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Introduction

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  14 October 2011

Brian Balogh
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Extract

In 1961 I was introduced to the invidious distinctions of race in America at the Sears and Roebuck store in Miami, Florida. I was seven years old when the babysitter took me shopping, spicing up the offer by promising some of those hot cashews whose aroma wafted through the deliciously cool air at Sears. While Myrtle browsed, I spotted a diversion that promised even more variety than the retail behemoth's tentative steps into fashion wear: it was a water fountain. There were two, actually, but the one I set my sights on was labeled “colored.” With thoughts of rainbows and Maypoles whirling through my mind, I headed straight for this ingenious invention that would soon quench all the shades of my thirst. Why hadn't I ever seen multicolored water before? Myrtle's guttural report aborted any further speculation. “Stop,” she boomed from oversized lingerie. Then something very strange happened. Myrtle ran. I had never seen Myrtle move quickly, let alone run. I froze. She grabbed my hand, suspended just inches from the cool silver handle and white porcelain basin. “That's dirty,” she grimaced. “It's for colored people.”

Type
Introduction
Information
Journal of Policy History , Volume 8 , Special Issue 1: Integrating the Sixties: The Origins Structures, and Legitimacy of Public Policy in a Turbulent Decade , January 1996 , pp. 1 - 33
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Copyright © The Pennsylvania State University, University Park, PA. 1996

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References

Notes

1. Graham, Hugh Davis, The Civil Rights Era: Origins and Development of National Policy, 1960–1972 (New York, 1990), 320.Google Scholar

2. Gates, Henry Louis Jr., Colored People: A Memoir (New York, 1994), xvi.Google Scholar

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5. By civil society. I mean the strata of institutions, and organizations like the market, the church and interest groups, and the habits, customs, and culture that mediate between individuals, mass society, and the state.

6. For a discussion of the 1970s and 1980s that focuses on the privatization of the public sphere, see Schulman, Bruce J., The Strange Death of American Public Life: Culture, Politics, and Society at the End of the American Century (forthcoming, 1996)Google Scholar. (My comments are based upon the chapter outline. 1 would like to thank the author for making it available to me.)

7. Even John Dewey, though he embraced the social sciences, softened the sharp edges between science, philosophy, and religion in ways that would soon go out of fashion in the academy. See Ryan, Alan, John Dewey and the High Tide of American Liberalism (New York, 1995), 20–25.Google Scholar

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10. The phrases come from Katz, Michael B., The Undeserving Poor: From the War on Poverty to the War on Welfare (New York, 1989).Google Scholar

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17. Ibid., 5.

18. Glendon notes in passing that “rights talk” converged with the language of psychotherapy (xi). For a more detailed discussion of the postwar therapeutic ethos, see Ehrenreich, Barbara, For Her Own Good: 150 Years of the Experts' Advice to Women (Garden City, 1978)Google Scholar, and May, Elaine Tyler, Homeward Bound: American Families in the Cold War Era (New York, 1988).Google Scholar

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21. There certainly was no room in this analysis for the concentration-camp victimlike emasculated slaves portrayed by Elkins, Stanley in Slavery, : A Problem in American Institutional and Intellectual Life (Chicago, 1959)Google Scholar. Historians soon obliged, discovering “agency,” particularly among the working class, women, and slaves. Historians then carried this force for social action to the ironic extreme of snatching cultural victory from the jaws of political and economic devastation.

22. Galambos, Louis and Pratt, Joseph A, The Rise of the Corporate Commonwealth: U.S. Business and Public Policy in the Twentieth Century (New York, 1988), 130.Google Scholar

23. Ibid., 130–31.

24. Ellis Hawley, whose work on the associative state in the interwar years laid the groundwork for the emergence of this form of political economy, also recognized the challenges faced by America's mixed economy during the Sixties. “To a degree unparalleled since the debates preceding and following World War II, the roles of the market, the state, and the syndicate in America's political economy again became open questions to which competing answers were being offered,” Hawley concluded. Hawley, Ellis W., “Challenges to the Mixed Economy: The State and Private Enterprise,” in Bremner, Robert H., Reichard, Gary W., and Hopkins, Richard J., eds., American Choices: Social Dilemmas and Public Policy Since 1960 (Columbus, Ohio, 1986), 160.Google Scholar

25. Vogel, David, “The New Social Regulation in Historical and Comparative Perspective,” in McCraw, Thomas, ed., Regulation in Perspective (Cambridge, Mass., 1981), 155–75.Google Scholar

26. I would like to thank Mel Leffler for suggesting this use of the “domino theory.”

27. Protecting Soldiers and Mothers: The Political Origins of Social Policy in the United States (Cambridge, Mass., 1992), 41Google Scholar. For examples of Skocpol's contribution to the state capacity debate, see Skocpol, Theda and Finegold, Kenneth, “State Capacity and Economic Intervention in the Early New Deal,” Political Science Quarterly 97, no. 2 (Summer 1982): 255–78CrossRefGoogle Scholar; and idem, “Political Response to Capitalist Crisis: Neo-Marxist Theories of the State and the Case of the New Deal,” Politics and Society 10, no. 2 (1980): 155–201.

28. For a brief historiographic tour of the organizational literature, see Galambos, Louis, “The Emerging Organizational Synthesis in Modern American History,” Business History Review 44 (Autumn 1970): 279–90CrossRefGoogle Scholar; idem, “Technology, Political Economy, and Professionalization: Central Themes of the Organizational Synthesis,” Business History Review 57 (Winter 1983): 471–93; and Balogh, “Reorganizing the Organizational Synthesis.”

29. For an extended discussion of how organizational scholars broke ranks with Progressive historiography over the Progressives' treatment of interests, see Balogh, “Reorganizing the Organizational Synthesis,” 125–27.

30. For a useful analysis of one of the few conservatives who did not swing behind the military industrial complex, see Stanley, Jay, “The Greater Danger to Freedom: Robert A. Taft and Military Spending” (Master's thesis, University of Virginia, 1995).Google Scholar

31. Hečlo, Hugh, “Issue Networks and the Executive Establishment,” in King, Anthony, The New American Political System (Washington, D.C., 1978), 87–124.Google Scholar

32. For a good summary of the relationship between foundations and social science, see Bulmer, Martin and Bulmer, Joan, “Philanthropy and Social Science in the 1920s: Beardsley Ruml and the Laura Spelman Rockefeller Memorial, 1922–29,” Minerva 19, no. 3 (Autumn 1981): 347–407CrossRefGoogle Scholar; and Karl, Barry D. and Katz, Stanley N., “The American Private Philanthropic Foundation and the Public Sphere, 1890–1930,” Minerva 19, no. 2 (Summer 1981): 236–70.CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed

33. These arguments are articulated in greater detail in Balogh, Brian, Chain Reaction: Expert Debate and Public Participation in American Commercial Nuclear Power, 1945–1975 (New York, 1991).CrossRefGoogle Scholar

34. Their response to the race problem was not that different from the men who had written the Constitution: African Americans were simply not considered full citizens; thus the polity genuinely could be regarded as a republic of equals. Demographics, the aid provided by some New Deal programs to African Americans in the North, the new meaning that Hitler imparted to racism, the liberation movements headed by people of color around the world, and, most significantly, the grassroots movement spearheaded by African Americans after World War II challenged the long-standing liberal policy of neglect. While liberalism was slow to address the problem of race relations in America, the Democratic party had little choice about the matter. It had grown by completing the organization of partially developed groups and by rewarding such emerging interests with policy rewards. Labor, of course, was the most important example of this, but there were many more, ranging from farmers to the elderly. African Americans faced a particular problem within the Democratic party—the solid South.

35. Lowi, Theodore J., The End of Liberalism: Ideology, Policy, and the Crisis of Public Authority (New York, 1969), 293–97.Google Scholar

36. See Glendon, Rights Talk, chap. 1, for a good summary.

37. Hugh Graham, Civil Rights Era; Hays, Samuel P., Beauty, Health, and Permanence: Environmental Politics in the United States, 1955–1985 (New York, 1987).CrossRefGoogle Scholar

38. Schlesinger, Arthur M. Jr., The Cycles of American History (Boston, 1986), 47.Google Scholar

39. Brinkley, Alan, The End of Reform: New Deal Liberalism in Recession and War (New York, 1995), 270.Google Scholar

40. Ibid., 269.

41. The Unfinished Journey: America Since World War II (New York, 1986), 488.Google Scholar

42. Ibid., 486–87.

43. Among the scholars who write in this tradition are Robert Bellah, Mary Ann Glendon, Steve Innes, Michael Sandel, Philip Selznick, Charles Taylor, and Michael Walzer. For a good scholarly discussion of the “‘rediscovery’ of the theme of civil society and the state, see Keane, John, ed., Introduction to Civil Society and the State: New European Perspectives (New York, 1988), 1–31Google Scholar. For a good discussion of the application of civil society to contemporary American politics, see Dionne, “The Quest for Community (Again).”

44. Taylor, Charles, “Modes of Civil Society,” Public Culture 3, no. 1 (Fall 1990): 101.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

45. I would like to thank Steve Innes for suggesting this phrase and for sharing his insight into the relationship between capitalism and liberalism.

46. Sandel, Michael J., “The Procedural Republic and the Unencumbered Self,” Political Theory 12, no. 1 (February 1984): 81–96CrossRefGoogle Scholar; On civic virtue and Rousseauean general will, see Seligman, Adam B., “Animadversions upon Civil Society and Civic Virtue in the Last Decade of the Twentieth Century,” in Hall, John A, Civil Society: Theory, History, Comparison (Cambridge, 1995): 200–223.Google Scholar

47. Taylor, “Modes of Civil Society,” 108.

48. While the “bottom line” sought by Bellah, Innes, Sandel, Taylor, and other “communitarians” is similar to the public spiritedness and sense of collective good sought by the architects of “republicanism,” the communitarians address explicitly a telling critique of republicanism. The failure to discover lasting institutions through which even the more moderate pretensions to a republican “tradition” could be sustained is just one reason cited by Daniel Rodgers for the collapse of the republicanism juggernaut—but it is one that has particular significance for our efforts to sort out the proper place of the Sixties in our interpretations of twentieth-century history. Rodgers, Daniel T., “Republicanism: The Career of a Concept,” Journal of American History 79, no. 1 (June 1992): 36–38.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

49. Rodgers, “Career of a Concept,” 34; see also Seligman, “Animadversions,” for his discussion of civic virtue and republicanism.

50. Seligman, “Animadversions,” 204–5; quotation on 205.

51. Gilbert, James, A Cycle of Outrage: America's Reaction to the Juvenile Delinquent in the 1950s (New York, 1986), 8–9.Google Scholar

52. Ibid., 149–53.

53. Riesman, David, The Lonely Crowd: A Study of the Changing American Character (New Haven, 1950)Google Scholar; Whyte, William H., The Organization Man (Garden City, 1957).Google Scholar

54. McDougall, Walter A., The Heavens and the Earth: A Political History of the Space Agex (New York, 1985)Google Scholar, appendix.

55. Hečlo, “Issue Networks,” 89–94.

56. Both as individuals and members of American society, blacks had been abused. What made matters worse for postwar liberals was the historical role that liberals had played in this abuse. As one student of liberalism put it, “Throughout the twentieth century, liberals have viewed African-American identity as embodying qualities essentially opposed to those of virtuous citizenship.” During the Progressive Era, disdain turned on biological determinism; during the interwar years, the liberal turn from racialism to a fascination with culture did little to secure the rights of blacks as individuals or to treat them as citizens. See Kerr, Catherine E., “Unbroken Circle: Race in the Rise and Fall of American Liberalism, 1912–1965,” (Ph.D. dissertation, The Johns Hopkins University, 1995), 1–10Google Scholar; quotation on 1. Even as African Americans, hardest hit by the economic distress in the 1930s, embraced the Roosevelt coalition, they remained outside America's liberal order.

57. Barry quoted in Steven F. Lawson, “E Pluribus Unum: Civil Rights and National Unity,” in Robert H. Bremner et al, eds., American Choices, 36.

58. Howe, Irving, “New Styles in “Leftism,”” Dissent 12, no. 3 (1965): 316.Google Scholar

59. Alan Ryan has noted that “immensely popular sociological accounts of the morally lost and bewildered condition of the average American, such as Habits of the Heart, have ascribed his or her parlous condition to an overdose of ‘individualism’ and in looking for a remedy, their authors have self-consciously appealed to John Dewey as a philosopher of ‘the Great Community,’ the American thinker who above all insisted that individuals exist only as members of society and can find satisfaction only when society gives their lives ‘meaning’ rather than mere consumer comforts.” Ryan, John Dewey, 23.

60. For a good sketch of Kerr, see Rorabaugh, W. J., Berkeley at War: The 1960s (New York, 1989).Google Scholar

61. Ralph J. Gleason, San Francisco Chronicle, 9 December 1964, quoted in Rorabaugh, Berkeley at War, 10.

62. Hečlo provides a more detailed description of this style of politics in “The Sixties' False Dawn.”

63. Balogh, Chain Reaction.

64. For an excellent discussion of the various roots of the New Left's origins, including its religious roots, and its experimentation with culture as a means of influencing politics, see Rossinow, Douglas Charles, “Breakthrough: White Youth Radicalism in Austin, Texas, 1956–1973” (Ph.D. dissertation, The Johns Hopkins University, 1994).Google Scholar

65. Goodman, Paul, “Berkeley in February,” Dissent 12, no. 2 (1965): 162Google Scholar. Emphasis is Goodman's.

66. Ibid., 163. Emphasis is Goodman's.

67. Ibid., 170.

68. Ibid., 168.

69. Ibid., 164

70. Ibid.

71. Ibid., 165.

72. Paul Berman, “Don't Follow Leaders” (review of Miller's Democracy Is in the Streets), The New Republic, 10 and 17 August 1987, 29; and Sandel, “The Procedural Republic.”

73. Berman, “Don't Follow Leaders,” 30–31.

74. On the state initiative in mobilizing the elderly, see Walker, Jack L., “Interests, Political Parties, and Policy Formation in American Democracy,”paper presented at the Conference on Federal Social Policy, University of Notre Dame,11–12 October 1985,12–14Google Scholar. Walker was one of the few scholars to defend the proliferation of interest groups, arguing that “it will become clear that the American political system actually is stronger as a result of these changes” (3).

75. Larson, Magali Sarfatti, The Rise of Professionalism: A Sociological Analysis (Berkeley and Los Angeles, 1977).Google Scholar

76. Innes, Stephen, in Creating the Commonwealth: The Economic Culture of Puritan New England (New York, 1995)Google Scholar, demonstrates the remarkable impact that religion and the “civic ecology” had on the political and economic culture of Puritan New England. As he concludes, “In creating a culture of development that was at once metaphysically grounded and socially binding, the Massachusetts settlers fashioned a potent engine of economic and human development” (7). Although life had grown far more secular by the 1950s, religion still proved to be a potent resource.

77. Bellah, Robert et al. , Habits of the Heart: Individualism and Commitment in American Life (Berkeley and Los Angeles, 1985), 251–52.Google Scholar

78. Smith is quoted in Innes, Creating the Commonwealth, 10.

79. See Eisenach, Eldon J., The Lost Promise of Progressivism (Lawrence, Kan., 1985), 187.Google Scholar

80. Eisenach, Lost Promise, 62.