Fault Lines Read online

  The third major event that captured the state of the economy was the near collapse of the Chrysler Corporation. The once thriving auto firm had in recent years been known as the “sick man of Detroit,” but now its disease looked terminal. While all American automakers were struggling, Chrysler seemed especially doomed. As a result of poor managerial decisions and difficulty keeping up with new environmental regulations, the company reported losses of $207.1 million in the second quarter of the fiscal year. The larger cars it produced, like the Dodge St. Regis, were not selling at all. Meanwhile, two of its major products—the Dodge Aspen and the Plymouth Volare—were frequently subjected to recalls due to poor designs. “This company is in the saddest shape,” a former auto executive remarked after reviewing the numbers.42 Soon, Chrysler laid off workers, shutting down plants and canceling stock dividends. In company towns like Hamtramck, Michigan, a Polish working-class city that had revolved around its Dodge Main plant for over seventy-five years, the impact was devastating. The factory there had employed 20,000 people in 1959, but its workforce had dwindled to only 8,000 people in 1978 and then just 2,600 in 1979.43

  As the third biggest automobile manufacturer and the tenth largest firm in the nation, Chrysler represented a major pillar of the American economy. With 250,000 employees and another 500,000 or so whose livelihoods indirectly depended on the company, its failure would have far-reaching impacts. “We couldn’t go belly up,” Chrysler executive John Riccardo worried. “We’d take down banks, towns and even some countries. It would be fantastic.” 44 Going into an election year, the political ramifications were clear. “Letting the company fold,” Louisiana senator and Democratic leader Russell Long told reporters, “would cost us a lot of revenue, a lot of jobs.” 45

  As the company struggled, the Board of Directors hired Lee Iacocca to take over as CEO in 1978. Upon his arrival, Iacocca implemented drastic steps to cut costs, such as selling off the corporation’s European wing. But in the end, none of the steps was sufficient to save the company. In a dramatic moment, Iacocca went to the White House and Congress in September 1979 to ask for help. He blamed new environmental regulations and consumer safety requirements (like the airbag) as the source of the company’s huge costs, and sought over $1 billion in special tax credits to alleviate the impact. But his proposals ran into fierce resistance. Many in the business community insisted that the company should be forced to fend for itself. One manufacturer in Long Beach, California, said “the right solution is to let the natural forces take place. In general, I don’t think the government should underwrite private enterprise’s failures. If we do that we aren’t going to have private enterprise.” 46 Labor leaders, however, were supportive. When United Auto Workers (UAW) leader Douglas Fraser heard that Thomas Murphy, chairman of General Motors, was “firmly opposed” to the plan, he lashed out, “If the shoe were on the other foot and GM were in trouble, Mr. Murphy would become a flaming socialist.” 47

  Despite labor’s enthusiasm for the proposals, many on the left resisted Iacocca’s plan. “Mismanagement at the company has been incredible,” complained consumer advocate Ralph Nader, so “why should a subsidy solve Chrysler’s problems? Let it go bankrupt.” 48 On the right, meanwhile, Texas representative Ron Paul agreed. “In a nation that is sinking in a sea of debt,” he warned, “it is irresponsible for this Congress to be considering a measure that would add billions to that debt.” 49 Despite warnings from legislators like Paul, Congress grudgingly provided most of the loans. Unions suffered a major blow from the deal. In exchange for $1.5 billion in guaranteed loans, Chrysler was required to reach a deal with the UAW to implement a wage freeze along with other major concessions, and then to wage cuts the following year under the supervision of the Loan Guarantee Board established by the law. Rank-and-file union members, furious at the deal, grew angrier with their union leaders, and the Democratic politicians aligned with them.

  Critics warned that the move sent a bad message to American industry. “There is a strong case,” said Time magazine, “that such help rewards failure and penalizes success, puts a dull edge on competition, is unfair to an ailing company’s competitors and their shareholders, and inexorably leads the Government deeper into private business. . . . Where should the government draw the line?” 50 The Business Roundtable, a powerful lobbying organization, soon announced that “whatever the hardships of failure may be for particular companies and individuals, the broad social and economic interests of the nation are best served by allowing this system to operate as freely and fully as possible . . . now is the time to reaffirm the principle of no federal bail-outs.” In response, Chrysler withdrew from the organization.51

  As the decade drew to a close, there seemed little cause for optimism. Experts routinely discussed American economic decline, unsure if the nation could recover. Most of the major economic indicators continued to be unfavorable. Unions watched as their once-strong position in the postwar era steadily crumbled. The federal government was struggling to respond, usually with halfmeasures such as the Chrysler bailout, but officials lacked any coherent plan for revitalizing economic growth. Conservative Republicans were gaining steam in opposition to the failures of the Carter administration and the Democratic Congress, yet their plans remained vague as well. The leaders of the nation’s private sector were likewise scrambling to offer plans of their own, though many industries still clung to outdated products that were no longer economically competitive. The future seemed dire.

  Stagflation and turmoil overseas only deepened the division and discord within the electorate. The actual strength and vitality of the economy had severely weakened, leaving many fearful about how the nation could ever recover. Time magazine predicted in 1981 that there would be “Gloom and Doom” for America’s workers in the years to come.52 With basic economic indicators in horrible shape, few Americans could rekindle the kind of optimism that had existed in the 1950s and 1960s. An era of grand expectations had given way to a decade of disillusionment.

  CHAPTER 3

  A Crisis of Identity

  AS THE POLITICAL AND ECONOMIC FOUNDATIONS OF THE postwar decades cracked apart in the 1970s, that era’s racial order crumbled as well.

  While Americans had watched the decline of government and industry in this era with a growing sense of despair, most welcomed the dismantling of the old structures of racial segregation and immigration restriction. The liberalism of the Great Society era, it seemed, had succeeded in addressing long-standing problems of racial division and discord. Most notably, the Civil Rights Act of 1964 and the Voting Rights Act of 1965 tore down institutional barriers that had served to oppress racial minorities within the nation across the twentieth century, while the Immigration and Nationality Act of 1965 dismantled the walls of immigration restriction constructed during an earlier era of nativism and racism.

  White liberals celebrated the passage of these measures as a sign of the ultimate triumph of racial integration and assimilation. “Our beautiful America was built by a nation of strangers,” President Lyndon B. Johnson announced when he signed the new immigration law on Liberty Island in New York harbor. “From a hundred different places or more they have poured forth into an empty land, joining and blending in one mighty and irresistible tide.” Such comments ignored the original presence of indigenous peoples, of course, but they also spoke to the popular belief that Americans had forged a single national identity from a wide array of sources, a belief as old as the nation’s original motto of E Pluribus Unum.1

  Ultimately, however, the optimism of that moment would not be fulfilled. The civil rights and immigration reforms of the mid-1960s succeeded in tearing down old walls of division, but in the rubble that remained it became increasingly difficult to discern anything that resembled a coherent or cohesive “American” identity. Rather than adopt the mainstream values of the white majority and adapt to its culture, racial and ethnic minorities increasingly sorted themselves into communities they made on their own terms and in their
own images. The influx of new immigrants, meanwhile, contributed to a broad remaking of the population as well. As the nation moved to embrace a sense of diversity, it came to accept that a new fault line came along with that development.

  The Struggle for Black Equality

  In the 1960s, the modern civil rights movement consumed the American imagination. Grassroots protest campaigns, coordinated by organizations like Martin Luther King Jr.’s Southern Christian Leadership Conference (SCLC) and the Student Non-Violent Coordinating Committee (SNCC), focused national attention on the segregated South. Employing strategies of nonviolent direct action, protesters exposed the inherent inequalities of the so-called “separate-but-equal” society of the region. Local campaigns cropped up all across the South, from the seemingly civilized “All-American City” of Greensboro, North Carolina, to the isolated rural areas of backwoods Mississippi. Shrewdly drawing in the attention of the national media, civil rights activists succeeded in forcing the nation to confront the raw ugliness of American apartheid. In 1963, for instance, the front pages of major newspapers carried photos of black children in Birmingham, Alabama, besieged by attack dogs and high-pressure fire hoses. Two years later, the ABC network interrupted the broadcast of its Sunday Night Movie—Judgement at Nuremberg, the story of Nazis on trial for genocidal atrocities against European Jews—to show film of another racial minority being savagely beaten by lawmen on the Edmund Pettus Bridge outside Selma, Alabama.2

  Through such confrontations, the civil rights movement dispelled the fictions that had propped up the old racial order. Nonviolent direct action, King had once predicted, would awaken “the conscience of the great decent majority who through blindness, fear, pride, or irrationality have allowed their consciences to sleep.” Forced to confront the ugliness and unfairness that had lain for too long in the foundation of their nation, Americans moved in the mid-1960s to uproot the legal structures of racial segregation and discrimination. Two landmark laws stand out. The Civil Rights Act of 1964 outlawed discrimination based on race, color, religion, sex, or national origin, and sparked the end of legal racial segregation in schools, workplaces, restaurants, hotels, and similar “public accommodations.” The Voting Rights Act of 1965 then committed the federal government to ensuring that there was no racial discrimination in the electoral process. Setting down clear rights for all Americans and establishing a new federal role for enforcement when those rights were violated, these landmark laws set new standards for greater social and political equality.3

  Despite such significant successes, it soon became clear that the civil rights movement had not ended racial inequality. Indeed, just days after the Voting Rights Act was signed into law, the black working-class community of Watts in Los Angeles exploded in violence. A neighborhood of single-family homes, Watts seemed to have little in common with more congested urban neighborhoods, but it shared the same problems: poor schools, high unemployment, high crime, and growing reports of police brutality. Sparked by rumors of a violent arrest, the Watts riots lasted for six days, resulting in thirty-four people killed, a thousand injured, and more than three thousand more in jail, as well as two hundred fifty buildings burnt down. Watts merely marked the beginning of a new wave of urban riots that spoke to the persistence of economic inequality and police brutality in the inner cities. In the summer of 1966, there were forty-three riots across America; in 1967, there were fifty-five. In response to the violence, Lyndon Johnson appointed a presidential commission to seek out the root causes and report back to the nation.

  The findings of the Kerner Commission, as it was known, ultimately cut to the heart of black people’s frustrations over the many problems arrayed against them and, just as importantly, to white ignorance of those same problems. “What white Americans have never fully understood—but what the Negro can never forget—is that white society is deeply implicated in the ghetto,” it concluded. “White institutions created it, white institutions maintain it, and white society condones it.” The Kerner Report offered a stark warning: “To continue present policies is to make permanent the division of our country into two societies; one, largely Negro and poor, located in the central cities; the other, predominantly white and affluent, located in the suburbs and in outlying areas.” Despite the clarion call to address these lingering inequalities, there ultimately proved to be little political will to act. The report came as political winds in Washington shifted strongly to the right. President Lyndon Johnson, then in his final months in office, lacked the ability to act on the recommendations. Instead, Johnson approved legislation that vastly expanded federal power over local law enforcement, helping to militarize the police in what he called the “war on crime.” 4 Johnson’s successor Richard Nixon, meanwhile, ran as a “law and order” candidate who promised to bring calm to cities not with new programs of government aid but a renewed commitment to harsher policing.5

  The urban riots revealed the limitations of liberal change and gave room to those who challenged the movement for integration. Black nationalism, a more radical philosophy grounded in an ideology of economic self-sufficiency and political separation, had been picking up strength for decades. It took on new urgency in the late 1960s. Under the leadership of chairman Stokely Carmichael, SNCC turned increasingly away from the old principles of interracialism and nonviolence and to a new rallying cry of “Black Power!” As older organizations like SNCC changed course, new ones like the Black Panther Party for Self-Defense emerged to set the pace for radical black activism. Seeking to combat police brutality in Oakland, California, the Panthers famously advocated armed revolution and openly displayed firearms. But in a larger sense, they worked to call attention to the manifestations of institutional racism, the ways in which racial inequality was embedded in the political, social, and cultural structures of American life. Accordingly, the Panthers sought to solve systemic problems in their community, initiating free breakfast programs for schoolchildren and setting up free health clinics. The media, however, focused solely on their clashes with police and political leaders, serving to marginalize them in the mind of the white majority as a problem, not a solution.6

  Traditional civil rights leaders increasingly turned their attention to economic inequality as well. In his final presidential address to the SCLC in August 1967, for instance, Martin Luther King Jr. pointed out that 40 million people still lived in poverty in America. It was their responsibility as Christians and citizens not simply to take care of the poor, he insisted, but to challenge the capitalist system that allowed them to be poor. “We’ve got to begin to ask questions about the whole society,” he asserted. “We are called upon to help the discouraged beggars in life’s marketplace. But one day we must come to see that an edifice which produces beggars needs restructuring.” Soon after his address, King organized the Poor People’s Campaign with plans to craft an interracial coalition that would wage a massive protest in Washington, DC. Much of his remaining time was devoted to promoting union causes across the country, including the sanitation workers’ strike that would bring him to Memphis, and to his murder, the following spring. In the aftermath of his assassination in April 1968, the nation’s cities erupted, once again, in destructive riots.7

  As the 1970s began, the civil rights movement seemed adrift. The SCLC limped along under the leadership of Ralph Abernathy, a loyal King aide who seemed unable to live up to the icon’s standards. Meanwhile, as SNCC turned to black nationalism, embracing racial separatism and making sharper critiques of institutional racism, it lost the support of white liberal funders and attracted the hostility of state and federal law enforcement. Most of SNCC’s chapters closed down, before the organization itself finally went under in 1976. The Congress of Racial Equality (CORE) likewise saw its membership hemorrhage as its embrace of black self-determination led it to whipsaw across the political spectrum, first moving to radical separatist politics aligned with Black Power advocates and then into a promotion of black capitalism in alliance with the Nixon administrati
on. Even the oldest integrationist organization, the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP), faced plummeting membership numbers and barely avoided bankruptcy by the end of the decade. Black Power organizations fared no better. Torn apart by internal struggles and police infiltration, most chapters of the Black Panther Party had closed down by the dawn of the 1970s. Increasingly isolated, the organization’s remaining leaders retreated to Oakland, seeking to shore up a base of support there.8

  As the organizations that shaped civil rights activism in the 1960s lost strength, the struggle for black equality entered a new chapter. “The marching has stopped,” a collection of essays by intellectuals and activists announced with authority in 1973. “In less than a decade, America has deaccelerated from a March on Washington, where hopes for the future were as high as the brilliant August sun that bathed black and white alike, to the shadows of the ’70s and the depths of despair, where the bright dreams of yesterday strangled on the bitter gall of rising indifference toward efforts to solve America’s racial dilemma.” Though the era of mass protests had accomplished much, much more still was left undone. “Untouched by the civil rights movement,” two officials with the Urban League observed, “are millions of blacks whose days begin and end with one goal—Survival!” 9

  In hopes of addressing the unfinished agenda of the civil rights era, black leaders increasingly spoke of the ongoing transition “from protest to politics.” Civil rights strategist Bayard Rustin used that phrase as the title of a 1965 manifesto and, in short order, the promise for securing black political power within the existing system seemed at hand. In 1966 and 1967, for instance, black mayors were elected in sizable midwestern cities including Flint, Michigan; Gary, Indiana; and, most notably, Cleveland, Ohio. By 1970, black mayors had won control of localities ranging from northern industrial cities like Newark and East Orange, New Jersey, to smaller southern towns like Chapel Hill, North Carolina. During the same period, African American representation in Congress grew rapidly. The number of black representatives in the House tripled over the course of the 1960s, from four to twelve; meanwhile, in 1966 Republican Edward Brooke of Massachusetts became the first African American popularly elected to the Senate. Black officials at the local and national level saw themselves working in common cause. In a 1971 address to the Cleveland Urban League, for instance, Charles Evers—a former NAACP field director who had won election as the first black mayor in Mississippi—pointed to African American representative Louis Stokes of Cleveland: “He’s my congressman, too.” Thinking of themselves increasingly as champions of not just their individual districts but black America as a whole, the thirteen African Americans in Congress formally banded together to form the Congressional Black Caucus later that year.10