01:512:104 Lecture Notes - Lecture 31: Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee, John F. Kennedy, Lyndon B. Johnson
13 May 2018
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Chapter 31 - The Ordeal of Liberalism
Expanding the Liberal State
John Kennedy
·The campaign of 1960 produced two young candidates who claimed
to offer the nation active leadership.
·The Republican nomination went almost uncontested to Vice President
Richard Nixon, who promised moderate reform.
·John Fitzgerald Kennedy was the son of the wealthy powerful, and
highly controversial Joseph P. Kennedy, former American
ambassador to Britain.
·He premised his campaign, he said, “on the single assumption that
the American people are uneasy at the present drift in our
national course”.
·Kennedy had campaigned promising a set of domestic reforms more
ambitious than any since the New Deal, a program he described
as the “New Frontier”.
·Kennedy had traveled to Texas with his wife and Vice President Lyndon
Johnson for a series of=2 0political appearances.
·While the presidential motorcade rode slowly through the streets of
Dallas, shots rang out.
·He got shot in the throat and head, he was rushed to a hospital, where
minutes later he was pronounced dead.
·Lee Harvey Oswald, was arrested for the crime later that day, and
then mysteriously murdered by a Dallas nightclub owner, Jack
Ruby, 2 days later as he was being moved from one jail to
another.
·In years later years many Americans came to believe that the Warren
Commission report had ignored evidence of a wider conspiracy
behind the murders.
Lyndon Johnson
·The Kennedy assassination was a national trauma-a defining event for
almost everyone old enough to be aware of it.
·Johnson was a native of the poor “hill country” of west Texas and had
risen to become majority leader of the U.S. Senate by dint of
extraordinary, even obsessive, effort and ambition.
·Between 1963 and 1966, he compiled the most impressive legislative
record of any president since Franklin Roosevelt.
·He created the “Great Society”.
·Record Democratic majorities in both houses of Congress, any of
whose members had been swept into office=2 0only because of
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the margin of Johnson’s victory, ensured that the president would
be able to fulfill many of his goals.
The Assault on Poverty
·The most important welfare program was Medicare: a program to
provide federal aid to the elderly for medical expenses.
·Its enactment in 1965 came at the end of a bitter, 20 year debate
between those who believed in the concept of national health
assistance and those who denounced it as “socialized medicine”.
·Medicare benefits available to all elderly Americans, regardless of
need.
·Medicare simply shifted responsibility for paying those fees from the
patient to the government.
·The centerpiece of this “war on poverty”, as Johnson called it, was the
Office of economic Opportunity, which created an array of new
educational, employment, housing, and health-care programs.
·The Community Action programs provided jobs for many poor people
and gave them valuable experience in administrative and
political work.
·The OEO spent nearly $3 billion during its first two years of existence,
and it helped reduce poverty in some areas.
Cities, Schools, and Immigration
·The Housing Act of 1961 offered $4.9 billion in federal grants to cities
for the preservation of open spaces, the development of mass
transit systems, and the subsidization of middle income housing.
·In 1966, Johnson established a new cabinet agency, the Department
of Housing and Urban Development.
·Johnson also inaugurated the Model Cites program, which offered
federal subsidies for urban redevelopment pilot programs.
·Johnson managed to circumvent both objections with the Elementary
and Secondary Education Act of 1965 and a series of subsequent
measures.
·Total federal expenditures for education and technical training rose
from $5 billion to $12 billion between 1964 and 1967.
·The Immigration Act of 1965 maintained a strict limit on the number
of newcomers admitted to the country each year (170,000), but
it eliminated the “national origins” system established in the
1920s, which gave preference to immigrants from northern
Europe over those from other parts of the world.
Legacies of the Great Society
·In 1964, Johnson managed to win passage of the $11.5 bill ion tax cut
that Kennedy had first proposed in 1962.
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·The cut increased the federal deficit, but substantial economic growth
over the next several years made up for much of the revenue
initially lost.
·The high costs of the Great Society programs, the deficiencies and
failures of many of them, and the inability of the government to
find the revenues to pay for them contributed to a growing
disillusionment in later years with the idea of federal efforts to
solve social problems.
The Battle for the Racial Equality
Expanding Protests
·John Kennedy had long been vaguely sympathetic to the cause of
racial justice, but he was hardly a committed crusader.
·In February 1960, black college students in Greensboro, North
Carolina, staged a sit-in at a segregated Woolworth’s lunch
counter, and in the following weeks, similar demonstrations
spread throughout the South, forcing many merchants to
integrate their facilities.
·The Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee, worked to keep the
spirit of resistance alive.
·In 1961, an interracial group of students, working with the Congress of
Racial Equality, began what t hey called “freedom rides”.
·Traveling by bus throughout the South, the freedom riders tried to
force the desegregation of bus stations.
·SNCC workers began fanning out through black communities and even
into remote rural areas to encourage blacks to challenge the
obstacles to voting that the Jim Crow laws had created and that
powerful social custom sustained.
·In April, Martin Luther King, Jr., helped launch a series of nonviolent
demonstrations in Birmingham, Alabama, a city unsurpassed in
the strength of its commitment to segregation.
·Medgar Evers was murdered in Mississippi.
A National Commitment
·To generate support for the legislation, and to dramatize the power of
the growing movement, ore than 200,000 demonstrators
marched down the Mall in Washington, D.C., in August 1963 and
gathered before the Lincoln Memorial for the greatest civil rights
demonstration in the nation’s history.
·Early in 1964, after Johnson applied both public and private pressure,
supporters of the measure finally mustered the two-thirds
majority necessary to close debate and end a filibuster by
southern senators; and the Senate passed the most
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Document Summary
The campaign of 1960 produced two young candidates who claimed to offer the nation active leadership. The republican nomination went almost uncontested to vice president. John fitzgerald kennedy was the son of the wealthy powerful, and highly controversial joseph p. kennedy, former american ambassador to britain. He premised his campaign, he said, on the single assumption that the american people are uneasy at the present drift in our national course . Kennedy had campaigned promising a set of domestic reforms more ambitious than any since the new deal, a program he described as the new frontier . Kennedy had traveled to texas with his wife and vice president lyndon. While the presidential motorcade rode slowly through the streets of. He got shot in the throat and head, he was rushed to a hospital, where minutes later he was pronounced dead.
