Featured * :: the big con

Atlanta: Finishing What General Sherman Started

Rick Perlstein — Sat, 21 Jun 2008 15:18:34 -0400

[Deer tracks across the parched bed of Atlanta's Lake Lanier. Creative Commons photo by Rusty Tanton]

[Correction: An earlier version of this post misidentified Georgia's capital, which is Atlanta, as Augusta.]

Most of our media have been far too busy following the news of what kind of fist bumps terrorists favor, and Luke Russert's exceptional poise under pressure, to notice—well, much of anything. Least of all, the Biblically proportioned drought in one of our nation's fastest growing regions, which is only getting worse, and more consequential for the civilization, by the day.

Atlanta magazine could no longer ignore it. The cover of their "The Water Issue," which I picked up on a recent swing through Hartsfield-Jackson Atlanta International Airport, is graced by a water glass that's one-quarter full—scratch that, three-quarters empty. The entire magazine is a fascinating document, a potsherd for future archeologists seeking answers to the kind of neuroses that allowed a civilization let itself be run according to an ideology—conservatism—so singularly unfit to govern a complex, modern society.

Amidst all the schmancy department store and Cartier watch ads, the columns on "Scent marketing" ("among Advertising Age's top ten trends to watch in 2007") and enticements to purchase property at marquee destinations like The Inn At Palmetto Bluff ("50 beautifully appointed waterfront cottages, full-service spa, inspired Lowcountry, cuisine, exclusive Jack Nicklaus Signature golf course...")—the landscaping ad featuring the gushing backyard waterfall alongside the furnished stone gazebo was an especially decadent touch, directly across from a full-page ad for "Brookhaven Retreat, treating both addiction and mental health challenges"—these 176 pages document a narcissistic metropolis on the verge of a nervous breakdown, but not quite able to admit it.

In a letter to subscribers, the editor describes what it was like growing up in the Third World, as a child of missionaries: "In one of the places we stayed, water was piped in only one hour a day—we had to run around with buckets and pots to catch every drop. in another, water that collected in rooftop tanks would turn scalding in the midday tropical heat. No matter where we traveled, flush toilets were a rarity."

That's what she's been thinking of, walking into all the Atlanta bathrooms with "empty buckets near the tub": Atlantans, you see, have begun flushing their toilets with recycled bath water.

The fashion shoot, lithesome models swaddled in this summer's "bright colors and bold lines," is apocalyptically staged in an empty swimming pool. Equally apocalyptic is the comic-book style feature about Atlanta circa 2050 as a civilization straight out of Soylent Green. ("Inevitably, water thieves find a way to get around the system, but penalties are Draconian. The water corps has the legal authority to SHOOT TO KILL.") The accompanying features on what happened and why are exemplary—save for the absence of one concept Atlanta (which on page 26 endorses, tongue only half in cheek, libertarian presidential candidate Bob Barr) can't quite bring itself to utter: conservatism.

One phrase they do manage to use: states rights. Portentously, in 1990, two conservative governors, Guy Hunt of Alabama and Robert Martinez of Florida, sued Georgia, "with its endless development" and "unquenchable thirst for water," to keep the Army Corps of Engineers from sharing "their" water resources.

All told over the entire United States, the Army Corps of Engineers built and runs 464 lakes in 43 states, one of them Atlanta's life-giving Lake Lanier; but the notion of the federal government actually coordinating all these resources for the common good would just be too, too un-American to contemplate. Instead, this civil war has ratcheted up to Israel-Palestine levels. "In March, U.S. Interior Secretary Dirk Kepthorne finally put the bickering governors in a collective time-out after they missed a deadline to come up with a tri-state agreement."

There hasn't been any agreement yet. Southerners are a prideful pack, after all, loath to take dictation from pointy-headed bureaucrats in Washington.

States rights: that fetish of generations of Southern politicians desperate for a rhetorically innocent way to institutionalize their rage at federal demands for equal racial justice. It has come back now to bite Dixie rather soundly in the ass. Actually, the ideology is more pathological than mere states rights: the zero-sum war of all against all has descended to the level of the localities, with the State House's blessing. "To [Georgia Gov. Sonny] Perdue, water is a local issue. 'The state can be there to help...but we should not be in the business of directing and instructing communities on how to do their business," [press secretary Bert] Brantley says.... Last year, Alabama went to court to stop the city of Canton and the Cobb County-Marietta Water Authority's (CCMWA) construction of the Hickory Log Creek Reservoir in Cherokee County—four weeks shy of the dam's projected completion."

One of the package's articles narrates the Hatfield-and-McCoy-like feud between the counties of Douglas and Cobb, when an administrator in the former had the foresight to plan for a possible drought, building a new reservoir, banning outdoor watering—only to see the Cobb connive in the state legislature, like Daniel Day Lewis in There Will Be Blood, to siphon off Douglas's suddenly flush water resources.

[Creative Commons photo. These structures were once referred to as "boats."]

Missed opportunity after missed opportunity are adumbrated therein. Yet the magazine blames not ideology but "bureaucracy." That's all right for our purposes, because the ideology hides in plain sight. Atlanta boomed in the wake of the monster capital investments made in anticipation of the 1996 Olympics, the magazine reports; "In 1990, the Atlanta area was projected to draw 800,000 new residents over the next twenty years; in the ten years following the Olympics, the total population increased by almost 1.4 million.... But in that same ten-year period, the reservoirs that supply our most vital resource grew not a bit."

Nobody could have anticipated the breach in the infrastructure: "In 1969, a study by the Atlanta Region Metropolitan Planning Commission...determined that significant infrastructure changes would be required to avoid critical water shortages when the metro area's population soared to between 3 million (reached in 1993) an 5 million (2006). In the 1980s, water planners mapped out a proposed network of reservoirs throughout North Georgia to shore up water for inevitable droughts. Yet the reservoirs never got off paper. By the nineties, the projects were not only deemed to costly to pursue once rainfall returned in abundance, but they also threatened to further antagonize Alabama and Florida in the tri-state water dispute." What did the Atlanta metropolitan area do instead? Issue building permits—48,262 in 1996; 68,240 in 2006. That's the free-market way. The conservative way.

"The drought of 2002 was another wake up call, and then-Govenror Roy Barnes said 2003 would be the 'Year of Water.' Would his plan to build reservoirs and aid municipalities in fixing leaks have worked? No one knows. That year's gubernatorial election came down to Confederate stripes on the state flag."

Like I said, the magazine tells this story well, as far as it goes; but again, what Atlanta magazine can't bring itself to probe is the reason for the season—the ideology that made it all possible, even inevitable. [Why no planning? Why no commitment of resources? Why did politics in Georgia at the most crucial possible juncture come down to the images on a flag?

"Eighteen years, fourteen governors, and endless posturing and finger-pointing" brought on his "tri-state water war," we learn; what we don't learn is that Roy Barnes, the guy who actually stuck his neck out to solve the problem, was a Democrat, and the man who replaced him was the Confederate Flag-baiting Republican; and that besides Barnes, eight of these eleven governors were Republicans; and that the remaining three Democrats were either conservatives or hobbled in whatever enlightened reforms they might have proposed by conservative and/or Republican legislatures. That when Roy Barnes was governor, 61 of Georgia's state legislators, about a quarter—Georgian readers, help me out: is that enough to stymie a tax reform in your state?—signed Grover Norquist's pledge never, ever to support a tax increase, no matter what civilizational collapse might befall the Peachtree State as a consequence (the numbers are now 34 percent of Georgian senators and 30 percent of Georgian house members). And that, by the time the Olympics might have inspired them to reasonably call on the nation's collective coffers to shore up their infrastructure the House was being run by Cobb County's own anti-public investment zealot, Plank Seven of whose "Contract With America" demanded a three-fifths congressional majority to pass any tax increase, and "A balanced budget/tax limitation amendment and a legislative line-item veto to restore fiscal responsibility to an out-of-control congress." Who promptly shut down the federal government when he didn't get his budgetary way. Newt Gingrich used to love to talk about saving "civilization." Well, Newt: thanks to you and your boys, in Atlanta, we are beginning to see how civilizations begin to die.

Can you imagine having to go back in time to 1969—the year before the Nixon administration bid for permanent conservative allegiance from Georgia by sending Vice President Agnew to dedicate a Confederate Memorial (the Atlanta Constitution was insulted when Kent State kept President Nixon himself from keeping the appointment—and trying to explain to the Atlanta Region Metropolitan Planning Commission's planners that their Confederacy-addled conservative state elites would prove so feckless as to utterly ignore their urgent, wise counsel? To do, simply, nothing but nothing?

Nobody could have anticipated the breach in the infrastructure

Metaphors of babies and bath water, bathtubs not even full enough to drown a government in (we have to save the water to make the toilets work), a dynamic regional economy spiraling down a drain proliferate at my fingertips, all too cheaply. They'll keep proliferating, in Atlanta and everywhere, until we defeat conservatism, and economic individualism, and "free market" madness," as "governing" philosophies.

[Cherokee County. The "buoy" reads: "Boats Keep Out." Mission accomplished. Creative Commons photo.]

Atlanta magazine can't make itself understand this; such are the powers that be, the broken right-wing culture within which it aspires to civic leadership, and in which it is, ultimately, complicit. The package's tone will be familiar to any student of the city's history. It is the cry of the "enlightened" business-boosterism class against the bubbas in the State Capitol who cramp downtown's mojo with their silly wingnut ways: "Last fall, Sonny Perdue prayed publicly for rain. In February, he gave the okay for area pools to open—an interesting and perhaps foolhardy decision given that Lake Lanier at the time was only two feet above its lowest level ever and adequate summer rainfall is unlikely." Perforce, the editors can't quite bring themselves to implicate the region's ür-Booster Business, Coca-Cola: did you know that the bottled water branded by Coke as "Dasani" ("Purified water enhanded with minerals for a pure, fresh taste") is actually pumped from Atlanta's municipal water supply (and is chemically indistinguishable from it); that Coke's flagship plant's monthly water bill from the city is only $27,000; but that, not to fear the plant is working stalwartly to cut its water consumption by 10 percent, and doesn't use as much water as the nearby chicken-processing plants, and has pledged to "replace every drop of water used in its beverages and their production"?

Apparently they're only replacing it in America. To its credit, Atlanta magazine points out the moral evasions in such claims: the "offsetting" is happening "in places such as India, where in the last few years more than 50 communities have complained of water shortages due to nearby Dasani bottling."

In the end, Atlanta magazine is far too busy to hate Coca-Cola Inc. The market made them do it: "In a way, though, we may all be to blame for how much of our water Coca-Cola is bottling and selling right back to us. It's a simple matter of supply and demand. Look around—at the food court, at the ALTA match, at the Dogwood Festival, even here in Atlanta magazine's vending machines. It's perhaps pointless to build a case for Coca-Cola rethinking its Dasani production in a time of drought when we're the ones swallowing, literally, the idea that we can't live without the bottle."

And for all their mockery of crazy old Governor Perdue and his misplaced affection for swimming pools, they do coo sympathetically of his new allowance for the hand-watering of lawns "to alleviate the $2 billion-plus [sic!] hit the local landscaping industry took last year because of the draught."

Those poor, poor landscapers. But no worries: another feature in the package, "Ripple Effect," reminds Atlantans that there's money to be made in them thar empty reservoirs; "In the economics of water, some win and some lose." The landscape and timber businesses gets downward arrows, but things are looking up, no joke, for "rain barrel merchants," "rain recyclers," "roofers, "arborists," "car washers" (at-home car washing has been banned), "stump grinders" and, yes, "golfers": "When a golf ball lands on hard, dry ground, you can get an extra thirty to forty yards off the tee with the bounce. Sweet!"

The Meaning of Box 722

Rick Perlstein — Thu, 05 Jun 2008 10:53:31 -0400

For at least six months now I've been planning, and putting off, this post. The imminent occasion of the first African American major-party nominee forces my hand. It's time for me to help give a sense of just how far we have come.

When I started researching NIXONLAND I knew the congressional elections of 1966 would form a crucial part of the narrative. They'd never really been examined in-depth before, but by my reckoning they were the crucial hinge that formed the ideological alignment we live in now.

In 1964, Lyndon Johnson—and, apparently, liberalism—achieved such a gigantic landslide victory that it appeared to pundits the Republican Party would be forever consigned to the outer darkness if it ever entertained a Goldwater-style conservative law-and-order platform again. Two years later, most of the new liberal congressmen swept in on LBJ's coattails—the congressional class that gave us Medicare and Medicaid, the first serious environmental legislation, National Endowments for the Humanities and Arts, Head Start, the Voting Rights Act, the Department of Housing and Urban Development, the end of racist immigration quotas, Legal Aid, and more—was swept out on a tide of popular reaction.

That reaction, I hope I demonstrate effectively in NIXONLAND, rested on two pillars: terror at the wave of urban rioting that began in the Watts district of Los Angeles; and terror at the prospect of the 1966 civil rights bill passing, which, by imposing an ironclad federal ban on racial discrimination in the sale and rental of housing—known as "open housing"—would be the first legislation to impact the entire nation equally, not just the South. (What that reaction most decidedly did not rest on: fear and loathing of "hippies," which were unknown, except in California, to most of the nation until 1967; or antiwar activists, which were not associated with either party, because Republicans and Democrats had about an equal number of hawks and doves in 1966.)

When I learned that the papers of Senator Paul Douglas were at the Chicago Historical Society (as it was known then; now it's cursed with the decidedly more prosaic name the Chicago History Museum), I decided to make Douglas's 1966 loss to Republican Charles Percy a key case study for my hypothesis. Douglas was a popular liberal lion first elected in 1948 and a civil rights champion, whose wife Emily Taft Douglas (a one-term congresswoman herself) had strode proudly across Edmund Pettus Bridge in 1965 arm in arm with Martin Luther King. He was also, as an economist, one of the architects of many of the New Deal ideas and programs that created the world's first mass middle class.

In the summer of 1966, as debate over open housing raged in Congress, King marched not in Alabama but in Chicago, to implore the city to enforce its own open housing ordinance, passed in 1963—which, if Chicago did, would be a first. It was the most segregated city in the north. As I put it in NIXONLAND (drawing on this classic study):

You could draw a map of the boundary within which the city's seven hundred thousand Negroes were allowed to live by marking an X wherever a white mob attacked a Negro. Move beyond it, and a family had to face down a mob of one thousand, five thousand, or even (in the Englewood riot of 1949, when the presence of blacks at a union meeting sparked a rumor the house was to be "sold to niggers") ten thousand bloody-minded whites. In the late 1940s, when the postwar housing shortage was at its peak, you could find ten black families living in a basement, sharing a single stove but not a single flush toilet, in "apartments" subdivided by cardboard. One racial bombing or arson happened every three weeks.... In neighborhoods where they were allowed to "buy" houses, they couldn't actually buy them at all: banks would not write them mortgages, so unscrupulous businessmen sold them contracts that gave them no equity or title to the property, from which they could be evicted the first time they were late with a payment.

And in 1966, a teenager answering a job ad walked over the border from Chicago into the all-white city of Cicero, and for that sin and no other was beaten to death. That was what Martin Luther King came to fight in Chicago.

At the Chicago History Museum, the Douglas collection covers seven hundred "linear feet"—archivsts' metric for how big a collection would be if you stacked the papers one atop another. And somehow, somewhere, I stumbled upon Box 722, which contained all the letters Senator Paul Douglas received about open housing and Martin Luther King's presence in Chicago. I quote many of them in a section of NIXONLAND of which I'm most proud, the one with the most original research and historical insights: the one on how "open housing" opened up the conservative backlash that inaugurated the Republican dominance of the politics of our own generation. I've always wanted to do a post printing, for the historical record, all the letters I put down in my research notes.

That's what I'm about to do. They comprise an unmatched emotional history on how the white middle class built by the New Deal learned to vote Republican. And an unmatched marker of how far this nation has come, now that this same city has given us our first African American presidential nominee.

The first is from March 11, 1965, as the Voting Rights Act was being considered—with nothing in it about open housing.

I am white and am praying that you vote against open housing in the consideration of Equal Rights.
Just because the negro refuses to live among his own race--that alone should give you the answer.
I was forced to sell my home in Chicago ('Lawndale') at a big loss because of the negroes taking over Lawndale--their morals are the lowest (and supported financially by Mayor Daley as you well know)--and the White Race by law.
Please don't take away our bit of peace and freedom to choose our neighbors.
What did Luther King mean when he faced the nation on TV New Year's day--announcing he will not be satisfied until the wealth of America is more evenly divided?
Sounds like Communism to Americans. 'Freedom for all'--including the white race, Please!

The letters start up again in May of 1966, when open housing was actually introduced. At first, there are a flurry of letters, most from liberal clergymen, supporting passage. Then these soon disappear.

From June:

Do you or any of your friends live next door to a negro--why should we have them pushed down our throats?

As a citzen and a taxpayer I was very upset to hear about 'TITLE IV' of the so-called civil rights Bill S. 3296. This is not Civil Rights. This takes away a person's rights. We too are people and need someone to protect us.
We designed and built our own home and I would hate too think of being forced to sell my lovely home to anyone just because they had the money.

The letters accelerate in July, after a black riot on Chicago's West Side, which brought this response from Mayor Daley—"I think you can't charge it directly to Martin Luther King. But surely some of the people that came in here have been talking for the last year of violence, and showing pictures and instructing people how to conduct violence, there on his staff, and they're responsible.... Who makes a Molotov cocktail? Someone has to train the youngsters"—and these from one M.R. Rosen, president of Becker Brothers Carbon in Cicero, and a resident of rural Danville:

Last night there was a show of appreciation for all that has been done to help the colored people. Even those that have been moved from the slums into high rise apartments have seen fit to shoot and wound our policemen. Don't you think it's time to have Dr Martin Luther King and other negro leaders start preaching that they should go to work the same as white folks do, if they wish to improve their lot, instead of continuing to promise them more and more in all their talks.
How much longer are we doing to be the suckers, giving away tax payer's money and in return see what it has got us. Shooting, looting, and additional cost to community in the way of police protection, hospital expenses, replacement of burned and smashed automobiles, etc.

I do not understand the Negro riots in our big cities. These negroes have civil rights. They do not suffer from discrimination. Many are supported by our taxes.

On July 28, 1966, The New York Times reported of deliberations on the civil rights bill, "Fearful of fairly widespread defections in their own ranks, Democratic leaders are counting heavily on Republican help in salvaging the open housing section." On the House floor, conservative Republican William C. Cramer of Florida, cried, "This is not going to bring about the solution of the plethora of problems relating to the ghettos. This is not going to settle the riots." A segregationist Democrat from Alabama warned of "the discord which will be provoked in communities throughout the land if this proposal is adopted.... It is ironic that many who cry for liberty and freedom for special groups...diminish and destroy the rights of all men." Another from Florida said, "In the past when legislation produced bad results, the Congress repealed it. Now sociological reasoning seems to say the solution to a statute which produces looting, burning, and rioting is to pass more of the same." And in Chicago, one Milton J. Hayes, vice president of the American National Bank and Trust Co. of Chicago, wrote his senator after a stroll in Washington D.C. was interrupted by an open housing march:

As a member of the over 150 million white population of this country, I respectfully request that some action be taken to prevent such demonstrations in the Nation's capitol. This is an imposition on the majority and prevents the average citizens from enjoying his capital. This is itself is one of the most severe forms of discrimination.

And a stockbroker wrote on his letterhead:

When the negro community & its leaders talk of civic responsibilities, I will be in favor of further civil rights legislation—not before. I live on the Lake Street 'L,' & all reason on this subject went up in smoke when riders had to lie on the floor to escape snipers' bullets fired from public (!) housing developments. You must assure me and my family of protection from this ghastly sort of thing, before you can expect sympathetic support for negro demands.

Then, the watershed. On July 29, Martin Luther King led what was supposed to be all-night vigil in front of F.H. Halvorsen Real Estate in the Bungalow Belt neighborhood of Gage Park. The police rescued them from an advancing mob. The returned to the same spot the next morning. They were met by a hail of rocks. And Senator Douglas got a raft of letters dated July 30. The one from "Mr and Mrs John Albrecth" included a column by Barry Goldwater arguing that blacks riot because their leaders demand too much, "speaking endlessly of quick solutions, of instantly setting aright old injustices, of changing men's hearts with a stroke of the pen.... We have far too long lived in the world of sociological LSD where political power was supposed to be able to make men healthy, wealth, and wise, even beautiful":

Although I am a staunch Democrat I cannot help but wholeheartedly agree with Barry Goldwater article. I'm almost sorry I didn't vote for him.
"I feel Mr Johnson Pres is much responsible for the present riot by his constant encouragement for the Negro to take any measure to assert himself & demand his rights--Rights, and respect are earned!

This one made it into the book. Elenaor M. Gavior of 5207 S. California, wrote:

As a Gage park resident & that of my in-laws & my parents, & their familes we are living as decent, hard-working people, you should consider martial law to prevent a peaceful community from getting harassed. That you should consider re-establishing law &order & change laws to protect the people and not criminals & people who openly voice their opinions against the majority as well as the government. Our children don't get sprinklers, day courts, new schools, elevators, cheap rent, yet they will be asked shortly to go fight on foreign shores. I think its time to defend our country from within. I have 3 sons & I will gladly have them defend this country here.

And, I wrote, Mrs. Gavion's sons would soon have the chance to do that, from their very own Gage Park front yards. On July 31 five hundred open housing marches were met by a mob of 4,000, and cherry bombs, bottles, and rocks. Priests and nuns ("whores!") were singled out for abuse. A first grade teacher, Sister Mary Angelica, was pummeled to the ground. A cheer went up: "We've got another one!" Marchers returning to their cars found them torched, overturned, or rolled into the muddy Marquette Park lagoon.

Back in Washington, the Republican Party passed a watershed: they chose Goldwaterism as their official ideology on civil rights. At an August 2 press conference of the House Republican Policy Committee, Gerald Ford announced the caucus's opposition to the open housing bill: "Respect for law and order is basic to the achievement of common goals within our nation," he began, and blamed the open housing struggle for law and order's decline. "Since its inception, it has created confusion and bitterness. It has divided the country and fostered discord and animosity when calmness and a unified approach to civil rights problems are desperately needed."

Three days later 600 marched again in Chicago, against 10,000 counterdemonstrators. Some wore Nazi helmets. Others waved Confederate battle flags, carried George Wallace banners, Swastika placards that helpfully explained, "The Symbol of White Power." This was the famous march where Martin Luther King was hit by a giant rock, where he told the press, "I think the people of Mississippi ought to come to Chicago to learn how to hate," where, because Mayor Daley, scared he wouldn't be able to secure the 1968 Democratic convention if King was injured, had the cops give them (relatively) safe passage—one of the reasons (Republican opposition to open housing being the other) for the chants along the route, "Don't vote for Democrats! Don't vote for Democrats."

Letters to Senator Douglas, August 5. Reading them in that archive, I felt like I was peering into the dark soul of America to a depth I'd never thought possible. From 3111 W. 71st:

Recently we members of the Marquette Park area of Chicago witnessed violence over the so called subject of civil rights. Since the Civil Rights Act Act was passed all we have seen is violence, riots, and general defiance of the laws of our land by the Negro population under the guise of this nebulous term, civil rights. When is the Congress going to wake up to the fact that it cannot legislate morals or love?
"We white people have taken a lot from the Negro. We have been patient, and now find ourselves pushed up against a wall by groups that feel it is their God given right to have our property. We have worked hard and saved to get what we now own. Because we do work hard and wish to maintain our property are we to be denied the right to dispose of our property as we see fit? Is the ultimate aim the same as the Soviet Union when all property was collectivized....
The Civil Rights legislation amendment that which deals with the so-called open occupancy law is disgusting and makes me almost ashamed to admit that it has been proposed in America. All this civil rights legislation is un-American.

From 3322 2. 64th:

Will you please do all in your power to make the laws for the benefit of America.
The average citizen is becoming nervous, tense, and disgusted, with people being allowed to cause all this. The marchers are a direct menace to public safety. Are they the devil or communists. I live in Chicago Lawn, stayed in my own house; the noise, confusion, anxiety is impossible to bear.
To your colleagues and anyone voting on our laws. The average citizen is losing his rights.

5715 S. Kolman:

He was quoted on TV tonite as seeing more hate in the Marquette Park area than he saw down South. What I want to know? Is that hate or fear? I think its fear that another neighborhood will go down the drain
For instance, the Southeast side of Chicago had many beautiful areas that have become slums because of dirty & sloppy people. Why don't Dr King, Al Raby, and his fellow followers work at educating thse people on fundamental cleanliness and moral obligations.

7134 S. Avers:

If this is a result of passing a law that was intended to help a group of people and if this is the reaction, something is drastically wrong. IT IS TIME TO CHANGE THE LAW TO PROTECT ALL THE PEOPLE. Maybe then, we will have some kind of peace and order in our cities. Reading this morning's paper makes me shuddering and wonder where it will all end. My husband and I were both of the opinion when the Civil Rights Law was passed that everyone in this country had right to whatever the country had to offer--by hard work as our parents did and as we are doing. They did not demand anything--they worked for what they have.
When a group of people march into neighborhoods--stir up the people with their irresponsible leaders and then say that are against violence--they are talking nonsense--why, their very actions reek with violence...
I am appealing to you to use our elected office to do whatever you can to bring some sanity back into our country before we crumble from within.

5939 S. Richmond:

Up until now many of us have been sympathetic & tolerant. This no longer exists. If our present leaders in Washington are confused, perhaps a completely new group would be able to handle the situation better.

And finally, a set of petitions, also dated August 5, 1966:

We are writing to you, and requesting legislation for a repeal of the Civil Rights Act of 1964.
The Act wil rob a great many Americans of their rights to property, individual liberty, freedom of choice, and enterprise.
This Act is the wrong vehicle, impracticale and undesirable, and we are bitterly opposed to it.
We also request legislation to stop these civil rights demonstrations.
When civil rghts leaders walk into a community and bring with them the most notorious thugs and gang leaders in the city, it is hypocrisy to call them peaceful demonstrations.
"You cannot substitute the law for incentive, responsibility, initiative, honor, duty, achievement, or creative activity of the individual."

The day after that:

At least fifty square of Chiago is occupied by negroes which means that no part of that area is safe for white people to travel...
It is safe to say that not a single white person has ever moved into a negro neighorhood yet there has been over a million white people dumped, shoved, or pushed out of their homes by expansion of negroes....
"NEGROES HAVE BEEN MADE THE BOSS OF THE UNITED STATES.

The day after that, from 6106 S. Whipple:

Please put me down as one who believes that brotherhood, racial harmony, morals or love cannot be legislated.
I also believe that bigotry, prejudice, or hate cannot be erased by additional laws or by physical force.
It is my opinion that the entire so-called 'civil rights' legislation should be reappraised. Money and laws will not automatically instill responsibility, honor, duty or achievement....
I think Negroes, as a body, will be accepted generally when and if they follow the example of the other ethnic groups that have in the past been discriminated against.
These groups worked hard, built their communities, religious institutions, hospitals, etc. through their thrift, example, education, and encouragement of their offspring to attain higher social status, they won general admiration and acceptance. This all was accomplished without any government hand-out....
Is it any wonder that people of the white race become incensed when they feel there is a threat of invasion or inundation by a people who have demonstrated their inability or incapability for concerted action for improvement of themselves or their surroundings?

This pretty much covers the tone of things for the next couple weeks—dozens of letters: "It is my firm belief, and of all my neighbors, that king should be taken into custody, charged with fomenting civil disorder and anarchy.... Today, the insufferable arrogance of this character places him on a pedestal as a dark-skinned Hitler." The only shift: the letters to Senator Douglas make more and more explicit reference to the November election:

While you sit on your butt in Washington Martin Luther King is violating everything I bought and paid for. That jackass Percy is beginning to look good to me.

Paul Douglas, for his part, stiffened his spine—"I am for open occupancy. I believe in equal opportunity of every man and woman. I do not intend to switch or to equivocate"—despite letters like this: "I have been a Democrat for over forty years, but you can be sure on November 8th that I shall turn Republican.... In all my years as a democrat I have not received any favors from any of the parties."

Perhaps he had seen the following poster that began appearing in Chicago's bungalow belt neighborhoods (also from Box 722):

"OUR SLOGAN: 'Your Home is your castle--Keep it that way by Voting STRAIGHT REPUBLICAN.
VOTE STRAIGHT REPUBLICAN IF YOU ARE:
"AGAINST--violence, riots, and marches in the streets;
"AGAINST--disregard for law and order;
"AGAINST--The 3 Rs of today--Riots, Rape & Robbery...
"Did Mayor Daley make a secret deal with Martin Luther King to stop the marches until after the election?... This is you chance to show where you stand on FORCED HOUSING.... Renters, as well as homeowners, would be effected for the law applies everywhere, including the suburbs. WHERE WOULD YOU GO TO BE SAFE?
"The only way to stop this program is by you, your family, and neighbors voting Republican on November 8th."

Republican Charles Percy had gone into the race a civil rights liberal: "Chuck, do you have to talk so much about open housing?" one suburban Republican official complained to him. But by October, following Jerry Ford's talking points to the letter, he went on ABC's "Face the Nation" and said that while he still supported the "principle" of open housing, he disagreed with Senator Douglas on one thing: including "single-family dwelling" would be "an unpassable and unenforceable" attack on property rights. "Right now, we aren't ready to force people to accept those they don't want as neighbors," he said in tones of rue.

Long story short: Douglas soldiered on, imploring his constituents to remember the favors they had received from the Democratic Party—entree, for one thing, into the world's first mass middle class of factory workers. To no avail. Percy won in an upset. Pundits said it was because Percy's daughter had just been brutally murdered; it was a sympathy vote. But if people voted for Percy because he was a grieving father, the ratio of the sympathetic to the callous was suspiciously high in the Bungalow Belt neighborhoods where Martin Luther King had marched. A ward analysis demonstrated that in Chicago neighborhoods threatened by racial turnover, new Percy voters were enough to account for Douglas's 80 percent decline in the city since 1960. Pundits also pointed to people's unwillingness to vote for such an old man. But in the backlash wards younger Democrats declined almost as significantly.

No, it was voters like this, from 4315 W. Crystal:

A few years ago I had written you a letter stating how I and my family would welcome the opportunity to vote you in to the highest office in the land--The Presidency. Since that time however your support of the open occupancy bill has caused me to change my support of your candidacy for senator of Illinois, and believe me sir there are many more in my category who are changing in their support of you.

Here is the fundamental tragedy of the backlash: Voters like this empowered a party that decided they didn't need protection against predatory subprime mortgage fraud. Didn't need affordable, universal health insurance; made it easier for companies to rape their pensions; kept on going back to the well to destroy their Social Security; worked avidly to shred their union protections. Fought, in fact, every decent and wise social provision that made it possible in the first place for mere factory workers to live in glorious Chicago bungalows, or suburban homes, in the first place.

Now a black man from the city King visited in 1966 and called more hateful than Mississippi is running for president, fighting for all those things that made the mid-century American middle class the glory of world civilization, but which that middle class squandered out of the small-mindedness of backlash.

This post is for Chicago. This post is for America. This post is for our future. This post is for our history—that we may redeem it. This post is for a man who, had he walked down the wrong street in his own city 42 years ago, might well have been beaten to death.

On the Presence of the Past

Rick Perlstein — Wed, 04 Jun 2008 12:58:41 -0400

This past Sunday I received a review in the Washington Post by Elizabeth Drew which, while kind and thoughtful, contained at least one empirical falsehood (actually, at least two empirical falsehoods: Richard Nixon did buy a townhouse on Fifth Avenue, not 65th Street, after his forced retirement).

I wrote, in "Nixonland," "Do Americans not hate each other enough to fantasize about killing one another, in cold blood, over political and cultural disagreements? It would be hard to argue they do not." Drew found this passage "peculiar," and responded, "Well, I, for one, don't find it so hard." Between the time she wrote those words and the time they were published, Senator Edward M. Kennedy's brain tumor was announced. Shortly after that, the exceptionally popular Pittsburgh sports talk radio host Mark Madden said, "I'm very disappointed to hear that Senator Ted Kennedy of Massachusetts is near death because of a brain tumor. I always hoped Senator Kennedy would live long enough to be assassinated." (He also wondered whether the Kopechnes—the family of the young woman who died while a passenger in Ted Kenendy's car at Chappaquiddick in 1969—sent a get-well card.)

I observe this out not to score cheap points off Elizabeth Drew, but to make some broader points. Elite opinion consistently downplays the level of deep-seated structural tension in American life, in the service of an ideology of "consensus" that is not, in the end, healthy for the country. It's one of the most crucial themes of NIXONLAND, and one I find consistent across American political history—in fact, one of the crucial, and under-explored, themes of American history itself.

As America has heading toward a sectional crisis in the 1850s over the subject of slavery that culminated in a civil war in which over 600,000 Americans slaughtered each other, Congress's solution to the rising tensions was not to talk about them: a "gag rule" was passed banning the discussion of slavery on the floor of the House and Senate. Maybe if we look the other way, all the bad stuff will somehow just go away: that was the response, 100 years later, of the opening shot of America's next civil war, the 1965 riot in the Watts neighborhood of Los Angeles. While the violence was still ongoing, an L.A. radio station fired its most popular call-in host. He insisted on talking about Watts. His bosses wanted him talking about anything but. In this way consensus was institutionalized.

Thus do I hypothesize in my book, "It is not to much to suggest that the rages that accompanied the crumbling of this myth of consensus, as the furies of the 1960s advanced, would not have been so rageful—would not have been so literally murderous—had the false rhetoric of American unity had not been so glibly enforced in the years that preceded it: that some of the 1960s anger and violence was a return of what America repressed."

You don't transcend conflict by ignoring it. You transcend conflict by bravely facing it, and working through it.

Republicans hate Democrats. And Democrats, yes, hate Republicans. I'd even warrant that there are those on the left who hate conservatives enough to fantasize about killing them. But at least our grudges are fresh. Republicans have to keep dredging up ones from 40 years ago like they just happened yesterday to keep their souls in the proper state of un-settlement.

One day two weeks ago I was having a pleasant chat about the book with a right-wing radio host in Orlando. We were rapping about the Vietnam War and its role in the divisions of the 1960s. He said it was extraordinary to him that America began its retreat from Vietnam after the Tet Offensive of 1968, when—"do you know who General Giap is?" he asked me—the North Vietnamese commander had written in his own memoir that they were about to surrender until a broadcast by Walter Cronkite about America's setbacks in Vietnam inspired them to continue fighting on.

I didn't handle the joust very effectively. I jumped down his throat, immediately insisting he should be ashamed of repeating an entirely made-up story about General Giap. I should have been more patient, kept my powder dry, and asked him if it's Giap's 1985 memoir he was referring to—a book frequently cited on the subject by the right which is, yes, a perfectly imaginary object. (I could have kept calm and concluded with something conciliatory and in keeping with the broader themes of the book: so obsessed are we with keeping alive dead controversies from the 1960s that we're willing to let down our intellectual guard and accept any story that buttresses our side of the argument without bothering to check out its accuracy. Instead, I sounded like just another frothing liberal. No-Drama Obama would have handled himself more coolly.)

It was deja vu all over again when I talked to a right-wing host from Orlando. He seemed to really like the book, or at least the press release (most radio hosts never read the book). I casually mentioned how meaningful it is to me that I, a liberal, could write something conservatives found useful. Perhaps he hadn't read the part of the press release that says I'm a liberal—for my ideological admission unleashed hell's own fury. He was frothing that "Ted Kennedy and the Democrats" had surrendered America's honor in Vietnam.

As I've explained earlier, I did pretty well in that exchange. On about his fifth spittle-enhanced oath against the "Democrat Party" and how it surrendered in Vietnam, I asked him if he knew who Mark Hatfield was. (He was the Republican cosponsor, with George McGovern, of a no-exceptions-admitted bill in the middle of 1970 to pull out of Vietnam lock, stock, and barrel by 1971; my host hadn't heart of him.) I asked him if he knew who George Aiken was. (He was the Republican senator who said regarding Vietnam, in 1966, that we ought just to "declare victory and go home"; my host hadn't heard of him.)

On and on he ranted, about how the Democrats had refused the stalwart South Vietnam Army the money they needed in 1974 to hold off the Communist marauders and establish their own freedom; I replied that his argument wasn't with me, or the "Democrat Party," but with Barry Goldwater, who thought further funding idiotic ("You can scratch South Vietnam," he said in becoming one of the 61 senators, including neocon hero Scoop Jackson, to vote against it. "It is imminent that South Vietnam is going to fall into the hands of Vietnam.")

He concluded our cut-and-thrust with one more insult against the not-yet-stricken Ted Kennedy. It was, you see, all his fault.

Here's a question I've been getting a lot lately, one I'm a little uncomfortable with: I'm a historian, and hate being called upon to predict the future. People want to know if the cultural condition I describe as "Nixonland"— the America where two separate and irreconcilable sets of apocalyptic fears coexist in the minds of two separate and irreconcilable groups of Americans, each believing that were the other to prevail, America as they understand it might end—will endure for yet another generation.

Ted Kennedy's tragic illness suggests, however, a possible answer. It is just how astonishingly threadbare and exhausted the arguments on the conservative side of this engagement have become.

A letter to Time magazine from 1969: "How tragic, too, Kennedy's professed concern with the loss of lives in Vietnam when he was so negligent about saving the one young life over which he had direct control at Chappaquiddick."

A talk radio host almost 40 years later, in 2008: "I wonder if he got a card from the Kopechnes."

A hale and healthy ideological tendency wouldn't be so hard up for reasons to hate that they have to have to recycle ones from 40 years ago. Some day—and after the senator's successful surgery this week I hope we can say this day will come many decades in the future—Edward M. Kennedy will no longer be with us. Isn't it remarkable to think what a sad day that will be for not only those who love him, but for those who so irrationally hate, him, too? For that will be the day when roughly 5 percent of the right's "arguments" against the left—the Teddy-centric ones—will perish from the earth as well.

How did Nixonland end? It has not ended...yet. Give it time, give it time.

Where's the Love for Our Veterans?

Isaiah J. Poole — Thu, 14 Feb 2008 11:48:29 -0500

The nation’s legions of homeless or near-homeless veterans make a mockery of all of those “support the troops” bumper stickers and other symbols of faux patriotism conservative blowhards like to flaunt — which is why right-wing mouthpiece Bill O’Reilly of the Fox News Channel has invested so much in the effort to convince his viewers that the phenomenon of homeless veterans is a myth sprung from the liberal mind of former Sen. John Edwards.

A definitive report on the subject of homeless veterans—compiled by the National Alliance to End Homelessness and based largely on statistics from federal, state and local agencies—has been around since November, and it effectively debunks the dissembling of the O’Reilly spin machine. It is also a stark testament to how much damage conservative government as done to the support services that, if properly funded, would get many of these veterans off the streets—ranging from subsidized housing to mental health services.

But leave it to Robert Greenwald to bring the statistics, and O’Reilly’s unconscionable rants, into sharp, visceral focus. First, his Brave New Films produced a video that graphically puts to shame O’Reilly’s ridicule of Edwards, who highlighted the homelessness alliance findings while running for president earlier this year. How he is ratcheting up the issue with a Valentine's Day demonstration at the mouth of the beast— the Fox News Channel studios in midtown Manhattan.

At the front of the line will be the homeless veterans that O'Reilly denies exists.

According to a press release, "the vets will demand that O'Reilly stop denying the problem of homelessness among former servicemen and women, quit referring to homeless vets as drug addicts, and set the record straight on the challenges veterans face when they return from military service."

The demonstration comes after repeated calls by organizations that work with homeless veterans for O'Reilly to retract his statements. So far, O'Reilly hasn't. Instead, Brave New Films recounts this incident:

A delegation of homeless veterans from Fitzgerald House, an organization that provides housing and assistance to veterans, visited FOX News two weeks ago to hand deliver the petition, signed by over 18,000 people. There they were confronted by O'Reilly's producer Jesse Watters, who ridiculed them for not having watched O'Reilly's program on television in spite of the fact that these were people without a roof over their heads, much less cable TV. The next day, O'Reilly, who had not come down to meet with the delegation, went on air to call the vets "confused," saying that he felt "sorry for those guys" and that they were being "used."

The report by the homelessness alliance details how Bush administration programs have fallen far short of adequately funding services for homeless veterans, from shelter needs to mental health.

But when it comes to supporting our veterans, the conservative failure doesn't stop there. McClatchy Newspaper columnist Joseph Galloway writes in his latest column:

If a society is judged by the way it treats its military veterans, then we who live in the richest nation in the world and those who lead us should be condemned for our shameful neglect and callous disregard for those who defend us.

When 15 million Johnnies came marching home from World War II, a package of benefits enacted in 1944 and signed by President Franklin D. Roosevelt was waiting for them, extending assistance for education, unemployment and the purchase of a house or a business.

More than half of those who served in World War II—8 million of the 15 million veterans of that war—signed up and had their college tuitions or technical school fees paid by Uncle Sam. They also received monthly checks to cover housing and food.

It was expensive, but for every dollar the U.S. Government spent on educational benefits for WWII veterans, the government recouped between $5 and $12 in taxes paid on the higher incomes earned by college graduates, says the Congressional Research Service.

Contrast that, Galloway goes on to write, to today's efforts to beef up GI educational benefits:

Sen. James Webb, D-Virginia, a Vietnam veteran, has been doggedly pursuing passage of a new GI Bill aimed at helping these new wartime veterans get that education by giving them much the same educational benefits that were extended to their grandfathers after WWII.

Under his bill, which has attracted three dozen other sponsors, the government would resume paying full college tuition for these veterans for a period linked to their times in uniform, but for no more than 36 months or four academic years. Every eligible college veteran also would receive a check for $1,000 a month to help cover living expenses.

This would cost the government about $2 billion a year, which is about what we're presently spending every 36 hours in Iraq.

President George W. Bush and the Pentagon oppose any such improvement of this miserly benefit for our young veterans. Why? The president says it would cost too much and be too hard to administer, and he's threatened to veto Webb's bill if it ever passes.

There is a pattern here. The conservative movement loves to wrap itself around its supposed love and respect for the military, but over the last seven years it has consistently failed to put its money where its mouth is. Even for those who have given life and limb for their country, it seems that conservatives would rather say "You're on your own" and turn their backs than do the hard work of solving the problems veterans face when they return from war.

We need to hasten the day in which it would be the Bill O'Reilly's of the world whose views would be relegated to a dark, cold space under a bridge.

What Ailes Us

Rick Perlstein — Fri, 30 May 2008 09:55:24 -0400

In interviews during my book tour, I was delighted to be constantly asked about something I thought everyone already knew about: Roger Ailes' work, long before he went on to found Fox News, as bamboozler-in-chief for Richard Nixon's 1968 presidential campaign, specifically his role in inventing the fake candidate "town meeting" staged for TV but closed to the press. (Find the whole riveting story here.)

Specifically, curious interviewers have been honing in on the story of the time one of the citizens panels set up to question the president included a psychiatrist. Len Garment, then a Nixon campaign aide, blanched, because he knew Nixon bore an irrational (rational?) fear of psychiatrists. Ailes hit on an idea for a substitute: "A good, mean, Wallaceite cab-driver. Wouldn't that be great? Some guy to sit there and say, 'Awright, Mac, what about these niggers?'"

Point was, Nixon could abhor the uncivility of the words, while endorsing a "moderate" version of the opinion. Ailes walked up and down a nearby taxi stand until he found a cabbie who fit the bill.

That's the creep who runs America's vaunted "fair and balanced" network. Here's the thing: maybe someone should ask him if he used the N-word quoted above often, and when was the last time he used it.