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| President Lyndon B. Johnson. Image courtesy of History.com |
When Marc Antony stands over the body of Caesar in Act 3 of
Shakespeare’s play, he delivers one of the more prophetic lines of the bard’s
entire works: “The evil that men do lives after them; the good is
oft interred with their bones” – that is unless you have a kind biographer
(see my notes on Kennedy a few weeks ago). FDR is remembered as the President
who got America going again after the crash of ’29 and then guided them through
the war years after the attack on Pearl Harbour, but short of dropping the bomb
– a weight forever around the neck of his successor Harry Truman. This got me
thinking of legacy and the importance of fact in those legacies. This was also
prompted by the last 2 blogs I wrote, looking at school funding, arts funding
and other liberal legislation in America. The dates in which these were passed
1965-68 were one President – Lyndon Johnson, a man perhaps with the unfairest
domestic legacy of all.
Having just read a huge article on Johnson and his
transformative presidency on domestic matters, I struggle not to think of the
early Blair years, and how both will always be remembered for imperialist
foreign policy and wars in Vietnam or Iraq. I don’t want this blog to become
side-tracked by a discussion of the New Labour policy achievements after 1997,
but this that whilst Blair is irrevocably stained by the blood of millions
killed in Iraq, his domestic achievements are impossible to scoff at. The same
can be said of Johnson where the tragedy of
Vietnam has created a dark cloud obscuring the full picture of his
Presidency. From Roosevelt’s New Deal, Truman’s Fair Deal and Kennedy’s New
Frontier, to Johnson’s Great Society,
this is the great progression of American liberalism and it was the last, which
arguably achieved the most.
In those tumultuous Great Society years, Johnson submitted,
and Congress enacted, more than one hundred major proposals in each of the 89th
and 90th Congresses. In those years of do-it-now optimism (Johnson’s signature
admonition: “Do it now. Not next week. Not tomorrow. Not later today. Now.”) presidential
speeches were about distributing prosperity more fairly, reshaping the balance
between the consumer and big business, rebuilding entire cities, eliminating
poverty, hunger and discrimination. In the Johnson years America did reduce
poverty; did broaden opportunity for college and jobs; did outlaw segregation
and discrimination in housing; did guarantee the right to vote to all; did
improve health and prosperity for older Americans; did put the environment on
the national agenda.
When Lyndon Johnson took office, only eight percent of
Americans held college degrees; by the end of 2006, twenty-eight percent had
completed college. His higher education legislation with its scholarships,
grants and work-study programs opened college to any American with the
necessary brains and ambition, regardless of financial resources. Below the
college level, LBJ passed the Elementary
and Secondary Education Act, for the first time committing the federal government
to help local schools (This, to me, is massive – GM). He anticipated the needs
of children with English as a second language with bilingual education, which
today serves four million children in some 40 languages across the United
States. His special education law has helped millions of children with learning
disabilities. Then there is Head Start. Millions
of pre-schoolers have been through Head Start programs in nearly every city and
county in the nation – increasing life chances and opportunity – and forming
the basis of Blair’s Sure Start policy, which continues to be one of New Labour’s
lasting and most enduring achievements.
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| Protesters against segregated education during the 1960s. Image courtesy of Civil Rights Resources. |
Closely related to LBJ’s Great Society health programs were
his initiatives to reduce malnutrition and hunger. Today, the Food Stamp
program helps feed some 27 million men, women and children in 12 million
households. The
School Breakfast program, building on Truman’s Russell National
School Lunch Act, has served more than billions of breakfasts to needy
children.
Johnson put civil rights and social justice squarely before
the nation as a moral issue. Recalling his year as a teacher of poor Mexican
children in Cotulla, Texas, he once told Congress:
“It never even occurred to me in my fondest dreams that I
might have the chance to help the sons and daughters of those students and to
help people like them all over this country. But now I do have that chance—and
I’ll let you in on a secret—I mean to use it.”
And use it he did. He used it to make Washington confront
the needs of the nation as no president before or since has. With the 1964
Civil Rights Act, Johnson tore down, all at once, the “Whites only” signs
and social system that featured segregated hotels, restaurants, movie theatres,
toilets and water fountains, and rampant job discrimination. The following year
he proposed the Voting
Rights Act, which it passed in the summer of 1965, to which Martin Luther
King, Jr. told Johnson, “You have created a second emancipation.”
LBJ had his heart in his War on Poverty. Though he found the
opposition too strong to pass an income maintenance law, he took advantage of the
Social Security budget. He proposed, and Congress enacted, whopping increases
in the minimum benefit. That change alone lifted 2.5 million Americans 65 and
over above the poverty line. Today, Social Security keeps some thirteen million
senior citizens above the poverty line.
Johnson’s Great Society programmes are still going: Head
Start, the Job Corps, Community Health Centres, Indian Opportunities (now part
of the US Labor Department), and Migrant Opportunities (now Seasonal Worker
Training and Migrant Education) are all helping people stand on their own two
feet today. Only the Neighbourhood Youth Corps has been abandoned—in 1974,
after enrolling more than 5 million individuals. Ronald Reagan quipped that
Lyndon Johnson declared war on poverty and poverty won. He was wrong. When LBJ
took office, 22.2 percent of Americans were living in poverty. When he left
five years later, only 13 percent were living below the poverty line—the
greatest one-time reduction in poverty in the US’s history.
Another Roosevelt, Theodore, launched the modern
environmental movement by setting aside public lands and national park. If
Teddy Roosevelt launched the movement, Lyndon Johnson drove it forward more
than any later president—and in the process, in 1965, he introduced an entirely
new concept of conservation: “We must not only protect the countryside and save
it from destruction,” he said, “we must restore what has been destroyed and
salvage the beauty and charm of our cities. Our conservation must be not just
the classic conservation of protection and development, but a creative
conservation of restoration and innovation.”
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| Cascades National Park, which became a National Park during LJB's Presidency. Image courtesy of Wikipedia. |
That new environmental commandment spelled out the first
inconvenient truth: that those who reap the rewards of modern technology must
also pay the price of their industrial pollution. It inspired a legion of Great
Society laws: the Clean Air, Water Quality and Clean Water Restoration Acts and
Amendments, the 1965 Solid Waste Disposal Act, the 1965 Motor Vehicle Air
Pollution Control Act, and the 1968 Aircraft Noise Abatement Act. Johnson
created 35 national parks, 32 within easy driving distance of large cities. The
1968 Wild and Scenic Rivers Act today protects 165 river segments in 38 states
and Puerto Rico. The 1968 National Trail System Act has established more than
1,000 recreation, scenic and historic trails covering close to 55,000 miles. No
wonder National Geographic calls Lyndon Johnson “our greatest conservation
president.”
These were major areas of concentration for Lyndon Johnson’s
Great Society, but there were many others. Indeed, looking back, the sweep of
this President’s achievements is breathtaking.
Yet the historian Irving Bernstein, in his book, The
Presidency of Lyndon Johnson, dedicates a chapter entire chapter to “Lyndon
Johnson, Patron of the Arts.” The Kennedy Centre for the Performing Arts (named
after his predecessor), where each year two million visitors view performances
that millions more watch on television, was a Great Society initiative.
The
National Endowments for the Arts and Humanities are Johnson’s, after he
asked Congress to establish them and for the first time, to provide federal
financial support for the arts to increase “the access of our people to the
works of our artists, and [to recognize] the arts as part of the pursuit of
American greatness.” LBJ used to say that he wanted fine theatre and music
available throughout the nation, and not just on Broadway and at the
Metropolitan Opera in New York. In awarding more than 130,000 grants totalling
more than four billion dollars since 1965, the Endowment for the Arts has
spawned art councils in all 50 states funding arts nationwide.
By the numbers, the legacy of Lyndon Johnson is monumental.
It exceeds in domestic impact even the New Deal of his idol, Franklin Roosevelt
(LBJ was Texas director of Roosevelt’s New Deal National Youth Administration).
It sets him at the cutting edge of America’s progressive tradition. Robert
Caro, LBJ’s biographer, describes him as “the lawmaker for the poor and the
downtrodden and the oppressed…the President who wrote mercy and justice into
the statute books by which America was governed.”
Lyndon Johnson died in 1973. But his legacy endures in the
acts he passed. It endures in the children in Head Start programs across
America, in the expanded opportunities for millions of minorities. It endures
in the scholarships and loans that enable the poorest students to attend the
finest universities and in the base funding from a federal government ensuring
a level of education for every child. It endures in the public art and theatres
supported by the National Endowments, the clean air Americans breathe, the
clean water in their rivers, in their National Parks.
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| Tony Blair in a Sure Start Centre. Image courtesy of The Daily Mirror. |
At this end, do we need to look at our opinions on many
things, not least the left’s (which I consider myself a member of) of Tony
Blair, whose achievements are remarkably similar - Introduced the National
Minimum Wage, Funding for every pupil in England doubled, 85,000 more nurses, 2,200
Sure Start Children’s Centres, the Equality and Human Rights Commission, 36,000
more teachers in England and 274,000 more support staff and teaching assistants,
A million pensioners & 600,000 children lifted out of poverty, scrapped
Section 28 and introduced Civil Partnerships, free entry to national museums
and galleries, cleanest rivers, beaches, drinking water and air since before
the industrial revolution, free nursery places for every three and
four-year-olds and free fruit for most four to six-year-olds at school. Plus,
his own New Deal – helped over 1.8 million people into work.
The late John Kenneth Galbraith, another leading critic of
the Vietnam War, has called for “historical reconsideration” of the Johnson
Presidency, saying “The initiatives of Lyndon Johnson on civil rights, voting
rights and on economic and social deprivation…must no longer be enshrouded by
that [Vietnam] war.” – would this approach to Blair be a productive one, or are
the wounds of Iraq, still not yet fully investigated or healed (if they ever
will), too fresh. To any Labour friends reading this, I’ll quote Shakespeare’s
Marc Antony again: “Good friends, sweet friends, let me not stir you up to such a sudden flood of mutiny.”