Congress sent it to Lincoln for his signature. The Constitution does not require presidents to sign constitutional amendments, but legislative leaders somehow forgot that Lincoln’s was not needed.96 This oversight, whether deliberate or not, testifies to the important role that the president played in persuading Congress and the people to embrace constitutional change—­as he put it, “a King’s ransom for all the evils.” Abolitionists, in turn, appreciated the distinctive roles that they and the president played in spurring this dramatic social, political, and constitutional reform. “Viewed from genuine abolition ground,” Douglass observed, “Mr. Lincoln seemed tardy, cold, dull, and indifferent; but measuring him by the sentiment of his country, a sentiment he was bound as a statesman to consult, he was swift, zealous, radical, and determined.”97 Douglass aptly highlighted the competing pressures to which Lincoln was subjected and the importance of his efforts to prepare public opinion. At a time of extraordinary crisis, the friction and abrasion between Lincoln and his abolitionist counterparts produced an unprecedented transformation of the American constitutional and social orders. Characteristic of formative movements, the form, substance, and timing of sweeping emancipation was ultimately a shared, albeit contentious, leadership enterprise. Radical movement activists kept abolitionism before the nation and ultimately played a critical part in reshaping public debate over slavery during the war. Sumner and other abolitionist “insiders” capitalized on the political strains and ideas posed by militants but—­with considerable help from woman abolitionists who played a critical mediating role between insurgents and radical Republicans—­reframed them in congressional legislation and private deliberations at the White House. Finally, Lincoln’s strategic choices and actions, which were profoundly influenced by both abolitionist militants and moderates, and his exercise of executive powers were ultimately integral to winning large-­scale change. The confluence of direct action, inside lobbying, and prudential presidential leadership ultimately made it possible to accomplish what Garrison and other radical abolitionists had once thought impossible: a closing

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of the vast divide between the Declaration of Independence and the Constitution. The highly influential but relatively reticent abolitionist Harriet Beecher Stowe articulated the value of Lincoln’s prudence clearly in a fervent call for his reelection, which was reprinted in several newspapers and weekly magazines: Slow and careful in coming to resolutions, willing to talk with every person who has anything to show on any side of a disputed subject, long in weighing and pondering, attached to constitutional limits and time-­honored landmarks, Lincoln certainly was the safest leader a nation could have at a time when the habeas corpus must be suspended, and all the constitutional and minor rights of citizens be thrown into the hands of their military leaders. A reckless, theorizing, dashing man of genius might have wrecked our Constitution and ended us in a splendid military despotism. . . . But almighty God has granted to [Lincoln] that clearness of vision which he gives to the true-­hearted, and enabled him to set his honest foot in that promised land of freedom, which is to be the patrimony of all men, black and white—­and from henceforth nations shall rise up to call him blessed.98

The Limits of Constitutional Change In the final analysis, the relationship between Lincoln and the abolitionists was sealed on the basis of the birth and rise to power of a new party. Firmly united in its commitment to emancipation, sanctified by a popular election and Lee’s surrender at Appomattox, the Republicans added two more amendments to the Constitution after Lincoln’s death. The Thirteenth Amendment transformed America’s scripture, the Declaration of Indepen­ dence, into a formal constitutional obligation. That obligation was further extended by the Fourteenth Amendment, ratified in 1868, which granted all Americans the “privileges and immunities of citizens of the United States,” “due process,” and “equal protection of the laws.” The Fifteenth Amendment, added in 1870, proclaimed that the “right of citizens of the United States to vote shall not be abridged by the United States or any State on account of race, color, or previous condition of servitude.” The three Civil War amendments changed the course of constitutional development and expanded government’s obligation to protect the rights of the common citizen. Ulysses S. Grant, elevated to the White House in 1868, declared that the ratification of the Fifteenth Amendment “completes the greatest civil change and constitutes the most important event that has

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occurred since the nation came to life.”99 African Americans jubilantly celebrated, hoping with Douglass that the amendment’s ratification “means that we are placed on an equal footing with all other men . . . and that liberty is to be the right of all.”100 Indeed, a number of former abolitionist groups disbanded on the assumption that now, finally, their work was done. But these hopes would be bitterly dashed. Among the most disappointed abolitionists were women like Stanton, Anthony, and Truth, who since Seneca Falls had defined their mission as forming a common front with male activists in the pursuit of the universal rights promised by the Declaration of Independence. Having fought effectively for the enactment of the Thirteenth Amendment, the Convention of Loyal Women of the Republic urged that the next step should be an amendment to “secure the elective franchise to all citizens who bear arms, or are taxed to support the Government.”101 They felt betrayed, therefore, when the Fourteenth Amendment proclaimed that states in the Confederate South, before being readmitted to the Union, must grant the vote “to all male inhabitants” or lose congressional representation proportionately. Insult was added to injury when the Fifteenth Amendment proscribed restrictions on voting by “race, color or previous condition of servitude,” but not sex. Yet many abolitionists supported the radical Republicans’ focus on the rights of African Americans. When women presented their petitions for universal suffrage, Stanton bitterly complained, “Abolitionists refused to sign them saying, ‘ This is the Negro’s hour.’ ”102 Indeed, Stanton’s plea to the Standard, the voice of the Anti-­Slavery Society, was sharply rebuked in an editorial that preached prudence: Mrs. Stanton must see that while there is a strong party in Congress who can be brought to vote directly or indirectly for putting the ballot in the hands of blacks, no considerable portion of those votes could be carried now for an Amendment to the Constitution which should include women. Thirty years of agitation and four years of war have created this costly opportunity. If we let it pass, it passes forever, or at any rate, for a generation. For that reason, we have no right, from any anxiety for something besides justice for the negro, for throwing away a single chance for securing it for him. Causes have their crises. That of the negro has come; that of the woman’s rights movement has not come.103

Spurned by both radical Republicans in Congress and many abolitionists, some woman suffragists turned to racist rhetoric. “The representative women of the nation have done their uttermost for the last thirty years to secure

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freedom for the negro, and so long as he was lowest in the scale of being we were willing to press his claims,” Stanton wrote to the Standard. “[B]ut now, as the celestial gate to civil rights is slowly moving to its hinges, it becomes a serious question whether we had better stand aside and see ‘Sambo’ walk into the kingdom first.”104 As Wendy Venet speculates, “some of the bigotry may have been more rhetorical than substantive.” While Congress debated the Fourteenth Amendment, Stanton invited Sojourner Truth to stay at her home. Truth was the most prominent of many black woman abolitionists who joined the National Woman Suffrage Association, which was formed in 1869, choosing to overlook its racist rhetoric and to support its platform for political and economic equality.105 Nevertheless, the schism over the Civil War constitutional amendments created a fault line in the struggle for civil rights that would reverberate through the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. During the Civil War, the inclusion of women in the abolitionist movement, although fraught with tension, revealed how a formative movement could be abetted by talented and passionate activists who were not directly affected by the principal injustice it fought. Yet creative tension gave way to bitter discord once abolitionists faced the daunting task of translating their victory into concrete constitutional change. So divided, the abolitionist movement could do little to fend off the implosion of Reconstruction. Indeed, the political order forged by Lincoln and the Republican Party imposed limits on presidential power and the constitutional transformation promised by the Civil War amendments. Absent the Civil War, Lincoln’s ability, even his desire, to lead the nation would have been severely constrained. The Republican Party he represented in the 1860 presidential election consisted mostly of former Whigs. Like Lincoln himself, they were dedicated to reversing the executive aggrandizement of the Jacksonians. Much of what Lincoln accomplished in consolidating presidential power during the war surprised his fellow Republicans in Congress—­and they acted forcefully to weaken the presidency after he was assassinated in 1865. Lincoln never abandoned his party’s principles. Even in war, he did not forsake entirely the Whig view of executive power that he had celebrated in the Peoria address. Consistent with this view, which most Republicans—­ radical and moderate—­embraced, Lincoln denied that the president could veto bills merely because he disagreed with them; only legislation, like the Wade-­Davis bill that he regarded as unconstitutional, would be returned to Congress.106 Despite serious reservations, he signed the Confiscation Acts; moreover, the president deferred almost entirely to Congress on matters unrelated to the war, “contributing little more than his signature” when

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Republican lawmakers “created a Department of Agriculture, established land grant colleges, passed the Homestead Act (to encourage western settlement), instituted the income tax, and erected the legislative framework that would lead to the construction of a transcontinental railroad.”107 As the postwar Republican reformer Carl Schurz wrote appreciatively of Lincoln, “With scrupulous care he endeavored, even under the most trying circumstances to remain strictly within the constitutional limits of his authority; and whenever the boundary became indistinct, or when the dangers of the situation forced him to cross it, he was equally careful to mark his acts as exceptional measures, justifiable only by the imperative necessities of the civil war, so that they might not pass into history as precedents for similar acts in time of peace.”108 Anticipating that “executive power . . . would be greatly diminished by the cessation of actual war,” Lincoln did not believe that emancipation would secure African American rights quickly.109 His celebrated second inaugural address both invoked a divine mandate to purge the sin of slavery and an appeal to pursue God’s will mercifully—­“with malice toward none; with charity for all.” Hoping to moderate the radicals’ bold plans to remake the South, he sought to realize the constitutional revolution in a lenient fashion, preferring to address the prejudices of Americans with persuasion rather than force. This is not to suggest that Lincoln’s assassination, and the ascent of his bigoted successor, Andrew Johnson, to the executive office, did not have serious consequences for the Republicans’ constitutional legacy. As Foner writes, Lincoln—­engaged in a contentious but formative relationship with abolitionists—­“had changed enormously during the Civil War. . . . During Reconstruction, Lincoln’s ideas would undoubtedly continue to evolve.” This is why Douglass, whose relationship with Lincoln best illustrates the uneasy alliance between a prudent politician and unrelenting movement activists, called his death “an unspeakable calamity” for African Americans.110 Yet even if Lincoln continued to grow, imposing obstacles would have impeded securing the rights promised African Americans in the Civil War amendments. Although Lincoln likely would have opposed the notorious Black Codes that his successor embraced, W. E. B. Du Bois expressed great uncertainty that he could have prevented the advance of Jim Crow in the South, especially as he was “bitterly hated” in the former Confederacy. As Du Bois wrote in Black Reconstruction in America, “The tragic death of Lincoln has given currency to the theory that the Lincoln policy of Reconstruction would have been far better and more successful than the policy afterward pursued. If it is meant by this that Lincoln would have more carefully

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followed public opinion and worked to adjust differences, this is true. But Abraham Lincoln himself could not have settled the question of Emancipation, Negro citizenship and the vote, without tremendous difficulty.”111 Beyond the racism of Johnson, which resonated powerfully in the South, the difficulty, as one abolitionist put it, of making “freedom a blessing to the freed”112 was compounded by most Republicans’ diffidence in the task of strengthening national administration. In the face of Johnson’s executive aggrandizement and his betrayal of the Republicans’ commitment to civil rights, GOP leaders set out to diminish rather than reconstruct presidential authority. As Sumner insisted, the Constitution made the president “only the instrument of Congress.” The impeachment and near conviction of Johnson, therefore, reversed the expansion of executive power during the Civil War and the early days of Reconstruction and redefined the presidency as “primarily ministerial.”113 What Sumner and his radical brethren failed to recognize, however, was that their indifference, indeed avowed hostility, to national administrative power would ultimately make elusive the expansion of government authority to fulfill the rights of African Americans that they prescribed.

Changing Patterns: Movements and the Rise of the Modern Presidency The troubled but essential alliance between Lincoln and the abolitionist move­ ment exemplifies the great promise and the profound tension of allying the reform ambition of presidents and social movements. Although the original constitutional design might have set these two actors at loggerheads, the fundamental struggle over slavery brought them together. Each had a contrasting vantage point, and each operated with a different perspective, but these distinct ambitions ultimately proved complementary rather than antagonistic. Although presidents might be fated by the Constitution to preserve, protect, and defend ordered liberty, Lincoln showed how this conserving role could be combined with fundamental change in a way that redefined the social contract. As the alliance between radical and moderate abolitionists illustrated, although social movement activists invariably have an antagonistic view of the existing political order, they may seek common cause with ambitious presidents in recasting, rather than destroying, constitutional forms. Lincoln and the antislavery movement could not have formed an alliance in the service of transformative change if it were not for a major crisis that fueled insurgents and gave the presidency exceptional prerogative power. According to Sojourner Truth, Lincoln referred to the necessities of war when they met late in 1864. When Truth told him, “I appreciate you, for

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you are the best president who has ever taken the seat,” Lincoln replied, “I expect you have reference to my having emancipated the slaves in my proclamation.” But, he said, mentioning the names of several of his predecessors (and among them emphatically that of Washington), “they were all just as good, and would have done just as I have done if the time had come. If the people over the river [pointing across the Potomac] had behaved themselves, I could not have done what I have; but they did not, which gave the opportunity to do those things.”114 Of course, as the reluctant, but ultimately decisive, bond Lincoln formed with Truth, Douglass, and other abolitionists makes clear, the conditions that shaped the opportunity structure of the Civil War, although necessary, were not sufficient for an effective executive-­activist nexus. As we argued in chapter 1, such an uneasy partnership also requires a powerful social movement that can mobilize both grassroots foot soldiers capable of considerable societal disruption and movement pragmatists who can exploit these pressures to work within institutionalized forms of American politics to secure enduring reform. Such was the case with the abolitionist movement during the Civil War. Lincoln and the abolitionists had a contentious relationship that revealed strong disagreements over tactics and timing. But both were committed to the objective Lincoln exalted in his Gettysburg Address: a “new birth of freedom.” Presidents who pursue, as Alexander Hamilton put it in Federalist 72, “extensive and arduous enterprises for the public benefit,” may thus share the same high ideals that social movements champion. Moreover, the relationship between Lincoln and the antislavery movement was mediated, and to a point rendered less contentious, by an intensely mobilized and highly decentralized party, women’s groups that pioneered new methods of influencing national politics, and a strong Congress. These forces gave rise to a formidable Republican coalition dedicated to national reform. Yet the limits of the Lincoln and abolitionist partnership also reveal how the rise of the modern executive office recast the ties between presidents and insurgents. Ultimately, the effect that Lincoln’s sudden death had on the abolitionist movement and Reconstruction is a matter of speculation, but the constitutional arrangements that dominated the nineteenth century outside of political crises and war made it unlikely that the formative relationship forged between the president and antislavery activists could have been institutionalized. Public administration was too decentralized to adequately enforce the sort of reform program that a president capable of mediating the intransigent divide between North and South might have envisaged. More­ over, executive prerogative was confined to wartime and constrained by institutional arrangements and constitutional principles closely associated with

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the Whig model upon which Lincoln first cut his political teeth. In short, the powerful, decentralized “state of courts and parties” of this era made impractical the expansion of national administration that might ensure the fulfillment of the rights embodied by the Thirteenth, Fourteenth, and Fifteenth Amendments.115 The Republicans’ fear of centralized power formed a critical backdrop to the notorious Compromise of 1877, which enabled white majorities in Southern states to enact Jim Crow laws, a system of forced segregation that neutered the Fourteenth and Fifteen Amendments and subjected African Americans to violent terror and second-­class status for nearly a century. The Civil War and its aftermath had firmly ensconced the Republicans as the majority party, but this partisan realignment did not prevent a debased form of local self-­determination from returning racial subjugation to American politics. The decentralized party state would severely limit presidential authority for the rest of the nineteenth century, so much so that the self-­styled modern reformers who emerged during the 1890s overwhelmingly viewed partisan politics as an obstacle to their ambition to construct an executive-­ centered “modern” state on American soil. Even during the unprecedented crisis of civil war, Lincoln’s prerogative powers and his relationship with the antislavery movement were constrained by a strong party and a formidable legislative branch. Little wonder that the presidents who followed, shorn of  wartime authority for seizing power, found that the disruptive capacities of their office were significantly limited by constitutional norms, the strength of rival branches, and a highly mobilized, decentralized, and disciplining party system. During the Progressive Era, however, reformers rededicated the presidency to direct popular leadership and placed the White House at the center of growing government commitments. Indeed, in their pursuit of popular reform, most Progressives had little patience for either the Constitution’s separation of powers or localized party organizations. The problem with the system of checks and balances, as Woodrow Wilson argued in his commentaries on the Constitution, “is that government is not a machine but a living thing. It falls, not under the theory of the universe, but under the theory of organic life. It is accountable to Darwin, not to Newton. . . . No living thing can have its organs offset against each other as checks and live. On the contrary, its life is dependent upon their quick cooperation, their ready response to the commands of instinct and intelligence.”116 Although Progressive Era reformers viewed the US political order in new terms, embracing fresh understandings of political institutions and representation, many activists at the dawn of the twentieth century were inspired by the lessons of Lincoln and the Civil War. “Following the disillusionment

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of Reconstruction . . . and in the face of bewildering changes caused by postwar industrialization,” the historian Thomas Sancton noted, “more than one alarmed thinker concluded that Gilded Age America had much to learn—­or relearn—­from the Civil War experience.”117 Theodore Roosevelt chose to give his important “New Nationalism” address in Osawatomie, Kansas, the site where John Brown and radical abolitionists battled a much larger proslavery force in 1856, to signify his intention to take command of the growing insurgent forces in the country. Brown’s fight in Osawatomie, he observed, was aroused by the country’s rank hypocrisy: “In name we had the Declaration of Independence until 1865; but we gave the lie by our acts to the words of the Declaration of Independence until 1865 [when the Thirteenth Amendment was ratified].” To Roosevelt, the Industrial Revolution was a crisis no less severe than the Civil War, one that required a fundamental realignment of the Declaration and the Constitution, indeed, another redefini­tion of the social contract. “The man who wrongly holds that every human right is secondary to his profit,” Roosevelt proclaimed, “must now give way to the advocate of human welfare, who rightly maintains that every man holds property subject to the general right of the community to regulate its use to whatever degree the public welfare may require it.”118 This idea of a “Living Constitution,” Roosevelt and his Progressive followers believed, was born of Lincoln’s and the abolitionists’ understanding that the idea of equality at the core of the Declaration had to become the lodestar of constitutional government. As the prominent Progressive Herbert Croly wrote in his highly influential Promise of American Life, “for the first time it was clearly proclaimed by a prominent politician that American nationality was a living principle rather than a legal bond; and Lincoln’s service to his country in making [the country’s citizens] understand that living Americans were responsible for their national integrity can scarcely be overvalued.”119 Consequently, even as they condemned the decentralized patronage state that emerged from the ashes of Reconstruction and sought to build a more direct connection between presidents and social activists, most Progressives viewed the Civil War Republican Party as a crucible that held important lessons for “modern” reform. As Eldon Eisenach observes about the heritage of leading Progressive reformers, “Even though all of them voiced antiparty ideas in one form or another, every one of them came from Republican Party backgrounds, in many cases with exceptionally strong evidence of party loyalty. This loyalty, however, was to the Republican party as a party against ‘parties,’ as the organized redeemer nation born in the abolitionist movement and matured in the Civil War and Reconstruction.”120

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The audacious hope—­or conceit—­of Progressives was to make Lincoln’s extraordinary leadership during the Civil War and the religiosity of abolitionists, spurred by the battle against slavery, enduring features of American politics. Members of Congress were no longer understood as more authentic representatives of the people, but rather as obstreperous actors who were compromised by the partial interests of their states and districts, powerful business lobbies, and by the arcane, anti-­majoritarian rules of the legislative branch. The recrudescence of localized party organizations that preempted the moral struggles of the Civil War and Reconstruction also came under fire as “boss-­ruled” and irrevocably corrupt, leading to reforms that weakened parties as checks on presidential power.121 By contrast, many Progressive reformers saw the modern presidency that emerged in the early twentieth century as a dynamic force that might give institutional form to a national democracy. Theodore Roosevelt’s pathbreaking administration and his 1912 Progressive Party campaign, which was launched by his New Nationalism decree at Osawatomie, suggested to these reformers that the presidency, not Congress or the political parties, was the principal instrument of popular rule. With the advent of the modern executive, reformers, including social movements and their leaders, were more likely to view occupants of the Oval Office as critical political agents capable of either advancing or derailing nonincremental change. The relationship between presidents and social movements has been anything but static over the course of American political development. The rise of the modern presidency in the Progressive Era made it a crucial target of social movements bent on securing major reform; their policy fortunes increasingly depended on White House support. Increased expectations that presidents advance the nation’s economic well-­being and geopolitical interests in turn gave them stronger reason to monitor and manage potentially disruptive domestic movements. As we shall see, the growing tendency for presidents and social activists to engage in uneasy but formative partnerships contributed to a new kind of partisanship: to the rise of presidency-­ centered parties that had more disruptive potential than the localized patronage-­based parties that had gripped the American polity by the end of the nineteenth century.122 As the next chapter illustrates, the idea that the executive office might act as a spearhead for racial justice—­a rallying point for civil rights—­was belied by presidential reluctance to challenge a seemingly intractable color line. Yet even in the deeply polarizing arena of race relations, the White House and social movements would eventually collaborate. The meshing of executive and insurgent ambition reached a critical stage during the late 1930s and

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early 1940s, when Franklin Roosevelt advanced institutional changes, born of the Progressive Era, that made the modern presidency—­as well as the uneasy partnership between presidents and social activists—­an enduring fixture of the American political system. The tempestuous and transformative relationship between Lyndon Johnson and the civil rights movement thus marked the culmination of nettlesome and constructive presidential-­ movement collaboration that began in the early part of the twentieth century. The long hard road that led to the uneasy and critical alliance between Johnson and the civil rights movement is the subject to which we turn next.

Three

The Wayward Path: Presidents and Civil Rights, 1901–­1945

In his brilliant, beguiling book The Souls of Black Folk, published in 1903, the great civil rights leader W. E. B. Du Bois described how African Americans experienced the demise of Reconstruction as an acute and devastating tragedy. Most disappointing, he reflected in lyrical and somber prose, was the failure to enforce the Fifteenth Amendment, which seemed to ensure that African Americans could preserve the hard-­won gains of the Civil War and Emancipation. “A million black men started with renewed zeal to vote themselves into the kingdom,” he wrote. But then came the turmoil of the following decade, culminating with what he characterized as the sadly ironic “revolution of 1876.” Yet this terrible denouement did not snuff out the moral fire of African Americans. It “left the half-­free serf weary, wondering, but still inspired.” This inspiration, aroused by Du Bois and other civil rights activists, would lead to new organizations, newspapers, and institutions of higher learning that would challenge the ramparts of Jim Crow. “Slowly but steadily in the following years,” Du Bois observed, “a new vision began gradually to replace the dream of political power,—­a powerful movement, the rise of another ideal to guide the unguided, another pillar of fire by night after a clouded day.” This new ideal, certainly, did not end hope of realizing the Fourteenth and Fifteenth Amendments, but amid forced segregation and subjugation, African American leaders sought to build a movement that would change the “child of Emancipation to the youth with dawning self-­consciousness, self-­realization, self-­respect.”1 The dawning of the civil rights movement coincided with, indeed helped advance, a more powerful and purposeful executive office. Although the emergence of the modern presidency in the early twentieth century did not quiet the inherent tension between presidents and social movements, it made it far less likely that the White House and activists would ignore each

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other. The contentious but ultimately successful alliance between Lincoln and the abolitionists showed how a president empowered by a domestic crisis and a social movement marshaling both disruptive and conventional political leverage could break through the gravitational pull of American constitutional government. Although its transformative potential was short-­ circuited by the failures of Reconstruction, the Civil War became a powerful part of America’s historical memory. Indeed, the memory of Lincoln and the abolitionists inspired twentieth-­ century progressive reformers to restore the ties between the president and social activists. The modern presidency was forged at least partially on the understanding that many prerogatives exercised by Lincoln during domestic rebellion should become more routine in American politics. This ambition, although never completely realized, made the executive central to growing government commitments. And it was precisely the energy, visibility, and authority of the modern presidency that made it an irresistible focal point for Alice Paul, A. Philip Randolph, and later generations of social activists. Consequently, the divide that characterized most presidential-­movement relations in the nineteenth century faded in the Progressive Era, recurrently challenged by the White House and leading movement activists eager to find a way to bring about top-­down and bottom-­up mobilization in the ser­ vice of social causes. As Bruce Miroff has observed, with the development of the modern executive, many twentieth-­century presidents were more likely to profess support for the same high ideals—­environmental protection, equal rights for women and minorities, and the rights of labor—­that social movements championed.2 This did not ensure presidents would champion civil rights; indeed, prior to the Second World War, most modern executives sought to distance themselves from this cause. But no sooner had Theodore Roosevelt given birth to the modern executive office than his relationship to African American leaders became not only crucial for a nascent civil rights movement, but also a preoccupation of the American public. His successor, Woodrow Wilson, would further contribute to the reconstruction of the presidency. Neither Roosevelt nor Wilson would take advanced positions on the “negro question”; both, especially Wilson, would embrace values and policies that exacerbated racial injustice. But their actions on race invariably proved to be an important focus for civil rights activism and contributed significantly to the development of what historians have called “the long civil rights movement.”3 Beginning as a marginal movement, civil rights insurgents would exploit this contentious collaboration with the White House to strengthen their position in American politics. By the 1940s, civil rights

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organizations deployed a combination of conventional lobbying and direct action, beginning to display the formative potential that would be fully realized in the 1950s and 1960s. Most scholars who insist that the civil rights movement did not “spring out of nothingness” in the 1950s “highlight the considerable ferment during the 1930s and 1940s.”4 Yet, as this chapter reveals, the early stages of the mating dance between presidents and civil rights activists in the 1910s established important precedents that endured. Despite the development of a variegated movement over the course of the twentieth century, the relationship between the modern presidency and civil rights activists during the Progressive Era established a pattern that would persist from the long tenure of Franklin Roosevelt to the dramatic encounters between John Kennedy and activists in the wake of the Birmingham bombings. Until those dramatic developments of 1963, presidents were reluctant to traverse the color line and sought to find, as Miroff puts it, a “balance point,” where they appeared to cooperate with a movement for noble purposes while retaining their “special commitment to law, order, and the general good.”5

The Modern White House and the Civil Rights Movement: First Encounters Theodore Roosevelt, the historian Christine Stansell has written, “invented the modern presidency, garnering more power for his office than any of his predecessors since Lincoln.”6 Roosevelt did not invent the modern executive ex cathedra. He envisioned a modern executive that would be aligned with the Progressive movement—­a scattered but potentially powerful coalition of academics, clergymen, settlement-­house workers, philanthropists, public officials, journalists, and various professionals that rose to prominence in reaction to massive economic and social changes wrought by the Industrial Revolution. Roosevelt and Progressive reformers undertook the first comprehensive efforts to address fundamental conflicts raised by technological breakthroughs and the frenzied search for new markets and sources of capital associated with rapid industrialization. The nation enjoyed unprecedented growth during the early twentieth century, but economic dynamism also generated numerous problems that seriously challenged the capacity of the American political system, especially after the collapse of Reconstruction left it dominated by highly decentralized party organizations. Above all, Progressives sought to strengthen the national government and construct a new executive office to curb the excesses of big business—­the giant “trusts” that, according to reformers, constituted irresponsible bastions of power.

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Roosevelt’s efforts to align the White House and social activists was abetted considerably by the rise of a new mass media. Before the 1890s, public debate was dominated by the decentralized party press, but the challenge to party organizations—­through such reforms as the Australian ballot, the direct primary, and civil service expansion—­and the development of inexpensive and rapid forms of manufacture had made possible a “mass market beyond the confines of one faction, party, or following.”7 The first president to recognize fully the value of the popular press as a medium to communicate directly with the people, and the first to understand that journalistic support had to be pursued actively and continuously, Roosevelt presumed to establish himself as the focal point of a new presidency-­centered democracy. As he wrote to a confidante on return from a Western trip in 1903: [Most people who greeted him] habitually led rather gray lives, and they came to see the President much as they would have come to see the circus. It was something to talk over and remember and tell their children about. But I think that besides the mere curiosity there was a good feeling behind it all, a feeling that the President was their man and symbolized their government, and that they had a proprietary interest in him and wished to see him, and that they hoped he embodied their aspirations and their best thought.8

The fresh attention that Roosevelt brought to the White House made him an essential if not always willing partner of burgeoning social movements. With their support, he brought to prominence and bestowed considerable legitimacy on reforms that had been under way since the 1890s. “More than any other single leader,” wrote the influential writer and publisher Herbert Croly, “Theodore Roosevelt contributed decisively to the combination of political with social reform and to the building up of a body of national public opinion behind the combination. Under his leadership as President, reform began to assume the characteristics, if not the name, of progressivism.”9 Believing that the restraints on presidential power, which were reinforced with a vengeance after the Civil War, had subjected the American polity to capture by “special interests,” Roosevelt proclaimed that the president was “a steward of the public welfare bound actively and affirmatively to do all he could for the people, and not content himself with the negative merit of keeping his talents undamaged in a napkin.”10 Stating the Progressive aspiration to make the prerogatives that Lincoln seized during a national crisis an enduring feature of American political life, Roosevelt honored the Great Emancipator, whose uncompromising defense of the Union served the “high purpose” of advancing equality of

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opportunity. “Men who understand and practice the deep underlying philosophy of the Lincoln school of American political thought,” he argued, “are necessarily Hamiltonian in their belief in a strong and efficient National Government and Jeffersonian in their belief in the people as the ultimate authority, and in the welfare of the people as the end of government.”11 The concept of the president as the “steward of the public welfare” resonated widely amid the unsettling conditions of the Progressive Era. Yet progressive notions of democracy excluded African Americans and other nonwhites from the national community. Indeed, Roosevelt’s vision of an energetic stewardship presidency, as Thomas Dyer has written, “coincided with one of the most violent periods of anti-­black activity in American history as lynchings reached an all-­time high, southern legislatures completed the legalized exclusion of blacks from meaningful participation in American life, and racial pogroms occurred with alarming frequency.”12 Disappointed by the chaos that followed Reconstruction’s failure and limited by what Stansell describes as “garden-­variety racism,”13 Roosevelt made no concerted effort to challenge Jim Crowism. Nevertheless, he and his political allies could not easily ignore the demand of reformers with close family ties to the abolitionist movement that Progressivism live up to its promise to provide equal opportunity for the “whole people.”14 Roosevelt ultimately sought to navigate a middle path between the purveyors of white supremacy and early civil rights activists such as Du Bois, who searingly demonstrated that twentieth-­century America’s leading injustice was “the problem of the color line.”15 On one hand, Roosevelt called for “full recognition of the fundamental fact that all men should stand on an equal footing, as regards civic privileges.” On the other, this commitment to equal rights, he insisted, “in no way interferes with recognition of the further fact that all reflecting men of both races are united in feeling that race purity must be maintained.”16 Roosevelt’s separate-­but-­ equal view of racial injustice ultimately translated into a call for gradual progress—­a plea for forbearance that his successors would echo until the 1960s. As he proclaimed in an address at the Tuskegee Institute, the Alabama school founded by the respected black educator and proponent of “gradualism” Booker T. Washington, the surest path forward for African Americans was patience and self-­reliance without interference by the federal government: “The [Negro] race cannot expect to get everything at once. It must learn to wait and bide its time; to prove itself worthy by showing its possession of perseverance, of thrift, of self-­control. The destiny of the race is chiefly in its own hands. . . . Remember also that the white man who can be of most use to the colored man is the colored man’s neighbor. It is the

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Southern people themselves who must and can solve the difficulties that exist in the South.”17 Roosevelt’s Tuskegee address echoed the famous speech that Washington had given ten years before to the Cotton States and International Exposition. “The wisest among my race understand that the agitation of questions of social equality is the extremest folly,” he told his predominantly white audience, “and that progress in the enjoyment of all the privileges that will come to us must be the result of severe and constant struggle rather than of artificial forcing.” He urged southern African Americans to “cast down your bucket where you are”—­stay in the South, gain education, and through hard work win economic advancement and the respect of their white neigh­ bors.18 Washington’s accommodationist strategy was embodied in an influ­ ential network of schools, newspapers, and the National Negro Business League. For the next decade, he became the leading representative of African Americans—­the architect of a nascent institutional movement that sought to master conventional political tactics, most notably attaining patronage positions for African Americans, that marked progress to his supporters but co-­optation to critics who gained influence during the Progressive Era. Soon after Roosevelt became president, in fact, he and Washington learned a hard lesson about the limits of the Union and the South pursuing progress harmoniously. On October 16, 1901, he invited Washington to dine with the First Family at the White House—­the first time that an African Amer­ ican “broke bread” in the executive mansion. The storm of protest this social courtesy unleashed in the South led to a national controversy over race rela­tions that dramatically reflected the unremitting attention and symbolic importance attached to the modern presidency. If Roosevelt thought he could modestly traverse “the color line” without major political repercussions, he discovered otherwise. Despite deep contention between North and South over “the Washington Incident,” public opinion in both sections agreed that dinner between the president and a distinguished black educator could not be considered a private engagement. Reflecting white southern views, the Raleigh Morning Post insisted that growing White House influence, amplified by the emerging mass media, made it “simply monstrous to affirm” that Roosevelt had a right to dine with whomever he wished. “The White House is intended to be the representative of­ ficial home of the American people, in its highest purest sense,” the Post’s editors harrumphed, “not a private home of the person chosen to occupy it. No president has ever invited a Negro to sit down to dinner with him in his private home, for very obvious reasons, and to do so in the White House . . . is a deliberate insult to the people whose official home it is.”19

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Those who praised Roosevelt’s actions saw the notorious dinner as no less a momentous occasion. Reporting on sermons by four Chicago clergymen, the New York Times quoted the African American minister A. L. Murray expressing a common northern sentiment: “We hail this action of the President as an omen of the coming of that day when we shall neither be favored nor hindered because of the color of our skin. All that the negroes of this country ask is a man’s chance . . . [from] fair-­minded men who are willing to forget the color of a man’s skin and measure him by his character and fitness.”20 Perhaps the most fulsome praise and dramatic interpretation of the White House dinner came in a letter to Roosevelt from Albion Tourgée, the renowned litigator for the plaintiff in the infamous Plessy v. Ferguson case, the notorious Supreme Court decision decided five years earlier that sanctified the “separate but equal doctrine.” Tourgée told Roosevelt that he was haunted by the fear that “for the first time in history a people endowed with political rights have been disenfranchised by millions,” giving white men permission to never “deal justly with the colored race.” But Roosevelt’s dinner with Washington gave Tourgée renewed faith: “In my opinion, it is one of the momentous acts of history, the effect of which no man can mea­ sure and only the future reveals.”21 Amid all the recriminations and fanfare, neither Roosevelt nor Washington acknowledged that the social occasion was historically significant. Both studiously avoided commenting publicly on the dinner or the sensation it caused. Determined to carry on business as usual, the president sought and the head of the Tuskegee Institute eagerly offered counsel about patronage appointments in the South. Roosevelt thereafter carefully adhered to the conventions of the color line—­studiously avoided offending “the prejudices of anyone else.” But he insisted that he did not regret the invitation—­“the clamor aroused by the act makes me feel as if the act was necessary”—­and stated his determination “to treat each black man strictly on his merits as a man, giving him no more and no less that he shows himself worthy to have.” True to his word, Roosevelt frequently used the appointment power and his bully pulpit to recognize those African Americans of merit who might strengthen the Republican Party in the South and to condemn the most egregious acts of racial injustice.22 Washington expressed appreciation for Roosevelt’s determination to con­ tinue their collaboration. Dismissing the sensational reaction to the “famous dinner” as politically motivated (elections were pending in several southern states) and transient, he wrote Roosevelt a week later, “I am more than ever convinced that the wise course is to pursue exactly the same [patronage] policy which you mapped out in the beginning.”23

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Washington thus retained his position as chief patronage dispenser for qualified African Americans in the South; Roosevelt frequently relied on his recommendations, even when these appointments helped fuel white supremacist scorn for his administration. Nevertheless, despite their shared cautiousness, Roosevelt and Washington knew that even modest encroachments on white supremacy could very well erupt into a cause célèbre. As Washington wrote Roosevelt in late October, having seen some early signs “of returning common sense to the South”: “While I must confess that the outbreak over my dining with you was far beyond my expectations, I cannot help but feel that it was providential and that good is going to come out of it.”24 Although the number of jobs and appropriations allotted to African Americans represented a relatively small share of the federal civil service, Washington believed that these patronage appointments, especially those that occurred in the Jim Crow South, were a critical measure of the success of his institutional approach to racial progress. At the same time, the fierce resistance to even the mildest measures testified to the imposing barriers to forging an effective alliance between the White House and the gradualist movement. Roosevelt’s appointment of William Crum, an African American physician, to head the custom house in Charleston, South Carolina, threw the state’s white supremacists into howls of opposition that echoed protests of the Washington dinner one year before.25 Although the position was of minor importance, Crum’s appointment came to symbolize what many African American leaders considered a key step toward “the door of hope” in an era of prejudice and oppression. In partisan terms, Washington and other influential African Americans viewed Crum’s appointment as an important victory—­a critical test of the GOP’s commitment to the principles of Lincoln.26 Most Republicans showed indifference to these principles, but Roosevelt forged a partnership between African American Republicans and the emerging modern executive office. When the GOP-­controlled Senate refused to confirm Crum’s appointment, the president defied his party brethren through a series of recess appointments; not until January 1905, three years later, did the Senate acquiesce to Roosevelt’s strong and clear defense of his right to appoint qualified African Americans to southern offices. The alliance that Roosevelt and Washington formed to temper the injustices of Jim Crow had its most impressive victory in defeating an effort by state party leader William Vaughan to form a lily-­white Alabama Republican Party. Following the ratification of Alabama’s 1901 constitution, which disenfranchised African Americans, Vaughan and other white supremacists passed a resolution limiting participation in the state party proceedings to “legal” voters. This effort to form a whites-­only GOP, enforced by armed

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guards blocking blacks from entering the 1902 state convention, aroused strong protests from Washington and other African American leaders in the state, who appealed to the White House. As Washington wrote the president, “The complete throwing down of the few decent, property-­holding Negroes—­just the class that you wanted to have come to the front—­by the Republican leaders in Alabama, is a thing I hope you will rebuke in no uncertain manner. Aside from the moral wrong, the effect on the Negro voter in the North will be serious if not checked.”27 Roosevelt responded decisively. He and a key aide, Judge James Sullivan Clarkson, worked closely with Washington to defeat Alabama’s racist party purge. The president removed Vaughan from his post of federal district attorney and refused to sit Alabama’s lily-­white delegation at the 1904 Republican convention. Although Roosevelt’s actions did not stop the advance of racial oppression and white supremacy in Alabama, it did force the state’s Republican Party to reopen its councils to African Americans. Indeed, African Americans, even as they were disenfranchised throughout the South, remained important power brokers in national Republican politics until the 1950s. In addition to thwarting “purification” efforts of southern Republican state party organizations, Roosevelt used his bully pulpit to issue moral appeals against the epidemic of lynchings that reinforced a system of forced segregation and socioeconomic subjugation with violent terror. Again, the regular communication and strong working relationship between Washing­ ton and Roosevelt were pivotal. In correspondence, Washington urged Roose­ velt to take a stand “on the general subject of lynching. . . . The subject is a very important and far reaching one and keeps many of our people constantly stirred up.”28 Roosevelt responded a few months later in a Memorial Day address at Arlington National Cemetery. In a speech mostly devoted to criticisms of American cruelties in its Philippines occupation, Roosevelt inserted words that again agitated white supremacists: Is it only in the army in the Philippines that Americans sometimes commit deeds that cause all other Americans to regret? No! From time to time there occur in our country, to the deep and lasting shame of our people, lynchings carried on under circumstances of inhuman cruelty and barbarity, cruelty in­ finitely worse than any that has ever been committed by our troops in the Philippines; worse to the victims, and far more brutalizing to those guilty of it. The men who fail to condemn these lynchings, and yet clamor about what has been done in the Philippines, are indeed guilty of neglecting the beam in their own eye while taunting their brother about the mote in his.29

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In condemning African American lynchings, Roosevelt stood apart from both his political peers and presidential predecessors by speaking out on a taboo subject. A prominent editorial in the New York Commercial Advertiser praised Roosevelt for being the first president to mention lynching in a public speech. A mercantile paper, albeit one that had long voiced opposition to white supremacy, the Advertiser strongly endorsed Roosevelt’s support of the Washington machine’s incremental approach to racial progress. Comparing the president to Lincoln, editors suggested that Roosevelt had restored, if not recast, the executive office as an important moral voice in the country: “When he becomes convinced that he has something to say that should be said, he will say it. . . . His chronic critics who are always leading him to the ‘parting of the ways,’ and filling the air with lamentation because he insists in going his way rather than theirs, would save themselves no end of trouble if they would grasp this fundamental element of his character.”30 Brownsville and the Niagara Movement Roosevelt commented on lynching at the urging of Washington and other moderate African American reformers. But this fruitful partnership had sig­ nificant limitations, even as it revealed the potential for a constructive alli­ ance between the modern presidency and social activists. It did not, for example, lead Roosevelt to propose any important civil rights reforms that alleviated racial oppression for African Americans. The partnership between Roosevelt and Washington rested on the presumption that, with certain important exceptions, persuasion rather than confrontation was the safer tactic to battle Jim Crow, lest a strong backlash make the situation worse. Yet as we learned in chapters 1 and 2, the most effective social movements benefit from blending conventional and confrontational leverage. Civil rights leaders like Du Bois and William Monroe Trotter strongly questioned Washington’s accommodation, and advocated aggressive collective agitation for equal rights and racial integration. Despite his determination to challenge the nation’s iron-­fisted racial hierarchy, Du Bois was reluctant to break from Washington, who was widely respected and powerfully connected. Trotter shared none of these inhibitions. As editor of the influential African American newspaper the Boston Guardian, Trotter dismissed Washington as a mere power broker who had no more moral authority than the bosses who dominated party politics in northern cities. While most African American leaders applauded Washington’s dinner with the president, Trotter dismissed the famous head of the Tuskegee Institute as a “hypocrite who

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supports social segregation between blacks and whites while he dines at the White House.”31 By 1905, Du Bois, frustrated at the lack of progress that the Roosevelt-­ Washington alliance accomplished, joined Trotter in forming a more demanding civil rights faction. In July 1905, he convened the Niagara Movement, the precursor to the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP), which marked an important advance of the civil rights movement toward formative capacity and stature. The emergence of a more aggressive cadre of leaders threatened to fracture the nascent movement, but it also promised to make it more variegated and effective. Dedicated to confrontation, Du Bois hoped to break the powerful bond between African Americans and Washington and, by extension, to emancipate them from the grip of Roosevelt and the Republican Party.32 “Step by step,” Du Bois proclaimed in his speech to the Niagara gathering, the defenders of the rights of American citizens have retreated. The work of stealing the black man’s ballot was progressive and the fifty and more representatives of stolen votes still sit in the nation’s capital. Discrimination in travel and public accommodation has so spread that some of our weaker brethren are actually afraid to thunder against color discrimination as such and are simply whispering for ordinary decencies. . . . Against this the Niag­ ara Movement eternally protests. We will not be satisfied to take one jot or tittle less than our full manhood rights. We claim for ourselves every single right that belongs to a freeborn American, political, civil and social; and until we get those rights we will never cease to protest and assail the ears of America.33

Roosevelt’s actions in the Brownsville, Texas, incident of 1906 appeared to vindicate these proponents of confrontational collective action. After violence erupted between African American soldiers and local white residents, the president summarily dismissed black troops stationed at nearby Fort Brown who were accused of creating a midnight disturbance in August 1906 that resulted in the murder of a bartender and the shooting of a policeman. He did so even though a local grand jury could not find enough evidence to return an indictment in the episode. Intent on proving that he was as determined to punish black lawlessness as he was willing to take on white supremacists in rewarding meritorious African Americans, Roosevelt ordered the US Army inspector general to investigate the matter. The inspector general’s report, based on flimsy circumstantial evidence, persuaded the president that dismissal of the troops “without honor” was justified.

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Just as Roosevelt’s breaking bread with Washington won acclaim among black leaders and journalists, so his peremptory actions in Brownsville led to widespread condemnation, not only from Niagara Movement leaders but also from nearly all the nation’s prominent black newspapers.34 Washington tried to talk the president out of taking precipitous action against an entire black regiment; however, even after Roosevelt coldly rebuffed him, the master of the Tuskegee machine refused to publicly condemn the White House. When a mass meeting was held in the nation’s capital soon after Roosevelt upheld the inspector general’s report to “discuss the matter,” Washington refused to attend, “as I do not believe in abusing the President.” “Still,” he counseled, “I think all of the colored people should go slow on him hereafter.” Characteristically, fearing the power of Roosevelt and the potential of a white backlash, Washington preached patience and restraint.35 Even Du Bois was reluctant to take on a popular president who expanded the rhetorical and administrative powers of the executive office. While he did not assert that all the soldiers were innocent, Du Bois argued that Roosevelt’s summary dismissal of an entire battalion without honor deprived the troops of due process. Furthermore, the Niagara Movement praised Republican senator Joseph Foraker of Ohio, who condemned Roosevelt’s actions and appealed to Congress to reopen the investigation. Roosevelt’s standoff with Foraker revealed that the modern presidency could be as powerful a foe as an ally of civil rights. Foraker argued, “I did not come to the Senate to take orders from anybody. . . . Whenever I fall so low that I cannot express my opinion on a great question freely, and without reservation or mental evasion, I will resign and leave my place to some man who has the courage to discharge his duties.” Roosevelt’s response was a strong defense of presidential prerogative in matters pertaining to the military and a direct refutation of the authority of Foraker and Congress to challenge it. The Brownsville incident, he insisted, “is my business and the business of nobody else. It is not the business of the Congress. . . . [A]ll the talk on that is academic. If they pass a resolution to reinstate these men, I will veto it; if they pass over my veto, I will pay no attention to it. I welcome impeachment.”36 The efforts of Foraker and Du Bois on behalf of the African American soldiers went nowhere politically. They were stoutly opposed by Roosevelt and his eventual successor, Secretary of War William Howard Taft, a powerful figure in his home state of Ohio. In response, Du Bois urged northern African Americans to back the embattled Ohio senator as well as to throw their support behind Democrat William Jennings Bryan for president. His appeal went for naught. Foraker was denied reelection through machinations in the state legislature, which still selected senators. Taft won the White House

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with 321 electoral votes to 162 for Bryan. Moreover, at Taft’s insistence, the 1908 GOP platform dropped its threat from four years before, of reducing congressional representation for states violating voting rights. Hoping to keep the Washington faction and most African American voters in the Republican fold, Taft did run on a platform that expressed stronger support for civil rights than Roosevelt’s campaign did four years earlier. “Without reservation,” it endorsed enforcement of the “letter and spirit” of the Thirteenth, Fourteenth, and Fifteenth Amendments, and condemned disfranchisement based on race. During the Taft years, however, Washington’s influence over the African American community faded as Du Bois became the leader of a more aggressive civil rights movement. Moreover, Taft’s term in office, which saw him compromise with the old guard on economic and conservation issues, disappointed Roosevelt, who formed an uneasy but powerful alliance with reformers in various Progressive Era reform movements. When the 1912 Republican convention spurned Roosevelt’s challenge to Taft for the nomination, he and his followers formed the Progressive Party. Their joining of a presidential candidate and social activists revealed the promise and perils of a new form of politics that would become an integral feature of American democracy by the middle of the twentieth century. Roosevelt, the Progressive Party, and Civil Rights Insurgency When Roosevelt bolted from the 1912 Republican convention and formed the Progressive Party, he led an army of crusading reformers aiming for not only major election reforms, but also measures such as national health insurance, government-­led industrial planning, the protection of national for­ ests from economic exploitation, woman’s suffrage, the direct election of senators, and popular referenda on court rulings. Indeed, Roosevelt’s bolt was encouraged by the cresting of vibrant reform movements dedicated to fundamental political, social, and economic change.37 The Progressive Party, therefore, represented a collective effort to join presidential politics and social activists who were at the vanguard of surging and restless Progressive Era reform movements. For example, Jane Addams, the famous suffragist and settlement-­house reformer, joined a variety of other activists in writing the Progressive Party platform—­a compendium of almost every reform that key movements had pushed for during the past decade. It thus brought together social and political insurgents who joined forces in an unprecedented display of collective ambition. “However things may turn,” the social reformer Paul Kellogg wrote soon after the Progressive

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Party convention, “the fact remains that in the past month, we have had for the first time in American life a striking of hands of political reformers, conservationists and social workers in a piece of national team play.”38 Yet the vision that inspired this team play, championed by social justice reformers, conservationists, good-­government crusaders, and other activists who presumed to speak for the “whole people,” paid scant attention to oppressed racial groups like African American, who largely resided outside their visions of national community. As Walter E. Weyl, who became an im­ portant member of the Progressive National Committee, wrote before the 1912 election, “The Negro problem is the mortal spot of the new democracy.” Taking note of how civil rights, especially voting rights, divided reformers, Weyl added, “Whatever the merits of this controversy as a matter of ethics or practical politics, it seems probable that the present democratic movement . . . will move forward, leaving the problem of Negro suffrage to one side.”39 Weyl’s concerns played out in dramatic fashion at the Progressive Party convention, which met in Chicago in August. The struggle over race pitted southern Progressives favoring a “lily-­white party” against northern defenders of African American rights. After bolting the GOP, Roosevelt believed that southern support for the Progressive Party was critical. For his chief southern adviser, he selected Colonel John Parker, a New Orleans municipal reformer and contender for the vice-­presidential nomination, which eventually went to California governor Hiram Johnson. In confidential letters, Parker warned Roosevelt that if the Progressive Party had any chance of breaking the Democratic monopoly in the South, it must abandon the Republican tradition, which Roosevelt had supported as president, of encouraging African American participation in the party organizations of southern states. “This should be a white men’s party,” he argued, because “[t]he South cannot and will not tolerate the Negro.”40 In his view, a Progressive white men’s party “would be a power throughout the South.”41 However, Parker was careful to add that “a plan on these lines” should be “diplomatically arranged.”42 He recognized what Roosevelt knew all too well: that a “lily-­white” party might alienate social reformers and African American voters north of the Mason-­Dixon Line. Jane Addams, Lillian Wald, Henry Moscowitz, Joel Spingarn, Florence Kelley, and other white social reformers with influence in the new party were among those who joined Du Bois in founding the NAACP just three years before the Progressive convention.43 Roosevelt and other Progressive leaders thus had good reason to tread delicately around the race issue, fearing that a decisive stance might sunder the party irrevocably along sectional lines.44

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To the dismay of the Progressive strategists, however, the new party was not afforded the luxury of silently neglecting the question of African American rights. In Alabama, Florida, Georgia, and Mississippi, rival white and racially integrated party conventions were held, and each sent competing slates of delegates to the national convention. The press, especially Republican newspapers that saw themselves as posing principled, constitutional opposition to Roosevelt’s insurgent candidacy, gave these delegate challenges expansive coverage. Hounded by press inquiries, Roosevelt felt compelled to publicly articulate the new party’s position on African American rights prior to the convention. The solution Roosevelt proposed, which spurned the insurgent challenges to the all-­white southern delegations, was “to bring the best colored men [of the North] into the movement,” and to entrust “the best white men in the South, the men of justice and of vision,” with the fate of southern African Americans. By making the “movement for social and industrial justice really nation-­wide,” he insisted, “we shall create a situation by which the colored men of the South will ultimately get justice.”45 The Progressive Party’s commitment to racial justice was demonstrated, Roosevelt insisted, by the large number of black delegates from northern and border states. African American delegates, in fact, were elected to the convention from Rhode Island, New Jersey, Pennsylvania, Ohio, Indiana, Illinois, Delaware, Maryland, West Virginia, and Kentucky. Roosevelt hoped that this compromise would appeal to southern Progressive whites without sacrificing the support of northern African Americans and social reformers dedicated to social justice. Yet civil rights activists refused to let the dispute die quietly. Instead, a more heated debate arose when the “Negro question” came before the platform committee of the national convention. Du Bois, holding forth from his position as editor in chief of the NAACP’s journal, the Crisis, composed a platform plank stating that the Progressive Party “recognizes that distinctions of race or class in political life have no place in a democracy” and that “a group of 10,000,000 people . . . deserve and must have justice, opportunity and voice in their own government.” White reformers like Joel Spingarn attempted in vain to persuade the New York delegation to endorse the plank. Nevertheless, a Minnesota delegate backed by Jane Addams and other activists introduced it to the platform committee. Openly challenging Roosevelt’s southern strategy, Addams protested to the committee: “Some of us are much disturbed that the Progressive party, which stands for human rights, should even appear not to stand for the rights of negroes. It seems to us to be inconsistent when on one page of our newspapers we find that this party is to stand for the working man and the working woman, and to protect the rights of the

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children, . . . and on the next we find that it denies the right of the negro to take part in the movement.”46 Addams’s plea failed to sway the convention’s platform committee, which, probably with Roosevelt’s approval, discarded the plank on African American rights. In the end, even ardent defenders of civil rights, such as Addams and Spingarn, succumbed on the race issue. Addams later recalled that she and her fellow social reformers, many of whom traced their lineage to the abolitionist movement, were “faced with the necessity of selecting from our many righteous principles those that might be advocated at the moment, and de­ ciding which must still wait for a more propitious season.”47 Addams, whose leadership was as essential to Progressive Era social justice causes as Frederick Douglass’s was to abolition, thus uttered the refrain of patience, which presidents would urge on social activists for most of the twentieth century. But her willingness to wait betrayed a pragmatism on a core issue that her abolitionist forebears, including pioneers in the abolitionist and woman’s suffrage movements, such as Sojourner Truth and Alice Paul, would have rejected. It is very unlikely that Addams would have stayed with the Progressive Party had it not championed a strong woman’s suffrage plank. Addams’s dilemma, her biographer Louise Knight argues, was thus similar to the one Douglass faced in 1866, “when he decided to endorse the proposed Fourteenth Amendment because he believed it would protect the right of African American men in the South to vote, even though by speaking of ‘male inhabitants,’ it excluded women. He argued that while the African American cause was ‘not more sacred than the women’s, it was certainly more urgent.’ ” Addams’s loyalties, Knight concludes, were as torn as Douglass’s had been, and like him, “she ultimately sided with her kind.”48 Echoing the fury that woman suffragists expressed in response to abolitionist complicity with the failure to empower women in the Fourteenth or Fifteenth Amendments, most African American leaders found Addams’s plea for patience insulting. Trotter wired Addams at the Progressive convention that she should refuse to second Roosevelt’s nomination. “Women suffrage will be stained with Negro blood,” he insisted, “unless women refuse alliance with Roosevelt.”49 Addams was deeply troubled by Trotter’s indictment. She publicly agonized over whether her abolitionist father “would have remained in any political convention in which colored men had been treated slightingly.” She concluded, however, that the Progressive Party offered African Americans the best hope, even though its platform, like that of the Republicans and Democrats, was completely silent on their civil rights. When Progressives were established on a national basis and the solid South had been broken, Addams wrote hopefully in the Crisis, the new party was

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“bound to lift this question of the races, as other questions, out of the grip of the past and into a new era of solution.”50 For African American activists, Roosevelt’s civil rights position—­and Addams’s acquiescence to it—­was worse than the evasions of Taft and Wilson on racial issues. Amid the crusading atmosphere of the Progressive Party convention, the crude compromise struck them as rank hypocrisy. “If there is any one group of men and women in this country suffering from oppression,” editorialized the Broad Ax, a Chicago African American newspaper, “it is the Colored people; but the party of social justice is to think only of the wrongs done to whites!”51 Not surprisingly, Du Bois was outraged by the Progressive Party’s rejection of his proposed civil rights plank that was “written in The Crisis office.” As he fumed to his readers, “Not only was this refused, but every suggested modification, refinement and watering down was rejected, and the platform of the new Progressive party of human rights appears absolutely silent on the greatest question of human rights that ever faced America!”52 Du Bois’s indignation continued into the general election campaign, when he and other civil rights leaders condemned Roosevelt as a false prophet. Disenchantment with Roosevelt, in fact, was one of the few positions that Du Bois and Roosevelt’s former ally Booker T. Washington agreed on. The Progressive Party convention demonstrated that even the most advanced white reformers in the country were willing to sacrifice the rights of African Americans in hopes of reuniting white American voters across regions. The Progressive Party’s battles over delegate selection in 1912 thus foreshadowed a parallel clash over racial justice and the Mississippi Freedom Party at the 1964 Democratic convention, which we take up in the next chapter. In both cases, the trauma of reconciling African American rights with presidential campaigns dedicated to civic nationalism would endure. As the historian Gary Gerstle has written, “It is not too much to say that the refusal to seat black delegates set a precedent that would haunt liberal politics for much of the rest of the twentieth century.”53

Woodrow Wilson and the Advent of a National Civil Rights Movement Often missed amid the disappointment of the Progressive Party’s silence on the “negro question” was how the formation of a new insurgent party helped to unify and strengthen a nascent civil rights movement that neither presidential candidates nor presidents could ignore. During the 1912 general election, Roosevelt tried to soften his party’s compromise with Jim Crow

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in Chicago by issuing a strong defense of civil rights. In an Outlook essay, “Progressives and the Colored Man,” Roosevelt implicated the North, as well as the South, in the epidemic of mob violence against African Americans that he had condemned as president. “There have been plenty of lynchings and race-­riots in the North,” he admitted, “and we intend to make se­ rious and conscientious effort to do away with the conditions which have brought about these race-­riots and lynchings.”54 Although Roosevelt took an especially strong position on lynching—­one of the NAACP’s core causes—­Du Bois responded disdainfully to the former president’s efforts to heal the wounds opened at the Progressive Party convention. Agitated by Taft’s complicity in the Brownsville affair, Du Bois and his National Independent Political League allies from 1908 onward considered supporting the Democratic Party. That temptation was heightened by Taft’s patronage policies, which retreated from Roosevelt’s efforts to promote meritorious African Americans in the South. Taft publicly announced that he would not appoint any black man for federal office if a white southerner found it objectionable. The consternation this “southern policy” aroused was further aggravated by Taft’s eulogy of Jefferson Davis during a tour of the South toward the end of 1909. “The Negro,” the Baltimore Afro-­American noted pointedly, “who has always been true to the Republican party and has helped to make it what it is and has even helped largely in the election of the present chief executive, is now to be given what his blessed Master had offered on the cross—­‘vinegar and gall.’ ”55 In his call for African Americans to abandon the Republican Party, Du Bois acknowledged that some might lose patronage positions; but he underscored that this was a small matter when cast against the chance to transform the party system. Should they join the Democrats, African American voters could tilt the party’s center of gravity toward its northern wing, which treated Negroes “better” than did northern Republicans. “The Negro voter, today, therefore has in his hand the tremendous power of emancipating the Democratic Party from its enslavement to the South.”56 Remarkably, Du Bois thus anticipated the New Deal realignment, which saw Franklin Roosevelt and northern Democrats, aided by the desperate conditions of the Great Depression, persuade many African Americans to switch party allegiance by appealing to them along economic and class lines. No change of this magnitude took place during the Progressive Era, when economic circumstances were far less dire, but due to the efforts of civil rights organizations like the NAACP and the National Independent Political League, the Democratic Party began to court African American voters. This was especially so in 1912, when the Progressives shook the foundations of the party system,

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challenging traditional loyalties in a way that had not been the case since the end of Reconstruction. Bishop Alexander Walters, of the African Methodist Episcopal Zion Church (AME), organized the National Colored Dem­ ocratic League to rally black support for Wilson. Urging African Americans to “Make Friends of Thine Enemies,” Walters warned his racial brethren not to join the Progressives. Understandably, Walters observed, African Amer­ icans feared “that should the Democrats come into power some greater misfortune would befall them.” But he pointed out that Democrats in Congress recently helped pass “the greatest of all pension bills, which included among its beneficiaries, thousands of old negro soldiers.” More important, the Democratic Party created the National Colored Democratic League, “the first bona fide national political organization of colored men ever formed” in the country. The Democratic Party thus demonstrated that it wanted to include African Americans in its ranks; Walters assured his readers that “it has met us half way.” With the invitation offered, “reason and intelligence command us to lay aside our prejudice and fears and reach out for the friendship and support of the people who are today oppressing us because of our political hostility toward them.”57 Du Bois was far more measured in his support of the Democrats. He openly admitted that the Democratic candidate, born in Virginia, shared the racist sentiments of many of his contemporaries. Not once in Woodrow Wilson’s entire career before 1912 had he expressed any interest in the rights of nonwhites; indeed, as president of Princeton University he supported the exclusion of African American students. “On the whole,” Du Bois understated, “we do not believe that Woodrow Wilson admires Negroes.” Nonetheless, Du Bois argued that African American electoral support could give the movement fresh traction within a historically hostile party: “[I]f he becomes President by the grace of the black man’s vote, his Democratic successors may be more willing to pay the black man’s price of decent travel, free labor, votes, and education.”58 Du Bois’s support of Wilson was not spontaneous. Since the Democratic convention, Wilson had been meeting with and seeking to reassure civil rights leaders on the race question. The Democratic nominee, in fact, was on fairly close terms with Oswald Garrison Villard, grandson of William Lloyd Garrison, crusading editor of the New York Evening Post, and one of the leading founders of the NAACP, who “was in 1912 unquestionably the leading white champion of Negro rights in the United States.”59 Villard supported Wilson’s gubernatorial campaign in 1910 and appreciated the New Jersey governor’s economic and political reform program. His hope that this energetic reform blueprint could be extended to civil rights was buoyed

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by a meeting with Wilson a month after the Democratic National Convention nominated Wilson. As Villard wrote in his diary of the meeting, “He said that, of course, he should be President of all the people, that he would appoint no man to office because he was colored, any more than he would appoint one because he was a Jew or a Catholic, but that he would appoint them on the merits.” Wilson acknowledged to Villard that he and the crusading reformer would “differ . . . as to where the entering wedge [on race relations] should be driven.” But the governor promised fair dealing for Af­ rican Americans, albeit in vague terms. “He said of course he would speak out against lynching,” Villard reported; at the same time, Wilson “did not wish the colored people to get the impression that he could help them in that matter as President, as the President had no power.”60 Despite the reassurances of Du Bois and Villard, many African American leaders, all too familiar with his past indifference to the cause of racial justice, refused to support Wilson. Several black newspapers urged African Americans to remain true to the gradualism and partisan loyalty of Booker T. Washington: stick with the Republican Party, they pleaded, for Taft was the only major candidate who stood for individual rights, although, in truth, he expressed deep commitments to property rights and little concern for the rights of nonwhite citizens.61 Yet many civil rights leaders and black newspapers remained enthralled with the possibilities of Roosevelt’s direct relationship with social reform movements. As the Afro-­American Ledger editorialized, “You have not been ashamed in all these years to call yourselves Republicans; now show your colors and let the folks know you are Progressives. . . . It has a ring about it that makes one feel that he is a part of the community in which he lives, and that he is up to the times. Progress is the watch word.”62 It was a good sign, the editorial added, that “enlisted in this battle with Col. Roosevelt are many of the best known exponents of social justice in the country.” And yet, the Ledger admitted, “the colored voters have not all heeded this argument, and the present campaign has resulted in the greatest division of the Negro vote during the forty odd years that the race has had the right to vote.”63 While the African American community split over whom to support in the 1912 election, all reformers agreed that presidential campaigns and the White House had become an important target of opportunity. Indeed, the emergence of the modern presidency and the rise of influential civil rights groups such as the NAACP and National Independent Political League defined the 1912 campaign as among the most serious electoral contests over the meaning of African American citizenship since Reconstruction’s end. Proponents of African American civil rights would be greatly disappointed by

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the Wilson administration, but even this sense of betrayal did not squelch the view of civil rights insurgents that presidential attention and power were crucial to their cause. The New Freedom and Racial Injustice Woodrow Wilson won the1912 election by championing a pragmatic version of progressive reform—­the “New Freedom”—­which was far more sympathetic than Roosevelt’s “New Nationalism” to parties and courts. But his reform message moved in Roosevelt’s direction over the course of the campaign. In particular, the Democratic candidate championed a modern executive—­with authority to speak for the nation as the instrument of social and economic reform—­almost as fervently as did Roosevelt. “America was coming out of the leading strings of parties and was beginning to transact the great business of humanity,” he observed. “Men and measures are the only things worthy of the thought of a great people who are . . . following their own visions, realizing their own dreams of what American manhood means and must achieve.”64 Once in office, Wilson advanced key features of Roosevelt’s New Nationalism—­such as interpreting and shaping mass public opinion and deploying national administrative power—­during his presidency. Most famously, he revived the practice, abandoned by Thomas Jefferson, of appearing before Congress to deliver important messages, including the State of the Union address.65 Wilson’s innovation displayed subtle differences with Roosevelt and the Progressive insurgents. He recalibrated the Progressive Party’s vision of democracy by joining direct appeals to the public with a new form of partisanship where the president, rather than Congress, would “stand at the intersection of party organization and national popular opinion”—­ where he might “harness each to great national effect.”66 He then joined this partisan version of Roosevelt’s concept of the executive as steward of the people to support for bolstering national administrative power.67 Poaching from the Progressives’ platform, he reversed the emblematic stand of his own party on business regulation and pressed for the creation of a federal trade commission with broad discretion in moving against unfair practices. Similarly, Wilson persuaded the Democratic Congress to accept a federal reserve act that established a board to oversee the national banking and currency system. In each case, Wilson overcame the Democratic Party’s traditional antipathy to national administrative power, suggesting that with the advance of progressive democracy, party leaders in Congress were induced to sacrifice programmatic principles to win the White House.68 As Croly wrote appreciatively of Wilson’s progressive leadership, “At the final test, the responsibility

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is his rather than that of his party. The party which submits to such a dictatorship, however benevolent, cannot play its own proper part in a system of partisan government.”69 Wilson’s further advance of the modern presidency made champions of African American civil rights all the more determined to target the White House and the executive branch to advance their agenda. The support that the NAACP and the National Independent Political League gave Wilson during the campaign made some civil rights leaders hopeful that their efforts to secure the new administration’s support would be reciprocated. After the inauguration, however, they soon learned otherwise. As David Levering Lewis has noted, “Du Bois and the civil rights leadership were sadly mistaken . . . in their Wilsonian optimism. Wilson had not needed any black votes to win; two million more Americans had voted for him than the second place Roosevelt.” Moreover, civil rights leaders had invested their faith in the “first southerner since Zachary Taylor and the first Democrat since Grover Cleveland to enter the White House.”70 Wilson, elected to the White House in large part because of white southern support, allowed his administration to actively promote racial segregation in the national government’s departments and agencies. Some segregation had been introduced in the Roosevelt and Taft administrations, but these discriminatory practices were limited and took place without the direct support of these Republican presidents. As we have seen, in fact, Roosevelt joined Booker T. Washington in resisting efforts by Alabama and other southern states to purge African Americans from their organizations and federal positions located below the Mason-­Dixon Line. Yet Wilson, who had promised African Americans “absolute fair dealing” during the election, knew and approved of the extension of segregation to several government departments, most notably in the Treasury and the Post Office. Moreover, far more than Taft, Wilson bowed to pressure from southern Democrats in his patronage appointments: he appointed only two African Americans during his first term, while he dismissed many black incumbents and put pressure on others to resign.71 Wilson’s betrayal of his promise to African American leaders only made civil rights leaders more determined to continue what Megan Ming Francis calls their “unsteady march into the Oval Office.”72 Villard, who helped court black support for the Democratic candidate, wrote a strong letter protesting the Wilson administration’s segregationist policies in July 1913. The president replied summarily that segregation was not a move designed to hurt African Americans but, rather, something that served their best interests. Things came to a head when a delegation, led by Trotter, obtained an audience with the

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president on November 12, 1914. In a confrontation that made the front page of the New York Times, Wilson once again argued “that the policy of segregation had been enforced for the comfort and best interests of both races in order to overcome friction.” The president also told his visitors that the practice would continue, assuring them that segregation would nurture “the independent development . . . of the negro race.” When Trotter protested vehemently, Wilson expressed his willingness to investigate individual cases of discrimination; however, he stuck adamantly to his belief that “separate but equal” was good for the races. He also insisted that segregation of blacks and whites, although enforced by the government, “had no place in politics.” During their meeting, in fact, Wilson grew increasingly outraged by Trotter’s persistent criticism of his attitudes on racial segregation. Unwilling to hear any more of Trotter’s challenges to his views, Wilson abruptly interrupted the civil rights leader, who had praised the Democratic candidate as the “second Abraham Lincoln” during the 1912 campaign, and demanded that he leave the White House. “What the President told us was entirely disappointing,” Trotter told the press as he left. “His statement that segregation was intended to prevent racial friction is not supported by facts. For fifty years negro and white employees have worked together in the government departments in Washington. It was not until the present Administration came in that segregation was drastically introduced, only because of the racial prejudices of [Assistant Secretary of the Treasury] John Skelton Williams, Secretary [of the Treasury] William McAdoo, and Postmaster General [Albert] Burleson.”73 Displaying the stronger organizational capacity that had been developed since the Niagara Movement, civil rights activists took their protests beyond the White House. In addition to Trotter’s heated confrontation with Wilson, the president’s segregationist policies were protested with public meetings organized by the NAACP, letter-­writing campaigns, lobbying on Capitol Hill, Crisis editorials, and mass-­distributed NAACP publications chronicling segregation in federal government. The clash was a potent demonstration of civil rights activists’ ability to directly challenge and resist a modern executive who so openly opposed their interests and aspirations.74 The deference that Booker T. Washington—­now dying at New York’s St. Luke’s Hospital—­ had displayed toward President Roosevelt was a thing of the past. More fundamentally, the special circumstances that motivated the uneasy partnership between Lincoln and the abolitionists—­presidential prerogative and movement activists capable of conventional and disruptive political tactics—­were becoming increasingly routine in a new century.

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The reality that neither Wilson nor his presidential successors could readily escape the attention and pressure of social movements is exemplified well by the fierce controversy aroused in February 1915 when the White House screened D. W. Griffith’s cinematic extravaganza Birth of a Nation. The film was a virulently racist production that glorified the Ku Klux Klan for vanquishing Reconstruction and restoring white supremacy in the South. It was made in collaboration with Thomas Dixon, the president’s classmate at Johns Hopkins and the author of The Clansman, the novel from which the film was adapted. Most provocatively, The Birth of a Nation included a scene of a white actor in blackface lustfully pursuing Lillian Gish, prompting Houston audiences to shout “lynch him.” According to the Crisis, it was no coincidence that mob murders spiked in 1915: nearly one hundred African Americans were lynched that year, “a larger number than had occurred [annually] for more than a decade.”75 After the NAACP’s legal battle against The Birth of a Nation failed in Los Angeles and New York, civil rights activists focused their efforts on Boston—­an important site of protest against racial injustice since the early nineteenth century—­where they hoped to find more traction. Faced with a strong censorship campaign, which spread to many other cities, Dixon’s lawyers countered by referencing the White House private screening to claim that the president and his guests, most notably Chief Justice Edward D. White, had enjoyed the film immensely.76 The chief justice, an old Confederate from Louisiana, put an end to the use of his name immediately, threatening that “if the rumors about my having sanctioned the show were continued that I might be under the obligation of denying them publicly and say . . . that I do not approve the show.”77 Yet, signifying the growing importance of the presidency, Wilson’s opinion on the film, his apparent endorsement, and the significance of screening The Birth of a Nation in the White House, remained central to the debates throughout the nation as to whether the film should be allowed to play. The conventional wisdom, repeated in nearly every popular and scholarly account of the presidential screening, is that Wilson, after the showing, said to Dixon, “It is like writing history with lightning. And my only regret is that it is all so terribly true.” This judgment is apocryphal—­there is no evidence that Wilson actually uttered these words. But given his shameful civil rights record, it is not surprising that this account endures. Indeed, Griffith’s advertisement for the film claimed that it was based on Wilson’s History of the American People. But Dixon did not use the quote in publicizing the movie or his memoirs. Moreover, the only survivor among those who

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attended the White House screening, Marjorie Brown King, told Wilson’s distinguished biographer Arthur Link that “Wilson seemed lost in thought during the showing, and . . . walked out of the room without saying a word when the movie was over.”78 If Brown King’s account is accurate, Wilson’s silence and preoccupation is understandable. This was the same day that Germany would officially enforce its war policy of sinking all vessels in the English Channel, and White House correspondence for the entire week that followed is overwhelmed with dispatches to and from Europe in an attempt to broker a peace deal before the war escalated further.79 In the face of this looming international crisis, it is more than plausible that Wilson would have been inattentive to Griffith’s film and sought to avoid distractions after its screening. Yet given the growing stature of the executive office, civil rights activists would not let the president ignore the fight at home over an incendiary film. Just as Roosevelt’s dinner with Washington led to an explosive national controversy that aroused white supremacists, so Wilson’s apparent endorsement of a brilliantly produced racist film became a cause célèbre for civil rights activists and their allies. Democratic congressman Thomas Thacher of Massachusetts sent a missive to the presidential secretary Joseph Tumulty, with several letters from his constituents who were appalled to learn of the president’s apparent endorsement, asking Wilson to confirm or deny the allegations. At the request of  Tumulty, who hoped to meet the protest head on, Wilson prepared a response stating that he was “entirely unaware of the character of the play before it was presented and has at no time expressed his approbation of it. Its exhibition at the White House was a courtesy extended to an old acquaintance.”80 Wilson’s tepid response and the failure to prevent The Birth of a Nation from being shown in Boston led the president’s nemesis Trotter and other African American leaders to hold massive protests in front of the historic Tremont Theater, which screened the film. Having received advance notice of the plan, the Boston police department stationed over two hundred plain­ clothes and uniformed officers in the surrounding area.81 When the box office refused to sell some of the remaining tickets to a group of African American men, police began to clear the lobby. Trotter was the first to be arrested of those standing at the ticket counter, escorted away by four police officers. “Several hundred” men followed them down the street. Police drew their clubs and pushed the crowd through the adjacent Boston Common, arresting ten other people—­nine of them black.82 Upon his release, Trotter would give a prescient warning; his demonstration was not the “violence” the nation needed to worry about: “It is a rebel play, an incentive to great

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racial hatred . . . it will make white women afraid of negroes and will have white men all stirred up on their account. If there is any lynching here in Boston, Mayor Curley will be responsible.”83 The White House record shows that Wilson saw clippings of news reports on the protests the following day. Once again, Tumulty urged Wilson to disavow his approbation of the movie—­this time, in fact, he requested that the president write a letter “showing that he did not approve of The Birth of a Nation.” The president’s response revealed that his growing concern about the White House’s seeming to favor a film that incited protest and mob violence against African Americans was trumped by his memory of Trotter’s forceful challenge to his segregationist personnel policies. “I would like to do this,” he wrote Tumulty, “if there were some way in which I could do it without seeming to be trying to meet the agitation . . . stirred up by that unspeakable fellow.”84 The president’s recalcitrance, however, served only to strengthen the civil rights movement in its censorship fight. As Lewis argues, “It instigated an unprecedented solidarity” of Progressive activists like Du Bois and Trotter with gradualists who maintained allegiance to Washington’s Tuskegee machine. Aroused movement activists blocked the showing of The Birth of a Nation in several northern cities. In New York, Jewish and Protestant religious leaders and prominent white Progressive reformers, including Jane Addams, marched in lockstep with the NAACP and other civil rights groups to city hall. Mayor John Purroy Mitchel, who originally sided with the producers, now subjected the film to legal scrutiny that resulted in minor deletions and delays. Paradoxically, the energetic censorship campaign of the fledgling civil rights movement only added to the interest in the film: when The Birth of a Nation was finally released in March 1916, New Yorkers “rushed to see it in record setting numbers.”85 That the passionate and well-­organized censorship fight contributed to the success of The Birth of a Nation revealed the limited power of the movement in a country still plagued by deep-­rooted racial prejudice. The film received rave reviews not only in the South but also in northern cities. The widely read syndicated columnist Dorothy Dix’s high praise of the narrative and cinematic qualities of the movie, although more detailed in its account than most reviews, was representative of the national response: “The Birth of the Nation” is the apotheosis of the moving picture. . . . [It is] history vitalized and made living. Go and see it for that. Go and see it because of the wonder of pictures themselves, and the marvel of this new art of film making, of which it is the last word.

106 / Chapter Three And finally go and see it because it will make a better American of you, for out of baptism of blood of the Civil War was born the new nation, one and indivisible.86

As Dix’s review shows, the glowing response to The Birth of a Nation was not only due to the powerful racism that still afflicted the country but also to cinematic prowess and the development of the mass media that would make a deep impression on politics. Both the modern executive office and twentieth-­ century social movements deployed tactics that sought to influence public opinion directly, thus making brilliant filmmakers like Griffith potentially powerful political allies or enemies. As Dixon wrote to Wilson’s secretary Tumulty, “Of course, I didn’t dare allow the President to know the real big purpose back of my film—­which was to revolutionize Northern sentiments by a presentation of  history that would transform every man in my audience into a good Democrat! . . . What I told the President was that I would show him the birth of a new art—­the launching of the mightiest engine for moulding public opinion in the history of the world.”87 Such an appeal probably resonated with Wilson, who along with Roosevelt had pioneered the use of movies in the 1912 presidential election. Moreover, the controversy aroused by The Birth of a Nation—­and the way it threatened to pull the White House into the vortex of a disruptive conflict between civil rights activists and white supremacists—­confirmed Wilson’s view that a great deal of politics, even partisanship, now took place beyond party and governing institutions. Leading African American activists acknowledged the dawn of a new political era—­and their determination to become a more formative movement—­ during an unprecedented civil rights leadership conference held at Amenia, New York, in August 1916. The gathering symbolized the renewal of an alliance between black and white reformers that unraveled at the 1912 Progressive Party convention. The Amenia meeting also included the full array of African American leaders—­followers of  Trotter, Du Bois, and the now deceased Washington—­thus confirming that “historic ideological and political differences within the Negro leadership class had been much attenuated after four years of Woodrow Wilson’s White House.” Wilson’s racist personnel policies, his seeming indifference to, if not endorsement of, The Birth of a Nation, and his deafening silence in the face of growing mob violence against African Americans ensured that the NAACP’s commitment to public protest and other forms of direct action “commanded the loyalty of the majority of educated Blacks.”88 The new era of civil rights activism, so visible in the midst of the 1916 presidential campaign, did not go unnoticed in established political circles.

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Both Wilson and the Republican candidate, Supreme Court justice Charles Evan Hughes, locked in a very close presidential campaign, sent greetings to the Amenia conference. Given the betrayal civil rights leaders experienced during and after the 1912 election, they understandably received these messages skeptically. At first, Du Bois supported Hughes, albeit with little enthusiasm. “Under ordinary circumstances,” he wrote in the Crisis, “the Negro must expect from him, as chief executive, the neglect, indifference and misunderstanding that he has had from recent Republican presidents. Nevertheless, he is practically the only candidate for whom we can vote.” Near the end of the campaign, however, Du Bois grew increasingly miffed at Hughes’s failure to address the issues of lynching, disenfranchisement, and segregation. In response, he “called a plague” on both major presidential candidates, encouraging African American voters to either lodge a protest vote for the Socialist Allen Benson or stay home altogether. But most African Americans joined Theodore Roosevelt in returning to the Republican Party, even though the GOP was as eager to cater to southern whites as the Democratic Party.89 Wilson’s close victory, it seemed, left the civil rights movement in the political wilderness. Yet civil rights activists, mobilizing in opposition to lynching, did not feel they could give up on the White House; they still believed, as Megan Ming Francis argues, that “the road to racial equality went through the executive branch.” Tellingly, as we noted earlier, Alice Paul and woman suffragists drew the same conclusion as they sought to harness the power and authority of the modern presidency to advance their cause, pressing Wilson with confrontational protests from his first inauguration through World War I.90 Hence the NAACP, which spearheaded the campaign against mob violence, “realized that in order for its program of political protest to succeed,” their organizations “would have to continue to work to change Wilson’s attitude on racial issues.”91 Riots in East Saint Louis a few months after Wilson was inaugurated for a second term—­the worst outbreak of urban violence that America had experienced in peacetime—­strengthened the resolve of civil rights leaders to get the president to address lynching. In July 1917, urban and racial tension resulting from African American migration out of the South exploded into a brutal race war, leaving hundreds of black corpses strewn in the streets, many of them shot or lynched by angry white mobs. Marcus Garvey, a Jamaican immigrant who became a leading proponent of African American exodus from the United States, condemned the riot as “one of the bloodiest outrages against mankind,” a “wholesale massacre of our people.” The victims were murdered “for no other reason than they are black people seeking

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an industrial chance in a country that they have labored for three hundred years to make great.” It was time, Garvey told a rapt audience in Harlem, “to lift one’s voice against the savagery of a people who claim to be the dispensers of democracy.”92 Determined to get the president’s attention after what David Levering Lewis has called “the first American pogrom,” the NAACP’s new executive director, James Weldon Johnson, was given an audience with the president’s secretary; however, even though Tumulty told the civil rights leader that reading accounts of the riots sickened him physically, his lofty superior remained silent.93 Not to be deterred, activists mobilized in a way that directly foreshadowed the philosophy and strategies of direct protest in the 1950s and 1960s. They organized a silent parade of ten thousand men, women, and children who marched down Fifth Avenue in New York City bearing banners that targeted the White House. One sign read, “Mr. President Please Make America Safe for Democracy”; another, placed deliberately next to the man who carried the American flag, protested, “Your Hands Are Full of Blood.” More resonant with Americans than the censorship campaign, the Silent Parade revealed the development of an aggressive and well-­organized civil rights movement that was determined to bring the grievances of African Americans to the attention of the office that presumed to represent the whole people. Captured by the newly emergent mass media, the demonstration, as the NAACP’s Johnson attested, was a new form of direct protest—­“a sight as has never before been seen.”94 The reference to Wilson’s defense of World War I, declared a few months before the East Saint Louis conflagration—­“The world must be made safe for democracy”—­revealed the civil rights activists’ hope to ally their cause with the president’s international idealism, rather than to simply denounce its hypocrisy. Just as the women’s movement had used the exigencies of war to pressure Wilson into supporting woman’s suffrage, so civil rights leaders hoped to take advantage of the president’s preoccupation with a unified war effort to support their campaign against white mob violence. Wilson’s idealist progressive principles did not include the protection of civil liberties; to the contrary, his view that the war was a moral crusade actually inspired intolerance toward those who disagreed. The battle between the White House, on one side, and antiwar activists and free-­speech defenders, on the other, fueled the formation of another formidable movement in response to the war: the American Civil Liberties Union.95 Progressive reformers themselves, including those who fought against racial injustice, were badly divided by the war. The revered Jane Addams and other anti-­imperialists resisted US involvement in the war, protesting that

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the nation should use its “vast neutral power to extend democracy throughout the world.” But other social activists, including Du Bois, hoped that a battle framed between democracy and autocracy was “full of social possibilities.” As his July 1918 Crisis editorial “Close Ranks” read, “Let us, while the war lasts, forget our special grievances and close our ranks shoulder to shoulder with our white fellow citizens and the allied nations that are fight­ ing for democracy. We make no ordinary sacrifice, but we make it gladly and willingly with our eyes lifted to the hills.”96 Du Bois’s support for the war fractured the civil rights community. Sharing Addams’s view, civil rights leaders like Trotter scorned Du Bois’s allegiance as a sellout—­an indictment incited in no small part by the Crisis editor’s acceptance of a captaincy sinecure that the Wilson administration granted him. Yet after the solemn Silent Parade, Wilson gradually became more responsive to the civil rights community’s demand that he denounce and take action against lynching. Like Frederick Douglass, Du Bois and other movement activists who supported the Great War believed that the black soldiers’ patriotism and bravery—­an estimated three hundred thousand African American soldiers eventually assisted the war effort—­would strengthen the cause of equal rights. Wilson first indicated a willingness to act against white mob violence after receiving a petition signed by twelve thousand citizens that a delegation representing the Silent Parade left at the White House. “We come asking that the President use his great powers,” the petition read, “to have granted to us some redress of the grievances set forth in our petition, and we come further praying the President may find it in his heart to speak some public word that will give hope and courage to our people, thus using his great personal and moral influence in our behalf.”97 Wilson did not meet with the delegation, but his response to the petition showed he was prepared finally to address the epidemic of white mob terror. As he wrote Tumulty on the day the parade delegation visited, “I wish very much that you would think this [Silent Parade petition] over and tell me just what form and occasion you think such a statement ought to take. I want to make it if it can be made naturally and with the likelihood that it will be effective.”98 Another episode of racial violence gave Wilson the opportunity to take a stand against white mob violence. On August 23, 1917, a detachment of African American soldiers in the army’s Twenty-­Fourth Infantry was charged with shooting up the city of Houston and leaving seventeen white people dead. In defiance of the NAACP’s protest, sixty-­three black soldiers were court-­martialed, and thirteen were quickly hung on December 11. Armed with a another petition signed by thousands of African American and white

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citizens, an NAACP delegation visited the White House; but unlike past civil rights missions that Tumulty intercepted, these four men were given an audience with the president, who greeted them warmly. Wilson responded swiftly to the NAACP’s appeal for clemency. “This document,” he wrote his war secretary Newton Diehl Baker, “which was left with me today, accompanied by a gigantic petition, that is, gigantic in the bulk of its signatures, has I must say moved me very much.” As requested by the NAACP delegation, Wilson told Baker that he wanted to reconsider “the cases of both the men who have been condemned to death and the men who have been condemned to life sentences.”99 Subsequently, Wilson forbade the execution of any more American soldiers before sentences were reviewed by the War Department. Moreover, after reviewing the cases of the men who faced capital punishment, Wilson commuted many of the death sentences and several of the life sentences.100 In delivering remarks on his decision, it was clear that the massive petition drive and the hundreds of letters in support of clemency had their effect. As Wilson told reporters, “The offense of which these soldiers were guilty is one of the greatest difficulty . . . [yet] I desire the clemency here ordered to be a recognition of the splendid loyalty of the race to which these soldiers belong and an inspiration to the people of that race to further zeal and service to the country of which they are citizens and for the liberties of which so many of them are now bravely bearing arms at the very front of great fields of battle.”101 After moving Wilson to action, civil rights leaders continued to push the president to condemn racial violence. In March 1918, Trotter, now head of the National Equal Rights League, petitioned the president to “urge cessation of lynching, and removal from [the] American stage [the] extraordinary attack upon racial peace, glorifier of the lynch law, The Birth of a Nation,” which was still drawing large audiences three years after its initial screening. In partial recognition of the petition’s realization of the “extraordinary need of racial amity in [the] presence of [an] extraordinary world war,” Wilson overcame his festering resentment of Trotter’s earlier confrontation at the White House over segregation. This time, Wilson instructed his secretary to respond: “I have always felt this was a very unfortunate production and I wish very sincerely that its production might be avoided, particularly in communities where there are so many colored people.” Considering this response to be somewhat anticlimactic after such a lengthy silence, Tumulty asked for a longer statement. “I think,” he wrote hopefully, “that you may perhaps care to say more than this.” “No this will do,” Wilson rejoined, hop­ ing to end the matter.102

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However, civil rights activists were determined to achieve a more definitive condemnation of racial injustice. When violence broke out in the nation’s capital in the summer of 1918, the NAACP sent a memo to Wilson outlining eleven reasons why he should denounce white terror.103 The next day, closely adhering to the NAACP’s reasoning, Wilson published a strong statement condemning lynching—­one that exceeded Roosevelt’s in length and moral purpose. In his “Statement to the American People,” Wilson declared: I take the liberty of addressing you upon a subject which so vitally affects the honor of the Nation and the very character and integrity of our institutions. . . . I allude to the mob spirit which has recently here and there very frequently shown its head among us, not in any single region, but in many and widely separated parts of the country. There have been many lynchings, and every one of them has been a blow at the heart of  law and humane jus­ tice. No man who loves America, no man who really cares for her fame and honor and character, or who is truly loyal to her institutions, can justify mob action while the courts of justice are open and the governments of the States and Nation are ready and able to do their duty. We are at this very moment fighting lawless passion. Germany has outlawed herself among the nations be­ cause she has disregarded the sacred obligations of law and has made lynchers of her armies. Lynchers emulate her disgraceful example. I, for my part, am anxious to see every community in America rise above that level.104

The address was first-­page, above-­the-­fold, headline news, reprinted in its entirety in many newspapers.105 The Chicago Defender noted that “embodied in the President’s appeal to the country can be found the principles enunciated by this paper for the past twelve months in its fight for a clarity of Race conscience.”106 The editorial continued its praise onto the back pages: “The coming of this message from President Wilson, a Democrat, was like a bolt out of a clear sky, a bolt intended to strike our enemies a stinging blow; a bolt intended to bring these wreckers of order and law to a realization of the fact that they are deserving of the same consideration from true American citizens as that shown for the Huns, who are endeavoring to kill democracy.”107 Progressives and Racial Justice The birth of the modern presidency and the emergence of an energetic civil rights movement during the Progressive Era did not yield a partnership

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dedicated to racial justice. Although they expressed high ideals in the name of economic reform and international engagement, neither Roosevelt nor Wilson was ever invested in civil rights. Both, in fact, saw “the negro problem” as an unwanted intrusion on their ambitions to establish the president as the “steward of public welfare.” Nevertheless, the civil rights movement during the early twentieth century was not relegated to the political margins or easily ignored by presidents and other government officials. Washington’s Tuskegee machine worked effectively with Roosevelt to resist the creation of “lily-­white” GOP organizations in the South, and Washington persuaded Roosevelt to denounce lynching, an important symbolic victory. Even Roosevelt’s summary actions against African American soldiers in Brownsville redounded with some benefit to the civil rights movement, unleashing dissent that ultimately led to the creation of the NAACP. Roose­velt’s 1912 “Stand at Armageddon” mobilized civil rights activists in an effort to pressure the Progressive Party to embrace racial justice. Although Roosevelt and white social activists struck an unsavory bargain with Jim Crow at their Chicago convention, the third-­party candidate’s more conciliatory stand on civil rights during the general election demonstrated the growing significance of a nascent movement. Far more than Roosevelt, Wilson embraced the segregation and subjugation of African Americans. The fact that he ultimately could not ignore civil rights activists despite these proclivities reflects some measure of effectiveness of the NAACP’s “marches into the White House,” street demonstrations, and grassroots mobilization. Wilson’s belated indictment of The Birth of a Nation and lynching were small victories in an era that saw the federal government abandon enforcement of the Fourteenth and Fifteenth Amendments, segregate and exclude African Americans from its bureaucracy, and allow them to endure horrific mob violence and racial intimidation. Nevertheless, as Megan Ming Francis persuasively argues, civil rights leaders were able “to leverage these victories as evidence it was having an impact and build up an advanced network of support, including sympathetic media and financial resources.” The civil rights movement persisted through the conservative Republican administrations of the 1920s; indeed, during the “return to normalcy,” activists not only persuaded Warren Harding to denounce lynching but also a conservative Republican House to pass an anti-­lynching bill. Although this bill was killed in the Senate, the NAACP redirected its political efforts to the federal courts, where it won a major legal triumph against mob violence in the case of Moore v. Dempsey. With this 1923 decision, the Supreme Court guarded the due process rights of African Americans against mob-­dominated trials and “positioned itself as a major

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player in the politics of race in Jim Crow America.”108 Moreover, this legal victory, capping the civil rights organization’s development in an influential national movement, ensured that another progressive Democratic president who thought that America was not ready for a civil rights revolution would not be able to ignore the entreaties of activists who fought to establish a foothold in the New Deal political order.

Franklin Roosevelt, the New Deal Political Order, and the Ongoing March of the Civil Rights Movement Franklin Roosevelt’s election in 1932—­amid the worst economic crisis in the nation’s history—­left many civil rights leaders with an uncomfortable feeling of déjà vu. Like Wilson, Roosevelt, having adopted Warm Springs, Georgia—­where he sought to rehabilitate his polio-­ravaged legs—­as his second home, had a great deal of sympathy for the white South. Like Wilson, too, Roosevelt was elected as the head of a Democratic Party that was beholden to its southern wing. The Crisis, still under the auspices of Du Bois, editorialized sourly during the campaign that “FDR has spent six months out of every twelve as Governor of New York and the rest swimming in a Georgia mudhole. If he is elected president, we shall have to move the White House to Warm Springs and to use Washington for his occasional vacations.”109 In important respects, the fear that Roosevelt would submit to racial segregation and oppression was prescient. “Not once in his long tenure,” the sympathetic historian William Leuchtenburg wrote of Roosevelt, “did he mount a campaign on behalf of civil rights.” Moreover, many of Roosevelt’s core social welfare programs reflected his willingness to compromise with the southern congressional leadership.110 For example, the old-­age insurance program of the 1935 Social Security law did not cover domestic and hotel workers, farm laborers, teachers, and nurses, thus excluding most African Americans and women from its benefits. Yet Roosevelt and the New Deal—­forged in response to major domestic and international crises—­far surpassed Wilson’s New Freedom in its political and programmatic ambition. The New Deal brought a major political realignment dedicated to national reform and advanced the institutional changes, born of the Progressive Era, that strengthened the relationship between modern executives and movement activists. During his second term, especially, Roosevelt pursued partisan practices and institutional reforms that greatly weakened the sectional, patronage-­based party system and gave rise to a national programmatic form of partisanship. The system of party responsibility that New Dealers championed, Roosevelt insisted, “required

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that one of its parties be the liberal party and the other be the conservative party,” a call to arms that required a frontal assault on his fellow partisans below the Mason-­Dixon Line. As journalist Thomas Stokes wrote after observing the role southern legislators played in impeding and compromising the wages and hours bill: “Southern Democracy was the ball and chain which hobbled the Party’s forward march.”111 A critical feature of this new party system was the establishment of the president as the repository of party responsibility. Like the Progressive Party, the New Deal Democratic Party was formed to advance the personal and nonpartisan responsibility of the executive at the expense of collective and partisan responsibility. Whereas executive-­centered partisanship had its origins in Wilson’s first-­term command of the Democratic Party, the New Deal was less a partisan program than an exercise in extending the president’s responsibility to fulfill popular aspirations for social and economic welfare.112 This is not to deny very significant differences between New Nationalist Progressivism and New Deal Liberalism. In calling themselves Liberals, rather than Progressives, the New Dealers’ reform program was more in keeping with the American constitutional tradition. Most important, it asserted more directly the connection between a strong national government and rights. Beginning with his 1932 campaign speech at the Commonwealth Club and at each key rhetorical juncture thereafter, Roosevelt stated that the purpose of modern government was “to assist in the development of an economic declaration of rights, an economic constitutional order.”113 Tellingly, the 1936 Democratic platform was written in the cadence of the Declaration of Independence and emphasized the need for a more capacious understanding of natural rights. If the national government was truly to protect liberty, the natural rights tradition had to be enlarged to include programmatic rights. With respect to the 1935 Social Security legislation, the platform claimed: We hold this truth to be self-­evident—­that the test of representative government is its ability to promote the safety and happiness of the people. . . . We have built the foundations for the security of those who are faced with the hazards of unemployment and old age, for the orphaned, the crippled, and the blind. On the foundations of the Social Security Act we are determined to erect a structure of economic security for all of our people, making sure that this benefit shall keep step with the ever-­increasing capacity of America to provide a high standard of living for all its people.114

The New Deal task of pronouncing a progressive understanding of rights culminated during the Second World War. As Roosevelt stated in his 1944

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State of the Union address, constructing a foundation for economic security meant that the inalienable rights protected by the Constitution—­speech, press, worship, due process—­had to be supplemented by a new bill of rights. Included in the second bill of rights were the right to a useful and remunerative job; the right to own enough to provide adequate food, clothing, and recreation; the right to adequate medical care; the right to a decent home; the right to adequate protection from the economic fears of old age, sickness, accident, and unemployment; and the right to a good education.115 Significantly, these programmatic rights promised that “a new basis of security and property [could] be established for all—­regardless of station, race, or creed.” Although this ideal never resulted in a direct attack on the Jim Crow South, it led to political reform that made African Americans a key constituency of the New Deal liberalism. At the urging of Pennsylvania senator Joseph Guffey, described by journalists as “first of the liberal bosses,” the Democratic National Committee (DNC) established the first effective DNC Negro Division in the early 1930s. Guffey, encouraged by prominent African American political leaders, believed that black voters could be persuaded to abandon their traditional loyalties to the Republican Party, which neither the Progressive Party nor Wilson’s Democratic Party could dislodge. As Du Bois presciently anticipated in supporting Wilson in 1912, African Americans might be drawn to the New Deal for economic reasons—­because it promised more relief from the harsh conditions under which they labored than did Herbert Hoover’s idea of “rugged individualism.” Guffey was confirmed in this hope when Robert Vann, the owner-­editor of the Pittsburgh Courier (one of the leading national black newspapers) indicted the Republicans for “indolently draw[ing] checks against the debt of the Civil War, without troubling themselves further with a lot of colored people.” African Americans were realizing that their votes were connected to economic conditions, Vann told Guffey in a private meeting. To Guffey’s way of thinking, this was an opportunity to be taken advantage of. “At the end a bright vista, he saw millions of negro voters,” reported the press. “Republicans no longer, Democrats all.”116 Guffey persuaded a reluctant James Farley—­the powerful political broker and DNC chair—­to appoint Vann as the manager in chief of a newly established “Colored Advisory Committee.” Vann’s efforts on behalf of Democrats and his ability to swing a number of voters to Roosevelt in 1932 won him praise from party figures like Farley. His work at Democratic headquarters and elsewhere after the election was instrumental in aiding the dramatic shift in African American support for the New Deal between 1932 and 1936.117 The recruitment of African American elites into the Democratic

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national organization and the efforts of this revamped organization to mobilize African American voters was one of several developments that gave rise to a more centralized party apparatus committed to programmatic reform. From within party headquarters, members of the “Colored Voters Division” vigorously advocated patronage for African Americans. This task proved difficult, but outside the South, historian Nancy Weiss notes, Democratic leaders at every level “found an incentive to woo Blacks. Building the Democratic Party meant broadening and deepening the party’s base; Blacks—­a constituency the party [except for Wilson’s brief flirtation with civil rights leaders in 1912] had never previously cultivated—­were one of the groups that could help build a powerful new Democratic coalition.”118 Some of these appointments were traditional patronage that, although of great symbolic and political importance, proved insignificant in the build­ ing of the New Deal. For example, at the insistence of Guffey, Roosevelt ap­ pointed Vann assistant attorney general as a reward for his effective work during the 1932 campaign. But this position, impressive as it may have been in title, was limited to routine and insignificant tasks. In the fall of 1935, a disappointed and frustrated Vann returned to the Pittsburgh Courier.119 Nevertheless, such black patronage, reminiscent of the jobs brokered by Washington’s Tuskegee Institute during the Theodore Roosevelt and Taft administrations, was joined to more programmatic appointments that were overseen by representatives of a rejuvenated civil rights movement. Joel Spingarn—­now the NAACP’s second president and chair of its board of directors—­spurred this renewal when he convened a three-­day civil rights retreat in August 1933, once again in Amenia, New York. The 1916 conference that Joel and Amy Spingarn hosted helped the NAACP achieve national prominence. “By reprising the event in 1933,” the historian Eben Miller has observed, “the NAACP hoped to reestablish its standing at a moment of economic crisis, floundering membership, and challenges from the radical left.”120 Predictably, one of the important issues the Amenia gathering discussed was the potential impact of the New Deal on the welfare of African Americans. Once skeptical that Roosevelt would effectively tackle the Great Depression, the NAACP activists were pleasantly surprised by his impressive first hundred days, when a plethora of new programs were enacted to combat economic suffering. The creation of the Civilian Conservation Corps, the Tennessee Valley Authority, the Agricultural Adjustment Administration, the National Recovery Administration, and the Public Works Administration promised to put thousands of African Americans to work and to create a new economic infrastructure in neglected sections of the country, most notably the South, where a majority of African Americans still

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lived. In response to the First New Deal, two young Harvard-­trained African Americans, John P. Davis and Robert Weaver, launched the Negro Industrial League to serve as a watchdog group that would oversee New Deal programs to ensure equal treatment for black workers.121 This aspiration for racial justice would be sorely disappointed. As Ira Katznelson so effectively demonstrates, the Faustian bargain that New Deal reformers cut with southern Democrats was to build a welfare state that excluded African Americans and left racial oppression in seventeen segregated states intact. This “southern cage” meant that African Americans were prevented from participating in programs like the Civilian Conservation Corps, the Tennessee Valley Authority, and Social Security, and denied the protections of many labor laws.122 Moreover, Richard Rothstein documents how the New Deal also fueled residential racial segregation in metropolitan areas nationwide through the construction of public housing by the Public Works Administration that mandated racial segregation in once integrated neighborhoods. In similar fashion, the Federal Housing Administration financed low-­interest loans for developers to build new subdivisions on the condition that homes were not sold to African Americans.123 Despite these formidable barriers reinforcing racial hierarchy, civil rights leaders relentlessly pressed the Roosevelt administration for favorable appointments to the embryonic New Deal state. This task was directed by Weaver, who became the first African American adviser on Negro affairs in the Roosevelt administration, and Mary McLeod Bethune—­head of the National Council of Negro Women, a new organization dedicated to enlisting talented females into the civil rights movement—­who the president appointed as the director of Negro affairs in the National Youth Administration, the progressive and energetic New Deal agency formed in 1935. Weaver and Bethune organized regular meetings of African American racial advisers in the various departments and agencies. (By 1937, all but five of the New Deal agencies had black advisers on their payrolls.) These individ­ uals, eventually dubbed the Black Cabinet, represented “a new cadre of black appointees,” according to Weaver. “These persons were chosen more for themselves and their ability to define issues relevant to the black community than to pay off political debts.” Consequently, although Roosevelt never launched a full-­scale attack on the segregation that Wilson imposed on the federal workforce, the number of African Americans in the civil service more than tripled during his first two terms. His collaboration with Weaver and Bethune, Du Bois admitted, “gave the American Negro a kind of recognition in political life which the Negro had never before received.” Even the young political scientist Ralph Bunche, whose presence at Amenia

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signaled the rise of a new generation of militant activists, conceded that the Roosevelt administration “represented a radical break with the past.”124 The Anti-­Lynching Campaign At the same time as civil rights leaders made progress in placing African Amer­ icans in important New Deal posts, they also used less conventional political tactics to mobilize support in communities nationwide to promote the NAACP’s twenty-­five-­year struggle against lynching and white mob violence. Soon after the 1933 Amenia conference, the sixty-­five-­year-­old Du Bois left his position as editor of the Crisis and the NAACP’s executive secretary Walter White assumed command of the civil rights organization. While White lobbied Congress to renew the fight for an anti-­lynching bill, he tapped a young and gifted community organizer, Juanita Jackson, to build grassroots support for the legislation. Jackson, the leading light within the Methodist Episcopal Church’s youth movement, traveled around the country inspiring the development of local organizations that transformed the battle for anti-­ lynching legislation into a moral crusade for African Americans’ civil rights. The promise of this campaign was dramatically revealed at the NAACP’s annual convention, which met in Baltimore—­Jackson’s home base—­in June 1936. Appearing before the two hundred young delegates in the Community House of the Sharp Street Methodist Episcopal Church, the home of Baltimore’s first African American congregation, White asked the NAACP’s youth section to “help us map out a program that will make the NAACP the kind of militant, uncompromising, fighting organization that you and I want it to be.” Inspired by White’s charge, the youthful organizers joined an audience of fifteen hundred convention delegates for Secretary of Interior Harold Ickes’s opening address, which was broadcast on national radio. Ickes, a former head of the Chicago NAACP who had desegregated the bathrooms and cafeterias of the Interior Department, linked Roosevelt to racial justice traditions of Abraham Lincoln.125 Speaking two weeks after the Democratic National Convention, Ickes’s reference to the Great Emancipator was joined to “cold hard arithmetic.” The 1936 election signaled the emergence of a new Democratic coalition, which, as one commentator put it, made northern African Americans “a more profitable object of political cajolery than the South.”126 Nevertheless, civil rights leaders, recognizing that most New Dealers, like their Progressive forebears, were determined to center conflict on economic issues, knew that getting an anti-­lynching bill through Congress would be a hard slog. To their great disappointment, Roosevelt resisted the lobbying

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efforts of White and the grassroots mobilization by the Jackson-­inspired youth councils to get his support for anti-­lynching legislation. The Costigan-­ Wagner act that they supported would hold local law-­enforcement authorities responsible for the lynching of prisoners “escaping” their custody. White’s efforts to get the president to speak out in favor of the Costigan-­Wagner legislation, which came before Congress in 1934, were rebuffed, even in the face of strong evidence that white mob violence against African Americans, if not as widespread as it had been in the 1920s, was still a national affront to the values New Dealers proclaimed to support. First Lady Eleanor Roosevelt, the White House’s ambassador to the civil rights movement, wrote to White in the spring of 1934, “The president talked to me rather at length today about the lynching bill. As I do not think you will agree with everything he thinks, I would like an opportunity of telling you about it, and would also like you to talk to the President if you feel you want to.”127 At his wife’s urging, the president did meet with White for a long, cordial meeting—­and Roosevelt promised to make it known to Senate majority leader Joseph Robinson that he favored enactment of legislation. But Roosevelt refused to use the modern presidency’s rhetorical clout to lend his enormous prestige to the legislation. The day after he hosted White, he made what Leuchtenburg calls a “mealy-­mouthed” statement at his press conference: “I frankly haven’t got sufficient clarity in my own mind as to whether that particular method will work and also as to the constitutionality of it, I think there is a question.” Roosevelt refused White’s entreaties again in 1935, staying silent as the bill was killed by a Senate filibuster, prompting the black scholar Horace Cayton to charge that Roosevelt and his circle regarded catering to white southerners “more greatly desired than justice for the masses, hence ‘mum is the word.’ ”128 Despite the defeat of the Costigan-­Wagner bill, civil rights activists, encouraged by the debate it aroused in the country and its near passage in Congress, redoubled their efforts to overcome Roosevelt’s recalcitrance. White, with cooperation from Senator Robert Wagner (D-­NY), the strongest congressional defender of anti-­lynching reform, maneuvered new legislation before the Seventy-­Fifth Congress, which convened after the triumphant 1936 Democratic victory. The NAACP’s effective lobbying campaign was supported by renewed grassroots efforts that, once again, Jackson orchestrated. The culmination of this community action was an Anti-­Lynching Day held on February 12, 1937, Lincoln’s birthday and the anniversary of the NAACP’s founding. Designed to test Ickes’s promise the year before, that Roosevelt would rediscover the imperative of African American rights, Anti-­ Lynching Day began with a nationally broadcast speech by Wagner, “The

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Lynching Problem Viewed on Lincoln’s Birthday,” which was heard over loudspeakers set up outside Mother African Methodist Episcopal (AME) Zion Church in Harlem. Following the broadcast, a parade featuring nine young men dressed in striped outfits to represent the Scottsboro defendants, the victims of infamous legal injustice in Alabama, arrived at the church, which was chosen as the hub of the demonstration for its storied connection to the abolitionist movement. An impressive list of civil rights speakers addressed activists who crowded into Mother AME Zion, including former NAACP board president Mary White Overington, who spoke of the civil rights organization’s long battle against lynching. “It [has been] twenty-­six years,” Overington said, since she had “edited the first anti-­lynching pamphlet issued by the NAACP . . . but the crimes continue and the methods of torture are as horrible as ever.” Then, acknowledging the youth councils cultivated by Jackson to revitalize local NAACP chapters, Overington expressed admiration for “another generation working to end this disgrace of America.”129 The New York demonstration was only the most celebrated and largest direct action that took place on Anti-­Lynching Day. Beyond Harlem, many NAACP chapters marked the national movement with well-­publicized and well-­attended protest activities. In Chicago, members of the NAACP youth council held a “No More Lynching” march through the downtown Loop, as did activists in Detroit, which claimed one of the largest demonstrations of the day, accompanied by a local radio broadcast. In Richmond, Virginia, supporters rallied in large churches, and in Columbus, Ohio, activists directly telegrammed appeals to Roosevelt asking for his support in passing anti-­lynching legislation. These and dozens of other youth council–­sponsored events gave the movement a national voice that added moral grassroots fervor to White’s well-­coordinated lobbying efforts.130 To the consternation of civil rights activists and their allies in Congress, however, Roosevelt still refused to publicly endorse anti-­lynching legislation, maintaining a firm stance of “benign neutrality” as the Wagner–­Van Nuys bill stalled in the Senate.131 After he and majority leader Kentucky senator Alben Barkley effectively ended efforts to enact legislation, Roosevelt explained his public silence to an African American delegation at the White House, echoing his apology to White during the fight over the Costigan-­ Wagner bill. Roosevelt insisted that he favored anti-­lynching legislation, but his endorsement would permit conservative southern Democrats, who were fighting against major New Deal initiatives during the second term, to “exploit the situation to gain re-­election on a campaign of racial prejudice.” Contemplating a campaign against obstreperous southern Democrats

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in the coming midterm elections, Roosevelt feared that an endorsement of anti-­lynching legislation would inflame racial tensions, thus undermining the prospects for electing liberal Democrats below the Mason-­Dixon Line who might advance the progressive thrust of the New Deal.132 Roosevelt also feared that loyal southern New Dealers such as Texas congressman Lyndon Johnson and Florida senator Claude Pepper, who did not include civil rights in their definition of liberal, would no longer consider themselves “100 percent New Dealers,” as Pepper styled himself, if the president’s program included African American rights. Pepper, in fact, helped filibuster to death the anti-­lynching measure, going on for nearly three hours one day to forestall its consideration.133 For all his intransigence on the issue, however, Roosevelt did not remain completely silent on lynching law. About a month after the Wagner–­ Van Nuys bill died in the Senate, he announced in a press conference, “If the Senate determines not to proceed with the anti-­lynching bill . . . the matter ought not to rest there.” The least Congress could do would be to empower the Justice Department or a standing committee to investigate mob violence. As Kevin McMahon has pointed out, the connection here to the collaboration between Wisconsin senator Robert La Follette’s Civil Liberties Committee and the Roosevelt Justice Department to uphold labor rights in the face of fierce resistance by business interests was unmistakable. Roosevelt seemed to be suggesting that if southern Democrats continued to block civil rights legislation, he and his progressive allies would pursue remedies through unilateral executive action.134 This was no idle threat. Since the 1936 Democratic convention, Roosevelt had been pursuing a strategy to transform his party into a progressive and executive-­centered organization. At the convention, he and James Farley worked skillfully behind the scenes to abolish the rule that required support from two-­thirds of the delegates for the nomination of the president and vice president. This rule had been defended in the past because it guarded the most loyal Democratic region—­the South—­against the imposition of an unwanted ticket by other less habitually Democratic regions. Eliminating the rule, therefore, weakened southern Democratic influence and facilitated the development of a New Deal coalition and reform program. This development deeply troubled conservatives like North Carolina senator Josiah Bailey as they reflected on the Philadelphia convention. “The abolition of the two-­thirds rule will enable the Northern and Western Democrats to control the Party, nominate its candidates, and write its platform,” he warned. “All of this will come out in 1940.” There is no evidence that Roosevelt was planning to run for a precedent-­shattering third term as early as 1936, but

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according to his close adviser Stanley High, the president told the publisher Herbert Bayard Swope soon after the 1936 election that although he did not expect to occupy the White House beyond 1940, “he was going to have something to say about the man who was to be there.”135 Roosevelt’s most decisive strategy to remake the Democratic Party in a New Deal image was his twelve-­state effort, involving one gubernatorial and various congressional primary campaigns, to unseat conservative Democrats in the 1938 midterm elections. This effort was viewed as such a shocking departure from the norm that the press labeled it “the purge,” a term associated with Adolf Hitler’s attempt to weed out dissention from Germany’s National Socialist Party and Joseph Stalin’s elimination of “disloyal” members of the Soviet Communist Party. Roosevelt’s appeal to public opinion was hardly despotic. Nevertheless, when combined with the other controversial legislation he pursued during his second term, most notably the court-­“packing” plan and the executive reorganization bill, the purge marked a historic effort to establish the president, rather than Congress or the states, as the repository of party responsibility and political dominance.136 Roosevelt’s most dramatic forays were in southern and border states: his primary targets were three states’ rights senators from Georgia, Maryland, and South Carolina. Roosevelt was hopeful that even the Deep South would support a liberalized Democratic Party. Claiming Warm Springs as his second home and showing reluctance to intervene in race relations, Roosevelt and his New Deal program were very popular below the Mason-­Dixon Line. Roosevelt believed that conservative democracy in this section of the country was not really an economic conservatism; rather, it was firmly established in reaction to the Populist movement at the end of the nineteenth century by the exploitation of the race issue. The president’s silence on anti-­ lynching legislation and his emphasis on a building an economic constitutional order that improved the material well-­being of most whites and blacks represented his hope that the South could be allied to a new liberal coalition, albeit one that would be tainted by his giving tacit consent to the maintenance of racial segregation and terror.137 Like Jane Addams’s acquiescence to the demand of lily-­white Progressives, the compromise of Roosevelt with Jim Crow was justified by the presupposition that a national liberal coalition was “bound to lift” the question of racial injustice “out of the grip of the past and into a new era of solution.” The president’s strong attack on traditional southern politics—­an assault that coincided, not coincidentally, with a report of the National Emergency Council on economic conditions in the South—­and his close ties, effectively mediated by Eleanor, with a revitalized civil rights move-

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ment convinced southern conservatives that the New Deal would eventually promote the rights of African Americans. The purge campaign, they feared, portended a class-­oriented alignment that would remake southern democracy. As Virginia senator Carter Glass, whose political views fused a commitment to economic reform with uncompromising support for white supremacy, wrote to a friend, “The Southern people may wake up too late to find the negrophiles who are running the Democratic party now will soon precipitate another reconstruction era for us.”138 The issue of race became especially salient in the South Carolina primary, where “Cotton Ed” Smith defeated the New Deal candidate, Governor Olin Johnston. Unlike the naturally reserved Georgia incumbent, Walter George, who subtly played the race card in his primary duel with the president, Smith did not hesitate to make coarse demagogic appeals in his fight for reelection. Race baiting and zealous defense of white supremacy, in fact, had been the cornerstone of his long career in the Senate. But the New Deal challenge to southern politics, Time reported, had “managed to put some new life into Smith’s traditional campaign plank.”139 Smith’s racist appeals and his effective attack on Roosevelt’s “outside interference” returned him to the Senate with a comfortable majority, the widest margin of all six of his races for the Senate. But even after the polls closed and his victory was made known, the senator did not stop campaigning. His supporters saluted his triumph over Roosevelt by paying homage to the Red Shirts, the post-­late-­nineteenth-­century mob that rid South Carolina, Smith recalled, of “carpetbaggers, scalawags and Negroes.” At one in the morning, Smith donned one of those red shirts, worn in memory of General Wade Hampton, who drove the champions of Reconstruction back north, and, “like a heavy set Garibaldi led the celebrants to [Hampton’s statue] on the State House grounds.” “White supremacy,” he enthused, “that time honored tradition, can no more be blotted out of the hearts of the South Carolina than the scars which Sherman’s artillery left on the State House at Columbia.”140 Roosevelt’s Civil Rights Section and the NAACP: Formalizing an Uneasy Partnership The purge campaign’s immense failure reinforced Roosevelt’s disinclination to support significant civil rights reform. Yet he also pursued institutional reforms that made it possible, as he suggested at his press conference after the defeat of the Wagner–­Van Nuys bill, for those within the New Deal coalition committed to racial justice to find more promising inroads away from Congress and within the growing administrative state. This aspiration was

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abetted by Roosevelt’s fight to strengthen executive administration, a battle that began soon after the 1936 election. An unsuccessful 1937 administrative reform bill aimed to expand presidential authority over the executive branch, including the independent regulatory commissions. It also sought to delegate to executive agencies extensive authority to govern, making unnecessary the constant cooperation of fellow partisans in Congress. As the presidential Brownlow committee report, which established the blueprint for administrative reform, put it, the “brief exultant commitment” to progressive government that was expressed in the 1932 and 1936 elections could only be firmly established in “persistent, determined, competent, day by day administration of what the nation has decided to do.”141 Roosevelt initially lost the congressional vote on executive reorganization in 1938, but he did manage to gain passage of a compromise version in 1939. While considerably weaker than Roosevelt’s original proposal, the 1939 Executive Reorganization Act was a significant measure in the development of the modern presidency. It not only provided authority to create the Executive Office of the President, which included the newly formed White House Office (the West Wing), and a strengthened and refurbished Bureau of the Budget, but also enhanced the president’s control of the expanding activities of the executive branch. The reorganization act represents the genesis of the institutional presidency, which was equipped to govern independently of the constraints imposed by the regular political process. Significantly, this institutional presidency gave the modern executive more leeway to develop direct ties with social movements; the nascent Executive Office of the President, in fact, quickly became the site of an important minuet between Roosevelt and civil rights leaders. Roosevelt first deployed national administration in the service of African American rights when he appointed Frank Murphy attorney general and urged him to create the Civil Liberties Unit, soon renamed the Civil Rights Section (CRS), within the Justice Department. Formed in February 1939 in the aftermath of the disappointing midterm purge elections, the CRS was charged with developing a legal strategy that would advance civil rights in critical areas such as voting and mob violence. Murphy, a former Michigan governor, perfectly embodied the shift from legislation to administration. As legal scholar Peter Irons noted, he “brought to the post a crusading spirit and passionate moralism that reflected his former membership on the NAACP board of directors and his hatred of racial and religious prejudice.”142 The civil rights movement first drew the Supreme Court into Jim Crow arbitration in the 1923 Moore case, but the creation of the CRS posed the tantalizing possibility of an alliance between the Justice Department and

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the legal arm of the NAACP. Viewing Murphy as a natural potential ally, civil rights activists praised Roosevelt’s selection. Writing Murphy soon after the formation of CRS, Walter White exulted, “It would warm the cockles of your heart if you only knew how great is the satisfaction among colored people all over the United States at your presence in the . . . post of Attorney General.” The CRS was a small division, and its actual effects on racial problems were modest; however, its gifted lawyers, often in cooperation with the NAACP, pursued court cases that, as Kevin J. McMahon argues, “laid the foundational precedent for later Supreme Court decisions constitutionally undercutting southern democracy and white supremacy.”143 Concerned that even the more sympathetic federal judiciary that was formed after Roosevelt’s court-­“packing” fight would not readily cross the color line, the CRS chose its cases carefully. The first test case to reach the Supreme Court, United States v. Classic (1941),144 upheld a federal prosecution for rights violations in a Louisiana primary election. The court thus overturned the 1921 Newbury case that limited federal authority to general elections, ruling that primaries were the province of parties, not government; this decision served as the major precedent in upholding the white primary fourteen years later in Grovey v. Townsend. Hoping to reverse this legal precedent, the CRS selected an ostensibly nonracial case—­no African Americans were involved in Classic—­with the expectation that it could be a step toward extending the right to vote in national primaries to African Americans.145 The court later ruled directly on the white primary in the 1944 Smith v. Allwright decision, which resulted from a civil action, which the NAACP sponsored, against Texas’s whites-­only primary.146 Francis Biddle, who had replaced Murphy as attorney general when the latter was elevated to the Supreme Court, rejected CRS arguments that the Solicitor General’s Office should file an amicus brief in support of the challenge. Biddle’s decision, however, aroused a strong reaction from the civil rights community that moved Roosevelt to question the attorney general’s position: “There is a good deal of howl because the Department of Justice has refused to participate as amicus curia in the Texas primary case. How about it?” Biddle ar­gued that the Justice Department had prepared the ground for a positive outcome, “having already established the right to vote in primaries as a federal enforceable right in the Classic case.” Subscribing to the caution that the Roosevelt administration had displayed prior to the purge campaign, Bid­ dle warned against intervening again because the “South would not understand why we were continually taking sides.”147 Yet the Roosevelt White House was not willing to abandon the strong

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pro–­civil rights efforts and alignments initiated by Murphy and CRS at Justice, especially since America’s entrance into World War II elevated the concerns about dictatorship at home as well as abroad. Although the Justice Department did not submit an amicus brief, Fred G. Folsom of the CRS published an article in the Columbia Law Review, which was taken as the Roosevelt administration’s position, arguing that the court’s 1937 unanimous decision in Grovey v. Townsend “might be considered as impliedly overruled by the Classic decision.” Thurgood Marshall and William Hastie of the NAACP made use of this de facto amicus curiae in stating their “total agreement” with this analysis before the Supreme Court. The near-­unanimous decision in Smith v. Allwright—­only one non-­Roosevelt appointee, Owen Roberts, dissented—­ac­ cepted the NAACP position that primaries were sanctioned by state law and thus met the standard of “state action” that constituted the denial of African Americans the right to vote as guaranteed by the Fourteenth and Fifteenth Amendments. Not surprisingly, the Allwright decision outraged southerners and especially those in the Deep South. The Justice Department offered a tepid response in enforcing the landmark case in criminal prosecution. But the unsteady alliance between Roosevelt’s Justice Department and the civil rights community was sustained, as CRS attorneys cooperated with those “great groups” (as the head of the division referred to the NAACP and other organizations that carried on the fight for racial justice) in encouraging a test of state law “through civil action” on equal protection grounds. The CRS’s support was evident in the NAACP’s 1947 challenge to South Carolina’s post-­Allwright statute dedicated to defying the critical court ruling. More­over, CRS’s willingness to provide support in the preparation of civil suits might have influenced a Supreme Court—­remade by the New Deal—­that was eager to defer to the modern executive.148 Lynching became a key focal point for the Justice Department and CRS, an issue that the civil rights movement had long targeted as central to African American peril and repression. The failure to achieve anti-­lynching legislation for years did not dampen but instead galvanized the movement’s campaign against white mob violence. The anti-­lynching crusade had brought local struggles together, one activist observed, in a “dramatic spectacle” that was creating “a sense of solidarity among Negroes.”149 Even more than was true of the battle for voting rights, this sense of solidarity to challenge white terror against African Americans was invigorated by World War II. As one black soldier wrote Roosevelt after reading newspaper accounts of brutal attacks on African Americans in his home town of New Iberia, Louisiana, “I thought I was fighting to make the world a better place

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to live in. . . . I am giving the USA all I got, and would even die, but I think my people should be protected. I am asking you, Sir, to do all in your power to bring these people to justice and punish the guilty ones.”150 The Roosevelt administration made an effort to answer this call. In his famous 1941 State of the Union address—­the “Four Freedoms” speech—­which marked the end of US neutrality and made all but certain the country’s entry into the war, Roosevelt pronounced the essential rights that represented the New Deal charter: the traditional freedoms of speech and religion, and two new rights that expressed the domestic and international ambitions of his presidency—­freedom from want, justifying the creation of a welfare state, and freedom from fear, which called for America to defend human rights in the world.151 Just as civil rights activists used Wilson’s call for a war “to make the world safe for democracy” to shame him into denouncing mob violence, so they invoked Roosevelt’s call for freedom from fear to pique his conscience on the injustices of lynching. Roosevelt’s appointment of Victor Rotnem as CRS chief suggested that the president was prepared to empower the Justice Department with federal law enforcement authority to “forge a sword to protect black citizens left defenseless by indifferent racist state officials and residents.” As one CRS staffer described Rotnem, he was “a crusader who conceived of the Civil Rights Section as a social as well as a legal operation.”152 Under Rotnem’s leadership, CRS attorneys developed a legal strategy based on the Fourteenth Amendment that would enable the Justice Department to prosecute lynching cases in the absence of a federal statute that specifically targeted mob violence. Similar to prosecuting cases related to the white primary, the main challenge was that the Fourteenth Amendment and the Civil Rights Acts passed to enforce it required “state action.” Yet local police officers, while often silent partners in lynchings and other forms of mob violence, did not themselves commit these murders. Elaborating on hitherto unrecognized judicial precedents and an 1870 civil rights enforcement statute that the federal courts had effectively neutered, the CRS drew significantly from an important law review article that Rotnem wrote, entitled, “The Right Not to Be Lynched.” As Rotnem and the CRS noted, the Fourteenth Amendment and the 1870 enforcement statute seemed “to authorize the prosecution of the members of a mob which lynches a person accused of a state crime while he is in the legal custody of the state because he is thus prevented from exercising and enjoying the right to a fair trial in the criminal courts of the state.”153 Armed with this legal standard, the Justice Department prosecuted some notable cases. For example, in October 1942, CRS attorneys were able to get an indictment from a federal grand jury in Jackson, Mississippi, involving the lynching of Howard Wash, an African American who had been convicted

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in the state court of murdering his employer. Wash was awaiting sentencing when he was taken from jail with the complicity of local law officers. The jailer, Luther Holder, and four members of the mob were indicted, marking the first time in forty years that a federal grand jury had returned a lynching indictment, a remarkable achievement that occurred in the most hostile of territories—­the capital of Mississippi. Assistant Attorney General Wendell Berge, who was not prone to hyperbole, called the indictment “a milestone of very great importance.”154 Mississippi representative John Rankin agreed, albeit disagreeably; from the House floor, he condemned the “Gestapo”-­ like tactics of the CRS, and called the indictments “an insult that had not been offered to a sovereign State of the Union since the darkest days of reconstruction, of which all right-­thinking Americans are now ashamed.”155 The all-­white jury quickly acquitted all the defendants; more broadly, CRS prosecutions, even in the North, rarely yielded more than a mild punishment given the standards of the civil rights enforcement statutes. However, the Roosevelt administration sent an important message through its lynching prosecutions: “no longer would the Justice Department be indifferent to such atrocities, particularly in time of war against dictatorship.”156 In sending this message there is little doubt that the Roosevelt administration was influenced by the swelling protests, litigation efforts, and unrelenting lobbying of the civil rights movement. Adam Clayton Powell, Jr., the pastor of New York’s Abyssinian Baptist Church, a recently elected member of the city council, and a stalwart of the NAACP’s anti-­lynching campaign, captured the defiance of politically active African Americans at a national protest rally against police brutality held in Baltimore in April 1942. “You’re doing [some] history making which will echo all over the world,” he proclaimed, “because colored people have said: ‘To hell with the world, we are not going to stand for this any longer.’ ”157 The uncompromising tone of Powell’s exhortation suggests how the movement had evolved since the Progressive Era into a strong grassroots organization that posed hard challenges, not only to the Jim Crow South, but also to national complacency on racial injustice. Roosevelt’s consolidation of the modern presidency in general and fresh avenues of independent executive initiative in particular allowed his administration to respond to the amplified protest of African Americans in the 1940s. To be sure, the Roosevelt administration was a reluctant, if not sometimes hostile, partner in the African American quest for racial justice and equal membership; nevertheless, civil rights activists’ demand for the attention of and action from the Roosevelt administration anticipated their more fruitful but fraught alliance with Lyndon Johnson. No episode more clearly reveals this tense and

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evolving partnership between the White House and civil rights reformers than the March on Washington movement that labor leader A. Philip Randolph launched in early 1941. Cornering an Elusive President: A. Philip Randolph and the March on Washington Movement Randolph was at the vanguard of efforts during the 1930s to advance a “civil rights unionism” or “Black Popular Front”—­an alliance of white and black progressives committed to union rights, broad social welfare programs, an as­ sault on racist practices in employment and housing, and anti-­colonialism.158 Randolph’s relationship with militant labor leaders was estranged due to his hostility to the Communist Party, which had a strong but short-­lived influence on the left wing of American labor. But this very hostility to syndicalism enabled Randolph to become a prominent voice for a durable US civil rights movement and a leader of the National Negro Congress, which was dedicated to the rights of African American workers. While paying homage to the language of economic security and opportunity that was so central to Roosevelt’s vision, Randolph insisted that the promises of the New Deal could not be fulfilled unless its leaders made serious efforts to treat the stubborn tumors of racial segregation and violent oppression. Randolph praised Roosevelt’s attempt to liberalize the South in 1938 as “courageous”; at the same time, he expressed disappointment that the president’s diagnosis of the southern “caste system” did not directly condemn Jim Crowism. “It is our own opinion,” he wrote in the influential African American paper the Chicago Defender in the midst of Roosevelt’s purge campaign, “that the great prestige and power of some President of the United States must be thrown into the balance against the nefarious terrorization of black Americans be­ low the Mason-­Dixon line.”159 As his creation of the CRS revealed, Roosevelt began to make a connection between the economic constitutional order and civil rights with the approach of war. In an open letter to Randolph of April 1940, marking a National Negro Congress gathering in the Department of Labor, the president wrote, “Because of the confusion and unrest it is now more than ever important that the place of a minority group in a democracy not be obscured by ignorance and prejudice. . . . It is even of greater importance that the whole people consider with open and sympathetic mind these problems of the minority in order that the processes of democracy may work to bring about their solution.”160 These words rang hollow, however, as defense industries and the armed

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services were organized along the color line. Randolph and other civil rights leaders were quick to denounce the president’s hypocrisy, a protest that grew louder when the White House, after privately discussing defense policy with the black labor leader and other activists, issued a fallacious statement that they supported a policy of segregation for “Negro Units in the Army.” After Randolph and NAACP executive secretary Walter White sent a telegram to the White House, sternly questioning the egregious claim that “Jim Crow policy of [the] army has proven satisfactory,” Roosevelt quickly issued an apology, and assured White and Randolph that “the attitude of the White House and War Department has been misunderstood.” The plan on which the administration and civil rights leaders agreed, the president reassured them, “is that Negroes will be put into all branches of the service, combatant as well as supply.”161 Weary of vague assurances, Randolph penned editorials in African American papers suggesting that the time had come for direct action against the White House. Encouraged by the response, he and White put together a March on Washington committee, which issued a “Call to Negro America” to “March on Washington for Jobs and Equal Participation in National Defense.” The most important objective of the “mobilization and coordination of their mass power,” the circular noted, was that it could “cause President Roosevelt to Issue an Executive Order Abolishing Discrimination in All Government Departments, Army, Navy, Air Corps, and National Defense Jobs.” Because the March on Washington movement was able to tap into the grass roots of an energized civil rights community, local committees quickly sprang up nationwide and, as Randolph observed, “the idea [of a massive demonstration] began to spread like a prairie fire.” So confident was Randolph of the movement’s strength that in June 1941 he wrote Eleanor Roosevelt, whom he had come to value as an important White House ally. He informed her that a march was planned for July 1: “Negroes are the victims of discrimination in national defense. Although loyal American citizens, we are denied jobs, not because of lack of merit, but on account of race and color. . . . To fight this un-­American and un-­Democratic practice, Negro leaders have formed a movement to mobilize 100,000 Negroes to March on Washington for jobs and justice in National Defense.”162 The March on Washington movement had antecedents in the demonstrations against The Birth of a Nation and the anti-­lynching campaigns. But never before had a mass civil rights protest focused so directly on the White House. Reminiscent of Coxey’s Army, Paul’s suffragist protests, and the Bonus March,163 the Randolph-­inspired demonstration deeply troubled the Roosevelt administration. Even the First Lady, who assured Randolph of her

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unfailing “concern about the rights of the Negro people,” tried to persuade Randolph to reconsider. “I have talked over your letter with the President,” she wrote on June 10, “and I feel very strongly that your group is making a very grave mistake. . . . That if any incident occurs as a result of this, it may engender so much bitterness that it will create in Congress even more solid opposition from certain groups than we have had in the past.”164 Knowing that they were now leaders of what was developing into a formative movement, with the capacity to work the courts and halls of Congress and to initiate mass protests, Randolph and his allies refused to budge. They remained unmoved when the president called Randolph and White to Washington, where, before the entire cabinet, Roosevelt promised the administration’s good faith effort to tackle the problem of discrimination in matters of defense. Echoing the long-­standing refrain of reluctant White House partners, however, Roosevelt also used the occasion to urge patience, insisting that remedial measures would be blocked if the movement continued to insist on an executive order. Making clear that his patience had run out, Randolph wrote to Eleanor Roosevelt a few weeks later, insisting that the march would proceed unless the president took action “to remove the disabilities in the form of discrimination in national defense and the federal departments of government in the form of an executive order which is strong, definitive, and clear.”165 Once it became clear that the movement leaders would not back down, Roosevelt finally blinked. With the help of staffers in the newly created executive office, he worked out a settlement with Randolph and other leaders on June 24, thus warding off the March on Washington. The next day he issued Executive Order 8802, which declared that there “shall be no discrimination in the employment of workers in defense industries or government because of race, creed, color, or national origin, and . . . that it is the duty of employers and of labor organizations . . . , to provide for the full and equitable participation of all workers in defense industries, without discrimination because of race, creed, color, or national origin.”166 Furthermore, Roosevelt set up the Fair Employment Practices Committee (FEPC) in the White House for the purpose of receiving and investigating complaints of discrimination in violation of the order.167 Roosevelt’s concession made for a triumphant national conference of the NAACP, which convened for its thirty-­second annual meeting on the same day the new executive order was announced. Randolph’s address to the Houston gathering praised the executive order as the most important presidential action “affecting Negroes in this country since the Emancipation Proclamation,” a sentiment echoed by the formidable Mary McLeod

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Bethune.168 In truth, both recognized that Executive Order 8802 and the new FEPC marked only modest steps toward a federal assault on discrimination against African Americans. Determined to maintain pressure on the White House, Randolph and White kept the March on Washington movement together. Throughout 1942 and 1943, they maintained a steady drumbeat of criticism, lamenting the FEPC’s limited resources and power as well as Roosevelt’s inaction amid persistent mob violence and egregious legal discrimination against blacks, not only in the South but also in northern cities like Detroit.169 Spurned in their efforts to meet with the president to discuss the need for more aggressive executive action, the March on Washington movement held a series of national demonstrations to advance its Double V campaign, which called for total war on the forces of oppression at home and abroad. The resilience of Randolph’s movement was most evident in a mass demonstration at New York’s Madison Square Garden, where twenty-­five thousand protesters showed their support for Randolph and a new stage in the development of the civil rights movement. As Bethune told the crowd, “A New Negro has arisen in America. . . . You are seeking full freedom, justice, respect and opportunity. You are militant in spirit. You are unwilling to accept less than the Constitution guarantees to you as citizens of the world’s greatest democracy. You are no longer begging—­you are insisting, because you realize that America, the only country you love, cannot be preserved nine tenth free and one tenth oppressed.”170 Although Bethune and other civil rights leaders were frustrated by Roose­ velt’s unsteady, if not lukewarm, support, the actions he did take revealed how the creation of the executive office and the expansion of national administrative power in response to the Great Depression and World War II helped free executive power from the constrictive grip of partisan politics. “Only reluctantly, tardily, inadequately, and under coercion did Roosevelt take these steps,” Leuchtenburg has written, but no other act of his four terms showed the president “so politically in advance of the majority of his own party as his creation of the FEPC.”171 Equally important, the civil rights movement demonstrated a growing capacity to force the White House to take action it otherwise would have avoided. The March on Washington movement thus marks a critical moment in the joining of executive power and insurgency that eventually would realign the parties and, more broadly, transform partisanship in the second half of the twentieth century. These structural changes were preordained by the considerable southern hostility that the FEPC aroused in the summer of 1942, when it held hearings in Birmingham, Alabama, and ordered that

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black workers be given jobs that were commensurate with their skills. Comptroller General Dewey Warren, a North Carolina native, sought to assuage his southern brethren by asserting that the antidiscrimination order was merely advisory. But Roosevelt supported the efforts of the March on Washington movement protests to save “this prop to democracy in action.”172 In November 1943, Roosevelt overruled Warren, affirming strongly that the antidiscrimination language of the executive order was “mandatory.” Although the president’s clarification of the FEPC’s authority did not quiet African American criticism of Roosevelt, it won the “deep gratitude” of several civil rights activists, including the major leaders of the March on Washington movement, who sent a public letter of thanks to Roosevelt.173 Thus the “long civil rights movement” proved its mettle and established the foundation of a contentious but formative relationship with the modern executive.

Conclusion: Anticipating Civil Rights Reform in Post–­World War II America The March on Washington movement represents a critical precursor to the civil rights demonstrations of the 1950s and 1960s. Indeed, A. Philip Randolph was a key leader of the 1963 March on Washington that focused the attention of the country and President John Kennedy on racial injustice at a time when presidents could no longer assume an indifferent response to civil rights insurgency. The movement that emerged after the critical Brown v. Board of Education case marked a new and distinctive stage in the civil rights movement’s long struggle for reform. As Eric Arnesen has argued, “it was significantly larger than its predecessors; it was visible nationally and in a way that was unmatched by earlier organizations; it attained a genuinely mass character; it provoked a violent backlash of unprecedented proportions; and it ultimately succeeded in toppling legalized segregation and en­ franchising black Southerners.”174 Yet, as this chapter has shown, to understand the cresting of civil rights activism requires knowledge of its deep historical roots. Just as civil rights leaders of the 1930s and 1940s learned from the earlier struggles of the Tuskegee Machine and the NAACP, so the men and women who formed what Randolph described in his address at the 1963 Washington demonstration as “the advance guard of a massive moral revolution for jobs and freedom” benefited from their forebears’ experience in fighting mob violence and discrimination in defense industries.175 What is often missed in the inspiring story of the civil rights movement’s evolution is how its development paralleled the emergence of the modern presidency, which became a crucial and contentious focal point

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for champions of racial justice. Although the leading architects of the modern executive office—­Theodore Roosevelt, Woodrow Wilson, and Franklin Roosevelt—­did not push for a comprehensive program of civil rights, activists deployed a combination of electoral mobilization, lobbying, litigation, grassroots activism, and disruptive protests that presidents as self-­styled leaders of the “whole people” could not ignore. Even when the White House pursued policies that were dispiritingly racist—­as Wilson did in extending Jim Crow to the nation’s capital—­civil rights activists used such egregious affronts to rally their supporters. Especially during World War I, Wilson was to learn that civil rights activists were determined to keep pressure on him to soften his stance on racial segregation; moreover, their pressure eventually enlisted Wilson’s use of the bully pulpit, which he played a critical role in establishing, in the battle against white mob terror. That Wilson, so often opposed to racial justice, eventually gave a major address against lynching was an important provisional sign that, as progressive reformers hoped, strong and persistent social movements might press the White House into service of their causes. With Franklin Roosevelt, the link between the White House and social activists assumed institutional form. The creation of the Executive Office of the President and the advance of national administrative power allowed a reform-­minded president to grudgingly forge a partnership with social activists that defied the tight boundaries of the decentralized, patronage-­based party system. Roosevelt’s creation of the Justice Department’s CRS and the FEPC revealed how he could pursue policies that defied white supremacists of the southern wing of his party and serve a new progressive coalition. The predictable conflicts and uneasy collaborations between modern presidents and a determined civil rights movement were poised to yield dramatic political results.

Four

“Joining the Revolution”: Lyndon Johnson and the Civil Rights Movement The title of this chapter is inspired by a comment civil rights activist James Farmer—­of the Congress of Racial Equality—­made after Lyndon Johnson’s speech to the joint session of Congress on March 15, 1965: the president’s dramatic conclusion expressed the White House’s unyielding support for Martin Luther King, and the other brave civil rights activists who were demonstrating against racial discrimination in Selma, Alabama. The Selma demonstrations targeted restrictions in voting behavior that had essentially rendered the Fifteenth Amendment meaningless in the South. Johnson’s final words were familiar yet powerful: “And we shall overcome.” With this dramatic peroration, Johnson adopted as his own rallying cry a line from an old hymn that had become a familiar refrain of the modern civil rights movement. Johnson’s speech resonated powerfully with civil rights activists, many of whom were skeptical of the first southern president since Andrew Johnson—­even after the passage of the 1964 Civil Rights Act, which breathed new life into the Fourteenth Amendment’s guarantee of “citizenship to all citizens born or naturalized in the United States.” After all, prior to his embrace of the civil rights movement, Johnson had made his mark not as a reformer but as a ruthlessly effective power broker in the Senate. Yet after this nationalized television address, which was designed to move the 1965 Voting Rights Act through Congress (where it was awaiting final passage), Farmer led a march to the White House to express civil rights activists’ support for the president’s efforts. “When President Johnson said ‘we shall overcome’ he joined the civil rights revolution,” Farmer told the marchers. “Now it’s up to you and me to keep him in it—­to keep him and our friends in Congress moving. If we let up the pressure, they let up the progress.”1

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Farmer’s ambivalent tribute—­expressing great appreciation for the president’s support, while emphasizing the need to keep pressuring the White House—­illustrates the core argument of this chapter: the historic civil rights reforms of the 1960s were conceived by an uneasy but critical relationship. It was a “mating dance” between a reform president intent on leveraging a cresting—­formative—­movement to stake his place in history and a movement determined to exploit the powers of the modern presidency in pursuit of its goals. Like the other great historical example of a presidential-­movement collaboration resulting in a historical breakthrough for racial justice—­ Lincoln and the abolitionists—­there were significant conflicts and rivalries between Johnson and civil rights leaders. But for the first three years of his presidency, Johnson and key movement leaders like King, John Lewis, and Farmer recognized that they needed each other. Although this partnership between Johnson and civil rights activists was short-­lived and eventually unraveled, their formative and contentious relationship, as King put it, was a “shining moment in the conscience of man”—­a critical chapter in the development of American politics.2 The uneasy collaboration between Johnson and the civil rights movement had historical roots. As chapter 3 shows, it marked a development more than fifty years in the making. Constrained by constitutional norms, the separation and division of powers, and a decentralized party system, the disruptive potential of executive power was, outside political crises and war, limited until the twentieth century. But with the advent of the modern presidency during the Progressive Era, the White House was more likely to challenge the existing order of things. To be sure, modern executives regularly shied away from close relationships with controversial social movements, especially those that fought against the deeply imbedded disease of racial injustice. Nonetheless, the consolidation of the modern presidency during the long reign of Franklin Roosevelt and the New Deal realignment invested the executive with powers and public expectations that made the White House a critical agent of social and economic reform. As Roosevelt’s successors demonstrated, once the White House became the center of growing government commitments both at home and abroad, its occupants were more likely to profess support for the same high ideals championed by prominent civil rights activists. But insurgents also knew well that modern presidents could be unreliable and cagey political partners, if not determined opponents, to many of their disruptive tactics and ambitious ends. These dynamics became engrained features of presidential-­movement relations during the Truman, Eisenhower, and Kennedy administrations.

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Civil Rights Insurgency and Presidential Leadership in Cold War America Harry Truman’s determination not only to sustain but to advance the New Deal political order made clear that this new executive-­activist nexus would endure beyond Roosevelt and wartime. Truman was a border-­state politician with close ties to southern legislators and strong sympathy for the region they represented. But, above all, he saw himself as Roosevelt’s heir and the steward of the executive-­centered New Deal state. To the surprise of southern politicians and civil rights leaders, Truman maintained the Fair Employ­ ment Practices Committee (FEPC) that seemed doomed once Roosevelt passed from the scene. Indeed, he argued in a letter to Illinois congressman Adolph J. Sabath, Democratic chairman of the powerful House Rules Committee, that “the principle . . . of fair employment practice should be established permanently as part of our national law.”3 Like Roosevelt, Truman had little hope of getting major civil rights legislation through Congress. But armed with the political and administrative weapons Roosevelt bequeathed to him, he staked out a substantial sphere for independent presidential action in support of racial justice. On Decem­ber 5, 1946, Truman established by executive order the President’s Committee on Civil Rights (PCCR), which was authorized “to determine whether and in what respect current law enforcement measures and the authority and means possessed by Federal, State, and local governments may be strengthened and improved to safeguard the civil rights of the people.”4 The PCCR’s recommendations shaped Truman’s message to Congress on February 2, 1948, calling for a ten-­point civil rights program that would provide federal protection against lynching, protect the right to vote, prohibit discrimination in interstate transportation facilities, and restore the FEPC, which Congress, ignoring Truman’s protest, had eliminated in June 1946.5 Truman’s unprecedented attention to racial justice was attributable in no small part to the strength of the civil rights movement and its close ties to the modern executive office. Building on the momentum it gained during Roosevelt’s third term, the movement’s cachet was enhanced by the migration of more than a million African Americans to large northern and western states, such as Michigan and California, which were rich in electoral votes. To counteract defections in the 1948 election on the left (where former vice president Henry Wallace was preparing an independent Progressive Party campaign to challenge Truman’s Cold War policy) and the right (where southern bourbons, deeply disaffected by Truman’s civil rights

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program, were hoping to block his nomination), presidential aides counseled a campaign dedicated to Roosevelt’s New Deal charter: Freedom from Want and Freedom from Fear. The regular party organization, White House aides James Rowe and Clark Clifford claimed, had been supplanted in large measure by “pressure groups,” and the “support of these must be wooed since they really control the 1948 election.” Clearly labor, which had become a crucial “anchor” of the New Deal coalition since 1936, was a critical constituency.6 But the Truman administration elevated civil rights organi­ zations to a far more important place in the New Deal political order than had his illustrious predecessor. Significantly, Truman formed a “research division,” financed nominally by the Democratic National Committee, but actually under Clifford’s supervision, to coordinate a militantly liberal government program with electoral politics. The committee was dominated by liberal activists who were prominent in progressive organizations and supported the formation of a labor–­civil rights coalition, including NAACP representatives. Truman’s ten-­point civil rights program was spurned by Congress, where the conservative coalition of Republicans and southern Democrats formed during Roosevelt’s controversial second term blocked the administration’s legislative initiatives. But the president’s decision to deploy the bully pulpit and executive office to promote civil rights reform made social movement organizations that agitated for racial justice a core constituency of the New Deal. Truman gave eloquent testimony to the strengthening of this alliance between the White House and the civil rights movement on June 29, 1947, when he addressed an NAACP rally at the Lincoln Memorial—­the first time a president had spoken to a large gathering of civil rights activists. The Lincoln Memorial speech, which reflected specific suggestions of Walter White and was drafted by two members of the PCCR, was arguably the most important presidential rhetoric about racial equality since Lincoln’s second inaugural. “The extension of civil rights today means,” Truman insisted, “not protection of the people against the Government, but protection of the people by the Government. . . . We must make the Federal Government a friendly, vigilant defender of rights and equalities of all Americans.” Then, alluding directly to the Double V campaign of World War II, the president spoke to the unfulfilled promise of Roosevelt’s war manifesto: “Many of our people still suffer the indignity of insult, the harrowing fear of intimidation, and, I regret to say, the threat of physical injury and mob violence. The prejudice and intolerance in which these evils are rooted still exist. The conscience of our nation, and the legal machinery which enforces it, have not yet secured to each citizen full freedom from fear.” After the address,

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which surprised and delighted the audience, Truman turned to White and said, “I mean every word of it—­and I am going to prove that I do mean it.”7 The civil rights movement, recognizing that the Cold War might elevate its moral appeal, was determined to make sure that Truman lived up to this promise. Indeed, only a few months after Truman’s Lincoln Memorial speech, the NAACP embarrassed the administration by petitioning the United Nation’s Committee on Human Rights to “get the nations of the world to persuade this nation to be just to its own people.” Entitled “An Appeal to the World,” the petition declared “it’s not Russia that threatens the United States so much as Mississippi . . . : internal injustice done to one’s brothers is far more dangerous that the aggression of strangers abroad.” To the chagrin of the US delegation, the Soviet Union championed the petition, arguing that the United Nations should consider this appeal by “15 mil­lion Negroes residing in the United States of America, who are subjected to discrimination on racial grounds.” The Committee on Human Rights eventually rejected the NAACP’s petition, albeit on technical grounds that did not acknowledge, as American representatives argued, that race relations in the United States were a domestic issue. More important, the UN petition captured the attention of a national and international audience, and revealed the capacity of civil rights insurgents to weaken America’s moral claim in its all-­consuming contest with the Soviet Union that it was “the leader of the free world.” As the press reported, the NAACP knew that their petition was likely to be rejected, but “their move [was] a good tactical stroke to publicize their cause.”8 The major substantive goal that civil rights leaders thought Truman could advance was the desegregation of the armed forces, which Roosevelt’s executive order did not address. Just as the NAACP was putting international pressure on the Truman administration, A. Philip Randolph created a new organization, the Committee against Jim Crow in Military Service and Training in November 1947. Walter White and Randolph were particularly agitated when a draft law bereft of any civil rights protections was enacted in early 1948. When Randolph’s personal appeals to Truman to remedy this deficiency with an executive order failed to persuade the president, he reprised the tactics that the March on Washington movement had deployed in spurring Roosevelt to action. Appearing before a Senate hearing in March 1948, Randolph threatened to organize a mass demonstration of civil dis­ obedience by mobilizing young African Americans to resist the draft. When the White House continued to demur, Randolph organized the League for Non-­ Violent Civil Disobedience in late June, and planned protest marches in major northern cities. He also led a march in front of the White House, carrying

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a sign that read, “If we must die for our country let us die as free men—­not as Jim Crow slaves.” Demonstrators distributed buttons inscribed, “Don’t join a Jim Crow Army.” Randolph followed up this protest with a picket line in front of the 1948 Democratic National Convention, which met in mid-­ July, where he carried a new sign that read, “Prison is better than Jim Crow.” Civil rights activists were supported inside the gates of power by the crusading efforts of Minneapolis mayor Hubert Humphrey and Andrew Biemiller, a former Wisconsin congressman, who, with the support of the liberal Americans for Democratic Action, won a much stronger civil rights plank at the convention than the president, facing the threat of a Dixiecrat rebellion, had proposed.9 Although Truman resented both the civil disobedience that Randolph prescribed and the contentious platform fight, he felt that the civil rights protests required a response. Besides, as his address to the NAACP rally demonstrated, he had gone on record expressing sympathy for the cause they fought for, especially as he learned of discrimination and brutal acts of mob violence against veteran African American soldiers in southern and border states. Soon after the Democratic convention, Truman issued two executive orders in the service of civil rights. One directly responded to the demands of White and Randolph, decreeing that “there should be equality of treatment and opportunity in the Armed Services without regard to race, color, religion, or national origin.” Although the order did not explicitly condemn racial segregation, Truman established a committee headed by Solicitor General Charles Fahey that set the stage for integration of the armed forces. Truman’s other executive order uprooted the discriminatory federal employment practices planted by Wilson. It forbade racial and ethnic discrimination in the federal civil service and established the Fair Employment Board to monitor hiring.10 The advance of civil rights that followed from the tense collaboration between Truman and civil rights leaders was, in a sense, a crossing of the Rubicon. In the aftershock of the Democratic convention, South Carolina governor Strom Thurmond and his segregationist allies bolted to form a third party that solidified the South’s growing resentment of the New Deal. Running atop the States’ Rights Party, or “Dixiecrats,” Thurmond won only 2 percent of the popular vote, but his geographically concentrated support won him the four Deep South states of Alabama, Louisiana, Mississippi, and South Carolina. Losing these states cost Truman only thirty-­nine electoral votes, but the civil rights agenda had opened a fissure in the Democratic Party that later spurred major defections of southern white voters to the GOP. Not wishing to aggravate the cleavage he had opened in his party,

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Truman de-­emphasized civil rights after his triumphant 1948 election. But committed to advancing the New Deal political order, he never abandoned the field. Building on the accomplishments of Roosevelt’s Justice Department, the Truman administration intervened in several important civil rights cases, most notably Brown v. Board of Education, submitting amicus briefs that added the weighty authority of the modern presidency to the moral imperative that the NAACP brought to this legal assault on Jim Crow. As the distinguished African American historian John Hope Franklin stated in a 1969 address on Truman’s civil rights policy, “The crucial turning point in viewing the problem of race as a national problem occurred when the executive branch of the federal government began actively to assume a major role.”11 The Supreme Court’s unanimous Brown decision unified the executive and judiciary in the struggle against racial discrimination, giving civil rights reformers hope that segregation had finally been routed. But the modern presidency, which had become such an important, albeit uneven, ally of the civil rights movement, did not rise to the challenge of the post-­Brown insurgency until 1963, when the explosion of racial tension in Birmingham, Alabama, finally revealed to the Kennedy administration that it could no longer straddle the color line. As Truman learned by the end of his first term, the civil rights movement was not, as Randolph would exclaim during in his 1963 March on Washington address, a “pressure group” but rather an insurgent force capable of mass nonviolent resistance that held the president’s feet to the fire. The movement that flourished for a decade after the Brown decision promised a second reconstruction, posing hard challenges for occupants of the Oval Office torn between maintenance of order and the reformist potential that Theodore Roosevelt first envisioned in describing the emerging modern executive as the “steward of the public welfare.” The challenges for post–­World War II presidents anxious over southern resistance and preoccupied by the Cold War was dramatically illustrated by Dwight Eisenhower’s tortured response to the Brown decision. The president dampened the hopes this decision had aroused for movement leaders by refusing to say whether he approved or disapproved of the opinion. When Ethel L. Payne, the Washington correspondent for the Chicago Defender, the nation’s leading black newspaper, asked the president about the significance of the Brown case during a White House press conference in July 1954, she clearly hit a nerve. Payne had, with the assistance of NAACP lobbyist Clarence Mitchell, carefully prepared a question that reflected the growing hopes of African Americans in the months after the judicial denunciation of “separate but equal” doctrine. “Mr. President, we were very happy last week

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when the Deputy Attorney General sent a communication to the House Interstate and Foreign Commerce Committee saying that there was a legal basis for passing a law to ban segregation in interstate travel,” Payne began. “Mr. [William] Rogers also said that in view of the recent decision by the Supreme Court in the school cases, that such legislation ought to be enacted by Congress at this time. . . . I would like to know if we could assume that we have administration support in getting action on this?” Eisenhower’s curt reply startled the room: “You say that you have to have administrative support. The administration is trying to do what it thinks and believes to be decent and just in this country, and it is not in the effort to support any particular special group of any kind. These opinions were sent down, these beliefs are held as part of the administration belief, because we think it is just and right, and that is the answer.”12 Eisenhower soon discovered that the civil rights movement was not merely a special interest, and that the cause it aroused demanded action that no modern president could avoid. Even after his equivocation helped set the stage for an ugly racial incident in Little Rock, Arkansas—­Governor Orval Faubus’s mobilization of state troops to thwart a federal court order to begin desegregating Little Rock’s all-­white Center High School—­the president was still reluctant to interfere, believing that to use federal troops to enforce desegregation might cause the violence to spread. But when neither state nor local authorities dispersed the mob that formed to support the governor’s stand against racial integration, Eisenhower no longer could avoid the responsibility. If he had failed to act in the face of Governor Faubus’s defiance of a court order, the president would have yielded to every segregationist governor the right to break the law. Eisenhower’s penalty for failing to grasp the weight of the simmering civil rights revolution was that when he did act, he was forced to deploy massive military power domestically. On September 24, a contingent of army paratroopers from the 101st Airborne Division was dispatched to Little Rock. The next day Americans saw shocking photographs of troops wielding bayonets in an American city. Like Eisenhower, John Kennedy failed to embrace the moral cause of civil rights, and thus he too was relegated to reacting to movement actions and events that had gotten out of hand. Kennedy did distinguish himself from his opponent in the 1960 campaign by showing more concern than did Vice President Richard Nixon about the incarceration of Martin Luther King when he was arrested in Georgia for an Atlanta sit-­in. Kennedy called Coretta Scott King to express sympathy for her husband and the cause of racial justice, and instructed his brother and closest adviser, Robert, to intervene with Georgia governor Ernest Vandiver to secure the civil rights leader’s

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release from a rural Georgia prison. Moreover, Kennedy criticized Eisenhower’s inaction on racial justice on the campaign trail, especially for his failure to integrate public housing. He would outpace Eisenhower, Kennedy promised, “with a stroke of a pen.” However, although Kennedy’s razor-­thin victory over Nixon owed much to the support of African American voters, there was a yawning gap between his campaign rhetoric and presidential action. Tellingly, Kennedy’s exalted inaugural address said nothing about the problem of race in America; instead, the overwhelming theme was the Cold War, which dominated Kennedy’s three years in office. Of course, as was the case with Truman, the Kennedy administration feared that growing racial tensions in the country, a hot topic of international news, contradicted America’s claim to stand for the principle that all individuals were created equal. But he and his brother Robert, who was named attorney general, did their best for more than two years to shun serious action. The modern presidency’s vast powers, so aggressively deployed in the spiraling conflict with the Soviet Union, were ex­ ercised tepidly in the cause of racial justice. Waiting more than a year for Kennedy to deliver on his promise to desegregate federal housing, civil rights organizations began to prod the White House. Pens were sent by the thousands in case the president had lost his, and civil rights activists confronted him on at least one public occasion with signs reading “Pick Up the Pen, Mr. President.” When Kennedy did finally sign an executive order, it was badly compromised. Executive Order 11063, issued late in 1962, banned racial discrimination in the sale, leasing, or rental of federally funded housing; however, it excluded all existing housing and applied only to new housing that the federal government directly owned or financed. Avoiding the fanfare that amplified the importance of the civil rights–­related executive orders of Roosevelt and Truman, Kennedy signed the housing rule at a time that would guarantee minimal media coverage. “If tokenism was our goal,” Martin Luther King mocked, “the administration moves us adroitly toward it.”13 Yet the movement’s persistent nonviolent civil disobedience, and the brutal rearguard action that southern public officials fought to squelch it, finally goaded Kennedy to act. Among the first to realize the moral suasion of the sixties movement was Ethel Payne; after her contretemps with Eisenhower, she devoted her reporting to what colleagues in the established press called the “seg beat.” Covering the Montgomery bus boycott during 1955 and 1956, Payne reported that a new African American leadership was emerging—­one that was different from the old ranks of the NAACP and the March on Washington movement. The leaders of these older movements,

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schooled by the reform tradition of the Progressive Era and New Deal, emphasized voter mobilization, litigation, lobbying, and administrative action that would embed a commitment to civil rights in the national state. Although King and other civil rights leaders inspired mass nonviolent dis­ obedience targeting the seats of national power, especially the White House, they were heirs of the youth movements, rooted in the black churches, that arose under the auspices of community organizers like Juanita Jackson (see chapter 3). “This gladiator going into battle,” Payne wrote of King, “wears a reverse collar, a flowing robe, and carries a Bible in his hand.”14 Frustrated with the Kennedy administration’s timidity, the Southern Christian Leadership Conference (SCLC) launched a carefully planned nonviolent demonstration in early April 1963 against racial injustice in Birmingham, Alabama—­adjudged by King as “probably the most thoroughly segregated city in the United States.”15 SCLC’s prime target was the downtown business community, which maintained segregated facilities as well as discriminatory hiring and promotion policies. Its ultimate purpose, however, was to join direct action with conventional negotiations with Birmingham’s white leadership. They anticipated a confrontation with Eugene “Bull” Connor, the segregationist commissioner of public safety known for thuggish tactics, which they hoped would gain sympathetic attention from the public and compel the cautious Kennedy administration to respond more decisively. As King explained this strategy in his famous letter from the Birmingham jail where he was confined, “Nonviolent direct action seeks to create such a crisis and establish such creative tension that a community that has consistently refused to negotiate is forced to confront the issue. It seeks to so dramatize the issue that it can no longer be ignored.”16 For a time, Connor showed surprising constraint, but his forbearance only encouraged the SCLC to deploy a more dramatic battle plan. On May 2, King and his allies organized six thousand children to march from the Sixteenth Baptist Church toward the downtown area; nearly a thousand of them were arrested. The movement’s use of children led to widespread criticism, most notably from the US attorney general. But the controversy this tactic aroused was overwhelmed by the dramatic events of the next day. Confronted by a thousand demonstrators of all ages, Connor’s restraint gave way to massive and highly visible police violence. News photographs of police dogs attacking peaceful demonstrators and policemen clubbing and blasting them with fire hoses shocked and outraged much of the nation.17 Birmingham, which served as a template for subsequent direct action, greatly strengthened the civil rights movement. Benefiting from a new pow­

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erful mass medium, the preachers of racial justice from the SCLC and similar organizations bravely and skillfully staged a series of real-­life morality plays throughout the South: nonviolent, hymn-­singing demonstrators stood up for justice against venomous southern “law enforcement” officials who ruthlessly exercised overwhelming force in defense of white supremacy. Following these demonstrations—­and the rapt attention they brought to the issue of racial injustice—­the Kennedy administration finally abandoned its lukewarm support for civil rights.18 The precipitating event that moved the White House to fully engage reform occurred on June 11, 1963, when the militantly segregationist Alabama governor George Wallace, surrounded by network television cameras, theatrically defied and then yielded to federal officials who came to Tuscaloosa to enroll two black students in the previously all-­white University of Alabama. In fact, this drama was the result of a deal the president and his brother struck with Wallace, allowing the governor to make a defiant speech before he stood aside and allowed Kennedy officials, accompanied by federal marshals, to secure the enrollment of two black students at the university. The humbling experience of having to navigate a hazardous path between heroic civil rights crusaders and repugnant white supremacists finally pushed Kennedy to champion a comprehensive civil rights program. The very night of the Tuscaloosa street theater, Kennedy delivered a stirring prime-­time address that asked Congress, indeed the country, “to make a commitment it has not fully made in [the twentieth] century to the proposition that race has no place in American life or law.” Eight days later he sent ambitious legislation to Capitol Hill, triggering vows by southern Democratic senators to wage a filibuster against it.19 Kennedy would not live to see passage of this law, and it is unclear whether he would have fulfilled the potential of a formative alliance with a movement at the height of its power. Although the president finally adopted the moral position of the civil rights movement, he continued to view it as “a rival for control over the direction of the civil rights struggle.” Indeed, even as his bill stalled in Congress, Kennedy—­ignoring how “the movement’s disciplined employment of the techniques of nonviolence” moved the nation—­strongly discouraged civil rights demonstrations. “The problem is now before the Congress,” he told lawmakers, “and I urge all community leaders, Negro and white, to do their utmost to lessen tensions and to exercise self-­restraint.”20 Kennedy, therefore, never placed the civil rights struggle at the center of American politics, nor did he grasp the importance of a formative movement in advancing that struggle. As Derek Catsam writes in his review of Kennedy’s civil rights record:

146 / Chapter Four Events drove Kennedy more than he drove them, and, while his administration ultimately pushed civil rights forward more than his predecessors, . . . by the time he fully enjoined the issue, events were moving more rapidly than most any president could address. It would take a man with a true commitment to racial justice from the beginning of his administration, coupled with an understanding of the pace of events, to fully grasp the reins of leadership that the White House offered civil rights. That man would come not from a border state such as Missouri or Kansas, or from liberal Massachusetts. That man, Lyndon Baines Johnson, would come from the deep heart of  Texas.21

The presidencies of Roosevelt, Truman, and Kennedy revealed that the growing powers of the modern executive and persistent rise of the civil rights movement made possible a fruitful alliance for racial progress. But these administrations also demonstrated the inherent conflicts between a White House fearful of the disruptive potential of racial politics and activists who were intent on destroying segregation. Only with Lyndon Johnson was the full arsenal of modern presidential powers—­political, administrative, and rhetorical—­deployed on behalf of insurgent interests and demands. At the same time, Johnson’s inability to sustain the vanguard role exposed more fully than any other example the inherent tension between presidents and social movements. The result was both a historic body of civil rights reform and a bitter estrangement between the White House and movement activists that would force Johnson into retirement and unravel the liberal consensus.

Seizing the Moment: Lyndon Johnson and the Politics of Race When Johnson assumed the presidency, he had instrumental reasons for taking a strong civil rights stand. By this time, the Solid South was no more, as Eisenhower and Nixon had won substantial support below the Mason-­ Dixon Line. The best hope for establishing an executive-­centered liberal coalition lay in expanding the black vote. Moreover, African American voters were suspicious of a southern president, as were many northern liberals who had become strongly committed to the civil rights cause after the demonstrations in Birmingham and the March on Washington in 1963. Johnson felt pressure to prove himself to the growing civil rights movement by carrying out—­indeed surpassing—­Kennedy’s civil rights program. Moreover, Johnson wanted to make his own historic mark on the presidency, and he viewed social justice and collaboration with leaders of the civil rights movement as critical to the success of the Great Society. To Johnson

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and aides like Richard Goodwin and Bill Moyers, the movements that emerged in the 1960s suggested that ideas and practices that were marginal during the Progressive Era and New Deal might become the foundation of a new reform program. “Johnson intended to align himself with the cause of blacks and women and consumers,” Goodwin has claimed, “and he saw their causes as evidence that the country was ready for leadership committed to social change.” The civil rights movement, the Johnson administration believed, especially “demonstrated not only the power and possibility of organized protests, but the unsuspected fragility in America to liberating changes.”22 The Johnson administration’s commitment to advancing a new form of top-­down and bottom-­up mobilization informed its War on Poverty. The civil rights movement highlighted the unrest of a disenchanted minority most affected by economic deprivation. The White House was eager to launch a national program to give the movement direction and purpose. Influenced by intellectuals such as Michael Harrington and John Kenneth Galbraith, the Johnson administration considered the problem of poverty as more than material deprivation; it was symptomatic of deep-­rooted social and political problems. As Harrington wrote in The Other America, the poor in post–­World War II America were both estranged and invisible: “They think and feel differently; they look upon a different America than the middle class looks upon.”23 The core of the administration’s War on Poverty, the Community Action Program (CAP), which became the signature policy innovation of the Great Society and the key institutional connection with grassroots civil rights activists, was designed to treat the deeper maladies that afflicted impoverished Americans. Its objective, War on Poverty director Sargent Shriver told Congress, was “to get action initiated against poverty at the point closest to where the people live by encouraging and inspiring local government and units, and local private voluntary agencies, to initiate programs at the local level.” Its deeper purpose, Shriver acknowledged, was “to change institutions as well as people,” to challenge “hostile or uncaring or exploitive institutions” in an attempt to make them responsive to the peculiar needs of the “whole community.”24 Viewing the influential civil rights movement as an opportunity for the White House to forge a new reform politics, Johnson was scornful of the Kennedys’ cautious moves toward new federal intervention.25 Although King and other civil rights leaders urged him to take a strong moral stand on the centennial of the Emancipation Proclamation, Kennedy, fearing comparisons with Lincoln and new strains in the New Deal coalition, chose not to attend the ceremony at the Lincoln Memorial; and his tape-­recorded speech appeared to “consign race problems generally to the past.”26 Kennedy

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praised African Americans for their patient efforts to “convert freedom from rhetoric to reality” and the “spectacular” gains these efforts had achieved. By contrast, Vice President Johnson viewed an invitation to give a Memorial Day speech commemorating the hundredth anniversary of the Gettysburg Address as an opportunity for “the distinguished grandson of distinguished confederates” to utter his “HIS Gettysburg address, a masterpiece to be remembered by.”27 Rather than demur as Kennedy had on a momentous occasion, Johnson’s impassioned oration exalted the demands of the civil rights movement, calling for a full-­scale moral and programmatic assault on racial injustice: One hundred years ago, the slave was freed. One hundred years later, the Negro remains in bondage to the color of his skin. The Negro today asks justice. We do not answer him—­we do not answer those who lie beneath this soil—­when we reply to the Negro by asking, “Patience.”28

At first, Johnson’s Gettysburg speech, which did not have an early press release, was ignored by the mainstream press. But it captured the attention of African American newspapers, including the Baltimore Afro-­American, which reported that Johnson’s “eloquent” address received the “warmest applause [he heard] from the colored community . . . during his long political career.”29 Eventually a copy of Johnson’s remarks reached the Washington Post, which published it on page 1, and the New York Times and other mainstream papers immediately followed suit. The speech became, popular syndicated columnist Drew Pearson reported, “a sort of Emancipation Proclamation for the Kennedy Administration, and some of the White House functionaries [were] irked that it was the Vice President, not the President, who made it.”30 Although his housing initiative struck activists as too little and too late, Kennedy did issue executive orders that advanced civil rights; for example, he and Johnson agreed during the 1960 campaign that Johnson would head a new President’s Committee on Equal Employment, which required government contractors to take active measures to achieve equality in job opportunities. Several civil rights leaders praised the work that Johnson and the committee’s executive vice president, African American lawyer Hobart Taylor, Jr., did through the Plans for Progress program, which, according to the African American press, carried out a “quiet revolution” in persuading business and industry to hire black workers.31 But, as noted above, the frag-

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ile North-­South Democratic coalition and heightened tensions of the Cold War kept Kennedy distant from the civil rights movement. Only after the Birmingham violence did Kennedy’s aides acknowledge that their efforts for reform were hampered by the White House’s failure either to “make an all out fight” for legislation or to engage the movement.32 Johnson was determined not to make the same mistake. As the vice president told Kennedy aide Theodore Sorensen a few days after his Memorial Day address, “I know one thing, that the Negroes are tired of this patient stuff and tired of the piecemeal stuff and what they want more than anything else is not an executive order or legislation, they want a moral commitment that he is behind them.” Johnson recalled that Roosevelt had attempted a “failed” purge campaign in the 1938 primaries, trying to replace conservative southern and border-­state Democrats with 100 percent New Dealers committed to economic reform (see chapter 3). The president’s moral commitment to civil rights, Johnson told Sorensen, should not be expressed in an effort to purge southern Democrats but in an appeal to their consciences.33 To a remarkable degree during the early days of his presidency, Johnson practiced what he preached. Echoing the fervent commitment of his Gettys­ burg address, he delivered a widely praised speech to Georgia Democratic officials in May 1964, declaring unequivocally that the time had come for “justice among the races.” Johnson insisted that he would never feel that he had done justice to his “high office”—­the national constitutional office—­so long as those old hatreds continued to rend the country. This constitutional responsibility presupposed searing the American creed, and how racial dis­ crimination tarnished it, into the national consciousness. “Georgians helped write the Constitution. Georgians have fought and Georgians had died to protect that Constitution,” he calmly but firmly declared. “Because the Constitution requires it, because justice demands it, we must protect the constitutional rights of all of our citizens, regardless of race, religion, or the color of their skin.”34 Johnson’s resolve to take the civil rights fight into the Deep South reverberated far beyond Georgia’s borders. In going before public officials in a southern state to make an unflinching statement on civil rights, he gained the hard-­won respect of northern liberals and civil rights leaders. “President Johnson has shown remarkable fortitude in carrying his message of racial equality and unity into Georgia—­the heart of the old Southern Confederacy,” enthused the African American newspaper, the Chicago Daily Defender.35 This fulsome praise was repeated across the black press, and echoed by the mainstream media. It was “becoming of the President of the United

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States,” a Washington Post editorial declared, that he should make such a “forthright statement” below the Mason-­Dixon Line. Johnson’s words were not novel; he and other presidents had said as much before. “But said in this setting,” the Post recognized, “the words have special impact, special meaning. They throw down the gauntlet of a challenge: they say to the South—­in part because they are spoken by a President of the United States who is himself a Southerner—­‘Remember that you are Americans; remember that you belong to a Union, not a confederacy.’ ”36 The reaction to Johnson’s moral appeal was hardly less impressive in the South than it was in the North. To be sure, he did not overcome all resis­ tance. At the breakfast meeting in Atlanta with Georgia Democrats, which in­ cluded Governor Carl E. Sanders and Senator Herman Talmadge, the audi­ ence applauded the president on several occasions, but not when he spoke of equal rights.37 Similarly, when he thumped the podium at his second stop in Georgia, the town of Gainesville, and shouted that “the Constitution of the United States applies to every American of every race, of every religion, of every region in this beloved country,” there was no applause from the large and otherwise enthusiastic audience. Nonetheless, as the Richmond Times Dispatch admitted, “despite his uncompromising civil rights stand, the President’s public appeal made its impact.” No major Georgia official, save the unreconstructed states’ rights senator Richard Russell, boycotted Johnson’s visit. Moreover, although there were notes of disagreement among the huge crowds that greeted the president in Atlanta and Gainesville—­white workers wearing coveralls held up a sign along the Atlanta motorcade that read “Kill the Bill” (a reference to the civil rights legislation then before Congress)—­the overwhelming response to Johnson’s visit was remarkably positive, an indication, he insisted, that a “new South” was ready to turn the page on racial intolerance.38 Johnson’s hope, in fact, was to liberate the South from its isolation. This task began with the New Deal. Roosevelt’s national reform program, Johnson observed in his 1964 election-­eve speech at the Houston Astrodome, did much to “ameliorate Southern poverty,” as the “South found its voice in a new political instrument of the Union.”39 The average income in the South multiplied by six since the 1930s, rising much faster that the rest of the nation, in no small part due to military contracts. But if the South’s progress was to continue, Johnson warned—­if the South was to participate fully in the nation’s prosperity—­it had to “move forward under [the Constitution] to give every man his right to work at a job.” Johnson’s commitment to joining the goals of southern economic prosperity and racial equality extended beyond the presidential podium, a fact he reminded party brethren

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of in Georgia. The desegregation that the Johnson-­led contracts-­compliance committee achieved at the Lockheed Martin plant in Marietta, Georgia, he insisted, must become the model, not just in the South, but also in “all the States in the Union.”40 Johnson’s widely praised trip to Georgia strengthened his resolve to see civil rights legislation enacted that would dismantle the Jim Crow system. King, who had met Johnson during his tenure as vice president and quickly sized him up as a valuable ally, recognized the importance of the president’s early and earnest advocacy of civil rights: [Johnson’s] approach to civil rights was not identical with mine—­nor had I expected it to be. Yet his careful practicality was nonetheless clearly no mask to conceal indifference. His emotional and intellectual involvement was genuine and devoid of adornment. . . . [I]t was Vice President Johnson I had in mind when I wrote in The Nation that the white South was splitting, and that progress could be furthered by driving a wedge between the rigid segregationists and the new white elements whose love of their land was stronger than the grip of old habits and customs.41

For a time, Johnson’s “careful practicality” and moral leadership made him an indispensable ally of the movement. His greatest strength as majority leader of the Senate had been personal persuasion, a talent he now used to convince the Senate Republican leader, Everett Dirksen, to endorse the 1964 civil rights bill and to enlist moderate Republicans in the cause. This support did not come without a price. Dirksen insisted on compromises that reduced the power of the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission (EEOC) and limited the Justice Department’s authority to bring suits against businesses in situations where a clear “pattern and practice” of discrimination existed.42 These bargains addressed moderate Republicans’ distaste for overlapping bureaucracies, excessive litigation, and federal regulation of businesses. Still the principal objective of the civil rights bill—­ eliminating entrenched segregation in the South—­was preserved. Dirksen’s support of the civil rights bill also followed from the senator’s perception, confirmed by the movement’s growing influence in the country and the president’s successful southern tour, that public opinion’s support for civil rights was building in the country. Investing the power and prestige of his office in a cause and a movement, Johnson persuaded Dirksen and most members of Congress that civil rights reform could no longer be resisted.43 As Dirksen put it, paraphrasing Victor Hugo’s diary, “No army is stronger than an idea whose time has come.”44 The bipartisan alliance

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that Johnson and Dirksen formed decisively defeated the conservative coalition of southern Democrats and Republicans against civil rights. For the first time, the Senate voted cloture against a southern filibuster designed to thwart civil rights reform and did so by a considerable margin of seventy-­ one to twenty-­nine. Once the filibuster was killed, Congress passed the bill quickly, and Johnson signed it on July 2, 1964. The enactment of the Civil Rights Act, which was overwhelmingly opposed by southern Democrats in the House and Senate, revealed how the modern presidency’s relationship with social movements had begun to transcend the White House’s link to parties. Indeed, throughout the fight for this legislation, Johnson drew strength from and collaborated with civil rights leaders, even seeking their support for his decision not to delay signing the bill until Independence Day.45 More controversially, the president enlisted the cooperation of these leaders to calm urban unrest during the summer of 1964, the first of the long hot summers. Riots erupted in July of that year, soon after the Republican National Convention nominated conservative Arizona senator Barry Goldwater, who voted against the civil rights bill, for president. As the rioting spread to several urban areas, including New York, Philadelphia, Chicago, and Jersey City, and civil rights demonstrations continued after passage of the Civil Rights Act, the administration feared that racial unrest would turn white voters against a president identified with the cause of African Americans. Toward the end of July, at Johnson’s request, leaders of major civil rights organizations, including King, met in New York, where they called for a moratorium on African American unrest. The leaders made clear that their major concern was riots featuring “looting, vandalism or any type of criminal activities,” which they condemned unequivocally; these forms of agitation were distinguished from “legitimate [nonviolent] protest by denied and desperate citizens seeking relief,” which should be postponed until after the general election campaign. The moratorium thus marked a “temporary change of emphasis and tactic,” so that civil rights forces could “be used to encourage the Negro people, North and South, to register and vote.”46 Johnson also actively intervened a month later in the struggle over the seating of the Mississippi delegation at the 1964 Democratic convention, which convened in Atlantic City. At issue was the challenge that the Mississippi Freedom Democratic Party (MFDP) lodged against the seating of the lily-­white delegation sent by the regular Mississippi Democratic Party to represent the state. The MFDP sprang not from the SCLC but from the bolder Freedom Summer initiatives of  the younger Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC). The MFDP’s grassroots activists’ spiritual

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leader was the civil rights heroine Fannie Lou Hamer, former sharecropper and vice-­chair of the delegation, who argued compellingly at televised hearings of the credentials committee that she and the MFDP viewed the delegate fight as part of a broader battle for the right to register to vote—­to “become first class citizens.”47 “Hamer’s account of her struggle for the right to vote against stubborn and violent resistance of white supremacists brought tears to the eyes of the members of credential committee members and television viewers throughout the country,” the distinguished journalist Nick Kotz has written; but it “incensed” Johnson, who feared that seating the MFDP would lead to a fractured party and contentious convention. As Hamer spoke, the president bolted from a White House meeting with Democratic governors to stage an impromptu news conference to tell reporters he had not decided on a vice presidential running mate and to discuss criteria that would inform his choice. Johnson’s real motive, however, was to prevent the country from hearing the end of Hamer’s riveting account of the battle for voting rights in Mississippi. His ploy failed, however, as the television networks played the MFDP’s arresting testimony in prime time. After Hamer’s moving appearance was aired, the White House received 417 telegrams—­all but one in support of seating the Freedom Democrats.48 Now celebrities, Hamer and her fellow Mississippi insurgents were mobbed by reporters and warmly received as they presented their case to various state delegations. Crowds gathered on the Atlantic City boardwalk in front of the convention center to hear Hamer lead the delegates in a rousing rendition of the gospel song “This Little Light of Mine,” which the MFDP challenge made one of the leading civil rights hymns during the 1960s. In an outdoor display, the Mississippi activists deftly placed resonant symbols: photographs of the shacks in which MFDP members lived, documented stories of violence and racism, and detailed records of Klan bombings. The exhibit’s centerpiece was a replica of a charred Ford station wagon and three poles that bore the photographs of James Chaney, Andrew Goodman, and Michael Schwerner, the three SNCC voting rights activists who had been murdered only a few months before—­an episode that traumatized the country.49 The Freedom Democrats’ growing support enthralled civil rights leaders, yet this adulation only made Johnson more determined to use his control over the convention to fend off what he perceived as a potentially disruptive challenge. With the help of Hubert Humphrey and labor leader Walter Reuther, Johnson forced a compromise on the MFDP delegation.50 Johnson in fact told Humphrey, the leading contender for the vice presidency,

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that his “future in the party” depended on keeping a lid on the Mississippi situation. The forced compromise included three key parts: seating of the regular Mississippi delegation if its members signed a pledge to support the presidential ticket; the symbolic gesture of making MFDP delegates honored guests at the convention, with two of its members seated as special delegates at large; and a prohibition of racial discrimination in delegate selection at the 1968 convention, to be enforced by a special committee to assist state parties in complying with this expectation. The MFDP controversy fractured civil rights activists, portending a fundamental rift that eventually would result in a full-­blown crisis for Johnson and the movement. SNCC, the Congress of Racial Equality, and militant MFDP challengers like Farmer and Ella Baker scorned the White House’s willingness to sacrifice the MFDP’s moral cause on the altar of expediency. But the MFDP’s lawyer John Rauh, who was told that his close friend Humphrey would not be selected as the vice-­presidential nominee unless he advanced Johnson’s terms, joined King and moderate civil rights leaders in accepting the bargain, albeit not without a great “sense of distress.”51 Not only were southern states threatening a convention walkout if regular Mississippi delegates were purged, but Johnson and Democratic leaders also warned civil rights leaders that an unruly convention would cost the party the support of several border states and deprive Democrats of a chance to win a historic landslide—­and a mandate for further reform.52 Lost in the immediate tug-­of-­war over delegates, however, was the fact that Johnson’s fierce efforts to defuse the Mississippi controversy included fundamental reform of convention rules with enormous long-­term consequences for the Democratic Party. Previously state parties had sole authority to establish delegate-­selection procedures. Johnson’s proposed solution to the MFDP challenge established the centralizing principle that henceforth national party agencies would not only decide the number of votes cast by each state delegation at the national convention, but also enforce uniform nondiscrimination rules for delegate selection. As the president told Reu­ ther, “We don’t want to cut off our nose to spite our face. If they [MFDP challengers] give us four years, I’ll guarantee the Freedom delegation somebody representing views like that will be seated four years from now.”53 Moreover, Johnson made it clear to all parties—­civil rights reformers and regular southern delegates alike—­that he did not propose this compromise merely as a short-­term stopgap to ensure peace at the 1964 convention. Rather, he viewed a new nondiscrimination rule as legitimate means for the national party to sanction state delegations that carried on discriminatory practices.

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As Humphrey told Johnson in a telephone conversation soon after the compromise plan was accepted, MFDP representatives should “be heralded not as delegates from the state of Mississippi,” but, rather, “as an expression of the conscience of the Democratic party, as to the importance of the right to vote . . . by all peoples in this country.”54 Anticipating fundamental changes in party rules that would be enforced at the 1968 Democratic convention, some African American newspapers praised the MFDP compromise as a great accomplishment. As the Chicago Daily Defender reported, “In a little-­discussed section of the routine ‘Call for the [1968] Convention,’ the Democratic National Committee served notice that the convention will not seat ‘lily white’ delegations.” Future delegations would be admitted “only from states where ‘voters will have the opportunity to participate fully in party affairs, and to cast their ballots regardless of race, color, creed or national origins.’ ” As a result, the Defender predicted correctly, old-­line party organizations from Mississippi and states across the Deep South that brought Jim Crow delegations to the 1968 Democratic gathering were certain to be contested and probably disqualified.55 The Freedom Delegates thus won “a big change,” claimed the Afro-­American: “No longer can Southern states with large colored populations show up with the completely lily white delegations.” The protest against the compromise at the 1964 convention—­which included the walkout of all-­white Mississippi and Alabama delegations—­ signaled, the African American newspaper presciently observed, “the shift of these segregationists from the Democratic party to the Republicans.”56 The MFDP compromise envisioned a long-­term shift in the national character of the Democratic Party, one that strengthened its commitment to civil rights. Yet Johnson’s strong-­arming also profoundly disillusioned SNCC activists who organized Freedom Summer and MFDP’s low-­income rural members who resented what they viewed as the liberal Democratic establishment’s slap-­down of their fight for racial justice. “We didn’t come all this way for no two seats,” insisted Hamer. Adding insult to injury, the White House was adamant that the MFDP would be represented at the convention by Dr. Aaron Henry, chairman of the delegation, and the Reverend Edwin King, its most prominent white member. Claiming Johnson wanted “an inter-­racial delegation,” the president’s representatives denied Vice-­ Chairman Hamer a seat, which SNCC organizers and grassroots activists viewed as an egregious affront to the heroine of the MFDP. For SNCC’s Rob­ ert Moses, Johnson’s dictating who would represent Freedom Democrats in the two at-­large seats smacked of the “white plantation boss making all the decisions for his black sharecroppers.”57

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Although the MFDP failed to unseat the regular delegation when the convention accepted the administration’s compromise, demonstrations in support of the Freedom Party continued. MFDP delegates and their supporters gained access to the convention floor, using passes that sympathetic delegates gave them. When the regular Mississippi delegation left the convention in protest against Johnson’s bargain with those who challenged their legitimacy, some MFDP representatives triumphantly occupied their seats—­until they were forcibly removed, a gratuitous act of recrimination that further roiled the Atlantic City convention again.58 Beyond the convention drama, the compromise disillusioned and radicalized SNCC organizers and their insurgent MFDP allies. As SNCC’s Cleveland Sellers described this transformation, “Never again were we lulled into believing our task was exposing injustices so that the ‘good people’ of America could eliminate them. We left Atlantic City with the knowledge that the movement had turned into something else. After Atlantic City, our struggle was not for civil rights, but for liberation.”59 For all the estrangement between the White House and civil rights activists, however, both Johnson and movement leaders left the convention determined not only to reform the Democratic Party, but also to enact another major civil rights law.60 Indeed, the hard-­won compromise was a critical prelude to an uneasy alliance that the president and civil rights activists would forge in the fight for voting rights legislation. After his landslide victory in the 1964 election, Johnson was determined to live up to his promise at the convention to fight for voting rights legislation that ultimately enfranchised millions of African Americans. Archival materials, specifically the Johnson Secret White House Tapes, clarify that Johnson did not want to go slow after the 1964 act. Indeed, Johnson was far less willing to compromise on voting rights than the Kennedy administration, which had been prepared to give up key features of reform that civil rights activists deemed critical.61 Johnson not only pushed aggressively to continue the advance of civil rights but also urged movement leaders not to compromise, as he insisted during the convention, but rather to disrupt politics-­as-­usual and to spur action. On January 15, 1965, for instance, Johnson put in a call to King, on the occasion of the civil rights leader’s thirty-­sixth birthday. To the surprise of King, who was skeptical that Johnson would move quickly on voting rights in the afterglow of his historic landslide (and expecting the White House to make educational reform its next big initiative), the president urged the civil rights leader and his grassroots organization to put pressure on Congress for voting rights reform. In particular, he called on King and the move­ment to protest “the worst conditions [of blacks being denied the vote]

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that you can run into. . . . If you can take that one illustration and get it on the radio, get on the television, get it in the pulpits, get it in the meetings—­ every place you can—­then pretty soon the fellow who didn’t do anything but drive a tractor would say, ‘Well, that is not right—­that is not fair.’ ”62 Johnson’s encouragement of King and other movement leaders to stir things up in the South does not mean, as former Johnson aide Joseph Califano has claimed, that the outbreak of demonstrations in Selma, Alabama, was the president’s idea.63 Looking for another episode like Birmingham to “create a crisis” that would compel federal action, King launched the “Alabama Project” against voting rights violations with a powerful sermon at the Brown Chapel African Methodist Episcopal Church two weeks before his conversation with the president. Echoing his condemnation of forced segregation in Birmingham two years earlier, King condemned Selma for its “bitter-­end resistance to the Civil Rights movement in the Deep South.” Still, Johnson’s overture was important to King, because it gave him hope that the powers of the modern presidency would be deployed in support of the Selma demonstrations. Johnson later might have had second thoughts about his call to arms, since King and civil rights activists would take direct action in Selma that aroused massive resistance from local police and state troopers, as well as national demonstrations in support of the marchers, some of which denounced the president for not taking immediate action to avert the violence. Yet when King sought his public endorsement of the Selma campaign, Johnson championed the demonstrators’ cause despite the efforts of  White House aides to shield him from public involvement in the crisis. “I should like to say that all Americans should be indignant when one American is denied the right to vote. . . . [A]ll of us should be concerned with the efforts of our fellow Americans to register to vote in Alabama,” Johnson said at a White House press conference. “I intend to see that the right [to vote] is secured for all our citizens.” King was elated: the president had expressed support for the movement’s Selma campaign and pledged to do something to support the civil rights activists’ cause.64 To return to where this chapter began, the following month, as the crisis in Selma worsened, Johnson lived up to this promise. On March 15, 1965, for the first time in nineteen years, a president appeared before a joint session of Congress to present a legislative message. Sensing that America was at a pivotal moment in its long and tortured history of slavery and racial oppression, hoping to seize the opportunity presented by the brave civil rights demonstrators, Johnson spoke with unusual feeling about the Voting Rights Act. His speech warned that the enactment of the voting rights bill

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was but one front in a larger war that must include not just federal laws to throw open the “gates of opportunity” but also affirmative action against ignorance, ill-­health, and poverty that would enable men and women to “walk through those gates”: What happened in Selma is part of a far larger movement which reaches into every section and State of America. It is the effort of American Negroes to se­ cure for themselves the full blessings of American life. Their cause must be our cause too. Because it is not just Negroes, but really it is all of us, who must overcome the crippling legacy of bigotry and injustice.

For effect, the president’s next line—­his invocation of the civil rights an­ them—­was expressed with dramatic flair, with distinctive emphasis on every word: “And we shall overcome.”65 Johnson’s nationally televised address, with its strong embrace of the movement’s cause, had not won over southern congressmen, most of whom slumped in their seats as the joint session erupted in applause. Yet he had triumphed where Franklin Roosevelt failed—­without embroiling himself in an enervating purge campaign against conservative Democrats, as Roosevelt had in 1938. Instead, he joined civil rights activists to discredit southern resistance to liberal reform. Showing the poignant scene of a family in Selma gathered before their television set to watch Johnson’s speech, the Chicago Daily Defender rejoiced that an American president had “swung the full weight of the federal government behind the drive to make good the promise of equality—­unkept for a century—­given the American Negro.”66 As Johnson embraced the civil rights activists’ ringing anthem, King, watching the televised address in Montgomery, Alabama, was moved to tears. As he wrote of the historic speech, “President Johnson made one of the most eloquent, unequivocal, and passionate pleas for human rights ever made by a President of the United States. He revealed an amazing understanding of the depth and dimension of the problem of racial justice. . . . We had the support of the President in calling for immediate relief of the problems of the disinherited people of our nation.”67 Even a few of the more skeptical civil rights activists, who had refused to acquiesce to the 1964 MFDP compromise, were inspired by Johnson’s fervent support of what one of his startled advisers called “radical” changes in the federal government’s approach to voting rights.68 John Lewis, then president of SNCC, acknowledged that on this night Johnson was “a man who spoke from his heart, a statesman, a poet.”69 The following week, the Congress of Racial Equality’s James Farmer, who also was alienated by the MFDP bargain, led the aforementioned march

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on the White House to express activists’ support for the president’s efforts, and to pressure him to keep moving forward. Farmer was preaching to the converted. Johnson—­strengthened by the support of these insurgents—­pushed the Voting Rights Act relentlessly through Congress. Seeing the handwriting on the wall, southern Democrats still filibustered the bill half-­heartedly, but cloture was easily invoked, and as with the 1964 law, a large bipartisan coalition of Republicans and Democrats in both houses enacted it. With Farmer, King, Lewis, and other civil rights leaders sitting in seats of honor, Johnson signed the Voting Rights Act on August 6. Although most activists appreciated Johnson’s support in achieving historic reforms, and the African American press praised the president as “one of the greatest humanitarians of his time,”70 tensions within the movement threatened to sever its critical but uneasy ties with the White House. In the wake of the MFDP controversy, the movement was a fissiparous mixture of familiar organizations that sought traditional rights long denied African Americans and newer militant groups intent on recasting the very framework of political life. In contrast to moderate civil rights leaders, more radical insurgents expressed deep scorn for a White House that increasingly took hold of the movement. A sign of this shift from formative to militant movement politics was the biting sarcasm that Johnson’s civil rights sermon elicited from radical activists in Alabama like James Foreman, the field secretary for SNCC. As far as radical SNCC dissidents were concerned, Johnson’s voting rights sermon, coming on the heels of his maneuvers at the 1964 Democratic convention, was little more than a “tinkling, empty symbol.” As he defiantly told reporters, “Johnson spoiled a good song that day.”71

Social Protest and the Limits of  White House Leverage Toward the end of 1965, the energy and resources committed to the Great Society, especially its antipoverty measures, began to suffer, threatened by Johnson’s preoccupation with the Vietnam War. The war also fatally wounded his relationship with the civil rights movement. From Franklin Roosevelt and subsequent presidents, Johnson inherited international commitments that pulled him away from the liberal activism to which his early presidency was dedicated.72 African Americans were among the first to sense this change, and even moderate civil rights leaders like King, who voiced publicly his opposition to the Vietnam conflict in September 1965, became visible participants in the antiwar movement. King saw the war not only as morally questionable

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but also as a growing commitment that would divert resources needed to address problems at home. As he told a rally of the National Conference for New Politics in Chicago, the president had deferred “the dreams of American Negroes and shipwrecked them off the coast of Asia in the Vietnam struggle.”73 Frederick Douglass viewed the Civil War as an opportunity for slaves to prove their mettle in the quest for emancipation; W. E. B. Du Bois treated World War I as a chance for African Americans to demonstrate their loyalties to the nation at war while others underscored the gap between Wilson’s pledge to “make the world safe for democracy” and African American subjugation; A. Philip Randolph saw World War II as an opening for seeking justice at home for those denied the liberties that Roosevelt proclaimed America was fighting for in Europe and Asia. In contrast, King believed that the Vietnam War was an unjust intrusion in a foreign nation’s quest for independence, a futile exercise that brought an abrupt end to the “shining moment” of fundamental reform embodied by the monumental civil rights reforms of 1964 and 1965.74 Indeed, his signature 1967 antiwar speech delivered at the Riverside Church in New York spoke of how Vietnam not only stalled progress on civil rights but also cut off the promise of the Great Society: “A few years ago . . . [it] seemed as if there was a real promise of hope for the poor, both black and white, through the poverty program. There were experiments, hopes, new beginnings. Then came the buildup in Vietnam, and I watched this program broken and eviscerated as if it were some idle political plaything of a society gone mad on war. And I knew that America would never invest the necessary funds or energies in rehabilitation of its poor so long as adventures like Vietnam continued to draw men and skills and money like some demonic, destructive suction tube.”75 Johnson had tried to renew ties with King a few weeks before the civil rights leader went public against Vietnam. In August, soon after race riots broke out in Watts, he called King to express his unflinching support for civil rights and to question him about rumors that he was opposed to the administration’s actions in Vietnam.76 Trying in vain to meet the demands of spiraling civil rights militancy, the president urged King to embrace and publicize a recent commencement address the president gave on June 4 at Howard University, with which Johnson sought to burnish his credibility as an ally of the movement, and indeed to lead it in redressing African American poverty.77 The Howard University address, Johnson told King, proclaiming that “freedom was not enough” and that the time had come to “seek . . . not just equality as a right and a theory but equality as a fact and as a result,” demonstrated his administration’s commitment to attack the

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most stubborn forces sustaining racial inequality.78 And yet, he complained, movement activists largely greeted it with a deafening silence. Johnson also urged King to support the administration on Vietnam, telling King, “I want peace as much as you do if not more so,” because “I’m the fellow who had to wake up to 50 marines killed.”79 But as the New York Urban League’s Dr. Eu­gene Callender lamented, the fact that a “disproportionate” number of African Americans were dying in Vietnam made a “tremendous impact” on their mounting opposition to the White House.80 King acknowledged that Johnson’s Howard University speech was “the best statement and analysis of the problem” he had seen and that “no president ever said it like that before.”81 Indeed, he saluted the president by wire soon after it was delivered, “for your magnificent speech . . . [that] evinced amazing sensitivity.”82 Nonetheless, King and other civil rights leaders refused to acknowledge that the Howard University address established the president as the principal agent of their reform aspirations—­the “Big Daddy of the civil rights movement,” as the African American newspaper New York Amsterdam News put it.83 King saw himself, not the president, as the leader of the movement. Moreover, he feared that tying himself too closely to Johnson, in an atmosphere of mounting racial tension, would weaken his standing in the civil rights community. As David Carter has written, “in this period of growing polarization it had become increasingly clear to civil rights leaders, and ultimately even to the President and his staff, that a White House blessing of a leader was tantamount to a curse.”84 As the schisms of the movement deepened alongside the administration’s involvement in Vietnam, Johnson became the target, rather than the uneasy ally, of civil rights activists. Johnson and his advisers feared that this rift between the president and civil rights leaders imperiled popular support for the president’s reform program. In November, White House aide Hayes Redmon lamented the antiwar efforts of civil rights activists. “I am increasingly concerned over the involvement of civil rights groups with anti-­war demonstrators,” he wrote in a memo to Press Secretary Bill Moyers. “The anti-­Vietnam types are driving the middle class to the right. This is the key group that is slowly being won over to the civil rights cause. Negro leadership involvement with anti-­Vietnam groups will set their programs back substantially.”85 Not all civil rights leaders abandoned the president, whom they credited, according to one prominent black journalist, James L. Hicks, with “advancing the cause of civil rights further than any other president in the history of the United States.” For example, militant civil rights activists failed to pass an anti-­Vietnam resolution at a January 1966 civil rights conference in

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Washington. Moderate leaders like the National Urban League’s Whitney Young opposed this proclamation because, as Hicks explained, “the masses of Negros are generally hard-­thinking, hard-­shell Baptists with a high respect for high office and an unquestioned loyalty to the President of the United States and everyone under him.”86 Yet the revered King’s opposition threatened to undermine this deference to the White House; his defection thus exposed the inherent conflict between the interests of the president and the civil rights movement. Like Kennedy, Johnson deferred to FBI director J. Edgar Hoover’s use of telephone wiretaps and hotel-­room microphones to discredit King on national security grounds; like Kennedy, he also took seriously Hoover’s ill-­founded warning that Communists had infiltrated the movement.87 In truth, King was the least of the administration’s problems. As the movement trained its eye on the poverty-­stricken ghettos of large northern cities, King lost influence to radical leaders who were better attuned to the frustrations and rage of young urban African Americans.88 The flames of Watts illuminated more than the western sky, the SCLC leader admitted; they cast light on the “imperfections in the civil rights movement and the tragic shallowness of white racial policy in the explosive ghettos.”89 King learned in his first foray against the grievances of northern ghetto residents—­a fight for open housing in Chicago—­that many northern civil rights activists thought his strategy and tactics were outdated. Rooted in the understanding that nonviolent protest would pique the conscience of the nation by exposing how America’s creed had not been realized by African Americans in either the North or South, these tactics, King’s more militant rivals insisted, underestimated how deeply engrained racism was in the United States. This critique became especially resonant after civil rights trailblazer James Meredith was shot on June 6, 1966, while attempting a “March against Fear” through Mississippi to encourage African American voter registration despite unrelenting resistance to the Voting Rights Act in the heart of the old Confederacy. After the shooting, several civil rights groups continued the march, during which Stokely Carmichael, the newly elected head of SNCC, gave a speech that called for a more radical “Black Power” movement.90 Black power advocates like Carmichael and the Congress of Racial Equality’s Floyd McKissick were not only dissatisfied with the achievements of the Johnson administration’s civil rights program; they also were contemptuous of its principal objective: racial integration. King had belatedly come to recognize that the proximity of ghettos to an “affluent society” made them especially volatile environments. “In the South there is something of shared poverty, Negro and white,” he wrote. In

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contrast, in the North, “white existence, only steps away, glitters with conspicuous consumption. Even television becomes incendiary when it beams pictures of affluent homes and multitudinous products to an aching poor, living in wretched hovels.”91 As we noted in chapter 3, many of these urban ghettos could trace their origins to the New Deal’s Public Housing Authority and Home Owners Loan Corporation, which often razed integrated neighborhoods in favor of segregated urban housing projects and metropolitan subdivisions.92 After Watts, King’s message began to champion strong social democratic measures to address this economic inequality. But he never went as far as more radical activists in rejecting the American Dream. As Carmichael and political scientist Charles Hamilton wrote in Black Power, a manifesto for the ascending militancy of the movement, “The goal of the black people must not be to assimilate into middle class America, for that class—­as a whole—­is without a viable conscience as regards humanity. The values of the middle class are based on material aggrandizement, not the expansion of humanity. . . . That class mouths its preference for a free, competitive society, while at the same time forcefully and even viciously denying the black people as a group the opportunity to compete.”93 In his autobiography, Carmichael added that “the underlying and fundamental notion [of black power] was that black folks needed to begin openly, and had the right and the duty, to define for ourselves, in our own terms, our real circumstances, possibilities, and interests relative to white America.”94 Structural racism could not be overcome, they concluded, through new civil rights laws or integrationist dreams.

The Johnson Presidency and Community Action Ironically, Carmichael and Hamilton’s critique of middle-­class America shared certain sentiments with the underlying premises of Johnson’s Great Society. As Johnson exhorted in his 1966 State of the Union message, praised by the New York Amsterdam News for its pledge not to sacrifice social welfare programs to the Vietnam War, “A great people flower not from wealth and power, but from a society which spurs them to the fullness of their genius . . . . [S]lowly, painfully, on the edge of victory, has come the knowledge that shared prosperity is not enough. In the midst of abundance modern man walks oppressed by forces which menace and confine the quality of his life, and which individual abundance alone will not overcome.”95 Johnson’s Community Action Programs (CAPs) were at the core of the Great Society’s commitment to transform the ideas and practices of the liberal administrative state. This faith in community-­based poverty programs

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helps explain how his alliance with civil rights activists both broadened the reach of the modern presidency and exposed its limits in controlling the disruptive potential of social movements. In part, the Johnson White House’s delegation of administrative responsibility to these local citizen groups was intended to be an extension of  his presidency. Johnson and his aides viewed state and local governments, and their affiliated party organizations, as obstacles to good government, to the “enlightened” management of social policy. They conceived of CAPs as a local arm of the Office of Economic Opportunity (OEO), thus enabling the Johnson administration to bypass local governments and the entrenched, usually Democratic, political machines.96 Federal guidelines, in fact, stipulated that CAPs had to be conducted by a public or private nonprofit agency (or some combination thereof ) other than a political party.97 From this perspective, the CAP was evidence of the White House’s ex cathedra effort to restore a sense of community. As Samuel Beer has pointed out, “The antipoverty program was not shaped by the demands of pressure groups and the poor—­there were none—­but by deliberations of  [White House] task forces.”98 At least in part, the communal concerns of the Johnson presidency were closely connected to administrative invention, a bold new initiative that embodied, in Nathan Glazer’s words, “the professionalization of reform in modern society.”99 In the hands of the administration, which relied to an unprecedented extent on presidential politics and governance, this invention never fulfilled its stated objective of popular participation. Especially after 1967, following recommendations from the Heineman task force on government organization, Johnson tried to tighten White House management over the CAPs.100 The following year, George Nicolau, stepping down after eighteen months of running the Harlem Community Action Program, the largest in the nation, declared himself “a victim of that process which in the space of three short years created and has almost been overwhelmed by its own complexities and its own bureaucracy.”101 The Johnson administration’s expressed concern for “community” involvement thus revealed how “qualitative” liberalism was potentially in tension with the centralization of authority required by an extensive welfare state. Viewing the idealistic zeal of the civil rights movement as the potential source of a new political order, Johnson deliberately initiated and helped legitimize an assault on New Deal institutional forms. Yet the cultural changes and social circumstances of the 1960s greatly aggravated the tension between enlightened administration and community control. Once riots became a routine disruptive force, Johnson developed a deeper appreciation of the limits of executive administration in fighting a war against

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racial discrimination and economic deprivation. As we shall see below, he learned from his aides who made visits to ghettos throughout the country that the riots, instigated by the profound sense of alienation among urban Af­rican Americans, appeared to confirm the Johnson administration’s view that “community action” was a critical element of their program to establish a post–­New Deal version of the welfare state. The architects of the Great Society were well aware of the political risks involved in delegating administrative responsibility to CAPs; however, these risks were taken in hopes of revitalizing, indeed surpassing, the radical side of New Deal liberalism. Johnson’s persistent, albeit not unqualified, support of the War on Poverty in the face of blistering criticism from Congress and local government officials, suggests that he did not disagree with this reform ambition.102 Johnson did not appreciate fully the clash between executive management and local self-­determination. Nor did he sufficiently appreciate that the civil rights movement was a catalyst for an adversarial politics that was inherently suspicious of presidential leadership. The CAPs took on the energy and aspirations of the movement and refocused them, thus giving a new generation of black leaders entrée into local and administrative politics. As a 1967 Senate investigation of the War on Poverty put it, “The Office of [Economic] Opportunity policies and programs have produced . . . a sizeable cadre, for the first time in the Negro community, especially, of young energetic and striving leadership.”103 That “cadre of striving leaders” developed political bases that were not tied directly to the Democratic Party or the White House.104 Nonetheless, having invested his immense ambition in the Great Society and staked his political fortunes in the social movements that it empowered, Johnson could not entirely abandon the OEO and the community organizations it spawned even as it aroused activists who viewed him “as part of the white apparatus which created and fostered the perpetuation” of racial injustice.105 Before violence and destruction raked America’s cities, Johnson had clear moral leadership and authority in the civil rights movement. His rhetoric was no doubt sincere and righteous, and the credit he received for pushing through the civil rights bills and in aligning himself with the crusade for justice in the South gave him hope that he was forging a new progressive coalition that joined economic security and social justice. But the expectations raised could never overcome the reality of politics; the War on Poverty, in particular, fomented insurrection in the nation’s ghettos without providing the resources necessary to meet the demands of the severe problems the Johnson administration condemned. The growing militancy of African Americans exploded during the summer of 1966 as urban riots swept across

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the nation. In the wake of these developments, the moderately conservative middle class, as the White House feared, grew impatient with reform. The administration’s string of brilliant triumphs in civil rights was snapped. Its 1966 civil rights bill, an open-­housing proposal, fell victim to a Senate filibuster. Johnson’s tense but unshakable alliance with the movement was a great asset to him in 1964; it largely became a political liability by the summer of 1966. From the start of his presidency, Johnson recognized that his alliance with the civil rights movement risked substantial Democratic losses in the South. The president’s encouraging visit to Georgia gave him hope that he would be forgiven by white southerners; this was the very purpose of his appeal to conscience. But the elections of November 1966 confirmed that the South was not in a forgiving mood. Three segregationist Democrats—­Lester Maddox in Georgia, James Johnson in Arkansas, and George P. Mahoney in Maryland—­won their party’s gubernatorial nomination. In Alabama, voters ratified a caretaker administration for Lurleen Wallace, since her husband, George, was not permitted to succeed himself. George Wallace, dubbed the “prime minister” of Alabama, had by 1966 emerged as a serious threat to inflame the North-­South split in the Democratic Party, either by entering the 1968 presidential primaries or running as a third-­party candidate. Yet the gubernatorial race in California, where former movie star Ronald Reagan, running as the “law and order” candidate, handily defeated the Democratic incumbent Edmund G. Brown, revealed that conservative insurgency was not limited to southern Democrats. Indeed, as we shall point out in chapter 5, Reagan’s presidential ambitions would lead him to form a partnership with an ascending Christian Right, which played a pivotal role in transforming the Republican Party into a decidedly right-­of-­center organization. The “new” Christian Right was animated by its reaction to civil rights reform; in particular, it was fueled by resentment of government regulations on private white Christian academies that were formed in response to public school desegregation.

The White House Goes to the Ghetto Since the emergence of the modern presidency in the Progressive Era, activist presidents had considered the White House to be a superior vantage point for guiding economic and social reform—­the “steward of the public welfare” in Theodore Roosevelt’s alluring phrase. As we noted in chapter 2, however, these presidents with reform aspirations had sought to find what Bruce Miroff calls a “symbolic balance point,” where they appeared to “co-

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operate with a social movement for noble purposes” while retaining their “special commitment to law, order, and the general good.”106 Yet Johnson sought more than a symbolic link with civil rights leaders as he partnered with them in a successful reform campaign while also demanding their support for a moratorium on demonstrations and a compromise with the MFDP during the 1964 election. With the enactment of the of the 1965 Civil Rights Act, most civil rights activists viewed these concessions as fair compensation for a transformative law that finally seemed to bestow, after a century’s betrayal, the right of full citizenship. But the implosion of the White House–­civil rights partnership aggravated the scar tissue left by the controversial MFDP compromise, abetting the rise of black power activists. The solution that Johnson and his aides engineered, Carmichael and Hamilton claimed, “clearly said ‘betrayal’ and clearly symbolized the bankruptcy of the establishment.”107 In the wake of the civil rights crisis of 1966, Johnson no longer claimed the mantle of civil rights leader. Nor, however, did he sound a full retreat from civil rights reform. Instead, he followed Attorney General Nicholas Katzenbach’s advice to send a number of his younger aides to various cities to meet with young black leaders. The attorney general’s suggestion was the origin of surprising ghetto visits that White House aides made throughout 1967; a dozen or so visited troubled black areas in more than twenty cities, including Chicago, Philadelphia, New York, Detroit, Washington, DC, Los Angeles, and Oakland. Like the War on Poverty, the ghetto visits revealed the Johnson administration’s uncertain stewardship of the modern executive office. On one hand, these visits revealed the extent to which a modern president thought he could assume important tasks once carried out by intermediary political associations like political parties. Rather than relying on local party leaders as a conduit to their communities, as Lincoln once relied on the Republican Party, Johnson asked his aides to live in various ghettos and then report directly to him about the state of black America. Local public officials and party leaders, even Chicago’s powerful boss Richard Daley, were not told of the ghetto visits, lest they take umbrage at someone from the White House rooting about their neighborhoods. On the other hand, these visits marked the declining significance of the modern presidency as the leading agent of liberal reform—­a symptom of its “extraordinary isolation.”108 This isolation was accentuated by the evolution of the civil rights movement, whose more militant leaders, representing an oppositional culture that tended to withdraw rather than bestow legitimacy on reigning institutions, gained ascendancy in urban ghettos. Johnson and other members of the White House were left to figure out why young urban

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blacks, as one aide put it, “were against just about every leader (Negro and white) . . . except [black power advocates like] Stokely Carmichael.”109 The awkward presence of these Johnson aides—­mostly white, mostly from small towns and cities in the Midwest and Southwest—­spending a week, sometimes a weekend, in volatile ghetto environments such as Harlem and Watts was, as a leading participant put it, a “unique attempt by the President to discover what was happening in urban ghettos and why.”110 Aides were not sent to organize or manipulate or steer, but solely to gain a sense of the ideas, frustrations, and attitudes at the basis of the riots.111 Whereas months earlier the White House shared a commanding role in the direction and political voice of civil rights reform, it was now left in the dark, along with almost every other moderate voice—­discredited by urban riots and a controversial war in Southeast Asia. Adding fuel to the fire, Muhammad Ali made headlines in March 1967 when he adamantly refused to enlist for the fight in Vietnam, telling reporters that he refused to “help murder and burn another poor nation simply to continue the domination of white slave masters of the darker people the world over.”112 Still, the ghetto visits appeared to show that the Johnson administration had gotten some things right, especially the Great Society’s celebration of “liberation” and “community.” Indeed, against the assault of black power activists, the lengthy reports written by aides for the president often observed that growing African American militancy appeared to vindicate the objectives of the Great Society. The volatile conditions in the ghetto did not stem from material deprivation alone, these reports argued; rather, as one White House aide put it, the most serious and common problem was that “the ghetto Negro lives in a world which is severed from ours.” Sherwin Markman, who organized the White House ghetto visits, wrote in his summary report that the first essential key to understanding urban America was “alienation—­of the ghetto Negro from the mainstream of American life, and of white America from the ghetto Negro.” Although housing, education, and employment varied from city to city, the “disconnection” blacks felt from the rest of America was “not limited to one city or region, but [was] nation-­wide in its pattern, and growing.”113 Markman sought to persuade LBJ that the severe alienation that afflicted urban America both explained and perhaps justified the black power movement. The “dramatic growth” of black power had become the “rally cry in the ghetto,” he reported after a return visit to Chicago in February 1968. “Power” should not be confused with violence, he insisted, even though “some advocates of the philosophy preach violence.” After talking with intellectuals like Charles Hamilton, as well as militant black nationalists,

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Markman concluded that this vague concept most essentially meant “an increase in race consciousness and pride.” In their early visits to urban areas, White House aides had discovered, as one report put it, that “perhaps the most significant symbol of the ghetto is the absence of proud men.” Black power, Markman told Johnson, would bring “positive results” in filling that terrible void: “It is my judgment that the increased pride in race must inevitably lead to strong racial motivation for better social organization, better education, and better jobs.”114 By all accounts, Johnson was deeply moved by these reports. The president carried with him one of Markman’s reports on the Chicago ghetto and read it to members of the cabinet, Congress, and the press, in order to persuade them to accept the White House’s position that civil disorders were a symptom of racial injustice.115 The president also followed Markman’s strong recommendation that he visit the Zion Baptist Church—­where the Reverend Leon Sullivan presided—­a “great bulwark” against the gloom and deprivation of the ghetto in north Philadelphia. Sullivan’s church established a number of community organizations, most notably the Opportunities In­ dustrialization Center (OIC) job-­training program, which the Johnson administration’s poverty officials considered one of the “nation’s outstanding ghetto projects.”116 What Johnson witnessed in Philadelphia during his visit to Sullivan’s church gave him hope that the Great Society and War on Poverty, if greatly expanded, might make a difference—­that with some help from Washington, programs like OIC might treat the worst maladies of the northern ghetto depicted in the White House aides’ reports: alienation and absence of pride. “What I have seen here with Reverend Sullivan is not just an institution—­it is a unique training program. I have seen men and women whose self respect is beginning to burn inside them—­like a furnace that will fire them all their lives. . . . It is a place where people find the power that they have always had—­power that was always within them, but that had been obscured because of lack of confidence, because of feelings of insecurity, because of self-­doubt, and trapped by the conviction of failure.”117 Having gained a sense of the frustrations and hardships that contributed to the incendiary conditions of northern cities, Johnson took a measured position on the riots that turned urban areas into domestic battle zones during the late 1960s. The worst riot during the summer of 1967 occurred in Detroit in late July. To this point, Johnson had been hesitant to use regular federal troops in quelling riots, believing that law and order was best left to state and local officials and the National Guard. But on July 24, when Detroit erupted into a situation of violence and death that the governor and mayor could not control, Johnson quickly dispatched forty-­seven hundred

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paratroopers to restore order. That evening Johnson delivered a powerful prime-­time address declaring that “pillage, looting, murder and arson [had] nothing to do with civil rights.”118 The Chicago Daily Defender praised the president’s speech, insisting that “all law abiding citizens cannot help agree with his words.” This important voice of African American opinion took some comfort from the fact that “despite the dark tragedies that followed in the wake of these riots, the President did not blame the riots on Negroes alone”—­from his acknowledgment that “with few exceptions the citizens of Detroit, Newark, Harlem—­all American citizens no matter how troubled they may be—­deplore and condemn these riots.”119 Still, given the growing divisions within the civil rights community, it is not surprising that many activists were quick to chastise Johnson’s show of force. The Reverend Carl Fuqua, executive secretary of the Chicago NAACP, lambasted Johnson for not focusing his remarks on “preventing rather than condemning the riots.” It was the “whites” in his judgment who, “failing in their responsibility to their fellow human beings,” were responsible for the underlying causes of the outbreaks.120 The harshest words came from the young militant leaders such as H. Rap Brown, who succeeded Carmichael as chairman of SNCC in 1967. Comparing Johnson’s sending of federal troops to Detroit to the tactics used by Governor George Wallace, Brown exhorted black people “to get guns to defend themselves.”121 The urban riots placed Johnson in a treacherous position. He recognized that the alliance he had forged earlier in his presidency with civil rights activists had made him vulnerable to attacks from Republicans who attrib­ uted civil disorder, as presidential-­hopeful Governor George Romney put it, to building up “false hopes and expectations.”122 Yet Johnson, steadied by his White House aides’ sympathetic reports of the causes of discontents in the ghettos, gave a far more empathic address to the nation a few days later. He did not abandon his condemnation of the riots. “There is no American right,” Johnson continued to insist, “to loot stores, or to burn buildings, or to fire rifles from the rooftops. That is a crime—­and crime must be dealt with forcefully, and swiftly, and certainly—­under law.” At the same time, he stood against the notion that a draconian commitment to law and order would resolve the urban firestorms. “This is not a time for angry reaction,” he argued. “It is a time for action: starting with legislative action to improve the life in our cities. The strength and promise of the law are the surest remedies for tragedy in the streets.”123 Hoping to give official cachet to the analyses of urban unrest he read in the White House ghetto reports, Johnson appointed the National Advisory Commission on Civil Disorders, which would be chaired by Governor Otto

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Kerner of Illinois. The civil rights community greeted the announcement of this blue ribbon commission with great skepticism, viewing it as a convocation of “ultraconservative ‘safe’ individuals who will make sure that their conclusions will not run afoul of their politics or erode their security.”124 However, the Kerner report, issued on March 1, 1968, presented an even harsher picture of racial injustice in America than had the sober accounts of the northern cities by Markman and his colleagues. “Segregation and poverty,” it warned, had created “in the racial ghetto a destructive environment totally unknown to most white Americans.” Yet “white society [was] deeply implicated in the ghettos. White institutions created it, white institutions maintained it, and white society condones it.” The startling conclusion of these “ultraconservative safe” individuals was that “our Nation is evolving toward two societies, one black, one white—­separate and unequal.” There could be “no higher claim on the nation’s conscience,” the commission urged, than a program of “unprecedented levels of spending and performance” to remedy “economic and social decay” in the urban ghetto and the “resulting discontent and disruption” that threatened “democratic values fundamental to our progress as a free society.”125 Although the commission’s observations confirmed many of the findings of his aides who visited the northern ghettos, Johnson did not take kindly to its report. The president felt that the commission’s dark vision failed to give his administration credit for “five years of historic accomplishments in achieving civil rights and social injustice.” Johnson also resented, and felt he would be embarrassed by, the Kerner report’s call for bold programmatic advances that the commissioners knew Congress, in the face of the massive commitment in Vietnam, would not approve. He refused to meet with the commission members and was slow to endorse their conclusions. But recognizing that the commission’s analysis and proposals were in general agreement with his own, Johnson eventually got over his disappointment. Along with the White House ghetto visits, the Kerner commission report was pivotal in persuading Johnson to respond to the riots by intensifying his efforts to expand civil rights programs.126 The president’s determination to continue the fight against racial injustice was strengthened by King’s assassination on April 4, 1968. Johnson was angered by King’s opposition to Vietnam, and his administration was badly weakened by the urban riots, which were reignited by the news of the civil rights leader’s death. Nevertheless, he seized the opportunity King’s death provided to regain the high ground of the resolute reformer. The president wrote an urgent note to congressional leaders calling on them to “renew for all Americans the great promise of opportunity and justice under the

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law” by enacting the open-­housing bill. This would be a fitting tribute to King, who had sought to extend the war against discrimination with a bat­ tle against housing segregation in Chicago. Just as the Johnson administra­ tion effectively wrapped Kennedy’s shroud around the 1964 Civil Rights Act, so it effectively translated national remorse over King’s assassination into an open-­housing bill, which Congress enacted on April 10. One final testament to the ambivalent collaboration of Johnson and King, the 1968 civil rights law prohibited discrimination concerning the sale, rental, and financing of housing based on race, religion, national origin, and sex.127 However, the enactment of a third major civil rights bill during the Johnson administration did not result from a rebinding of the fraught relationship between the president and the civil rights movement. Both the White House and activists were distracted and estranged by the Vietnam War. As the moderate leader of the NAACP, Roy Wilkins, lamented during the summer of 1967, the movement, increasingly under the sway of black power advocates, lost interest in segregation, even in the face of growing complaints of ghetto residents about housing discrimination. Eschewing the intrepid work of “shepherding legislation to passage,” its ascendant leaders—­the “shouters”—­he complained, “were interested in the much easier task of blasting away at LBJ.”128 Prior to King’s death, much of the hard work in Congress was done by two liberal senators—­Minnesota Democrat Walter Mondale, who replaced the legislature’s civil rights conscience, Hubert Humphrey; and Massachusetts Republican Edward Brooke, the upper chamber’s lone African American. Their efforts, and those of northern Republicans who feared a repeat of the electoral reprisals they suffered in 1964 as a result of Goldwater’s stand against civil rights, had succeeded in getting a cloture vote in March. But as George Marder wrote in the Chicago Daily Defender, an all-­out effort by the administration in the aftermath of King’s assassination gave the open-­housing bill the “final push” toward passage in the House.129 More broadly, as Gary Orfield has written, Johnson’s commitment to civil rights, confirmed by his desire to make the fair-­housing legislation a tribute to the “greatest black leader of the twentieth century,” paved the way for a bill that covered nine-­tenths of the housing market—­a notable achievement in the immensely contentious area of neighborhood segregation: “[F]air housing never would have become a serious legislative possibility if Johnson had not raised the issue in 1966. There would have been no Kerner Commission Report had not the president named the commission and set the stage for a broader view of the nation’s racial situation in his historic Howard University speech. As the country clearly began to turn away from federal action for

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racial justice, Johnson continued to press for more, even though his power was declining and his time was running out.”130 As occurred during the congressional maneuvers over the employment discrimination in the 1964 Civil Rights Act, the housing measure’s broad coverage was compromised by weak enforcement power at the insistence of the pivotal Senator Dirksen. The newly created Department of Housing and Urban Development would have to depend on an institutional alliance with federal courts to achieve meaningful progress. Nevertheless, Johnson, recalling as he signed the bill how pessimistic the response had been to his proposal two years earlier, viewed enactment of the legislation as a critical first step in efforts to tear down ghetto walls. “The proudest moments of my Presidency,” he added, “have been the times such as this when I have signed into law the promises of a century.”131 Regaining some of the lost momentum in his fight against racial injustice, Johnson submitted and Congress passed the most extensive and most expensive public-­housing legislation in American history. Moreover, Johnson continued to support the War on Poverty’s White House OEO, even though its sponsorship of CAPs, requiring “the maximum feasible participation of residents of the areas and groups involved,” was reportedly having a disruptive influence in many cities and drew bitter complaints from local party leaders.132 The president seethed privately about the “revolutionary” activity that some CAPs were fomenting, and his relations with War on Poverty director Sargent Shriver were strained. Nonetheless, encouraged by the ghetto reports of their valuable work in ameliorating the alienation of urban dwellers from American society and government—­work he witnessed firsthand during his visit to Philadelphia—­he never repudiated them publicly and continued to support federal funds for neighborhood organizations. This alienation had been a major theme of King’s address to the Eleventh Annual SCLC Convention, his final official message to the civil rights organization he had led to prominence. Seeking to respond to the rising militant voices preaching separation and revolution in the name of black power, he argued that nonviolent protest had to be joined to more concerted efforts to organize the strength of the movement into economic and political power—­to emancipate African Americans in the Jim Crow South and northern ghettos from “a life of voicelessness.”133 The War on Poverty’s CAP thereby was the Johnson administration’s best, frail hope that it could benefit from the transformative energy of a movement over which it was rapidly losing influence. As he faced the daunting task of running for reelection, Johnson became more reflective about how the reform aspirations he hoped to fulfill

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exceeded what any president could accomplish. Meeting with student leaders from eleven colleges at the White House, he remarked that his administration was doing all it could to find solutions to the urban problems afflicting the country; at the same time, he confessed, “We’ll have several bad summers before we can avert the deficiencies of centuries.” The growing anger of youthful protesting, he said wistfully, looked to the government “in a very unusual light as something that can perform miracles”; yet, he told the student leaders, “all we can guarantee is that you speak freely.”134

Conclusion: Political Failure and Enlightened Administration Johnson’s fraught but formative collaboration with the civil rights movement provides a leading example of how an ambitious president and social activists can form an alliance in the service of enduring reform. Just as important as Johnson’s reform leadership, and the prerogatives he was able to accrue, was the capacity of civil rights reformers to effectively mount multipronged pressure on Johnson and other officials, from litigation and lobbying to massive nonviolent civil disobedience and more militant disruptions. Although this fusion of presidential power to a movement for social justice was short lived, the fragile partnership made possible the most dramatic civil rights legislation since the Reconstruction era. Without the work of King and other civil rights leaders in mobilizing demonstrations that elicited the violent reaction of segregationists and aroused strong sympathy in the country, no civil rights revolution would have been possible. At the same time, without Johnson’s willingness to support, indeed, take advantage of, the opportunity that civil rights direct action provided, the landmarks laws of 1964, 1965, and 1968 might never have been enacted. Yet this singularly determined fusion of executive power to a social movement eventually imploded. As early as 1965, it became clear that Johnson’s effort to become a leader of the civil rights movement suffered from his attempt to manage all the other responsibilities that the modern presidency pulls in its train. Johnson’s decision to expand America’s involvement in Vietnam, in particular, stemmed in part from his firm belief that nothing could be accomplished unless certain received commitments were steadfastly affirmed. However, this view unwittingly confirmed the view of civil rights activists that the presidency ultimately could not be trusted to further their cause or to embody their moral vision. In the end, the Great Society revealed both the untapped potential for cooperation between the modern presidency and social movements and the inherent tensions between “high office” and insurgency that made such

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collaboration so difficult. Johnson’s announcement on March 31, 1968, that he would not seek or accept the nomination of his party for another term as president marked a failure to align himself and the powers of the modern executive with the carriers of a new politics, not only civil rights activists, but also consumer, environmental, and women’s rights advocates.135 The tasks of the modern presidency—­the domestic and international responsibilities that constrained the “steward of the public welfare”—­necessarily limited the extent to which Johnson could become a trusted leader of the social movements that arose during the 1960s. By 1968, Johnson, the self-­fashioned agent of a political transformation as fundamental as any in history, had become a hated symbol of the status quo, forced into retirement lest he con­ tribute further to the destruction of the liberal consensus. As he privately told Humphrey in the spring of 1968, “I could not be the rallying force to unite the country and meet the problems confronted by the nation . . . in the face of a contentious campaign and the negative attitudes towards [me] of the youth, Negroes, and academics.”136 Despite his estrangement from the civil rights movement, Johnson’s approval ratings among black Americans remained consistently high throughout his presidency, signaling an important partisan realignment.137 In effect, civil rights and other key social organizations rivaled (and eventually supplanted) labor as the core constituency of the Democratic Party, accelerating the transformation of regional voting patterns advanced by the 1964 election. Indeed, the reforms achieved during Johnson’s presidency secured an important role for civil rights activists in a transformed Democratic Party. So much was made clear by the delegate fights that took place at the 1968 Democratic convention. These battles were a sequel to the struggle over the seating of the MFDP at the 1964 convention, when as part of the compromise that resolved that controversy, Johnson supported a reform that would give the national party power to reject state delegations that carried on discriminatory practices. When the regular Mississippi Democratic Party failed to “comply either with the spirit or letter” of the 1964 convention’s call prohibiting racial discrim­ ination, an insurgent coalition calling itself the Loyal Democrats of Mississippi (LDM) challenged the regular state organization’s legitimacy before the credentials committee of the 1968 Democratic National Convention. The LDM, composed of twenty-­two whites and twenty-­two African Americans, included many members of the 1964 insurgency, including Fannie Lou Hamer, who returned four years later with the support of labor unions, teachers, and the NAACP, which began putting public pressure on the DNC to uphold “the national party mandate of 1964” prior to the start of the

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convention.138 Just as the MFDP’s claim was infused with moral passion by Hamer, so the LDM’s appeal was elevated by one of its key spokesmen, Charles Evers, brother of the slain civil rights leader Medgar Evers. The regular Democratic Party in Mississippi, he argued at the credentials committee’s hearings, “has defied the national party itself. This group not only keeps Negroes out of it but it also keeps open minded whites out.”139 The regular Mississippi Democrats, supported by southern delegations as well as DNC chairman John Bailey, sought to save their seats in another eleventh-­hour compromise. Like Johnson in 1964, Bailey’s support for the deal resulted from the warnings of other southern delegations that they would abandon the Democratic ticket if Mississippi regulars were not seated. But there would be no compromise this time. Fortified by the antidiscrimination rule that Johnson sanctioned in 1964, the credentials committee voted overwhelmingly (85–­9) to seat the biracial LDM.140 It was a verdict supported by the top two contenders for the party nomination: Humphrey, who had played a key role in resolving the MFDP controversy, and Senator Eugene McCarthy, the formidable antiwar candidate. Hamer, an official delegate at last, received a standing ovation from the convention as she took her seat.141 The action taken in the Mississippi case was, according to many civil rights activists, a “monumental victory” in the fight against the lingering effects of Jim Crow.142 As the Chicago Daily Defender editorialized, the Mississippi activists’ challenge to the regular state delegation rested not just on their adherence to the 1964 mandate but was also a “determinative test of the depth to which the national Democratic Party [was] willing to commit itself on the question of racial integration in the rank and file.”143 The Democrats had given a clear demonstration that their national party had a basic belief in racial equality and that, if an existing state party was not willing to abide by that belief, the convention was prepared to grant official status to a new state party that would live by it. Before the end of the Chicago meeting, the convention gave one more demonstration of this maxim. Pushed by the McCarthy supporters, the convention provided for the sharing of the Georgia vote by rival groups led by Atlanta state representative Julian Bond and the segregationist forces of Governor Lester Maddox, although most of the “regulars” rejected the settlement and walked out—­another sign of the ongoing transformation of partisanship instigated by the civil rights revolutions of the 1960s. The Democratic National Convention’s seating of two integrated southern delegations appeared to vindicate the politically oriented and nonviolent approach that characterized the initial alliance between the White House and civil rights leaders. Yet the triumph of the insurgents in Missis-

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sippi and Georgia was part of a larger national offensive against the regular party organizations and the modern executive office. Fueled by the radicalization of the civil rights movement and the Vietnam War, this assault fractured the Democratic Party and gave rise to a new form of politics that channeled many of the ideas but not the tactics of the black power movement. As one African American delegate from Maryland expressed this strategy in the wake of the clashes between police and antiwar demonstrators at the Democratic gathering in Chicago, civil rights activists had to bore from within. “People are no longer willing to turn the other cheek as they did with Dr. King. The only way to avoid violent confrontations with the existing structure is to take our battles to the main-­line. We must speak out through the electorate and elect those who, once in office, will confirm our rights.”144 John Lewis’s election to Congress in 1986 best revealed that this aspiration to join the disruptive potential of social movements and the mainstream electoral politics was not a chimera. The antiwar movement, which was so closely aligned with the civil rights insurgency, also played a critical part in this transformation of politics. In a mark of its influence, Johnson saw the mantle of reform leadership pass to the likes of Eugene McCarthy, whose pioneering grassroots organization drove the president from the field in 1968, and George McGovern, the Democratic nominee for president in 1972.145 The “McGovern Democrats” who took control of the Democratic Party after the fractious 1968 presidential contest followed the progressive tradition of scorning party organizations—­of desiring a direct relationship between presidential candidates and grassroots activists. In this respect, the expansion of presidential primaries and other changes in the nomination process initiated by the McGovern-­ Fraser reforms were the logical extension of the modern presidency and movement politics. But reformers rejected the concept of popular presidential leadership that prevailed during the Progressive and New Deal Eras.146 Viewing the president as the agent rather than the steward of the public welfare, new politics liberals embraced the general ideas current in the late 1960s that presidential politics and governance should be directed by social movements.147 This ideal represented a critical starting point for the joining of presidential leadership, social activism, and partisanship, which was further advanced by the collaboration between Ronald Reagan and the new Christian Right and came into full view during the presidencies of Barack Obama and Donald Trump. Assuming the leadership of an embattled Democratic Party, McGovern’s insurgent presidential campaign was an electoral disaster. Nevertheless, unlike the ignominious retreat from post–­Civil War reforms, the legislation

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conceived by the ephemeral alliance between Johnson and the civil rights movement led to the construction of a national administrative apparatus that had an enduring effect on American politics and governance. Whereas the postbellum Republicans denigrated executive administration, the 1964 and 1965 civil rights acts enlisted the president and key executive agencies in an ongoing effort to ban racial discrimination. The 1964 and 1965 civil rights reforms empowered the federal bureaucracy—­especially the Department of Justice, the Department of Health, Education, and Welfare, and the newly formed EEOC—­to assist the courts in creating parallel enforcement mechanisms for civil rights. These proved effective. For example, in four years the Johnson administration accomplished more desegregation in southern schools than the courts had in the previous fourteen. These developments were spurred by the rise of liberal advocacy groups, which signified that many social activists had come to embrace institutional tactics. The social movements of the 1960s spawned public interest groups during the 1970s, and these developed a close relationship with bureaucratic agencies, congressional committees, and the courts—­institutional partnerships that sustained and expanded regulatory protection of civil rights over the next four decades.148 Indeed, the “civil rights state” that arose from the ashes of the Johnson presidency implemented civil rights reforms in a manner that went well beyond the unfulfilled promises of the Civil War amendments and their explicit design to legislate a color-­blind nation.149 Attorney General Robert Kennedy expressed a broadly shared national sentiment in 1964 when he said, “I don’t think quotas are a good idea.”150 Yet as historians such as Hugh Davis Graham have chronicled, “new theories of compensatory justice and group rights” given prominent expression in Johnson’s Howard University address were deftly advanced by “new social regulators” in the EEOC.151 Despite the political undoing of the Great Society by decade’s end, the EEOC staff, aided by supporters in other executive agencies, the federal courts, and public interest groups, were able to expand the EEOC’s power far beyond the original constraints of  Title VII of the act. The text of Title VII explicitly sought to limit findings of discrimination by requiring evidence of intent. EEOC staffers argued that racial disparities in the composition of a labor force were ample proof of discrimination, whether intended or not. Seizing authority on its own accord, the EEOC collected data from tens of thousands of employers in order to analyze entire industries. Only a couple of years after Johnson left office, the federal courts deferred to EEOC guidelines, tossing aside Title VII’s original dictates in favor of an “effects based definition of discrimination” that went beyond the goal of equal treatment to that of equal results.152 In this way, the “quiet rev­

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olution” in national administration that had begun with Vice President Johnson’s contract-­compliance committee was expanded and advanced in the aftermath of  his tumultuous six years in the White House, a bureaucratic offensive that dismantled the compromise that Dirksen and moderate Republicans extracted in 1964. Similarly, as Richard Valelly has documented, an “extended Voting Rights Act” emerged from an institutional partnership between the Justice Department, the courts, and civil rights advocates. The alliance between bureaucratic discretion and legal activism expanded the 1965 statute from the commitment to free African Americans from discriminatory practices such as literacy tests to a more capacious program that promoted minority office holding. It also regulated non-­southern states and local jurisdictions that had discriminated against the voting rights not just of African Americans, but also of other minorities such as Hispanics and Native Americans. Finally, this alliance freed regulators and plaintiffs from having to demonstrate intentional discrimination in seeking remedies for low levels of minority representation and electoral participation.153 Court decisions and administrative action were also critical to the fate of the third of the great civil rights laws passed during the 1960s; however, progress on open housing lagged. The early history of the fair-­housing law suggested that, like the employment provisions of  Title VII, the compromise on enforcement that was necessary to overcome a Senate filibuster would be obviated by legal and administrative action. Most significantly, the Supreme Court decision Hills v. Gautreaux set an important precedent for suing local and federal housing authorities that fostered neighborhood segregation. The decision held that the long history of local and federal officials in building and administering substandard public housing was such a serious constitutional violation that it justified the sort of powerful remedy the courts had recently rejected in Milliken v. Bradley, a case that denied illegally segregated Detroit students access to suburban schools. In Gautreaux, involving a suit against the Chicago housing authority, the court acknowledged that segregated housing was the result of the dynamics of a metropolitan market. The remedy provided rent subsidies that allowed a household to pay for standard housing wherever the landlords accepted the voucher, including the suburbs. The court did not directly overrule Milliken: since new subsidized housing would be built by private companies, there was no need to sue suburban authorities. But as Gary Orfield concludes, the pathbreaking case “led to an extremely important experiment run by the nation’s largest fair housing organization,” which, as King learned, was “one of the most re­ sistant, most segregated housing markets.”154

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Yet the advance of such bold experimentation in fair housing was greatly impeded by the courts’ unfavorable decisions regarding “exclusionary zoning,” which involved civil rights litigators’ efforts to win judgments against suburban land-­use and building policies that prevented the development of affordable subsidized housing in areas of job growth and good public schools. One critical case, Village of Arlington Heights v. Metropolitan Housing Development Corp., required lawyers to prove that local officials intentionally discriminated in promulgating such zoning laws; showing that such restrictions resulted in segregated neighborhoods was not enough. The judicia­ ry’s halting approach to fair housing discouraged aggressive action by the Department of Housing and Urban Development, already compromised by weak legal authority and constraints that presidents after Johnson, especially Republicans, imposed on its budget and regulatory power. In truth, fearful of arousing bitter public reaction, neither party embraced efforts to reduce the racial segregation of residential neighborhoods.155 For the most part, Americans acknowledged that everyone should be able to eat, drink, and travel where they liked. They did not view the right to live and work where one wanted in the same absolute terms. Still, although the 1968 Civil Rights Act did not make much of a dent in housing segregation in those areas where racial enclaves had become deeply rooted at the time the law was passed, it led to a significant reduction of residential segregation in many cities.156 Furthermore, as we will discuss in chapter 7, the institutional partnership between federal administra­tors, courts, and fair-­housing advocates, although slow to form behind the fair-­ housing law, showed new signs of life during the second term of Barack Obama, America’s first African American president. The long unsteady march of the fair-­housing law through the institutions of the civil rights state was only the most dramatic example of the limits of “enlightened administration”—­of a movement that, having evolved from a formative to a militant force during the 1960s, embraced an institutional form of politics at the twilight of the Great Society. Court decisions and administrative action have been central to the emergence of a “policy state” since the Second World War.157 This is especially true of civil rights reforms, dedicated to closing the principal fault line of American politics, which have been governed by broad statutes and novel constitutional interpretations that have been subject to ongoing bureaucratic skirmishes and contentious litigation.158 These administrative and legal battles appeared to give institutional form to hard-­won victories achieved by Johnson and civil rights activists. At the same time, the securing of what Valelly has called a “second reconstruction” has tended to relegate civil rights activists to political isolation.

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Johnson paid dearly for the alienation of the social movements from the White House; just as surely, the civil rights movement and the other social protest movements it inspired paid a price for their rejection of presidential leadership. The 1960s unleashed new forces and new expectations that could not be quelled by the election of Richard Nixon. Indeed, it was the 1970s rather than the 1960s when affirmative action and many other civil rights measures became a real presence in American society. Yet even as they continued to look to the national government to solve the problems thrown up by an industrial—­and postindustrial—­order, the public interest groups that emerged during the 1970s, which evolved from the social movements of the 1960s, distrusted presidential leadership and bureaucratic agencies, and sought to protect social policy from unfriendly executive administration.159 Teaching Americans both to expect more from the government and to trust it less, the Great Society was the fulcrum on which decline of liberalism and the rise of conservatism tilted. Johnson’s willingness to embrace the civil rights movement and its reform agenda transcended conventional partisan strategy. Indeed, his wholehearted support of far-­reaching civil rights reform defied the careful distance that most presidents maintained vis-­à-­vis social movements. As the venerable African American newspaper, the Crisis, eulogized Johnson after his death in January 1973, “Never before had an American President manifested such compassion for those in need of understanding, sympathy and assistance—­not Abraham Lincoln, not Franklin Roosevelt, not completely Harry Truman.” Johnson did not succeed totally in obtaining his “great goal of human equality.” But he created “a public awareness of the affliction of racism, established certain legal barriers to curb its extension, and, above all, raised hope for its elimination.” Johnson thus should be remembered throughout time, the Crisis concluded, as the “Great Liberator, the White House champion of equal rights for all.”160 Yet Johnson’s unprecedented desire to ally himself directly with the forces of liberation ultimately contributed to the diminishment of the modern executive office as a vanguard of reform. In part, this followed from Johnson’s determination to achieve civil rights reform: race is an extremely contentious issue, and Johnson’s commitment to further progress in race relations was immensely controversial and politically dangerous. Just as important, the weakening of the modern presidency followed from Johnson’s attempt to wed civil rights reform and the Great Society; from his view, it was not enough to achieve just a better deal for those Americans who in Herbert Croly’s capacious phrase did not partake of the “promise of American life.” Johnson’s ambition to push the country toward the Great Society made it

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impossible for him to find a “symbolic point,” allowing his administration to form an alliance with the civil rights movement for a noble purpose and still uphold the modern executive office’s obligation to foster domestic calm and international security. As we shall see in chapter 6, the fallout from the collapse of the relationship between Johnson and the civil rights movement—­dramatized by riots in almost every major American city during the summers of 1966 and 1967—­set the stage for the formation of an executive-­insurgency alliance that spurred a national conservative offensive. Ronald Reagan’s political ca­ reer took off in 1966, with his election as governor of California, in a cam­ paign that condemned the excesses of the Great Society. A decade and a half later, like Johnson, he commanded a strong and active presidency that reshaped national law and policy commitments, but he sought to deploy modern executive power to achieve conservative objectives. Just as Johnson facilitated the emergence of civil rights groups as the core constituency of the Democratic Party, so the Reagan Revolution made the Christian Right a dominant constituency of the Republican Party. Reagan’s contribution to the development of a decidedly right-­of-­center modern Republican Party, pledged to advance issues of critical importance to religious conservatives, made the GOP an attractive venue for the forging of a strong bond between the White House and Christian Right. The fact that Christian conservatives were less suspicious of executive power than civil rights activists had been might have diminished their reformist potential—­made the movement vulnerable, in the terms of the conceptual framework we developed in chapter 1, to co-­optation. Yet these religious movement activists joined with Reagan in advancing a more centralized and programmatic party system that resulted in a polarizing contest between conservatives and liberals for control of the modern executive office.

Five

Protestant Rearguard: Presidents, Christian Conservatives, and the Modern State A glossy booklet arrived in the mailboxes of conservative evangelical ministers and lay leaders in late 1975. On its front cover was a stirring photograph of the White House, and on the second page was a darker version of the same image with a large, dramatic crack down the middle and text calling the faithful to action: “For such a time as this . . . calling evangelical Christians to a more active role in civic affairs. Now that scandal has touched the White House, America has truly come to the end of innocence. America needs honest leadership.”1 The booklet was mass produced and distributed by the Christian Freedom Foundation (CFF), an organization created in 1951 by conservative clergyman Norman Vincent Peale and retired businessman Howard Kershner to preach the virtues of Christian libertarianism. The CFF was originally bankrolled by an oil tycoon who, like other pro-­business conservatives, generously supported the formation of right-­wing Protestant organizations in opposition to liberal governance.2 Under Kershner’s leadership, the CFF published a widely distributed journal, Christian Economics, whose masthead proclaimed, “We stand for free enterprise—­the economic system with the least amount of Government and the greatest amount of Christianity.”3 A quarter century later, new CFF leadership warned that presidential dishonesty and illegality were symptomatic of a larger moral crisis in the United States. “The end of self-­restraint is paving the way to a breakdown of order itself,” it proclaimed. “America needs to believe in something.”4 In this 1970s publicity campaign targeting evangelical conservatives, the CFF referenced a host of cultural challenges—­such as new government regulations on private religious schools, homosexuality, pornography, and the Equal Rights Amendment (ERA)—­that signaled an untenable shift: “Our country was established on a certain harmony of values preserved by our Christian heritage. . . . But now the value consensus is disappearing.” More

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than a “culture war,” CFF leaders underscored that they were “engaged in a battle” with the “abuses and arbitrary excesses” of a secular government and ever-­present communist threat, one in which “ ‘rule by bureaucracy’ has made Uncle Sam a dominant factor in our lives.” These conditions, accentuated by “Watergate’s shattering blow to public confidence,” made it impossible “for Christians to be secluded from the mainstream of human events, content to remain cloistered in smug fellowships.” The time had come, the CFF declared, to call on the nation and its citizens to repent. “This is not a time for either panic or lethargy. It is a time . . . for brave commitments and vigorous action motivated by the love of Jesus Christ.” In the months that followed, the CFF’s energetic national field director, Ed McAteer, a former Colgate-­Palmolive salesman and devout Baptist, developed an impressive grassroots roster of evangelical activists ready to join the fight. As we shall see, he would also be instrumental in making a pivotal connection between an entrepreneurial group of Washington-­based conservative operatives and the nation’s most influential televangelists. The CFF’s post-­Watergate appeal encapsulates some of the most impor­ tant features of the Christian Right’s rise to prominence and power in American politics during the late twentieth century, a development often inadequately understood by many contemporary observers. As the progeny of Kershner’s Christian libertarian efforts of the 1950s, McAteer’s modernized CFF hints at the extent to which the nation’s religious Right was engaged in a political mobilization that did not spring fresh from the 1970s. Like the long civil rights movement, the Christian Right and its relationship with the American presidency reflects long-­term processes of development that stretch across the century. At the same time, the CFF’s call for evangelicals in the mid-­1970s to end their seclusion in “smug fellowships” highlights the large number of Christian fundamentalists and other evangelicals who spurned political participation for decades—­and whose increasing mobilization in the 1976, 1978, and 1980 elections ushered in the Reagan Revolution. It also offers a glimpse of the movement’s multipronged agenda for protecting families, retrenching the welfare state, promoting free enterprise, and checking Soviet aggression, a disparate set of goals that fostered deep ambivalence about limiting or expanding the role of the national state. As much as the new Christian Right movement that emerged in the late 1970s eventually made its presence felt in every branch and at all levels of US government, it clearly devoted special attention to its relationship with modern presidents and to the possibilities of enlisting executive power in service of its programmatic aims. Whereas civil rights leaders and activists maintained a persistent suspicion of, if not outright antagonism toward, oc-

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cupants of the Oval Office, their conservative evangelical counterparts were far less hostile to presidential leadership and power. Indeed, at least early on, more than a few key conservative evangelical leaders could be mollified by presidential access and recognition. This contrast in how Christian Right and civil rights activists approached the presidency is far from the only revealing difference between a long conservative movement of the American political right and its progressive counterparts on the left. Even when filtered through the more tempered appeals of Martin Luther King and the Southern Christian Leadership Conference (SCLC), the civil rights movement condemned unrestrained capitalism for producing savage poverty, and questioned military engagements like Vietnam for devastating non-­Western people of color. Their critique of modern America was rooted in radical messages of the New Testament concerning wealth, justice, and nonviolence—­a progressive religiosity closely aligned with Social Gospelers of the Progressive Era. By contrast, political activists of the Christian Right spent most of the twentieth century embracing a “prosperity Gospel” of hard work and individual reward while condemning the unholy socialism of New Deal welfare programs. They also threw their weight wholeheartedly behind US war efforts and “100% Americanism” at home, including zealous support of the federal government’s crusade against godless communists throughout the Cold War. While abolitionist firebrands like William Lloyd Garrison openly burned the US Constitution, most leaders of the Christian Right wrapped themselves and their movement in the American flag—­devotion to God and Country was indivisible. In the South, white evangelical conservatives also resisted the dismantling of Jim Crow, denounced the “troublemaking” of African American preachers like King and his followers, and established private religious schools in the 1960s that critics called “segregation academies” because they excluded nonwhite students. Predictably, this ideological and theological divide often nurtured contrasting political resources, strategies, and tactics. Most white conservative evangelicals lived in poverty throughout the twentieth century, and many felt politically and socially marginalized in the United States from the 1920s to the 1970s. Yet compared to the African American activists who braved government violence and vigilante terror to demand basic civil rights, the white evangelicals of the Christian Right possessed powers and privileges that eluded nonwhite protesters. Neither the grassroots foot soldiers nor the leadership of the Christian Right faced the prospect of murder, beatings, fire hoses, or police dogs that confronted their African American counterparts marching for civil rights.

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The Christian Right was also quite different from the civil rights movement in the strategy and tactics it deployed. It did not begin as a formidable movement; as noted in chapter 1, broader temporal horizons often help us discern a trajectory of long insurgencies from marginal and militant incarnations to formative and institutionalized movements. The Christian Right over time developed significant conventional political capacities and plans in terms of voter mobilization, fund-­raising, political advertising, media campaigns, lobbying, and litigation. In part, the emergence of this mainstream political clout for the Christian Right was nurtured by a partnership of conservative evangelical leaders and New Right political professionals in the late 1970s. But this strategy also reflected the ideological proclivities described above. This is not to say that the Christian conservative movement was incapable of employing disruptive tactics or that it was immune from violent extremes, as emerged in 1970s battle over school textbooks in West Virginia or Operation Rescue’s later assault on abortion clinics. In general, however, the Christian Right did not develop or deploy the breadth of disruptive tactics that proved so crucial to the civil rights movement. Because of these ideological and tactical qualities, twentieth-­century pres­ idents generally were not rattled by the insurgency efforts of the Christian Right in the same way as they were by the civil rights movement. In the face of the strong anti-­imperialist movement that undermined his support among Progressive reformers, Woodrow Wilson looked to early conservative religious leaders like Billy Sunday to infuse America’s entry into World War I with moral fervor. In contrast, presidents like Harry Truman considered conservative evangelical actors in the public square to be irritating and fumed over what he considered to be their theological hypocrisy. Still others, like Dwight Eisenhower, found spiritual affinity with conservative evangelical leaders like Billy Graham, and embraced efforts to weave faith in general—­and Christian nationhood in particular—­into prominent rituals, symbols, and language of the federal government. Yet although nearly all modern presidential campaigns and administrations recognized the potential electoral importance of conservative Christian activists, none perceived their insurgency as a major threat to the nation’s social, economic, and political order. Indeed, after the notorious Scopes trial, which subjected religious conservatives to nationwide scorn and derision, many evangelicals retreated from the political stage. Nevertheless, prominent Christian libertarians with the backing of conservative business leaders declared war on both the New Deal state and the powerful presidential office that built it. This anti–­New Deal activism was an important forerunner to the Christian

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Right of the 1970s and 1980s that would form an important partnership with conservative strategists and the Reagan White House. Whereas massive nonviolent civil disobedience and other disruptive capacities of the civil rights movement could elicit both quiet and overt forms of executive repression or compel presidents to take action on its behalf, the Christian Right almost invariably advanced its cause through conventional political means that involved mobilizing its faithful conservative base in local, state, and national struggles. Their insurgency was largely perceived by modern presidents to be electoral and ideological, channeled through mainstream practices and institutions of American politics. This meant that the conflicts and rivalries between the White House and the Christian Right often played out in conventional partisan and political venues rather than in the streets. As we shall see, although white evangelical activists felt acutely threatened by government intrusions in their affairs in the 1970s, conservative Christian leaders also were far less wary of executive power than African American civil rights reformers, and thereby more susceptible to political co-­optation in the Reagan years. For most of the twentieth century, however, the political activism and development of the Christian Right elicited varying levels of presidential indifference and collaboration. In short, presidents’ “mating dance” with the conservative evangelical movement was markedly different from that with the civil rights movement. Yet the impact of their uneasy partnership would prove no less transformative for American politics.

Confrontation and Seclusion: Christian Conservatives of the Early Twentieth Century The origins of the Christian Right in the United States can be traced back to the Progressive Era, a time when conservative Protestants were unsettled by significant social and economic upheavals, including urbanization, the growing influence of science and new technologies, mass immigration, and expanding non-­Protestant populations.5 In fact, these dislocations elicited divergent responses from Protestant liberals and conservatives, accentuating differences between largely northern mainline denominations and southern evangelicalism. On the left, Social Gospel activists—­led by activist clergy and theologians like Walter Rauschenbusch of Hell’s Kitchen in New York and settlement reformers like Jane Addams of Hull-­House in Chicago—­ fervently believed in applying Christian ethics to perceived crises of social

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justice.6 Reflecting the disquiet of his generation, Rauschenbusch wrote in his influential Christianity and Social Crisis (1907) that the United States “is passing through a social revolution unparalleled in history for scope and power.”7 In this context, he proclaimed, “the essential purpose of  Christianity” is to “transform human society into the kingdom of God,” a socially active faith that was nothing short of “a great revolutionary movement pledged to change the ‘world-­as-­it-­is’ into the ‘world-­as-­it-­ought-­to-­be.’  ”8 Believing that salvation relied upon both piety and good works, Social Gospelers joined other Progressives in their pursuit of social reform aimed at ameliorating poverty, child labor, slums, long workdays, inadequate health care, political corruption, crime, poor schools, and other collective problems. By contrast, conservative evangelicals of this period concentrated their energies on individual redemption, rejecting as chimerical the Social Gospel aspiration of achieving social justice. Whereas postmillennialism (adhered to by most American Protestants associated with reform movements, including abolitionism) held that Jesus’s Second Coming relied upon “transforming the life on earth into the harmony of heaven,” conservative evangelicals embraced the premillennial belief that the world was irredeemable and transitory. “Evangelicals’ adoption of dispensational premillennialism . . . with its assurance that Jesus would return at any moment, effectively absolved them from the task of social reform,” Randall Balmer notes. “It was bet­ter to hunker down, seek the regeneration of other individuals, and scru­tinize your own spiritual affairs in preparation for the rapture.”9 Consequently, they focused on evangelism and missionary work to save individual souls. Science and modernist scriptural interpretations thereby separated two key streams of US Protestantism. While mainline Protestant denominations with rationalistic and liturgical traditions increasingly reconciled their religious beliefs with new scientific findings and accommodated modernist questions about biblical authorship, evangelicals vigorously rejected Darwinian theories of evolution and unflinchingly defended the inerrancy of the Scriptures.10 In the early twentieth century, conservative evangelical leaders targeted their political efforts on waging a furious battle against what they perceived to be the most menacing secular threats to their religious beliefs and way of life. Billy Sunday, a born-­again former National League baseball player, became the most prominent and celebrated evangelist of this era, heard in person by hundreds of thousands of Americans in tent revivals around the country. A die-­hard conservative and lifelong Republican, he preached the virtues of limited government, individual self-­reliance, and free enterprise. Lampooning Social Gospel as “godless social service nonsense,” Sunday en-

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joyed friendships with John D. Rockefeller, J. P. Morgan, Marshall Field, and Herbert Hoover. Despite his endorsement of laissez-­faire capitalism and his warm acceptance among the nation’s pro-­business establishment, Sunday was anything but sedate behind the pulpit. Indeed, he viciously attacked those whom he viewed as enemies of conservative Protestant America: modernist theologians, evolution scientists, Catholic and Jewish immigrants, political radicals, and saloonkeepers.11 His defense of fundamentalist doctrines also translated into a patriotic devotion to his country. Woodrow Wilson sought tirelessly but unsuccessfully to distance himself from the nascent civil rights movement of the early twentieth century; indeed, during the “Great War” he sought the support of leaders like W. E. B. Du Bois to unify the country in a controversial struggle. At the other end of the US ideological spectrum, Wilson also sought the help of Sunday to imbue the war—­a struggle the president framed as a crusade to make the “world safe for democracy”—­with religious fervor. During the war, at Wilson’s behest, Sunday joined Will Rogers in large “Wake Up America” rallies, at which he condemned Germans and those who criticized the president, helped sell $100 million of Liberty Bonds, and called on able-­bodied men to join the armed forces. Yet Sunday focused his talents and beliefs most frequently on denouncing Progressive reformers and their allies in the Social Gospel movement. At the peak of his popularity in the 1910s and 1920s, Sunday lashed out against “Godless” forces at home and abroad, reflecting the indignation of many American conservative evangelicals.12 Such fundamentalism led numerous conservative Christian activists to participate in “voluntary organizations” that roiled a fractious civil society. For example, one response to the nation’s demographic transformations and the burgeoning power of cities was the massive growth of the Ku Klux Klan in the 1920s, which in its second incarnation positioned itself as a protector of traditional Protestant values. Broadening their target of hate beyond African Americans, they railed against Catholics, Jews, and foreigners as well as other enemies of rural agrarian virtues, including urban elites, intellectuals, and purveyors of alcohol and motion pictures. Evangelical ministers figured prominently in the leadership of this secret organization, and white evangelical Protestants outnumbered other groups among the estimated three to eight million Americans who joined the movement. The Klan’s “Invisible Empire” proved to be influential in national politics. In 1924, the Klan helped elect dozens of US senators and House members, dominated state and local politics in many regions of the country, and played a pivotal role in blocking the Democratic presidential nomination of Al Smith, the Catholic New York governor, at the 1924 Democratic convention.13

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Two other causes animated conservative evangelicals in their political mobilization against secular forces in the early twentieth century: banning the sale of alcohol and prohibiting the teaching of evolution in schools. The successful crusade against alcohol, of course, was short lived. By the close of the 1920s, the Eighteenth Amendment was under full-­scale attack as a failed experiment that hurt the economy, was ineffectively enforced, and enabled organized crime to flourish. Franklin Roosevelt and the Democrats campaigned in 1932 to sweep Prohibition from the Constitution and soon after entering office in 1933 enacted legislation that authorized the manufacture and sale of beer; nine months later the Twenty-­First Amendment repealed Prohibition.14 The battle against teaching evolution in public schools further estranged conservative evangelicals from the larger culture. When Charles Darwin’s theory of biological evolution first appeared in the nineteenth century, it was widely denounced by Christian leaders across denominations as incompatible with biblical teachings of creation. By the turn of the century, however, mainline denominations increasingly accepted evolutionary theory as consistent with their religious beliefs. Yet for conservative evangelicals, faith in the inerrancy of the Scriptures meant that Darwin’s theory of evolution was heretical. During the early 1920s, Christian fundamentalists won passage of laws banning the teaching of evolution in a handful of southern states. One of these laws, Tennessee’s Butler Act, was famously put to the test when the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) and civic leaders in the town of Dayton found a young high school teacher, John T. Scopes, to challenge its constitutionality. The show trial that ensued pitted the renowned liberal trial attorney Clarence Darrow for Scopes and the ACLU against populist champion William Jennings Bryan, and ended in Scopes’s conviction (later reversed by the state supreme court). But the real contest was waged in the broader court of public opinion, with the trial aired live to large radio audiences and vividly reported by journalists like the Baltimore Sun’s acerbic H. L. Mencken. In his efforts to defend the inerrancy of the Bible, Bryan stumbled badly as Darrow’s withering arguments and Mencken’s satirical reporting humiliated evangelicals and signaled increased public faith in scientific progress. By 1929, most legislation prohibiting evolution being taught in public schools and universities was repealed.15 Meanwhile, Billy Sunday, once the darling of influential leaders and huge crowds nationwide, struggled to find an audience in the 1930s for his evangelical theatrics.16 For years after the Scopes trial and Prohibition’s demise, many evangelical Protestants largely retreated from the political sphere into a separate subculture of churches and sectarian educational and social institutions.17

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As they turned inward, conservative fundamentalists and evangelicals established independent congregations, denominations, colleges, seminaries, missionary efforts, publications, and radio programs. Conservative clergy responded to what they saw as the liberal apostasy of mainline Protestant denominations by forming organizations like the fundamentalist American Council of Christian Churches and the less absolutist National Association of Evangelicals. Yet these evangelical leaders generally steered clear of politics, and most of their followers either voted Democratic or not at all.18 Although many on the Christian Right entered something of a political wilderness after the Scopes trial, their feverish institution building in this pe­ riod created a relatively strong and autonomous infrastructure that guarded the purity of their religious beliefs and helped insulate their subculture from what they perceived as a doomed larger society.19

In the Shadow of the New Deal: An Evangelical-­Business Alliance against the State At the same time as most conservative evangelicals retreated from the political realm, Christian traditions and teachings remained center stage throughout Franklin Roosevelt’s long tenure in the White House. Close advisers observed that Roosevelt regularly read both the Bible and the Book of Common Prayer, and that his religious faith served as an important anchor for his leadership.20 Far more than a private matter, Roosevelt often framed his political struggles and programmatic aspirations in explicitly religious terms. In his first inaugural address, he memorably invoked Matthew’s story of Jesus driving money changers from the temple when he indicted the “practices of unscrupulous money changers”—­craven bankers, stock traders, and other businessmen—­for the tolls of the Great Depression. It was time, Roosevelt added, to restore “the temple of our civilization” to “ancient truths,” including the lesson that “our true destiny is not to be ministered unto but to minister to ourselves and to our fellow man.”21 The scriptural references and overtones of his first inaugural proved to be recurrent features of Roosevelt’s rhetorical presidency. As James MacGregor Burns observes, Roosevelt was exceptional among modern US politicians for the extent to which he delivered “speeches that were essentially sermons rather than statements of policy.”22 As Ronald Isetti adds, few presidents “employed biblical symbols, religious language, and moral injunctions in their public addresses more often than Roosevelt did—­and arguably none more effectively or eloquently.”23 However, this deft use of religious images, stories, references, and principles was not merely a rhetorical device

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designed to sell the New Deal agenda. As James Morone contends, both Roosevelt’s political speech and policy initiatives were deeply infused with a “1930s Social Gospel”—­one that “hailed religion as another foundation for social justice, another call to communal duty.”24 The Social Gospel took a major hit during the first Red Scare; New Deal reformers gave new life to the notion that a faithful nation must lift up the weak and redeem sinful social and economic institutions. As Roosevelt himself put it to a group of Protestant missionaries who visited him at the White House, “We call what we have been doing ‘human security’ and ‘social justice.’ In the last analysis all of those terms can be described by one word, and that is ‘Christianity.’ ”25 Neither US corporate leaders nor conservative Protestant clergy easily endured Roosevelt’s sermons on “human security” and collective obligation. His policy triumphs—­from economic regulations to an unprecedented welfare state—­were equally bitter pills to swallow. As we saw in chapter 3, civil rights activists viewed the modern executive office, consolidated under Roosevelt’s auspices, as a reluctant but potentially powerful ally in their battle for racial justice. For key Christian Right leaders, however, Roosevelt’s presidency was a dangerous enemy to traditional government, social morality, and faith. It is often assumed that after the Scopes trial, defeated Christian conservatives walled themselves away from American politics until the 1970s. In truth, however, while most conservative evangelicals eschewed the political realm and the dominant culture for decades, an important segment of the Christian Right did not. Michael Janson has identified several conservative evangelical organizations, such as the National Council for Christian Leadership (NCCL) and the National Association of Evangelicals, that viewed the 1930s as a period of spiritual decline because the national state provided “political and economic solutions” to problems of individual faith and responsibility. The NCCL could trace its origins to collaboration between conservative Seattle pastor Abraham Vereide and business leaders to tamp down labor unrest and promote economic self-­reliance. The New Deal spurred “a new set of religious-­political organizations,” Michael Janson notes, “that from the outset were deeply skeptical, if not hostile, to the idea of the welfare state . . . and they believed that bringing America back to God would ameliorate the demands for state expansion.”26 Alan Lichtman similarly points to new, anti–­New Deal organizations like the Church League of America, founded in 1937 by conservative Protestant and business leaders. With a membership topping one hundred thousand, the league recruited conservative pastors and lay leaders to help resist an expanding welfare state. As the Church League proclaimed, Christian faith “elevates and dignifies human personality in contrast to the so-­called ‘Collectivist’ or Marxian doctrines.”27

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Fundamentalists also attacked the New Deal in the 1930s; groups like the Defenders of the Christian Faith cast Roosevelt as the Antichrist and blended Christian doctrines with quasi-­fascist and anti-­Semitic positions.28 In 1937, Gerald L. K. Smith, a former fundamentalist preacher, formed the Committee of One Million to defend “Christian Americanism” from the “Jewish Communism” that he blamed on Roosevelt. Smith had been a lieu­ tenant to the infamously demagogic Louisiana governor Huey P. Long, and ran his Share Our Wealth organization. After Long’s assassination in 1935, Smith distanced himself from economic populism but kept the Share Our Wealth mailing list, ultimately drawing two million followers to his anti–­New Deal Committee of One Million, including wealthy supporters like Henry Ford. In less extreme terms, prominent Baptist pastor John Rice preached the evils of the New Deal and the virtues of untethered capitalism to large audiences in countless sermons, popular books, and his mass-­ circulation magazine, The Sword and the Lord.29 Conservative Protestant opposition to the New Deal regime also was advanced by a new generation of evangelists and opinion leaders funded generously by economic elites and major business associations like the US Chamber of Commerce and the National Association of Manufacturers (NAM). After years of serving as the chief villains (“economic royalists”) of Roosevelt’s sermons and enduring deep public scorn, business elites at NAM concluded that “the only antidote is a revival of American patriotism and religious faith.”30 Along with hiring public relations firms, the captains of America’s corporate and financial world invested in conservative Protestant evangelists who championed free enterprise, individual autonomy, and limited government. Together during the late 1930s and 1940s they breathed life into a potent ideology of Christian libertarianism.31 “Decades before Eisenhower’s inaugural prayers,” historian Kevin Kruse notes, “corporate titans enlisted conservative clergymen in an effort to promote new political arguments embodied in the phrase ‘freedom under God.’ This new ideology was designed to defeat the state power its architects feared most—­not the Soviet regime in Moscow, but Franklin D. Roosevelt’s New Deal administration in Washington.”32 To that end, Christian libertarian organizations like the Reverend Vereide’s City Chapel in Seattle (later the NCCL) brought together conservative clergy and business leaders in the late 1930s to counteract massive strikes throughout Seattle. Vereide formed City Chapel after shifting his ministry from the “down and out” to the “up and out”—­to evangelize those who he said God entrusted with wealth and power and who were best positioned to save the nation from socialism. Adamantly opposed to Roosevelt and the

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New Deal, Vereide claimed the less fortunate were best served by private charity and individual self-­reliance. As his ministry grew, Vereide organized Seattle’s business and political worlds into “prayer cells” and “breakfast groups.” During exceptional labor strife in 1936, Vereide’s movement held a retreat at which Arthur Langlie, a conservative lawyer and member of Seattle’s anti-­labor New Order of Cincinnatus, proclaimed that he had been called by God to run for mayor. Vereide and City Chapel members strongly backed Langlie’s campaigns, which failed in 1936 but succeeded in 1938 when unions split between rival candidates. When Langlie became Washington governor two years later, Vereide hailed him as “the spearhead of a return to an American way of life.”33 Another prophet of Christian libertarianism, California Congregational minister James Fifield, Jr., cofounded an organization, Spiritual Mobilization, to counteract both the collectivism of the New Deal and progressive ecumenical bodies like the Federal Council of Churches. Fifield arrived in Los Angeles in 1935 to take the helm of the city’s indebted and struggling First Congregational Church. During the Depression years, the self-­assured young preacher dramatically expanded his church’s programs and staff, and initiated five new radio programs. A forebear of the contemporary “prosperity gospel,”34 Fifield led a Los Angeles church that attracted the city’s wealthy and influential, who welcomed his message that “their worldly success was a sign of God’s blessings.” Indeed, his church sometimes infused its theological claims with social Darwinism, challenging social policies aimed at “supporting and upbuilding the weak, whom nature would destroy.”35 After decades of preaching the gospel of free enterprise, Spiritual Mobilization in the 1950s emphasized “the Christian’s political responsibility” to mobilize against a political left and its “principles of the anti-­Christ.”36 As noted at the outset of this chapter, the CFF was another organization that promoted Christian libertarianism, funded by Sun Oil president J. Howard Pew and shepherded by Peale and Kershner. Pew was vexed by Republicans’ failure to win the White House in 1948, and the CFF was one of several initiatives that he bankrolled in reaction. One of CFF’s major activities was the publication of Christian Economics, a regular journal distributed to roughly a quarter-­million Protestant ministers in the 1950s. A common refrain within the pages of this journal was “the cold truth” that “Socialism—­Welfare Statism—­[was] a reversal of God’s plan for man.” Kershner regularly juxtaposed “Trusted Money versus Keynesian Money,” “self-­reliance versus the false hope of collective security,” and “the supremacy of God versus the supremacy of the state.” During the Progressive Era, Rauschenbusch declared that “the principles of Jesus Christ” called the na-

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tion’s faithful to build a state and society that reflected “an irrepressible hunger for justice and a belief in the rights of the poor.” Kershner urged clergy nationwide to turn this logic on its head: “State aid means forcibly taking wealth from some and distributing it to others. . . . ‘State charity’ motivated by covetousness and the desire to obtain votes is to fulfill the Scripture, ‘My House Shall be Called the House of Prayer; But Ye Have Made it a Den of  Thieves.’ ”37 Civil rights activists viewed the modern executive power consolidated by Roosevelt and Truman as a critical, although sometimes evasive, ally in this quest for racial justice; Fifield and Spiritual Mobilization viewed the growing authority of the White House as the enemy of rugged individualism. Urged on by prominent conservatives like former president Herbert Hoover, Fifield warned his followers in sermons, leaflets, and other publications that “the totalitarian trends of the New Deal” endangered capitalism, constitutional democracy, and Christian ideals.38 Protestant clergy, he argued, were particularly obligated to preach against the evils of Roosevelt’s mastery of the US polity. “We ministers have special opportunities and special responsibilities in these critical days,” insisted Fifield in one of Spiritual Mobilization’s publicity materials. “America’s movement toward dictatorship has already eliminated checks and balances in its concentration of powers in our chief executives.”39

Billy Graham, the Presidency, and National Revival Not all leaders of the Christian Right were threatened by the unprecedented attention and power commanded by the White House during the New Deal, before and after the Second World War, and their aftermath. To a magnetic young preacher from North Carolina who drew staggering crowds to revival meetings across the country, the modern presidency—­as the vanguard of America’s struggle to contain communism—­held special allure as a means of redeeming the nation and the world. Billy Graham set his sights on influencing and ministering to presidents early in his career as an evangelist. Bucking the fundamentalist traditions of his upbringing in favor of a more inclusive evangelical message, Graham made his first major splash on the national stage as a charismatic preacher who filled tents each night at revivals from Los Angeles to Boston.40 In contrast to the political firebrands of the abolitionist and civil rights movements, Graham preached about themes that made him a darling of media moguls, business leaders, and conservative politicians: the need for individual redemption, the evils of communism, and the superiority of free enterprise.41 “Communism . . .

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has decided against God, against Christ, against the Bible, and against all religion,” Graham proclaimed from the pulpit. “Communism is a religion that is inspired, directed, and motivated by the Devil himself who has declared war against Almighty God.”42 He also reinforced Christian libertarian ideals, preaching about “the rugged individualism that Christ brought” and imagining a Garden of Eden with “no union dues, no labor leaders, no snakes, no disease.”43 Graham’s message resonated with William Randolph Hearst, who stood atop the nation’s largest newspaper chain. Hearst ordered his editors to “puff Graham,” leading to positive front-­page features on the evangelist in newspapers nationwide. During Graham’s South Carolina crusade, Governor Strom Thurmond insisted he stay at the governor’s mansion and address the state legislature. Thurmond also set up a meeting between Graham and publisher Henry Luce, who hyped the evangelist’s work in the pages of  Time and Life magazines. In addition to media attention and ties to conser­va­ tive political luminaries like Thurmond, Graham’s ministry also won generous financial support from wealthy and influential figures like Texas oilman Sid Richardson. Fittingly for someone tagged “the Big Business evangelist,” Graham adopted a business model in 1950 by incorporating the Billy Graham Evangelical Association and creating a board of directors. He also exploited new communications technologies in radio and television programming; by the early 1950s, Graham’s preaching had been heard by millions of Americans.44 Although he publicly distanced himself from partisan plans for political action, Graham yearned early on to have his message influence powerful politicians in both parties. However, first and foremost, he wanted to make his spiritual presence felt at the White House. Soon after he gained national publicity for successful revival events in 1949 and 1950, Graham lobbied hard to meet with President Truman. As “God’s choice for this great office,” he wrote Truman, the president “could call America to her knees in a day of prayer and repentance.”45 Truman was deeply faithful, but the heir to the New Deal state had little patience for “evangelists ranting and raving and carrying on.”46 After being rebuffed repeatedly by the White House, Graham continued to seek a meeting with the president. As he told journalists, the country was hungry for spiritual renewal, and his crusade would get a huge boost if he were able “to get President Truman’s ear for thirty minutes.”47 Thanks to pressure from congressional allies, Graham finally got twenty minutes to meet with Truman in July 1950. The meeting was a debacle. Arriving with three associates in flamboyant attire (hand-­painted ties, white suede shoes,

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colorful socks, and suits that Time magazine described as “pistachio-­green”), Graham later noted that “the chief executive of our nation must have thought he was receiving a vaudeville team.” The brief discussion that followed was cordial, but the president was clearly uncomfortable when Graham put his arm around him for a prayer that was punctuated by the evangelist’s associates exclaiming “Amen” and “Do it, Lord!” As Graham emerged from the meeting, reporters peppered him with questions. “I told them everything I could remember,” he recalls. The press corps then persuaded Graham and his associates to kneel in prayer on the White House lawn for photos.48 Truman was outraged, believing Graham had used him for a publicity stunt. In 1952, when Graham packed an armory every night during a celebrated five-­week crusade in Washington, DC, federal lawmakers flocked to his services and passed legislation permitting him to hold an unprecedented religious service on the Capitol steps. Yet Truman declined all invitations to attend services, and adamantly refused to receive Graham again at the White House. “He’s one of the counterfeits,” the president fumed. “All he’s interested in is getting his name in the paper.”49 Graham forged a very different relationship with Truman’s successor. Oil tycoon Sid Richardson arranged for the evangelist to meet General Dwight Eisenhower at his Paris offices soon after Graham’s Washington crusade in 1952, initiating an enduring connection between the two men. Eisenhower shared Graham’s belief that the nation was in need of redemption, and welcomed using his presidential role to advance this cause. “I think one of the reasons I was elected was to help lead this country spiritually,” he told Graham after his election. “We need a spiritual renewal.”50 Eisenhower became the first president baptized in office, kept a bible that Graham gave him next to his bedside, and met numerous times with the preacher for spiritual guidance. He also made nondenominational religiosity a fixture of modern American government, from inaugural prayers and the National Prayer Breakfast to the invocation of God in the Pledge of Allegiance and the adoption of “In God We Trust” as the new national motto. As Kruse observes of the Eisenhower years, “piety and patriotism became one and the same, love of God and love of country conflated to the core.”51 Graham also quietly assisted the president on practical political matters, such as working with his speechwriters to incorporate scriptural references in his 1952 and 1956 campaign rhetoric. His collaboration with the White House on civil rights, however, was anything but low-­key. Following the landmark Brown ruling, Eisenhower asked Graham for his help in “promoting both tolerance and progress in our race relations problems.”52 Graham agreed “the Church must take a place of spiritual leadership in this crucial

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matter,” and discretely met with “moderate” southern governors and religious leaders “to consider the racial problem from a spiritual point of  view.”53 Having entered the public square as a Christian libertarian and anticommunist, Graham’s intimate alliance with Eisenhower ultimately yielded more than rituals and iconography proclaiming the United States as a God-­fearing nation. Although both men privately wished the pace of civil rights reform “will go slowly and the extremists on both sides will quiet down,” Graham eventually joined progressive clergy in advocating racial justice. Indeed, Graham shocked and enraged many southern supporters by urging clergy throughout the country “to take a strong stand in calling for desegregation.” He also praised Martin Luther King for “setting an example of Christian love,” and insisted that his rallies be racially integrated even in the Deep South.54 Whereas attacking Soviet communism was safe ground for a conservative evangelist, assailing racist structures and individual prejudice placed him squarely at odds with many former allies. Eight years after Graham moved into Thurmond’s governor’s mansion during his 1950 South Carolina crusade, he was assailed by the state’s political leaders, White Citizens’ Councils, and the Klan for backing Eisenhower’s civil rights policy and for refusing to segregate a mass religious rally in Fort Jackson—­reported to be the first racially integrated mass meeting in state history.55 Like Eisenhower, Billy Graham sought to transcend the partisan and ideo­ logical struggles of the New Deal era. Just as Eisenhower was a very pop­ular two-­term president, so Graham remained the nation’s most prominent religious celebrity in the 1950s and 1960s. His crusades regularly filled stadiums and auditoriums across the country and drew heavy media attention, while he made appearances on the Jack Paar Show, Tonight Show, The Phil Donahue Show, and other television programs. Graham also continued to have high-­profile relationships with American presidents, especially Richard Nixon, whom he befriended in the 1950s. His relationship to Nixon edged him into the cultural clashes that roiled the 1960s. In August 1960, he organized a closed-­door meeting of conservative Protestant leaders to discuss how to prevent John Kennedy, a Roman Catholic, from ascending to the Oval Office. Graham also went so far as to write an article for Time magazine endorsing Nixon late in the 1960 presidential contest, but ultimately worried about appearing so overtly partisan and persuaded its publisher to pull the piece. In 1968, Graham took as active a role in Nixon’s campaign as he had in Eisenhower’s 1952 bid. He met and corresponded regularly with the candidate, offered prayer at the Republican National Convention, joined discussions of possible running mates, had Nixon seated prominently at his

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Pittsburgh crusade in September 1968, and openly endorsed Nixon in the media and campaign ads. Nixon’s presidency heralded a new era of public religion at the White House, with Graham frequently advising the administration “something like an extra officer in Nixon’s Cabinet” and playing a visible spiritual role at various official ceremonies. Prayer breakfasts and regular church services at the White House, featuring sermons from prominent conservative clergy, were a fixture during the Nixon years. In the wake of the Watergate scandal and Nixon’s resignation, however, Graham not only took a public beating but also distanced himself from the kind of intimate political involvement that characterized his relationships with the Eisenhower and Nixon administrations.56 “Watergate sobered Graham mightily and made him more wary of patrolling the corridors of power in Washington,” observes religious scholar William Martin.57 Although Graham emerged from the mid-­1970s politically bruised and careful to avoid compromising relationships with the White House, he remained arguably the foremost religious celebrity in the country and a potent symbol of broader public engagement for US evangelicals.58 His charismatic presence thus marks an important precursor to the emergence of a more militant and politically savvy Christian Right during the 1970s—­to a new stage of this movement that would eventually join the White House in a national conservative offensive.

“Get Them Saved, Baptized, and Registered”: Mobilizing a New Christian Right As we have seen, the Christian Right was hardly dormant politically in the decades following the Scopes trial and the repeal of Prohibition. Indeed, Christian libertarians of the New Deal era coupled with the high-­profile evangelism of Billy Graham helped pave the way for the new Christian Right that roared onto the US political scene in the 1970s. Whether lashing out against the expansion of the welfare state and presidential power, or forging alliances with Republican presidents in the promotion of the United States as a Christian nation at war with godless communists, conservative religious leaders made their presence felt throughout the century. Nevertheless, before the 1970s, most Christian fundamentalists, evangelicals, Pentecostals, and charismatics preferred to live in their own subculture insulated from the larger world. To fundamentalist detractors, Graham’s popular ministry represented a “domesticated evangelicalism” worthy of scorn.59 They were even more disconcerted by forces of liberalism, modernism, and unrest during the 1960s and 1970s that challenged the refuge they sought from US society and politics. In fact, the perception that their autonomy was under attack

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from secular radicals and a hostile federal government would serve as a po­ tent catalyst for grassroots conservative evangelical activism in the 1970s. Nowhere was this path to mobilization more evident than in the evolution of  Thomas Road Baptist Church, a fundamentalist Baptist congregation in Lynchburg, Virginia. It was founded in 1956 by a small group of families and a young minister who grew up in the town, Jerry Falwell. Falwell called on every white family in Lynchburg to join the new church, and it grew rapidly in the 1960s with a new thousand-­seat sanctuary, youth camps, and radio and television programming. Even as Falwell’s church actively recruited new members and sponsored missionary work, its focus was on preaching the Gospel and on individual redemption over social action.60 “Love cannot be legislated,” Thomas Road Baptist Church proclaimed. “Love is found in a Person—­His Name is Jesus Christ. . . . Education, medicine, social reform, and all the other external ministries cannot meet the needs of the human soul and spirit.”61 Graham hovered on the edge of the culture wars of the 1960s; Falwell’s crusade was rattled and animated by the civil rights movement. Civil rights battles not only consumed Lynchburg during the 1960s, but also came to the front steps of  Thomas Road Baptist Church in the form of a 1964 Sunday morning “kneel-­in” by black and white high school students associated with the Congress of Racial Equality. Upset that the church did not have a single black member, student protest signs asked parishioners, “Does God Discriminate?” Complaining that the Civil Rights Act was “a terrible violation of human and private-­property rights,” Falwell cracked that there was nothing wrong with the young activists that good haircuts could not solve. The police who were summoned to remove the protesters were anything but glib in response, threatening to shoot the students if they returned the next Sunday.62 In 1965, Falwell delivered a sermon titled “Ministers and Marches,” in which he told parishioners why he denounced the civil rights leadership of Martin Luther King. In true premillennial fashion, he told parishioners that the Scriptures commanded the faithful to “pay your taxes, forget politics, and serve Me with all your heart.” This meant that his obligations as a minister should focus on shepherding more people to redemption: “Believing in the Bible as I do, I would find it impossible to stop preaching the pure saving Gospel of Jesus Christ, and begin doing anything else—­including fighting communists, or participating in civil rights reforms. As a God-­called preacher, I find that there is no time left after I give the proper time and attention to winning people to Christ. Preachers are not called to be politicians but to be soul winners. . . . I feel we need to get off the streets and back into the pulpits.”63

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Fourteen years later, on the eve of the 1980 election, Falwell was leading patriotic “I love America” rallies at state capitols across the country and telling rooms full of conservative clergy that “we cannot be isolationists.” Lamenting that too many conservative evangelicals were politically inactive, Falwell told fellow pastors that they were obligated to issue a clarion message in every congregation: “If there is one person in this room not registered, repent of it. It’s a sin. Get them saved, baptized, and registered.”64 On his television show, The Old Time Gospel Hour, Falwell offered conservative social commentary and exhorted evangelical followers to take action at the voting booth. “For years I used to preach that no pastor should be involved in politics,” he explained in a 1979 mass mailing. “I believe now that as a pastor I have a responsibility to stand up publicly . . . in an effort to bring this nation back to God.”65 How do we explain Falwell’s evolution from telling parishioners that “we have few ties to this earth”66 to insisting that conservative Christians have a moral duty to take political action? Falwell was hardly alone among conser­ vative evangelicals in his call to arms during the late 1970s. Popular televange­ lists like Pat Robertson and James Robison and other influential evangelical preachers—­in contrast to older televangelists like Graham, Oral Roberts, and Rex Humbard—­openly declared that conservative Christians must organize politically to defend their churches, communities, and nation. Why did these ministers and religious organizations like the CFF, as we noted at the start of this chapter, urgently proclaim in this period that evangelical Christians could no longer “remain cloistered in smug fellowships,” that they were obligated to take “vigorous action motivated by the love of Jesus Christ”?67 Much of the answer lies in the cultural and programmatic legacy of the Great Society—­the perception shared by Falwell and other conservative evangelicals that with the extension of national governance to causes such as civil rights and education reform, their faith-­based subculture was under siege in the 1970s. The federal executive branch, in general, and the White House, in particular, figured prominently in both the anxieties and hopes of millions of conservative evangelical voters who swarmed to the polls by the decade’s end. According to some accounts, the new Christian Right as a political movement was spurred by its moral indignation over the Supreme Court’s 1973 decision legalizing abortion in Roe v. Wade. Falwell, for instance, claimed in 2005 that his own political awakening was directly tied to his outrage when he first learned of the Roe v. Wade ruling. “I could not believe that seven justices on the nation’s highest court could have so little regard for the value of human life,” he noted. “I began to preach against abortion, calling it ‘America’s national sin.’ ” When “it soon became apparent

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that preaching was not enough,” he explained, the new Christian Right movement was born.68 However, as Randall Balmer convincingly argues, this narrative is largely “a work of fiction.” In truth, most evangelicals were quite slow to join Roman Catholics in taking to the streets and the polls in opposition to abortion.69 Five years before the Roe decision, the Christian Medical Society and the evangelical magazine Christianity Today convened evangelical leaders to develop “the conservative or evangelical position within Protestantism” that culminated in a unanimous endorsement of access to contraception and abortion. In 1971, 1974, and 1976, the Southern Baptist Convention affirmed “the possibility of abortion under such conditions as rape, incest, clear evidence of fetal deformity” or evidence of “the likelihood of damage to the emotional, mental, and physical health of the mother.”70 The convention’s Baptist Press reported in 1973 that most evangelical clergy rejected the interpretation of “the Catholic hierarchy” that the court’s Roe v. Wade decision was “immoral, anti-­religious, and unjustified.” Rather, it concluded that “religious liberty, human equality and justice are advanced by the Supreme Court abortion decision.”71 When the National Christian Action Coalition was organized in 1975 to galvanize conservative evangelicals to fight Roe v. Wade and abortion, its founders learned that few were motivated to join the cause. “We thought, ‘Once people realize what’s going on, there will be spontaneous upheaval.’ That didn’t happen,” they lamented. “Evangelicalism as a whole has uttered no real outcry. . . . The Catholics have called abortion ‘The Silent Holocaust.’ The deeper horror is the silence of the evangelical.”72 Major evangelical opposition to abortion did not emerge until the late 1970s; however, several grassroots campaigns of the 1970s captivated conservative evangelicals far more intensely than antiabortion insurgency. These causes planted seeds for broader political engagement that only later included fervent opposition to abortion. The first was a 1974 textbook battle led by one of their own, Alice Moore, the wife of a fundamentalist minister who served on the school board of Kanawha County, West Virginia. Elected to the local board because she opposed sex education in schools, which she described as a “humanistic, atheistic attack on God,” Moore was firmly backed by conservative churches in the area. In the spring of 1974, Moore challenged the adoption of new English textbooks that reflected a mandate by the State Board of Education to diversify language arts sources to include work by Allen Ginsberg, Malcolm X, Arthur Miller, George Orwell, and other New Left cultural warriors. Moore and her husband were especially outraged by inclusion of Malcolm X’s Autobiography, and she publicly attacked the new textbooks at school board meetings

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as “destructive of social and cultural values, obscene, pornographic, unpatriotic, or in violation of individual and familial rights of privacy.” Moore was supported by hundreds of protesters from rural white evangelical churches in the county, while twenty-­seven evangelical clergy publicly denounced the textbooks. With state education funding tied to adoption of the new textbooks, the school board formally approved purchase of the books by a narrow three to two vote. The conservative evangelical backlash was fierce. During the summer of 1974, outraged local conservative evangelical activists organized large rallies in the city of Charleston, the county seat, established regular picket lines at city businesses and government buildings, and even shut down the county bus line.73 After conservative preachers urged “true Christians” to boycott the public schools in the fall, about 20 percent of students stayed home. In September, the anti-­textbook protesters were joined by thirty-­five hundred coal miners who staged a wildcat strike in solidarity. Within Charleston, however, a coalition of educators, business leaders, and progressive clergy became vocal supporters of the new textbooks. When the school board attempted to appease Moore and her supporters by temporarily pulling all textbooks for review by a special committee, more than twelve hundred Charleston high school students walked out to protest “censorship” and demanded all books be returned. Tensions escalated when violence broke out between picketers and other residents, resulting in vandalism, gun violence, bombings of unoccupied schools, and temporary closure of the schools.74 Although these events reflected the potential of the Christian Right to develop a militant wing capable of disrupting the social order, they proved to be the exception rather than the rule. Perhaps a key reason for this institutional turn was the intervention of conservative political professionals. Spying its great potential as the grassroots arm of a new coalition, these strategists sought to channel the new Christian Right’s energy into more conventional political strategies and clout. For example, Paul Weyrich, a young conservative activist based in Washington, DC, took notice of the Kanawha County uprising. With a $250,000 donation from Colorado brewer Joseph Coors, Weyrich had launched the Heritage Foundation in the early 1970s to provide position papers and “intellectual back-­up” to members of Congress who “did not regard the Nixon administration as conservative.” He also founded a political action committee, the Committee for the Survival of a Free Congress, to recruit and train conservative candidates for Congress. As a Catholic Republican, Weyrich’s own faith lay outside the conservative evangelical traditions of the resurgent Christian Right movement. Yet when anti-­textbook protesters were arrested for violating numerous Charleston

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ordinances in 1974, Weyrich and the Heritage Foundation rushed to provide legal assistance, due to shared “suspicion of the education establishment.” An associate of Weyrich’s in Washington, Connaught “Connie” Marshner, also was drawn to Kanawha County’s “battle of the books.” She started a fledgling national newsletter in this period, the Family Protection Report, to inform Christian conservatives about family issues and to build grassroots support for a right-­wing “pro-­family agenda.” Marshner conducted training seminars for anti-­textbook activists in Kanawha County in January 1975. Although this West Virginia revolt subsided when one grassroots evangelical leader was sent to prison for his role in sparking violence, conservative evangelical parents initiated similar challenges in school districts nationwide.75 Another important grassroots campaign that politically galvanized conservative evangelicals in the 1970s focused on gay rights in Dade County, Florida. In 1977, county commissioners passed an ordinance at the urging of gay rights activists that barred discrimination on the basis of “affectional or sexual preference” in housing, employment, and public services.76 The measure alarmed conservative evangelicals, with twenty fundamentalist Miami-­Dade churches collecting thousands of petitions demanding a popular referendum on the ordinance. Representing her Northwest Baptist Church, singer-­celebrity Anita Bryant became the most visible and vocal leader of efforts to repeal the ordinance. The mother of four school-­aged children and the well-­recognized television pitchwoman for Florida orange juice, Bryant’s crusade received extensive media coverage. “As a mother, I know that homosexuals cannot biologically reproduce children,” she told reporters, “therefore, they must recruit our children.” Like those who led the anti-­textbook crusade, these Florida evangelicals joined forces with conser­ vative political professionals. Together, they launched an advertising campaign that tied homosexuals to child sex abuse by teachers and highlighted sexualized images of the San Francisco Gay Freedom Day Parade. After easily securing enough signatures to compel a referendum vote, this coalition of conservative ministers and political professionals formed an organization called Save Our Children, Inc., and elected Bryant as its president. Close to three hundred thousand Miami-­Dade residents cast ballots in a special election on June 7, 1977, and more than two hundred thousand of them (roughly 70 percent) voted to repeal the gay rights ordinance. “Today the laws of God and the cultural values of man have been vindicated,” Bryant enthused at a hotel ballroom celebration. “The people of Dade County—­the normal majority—­have said, “Enough, enough, enough!”77 Falwell and other evangelists went to Dade County to help Bryant’s cause, an experience he credited as being politically transformative. “Two years ago

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I was down in Dade County, Florida, joining hands with Anita Bryant to fight the militant homosexuals,” he told followers in 1979. “And there, in the thick of  battle, the message was really brought home to me—­America, our beloved country, is sick.” In particular, he concluded that faith and country were inescapably under “concerted attack by ultraliberals.”78 Yet for Falwell and other conservative evangelicals, the activism of the federal government in service of liberal causes posed an even more dire threat to something much closer to home: private Christian schools. The number of private religious schools in the United States, and particularly in the South, grew dramatically during the 1960s. Conservative evangelical leaders explained this growth as a response to a variety of triggers, including social and cultural permissiveness, the teaching of evolution, sex education, offensive textbooks, and the Supreme Court’s Engel v. Vitale79 ruling in 1962 that banned school prayer.80 They also suggested that private evangelical schools held special appeal to parents who wanted their children “to study under born-­again teachers in a Christian environment with academic excellence.”81 Critics, by contrast, charged that many of these private institutions were formed primarily as “segregation academies” or “white-­flight schools” to enable white parents to have their kids instructed apart from African American children at precisely the same time as federal and state governments mandated desegregation of public schools.82 Tellingly, Thomas Road Baptist Church established its Lynchburg Christian Academy only a few months after Virginia’s commissioner of education ordered all public schools in 1966 to implement far-­reaching integration plans. Billed in the local news as “a private school for white students,” Lynchburg’s African American clergy protested “the use of the word ‘Christian’ in the title of a school that excludes Negroes and other non-­white people.”83 Proponents of racial justice and school desegregation pressed the federal government to challenge and sanction this proliferation of “segregation academies.” Christian school officials responded that they were not trying to thwart racial desegregation; instead, they explained, they were resisting government efforts to regulate licensure, hiring practices, admissions, and curriculum standards that they considered intrusive. During the 1970s, the Internal Revenue Service’s (IRS) regulations governing tax-­exempt status for private schools became the focal point of this conflict.84 In the late 1960s, five African American families in Mississippi partnered with the Lawyers Committee for Civil Rights under Law in Green v. Kennedy to challenge the tax-­exempt status of private evangelical schools engaged in racially discriminatory practices.85 Between 1964 and 1970, the number of non-­Catholic private schools in the state exploded from 17 to 155. In

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1967 alone, 49 new private schools were formed in Mississippi against the backdrop of court-­ordered desegregation, only one of which admitted nonwhites. In addition to initiating the Green litigation in 1969 to enjoin the IRS from issuing tax exemption to Mississippi private schools, civil rights advocates pressed the Nixon administration and Congress to use IRS rules in novel ways to enforce the 1964 Civil Rights Act’s prohibition on racial discrimination. They argued that any organization, including “segregation academies,” which engaged in racial discrimination should not be deemed “charitable” and thus were ineligible for tax exemption. Likewise, donations to these discriminatory organizations also should be considered unqualified for tax exemption.86 In July 1970, Senator Walter Mondale (D-­MN) led hearings of the Select Committee on Equal Education Opportunity, questioning IRS exemption policy in light of growing numbers of  whites-­only private Christian schools. The same month, after debate among administration officials, Nixon instructed the IRS to shift policy and to deny tax exemptions to private schools that failed to meet certain standards of racial integration. Nixon’s order was reinforced by a federal district court in its 1971 Green v. Connally ruling, which determined that the Civil Rights Act forbade the IRS from granting charitable, tax-­exempt status to organizations engaging in racially discriminatory practices.87 One of the most prominent targets for the IRS under its new policy was South Carolina’s fundamentalist Bob Jones University, which denied admission to African Americans and other nonwhites for most of its history. The university lifted racial bars on admission in 1971 due to Nixon’s order on tax-­exemption policy and the Green decision, but maintained a policy that interracial dating and marriage were grounds for expulsion. The IRS informed Bob Jones University in 1975 that its tax-­exempt status had been revoked due to racially discriminatory practices, effective retroactively to 1970. The same year, with President Ford’s approval, the IRS issued a new revenue rule establishing stricter guidelines for private schools to be considered nondiscriminatory and maintain tax-­exempt status. These included adoption of nondiscriminatory charters, staff hiring practices, and financial aid, as well as compilation of data on student, staff, and scholarship demography.88 Clearly the “civil rights state” that emerged after the 1960s was instrumental in these efforts of racial-­justice advocates to challenge the tax-­exempt status of private Christian “segregation academies” across the South.89 Indeed, as we note in chapter 4, civil rights activists turned to the federal courts and key bureaucratic agencies—­the IRS and the Justice Department’s Civil Rights Division—­to tenaciously battle discriminatory private schools long after the

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dramatic demise of Lyndon Johnson’s presidency. The struggle that ensued, like the conflicts over textbooks and gay rights, would fuse grassroots agitation and white evangelical leadership with support from opportunistic conservative political professionals.

Political Tightrope: Jimmy Carter, Conservative Evangelicals, and Programmatic Liberalism For conservative evangelicals, the Watergate scandal was yet another signal that the United States was in moral crisis and in need of redemption. Just as the CFF in 1975 distributed pamphlets calling for “honest leadership” in the White House, the Southern Baptist Christian Life Commission declared that the time had come for “repentance and revival in our land, a commitment to honesty and integrity and fair dealing in the political realm.”90 Billy Graham, shaken that Watergate had revealed Nixon to be “a man I never knew,” told television audiences in 1976 that the nation now had “a yearning for morality. Americans want more than anything else in their president, this year, the spiritual qualities.”91 For many evangelicals, the ascendance of Jimmy Carter as the Democratic nominee for president was a promising answer to these longings. Carter made headlines during the 1976 presidential campaign by touting his background as a devout born-­again Baptist. Whereas the mainstream media scrambled to learn what it meant to be “born-­again,” many evangelicals across the country celebrated the political success of one of their own. Early polls suggested that the former Georgia governor and Baptist Sunday school teacher enjoyed broad support from evangelicals. Televangelist Pat Robertson gave “quiet help behind the scenes” by encouraging conservative evangelicals to back Carter in the primaries. He also assisted Carter with evangelical television audiences, featuring him on the popular 700 Club program in the general campaign. During an interview in Carter’s hometown of Plains, Georgia, Robertson and Carter discussed issues such as strengthening families, supporting Israel, and the integrity of officeholders.92 In Christianity Today, founded by Graham as evangelicalism’s flagship journal, Carter’s avowed evangelical faith was defended on both its news and editorial pages. “There is a growing resentment among Southern Baptists over the way Carter is being treated by some of the secular media,” the journal observed.93 An organization of evangelical supporters named Citizens for Carter put out print media ads calling for a “dedicated evangelical” in the White House.94 At the Southern Baptist Convention during the heat of the election, popular keynote speaker Bailey Smith told fifteen thousand

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pastors and lay leaders that America needed “a born-­again man in the White House . . . and his initials are the same as our Lord’s!” Newsweek ran a cover story declaring 1976 “The Year of the Evangelical,” while columnist James Reston concluded that Carter’s appeal among key segments of white evangelicals in the general election was critical.95 Not all white evangelicals shared this enthusiasm for the Carter candidacy, however. Falwell openly assailed Carter in sermons aired on his Old Time Gospel Hour, a syndicated program carried on more than 260 television stations. After Carter ill-­advisedly interviewed with Playboy magazine, Falwell proclaimed that most evangelicals were “disillusioned,” adding that “four months ago the majority of the people I know were pro-­Carter. Today that has totally reversed.”96 Yet when the votes were tallied in November, Carter fared much better among white evangelicals than Falwell predicted. White evangelicals favored Republicans for most of the postwar era; in 1976, however, Carter won roughly half of white evangelical voters and 56 percent of Southern Baptists.97 In truth, Carter was walking a political tightrope. He touted his devout, born-­again Baptist background with evangelical voters, but reassured uneasy progressive groups in his party’s base that he subscribed to a strict separation of church and state. Carter emphasized issues of family, faith, cutting government waste, and moral character with conservative audiences. Yet he joined liberal Democrats in favoring the Equal Rights Amendment (ERA) and in denouncing discrimination against homosexual men and women, positions that put him directly at odds with most Christian conservatives. Conservative evangelicals also learned over time that Carter did not share their belief in the inerrancy of the Scriptures, that he admired the liberal theologian Reinhold Niebuhr (a tough critic of Christian libertarians like Fifield and popular evangelists like Graham), and that he opposed school prayer. Moreover, Robertson discovered that his support for Carter during the election did not translate into White House access or influence. Convinced that he shared a theological bond with Carter after their 700 Club interview, Robertson devoted significant energy developing a pool of “godly” evangelicals for possible appointment by the new president. This included “marathon conference calls with ministers to create the list.” Yet the Carter administration made no effort to consider Robertson’s list and never considered appointing notable conservative evangelicals to appease that community. Robertson ruefully grumbled that Carter “ignored the wishes of the Evangelicals” and became a tool of the secular “Eastern Establishment.”98 Carter’s efforts to navigate the abortion issue were especially fraught. By 1976, evangelist Francis Schaeffer and pediatrician C. Everett Koop, with

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support from Graham, were building momentum for an evangelical anti­ abortion movement. During the campaign, Carter announced that he was personally opposed to abortion and that he might endorse the Hyde amendment, which called for outlawing federal funding of abortions except in cases of rape or incest or when the life of the mother was in jeopardy. When incensed pro-­choice Democrats protested, Carter tried to appease both camps by describing himself as reluctantly pro-­choice, supporting legal ac­ cess to abortion but disapproving of federal funding and committed to limiting “the need for abortions, which I think are wrong.” These equivocations only alienated both sides of the abortion conflict, and the Carter team eventually concluded that the best solution was to avoid “moral absolutism” on abortion.”99 Carter’s equivocations on abortion strained relations with erstwhile evangelical supporters, but it was the federal government’s persistent attempt to regulate private Christian schools that incited conservative evangelicals to decisively repudiate his administration. The year before Carter became president, the IRS issued tough guidelines for private schools to demonstrate nondiscriminatory practices necessary to retain tax-­exempt status; it also re­voked the tax exemption of Bob Jones University, beginning a litigation battle ultimately resolved by the Supreme Court in 1983. At the urging of the Civil Rights Commission and federal courts, the IRS in 1978 unveiled new benchmarks for racial integration in private schools. The most controversial of these rules required private schools established when their communities were undergoing school desegregation to prove that they either had significant numbers of nonwhite students or made vigorous efforts to recruit minority students. As conservative Christian school officials protested the new IRS mandate, Paul Weyrich turned his professional political talents to assisting their cause. He worked closely with Robert Billings, a leader of the Christian Day School movement, to mobilize opposition to the IRS ruling.100 Assisted by New Right professionals in Washington, Billings created a new national organization, Christian School Action, to spearhead resistance to the IRS. Billings warned of an IRS threat to religious freedom at evangelical churches and schools across the country, and sounded the alarm in a widely distributed Christian School Alert newsletter. Although the IRS began using tax-­exemption policy to counteract Christian “segregation academies” during the Nixon and Ford presidencies, Billings and Christian School Action pinned blame on Carter. In fact, believing that their battle against the IRS and other causes that they championed would be best served by a partisan realignment, Billings and other conservative evangelicals looked for a champion among Republican presidential candidates.101

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Falwell and James Dobson, an evangelical Christian author and founder of the conservative Focus on the Family, signed onto the cause. “The Infernal Revenue Service has been questioning the taxability, the exempt status of Christian schools,” Falwell fumed over the airwaves. “Why? To put Christian schools out of business. Why? Because they’re motivated by the devil in this business, that’s why.” He ruefully added that “it’s easier to open a massage parlor than to open a Christian school.” On television shows like Robertson’s 700 Club and Jim Bakker’s PTL Club, viewers heard from alarmed Christian school officials, parents, ministers, and lawyers about the IRS offensive. Hundreds of thousands of letters poured into congressional offices protesting the new IRS exemption policy. This conservative offensive proved effective: after withering congressional hearings and the introduction of hostile legislation from conservative lawmakers like Senator Jesse Helms (R-­NC) and Representative Bob Dornan (R-­CA), the IRS suspended its civil rights guidelines for conservative evangelical schools. The struggle between the IRS and Christian Day School activists underscored how great the divide had become between Carter and the new Christian Right by the late 1970s; in effect, Carter became a scapegoat for actions set in motion by the administrative presidencies of his two Republican predecessors. The heightening of the IRS–­evangelical school battle reinforced the claim by conservative evangelical leaders that their subculture was under full-­scale assault and that they needed to organize and unify politically to defend themselves. “We all sense a great threat,” as one local fundamentalist leader explained his political activism in the 1970s. “I can see a day coming when we will be persecuted by governmental entities if we refuse to compromise very basic convictions that we have, unless there is a big turn in Washington.”102 Conservative political operatives like Weyrich and direct-­mail fund-­ raising pioneer Richard Viguerie later offered similar accounts of estrangement between Carter and conservative evangelicals, characterizing the school battle as pivotal to solidifying the new Christian Right movement. It “kicked the sleeping dog,” Viguerie observed, and cemented the Christian Right’s “involvement in real politics.” Weyrich echoed this assessment: What galvanized the Christian community was not abortion, school prayer, or the ERA. I am living witness to that because I was trying to get those people interested in those issues and I utterly failed. What changed their mind was . . . intervention against the Christian schools, trying to deny them tax-­ exempt status on the basis of so-­called segregation. . . . It was at that moment that conservatives made the linkage between their opposition to government

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Weyrich and others may overstate the case that the IRS–­private school struggle singularly breathed life into the new Christian Right movement in the 1970s; there is no question, however, that it played a decidedly pivotal role in mobilizing conservative evangelicals against the liberal state. The 1970s mobilization of the Christian Right, therefore, was as much (if not more) a reaction to the civil rights revolution as it was a burst of fresh religiosity to battle the forces of secularism associated with the ERA, gay rights, abortion, and the welfare state.

The Institutionalization of the New Christian Right For seasoned New Right professionals—­most notably Weyrich, Viguerie, Howard Phillips of the Conservative Caucus, and John (Terry) Dolan of the National Conservative Political Action Committee—­the political ferment among conservative evangelicals in the late 1970s presented a crucial opportunity to realize larger goals. The New Right promoted an aggressive US posture toward the Soviet Union; free-­market economics that included tax cuts and business deregulation; and traditional morality to counteract abortion, the ERA, pornography, homosexuality, and secular values. Viguerie and Weyrich saw moral or social issues as especially promising for mobilizing conservative evangelicals across the country. As the New Right’s Conservative Digest explained, the moral issues championed by evangelical insurgents, rather than foreign policy or economic concerns, marked the true divide between older and newer conservatives: “For the past 50 years, conservatives have stressed almost exclusively economic and foreign policy. The New Right shares the same basic beliefs of other conservatives in economic and foreign policy matters, but we feel that conservatives cannot become the dominant political force in America until we stress the issues of concern to ethnic and blue-­collar Americans, born-­again Christians, pro-­life Catholics, and Jews. Some of these issues are busing, abortion, pornography, education, traditional Biblical moral values and quotas.”104 Weyrich predicted that this “pro-­family” agenda would be the same kind of unifying force for the right in the 1980s as “Vietnam was in the 1960s and environmental and consumer issues were in the 1970s for the Left.”105 After helping organize a successful campaign against the IRS exemption policy, Weyrich, Viguerie, and Phillips encouraged influential conservative evangelical leaders to channel the energy of the new Christian Right into

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mainstream electoral clout. The bonds that Weyrich forged with Billings in the IRS fight and the creation of the National Christian Action Coalition would help him capitalize on Billings’s strong ties to both televangelists and grassroots conservative evangelical activists. The same was true of Phillips’s close relationship with Ed McAteer, the Colgate-­Palmolive executive and CFF field director with strong ties to prominent evangelical clergy.106 While reaching out to prominent conservative clergy, Weyrich and Phillips made special efforts to convince Falwell to spearhead a mobilization of Christian Right supporters in the 1980 election. After a series of meetings in Lynchburg of Falwell, Phillips, Weyrich, McAteer, and others, Phillips wrote to Falwell in February 1979 imploring him to expand “your ministry to include a political ‘call to arms’ for the entire ‘moral majority’. . . . I believe the Moral Majority can be victorious—­but we need a system of communication, and a leader.”107 Phillips is credited with coining the phrase “moral majority,” and as his February letter captures, he used it frequently once he discovered that Falwell found it appealing. In the spring of 1979, Billings and McAteer set up a decisive strategy meeting in Lynchburg at which Weyrich persuaded Falwell and his associates to establish a new religious Right organization to rally conservative evangelicals. “Jerry, there is in America a moral majority that agrees about the basic issues,” Weyrich pleaded. “But they aren’t organized. They don’t have a platform. The media ignore them. Somebody’s got to get that moral majority together.”108 In particular, Weyrich suggested that if pressure could be placed on the Republican Party to firmly oppose homosexuality, the ERA, abortion, and regulation of private Christian schools, it would split southern white evangelical voters from the Democratic Party. With practical guidance from Weyrich and Phillips, Falwell established a new political organization—­the Moral Majority, Inc.—­to mobilize Christian Right voters in the 1980 election. “How can I be silent about abortion, homosexuality, pornography, and the laws that seek to destroy the Christian family and our Christian schools?” Falwell asked supporters. “I for one cannot remain true to my calling and be silent on these issues. The time for timid preaching is over!”109 Drawing its bedrock support from the roughly fifteen million viewers of Falwell’s Old Time Gospel Hour, the Moral Majority had little trouble raising funds, and it soon boasted a membership of three hundred thousand, including seventy thousand clergy. In its first year, the Moral Majority orga­ nized mass rallies and focused on registering Christian Right voters. While it claimed to register four to eight million new voters, more realistic estimates put the figure at a still formidable two million. The Moral Majority was not the only notable organizational face of the new Christian Right. Phillips and

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McAteer also helped Texas televangelist James Robison establish the Religious Roundtable to bring together religious leaders across denominational lines behind a conservative reform agenda. “Attacks on the family are unequaled at any time in American history,” warned Robison, a fiery preacher with millions of viewers in ninety cities. It was no longer tenable, he concluded, that “Christians stay in the closet while the morally perverted come out of the closet and parade their sin down Main Street.”110 Another new organization, the Los Angeles–­based Christian Voice, worked closely with conservative lawmakers in Washington while lending support to local crusades against gay rights and abortion. Meanwhile, numerous other evangelical leaders soon joined Robison, Falwell, Billings, and McAteer in voicing their support for entering the political fray. Now completely estranged from Carter, Robertson urged his followers on the 700 Club to become politically active in order to “place this nation under God.” If conservative Christians be­ came engaged, he insisted, “we have enough voters to run the country.”111 On PTL Club broadcasts, Jim Bakker made it clear that “our goal is to influ­ence all viable candidates on issues important to the church.”112 As the 1980 election neared, two influential young conservatives argued that the new Christian Right would bring about a political revolution. They were William Bennett, the president of the National Humanities Center, and Terry Eastland, editorial-­page editor of the Greensboro Record. In their view, evangelical insurgency was not merely a reaction to the rights revolution; rather, they suggested, it represented a novel, radical strain of conservatism. “The New Right Christians may be called a civil rights group, not in the sense, as in the case of blacks, that certain rights have been denied them, but in the important psychological sense common to all civil rights groups, that they have been shut out of politics and are now ignored,” they wrote. “Feeling so oppressed, they have now become aggressors. The members of the [movement] are asking, as blacks and women and others have done, for recognition, for status in the polity.” Addressing the “standard criticism of New Right Christians” that they violated the wall of separation that the Constitution erected between politics and religion, Bennett and Eastland insisted that previous social activists, including many critics of fundamentalist politics, had breached that barrier: “The religious assault on slavery in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries was echoed in the 1950s and 1960s by a full scale attack on segregation as a moral and religious evil and a funda­ mental contradiction of  the Christian gospel, as the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. sought to remind everyone. Throughout our history the political voices of many religious leaders of a variety of sects would have been severely muted had they not been able to speak out on religious grounds.”113

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Just as abolitionists and civil rights reformers fused faith and political confrontation to end slavery and Jim Crow segregation, Bennett and Eastland argued, so the Christian Right was entitled to champion traditional values against secular onslaughts. Of course, they failed to mention that a prominent segment of the movement—­captured well by Falwell, Billings, and their followers—­originally mobilized to block racial integration and to guard white Christian academies that mushroomed in the South as the Brown decision was implemented. In important respects, this resistance to an entrenched liberal state encouraged the Christian Right to embrace institutional strategies and tactics. To be sure, like the abolitionists and civil rights activists, the Christian Right was split between grassroots activists, who championed direct—­and sometimes violent—­action to advance the movement’s causes, and pragmatists, who were committed to winning elections and exercising influence within the mainstream political process. Many of the most militant activists, such as Operation Rescue founder Randall Terry, believed that, as instruments of God’s justice, they should break human laws. Such beliefs were common among Terry’s followers who blocked abortion clinics in New York, Atlanta, Los Angeles, and Wichita, as well as fringe groups that bombed clinics and murdered citizens. But most movement leaders and followers gravitated toward building conventional political capacities, believing that the potential influence of the New Right coalition justified more practical engagement. Indeed, as Jonathan Shields has noted, most Christian Right activists were self-­consciously conservative and thereby exceptionally patriotic. More than abolitionists and civil rights activists, they were likely to eschew civil disobedience and to seek their goals within the regular political process.114 Like the abolitionists who were critical in founding a new insurgent party, however, Christian Right activists did not accept politics-­as-­usual. They were deeply disappointed with the moderate international and domestic policies of the Nixon and Ford administrations. Likewise, Carter stood no chance of winning conservative Christian backing in 1980. Robertson’s monthly newsletter openly attacked Carter for failing to keep “godly counsel” in the White House.115 In the summer of 1979, the Conservative Digest began publishing feature stories on “Jimmy Carter’s Betrayal of the Christian Voter.”116 It was a message reiterated from conservative evangelical pulpits across the country. Nevertheless, Weyrich and Viguerie counseled their conservative evangelical allies to proceed cautiously, resisting the notion that the new Christian Right should forge a permanent alliance with the Republican Party. The new Christian Right and their professional political advisers were in search of a presidential candidate to advance their vision of a new conservative order.

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The New Christian Right and the Quest for a Presidential Standard-­Bearer In the span of the 1970s, conservative evangelicals emerged from battles over the tax-­exempt status of Christian schools, the ERA, abortion, textbook content, and LGBTQ rights politically engaged and eager to change the direction of American government. The 1976 election confirmed their clout at the ballot box. Christian Right leaders set their sights on building a conservative governing coalition and, in particular, on the 1980 election. The hostility of conservative evangelical leaders to Carter became clear to the White House following the president’s speech to the National Religious Broadcasters in January 1980. At a closed-­door breakfast, these leaders and administration officials could find little to agree on. Carter’s religious liaison observed that it was impossible “to really change a political enemy, particularly with just a breakfast.”117 Conservative clergy at the meeting drew the same conclusion: “We went outside and . . . we prayed that God would help us to do everything we could to keep him from being reelected.”118 Conservative evangelical leaders were in fact searching for a presidential candidate who would embrace their agenda in 1979. As they did so, seasoned political allies like Viguerie and Weyrich counseled their evangelical pupils not to translate their hostility toward Carter into a permanent alliance with the Republican Party. In response to the liberal policy tilt of the Nixon and Ford presidencies, these New Right pioneers initially looked to independent and third-­party conservatives. Viguerie lent his fund-­raising talents to George Wallace in 1972, the Democratic ex-­governor of Alabama who promoted white nationalism; both Viguerie and Weyrich tried unsuccessfully to persuade Wallace to accept New Right support in another presidential bid in 1976. They eventually endorsed Reagan during his insurgent Republican primary campaign the same year, impressed by what they considered to be his impeccable conservative credentials. However, they later denounced the former California governor when he announced before the GOP convention that if selected as his party’s nominee, he would name the moderate Senator Richard Schweiker (PA) as his running mate to balance the ticket.119 Thus Viguerie and his allies claimed that a new conservative coalition was “ready to lead,” but they doubted that the objectives of their movement could be fulfilled by an unreconstructed Republican Party. Having decided that forming a third party was impractical, these New Right activists endorsed strong conservative political leadership that that would make a party the servant rather than master of right-­wing aspirations.

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At the start of the 1980 campaign, Viguerie and Weyrich embraced the candidacy of John Connally, a Democrat-­turned-­Republican, and touted his “Christian values” to their evangelical supporters.120 Connally was a former governor of  Texas and served as Treasury secretary during the Nixon ad­ ministration. Yet what most impressed New Right activists was Connally’s toughness; as one conservative pundit put it, he was the political equivalent of John Wayne.121 At the same time, New Right leaders remained adamant that their cause should be decoupled from the Republican Party, and they urged Christian Right leaders to follow a similar strategy to avoid partisan capture. “[T]he blacks have sent a message loud and clear to the politicians—­they are Democrats, and regardless of the candidate, they will vote Democratic,” Viguerie bluntly observed. “But the born-­again Christians clearly are not married to any political party as are the blacks, union officials, environmentalists, and Naderites.”122 Scholars like Doug McAdam and Karina Kloos challenge this logic of social movement capture, finding that the interaction of movement activists and party politics pushed Democrats away from the ideological center and bipartisan cooperation.123 But Viguerie and Weyrich were convinced that political parties devoured movements, and they counseled the Christian Right movement to avoid deep involvement in Republican Party politics. Most conservative evangelical leaders had very different aims in mind. One full year before the 1980 Republican National Convention, many in­ fluential figures of the new Christian Right hoped to position their followers as a significant voting bloc within the Republican Party that would be able to influence the selection of its presidential nominee. Falwell, for instance, firmly aligned himself with the Republican Party, having been “openly supportive of Ford in ’76,” and he eagerly sought a GOP presidential candidate who would champion the movement’s values and agenda. In 1979, he arranged for conservative representative Philip Crane (R-­IL) to speak at Liberty Baptist College, and gushed during the visit that “you are the kind of man we need in the White House.” Nevertheless, most movement leaders clearly understood that Crane was a long-­shot candidate for the nomination. By 1980, they focused on vetting two GOP candidates who they considered the most viable conservative standard-­bearers: Connally and Reagan.124 Contemplating Connally as a top contender for the GOP nomination, a delegation of conservative evangelical leaders led by Arizona congressman John Conlan traveled to Connally’s southern Texas ranch to interview him before the 1980 campaign. The delegation, including Falwell, pressed Connally on his personal Christian beliefs. “If you were to die tomorrow, Governor, and you wanted to go to heaven,” Florida pastor James Kennedy

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asked him, “what reason would you give God for letting you in?” Connally answered that “my mother was a Methodist, my pappy was a Methodist, my grandmother was a Methodist and I’d just tell him that I ain’t any worse than any of the other people that want to get into heaven.”125 According to Conlan, his response “fell like a stone on all these Christian leaders,” most of whom thought that passage to heaven was inextricably tied to a profound personal faith in Jesus Christ. Not long after, Bill Bright of the Campus Crusade for Christ met with Connally and asked him about his “relationship with Christ.” Like Truman, who decades earlier considered public professions of faith distasteful for political leaders, Connally tersely responded that his spiritual life was “a personal matter.” Yet Connally later made fresh efforts to win over new Christian Right leaders, and he trumpeted personal support for the Campus Crusade’s “Here’s Life” campaign.126 But his pivot came too late for most Christian Right leaders. Well before Connally saw the light, Reagan and his campaign team, recognizing the advance of conservative movement politics, understood that winning over the new Christian Right could be significant to realizing his presidential aspirations. Carter held an advantage over Ford among white evangelical voters in 1976, for instance gaining 56 percent of white Baptist votes to Ford’s 43 percent. By the 1978 midterm elections, however, conservative evangelicals demonstrated both capacity and inclination to mobilize successfully on behalf of Republican gubernatorial, House, and Senate candidates who shared their policy positions. Along with their alluring voter rolls, the new Christian Right was quite adept at the latest direct-­mail technology and commanded a formidable presence on conservative television and radio airwaves that assumed new political importance in the hands of televangelists like Robertson, Falwell, and Robison. The new breed of politically active Christian conservatives also formed national organizations to conduct research on public policy, congressional voting records, and candidate positions; their capacities included strong fund-­raising, lobbying, publicity, and election campaigning arms.127 Christian Voice, formed by conservative evangelicals championing anti-­gay and anti-­ pornography activities at the state level, established an office in Washington in 1978. It boasted an impressive budget and 130,000 grassroots members in its first year, and soon initiated what became highly visible “Moral Report Cards” and “Candidate Scorecards” on issues important to the Christian Right. Led by Gary Jarmin, a savvy Beltway Republican insider, Christian Voice also developed a prominent lobbying presence on Capitol Hill; it soon created an advisory board that included Senators Orrin Hatch, Roger Jepsen, Gordon Humphrey, James McClure, and a dozen other conservative

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lawmakers.128 The Moral Majority was even more successful than Christian Voice in its first year, raising twice the budget, gaining four hundred thousand members, and registering hundreds of thousands of new voters. The same year, Christian Right activist Beverly LaHaye (wife of evangelical minister and author Tim LaHaye) founded Concerned Women of America as an antifeminist counterpart to the National Organization for Women.129 Despite his strong conservative credentials, Reagan raised serious concerns for a number of conservative evangelicals who led this formidable new movement. As California governor, he signed the Therapeutic Abortion Act of 1967, the most permissive pro-­choice legislation in the country, and thwarted efforts to prevent homosexuals from being public school teachers. In 1978, Reagan publicly opposed Christian Right efforts to secure an antigay referendum in California that would have prohibited homosexuals from teaching in the state’s public schools. Falwell, who traveled to California to campaign for the referendum, denounced Reagan at the time, proclaiming that he would “have to face the music from Christian voters two years from now.”130 Furthermore, it was no small matter that Reagan was a divorced and remarried man, circumstances that disqualified Nelson Rockefeller from the presidency in the eyes of most evangelical leaders during the 1960s. “For decades, evangelical leaders had attached considerable stigma to divorce, and especially to remarriage after divorce while the first spouse was still living,” historian Randall Balmer explains. “Anyone who was divorced faced likely expulsion from evangelical congregations, or at least ostracism.”131 Some devout conservatives also noted that Reagan’s tax returns revealed that he gave paltry sums to charitable and religious causes.132 A final knock on Reagan among evangelicals was the well-­known fact that he attended church infrequently, and that his personal knowledge of the Scriptures was at best limited. “Reagan was not the best Christian who ever walked the face of the earth,” Christian Voice’s executive director Richard Zone later admitted. “But we really didn’t have a choice.”133 Reagan was aware of his potential liabilities with conservative evangelical voters, and sought to redress them before the 1980 election campaign began. He touted his long-­standing support for returning prayer to public schools, and openly told conservative audiences that he regretted signing the permissive California abortion law as a newly elected governor. Reagan also made overtures to right-­to-­life organizations and endorsed a human life amendment in 1979, explaining that “I personally believe that interrupting a pregnancy is the taking of a human life.” However, given his long-­ standing conservative stands on the economy, law and order, and foreign policy, the former California governor did not have to completely reinvent

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himself. Reagan’s hard-­line approach toward the Soviet Union was particularly appealing to conservative evangelicals, who had been railing against communism throughout the twentieth century. Besides confirming his conservative bona fides, Reagan and his speechwriters also learned to communicate effectively with the Christian Right movement. According to Charles Colson, the former special counsel to Nixon who became a fervent evangelical leader, Reagan struggled during the 1976 Republican primaries when a reporter asked him, “Are you born again?” As Colson recalls, “Reagan shrugged, like the fellow had landed form Mars. He didn’t know what he meant.”134 Yet Reagan later appeared on a conservative Christian radio show to tell listeners that he favored public policies that promoted greater personal morality and that he had a religious experience that could be described as “born again.”135 Kenneth Briggs, the religion reporter for the New York Times, found that by 1979 the Reagan team knew how to invoke language and commitments that resonated with conservative white evangelicals. “Reagan very definitely played to the evangelical constituency, and did it rather skillfully,” observed Briggs. “He had a feel for who evangelical people were and what they valued, and I think he spoke very directly and effectively to those people. . . . [H]e played the themes—­the personal morality themes, his opposition to abortion, his emphasis on the family.”136 It also helped Reagan’s courtship of conservative evangelicals that, unlike Connally, Howard Baker, and other viable 1980 GOP hopefuls, he had influential allies within the leadership of the new Christian Right. Although Richard Zone of Christian Voice considered Reagan a flawed choice, other conservative evangelical leaders like Falwell, Conlan, and Bright thought highly of him. Bright knew Reagan well due to his California roots, and sent Campus Crusade evangelists to the University of California at Berkeley in the late 1960s in an effort to help the governor quiet student protests. In the summer of 1979, shortly after Connally was interviewed by evangelical leaders at his Texas ranch, the same delegation led by Conlan met with Reagan. When D. James Kennedy asked Reagan the question about his qualifications for heaven, he replied that he would not provide God with a reason to let him in. “I’d just ask for mercy,” he told them, “because of what Jesus Christ did for me at Calvary.”137 Conlan recounts that the entire evangelical delegation was electrified by Reagan’s response. “To a man and woman in the room,” he recalls, “they said ‘Let’s go!’ and they went all out for him.”138 The conservative magazine Human Events reported in 1979 that Connally was the darling of the Republican establishment but that Reagan was unquestionably “the first choice” of “rank-­and-­file Republicans.”139

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Having won over important movement leaders, Reagan courted conser­ vative evangelicals aggressively in the 1980 campaign. Sharing their enthusiasm for restoring traditional values, Reagan pledged his support for their social agenda. In a play for southern white evangelical votes on the eve of the South Carolina primary, Reagan spoke at Bob Jones University in January 1980. Tied up in litigation initially for denying entry to nonwhites and later for prohibiting interracial dating, Bob Jones University was a potent symbol of the Christian Right’s tenacious resistance to the federal government’s efforts to desegregate private Christian schools. Reagan’s campus visit on the eve of the South Carolina primary was an explicit bid for the southern white and evangelical vote. In various ads, the Reagan campaign touted their candidate’s support for private Christian schools and “the primacy of parental rights” in educating their children.140 Conservative evangelical leaders embraced Reagan even tighter as he scored victories in Republican presidential primaries. Reagan took pains to sustain their support. Gearing up for the general campaign, the Reagan team hired the Moral Majority executive director (and former coordinator of Christian School Action) Robert Billings as its religious liaison. Reagan also addressed a Washington for Jesus rally of two hundred thousand faithful at the Capitol Mall, organized by evangelical preachers Robertson and John Gimenez. Carter had been invited to speak but chose not to do so. By the end of June, the Christian Science Monitor reported that Reagan was tell­ing conservative Christian audiences on radio and in person about his “born-­again Christian faith.”141 As Reagan readied for his nomination at the Republican National Convention in Detroit, his campaign team confronted two competing demands. On one side, Reagan’s top advisers knew well that modern insurgency campaigns that successfully wrested the presidential nomination from the party establishment—­such as Goldwater had in 1964 and McGovern had in 1972—­often divided their parties and failed with the general electorate. On the other, the Reagan campaign was under enormous pressure from its strongest right-­wing supporters to revamp the Republican Party as a more forcefully conservative, national, and programmatic organization. Conser­ vative loyalists like Morton Blackwell, who had close ties to right-­wing move­ ments and members of Congress, long had advised Reagan campaign aide Lyn Nofziger that the time was ripe to take over the GOP and forge a new party coalition of the new Christian Right, economic conservatives, and foreign policy hard-­liners. This was precisely the vision shared by many conservative evangelical leaders like Falwell and Billings. Blackwell was particularly adamant in warning Nofziger that “we must not have a repeat” of the

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kinds of political equivocations that led Reagan to court party moderates in 1976 by adding Schweiker to his ticket.142 At the same time, centrists like Pennsylvania governor Richard Thornburgh urged fellow Republicans to avoid the sort of political infighting that made the 1964 national convention a damaging spectacle for the GOP, replete with Rockefeller being lustily booed off the stage by overzealous Goldwater delegates. It would be political suicide, he warned, to “leave the battlefield littered with the wounded from an ideological tong war.”143 The Reagan campaign leadership looked for a way to thread this partisan needle: their task was to remake the Republican Party with a new majority coalition dedicated to conservative programs, while also somehow avoiding the bitter ruptures with GOP moderates that characterized the divisive 1964 national convention. As Republicans crafted their 1980 national platform, the Reagan camp gave every indication that they were committed both to making the GOP unabashedly conservative and to aggressively cultivating the new Christian Right vote. Convention delegates affirmed strong antiabortion planks, calling for a constitutional amendment to protect “unborn children” and for “judges at all levels of the judiciary who respect traditional family values and sanctity of human life.” In a victory for conservative antifeminist Phyllis Schlafly and other traditionalists, the GOP withdrew its historic support for the ERA. For decades, Republican platforms had endorsed the ERA; just four years earlier, the 1976 platform boasted that “our party was the first national party to endorse the ERA in 1940.” GOP convention delegates pivoted on the issue in 1980, and the party never looked back. Consistent with Reagan’s hard-­line stance toward the Soviet Union, planks also were adopted that tacitly repudiated the Nixon-­Ford-­Kissinger policy of détente with the Soviets—­a position that squared well with long-­standing anticommunist traditions of the Christian Right. Finally, the freedom of white private Christian schools received special emphasis in the platform, a focus that clearly targeted new Christian Right voters. After highlighting the preeminent importance of “religious training and the home” for families to teach cherished beliefs and values to children, the GOP platform called for educational reforms ranging from elimination of the Department of Education to new legislation that would “restore the right of individuals to participate in voluntary, non-­denominational prayer in schools and other public facilities.”144 But perhaps most revealingly, the platform pledged that the Reagan presidency and GOP lawmakers would “halt the unconstitutional regulatory vendetta launched by Mr. Carter’s IRS Commissioner against independent schools.”145 Reacting to the most socially conservative platform in Republican history, one conservative Christian delegate marveled that

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“it’s right down the line an evangelical platform!”146 In addition to platform victories for the Christian Right, Reagan’s team selected the conservative evangelical congressman Guy Vander Jagt (MI) to deliver the convention’s keynote address. Even as they made loud overtures to a movement, Reagan, along with top advisers like campaign manager William Casey, Michael Deaver, Paul Hannaford, Ed Meese, and pollster Richard Wirthlin, quietly worried about how to unite a party that had veered so far to the right. Desperate to strike a balance, they stunned conservative supporters by negotiating with former president Gerald Ford, a staunch rival in the 1976 primaries, to be Reagan’s vice-­presidential running mate. Talks eventually reached an impasse, however, when Ford demanded a power-­sharing arrangement that included naming Henry Kissinger as secretary of state and Alan Greenspan as Trea­ sury secretary. At the eleventh hour, aides dismayed by the notion of a “co-­ presidency” with Ford urged Reagan to choose George H. W. Bush as his running mate. The problem was that many Reagan advisers viewed Bush, who the nominee had bested in twenty-­nine of thirty-­three primaries, as too liberal. Reagan himself said, “I can’t take him; that ‘voodoo economic policy’ charge and his stand on abortion are wrong.” Yet when Bush agreed to support the GOP platform “with no exceptions”—­including its antiabortion and supply-­side economics planks—­he became a late addition to the ticket. The choice temporarily disgruntled Falwell and other conservative evangelical leaders, but reassured by the conservative platform and overall tone of the convention, they quickly made peace with the move.147 The Republican nominee helped assuage any lingering doubts. During his acceptance speech on July 17, 1980, Reagan assured the American people that theirs was a nation ordained by God as a “city upon a hill” and one that was capable of renewed greatness at home and abroad. At the end of his speech, the former Hollywood actor paused theatrically and said, “I have to confess that I’m a little afraid to suggest what I’m going to suggest. I’m more afraid not to.” He then asked the Republican faithful and millions of television viewers, “Can we begin our crusade, joined together, in a moment of silent prayer?” As their nominee bowed his head, convention delegates stood quietly for thirteen seconds. Reagan broke the silence with three words never before uttered in a presidential nominee’s acceptance speech: “God bless America.” The convention hall erupted into a twenty-­minute ovation; moreover, Reagan’s charismatic moment became a ritual. Within a decade, these words were invoked so regularly at the end of major political addresses that they became a reflexive element of US civil religion.148 The new Christian Right had found their presidential standard-­bearer.

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Conclusion: Out of the Wilderness As a long movement whose impact on American political life ebbed and flowed across the twentieth century, the Christian Right had an uneven relationship with the US presidency. During the Progressive Era and World War I, white conservative evangelicals crusaded for national moral regeneration and individual redemption while patriotically backing Wilson’s war efforts. Their political defeats on evolution in the schools and Prohibition drove many of these fundamentalist and evangelical Christians to the margins of the polity, where they established an independent subculture of churches, seminaries, social institutions, and media. Yet other Christian conservatives resisted the growth of the presidency and the national state during the Great Depression. Indeed, Christian libertarians fought tooth and nail against the New Deal state and its liberal champions. For white conservative evangelicals in particular, Billy Graham played an important transitional role in bringing their beliefs back to the public square and in working with Eisenhower to make God and patriotism indivisible during the Cold War. Although he shared Eisenhower’s preference that the country go slow on questions of racial justice, Graham also took stands on civil rights and racial equality that put him at odds with many of his most ardent white evangelical supporters, especially in the South. In fact, as we have noted, the new Christian Right that emerged in the early 1970s was in no small part galvanized in opposition to the challenges of civil rights activists and federal officials to private white Christian schools formed precisely when school integration was being implemented across the South. Of course, we need not attribute the rise of this conservative movement to one source. The movement’s development in the 1970s was also driven by reactions against feminism and the ERA, gay rights, “secular” textbooks, and, only later in the decade, abortion. However, while Falwell and other movement leaders liked to trace the origins of the new Christian Right to the Supreme Court’s Roe v. Wade ruling on abortion rights, the assault on “segregation academies” by federal agencies and the courts was a crucial catalyst to their political activism long before Roe was decided. Indeed, from textbook wars triggered by inclusion of material from Malcolm X’s Autobiography to the 1980 GOP platform promising protection from IRS challenges to segregated Christian private schools, the white grievances of many conservative evangelicals helped spur the movement. As we noted in chapter 1, long movements in American history rarely as­ sume one political incarnation, but rather shift over time in terms of their resources, strategies, and tactics. Movements that are marginal in one period

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and elicit presidential indifference may assume militant qualities in another and draw harsh government restriction. As they become formative and institutionalized movements with formidable political capacities and clout, they are far more likely to forge tense partnerships with presidents and gain traction on their agendas. As we have seen, the development of the Christian Right as a long movement looks quite different from that of the civil rights movement. In addition to their sharp ideological contrasts, these movements varied dramatically in the kinds of political weapons and strategies each deployed. In particular, the new Christian Right’s mobilization in the 1970s revealed the development of significant conventional political capacities for getting out the vote, fund-­raising, lobbying, and conservative media blitzes. This conservative movement did demonstrate disruptive potential and even violent tendencies in episodes like the extreme West Virginia battle over textbooks. Yet during the 1970s, the new Christian Right was propelled by a partnership of conservative evangelical leaders with New Right political professionals, who channeled the energy of faithful activists at the grassroots into largely mainstream political blueprints and tactics. During the 1950s and 1960s, the civil rights movement combined conventional political tactics such as litigation and congressional lobbying with an unrelenting series of disruptive, mass protests that shook the social, economic, and political status quo. Civil rights insurgents also remained instinctively hostile toward the American presidency, even as they saw executive power as essential to their quest for dramatic reform. For different reasons, Christian libertarians in print and from the pulpit railed against the modern presidency and welfare state that Roosevelt and his great legatee Lyndon Johnson built. Conservative evangelicals fervently battled textbooks, gay rights, IRS restrictions on southern white Christian schools, and other perceived threats during the 1970s. By the decade’s end, however, the new Christian Right movement had positioned itself for an exceptional march through American political institutions—­one that would eventually transform the Republican Party. Inspired by Reagan’s fervent efforts to win their support, conservative evangelicals now looked to a conservative Republican White House to champion their cause.

Six

Building a Movement Party: Ronald Reagan and the New Christian Right Conservative white evangelicals emerged as a potent new force in American politics during the 1970s. In earlier decades when conservative Christian libertarians fought New Deal programs and Billy Graham drew millions to his televised mass rallies, many conservative evangelical Protestants retreated from broader political life into separate churches and sectarian educational and social institutions.1 Most were beckoned from their post–­Scopes trial exile back to the public square in the early 1970s by fears of their rights being attacked by a hostile government and modern society. In particular, they perceived their subculture as under siege by IRS intrusions on the autonomy of religious schools, the push for the ERA (which passed the Senate in 1972), LGBTQ activism, limits on school prayer, science, pornography, and Roe v. Wade. By the late 1970s, evangelical leaders began to envision a bold political agenda that transcended defensive actions against government policies that they thought favored “secular humanism” over faith-­based morality. Indeed, far removed from the violent terror, repression, and barriers to basic membership that haunted African American civil rights reformers and their constituency, the new Christian Right enjoyed political privileges and resources to take institutionalized US politics by storm. Whereas the civil rights movement engaged in mass-­based nonviolent resistance designed to disrupt social, economic, and political order, the new Christian Right by the late 1970s increasingly focused on coalition and party building, electoral mobilization, and influencing officials in every branch and level of American government. Its ultimate goals reached beyond specific substantive policy goals to a seismic rightward shift in US political life. We gain more than a glimpse of these larger coalitional and partisan aspirations in the private blueprints developed by Jerry Falwell, Paul Weyrich,

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and other prominent conservative evangelical and New Right leaders at the end of 1979. During discussions about the purposes and tactics of the Moral Majority, they devoted strikingly little attention to how they might secure specific objectives like tax credits for private schools, outlawing abortion, attacking pornography, reinstating school prayer, and other policy items. Rather, their plans as the 1980 presidential election year neared concentrated on recasting the broader direction and philosophy of American government. Months before conservative evangelicals and New Right activists settled on Ronald Reagan as their preferred candidate, they observed that “the old Roosevelt coalition is no longer viable,” citing as evidence that “Jimmy Carter’s [1976] victory at the polls is not a true reflection of the old coalition’s power because the Carter phenomenon may never have taken place had the President been from another part of the country except the South.” The Moral Majority’s conservative architects shared a sense of hopeful urgency as Carter’s presidency foundered. “Leadership is a rare commodity,” they noted. “Politics founded upon a sound moral philosophy is equally rare. We should strike while the iron is hot!”2 As they privately strategized, Falwell, Weyrich, and others were explicit in targeting three sequential “challenges” for their conservative movement to tackle: first, “to articulate the philosophy of individual freedom and personal responsibility”; second, “to identify the elements of, and form, a new coalition”; and finally, “to achieve political power through the coalition.” With these objectives in mind, their plans called for a broad-­based effort to influence elections, especially the upcoming 1980 presidential and congressional contests, to establish a Washington office and staff for lobbying purposes, and to draw upon the formidable communications and fund-­raising capacities of the new Christian Right. At the heart of the new coalition they had in mind were key conservative religious elements: white evangelical and fundamentalist Protestants, “urban, ethnic Catholics,” and Mormons (with the promise of building alliances with Orthodox Jews later). Party politics also figured prominently in these initial calculations. Their blueprints adamantly stipulated that no attempt should be made to create a third party because doing so “would drain valuable assets and energies,” opting instead to “become the majority” within one of the nation’s two dominant parties.3 The Christian Right illustrates the potential and limits of an institutional movement. None of the designs articulated by these conservative evangelical and New Right leaders called for mass protests or other radically disruptive political tactics employed by civil rights activists and other movements. What they mapped out in 1979 was a plan to revolutionize American politics through decidedly conventional means: “With the old

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coalition and political parties dying, there is a vacuum. Nature abhors a vacuum. . . . We should be the ones to fill it. The new political philosophy must be defined in moral terms and propagated throughout the country by our new coalition. When political power is achieved, the moral majority will have the opportunity to recreate this great nation. To be practical, the movement must generate votes to elect the right people to office.”4 The Moral Majority’s founders were hardly alone among religious conservatives in their aspirations to recast the character of US electoral and partisan politics, as Pat Robertson, James Robison, Bill Bright, Ed McAteer, Tim LaHaye, and other evangelical leaders expressed similar determination to exercise political clout. “President Roosevelt did not hesitate to use power to force the Supreme Court to acquiesce to New Deal legislation,” Robertson noted in October 1979. “Christians should not hesitate to use the lawful power at their disposal.”5 The imperatives of redressing racial oppression and inequality trumped all other political goals for civil rights leaders and activists in the post–­World War II decades. Their instinctive antagonism for Lyndon Johnson and traditional partisan politics was deep, and their concern for the electoral fortunes of Johnson and the Democratic Party was limited, if not conflicted. By contrast, Falwell and many other leaders of the new Christian Right were persuaded by 1979 that their political and policy ends were best achieved through party building, creating a new majority coalition, and expanding their influence in the corridors of power. Interestingly, as they developed political blueprints for the Moral Majority in 1979, Weyrich, Falwell, and other conservative strategists were uncertain whether the Republican Party would be a reliable vehicle for their conservative agenda, and they resisted the notion of a permanent alliance with the GOP. Indeed, as the 1980 election campaign neared, white evangelical leaders had not yet settled upon Reagan as their preferred presidential candidate. As noted in chapter 5, however, it did not take long for Reagan and the new Christian Right to establish a strong political partnership, one that rarely shared the tensions and antagonisms that characterized Lyndon Johnson’s relationship with the civil rights movement. Indeed, most Christian Right leaders and their followers forcefully backed Reagan and his agenda even when this alliance produced few tangible policy gains for religious conservatives. The recognition and access that Reagan bestowed upon conservative evangelicals was a powerful source of legitimation for a movement that for years was relegated to the US political wilderness. Like Johnson in the 1960s, Reagan viewed the modern presidency as an institution that would allow him to make his mark on history; like Johnson, too, Reagan viewed the emergence of a formidable social movement

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as evidence that the United States was ready for fundamental change. In part, Reagan’s alliance with the Christian Right represented conservatives’ embrace of national administrative power. Until the late 1960s, opponents of the welfare state, including Christian libertarians, were generally opposed to the modern presidency, which had served as the fulcrum of liberal reform. Nevertheless, by the end of the Johnson administration it was clear that a strong conservative movement would require an activist program of retrenchment to counteract the enduring effects of the New Deal and Great Society.6 As Bert Rockman notes, “It was the Nixon presidency, particularly its aborted second term, that became celebrated for its deployment of [unilateral executive power],” but “the Reagan presidency intended to perfect the strategy and to do it from the beginning.”7 The relationship between Reagan and the Christian Right was mediated by a Republican Party that developed a strong national organization during the 1970s. Indeed, Reagan benefited from and in turn helped to galvanize a renewal of party politics. His administration’s opposition to the liberal administrative state advanced a transformation of the party system in which the traditional party apparatus, based on patronage and state and local organizations, gave way to a more programmatic party politics based on national organization. Although the uneasy partnership between Johnson and the civil rights movement contributed to the development of a nationalized progressive party, the liberal public interest groups spawned by the movements of the 1960s tended to emphasize “state building” as much as party building. In contrast, Reagan and the new Christian Right spied advantage in forging a national party offensive that would connect them to an electorate that had become increasingly disenchanted with the bureaucratic state. Their partnership was forged during the 1980 presidential contest.

Conservative Evangelicals and the 1980 Election As we saw in chapter 5, the Republican National Convention was a triumph for the new Christian Right. From their sweeping successes during the GOP platform battles to Reagan’s soaring acceptance speech filled with conservative Christian themes and fealty to American civic religion, movement leaders and grassroots activists reveled over their meteoric rise in national electoral and party politics. Reagan and the New Right viewed this alliance as the vanguard of a campaign to rally conservative Democrats to their side. In his first post-­ convention appearance, Reagan shifted from the unifying message of his ac­ ceptance speech to taking a decidedly divisive step in his efforts to court

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conservative white votes in Carter’s native South. In early August, he became the first Republican presidential candidate to appear at the Neshoba County Fair, located only a few miles from Philadelphia, Mississippi, where Klan members infamously murdered three civil rights workers—­James Chaney, Andrew Goodman, and Michael Schwerner—­in 1964. A Republican national committeeman from the state had urged an appearance at the fair to shore up “George Wallace inclined voters.” Reagan used the occasion to rail against the powers of the “federal establishment” and to declare that, “I believe in states’ rights.”8 As Andrew Young, a respected civil rights leader and African American politician, ruefully noted, “Traditionally these code words have been the electoral language of Wallace, Goldwater, and the Nixon southern strategy.”9 Reagan’s controversial appearance and invocation of “state’s rights” close to Philadelphia, Mississippi, underscores how eager his team was to bring conservative white southerners into the GOP column. The bond between Reagan and the new Christian Right was cemented before more than twenty-­five hundred conservative evangelical pastors from forty-­one states gathered in Dallas on August 21 for the National Affairs Briefing Conference. One year earlier, Campus Crusade’s Bill Bright convened a Dallas meeting of prominent conservative evangelicals focused on the twin threats of Soviet communism and national moral degeneration. Billy Graham dramatically declared at the meeting that if there were not a major “philosophical change of principle,” then the United States had “a thousand days of freedom” left.10 Although critical of the Carter administration behind closed doors, Graham, Rex Humbard, and other evangelical old guard leaders avoided the political fray in 1980. But younger evangelical leaders in attendance, including Bright, Robison, and Robertson, resolved to organize a pastors’ conference during the presidential election to evaluate candidates and “to mobilize the churches to get people out to register to vote.”11 The National Affairs Briefings Conference a year later gave voice to these younger and more politically active evangelical leaders; Robison and Religious Roundtable’s Ed McAteer organized the August 1980 program.12 One young Southern Baptist pastor who worked for Robison—­none other than future Arkansas governor and GOP presidential candidate Mike Huckabee—­coordinated logistics for the rally. Conference speakers featured a who’s who of New Right and Christian Right politics, including Robertson, Falwell, Weyrich, Phillips, McAteer, Schlafly, LaHaye, Robison, Helms, Crane, and Marshner. Old guard evangelicals like Graham, Humbard, Oral Roberts, and Robert Schuller kept their distance. “If I backed a Republican for president,” Humbard later asked, “what about the Democrats in my audience?”13 Carter and third-­party candidate John Anderson also declined to

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address the Dallas conference when their campaigns learned the conservative tilt of the gathering. Yet the Reagan team, as expected, enthusiastically agreed to have their candidate provide the conference’s keynote address.14 As roughly sixteen thousand conservative evangelical pastors and lay leaders filled Reunion Arena in Dallas, Robison and John Connally picked up Reagan at the airport to brief him before his address. During the ride, Robison explained that his evangelical gathering was officially nonpartisan and thus could not endorse Reagan. “I told him that . . . it would probably be wise if his opening comment would be, ‘I know this is non-­partisan, so you can’t endorse me, but I want you to know that I endorse you,’ ” Robison recounts. “Oh he loved that. He wrote that down and said, ‘That’s great. I’m going to use it.’ ”15 At a press conference prior to his address, Reagan told reporters that the biblical story of creation should be taught in public schools as prominently as the theory of evolution. Robison was slated to offer a speech to the evangelical crowd just prior to Reagan’s, and Connally encouraged Reagan to “go out and sit on the platform” to signal his support to the audience. Knowing of Robison’s fiery rhetoric, campaign aides Michael Deaver and Ed Meese urged Reagan to wait offstage, but he instead marched onto the platform and sat behind Robison. “We’ll either have a Hitler-­type takeover, or Soviet dominion, or God is going to take over this country,” Robison bellowed. “It is time to crawl out from under the pews and stop looking through the stained-­glass windows. . . . We can turn to God or bring down the curtain. We can sound the charge or play taps.” Arizona’s conservative evangelical senator, John Conlan, was in at­ tendance backstage and recounts that Deaver and Meese “were cringing and saying, ‘Where the heck did this guy come from?’ ”16 But their candidate had a very different reaction. When Robison’s speech assailed communists, homosexuals, liberal politicians, and other threats to the traditional family, Reagan nodded and applauded enthusiastically from the dais. When Reagan was introduced to deliver his own speech, he was greeted with thunderous applause. On cue from his private meeting with Robison and Connally, Reagan’s first line would be the most memorable and oft-­ quoted of his Dallas address: “I know this is nonpartisan, so you can’t endorse me, but I want you to know that I endorse you!”17 These words elicited a rapturous standing ovation from the sixteen thousand conservative evangelicals in attendance. Reagan’s speech further electrified the crowd by familiarly railing against plans to “force all tax-­exempt schools—­including church schools—­to abide by affirmative action orders drawn up by—­who else?—­IRS bureaucrats.” It was an explicit declaration of support for white evangelical private schools that critics called “segregation academies.” He

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also told the assembled pastors and lay leaders that if he were shipwrecked and could read only one book the rest of his life, he would choose the Bible because “all the complex questions facing us at home and abroad have their answer in that single book.” To explosive applause, he closed by urging conservative Christians to mobilize: “If you do not speak your mind and cast your ballots, then who will . . . vote to protect the American family and respect its interests in the formulations of public policy?”18 Reagan was now the unquestioned darling of the Christian Right, and Falwell pledged that the Moral Majority would get Christian Right voters to elect Reagan “even if he has the devil running with him.”19 For conservative evangelicals who largely resided at the margins of Amer­ ican politics for decades, Reagan’s message was more than rhetorical flour­ ish. His words signified unprecedented political recognition and legitimation from a major party’s presidential candidate in the modern era. “I don’t think people understand that the average fundamentalist felt alienated from the mainstream of American culture,” Ed Dobson explained. “That was a significant moment, because the candidate came to us; we didn’t go to the candidate.”20 The Southern Baptist Convention’s Richard Land described both the Dallas conference and Reagan’s speech as “a transformative moment” when “the evangelical involvement in public policy” came of age.21 Other ob­ servers described the mutual embrace of Reagan and conservative evangeli­ cals in Dallas as nothing short of a “marriage ceremony between Southern Baptists and the Republican Party.”22 Reagan’s coronation in Dallas as the beloved champion of conservative evangelicals did not mean that movement-­campaign relations were harmonious from August through Election Day. In fact, even as the Reagan team worked during the campaign’s final two months to fuse conservative evangelical voters to the GOP, it sought to win over more centrist voters and distanced itself from the Christian Right’s most provocative policy demands. Despite the ideological resonance between Reagan and the new Christian Right, conflict was inevitable between a major-­party presidential campaign driven to construct a broad majority coalition, and a movement bent on transforming society according to its distinctive and controversial beliefs. These competing imperatives anticipated struggles that would loom large during Reagan’s eight years in the White House. To better understand underlying movement-­campaign tensions, let us turn to a revealing battle of the general election: the struggle between Reagan campaign strategists and antifeminist religious conservatives over how to win the votes of American women. Due to their candidate’s well-­publicized personal opposition to the ERA and the GOP’s hard-­line positions on abortion and other social issues, the

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Reagan campaign feared major defections among women voters who traditionally supported Republican tickets. Touting their strong backing of the ERA and reproductive rights for women, the Democratic ticket and John Anderson actively courted these votes in the fall. Months earlier, leaders of the Republican Woman’s Task Force like vice-­chair Pam Curtis had openly warned that Reagan’s anti-­ERA position would split GOP women between those who believe “the party comes first” and those who “are going to bite the bullet as feminists and support the candidate who is perfect on the issues.”23 Another task force member said that Reagan’s conservative ERA and abortion positions put Republican “moderates and women into a real tailspin” and led many “to see no point in being involved with him.”24 At the Detroit convention, the National Organization for Women staged a march designed to replicate demonstrations by suffragists at the Republican National Convention in 1920.25 Forced out of her position as a Republican cochair, feminist Mary Crisp rebuked the party’s Reagan-­led conservative turn on the ERA and abortion, protesting that the GOP had elected to “bury the rights of over a 100 million American women under a heap of platitudes.”26 In an effort to mend fences with moderate Republican women unhappy with the party platform, the Reagan campaign met with a delegation of prominent GOP women who were dedicated to a variety of feminist causes. This women’s delegation was led by Mary Louise Smith, who was a former national party chair and an International Women’s Year commissioner. She also was a power broker in Iowa party politics, staunchly pro-­ERA, a vocal supporter of Planned Parenthood, and a strong backer of Bush during the primaries. After meeting with Reagan’s campaign brass, Smith and her delegation told reporters that “we came away with a good feeling” after Reagan promised to appoint women to important federal posts and to combat workplace discrimination.27 In contrast to Crisp, who openly broke with the party and chose to back John Anderson in the general election, Smith delivered a unifying message emphasizing that the party was like a family whose dis­ agreements could make them “stronger and more respectful of each other.”28 As the campaign entered the fall, the Reagan team continued to worry that the association of its candidate with conservative social and cultural views posed an electoral vulnerability. In hopes of touting its support for women’s rights and blunting a potential gender gap, the Reagan campaign announced in mid-­September that it was adding a Women’s Policy Advisory Board (WPAB) to its organization to promote “issues of importance to women.”29 Smith was named as the WPAB chair, and she enthusiastically told the media that “the overwhelming majority of this Board strongly sup­ port the Equal Rights Amendment.”30 What she did not mention is that

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nearly all WPAB members also strongly favored abortion rights and affir­ mative action, since Reagan campaign leaders urged them not to discuss these issues. This nod to feminist voters vexed the candidate’s conservative evangelical supporters, and instantly triggered a firestorm of protest from numerous conservative groups focused on family issues. Reagan quickly tele­ phoned Phyllis Schlafly of the Eagle Forum to help quell an uprising from the “pro-­family movement.” Schlafly confided to her Eagle Council members that Reagan told her that “he knew nothing about the formation of the Woman’s Policy Board” until after it was publicly announced. She also told her loyal confidantes that she believed Reagan was squarely in their corner but that his closest advisers, most notably campaign director William Casey and chief of staff Ed Meese, were mistakenly convinced “that they must seek the support of the pro-­ERA forces in order to win the election.”31 At a tense three-­hour meeting with Casey and Meese, Schlafly and other pro-­family conservatives argued that “many more votes are available to Reagan from the pro-­family movement” than from voters aligned with feminist Republicans of the WPAB. Yet the campaign leadership remained “unwilling to add an equal number of pro-­family women to balance the Women’s Policy Board.” These antifeminist conservative activists, led by Schlafly, privately noted that they “had become politically sophisticated enough” to know that “Reagan’s personal sincerity” would not be enough to “determine the ideology and the policies of the Reagan Administration.”32 In the end, Casey and Meese appeased Schlafly and other traditional family advocates by establishing a Family Policy Advisory Board (FPAB) within the campaign as a counterweight to the feminist WPAB. In early October, Reagan asked the FPAB to develop an administration plan to “promote a national rededication to traditional family values.” The occasion provided him a chance to castigate the federal government for doing little to protect “the rights of the born and unborn” children, while intruding on education, value formation, and health care. Reagan also highlighted a familiar problem that galvanized conservative evangelicals: “The Internal Revenue Service has harassed private religious-­oriented schools.”33 The new FPAB would include notable antifeminists of the new Christian Right such as Connie Marshner, Beverly LaHaye, and fervent abortion opponents like Representative Henry Hyde (R-­IL). The new FPAB began its work in early October with relish, designating family coordinators for each state, mobilizing “grass-­roots pro-­family activists,” and coordinating these efforts with state campaign headquarters. Conservative pro-­family groups not actively backing the Reagan-­Bush ticket were “telephoned and asked directly for their support.”34 Hostility toward the civil rights state and its assault on private white evangelical schools also continued

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to preoccupy activists. The FPAB developed blueprints for Reagan to make a high-­profile visit to “a Christian School in a southern state” as “the site of a strong pro-­Christian, anti-­IRS” statement.35 “The Board feels that the Christian school v. IRS issue is of greatest importance in the south,” FPAB members internally told campaign leaders. Although Reagan clearly backed private Christian schools in their struggle with the IRS over racial integra­ tion, the FPAB worried in October that “the issue has not been given high visibility as yet and, consequently, the difference between Carter and Reagan is not known.”36 The board’s leadership also drafted a major “family speech” or “radio address” for Reagan to deliver in October that highlighted his oppo­ sition to government intrusions on “the primary rights and responsibilities of parents in the rearing of their children, particularly in the areas of education and health, and value formation.” Prominent themes in the speech included support for voluntary prayer in schools, new procedures for parental textbook review, government noninterference with private Christian schools, retrenchment of “government welfare policies that encourage the break-­up of families,” and protecting “innocent, helpless, unborn children.”37 FPAB members soon discovered that their recommendations did not square well with the overall strategy of Reagan’s campaign headquarters. Indeed, during a chilly meeting in October, Casey shot down nearly every idea and request of the board’s leadership. Proposals for Reagan to appear at a southern Christian school went nowhere. “Bill Casey was negative on this point,” FPAB leaders reported to members, “stating flatly there ‘will be no more religious events.’ ” When the FPAB asked for campaign funds to run advertisements in “pro-­family/pro-­life/evangelical” newspapers and magazines before the election, Casey said all advertising funds had been expended.38 Finally, FPAB leaders requested that Reagan deliver the family speech they drafted, noting that they carefully crafted the speech to “use language that the ‘pro-­family’ constituency relates to without using ‘buzz words’ that disenchant other constituencies.”39 At the very least, they argued, the campaign should authorize radio commercials “specially tailored” to address “social/moral issues” of concern to conservative evangelicals. Casey was unmoved by these appeals, rejecting all requests and underscoring that all remaining speeches, statements, and advertising would be of a “general theme” related to the national economy and foreign policy.40 Yet Casey’s insistence that the campaign headquarters was highlighting only general themes was belied by Reagan’s continued efforts to repair his standing with centrist women voters. Reagan told reporters the same week that he fervently supported “full and equal opportunities for women in America” and that he planned to nominate a woman to the Supreme Court if elected.

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“I am announcing today that one of the first Supreme Court vacancies in my administration will be filled by the most qualified woman I can possibly find,” he proclaimed. “It is time for a woman to sit among our highest jurists.”41 The Reagan campaign’s instinctive resistance to the requests of religious antifeminists like Marshner and LaHaye foreshadowed conflicts and disappointments that lay ahead for new Christian Right activists during his administration. Reflecting the personal bond they had formed with the Republican candidate, these conservative activists concluded that the blame lay not with Reagan but his top advisers. Reagan won the presidential election in a landslide, carrying forty-­four states and defying most expert predictions and preelection polls. He won 67 per­cent of the white evangelical vote, vindicating Reagan strategists like Lyn Nofziger who saw the new Christian Right as “a natural constituency.”42 Although Reagan’s victory was attributed more to economic and foreign policy than to social issues, many Republicans and Reagan himself gave the new Christian Right considerable credit for the GOP’s decisive victory. This perception was confirmed by an ABC News–­Lou Harris poll that concluded “Ronald Reagan won his stunning victory . . . not because the country as a whole went conservative, but because the conservatives—­particularly the white moral majority—­gave him such massive support.” The ABC-­Harris survey showed that among 39 percent of the electorate that viewed itself as conservative, Reagan won by an overwhelming 62–­30 percent margin. This advantage was particularly decisive in the South and rural Midwest.43 Politics and religion scholar Albert Menendez, who surveyed sample counties across the country, further substantiated the Christian Right’s role in electing Reagan. Of the one hundred heavily “evangelical” counties, where there was a high percentage of members of conservative Protestant churches, fifty-­eight went for Carter in 1976, but only sixteen did so in 1980.44 Yet several studies showed that Reagan did not need Christian Right voters to win the election, and some social scientists noted that it was difficult to isolate spiritually based incentives shaping voter decisions from other motivations. Overall, considerable evidence reinforced the conclusion that conservative evangelical support for Reagan followed broader trends, rather than determining the outcome.45 There is little question, however, that Reagan’s 1980 presidential bid served as an important catalyst for unifying and mobilizing the new Christian Right, making it a formidable electoral force in American politics. Falwell, who worked tirelessly to mobilize conservative evangelicals and their allies for Reagan and other Republican candidates in 1980, listened to election returns in the parking lot of his Thomas Road Baptist Church. He described the sweeping victory as “my finest hour.” Ed Dobson, one of Falwell’s Moral

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Majority lieutenants, also celebrated what he believed was an important show of electoral might by the movement. “The most cynical of the press were admitting that the Religious Right . . . had at least influenced the election,” he recalled. “Others were saying we had swayed it. We chose to believe we swayed it.” Robison agreed, proclaiming that it was “outspoken preachers” who “impacted the direction of this country, and they impacted the election. There is no doubt about it.”46 The Christian Right was given considerable credit not only for Reagan’s victory, but also for the Republican Party’s takeover of the Senate and its considerable gains in the House. The transformation of the Senate was especially significant, where many leading liberal Democrats, such as Birch Bayh of Indiana, Frank Church of Idaho, Gaylord Nelson of Wisconsin, and George McGovern of South Dakota, were replaced by Republicans with close ties to the Christian Right. Moderate Democrats, especially those in the South, fared no better. Particularly notable was Jeremiah Denton’s defeat of James Folsom in Alabama. Although Folsom had defeated a liberal Democrat in the primary and was favored to win late in the campaign, Denton deployed an effective organization that combined savvy political professionals and fervent evangelical support to win a close but decisive victory.47 That the Christian Right was given credit for a Republican triumph that seemed to portend not just a partisan but an ideological shift of major proportions gave its leaders hope that they would play an important role in the Reagan administration. Although polls still showed that most Americans disagreed with the positions of conservative evangelical church leaders, president-­elect Reagan attributed them with helping get him and many conservative Republicans elected. When asked at his first news conference how much consideration he would give to the counsel of conservative or­ ganizations—­specifically the Moral Majority and Falwell—­in the formation of his government, Reagan responded that he certainly would be “open” to their input. “I’m not going to separate myself from the people who elected us and sent us there.”48 For every election to follow, the new Christian Right and the Republican Party were virtually synonymous.

Political Recognition and Policy Challenges under a New Administration Following the 1980 election, Christian Right and New Right movement activists were jubilant about dramatic political and programmatic changes they anticipated with a conservative makeover of the federal government led by Reagan. One movement leader heralded Reagan’s win as “the greatest

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victory for conservatism since the American revolution.” Another marveled that their efforts scored such a stunning victory for the American right: “It was one of those moments of ‘Can you believe what we did?’ ” A few days after Reagan’s inauguration, about twenty-­five hundred conservative evangelical activists gathered for a five-­day conference at Sheraton Washington Hotel, organized by the National Association of Evangelicals and the National Religious Broadcasters. A steady stream of speakers portrayed Reagan’s ascendance to the White House as God’s will. “It was Jesus that gave us this victory in November,” proclaimed Bobbie James, the wife of Alabama’s Republican governor and a popular born-­again figure. “God in his mercy heard the prayers of Christians all over this country . . . perhaps all over the world.” The enthusiastic audience cheered when another evangelical activist described Reagan’s landslide as “a victory for belief, a victory for faith, a victory for God.” A dominant theme underscored at the gathering by religious leaders like Falwell was that the 1980s were destined to be “the de­ cade of the evangelicals,” an era when believers would “assert their spiritual rights” and lead the country to “a moral rebirth.” Billy Graham also attended the meeting, honored by the National Religious Broadcasters as an inductee into its Hall of Fame. As the seasoned crusader who led earlier evangelical efforts to redeem Washington and the nation, Graham told the audience that he understood their optimism and the “high expectation” that Reagan would usher in a new era. But he warned his fellow believers not to count on the Reagan administration to turn the country around, reminding them that “only God can do that.” When they were not listening to prominent movement leaders, conservative evangelical conferees attended dozens of workshops designed to enhance their practical political skills and knowledge.49 Graham was not the only sage voice cautioning movement activists not to place too much hope in Reagan as their champion. For months, Weyrich urged them not to look upon Reagan as a potential political savior (or villain), or to expect electoral success to be translated into tangible policy victories without fighting for them forcefully. Weyrich observed that many movement conservatives embraced Reagan as “a hero first-­class who is going to do all of these things which conservatives have longed for but which have been denied us by the few modern Republican presidents who have occupied the White House.” He also recognized that other conservative activists were more skeptical, worrying that Reagan was “a wolf in sheep’s clothing who deliberately seeks to achieve liberal objectives by pretending to be a conservative.” For Weyrich, both of these perceptions were wrong-­headed: “Reagan is neither a demagogue nor a figure larger than his time.” Rather, he argued, the most essential task for movement conservatives was to capture,

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not to dismantle, the executive-­centered administrative state forged on the New Deal and Great Society. “We must fight inside a Reagan administration for what we believe in,” he urged. “Let us not expect miracles from a Reagan presidency. Let us not expect him to fight for our causes just because he gave us lip service during the campaign or because we are ‘right.’ Let us expect to have to fight hard for what we get, and let’s do it.”50 Few conservative evangelical leaders shared Weyrich’s chary, insurgent approach toward the new Reagan administration at the outset. Most remained exuberant about Reagan’s sweeping electoral victory, eagerly expecting victories for their chief political and policy goals. Yet three significant disappointments surfaced for the new Christian Right during the first year of the Reagan presidency. First, the movement learned that few evangelicals would hold positions in the Reagan administration despite campaign promises. Second, both the White House and Republican leaders in Congress made it crystal clear in 1981 that the Christian Right’s hopes for tangible gains on outlawing abortion, returning prayer to public schools, and other social reforms were a low priority. The White House and congressional Republicans insisted that they must focus on healing a troubled economy, lifting the tax burden, and strengthening the national defense. Finally, a vacancy on the Supreme Court months into Reagan’s presidency dramatically underscored the distance between the White House and the new Christian Right on their blueprints for conservative revolution. During his successful 1979 meeting with Christian Right clergy led by Conlan, Reagan promised that he would appoint evangelical Christians to his administration commensurate with their numbers in the US population. This was an enormously important issue for televangelist and Christian media mogul Pat Robertson, who was outraged that Carter had not kept “godly counsel” by appointing more devout evangelicals to his administration.51 Yet Reagan came nowhere near his promise to appoint conservative evangelicals at a rate comparable to their proportion of the national population, which was estimated between 35 to 40 percent. Morton Blackwell, who served as a liaison between conservative evangelicals and the Reagan campaign in 1980, was named a special assistant on the White House staff. Blackwell had been Barry Goldwater’s youngest elected delegate to the 1964 Republican convention and he worked for years in Richard Viguerie’s direct-­ mail operation. Christian Right leaders trusted Blackwell deeply, and he played a key role mediating relations between the movement and the Reagan administration. In Blackwell’s estimation, the Reagan transition team simply could not identify more than a handful of conservative evangelicals with the requisite experience to serve capably in the administration. “There

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were very few people who were available for appointment whose resumes indicated that they could run a major department or agency,” Blackwell ex­ plained. “How do you fill an entire administration with people who have never managed large staffs or handled huge budgets?”52 Yet Conlan and other Christian conservatives discerned a more profound hurdle than evangelical qualifications at play in the new administration’s appointments: Reagan’s closest advisers did not share the moral convictions of movement activists and saw much of their agenda as politically inexpedient. “The core group around Reagan—­the Mike Deavers of the world—­ were not at all interested either in appointing evangelical Christians into the administration or in concentrating on their values,” Conlan observed. “Their hearts were not with [people] that were oriented to church and moral values.”53 Nevertheless, a handful of conservative evangelicals were appointed to key administration posts. James Watt, a member of the Assemblies of God, was named secretary of Interior. Gerald “Jerry” Regier, who later teamed with James Dobson to found the Family Research Council, was named as director of the Office of Family Services in Health and Human Services. Robert Billings, who resigned as the Moral Majority’s executive director to campaign for Reagan, hoped for an appointment to the White House senior staff as liaison for religious groups. But the Reagan transition team decided to jettison the position altogether. Instead, Billings received a prominent post in the Department of Education, despite the fact that he once lobbied for the department’s abolition.54 Gary Bauer, a future director of the Family Research Council and GOP presidential candidate, became a domestic adviser in Reagan’s second term. Christian conservatives also were pleased by the eventual appointment to US surgeon general of C. Everett Koop, an accomplished pediatric surgeon who collaborated with Francis Schaeffer on a book and film that inspired many evangelicals to back a burgeoning pro-­life movement. Beyond this handful of appointments, conservative evangelicals lamented that they received few positions in the new administration.55 Dur­ ing a special meeting of the Religious Roundtable in January 1981, Christian activists heard movement leaders offer “quite critical” views of the new administration’s appointments.56 The fact that conservative evangelicals did not make up a significant presence within the Reagan administration was only part of the personnel issues that vexed new Christian Right leaders. They also shared Conlan’s view that many within Reagan’s inner circle did not share or validate the fundamental ideals and political goals of Christian conservatives. In particular, Chief of Staff James Baker and Deputy Chief of Staff Michael Deaver—­who

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along with Counselor to the President Ed Meese made up the triumvirate that dominated the Reagan White House in its early years—­tried to insulate the administration from both conservative evangelical leaders and New Right operatives. This perception was confirmed for many movement activists when they read newspaper stories early in the administration quoting Deaver as saying that the only way conservative evangelicals would be welcomed to the White House was through “the back door.”57 Cal Thomas, a syndicated columnist and vice president of the Moral Majority from 1980 to 1985, made no effort to hide his exasperation with a Reagan White House that he thought gave Falwell and the Christian Right the cold shoulder. As Thomas fumed to Blackwell: Does this Administration really believe Jerry Falwell is a liability after all he did to help Ronald Reagan get elected? . . . I see the President in danger of committing the same mistake Jimmy Carter made when he played up to the feminists and other liberals who in the end abandoned him for Ted Kennedy and were never won over by his courtship of them. Maybe you can explain the thinking behind the decision to hold Jerry at arms distance. Quite frankly, I don’t understand and I think it is a great mistake. We will continue to push ahead with this project because it is right, but it quite frankly hurts when those you love and support turn a deaf ear, as well as their backs, and pretend we don’t exist.58

Faith Whittlesey, who was assistant to the president in the Office of Public Liaison for the Reagan administration from 1981 to 1982 before being named to an ambassadorial post, later noted that senior White House staff had those associated with the new Christian Right “seated way in back at presidential appearances.”59 While prominent figures like Thomas and Weyrich openly criticized efforts by Deaver and Baker to limit the visibility and influence of the Christian Right, movement leaders like Robertson and Falwell gave the administration a pass in its early stages.60 More disappointing for the Christian Right was an unequivocal message from the Reagan administration and congressional Republicans early in 1981 that its most prominent goals—­ eliminating abortion, restoring voluntary prayer in public schools, derailing gay rights, fighting pornography, and other causes—­were a distraction. Instead, conservative evangelical leaders were told by GOP leaders that they needed to get behind a Reagan agenda focused on addressing a poor economy, easing the tax burden, and bolstering the country’s military and geopolitical position. Even strong movement allies like Senator Orrin Hatch

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toed the president’s line. “Until we solve the economic problems,” he told reporters, “I don’t believe we can get into peripheral issues.” Drawing from the same talking points, Senator Charles Mathias (R-­MD) said, “I don’t think we ought to bog down in what are really peripheral issues.”61 In similar fashion, Senate majority leader Howard Baker insisted that elected Republican officials were united in seeing abortion, school prayer, and other “emotional” issues as necessary “collateral” for the president’s economic agenda.62 Baker and House Republican leader Robert Michel suggested that lawmakers might tackle the Christian Right’s social agenda the next year. Recognizing that many Christian Right and New Right activists were deeply frustrated that their core issues were on the back burner, Blackwell organized a White House briefing in February 1981 as “an overture” to aggrieved movement leaders. Invitees included Viguerie, Phillips, Marshner, Schlafly, and Terry Dolan, among others. Elizabeth Dole, the director of public liaison for the administration and Blackwell’s boss, ran the meeting. It began with an introduction of Secretary of Navy John Lehman, who outlined the administration’s military strategy and foreign policy blueprints for coming years. He was followed by Office of Management and Budget director David Stockman, whose presentation provided an overview of proposed budget cuts and other economic plans. According to Marshner, attendees grew restless when it became clear that the carefully scripted meeting offered little room for questions or feedback from the movement leaders. The grand finale was an appearance by President Reagan, who offered brief comments before particular individuals were called on to ask prearranged questions. Undaunted, Marshner elbowed her way into the Q&A session. “I made the point that the pro-­family movement would . . . cooperate with the budget cuts but they would need some reassurance that the social issues were not totally forgotten,” she reported to confidantes. “He said well you know the budget cuts are the most important thing but when we get them taken care of well you know, we’ll take a look” at conservative social issues.63 One month later, Reagan assured the Conservative Political Action Con­ ference that he and his “fellow truth seekers” did not “have a separate social agenda, a separate economic agenda, and a separate foreign policy agenda. . . . Just as surely as we put our financial house in order and rebuild our national defenses, so too we seek to protect the unborn, to end manipulation of school children by utopian planners and permit acknowledgment of a Supreme Being in our classrooms.”64 However, as much as he sought to persuade movement conservatives that “we have one agenda” and that “ours is a consistent philosophy,” he also cautioned his audience that “obviously we’re not going to be able to accomplish all this at once.” Only ten days

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later, Reagan barely survived an assassination attempt at the Washington Hilton. During the recovery period that followed, Falwell offered spiritual support that Reagan acknowledged as “instrumental in minimizing the dam­ age of this unfortunate incident.”65 Movement activists grew restive over Washington’s inaction on key social issues by the summer of 1981. At a spirited meeting organized by the Religious Roundtable that included Christian Right activists, New Right operatives, conservative members of Congress, and administration officials like Blackwell and Dole, movement leaders did not pull any punches. The Moral Majority’s Ron Godwin observed that his organization readily agreed when the president asked for its assistance in mobilizing conservative Christians in support of his “first budget cut and tax reform.” He pointed out that it did so again when “Jerry [Falwell] got a phone call from the President asking for help with AWACS.”66 But Godwin warned that there was a limit to which the new Christian Right could back Reagan’s economic and foreign policy agenda without genuine policy gains on social issues that deeply mattered for the movement. “[I]t becomes increasingly difficult to go back to the same well over and over again and to ask people to support the Adminis­ tration which they do not see as doing anything to advance their major con­ cerns,” he told attendees. During the same gathering, Weyrich advised “peo­ ple in this movement, particularly those who have been interested in the political process only recently,” that they needed to closely monitor Rea­gan and congressional Republicans to see that they “live up to” their campaign promises. A few days later, stalwart conservative Senator Paul Laxalt assured movement allies at Schlafly’s Eagle Council banquet that the Rea­gan administration would take up social issues at the start of 1982.67 To help assuage the new Christian Right, Reagan regularly used religiously infused rhetoric that deepened what Kevin Kruse describes as “the sacralization of the state.”68 Although Reagan almost never attended church during his presidency, he embraced civic religion. “I am told that tens of thousands of prayer meetings are being held on this day,” Reagan declared in his first inaugural address; “for that I am deeply grateful.” As we have noted, he was the first major party nominee to end an acceptance speech by solemnly proclaiming, “God bless America.” He also became the first president to do so at the close of his 1984 State of the Union address. Communications scholars Kevin Coe and David Domke found that God was invoked in 47 percent of presidential speeches from Franklin Roosevelt to Jimmy Carter, but exploded to 90 percent in Reagan’s addresses.69 He also regularly attended rituals of civic religion like the National Prayer Breakfast, using these occasions as an opportunity to profess his support for conservative

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evangelical positions such as protecting “the unborn” and returning school prayer and Bible readings to public schools.70 With Blackwell’s faithful assistance, Reagan and other administration officials catered to innumerable personal requests from conservative evangelical leaders. Reagan provided printed or video greetings for many conferences and meetings organized by major organizations of the new Christian Right, and granted special interviews with various conservative religious broadcasters.71 During the spring of 1981, Reagan agreed “to do a video clip” congratulating Falwell for a cel­ ebration of his twenty-­five years of ministry at his Thomas Road Baptist Church.72 The White House even fielded requests from leaders of the Christian Right to look into “impending deportation” cases involving persons they hoped could remain in the United States.73 In short, the Reagan administration found itself engaged in various forms of constituent service work for Christian Right leaders and groups. Despite Reagan’s promotion of civic religion and his administra­tion’s outreach efforts with movement organizations and leaders, the White House senior staff continued to rankle movement activists by deflecting their substantive political and policy objectives. Media leaks from top aides intimating how administration strategists sought to neutralize conservative evangelicals further fueled these tensions. Following a well-­publicized gathering of Christian Right activists at the White House in 1981, for instance, one prominent Reagan adviser told the Washington Post that the event was political stagecraft with no programmatic significance. The aide vividly un­derscored this point by quoting from the popular movie The Godfather, explaining that the administration’s game plan was to “hold your friends close, and your enemies closer. We want to keep the Moral Majority types so close to us that they can’t move their arms.”74 With the movement’s agenda mired in Congress, Weyrich organized a conference call among Christian Right leaders in hopes of rallying them to mobilize grassroots supporters to pressure the president. “If the idea that economic issues are more important than moral issues takes hold, then it says something about what we stand for,” he insisted. “You have to show righteous indignation over this, and you can’t just take this.” Yet few were prepared to battle the Reagan administration. Robertson and Falwell told Weyrich that he was overreacting: “They told me to calm down and give these people their due.”75 Paradoxically, while the White House was marginalizing religious issues, the Moral Majority, the Religious Roundtable, and other movement organizations dutifully joined a broad coalition of conservative interest groups rallying behind the president’s 1981 Omnibus Budget Reconciliation Act and his Economic Recovery Tax Act.76 A frustrated

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Weyrich compared the docility of Falwell, Robertson, and other evangelical leaders to a “ghetto mentality”: “What overshadowed all their concerns was simply their pleasure in being able to get in even the back door of the White House. They didn’t want to do anything to jeopardize that. They were willing to put aside their [agendas] . . . to safeguard meaningless access.”77 Adding insult to injury, Reagan nominated Sandra Day O’Connor to fill the vacated spot of Justice Potter Stewart on the Supreme Court in the summer of 1981. O’Connor was an economic conservative, but she had demonstrated no support for the Christian Right’s program; indeed, while a member of the Arizona state legislature, she supported the ERA and women’s reproductive rights. Reagan and his aides argued that O’Connor’s selection fulfilled the president’s promise during the 1980 campaign to nominate a woman, and they insisted that her “instincts and values were consistent with his.” But many in the Christian Right considered the choice to be a betrayal of the Republican platform. When Robison heard that O’Connor was Reagan’s selection, he “hollered and screamed” at Ed Meese for abandoning the principles that had been promised at his Dallas Public Affairs Briefing during the heat of the campaign. To the administration’s chagrin, Robison teamed with McAteer to orga­ nize an anti-­O’Connor rally of Christian conservatives and their allies in Dallas.78 Marshner complained that Reagan “had not checked with his conservative friends . . . there had not been any opportunity for input, and no care had been paid to the fact that she had a pro-­abortion voting record in Arizona.”79 Billings quietly reported to Weyrich that he had spent five days in Phoenix researching O’Connor’s legislative record, and was deeply troubled by what he found. “President Reagan has called Judge O’Connor ‘a woman for all seasons,’ ” he noted. “If that means that she straddles an ideological fence, Reagan is correct. . . . Conservatives should disapprove of  her record on abortion, the ERA, pornography, criminal justice, and growth of government.”80 Facing a potential backlash from movement activists, Reagan called Falwell to explain his choice of O’Connor and to ask him not to go public in opposition during her confirmation hearings. Falwell agreed not to take a public position before or during the hearings, and ultimately made no comment at all on the nomination. Not all of those working at the Moral Majority offices shared Falwell’s magnanimous view of the matter. The organization’s vice president and savvy public relations director Cal Thomas was incredulous that Reagan had failed to capitalize on the Republican Senate majority to nominate a more ardent and proven conservative jurist—­“someone with the convictions of  Judge [Robert] Bork”—­who could shift the court more decisively rightward. A bipartisan, centrist choice like

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O’Connor, he reasoned, would be better when Democrats controlled more Senate seats. Thomas was anything but shy about sharing his objections with reporters and appearing on Ted Koppel’s Nightline to express his opposition to O’Connor’s nomination. He also drafted a statement one week after Reagan’s court announcement, explaining why the Moral Majority joined with other traditional pro-­family groups in raising serious “substantive concerns” about O’Connor. Before long, however, he was instructed by superiors like Falwell to refrain from publicly fighting the nomination because they viewed White House access and favor as crucial.81 O’Connor’s confirmation ultimately sailed through the Senate by a unanimous 99–­0 vote. The movement faced deeper disappointments in the years that followed, including important defeats for specific policy goals. The 1980s struggles over the autonomy of private Christian schools like Bob Jones University and over social issues of moral significance to Christian conservatives provide important examples of these setbacks.

The Battle over Christian Schools, Racial Justice, and Bob Jones University At the dawn of the Reagan Revolution, many Christian Right activists remained preoccupied by questions of race and antidiscrimination reforms won by the civil rights movement more than a decade earlier. In particular, charges that private white Christian schools were designed to exclude racial minorities continued to roil the political waters. As we saw in chapter 5, the wellsprings of the new Christian Right can be traced in no small part to the late 1960s when civil rights lawyers successfully challenged the tax-­exempt status of “white-­flight” Christian schools that exploded after the Supreme Court’s landmark decision. In May 1969, for example, a federal court ruled that all-­white Christian schools in Mississippi were ineligible for tax exemptions so long as they excluded African American students. Its decision meant that the IRS was under court order to deny tax-­exempt status to all private Mississippi schools engaged in racially discriminatory practices. With the reluctant approval of President Nixon, the IRS later reached beyond the federal court’s order in Mississippi by taking steps to deny tax-­exempt status to private Christian schools practicing racial segregation throughout the country. This use of tax-­exemption policy as a tool for enforcing civil rights law—­ sparked by frustrated African American parents in Mississippi, resourceful advocacy attorneys, and responsive judges—­put the federal government on a collision course with movement defenders of private white Christian schools.

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South Carolina’s Bob Jones University became the most visible flashpoint for this battle, a fundamentalist institution that for years unabashedly promoted racial segregation in its admissions and student-­life policies and de­ fiantly proclaimed that its explicit practices of racial discrimination were in keeping with sacred religious freedoms and an inviolable higher law. The Reagan administration committed itself to protect private Christian schools from what it described as an overreaching IRS, but the fusion of antigovernment hostility, open racial bigotry, and hyper-­fundamentalist separation evinced by the Bob Jones University case would put the White House and the new Christian Right under intense political fire. Recall that the IRS notified Bob Jones University at the close of 1970 that its charitable tax-­exempt status was in jeopardy because it openly refused to admit nonwhite students. School officials responded by claiming that the separation of races was mandated by biblical scriptures, and threatened litigation. Within six months, however, the US District Court for the District of Columbia ruled in its Green v. Connally decision that the IRS could revoke charitable tax exemption for private educational institutions that were racially discriminatory. With its legal authority to punish segregationist schools affirmed, the IRS targeted egregiously biased schools like Bob Jones University. In an effort to comply with the Green decision and the IRS edict, the university lifted restrictions on the admission of married African Americans and other nonwhites. Yet it continued to deny entry to unmarried racial minorities because university leaders worried about miscegenation. Admissions to Bob Jones University were opened more broadly in 1975, but the school maintained a strict policy against interracial dating and marriage. Those who violated this dating policy were subject to immediate expulsion, as were any students who “espouse, promote, or encourage others to violate the university’s dating rules and regulations.”82 In 1976, the IRS formally revoked the charitable tax-­exempt status of Bob Jones University, and informed the school that it owed taxes dating back to 1970, when it was originally notified by the IRS that its discriminatory policies made it ineligible for tax relief. Facing a major financial hit that was both retroactive and prospective, the university sued to retain its tax exemption. It initiated a litigation battle with the federal government that would span seven years.83 With the blessing of the Ford White House, the IRS issued new guidelines in 1976 for private schools on nondiscriminatory charters, staff hiring practices, and financial aid. The IRS’s civil rights offensive continued apace during the Carter administration, including new requirements for private schools formed at the same time as public schools were being integrated. These “segregation academies,” as civil rights champions called them, faced

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new IRS sanctions if they had an “insignificant number of minority stu­ dents”—­measured as “less than twenty percent of the minority school age population in the community served by the school.”84 Private schools falling below this benchmark were expected to demonstrate vigorous efforts to recruit minority students. As noted in chapter 5, these developments mo­ bilized conservative evangelicals who feared that their institutions were under threat from an overzealous federal bureaucracy. Discerning a propitious opening both to attack big government and to appeal to Christian Right voters, Reagan made the IRS–­Christian school struggle a prominent focus of one of his nationally syndicated radio commentaries in November 1978. Echoing language employed by Billings, Falwell, and other movement leaders, the future president railed against an intrusive IRS that “threatens the destruction of religious freedom itself” by coupling tax-­exempt status to racial integration of Christian private schools. In an assertion disputed by most civil rights organizations, Reagan added that such aggressive bureaucratic actions were especially unjustified since “virtually all such schools are presently desegregated.”85 Reagan was not alone in championing their cause; fighting on behalf of Christian private schools increasingly became part of the Republican brand through the 1980 election. Conservative GOP House members attached riders to appropriations bills in 1979 and 1980 designed to prohibit the IRS from governing the tax-­exempt status of parochial schools.86 The 1980 Republican platform, as we saw, also condemned the IRS antidiscrimination efforts as an “unconstitutional regulatory vendetta” against indepen­ dent Christian schools (why GOP conservatives thought the IRS beginning under the Nixon administration had an incentive to seek vengeance against these schools was never explained). The Reagan campaign also hammered away at an unpopular federal bureaucracy as it courted evangelical support, promising to halt “the IRS’s attempt to remove tax-­exempt status of private schools by administrative fiat.”87 Meanwhile, the US Court of Appeals for the Fourth Circuit ruled that Bob Jones University was not entitled to a tax break because its racist policies violated sound public policy “rooted in the Constitution, condemning racial discrimination, and more specifically, the government policy against subsidizing racial discrimination in education, public or private.”88 From the start of the Reagan presidency, Christian Right lobbyists and congressional conservatives urged officials such as IRS commissioner Ros­ coe Egger and Treasury secretary Donald Regan to reverse policies of the Nixon, Ford, and Carter administrations and leave the tax-­exempt status of Christian schools intact. In Congress, House minority whip Trent Lott

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led the charge for the new administration to halt IRS efforts to revoke tax exemptions for noncomplying parochial schools. As one of the most prominent conservative politicians from Mississippi, Lott was well acquainted with the rise of “segregation academies” in the state and the successful litigation challenge mounted by African American parents and civil rights lawyers that culminated with the Green decision. Since Mississippi was ground zero in this struggle, numerous independent Christian schools had seen their tax exemptions revoked. Less than a week after Reagan’s inauguration, a letter arrived in Donald Regan’s office from Lott and other members of Mississippi’s congressional delegation. In their message to the new Treasury secretary, Lott and his colleagues argued that the IRS’s use of tax-­exemption policy to regulate religious schools was unconstitutional, despite the fact that a federal district court said otherwise. The IRS initiative was “absolutely unprecedented” because “historic tax-­exemption for churches . . . has been consistently, unwaveringly maintained under the first amendment principles of separation of church and state.”89 Tellingly, no mention was made of African American exclusion from whites-­only Christian schools in the state. Evangelical leaders and school officials made similar pleas to the new administration. Despite the urgency with which Christian Right activists and supportive congressional members sought to insulate private evangelical schools from the reach of the IRS, the Reagan administration responded slowly. Christian school advocates hoped for a pivot to occur before the Bob Jones University case made its way to the Supreme Court. Nevertheless, Regan and the Treasury Department largely steered clear of the controversy. Meanwhile, the Justice Department also endorsed the status quo by filing a brief in September 1981 with the Supreme Court, supporting the IRS’s position. Yet Lott, nudged by Christian Right activists, was determined to persuade the administration that the IRS should be forced to change course. Senator Strom Thurmond of South Carolina joined Lott in pressuring the White House to reverse IRS policy. As the Republican chair of the Senate Judiciary Committee and a trustee of Bob Jones University, Thurmond summoned IRS commissioner Egger to Capitol Hill to underscore “the First Amendment issues” being violated by his agency’s enforcement.90 The lobbying by Lott increased when several Mississippi Christian schools, including one in his own district, received final notice from the IRS that their tax exemptions had been revoked for sustained racial bias in their admissions. Lott drafted a new memorandum calling for a reversal of IRS policy, blanketing key administration officials. “Didn’t he write about everybody?” IRS chief Egger asked. By December 1981, Lott’s request found its way to Reagan’s desk in

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the Oval Office. After reading Lott’s arguments, Reagan informed Regan that “I think we should” end IRS use of tax-­exemption policy to regulate Christian schools.91 At the urging of Ed Meese, high-­level appointees in the Justice and Trea­ sury Departments took steps to change the policy in late December. Pursuant to White House plans, Deputy Attorney General Edward Schmults noted the absence of any statute that specifically granted the IRS authority to deny tax exemptions on the grounds of racial discrimination. In conversations with his counterpart at the Treasury Department, Deputy Treasury Secretary R. T. McNemar, it was clear that Reagan’s campaign promise “was the reason we looked very hard at legislative intent.”92 Civil Rights Division chief William Bradford Reynolds and his aide, Charles Cooper, did the legal research to fortify a policy change. At the behest of Schmults, Associate Deputy Attorney General Bruce Fein drafted a four-­page “confession of error” memo arguing that earlier Justice Department briefs incorrectly endorsed IRS enforcement efforts that clearly went beyond the agency’s legal authority. Reynolds made it clear that he opposed Bob Jones University’s bigoted rules barring interracial dating, but agreed with Fein and other young Justice Department appointees that only Congress—­not the IRS—­could revoke the tax-­exempt status of private organizations. Behind closed doors, general counsel for the Treasury Department Peter Wallison told Regan that these moves likely would spur an “outcry” from critics charging that the administration cared little about “overtly discriminatory practices.”93 It was a warning that never made it to the White House.94 Confident that a solid legal case could be made for a decisive policy shift, Schmults and McNemar took the proposed change to Meese for final White House approval. At a White House senior staff meeting, Meese described the decision as “a reversal of a Carter policy” and a clear-­cut matter of “not allowing bureaucrats to make social policy.” He did not mention that the policy in fact began during the Nixon administration or that it targeted private schools that blatantly excluded African American students. Framed by Meese in politically innocuous terms, Baker and Deaver concurred that a rule change was in order.95 In January 1982, the Treasury Department declared an about-­face on the IRS’s policy denying tax exemptions to parochial schools that engaged in racial discrimination, stipulating that only Congress could authorize this action. Reagan’s Justice Department announced the same day that the new federal policy meant that the Supreme Court no longer needed to hear a case involving Bob Jones University seeking to have its tax exemption reinstated.96 Opponents of the eleven-­year IRS policy predictably hailed the news. Bob Jones III, president of the university bearing

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his grandfather’s name, celebrated that Reagan’s decision “in effect gives us a clean bill of health.”97 Senator Thurmond praised the White House for putting “an end to a decade of trampling on religious and private civil rights by the Internal Revenue Service.”98 Beyond movement circles, however, the Reagan administration’s reversal of a long-­standing IRS policy instantly elicited angry protest from both inside and outside government. The NAACP executive director Benjamin Hooks described the rule change as “nothing short of criminal. It opens the door to every racist element in our nation to discriminate against blacks, against women, against Hispanics, and to do it with a subsidy from the Government’s pocket.”99 The American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU), the American Jewish Committee, and the Lawyers Committee for Civil Rights under Law called the decision “appalling,” and pointed out that the Reagan Justice Department as recently as September had reaffirmed previous IRS policy as consistent with its “commitment to the eradication of racial discrimination in education both in the Constitution and in many Federal statutes.” Prominent Democratic senators including Daniel Patrick Moynihan (NY), Edward Kennedy (MA), and Gary Hart (CO) denounced the policy reversal as “tragic,” “illegal,” and “immoral,” representing the administration’s desire to appease forces “that want to undo the civil rights movement.” Democratic National Committee chairman Charles Manatt declared that the administration’s turnabout “has effectively made every American taxpayer a forced contributor to segregationist schools.”100 Although the blistering criticism from Democratic politicians and various progressive and civil rights organizations was damaging, the White House was particularly stunned by harsh rebukes from centrist Republicans in Congress and many respected current and former government offi­cials. Senators Mathias (R-­MD) and Richard Lugar (R-­IN) assailed Reagan’s new tax-­exemption policy as “bad ethics,” “outrageous,” and “bad politics.” For­ mer IRS commissioners representing Republican and Democratic admin­ istrations also loudly condemned the new policy as “clearly contrary to the law, a reversal of years and years of precedent.” Donald Alexander, the respected head of the IRS from 1973 to 1977 under Presidents Nixon and Ford, said that “the IRS should not be forced to close its eyes to blatant discrimination.”101 It also became clear that Reynolds, Schmults, and other Reagan appointees were opposed by career Justice Department lawyers and IRS officials. In a dramatic turn, more than two hundred lawyers and staffers of Justice’s Civil Rights Division signed an open letter to Reynolds protesting “President Reagan’s recent decision to extend tax-­exempt status” to private Christian schools “established for the purpose of perpetuating

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racial discrimination.” Providing tax breaks to schools that sought to evade the Brown decision, they noted, violated acts of Congress, the Constitution, and federal court rulings. The fact that Reagan’s zealous Justice appointees, armed with copies of the 1980 Republican platform and fresh legal briefs, undid a long-­standing policy was especially troubling to Civil Rights Division lawyers. Reynolds’s role in particular, they wrote, cast “serious doubt upon the division’s commitment to enforce vigorously the nation’s civil rights laws.”102 The Reagan White House was caught off guard by the breadth and intensity of the political blowback elicited by their policy shift. “My god, what is this thing?” Deaver asked at a breakfast meeting of stunned senior staff.103 The administration’s seeming ignorance or indifference concerning the ra­ cial implications of its decision created a public relations disaster, espe­ cially because it fed a narrative that Reagan was at best insensitive to African American civil rights and at worst a political opportunist who engaged in a “southern strategy” to win white conservative votes. Reagan had voiced strong public opposition in the 1960s to both the Civil Rights Act of 1964 and the Voting Rights Act of 1965. He also raised eyebrows when he failed to join many respected Republican leaders in denouncing George Wallace during his demagogic, bigotry-­fueled race for the presidency in 1968. Reagan also alienated racial progressives by delivering his controversial 1980 campaign speech on “state’s rights” near Philadelphia, Mississippi, the notorious site where three civil rights workers were murdered by the Klan during Freedom Summer of 1964. Now the NAACP’s Hooks told reporters that the president’s IRS decision was one of a “series of retreats on discrim­ ination that puts them mighty close” to being outright racist.104 In full damage-­control mode, the president’s advisers worked quickly on what they called a “salvage operation.” First, White House advisers de­ fended Reagan as a “fair-­minded man” whose reputation had been tarnished by “faulty staff work” that “failed to see the sensitivity of the issue.”105 Second, on January 18, Reagan sent a letter to the House Speaker and Senate president expressing his “unalterable opposition to racial discrimination in any form.”106 He also asked Congress to give “the very highest priority” to legislation proposed by the administration to outlaw tax breaks for segregated schools. White House communications director David Gergen insisted that pressure from Thurmond, Lott, and religious conservatives had not influenced the administration’s decision to end the IRS’s regulatory policy. He also contended that its reversal reflected concerns over making social policy by administrative fiat, underscoring the need for legislation on tax-­exemption policy. In a final modification of its position, the White

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House also announced that the IRS would not restore tax exemptions to hundreds of blatantly discriminatory private schools until Congress acted on the issue.107 For new Christian Right activists who perceived the IRS’s antidiscrimination rules as an example of the federal government’s unconstitutional intrusion on religious freedom, the early weeks of 1982 were a political roller coaster. Whereas Reagan’s initial reversal of IRS policy was hailed as a major triumph for white evangelical schools, the administration’s urgent modifications amid a powerful backlash signaled a dramatic reversal of fortunes for religious conservatives. “The Worst Has Happened: Torpedoed When Victory Was in Sight,” screamed the headline of the Evangelical Methodist. Predictably, most movement conservatives let Reagan off the hook for walking back his original decision. They resented the political caution and moderation of senior White House staffers and centrist Republicans in Congress. But most of their ire was directed toward civil rights champions in the federal bureaucracy, Congress, and the Washington interest group community, who they blamed for overreaction and manipulation of the liberal media. The fundamentalist Baptist newspaper, the Sword of the Lord, reflected this antipathy when it reported that “humanists, secularists, and real racists created an explosive protest that must have measured a ‘10’ on the Richter scale.”108 Bob Jones III, however, was anything but forgiving of Reagan. He accused the president of being no less than a “traitor to God’s people” because he surrendered to elite pressure and “sent a bill to Congress to destroy Bob Jones University.”109 Before Congress felt compelled to address the Reagan administration’s proposed legislation denying tax exemptions to segregated private schools, the US circuit court of appeals changed the discussion by prohibiting the Treasury Department from granting tax breaks to Bob Jones University. The court’s intervention convinced many lawmakers that they could ignore the Reagan proposal and wait for the Supreme Court to settle the matter. The White House now found itself in the uncomfortable position of preparing fresh legal briefs justifying why it was convinced that the IRS was not permitted to withhold tax exemptions from private schools engaging in racial discrimination while also claiming that a congressional statute authorizing the denial of school tax breaks was constitutional. The challenges for the administration were heightened by the fact that long before it altered the IRS rules, lawyers in the Solicitor General’s Office argued vociferously that the legal rationale for a change of policy was anemic. Although it routinely falls to litigators in the Solicitor General’s Office to prepare legal briefs and argue cases on behalf of the US government before the Supreme Court, they

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refused to do so in the Bob Jones University case due to the threadbare legal reasoning used to handcuff the IRS by Reagan Justice Department appointees (rather than career lawyers). Instead, the job fell to one of those Justice appointees, William Bradford Reynolds, to advance the administration’s bifurcated argument. Meanwhile, the Supreme Court named a former NAACP Legal Defense Fund chief, William Coleman, to advance the argument that the IRS was legally authorized to deny tax exemptions from private educational institutions that were racially discriminatory. William Ball, representing Bob Jones University, insisted that the school’s racial policy reflected sacred convictions based on the Scriptures and thereby made IRS intervention an “egregious offense to religious liberty.” Reynolds distanced the government from Ball’s justification for the university’s policies against interracial dating and marriage, but awkwardly joined him in contending that the IRS rules had no basis in law. Coleman responded that Congress had never sought to overturn the IRS’s rules governing tax exemptions for private schools. Both the Reagan administration and Bob Jones University suffered a decisive legal defeat when the Supreme Court ruled by an 8 to 1 margin that the IRS was unquestionably authorized to withhold tax-­exempt status. It ordered Bob Jones University to pay back taxes with interest. Chief Justice Warren Burger, who Reagan described as an idyllic conservative jurist, issued the blistering majority opinion that eviscerated the legal arguments made by Reagan lawyers. The court underscored that the administration’s core legal claims had been settled long ago, noting that the original IRS rules of 1970 were ‘‘wholly consistent with what Congress, the Executive and the courts had repeatedly declared.” Burger, joined by seven fellow justices including Reagan’s sole appointee, Sandra Day O’Connor, was particularly forceful in arguing that “racial discrimination in education violates a most fundamental national policy, as well as rights of individuals. . . . Given the stress and anguish of the history of efforts to escape from the shackles of the ‘separate but equal’ doctrine, it cannot be said that educational institutions that, for whatever reasons, practice racial discrimination are institutions exercising ‘beneficial and stabilizing influences in community life’ or should be encouraged by having all taxpayers share in their support.”110 Described by legal experts as “worse than an embarrassment” for Reagan, the court’s Bob Jones University ruling was viewed by white conservative evangelicals in decidedly menacing terms. New Christian Right leaders said the court had declared “open season” on fundamentalist schools and churches, and that the decision represented a “broad-­brushed attack on religious liberty.”111 In truth, the federal judiciary for years stipulated

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that private Christian schools had the freedom to pursue segregationist and anti-­miscegenation policies, but also that to qualify for tax exemption, an activity had to be “charitable” in ways compatible with public policy.112 This was cold comfort to movement activists, who worried that “shock waves from the bomb dropped on Bob Jones University by the Supreme Court will eventually reach all Christian schools, parochial schools, churches and other religious institutions.”113 Despite their unequivocal defeat on IRS tax-­ exemption policy, most Christian Right leaders continued to view Reagan as a well-­meaning defender of their cause, albeit one who was often hamstrung by liberal secular humanists outside his administration and pragmatic political moderates within it. The question of whether the Reagan administration had the capacity or will to fight for the movement’s most fervent causes came into even sharper relief in the conservative evangelical quest to outlaw abortion, restore school prayer, and secure other key elements of its “pro-­ family” social agenda.

Abortion, Prayer, and the “Social Issues Agenda”: Mobilizing a Reluctant Administration During its earliest stages, the Reagan White House maintained a disciplined focus on economic and military policies. Although this meant that social issues of importance to the new Christian Right and its conservative allies would have to wait, influential evangelical leaders including Falwell, Bright, Bakker, and Robertson offered unqualified support for the president’s agenda of tax cuts, reduced social spending, and a defense-­weapons buildup. By September 1981, however, the new administration found itself under attack from its right flank as disgruntled Christian Right, New Right, and pro-­life activists demanded action on unfulfilled campaign promises. The immediate impetus for this political brushfire was O’Connor’s nomination, although restless movement activists saw her nomination as indicative of a more significant problem in their relationship with the White House. The O’Connor choice was, as the National Pro-­Life Alliance PAC (NPLA-­ PAC) put it, “an act of political finesse” that involved no consultation with movement allies and reflected deep-­seated resistance from administration moderates to the “social issues agenda” of religious conservatives.114 One year after Reagan was embraced as the political darling of the new Christian Right at Robison’s Public Affairs Briefing, an impressive lineup of movement leaders reassembled in Dallas to openly convey their discontent: Robison, Weyrich, Schlafly, Phillips, McAteer, and Moral Majority leaders. Most were frustrated by media reports of Meese saying that “social issues

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are not about to become the administration’s top priority” and that it had “yet to develop any timetable or strategy to deal with them.” This was bitter news for conservative activists who agreed to support the president’s focus on economic and tax initiatives in his early months in return for strong backing of their social agenda. Phillips complained that Reagan’s top advisers spent too much time traveling “in a more liberal circle” and that “Jim Baker is operationally the President of the United States.” Christian Right leaders continued to express faith in the president but blamed those around him for derailing their reform goals: “Reagan is fine,” one movement activist said, but added that “I don’t think Meese, Deaver, and Baker give a damn about these social issues. I can see them wiping their hands and saying, keep the boss away from these screwball issues.”115 This movement perception of Reagan’s closest advisers and their aversion to contentious issues of social morality was hardly unfounded. Within the White House, Whittlesey and Blackwell quietly observed that the prevailing view among key staffers was that the Christian Right’s social agenda would damage Reagan’s positioning for reelection and for less contentious programmatic blueprints, since he might appear to be influenced too much by religious extremists. Given these environs, “there was a kind of White House underground of people who were known to be supporters of the ‘pro-­life’ position, of school prayer, of tuition tax credits.”116 Efforts by Reagan’s inner circle to shield him from the conservative social agenda surfaced early on when the president reneged on a campaign promise to appear at the 1981 March for Life in Washington two days after his inauguration, despite the fact that it took place half a mile from the White House. Instead, Reagan invited antiabortion leaders to meet with him privately in the Oval Office. Some “pro-­life” movement figures, like Jack Wilke, president of the National Right to Life Committee, praised Reagan for the gesture and saw it as comparable to “when the civil rights leaders were brought in the White House by Kennedy.” Yet many antiabortion activists saw Reagan’s failure to appear personally at the March for Life as a snub, including the march’s organizer and president, Nellie Gray, who blasted the president’s top aides for their “untenable excuses for keeping the president from speaking to . . . huge, pro-­life gatherings.”117 Several major antiabortion organizations and leaders boycotted the Oval Office meeting in protest. The frustration of antiabortion advocates grew when the White House failed early on to back a human life statute cosponsored by Senator Helms and Representative Hyde that stipulated “human life shall be deemed to exist from conception.” The Helms-­Hyde bill failed to garner majority support in either house of Congress.118 Father Charles Fiore of the NPLA-­PAC

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went public reminding Washington that in 1978, its first year of involvement in congressional elections, its antiabortion candidates won 60 percent of the races. By 1980, he added, it supported fifty-­two antiabortion candidates of whom 70 percent won election and of whom only 25 percent were incumbents.119 These developments formed the backdrop of movement activists’ loss of patience with the administration in the fall of 1981. Prominent evangelicals and New Right conservatives blasted the White House for its inertia on their specific policy goals, especially after they rallied support for the president’s economic and military agendas. “If they attempt to stiff the social interest conservatives,” one movement insider warned, “there’s going to be a tremendous backlash. That would be going back on their word that was given to get support for the economic program.”120 The Moral Majority vice president Ron Godwin met with Dole in early October to reassure her that movement groups would continue to do “all we can on the economic question” for the president. But he questioned why the administration had not launched an offensive on social issues as well, arguing that “we don’t believe the White House is so weak it can only fight one battle at a time.”121 Another Moral Majority vice president, Cal Thomas, also pressed the White House far more vigorously. In a letter to James Baker, he warned of movement restiveness and explained why antiabortion activists viewed the moral imperatives of their cause as too important to ignore for the sake of economic improvement: Many of our people are getting restless over the delay in some form of movement on the so-­called “social issues,” particularly abortion. . . . The President said during the campaign, “ask yourself if you are better off today than you were four years ago.” If we clean up the economy, but are still allowing the slaughter of one and one-­half million babies a year, I will not be able to say we are better off at all. If a timetable [for addressing abortion] hasn’t been developed, it urgently needs to be developed. Without one, without something to share with our people, serious political consequences will develop, I assure you. Please, can we talk about this so the ball will get rolling. This Administration MUST succeed.122

For all the moral fervency and political foreboding of Thomas’s appeal to Baker, the last line of his letter is particularly revealing. No African American civil rights insurgent of the 1960s proclaimed that Lyndon Johnson’s presidency “MUST succeed.” While civil rights activists and other movements recognized the imposing power of the modern presidency, and sought to

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harness the potential of executive power to advance their causes, the new Christian Right stands out for how closely it identified with the Reagan administration. Even a conservative evangelical firebrand like Thomas, one who was far less compromising with the White House than his boss, Jerry Falwell, perceived the political efficacy and fate of  his movement as decisively tied to Reagan’s ability to spearhead a conservative reordering of American politics. During the same period, Dole and Blackwell also met with a coalition supporting the family protection act (FPA), an unwieldy bill addressing a hodge-­podge of right-­wing causes.123 Sponsored by Senators Roger Jepsen (R-­IA) and Paul Laxalt (R-­NV), the legislation ranged from authorizing school prayer and fostering parental review of textbooks to permitting employment discrimination against homosexuals.124 Beginning in June, Jepsen, the Eagle Forum, the National Pro-­Family Coalition, and the Moral Majority requested a meeting with the White House “to begin a dialogue which hopefully will culminate in Administration endorsement” of the FPA. Amid the movement ferment of the fall, Dole met with FPA advocates led by Jepsen and Marshner of the National Pro-­Family Coalition. Aware that critics charged that the bill imposed “their morality on somebody else,” Marshner insisted that it “would actually only defend and protect traditional social institutions like the family and churches from encroachment by the government.” Jepsen urged the White House to make the FPA “an ideal vehicle for involvement.”125 Yet Dole and her colleagues discretely decided that the FPA was anything but an ideal entrée to battles over so­cial issues. Eager to defuse tensions with the movement, the White House spread the word in October that it would begin tackling social issues in January 1982. The timing of this announcement coincided with efforts in the Justice and Treasury Departments to reconsider the IRS tax-­exemption policy affecting discriminatory Christian schools, another clear effort to conciliate movement activists. However, the administration’s inept handling of the IRS rule change—­replete with humiliating modifications and resounding defeat in the Supreme Court—­virtually guaranteed that it would need to address other social issues on the conservative evangelical agenda. In deciding which of these items to tackle in 1982, Reagan’s top advisers ultimately agreed that abortion could not be ignored. From the Office of Policy Development, they learned from Gary Bauer that important Christian Right activists and pro-­life groups around the country shared a “deep sense of despair and a feeling of keen disappointment in this Administration,” a development that could have electoral consequences.126 In early 1982, Reagan’s inner circle scheduled meetings with prominent religious and pro-­life

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leaders to discuss policy options and political tactics. These reformers urged the president to make public “his specific, active support” for particular antiabortion legislation.127 The problem for the White House, however, was that significant rifts divided the antiabortion coalition. As one West Wing staffer put it, “Our difficulty in doing much in this area stems from two pro-­life camps—­Helms and Hatch.”128 At the heart of the split was an internecine movement conflict that emerged when Republican senators Hatch and Helms introduced two antiabortion measures in 1981. Hatch sponsored a constitutional amendment to nullify the Supreme Court’s 1973 Roe v. Wade decision and thereby return governance over abortion to the states. Helms proposed legislation that would permanently ban public funding of abortions and strip federal courts of the power to overturn state antiabortion laws. Although the Hatch and Helms initiatives were inspired by compa­ rable moral beliefs and policy ends, they nonetheless divided the pro-­life movement over which measure was most politically attainable. In truth, both were a long shot given the likelihood of a Senate filibuster (requiring a supermajority to overcome). Yet many pro-­life organizations threw their support behind the Hatch amendment because they saw it as “an achievable solution” that bridged differences between activists who favored antiabortion legislation and those who advocated a human-­life amendment.129 The pro-­Hatch amendment coalition included the US Catholic Conference, the Na­tional Right to Life Committee (the largest antiabortion group in the country), the NPLA-­PAC, and Weyrich’s Coalitions for America. By contrast, most conservative evangelical groups preferred the Helms bill because they considered it a pipe dream for Hatch to secure the two-­thirds majority vote required in both houses of Congress simply to formally propose a constitutional amendment for ratification by a full three-­fourths of the states. Groups in the pro-­Helms camp included the American Life Lobby, the National Christian Action Coalition, the March for Life, the Ad Hoc Committee for the Defense of Life, and, ironically, the Life Amendment Political Action Committee.130 Before he was willing to enter the fray, however, Reagan served notice that the disparate organizations and leading advocates of the pro-­life movement had to “reconcile their differences and unite behind a position in order to go forward.”131 As he had done one year earlier, Reagan invited twenty prominent antiabortion leaders to the White House in January on the same day as the March for Life (and the ninth anniversary of  Roe v. Wade). Rather than unveiling the administration’s blueprints for addressing abortion, Reagan complained that he had read “many reports” of “division within the right-­to-­life

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movement” that made effective action nearly impossible. “I do not intend to take sides in the current controversy over which alternative the right-­to-­ life community should embrace,” he announced. Reagan then ended further discussion by declaring that the movement “needed to get its act together.”132 Similar conflicts, however, churned within the administration itself. Assistant Attorney General Robert McConnell scored the Hatch amendment as “overly broad,” inviting legal complications over potential federal usurpation of state birth-­control and homicide laws. McConnell’s analysis infuriated Blackwell, who called it a “parade of horribles” and fumed that “there is no shortage of pro-­life attorneys and legal experts except, it seems, at Justice.”133 Within the Reagan White House, top aides also debated the political tradeoffs of throwing its weight behind an antiabortion measure or steering clear of the issue. Edwin Harper, Reagan’s assistant for policy development, reminded the president of a long-­standing concern among his top advisers that his engagement on the issue might fuel an electoral gen­ der gap: “we should be aware that the more visible our efforts become, the task of building support among women’s groups will be made more diffi­ cult.”134 At the same time, Blackwell argued that “a credible Administration effort” on behalf of an antiabortion measure was crucial to Republicans in upcoming congressional races. Bauer warned that failure to act could hurt GOP chances of maintaining control of the Senate by alienating conservative evangelical voters who vehemently opposed abortion: “These people may not even participate in the 1982 Congressional elections.”135 Beyond the West Wing, Christian Right leaders continued to pressure the Reagan administration to exercise leadership in outlawing abortion. In March, Cal Thomas pointedly sent Blackwell a copy of a script he drafted for his regular “Moral Majority Report” aired on over 400 Christian radio stations across the country. True to form, his commentary took no prisoners: During the 1980 Presidential campaign, the slogan of the Republican candidate was “The Time is Now for Reagan.” It appeared everywhere, on bumper stickers, posters, and television and radio spots: “The Time is Now for Reagan.” I’d like to suggest a takeoff of that slogan: The time is now to deal with abortion! . . . The President has told pro-­life leaders that when we get our act together and present a unified position on abortion, he will take some action. But the question must be asked, did the President wait for a unified view of the economy before striking out on this controversial issue? Defense? . . . The answer to all of these questions is, of course, no. . . . We cannot afford NOT to do something about the abortion issue. Time is running out and our people are running out of patience.136

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While antiabortion activists remained at odds over the rival Hatch and Helms initiatives, they resented the White House’s refusal to act until they settled their differences. From his bully pulpit, Reagan sought to leave no doubt that he thought the “pro-­life” movement was on the side of angels. During his address to the Annual Conservative Political Action Conference dinner on February 26, 1982, Reagan acknowledged that most Americans did not want to overturn Roe v. Wade but delighted the right-­wing audience by contending that this meant they must convince the public that abortion was morally wrong. “We must, with calmness and resolve, help the vast majority of our fellow Americans understand,” he said, “that the more than one-­and-­one-­half million abortions performed in American in 1980 amount to a great moral evil and an assault on the sacredness of life.”137 In the spring, Reagan wrote Helms to underscore his hope for Congress to enact legislation “that would restore protection of the law to children before birth.” However, he also noted that conservatives would “miss this long delayed opportunity” if they did not overcome “sharp differences of opinions as to which action is the best one.”138 Reagan also sent out a letter to right-­to-­life advocates and antiabortion members of Congress, originally drafted by Bauer, to spur lawmakers to pursue legislative action “without delay.” Yet the final version revised by the legislative affairs office removed “without delay” from the letter and re­ peated the administration’s position that it would not endorse a specific legislative course until the movement’s divisions were “resolved in favor of the common goal.” Meanwhile, the Senate Judiciary Committee voted to report the Hatch amendment by a 20 to 7 vote, with Catholic Democrats Joseph Biden (DE) and Dennis DeConcini (AZ) joining GOP members.139 If ambivalent White House advisers thought the pro-­life movement’s fractious character might allow for indefinite presidential delay on pending legislation in Congress, their strategy was undercut when Reagan’s newly appointed director of the National Institutes of Health, James Wyngaarden, told stunned reporters that he favored “freedom of choice” for women on reproductive health and abortion decisions. He also emphasized the importance of government support for research on prenatal diagnosis of fetal abnormalities in order to give expectant mothers a “scientific” basis for making decisions about carrying a baby to term. Not surprisingly, his “pro-­choice” statements touched off a firestorm of criticism from “pro-­life” groups and anger from their allies within the administration. “Mr. President, the actions of your administration and your appointments have to match your words to the pro-­life movement,” demanded Paul Brown, director of the

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Life Amendment Political Action Committee. “The last president whose actions didn’t match his words is now living in south Georgia.”140 Within the West Wing, Blackwell demanded to know why Wyngaarden was not forced to resign, especially since Surgeon General Koop was pressured to say nothing about abortion after his appointment. “If a major Defense Department official expressed his ‘personal opinion’ that the President’s defense budget was too large, would he be fired?” a livid Blackwell pressed Dole and other top aides.141 Blackwell later told his superiors that if “it is our intention to stonewall” on the Wyngaarden public relations debacle, something needed to be done “to soothe the bitterly upset pro-­life activist community.”142 Consistent with other insurgents, Brown and fellow abortion opponents ultimately expressed continued trust in the president while blaming his closest aides for missteps. “I am still convinced that President Reagan is strongly pro-­life,” the Life Amendment Political Action Committee director declared. “I am equally convinced that some of his advisers are not.”143 Reagan soon declared that he was ready to battle on behalf of congressional antiabortion legislation, proclaiming in a speech to the Knights of Columbus that it was time for the Senate to give right-­to-­life reform “speedy consideration.” In the end, Reagan and his inner circle viewed the Helms amendment to a debt-­ceiling bill, which proscribed federal funding for abortion, as a more practical pro-­life measure than Hatch’s proposal for constitutional amendment. Although five previous Congresses had voted to restrict funding for abortion, the Helms amendment would make that ban permanent; furthermore, it included language—­“affirming the humanity of the unborn child in our society”—­that invited the Supreme Court to reconsider the Roe decision. “I realized that this amendment reflects a moderate approach,” Reagan acknowledged in a letter that appealed to key senators for support, but “this amendment is a responsible statutory approach to one of the most sensitive problems our society faces.”144 To antiabortion activists uneasy about the Helms amendment, administration officials like Blackwell promised that this statutory approach did not preclude support for the Hatch constitutional amendment in the future. In early September, White House staffers cheerfully told the president that “right-­to-­life groups have met your requirements that they band together behind one measure.”145 During the fall of 1982, the Reagan White House worked closely with Helms, conservative Senate leaders, and antiabortion groups to work for passage of his “pro-­life” amendment to a debt-­ceiling bill. They quietly calculated that they could count on between fifty to fifty-­five votes “on the

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merits,” but recognized that the challenge would be securing sixty votes to make the amendment filibuster-­proof.146 Although Christian Right and single-­issue “pro-­life” groups rallied behind the Helms measure, the coalition struggled to end a filibuster by Senator Robert Packwood (R-­OR). Reagan made dozens of phone calls to lawmakers on the fence.147 Despite these efforts, the “pro-­life” camp fell short of winning cloture against Packwood’s filibuster by one vote. Even in defeat, Christian Right groups and other abortion opponents expressed gratitude to the president for his work championing the Helms amendment. After the third cloture vote failed, movement leaders requested a meeting with Chief of Staff Baker, the centrist often viewed as their nemesis in the White House. They did so not to engage in recriminations, but instead “to express thanks for the Administration efforts.”148 The US Catholic Conference likewise was encouraged that “President Reagan had stepped up his lobbying effort on behalf of the Helms measure.”149 The Reagan team’s full-­court press to overcome cloture on the Helms amendment bore no policy fruits, but it instilled confidence among many Christian Right and other antiabortion activists that the president was fighting for them. For Reagan’s inner circle, including Baker, Deaver, and Dole, the internal and external battles over the Helms amendment as well as its ultimate failure taught different lessons. Public support for the Roe decision, they believed, dictated that the president’s commitment to social issues must be carefully modulated. As Dole reflected on the fight over the Helms mea­ sure, “In working to support cloture we should be aware of the fact that the more visible our efforts become, the more difficult will be our efforts in reversing the erosion in the general women’s constituency. In the have-­ your-­cake-­and-­eat-­it-­too spirit, the optimal posture for the president will be that level of involvement where his work guarantees success on the cloture vote, having taken such in the least visible fashion possible.”150 That Reagan worked behind the scenes, rather than go public, in supporting the Helms legislation showed that he did not disagree with this advice; by the same token, the failure of this optimal strategy betrayed the tension between the White House’s partisan and policy objectives and those of its conservative evangelical allies. The late-­1982 push for the Helms amendment was the last significant effort during the Reagan presidency to reverse Roe v. Wade through legislative means. In what was becoming a ritual during the Reagan years, religious conservatives and other right-­to-­life movement leaders assembled at the White House in January 1983 on the tenth anniversary of Roe. Recalling the feverish lobbying for the Helms amendment, the president pledged thereaf-

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ter to “plan all our pro-­life battles in the Congress long enough in advance for us in the Administration to do a better job working the Hill.” As it turned out, there were no major legislative struggles on abortion ahead for Reagan. In 1983, the administration joined most “pro-­life” groups in supporting a new Hatch constitutional amendment pared down to a short statement that the “right to an abortion is not secured by this Constitution.” Despite presidential and movement backing, the Hatch measure garnered only forty-­ nine Senate votes, far below the necessary two-­thirds required for a constitutional amendment to move forward.151 When he met with antiabortion leaders at the start of 1984, Reagan conceded that Congress was unlikely to pass any sweeping prohibition on abortion, and encouraged them to focus on more modest goals like limiting federal funding for abortion procedures.152 After the president’s reelection in 1984, Congress devoted little attention to social issues. The movement’s dream of reversing Roe v. Wade in Congress gained even less traction after 1986, when Democrats recaptured control of the Senate. The most notable legislative achievement of abortion foes during the Reagan presidency was a continued prohibition on funding for low-­income women’s access to abortion.153 Despite negligible legislative gains against abortion, Reagan continued to encourage the movement. He used the rhetorical presidency to argue on behalf of outlawing abortion, met periodically to discuss political strategy with prominent movement leaders, and from 1984 through 1988, he called the annual March for Life where his message was projected on loudspeakers.154 Weary of  Washington stalemate on abortion, some militant “pro-­life” activists like Randall Terry called for more disruptive tactics. Like militant abolitionists and civil rights activists, Terry’s Operation Rescue mobilized grassroots activists to take direct—­and sometimes violent—­action to advance the movement’s causes. Yet as we noted in chapter 5, these activists were decidedly different from reformers associated with the NPLA-­PAC, National Right to Life Committee, Moral Majority, Christian Voice, and Religious Roundtable, who were committed to winning elections and exercising influence within the political process. Even in the face of frustrating defeats on their core issue, most Christian Right activists remained self-­consciously conservative and thereby exceptionally patriotic—­prone to eschew civil disobedience and to pursue the promised land through conventional political means.155 The dynamics of presidential-­movement interactions of Reagan and the Christian Right during the abortion battles reappeared during their pursuit of reviving school prayer. One might argue, in fact, that Reagan pressed for school prayer more directly and aggressively than he had engaged the abortion issue. With public opinion polls showing broad, although not intense,

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public support for school prayer, Reagan endorsed voluntary prayer in public schools in both his 1976 and 1980 presidential bids. During Reagan’s first year in office, Senator Helms introduced legislation that called for stripping from the Supreme Court the authority to review any cases related to school prayer. Yet the White House and most Republican lawmakers, not to mention their Democratic counterparts, considered the Helms bill to be patently unconstitutional. However, showing less reserve than it did in the abortion controversy, the Reagan administration made an effort in 1982 to force action on school prayer. At the National Prayer Breakfast on February 4, 1982, the president made a clarion appeal for restoring school prayer: “God, the source of all knowledge, has been expelled from the classroom.” With encouragement from the White House, Christian Right activists took to the television and radio airwaves to call for reform, including a one-­hour program titled, “Let Our Children Pray.” Conservative evangelical students came to Washington, DC, to form a human chain that stretched from the Capitol to the Supreme Court to illustrate their support for school prayer. Flanked in the Rose Garden by a who’s who of prominent Christian Right leaders, Reagan took the lead in proposing a constitutional amendment restoring voluntary prayer to public schools in May 1982.156 Gary Bauer advocated a strong presidential offensive on a voluntary prayer amendment, arguing that it provided far more political leeway than abortion. Whereas it was unlikely that “a large segment of the population” would “mobilize against us on this issue,” he reasoned, it was equally true that “school prayer is high on the agenda of many of the conservative oriented, evangelical, religious groups who supported us [in 1980].”157 Reagan’s constitutional amendment stipulated, “Nothing in this Constitution shall be construed to prohibit individual or group prayer in public schools or other public institutions.” But it also emphasized that all such prayer was voluntary: “No person shall be required by the United States or by any State to participate in prayer.” Falwell confidently predicted smooth sailing for the president’s amendment, telling reporters that neither Congress nor state legislatures “could oppose religious liberty for the children today when that’s what the people want them to have.”158 The Senate Judiciary Committee held three days of high-­profile hearings featuring a parade of notable Christian Right leaders such as Falwell, Robertson, McAteer, Bright, and Jimmy Swaggart. In September, Reagan participated in a national Prayer Day Vigil designed by Weyrich and Christian Voice’s Gary Jarmin to build support for the president’s proposed amendment. Despite all this momentum, the prayer amendment never made it out of committee; centrist GOP Senators Mathias and Arlen Specter (R-­PA) joined Democratic colleagues

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in opposition on First Amendment grounds that school prayer fostered the establishment of religion. The Reagan administration resubmitted its voluntary school prayer amendment in March 1983, and the Judiciary Committee initiated a fresh round of hearings, providing a platform for Christian Right leaders. But an unexpected complication soon emerged when Senator Hatch proposed a compromise constitutional amendment that softened the language to allow silent prayer in public schools and to grant “equal access” of school facilities for all student groups, including religious ones. Conservative evangelical activists and New Right leaders reacted furiously to this effort to water down the prayer amendment. “One thing we made VERY CLEAR was that silent prayer was NOT an acceptable compromise,” Weyrich told Bauer and other allies of his discussions with Senate Judiciary Committee staffers.159 Ultimately, however, neither version of a prayer amendment succeeded; Reagan’s proposed voluntary school prayer amendment lost on the Senate floor by eleven votes. Subsequent efforts to enact a school prayer amendment languished in committee. The sole legislative success for new Christian Right groups was a new “equal access” law signed by Reagan that permitted student religious groups to use public school facilities before and after school.160 Thus, Reagan’s apparent willingness to spearhead a school prayer initiative did not overcome the political stalemate that had derailed the “pro-­life” campaign. Indeed, to Ralph Reed, a young executive director of the College Republican National Committee in Washington, DC, what was most striking about the school prayer amendment fight was how much the Reagan administration stayed out of it. As he later noted, the “direct involvement of President Reagan in strong-­arming wavering voters . . . was all a mirage.” There was good reason why the new Christian Right could point to no major legislative victories for their social agenda in the Reagan years. “The votes were never there,” Reed explained; “the battle was purely political theater.”161 Journalist Sidney Blumenthal posited the same argument years earlier, noting that the strategy of Reagan’s team from the 1980 campaign onward was to peel conservative evangelical whites from the Democratic Party by emphasizing social issues such as abortion, school prayer, homosexual rights, pornography, the ERA, and textbooks. Once in the White House, Blumenthal contended, the plan was to keep new Christian Right supporters “in a state of perpetual mobilization” by supporting various bills and constitutional amendments that would energize religious conservatives but routinely go down in defeat.162 For all of the frustration experienced by the new Christian Right in trying to advance their “pro-­family” social agenda through congressional legislation,

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many movement leaders discerned significant political and policy gains during the Reagan years that Reed and Blumenthal did not. We can obtain some important clues about why they perceived progress for their causes during the Reagan Revolution by turning to a candid exchange between Reagan and antiabortion leaders after major legislative defeats in 1982 and 1983. Meet­ ing at the White House in early 1984, the president did not pull any punches in telling leaders of the Christian Right movement and other antiabortion advocates that Congress could not be counted on to address their aims. But he encouraged them not to lose heart: “Even though we are having such difficulty with members of Congress on this issue, I think we should not be discouraged.” Reagan then told these movement leaders that “one sure way to overturn the Roe v. Wade decision” was to transform the Supreme Court and lower federal courts. “We should recognize the variety of ways to make progress for the right to life,” he continued. “They are legislative, administrative, judicial, and electoral.” In other words, when faced with formidable congressional roadblocks, conservative reformers could look to capturing the federal courts, the administrative state, and the Republican Party.163 Four years later, as Reagan presided over his final year in office, antiabortion advocates thanked him for transforming a “pro-­abortion” judicial branch by appointing conservative federal judges from Antonin Scalia on the Supreme Court to hundreds of lower-­court jurists. They also pointed to numerous ways Reagan officials used the administrative presidency to protect “unborn children,” such as a National Institutes of Health rule denying funds to studies involving “transplantation of human tissue from induced abortions” and a surgeon general’s report on the deleterious health effects of abortion for women. Finally, movement activists expressed deep gratitude for the president’s rhetorical impact on the national debate. In particular, they praised him for effectively elevating the movement’s fundamental moral claims in his influential essay “Abortion and the Conscience of a Nation.”164 Perhaps the most memorable element of this appeal was the analogy Reagan drew between the long, and often unpopular, struggle to end slavery in Europe and the United States, and the “pro-­life” movement’s arduous quest to save “unborn children.” Recounting the poignant saga of William Wilberforce, the famous member of the British Parliament, who “prayed” with a small group of determined abolitionists “for decades to see an end to slavery in the British empire,” the president’s essay described antiabortion advocates as America’s modern abolitionists combining prayer, unflagging activism, and abiding faith in “the sanctity of life.” As much as “Abraham Lincoln recognized that we could not survive as a free land when some men could decide that others

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were not fit to be free and should therefore be slaves,” he noted, “we cannot survive as a free nation when some men decide that others are not fit to live and should be abandoned to abortion or infanticide. My Administration is dedicated to the preservation of America as a free land, and there is no cause more important for preserving that freedom than affirming the transcendent right to life of all human beings, the right without which no other rights have any meaning.”165 To many Christian Right and other antiabortion activists looking back on the Reagan legacy in 1988, the power of this kind of presidential legitimation of a movement’s struggle and cause was enormous.

The Christian Right and the President’s Foreign Policy and Domestic-­Reform Agenda In spite of the president’s avowed commitment to their principles, some leaders of the new Christian Right dismissed the president’s eloquent words as meaningless rhetoric. They found the Reagan administration to be infuriatingly uncooperative in fighting hard for their social-­reform agenda let alone winning tangible policy breakthroughs on the issues that mattered most to them. His White House was maddeningly cautious, in their view, forever preoccupied with subordinating movement demands in order to appease the moderate wing of the Republican Party and to reassure centrist voters. The Moral Majority’s Cal Thomas shared many of these frustrations, and his bristling exchanges with the White House’s Morton Blackwell in Reagan’s first term captures a quintessential and predictable divide between movement and presidential perspectives and incentives. As noted, Thomas’s responses to Reagan’s economic agenda priorities and the O’Connor nomination were among the most caustic and threatening of the missives launched by conservative evangelicals in the early 1980s. In many respects, however, they were typical for a restless insurgent. It was this political restiveness that animated Thomas when he blasted the administration in 1982, confessing to Blackwell that he was “shocked, dismayed, and disappointed” that the White House had turned “a deaf ear” to the Christian Right’s “pro-­ family” social agenda.166 Blackwell initially responded by reminding Thomas that the White House had provided valuable access to the Moral Majority’s head: “we have been able to arrange numerous occasions for Dr. Falwell to be with the President, some of them rather intimate.” But as one would predict for a key presidential aide, even one with strong sympathies for the movement, Blackwell also urged political patience. “I think it’s vital that we all keep

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the faith, realize that we are in a long ball game, and recognize that major progress can be made only through the accumulation of incremental gains,” he advised.167 Thomas would hear none of it. “I was intrigued by your use of the word ‘incremental’ to describe the gains we are hopeful of making,” he retorted. “I thought we could expect more than ‘incremental’ gains from one of our ‘own’ in the White House.”168 Blackwell did not back down. “We can argue over whether or not increments of change in the right direction have been as large as possible, but the incremental nature of the solution to our problems is to me beyond question,” he contended. “A foolish belief in the possibility of total, instant victory is a prescription for unrealistic hopes and early disillusionment at the grassroots.”169 Like most movement insurgents, Thomas was neither soothed by the notion of “incremental” gains nor quieted by the appeals of institutionally situated allies for political patience. Instead, he threatened that the new Christian Right, like other social movements, would punish politicians who failed to advance their cause. Conservative evangelicals, he insisted, were not captive to Reagan or the GOP: Old line Republicans think they have [the Christian Right] in their hip pocket. They reason, “where else can they go, except behind Mr. Reagan?” There are several places we can and will go. First, the Administration and the Republican party still don’t seem to understand that our people are not motivated by Party, but by principle. Whether one wears a Republican or a Democratic label is of less concern to us than the position the candidate or incumbent takes on important issues, such as abortion. Our people can stay home like they used to. We could vote for the other guy as a protest. Or we could form a third party so that we might still be able to vote and express our principles. The expressed view of the White House has been, “we have enough trouble with the economic problems without starting to deal with social problems.” We need to change their thinking to something like this: “If we don’t do something soon for these conservatives, we’re going to lose them and the back of the newly-­acquired Republican power will be broken.”170

In truth, however, Thomas’s proposed militancy toward the Reagan White House was undermined by the demonstrated passivity of  his own boss. When Reagan’s top aides worried about Thomas’s threats, Blackwell told them that he called Falwell and was assured the matter was closed. “Falwell is a strong and consistent supporter,” he explained, and “he feels he has had good access.”171 Less than a year later, Reagan invited Falwell to a private meeting in the Oval Office. In prepping the president for the one-­on-­one exchange,

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Whittlesey and other aides reminded him that Falwell “had never criticized you or Reagan administration policy” and that he had been “strongly supportive” of the administration’s economic, tax, and military initiatives. They also cheerfully informed Reagan that only one week before Falwell announced that the “Moral Majority’s main goal for 1983 is to combat the nuclear freeze movement.”172 Falwell’s support for the Reagan administration’s economic policies and defense buildup was not unusual: most conservative evangelical leaders strongly backed the president’s major policy initiatives of the first term. And Falwell’s declaration of war against the nuclear freeze movement in 1983, as we shall see, was part of a concerted White House strategy to mobilize the leadership and grass roots of the new Christian Right behind the president’s foreign policy and domestic-­reform agenda. As Reagan had proclaimed in his 1981 Conservative Political Action Conference speech, the American Right could not have separate economic, foreign, and social objectives. “We have one agenda,” he insisted. Most Christian Right leaders embraced this charge, even when doing so subordinated social causes that served as the lifeblood of their movement. Reagan’s exalted defense of pro-­life principles, therefore, was joined to a broader conservative aspiration to forge a decidedly right-­of-­center Republican Party. And key Christian Right leaders like Falwell and Dobson of Focus on the Family embraced Reagan’s position that a broad conservative agenda would strengthen the Republican Party’s commitment to core principles, such as anticommunism and tax policy supportive of the family, that were sacred to them and their followers. Indeed, although the relationship between the Reagan administration and the Christian Right yielded no major innovations for abortion policy, school prayer, or other “pro-­family” agenda items (at least not measured in terms of gradual judicial and administrative shifts), their collaboration had an immediate, important, and durable effect on foreign policy. Clearly, this was not a “back-­burner” issue for the Christian Right. Just as the civil rights movement rejected conventional patriotism, viewing the Vietnam War as a violation of the liberating values it celebrated, so the Christian right, standing for “traditional American values,” viewed the Reagan administration’s militant anticommunism as a blessing. One of the most important ways that Billy Graham had made evangelicalism appealing to millions of Amer­ ican Protestants in the post–­World War II decades was to deftly fuse conservative faith with fervent anticommunism. “Communism is inspired, directed, and motivated by the Devil himself,” Graham proclaimed. “America is at a crossroads. Will we turn to the left-­wingers and atheists, or will we turn to the right and embrace the cross?”173 One of the “Christian Bill of

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Rights” proclaimed by the Moral Majority was the group’s “belief in the right to expect our national leaders to keep this country morally and mil­i­ tarily strong so that religious freedom and Gospel preaching might continue unhindered.”174 Significantly, Reagan chose a meeting of the National Association of Evangelicals on March 8, 1983, for the site of one of his most important foreign policy speeches. This address, written by chief speechwriter Tony Dolan, the brother of the National Conservative Political Action Committee’s Chairman Terry Dolan, was a sharp criticism of the nuclear freeze movement; more affirmatively, it sought to frame the Cold War in the starkest moral terms. In the famous passage for which this address would be most remembered, the president proclaimed, “Yes, let us pray for the salvation of all of those who live in that totalitarian darkness—­pray they will discover the joy of knowing God. But until they do, let us be aware that while they preach the supremacy of the state, declare its omnipotence over individual man, and predict its eventual domination of all peoples on the Earth, they are the focus of evil in the modern world.” Meeting the challenge of this “evil empire,” Reagan added, was partly a matter of military strength; but the real crisis posed by the Cold War was “a spiritual one . . . a test of moral will and faith.” The president’s dramatic peroration made clear that he viewed the Reagan doctrine in religious and moral terms: I believe that communism is another sad, bizarre chapter in human history whose last pages even now are being written. I believe this because the source of our strength in the quest for human freedom is not material, but spiritual. And because it knows no limitation, it must terrify and ultimately triumph over those who would enslave their fellow man. For in the words of Isaiah: “He giveth power to the faint; and to them that have no might He increased strength. But they that wait upon the Lord shall renew their strength; they shall mount up with wings as eagles; they shall run, and not be weary.”175

The mainstream press sharply criticized Reagan’s address for dangerously entangling foreign policy and sectarianism. But the evangelical activists in the audience loved it, cheering joyously as an orchestra played “Onward Christian Soldiers.”176 The president’s foreign policy alliance with evangelical leaders was solidified when Falwell, the only Christian Right leader who had been speaking out against the nuclear freeze, went to the aforementioned meeting at the White House the following week for what turned out to be a lengthy discussion with Reagan about how the Moral Majority could mobilize support for the president’s “peace through strength” position. A

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few days later, Falwell was briefed by National Security Council staffers, who supplied him with material he used in producing a glossy document that the Moral Majority mailed out en masse. The final page of the brochure featured a picture of Reagan and Falwell in the Oval Office, a partnership that promised more conservative evangelical support for the president’s controversial foreign policy and more stature for a prominent leader of the Christian Right. Christian Right groups also took out a full-­page ad in national newspapers with language that called on Americans to rally behind the president’s defense plans. “We have a President who wants to build up our military strength,” it noted. “But he is catching it from all sides. The ‘freezeniks,’ ‘ultra libs,’ and ‘unilateral disarmers’ are after him. He and loyal members of Congress need to know you are with them.”177 The National Association of Evangelicals commissioned a Gallup poll focusing on evangelical Christian attitudes on Reagan’s foreign policy, and trumpeted in July 1983 that 61 percent approved of “his Administration’s position on national defense.”178 Reagan’s anticommunist foreign policy initiatives earned him considerable praise from the Christian Right.179 In turn, Falwell gained credit—­or blame—­for helping to infuse the administration’s national security policy with messianic fervor. “Rev. Jerry Falwell might have become more than a crucial factor in our great nuclear arms debate,” the prominent journalist Haynes Johnson wrote on learning of the Reagan-­Falwell alliance. He might also have been writing “a new, potentially fateful chapter in the story of church and state relationships in America.”180 The ties between Reagan and the new Christian Right on the administration’s policy of “peace through strength” assuaged some of the disappointment felt by conservative evangelicals over limited policy change on their social agenda. Conservative insurgents like Thomas protested the marginalization of their domestic issues, but nearly all movement activists deeply appreciated Reagan’s collaboration with conservative evangelical leaders in developing his foreign policy doctrine. “The world situation,” Reagan stated in an interview with Conservative Digest during the 1984 campaign, would be the “single most important thing” his administration would address during a second term.181 Falwell, especially, who was given access to the White House and National Security Council, agreed, and argued that it would be self-­defeating to antagonize the administration.182 Some Christian conservatives like Robison of the Religious Roundtable were not willing to give up their role as “prophets” for the privilege of becoming White House “advisers.” But most movement leaders joined Falwell in approving of Reagan’s strong stand on national defense and his charismatic stewardship of the nation.183

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Despite the few tangible social-­reform gains they had to show for their alliance with Reagan, prominent Christian Right groups thus threw their full support behind the president’s reelection campaign. It marked the third time they rallied to his side. In 1982, the Moral Majority and other conservative evangelical groups devoted considerable energy to voter mobilization for the congressional midterm election and carefully analyzed the returns. Their preeminent concern was preserving what they called “the Reagan conservative coalition in Congress,” and they celebrated that the GOP maintained a 54 to 46 Senate majority and that Democratic gains in the House were below “the average midterm loss” for the party of the incumbent president. Sounding more like a party leader than the chief operations officer of a social movement organization, Godwin of the Moral Majority exuberantly told followers that Republican victories in 1982 guaranteed that the “Reagan Era” in American politics was alive and well.184 Two years later, Christian Right leaders again called conservative evangelicals to support the president. Robison, who had lambasted the White House after the O’Connor nomination, had returned to the fold by 1984 and led the Republican National Convention in prayer: “We thank you, Father, for the leadership of President Ronald Reagan.”185 Christian Voice trained faithful conservatives “how to win elections,” producing strategy guides for “Reclaiming America” that had much in common with GOP campaign literature.186 The Reagan White House devised a campaign that celebrated the restoration of national pride—­“It’s Morning in America”—­rather than framing the election as a choice between conservative Republican and Democratic views of the nation’s future. Benefiting from economic prosperity and the public’s perception that he led the country out of the “malaise” that characterized the twilight of the Carter years, Reagan won a reelection landslide. But the triumphal campaign gave little support to “movement conservatives” in the Senate and House. Republicans failed to take control of the House, picking up just fourteen additional seats. Presaging the return of the Senate to Democrats in 1986, Republicans actually lost two Senate seats. Having embraced the Reagan mystique, the Christian Right became part of a presidential coalition that had mixed success in mobilizing evangelicals at the grass roots. Right-­wing religious groups had great success in raising money through direct-­mail campaigns and helped steer white conservative evangelical voters toward the Republican Party. The vast majority again voted for Republican candidates up and down the ballot, but turnout among evangelical Christians did not increase in 1984.187 The Reagan administration’s command of the conservative political agenda did not dissipate in its second term. Nor did new Christian Right

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leaders stray far from the fold. Consider, for example, the priorities of a new group of Christian conservatives founded by Weyrich in 1985: the Anatole Fellowship. Drawing its name from the New Testament term for “a rising,” the Anatole Fellowship was quite different from the host of other political organizations that Weyrich had a hand in creating. This group did not have a mass membership but instead was a secretive body of conservative Christian leaders who met periodically to enjoy fellowship, strategize, and “pray about national issues of concern to the Judeo-­Christian community.” To help guide their deliberations in 1986, an issues survey was distributed to these leaders with “security procedures” in place to guard their results. Tellingly, their top policy concerns captured the influence of Reagan’s agenda: along with what they called the “flagrant sin issues” of “Abortion” and “Homosexuality,” they were most preoccupied by “Tax Reform,” “Central America,” and “National Defense.”188 In very public fashion, Christian Voice produced legislative “report cards” emphasizing “greater defense spending,” “reducing the deficit,” “against abortion funding,” “against the nuclear freeze,” “for more local control of education,” and “opposing IMF funding to communist countries.”189 Reagan’s Conservative Political Action Conference call for “one agenda” was alive and well. Indeed, the Christian Right readily signed on to help the president with his second-­term tax reform and Central American policies. To advance tax reform, the Reagan administration invited dozens of conservative evangelical activists to the White House for special briefings in 1985 and 1986. It also coordinated closely with Americans for Tax Reform (ATR), “a nationwide coalition of corporate, family, fraternal, and community leaders recently organized to support the President’s reform.” Prominent Christian Right figures like James Dobson served on the ATR’s steering committee, made frequent trips to the White House for briefings and strategy sessions, and interviewed the president for Focus on the Family publications touting the administration’s tax-­reform plan as “pro-­family.”190 White House staffers like Patrick Buchanan and Carl Anderson also met with movement leaders including Falwell, the LaHayes, and Robertson to promote the tax-­reform initiative.191 With the leadership of the National Religious Broadcasters, they also encouraged a big play on Christian radio and television in favor of tax reform.192 In the end, the Reagan administration’s broad coalition building and publicity campaign—­in which Christian Right leaders and organizations eagerly mobilized in support of the initiative—­paid legislative dividends with the Tax Reform Act of 1986. At the signing ceremony on the south lawn of the White House in October, Reagan acknowledged the “herculean

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effort it took to get this landmark bill to my desk.” The president himself went to Capitol Hill to charm and cajole wayward GOP lawmakers into supporting the measure. A bipartisan compromise, the new law simplified the tax code, shifted a significant portion of the tax burden from individuals to corporations, and exempted many low-­income families from federal taxes. Reagan hailed the law as “a sweeping victory for fairness” where “vanishing loopholes and a minimum tax will mean everybody and every corporation pay their fair share.”193 Although many of these loopholes would eventually be restored to the tax code, the alliance between Reagan and the Christian Right formed in the service of a tax reform would endure. Significantly, at the request of the White House, the militant anti-­tax activist Grover Norquist managed ATR’s policy advocacy. The White House–­Norquist partnership foretold the Republican Party’s fervent opposition to taxes, one that was infused with religiosity that nearly matched the messianic fervor of Reagan’s foreign policy doctrine. Christian Right leaders also readily supported Reagan’s policies in Central America. Indeed, the White House’s controversial extension of the “Reagan Doctrine” to Latin America, where Protestant missionaries were heavily concentrated, won strong backing from the movement.194 Under the stewardship of Whittlesey and the Office of Public Liaison, an unofficial task force of movement allies was established in Reagan’s second term to defend and promote the president’s foreign policy goals in Nicaragua, El Salvador, and the rest of Central America. Those in the working group included a host of conservative evangelical organizations like the Moral Majority as well as the Heritage Foundation, Eagle Forum, and Council for Inter-­American Security.195 In these efforts, much of the Christian Right’s lobbying and publicity efforts were spearheaded by the Institute on Religion and Democracy, established by religious neoconservatives to counter the foreign policy liberalism of the National Council of Churches.196 Christian Right leaders cooperated with the White House, State Department, and intelligence agencies to advance administration goals in Central America. Special videotapes were prepared for Christian media outlets, featuring Reagan rallying support for federal outlays to provide aid to “freedom fighters” in El Salvador.197 White House officials like James Baker appeared on the 700 Club with Robertson to discuss “the struggle for freedom” in Nicaragua and El Salvador.198 Although not a subject discussed during congressional hearings on the Iran-­Contra scandal, Oliver North played an especially instrumental role in recruiting conservative evangelical supporters as part of an intricate Contra aid network.199 The discovery that the

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administration had been aiding the Nicaraguan rebellion in violation of the Boland amendment eventually short-­circuited the White House–­Christian Right alliance in Central America. Yet the Iran-­Contra scandal did nothing to dampen the Christian Right’s active support of Reagan’s foreign policy initiatives or its opposition to liberal challenges like the nuclear freeze movement. Whereas the civil rights and antiwar movements waged a full-­scale attack on the modern presidency in the late 1960s and early 1970s,200 new Christian Right activists formed a partnership with the White House that advanced an executive-­centered partisanship—­one that sharply divided liberals and conservatives and threatened to rattle national resolve.

Conclusion: Coming Home As much as the new Christian Right movement struggled to gain tangible political traction on its “pro-­family” social agenda during the Reagan presidency, it was fully integrated into the administration’s controversial and largely successful efforts to transform the nation’s economic, tax, and foreign policies. Yet Jerry Falwell, arguably the most visible and unquestionably the most controversial leader of the new Christian Right during the late 1970s and early 1980s, assumed a more diminished role in both the movement and national politics from Reagan’s second term onward. During the late 1980s, donations to the Moral Majority and other Christian Right organizations also declined, perhaps because many former donors no longer felt the country was in free fall as they had before Reagan assumed office.201 The Moral Majority formally closed up shop in 1989, the result, according to Falwell, of its success: “Our goal has been achieved . . . religious conservatives are now in for the duration.”202 Yet two of Falwell’s most important lieutenants, Ed Dobson and Cal Thomas, offered a very different verdict on the efficacy of their former organization and the larger Christian Right movement during the Reagan presidency. In their coauthored book, Blinded by Might, Dobson and Thomas contend that Reagan and congressional Republicans delivered very little for conservative evangelicals. One of the fundamental problems, in their view, was that the movement was driven by unwavering moral convictions while politics demands compromise.203 Thomas separately observed that newfound political access proved to be both intoxicating and pacifying for many movement leaders. During the first two years of the Reagan administration, Whittlesey and Blackwell invited a parade of conservative evangelical pastors to visit the White House and be photographed with the president. Later,

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when Thomas traveled to churches around the country to spur grassroots mobilization for the movement’s social agenda, he noticed in nearly every large congregation a picture of the pastor with Reagan displayed prominently. “Politics is a great seducer,” he observed. “[T]he moral and spiritual power to speak truth to power seemed to be put on the back burner.”204 Religious scholar Randall Balmer draws very similar conclusions. Despite the Christian Right’s “proximity to powerful politicians,” he notes, “the legislative accomplishments of the Religious Right . . . are negligible.”205 Journalist E. J. Dionne offers comparable insights on the thin policy accomplishments of the Christian Right during the Reagan Revolution. As he put it, “It is striking how much loyalty Ronald Reagan won from this constituency without delivering much to them at all—­except on judicial appointments, which proved important. There was no school-­prayer amendment, no antiabortion amendment, no school-­choice program. Most of their core issues were not dealt with. I think Reagan sensed, correctly as it turned out, that he could maintain the loyalty of this constituency—­because they still thought that, in his heart of hearts, he was with them—­without doing much for them.”206 Recalling his disappointment as a young movement lobbyist that Reagan had not done more to press for the voluntary school prayer amendment in 1983, Ralph Reed also blamed the political naiveté of the movement and the president’s magnetism. “Religious conservatives had been rolled by the White House and didn’t even know it,” he ruefully noted. They were too ready to accept, he laments, “consolation prizes like speeches by the Gipper to their annual conventions or schmooze sessions in the Roosevelt Room.”207 These grim verdicts on the partnership of Reagan and the new Christian Right reminds us of how elusive it can be to define movement “success.” For scholars like Frances Fox Piven, Richard Cloward, and Ann-­Marie Szymanksi, major constitutional, legal, and policy breakthroughs are the ultimate measures of success.208 Just as abolitionists won when slavery was outlawed by the Thirteenth Amendment, Prohibitionists succeeded when the Eighteenth Amendment was ratified. Labor activists triumphed with passage of the Wagner Act, and civil rights reformers made historical gains with the Civil Rights and Voting Rights Acts. Tellingly, however, African American civil rights activists were deeply divided in their evaluations of movement success or failure at the close of the 1960s, a schism that led to widely divergent strategies and tactics in the years that followed. In similar fashion, many activists of the new Christian Right disagreed vehemently with the dire perspectives offered by Thomas, Dobson, and Reed on the movement’s alliance with Reagan. For a significant number of movement

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leaders and followers of this era, success was defined by unprecedented political recognition. Other Republican presidents who followed—­George W. Bush and Donald Trump—­in fact won a larger share of white conservative evangelical votes and arguably delivered more policy gains. Yet the Reagan presidency played an exceptionally powerful role in the process of legitimation for conservative evangelicals, and paved the way for a transformation of the GOP by the movement. Dobson himself recalls that before the Reagan administration, he and other movement activists had “the feeling that they were a disenfranchised people.”209 It was this shared perception of political marginalization that convinced Bennett and Eastland in 1980 that white conservative evangelicals had “been shut out of politics” and led them to demand “as blacks and women and others have done, . . . recognition [and] status in the polity.”210 One cannot dismiss the Christian Right, then, as an institutional movement that was co-­opted by the Reagan administration. Beyond the realm of policy, the Reagan presidency gave the Christian Right and its conservative social agenda enormous symbolic recognition. Like Lincoln and progressive presidents during most of the twentieth century, Reagan kept social activists at a distance. But his visionary rhetoric and unabashed celebration of America as a “city on a hill” persuaded the principal leaders of the Christian Right that he shared their convictions, even when the actions of his administration did not always support such a perception. That Reagan became, as Thomas put it, the Christian Right’s “surrogate Messiah” abetted the rise of a national conservative Republican Party.211 Reagan’s candidacy and two terms in office forged an enduring alliance between the Christian Right and the GOP: in every presidential election since 1980, the movement has focused its energies on electing the Republican candidate. Dobson, for all his disappointment over paltry policy gains, remembers that with the 1980 election victory and his subsequent visit with Falwell to the Oval Office, “we were affirmed as legitimate partners in the democratic process. . . . We had come home, and the home was the White House.”212 Once embraced as crucial partisan allies, new Christian Right leaders and activists participated in a dramatic transformation of the Republican Party and the character of US party politics in general. The electoral success of the GOP on Reagan’s watch led more than a few pundits to speculate about whether the 1980 election was a “critical” presidential contest—­the start of a partisan realignment that, like the 1860 election, signaled the dethronement of an established majority party by its opposition. But as Irving Kristol noted in a 1983 essay in the Wall Street Journal, those discussions

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missed an important point: “the really basic political changes within parties which, over the longer term, alter the very meaning of a party alignment.”213 At the end of the day, Reagan and the new Christian Right instigated a more moralistic and presidency-­centered party politics that polarized activists in Washington, DC, but left a large part of the country indifferent, if not avowedly hostile, to the “new” party system.

Seven

Executive Power, Social Movements, and American Democracy in a Polarized Age

On March 7, 2015, at the fiftieth anniversary of the Selma to Montgom­ ery march—­“Bloody Sunday,” when civil rights activists led by John Lewis and Hosea Williams braved George Wallace’s state troopers and waves of vigilantes who beat them mercilessly with billy clubs, whips, and barbed truncheons—­the nation’s first African American president stood at the Ed­ mund Pettus Bridge and celebrated the demonstrators. The real nature of American exceptionalism, Barack Obama told those assembled, was more than a matter of the creed written into the nation’s founding documents; it was embodied in movements whose foot soldiers made the exalted words of the Constitution’s Preamble and the Declaration of Independence “a call to action, a roadmap for citizenship and an insistence in the capacity of free men and women to shape their destiny.” When movements gather enough force to move the executive branch, Obama added—­when they become what we describe in chapter 1 as formative organizations, featuring a rare and power­ ful confluence of radical and conventional political beliefs and tactics—­they push the nation toward enduring change. These uneasy alliances between insurgents and presidents show the United States to be a “constant work in progress,” a country whose destiny requires “the occasional disruption, the willingness to speak out for what is right, to shake up the status quo.” The Selma marchers “were not physically imposing” and “they held no elected office,” Obama acknowledged, but their courage and their cause—­ like those of abolitionists and woman’s suffragists—­reverberated all the way to the White House. Through “the courage of ordinary people,” the chorus of the civil rights movement “would well up and reach” President Lyndon Johnson. “And he would send them protection, and speak to the nation, echoing their call for America and the world to hear: ‘We Shall Overcome.’ ” Obama thus understood well that political transformation in an American

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nation “born of change” in pursuit of “inalienable rights” was not “the project of any one person,” but instead hinged upon an uneasy but pivotal relationship between irrepressible social movements and ambitious presidents.1 Like many presidents and movement leaders before him, Obama recog­ nized that the formative potential of top-­down and bottom-­up mobilization was not easily achieved. Yet he also believed, as we have argued in this book, that the relationship between large-­scale social movements and presidents, no matter how uneasy, has been a critical dimension of American politi­ cal development. Indeed, as the previous chapters have demonstrated, the most momentous changes in American politics have neither been top down nor bottom up but a fascinating mixture of the two. The original constitu­ tional design might have set these two actors at loggerheads; as we discuss in chapter 1, presidents typically repress militant movements that espouse unpopular political beliefs and show little interest in (if not contempt for) conventional political processes, particularly when they seem to threaten orderly economic, social, and political life. Yet the democratic struggle over the meaning of rights and liberal democratic principles throughout US history has on occasion brought them together. Each challenges the politi­ cal status quo for different reasons, and each operates from a contrasting perspective, but these distinct aims are sometimes complementary rather than antagonistic. Presidents might be fated by the Constitution to preserve, protect, and defend ordered liberty, but some have sought to combine this conserving role with fundamental change that has redefined the social con­ tract. Social activists invariably have an antagonistic view of the existing political order; however, formative movements at times have found com­ mon cause with ambitious presidents in refounding, rather than destroying, constitutional arrangements. As we have seen in the tumultuous history of the abolition movement, the long-­term struggles and gradual development of the civil rights move­ ment, and the extended periods when much of the Christian Right distanced itself from the public square, none of these presidential-­movement col­ laborations occurred overnight. Indeed, at their lowest ebb of attention and influence, movements typically elicit little more than presidential indiffer­ ence. As chapters 3 and 5 remind us, however, what we conceptualize as marginal movements, which often labor in political obscurity, may become formative over time. The nation’s most formidable social movements often have required a long gestation before they were capable of challenging the political establishment. We also discovered critical differences in the strategies and political recep­ tion of progressive and conservative mobilization efforts during the twentieth

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century. Even when committed to nonviolent protest and forgoing the “vio­ lent” tactics of militant movements, progressive social organizations might have to traverse a long hard road before gaining the support of presidents or winning the hearts and minds of the American people. As the civil rights movement gathered resources for mainstream political pressure and massive nonviolent disruption, collisions with state actors—­including presidents—­ predictably increased as it threatened politics-­as-­usual. Just as abolitionists clashed with presidents and angry mobs in the antebellum years, civil rights activists faced violent assaults from officials and ordinary citizens at protest sites across the country and clandestine repression by the FBI for most of the twentieth century.2 By contrast, the leaders of the new Christian Right—­an institutionalized movement in our rendering that exercised considerable conventional political leverage—­invested faith in the belief that the modern presidency could be the vanguard of a conservative party offensive. Conse­ quently, these activists generally eschewed disruptive tactics in favor of more institutionalized forms of political mobilization. Likewise, this conservative movement encountered little or no official repression, and its rank-­and-­file supporters never faced the grave physical threats encountered by civil rights protesters decades earlier. Whether they form alliances in the service of traversing the color line or launching a national conservative offensive, presidents and social move­ ments may pay a price for their collaboration: presidents risk becoming so tied to an ideological cause as to compromise their special commitment to order and national consensus; social activists gamble that their idealistic zeal will be co-­opted in forming an alliance with a centralizing institution typi­ cally dominated by political pragmatists. Nonetheless, as our case studies of Abraham Lincoln and the abolitionists, Lyndon Johnson and the civil rights movement, and Ronald Reagan and the Christian Right illustrate, during the Civil War crisis, the strife of the 1960s, and the final dramatic stages of the Cold War, presidents and social activists deemed these costs acceptable. They calculated that they needed each other to break through the imposing inertial powers of the American political system. Each of the cases we have studied shows the presidency–­social movement nexus is fraught with ten­ sion; at the same time, each suggests that collaboration between the White House and social activists was indispensable to the important changes that occurred during these three formative periods. The push and pull between a savvy Whig politician and militant abolitionists made possible constitu­ tional reform that abolished slavery, gave African Americans the vote, and established laws that would inspire black Americans, women, and other excluded groups to fight for their rights into the twentieth and twenty-­first

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centuries. The tempestuous collaboration between Lyndon Johnson and civil rights activists led to the enactment of laws and the deployment of national administrative power that breathed new life into the Fourteenth and Fifteen Amendments and extended the “rights revolution” to de facto practices that disadvantaged people of color, women, and the disabled. The alliance between a populist conservative and evangelical Christians recast national administrative power in a form that posed fundamental challenges to the liberal administrative state and infused American foreign policy with messianic fervor. Our task is not to judge these episodes as good or bad; rather the purpose of this book is to train a spotlight on the understudied relationship between presidents and social movements, one that offers a fascinating window onto the interplay between state and society and that has proven pivotal to some of the most significant sea changes in American politics. In examining Lin­ coln and the abolitionists, Johnson and the civil rights movement, and Rea­ gan and the new Christian Right, we have focused on three examples where the contentious relationship between presidents and social movements has been among the most productive in American history. In all three instances, the president has been able to claim unusual prerogatives, and social move­ ments have demonstrated the clout to mobilize protest and support on the ground and to effectively employ traditional tactics within the halls of power to secure major transformations in American democracy. In the cases of the formative abolition and civil rights movements, this combination of disruptive and mainstream political pressure gave these mass mobiliza­ tions the leverage to challenge presidents on the timing and circumstances of reform. Although the new Christian Right did not engage in the kind of grassroots disruptive protests exhibited by abolitionists and civil rights activists, its leaders were not co-­opted the way the labor movement was by the Roosevelt and Truman administrations after 1940. Just as the status of social movements can change over time, so it is difficult to character­ ize them at any particular historical moment. As we note in chapter 1 and chronicle in subsequent chapters, the line between formative and institu­ tionalized movements can be blurred by the ambition of social movements to bring about structural change. Chapter 6 details the political dynamics that established Christian conservatives as an “anchor group,” to use Daniel Schlozman’s term, of a transformed Republican Party, one that instigated the formation of a national, programmatic, and presidency-­centered par­ tisanship that ritualized the relationship between modern executives and social movement organizations.3 The movement responded to policy disap­ pointments of the 1980s not by disavowing the Reagan White House, but

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rather by demonstrating its support for the administration’s economic and foreign policy agendas and by redoubling efforts to influence institutional arrangements in every branch and level of US government in the years that followed.

Presidents and Insurgents in a Bureaucratic Age The joining of the Reagan administration and Christian Right in a novel form of executive-­centered partisanship suggests how important it is not only to take account of the enduring features of the executive–­social movement relationship but also to consider changes over time that have reconfigured their interactions. The cases we have examined in this book were designed to explore the presidential-­movement relationship from different partisan and ideological angles. Yet we also have focused on rivalries and alliances in this relationship that have evolved markedly over time, reflecting the de­ velopment of long movements as well as important shifts in the norms and structures of the American political system. Lincoln and the abolitionists collaborated in a political order of highly decentralized and intensely mobi­ lized political parties that animated a party realignment and circumscribed national administrative power. Johnson and civil rights activists tested the Progressive Era hope that the presidency, as Theodore Roosevelt put it in an alluring and elusive phrase, is the “steward of the public welfare,” with the potential to ally itself with social movements in a collaborative pursuit of social and economic reform.4 Reagan joined with the Christian Right to prove that the modern presidency—­allied to a new form of executive-­ centered party—­was, ideologically, a two-­edged sword that could cut in a conservative as well as a liberal direction. More generally, the relationship between the White House and social movements has increasingly been shaped by the development of a powerful but fragmented administrative state that has made it difficult for presidents and social activists to join forces in bringing about change while retaining a vital connection with the public. The routine and contentious ties between the White House and so­ cial movement organizations since the 1980s have aroused a new form of partisanship that engages liberals and conservatives in raw and disruptive battles for the services of national administrative power—­a form of polari­ zation that fractures the nation and saps civic vitality. The difficulty of marrying executive administration and social insur­ gency bespoke the exalted turmoil of the 1960s. Dedicated to breaching the seemingly ineradicable color line, the social movements of that restive decade aroused an unprecedented clash between America’s oppositional

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culture and the modern executive establishment, which presumed to em­ body its aspirations. Ultimately, this confrontation made Lyndon Johnson the focus of the activists’ sense of national betrayal.5 Nevertheless, civil rights organizations and the other movements these associations helped inspire—­ feminists, LGBTQ activists, environmentalists, and consumer advocates—­believed they had no recourse but to forge ties with the national administrative state. The new public interest movements of the 1970s, Jef­ frey Berry has observed, followed from their leaders’ desire “to transcend ‘movement politics’ with organizations that could survive beyond periods of intense emotion.”6 As discussed in chapter 4, they championed statutes and court rulings that would make administrative agencies more responsive to social causes than they had been in the past. Along with the changes in party rules that established a primary system, which displaced the national party convention as the method to nominate presidential candidates, these reforms were pursued with the objective of transforming national administra­ tive power into the instrument rather than the steward of the public welfare. But participation in administrative politics and presidential campaigns has exacted a steep price: since the 1960s, Charles Tilly observes, professional political organizers and administratively oriented reform organizations “have taken an increasingly prominent part in promoting social move­ ments—­to the dismay of populist critics.”7 The temptation to bore from within the gates of administrative power has threatened to deprive social movements of their formative potential—­to subordinate grassroots organization to efforts to capture institutions. In re­ cent years, however, both conservative and liberal activists have taken steps to restore their moral fervor—­to nurture both mass-­based insurgency from below and institutionally rooted influence from above. Recognizing that their alliance with Ronald Reagan had left them politically constrained, conservative Christians at the end of the 1980s refocused their organiz­ ing talents on forming a strong grassroots political movement—­one that would greatly strengthen their voice in the Republican Party. As discussed in chapter 6, organizations like the Christian Coalition led by Ralph Reed em­ phasized getting conservative evangelicals involved at the local level of the Republican Party, where they could have greater influence on future Repub­ lican nominees at the local, state, and national level. These multilevel efforts mobilized new voters, enhanced other forms of participation such as neigh­ borhood canvassing, and gave Christian activists tremendous influence over GOP nominations and national platforms, especially after the revamped lo­ cal evangelical organizations were credited with their party’s capture of both the House and Senate in the 1994 congressional elections.8 The elevation

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of George W. Bush, saved from alcoholism by a born-­again experience and counseled by Morton Blackwell protégé Karl Rove, firmly established the new Christian Right grassroots network as a central part of a national Re­ publican “machine” that successfully deployed a reciprocal top-­down and bottom-­up campaign strategy in the 2004 election.9 In contrast to the civil rights movement of the 1960s, the new Christian Right thus set about from the start to build and remake the party with which they were most closely aligned. This example would not be lost on progressive candidates and activists intent on revitalizing the Democratic Party. Improving on the innovative techniques that the Bush-­Cheney campaign developed in 2004, the Obama team further refined and greatly expanded the multilayered grassroots cam­ paign that joined his presidential candidacy to movement politics. Tell­ ingly, this effort was supported by a network of liberal activists, composed of social movement organizations like MoveOn.org, the National Women’s Political Caucus, the Service Employees International Union, the National Council of La Raza, and the Human Rights Campaign. These groups were led by activists who sought both to learn from and counteract the Christian Right’s success in mobilizing new voters and lobbying for its causes.10 To a point, as Douglas McAdam and Karina Kloos point out, the ten­ sion between movement politics and the Democratic “establishment” be­ gan in the 1960s with the fraught relationship forged between Johnson and the civil rights movement.11 But the liberal advocacy groups of the 1970s, as we discussed in chapter 4, were more dedicated to policy making and state building than to transforming partisanship. In contrast, the Obama presidency and the networks of progressive social movements it engaged—­ collaboratively and competitively—­became embroiled in the executive-­ aligned partisanship that roiled the Reagan and Bush years. We share the view of McAdam and Kloos that the movement wing of the Republican Party has been more dominant than its counterpart in the Dem­ ocratic Party. The emergence of the Tea Party in response to Obama’s efforts to change the arc of the Reagan Revolution has decisively transformed the Republicans into a party against the liberal administrative state, and its fero­ cious opposition to the nation’s first African American president, although first aroused by Obama’s pursuit of comprehensive health insurance reform, was rooted in deep cultural issues that reopened the festering wounds of the civil rights revolution and the opposition it spawned. In effect, the Tea Par­ ty’s assault on what was left of the Republican establishment intensified a paradoxical development that has weakened party organizations but height­ ened partisanship, albeit more on the right than on the left, which has a

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lingering commitment to the pragmatism and expertise that are the cachet of the administrative state forged during the New Deal and elaborated amid the turmoil of the 1960s. McAdam and Kloos provide an insightful analysis that sheds light on the growing influence of social movements on partisanship since the 1960s. But as the story we have told makes clear, the modern presidency—­in particular, the alliances that Johnson and Reagan formed with social activists—­has been a critical factor in giving rise to the contemporary battle between liberals and conservatives for the soul of American democracy. In truth, the Tea Party is less a new, independent movement than a reinvigoration, and further incur­ sion, of the conservative assault on the halls of power spearheaded by the partisan offensive of the Christian Right. The principal conservative social movements, in fact, have collaborated on issue advocacy and electoral cam­ paigns. The alliance between Tea Party and Christian Right activists formed the foundation of the Faith and Freedom Coalition, organized by Ralph Reed, which has been very active in primary and general elections as well as policy campaigns since 2012. The followers of this new conservative insurgency have been determined to hold the GOP accountable to the same conserva­ tive principles—­tax relief, family values, and patriotism—­that Reagan and his Christian Right allies trumpeted.12 Revealingly, the fusion of the presidency and social activism in strength­ ening the influence of social movements in party politics also surfaced dur­ ing the Obama administration. The Reagan administration’s weakening of the regular party organization in forging an alliance with the new Christian Right paved the way for the transformation of the Republican Party into a movement-­driven organization. As underscored by the unexpected ground­ swell of antiestablishment support for the 2016 campaign of self-­styled dem­ ocratic socialist Bernie Sanders, Obama helped prepare the ground for the growing power of social movement organizations and grassroots progressive populism within the Democratic Party. Nor was Obama’s groundwork for movement politics limited to elec­ tions. Indeed, his presidency revealed that the relationship between the White House and movements, although as uneasy as ever, had become a routine feature of American politics. Tellingly, the Obama team renamed the Office of Public Liaison, the main portal for White House–­social movement collaboration during the Reagan years, the Office of Public Engagement to signify his ambition to align his presidency with social activists. According to Jon Carson, who headed the office from 2011 to 2013, the administration rejected the notion that “we are the central power broker and this is our system to work with you on what we are doing.” Instead, Carson explained,

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“the president’s view [is] that the change on the ground and the great work that is going on everywhere is what matters.”13 As the first African Ameri­ can president and a former community organizer who, as his Selma address dramatized, embraced grassroots activism as a necessary part of the struggle to form a “more perfect Union,” Obama seemed especially well suited to the task of forging strong bonds with the social movement organizations that championed progressive causes. “As a community organizer,” the prominent journalist David Maraniss observed, “he refined the skill of leading without being overt about it, making the dispossessed citizens he was organizing feel their own sense of empowerment.”14 Obama’s presidency, then, can be described as an effort to advance the fusion of presidential leadership, social activism, and partisan politics that began to form in the aftermath the tumultuous events of the 1960s. Obama’s commitment to cementing the linkages between these contentious forces was most clearly seen in the pioneering organization he formed to mobi­ lize support for his campaigns and presidential polices. During the 2008 campaign, Obama built an information-­age, grassroots organization whose staff and volunteers viewed his historic run for the presidency not merely as a campaign, but also as a lasting movement. After the election, they rede­ ployed his personal electoral machine, Obama for America, as Organizing for Action (OFA). OFA was tasked with mobilizing support for the progres­ sive policies Obama had promised to advance, most notably, major health care reform, climate-­change policy, and immigration reform. Candidate-­ centered organizations had been a staple of American politics since the Ken­ nedy administration, but Obama was the first president to keep his electoral machine intact as the vanguard of a movement that would free him from the constraints of the Democratic “establishment” and connect him directly to a widely scattered but potentially powerful coalition that might be con­ sidered a coming of age of the Great Society: minority groups, youth, the LGBTQ community, and educated white voters, especially single women.15 By the time Obama left office, the struggles between presidents, move­ ments, and parties—­roiled by racial and religious strife—­deeply divided the country between liberals and conservatives who battled not only over public policy, but US national identity itself. “Only the bitter run up to the Civil War,” McAdam and Kloos write, surpassed Barack Obama’s time in office “for partisan bloodletting.”16 In a troubling denouement of the long-­term merging of presidential and social movement politics, the polarization agi­ tated by the Christian Right and Tea Party reached a crescendo when the 2016 Republican standard-­bearer tapped into the anger of antiestablish­ ment white voters. As much as Obama’s team envisaged a stronger fusion

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of executive power and grassroots mobilization, Donald Trump’s stunning, grievance-­fueled ascendance to the presidency in 2016 reaffirmed the un­ comfortable melding of centralized administration and mass mobilization. Still, although the governing philosophies and policy objectives of Obama and Trump could not be more antithetical, the style of politics they practice reflects two key areas of common ground: a detachment from party organi­ zation and a vision of the White House as the vanguard of a movement. Yet even as the most ardent supporters of Obama and Trump fancied them­ selves as part of a movement, committed insurgents rejected the notion that a “great” or demagogic leader standing atop the presidential establishment could spearhead a true social movement. Indeed, a closer examination of Obama’s two terms and the early days of the Trump administration make clear that the pioneering politics of these two administrations have not dis­ placed the pattern that has characterized the relationship between presi­ dents and social movements throughout American history: the promise of reform and the estrangement of rivalry endure. In fact, the ritualization of executive management and insurgency threatens to relegate presidents to a perpetual struggle for credibility while social activists, no matter what is gained, are destined to feel bitter disappointment. Despite White House attempts to harness movement energy, Obama ultimately could not escape jarring collisions with determined insurgents on the left who were unwilling to follow his lead on the nature and pace of reform. As in the past, pressure from below and leadership from above combined to reshape American law and politics.

“Obama the President Was Different” Viewing himself as a descendant of the civil rights movement, Obama in certain respects was determined to renew the formative relationship be­ tween the White House and social movements of the 1960s. For example, he joined hands with open-­housing advocates to shore up the anemic en­ forcement, discussed in chapter 4, that had long stifled the 1968 Civil Rights Act. In a surprising June 2015 decision, a divided Supreme Court sided with a nonprofit advocacy group, the Inclusive Communities Project, which claimed that the Texas Department of Housing and Community Affairs had contributed to “segregated housing patterns by allocating too many tax credits to housing in predominantly black inner-­city areas and too few in mostly white suburban neighborhoods.” Significantly, the court placed the Fair Housing Act on the same legal footing as Title VII employment provisions, ruling that racially segregated housing patterns could be used

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to show that local government actions and practices could have discrimina­ tory effects. It thus was no longer necessary to prove that such segregation stemmed from discriminatory intentions. Invoking the Kerner commis­ sion’s “grim prophesy” that America was “moving toward two societies,” the court acknowledged “the Fair Housing Act’s continuing role in moving the Nation toward a more integrated society.”17 Two weeks later, the Obama administration issued a new fair-­housing requirement that cities and localities account for how they used federal housing funds to reduce racial disparities; governments faced penalties for noncompliance, including the loss of federal funds. Obama’s HUD secre­ tary, Julian Castro, joined with fair-­housing activists in citing the Supreme Court’s endorsement of a broad interpretation of the 1968 Civil Rights Act, which was enacted toward the end of Johnson’s presidency, as well as recent academic research documenting that lower-­income children have much bet­ ter prospects if they live in diverse neighborhoods. “While the 1968 law has always required communities to ensure equal opportunity in their neigh­ borhoods,” Castro stated, “the fact is that federal efforts have often fallen short” when it came to enforcement.18 These examples reveal how the president’s relationship with civil rights organizations became imbedded in administrative politics—­a testament to how the reforms achieved in the fraught relationship between Lyndon John­ son and social activists had become an enduring part of America’s “living Constitution.” As Obama observed in commemorating the fiftieth anniver­ sary of the enactment of the 1964 Civil Rights Act at the Lyndon Johnson Presidential Library: “Because of the civil rights movement, because of the laws President Johnson signed, new doors of opportunity and education swung open for everybody—­not all at once but they were swung open . . . and that’s why I’m here today—­because of these efforts, because of that legacy.” “Half a century later,” Obama added, the laws that were the re­ sult of the extraordinary partnership between Johnson and the civil rights movement “are now as fundamental to our conception of ourselves and our democracy as the Constitution and the bill of rights. They are foundational, an essential piece of the American character.”19 Yet developments since the Reagan presidency had opened cracks in this foundation. With the appointment of two new justices during George W. Bush’s two terms—­Chief Justice John J. Roberts and Samuel Alito—­a bit­ terly divided court curbed the use of busing for the purpose of desegregating schools. There followed a similarly fractious decision declaring that the so-­called screening provision of the Voting Rights Act that makes the south­ ern states especially suspect no longer applied “because it is based on fact

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having no logical relationship to the present day.”20 Adding to the erosion of voting rights, President Obama and other liberal activists warned, are so-­called ballot-­protection statutes enacted in many Republican-­controlled states across the country requiring voters to have a picture ID. As important as these challenges to the 1964 and 1965 Civil Rights Acts have been, they have paled against the chronic struggles between law enforce­ ment officers and African Americans—­dramatized by the massive number of African Americans who had been incarcerated as well as the disturbing images of unarmed young black men killed by police that were projected across social media and cable news. This battle over the “carceral state”21—­ forged in the aftermath of the sixties riots—­was graphically depicted in the killing of Michael Brown by a white police officer in Ferguson, Missouri. A flash point for the emergence of the Black Lives Matter movement, Brown’s shooting prompted Darrel Moore, a writer and activist based in Brooklyn, to coordinate “freedom rides” to Missouri from New York, Chicago, Portland, Los Angeles, Philadelphia, and Boston. Just as this campaign recalled the grassroots actions in Mississippi and Alabama at the height of the civil rights movement, so the protests that followed were reminiscent of scenes from the front lines of the climactic battles against Jim Crow, with police officers in riot gear, and outraged protesters chanting demands for human security and equal treatment. In response to the recrudescence of racial confrontation, Obama found himself awkwardly positioned between the movement politics of the six­ ties, of which he was a lineal descendant, and the social activism practiced by Black Lives Matter activists, who were deeply skeptical of his claim to be a movement president. As part of the official recognition of his last Black History Month as president, Obama held a “first of its kind meeting” that brought together different generations of activists. Iconic civil rights lead­ ers like Representative John Lewis were invited to the White House to join representatives of a new generation of activists such as DeRay Mckesson, Brittany Packnett, and Aislinn Pulley, all prominent figures in Black Lives Matter. Most of the more established civil rights leaders shared a sense of ur­ gency to get the president to act decisively on criminal justice issues during his final year in office, since the first African American president would soon be leaving his post. For younger activists, however, Obama was viewed as a pragmatic politician whose commitment to their cause had to be viewed skeptically, a view shared by the LGBTQ and immigration rights communi­ ties. Indeed, Pulley, a community organizer in Chicago, declined the White House invitation, claiming it was nothing but a “photo opportunity” for the president.22

Executive Power, Social Movements, and American Democracy  /  291

In reflecting on why Obama “did not do enough for Black Lives Matter,” young African American commentators have noted that any occupant of the Oval Office would be at odds with “a youth-­led grassroots movement” fighting “state-­sanctioned violence.” And the nation’s first African American president was particularly hamstrung, they argued. Because “the blowback was unrelenting” whenever Obama “spoke candidly about race,” notes Dan­ ielle Fuentes Morgan, he was compelled to couch his responses to police brutality “in language of universalism.”23 Even as “Obama’s connection to the pain that black people experienced” over police brutality “felt authentic,” Brittney Cooper adds, the “inability (or unwillingness) of his office to do anything substantive” underscored “particularly to Millennial black people” that his presidency “had little ma­ terial effect on making black people safer from extralegal violence from vigi­ lantes and police.”24 This recognition, in fact, fueled the Black Lives Matter insurgency: “The political limitations of our first black president brought into sharp relief the need for a new movement for racial justice.”25 In the end, Black Lives Matter activists and their supporters readily understood that presidential opportunities and constraints were vastly different from those of movements. “Obama, the Chicago-­based community organizer, would have certainly been an outspoken proponent of Black Lives Matter,” Morgan concludes. “Obama, the president, was different.”26 Obama’s ambition to lead a new progressive coalition thus appeared to face challenges comparable to those that Johnson confronted in his fraught relationship to the civil rights movement of the 1960s. Reflecting his own roots as a community organizer and responding to the ritualization of the relationship between presidential politics and social movement organiza­ tions that had been developing since the Reagan years, Obama sought to cultivate a novel, less contentious form of top-­down and bottom-­up mo­ bilization in campaigns and policy advocacy—­one that he hoped would blossom under the umbrella of a presidency-­centered grassroots organiza­ tion.27 As the more militant members of Black Lives Matter and their allies in the immigration and LGBTQ rights movements argued, however, OFA eschewed the characteristics of successful social justice movements like the abolitionists and civil rights activists who demonstrated the will and capac­ ity for both disruptive and mass-­based mobilization and institutionalized politics. Obama’s alliance with OFA suggests how the relationship between the White House and social movement organizations in a bureaucratic age might be mediated by an innovative institution that allows for a “recipro­ cal top-­down and bottom-­up” mobilization in campaigns and policy ad­ vocacy;28 yet this innovation in administrative politics could not mollify

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genuine social movements of the left, which constantly tested the fragility of Obama’s partisan coalition. The relationship between the Obama administration and genuine pro­ test movements, then, ultimately reflected a familiar pattern of profound conflict and tense collaboration in pursuit of reform. As much as Obama paid tribute to the civil rights activists of a previous generation who made his political ascendance possible, and as much as he hoped to channel the popular energies of his 2008 campaign into a formidable movement of its own, the imperatives of his administration and of social movements re­ mained fundamentally different. “Obama himself was an activist and a community organizer, albeit for only two years—­but he is not, by tempera­ ment, a protester,” noted Ta-­Nehisi Coates after a series of interviews with the president. “He is a consensus-­builder; consensus, he believes, ultimately drives what gets done. He understands the emotional power of protest, the need to vent before authority—­but that kind of approach does not come naturally to him. . . . The notion that a president would attempt to achieve change within the boundaries of the accepted consensus is appropriate. But Obama is almost constitutionally skeptical of those who seek to achieve change outside that consensus.”29

We, the People In January 2016, Alicia Garza, one of the leading organizers of Black Lives Matter, attended President Obama’s final State of the Union message. She returned to her community in California disappointed. Obama had not emphasized criminal justice or police reform. Instead, he focused gener­ ally on economic and political inequality in a way that scarcely touched on the specific injustices endured by African Americans.30 To be sure, Obama had given rhetorical and policy support to Black Lives Matter. After all, he strongly defended their right to protest; issued an executive order that would phase out the incarceration of federal prisoners in private facilities; barred the military from transferring certain types of equipment to police or sheriff ’s departments, including tracked armored vehicles, armed aircraft or vehicles of any kind, .50-­caliber firearms and ammunition, grenade launch­ ers, bayonets, and camouflage uniforms; issued clemency to over one thou­ sand inmates, many of them long-­serving nonviolent drug offenders (more than his three predecessors combined); and authorized the Department of Justice to impose federal oversight on eight large police departments over his two terms (in their sixteen years combined, Clinton and George W. Bush oversaw just six).31

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Obama and the Dreamers Despite these administrative measures, according to one of his aides, Van Jones, Obama’s support of Black Lives Matter was muted by his hope that he could “build bridges across race and party under his presidency.”32 Yet Obama’s transcendental leadership was less about “universalism” than it was an effort to position himself as the steward of a new progressive coalition—­ one dedicated to a post-­sixties liberalism that envisioned a cosmopolitan, pluralistic society whose government would protect the rights of African Americans, women, immigrants, and the LGBTQ community at home; and pursue “global” policies that would serve, not imperialism, but human rights abroad. As the steward of this new progressive ideal, Obama and OFA engaged in a contentious but potentially formative relationship with the groups that shared his more capacious understanding of nationhood. The White House’s tense alliance with immigration rights groups and LGBTQ activists was especially illustrative of Obama’s desire to embody a movement that advanced what the journalist Ronald Brownstein dubbed a “coalition of the ascendant.”33 The White House’s support became especially important to progressive social movement organizations after the 2010 elections, which saw the Re­ publicans assume control of the House of Representatives. Significantly, the most dramatic and controversial unilateral action of Obama’s first term was an overture to one of the core constituents of this coalition: the “Dreamers,” those undocumented foreign-­born residents who had come to the United States as children and had become both one of the leading causes and the spearheads of a burgeoning immigration rights movement. Following a se­ ries of collisions and tense negotiations with immigration rights activists, Obama announced in June 2012 an executive initiative—­Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals (DACA)—­that granted relief to an entire category of young immigrants, ultimately eight hundred thousand people, who would otherwise have been subject to deportation. Obama thus elided the Repub­ lican opposition to the Dream act, a recurring bill advanced by a biparti­ san minority of sympathetic members of Congress to provide a conditional pathway to citizenship for immigrants brought to America as children.34 Prior to issuing DACA, Obama officials had demurred on immigration reform, claiming in the face of importunities from Senator Richard Durbin (D-­IL) and a newly emergent and political influential Dreamers movement—­ United We Dream—­that although they supported the Dream act, it was up to Congress to pass a law. Yet whereas presidents from Lyndon Johnson to George W. Bush worked closely with prominent lawmakers from the other

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party on immigration reform, Obama quickly discovered in his first term that he could scare up no more than a handful of Republicans in either house of Congress to back a major overhaul of national immigration law. Neither the congressional GOP leadership nor its rank and file considered angering their partisan base, which was energized by a revived immigration-­restriction movement that made undocumented immigrants convenient scapegoats for a host of social, economic, and national-­security woes.35 Young immigration rights activists in the president’s own base grew im­ patient with this legislative impasse. As late as April, Valerie Jarrett, the presi­ dent’s senior adviser, and Cecilia Muñoz, the domestic policy adviser and formerly a key leader at the National Council of La Raza—­the nation’s larg­ est Latino civil rights organization—­held a meeting with United We Dream leaders. The purpose of the tête-­à-­tête was for Jarrett and Muñoz to express strong support for their cause, but also to insist that President Obama had no legal authority to issue an order granting deportation protection. Yet these Dreamer activists were intransigent, not unlike young civil rights activ­ ists of the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee who rejected the political pragmatism of Johnson and older Southern Christian Leadership Conference leaders a half century before. Seeking leverage, Dreamers continued to press their cause through pro­ vocative protests that captured widespread media attention and assailed Obama as “Deporter-­in-­Chief,” a moniker that vexed the president. While established immigration rights groups counseled patience and collabora­ tion with the White House, younger insurgents remained hostile toward an administration that detained and deported hundreds of thousands of un­ documented immigrants. They also were convinced that pressuring Obama would yield tangible policy gains.36 It was a strategy that riled the president. “I think that where I’ve gotten frustrated during the course of my presidency has never been because I was getting pushed too hard by activists to see the justness of a cause or the essence of an issue,” Obama later explained. “I think where I got frustrated at times was the belief that the president can do anything if he just decides he wants to do it. And that sort of lack of aware­ ness on the part of an activist about the constraints of our political system and the constraints on this office, I think, sometimes would leave me to mutter under my breath.”37 Dreamers in fact proved quite adept at assessing and exploiting the struc­ tural constraints and political incentives that might force Obama’s hand. In addition to public protests targeting the president, Dreamers unnerved the White House by entering into discussions with Florida’s Republican senator Marco Rubio, the charismatic son of Cuban refugees, who indicated that he

Executive Power, Social Movements, and American Democracy  /  295

was interested in reviving the Dream act in Congress. Immigration activists told the White House about these negotiations, and made clear that the president’s failure to preempt them with administrative action would have serious consequences for the 2012 election, especially in Florida, a crucial swing state, where Latino support would be critical to his reelection pros­ pects. When the White House received news that Rubio, in consultation with Dreamers, was preparing a new bill to give visas to young immigrants, the administration moved decisively toward an administrative solution.38 On June 15, Secretary of Homeland Security Janet Napolitano, who hitherto had echoed the White House’s demurrals, issued a memorandum that in­ structed the Immigration and Custom Enforcement (ICE) agency to exercise “prosecutorial discretion” to provide leniency for most undocumented im­ migrants who came to the United States prior to the age of sixteen.39 In truth, as Obama and Muñoz insisted, they were not forced to em­ brace the DACA initiative against their will. To a point, the Dreamers and other immigration rights advocates were forcing the president to do what he wanted to do. During the 2008 campaign, Obama frequently told social activists the story of A. Philip Randolph’s March on Washington movement, which, as we discuss in chapter 3, forced Franklin Roosevelt to issue an executive order proscribing discrimination in the defense industry. “What we are doing,” Lorella Praeli, advocacy and policy director of United We Dream, told Obama during one heated White House meeting, “is doing the work on the outside that you asked us to do.”40 This invocation of Randolph by Obama and a leading Dreamer revealed just how ritualized the interplay between presidents and social movements had become. At the same time, the direct action that Dreamers took to hold the president’s feet to the fire and the bristling environment that fre­ quently characterized exchanges behind closed doors made clear that the rules of engagement, although more routine, were still fraught with tension. Significantly, although the president acknowledged that he was irritated by regular attacks from younger Latino and immigration rights activists who lambasted him for enhanced enforcement and tepid support for compre­ hensive immigration reform, he felt compelled to respond to these pres­ sures. Secretary Napolitano’s memo was a critical step in the ongoing dance between the White House and immigration rights activists. It was contem­ plated a year earlier in a memo issued by ICE director John Morton, an ini­ tiative that was influenced by the intensive efforts of immigration advocates. Morton’s memo set out nineteen factors that ICE officers should consider in determining whether to exercise prosecutorial discretion.41 This policy seemed to protect Dreamers, but prosecutorial discretion did

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not require ICE field officers to exercise discretion in individual cases, and therefore left open the possibility that many individuals who were low en­ forcement priorities still faced the threat of deportation. More to the point, the private lobbying and direct action that Dreamers took in all probability affected the timing and programmatic form of the White House’s adminis­ trative action. This is seen both in the White House’s concern to short-­circuit the deliberations between Dreamers and Rubio and in the substance of the action eventually taken. DACA created a program that Dreamers and their allies insisted on, viewing it as a crucial legal benefit for undocumented im­ migrants to not only avoid deportation but also to gain access to the labor market and other basic membership rights. Secretary Napolitano’s memo specified that the directive “conferred no substantive right, immigration status or pathway to citizenship”; but it did establish a process to allow qualifying individuals to gain protection from deportation for two years, and instructed that those Dreamers granted deferred action could apply for work authorization, a status that allowed young immigrants to get a Social Security card, obtain a driver’s license, and enjoy greater economic oppor­ tunity. A 2014 study of Dreamers revealed that those who received deferrals reported that their finances had improved as a result of DACA: nearly three-­ quarters of these youths said they had started their first job or moved to a better job after being granted deferrals.42 Although deportation relief and work authorization were no substitute for comprehensive immigration reform, its political importance, combined with the way partisan rancor had made legislative action so unlikely, el­ evated the demands of immigration rights advocates for executive action. Indeed, Obama’s adroit administrative maneuver in 2012 was critical to his reelection. Prior to DACA, Latino activists in particular were highly am­ bivalent about the Obama administration, which had pursued a vigorous deportation policy. But a survey of Latinos following the action revealed a significant turning of the tide: on Election Day, 58 percent of respondents indicated DACA had made them “more enthusiastic” about Obama, while 57 percent said that they were less enthusiastic about Republican candidate Mitt Romney because of his opposition to the executive order. President Obama would go on to win roughly 71 percent of the Latino vote to 27 per­ cent for Mitt Romney. For the first time in American history, activists could claim that the Latino vote was decisive in the outcome of a presidential election: if Latinos had split their vote evenly, Obama would have lost the popular vote; in fact, even if Romney only won 35 percent of the Latino vote, Obama still would have lost the popular vote.43

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Obama’s uneasy alliance with the immigration rights activists in 2012 paid immediate electoral dividends; however, it is important to recognize that this action was only one vital part of a broader ambition to leave a lasting legacy of progressive reform. During the 2008 campaign, Obama in­ dicated that he wanted to be a consequential president like Ronald Reagan, and change “the trajectory of America.” Despite ruffling the feathers of some mainstream Democrats, Obama clarified that unlike Bill Clinton, whose “Third Way” politics seemed to operate in the shadow of the Reagan Revo­ lution, he was determined to leave a record of accomplishment that would bend the arc of American politics toward a progressive future. His hesitant but ultimately decisive action on behalf of Dreamers helped revive the spirit of the Immigration and Nationality Act of 1965 (INA), which Lyndon John­ son shepherded through Congress, viewing the national quota system that it eliminated as a stain on the Great Society’s dedication to civil rights and social justice. Although the INA has not traditionally been viewed as part of the civil rights agenda, and few of its champions anticipated how pro­ foundly it would change the US demographic landscape, Johnson seemed to recognize that its passage was especially significant—­enough so that he oversaw the staging of an elaborate signing ceremony at the base of the Statue of Liberty.44 But the massive expansion of foreign-­born citizens that followed in its wake—­an increase from 9.6 million then to a record 45 mil­ lion in 2015—­animated the rise of a formative immigration rights move­ ment by the time of Obama’s presidency that viewed immigration reform—­ especially a path to citizenship for undocumented immigrants—­as the civil rights cause of this generation. Like many presidents since the Great Society, Obama had been reluctant to embrace this cause, but the compelling story and effective action of the Dreamers—­combined with the growing impor­ tance of the Latino vote—­encouraged him to make immigration reform a principal objective of his presidency by the end of his first term. Obama and the LGBTQ Community Movement pressure combined with Obama’s commitment to forging a new progressive coalition also fueled the president’s steady but cautious march toward an acceptance of LGBTQ rights during his first term.45 Engaged in the same sort of love-­hate relationship he developed with immigration rights activists, the president eventually became an ally of the LGBTQ community, whose causes also became—­in the assessment of former attorney general Eric Holder—­one of “the defining civil rights challenges of our time.”46

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Obama readily supported repealing laws that LGBTQ activists viewed as egregiously discriminatory, such as “don’t ask, don’t tell” (DADT) and the Defense of Marriage Act (DOMA), both of which were enacted during the Clinton presidency. Yet he was reluctant to grant his open approval or ex­ pend significant political capital on the cause of same-­sex marriage, the core reform goal of most gay rights activists after the 2008 election. Whether his opposition to marriage equality was a matter, as the president suggested, of personal religious views or political calculations based on the strong op­ position to this cause prior to his ascent to the White House is an open question. In all likelihood both factors were important. But even as he al­ lied with a cresting gay rights movement in persuading Congress to repeal DADT and supporting critical law suits that resulted in the Supreme Court’s declaring DOMA a violation of the Fourteenth Amendment, Obama refused to express his personal support for same-­sex marriage during the first three years of his presidency. That the LGBTQ community viewed Obama’s “evolution,” as the presi­ dent termed his tortuous journey toward acceptance of marriage equality, as a critical step in the fulfillment of their rights offers further evidence that the relationship between the White House and social movements remained just as pivotal in the second decade of the twenty-­first century as it was to abolitionists, civil rights insurgents, and new Christian Right activists years before. As Marc Solomon, political director of the highly influential social movement organization Freedom to Marry acknowledged, once the courts declared DOMA unconstitutional, there was no direct policy benefit in having Obama support same-­sex marriage.47 Still, activists believed it was critical to get Obama’s personal testimony. Some noted the important role the president could play as a moral voice in the political debate, and be­ lieved that the bully pulpit could be a significant factor in advancing their signature cause. Others held the view that having the first African Ameri­ can president express his personal support for their signature cause would greatly abet the task of connecting marriage equality to the long journey of civil rights progress and thus win support among African American voters, a critical Democratic constituency whose support for marriage equality was in great doubt. As Lori Jean, CEO of the Los Angeles LGBT Center put it: I think without [the president] it would have happened eventually. But I also think his support was pivotal. [The successful campaign for marriage equal­ ity] happened when it happened because of him. When he added his voice to the chorus, and he won reelection, that development gave permission to every other Democrat hiding in the shadows to come out in support of LGBT

Executive Power, Social Movements, and American Democracy  /  299 equality. It even gave permission to Republicans who had gay family mem­ bers to change the dialogue in their party. It changed the dialogue in the Afri­ can American community. He’s the president, and there’s no more powerful bully pulpit in the world.48

Obama had made it clear all along that his conversion on this controver­ sial issue would not come without considerable effort on the part of LGBTQ advocates. Just as United We Dream’s Lorella Praeli mentioned Obama’s ref­ erences to A. Philip Randolph, so several LGBTQ activists, Democratic Party leaders, and administration officials recalled being told directly by Obama that they would need to “make him do it.” Legal scholar and activist Tobias Wolff, who was the leading LGBTQ rights adviser to the president’s 2008 campaign, remembered hearing Obama explain during his first run for the president that “it was the job of the advocates to push him to advance their priorities, and to help create the support and political momentum on the ground that would make it possible for him . . . to advance their priorities suc­ cessfully.” From Obama’s perspective, the president’s “job is to make the best assessment of what is achievable, how much political capital certain goals are going to take,” while the task of advocacy groups was to build grassroots support for marriage equality—­“to push me really hard on this.”49 LGBTQ groups understood, then, that they would not get presidential support for marriage equality unless they “forced” Obama to change his position.50 Throughout 2011 and the spring of 2012, LGBTQ groups, such as Free­ dom to Marry, engaged in a campaign to have Obama announce his sup­ port for same-­sex marriage before the general election. Activists engaged in a variety of activities to achieve their goal. Evan Wolfson, the president and founder of Freedom to Marry, met directly with Valerie Jarrett, to stress that without support for marriage equality the LGBTQ community would never fully appreciate the administration’s other achievements. Wolfson also hired a team of Democratic and Republican pollsters to analyze opinion research on marriage. Released in July 2011, the memo indicated that polls suggested a solid majority of Americans firmly supported same-­sex marriage and were as motivated to vote as were their opponents—­crucial information if the LGBTQ community were to convince Democratic leaders that same-­ sex marriage would not cost them the 2012 election. Wolfson shared the results with Jarrett during a meeting in December 2011.51 But Freedom to Marry’s strategy was not limited to lobbying. Looking for a major public campaign to pressure the president to reach the desired desti­ nation prior to the 2012 election, Solomon focused his attention on ensur­ ing that the Democratic National Convention would ratify a plank in the

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platform endorsing marriage equality. Recalling the painful struggle waged by the Mississippi Freedom Democratic Party with the Johnson administra­ tion at the Atlantic City Convention, what followed showed dramatically how much more important social movement organizations have become in partisan counsels since the 1960s. Almost immediately after Freedom to Marry announced its intention to mobilize support for a marriage-­equality plank, minority leader Nancy Pelosi (D-­CA) backed the plan. A week later, Senator Jeanne Shaheen (D-­NH) became the first member of the Senate to pledge her support. When the LGBTQ publication the Washington Blade contacted all Democratic senators to ask their position on the plank, an additional twenty-­two senators signed on. Solomon also enlisted the sup­ port of former DNC chairman Steven Grossman. Grossman and his wife had been long-­term supporters of LGBTQ rights, and he remembered that Solomon had called him and “asked if I would come out in support of this as a former DNC chair, and I said absolutely. Second, he asked if I could call all the former DNC chairs and ask for their support, and I said abso­ lutely.”52 Grossman enlisted several former DNC chairs—­including Howard Dean, David Wilhelm, and Don Fowler—­to come out in support of the pro-­ marriage-­equality plank. Although this support from Democrats outside of the administration was a great asset to its cause, Freedom to Marry still faced opposition from the DNC, which tried to prevent LGBTQ activists and their allies from enlisting current state chairmen to support the marriage plank. As Solomon recalled, “We got pushback from the DNC. They were actively trying to get people not to sign on. It was especially troubling to them that we were trying to get state party chairs [to support the marriage-­equality plank]”53 Despite the lingering resistance among party regulars, the LGBTQ com­ munity’s pressure had an effect on the administration. Significantly, activists had support within the palace gates. White House LGBTQ employees and their straight allies in the administration also subtly tried to cajole their president to embrace gay rights issues. As one former administration official noted, LGBTQ couples were specifically selected to interact with Obama during his travels: “If [Obama] was talking about healthcare, a [same-­sex] married couple affected by the Affordable Care Act” would be selected to be among the small group of citizens with whom Obama met.54 Eventually, this combination of outside and inside pressure had its de­ sired effect. In September 2011, as the Obama campaign began to prepare for the 2012 elections, the president told his core advisers that he wanted to come out in favor of same-­sex marriage to avoid having to deal with “evo­ lution” questions during the campaign and debates. That pronouncement

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initiated a process within the campaign of identifying the time and venue for the president to proclaim his support, not unlike Lincoln waiting for the right moment to issue his Emancipation Proclamation. Still, Obama’s top advisers remained hesitant: they believed support for marriage equality would play well with the LGBTQ community and young voters, but were concerned about alienating culturally conservative voters in swing states. These voters, White House and Democratic strategists feared, might even in­ clude reliable Democrats in the African American and Latino communities. From 2011 until the spring of 2012, Obama thus received conflicting advice from his team on when, and even whether, to complete his tortured journey toward acceptance of marriage equality. Even some party officials who were very supportive of marriage equality granted that, given the different van­ tage points the president and social activists occupied, the divided counsel was understandable. An ally of the LGBTQ community, DNC treasurer Andy Tobias, admitted, “To be completely unconcerned would have been kind of short-­sighted. As with most things, it would have been a balance: would it help us more than hurt?”55 While Solomon believes Obama himself wanted to change his position, he was surrounded by “skeptical staff people,” mak­ ing it possible “for the time to ‘never be right.’ ”56 The LGBTQ community’s activities were, therefore, very important in breaking through the mixed signals that the president was getting from his top political and policy advisers. Social activists provided Obama the “cover” necessary to make the switch from opposition to support of same-­ sex marriage in two ways. First, the community’s public programs aimed at changing public opinion on marriage equality meant that by 2012, in the assessment of the prominent LGBTQ activist Cleve Jones, there had been “a sea change in the country that was extremely obvious.”57 A key moment in this transformation came when gay rights leaders, aided by psychologists, discovered through focus groups and polling that framing marriage as a “right” limited the effectiveness of their importunities. Echoing the power­ ful insight of social activists like Frederick Douglass and Martin Luther King, LGBTQ activists discovered that radical reform could be reconciled with fundamental cultural norms. Indeed, some activists had argued for years that marriage was a conservative position about love and commitment, a message that resonated widely with the general public. As Wolfson noted in explaining why same-­sex marriage became a foundational issue for the LGBTQ community, “Marriage is the language of love, commitment, family, inclusion, responsibility, self-­sacrifice, civic worth. By claiming this central vocabulary—­even while some people in the community might have thought of [same-­sex marriage] as the most difficult [cause] or too radical—­that very

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power and centrality makes marriage the most effective engine to achieve broader recognition.”58 Second, the effectiveness of the LGBTQ community’s ideals, although transcending some of the fractious partisanship that divided the country, had an especially important influence on the Democratic Party. With the approach of the 2012 election, in fact, same-­sex marriage had become a core value of the liberal base. Consequently, Freedom to Marry’s success in mounting support for a marriage-­equality plank put additional pressure on Obama to complete his wayward march toward support of gay marriage. In­ deed, during the successful platform operation, Obama told his top adviser David Plouffe that he could not go into a convention “taking a different po­ sition on this than my party.”59 While the Obama campaign was still pondering the exact timing of its announcement, Vice President Joe Biden forced the issue. As we noted in chapter 4, Vice President Lyndon Johnson jumped out front in the struggle for civil rights reform with his address commemorating the one-­hundredth anniversary of the Gettysburg Address. Strikingly, Biden played a similar role in moving ahead of the president in the cause of marriage equality. During an appearance on Meet the Press on May 6, Biden expressed sup­ port for same-­sex marriage. Freedom to Marry immediately released a state­ ment calling on Obama to join Biden and other prominent politicians and administration officials in expressing his support for marriage equal­ ity. The White House attempted to downplay the significance of Biden’s statement, but within a matter of days several other prominent Democratic politicians stated their support for marriage equality. With his “evolution” position now untenable, Obama recorded an interview with Good Morning America anchor Robin Roberts on May 9, during which he—­for the first time—­unequivocally expressed support for marriage equality. Significantly, in doing so Obama followed the path outlined in documents prepared by Freedom to Marry: he explained his personal path toward changing his po­ sition with reference to gay and lesbian couples in his life and of their love and commitment, thus adopting the “message frame” that Wolfson, in one of his meetings with Valerie Jarrett, recommended the president use when the time came to announce his support.60 Despite Democratic fears in 2009 and 2010 that embracing LGBTQ rights would hurt the party, Obama’s switch on gay marriage had no negative con­ sequences for his approval rating or his polling figures against Romney.61 The lack of negative consequences liberated Obama to embrace LGBTQ rights as a cornerstone of his administration’s achievements. “This fight goes on,” Jon

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Carson, now executive director of OFA, promised still-­skeptical LGBTQ activ­ ists in June 2013. “I know OFA supporters are ready for it—­and we’ll be there every step of the way, fighting like hell to see it through until everyone has the right to marry the person they love.”62 In spite of Obama’s uneven path to support for marriage equality, the president’s grassroots organization did, as Carson promised, become fully committed to LGBTQ rights, including sup­ port for federal legislation to protect gay and transgender individuals from workplace discrimination.63 There was no prospect this law would pass with Republicans in control of the House and, after 2014, the Senate. But on July 21, 2014, taking action that the LGBTQ community had pushed for since the start of his first term, Obama signed Executive Order 13672, amending an earlier order that applied to race and gender, to prohibit federal contractors and subcontractors from discriminating on the basis of sexual orientation or gender identity.64 Indeed, Obama’s reelection seemed to sanction his position as the apos­ tle of a new progressive coalition. Invoking the Declaration of Indepen­ dence as Lincoln did in the midst of the slavery imbroglio, the president’s second inaugural trumpeted his administration’s mission to continue the march of progress that had consumed liberal politics since the 1960s: We, the people, declare today that the most evident of truths—­that all of us are created equal—­is the star that guides us still; just as it guided our forebears through Seneca Falls, and Selma, and Stonewall; just as it guided all those men and women, sung and unsung, who left footprints along this great Mall, to hear a preacher say that we cannot walk alone; to hear a King proclaim that our individual freedom is inextricably bound to the freedom of every soul on Earth. . . . It is now our generation’s task to carry on what those pioneers began.65

Obama’s joining of the Stonewall uprising—­the 1969 riots at the Stone­ wall Inn in Greenwich Village often considered the start of the modern gay rights movement—­with iconic episodes in the struggle for the rights of women and African Americans gave critical testimony that he now consid­ ered members of the LGBTQ community full-­fledged citizens. The president chose a “solemn occasion,” Wolfson noted, to “[articulate] the movement as important not just for gay people but for the American journey.”66 At the same time, Obama made clear that the journey to full equality would not be “complete until we find a better way to welcome the striving hopeful im­ migrants who still see America as a land of opportunity.” Just as Johnson

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viewed the rights of African Americans as his most important reform task, so Obama urged a new generation to include LGBTQ Americans and immi­ grants who aspired to be Americans in their idea of “We, the People.”

Who Is an American? Obama’s tense but fruitful relationship with immigrant rights and LGBTQ activists demonstrates that that the dynamics of rivalry and reform that have characterized the uneasy alliances between presidents and social movements remains a critical dimension of American political development. At the same time, the emergence of the modern presidency had made the White House a more crucial target for social activism, just as social movement organiza­ tions had become indispensable means to the ambitions of an office in­ creasingly compelled to mobilize grassroots supporters and to advance their policy causes. These changes were a response to, and further advanced, the decline of regular party organizations, giving rise to an unfiltered partisan­ ship that sharpened political conflict and rattled national resolve. Obama’s celebration of a more inclusive national community was strongly resisted by Republicans and the influential social movement organizations in the new Christian Right and Tea Party. Marriage equality faced ongoing battles in states, most of which were now controlled by Republicans. North Caro­ lina, Mississippi, and Indiana enacted “religious freedom” laws that protected businesses and religious groups from punishment if they denied services such as counseling, wedding planning, and adoption support to lesbian, gay, bi­ sexual, and transgender people when such action was based on “sincerely held religious beliefs or convictions.” Moreover, several localities enacted or­ dinances that regulated the use of locker rooms and restrooms, leading the Obama administration to come out strongly in support of transgender Ameri­ cans facing hostile legislation in the form of “bathroom bills.”67 The battle over immigration rights became especially fierce during Obama’s second term, setting the stage for ongoing conflicts with Congress and the courts. In the face of this continuing partisan gridlock, unilateral presidential action in the service of their rights became a cause célèbre for advocates of immigration reform, who urged, indeed demanded, that the White House keep pushing the envelope.68 As one key Dreamer leader put it in the spring of 2014, “We thought DACA was an important step—­but we need more administrative relief for hard working immigrants who remain at risk.”69 With comprehensive immigration reform hopelessly derailed in the Republican-­dominated House, expanding deportation relief and work authorization permits through unilateral executive action became the

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major policy objective of many immigration rights activists. Even relatively moderate Latino advocacy organizations like the National Council of La Raza—­which had deep ties to the White House’s Cecilia Muñoz—­turned up the heat on the president. Joining the chorus of more-­radical activists who denounced Obama for deporting record numbers of undocumented immigrants each year, council president Janet Murguia declared that the president’s legacy depended on doubling down on aggressive administrative action that provided broader protection against deportation.70 For a time, Obama resisted these pressures by claiming, as he had before the DACA initiative, that reductions or modifications in deportation policy depended on Congress. Indeed, the White House had maintained near si­ lence on the immigration question since the 2012 election, hoping that Re­ publicans would come to recognize the critical importance of Latino political support and agree to cooperate in an effort to pass comprehensive legisla­ tive reform. The Senate did pass a bipartisan comprehensive law; however, the Republican-­controlled House, which was more responsive to the party’s movement wing, adamantly opposed legislation that would carve out a path­ way to citizenship for undocumented immigrants. With legislation ensnared in relentless partisan rancor, Obama, too, finally gave up on legislative reform. This was clear by the summer of 2014, when he held a Rose Garden ceremony and promised further administrative action to help the most worthy and vulnerable undocumented immigrants. To the consternation of activists, the president delayed action until after the 2014 midterm campaigns; however, just a few weeks after an election that saw the Democrats lose control of the Senate—­and was interpreted by the press as a “Red Wave”—­Obama announced with great fanfare that the Department of Homeland Security would expand deferred action that had been granted to Dreamers to include the undocumented parents of US citizens and legal permanent residents. The Deferred Action for Parents of Americans and Lawful Permanent Residents (DAPA), which promised to assist between four and five million undocumented immigrants, also en­ hanced the social benefits associated with deportation relief.71 In response, young immigration rights activists who long were deeply scornful of Obama’s preelection delay now joined OFA and the White House public campaign to rouse support for the new initiatives. On a trip to Nash­ ville, Tennessee, one of the many political territories that might be drastically affected by demographic shifts over the next several years, the president was accompanied on Air Force One by the hitherto White House gadfly Lorella Praeli. Prior to DAPA, Praeli had refused to join other Latino activists in sup­ port of Obama’s attempt to pursue a measured course on deportation. But she

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now stood with the president after the White House promised to challenge a Texas district court’s stay of the DAPA initiative. Praeli and representatives from various Latino groups gathered for a press conference outside the White House after a meeting with Obama, at which the president promised to pro­ tect undocumented immigration families from deportation until the legal is­ sue of work authorizations and visas was resolved. The meeting of the minds between President Obama and the immigration rights movements, Marielena Hincapie of the National Immigration Law Center announced, “is one of the rare times in history when the White House and activists are completely in agreement.” After a long difficult period of negotiation and conflict, which Praeli characterized as “riding a roller coaster,” Obama’s executive action sealed a bond with Latinos, one that eventually promised to be a linchpin of the new progressive coalition he envisioned.72 Predictably, however, DACA and DAPA outraged conservative activists in the Republican Party who were drawn to both anti-­immigrant nativism and charges of executive overreach. Obama and his legal team knew that DAPA was legally vulnerable, but their options were limited when a bipartisan Sen­ ate immigration bill met familiar partisan barriers in the House. The bonding of executive action and social insurgency thus left presidents and their nettle­ some allies vulnerable to partisan blowback that could stall or reverse policy reforms in a political environment that defied popular consensus. The ties between the White House and social activists appeared to reach a new stage of collaboration; however, the combination of partisan polarization and activ­ ists’ dependence on the administrative power of presidents to advance their core commitments, jeopardized the type of formative action that character­ ized previous productive alliances between presidents and movements. The president’s executive actions on behalf of undocumented immi­ grants generated heated partisan maneuvers that reverberated throughout the 2016 election. President Obama’s bold administrative maneuver after the 2014 midterms heartened immigration rights advocates. Yet his uni­ lateral pursuit of reform in the service of social activists’ demands so en­ raged Republicans as to make them more adamant about pressing for new measures to crack down on unauthorized immigration while repudiating all immigration reform packages that contained a path to legal status for the more than eleven million undocumented immigrants living in the country. The partisan divide only grew wider as an evenly split Supreme Court let a lower-­court decision stand that blocked the president’s second, more ambi­ tious DAPA immigration order.73 Indeed, the contretemps over undocumented immigrants became a leading issue during the 2016 presidential campaign. While Democratic front-­runner

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Hillary Clinton promised to continue Obama’s pursuit of immigration rights, the Republican dark-­horse Donald Trump waged an unprecedentedly nativist, anti-­immigrant campaign. He made attacks on undocumented immigrants—­ especially Mexican “illegals”—­the signature focus of his populist appeals to angry white voters during both his primary and general election campaigns. Within the polarizing environment that led up to the 2016 campaign, the ascendance of  Trump—­and his promises to build a massive wall on the Mexi­ can border and to deport over eleven million undocumented immigrants if elected president—­should not have surprised scholars and pundits as much as it did. The rancor over immigration was characteristic of a divisive partisan­ ship nurtured by the contentious collaboration between presidents and social activists that had become more routine since the Johnson years. Still, for many Americans, Trump’s shocking victory over Clinton marked a novel and dangerous development in the alignment of presidents and social movements. Although Trump, capturing five states that Obama had won in 2012—­Iowa, Florida, Wisconsin, Michigan, and Pennsylvania—­won a majority of the Electoral College, Clinton obtained a clear plurality of pop­ ular votes. In fact, taking account of support for the Libertarian candidate, Gary Johnson, and Green Party standard-­bearer Jill Stein, approximately 53.5 percent of the American electorate did not vote for Trump, many of them believing that he lacked the decency of character and appropriate ex­ perience to occupy the White House. Even many important Republican leaders refused to support Trump—­ condemning his toxic appeals to an angry conservative base. Yet Trump’s political ascendance was fueled by his eight-­year leading role in promoting birtherism—­the myth that Obama was not born in the United States—­a canard that played well with the conservative rank and file of the Republican Party. In poll after poll, most Republicans said they did not believe Obama was American.74 The GOP leadership in Congress skirted questions about birtherism, consistently failing to denounce Trump and the racist claim that resonated so deeply with many of their die-­hard conservative constituents. In short, the political ground had been laid for an antiestablishment candi­ date willing to desecrate the Republican brand with a campaign that openly embraced nativism, racism, sexism, and isolationist nationalism. Trump’s “Make America Great Again” campaign represented the un­ precedented influence of a populist right-­wing strain in American politics. Previous embodiments of this strain—­Huey P. Long in the 1930s, Charles Lindbergh (the hero of the original America First movement) of the 1940s, Joseph McCarthy of the 1950s, and George Wallace of the 1960s—­were dis­ ruptive figures. But none succeeded in capturing the presidential nomination

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of a major political party. Such right-­wing populism has a long tradition in Europe; for example, there are strong parallels between Trump’s ascendency and the Brexit movement in the United Kingdom. But it was startling to see this authoritarian tradition, with connection to an emergent white national­ ist movement—­move from the margins of what was once thought to be a moderate constitutional republic to the mainstream of American politics. Trump’s appointment of Stephen Bannon, a leading figure in the so-­called alt-­right movement in American politics, as his senior White House coun­ selor only intensified fears that the conservative movement had been hijacked by a scheming demagogue who appealed to Republican supporters’ worst instincts and prejudices. Never-­Trump conservatives have lamented that Trump’s war cry that Amer­ ica was no longer a great nation, but the stooge of our international trading partners and the victim of predatory immigrants, abandoned the more uplift­ ing conservatism that Ronald Reagan expressed—­a conservatism that insisted, in opposition to the globalism of post-­sixties liberals, that America still was a “city on a hill.” This message of resilience and religious tolerance inspired the position that Reagan heir-­apparent George W. Bush projected in the wake of the attacks of September 11, 2001. The first sentence of the 2016 Republican platform read, “We believe in American exceptionalism,” an uplifting senti­ ment that Trump virtually ignored during the long and bitter 2016 contest. But this nostalgia for the Reagan Revolution overlooked how, under these kinder and gentler partisans, the Republican Party had built a conservative base whose foot soldiers, most notably the Christian Right (which Reagan enlisted in his administration’s conservative crusade) and the Obama-­era Tea Party, which Republican presidential candidates had been courting since its inception, rallied around the belief that liberalism had so corrupted the coun­ try that the national government had the responsibility to support “family values” (a view that permeates proposals to restrict abortion and same-­sex marriage; to require work for welfare and health care benefits; and to impose standards on secondary and elementary schools). Significantly, Trump, a thrice-­married and one-­time New York liberal, received strong support not only from Tea Party activists but also from con­ servative evangelical leaders. One of his strongest champions was Ralph Reed, now chairman of the Faith and Freedom Coalition, who, recounting the Christian Right’s long march toward a leading place in the conserva­ tive coalition, appreciated Trump’s strong pledge to make appointments to the administration and the Supreme Court who would oppose abortion, stand up to for the traditional family, and protect Christian schools from

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the Department of Education.75 Other crucial defenders included Liberty University president Jerry Falwell, Jr., Focus on the Family’s James Dobson, and Family Research Council’s Tony Perkins. “We’re not electing a pastor-­ in-­chief,” Falwell explained to Fox News during the campaign, echoing the pragmatism his father expressed in championing the candidacy of Ronald Reagan. “Sometimes you have to be pragmatic. You have to choose the one with the best chance of winning and who is closest to your views.”76 In the wake of the September 11 attacks and the Great Recession of late 2007 to 2009, it is not surprising that the most pressing targets of conserva­ tive activists in the 2016 campaign became “radical Islamic terrorism” and unauthorized immigration. Appealing to a restive Republican base agitated by movement conservatives, the 2012 Republican candidate, Mitt Romney, embraced a punitive immigration policy—­endorsing Arizona’s ultimately unconstitutional “show-­me-­your-­papers” law and calling on undocumented immigrants to “self-­deport” by denying them public benefits and fostering a subclass status that would drive most to leave. In subsequent years, GOP state officials and congressional members embraced harsh crackdowns on unauthorized immigration and demonized undocumented immigrants. Against this backdrop, Trump’s ascendance was more than a cult of person­ ality or the discovery of anti-­immigrant appeals. His political success must also be attributable to his giving unfiltered expression to the marriage of Re­ publican presidents and social movements that was more than four decades in the making. Just as Obama’s entourage heralded him as the leader of a “coalition of the ascendant,” so Trump and his strategists view him as the steward of a “coalition of restoration” comprising blue-­collar, religiously devout, and nonurban whites who are exceedingly anxious about demo­ graphic and social change that is turning the United States into a country to which they no longer feel an allegiance.77 As we noted above, amid this rancorous partisanship that has fractured America runs a development that shapes contemporary liberalism and con­ servatism: the joining of executive discretion, party polarization, and grass­ roots insurgency. Just as Obama relied on OFA supporters to mobilize sup­ port for his candidacy and programs, so Trump stood apart from most of the GOP “establishment,” basing his campaign on cable television, social media (especially his notorious Twitter account), and mass rallies. Like Obama, too, Trump did not “pivot” away from his movement at the end of the campaign; rather, the president-­elect took off on a “thank you tour” during the transition period, showing that he intended to continue to hold mass rallies after he occupied the White House. Indeed, Trump’s inaugural address was a rallying

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cry to his antinomian followers: “You came by the tens of millions to become part of a historic movement, the likes of which the world has never seen be­ fore. At the center of this movement is a crucial conviction, that a nation ex­ ists to serve its citizens. Americans want great schools for their children, safe neighborhoods for their families, and good jobs for themselves. These are just and reasonable demands of righteous people and a righteous public.”78 Providing further evidence of Trump’s “movement politics” was the for­ mation during the early days of his administration of a personal advocacy group, dubbed the Great America Alliance, cochaired by two of the new president’s most important supporters: Rudy Giuliani and Newt Gingrich. Echoing language that Obama had used in forming OFA, former Speaker of the House Gingrich noted, “The election of Donald Trump represents a watershed moment for the American people. I am excited to continue my strong support of the president, and I will do all I can in the critical months ahead to support his efforts to grow jobs, fix immigration, shrink govern­ ment and return power to the American people.”79 Yet Trump’s advocacy group, despite producing some media blitzes dur­ ing key battles, like the president’s Supreme Court nomination of conserva­ tive Neil Gorsuch, was neither as active nor as visible as was OFA.80 Rather than invest heavily in an information-­age grassroots organization that would mediate between the White House and social movements, Trump preferred to communicate directly with his followers through social media and mass rallies. He and his strategists thus sought a fusion of the presidency and the conservative movement that relied almost totally on his personal appeal and action. He “alone,” as Trump put it in his bombastic address before the 2016 Republican National Convention in Cleveland, “could fix” the mess left by the first African American president’s two terms in office. Trump promised to take advantage of Republican majorities in the House and the Senate to pursue a program dedicated, as one important Trump ad­ viser put it, to “erasing” Obama’s legacy, starting with the Affordable Care Act. Yet he resorted primarily to unilateral action in seeking to reverse or dramati­ cally recast Obama’s policies. Autonomous presidential action had become a staple of executive-­centered partisanship during the George W. Bush and Obama years, fueled in no small part by their having to face a Congress with at least one branch controlled by the other party over substantial periods of their presidencies. Trump resorted to administrative aggrandizement right from the start. He expanded the power of the Department of Homeland Se­ curity to deport undocumented immigrants and build a wall on the Mexican border; issued an executive order, which was ensnared in ongoing legal bat­ tles, imposing a moratorium on migration from seven countries deemed to

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harbor “radical Islamic terrorists”; threatened to strip federal grant money from “sanctuary” states and cities that harbor undocumented immigrants and often refuse to cooperate with federal authorities; and—­on his first day in office—­instructing federal officials to ease regulations associated with the Af­ fordable Care Act by directing agencies “to waive, defer, grant exemptions from or delay the implementation of any provision or requirement of the Act that would impose a fiscal burden.” The early efforts of the Trump administration to repeal and replace “Obamacare” stalled in Congress, largely because Re­ publicans could not reach agreement about what health care policies should supplant the Affordable Care Act.81 Yet, as has been demonstrated since the Reagan presidency, administrative action such as waivers can be used to redirect policy—­to redeploy state power—­albeit not without a measure of recrimination from Congress and the states.82 Given the fractious state of American politics, and the vast network of progressive social movements and advocacy groups that had formed during the Obama presidency, Trump’s executive action in the service of conserva­ tive causes aroused a ferocious opposition from the Democratic Party’s base. Indeed, the Women’s March on January 21, 2017, made headlines as the big­ gest single-­day demonstration in recorded US history; it brought between 3.4 and 5.3 million protesters to the streets in Washington, DC, as well as urban and small-­town marches across the country.83 Organizers of the pro­ tests made sure to address a broad array of issues that included not just tra­ ditional feminist issues such as abortion rights, access to contraception, and pay parity between men and women, but also grievances related to racism and immigration laws. One week later, demonstrations by thousands of ac­ tivists erupted at airports nationwide after Trump issued an executive order banning travel from seven Muslim-­majority countries.84 Moreover, Trump’s election and the tumultuous early days of his presidency were followed by town hall–­style protests over plans to dismantle “Obamacare” that drew comparisons to the Tea Party movement that roiled the Republican “estab­ lishment” and posed unyielding resistance to the Obama White House.85 These mobilizations underscore how presidential administrations fuel intense opposition movements as much as those seeking uneasy alignments in pursuit of reform. From day one of his presidency, therefore, the Trump presidency found itself governing in a political war zone; and given the president’s combative temperament, he responded in kind, using Twitter and mass rallies in small towns and rural areas to attack, indeed declare il­ legitimate, the insurgent opposition to his program. Just as Richard Nixon claimed to speak for the Silent Majority in his battles with the antiwar move­ ment of the late 1960s and early 1970s, so Trump condemned large-­scale

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protests against his health care and immigration policies, indicting progres­ sive activists for denying the results of an “open and fair election.” Yet Trump’s administrative aggrandizement and defiant rhetoric has been strategically linked to the mobilization of his activist base, a tactic that has been a core feature of executive-­centered partisanship. In fact, although the relationship between presidents and social movement organizations had be­ come commonplace since the 1960s, Trump appeared to become especially dependent on social movement organizations. As the president’s poll num­ bers dropped to historically low numbers during the first year of his presi­ dency and the administration became embroiled in a scandal that risked ex­ posing collusion between his campaign and the Russian government, Trump emphasized the importance of maintaining the strong bonds that he had forged with the leaders of the conservative movement that he had cultivated during the general election. Despite his weak public support after six months in office, the president’s approval rating among conservative Republicans, ac­ cording to a Gallup poll, was 89 percent—­almost exactly what it was on inau­ guration day. Significantly, during his first six months in office, Trump pushed the issues that had become the template of movement conservatives over the past four decades: “traditional” family values, law and order, enhanced border security, opposition to affirmative civil rights policy, and the war against “radi­ cal Islamic terrorism.” Defying claims that he was denigrating Reaganism, Trump strengthened his alliance with the Christian Right, including tweet­ ing an order in July 2017 that transgender people would be barred from the military—­an action that Tony Perkins of the Family Research Council had been urging for months.86 Indeed, conservative white evangelicals stuck by Trump even as he was roundly criticized in August 2017 for assigning “blame on both sides” when neo-­Nazis, Klan members, and other white supremacists incited violence in Charlottesville, Virginia. Moments after Trump made even more incendiary comments—­describing some of the torch-­bearing marchers, who paraded through the hallowed “grounds” of the University of  Virginia chanting “Jews will not replace us” and “Blood and Soil,” as “very fine people”—­David Duke, a white nationalist and former grand wizard of the Klan, tweeted his thanks to the president for “your honesty and courage to tell the truth.”87 A few hours later, Falwell tweeted ominously similar language in praising Trump for his “bold, truthful statement” about Charlottesville.88 Like his father’s vigorous defense of southern evangelical segregation academies nearly a half century before, Falwell’s endorsement of Trump’s post-­Charlottesville equivocations about violent white supremacists failed to distance his conservative faith from virulent racist traditions. Six weeks

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later, evangelicals led by Southern Baptist Convention president Steve Gaines called on the president to decisively condemn white supremacists. But more-­ prominent conservative evangelicals like Falwell and Perkins, who embraced birtherism during the Obama administration, did not waiver in their support for Trump.89 Beyond a programmatic and ideological alliance, Trump’s relations with social movement organizations bestowed even greater legitimacy on con­ servative evangelical activists, which, as we show in chapter 6, had its critical beginning during the Reagan years. Kellyanne Conway, Trump’s counselor and a former pollster and strategist for conservative causes for two decades before joining the Trump campaign, noted that the goal of the president’s relationship with the conservative activists was to bring the movement in­ side after years in the political wilderness: “So many of them look at this administration as a rescue mission years in the making. It’s not just about policy but respect. And they just haven’t felt respected.”90 Whether Trump’s presidency bestows legitimacy on social movement organizations that champion authoritarian nationalism awaits the verdict of history. What is certain is that his followers’ alliance with these groups demonstrate how palpable and dangerous the fusion of presidents and social activists may become.

New Challenges and Enduring Strains By the second decade of the twenty-­first century, the polarized partisan poli­ tics that characterizes American politics today continues to be shaped by the kinetic relationship between presidents and social movements. Just as Obama’s interactions with progressive social activists echoed the fraught, productive tension of the Great Society, so Trump’s courting of the Chris­ tian Right and other conservative activists furthered the transformation of the Republican Party into a decidedly right-­of-­center organization that ap­ peared to privilege causes over the exigencies of policy-­making. This joining of executive prerogative, social activism, and party politics has intensified rather than ameliorated the alienation and mistrust that the public has ex­ pressed for the national government since the late 1960s. The view that the system is rigged is more pronounced among Republicans than Democrats, but as the Sanders insurgency and the anti-­Trump protests that followed the 2016 election made clear, this message resonates on the Left as well, especially among young people. That the Democrats won the popular vote and witnessed what looked to them like the devastating intervention of the FBI—­and perhaps the Russians—­in the campaign only fanned the flames

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of their discontent with America’s governing institutions. The widespread demonstrations the day after the election and effective grassroots opposition to the Republican efforts to undo Obama’s legacy during the early months of  Trump’s presidency was an important signpost of just how enduring and bitter the recriminations against the Trump presidency has proven to be. Many scholars and pundits lament with good reason the polarization that currently riles presidential politics and governance, warning it might pose a risk to constitutional principles and antagonize an American citizenry that is put off by chronic partisan rancor and policy stalemate. Even social activists, whose cachet is disruption, express concern that divisive conflict fueled by an alliance between the White House and social movements will relegate their causes to the whims of presidents, a concern that might become especially pronounced during the administration of a real estate mogul and former reality-­television star with no experience in public affairs. As Charles Kessler, a leading conservative intellectual who has generally expressed support for Trump, cautions, “You can be building castles in the air that have no reference to reality. And that’s a real danger for anyone who’s in the business of trying to detail/enumerate/explain the elements of  Trumpism.”91 The dangerous re­ ality that conservative intellectuals and activists must face is that in relying on a president who insists only he can be the solution to their discontents might consign them to a relationship that destroys their collective identity as a transformative movement. The limits of presidential candidates and incumbents conceived as lead­ ers of their own movements point to a deeper inquiry. Can presidents and social movements be joined and still retain the distinctive virtues they have traditionally bestowed on the American polity? This is one of the fundamen­ tal questions that has emerged from the collisions and alliances between these two forces since the 1960s, serving as a potent engine of reform and re­ casting the very character of American politics. Yet the efforts of Obama and Trump to inspire their own “presidential movements,” although entirely distinctive, both sought to defy the realities of elective office and the en­ during tensions between genuine social movements and the White House. Because they need each other, presidents and social activists will continue to form alliances; however, the dynamics of political development in the United States are still imbued with certain essential qualities—­a fear of cen­ tralized power, an obsession with rights, and a concern to maintain a wall of separation between state and society—­that invariably make these partner­ ships uneasy. We have reason to expect, therefore, that presidents and social activists will continue to maintain some distance from each other, even as

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they conspire to overcome the gravitational pull of American constitutional democracy. It is sobering yet appropriate that so many analyses of contemporary de­ velopments, including the incisive work of McAdam and Kloos, reference the Civil War. For all its disturbing novelty, as we learned in chapter 2 from the uneasy but formative relationship between Lincoln and the abolitionists, the current state of contentious democracy has historical roots. On March 4, 1865, almost exactly 150 years before Obama’s Selma speech, police blocked Frederick Douglass when he tried to attend Lincoln’s inaugural reception at the Executive Mansion. Earlier in the day, with the war almost over and the Thirteenth Amendment recently passed, he heard Lincoln proclaim at his sec­ ond inaugural address that slavery was the “cause” of civil war and that because of this original sin, God determined that “every drop of blood drawn with the lash shall be paid by another drawn by the sword.”92 These words resonated with Douglass’s theological view of the war and made him determined to attend Lincoln’s reception, regardless of de facto bans on African American attendance at such events. Although police tried to prevent Douglass from entering the White House, he was quickly admitted after one of the guests told Lincoln that the famous abolitionist with whom he had formed a close rela­ tionship during the war was being detained. Insisting that his “friend” move ahead of a long line of white visitors, Lincoln told Douglass that “there is no man in the country whose opinion I value more than yours.”93 Their relationship had not always been so warm. Like many leaders of the abolitionist movement, Douglass’s views of Lincoln and his administra­ tion changed dramatically as the White House stance on slavery evolved during the war. A few weeks after the 1860 election, Douglass and other abolitionists had condemned Lincoln for accepting what they considered an unacceptable compromise: he opposed the extension of slavery to new ter­ ritories while he accepted the evil institution where it already existed. These movement activists were hopeful they could push the president-­elect to eventually embrace immediate emancipation, and vowed to see “Mr. Lincoln and his Administration attacked more bitterly for their pro-­slavery truckling, than for doing any anti-­slavery work.”94 As we learned in chapter 2, Lincoln’s early decisions to revoke orders by General John C. Frémont in 1861 and General David Hunter in 1862 to free slaves in certain areas outraged Doug­ lass and other abolitionists, leading them to step up pressure on the ad­ ministration in speeches, demonstrations, and newspapers. In spite of their bitter disappointment, however, Douglass and the movement kept their eyes fixed on the White House. When Congress passed the Confiscation Act

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of 1862 liberating all slaves who crossed Northern lines, for example, Doug­ lass underscored the primacy of Lincoln’s executive power for their cause: “The measure is important or unimportant, significant or insignificant only as the President himself shall determine. The sole power of putting life into this law is vested in the President.”95 Douglass’s relationship with Lincoln thus changed dramatically after a preliminary version of the Emancipation Proclamation was announced in late 1862. He and other abolitionists hailed the president’s emancipation decision and helped recruit African American soldiers for the Union cause. In the summer of 1863, the two men met for a lengthy discussion of un­ equal pay for African American soldiers in which Lincoln argued that unlike movement activists, he had to be cognizant of widespread white popular resistance to black troops: “the fact that they were not to receive the same pay as white soldiers seemed a necessary concession to smooth the way to their employment at all as soldiers.” Douglass remained adamant that African American soldiers receive better terms, but he left the White House impressed that he had been treated as an equal—­“I felt big there”—­and that the president’s vision for a “rebirth” of the nation was close to his own. As noted in chapter 2, Lincoln and Douglass met a year later to discuss what they expected to be an electoral backlash in 1864 against what opponents called an “abolitionist war,” likely delivering the White House and Congress to Democrats willing to negotiate a proslavery peace. As they strategized about how “to get more of the slaves within our lines” if Democrats won, Douglass grew convinced that abolitionists had made an impact on the president and that he “showed a deeper moral conviction against slavery than I had ever seen before in anything spoken or written by him.”96 Years later, at the unveiling of a Lincoln statue erected by grateful African Americans of Washington, DC, Douglass remained unsentimental in not­ ing that “the President’s chair” conditioned Lincoln from the start to “deny, postpone, and sacrifice the rights of humanity in the colored people.” But he also came to appreciate that “the circumstances of his position” demanded that Lincoln win “the powerful co-­operation” of reluctant Northern whites, and that “we saw ourselves gradually lifted from the depths of slavery . . . by measures approved and vigorously pressed by him.”97 Separated by 150 years and occupying contrasting political roles, Doug­ lass and Obama both recognized the indispensability of presidential-­ movement alliances—­however fleeting—­to monumental transformations of American political life. Douglass, an abolitionist firebrand hostile to the moral equivocations of elected officials, paid homage to a president who was legendary for his strategic pragmatism. Obama, an iconic president

Executive Power, Social Movements, and American Democracy  /  317

headstrong in authoring major policy reforms on his own terms, celebrated the legacy of a social movement that ignored government allies urging pa­ tience and brazenly upended the social order. They both understood well that the interests and purposes of social movements and presidents predict­ ably collided, inviting bitter debate and epic conflicts. Yet Douglass and Obama also believed that any major reform to create “a more perfect union” could never be achieved solely through grassroots insurgency from below or presidential leadership from above, but rather by an uneasy alignment of these two potent disruptive forces. It is a view that was shared by new Christian Right leaders and millions of their followers in the 1980s, and by Reagan, who channeled their energy and support into a new era of Ameri­ can politics. As two of the most formidable—­and important—­agents of change in US political life, presidents and social movements regularly battle one another to control the public agenda and to shape the character of reform. Even when many of their aspirations and interests converge, as we saw with Lin­ coln and abolitionists, Johnson and the civil rights movement, and Reagan and the new Christian Right, these two actors inevitably struggle over the extent, timing, and conditions of reform. Yet, however tumultuous, the re­ lationship between presidents and social movements often has held the key to change in an American polity laden with inertial forces. For a constitu­ tional democracy designed so that, as James Madison put it, “ambition must be made to counteract ambition,” it is fitting that political transformation has been fueled by the strained collaboration of potent rivals.

Notes

C h a p t e r On e

1.

Based on a series of interviews with leaders of immigrant rights and marriage-­equality movements conducted by the authors, April 2014–­January 2016. These interviews are used extensively in chapter 7 of this book. 2. A. Philip Randolph to Eleanor Roosevelt, and attached “Call,” June 5, 1941, in “The Papers of Eleanor Roosevelt, 1933–­1945” (ed. Susan Ware and William Chafe), housed jointly by the Library of Congress (Washington, DC) and the Franklin D. Roosevelt Presidential Library (Hyde Park, NY). 3. See, for example, Mary Walton, A Woman’s Crusade: Alice Paul and the Battle for the Ballot (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2010). 4. Langston Hughes, “Poem for a Man: To A. Philip Randolph on Achieving His Seventieth Year,” 1959, in “The Papers of A. Philip Randolph” (ed. John H. Bracey and August Meier), Library of Congress, Washington, DC. 5. Authors’ anonymous interview of Dreamers movement leaders, April 3, 2014, and LGBTQ rights leaders, January 6, 2016. 6. Frederick Douglass, “If There Is No Struggle, There Is No Progress,” in Two Speeches by Frederick Douglass (Rochester, NY: O. P. Dewey, 1857). 7. Thomas Cronin, Inventing the Presidency (Lawrence: University Press of Kansas, 1989); Jeffrey Tulis, The Rhetorical Presidency (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1987); Richard Neustadt, Presidential Power and the Modern Presidents (New York: Free Press, 1991); Sidney M. Milkis, The President and Parties: The Transformation of the American Party System during the New Deal (New York: Oxford University Press, 1993); Stephen Skowronek, The Politics Presidents Make : Leadership from John Adams to Bill Clinton (Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 1997); Terry M. Moe and William G. Howell, “Unilateral Action and Presidential Power: A Theory,” Presidential Studies Quarterly 29, no. 4 (December 1999): 850–­ 73; David McCullough, John Adams (New York: Simon and Schuster, 2002); Mary Stuckey, Defining Americans: The Presidency and National Identity (Lawrence: University Press of Kansas, 2004); Doris Kearns Goodwin, Team of Rivals (New York: Simon and Schuster, 2005); Samuel Kernell, Going Public: New Strategies of Presidential Leadership, 4th edition (Washington, DC: CQ Press, 2006); Fred Greenstein, The Presidential Difference (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2009); Justin Vaughn and Lilly

320  /  Notes to Pages 4–5 Goren, eds., Women and the White House (Lexington: University of Kentucky Press, 2012); Louis Fisher, Presidential War Power (Lawrence: University Press of Kansas, 2013); Julia Azari, Delivering the People’s Message: The Changing Politics of Presidential Mandates (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2014); David Greenberg, Republic of Spin: An Inside History of the American Presidency (New York: W. W. Norton, 2016); George Edwards, Predicting the Presidency (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2016); Bruce Miroff, Presidents on Political Ground (Lawrence: University Press of Kansas, 2016). 8. Frances Fox Piven and Richard Cloward, Poor People’s Movements: Why They Succeed, How They Fail (New York: Vintage, 1978); Charles Tilly, From Mobilization to Revolution (New York: Addison Wesley, 1978); Aldon Morris, The Origins of the Civil Rights Movement (New York: Free Press, 1986); Taylor Branch, Parting the Waters: America in the King Years, 1954–­1963 (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1988); Douglas McAdam, Freedom Summer (New York: Oxford University Press, 1990); Gary Marx and Douglas McAdam, Collective Behavior and Social Movements (New York: Pearson, 1993); Elisabeth Clemens, The People’s Lobby (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1997); Sidney Tarrow, Power in Movement (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1998); James Jasper, The Art of Moral Protest (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1999); Mary Dudziak, Cold War and Civil Rights: Race and the Image of American Democracy (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2001); Ann-­Marie Szymanksi, Pathways to Prohibition: Radicals, Moderates, and Social Movement Outcomes (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2003); Phillip Shabecoff, A Fierce Green Fire: The American Environmental Movement (Washington, DC: Island Press, 2003); James Green, Death in the Haymarket: A Story of Chicago, the First Labor Movement and the Bombing That Divided the Gilded Age (New York: Pantheon Books, 2006); Charles Tilly and Sidney Tarrow, Contentious Politics (New York: Oxford University Press, 2015). For a good summary of the major themes and literature pertaining to social movements and American political development, see David S. Meyer and Eulalie Laschever, “Social Movements and the Institutionalization of Dissent in America,” in The Oxford Handbook of American Political Development, ed. Richard M. Valelly, Suzanne Mettler, and Robert C. Lieberman (New York: Oxford University Press, 2016), 563–­89; and Donnatella della Porta and Mario Daini, The Oxford Handbook of Social Movements (New York: Oxford University Press, 2016). 9. Fredrik Logevall and Kenneth Osgood, “Why Did We Stop Teaching Political History?,” New York Times, August 29, 2016. 10. David Ray Papke, The Pullman Case: The Clash of Labor and Capital in Industrial America (Lawrence: University Press of Kansas, 1999). 11. Rick Perlstein, Nixonland: The Rise of a President and the Fracturing of America (New York: Scribner, 2009), 423–­31. 12. Larry Kramer, “Reagan and AIDS,” New York Review of Books, March 1, 2007; Larry Kramer, The Tragedy of Today’s Gays (New York: Penguin, 2005). 13. Matt Flegenheimer, “Occupy Protesters Mobilize for Obama’s Visit,” New York Times, November 30, 2011. 14. Flegenheimer, “Occupy Protesters.” 15. John D. McCarthy and Mayer Zald, “Resource Mobilization and Social Movements: A Partial Theory,” American Journal of Sociology 82, no. 6 (May 1977): 1217–­41. See also Charles Tilly, Regimes and Repertoires (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2006). 16. Skowronek, Politics Presidents Make, 27–­28.

Notes to Pages 6–11  /  321 17. For example, see Elizabeth Sanders, “Presidents and Social Movements: A Logic and Preliminary Results,” in Formative Acts: American Politics in the Making, ed. Stephen Skowronek and Matthew Glassman (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2007); and Russell Riley, The Presidency and the Politics of Racial Inequality: Nation-­ Keeping from 1831–­1965 (New York: Columbia University Press, 1999). 18. Jacquelyn Dowd Hall, “The Long Civil Rights Movement and the Political Uses of the Past,” Journal of American History 91, no. 4 (March 2005): 1233–­63. 19. John Wilson, Introduction to Social Movements (New York: Basic Books, 1973), 8. 20. William Kornhauser, The Politics of Mass Society (New York: Free Press, 1959), 47. 21. Martin Luther King, Jr., Where Do We Go from Here: Chaos or Community? (Boston: Beacon Press, 1967); Jerry Falwell, Listen, America! (Garden City, NY: Doubleday, 1980), 19. 22. Charles Tilly, Social Movements, 1768–­2004 (Boulder, CO: Paradigm, 2004), 53. 23. Wilson, Introduction to Social Movements, 8. 24. Sidney Tarrow, Power in Movement: Social Movements, Collective Action and Politics (Cam­ bridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994), 4. 25. William Hogeland, The Whiskey Rebellion: George Washington, Alexander Hamilton, and the Frontier Rebels Who Challenged America’s Newfound Sovereignty (New York: Simon and Schuster, 2010); Thomas Slaughter, The Whiskey Rebellion: Frontier Epilogue to the American Revolution (New York: Oxford University Press, 1988). 26. Robert Dunn, ed., The Palmer Raids (New York: International, 1948); Roberta Strauss Feuerlicht, America’s Reign of Terror: World War I, the Red Scare, and the Palmer Raids (New York: Random House, 1971). 27. David Garrow, The FBI and Martin Luther King (New York: Penguin, 1983); Tim Wiener, Enemies: A History of the FBI (New York: Random House, 2013). 28. Dave Boyer, “Trump Takes Aim at Black Lives Matter,” Washington Times, May 15, 2017; Tim Marcin, “Black Lives Matter Four Years Later: Under Donald Trump Movement Is under Attack,” Newsweek, July 13, 2017. 29. Adam Goldman, “Trump to Fully Restore Military Surplus Transfers to Police,” and Kevin Johnson, “Trump Expected to Lift Ban on Military Gear to Local Police Forces,” USA Today, August 27, 2017. 30. For a rich account of social movements and media coverage, see Todd Gitlin, The Whole World Is Watching (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2003). 31. Daniel J. Tichenor, “The Presidency and Interest Groups: Allies, Adversaries, and Policy Leadership,” in The Presidency and the Political System, ed. Michael Nelson (Washington, DC: Congressional Quarterly Press, 2013), 272–­303. 32. See, for example, Eleanor Flexner and Ellen Fitzpatrick, Century of Struggle: The Woman’s Suffrage Movement in the United States (Cambridge, MA: Belknap, 1996); Marjorie Spruill Wheeler, One Woman, One Vote: Rediscovering the Women’s Suffrage Movement (New York: New Sage Press, 1995); Jean Baker, ed., Votes for Women: The Struggle for Suf­ frage Revisited (New York: Oxford University Press, 2002). 33. Walter White, A Man Called White: The Autobiography of Walter White (Athens: University of Georgia Press, 1995), 169–­70. 34. Robert A. Dahl, “The Concept of Power,” Behavioral Science 2, no. 3 (1957): 201–­15. 35. Peter Bachrach and Morton Baratz, “Two Faces of Power,” American Political Science Review 56 (1962): 947–­52. 36. John Gaventa, Power and Powerlessness: Quiescence and Rebellion in an Appalachian Valley (Urbana-­Champaign: University of Illinois Press, 1982), 16–­17. Stephen Lukes

322  /  Notes to Pages 11–16 offered a different version of a “third” face of power that emphasized psychological manipulation; see Lukes, Power: A Radical View (London: Macmillan, 1974). 37. Gary Wills, Lincoln at Gettysburg: The Words That Remade America (New York: Simon and Schuster, 2006). 38. James Oakes, Frederick Douglass, Abraham Lincoln, and the Triumph of Antislavery Politics (New York: W. W. Norton, 2008); Walton, Woman’s Crusade; Jean Baker, Sisters: The Lives of America’s Suffragists (New York: Hill and Wang, 2006); Melvyn Dubofsky, John L. Lewis: A Biography (Urbana–­Champaign: University of Illinois Press, 1986); Branch, Parting the Waters; David Garrow, Bearing the Cross: Martin Luther King, Jr. and the Southern Christian Leadership Conference (New York: William Morrow, 2004). 39. James MacGregor Burns, Presidential Government: The Crucible of Leadership (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1965), 351. 40. Alexander Hamilton, John Jay, and James Madison, The Federalist Papers (New York: Filiquarian, 2007), 551. 41. Harvey C. Mansfield, Jr., Taming the Prince: The Ambivalence of Modern Executive Power (New York: Free Press, 1989); David Nichols, The Myth of the Modern Presidency (State College, PA: Penn State University Press, 1994): Joseph Bessette and Jeffrey Tulis, eds., The Constitutional Presidency (Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2009). 42. Washington’s Neutrality Proclamation is an apt example, and Hamilton’s views on this unilateral presidential action and Madison’s critique are chronicled in the Helvidius versus Pacificus debate that ensued. 43. Skowronek, Politics Presidents Make, 4, 15. 44. Riley, Politics of Racial Inequality, 254; Thomas Langston, With Reverence and Contempt: How Americans Think about Their President (Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1995), 32. 45. Kenneth O’Reilly, Nixon’s Piano: Presidents and Racial Politics from Washington to Clinton (New York: Free Press, 1995), 10. 46. Sanders, “Presidents and Social Movements,” 224. 47. Riley, Politics of Racial Inequality, 32. 48. Bruce Miroff, “The Presidential Spectacle,” in Nelson, Presidency and the Political System, 231–­57; Tulis, Rhetorical Presidency; Samuel Kernell, Going Public: New Strategies of Presidential Leadership (Washington, DC: Congressional Quarterly Press, 1997). 49. Bruce Miroff, “Presidential Leverage over Social Movements: The Johnson White House and Civil Rights,” Journal of Politics 43 (1981): 5. 50. Marc Landy and Sidney M. Milkis, Presidential Greatness (Lawrence: University Press of Kansas, 2000). 51. Mary Fainsod Katzenstein and Carol McClurg Mueller, eds., The Women’s Movements of the United States and Western Europe: Consciousness, Political Opportunity, and Public Policy (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1992), 5. 52. Victoria Bissell Brown, “Did Woodrow Wilson’s Gender Politics Matter?,” in Reconsidering Woodrow Wilson: Progressivism, Internationalism, War, and Peace, ed. John Milton Cooper (Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2008),125–­53; Linda G. Ford, Iron Jawed Angels: The Suffrage Militancy of the National Woman’s Party, 1912–­ 1920 (Lanham, MD: University Press of America, 1991), 2–­13. 53. Brown, “Wilson’s Gender Politics,” 125–­53. 54. This observation of Frances Perkins concerning Roosevelt is quoted in Bruce Miroff, Icons of Democracy (Lawrence: University Press of Kansas, 2000), 262. See also Brian

Notes to Pages 16–24  /  323 Stipleman, The Broader Definition of Liberty: The Theory and Practice of the New Deal (New York: Rowman and Littlefield, 2012). 55. Daniel J. Tichenor, “Leadership, Citizenship Movements, and the Politics Rivalries Make,” in Skowronek and Glassman, Formative Acts, 241–­67. 56. Piven and Cloward, Poor People’s Movements. 57. Szymanski, Pathways to Prohibition. 58. Sidney Tarrow, “ ‘The Very Excesses of Democracy’: State-­Building and Contentious Politics in America,” in Social Movements and American Political Institutions, ed. Anne Costain and Andrew McFarland (New York: Rowman and Littlefield, 1998), 20–­37. 59. Herbert H. Haines, Black Radicals and the Civil Rights Mainstream, 1954–­1970 (Knoxville: University of Tennessee Press, 1988); and “Radical Flank Effects,” in The Wiley-­ Blackwell Encyclopedia of Social and Political Movements (New York: Blackwell, 2013). 60. See, for example, John Kingdon’s classic treatment of this subject, Agendas, Alternatives, and Public Policies (New York: HarperCollins, 1995). 61. Thomas A. Bailey, A Diplomatic History of the American People (Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice-­Hall, 1974), 479. See also Robert P. Saldin, War, the American State and Politics since 1898 (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2011), 58–­63. 62. Gerald McKnight, The Last Crusade: Martin Luther King, Jr., the FBI, and the Poor People’s Campaign (Boulder, CO: Westview, 1998); Taylor Branch, At Canaan’s Edge: America in the King Years, 1965–­1968 (New York: Simon and Schuster, 2006). 63. Lucy Madison, “Obama: ‘Occupy Wall Street’ Reflects ‘Broad-­Based Frustration,’ ” CBS News, October 9, 2011. 64. Zeke Miller, “White House Draws Closer to the Occupy Wall Street,” Business Insider, October 16, 2011. 65. Mytheos Holt, “ ‘Nobody 2012’: Occupy Wall Street Turns on Obama,” Blaze, July 31, 2012. 66. Elias Isquith, “More Than Just Wall Street,” Salon, February 25, 2015. 67. Doyle McManus, “Obama in the Occupy Wall Street Camp,” Los Angeles Times, October 20, 2011. 68. Naomi Wolf, “Revealed: How the FBI Coordinated the Crackdown on Occupy,” Guardian, December 29, 2012. 69. Jack Brubaker, “Buchanan Viewed as Too Eager to Prosecute John Brown,” Lancaster Online, October 13, 2009; John Reynolds, John Brown, Abolitionist (New York: Knopf, 2005). 70. Donald Liddick, Eco-­Terrorism: Radical Environmentalism and Animal Liberation Movements (New York: Praeger, 2006); Steven Best and Anthony Nocella, eds., Terrorists or Freedom Fighters?: Reflections on the Liberation of Animals (New York: Lantern Books, 2004); Ingrid Newkirk, Free the Animals (New York: Lantern Books, 2011); Peter Daniel Young, Animal Liberation Front: Complete Diary of Actions, the First 30 Years (New York: Warcry Communications, 2010). 71. Lucy Barber, Marching on Washington: The Forging of an American Tradition (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2002), 11–­42. 72. Jacob S. Coxey, “Address of Protest” on the steps of the Capitol, Congressional Record, 53rd Congress, 2nd session (9 May 1894), 4512. 73. Quoted in Norman Pollack, The Just Polity: Populism, Law, and Human Welfare (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1987), 156. 74. Benjamin Alexander, Coxey’s Army: Popular Protest in the Gilded Age (Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2015); Carlos Arnaldo Schwantes, Coxey’s Army: An American Odyssey (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1985).

324  /  Notes to Pages 24–28 75. Richard Schneirov, Shelton Stromquist, and Nick Salvatore, The Pullman Strike and the Crisis of the 1890s (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1999). 76. Grover Cleveland, The Government in the Chicago Strike of 1894 (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1913), 6. 77. The Founding Convention of the IWW: Proceedings (New York: Merit, 1969); Philip S. Foner, History of the Labor Movement in the United States: Industrial Workers of the World (New York: International, 1965). 78. “I.W.W. Strike Chief Lynched at Butte,” New York Times, August 2, 1917. 79. Richard Striner, Woodrow Wilson and World War I: A Burden Too Great to Bear (New York: Rowman and Littlefield, 2014), 118–­19. 80. Kenneth Stern, A Force upon the Plain: The American Militia Movement and the Politics of Hate (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1996); David Bennett, The Party of Fear (New York: Vintage, 1995); Lane Crothers, Rage on the Right: The American Militia Movement from Ruby Ridge to Homeland Security (New York: Rowman and Littlefield, 2003). 81. Robert Rankin and Nolan Walters, “President Denounces the Militia Movement,” Philadelphia Inquirer, May 2, 1995. 82. Stern, Force upon the Plain; Crothers, Rage on the Right. 83. See, for example, Mayer N. Zald and Roberta Ash, “Social Movement Organizations: Growth, Decay and Change,” Social Forces 44, no. 3 (March 1996): 327–­41; and Jo Freeman, “A Model for Analyzing the Strategic Options of Social Movement Organizations,” in The Dynamics of Social Movements, ed. Mayer N. Zald and John D. McCarthy (Cambridge, MA: Winthrop, 1979), 167–­89. 84. Theodore Roosevelt and George Bird Grinnell, American Big-­Game Hunting: The Book of the Boone and Crockett Club (New York: Forest and Stream, 1902); George Bird Grinnell and Charles Sheldon, Hunting and Conservation (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1925); Michael Collins, The Damned Cowboy: Theodore Roosevelt and the American West, 1883–­1898 (New York: P. Lang, 1989); Douglas Brinkley, The Wilderness Warrior: Theodore Roosevelt and the Crusade for America (New York: HarperCollins, 2009). 85. Char Miller, Seeking the Greatest Good: The Conservation Legacy of Gifford Pinchot (Pittsburgh, PA: University of Pittsburgh Press, 2013); Gifford Pinchot, Gifford Pinchot: Selected Writings, ed. Char Miller (College Park, PA: Penn State University Press, 2017); Samuel Hays, Conservation and the Gospel of Efficiency, 1890–­1920 (Pittsburgh, PA: University of Pittsburgh Press, 1999); Dorceta Taylor, The Rise of the American Conser­ vation Movement: Power, Privilege, and Environmental Protection (Durham, NC: Duke Uni­ versity Press, 2016). 86. Donald Worster, A Passion for Nature: The Life of John Muir (New York: Oxford University Press, 2011); Douglas Brinkley, Wilderness Warrior; Darrin Lunde, The Naturalist: Theodore Roosevelt, A Lifetime of Exploration, and the Triumph of American Natural History (New York: Broadway Books, 2017). 87. Theodore Roosevelt, “Our Vanishing Wildlife,” in Literary Essays (volume 12 of The Works of Theodore Roosevelt, national edition (New York: Scribners, 1926), chapter 46, 420. Originally appeared in The Outlook, January 25, 1913. 88. Douglas Brinkley, Wilderness Warrior; Lunde, Naturalist. 89. Taylor Dark, The Unions and the Democrats: An Enduring Alliance (Ithaca, NY: ILR Press, 2001). See also Daniel Schlozman, When Movements Anchor Parties: Electoral Alignments in American History (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2015). 90. Alan Brinkley, The End of Reform: New Deal Liberalism in Recession and War (New York: Vintage, 1996), 200.

Notes to Pages 28–33  /  325 91. Dark, Unions and the Democrats. 92. Herbert Haines, “Black Radicalization and the Funding of Civil Rights, 1957–­1970,” Social Problems, 23 (October 1984): 31–­43; Aldon Morris, “Birmingham Confrontation Reconsidered: An Analysis of the Dynamics and Tactics of Mobilization,” American Sociological Review 58 (1993): 621–­36. 93. Haines, “Black Radicalization,” 32. 94. Walton, Woman’s Crusade; Robert Booth Fowler, Carrie Catt: Feminist Politician (Boston: Northeastern, 1988). 95. Piven and Cloward, Poor People’s Movements. 96. Whereas scholars of historical institutionalism and American political development like Theda Skocpol discuss the interaction of group identities and capacities with changing organizational arrangements of the national state and party system, many social movement scholars point to political opportunity structures. See, for example, Skocpol, Protecting Soldiers and Mothers (Cambridge, MA: Belknap, 1992); Sven Steinmo, Kathleen Thelen, and Frank Longstreth, Structuring Politics: Historical Institutionalism in Comparative Perspective (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1992); David S. Meyer and Suzanne Staggenborg, “Movements, Countermovements, and the Structure of Political Opportunity,” American Journal of Sociology 101, no. 6 (May 1996): 1628–­60; Doug McAdam, John D. McCarthy, and Mayer N. Zald, Comparative Perspectives on Social Movements: Political Opportunities, Mobilizing Structures, and Cultural Framings (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1996). 97. Victor Hugo, Histoire d’un Crime, written in 1852 and published in 1877; Hugo was quoted by Martin Luther King, Jr., in his Nobel lecture, “The Quest for Peace and Justice,” December 11, 1964, https://www.nobelprize.org/nobel_prizes/peace/laureates /1964/king-­lecture.html. 98. Adam Gabbatt, “Former Occupy Wall Street Protesters Rally around Bernie Sanders Campaign,” Guardian, September 17, 2015; Tessa Stuart, “In Battle for New York, Occupy Wall Streeters Turn Out for Bernie,” Rolling Stone, April 19, 2016; Joseph Lowndes and Dorian Warren, “Occupy Wall Street: A Twenty-­First Century Populist Movement?,” Dissent, October 21, 2011. 99. Louis R. Harlan, Booker T. Washington: The Wizard of Tuskegee, 1901–­1915 (New York: Oxford University Press, 1989); Robert Norrell, Up from History: The Life of Booker T. Washington (Cambridge, MA: Belknap, 2009). 100. David Levering Lewis, W. E. B. Du Bois: A Biography (New York: Holt, 2009), 222; Raymond Wolters, Du Bois and His Rivals (Columbia: Missouri University Press, 2002), 70. 101. Angela Jones, African American Civil Rights: Early Activism and the Niagara Movement (New York: Praeger, 2011); Lewis, W. E. B. Du Bois; Wolters, Du Bois and His Rivals. 102. Colin Grant, Negro with a Hat: The Rise and Fall of Marcus Garvey (New York: Oxford University Press, 2010). 103. Randall Terry and D. James Kennedy, Operation Rescue (New York: Whitaker House, 1988). 104. Daniel K. Williams, God’s Own Party: The Making of the Christian Right (New York: Oxford University Press, 2012); Frances Fitzgerald, The Evangelicals: The Struggle to Shape America (New York: Simon and Schuster, 2017); Clyde Wilcox and Carin Robinson, Onward Christian Soldiers? (Boulder, CO: Westview, 2010). 105. Skowronek, Politics Presidents Make, chapter 2. 106. Alexander Saxton, The Indispensable Enemy: Labor and the Anti-­Chinese Movement in California (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1975); Roger Daniels, Coming to America (New York: Harper Perennial, 1991); Daniel J. Tichenor, Dividing Lines: The

326  /  Notes to Pages 33–42 Politics of Immigration Control in America (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2002). 107. Stephen Skowronek, Building a New American State: The Expansion of National Administrative Capacities, 1877–­1920 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1982). 108. This commitment to limit presidents to one term was a plank in the platform of the 1892 Populist Party. See the Nationalist People’s Party Platform, http://historymatters .gmu.edu/d/5361/. 109. Daniel J. Tichenor and Richard A. Harris, “Organized Interests and American Political Development,” Political Science Quarterly 117, no. 4 (Winter 2002–­3): 587–­612. 110. Daniel J. Tichenor, “The Presidency, Social Movements, and Contentious Change,” Presidential Studies Quarterly 29, no. 1 (March 1999): 16. 111. Edward Larson, Summer for the Gods (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1997), 232–­35. 112. Hugh Heclo, “The Sixties False Dawn: Awakenings, Movements, and Postmodern Policy Making,” in Integrating the Sixties, ed. Brian Balogh (University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press, 1996), 34–­63. 113. Jeffrey Berry, The Interest Group Society (Boston: Little, Brown, 1984), 28. 114. Tilly, Social Movements, 13. 115. Sidney M. Milkis and Jesse Rhodes, “George W. Bush, the Republican Party and the ‘New’ Party System,” Perspectives on Politics 5, no. 3 (2007): 461–­88. 116. Sidney M. Milkis, Jesse Rhodes, and Emily Jane Charnock, “What Happened to Post-­ Partisanship? Barack Obama and the New American Party System,” Perspectives on Politics 10, no. 1 (2012): 57–­76. 117. Organizing for Action website, http://www.barackobama.com/#get-­the-­facts, accessed June 26, 2014. C h a p t e r Tw o

1.

Vita Dutton Scudder, “On the Civil War,” in The Social and Political Thought of American Progressivism, ed. Eldon Eisenach (Indianapolis, IN: Hackett, 2006), 11–­13. 2. The decentralized polity, as Stephen Skowronek describes it, might better be described as a state of parties and courts, for party politicians, empowered by a “highly mobilized, highly competitive and locally oriented democracy,” had the commanding voice in late-­nineteenth-­century American politics and government. The federal judiciary molded the political character of the nineteenth-­century state into a legal tradition. See Skowronek, Building a New American State: The Expansion of National Administrative Capacities, 1877–­1920 (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1982), 41. On the centrality of parties, see Morton Keller, America’s Three Regimes: A New Political History (New York: Oxford University Press, 2007), chapter 8. 3. Ann-­Marie Szymanski, Pathways to Prohibition: Radicals, Moderates, and Social Movement Outcomes (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2003); Joseph R. Gusfield, Symbolic Crusade: Status Politics and the American Temperance Movement (Urbana-­ Champaign: University of Illinois Press, 2003); Daniel J. Tichenor, Dividing Lines: The Politics of Immigration Control in America (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2002), chapter 4. 4. On the influence of the Second Great Awakening—­the first taking place during the Revolutionary period—­see James Morone, Hellfire Nation: The Politics of Sin in American History (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2003), chapter 5. As we note in the introduction, although race and religion can be considered the two principal fault lines of American democracy, these dimensions of conflict are often intertwined.

Notes to Pages 43–47  /  327 5.

Daniel J. Tichenor, “Historical Set Points and the Development of Presidential Emergency Power,” Perspectives on Politics 11, no. 3 (September 2013): 769–­88. 6. Stephen Skowronek, Presidential Leadership in Political Time: Reprise and Reappraisal, 2nd edition (Lawrence: University Press of Kansas, 2011), 184. 7. Christopher Cameron, To Plead Our Own Cause: African-­Americans in Massachusetts and the Making of the Antislavery Movement (Kent, OH: Kent State University Press, 2014), 1, 114–­26. 8. David Walker, Walker’s Appeal in Four Articles (1829), 12 (emphasis in original). 9. William Lloyd Garrison, The Liberator, January 1, 1831, http://fair-­use.org/the-­liber ator/1831/01/01/the-­liberator-­01-­01.pdf. 10. Gilbert Hobbs Barnes, The Antislavery Impulse, 1830–­1844 (New York: Harcourt, Brace, and World, 1964), 71–­89. 11. Barnes, Antislavery Impulse, 71–­89. 12. Leonard L. Richards, Gentlemen of Property and Standing: Anti-­Abolition Mobs in Jacksonian America (New York: Oxford University Press, 1970); Jean Fagan Yellin and John C. Van Horne, eds., The Abolitionist Sisterhood: Women’s Political Culture in Antebellum America (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1994); David Grimsted, American Mobbing, 1828–­1861: Toward Civil War (New York: Oxford University Press, 1998); Russel B. Nye, Fettered Freedom: Civil Liberties and the Slavery Controversy, 1830–­ 1860 (East Lansing: Michigan State College Press, 1949). 13. William Sherman Savage, The Controversy over the Distribution of Abolition Literature, 1830–­1860 (Ann Arbor, MI: Association for the Study of Negro Life and History, 1938); Bertram Wyatt-­Brown, “The Abolitionists’ Postal Campaign of 1835,” Journal of Negro History 50, no. 4 (1965): 227–­38; Susan Wyly-­Jones, “The 1835 Anti-­ Abolition Meetings in the South: A New Look at the Controversy over the Abolition Postal Campaign,” Civil War History 47, no. 4 (2001): 289–­309; “America’s First Direct Mail Campaign,” Smithsonian’s National Postal Museum Blog (July 2010); Michael Kent Curtis, Free Speech, “The People’s Darling Privilege” (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2000). 14. The Jackson administration suppressed the abolitionists’ efforts by permitting local postmasters to destroy their mailings and to reveal the names of southern subscribers. In addition to facing regular bursts of mob violence and local sanctions, then, abolitionists faced what even the proadministration New York Evening Post called “a censorship of the press in its worst possible form, allowing every two penny Postmaster . . . to be the judge of what species of intelligence is proper to circulate, and what to withhold from the people.” See A Collection of Political Writings of William Leggett (New York: Taylor and Dodd, 1840), 2:14. This was but one of many efforts initiated by presidents and other political actors in the decades before the Civil War to impede the designs of abolitionists. 15. Wendell Phillips, Review of Lysander Spooner’s Essay on the Unconstitutionality of Slavery (Boston: Andrews and Prentiss, 1847); William Wiecek, The Sources of Antislavery Con­ stitutionalism in America, 1760–­1848 (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1977). 16. William Lloyd Garrison, “A Covenant with Death and an Agreement with Hell,” Massachusetts Historical Society, July 2005, http://www.masshist.org/object-­of-­the-­month /objects/a-­covenant-­with-­death-­and-­an-­agreement-­with-­hell-­2005-­07-­01. 17. Richard Sewell, Ballots for Freedom: Antislavery Politics in the United States, 1837–­1860 (New York: Oxford University Press, 1976), chapter 2. 18. Phillips is quoted in Lillie Buffum, Chace Wyman, and Arthur Crawford Wyman, Elizabeth Buffum Chace, 1806–­1899 (Boston: W. B. Clarke, 1914), 1:83.

328  /  Notes to Pages 47–56 19. Sumner is quoted in Irving Bartlett, Wendell and Ann Phillips: The Community of Reform, 1840–­1880 (New York: Norton, 1979), 151. 20. Wendell Phillips, Liberator, May 16, 1845. 21. Harriet Beecher Stowe, “What Hath God Wrought,” Independent, November 15, 1860. 22. Elizabeth Cady Stanton, “Speech to the Anniversary of the American Anti-­Slavery Society,” Liberator, May 18, 1860. 23. This paragraph owes much to Morone’s Hellfire Nation, 159–­68. 24. Morone, Hellfire Nation, 168. 25. Inaugural address of Franklin Pierce, March 4, 1853, http://avalon.law.yale.edu/19th _century/pierce.asp. 26. Charles Sumner, Charles Sumner: His Complete Works (New York: Negro Universities Press, 1969), 2:307. 27. David Potter, The Impending Crisis, 1848–­1861 (New York: Harper and Row, 1976), 143. 28. Daniel J. Tichenor, “Leaders, Citizenship Movements, and the Politics Rivalries Make,” in Formative Acts: American Politics in the Making, ed. Stephen Skowronek and Matthew Glassman (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2007), chapter 12. 29. Abraham Lincoln to Ichabod Codding, November 27, 1854, in The Collected Works of Abraham Lincoln, ed. Roy Basler (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 1953–­55), 2:288 (emphasis in original), http://quod.lib.umich.edu/l/lincoln/ (emphasis in original). 30. Lincoln’s speech at Peoria, Collected Works of Abraham Lincoln, 2:247–­83. 31. Lincoln’s inaugural address, in James D. Richardson, ed., Messages and Papers of the Pres­ idents (New York: Harper and Row, 1897), 7:3206. 32. Lincoln’s inaugural address, 3210 (emphasis in original). 33. Stowe, “What Hath God Wrought” (emphasis in original). 34. Quincy and Garrison quoted in Ford Risely, Abolition and the Press: The Moral Struggle against Slavery (Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press, 2008), 151. 35. See Hans L. Trefousse, The Radical Republicans: Lincoln’s Vanguard for Racial Justice (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1969), 228. 36. Charles Sumner, Address at a Republican State Convention, Worcester, MA, October 1, 1861, in Sumner, Complete Works, 7:252, 268. 37. Lincoln is quoted in Gerald Sorin, Abolitionism: A New Perspective (New York: Praeger, 1972), 150. 38. Abraham Lincoln, “Remarks to a Delegation of Progressive Friends,” in Collected Works of Abraham Lincoln, 5:278–­79. 39. Mrs. L. Maria Child to the President of the United States, Liberator, August 29, 1862. 40. Abraham Lincoln to Orville Browning, September 22, 1861, in Collected Works of Abra­ ham Lincoln, 4:531–­32 (emphasis in original). See also James M. McPherson, Battle Cry of Freedom: The Civil War Era (New York: Oxford University Press, 1988), 356–­57. 41. Abraham Lincoln to Albert G. Hodges, April 4, 1864, in Collected Works of Abraham Lincoln, 7:281. 42. Quoted in Richard Hofstadter, The American Political Tradition (New York: Vintage, 1973), 184. 43. See Philip S. Foner, Frederick Douglass (New York: Citadel, 1964), 201–­5. 44. Hofstadter, American Political Tradition, 196. 45. Sorin, Abolitionism, 151; Oscar Sherwin, Prophet of Liberty: The Life and Times of Wendell Phillips (New York: Bookman Associates), 452. 46. Philip S. Foner, Frederick Douglass, 197, 200.

Notes to Pages 56–62  /  329 47. “Remarks to a Delegation of Progressive Friends,” June 20, 1862, in Collected Works of Abraham Lincoln, 5:420. 48. David Herbert Donald, Lincoln (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1995), 345. 49. T. Harry Williams, Lincoln and the Radicals (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1941), 64. 50. Donald, Lincoln, 343. 51. Sorin, Abolitionism, 154. 52. Hans L. Trefousse, Lincoln’s Decision for Emancipation (Philadelphia: Lippincott, 1975), 18–­23. 53. McPherson, Battle Cry of Freedom, 356 (emphasis in original). 54. Abraham Lincoln, First Annual Message to Congress, December 3, 1861, in Collected Works of Abraham Lincoln, 5:144–­46. 55. Eric Foner, Fiery Trial: Abraham Lincoln and American Slavery (New York: W. W. Norton, 2010), 17. 56. Abraham Lincoln, Address on Colonization to a Committee of Colored Men, Washing­ ton, DC, August 14, 1862, https://www.learner.org/workshops/primarysources/eman cipation/docs/address.html. 57. Eric Foner, Fiery Trial, 183. 58. Sherwin, Prophet of Liberty, 458. 59. Mrs. L. Maria Child to the President (emphasis in original). 60. Abraham Lincoln, “The President to Congressional Representatives from the Border States,” July 12, 1982, in Collected Works of Abraham Lincoln, 5:318–­19. 61. Phillip Shaw Paludan, The Presidency of Abraham Lincoln (Lawrence: University Press of Kansas, 1994), 104–­5. 62. Philip S. Foner, Frederick Douglass, 200–­201. 63. Frederick Douglass, “Fighting Rebels with One Hand,” address delivered in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, January 14, 1862, in The Writings of Frederick Douglass, Library of Congress Collection, http://memory.loc.gov/ammem/doughtml/dougFolder5 .html. 64. Philip S. Foner, Frederick Douglass, 200–­201. 65. Tichenor, “Leaders, Citizenship Movements.” 66. McPherson, Battle Cry of Freedom, 500. 67. T. Harry Williams, Lincoln and the Radicals, 157–­67. 68. Anna Ella Carroll to Abraham Lincoln, July 14, 1862, Abraham Lincoln Papers at the Library of Congress, transcribed and annotated by the Lincoln Studies Center, Knox College, Galesburg, IL, http://memory.loc.gov/cgi-­bin/query/r?ammen/mal :@field(DOCID+@lit(d1704800)). 69. Sherwin, Prophet of Liberty, 464–­65. 70. Benjamin P. Thomas, Abraham Lincoln (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1952), 342–­43. 71. Donald, Lincoln, 362–­69. See also Sherwin, Prophet of Liberty, 464–­65. 72. Eric Foner, Fiery Trial, 227. 73. “The Convention,” Liberator, June 6, 1862 (emphasis in original). 74. Trefousse, Radical Republicans, 203–­4. 75. Lydia Child to Mrs. S. B. Shaw, 1863, in The Letters of Lydia Maria Child (Boston: Houghton, Mifflin, 1883), 171. 76. “Emancipation Day in Boston,” Liberator, January 16, 1863; McPherson, Battle Cry of Freedom, 558; John Hope Franklin, Emancipation Proclamation (Washington, DC: National Archives and Records Service, 1994), 61–­62.

330  /  Notes to Pages 63–67 77. Frederick Douglass, “Negroes and the National War Effort,” address delivered in Phil­ adelphia, Pennsylvania, July 6, 1863, in Writings of Frederick Douglass. 78. Cited in Wendy H. Venet, Neither Ballots nor Bullets: Women Abolitionists and the Civil War (Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press, 1991), 1–­2. 79. Address to the President, May 14, 1863, New York, in Proceedings: The Meeting of the Loyal Women of the Republic (New York: Phair, 1863), 33, 34. 80. Ibid. (emphasis in original). 81. Elizabeth Cady Stanton and Susan B. Anthony, eds., The History of Woman Suffrage (New York: Fowler and Wells, 1861–­78), 2:78–­89; Venet, Neither Ballots nor Bullets, 146. 82. Stanton and Anthony, History of Woman Suffrage, 85. 83. “Lecture of Miss Anna Dickinson,” Liberator, April 18, 1862. 84. Venet, Neither Ballots nor Bullets, 45. 85. Lincoln’s plan required that only 10 percent of the voters who cast ballots in 1860 take a loyalty oath to form a new state government. Voting qualifications from before the war would apply, excluding blacks from the franchise. The new state constitution must abolish slavery and provide for the education of freed people, but it could also adopt temporary measures regarding the freed people “consistent . . . with their present conditions as a laboring, landless, and homeless class.” Eric Foner, Fiery Trial, 271–­72. 86. “Anna Dickinson’s Address in the House of Representatives,” Washington Daily National Republican, January 18, 1864 (emphases are those of the newspaper). For an account of Dickinson’s prominence and her appearance in the House of Representatives, see James Harvey Young, “Anna Elizabeth Dickinson and the Civil War: For and against Lincoln,” Mississippi Valley Historical Review 34 (June 1944): 59–­80. 87. The bill proposed to delay the start of Reconstruction until a majority, not 10 percent, of the state’s white males had taken an oath to support the Constitution. 88. Abraham Lincoln, “Proclamation on the Wade-­Davis Bill, July 8, 1864,” http://www .let.rug.nl/usa/presidents/abraham-­lincoln/proclamation-­on-­the-­wade-­davis-­bill -­july-­8-­1864.php; “The Wade-­Davis Manifesto, August 5, 1864,” http://www.let.rug .nl/usa/documents/1851-­1875/the-­wade-­davis-­manifesto-­august-­5-­1864.php. 89. Young, “Dickinson and the Civil War,” 72. What really transpired between Lincoln and Dickinson remains a matter of some dispute, yet it seems very possible that the president gently expressed the same sentiments that he stated in his proclamation on the Wade-­Davis bill. 90. Abraham Lincoln to Charles D. Robinson, August 17, 1864; Lincoln interview with Alexander W. Randall and Joseph T. Mills, August 19, 1864, in Collected Works of Abraham Lincoln, 7:499–­500, 506–­7. At the urging of Douglass, Lincoln did not send the letter to Robinson. Douglass objected to the final sentence of the draft letter, “If Jefferson Davis wishes . . . to know what I would do if he were to offer peace and reunion, saying nothing about slavery, let him try me.” “It would be given a broader meaning than you intend to convey,” Douglass warned, and be taken as “a complete surrender of your anti-­slavery policy.” In the face of continuing pressure to retreat on his position, with the strong support of antislavery activists, Lincoln continued to express the moral and practical reasons why he could not go back on the Emancipation Proclamation. Eric Foner, Fiery Trial, 305–­6. 91. James M. McPherson, Abraham Lincoln and the Second American Revolution (New York: Oxford University Press, 1991), 86.

Notes to Pages 67–74  /  331 92. Frederick Douglass to Abraham Lincoln, August 29, 1864, Abraham Lincoln Papers, Library of Congress. As Douglas recalled his meeting of August 19 with the president, “The main subject on which he wished to confer with me was as to the means most desirable to be employed outside the army to induce the slaves in the rebel States to come within the Federal lines. The increasing opposition to the war, in the North, and the mad cry against it, because it was being made an abolition war, alarmed Mr. Lincoln, and made him apprehensive that a peace might be forced upon him which would leave still in slavery all who had not come within our lines. What he wanted was to make his proclamation as effective as possible in the event of such a peace. He said, in a regretful tone, ‘The slaves are not coming so rapidly and so numerously to us as I had hoped.’ I replied that the slaveholders knew how to keep such things from their slaves, and probably very few knew of his proclamation. ‘Well,’ he said, ‘I want you to set about devising some means of making them acquainted with it, and for bringing them into our lines.’ ” Lincoln meeting with Douglass, https://cwcrossroads.word press.com/2014/08/18/august-­19-­1864-­frederick-­douglass-­meets-­abraham-­lincoln/. 93. Douglass cited in Eric Foner, Fiery Trial, 306. 94. Frederick Douglass to William Lloyd Garrison, September 17, 1864, in Writings of Frederick Douglass. 95. Theodore Tilton to Anna Dickinson, September 3, 1864, cited in Young, “Dickinson and the Civil War,” 75 (emphasis in the original). 96. Paludan, Presidency of Abraham Lincoln, 297–­302. 97. Philip S. Foner, ed., The Life and Writings of Frederick Douglass (New York: International, 1955), 4:316. 98. Harriet Beecher Stowe, “Abraham Lincoln,” Living Age, February 6, 1864, 284 (emphasis in original). 99. Ulysses S. Grant, Special Message to Congress, May 30, 1870, https://www.nps.gov /ulsg/learn/historyculture/grant-­and-­the-­15th-­amendment.htm. 100. Frederick Douglass, quoted in Alexander Keyssar, The Right to Vote: The Contested History of Democracy in the United States (New York: Basic Books, 2009), 82. 101. Stanton and Anthony, History of Woman Suffrage, 85. 102. Stanton and Anthony, History of Woman Suffrage, 94. 103. “Woman’s Rights,” editorial, Standard, December 30, 1865. 104. Stanton and Anthony, History of Woman Suffrage, 94. 105. Venet, Neither Ballots nor Bullets, 157. 106. Lincoln took this position in refusing to veto a bill reducing fees paid to the marshal of the District of Columbia; see Collected Works of Abraham Lincoln, 7:414–­15. 107. Matthew Crenson and Benjamin Ginsberg, Presidential Power: Unchecked and Unbalanced (New York: Norton, 2007), 102. 108. Carl Schurz, “Abraham Lincoln,” in Abraham Lincoln, ed. Carl Schurz (New York: Chautauqua, 1891), 72. 109. Abraham Lincoln, Annual Message to Congress, December 6, 1864, in The Language of Liberty: Political Speeches and Writings of Abraham Lincoln, ed. Joseph R. Fornieri (Washington, DC: Regnery, 2009), 697. 110. Eric Foner, Fiery Trial, 335. 111. W. E. B. Du Bois, Black Reconstruction in America (New York: Harcourt Brace, 1935), 165. 112. Eric Foner, Fiery Trial, 335. 113. Sumner quoted in Keith E. Whittington, Constitutional Constructions: Divided Powers and Constitutional Meaning (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1999).

332  /  Notes to Pages 75–84 114. “The Interview with Lincoln.” Truth’s account of her meeting with President Abraham Lincoln on October 29, 1864, is taken from a letter dictated by her to Rowland Johnson, reprinted in the “Book of Life” section of the Narrative (Battle Creek, MI: Review and Herald Office ,1875), 177–­79. 115. Stephen Skowronek, Building a New American State: The Expansion of National Administrative Capacities, 1877–­1920 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1982). 116. Woodrow Wilson, Constitutional Government in the United States (New York: Columbia University Press, 1908), 56. 117. Thomas A. Sancton, “Looking Backward: Edward Bellamy’s Spiritual Crisis,” American Quarterly 25, no. 5 (December 1973): 554. 118. Theodore Roosevelt, “The Progressives Past and Present,” Outlook, September 3, 1910, 20. 119. Herbert Croly, The Promise of American Life (1909; New York: Dutton, 1963), 88. 120. Eldon Eisenach, The Lost Promise of Progressivism (Lawrence: University Press of Kansas, 1994), 42. 121. Sidney M. Milkis, “Executive Power and Political Parties,” in The Executive Branch, ed. Joel Aberbach and Mark Peterson (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2005), 386. 122. Sidney M. Milkis, The President and the Parties: The Transformation of the American Party System since the New Deal (New York: Oxford University Press, 1993). Chapter Three

1.

W. E. B. Du Bois, “Of Our Spiritual Strivings,” in The Souls of Black Folks (1903), chapter 1, http://teachingamericanhistory.org/library/document/of-­our-­spiritual-­strivings/. 2. Bruce Miroff, “Presidential Leverage over Social Movements,” Journal of Politics 43, no. 1 (February 1981): 1–­23. 3. For a review of scholarship on the civil rights movement’s duration and evolution, see Eric Arnesen, “Reconsidering the ‘Long Civil Rights Movement,’ ” Historically Speak­ ing 10, no. 2 (April 2009): 31–­34. 4. Arnesen, “Long Civil Rights Movement,” 265. 5. Miroff, “Presidential Leverage over Social Movements,” 14. 6. Christine Stansell, “Details, Details,” New Republic, December 10, 2001, 29. 7. Elmer Cornwell, Jr., Presidential Leadership of Public Opinion (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1965), 10. 8. Theodore Roosevelt to John Hay, August 9, 1903, in H. W. Brands, ed., The Selected Let­ ters of Theodore Roosevelt (New York: Cooper Square, 2001), 308. 9. Herbert Croly, Progressive Democracy (New York: Macmillan, 1914), 11. 10. Theodore Roosevelt, “Autobiograhphy,” in The Works of Theodore Roosevelt, 20 volumes (New York: Scribner’s, 1926), 20:347. 11. Roosevelt, Works of Theodore Roosevelt, 20:414. 12. Thomas Dyer, Theodore Roosevelt and the Idea of Race (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1980), 102. 13. Stansell, “Detail, Details,” 29. 14. Eldon Eisenach, The Lost Promise of Progressivism (Lawrence: University Press of Kansas, 1994), 42–­43. 15. W. E. B. Du Bois, The Souls of Black Folk (1903; Chicago: A. C. McClurg, 1909). 16. Theodore Roosevelt, “The Negro Problem,” address at the Lincoln Dinner of the Re­ publican Club of the City of New York, February 13, 1905, in Works of Theodore Roo­ sevelt, 16:348.

Notes to Pages 85–93  /  333 17. Theodore Roosevelt, “The Education of the Negro,” address at Tuskegee Institute, Tuskegee, AL, October 24, 1905, in Works of Theodore Roosevelt, 16:354. 18. Booker T. Washington, Speech before the Cotton States and International Exposition, September 18, 1895, http://historymatters.gmu.edu/d/39/. 19. Raleigh Morning Post, October 21, 1901, reprinted as “Two Views of Roosevelt’s Act,” State (Columbia, SC), October 22, 1901, 4. 20. “The President Commended,” New York Times, October 21, 1901. 21. Albion W. Tourgée to Roosevelt, October 21, 1901, Theodore Roosevelt Papers, Manuscript Division, Library of Congress, Washington, DC. 22. Roosevelt to Tourgée, November 8, 1901, Theodore Roosevelt Papers. 23. Booker T. Washington to Theodore Roosevelt, October 26, 1901, Booker T. Washington Papers, Manuscript Division, Library of Congress. 24. Washington to Roosevelt, October 31, 1901, Booker T. Washington Papers. 25. Dyer, Theodore Roosevelt, 104. 26. William B. Gatewood, “William D. Crum: A Negro in Politics,” Journal of Negro History 53, no. 4 (1968): 301–­20; Washington to Roosevelt, December 1, 1902, Theodore Roosevelt Papers. 27. Washington to Roosevelt, September 27, 1902, Theodore Roosevelt Papers. 28. Washington to Roosevelt, February 6, 1902, Theodore Roosevelt Papers. 29. Theodore Roosevelt, Memorial Day Address, May 30, 1902, Arlington National Cemetery, Arlington, VA, Theodore Roosevelt Papers. 30. “The President and Lynching,” New York Commercial Advertiser, June 3, 1902, reprinted in Boston Evening Transcript. 31. Clarence Lusane, The Black History of the White House (New York: City Light, 2013), 255. 32. Harry Lembeck, Taking on Theodore Roosevelt: How One Senator Defied the President on Brownsville and Shook American Politics (New York: Prometheus Books, 2015), 187–­95. 33. W. E. B. Du Bois, “Niagara Movement Speech,” 1905, http://teachingamericanhistory .org/library/document/niagara-­movement-­speech/. 34. Dyer, Theodore Roosevelt, 115. 35. Lembeck, Taking on Theodore Roosevelt, 253. 36. Roosevelt and Foraker cited in Mary Stuckey, “Establishing the Rhetorical Presidency through Presidential Rhetoric,” Quarterly Journal of Speech 92, no. 3 (August 2006): 300. 37. Sidney M. Milkis, Theodore Roosevelt, the Progressive Party and the Transformation of the American Democracy (Lawrence: University Press of Kansas, 2009). 38. Paul Kellogg, “The Industrial Platform of the New Party,” Survey 28 (August 24, 1912): 669. 39. Walter E. Weyl, The New Democracy (New York: Macmillan, 1912), 342–­43. 40. John Parker to Theodore Roosevelt, July 24, 1912, Theodore Roosevelt Papers. 41. Parker to Roosevelt, July 15, 1912, Theodore Roosevelt Papers. 42. Parker to Roosevelt, July 24, 1912, Theodore Roosevelt Papers. 43. National Association for the Advancement of Colored People, First Annual Report, January 1, 1911, in “National Association for the Advancement of Colored People,” 1911–­32, Organizational Files, Jane Addams Papers, Swarthmore College Peace Collection, Swarthmore, PA. 44. For insightful accounts of Roosevelt’s other strategies and the race question, see George Mowry, “The South and the Progressive Lily White Party of 1912,” Journal of

334  /  Notes to Pages 94–99 Southern History 6 (May 1944): 237–­47; Arthur Link, “Theodore Roosevelt and the South in 1912,” North Carolina Historical Review 23 (July 1946): 313–­24; John A. Gable, Bull Moose Years: Theodore Roosevelt and the Progressive Party (Port Washington, NY: Kennikat Press, 1978), 60–­74. 45. Theodore Roosevelt to Julian La Rose Harris, August 1, 1912, in The Letters of Theodore Roosevelt, ed. Elting E. Morison (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1954), 7:587–­90. 46. Addams is quoted in New York Tribune, August 6, 1912. 47. Jane Addams, The Second Twenty Years at Hull-­House: September 1909 to September 1929 (New York: Macmillan 1930), 34. 48. Louise Knight, Jane Addams: Spirit in Action (New York: Norton, 2010), 177. 49. W. M. Trotter to Jane Addams, telegram, August 7, 1912, Jane Addams Papers. 50. Jane Addams, “The Progressive Party and the Negro,” Crisis, November 1912, 31. 51. “Colonel Theodore Roosevelt and His Hostile Attitude towards the Afro-­Americans,” Broad Ax (Chicago, IL), August 17, 1912. 52. “Mr. Roosevelt,” editorial, Crisis, September 1912, 236. 53. Gary Gerstle, “Theodore Roosevelt and the Divided Character of American Nationalism,” Journal of American History 86 (December 1999): 1306. 54. Roosevelt, Works of  Theodore Roosevelt, 17:304. 55. “We Despise a Sycophant,” Baltimore Afro-­American, December 18, 1909. 56. W. E. B. Du Bois quoted in August Meier, “The Negro and the Democratic Party: 1875–­1915,” Phylon 17 (June 1956): 187, 188. 57. Alexander Walters, “Make Friends of Thine Enemies,” Crisis, October 1912, 307. 58. “Politics,” editorial, Crisis, August 1912, 181. 59. Arthur Link, “The Negro as a Factor in the Campaign of 1912,” Journal of Negro History 32, no. 1 (January 1947): 88. 60. “From Diary of Oswald Garrison Villard,” August 14, 1912, in The Papers of Woodrow Wilson, ed. Arthur Link (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1978), 25:25–­26. 61. Oswald Garrison Villard, Fighting Years: Memoirs of a Liberal Editor (New York: Harcourt, Brace, 1939), 223. 62. Editorial, Afro-­American Ledger, October 12, 1912. 63. “Closing Days of Strenuous Campaign,” Afro-­American Ledger, November 2, 1912. How many votes civil rights activists secured for Wilson remains a matter of conjecture, but it appears that most African Americans voted for Roosevelt. Writing in May 1913, for example, Kelly Miller estimated that possibly 60 percent of the African American vote went to Roosevelt, with the rest divided between Wilson and Taft. Kelly Miller, “The Political Plight of the Negro,” Kelly Miller’s Monograph Magazine 1 (May 1913): 3. Such estimates are not particularly reliable, but the results of the Chicago vote suggest that Miller may have been on target. In the two precincts with substantial black populations (Wards 2 and 3), Roosevelt won nearly 57 percent of the vote to Taft’s 33 percent and Wilson’s 9 percent. Roosevelt won Chicago, but only with 39 percent of the vote to Wilson’s 31 percent and Taft’s 18 percent. By most accounts, Wilson received about 20 percent of the African American vote in the North, more than any Democratic candidate had received since the Civil War. The demise of the Progressive Party after 1916 and Wilson’s egregious record on civil rights meant that this shift in the northern black vote did not endure; indeed, African American voters returned to the Republican fold by the 1914 midterm elections. But the temporary disruption of party alignments in 1912 signaled the formative potential of

Notes to Pages 100–106  /  335 a relationship between the modern presidency and the civil rights movement that would be partially fulfilled during the New Deal and fully realized in the 1960s. 64. Woodrow Wilson, “A Campaign Address in Burlington, New Jersey,” in Papers of Woodrow Wilson, 25:490–­91, 492. 65. Jeffrey Tulis, The Rhetorical Presidency (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1987); James Ceaser, Presidential Selection (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1979), especially chapter 4. 66. Scott James, “The Evolution of the Presidency,” in The Executive Branch, ed. Joel Aberbach and Mark Peterson (New York: Oxford University Press, 2005), 19. 67. John Milton Cooper, The Warrior and the Priest (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1983), 195. 68. Scott James, Presidents, Parties, and the State: A Party System Perspective on Democratic Regulatory Choice, 1884–­1936 (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2000). 69. Croly, Progressive Democracy, 346. 70. David Levering Lewis, “Civil Rights [Mis]Calculations: Woodrow Wilson and the African American Leadership,” paper presented at the Woodrow Wilson Presidential Library Symposium, “1912: An Election to Remember,” September 14, 2012, Mary Baldwin College, Staunton, VA. 71. Richard B. Sherman, The Republican Party and Black America from McKinley to Hoover (Charlottesville: University Press of Virginia, 1973), 113–­44. 72. Megan Ming Francis, Civil Rights and the Making of the Modern State (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2014), chapter 3. 73. “President Resents Negro’s Criticism,” New York Times, November 13, 1914. 74. Lewis, “Civil Rights [Mis]Calculations.” 75. Lewis, “Civil Rights [Mis]Calculations.” 76. From transcript excerpt, originally collected by two prominent Boston lawyers, Frank­ lin T. Hammond and J. Mott Hollowell, at the request of Annie Fisher. Fisher would send this transcript along with a short newspaper clipping of the hearing to her former congressman Thomas Thacher (D-­MA). Thacher, having just lost his reelection campaign in 1914, would bring this information to Tumulty, prompting the White House’s response. See original letters, excerpts, and attachments in Woodrow Wilson Papers, Library of Congress, Washington, DC, series 4, reel 332, case file 2247. 77. Edward Douglas White to Joseph Patrick Tumulty, April 5, 1915, in Link, Papers of Woodrow Wilson, 32:486. 78. Link, Papers of Woodrow Wilson, 32:267n1. The quotation attributed to Wilson first appeared in Milton McKay, “The Birth of a Nation,” Scribner’s Magazine 102 (November 1937). Link’s discussion with King occurred on June 23, 1977. 79. See Wilson Correspondence, February 19–­26, 1915, Wilson Papers. 80. White House memorandum and attached letter, March 29, 1915, Wilson Papers. 81. “Race Riot at Theater,” Washington Post, April 18, 1915; “Birth of Nation Causes Near-­ Riot,” Boston Sunday Globe, April 18, 1915, 1; “Boston Race Leaders Fight Birth of a Na­ tion,” Chicago Defender, April 24, 1915. 82. “Birth of Nation Causes Near-­Riot,” 1. 83. “Birth of Nation Causes Near-­Riot,” 3. 84. Woodrow Wilson to Joseph Tumulty, April 24, 1915, in Link, The Papers of Woodrow Wilson, 33:68. 85. Lewis, “Civil Rights and [Mis]Calculations.” 86. “ ‘The Birth of a Nation’ Master Work Says Dorothy Dix,” Dix Review, March 5, 1915.

336  /  Notes to Pages 106–114 87. Thomas Dixon to Joseph Tumulty, May 1, 1915, in Link, Papers of Woodrow Wilson, 32:142. 88. Lewis, “Civil Rights [Mis]Calculations.” 89. Meier, “Negro and the Democratic Party,” 173–­91; Sherman, Republican Party and Black America, 121–­22; David Levering Lewis, W. E. B. Du Bois: Biography of a Race, 1868–­1919 (New York: Henry Holt, 1993), 522. 90. Daniel J. Tichenor, “Presidents, Social Movements, and Contentious Change,” Presidential Studies Quarterly 91 (March 1999): 14–­25. 91. Francis, Civil Rights, 70. 92. “Speech by Marcus Garvey, July 8, 1917,” in The Marcus Garvey and Universal Negro Improvement Association Papers, ed. Robert Hill, volume 1, 1826–­August 1919 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1983). See also Herbert Shapiro, White Violence and Black Response: From Reconstruction to Montgomery (Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 1988). 93. Lewis, “Civil Rights [Mis]Calculations.” 94. Francis, Civil Rights, 73. 95. Geoffrey Stone, “Mr. Wilson’s First Amendment,” in Reconsidering Woodrow Wilson’s Progressivism, Internationalism, War, and Peace, ed. John Milton Cooper (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2008), 213. 96. Lewis, W. E. B. Du Bois, 556. 97. Joseph Patrick Tumulty to Governor Frank Orren, with enclosures, August 1, 1917, in Link, Papers of  Woodrow Wilson, 43:342. 98. Wilson to Tumulty, August 1, 1917, in Link, Papers of Woodrow Wilson, 43:343. 99. Wilson to Newton Baker, February 19, 1918, in Link, Papers of Woodrow Wilson, 48:383. 100. Frances, Civil Rights, 75–­76. 101. Woodrow Wilson. “Statement on the Houston Riots,” August 31, 1918, in Link, Papers of Woodrow Wilson, 49:400–­402. 102. Emory Morris and others, petition to the president, March 5, 1918, in Link, Papers of Woodrow Wilson, 48:550; exchange between Tumulty and Wilson, April 22, 1918, Wilson Papers. 103. John R. Shillady to Wilson, July 25, 1918, in Link, Papers of Woodrow Wilson, 49:88–­89. 104. Wilson, “A Statement to the American People,” in Link, Papers of Woodrow Wilson, 49:97–­98. 105. “President Wilson’s Proclamation Denouncing Lynching,” Baltimore Afro-­American, August 2, 1918, 1. 106. “President Wilson against Mob Rule,” Chicago Defender, August 3, 1918, 1. 107. “Our President Has Spoken,” Chicago Defender, August 3, 1918, 16. 108. Francis, Civil Rights, 171. 109. Cited in William Leuchtenburg, The White House Looks South (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 2005), 55. 110. Ibid. 111. Franklin D. Roosevelt, Public Papers and Addresses, ed. Samuel I. Rosenman (New York: Random House, 1938–­50), 7:xxviii–­xxxii; Thomas Stokes, Chip off My Shoulder (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1940), 503. 112. For an extensive analysis of the Progressive Era, New Deal, and Great Society, see Sidney M. Milkis, The President and the Parties (New York: Oxford University Press, 1993). 113. Franklin Roosevelt, Public Papers and Addresses, 1:751–­52.

Notes to Pages 114–124  /  337 114. “Democratic Platform of 1936,” in Donald Bruce Johnson, ed., National Platforms (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1978), 360. 115. Franklin Roosevelt, Public Papers and Addresses, 13:40. 116. Joseph Alsop and Robert Kintner, “The Guffey: Biography of a Boss,” Saturday Evening Post, March 26, 1938, 5–­6, 98–­102; Nancy Weiss, Farewell to the Party of Lincoln: Black Politics in the Age of FDR (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1983), 14–­15. 117. John Kirby, Black Americans in the Roosevelt Era (Knoxville: University of Tennessee Press, 1980), 132–­39. 118. Weiss, Farewell to the Party of Lincoln, 95. 119. Weiss, Farewell to the Party of Lincoln, 43–­44. 120. Eben Miller, Born along the Color Line (New York: Oxford University Press, 2012), 1. 121. Miller, Born along the Color Line, 122. 122. Ira Katznelson, Fear Itself (New York: Liveright, 2013). 123. Richard Rothstein, The Color of Law (New York: Liveright, 2017). 124. Leuchtenburg, White House Looks South, 62–­63. 125. Miller, Born along the Color Line, 186. 126. John Temple Graves, cited in Leuchtenburg, White House Looks South, 78. 127. Ibid., 57. 128. Ibid. 129. Miller, Born along the Color Line, 196–­98. 130. Miller, Born along the Color Line, 199–­200. 131. Walter White to FDR, memorandum, January 2, 1936, Thomas Corcoran Papers, Franklin D. Roosevelt Library, Hyde Park, NY; Time, September 9, 1938, 12. 132. Franklin Roosevelt as cited in Weiss, Farewell to the Party of Lincoln, 14–­15. 133. Claude Dewson Pepper and Hays Gorey, Pepper: Eyewitness to a Century (San Diego, CA: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1987), 65. 134. Kevin J. McMahon, Reconsidering Roosevelt on Race (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2004), 118. 135. Josiah Bailey to R. R. King, August 10, 1936, Josiah Bailey Papers, Manuscript Department, William R. Perkins Library, Duke University, Durham, NC; Stanley High, Diary Notations, January 1, 1937, Stanley High Papers, Franklin D. Roosevelt Library. For a detailed discussion of the two-­thirds rule, see Milkis, President and the Parties, chap. 3. 136. On the significance and consequences of the 1938 purge campaign, see Milkis, President and the Parties, chapter 4. 137. When asked whether he thought the solid South would stay Democratic very long, Roosevelt replied: “I think the South is going to remain Democratic, but I think it is going to be a more intelligent form of democracy than has kept the South, for other reasons, in the democratic column all these years. It will be intelligent thinking, and, in my judgment, because the South is learning, it is going to be a liberal democracy.” Complete Presidential Press Conferences of Franklin D. Roosevelt (New York: Da Capo, 1972), April 21, 1938, no. 452-­B, 11:338–­40. 138. Carter Glass to Jack Dionne, October 17, 1938, Carter Glass Papers, Alderman Library, University of Virginia. 139. Time, September 19, 1938, 12. 140. “Cotton Ed” Smith cited in Alan Michie and Frank Ryhlick, Dixie Demagogues (New York: Vanguard, 1939), 280–­81. 141. Report of the President’s Committee on Administrative Management (Washington, DC: Government Printing Office, 1937), 53.

338  /  Notes to Pages 124–132 142. McMahon, Reconsidering Roosevelt on Race, 145. 143. McMahon, Reconsidering Roosevelt on Race, 144–­45. 144. United States v. Classic 313 U.S. 299 (1941). 145. McMahon, Reconsidering Roosevelt on Race, 150–­53. 146. Smith v. Allright 321 U.S. 649 (1944). 147. McMahon, Reconsidering Roosevelt on Race, 153. 148. McMahon, Reconsidering Roosevelt on Race, 154–­56. 149. Miller, Born along the Color Line, 206. 150. McMahon, Reconsidering Roosevelt on Race, 159–­60. 151. Franklin Roosevelt, “Four Freedoms” address, annual message to Congress, January 6, 1941, http://www.fdrlibrary.marist.edu/pdfs/fftext.pdf. 152. McMahon, Reconsidering Roosevelt on Race, 161–­62. 153. Victor Rotnem, “The Federal Civil Right ‘Not to Be Lynched,’ ” Washington University Law Review 28, no. 2 (January 1943): 57–­73. 154. McMahon, Reconsidering Roosevelt on Race, 165. 155. McMahon, Reconsidering Roosevelt on Race, 149–­50. 156. McMahon, Reconsidering Roosevelt on Race, 165–­67. 157. Miller, Born along the Color Line, 215. 158. Arneson, “Long Civil Rights Movement,” 32–­33. 159. “President’s Remedy for a Sick South Does Not Go Far Enough Says Randolph,” Chicago Defender, August 27, 1938. 160. “FDR Says Nation Should Consider Special Problems of Minorities,” Chicago Defender, April 13, 1940. Randolph left the National Negro Congress soon thereafter, when it accepted the non-aggression pact between Adolf Hitler and Joseph Stalin, a sign, he feared, that the group had been taken over by communists. See “Randolph Is Out,” New York Amsterdam News, May 4, 1940. 161. “Walter White in Protest on Army Jim Crow Plans,” Chicago Defender, October 19, 1940; “Army Policy Was Misunderstood,” New York Amsterdam News, November 2, 1940. 162. A. Philip Randolph to Eleanor Roosevelt, and attached “Call,” June 5, 1941, in “The Papers of Eleanor Roosevelt, 1933–­1945” (ed. Susan Ware and William Chafe), housed jointly by the Library of Congress (Washington, DC) and the Franklin D. Roosevelt Presidential Library (Hyde Park, NY). 163. The Bonus March was a demonstration of some seventeen thousand US World War I veterans, their families, and affiliated groups in the summer of 1932 to demand cash-­payment redemption of their service certificates, or bonuses. President Herbert Hoover ordered the army to drive the veterans and their families out of the capital, and to burn their shelters and belongings. 164. Eleanor Roosevelt to A. Philip Randolph, June 10, 1941, in “Papers of Eleanor Roosevelt.” 165. A. Philip Randolph to Eleanor Roosevelt, June 23, 1941, in “Papers of Eleanor Roosevelt.” 166. Executive Order 8802, “Fair Employment Practices in Defense Industries,” http:// www.eeoc.gov/eeoc/history/35th/thelaw/eo-­8802.html. 167. FDR to Marvin McIntyre, memorandum, June 7, 1941; Wayne Coy to Steven Early, memorandum, June 12, 1941; and attached correspondence; all in Official File 391, folder: Marches on Washington, 1937–­1945, Franklin D. Roosevelt Papers. 168. A. Philip Randolph, address delivered before the Thirty-­Second Annual Conference of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People, June 25, 1941,

Notes to Pages 132–142  /  339 in “The Papers of A. Philip Randolph” (ed. John H. Bracey and August Meier) housed by the Library of Congress, Washington DC; Kirby, Black Americans in the Roosevelt Era, 119. 169. Beth Thompkins Bates, Pullman Porters and the Rise of Protest Politics in Black America, 1925–­1945 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2001), chapter 7. 170. “25,000 Roar Approval as Speakers Define ‘Real Democracy,’ ” Pittsburgh Courier, June 27, 1942. 171. Leuchtenberg, White House Looks South, 65. 172. A. Philip Randolph to Eleanor Roosevelt, November 18, 1943, in “Papers of Eleanor Roosevelt.” 173. “Thank FDR for Letter on FEPC,” Chicago Defender, November 30, 1943. 174. Arnesen, “Long Civil Rights Movement,” 34. 175. A. Philip Randolph, “Address on the March on Washington,” A. Philip Randolph Papers. Chapter Four

1.

James Farmer cited in United Press International story, March 21, 1965, found in Katzenbach Papers, box 8, Selma to Montgomery I (part I), John F. Kennedy Library, Boston. 2. King cited in Nick Kotz, Judgment Days: Lyndon Baines Johnson, Martin Luther King, Jr., and the Laws That Changed America (New York: Houghton Mifflin, 2006), 324. 3. William Leuchtenburg, The White House Looks South (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 2005), 163. 4. Harry S Truman, Executive Order 9308, “Establishing the President’s Committee on Civil Rights,” December 5, 1946, in The Growth of Presidential Power: A Documented His­ tory, 3 volumes, ed. William Goldsmith (New York: Chelsea, 1974), 3:1568–­69. 5. Harry S Truman, Special Message to Congress on Civil Rights, February 2, 1948, in Goldsmith, Growth of Presidential Power, 3:1586–­92. 6. Daniel Schlozman, When Movements Anchor Parties: Electoral Alignments in American History (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2015). 7. Harry S Truman, Address to the NAACP, June 29, 1947, http://www.americanrhetoric .com/speeches/harrystrumannaacp.htm; Leuchtenburg, White House Looks South, 171. 8. Leuchtenburg, White House Looks South, 169; Azza Salama Layton, International Politics and Civil Rights Policy in the United States, 1941–­1960 (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2000), 57–­58. 9. Howard Brick and Christopher Phelps, Radicals in America (New York: Cambridge Uni­ versity Press, 2015), chapter 1. 10. Executive Order 9981, “Establishing the President’s Committee on Equality of Treatment and Opportunity in the Armed Services,” July 26, 1948, https://www.ourdocu ments.gov/doc.php?flash=false&doc=84; Executive Order 9980, “Regulations Governing Fair Employment Practices within the Federal Establishment,” July 26, 1948, http://www.presidency.ucsb.edu/ws/?pid=78208. 11. John Hope Franklin, “Civil Rights and the Truman Administration,” public address at the University of Chicago, April 5, 1968, in Conference of Scholars on the Truman Administration and Human Rights, ed. Donald McCoy, Richard Reutten, and J. R. Fuchs (Independence, MO: Harry Truman Library Institute, 1968), 134. 12. The president’s news conference of July 7, 1954, in Public Papers of the President: Dwight D. Eisenhower, 1954 (Washington, DC: Government Printing Office, 1960), 160–­61; James McGrath Morris, “Ethel Payne—­‘First Lady of the Black Press,’ ” Washington

340  /  Notes to Pages 143–148 Post, August 12, 2011, https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/ethel-­paynefirst -­lady-­of-­the-­black-­pressasked-­questions-­no-­one-­else-­would/2011/08/02/gIQAJl oFBJ_story.html. 13. Derek Catsam, “Civil Rights,” in A Companion to John F. Kennedy, ed. Marc Selverstone (New York: John Wiley, 2014), 541–­42; Leuchtenburg, White House Looks South, 416. 14. Morris, “Ethel Payne.” 15. Martin Luther King, Jr., Birmingham Jail Treatise, April 6, 1963, http://okra.stanford .edu/transcription/document_images/undecided/630416-­019.pdf. 16. King, Birmingham Jail Treatise. 17. For an account of the Birmingham demonstrations and the SCLC’s strategy, see Bruce Miroff, Pragmatic Illusions (New York: David McKay, 1976), 250–­70. 18. Miroff, Pragmatic Illusions, 255. 19. John F. Kennedy’s Address on Civil Rights, June 11, 1963, https://millercenter.org/the -presidency/presidential-speeches/june-11-1963-address-civil-rights. 20. Miroff, Pragmatic Illusions, 259. 21. Catsam, “Civil Rights,” 554–­55. 22. Richard Goodwin, Remembering America (Boston: Little, Brown, 1988), 275. 23. Michael Harrington, cited in Office of Economic Opportunity (OEO), “The Office of Economic Opportunity during the Administration of President Lyndon B. Johnson: November 1963–­January 1969,” 1:5, Special Files: Administrative History, OEO, Lyn­ don Johnson Presidential Library, Austin, TX. 24. Shriver cited in OEO, “Office of Economic Opportunity,” 40, 45. 25. Paul Conkin, Big Daddy of the Pedernales (Boston: Twayne, 1986), 164. Louis Martin, editor and publisher of the black newspaper Michigan Chronicle and an important official of the Democratic National Committee during the Johnson years, where he served as an effective liaison between the White House and the African American community, saw Johnson’s southern background as the key to understanding the president’s strong civil rights record: “Now my feeling about Johnson . . . is that since [he] was a southerner, he would normally, being a good politician, lean over backwards to prove that he was not a racist. Further, there’s something in the folklore of Negro life that a reconstructed southerner is really far more liberal than a liberal Yankee. . . . Johnson did many things that Kennedy would never have done.” Oral History of Louis Martin, May 14, 1969, interviewed by David G. McComb, tape 1, transcript, 22, Johnson Library. Pointing to the fragile yet indispensable link between civil rights reformers and the Johnson White House, Martin admitted that he “exploited this part of folklore,” just as Johnson exploited his African American advisers and civil rights leaders to make a distinctive mark on American history. 26. Taylor Branch, Parting the Waters (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1988), 642. 27. Juanita Roberts to Lyndon Johnson, memorandum, March 9, 1963, White House Central Files, Johnson Library. 28. Lyndon Johnson, remarks on Memorial Day, Gettysburg, PA, May 30, 1963, http:// www.lbjlib.utexas.edu/johnson/archives.hom/speeches.hom/630530.asp. 29. “Johnson Challenge Pleads for Justice,” Baltimore Afro-­American, June 8, 1963. 30. Drew Pearson, “LBJ Carries the Ball on Rights,” Washington Post, June 9, 1963. Some Kennedy critics, Pearson went on to report, compared Johnson’s Gettysburg speech with the three addresses the president had made on a recent trip to the South, where he talked about the TVA, the race for the moon, and the importance of law and order, but did not mention the problem of racial injustice. 31. “The Quiet Revolution,” New York Amsterdam News, April 23, 1966.

Notes to Pages 149–152  /  341 32. Lee White to Lawrence O’Brien, memorandum, April 17, 1963, Lee White Papers, box 22, Legislation, 11-­13-­61 to 11-­12-­63, Kennedy Library. See also Theodore Sorensen’s report on 1963 legislative proposals, where he admits that the most important reason for the failure of the administration’s voting rights bill was “the lack of all-­out support by minority organizations.” Theodore Sorensen Papers, box 59, “Proposals for 1963,” Kennedy Library. 33. Telephone conversation between Lyndon Johnson and Theodore Sorensen, June 3, 1963, George Reedy Office Files, Johnson Library. 34. Lyndon Johnson, “Remarks at a Breakfast of the Georgia Legislature,” in Public Papers of the Presidents: Lyndon B. Johnson, 1963–­1964 (Washington, DC: Government Printing Office), 1:645–­51. 35. “Johnson in Georgia,” Chicago Daily Defender, May 12, 1964. 36. Editorial, Washington Post, May 9, 1964. 37. Ibid. 38. Editorial, Richmond Times Dispatch, May 9, 1964. 39. Cited in Leuchtenburg, White House Looks South, 413. 40. Johnson, “Georgia Legislature,” 649. 41. Martin Luther King, Jr., The Autobiography of Martin Luther King, Jr. and the Laws that Changed America (New York: Warner, 1998), 242–­43. 42. The Equal Employment Opportunity Commission, charged with preventing racial and sexual discriminatory practices in employment, was stripped of its authority to file suit in the courts. The commission could recommend, but only the Justice Department had the power to initiate a suit. The Justice Department, in turn, could only file suits under conditions where obvious discriminatory practices, which characterized Jim Crow laws in the South, prevailed. On Dirksen’s relationship with Johnson and the role that the Republican Senate leader played in enacting civil rights legislation, see Byron Hulsey, Everett C. Dirksen and His Presidents (Lawrence: University Press of Kansas, 2000), 183–­204. 43. For a comprehensive study of the changes in the country’s view on civil rights that Johnson tapped into, see Eric Schickler, Racial Realignment (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2016). 44. Dirksen cited in Hulsey, Everett C. Dirksen, 196. Johnson’s power over Congress had become so great by the summer of 1964 that he was able to pressure the Republican minority leader, Charles Halleck, to support a rule that enabled Congress to act on the president’s poverty legislation. See telephone conversation between Lyndon Johnson and Charles Halleck, June 22, 1964, Secret White House Tapes, Mil­­ler Center, https://millercenter.org/the-­presidency/secret-­white-­house-­tapes/about-­johnsons -­secret-­white-­house-­tapes. 45. See, for example, Johnson telephone conversation with Roy Wilkins, head of the NAACP, July 2, 1964, Secret White House Tapes. Johnson was concerned that Republican legislators were heading off to the GOP convention and might not be able to participate in the signing ceremony, thus risking the bipartisan support he had worked so hard to achieve. Wilkins expressed his support for Johnson’s desire to sign the bill on July 2, emphasizing particularly the need to cultivate bipartisanship as “an overwhelming political reason” to act quickly. 46. Because Johnson’s efforts were sub rosa, direct evidence of his efforts to influence the civil rights leadership is lacking, but leaders of the major organizations convened on July 29 and issued statements that conformed to Johnson’s immediate political objectives. See “Key Negro Groups Call on Members to Curb Protests,” New York

342  /  Notes to Pages 153–158 Times, July 30, 1964; Bruce Miroff, “Presidential Leverage over Social Movements: The Johnson White House and Civil Rights,” Journal of Politics 43 (1981): 10–­11. 47. Kotz, Judgment Days, 203. 48. Kotz, Judgment Days, 204–­5. 49. Kotz, Judgment Days, 206. 50. Johnson combined persuasion and ruthless methods, including the use of FBI wiretaps on civil rights leaders, in resolving the MFDP dispute. See Kotz, Judgment Days, 206–­18. 51. Lee White to Johnson, memorandum, August 13, 1964, White House Central File, Johnson Library; email to authors from Sherwin J. Markman, a Johnson White House aide, who was heavily involved in resolving the MFDP controversy, January 13, 2004. 52. Johnson also was concerned, even at this early stage of his presidency, that an unruly convention might open the door to a Robert Kennedy candidacy. Markman email, January 13, 2004. 53. Johnson telephone conversation with Walter Reuther, August 9, 1964, White House Secret Tapes. 54. Johnson telephone conversation with Hubert Humphrey and Walter Reuther, August 25, 1964, White House Secret Tapes. Johnson followed closely the Democratic National Committee’s implementation of the 1964 convention’s call for greater participation; given the tight reins the White House kept on the committee, these activities certainly would not have gone on without the president’s approval. See Marvin Watson to LBJ, memorandum, April 19, 1967, Marvin Watson Files, Johnson Library. As became clear at the 1968 convention, which will be discussed below, the rule was no paper tiger; indeed, it marked a landmark in the Democratic Party’s embrace of civil rights as a core issue. See Sidney M. Milkis, The President and the Parties (New York: Oxford University Press, 1993), 210–­16. 55. “Jim Crowism Ruled Out,” Chicago Daily Defender, January 20, 1968. 56. Cliff McKay, “Freedom Delegates Win Big Change,” Baltimore Afro-­American, September 5, 1964. 57. Kotz, Judgment Days, 220. 58. Clayborn Carson, In Struggle: SNCC and the Black Awakening of the 1960s (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1981), 126. 59. Kotz, Judgment Days, 220–­21. 60. Clayborn Carson, In Struggle, 127. 61. For example, Attorney General Robert Kennedy proposed legislation that would apply only to federal elections. Moreover, the Kennedy plan for voting rights did not include the provisions that made the 1965 Voting Rights Act so significant and controversial, including preclearance of changes in voting laws and the abolition of literacy tests. See Robert Kennedy to John F. Kennedy, memorandum, October 23, 1963, Burke Marshall Papers, box 8, Presidential 4-­8-­63 to 8-­17-­63, Kennedy Library. 62. Johnson telephone conversation with Martin Luther King, Jr., January 15, 1965, White House Secret Tapes. 63. Joseph A. Califano, Jr., “The Movie Selma Has a Glaring Flaw,” Washington Post, December 26, 2014, https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/the-­movie-­selma -­has-­a-­glaring-­historical-­inaccuracy/2014/12/26/70ad3ea2-­8aa4-­11e4-­a085-­34e9b9 f09a58_story.html. 64. Cited in Kotz, Judgment Days, 267. 65. Lyndon Johnson, “Speech before Congress on Voting Rights,” March 15, 1965, http:// millercenter.org/president/lbjohnson/speeches/speech-­3386.

Notes to Pages 158–161  /  343 66. “LBJ Puts U.S. Might behind Voting Rights,” Chicago Daily Defender, March 17, 1965. 67. King, Autobiography, 288. 68. Horace Busby to Bill Moyers and Lee White, memorandum, February 27, 1965, Katzenbach Papers, box 8, Voting Legislation (Civil Rights), Kennedy Library. 69. John Lewis, with Micahel D’Orso, Walking with the Wind (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1998), 340; see also Kotz, Judgment Days, 312. Johnson showed Lewis a less poetic, more practical side in asking for the civil rights movement’s help in implementing the Voting Rights Act. Inviting the civil rights leader to meet privately with the president in the Oval Office prior to signing the legislation, Johnson told him earnestly, “Now John you’ve got to go back and get all those folks registered. You’ve got to go back and get those boys by the balls. Just like a bull gets on top of a cow. You’ve got to get them by the balls and you’ve got to squeeze, squeeze ’em till they hurt.” “I’d heard that Lyndon Johnson enjoyed talking in graphic, down-­home terms,” Lewis later acknowledged, “but I wasn’t quite prepared for all those bulls and balls” (346; emphasis in original). 70. “LBJ Is Hailed; Montgomery March Goes On,” New York Amsterdam News, March 20, 1965. 71. Lewis, Walking with the Wind, 340. 72. Johnson’s enormous ambition, invested in the bold commitment to create a Great Society, could hardly be indifferent to world affairs. “History has a peculiar ability to forget what a president does at home and judges him on the size of his impact on the world beyond his shores,” Bill Moyers wrote in a memo to Johnson in June 1965. This “irony of judgment” would determine Johnson’s place in history. “Some president, some day will come along and pass programs topping the Great Society—­ the country will have greater needs than today and he will have more GNP to use in solving them.” Moyers’s memo concluded, “But no president is likely again to have the chance to redeem Southeast Asia from Red China—­or keep the Communists out the Caribbean—­or save the U.N.” Moyers to LBJ, June 21, 1965, Office Files of Bill Moyers, Johnson Library. 73. Raymond McCann, “LBJ Deferred Negro Dreams: Dr. King,” Chicago Defender, September 2, 1967. 74. King frequently referred to Vietnam as a small nation of people of color that quoted the US Declaration of Independence in its own document of freedom when the people declared their independence from the French in 1945. 75. Martin Luther King, Jr., “Beyond Vietnam: A Time to Break Silence,” speech at the River­ side Church, New York City, April 4, 1967, https://mlk50.org/writings/the-­sermon/full -­text-­beyond-­vietnam/. 76. Johnson telephone conversation with Martin Luther King, August 20, 1965, White House Secret Tapes. 77. Kotz, Judgment Days, 353. 78. Richard Goodwin, speech draft, May 1965, White House Central File: SP 3–­93, box 172, Johnson Library; Johnson telephone conversation with King, August 20, 1965; Lyndon Johnson, “Commencement Address at Howard University: ‘To Fulfill These Rights,’ ” June 4, 1965, in Public Papers of the Presidents: Lyndon B. Johnson, 1965, 2:636. 79. Johnson telephone conversation with King, August 20, 1965. 80. “LBJ Losing Black Backing: Leader,” Chicago Daily Defender, October 24, 1967. 81. Johnson telephone conversation with King, August 20, 1965. 82. Taylor Branch, At Canaan’s Edge: America in the King Years, 1965–­1968 (New York: Simon and Schuster, 2006), 234.

344  /  Notes to Pages 161–163 83. James L. Hicks, “He Won a Battle—­But Lost the War,” New York Amsterdam News,” June 11, 1966. 84. David Charles Carter, “Two Nations: Social Insurgency and National Civil Rights Policymaking in the Johnson Administration, 1965–­1968” (PhD dissertation, Duke University, 2001), 320. 85. Hayes Redmon to Bill Moyers, memoranda, November 27 and 30, 1965, Office Files of Bill Moyers, Johnson Library. 86. Hicks, “He Won a Battle.” 87. As Kotz notes, both Kennedy and Johnson “failed to recognize a significant historical reality. The Communist Party’s fifty-­year campaign to recruit African Americans to its cause had been a colossal failure.” Kotz, Judgment Days, 236. Kennedy’s Justice Department admitted as much in seeking to reassure some members of Congress who were looking into potential ties between the civil rights movement and communists. As assistant attorney general for civil rights, Burke Marshall wrote Senator Peter Dominick (R-­CO), “Based on all available information from the FBI and other sources, we have no evidence that any of the top leaders of the major civil rights groups are Communists, or Communist controlled. This is true as to Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., about whom particular accusations were made, as well as other leaders. It is natural and inevitable that Communists have made efforts to infiltrate the civil rights groups and to exploit the current racial situation. In view of the real injustices that exist and the resentment against them, these efforts have been remarkably unsuccessful.” Marshall to Dominick, July 31, 1963, Burke Marshall Papers, box 8, Congressional, House A–­Z. Indeed, King went to extraordinary measures to distance civil rights organizations from the extreme Left. For example, he suspended Jack O’Dell for several months while the New York civil rights worker’s alleged ties to the Communist Party were investigated. Even though the SCLC found no basis for these charges, King asked O’Dell to make his resignation permanent, so as to avoid even the hint of radical influence on the civil rights movement. “The situation in our country is such,” King wrote O’Dell, “that any allusion to the left brings forth an emotional response which would seem to indicate that the SCLC and the Southern Freedom movement are communist inspired. In these critical times we cannot afford to risk any such impressions.” King to O’Dell, July 3, 1963, Burke Marshall Papers, box 8, James H. Meredith. 88. Robert Mann, The Walls of Jericho (New York: Harcourt, Brace, 1996), 480. 89. Martin Luther King, Jr., “Beyond the Los Angeles Riots,” Saturday Review, November 13, 1965, 33, 105. 90. Lori Waite, “Divided Consciousness: The Impact of the Black Elite Consciousness on the 1966 Chicago Freedom Movement,” in Oppositional Consciousness, ed. Jane Mansbridge and Alton Morris (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2001), 191, 203n7. 91. King, “Beyond the Los Angeles Riots,” 34. 92. Richard Rothstein, The Color of Law (New York: Livermore, 2017). 93. Stokely Carmichael and Charles Hamilton, Black Power (New York: Vintage, 1967), 40 (emphasis in original). 94. Stokely Carmichael, with Ekwueme Michael Turin, Ready for Revolution (New York: Scribner, 2003), 527 (emphasis in original). 95. Lyndon B. Johnson, State of the Union address, January 12, 1966, in Public Papers of Lyndon B. Johnson, 1:5–­6; “A Firm Hand,” New York Amsterdam News, January 22, 1966.

Notes to Pages 164–165  /  345 96. The OEO was conceived as the president’s managerial arm that could “cut across departmental lines to facilitate coordination.” As its director, Sargent Shriver testified before a House committee that placing the OEO in the White House bestowed “an authority which the President wants because he wants to be a focal point with respect to this aspect of the domestic effort.” This line of reasoning invoked the administrative science of the Brownlow committee report, the blueprint for the creation of the Executive Office of the President during Franklin Roosevelt’s second term. Shriver is quoted in The Administrative History of the OEO, 35–­36, Special Files, Johnson Library. On the Brownlow committee report and the role it played during the Roosevelt years, see Milkis, President and the Parties, chapters 5–­6. 97. Economic Opportunity Act of 1964, title 2, part A, section 202 (a). 98. Samuel Beer, “In Search of a Public Philosophy,” in The New American Political System, ed. Anthony King (Washington, DC: American Enterprise Institute, 1990), 16. Beer notes that the research-­based theories of two Columbia University sociologists, Richard Cloward and Lloyd Ohlin, had an especially important influence on the presidential task forces that shaped the antipoverty program. For Cloward’s thoughts on the origins and development of the community action during the Great Society, see the essay by Frances Fox Piven and Richard Cloward, “The Politics of the Great Society,” in The Great Society and the High Tide of Liberalism, ed. Sidney M. Milkis and Jerome Mileur (Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 2005). See also Administrative History of the OEO, chapter 1. 99. Nathan Glazer cited in Administrative History of the OEO, 18. 100. The Heineman group was the second task force to report on government organization during the Johnson presidency; the first, chaired by Don Price, issued its study in 1964. Its recommendations appear in two lengthy memoranda: “Task Force on Government Organization,” memorandum to the president, December 15, 1966, White House Central File; and “A Final Report by the President’s Task Force on Government Organization,” June 15, 1967, 18–­20, Outside Task Forces, Johnson Library. 101. Nicolau cited in Daniel Patrick Moynihan, Maximum Feasible Misunderstanding (New York: Free Press, 1971), 139. 102. Johnson voiced such a view in his memoirs. “I heard bitter complaints from the mayors of several cities,” he wrote. “Some funds were used to finance questionable activities. Some were badly mismanaged. That was all part of the risk. We created new bureaus and consolidated old ones. We altered priorities. We learned from our mistakes. But as I used to tell our critics, ‘We have to pull the drowning man out of the water and talk about it later.’ ” Lyndon Johnson, The Vantage Point: Perspectives on the Presidency (New York: Holt, Rinehart and Winston, 1971), 81. For an alternative view of Johnson’s commitment to the War on Poverty, see Bruce Miroff, “The Presidency and Social Reform,” in The Presidency, ed. Steven Shull and Lance LeLoup (Brunswick, OH: King’s Court Communications, 1979), 174–­94. 103. Examination of the War on Poverty, prepared for the Subcommittee on Employment, Manpower and Poverty of the Committee on Labor and Public Welfare, US Senate (Washington, DC: Government Printing Office, 1967), 5:1238, 1241–­42. For this quotation and many of the ideas expressed in the discussion of the CAP, I am indebted to James Morone, The Democratic Wish, revised edition (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1998), chapter 6. 104. Kenneth Andrews, “The Impact of Social Movements on the Political Process,” Amer­ ican Sociological Review 62, no. 5 (October 1997): 800–­819; Michael Katz, “The New

346  /  Notes to Pages 165–172 African American Inequality,” Journal of American History 92, no. 1 (June 2005), emphasizing how the Great Society and War on Poverty enhanced the role of public and quasi-­public (privately controlled but government-­funded) employment of African Americans, both increasing their influence on public policy and contributing to advances in economic security; John D. Skrentny, The Minority Rights Revolution (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2002), on how the Great Society increased the influence of social movements on regulatory policy. 105. Sherwin Markman, memorandum for the president, February 1, 1967, White House Central File: We9, Johnson Library. 106. Miroff, “Presidential Leverage over Social Movements,” 14. 107. Carmichael and Hamilton, Black Power, 93. 108. The term extraordinary isolation is Woodrow Wilson’s. See Wilson, Constitutional Government in the United States (New York: Columbia University Press, 1908), 69. 109. Markman memorandum for the president, February 1, 1967. 110. Sherwin Markman, written communication with the authors. 111. For a primary account of the ghetto visits, see the Oral History of Sherwin Markman, interviewed by Dorothy Pierce McSweeney, May 21, 1969, tape 1, transcript, 24–­36, Johnson Library. 112. David Zirin, “Don’t Remember Muhammad Ali as a Sanctified Sports Hero,” Los An­ geles Times, June 4, 2016. 113. Sherwin Markman, “American Ghettos: Our Challenge and Response,” April 5, 1967, White House Central File: We9, Johnson Library; Markman, memorandum for the president, February 1, 1967 (emphasis in original). 114. Markman to the president, memorandum, February 17, 1968, White House Central File: We9, Johnson Library; White House Fellow Thomas E. Cronin, who visited Baltimore, spoke of the “absence of proud men.” Cronin to LBJ, memorandum, May 11, 1967, White House Central File: We9, Johnson Library (emphasis in original). 115. See Oral History of Sherwin Markman, 28; notes of a meeting with Peter Lisigor of the Chicago Daily News, August 4, 1967, Tom Johnson’s notes of meetings, May 1968, Meetings with Correspondents; Tom Johnson to the president, memorandum, August 10, 1967, and attached notes of meeting with labor leaders, Tom Johnson’s notes of meetings, box 1. 116. Sherwin Markman, memorandum for the president, May 9, 1967, Johnson Papers. 117. Lyndon Johnson, remarks in Philadelphia at the Opportunities Industrialization Cen­ ter, June 29, 1967, http://www.presidency.ucsb.edu/ws/index.php?pid=28329. 118. Lyndon Johnson, Speech to the Nation on Civil Disorders, July 24, 1967, http:// millercenter.org/president/lbjohnson/speeches/speech-­4040. 119. “Our President Speaks,” editorial, Chicago Daily Defender, July 25, 1967. 120. “Leaders Lash LBJ for Riot Remarks,” Chicago Daily Defender, July 26, 1967. 121. Ethel L. Payne, “Nation’s Capital Bracing for Possible Outbreaks,” Chicago Daily Defender, July 29, 1967. 122. “Romney Sounding Like a Candidate,” Chicago Daily Defender, September 14, 1967. 123. “The President’s Address to the Nation on Civil Disorders,” Public Papers of the Presidents: Lyndon B. Johnson, 1967, 1:721, 723. 124. “The Anti-­Riot Panel,” Chicago Daily Defender, August 2, 1967. 125. Report of the National Advisory Commission on Civil Disorders (Washington, DC: Government Printing Office, 1968), 1–­2, 410–­12. 126. Kotz, Judgment Days, 392. 127. Kotz, Judgment Days, 415–­21.

Notes to Pages 172–176  /  347 128. Roy Wilkins’s comments came from a piece he wrote for the New York Post, published August 26, 2016; it was printed in the Congressional Record, House, August 31, 1967, 24911–­12. 129. George Marder, “Assassination Gave Rights Bill ‘Final Push’ in House,” Chicago Daily Defender, April 17, 1968. 130. Gary Orfield, “Ending Jim Crow, Attacking Ghetto Walls,” in LBJ’s Neglected Legacy, ed. Robert Wilson, Norman Glickman, and Laurence Lynn, Jr. (Austin: University of Texas Press, 2015), 65. A point “fundamental to the Kerner Commission’s recommendations” was that “federal housing programs must be given a new thrust aimed at overcoming the prevailing pattern of racial segregation. If this is not done, those programs will continue to concentrate the most impoverished and dependent segments of the population into central-­city ghettos where there is already a critical gap between the needs of the population and the public resources to deal with them.” To accomplish this aim, the commission recommended that the federal government “enact a comprehensive and enforceable open housing law to cover the sale or rental of all housing,” and that it “reorient federal housing programs to place more low and moderate income housing outside of ghetto areas” (Report of the National Advisory Commission on Civil Disorders, 28). 131. Lyndon Johnson, Remarks upon Signing the Civil Rights Act, April 11, 1968, http:// www.presidency.ucsb.edu/ws/?pid=28799. 132. In June 1965, James Rowe, who ran Johnson’s 1964 campaign, informed the president that the OEO was “giving instructions and grants to local private groups for the purpose of training the Negro poor on how to conduct sit-­ins and protest meetings against government agencies, federal, state and local.” Johnson passed this memo on to Bill Moyers, with a pointed note: “For God’s sake get on top of this and stop it at once.” James Rowe to the President, memorandum, June 29, 1965, White House Cen­tral File: Aides, Moyers, Johnson Library. Shriver “started a damn revolution,” Johnson complained to Richard Daley a few months later. Telephone conversation with Richard Daley, December 24, 1965, Secret White House Tapes. 133. Martin Luther King, Jr., “Where Do You Go from Here,” address delivered at the Eleventh Annual SCLC Convention, Atlanta, GA, August 16, 1967. 134. “LBJ Predicts Many More Hot Summers of Turmoil,” Chicago Daily Defender, February 14, 1968. 135. Sidney M. Milkis, “Lyndon Johnson, the Great Society, and the Twilight of the Modern Presidency,” in Milkis and Mileur, Great Society, 1–­48. 136. W. W. Rostow, Memorandum of Conversation, Participants: The President; the Vice President; Charles Murphy; W. W. Rostow, April 5, 1968, White House Famous Names, box 6, folder: Robert F. Kennedy, 1968 Campaign, Johnson Library. 137. Kotz, Judgment Days, 394. A Gallup poll on September 6, 1967, showed that 67 percent of nonwhite Americans supported Johnson, compared to only 38 percent of white Americans. 138. “Democrats Warned about ‘Tokenism’ of Delegates,” Chicago Daily Defender, July 13, 1968. 139. Bob Hunter, “Mississippi Democrats Accused of Anti-­Negro Bias,” Chicago Daily Defender, August 20, 1968. 140. “Mississippi Loyal Demos Bask in the Victory’s Glow,” Chicago Daily Defender, August 22, 1968. 141. Kotz, Judgment Days, 423. 142. Kotz, Judgment Days, 423.

348  /  Notes to Pages 176–183 143. “Mississippi Again,” editorial, Chicago Daily Defender, July 22, 1968. 144. Sheryl Fitzgerald, “Black Voting Strength Is Key to Equality,” Chicago Daily Defender, August 29, 1968. 145. Daniel J. Tichenor and Daniel Fuerstman, “Insurgency Campaigns and the Quest for Participatory Democracy,” Polity 40 (Winter 2008): 49–­60. 146. James Ceaser, Presidential Selection (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1979); Bruce Miroff, The Liberal Movement (Lawrence: University Press of Kansas, 2007). 147. Ceaser, Presidential Selection, 283. 148. Richard Harris and Sidney M. Milkis, The Politics of Regulatory Change: A Tale of Two Agencies, 2nd edition (New York: Oxford University Press, 1996). 149. Following R. Shep Melnick, by “civil rights state” we mean “not just the abstract rights and policies announced by the courts, Congress, and federal agencies, but the dense institutional structures developed over the decades to define the meaning of such key terms as ‘discrimination’ and ‘equal opportunity,’ to establish detailed guidelines for the many public officials and private parties subject to civil rights laws, to monitor their compliance, and to impose sanctions on those who fail to comply.” See R. Shep Melnick, “The Supreme Court and the Civil Rights State,” lecture, University of California, San Diego, March 2010. 150. Hugh Davis Graham, The Civil Rights Era (New York: Oxford University Press, 1990). 151. Graham, Civil Rights Era, 4, 114–­454. 152. Graham, Civil Rights Era, 462–­63. 153. Richard M. Valelly, The Two Reconstructions (Chicago: University of Chicago Press), chapter 9. 154. Orfield, “Ending Jim Crow,” 66. 155. Arlington Heights v. Metropolitan Housing Development Corp. 429 U.S. 352 (1977); Orfield, “Ending Jim Crow,” 68–­69. 156. Orfield, “Ending Jim Crow,” 69. 157. Karen Orren and Stephen Skowronek, The Policy State (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2017). 158. Orren and Skowronek, Policy State, 85. See also their work on the emergence of the policy state in that volume. 159. R. Shep Melnick, “From Tax and Spend to Mandate and Sue: Liberalism after the Great Society,” in Milkis and Mileur, Great Society, 387–­410. 160. “Lyndon the Liberator,” editorial, Crisis, April 1973. C h a p t e r F iv e

1.

“Christian Freedom Foundation, 1975–­76,” booklet, box 15, folder 18, Paul Weyrich Papers, collection #10138, American Heritage Center, University of Wyoming, Laramie. 2. Eckard V. Toy, “Faith and Freedom, 1949–­1960,” in The Conservative Press in Twentieth-­ Century America, ed. Ronald Lora and William Longton (Westport, CT: Greenwood, 1999), 165–­66; Martin Marty, Modern American Religion: Under God, Indivisible, 1941–­ 1960 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1996), 3:322; Alan Lichtman, White Protestant Nation (New York: Grove Press, 2008), 173–­74; Lee Haddigan, “The Importance of Christian Thought for the American Libertarian Movement,” Libertarian Papers 2, article 14 (2010): 1–­31. 3. Christian Economics, September 6, 1955. 4. “Christian Freedom Foundation, 1975–­76” (emphasis in original).

Notes to Pages 187–191  /  349 5.

Kenneth Wald and Allison Calhoun-­Brown, Religion and Politics in the United States (New York: Rowman and Littlefield, 2011), 203–­4; Randall Balmer, The Making of Evangelicalism (Waco, TX: Baylor University Press, 2010), 45–­47. 6. Charles Hopkins, The Rise of the Social Gospel in American Protestantism, 1865–­1915 (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1940); Maurice Latta, “The Background for the Social Gospel in American Protestantism,” Church History 5, no. 3 (September 1936): 256–­70; Robert Handy, ed., The Social Gospel in America, 1870–­1920 (New York: Oxford University Press, 1999), 1966); Dorothea Muller, “The Social Philosophy of Josiah Strong,” Church History 28, no. 2 (1959): 183–­201; William Hutchison. “The Americanness of the Social Gospel,” Church History 44, no. 3 (September 1975): 367–­81. 7. Walter Rauschenbusch, Christianity and Social Crisis (New York: Macmillan, 1913), xi. 8. Rauschenbusch, Christianity and Social Crisis, xii, 143. 9. Balmer, Making of Evangelicalism, 43. 10. Edward Larson, Summer for the Gods (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1997); John Headley Broke, Science and Religion: Some Historical Perspectives (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1991); Thomas Dixon, Science and Religion (New York: Oxford University Press, 2008). 11. William Ellis, Billy Sunday (New York: Thomas Manufacturing, 1914); Lyle Dorsett, Billy Sunday and the Redemption of Urban America (New York: Eerdmans, 1991); Roger Bruns, Preacher (New York: W. W. Norton, 1992); Robert Martin, Hero of the Heartland (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2002). 12. Martin, Hero of the Heartland. 13. Wyn Craig Wade, The Fiery Cross (New York: Oxford University Press, 1998); Thomas Pegram, One Hundred Percent American (New York: Ivan Dee, 2011); William Rawlings, The Second Coming of the Invisible Empire (Detroit, MI: Mercer University Press, 2016). 14. Daniel Okrent, Last Call (New York: Scribner, 2011); Lisa McGirr, The War on Alcohol (New York: W. W. Norton, 2015); Ann-­Marie Szymanski, Pathways to Prohibition (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2003). 15. H. L. Mencken, A Religious Orgy in Tennessee (New York: Melville House, 2006); Larson, Summer for the Gods; Samuel Crompton, The Scopes Monkey Trial over Evolution (New York: Chelsea House, 2010); John Perry and Marvin Olasky, Monkey Business (New York: B&H Books, 2005). 16. Ellis, Billy Sunday; Dorsett, Billy Sunday; Martin, Hero of the Heartland. 17. Larson, Summer for the Gods, 232–­35. 18. For a useful review of research on these evangelical political positions, see Robert Wuthnow, “The Political Rebirth of American Evangelicals,” in The New Christian Right, ed. Robert Liebman and Robert Wuthnow (New York: Aldine, 1983), 168–­72. 19. William Martin, With God on Our Side: The Rise of the Religious Right in America (New York: Broadway Books, 2005), 17–­18; Balmer, Making of Evangelicalism, 49–­50. 20. George Scott Smith, Faith and the Presidency (New York: Oxford University Press, 2006), 191–­98. 21. Franklin D. Roosevelt, inaugural address, March 4, 1933, Washington Post, March 5. 22. James MacGregor Burns, The Lion and the Fox (New York: Harcourt, Brace and World, 1956), 476. 23. Ronald Isetti, “The Moneychangers of the Temple,” Political Science Quarterly 26 (Summer 1996): 678.

350  /  Notes to Pages 192–198 24. James Morone, Hellfire Nation (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2003), 355, 376. 25. Morone, Hellfire Nation, 355. 26. Michael Janson, “Evangelical Mobilization and Late-­20th Century American Politics,” in A History of the U.S. Political System, ed. Richard Harris and Daniel J. Tichenor (Santa Barbara, CA: ABC-­Clio, 2009), 123–­24. 27. Lichtman, White Protestant Nation, 96–­97. 28. Robert Horwitz, America’s Right (New York: Polity, 2013). 29. Horwitz, America’s Right. 30. Quoted in Kevin Kruse, One Nation under God (New York: Basic Books, 2015), 6. 31. Toy, “Faith and Freedom,” 165–­66; Marty, Modern American Religion, 3:322; Lichtman, White Protestant Nation, 173–­74; Haddigan, “Importance of Christian Thought,” 1–­31; Janson, “Evangelical Mobilization,” 99–­122; Kruse, One Nation under God. 32. Kruse, One Nation under God, xii. 33. Jeff Sharlet, The Family (New York: HarperCollins, 2009), 87–­114; Kruse, One Nation under God, 40–­43; Dale Soden, Outsiders in a Promised Land (Corvallis: Oregon State University Press, 2015). 34. Kate Bowler, Blessed: A History of the American Prosperity Gospel (New York: Oxford University Press, 2013); David Jones and Russell Woodbridge, Health, Wealth, and Happiness (New York: Kregel, 2010). 35. Carey McWilliams, “Battle for the Clergy,” Nation, February 7, 1948, 150–­52. 36. Kruse, One Nation under God, 9–­11; see also James W. Fifield, Jr., and Bill Youngs, The Tall Preacher (Los Angeles: Pepperdine University Press, 1977). 37. Howard Kershner, “Ideological Conflicts and the Future,” Vital Speeches of the Day 17, no. 22 (July 1951): 688, 691. 38. Kruse, One Nation under God, 12–­13. 39. Kruse, One Nation under God, 13. 40. Grant Wacker, America’s Pastor (Cambridge, MA: Belknap, 2014); John Pollock, Billy Graham (New York: McGraw-­Hill, 1966). 41. Balmer, Making of Evangelicalism, 38–­40. 42. Martin, With God on Our Side, 29–­30. 43. Kruse, One Nation under God, 39, 51. 44. Balmer, Making of Evangelicalism, 51–­52; Wacker, America’s Pastor; Pollock, Billy Graham. 45. Nancy Gibbs and Michael Duffy, The Preacher and the Presidents (New York: HarperCollins, 2007). 46. Merle Miller, Plain Speaking (New York: G. P. Putnam Sons, 1973), 363. 47. Gibbs and Duffy, Preacher and the Presidents; Cathy Burns, Billy Graham and His Friends: A Hidden Agenda (New York: Sharing Press, 2001), 44–­47. 48. Graham, Just as I Am (New York: HarperCollins, 2007), xx–­xxi. 49. Miller, Plain Speaking, 363. 50. Graham, Just as I Am, 188–­99. 51. Kruse, One Nation under God, 72. 52. Dwight Eisenhower to Billy Graham, March 22, 1956, Dwight David Eisenhower Papers, Dwight David Eisenhower Presidential Library, Abilene, KS. 53. Billy Graham to Dwight Eisenhower, March 27, 1956, Dwight David Eisenhower Papers. 54. Billy Graham to Dwight Eisenhower, June 4, 1956, Dwight David Eisenhower Papers; Martin, With God on Our Side, 44–­45.

Notes to Pages 198–205  /  351 55. Steven Miller, Billy Graham and the Rise of the Republican South (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2009). 56. Graham, Just as I Am, 194–­95. 57. Martin, With God on Our Side, 146–­47. 58. Balmer, Making of Evangelicalism, 51–­53. 59. David Edwin Harrel, Jr., “The Roots of the Moral Majority,” paper, 1982, Record Group 3–­1, Series 2, Falwell Family Papers, Liberty University Archives, Lynchburg, VA. 60. Martin, With God on Our Side, 54–­58. 61. Jerry Falwell, “Ministers and Marches,” sermon delivered on March 21, 1965, Record Group 4–­2, Series 2, Falwell Family Papers, 16. 62. Martin, With God on Our Side, 68–­71; Robert Scheer, “The Prophet of ‘Worldly Methods,’ ” Los Angeles Times, March 4, 1981. 63. Falwell, “Ministers and Marches,” 6–­7, 17. 64. Quoted in Laurence Barrett, “Politicizing the World,” Time, October 1, 1979, 62. 65. Jerry Falwell to Christian School Leaders, mass mailing from the Moral Majority, November 30, 1979, Moral Majority Papers, Series 2, Liberty University Archives. 66. Quoted in Frances Fitzgerald, “A Disciplined, Changing Army,” New Yorker, May 18, 1981, 63. 67. “Christian Freedom Foundation, 1975–­76.” 68. Jerry Falwell, Building Dynamic Faith (Nashville, TN: World, 2005); Randall Balmer, “The Real Origins of the Religious Rights,” Politico, May 27, 2014; Jonathan Dudley, “The Not-­So-­Lofty Origins of the Evangelical Pro-­Life Movement,” Religion Dispatches, February 5, 2013. 69. Balmer, Making of Evangelicalism, 60–­61. 70. Jonathan Dudley, “How Evangelicals Decided That Life Begins at Conception,” Huffington Post, January 23, 2014; Balmer, Making of Evangelicalism, 61–­62. 71. W. Barry Garrett, “High Court Holds Abortion to Be ‘A Right of Privacy,’ ” Baptist Press, January 31, 1973. 72. Dudley, “How Evangelicals Decided.” 73. James Haught, “The Great West Virginia Holy War,” Charleston Gazette, October 12, 1993; Wald and Calhoun-­Brown, Religion and Politics in the United States, 206–­7; Nazarene Ministerial Association to Kenneth Underwood, Kanawha County School Superintendent, September 9, 1974, West Virginia Archives and History Library, Charleston, WV. 74. Kay Michael, “County Schools Close in Face of Text Fight,” Charleston Gazette, September 13, 1974; Bob Adams and Keith Walters, “United Parcel Worker Shot at Rand,” Charleston Daily Mail, September 13, 1974; Robert H. Burger, “The Kanawha County Textbook Controversy,” Library Quarterly 48, no. 2 (1978): 143–­62; Haught, “Great West Virginia Holy War.” 75. Robert Knight, “Culture War Heroine Gets Her Due,” Washington Times, October 10, 2011; Martin, With God on Our Side, 135, 170–­75; Wald and Calhoun-­Brown, Religion and Politics in the United States, 206–­7. 76. “Bias against Homosexuals Is Outlawed in Miami,” New York Times, January 19, 1977. 77. “Anita Bryant on the March: The Lessons of Dade County, Ms., September 1977, 75–­ 77; Tom Matthews, Tony Fuller, and Holly Camp, “Battle over Gay Rights,” Newsweek, June 6, 1977, 16–­19; Gillian Frank, “The Civil Rights of Parents,” Journal of the History of Sexuality 22, no. 1 (January 2013): 126–­60. 78. Jerry Falwell, “Why the Moral Majority?,” Moral Majority Newsletter, August 1979, 1, Moral Majority Papers, Series 2, Liberty University Archives.

352  /  Notes to Pages 205–210 79. Engel v. Vitale 370 U.S. 421 (1962). 80. David Nevin and Robert Bills, The Schools That Fear Built (Washington, DC: Acropolis Books, 1976); Joseph Crespino, In Search of Another Country (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2007); Susan Rose, Keeping Them out of the Hands of Satan (New York: Routledge, 1988); Peter Skerry, “Christian Schools versus the IRS,” Public Interest, Fall 1980, 26; see also “The Christian School Movement,” Oral History Inter­ views, Indiana University Center for the Study of History and Memory, Project No. 027, June 1985. 81. Martin, With God on Our Side, 71. 82. Jack White, “Segregation Academies,” Time, December 15, 1975, 60; Nevin and Bills, Schools That Fear Built; Skerry, “Christian Schools versus the IRS.” 83. Martin, With God on Our Side, 70–­71. 84. Randall Balmer, Redeemer: The Life of Jimmy Carter (New York: Basic Books, 2014), 104–­5; Crespino, In Search of Another Country, 237–­52; Nevin and Bills, Schools That Fear Built. 85. Green v. Kennedy 308 F.Supp. 1127 (1970). 86. “The Judicial Role in Attacking Racial Discrimination in Tax-­Exempt Schools,” Harvard Law Review 93, no. 2 (1979): 378–­407; Balmer, Redeemer, 104–­5; Crespino, In Search of Another Country, 237–­52; Nevin and Bills, Schools That Fear Built. 87. Nevin and Bills, Schools That Fear Built. 88. Aaron Haberman, “Into the Wilderness,” Historian 6, no. 2 (Summer 2005): 239–­52; Mark Taylor Dalhouse, An Island in the Lake of Fire (Athens: University of Georgia Press, 1996); Godfrey Hodgson, The World Turned Right Side Up (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1996), 170–­73. 89. R. Shep Melnick, “Courts and Agencies in the American Civil Rights State,” in The Politics of Major Policy Reform in Postwar America, ed. Jeffrey Jenkins and Sidney M. Milkis (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2014). 90. Martin, With God on Our Side, 148. 91. Martin, With God on Our Side, 151. 92. Balmer, Making of Evangelicalism, 53–­58; Martin, With God on Our Side, 148–­54; J. Brooks Flippen, Jimmy Carter, the Politics of the Family, and the Rise of the Christian Right (Athens: University of Georgia Press, 2011). 93. Flippen, Jimmy Carter, 74. 94. Quoted in Martin, With God on Our Side, 151. 95. James Reston cited in Flippen, Jimmy Carter, 80. 96. Balmer, Redeemer, 71. 97. Flippen, Jimmy Carter, 102–­6. 98. Flippen, Jimmy Carter, 119. 99. Adam Walinsky to 1976 Carter Campaign, “The Northern Campaign and the Catholic Problem,” memorandum, box 15, folder 2, Weyrich Papers. 100. Sara Diamond, Not by Politics Alone: The Enduring Influence of the Christian Right (New York: Guilford Press, 2000), 65–­66; Thomas Edsall and Mary Edsall, Chain Reaction (New York: W. W. Norton, 1992), 132–­34. 101. Diamond, Not by Politics Alone, 65–­66. 102. Interview of Bill Monroe, chairman of the South Carolina Moral Majority, July 1981, in Gerald Thurmond, “The Political Organization of the Christian Right in the South,” paper, Moral Majority Papers, MOR 1–­1, Series 3, folder 1, Liberty University Library Archives, Lynchburg, VA.

Notes to Pages 211–218  /  353 103. Randall Balmer, Thy Kingdom Come: How the Religious Right Distorts Faith and Threatens America (New York: Basic Books, 2005), 15; Martin, With God on Our Side, 173. 104. Richard Viguerie, “The New Right,” Conservative Digest, October 1980, 17. 105. Viguerie, “New Right,” 11. 106. “Conservative Protestant Leaders,” Conservative Digest, August 1979, 17. 107. Howard Phillips to Jerry Falwell, February 27, 1979, box 15, folder: “Christians in Politics, 1978–­1979,” Weyrich Papers. 108. E. J. Dionne, Why Americans Hate Politics (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1991), 230. 109. Jerry Falwell to Christian School Leaders, November 30, 1979, Moral Majority Papers, folder 2, Liberty University Archives. 110. James Robison, “Secret of American Liberty Is to Bind Government or Government Will Bind Us,” Conservative Digest, January 1981, 32. 111. “Mobilizing the Moral Majority,” Conservative Digest, August 1979, 14. 112. Fitzgerald, “Disciplined, Changing Army,” 60. 113. William Bennett and Terry Eastland, “New Right Christians Fighting Back for Traditional American Values,” Conservative Digest, October 1980, 18; first published in Wall Street Journal, September 17, 1980 (emphasis in original). 114. Jon Shields, “What Abortionist Killers Believe,” Weekly Standard, June 22, 2009, http:// www.weeklystandard.com/what-­abortionist-­killers-­believe/article/17699. 115. Pat Robertson, Pat Robertson’s Perspective, April 1978. 116. “Jimmy Carter’s Betrayal of the Christian Voter,” Conservative Digest, August 1979, 15. 117. Dr. Robert Maddox, Special Assistant for Religious Affairs, exit interview, December 8, 1980, Jimmy Carter Presidential Library, Atlanta, GA. 118. John Turner, Bill Bright and the Campus Crusade for Christ (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2008), 190. 119. Steve Bruce, The Rise and Fall of the New Christian Right (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1988), 57–­58. 120. “Connally Calls for Return to Christian Values,” Conservative Digest, February 1980, 14. See also George Fowler, “John Connally: A Man for the Times,” Conservative Digest, February 1980, 10–­11; Patrick Buchanan, “Tough, and Tough-­Minded, John Connally,” Conservative Digest, February 1980, 12. 121. Fowler, “John Connally,” 11. 122. Richard Viguerie, “The New Right: We’re Ready to Lead” (Falls Church, VA: Viguerie, 1980). 123. Doug McAdam and Karina Kloos, Deeply Divided: Racial Politics and Social Movements in Postwar America (New York: Oxford University Press, 2014). 124. Daniel K. Williams, God’s Own Party: The Making of the Christian Right (New York: Oxford University Press, 2010), 188–­89. 125. Daniel K. Williams, God’s Own Party, 188; Turner, Bill Bright, 189; Martin, With God on Our Side, 209–­10. 126. Turner, Bill Bright, 190. 127. Sara Diamond, Roads to Dominion (New York: Guilford Press, 1995), 174–­77. 128. Diamond, Roads to Dominion, 174n63. 129. Diamond, Roads to Dominion, 174–­77. 130. Daniel Williams, “Reagan’s Religious Right,” in Ronald Reagan and the 1980s, ed. Cheryl Hudson (New York: Springer Link, 2008), 135–­50; Williams, God’s Own Party, 188. 131. Randall Balmer, God in the White House (New York: Harper One, 2009), 114–­15.

354  /  Notes to Pages 218–229 132. Martin, With God on Our Side, 208. 133. Daniel K. Williams, God’s Own Party, 188. 134. Martin, With God on Our Side, 208. 135. Daniel K. Williams, God’s Own Party, 188. 136. Daniel K. Williams, God’s Own Party, 209. 137. Martin, With God on Our Side, 210; Turner, Bill Bright, 190. 138. Martin, With God on Our Side, 210. 139. Daniel Devine, “GOP ‘Establishment’ Battles Grass Roots,” Human Events, May 12, 1979, 13–­14. 140. “The Time Is Now,” Reagan ad, box 36, folder 34, Weyrich Papers; Daniel K. Williams, God’s Own Party, 180; Balmer, God in the White House, 117. 141. Richard Harley, “The Evangelical Vote and the Presidency,” Christian Science Monitor, June 25, 1980. 142. Morton Blackwell to Lyn Nofziger, February 13, 1979, box 38, Weyrich Papers. 143. Martin, With God on Our Side, 213. 144. “Republican Party Platform of 1980,” July 15, 1980, in Republican Party Platforms, The American Presidency Project, University of California, Santa Barbara. 145. Edsall and Edsall, Chain Reaction, 133–­34. 146. Steven Miller, Age of Evangelicalism (New York: Oxford University Press, 2014), 61. 147. Richard Allen, “George Herbert Walker Bush: The Accidental Vice President,” New York Times Magazine, July 30, 2000. 148. Bill Scher, “When Reagan Dared to Say ‘God Bless America,’ ” Politico, July 17, 2015; Kevin Coe and David Domke, The God Strategy (New York: Oxford University Press, 2007). C h a p t e r Six

1. Edward Larson, Summer for the Gods (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1997), 232–­35. 2. “The Moral Majority,” memorandum, 1979, box 15, folder 18, Paul Weyrich Papers, Collection #10138, American Heritage Center, University of  Wyoming, Laramie, WY. 3. “Moral Majority,” 2–­3. 4. “Moral Majority,” 2–­3. 5. Daniel K. Williams, God’s Own Party: The Making of the Christian Right (New York: Oxford University Press, 2010), 181. 6. Stephen Teles, “Conservative Mobilization against Entrenched Liberalism,” in The Transformation of American Government, ed. Paul Pierson and Theda Skocpol (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2007). 7. Bert A. Rockman, “The Style and Organization of the Reagan Presidency,” in The Reagan Legacy, ed. Charles Jones (London: Chatham House, 1989), 10. 8. Paul Krugman, “Republicans and Race,” New York Times, November 19, 2007; Douglas Kneeland, “Reagan Campaigns at Mississippi Fair,” New York Times, August 4, 1980; “Transcript of Ronald Reagan’s 1980 Neshoba County Fair Speech,” Neshoba Democrat, November 15, 2007. 9. Randall Balmer, “Jimmy Carter’s Evangelical Downfall,” Salon, May 24, 2014. 10. John Turner, Bill Bright and the Campus Crusade for Christ (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2008), 189. 11. Turner, Bill Bright, 189. 12. Turner Robison, Indivisible: Restoring Faith, Family, and Freedom before It’s Too Late (New York: FaithWords, 2012).

Notes to Pages 229–235  /  355 13. Miller, Age of Evangelicalism, 62. 14. William Martin, With God on Our Side:The Rise of the Religious Right in America (New York: Broadway Books, 2005), 214–­16; Turner, Bill Bright. 15. Martin, With God on Our Side, 216. 16. Martin, With God on Our Side, 216. 17. Martin, With God on Our Side, 216. 18. “Reagan Strongly Backs Traditional Values,” Conservative Digest, September 1980, 21. 19. Quoted in James Guth, “The New Christian Right,” in The New Christian Right, ed. Robert Liebman and Robert Wuthnow (New York: Aldine, 1983), 36. 20. Martin, With God on Our Side, 217. 21. Brian Kaylor, “A Transformative Moment in SBC Political Activity,” August 20, 2010, EthicsDaily.com. 22. Kaylor, “Transformative Moment.” 23. “Judy Mann, GOP Feminists Seek Way to Support Reagan,” Washington Post, May 30, 1980. 24. “Judy Mann, GOP Feminists.” 25. Catherine Rymph, Republican Women: Feminism and Conservatism from Suffrage through the Rise of the New Right (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2006), 227. 26. Rymph, Republican Women, 228. 27. David Broder, “The Republicans in Detroit,” Washington Post, July 16, 1980. 28. “Remarks of Mary Louise Smith at the Republican National Convention,” July 15, 1980; Rymph, Republican Women, 228. 29. Reagan Bush Committee news release, September 11, 1980, Ronald Reagan Presidential Library, Simi Valley, CA. 30. Reagan Bush Committee news release, September 11, 1980. 31. Phyllis Schlafly to the Eagle Council, October 1, 1980, box 36, folder 34, Weyrich Papers (emphasis in original). 32. Phyllis Schlafly to the Eagle Council, October 1, 1980. 33. Reagan Bush Committee news release, October 1, 1980, Weyrich Papers. 34. Marilyn Thayer, Coordinator, to Family Policy Advisory Board, Brief Report on Meeting Held on October 8, 1980, Reagan Bush Committee memorandum, box 36, folder 34, Weyrich Papers. 35. Thayer to Family Policy Advisory Board, Brief Report; Memo Regarding RR Christian School Visit, Southern State, October 13, 1980, box 36, Weyrich Papers. 36. Thayer to Family Policy Advisory Board, Brief Report; Memo Regarding RR Christian School Visit. 37. Lorelei Kinder to Bill Gavin, “Family Speech,” memorandum, Family Policy Advisory Board, October 13, 1980, Weyrich Papers. 38. Family Policy Advisory Board, Summary of Decision Making, October 18, 1980, Weyrich Papers. 39. Lorelei Kinder to Bill Gavin, “Pro-­Family Speech,” October 13, 1980, Weyrich Papers. 40. Family Policy Advisory Board, Summary of Decision Making. 41. Reagan Bush Committee news release, October 14, 1980, Reagan Presidential Library. 42. Daniel K. Williams, God’s Own Party, 189. 43. James Lofton, Jr., “Pollster Harris Credits Moral Majority Vote for Reagan’s Stunning Landslide Win,” Conservative Digest, December 1980, 13. 44. Albert Menendez, Evangelicals at the Ballot Box (Amherst, MA: Prometheus, 1996). 45. Stephen Johnson and Joseph Tamney, “The Christian Right and the 1980 Presidential Election,” Journal for the Scientific Study of Religion 21, no. 2 (June 1982): 123–­31;

356  /  Notes to Pages 236–243 Andrew Busch, The 1980 Election and the Rise of the Right (Lawrence: University Press of Kansas, 2005). 46. Martin, With God on Our Side, 220. 47. “Christian New Right’s Rush to Power,” New York Times, August 18, 1980; “Rev. Falwell Inspires the Evangelical Vote,” New York Times, August 20, 1980; “A Time of Born-­Again Politics,” Newsweek, September 15, 1980. See also Seymour Martin Lipset and Earl Raab, “The Election and the Evangelicals,” Commentary, March 1981, 25. 48. Lofton, “Harris Credits Moral Majority.” 49. Marjorie Hyer, “Evangelical Christians Meet to Develop Strategy for 1980s,” Washington Post, January 30, 1981. 50. Paul Weyrich, “The Reagan Do-­It-­Yourself Administration,” Conservative Digest, July 1980, 5. 51. David Marley, “Ronald Reagan and the Splintering of the Christian Right,” Journal of Church and State 48, no. 4 (August 2006): 854–­55. 52. Martin, With God on Our Side, 221–­22. 53. Martin, With God on Our Side, 221–22. 54. Hyer, “Evangelical Christians Meet.” 55. Neil Young, “Ronald Reagan Stiff-­Armed the Religious Right,” Salon, October 24, 2015; Neil Young, We Gather Together: The Religious Right and the Problem of Interfaith Politics (New York: Oxford University Press, 2015), chapter 6. 56. Paul Weyrich to the Coalition, memorandum, January 26, 1981, Weyrich Papers. 57. Young, We Gather Together, chapter 7; Martin, With God on Our Side, 222. 58. Cal Thomas to Morton Blackwell, March 23, 1982, Reagan Presidential Library. 59. Martin, With God on Our Side, 224. 60. Marley, “Ronald Reagan,” 854. 61. “News Summary,” New York Times, January 5, 1981. 62. Stephen Weisman, “Reagan’s First 100 Days,” New York Times, March 27, 1981. 63. Constance Marshner to the Coalition, March 3, 1981, Weyrich Papers. 64. Ronald Reagan, address before the Conservative Political Action Conference, March 20, 1981, Mayflower Hotel, Washington, DC, printed in Conservative Digest, April 1981, 24–­26. 65. Ronald Reagan to Jerry Falwell, April 8, 1981, Reagan Presidential Library. 66. In August 1981, Reagan confirmed his intention to sell airborne early warning and control aircraft, known as AWACs, to Saudi Arabia. This was accomplished in spite of strong opposition in Congress and the protests of Israel. Charles Mohr, “Senate 52–­ 48, Supports Reagan on AWACs Jet Sale to Saudis; Heavy Lobbying Tips Key Vote,” New York Times, October 29, 1981, http://www.nytimes.com/1981/10/29/world/sen ate-­52-­48-­supports-­reagan-­awacs-­jet-­sale-­saudis-­heavy-­lobbying-­tips-­key-­votes.html. The key to gaining enough congressional support was a Reagan letter that appeared to commit the president to obtaining “substantial assistance” from the Saudi government in working toward a resolution of the Arab-­Israeli conflict. 67. Paul Weyrich to the Coalition, June 17, 1981, Weyrich Papers. 68. Kevin Kruse, One Nation under God (New York: Basic Books, 2015), 278. 69. Bill Scher, “When Reagan Dared to Say ‘God Bless America,’ ” Politico, July 17, 2015. 70. “The President’s Religious Speeches,” Douglas Holladay Files, White House Staff and Office Files, OA12249, Reagan Presidential Library; Kruse, One Nation under God, 278. 71. See, for example, “Traditional Values Work! Family Forum II,” Free Congress Research and Education Foundation and Moral Majority Foundation, Leadership Training

Notes to Pages 243–250  /  357 Conference at Sheraton Washington Hotel, Washington, DC, July 27–­29, 1982 (Reagan message the front of the booklet), box 17, folder 8, Weyrich Papers; Ronald Reagan to Pat Robertson, draft of telegram, June 29, 1982, FG006–­01, WHORM, Subject File, Reagan Presidential Library; briefing notes for Wednesday interview with Pat Robertson, April 23, 1985, PR016, Office of the President, Reagan Presidential Library. 72. Nelson Keener, Administrative Assistant of Rev. Jerry Falwell, to Morton Blackwell, May 28, 1981, Reagan Presidential Library. 73. Morton Blackwell to Fred Fielding re: Letter from Jerry Falwell, August 12, 1983, Reagan Presidential Library. 74. Lou Cannon, Reagan (New York: G. P. Putnam’s Sons, 1982), 316. 75. Marley, “Ronald Reagan,” 854–­55; Martin, With God on Our Side, 222–­23. 76. A. James Reichley, Religion in American Public Life (Washington, DC: Brookings Institution, 1985), 325. 77. Weyrich cited in Martin, With God on Our Side, 222–­23. 78. Martin, With God on Our Side, 228. 79. Martin, With God on Our Side, 229. 80. Robert Billings to Paul Weyrich, July 20, 1981, Weyrich Papers. 81. Marley, “Ronald Reagan,” 858–­59; Martin, With God on Our Side, 233–­35. 82. Randall Balmer, The Making of Evangelicalism (Waco, TX: Baylor University Press, 2010), 62–­63. 83. Mark Dalhouse, An Island in the Lake of Fire (Athens: University of Georgia Press, 1996); Godfrey Hodgson, The World Turned Right Side Up (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1996), 170–­73. 84. Aaron Haberman, “Into the Wilderness: Ronald Reagan, Bob Jones University, and the Political Education of the Christian Right,” Historian 67, no. 2 (Summer 2005): 239–­40. 85. Haberman, “Into the Wilderness,” 239–­40. 86. Raymond Wolters, Right Turn: William Bradford Reynolds, the Reagan Administration, and Black Civil Rights (New York: Transaction, 1996), 475. 87. Reagan and Bush on the Issues, Papers of William Barr, Reagan Presidential Library; Haberman, “Into the Wilderness,” 240–­41. 88. Martin Schram and Charles Babcock, “Reagan Advisers Missed School Case Sensitivity,” Washington Post, January 17, 1982. 89. Thad Cochran et al. to Treasury Secretary Donald Regan, January 26, 1981, Bob Jones and Goldsboro folder, Barr Papers, Reagan Presidential Library; Haberman, “Into the Wilderness,” 241. 90. Schram and Babcock, “Reagan Advisers.” 91. Haberman, “Into the Wilderness,” 222; Trent Lott to Donald Regan, December 21, 1981, Bob Jones and Goldsboro folder, Barr Papers, Reagan Presidential Library. 92. Schram and Babcock, “Reagan Advisers.” 93. Peter Wallison to Donald Regan, Barr Papers, Reagan Presidential Library; Haberman, “Into the Wilderness,” 242–­43. 94. Wallison to Regan, Barr Papers. 95. Schram and Babcock, “Reagan Advisers.” 96. Stuart Taylor, “School Tax Ruling Faces a Challenge,” New York Times, January 9, 1982; Washington Post, January 11, 1982. 97. Denis Gulino, “Tax Exempt Status Restored to Discriminating Church Schools,” United Press International, January 9, 1982, UPI Archives.

358  /  Notes to Pages 250–258 98. Stuart Taylor, “School Tax Ruling.” 99. Haberman, “Into the Wilderness,” 244; Stuart Taylor, “School Tax Ruling.” 100. Stuart Taylor, “School Tax Ruling.” 101. Stuart Taylor, “Ex-­Tax Officials Shift on School Exemption Status,” New York Times, January 12, 1982. 102. Stuart Taylor, “200 in U.S. Agency Criticize Decision on Tax Exemptions,” New York Times, February 3, 1982. 103. Schram and Babcock, “Reagan Advisers.” 104. Stuart Taylor, “School Tax Ruling.” 105. Schram and Babcock, “Reagan Advisers.” 106. Letter to the President of the Senate and the Speaker of the House, in Public Papers of the Presidents of the United States: Ronald Reagan (Washington, DC: Government Printing Office, 1983), 17. 107. Steven Weisman, “Reagan Acts to Bar Tax Break to Schools in Racial Bias Cases,” New York Times, January 19, 1982. 108. Bob Sumner, “Dangerous Proposed Legislation Affecting Christian Schools,” Sword of the Lord, February 12, 1982; Haberman, “Into the Wilderness,” 246. 109. Haberman, “Into the Wilderness,” 246. 110. Anthony Lewis, “Abroad at Home: The Court Says No,” New York Times, May 26, 1983. 111. Haberman, “Into the Wilderness,” 250. 112. Lewis, “Abroad at Home.” 113. Haberman, “Into the Wilderness,” 250. 114. “Reagan Goofs!,” Pro-­Life Political Reporter, special report published by the National Pro-­Life Alliance PAC, August 1981. 115. See George Condon, Jr., “New Right Wants Fulfillment of Reagan Campaign Promises,” Phoenix Gazetter, August 28, 1981. 116. Martin, With God on Our Side, 224–­25. 117. Martin, With God on Our Side, 232. 118. Martin, With God on Our Side, 227–­28. 119. Statement of Father Charles Fiore, Chairman, National Pro-­Life PAC, June 3, 1981, Reagan Presidential Library. 120. Condon, “New Right.” 121. Godwin’s exchange with Dole is quoted in Cal Thomas, VP of Communications for Moral Majority, to Jim Baker, Chief of Staff, October 9, 1981, Reagan Presidential Library. 122. Cal Thomas to Jim Baker, October 9, 1981. 123. Connie Marshner to the Coalition, “White House Briefing on the Family Protection Act,” October 7, 1981, box 17, folder 16, Paul Weyrich Papers, American Heritage Cen­ ter, University of Wyoming, Laramie. 124. Donna Hill, “Censorship: What Johnny Can’t Read,” Washington Post, April 19, 1981; “Family Protection Act,” Connie Marshner to The Coalition, June 17, 1981, box 17, folder 16, Weyrich Papers. 125. Connie Marshner to the Coalition. “White House Briefing on the Family Protec­­ tion Act.” 126. See the Ad Hoc Committee in Defense of Life, Inc. to Gary Bauer, Office of Policy Development, June 17, 1982, Reagan Presidential Library. 127. Father Charles Fiore, Chair of the National Pro-­Life PAC, to Edwin Meese III, Assistant to the President, February 4, 1982, Reagan Presidential Library.

Notes to Pages 258–262  /  359 128. Red Caveney to Edwin Harper, “On Abortion,” memorandum, June 29, 1982, Reagan Presidential Library. 129. Lawrence McAndrews, What They Wished For (Athens: University of Georgia Press, 2013), 233. 130. Morton Blackwell to Red Cavaney, September 14, 1982, Reagan Public Library; Diamond, Roads to Dominion, 234–­35. 131. Red Cavaney to Edwin Harper, “Abortion: Impact on Our Coalition,” June 29, 1982, Weyrich Papers. 132. McAndrews, What They Wished For, 233–­34. 133. McAndrews, What They Wished For, 233–­34. 134. Edwin Harper to President Reagan, “Memorandum on Proposed Action on Senate Abortion Vote,” September 2, 1982, Weyrich Papers. 135. Red Cavaney to Edwin Harper, “Abortion: Impact on Our Coalition,” June 29, 1982; Morton Blackwell to Red Cavaney, September 14, 1982. 136. “Moral Majority Report, March 24, 1982,” early transcript sent by Cal Thomas, Vice President for Communications, Moral Majority, to Morton Blackwell, March 1, 1982. 137. Ronald Reagan, address to the Annual Conservative Political Action Committee Conference, February 26, 1982. 138. Ronald Reagan to Jesse Helms, April 5, 1982, Reagan Presidential Library. 139. McAndrews, What We Wished For, 234. 140. Press conference statement of Paul A. Brown, Director of LAPAC, March 13, 1982, Reagan Presidential Library. 141. Morton Blackwell to Elizabeth Dole, “On the Subject of Dr. James B. Wyngaarden, Director of the National Institutes of Health,” May 12, 1982, Reagan Presidential Library. 142. Morton Blackwell through Diana Lozano, memorandum for Elizabeth Dole, May 14, 1982, Reagan Presidential Library. 143. McAndrews, What They Wished For, 235. 144. Ronald Reagan, template of letter sent to select senators, September, 8, 1982, box 1, folder “Abortion of 1982” (1 of 6), Elizabeth Dole Files, Ronald Reagan Presidential Library. 145. Edwin Harper to President Reagan, Memorandum on Proposed Action on Senate Abortion Vote, September 2, 1982, Reagan Presidential Library. 146. Harper to Reagan, memorandum, September 2, 1982; Morton Blackwell to Elizabeth Dole, September 9, 1982, Reagan Presidential Library. 147. Recommended Telephone Call List for September 8, 1982, to Republican Senators for Cloture Vote, Recommended by Kenneth Duberstein and Edwin Harper, submitted on September 7, 1982; Ronald Reagan to John Heinz, September 7, 1982; Ronald Reagan to Howard Baker, September 7, 1982; Ronald Reagan to Jesse Helms, September 7, 1982; Diana Lozano to Morton Blackwell, September 13, 1982; all in Reagan Presidential Library. 148. Douglas Johnston, John Willke, Paul Weyrich, Robert Dugan, Jr., and Peter Gamm to Morton Blackwell, September 13, 1982; Participants at Jim Baker Meeting, Morton Blackwell to Red Cavaney, September 14, 1982; both in Reagan Presidential Library. 149. McAndrews, What They Wished For, 235. 150. Elizabeth Dole to Ed Harper, memorandum, August 31, 1982, folder, “Abortion of 1982” (4 of 6), Reagan Presidential Library.

360  /  Notes to Pages 263–271 151. McAndrews, What They Wished For, 236–­37; “White House Memo on Meeting with National Leaders of the Pro-­Life Movement,” January 23, 1984, Reagan Presidential Library. 152. “Meeting with National Leaders of the Pro-­Life Movement.” 153. Diamond, Roads to Dominion, 236. 154. See, for example, March for Life phone call, January 22, 1987, Carl Anderson Files, OA 17969, Reagan Presidential Library. 155. Shields, “What Abortionist Killers Believe.” 156. Haberman, “Into the Wilderness”; Martin, With God on Our Side, 232–­33. 157. Gary Bauer to Edwin Harper, memorandum, March 8, 1982, Reagan Presidential Library. 158. Howell Raines, “Reagan Endorses Voluntary Prayer, New York Times, May 7, 1982. 159. Paul Weyrich to GB and PBM, Memorandum on School Prayer, June 20, 1983, Weyrich Papers. 160. Aaron Louise Haberman, “Civil Rights on the Right: The Modern Christian Right and the Crusade for School Prayer, 1962–­1996” (PhD dissertation, University of South Carolina, 2002). 161. Ralph Reed, Active Faith (New York: Free Press, 1996), 116–­18. 162. Sidney Blumenthal cited in Martin, With God on Our Side, 234. 163. “Meeting with National Leaders of the Pro-­Life Movement.” 164. “Thank You President Reagan,” National Right to Life News, May 19, 1988. 165. Ronald Reagan, “Abortion and the Conscience of a Nation,” Human Life Review, February 3, 1983. 166. Cal Thomas to Morton Blackwell, March 23, 1982, Reagan Presidential Library. 167. Morton Blackwell to Cal Thomas, March 25, 1982, Reagan Presidential Library. 168. Cal Thomas to Morton Blackwell, March 20, 1982, Reagan Presidential Library. 169. Morton Blackwell to Cal Thomas, April 6, 1982, Reagan Presidential Library. 170. Cal Thomas to Morton Blackwell, March 1, 1982. 171. Morton Blackwell to Ken Cribb, June 7, 1982, Reagan Presidential Library. 172. Faith Ryan Whittlesey, Office of Public Liaison, memorandum on meeting with Dr. Jerry Falwell, March 14, 1983, Reagan Presidential Library. 173. Quoted in James Davison Hunter, American Evangelicalism (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 1983), 44–­45. 174. “Christian Bill of Rights,” Conservative Digest, November 1980. In return for signing the Christian Bill of Rights and sending it to the Moral Majority’s headquarters in Lynchburg, VA, respondents would receive a “parchment” of the Christian entitlements and an “Old Glory” lapel pin for signers to “proudly wear.” 175. Ronald Reagan, address to the meeting of the National Association of Evangelicals, Orlando, FL, March 8, 1983, in Public Papers of the Presidents of the United States: Ronald Reagan, 1983, 2 volumes (Washington, DC: Government Printing Office, 1984), 1:364. 176. Anthony Lewis, “Onward Christian Soldiers,” New York Times, March 10, 1983. 177. Full-­page newspaper ad, March 9, 1983, in the Moral Majority file of Morton Blackwell, Reagan Presidential Library. 178. National Association of Evangelicals news release, July 5, 1983, Morton Blackwell file, Reagan Presidential Library. 179. Haberman, “Into the Wilderness,” 252. 180. Haynes Johnson, “The Falwell-­Reagan Connection,” Philadelphia Inquirer, April 6, 1983, folder: Moral Majority (1 of 4), OA 9079 (box 7), Morton Blackwell Files,

Notes to Pages 271–276  /  361 Reagan Presidential Library. See also report, “Special Briefing Opposing an Immediate Nuclear Freeze,” Moral Majority Publication, Spring 1983, Morton Blackwell Files, Reagan Presidential Library. The Reagan archives also include a Gallup poll commissioned by the National Association of Evangelicals that showed fundamentalist Christians were more likely than the general public to be against a nuclear freeze. News release, July 5, 1983, folder: Nuclear Freeze (1 of 10), OA 9079 (box 7), Morton Blackwell Files, Reagan Presidential Library. 181. “It’s Going to Be a Classic Liberal vs. Conservative Campaign: An Exclusive Interview with Ronald Reagan,” Conservative Digest, September 1984, 16. 182. See Reed, Active Faith, 114–­15. 183. Roger Bradford, “Conservatives Grade Reagan,” Conservative Digest, December 1983, 6. 184. Inside the Moral Majority, newsletter of the Moral Majority national office, volume 1, November 19, 1982, Falwell Papers, Liberty University Archives, Lynchburg, VA. 185. Martin, With God on Our Side, 235–­36. 186. Christian Voice packet, Doug Holladay files, OA 12249, Reagan Presidential Library. 187. Stephen D. Johnson and Joseph B. Tamney, “The Christian Right and the 1984 Presidential Election,” Review of Religious Research 27, no. 2 (December 1985): 124–­33. 188. Anatole Fellowship, 10138, box 15, folder 2, Weyrich Papers. 189. Christian Voice packet. 190. Dobson and Focus on the Family interview, September 10, 1985, Carl Anderson files, OA 17967, Reagan Presidential Library. 191. See, for example, meeting on June 27, 1985, Tax Reform Background Material, Carl Anderson folders, OA17954, Reagan Presidential Library. 192. Christian Media and Tax Reform folders, August 1, 1985, Carl Anderson files, OA17954, Reagan Presidential Library. 193. David Welna, “Times Have Changed since Reagan’s 1986 Tax Reform,” National Public Radio, October 17, 2011. 194. Martin, With God on Our Side, 252. 195. Central America Misc. folders, Morton Blackwell files, White House, Reagan Presidential Library. 196. Diamond, Roads to Dominion, 239. 197. Nicaragua Tape for Christian Media, March 5, 1986, Carl Anderson files, OA17967; J. Douglas Holladay to Pat Robertson, May 23, 1984, Reagan Presidential Library. 198. J. Douglas Holladay to James Ciccconi, Memorandum on CBN Interview on July 25 with Jim Baker, July 13, 1984, Reagan Presidential Library. 199. Diamond, Roads to Dominion, 239. 200. Bruce Miroff, The Liberal Movement (Lawrence: University Press of Kansas, 2007), 269. 201. Clyde Wilcox, Onward Christian Soldiers? (Boulder, CO: Westview, 1996), 38. 202. Patrick Alitt, Religion in America since 1945 (New York: Columbia University Press, 2003), 198. 203. Cal Thomas and Ed Dobson, Blinded by Might (New York: Zondervan, 2000). 204. Martin, With God on Our Side, 224–­25. 205. Balmer, The Making of Evangelicalism, 72–­73. 206. Martin, With God on Our Side, 309–­10. 207. Reed, Active Faith, 115, 117. 208. Frances Fox Piven and Richard Cloward, Poor People’s Movements (New York: Vintage, 1978); Ann-­Marie Szymanski, Pathways to Prohibition (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2003).

362  /  Notes to Pages 277–286 209. Martin, With God on Our Side, 225–­26. 210. William Bennett and Terry Eastland, “New Right Christians Fighting Back for Traditional American Values,” Conservative Digest, October 1980, 18, first published in Wall Street Journal, September 17, 1980. 211. Cal Thomas quoted in William Martin, “How Ronald Reagan Wowed Evangelicals,” Christianity Today, August 2004, 49. 212. Martin, With God on Our Side, 225–­26. 213. Irving Kristol, “A Tale of Two Parties,” Conservative Digest, March 1983, 10, first published in Wall Street Journal, January 4, 1983 (emphasis in original). Chapter Seven

1.

Barack Obama, Remarks by the President at the 50th Anniversary of the Selma to Montgomery Marches, March 7, 2015, https://www.whitehouse. 2. David Garrow, The FBI and Martin Luther King, Jr. (New York: Penguin, 1983); Tim Weiner, Enemies: A History of the FBI (New York: Random House, 2003); Jeffrey Ogbar, “The FBI’s War on Civil Rights Leaders,” Daily Beast, January 15, 2017. 3. Daniel Schlozman, When Movements Anchor Parties: Electoral Alignments in American History (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2015). Schlozman argues that labor is the “anchor group” of the Democratic Party; this misses, we think, the important transformation of the Democrats during the 1960s, when civil rights organizations became the vanguard of a new form of liberal politics. 4. Theodore Roosevelt, “The New Nationalism,” speech delivered at Osawatomie, KS, August 31, 1910, http://teachingamericanhistory.org/library/document/new-­nationalism -­speech/. 5. Hugh Heclo, “The Sixties False Dawn: Awakenings, Movements, and Postmodern Policy-­Making,” in Integrating the Sixties, ed. Brian Balogh (University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press, 1996). 6. Jeffrey Berry, The Interest Group Society (Boston: Little, Brown, 1984), 28. 7. Charles Tilly, Social Movements, 1768–­2004 (Boulder, CO: Paradigm, 2004), 13. 8. Aaron Haberman, “Into the Wilderness,” Historian 6, no. 2 (Summer 2005): 251–­52. See also Jon Shields, Democratic Virtues of the Christian Right (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2009), 130–­46. 9. Sidney M. Milkis and Jesse H. Rhodes, “George W. Bush, the Republican Party, and the ‘New’ American Party System,” Perspectives on Politics 5, no. 3 (September 2007): 461–­88. 10. Chris Frates, “Liberal Groups Get Makeover,” Politico, June 4, 2009, http://www.poli tico.com/news/stories/0609/23329_Page2.html. 11. Doug McAdam and Karina Koos, Deeply Divided: Racial Politics and Social Movements in Postwar America (New York: Oxford University Press, 2014). 12. Support for the Tea Party is not synonymous with support for the Christian Right. But survey analysis has shown that Tea Party supporters tend to have conservative opinions not just about economic issues but also abortion and same-­sex marriage. Pew Forum on Religion and Politics, The Tea Party and Religion, February 23, 2011, http://www.pewforum.org/2011/02/23/tea-­party-­and-­religion/. On the relationship between the Christian Right and the Tea Party, see Ed Kilgore, “Tevangelicals: How the Christian Right Came to Bless the Economic Agenda of the Tea Party,” New Republic, July 11, 2011, https://newrepublic.com/article/91661/tea-­party-­christian-­right -­michele-­bachmann; and Jo Becker, “An Evangelical Is Back from Life, Lifting Romney,”

Notes to Pages 287–291  /  363 New York Times, September 17, 2012, http://www.nytimes.com/2012/09/23/us/poli tics/ralph-­reed-­hopes-­to-­nudge-­mitt-­romney-­to-­a-­victory.html?_r=1. 13. Jon Carson, former executive director, Organizing for Action, interview with Sidney M. Milkis and John W. York, December 14, 2015. This chapter draws from over twenty-­five interviews conducted with Organizing for Action staff and volunteers, activists in the immigration rights and LGBTQ movements, congressional staff, former officials of the Obama administration, policy experts in think tanks, and party officials. The interviews, which lasted an hour on average, were conducted in person or by phone and were not recorded. Notes were made during the interviews, and our participants were given the right to edit the notes according to their recollections of the conversation. Participants were also given the choice to remain anonymous. We have been very careful to use our interviews in appropriate ways to ensure that conclusions drawn from these discussions are valid. Specifically, we have used these data to draw conclusions about our interviewees’ perceptions about the relationship between the Obama administration and social activists. Throughout, we have avoided equating interviewees’ statements with objective factual information. Rather, interview information has been used to shed light on how individuals in the White House, party organizations, think tanks, universities, law firms, and social groups approached issues and why they took the actions they did. Whenever possible, we have corroborated the information gleaned from interviews with other sources. 14. David Maraniss, “The Content of His Presidency,” Washington Post, April 24, 2016. 15. Sidney M. Milkis and John W. York, “Barack Obama, Organizing for America and the Executive-­Centered Partisanship,” Studies in American Political Development 31 (2017): 1–­23; Karen Orren and Stephen Skowronek, The Policy State (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2017), chapter 4. 16. McAdam and Kloos, Deeply Divided, 253. 17. Texas Department of Housing and Community Affairs, et al., Petitioners v. The Inclusive Communities Project, Inc., et al., No. 13–­1371, June 25, 2015, 25, https://www .oyez.org/cases/2014/13-­1371. 18. Julie Hirschfeld Davis and Binyamin Appelbaum, “Obama Unveils Stricter Rules against Segregation in Housing,” New York Times, July 8, 2015. 19. President Barack Obama, keynote address Civil Rights Summit, July 2, 2014, Lyndon Johnson Presidential Library, Austin, TX, https://www.c-­span.org/video/?318484-­1 /civil-­rights-­act-­50th-­anniversary. 20. Meredith v. Jefferson County Board of Education, No. 05–­915 (2007), https://www .law.cornell.edu/supct/cert/05-­915; Shelby County v. Holder (1913), http://caselaw .findlaw.com/us-­supreme-­court/12-­96.html. 21. Michelle Alexander, The New Jim Crow: Mass Incarceration in the Age of Colorblindness (New York: New Press, 2010); Marie Gottschalk, Caught: The Prison State and the Lockdown of American Politics (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2014); Naomi Murakawa, The First Civil Right: How Liberals Built Prison America (New York: Oxford University Press, 2014); Amy Lerman and Vesla Weaver, Arresting Citizenship (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2014). 22. Jelani Cobb, “The Matter of Black Lives,” New Yorker, March 4, 2016, http://www.new yorker.com/magazine/2016/03/14/where-­is-­black-­lives-­matter-­headed. 23. Danielle Fuentes Morgan, “Obama and Black Lives Matter: An Epilogue,” Al Jazeera, January 27, 2017.

364  /  Notes to Pages 291–297 24. Brittney Cooper, “President Obama Could Have Done More to Remind America That Black Lives Matter,” Cosmopolitan, December 12, 2016. 25. Brittney Cooper, “Obama Could Have Done More.” 26. Morgan, “Obama and Black Lives Matter.” 27. Hugh Heclo, “The Once and Future Chief Executive: Prophecy versus Prediction,” remarks delivered at the Fourth Annual Symposium in Honor of Ronald Reagan, “The Future of the American Presidency,” February 6, 2009, Regent University, Virginia Beach, VA. 28. Heclo, “Once and Future Chief Executive.” 29. Ta-­Nehisi Coates, “My President Was Black,” Atlantic, January/February 2017. 30. Cobb, “Matter of Black Lives.” 31. Jamiles Lartey, “Obama Made Progress on Criminal Justice Reform: Will It Survive the Next President?,” Guardian, November 14, 2016, https://www.theguardian .com/us-­news/2016/nov/14/barack-­obama-­criminal-­justice-­reform-­prison-­sentencing -­police. 32. Lartey, “Obama Made Progress.” 33. Ronald Brownstein, “The Clinton Conundrum,” Atlantic, April 17, 2015, http://www .theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2015/04/the-­clinton-­conundrum/431949/. 34. Kenneth S. Lowande and Sidney M. Milkis, “We Can’t Wait: Barack Obama, Partisan Polarization, and the Administrative Presidency,” Forum 12 (2014): 3–­27. 35. Daniel J. Tichenor, “The Demise of Immigration Reform: Policymaking Barriers under Unified and Divided Government,” in Congress and Policy Making in the 21st Century, ed. Jeffrey Jenkins and Eric Patashnik (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2016), 242–­71. 36. Confidential interviews by Tichenor with immigration rights movement leaders and activists, Democracy’s Shadow Project, March 14–­December 4, 2016. 37. Obama is quoted in Coates, “My President Was Black.” 38. Interviews with Cristina Jimenez, managing director, and Lorella Praeli, advocacy and policy director, United We Dream, Sidney M. Milkis and Daniel J. Tichenor, April 3, 2014. 39. “Secretary Napolitano Announces Deferred Action Process for Young People Who Are Low Law Enforcement Priorities,” June 15, 2012, https://www.dhs.gov/news/2012 06/15/secretary-­napolitano-­announces-­deferred-­action-­process-­young-­people-­who -­are-­low. 40. Praeli interview. 41. See Janet Napolitano to Richard Durbin, August 18, 2011, American Immigration Lawyers Association Document No.11081834; DHS Memorandum on Civil Immigration Enforcement, March 2, 2011, https://www.nilc.org/wp-­content/uploads /2015/11/Napolitano-­response-­to-­senators-­2011-­08-­18.pdf. 42. Tom K. Wong, “In Their Own Words: A Nationwide Survey of Undocumented Millennials,” http://www.tomwongphd.com/survey. 43. Gabriel Sanchez, “The Implications for Immigration Reform for Latin American Behavior,” presentation at the John Galbraith Conference on Immigration, October 11, 2013, sponsored by the Miller Center, University of Virginia, Washington, DC. 44. Daniel J. Tichenor, “The Overwhelming Barriers to Immigration Reform,” Atlantic, May 25, 2016; Daniel J. Tichenor, Dividing Lines: The Politics of Immigration Control in America (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2002). 45. This section draws extensively on Boris Heersink and Sidney M. Milkis, “Through Seneca Falls, and Selma, and Stonewall: Barack Obama and the Gay Rights Movement,”

Notes to Pages 297–305  /  365 paper prepared for the 2015 Annual Meeting of the American Political Science Association, September 3–­6, San Francisco, CA. 46. Jamie Fuller, “Holder Call LGBT Rights One of the ‘Civil Rights Challeges of Our Time,’ ” Washington Post, February 4, 2014. 47. Marc Solomon interview with Sidney M. Milkis and Boris Heersink, August 15, 2015. 48. Lori Jean interview with Sidney M. Milkis and Boris Heersink, August 5, 2015. 49. Tobias Wolff, interview with Sidney M. Milkis and Borris Heersink, January 6, 2016. 50. Jean interview. 51. Evan Wolfson interview with Sidney M. Milkis and Boris Heersink, July 27, 2015. 52. Steven Grossman, former DNC chair, interview with Sidney M. Milkis and Boris Heersink, December 15, 2015. 53. Solomon interview. 54. Former White House official interview with Sidney M. Milkis and Boris Heersink, not for attribution, July 22, 2015. 55. Andrew Tobias interview with Sidney M. Milkis and Boris Heersink, January 15, 2016. 56. Solomon interview. 57. Cleve Jones interview with Sidney M. Milkis and Boris Heersink, December 19, 2015. 58. Wolfson interview. See also Carrie Wofford, “Why Equality Is Winning,” U.S. News, March 26, 2014, https://www.usnews.com/opinion/blogs/carrie-­wofford/2014/03/26 /how-­did-­public-­opinion-­on-­gay-­marriage-­shift-­so-­quickly. Heather Cronk, codirector of the militant direct-­action organization GetEQUAL, while noting that she is “highly critical of [the moderate tactics used by] Freedom to Marry,” also acknowledged that “one of the really brilliant things they have done is change the narrative on marriage and family, by refusing to say that the [Christian] right has a corner on the family market.” Heather Cronk interview with Sidney M. Milkis and Boris Heersink, October 6, 2015. 59. Mark Halperin and John Heilemann, Double Down: Game Change 2012 (New York: Penguin, 2013), 298. 60. Marc Solomon, Winning Marriage: The Inside Story of How Same-­Sex Couples Took on the Politicians and Pundits—­and Won (Lebanon, NH: ForeEdge, 2014). 61. A Gallup poll of early May 2012 found that 51 percent of Americans approved of Obama’s support for same-­sex marriage rights. More importantly, 71 percent of Democrats and 53 percent of independents approved. Predictably, 74 percent of Republicans disapproved of Obama’s new position (Gallup, May 11, 2012). 62. Carl M. Cannon, “Democrats and Gay Marriage, No Profile in Courage,” June, 27, 2013, RealClearPolitics, http://www.realclearpolitics.com/articles/2013/06/27/demo crats_and_gay_marriage_no_profiles_in_courage_118998.html. 63. Organizing for Action, email, https://www.barackobama.com/lgbt-­equality/. 64. Interview with White House adviser, not for attribution, July 22, 2015. 65. Barack Obama, second inaugural address, https://obamawhitehouse.archives.gov/blog /2013/01/21/second-­inauguration-­barack-­obama. 66. Wolfson interview. 67. Caitlyn Emma, “Obama Administration Releases Directive on Transgender Rights to School Bathrooms,” Politico, May 12, 2016, http://www.politico.com/story/2016/05 /obama-­administration-­title-­ix-­transgender-­student-­rights-­223149. 68. Lowande and Milkis, “We Can’t Wait.” 69. Lowande and Milkis, “We Can’t Wait.” 70. Reid J. Epstein, “NCLR Head: ‘Deporter-­in Chief,” Politico, March 4, 2014.

366  /  Notes to Pages 305–312 71. “The Obama Administration’s DAPA and Expanded DACA Programs,” National Immigration Law Center Bulletin, March 2, 2015. 72. News Conference of Immigration Advocacy Leaders, White House, February 25, 2015, http://www.presidency.ucsb.edu/ws/index.php?pid=109670; Praeli interview. 73. Adam Litak and Michael D. Shear, “Supreme Court Tie Blocks Obama Immigration Plan,” New York Times, June 23, 1916, http://www.nytimes.com/2016/06/24/us/su preme-­court-­immigration-­obama-­dapa.html?_r=0. 74. Coates, “My President Was Black.” 75. Katie Glueck, “Christian Leaders See Influence Growing on Trump,” Politico, November 25, 2016. 76. Jerry Falwell, Jr., interview on Fox Business News, September 27, 2016. 77. Brownstein, “Clinton Conundrum.” 78. Donald Trump, inaugural address, http://edition.cnn.com/2017/01/20/politics/trump -­inaugural-­address/. 79. “Newt Gingrich Joins Great America Alliance as Co-­chair to Advance President Trump’s National Agenda,” Politico, January 30, 2017, http://www.bizjournals.com/prnews wire/press_releases/2017/01/30/SF00092. 80. Gorsuch’s confirmation will likely shift the balance on the court toward greater acceptance of public action that advances conservative policies in national security, protection of the homeland, policing, and civil rights. 81. Guian McKee, “Why Are Republicans Trapped on Health Care? Because Democrats Stole Their Best Idea,” Washington Post, June 26, 2017. 82. For example, see Lowande and Milkis, “We Can’t Wait.” Trump followed up this order with additional actions that threatened to dismantle the Affordable Care Act through executive fiat, most notably his decision in October 2017 to scrap subsidies to health insurance companies that help pay out-­of-­pocket costs of low-­income people. Robert Pear, Maggie Haberman, and Reed Abelson, “Trump to Scrap Critical Health Care Subsidies, Hitting Obama Care Again,” October 12, 2017, New York Times, https://www.nytimes.com/2017/10/12/us/politics/trump-­obamacare-­exe cutive-­order-­health-­insurance.html. Trump’s aggressive adminstrative actions, seeking to reverse or redeploy Obama’s initiatives in homeland security, health care, climate change, civil rights, criminal justice, and immigration policy (both DAPA and DACA were rescinded), continued through his first year. See Sidney M. Milkis and Nicholas Jacobs, “ ‘I Alone Can Fix It’: Donald Trump, the Adminstrative Presidency, and Hazards of Executive-­Centered Partisanship,” Forum 15, no. 3 (2017): 583–­613. 83. Erica Chenowith and Jeremy Pressman, “This Is What We Learned by Counting the Marches,” Monkey Cage, Feburary 7, 2017; Yamiche Alcinder, “Liberal Activists Join Forces against Common Foe: Trump,” New York Times, February 14, 2017, https:// www.nytimes.com/2017/02/14/us/politics/protesters-­resist-­trump.html?_r=0. 84. John Knefel, “Inside the Huge JFK Airport Protest over Trump’s Muslim Ban,” Rolling Stone, January 29, 2017. 85. Lisa Mascaro, “Trump’s Election Has Mobilized a Resistance like No Other, but Will Democrats’ Answer to the Tea Party Divide the Ranks?” Los Angeles Times, April 23, 2017, http://beta.latimes.com/politics/la-­na-­pol-­tea-­party-­democrats-­20170423-­story .html. 86. Jeremy Peters, “Trump Keeps His Conservative Movement Allies Closest,” New York Times, August 2, 2017, https://www.nytimes.com/2017/08/02/us/politics/trump-­con servative-­republicans.html?emc=eta1.

Notes to Pages 312–317  /  367 87. John Bowden, “David Duke Thanks Trump for Blaming ‘Alt-­Left,’ ” Hill, August 15, 2017; Greg Price, “White Supremacist David Duke Thanks Donald Trump for Slamming Antifa and Leftists at Press Conference,” Newsweek, August 15, 2017. 88. Sean Langille, “Evangelical Leader Praises Trump’s ‘Bold, Truthful’ Statement about Charlottesville,” Washington Examiner, August 16, 2017. 89. Chris Moody, “Evangelicals Urge More Action from Trump against ‘Alt-­Right,’ ” CNN .com, September 28, 2017; Susan Wright, “Family Research Council’s Tony Perkins “We Are a Nation in Crisis,” Resurgent, August 18, 2017; Coates, “My President Was Black.” 90. Peters, “Conservative Movement Allies.” 91. Charles Kessler quoted in Jeremy Peters, “Building a Trump-­Centric Intellectual Move­ ment, with or without Him,” New York Times, August 6, 2017. 92. Abraham Lincoln, “Second Inaugural Address,” March 4, 1865, in The Collected Works of Abraham Lincoln, ed. Roy Basler, (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 1953–­55), 8:333. 93. Frederick Douglass, The Life and Times of Frederick Douglass: From 1817–­1882, ed. John Lobb (London: Christian Age Office, 1882), 32. 94. Frederick Douglass, “The Late Election,” Douglass’ Monthly, ed. Frederick Douglass, December 1860, 370. 95. Frederick Douglass, “The Confiscation and Emancipation Law,” Douglass’ Monthly, ed. Frederick Douglass, August 1862. 96. Frederick Douglass, Autobiographies, ed. Henry Louis Gates (New York: Library of America, 1994), 787–­98. 97. “Douglass on Lincoln,” New York Times, April 22, 1876.

I nde x

abolition movement, 2, 9, 18, 23, 34, 41–­ 45, 49–­52, 56, 58–­59, 61–­62, 64–­65, 67–­71, 74–­75, 77–­78, 81, 95, 102, 188, 276, 280–­83, 291, 315–­16, 327n14; rivalry within, 46, 66, 72; women, important role in, 47–­48 abortion, 231–­32, 238, 240–­41, 256–­63, 267; abortion clinics, blocking of, 214; evangelical anti-­abortion movement, 208–­9; Hyde amendments, 209; opposition to, 201–­2; as “Silent Holocaust,” 202 Addams, Jane, 92–­96, 105, 108–­9, 122, 187 Ad Hoc Committee for the Defense of Life, 258 affirmative action, 158, 181, 230 Affordable Care Act (ACA), 39, 300, 310–­ 11, 366n82. See also Obamacare African Americans, 73–­74, 76, 80, 84–­85, 89, 99, 101, 103, 105, 143, 152, 170, 179, 185, 187, 205, 225, 281–­82, 292, 303–­4, 315, 334–­35n64; alienation among, 164–­65; Amenia conferences, 106–­7, 116; armed forces, desegregation of, 139; black soldiers, during Civil War, 62–­63, 67, 316; black soldiers, during World War I, 109, 160; black vote, ex­ pansion of, 146, 156; discrimination against, 2, 31, 90, 102, 130–­33, 135, 137, 140–­41, 151, 154, 164–­65, 172–­ 73, 178, 206, 246–­47, 249–­53, 295; federal civil patronage, 87; law enforcement officers, struggles between, 290; militancy of, 163, 165–­66, 168–­69;

mob violence against, 119, 126, 129, 140; “Negro question,” 81, 93–­94, 96, 112; New Deal, effect on, 116–­17, 122–­ 23; northern migration of, 137; party allegiance, switching of, 97; radical insurgents, rise of, 159; rage of, 162; urban roots, 107–­8; white Christian schools, 245–­46, 248; woman’s suffragist movement, betrayal by, 71–­72; women, as nat­ ural allies of, 47–­48. See also segregation; slavery African Methodist Episcopal Zion Church (AME), 98 Agricultural Adjustment Administration (AAA), 116 AIDS Coalition to Unleash Power (ACT UP), 5 Alabama, 88, 94, 101, 120, 140, 155, 159, 166, 290 Alexander, Donald, 250 Ali, Muhammad, 168 Alito, Samuel, 289 Altgeld, John, 24 alt-­right movement, 308 America First movement, 307 American Anti-­Slavery Society (AASS), 44–­ 46, 48, 54, 63, 68 American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU), 108, 190, 250 American Council of Christian Churches, 191 American Dream, 163 American Federation of Labor (AFL), 24, 28–­29

370 / Index American Jewish Committee, 250 American Life Lobby, 258 American Revolution, 9, 46, 49 Americans for Democratic Action, 140 Americans for Tax Reform (ATR), 273–­74 Anatole Fellowship, 273 Anderson, Carl, 273 Anderson, John, 229–­30, 232 Animal Liberation Front, 23 Annual Conservative Political Action Conference, 260 Anthony, Susan B., 47, 63–­66, 71 Anti-­Imperial League (AIL), 20–­21 Anti-­Lynching Day, 119–­20 Anti-­Slavery Society, 71 Appeal (newspaper), 44 Appeal in Four Articles (Walker), 43–­44 Antietam, 61–­62 antiwar movement, 159–­60, 275 Arizona, 244, 309 Arnesen, Eric, 133 Asia, 160, 168, 343n72 Atlanta, GA, 214 Atlanta Compromise, 31 Autobiography (Malcolm X), 202–­3, 223 Bachrach, Peter, 11 Bailey, John, 176 Bailey, Josiah, 121 Baker, Ella, 154 Baker, Howard, 219, 241, 249 Baker, James, 239–­40, 255–­56, 262, 274 Baker, Newton Diehl, 110 Bakker, Jim, 210, 213, 254 Ball, William, 253 Balmer, Randall, 188, 202, 218, 276 Bannon, Steve, 308 Baratz, Morton, 11 Barkley, Alben, 120 Bauer, Gary, 239, 257, 259, 264–­65 Bayh, Birch, 236 Beecher, Henry Ward, 47 Beer, Samuel, 164, 345n98 Bennett, William, 213–­14, 277 Benson, Allen, 107 Berge, Wendell, 128 Berry, Jeffrey, 38, 284 Bethune, Mary McLeod, 117, 131–­32 Biddle, Francis, 125 Biden, Joe, 260, 302 Biemiller, Andrew, 140

Billings, Robert, 209, 211–­14, 220, 239, 244, 247 Billy Graham Evangelical Association, 196 Birmingham, AL, 144, 146, 149, 157; church bombing, 82 Birney, James, 48–­49 birtherism, 307, 313 Birth of a Nation, The (film), 103, 106, 110, 112, 130; protests against, 104–­5 Black Codes, 73 Black Lives Matter, 9–­10, 290–­93 Black Power (Carmichael and Hamilton), 163 black power movement, 31–­32, 162–­63, 173, 177; ghetto, as rallying cry of, 168–­69 Black Reconstruction in America (Du Bois), 73 Blackwell, Morton, 220–­21, 238–­39, 241–­ 43, 255, 257, 259, 261, 267–­68, 275, 284–­85 Blair, Montgomery, 68 Blinded by Might (Dobson and Thomas), 275 Bloody Sunday march, 279 Blumenthal, Sidney, 265–­66 Bob Jones University, 206, 209, 220, 245–­ 49, 252–­54 Bob Jones University ruling, 253 Boland amendment, 274–­75 Bonus March, 130, 338n164 Bond, Julian, 176 Boone and Crockett Club, 26 Bork, Robert, 244–­45 Boston, 103, 290 Boston Female Anti-­Slavery Society, 45 Brexit, 308 Briggs, Kenneth, 219 Bright, Bill, 217, 227, 229, 254, 264 Brinkley, Alan, 28 Brooke, Edward, 172 Brotherhood of Sleeping Car Porters, 1 Brown, Edmund G., 166 Brown, H. Rap, 170 Brown, John, 8, 53, 77; raid at Harpers Ferry, 9, 23, 31, 49 Brown, Michael, 290 Brown, Paul, 260–­61 Brown v. Board of Education, 16, 133, 141, 197, 214 Brown Chapel African Methodist Church, 157

Index / 371 Browning, Orville, 54 Brown King, Marjorie, 104 Brownstein, Ronald, 293 Brownsville affair, 97, 112 Bryan, William Jennings, 21, 91–­92, 190 Bryant, Anita, 204–­5 Buchanan, James, 23, 49–­50 Buchanan, Patrick, 32, 273 Bunche, Ralph, 117–­18 Burger, William, 253 Burleson, Albert, 102 Burns, James MacGregor, 12, 191 Bush, George H. W., 15, 32, 222, 233 Bush, George W., 10, 32, 38, 277, 284–­85, 289, 292–­93, 308, 310 Butler Act, 190 Caldwell, James, 62 Califano, Joseph, 157 California, 137, 166, 218, 292 Callender, Eugene, 161 Campus Crusade, 219 Carmichael, Stokely, 162–­63, 167–­68, 170 Carson, Jon, 286–­87, 302–­3 Carter, David, 161 Carter, Jimmy, 15, 213, 215, 217, 220–­21, 226, 228–­30, 234–­35, 240, 242, 246–­47, 249, 272; as born a­ gain, 207; evangelicals, relation with, 208–­10, 214; Playboy interview with, 208 Casey, William, 222, 233–­34 Castro, Julian, 289 Catsam, Derek, 145–­46 Catt, Carrie Chapman, 29 Cayton, Horace, 119 Center High School, 142 Central America, 273–­75 Chaney, James, 153, 229 Charleston, SC, 203–­4 Charlottesville, VA, 312 Cheney, Dick, 38, 285 Chicago, 120, 152, 167–­68, 170, 176–­77, 179, 290; housing segregation in, 172; open housing fight for, 162, 172 Child, Lydia Maria, 47, 54, 58, 62, 66 China, 343n72 Chinese Exclusion Leagues, 33 Chinese exclusion movement, 42 Christian Coalition, 284 Christian Day School movement, 209–­10 Christian Economics (journal), 183, 194

Christian Freedom Foundation (CFF), 183–­ 84, 194, 207 Christianity, 188, 192 Christianity and Social Crisis (Rauschenbusch), 188 Christianity Today (magazine), 207 Christian libertarianism, 194, 199, 224–­25, 228 Christian Medical Society, 202 Christian Right, 6–­10, 18, 28, 32, 36, 38, 42, 166, 177, 182, 184–­85, 191–­92, 195, 199, 202–­3, 217–­20, 222, 224, 228, 247–­48, 252–­56, 265–­68, 273, 281–­82, 285, 287, 298, 304, 312–­13, 317, 365n58; abortion issue, 15, 33, 186, 201, 210–­15, 221, 223, 233, 240–­ 41, 259, 262–­63, 269; coalition and party building, 225–­26; family values, 37, 221, 269, 286, 308; as institutional movement, 226, 277; legislative accomplishments of, as negligible, 276; origins of, 187; public square, distance from, 280; and Reagan, 229–­31, 235–­44, 257, 259, 271–­72, 274–­78, 283, 286; Republican triumph, credit for, 236; school prayer, 263–­64; strategies of, 186–­87; symbolic recognition of, 277; Tea Party, 362n12. See also Christian schools; conservative movement; evangelicalism Christian School Action, 209, 220 Christian schools, 224, 308–­9; and IRS, 206, 209–­10, 233–­34, 245–­48, 250, 253–­54, 257, 308–­9; as segregation academies, 185, 205–­6, 209, 223, 230, 246–­48, 312 Christian Voice, 213, 217–­19, 263, 273 Church, Frank, 236 Church League of America, 192 citizen militia movements, 23, 25 City Chapel, 193, 194 Civilian Conservation Corps (CCC), 116–­17 Civil Liberties Committee, 121 Civil Liberties Unit, 124. See also Civil Rights Section (CRS) Civil Rights Act (1964), 135, 152, 172–­73, 178, 206, 251, 289–­90 Civil Rights Act (1965), 167, 178, 290 Civil Rights Act (1968), 180, 288–­89 civil rights activism, 3, 18, 36, 81, 106, 112, 134, 192, 195, 224, 256–­57, 281–­84; lynching, opposition to, 107

372 / Index Civil Rights Acts, 18, 31, 127, 200, 276. See also specific acts Civil Rights Commission, 209 civil rights movement, 6–­7, 16, 30–­31, 36, 38–­39, 42, 79–­82, 96, 107, 112–­ 13, 122–­25, 128, 135–­36, 139, 164, 177, 181, 185–­87, 189, 197–­98, 200, 275, 280–­81, 285, 288–­89, 291, 317; aggressive­ness of, 132; demonstra­ tions of, 144–­46; “long civil rights movement,” 133, 184, 224; lynching, as key focal point, 126; modern presidency, parallel emer­gence of, 133–­34, 137; nonviolent re­sistance of, 225; Silent Parade, 108; World War I, effect on, 109 Civil Rights Section (CRS), 124–­29, 134. See also Civil Liberties Unit civil society, 189 Civil War, 8, 29, 33–­34, 41, 43, 50, 53, 74–­ 78, 80–­81, 83, 115, 160, 178, 281, 287, 315, 327n14; black soldiers, recruiting of, 62–­63; Civil War amendments, 70–­73 Clansman, The (Dixon), 103 Clarkson, James Sullivan, 88 Clay, Henry, 49 Cleveland, Grover, 4, 23–­24, 26, 33, 101 Clifford, Clark 138 Clinton, Bill, 25, 292, 298; Third Way politics of, 297 Clinton, Hillary, 40, 306–­7 Cloward, Richard, 18, 276, 345n98 Coalitions for America, 258 Coates, Ta-­Nehisi, 292 Codding, Ichabod, 50 Coe, Kevin, 242 Cold War, 137, 139, 141, 143, 148–­49, 185, 223, 270, 281 Coleman, William, 253 College Republican National Committee, 265 Colson, Charles, 219 Columbus, OH, 120 Committee Against Jim Crow in Military Service and Training, 139 Committee on the Conduct of the War, 56, 59–­60 Committee of One Million, 193 Committee for the Survival of a Free Congress, 203

Communism, 195–­96 Communist Party, 344n87 Community Action Programs (CAPs), 163–­65 Compromise of 1850, 48 Compromise of 1877, 76 Concerned Women of America, 218 Confiscation Act, 57, 60, 72, 315–­16 Congressional Black Caucus, 32 Congress of Industrial Organizations (CIO), 27–­29 Congress of Racial Equality (CRE), 135, 154, 158, 162, 200 Conlan, John, 216–­17, 219, 230, 238–­39 Connally, John, 216–­17, 219, 230 Connecticut, 65 Connor, Eugene “Bull,” 144 conservation movement, 26–­27 Conservative Caucus, 211 Conservative Digest (journal), 211 conservative movement, 28, 32, 37–­40, 166, 181–­82, 184–­87, 189, 199–­200, 202–­3, 210–­11, 213–­20, 222, 236, 245, 247, 251–­52, 258, 261, 267–­69, 271–­ 72, 274–­77, 281, 283, 286–­87, 309; ac­ tivism of, 228–­29, 233, 235, 237–­44, 256–­57, 265–­66, 273, 284, 306, 314; strategies of, 226–­27; and Trump, 307–­ 8, 310, 312–­13. See also Christian Right; Christian schools; evangelicalism Conservative Political Action Conference, 241, 269, 273 Convention of Loyal Women of the Republic, 71 Convention of the New England Anti-­ Slavery Society, 61 Conway, Kellyanne, 313 Cooper, Brittney, 291 Cooper, Charles, 249 Coors, Joseph, 203 Costigan-­Walker Act, 119 Costigan-­Walker bill, 120 Council for Inter-­American Security, 274 Coxey, Jacob, 23–­24 Coxey’s Army, 23–­24, 130 Crane, Philip, 216, 229 Crisis (journal), 94, 109, 113, 118, 181 Crisp, Mary, 232 Crittenden, John J., 55, 59 Croly, Herbert, 77, 83, 100–­101, 181 Cronk, Heather, 365n58

Index / 373 Crum, William, 87 Cuba, 21 culture war, 183–­84 Curley, Mayor, 105 Curtis, Pam, 232 Dade County, FL, 204–­5 Dahl, Robert, 11 Daley, Richard J., 167 Darrow, Clarence, 190 Darwin, Charles, 76, 188, 190 Davis, Jefferson, 97, 330n90 Davis, John P., 117 Dean, Howard, 300 Deaver, Michael, 222, 230, 239–­40, 249, 251, 255, 262 Declaration of Independence, 46, 63, 69–­ 71, 77, 114, 279, 303 DeConcini, Dennis, 260 Defenders of the Christian Faith, 193 Defense of Marriage Act (DOMA), 298 Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals (DACA), 293, 296, 304–­6. See also Dream Act; Dreamers Deferred Action for Parents of Americans and Lawful Permanent Residents (DAPA), 305–­6 Delany, Martin, 44 Delaware, 94 Democratic National Committee (DNC), 39, 138, 155, 340n25, 342n54; Colored Advisory Committee, 115–­16 Democratic National Convention: in 1924, 189; in 1936, 121; in 1948, 140; in 1964, 96, 152, 159; in 1968, 10, 155–­ 56, 175–­77; in 2012, marriage equality plank, 299–­300, 302 Democratic Party, 68, 95, 100, 165, 212, 216, 227–­28, 236, 287, 299, 305, 311, 313–­14; African American voters, courting of, 97–­98, 115–­16; convention rules, reform of, 154–­56; fissure in, 140, 155, 166; labor, as anchor of, 175, 362n2; LGBTQ community, 302; McGovern Democrats, 177; movement politics, 285; South, losses in, 166; “southern cage,” 117; southern wing, beholden to, 113–­14, 120–­21 Denton, Jeremiah, 236 Department of Homeland Security (DHS), 310

Department of Housing and Urban Development (HUD), 173, 180 Detroit, 120, 132, 167, 169–­70, 179 Dickinson, Anna, 47, 66–­69, 330n89; as Second Joan of Arc, 65 Dionne, E. J., 276 Dirksen, Everett McKinley, 151–­52, 173, 179 Dix, Dorothy, 105–­6 Dixiecrats, 140 Dixon, Thomas, 103 Dobson, Ed, 231, 235–­36, 275–­277 Dobson, James, 210, 239, 273, 309 Dolan, John (Terry), 211, 241, 270 Dole, Elizabeth, 241–­42, 256–­57, 262 Dominick, Peter, 344n87 Domke, David, 242 Dornan, Bob, 210 Double V campaign, 138 Douglas, Stephen, 49; doctrine of popular sovereignty, 50 Douglass, Charles, 62 Douglass, Frederick, 3, 11–­12, 44, 47–­48, 55–­57, 62–­63, 65–­69, 71, 73, 75, 95, 109, 160, 301, 315–­17, 330n90, 331n92 Douglass, Lewis, 62 Dream Act, 293–­95. See also Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals (DACA) Dreamers, 293–­97, 304–­5. See also Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals (DACA) Dred Scott case, 51, 55 Du Bois, W. E. B., 73, 80, 84, 89, 92–­94, 97–­98, 101, 105–­7, 113, 115, 118, 160, 189; color line, problem of, 85; Democratic Party civil rights plank, 95–­96; on Lincoln’s death, 74; New Deal realignment, anticipation of, 97, 116; Niagara Movement, role in, 31, 90; on Reconstruction, 74, 81; Wilson, support for, 99; World War I, support for, 109, 161 Duke, David, 312 Durbin, Dick, 293 Dyer, Thomas, 84 Eagle Forum, 233, 242, 257, 274 Eastland, Terry, 213–­14, 277 East Saint Louis, IL: riots in, 107–­8 Economic Recovery Tax Act (1981), 243 Egger, Roscoe, 247–­48 Eighteenth Amendment, 190, 276

374 / Index Eisenach, Eldon, 77 Eisenhower, Dwight D., 16, 37, 136, 141–­ 43, 146, 186, 193, 197–­99, 223 El Salvador, 274 Emancipation League, 55–­56, 59 Emancipation Proclamation, 53, 63–­66, 74, 131, 147, 301, 316 Engel v. Vitale, 205 Environmental Front, 23 Equal Employment Opportunity Commission (EEOC), 151, 341n42; Title VII of, 178–­79 Equal Rights Amendment (ERA), 183, 208, 210–­11, 215, 221, 223, 225, 231–­32, 244, 265 Europe, 62, 104, 160, 266, 308 evangelicalism, 187, 200–­202, 208, 225, 269, 282; alcohol, banning of, 190; causes of, 189–­90; dispensational pre­ millennialism, 188; domesticated evan­ gelicalism, 199; retreat of, 190–­91; theory of evolution, rejection of, 188, 190. See also Christian right; Christian schools; conservative movement Evers, Charles, 176 Evers, Medgar, 176 Executive Reorganization Act, 124 Fahey, Charles, 140 Fair Employment Board, 140 Fair Employment Practices Committee (FEPC), 2, 131–­34, 137 Fair Housing Act, 288–­89 Faith and Freedom Coalition, 286, 308 Falwell, Jerry, 8, 200–­201, 204–­5, 208, 210, 212–­14, 216–­20, 222–­23, 225–­27, 229, 231, 235–­36, 240, 242–­45, 247, 254, 257, 264, 267–­71, 273, 275 Falwell, Jerry, Jr., 309, 312–­13 Family Policy Advisory Board (FPAB), 233–­34 Family Protection Act (FPA), 257 Family Protection Report (newsletter), 204 Family Research Council, 239, 312 Farley, James, 115, 121 Farmer, James, 135–­36, 154, 158–­59 Faubus, Orval, 142 Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI), 313–­14 Federal Council of Churches, 194

Federal Housing Administration (FHA), 117 Federalist Papers (Hamilton and Madison), 12; Federalist 72, 75 Fein, Bruce, 249 Field, Marshall, 189 Fifield, James, Jr., 37, 194–­95, 208 Fifteenth Amendment, 34, 70–­71, 76, 80, 92, 95, 112, 126, 135, 248, 282 Fiore, Charles, 255–­56 First Amendment, 45; school prayer, 264–­65 First Congregational Church, 194 Fisher, Annie, 335n77 Florida, 94, 295, 307 Focus on the Family, 269 Folsom, Fred G., 126 Folsom, James, 236 Foner, Eric, 57–­58, 73 Foraker, Joseph, 91 Ford, Gerald R., 206, 209, 214–­17, 221–­22, 246–­47, 250 Ford, Henry, 193 Foreman, James, 159 Fort Sumter, 52 Foster, Abby Kelley, 48 Fourteenth Amendment, 34, 71–­72, 76, 92, 95, 112, 126–­27, 135, 282, 298 Fowler, Don, 300 Framers, 12 Francis, Megan Ming, 101, 107, 112 Franklin, Benjamin, 49 Franklin, John Hope, 141 Freedom to Marry, 298–­300, 302, 365n58 Freedom Summer, 155, 251 Free Soil Party, 49 free speech fights, 24 Frémont, John C., 53–­54, 57, 60, 66, 68, 315 Fugitive Slave Act, 56 fugitive slaves, 56–­57, 59–­60 fundamentalism, 189–­90, 193 Fuqua, Carl, 170 Gaines, Steve, 312–­13 Galbraith, John Kenneth, 147 Garrison, William Lloyd, 8, 29, 44–­47, 49, 52, 55–­56, 61–­62, 66, 68–­70, 98, 185 Garvey, Marcus, 31, 107–­8 Garza, Alicia, 292 Gaventa, John, 11

Index / 375 gay rights movement, 1, 204, 207, 211, 213, 223–­24, 240, 298–­301, 303–­4. See also LGBTQ community General Motors, 29 George, Walter, 123 Georgia, 94, 122, 149–­51, 166, 176–­77 Gergen, David, 251 Germany, 104, 111, 122 Gersle, Gary, 96 GetEQUAL, 365n58 Gilded Age, 26, 33, 77 Giminez, John, 220 Gingrich, Newt, 310 Ginsberg, Allen, 202 Gish, Lillian, 103 Giuliani, Rudy, 310 Glass, Carter, 123 Glazer, Nathan, 164 Godwin, Ron, 242, 256, 272 Goldwater, Barry, 152, 172, 220–­21, 229, 238 Gompers, Samuel, 25 Goodman, Andrew, 153, 229 Goodwin, Richard, 146–­47 Gorsuch, Neil, 310 gradualist movement, 87 Graham, Billy, 37, 186, 195, 200–­201, 207–­ 9, 223, 225, 229, 237, 269; civil rights movement, 197–­98; desegregation, call for, 198; Pittsburgh crusade of, 198–­99; racial justice, advocating of, 198; South Carolina crusade, 196, 198; Truman, meeting with, 196–­97 Graham, Hugh Davis, 178 Grant, Ulysses S., 70 Gray, Nellie, 255 Great America Alliance, 310 Great Britain, 55, 62, 308 Great Depression, 36, 97, 116, 132, 191, 223 Great Recession, 39, 309 Great Society, 146, 159–­60, 163, 165, 168–­69, 174–­75, 178, 180–­82, 201, 228, 237–­38, 287, 297, 313, 343n72, 345–­46n104 Greeley, Horace, 61–­62 Green v. Connally, 246, 248 Green v. Kennedy, 205–­6 Greenspan, Alan, 222 Griffith, D. W., 103, 106

Grimké, Angelina, 47 Grimké, Sarah, 47 Grossman, Steven, 300 Grovey v. Townsend, 125–­26 Guam, 21 Guffey, Joseph, 115–­16 Haines, Harold, 29 Haines, Herbert, 18 Halleck, Charles, 341n44 Hamer, Fannie Lou, 153, 155, 175–­76 Hamilton, Alexander, 3, 5, 12, 75, 84 Hamilton, Charles, 163, 167–­69 Hamlin, Hannibal, 65 Hammond, Franklin T., 335n77 Hampton, Wade, 123 Hannaford, Paul, 222 Harding, Warren G., 112 Harlem, 168, 170 Harlem Community Action Program, 164 Harper, Edwin, 259 Harrington, Michael, 147 Hart, Gary, 250 Hastie, William, 126 Hatch, Orrin, 217, 240–­41, 258, 260–­61, 265 Hatch amendment, 258–­59, 263 Hearst, William Randolph, 196 Heineman task force, 164, 345n100 Helms, Jesse, 210, 229, 255, 258, 260–­62, 264 Helms amendment, 262–­63 Henry, Aaron, 155 Heritage Foundation, 203–­4, 274 Hicks, James L., 161–­62 High, Stanley, 121–­22 Hillman, Sidney, 27 Hills v. Gautreaux, 179 Hincapie, Marielena, 306 History of the American People (Wilson), 103 Hitler, Adolf, 122 Holder, Eric, 297 Holder, Luther, 128 Hollowell, J. Mott, 335n77 Homestead Act, 73 Hooks, Benjamin, 250–­51 Hoover, Herbert, 115, 189, 195, 338n164 Hoover, J. Edgar, 9, 162 House Rules Committee, 137 Houston, 109

376 / Index Huckabee, Mike, 229 Hughes, Charles Evans, 107 Hughes, Langston, 1–­2 Hugo, Victor, 30, 151 Hull-­House, 187 Human Rights Campaign, 285 Humbard, Rex, 201, 229 Humphrey, Gordon, 217 Humphrey, Hubert H., 140, 153, 155, 172, 176 Hunter, David, 315 Hyde, Henry, 233, 255 Ickes, Harold, 118–­19 Illinois, 50, 94 Immigration and Custom Enforcement (ICE), 295–­96 Immigration and Nationality Act (INA) (1965), 297 immigration reform, 39, 287, 293–­97, 304, 306, 311 Inclusive Communities Project, 288 Independent (newspaper), 47 Independent Progressive Party, 137 Indiana, 94, 304 Industrial Revolution, 77, 82 Industrial Workers of the World (IWW), 23–­25 Institute on Religion and Democracy, 274 Iowa, 307 Iran-­Contra scandal, 274–­75 Isetti, Ronald, 191 Israel, 356n66 Jackson, Andrew, 43, 45, 48, 135, 327n14 Jackson, Juanita, 118–­20, 144 James, Bobbie, 237 Janson, Michael, 192 Jarmin, Gary, 217, 264 Jarrett, Valerie, 294, 299, 302 Jean, Lori, 298–­99 Jefferson, Thomas, 49, 57, 100 Jepsen, Roger, 217, 257 Jersey City, 152 Jim Crow, 13, 31, 73, 76, 80, 84, 87, 89, 96, 97, 112–­13, 115, 122, 124–­25, 128–­30, 134, 140–­41, 151, 155, 173, 176, 185, 214, 290, 341n42 Johnson, Andrew, 59, 73–­74 Johnson, Gary, 307 Johnson, Hiram, 93

Johnson, James, 166 Johnson, James Weldon, 108 Johnson, Lyndon B., 3, 10, 13, 21, 30–­32, 37–­38, 121, 128, 153–­55, 162, 173, 176, 179, 206–­7, 224, 227–­28, 256, 279, 281, 283–­84, 286, 293–­94, 297, 300, 302–­ 4, 307, 317, 340n25, 341n45, 341n46, 342n50, 342n52, 342n54, 343n69, 344n87, 345n96, 345n102; antipoverty programs, 163–­64; civil rights movement, 36, 39, 42, 79, 135–­36, 146–­52, 156–­57, 159, 165–­67, 171–­72, 174–­75, 177–­78, 180–­82, 282, 285, 289, 291; community action, view of, 165; Congress, power over, 341n44; election-­eve speech (1964), 150; Gettysburg hundredth anniversary speech, 148–­49, 340n30; ghetto visits, administration of, 167–­69; as Great Liberator, 181; Great Society, 6, 39, 146, 181–­82, 343n72; Howard University speech, 160–­61, 178; open housing bill, support for, 171–­73; personal persuasion of, 151; reelection, refusal of, 174–­75; Secret White House Tapes, 156; southern poverty, ameliorating of, 150–­51; urban riots, reaction to, 170; Vietnam War, pre­ occupation with, 159; Voting Rights Act speech, 135, 157–­59; voting rights reform, support of, 156–­59; War on Poverty program, 147, 165 Johnston, Olin, 123 Jones, Bob, III, 249–­50, 252 Jones, Cleve, 301 Jones, Van, 293 Kansas, 50, 146 Kansas-­Nebraska Act, 49–­50 Katzenbach, Nicholas, 167 Katzenstein, Mary Fainsod, 14–­15 Katznelson, Ira, 117 Kelley, Florence, 93 Kelley, W. D., 65 Kellogg, Paul, 92–­93 Kendall, Amos, 45 Kennedy, Edward M., 240, 250 Kennedy, James, 216–­17, 219 Kennedy, John F., 3, 16, 133, 136, 141– ­42, 147, 156, 162, 172, 198, 255, 287, 340n25, 340n30; civil rights, reaction of, 143–­46, 148–­49; executive orders, 143

Index / 377 Kennedy, Robert F., 142–­43, 145, 178, 342n52, 342n61 Kentucky, 54, 94 Kerner, Otto, 170–­71 Kerner Commission Report, 172, 289, 347n130 Kershner, Howard, 37, 183–­84, 194–­95 Kessler, Charles, 314 King, Coretta Scott, 142 King, Edwin, 155 King, Martin Luther, Jr., 8, 12, 21, 135–­ 36, 152, 154, 156, 158–­59, 161, 163, 173–­74, 177, 179, 185, 198, 200, 213, 301, 344n87; Alabama Project, 157; as­ sassination of, 171–­72; Birmingham jail letter, 144; incarceration of, 142–­43; open­ ing housing, fight for, 172; on Vietnam War, 160, 162, 343n74; wiretapping of, 162 Kissinger, Henry, 221–­22 Kloos, Karina, 216, 285–­87, 315 Knight, Louise, 95 Koop, C. Everett, 208–­9, 239, 261 Koppel, Ted, 245 Kornhauser, William, 8 Kotz, Nick, 153, 344n87 Kristol, Irving, 277–­78 Kruse, Kevin, 193, 197, 242 Ku Klux Klan (KKK), 103, 153, 198, 251, 312; growth of, 189; Invisible Empire of, 189 labor movement, 16, 24–­30, 81, 117, 121, 129, 138, 192, 194, 276, 282 La Follette, Robert, 121 Land, Richard, 231 Langlie, Arthur, 194 Langston, Thomas, 13 Lawyers Committee for Civil Rights under Law, 205, 250 LaHaye, Beverly, 218, 229, 233, 235, 273 LaHaye, Tim, 218, 227, 273 Latin America, 274 Laxalt, Paul, 257 League of Gileadites, 23 League for Nonviolent Civil Disobedience, 139 Lee, Robert E., 70 Left, the, 211 Lehman, John, 241 Leuchtenburg, William, 113, 132

Lewis, David Levering, 101, 105, 108 Lewis, John, 136, 158–­59, 177, 279, 290, 343n69 Lewis, John L., 12, 16 LGBTQ community, 3, 38–­40, 215, 225, 284, 287, 290–­91, 293; Defense of Marriage Act (DOMA), 298; don’t ask, don’t tell (DADT) policy, 298; and Obama, 297–­304; same-­sex marriage, 298–­304; transgender people, 303–­4, 312. See also gay rights movement liberalism, 40, 114–­15, 165–­66, 181, 199–­ 200, 274, 294, 308–­10 Liberator (newspaper), 44 Liberty Party, 48–­49 Lichtman, Alan, 192 Life Amendment Political Action Committee, 258, 260–­61 Lincoln, Abraham, 6–­7, 13, 30, 33, 41, 59, 65–­69, 77–­78, 82–­84, 87, 89, 102, 118–­ 19, 136, 147, 167, 181, 266–­67, 281–­ 83, 301, 303, 315–­16, 330n85, 330n89, 330n90, 331n92, 331n106; abolitionists, alliance with, 2, 34, 42–­43, 60, 70, 74–­75, 81; colonization of freed slaves, calling for, 57–­58; death, as calamity for African Americans, 73; Emancipation Proclamation, 61–­64, 66, 74; Gettysburg Address, 11, 63–­64, 75, 148, 302; gradualism of, 55–­56, 58; moderation of, 51–­55; Peoria address of, 50–­51, 72; reform ambition of, 43; second inaugural address, 61, 73, 138; Whig principles, adherence to, 51–­52, 75–­76 Lindbergh, Charles, 307 Link, Arthur, 104 Little, Frank, 25 Little Rock, AR, 142 Long, Huey P., 193, 307 longue durée, 32 Los Angeles, 103–­5, 167, 194, 214, 290; Watts (neighborhood), 160, 162–­63, 168 Lott, Trent, 247–­49, 251 Louisiana, 125, 140 Louisiana Territory, 50 Lovejoy, Owen, 50 Lowell, Russell, 41 Loyal Democrats of Mississippi (LDM), 175–­76 Loyal Women of the Republic, 67

378 / Index Luce, Henry, 196 Lugar, Richard, 250 Lynchburg Christian Academy, 205 lynching, 84, 99, 103, 105, 109–­10, 126; anti-­lynching campaigns, 126, 130; anti-­ lynching legislation, 112, 118–­20, 127; anti-­lynching marches, 120; condemning of, 88–­89, 97, 107, 111–­12, 134 Lynch Men, 45 Maddox, Lester, 166, 176 Madison, James, 12, 317 Mahoney, George P., 166 Malcolm X, 202, 223 Manatt, Charles, 250 Maraniss, David, 287 March for Life, 255, 258 March on Washington (1963), 133, 146 March on Washington movement, 1–­3, 129–­31, 133, 139, 141, 143, 295; Double V campaign, 132 Marder, George, 172 Markman, Sherwin, 168–­69, 171 Marshall, Burke, 344n87 Marshall, Thurgood, 126 Marshner, Connaught “Connie,” 204, 229, 233, 235, 241, 244, 257 Martin, Louis, 340n25 Martin, William, 199 Maryland, 54, 94, 122 Mason-­Dixon Line, 67, 93, 101, 114, 121–­ 22, 129, 146, 150 Massachusetts, 53, 146 Massachusetts Anti-­Slavery Society, 46 Massachusetts Fifty-­Fourth Infantry, 62 Massachusetts General Colored Association, 44 mass movements, 8 Mathias, Charles, 241, 250, 264–­65 McAdam, Douglas, 216, 285–­87, 315 McAdoo, William, 102 McAteer, Ed, 184, 212–­13, 227, 229, 244, 254, 264 McCarthy, Eugene, 176–­77 McCarthy, Joseph, 307 McClellan, George B., 59, 65, 67–­68 McClure, James, 217 McConnell, Robert, 259 McGovern, George, 177, 220, 236 McGovern-­Fraser reforms, 177 Mckesson, DeRay, 290

McKinley, William, 21 McKissick, Floyd, 162 McMahon, Kevin J., 121, 125 McNemar, R. T., 249 McPherson, James, 57 Meese, Ed, 222, 230, 233, 240, 244, 249, 254–­55 Melnick, R. Shep, 348n149 Mencken, H. L., 190 Menendez, Albert, 235 Meredith, James, 162 Methodist Episcopal Church, 118 Michel, Robert, 241 Michigan, 137, 307 Militia Act, 60 Miller, Arthur, 202 Miller, Eben, 116 Miller, Kelly, 334–­35n64 Milliken v. Bradley, 179 Miroff, Bruce, 81–­82, 166–­67 Mississippi, 94, 139–­40, 153–­56, 162, 176–­77, 205–­6, 245, 248, 290, 304 Mississippi Freedom Democratic Party (MFDP), 10, 96, 152–­56, 158–­59, 167, 176, 300, 342n50 Missouri, 53–­54, 146, 290 Missouri Compromise, 50–­51, 55 Mitchel, John Purroy, 105 Mitchell, Clarence, 141 modernism, 199 modern presidency, 136, 143, 227, 275; autonomous presidential action, staple of, 310; as bully pulpit, clout of, 14; as change resistant, 13; Christian Right, 37, 184; civil rights movement, 99, 111–­ 12, 133, 141, 146, 157, 174; ex­ecutive-­ centered partisanship, 312; insurgent power, effect on, 14–­16; isolation of, 167; as ministerial, 74; as nation-­maintaining institution, 13; primary rules, changes in, 284; rhetorical presidency, 11; rugged individualism, as enemy of, 195; social justice, spearhead of, 36, 78; social movements, link with, 152, 163–­64, 174–­75, 181, 280–­83, 286–­88, 291–­92, 295, 304, 306–­7, 313–­14, 316–­17; as steward of public welfare, 34, 83–­84, 112, 141, 166, 175, 177, 283–­84. See also individual presidencies Mondale, Walter, 172, 206 Montana, 24–­25

Index / 379 Montgomery bus boycott, 143 Moore, Alice, 202–­3 Moore, Darrel, 290 Moore v. Dempsey, 112, 124–­25 Moral Majority, 212, 218, 220, 226–­27, 231, 235–­36, 239–­40, 242–­45, 254, 256–­57, 263, 267, 271–­72, 274; Christian Bill of Rights, 269–­70, 360n174; end of, 275 Morgan, Danielle Fuentes, 291 Morgan, E. D., 67 Morgan, J. P., 189 Morone, James, 48, 192 Morris, Aldon, 29 Morton, John, 295 Moscowitz, Henry, 93 Moses, Robert, 155 Mother African Methodist Episcopal (AME) Zion Church, 120 movement politics, 284 MoveOn.org, 285 Moyers, Bill, 146–­47, 161, 343n72, 347n132 Moynihan, Daniel Patrick, 250 Muir, John, 27 Muñoz, Cecilia, 294–­95, 305 Murguia, Janet, 305 Murphy, Frank, 124–­26 Murray, A. L., 86 Murray, Philip, 27 Napolitano, Janet, 295–­96 National Advisory Commission on Civil Disorders, 170–­71 National Affairs Briefing Conference, 229 National American Woman’s Suffrage Association (NAWSA), 29 National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP), 11, 90, 93–­ 94, 97–­99, 101–­3, 105–­12, 116, 118–­20, 124–­26, 128, 131, 133, 138, 140–­41, 143, 170, 172, 175–­76, 251; UN petition of, 139 National Association of Evangelicals, 191–­ 92, 237, 270–­71, 360–­61n180 National Association of Manufacturers (NAM), 193 National Christian Action Coalition, 202, 212, 258 National Colored Democratic League, 98 National Conference for New Politics, 160

National Conservative Political Action Committee, 211 National Council for Christian Leadership (NCCL), 192–­93 National Council of Churches, 274 National Council of La Raza, 285, 294, 305 National Council of Negro Women, 117 National Emergency Council, 122 National Equal Rights League, 110 National Humanities Center, 213 National Immigration Law Center, 306 National Independent Political League, 97, 99, 101 National Negro Business League, 85 National Negro Congress, 1, 129 National Organization for Women (NOW), 218, 232 National Prayer Breakfast, 242, 264 National Pro-­Family Coalition, 257 National Pro-­Life Alliance PAC (NPLA-­PAC), 254–­56, 258, 263 National Recovery Administration (NRA), 116 National Religious Broadcasters, 215, 237, 273 National Right to Life Committee, 255, 258, 263 National Security Council, 271 National Urban League, 162 National Youth Administration (NYA), 117 National Woman’s Party, 29 National Woman’s Political Caucus, 285 National Woman Suffrage Association, 72 Nebraska, 50 Negro Industrial League, 117 “Negro question,” 93–­94, 112 Nelson, Gaylord, 236 Newark, NJ, 170 Newbury case, 125 New Deal, 16, 28, 97, 113–­15, 118–­19, 120–­23, 126–­27, 129, 136–­38, 141, 143–­44, 147, 149–­50, 164–­65, 177, 185, 191, 194–­96, 198–­99, 223, 225, 227–­28, 237–­38, 285–­86, 334–­35n64; African Americans, effect on, 116–­17; Black Cabinet, 117; Home Owners Loan Corporation, 163; opposition to, 186–­ 87, 192–­93; Public Housing Authority, 163; southern resentment against, 140 New England, 65 New Hampshire, 65

380 / Index New Jersey, 51, 94 New Left, 202 New Nationalist Progressivism, 114 New Order of Cincinnati, 194 New Right, 186, 209, 211, 215–­16, 226, 228, 236, 240–­42, 254, 256, 265 Newton, Isaac, 76 New York, 65, 105, 152, 167, 214, 290 Niagara Movement, 31, 90–­91, 102 Nicaragua, 274–­75 Nicolau, George, 164 Nicolay, J. G., 65 Niebuhr, Reinhold, 208 Nineteenth Amendment, 18 Nixon, Richard M., 4, 37, 142–­43, 146, 181, 198–­99, 203, 206–­7, 209, 214–­15, 221, 245, 247, 249–­50, 311; executive power, deployment of, 228; southern strategy, 229 Nofziger, Lyn, 220–­21, 235 Norquist, Grover, 274 North, Oliver, 274 North Carolina, 304 Northwest Baptist Church, 204 Oakland, CA, 167 Obama, Barack, 1, 3, 5, 22, 38–­40, 177, 180, 280, 285, 308–­11, 313, 316–­17, 363n13, 365n61; on American exceptionalism, 279; and birtherism, 307; Black Lives Matter movement, response to, 290–­92; civil rights movement, as descendent of, 288, 292; coalition of, 287, 291, 292, 293; as consensus builder, 292; as “Deporter-­in-­Chief,” 294; and Dreamers, 293–­97, 304–­6; executive orders, 303; fair housing, 289; grassroots organization of, 287; LGBTQ community, 297–­304; immigration rights, battle over, 304–­7; legacy, attempts to undo, 314; movement politics, 286–­88; partisan bloodletting, 287; as pragmatic, 290; Selma speech, 279, 287, 315; transgender Americans, and bathroom bills, 304 Obamacare, 39, 311. See also Affordable Care Act (ACA) O’Connor, Sandra Day, 253–­54, 267, 272; Christian Right, opposition to, 244–­45 Occupy Wall Street (OWS) movement, 5, 21, 23, 30; “Nobody 2012,” 22

O’Dell, Jack, 344n87 Office of Economic Opportunity (OEO), 164–­65, 345n96, 347n132 Office of Public Engagement, 286 Office of Public Liaison, 286 Ohio, 94 Ohlin, Lloyd, 345n98 Oklahoma City bombing, 25 Old Time Gospel Hour (television program), 208, 212 Omnibus Budget Reconciliation Act (1981), 243 Operation Rescue, 32, 186, 214, 263 Opportunities Industrialization Center (OIC), 169 O’Reilly, Kenneth, 13 Orfield, Gary, 172, 179 Organizing for Action (OFA), 287, 291, 302–­3, 309–­10, 363n13. See also Orga­ nizing for America (OFA) Organizing for America (OFA), 39. See also Organizing for Action (OFA) Orwell, George, 202 Other America, The (Harrington), 147 Overington, Mary White, 120 Packnett, Brittany, 290 Packwood, Robert, 262 Palmer Raids, 9 Parker, John, 93 partisanship, 39–­40, 78, 100, 106, 113, 132, 176–­77, 286, 302, 309; as executive-­ centered, 42, 79, 101, 114, 275, 283, 285, 310, 312; social movements, influence of, 176, 286 Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act. See Affordable Care Act (ACA) Payne, Ethel L., 141–­44 Paul, Alice, 12, 15–­16, 29, 81, 95, 107, 130; Silent Sentinels of, 2, 35 Peale, Norman Vincent, 37, 183, 194 Pearson, Drew, 148, 340n30 Pelosi, Nancy, 300 Pennsylvania, 9, 15, 65, 94, 307 Pepper, Claude, 121 Perkins, Frances, 16 Perkins, Tony, 309, 312–­13 Pew, J. Howard, 194 Philadelphia, MS, 229, 251 Philadelphia, PA, 152, 167, 169, 173, 290

Index / 381 Philippines, 21, 88 Phillips, Howard, 211, 213, 229, 241, 254–­55; moral majority phrase, coining of, 212 Phillips, Wendell, 46–­48, 55–­59, 64, 66 Pierce, Franklin, 48–­50 Pinchot, Gifford, 26–­27 Piven, Frances Fox, 18, 276 Planned Parenthood, 232 Plans for Progress, 148 Plessy v. Ferguson, 86 Plouffe, David, 39, 302 polarization, 7, 161, 287, 306, 309, 314 Poor People’s Campaign, 21, 31–­32 Populist movement, 122 Portland, 290 postmillennialism, 188 Potter, David, 49 Powell, Adam Clayton, Jr., 128 Praeli, Lorella, 295, 299, 305–­6 President’s Committee on Civil Rights (PCCR), 137–­38 President’s Committee on Equal Employment, 148 Price, Don, 345n100 Progressive Era, 6, 27, 34, 41, 76, 78–­79, 81–­82, 84, 85, 92, 95, 97, 111–­13, 128, 136, 143–­44, 147, 166, 177, 185, 187–­ 89, 194–­95, 223, 283 Progressive National Committee, 93 Progressive Party, 78, 92, 99, 106, 114–­15, 334–­35n64; African American rights, stance on, 93–­98; “negro question,” silence on, 96 “Progressives and the Colored Man” (T. Roosevelt), 97 Prohibition, 36, 190, 199, 276 pro-­life movement, 211, 240, 254–­55, 257, 260–­63, 265–­66, 269 Promise of American Life (Croly), 77 Protestantism, 188–­89, 191–­93, 225, 269 PTL Club (television program), 210, 213 Public Affairs Briefing, 254 Public Works Administration (PWA), 116–­17 Puerto Rico, 21 Pulley, Aislinn, 290 Pullman Company, 24 Pullman strike, 4, 33 Quincy, Edmund, 52

race riots, 152, 160, 164–­66, 168–­70 racism, 162; structural racism, 163 Randolph, A. Philip, 1–­3, 81, 129–­33, 139–­ 41, 160, 295, 299 Rankin, John, 128 Rauh, John, 154 Rauschenbusch, Walter, 187–­88, 194–­95 Reagan, Ronald, 5–­6, 10, 18, 28, 32, 36–­39, 42, 166, 177, 182, 187, 215–­17, 226, 245, 268, 269, 281–­86, 289, 291, 297, 309, 311, 313, 317, 356n66, 360–­61n180; on abortion issue, 257–­63, 266–­67; an­ ticommunist foreign policy initiatives of, 271; assassination attempt on, 242; charismatic moment of, 222; “city on a hill” speech, 222, 277, 308; evangelicals, relationship with, 218–­22, 224, 227–­31, 235–­44, 254, 256–­59, 271, 275–­78; evil empire comment, 270; executive power, deployment of, 228; IRS-­Christian school, struggle over, 246–­54; “It’s Morning in America” comment, 272; legacy of, 267; reelection of, 272; school prayer, 263–­65; social issues agenda, 254–­56; southern strategy, accusations of, 251; state, sacralization of, 242; state’s rights speech, 251; as surrogate Messiah, 277; tax re­form, 273–­74; women voters, appeal to, 232–­35 Reagan Doctrine, 270, 274 Reaganism, 312 Reagan Revolution, 7, 182, 245, 266, 276, 285, 297, 308 Reconstruction, 34, 66, 72–­78, 80–­82, 84, 98–­99, 103, 123, 174, 330n87 Redmon, Hayes, 161 Red Scare, 192 Red Shirts, 123 Reed, Ralph, 265–­66, 276, 284, 286, 308 Regan, Donald, 247–­49 Regier, Gerald “Jerry,” 239 Religious Roundtable, 213, 239, 242–­43, 263, 271 Religious Society of Progressive Friends, 53 Republican National Committee, 67 Republican National Convention: in 1920, 232; in 1964, 152, 238; in 1968, 198–­ 99; in 1980, 216, 221–­22, 228; in 1984, 272; in 2012, 22; in 2016, 310

382 / Index Republican Party, 37, 42–­43, 50–­51, 55, 58, 60, 65, 67–­68, 72, 75, 77, 86, 90, 95, 99, 107, 167, 178, 212, 235, 266, 274, 304, 306, 312–­14; African Americans, abandoning of, call for, 97; American exceptionalism, belief in, 308; centralized power, fear of, 76; Christian Right, alliance with, 166, 182, 214–­16, 220–­ 22, 227–­28, 236, 277, 282, 284–­85; Dreamers, reaction to, 293–­94; forming of, 49; pro-­life principles, 269; radical Republicans, 49, 52–­54, 56, 59, 66, 71; right-­of-­center party, turn toward, 166, 182; Southern Baptists, 231; southern white voters, defection to, 140, 155 Republican Woman’s Task Force, 232 Reston, James, 208 Reuther, Walter, 27, 153–­54 Reynolds, William Bradford, 249–­51, 253 Rice, John, 193 Richardson, Sid, 196–­97 Richmond, VA, 120 Riley, Russell, 13 Riverside Church, 160 Roberts, John J., 289 Roberts, Oral, 201, 229 Roberts, Owen, 126 Roberts, Robin, 302 Robertson, Pat, 32, 201, 207–­8, 210, 214, 217, 220, 227, 229, 238, 243–­44, 254, 264, 273–­74 Robinson, Joseph, 119, 330n90 Robison, James, 201, 213, 217, 227, 229–­ 30, 236, 244, 254, 263, 271–­72 Rockefeller, John D., 189 Rockefeller, Nelson, 218, 221 Rockman, Bert, 228 Roe v. Wade, 201–­2, 223, 225, 258, 260–­62, 266 Rogers, Will, 189 Rogers, William, 142 Romney, George, 170 Romney, Mitt, 296, 302, 309 Roosevelt, Eleanor, 119, 122–­23, 130–­31 Roosevelt, Franklin D., 11, 16, 30–­31, 36, 78–­79, 82, 97, 113–­14, 116–­18, 126, 128, 136–­38, 143, 146, 150, 158–­60, 181, 190, 193, 195, 224, 227, 242, 282, 295, 337n138, 345n96; anti-­lynching legislation, lukewarm to, 119–­22; court-­

packing plan, 122, 125; executive admin­ istration, strengthening of, 123–­24, 134; executive orders, issuing of, 2, 130–­33; first inaugural address, 191; Four Freedoms speech, 127; government job discrimination, abolishing of, 130; March on Washington, response to, 130–­33; purge campaign of, 122–­23, 129, 149; racial progress, as reluctant partner, 3; Roosevelt coalition, 226; school prayer, 263–­64; scriptural references, allusion to, 191–­92; second bill of rights, 115; Social Gospel, infused with, 192; twelve-­state effort, 122 Roosevelt, Theodore, 26–­28, 31, 35–­36, 99, 101, 102, 106–­7, 116, 134, 334–­ 35n64; African American appointments, 87; anti-­lynching rhetoric of, 88; Brownsville incident, 90–­91, 112; bully pulpit, use of, 88; as false prophet, charges of, 96; Living Constitution, idea of, 77; lynching, condemning of, 88–­89, 97; Memorial Day address, 88; modern presidency, invention of, 82; New Na­tionalism, 77–­78, 100; “Negro question,” 81, 112; popular press, recognizing of, 83; Progressive movement, alignment with, 82–­84; Progressive Party, role in, 92–­97; “purification” efforts, thwarting of, 87–­88; racial injustice, separate-­but-­equal view of, 84, 86; “Stand at Armageddon,” 112; as steward of people, 34, 83–­84, 100, 112, 141, 166, 283; Tuskegee address, 84–­85; Washington Incident, 85–­86, 104 Rothstein, Richard, 117 Rotnem, Victor, 127 Rove, Karl, 38, 285 Rowe, James, 138, 347n132 Rubio, Marco, 294–­96 Russell, Richard, 150 Russia, 39. See also Soviet Union Sabath, Adolph J., 137 Sancton, Thomas, 77 Sanders, Bernie, 30–­31, 286, 313 Sanders, Carl E., 150 Sanders, Elizabeth, 13 Saudi Arabia, 356n66 Save Our Children, Inc., 204

Index / 383 Scalia, Antonio, 266 Schaeffer, Francis, 208–­9, 239 Schlafly, Phyllis, 221, 229, 233, 241–­42, 254 Schlozman, Daniel, 282, 362n2 Schmults, Edward, 249–­50 Schuller, Robert, 229 Schurz, Carl, 73 Schweiker, Richard, 215, 221 Schwerner, Michael, 153, 229 Scopes, John T., 190 Scopes trial, 36, 186, 190–­92, 199, 225 Scottsboro boys, 120 Scudder, Vita Dutton, 41–­42 Seattle, 193–­94 Second Great Awakening, 42 segregation, 76, 80, 88–­90, 101–­2, 105, 107, 110, 112–­13, 117, 141–­42, 144, 157, 171–­ 72, 174, 176, 179–­80, 210, 213–­14, 245–­ 46, 250, 253–­54, 288–­89; and desegre­ gation, 16, 139, 142, 151, 166, 178, 198, 205–­6, 209; segregation academies, 185, 205–­6, 209, 223, 230, 248, 312 Select Committee on Equal Education Opportunity, 206 Sellers, Cleveland, 156 Selma, AL, 135, 157–­58, 303 Seneca Falls Convention, 48, 303 September 11 attacks, 308–­9 Service Employees International Union (SEIU), 285 700 Club (television program), 207–­8, 210, 213, 274 Seward, William H., 51, 55 Shaheen, Jeanne, 300 Share Our Wealth, 193 Sharp Street Methodist Episcopal Church, 118 Sherman, William Tecumseh, 68, 123 Shriver, Sargent, 147, 173, 345n96 Sierra Club, 27 Silent Majority, 311 Silent Parade, 109; as direct protest, 108 Skocpol, Theda, 325n96 Skowronek, Stephen, 5, 12, 33, 43, 326n2 slavery, 13, 46, 52, 55, 59, 64–­65, 69, 77, 157, 213–­14, 266, 303, 315–­16; abolition of, 19, 53, 59–­60, 63–­64, 67–­68, 276, 281; anti-­slavery movement, 9, 30,

33–­34, 41–­45, 47–­51, 56–­58, 68, 74–­ 76, 78; sin of, 54, 61, 73 Smith, Al, 189 Smith, Bailey, 207–­8 Smith, “Cotton Ed,” 123 Smith, Gerald L. K., 193 Smith, James McCune, 44 Smith, Mary Louise, 232 Smith v. Allwright, 125–­26 social Darwinism, 194 Social Gospel movement, 185, 187–­89, 192 Social Ideals in English Letters (Scudder), 41 social movements, 40, 75, 83, 216, 291, 311; authoritarian nationalism, 313; as collective challenges, 5; collective claims of, 8; definition of, 7; elemental features of, 16–­17; emergent patterns, 33; formative movements, 20, 28–­30, 33, 46, 69, 282, 284; institutionalized movements, 20, 26–­28, 30, 33, 37, 75–­76, 78–­79, 282; “long” movements, 6, 30–­32; marginal movements, 19–­20, 23, 30, 33, 43, 81; militant movements, 19–­20, 23–­25, 33, 43; noninstitutional methods, 8–­9, 18; partisanship, influence of, 286; presidency, defining features of, 32–­33; presidential authority, as blunt disruptive force, 12; presidential avoidance, 20–­22; presidential bully pulpit, clout of, 14; presidents, and collaboration, 17, 42; presidents, uneasy alliance between, 2–­6, 9–­17, 32–­33, 36, 78, 80–­81 Social Security Act, 113–­14, 117 sociology, 4 Solomon, Marc, 298–­301 Sorensen, Theodore, 149 Souls of Black Folk, The (Du Bois), 80 South Carolina, 122–­23, 140, 196, 198, 206, 220 Southern Baptist Christian Life Commission, 207 Southern Baptist Convention, 202, 207–­8, 231, 312–­13 Southern Christian Leadership Conference (SCLC), 21, 144–­45, 152, 162, 173, 185, 294, 344n87 Soviet Union, 139, 143, 211, 219, 221. See also Russia Spain, 22

384 / Index Spanish-­American War, 21 Specter, Arlen, 264–­65 Spingam, Amy, 116 Spingam, Joel, 93–­95, 116 Spiritual Mobilization, 194–­95 Spokane, WA, 24 Stalin, Joseph, 122 Stansell, Christine, 82, 84 Stanton, Edwin, 59 Stanton, Elizabeth Cady, 47, 63–­66, 71–­72 “Statement to the American People” (Wilson), 111 Stein, Jill, 307 Stevens, Thaddeus, 65 Stewart, Potter, 244 Stockman, David, 241 Stokes, Thomas, 114 Stonewall uprising, 303 Stowe, Harriet Beecher, 47, 52 Student Nonviolent Coordinating Com­ mittee (SNCC), 154–­56, 158–­59, 162, 170, 294; Freedom Summer initiatives, 152 suffrage movement, 2, 16, 18, 29, 35, 63, 92, 95, 108; abolitionist movement, betrayal by, 71–­72 Sullivan, Leon, 169 Sumner, Charles, 46–­47, 49, 53, 55–­56, 59, 64–­65, 69, 74 Sunday, Billy, 37, 186, 188–­90 Swaggart, Jimmy, 264 Swope, Herbert Bayard, 121–­22 syndicalism, 129 Szymanski, Ann-­Marie, 18, 276 Taft, William Howard, 91–­92, 96, 99, 101, 116, 334–­35n64; southern policy of, 97 Talmadge, Herman, 150 Tappan, Arthur, 44 Tappan, Lewis, 44, 48 Tarrow, Sidney, 8, 18 Tax Reform Act (1986), 273 Taylor, Herbert, Jr., 148 Taylor, Zachary, 101 Tea Party movement, 22, 39, 285–­87, 304, 308, 311; Christian Right, 362n12 temperance campaigns, 18 Tennessee, 190 Tennessee Valley Authority (TVA), 116–­17 Terry, Randall, 32, 214, 263 Texas, 146

Thacher, Thomas, 104, 335n77 Therapeutic Abortion Act (1967), 218 Thirteenth Amendment, 34, 68, 70–­71, 76–­ 77, 92, 276, 315 Thomas, Cal, 240, 245, 256–­57, 259, 267–­ 68, 275–­76 Thomas Road Baptist Church, 200, 205, 235, 243 Thornburgh, Richard, 221 Thurmond, Strom, 140, 196, 198, 248, 250–­51 Tilly, Charles, 8, 284 Tobias, Andy, 301 Tourgée, Albion, 86 Treaty of Paris, 21 Trotter, William Monroe, 31, 89–­90, 95, 101–­2, 104–­6, 109–­10 Truman, Harry S., 136, 143, 146, 181, 186, 195–­97, 217, 282; civil rights program, 138, 140–­41; executive orders, 140; Lincoln Memorial speech, 138–­39; racial justice, attention to, 137 Trump, Donald, 9–­10, 40, 177, 277, 288, 307–­8, 366n82; Christian Right, alliance with, 312–­13; coalition of restoration, as steward of, 309; conservative Republicans, popularity among, 312; demonstrations against, 311; inaugural address of, 309–­10; movement politics of, 310; protests against, 313–­14 Truth, Sojourner, 44, 47, 62, 71–­72, 74–­75, 95 Tumulty, Joseph, 104–­6, 108–­10, 335n77 Tuskegee Institute, 31, 84, 112, 116 Tuskegee Machine, 133 Twenty-­First Amendment, 190 Twenty-­Fourth Infantry, 109 Uncle Tom’s Cabin (Stowe), 47 underground railroad, 9 United Auto Workers, 27 United Nations (UN), 25; Committee on Human Rights, 139 United Negro Improvement Association, 31 United States, 4, 6, 13, 22, 27, 31, 34, 46– ­47, 54, 57–­58, 63, 68, 70, 125–­26, 139, 144, 157–­58, 161, 171, 174, 183, 185– ­88, 198, 207–­8, 227–­29, 243, 266, 271, 279, 293, 314; as Christian nation, pro­ motion of, 199; demographic landscape, change in, 297, 309; partisanship in, 309,

Index / 385 313; private religious schools, growth of, 205; racism, as deeply ingrained, 162; right-­wing strain, 307–­8; as two societies, 289; urban riots, 107 United States v. Classic, 125 United We Dream movement, 293–­95, 299 University of Alabama, 145 urbanization, 187 US Catholic Conference, 258 Valelly, Richard, 179–­80 Van Buren, Martin, 49 Vandiver, Ernest, 142–­43 Vann, Robert, 115–­16 Vaughan, William, 87–­88 Venet, Wendy, 65, 72 Vereide, Abraham, 192–­94 Vietnam War, 163, 171, 174, 185, 211, 343n74; antiwar movement, 159–­61, 177; civil rights movement, alignment with, 177; moratorium against, 4 vigilance committees, 45 Viguerie, Richard, 210–­11, 215–­16, 238, 241 Village of Arlington Heights v. Metropolitan Housing Development Corp., 180 Villard, Oswald Garrison, 98–­99, 101 Virginia, 9, 205 voting rights: erosion of, 289–­90 Voting Rights Act (1965), 18, 31, 135, 157, 159, 162, 179, 251, 276, 289–­90, 343n69 Wade, Benjamin, 49 Wade-­Davis bill, 330n89 Wade-­Davis Manifesto, 66–­67, 72 Wagner Act, 16, 276 Wagner, Robert, 119 Wagner–­Van Nuys bill, 120–­21, 123 Wald, Lillian, 93 Walker, David, 43–­44 Wallace, George C., 145, 166, 170, 215, 229, 251, 279, 307 Wallace, Henry, 137–­38 Wallace, Lurleen, 166 Wallison, Peter, 249 Walters, Alexander, 98 War on Poverty, 165, 167, 169, 345–­ 46n104; Community Action Program (CAP), 147, 173

Warren, Dewey, 133 Wash, Howard, 127–­28 Washington, Booker T., 31, 86–­88, 91–­92, 96, 99, 101–­2, 104–­6, 112, 116; accommodationist strategy of, 85, 89; criti­ cism of, 89–­90; gradualism, proponent of, 84 Washington, DC, 111, 167 Washington, George, 9, 12, 15, 49, 75 Washington for Jesus, 220 Watergate scandal, 184, 199, 207 Watt, James, 239 Weaver, Robert, 117 Weiss, Nancy, 116 West Virginia, 94, 186, 204, 224 Weyl, Walter E., 93 Weyrich, Paul, 203–­4, 209–­12, 215–­16, 225–­27, 229, 237–­38, 240, 242–­44, 254, 258, 265, 273 Whig Party, 49, 51–­52, 54, 68, 72, 75–­76, 281 whiskey rebellion, 9, 15 White, Edward D., 103 White, Walter, 11, 118–­20, 125, 130–­32, 138–­40 White Citizens’ Councils, 198 white supremacy, 87–­88, 103–­4, 123, 125 Whittlesey, Faith, 240, 255, 268–­69, 274–­75 Wichita, KS, 214 Wilberforce, William, 266 Wilhelm, David, 300 Wilke, Jack, 255 Wilkins, Roy, 172, 341n45 Williams, Hosea, 279 Williams, John Skelton, 102 Wilson, John, 7–­8 Wilson, Woodrow, 2, 9, 15–­16, 24–­25, 31, 35–­36, 76, 96, 105, 107–­8, 115, 127, 160, 186, 189, 223, 334–­35n64; African Americans, fraught relationship with, 98–­102; Birth of a Nation screening, 103–­4, 106, 112; bully pulpit, use of, 134; extraordinary isolation, term of, 346n108; lynching, reaction to, 109–­12, 134; “Negro question,” 81, 112; New Freedom, 100, 113; patronage appointments of, 101; progressive leadership of, 100–­101; segregation, support of, 101–­2, 112; separate but equal stance, 102; State of Union address, 100; Twenty-­Fourth infantry incident, reaction to, 109–­10

386 / Index Wirthlin, Richard, 222 Wisconsin, 307 Wolff, Tobias, 299 Wolfson, Evan, 299, 301–­2 Woman’s National Loyal League, 63–­64 Women’s March, 311 Women’s Policy Advisory Board (WPAB), 232–­33 World War I, 2, 15–­16, 24–­25, 35, 134, 160, 186, 189, 223; opposition to, 108–­9

World War II, 2, 27, 36, 114, 125–­26, 132, 160 Wyngaarden, James, 260, 261 Yellowstone National Park, 26 Yosemite National Park, 27 Young, Andrew, 229 Young, Whitney, 162 Zion Baptist Church, 169 Zone, Richard, 218–­19