Great Society - Book Review - Wall Street Journal

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https://www.wsj.com/articles/great-soci ... 1575044280


‘Great Society’ Review: A ‘Mystical Belief’ in the State --
The architects of the antipoverty programs devised in the 1960s were intoxicated by America’s postwar prosperity—and heedless of unintended consequences.

By Michael Barone — senior political analyst for the Washington Examiner, resident fellow at the American Enterprise Institute and author of “How America’s Political Parties Change (And How They Don’t).”


Updated Nov. 29, 2019


How can government get rid of poverty? It’s a question that gets asked not in a society where almost everyone is poor but in one giddy with surging growth and concerned about those who seem left behind—a society whose leaders have “an almost mystical belief in the infinite potentials of American society.”

Those are the words of Paul Jacobs, a prominent left-wing journalist and activist a half-century ago, quoted by Amity Shlaes in “Great Society: A New History.” Just as she presented a skeptical alternative to New Deal historians’ accounts of the 1930s in “The Forgotten Man” (2007), Ms. Shlaes now offers an illuminating alternative to sentimental reminiscences of liberals’ attempts in the 1960s—actually, in the years starting around 1963 and ending around 1972—to banish poverty in America. Lyndon Johnson’s raft of Great Society programs—from Head Start and Community Action to Medicare and Medicaid—is a centerpiece of this period, of course, but it is only part of the story. The longer arc, as Ms. Shlaes shows, is a “mystical belief” in America’s potential and the government’s often misguided attempts to achieve it.

Her account is original and persuasive, presenting the leading poverty warriors not with scorn but with sympathy and piercing insight. Her subjects include the gentle socialist Michael Harrington, with his background in the Catholic Worker movement; the religious intellectual and Kennedy in-law Sargent Shriver, the Peace Corps’ first director who was drafted to head LBJ’s Office of Economic Opportunity; the up-from-the-working-class professor Daniel Patrick Moynihan, plucking politically inconvenient truths from overlooked data; the student-journalist and activist Tom Hayden, pursuing endless causes and a radical vision of “participatory democracy.” These are basically good people brimming over with good intentions.

A central figure in the book is one often overlooked in histories of the times: Walter Reuther, president of the United Auto Workers. His father, Valentine Reuther, was a German-born socialist proud of keeping a Carnegie library out of his home town of Wheeling, W.Va. Walter, together with his brother Victor, spent a year in the Soviet Union and came back a strong anticommunist, dedicated to the freedoms that some liberals then and even now seem ready to set aside. With Victor and another brother, Walter led activists in organizing the sit-down strikes that forced the auto companies to recognize the UAW and then helped keep the auto factories humming with war production.

Autos had been America’s boom industry for the first three decades of the 20th century; the New Deal-assisted unionization of auto workers and the workers in other mass-production industries had doubled the size of organized labor. Reuther’s leadership in the prolonged 1945-46 GM strike and his elevation that year to the UAW presidency made him, at just 38, a powerful figure in one of the so-called Big Units—big government, big business, big labor—that had won World War II and would usher in prosperous postwar America in the next dozen years.

Reuther’s UAW secured wage increases and health insurance for its hundreds of thousands of members, and its auto contracts set terms for millions of others. But Reuther’s ambitions went further. He was a friend of and collaborator with Scandinavian social democrats and an admirer of Scandinavian architecture (more attractive than continental Brutalism, as Ms. Shlaes rightly suggests). He especially admired Scandinavia’s success in spreading postwar growth and prosperity to people who might otherwise be left out.

Ms. Shlaes shows Reuther setting up the conference out of which Tom Hayden and other students produced the 1962 Port Huron Statement—a call for a hazily defined regeneration of society—and started organizations that later transmogrified into the radical Students for a Democratic Society and Weathermen. She shows Reuther aiding the civil-rights movement in Mississippi, organizing with Mayor Jerome Cavanagh and Martin Luther King a 125,000-person march in Detroit and then helping run King’s march in Washington two months later. She shows him taking the lead role in putting together Hubert Humphrey’s shambles of a campaign after the disastrous convention in Chicago in 1968—and notes that many of the protesters there were from groups that Reuther had helped set up.

Reuther’s story is but one of many in “Great Society” demonstrating how ideas in this period percolated up from unlikely quarters and sparked government programs. She traces how Michael Harrington’s “The Other America” (1962), an evocative description of remaining pockets of poverty, caught the Kennedy administration’s attention and how Lyndon Johnson’s local Community Action personnel organized antipoverty protests against mostly Democratic mayors and liberal governors—and were largely shut down. She describes the appeal of the idea, suggested by the success of the church-based Southern civil-rights movement, that only the poor could point the way to eliminating poverty.

The idea that government could do a better job of providing housing than the private sector may have come naturally to postwar Americans doubled up in multi-generation houses, because almost no new housing had been built in the preceding 15 years of depression and war. And the cramped and dank conditions of New York’s turn-of-the-century tenements probably account for the spread of the idea, cherished by European architects and pushed by American government bureaucrats, that poor families would be better off in well-lighted high-rise apartments than in houses. Ms. Shlaes’s vivid account of St. Louis’s Pruitt-Igoe housing project—opened with high hopes in the 1950s and demolished beginning in 1972—shows how that dream quickly became a nightmare of crime and squalor.

The architects of antipoverty programs were, like most policy makers, creatures of their times, and after the perceived policy successes of some of the New Deal and early postwar programs, they were heedless of potential unintended consequences—like the vast increases in crime and welfare dependency in the 1965-75 decade. Most of all, they were intoxicated with the unexpected postwar prosperity, which was producing so much revenue that Lyndon Johnson thought he could pay for both guns and butter and which prompted Richard Nixon, in 1972, to sign a revenue-sharing law that diverted federal money directly to the states. The ascetic Michael Harrington, in 1964, blanched at asking for $1 billion to fight poverty, but the ebullient Sargent Shriver was happy to pony up. “We have plenty of money,” he later said.

“Great Society” is in part a story of how antipoverty programs like Community Action sprang into being and then nose-dived. But interspersed among Ms. Shlaes’s chapters on the programs’ architects are chapters on seemingly unrelated individuals and trends. Between the Port Huron Statement and Michael Harrington, we encounter General Electric CEO Ralph Cordiner, his labor-relations head Lemuel Boulware, and company spokesman Ronald Reagan: Together they launched a campaign of free-market boosterism that would see fruition, politically, decades later in the 1980s and ’90s.

In between Shriver’s Office of Economic Opportunity and its scuffles with mayors and governors, we meet Gordon Moore and Robert Noyce as they leave Fairchild Semiconductor, found what would become Intel, and develop microchips, whose capacity, as has been famously calculated, doubles every 18 months or so. After we read about Tom Hayden’s trip to North Vietnam in 1965 and the “Negro removal” necessary to build Pruitt-Igoe-type projects, we learn about European nations, in their attempts at economic recovery, whittling down America’s gold supply and threatening devaluation of the dollar. And after describing the tumult at the 1968 Democratic National Convention, Ms. Shlaes shifts our attention to Japan, where Toyota executives are preparing to boost sales in America of tiny Corollas produced by workers empowered to make decisions and not represented by adversary-minded labor unions like the UAW.

These juxtapositions underline a central message delivered not explicitly but by unmissable implication: The architects of the Great Society’s war on poverty thought their ideas and strategies were the wave of the future. Hadn’t government shown its capacity to win a world war, develop technology and provide direction for the macroeconomy in the two decades before Harrington wrote about the “other America”? The Big Units of big government, big business and big labor just needed the right guidance and the injection of energy from yet another generation of young men (and an occasional woman) to eliminate the last pockets of poverty and racism.

But the critical changes that were coming turned out to be not from thinkers with connections at the top of society but from innovators whose ideas were bubbling up, mostly unseen, from odd geographic corners and outside familiar institutions. The Big Units’ dominance was being quietly, without celebration in newsmagazine covers, undermined by Silicon Valley entrepreneurs and Japanese auto makers, by financial innovators and by that former spokesman for GE, who would be elected governor of California and, in time, U.S. president.

At least one of the antipoverty programs’ progenitors recognized that progressive policies could produce regressive results. Daniel Patrick Moynihan’s famous 1965 report on the breakdown of the black family sprang from his noticing that welfare dependency among blacks was rising despite widespread economic growth and in the wake of the successes of the civil-rights movement. Perusal of data a few years later would have shown crime rates rising as well, even if liberal reforms resulted in reduced prison populations. Los Angeles’s Watts riot occurred in 1965 just after passage of the Voting Rights Act. Detroit, the home base of Reuther’s UAW, whose Lafayette Park was one of the first urban-renewal projects, was the site of the nation’s deadliest riot in 1967 (which I witnessed as an intern in the mayor’s office).

The final chapter of “Great Society” shows how the usually frosty Richard Nixon encouraged bonhomie among his economic appointees at a Camp David weekend in August 1971, when Treasury Secretary John Connally pushed Fed Chairman Arthur Burns to endorse closing the gold window—thereby, in Ms. Shlaes’s analysis, ushering in 10 years of inflation and deficit spending. One of the arguments of “The Forgotten Man” was that, more than is usually grasped, Herbert Hoover’s policies were much like Franklin Roosevelt’s. One of the arguments of “Great Society” is that Richard Nixon’s policies were an extension, not a repudiation, of Lyndon Johnson’s. Neither Hoover nor Roosevelt, Ms. Shlaes argued, ended the Depression. Neither Johnson nor Nixon, she argues, ended poverty.

The genuine achievements of the 1940s and ’50s led them to imagine they could. That is one of the lessons of “Great Society”: Success breeds failure. But another lesson comes from those interlaced vignettes of embryonic financial and technological innovation: Failure can breed success. Ms. Shlaes’s chronicle is not just a story of how good people’s good intentions went wrong. It is also a story of how the assumption that the near future will closely resemble the recent past can lead even the best intentioned and most well-informed people to pursue policies that turn out to be mostly counterproductive and often destructive.