The Great Society and the High Tide of Liberalism
Publication Year: 2005
Published by: University of Massachusetts Press
Cover
Title Page
Copyright Page
Table of Contents
Preface
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pp. xi- xx
This volume marks the third we have edited on political reform in the twentieth century. In important respects, these three volumes— on the Progressive Era, the New Deal, and the Great Society— tell the story of a long secular development. Twentieth-century America was a country in transition from a localist and provincial regime to a more national and socially
Chapter 1 - Lyndon Johnson, the Great Society, and the “Twilight” of the Modern Presidency
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pp. 1-52
The place in history of Lyndon B. Johnson and the Great Society is a difficult matter to assess. As the essays in this volume reveal, the Great Society marks both an extension of and a critical departure from the New Deal. In this essay I seek to make sense of the continuities and discontinuities...
Part I - Rethinking the Great Society: Ideology, Institutions, and Social Movements
Chapter 2 - Sixties Civics
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pp. 53-82
In a time when “teach-ins” became a campus fashion, the sixties as a whole constituted the biggest teach-in of all. The period became a school of sorts for teaching Americans how to think about public affairs. Its curriculum developed in thousands of campus debates, TV exposés, street demonstrations, and newspaper and magazine stories. Less dramatically, the teaching....
Chapter 3 - Pluralism, Postwar Intellectuals, and the Demise of the Union Idea
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pp. 83-114
Trade union movements in the industrialized West normally stand on the left side of a nation’s political culture, and they usually reap benefits of great organizational and political value when leftwing ideas circulate freely and when social democratic regimes come to power. This is true in most of Western Europe, Canada, and even Poland, Spain, South Africa, and...
Chapter 4 - Contested Rights: The Great Society between Home and Work
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pp. 115-144
The proper relation between wage earning and family labor has stood at the center of a century-long debate over public assistance for those in need. A set of binaries has framed this discussion. Do public or private efforts sap initiative or alleviate suffering? Will marriage or economic independence...
Chapter 5 - Making Pluralism “Great”: Beyond a Recycled History of the Great Society
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pp. 145-182
The proper relation between wage earning and family labor has stood at the center of a century-long debate over public assistance for those in need. A set of binaries has framed this discussion. Do public or private efforts sap initiative or alleviate suffering? Will marriage or economic independence...
Part II - Lyndon Johnson and the American Presidency
Chapter 6 - Lyndon Johnson in the Shadow of Franklin Roosevelt
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pp. 183-213
For reasons only those captivated by psychohistory will care to explore, Lyndon Johnson went through life with a series of “daddies”— older men he revered and counted on to advance his career—and of all the daddies, by far the most important for him was Franklin Delano Roosevelt. Toward the end of his life, Johnson told Walter Cronkite: “Franklin D. Roosevelt, he...
Chapter 7 - Great Societies and Great Empires: Lyndon Johnson and Vietnam
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pp. 214-232
Always a bit larger than life, Lyndon Johnson seems even more titanic when compared with his successors. During the lackluster campaign of 2000, James MacGregor Burns, longing for a president uniting “transformational” vision and “transactional” political craft, thought immediately of “a 21st century LBJ.” 1 Even...
Chapter 8 - Lyndon Johnson: Means and Ends, and What His Presidency Means in the End
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pp. 233-250
From this vantage point, where the writing of journalism ends and the crafting of history begins, the fog has lifted, the physical characteristics of the landscape of the 1960s now are clear. A third of a century later, the view is far different. At the time—when the passions were strong, the wounds raw, the heartache real—the principal figures of the age seemed to be...
Part III - The Great Society in Action
Chapter 9 - The Politics of the Great Society
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pp. 251-269
The features of domestic policy that distinguish the Great Society era are widely agreed on. First, new federal programs were initiated, presumably to deal with such social problems as juvenile delinquency (Juvenile Delinquency and Youth Offenses Act of 1961), mental illness (Community Mental Health Centers Act of 1963), poverty (Economic Opportunity...
Chapter 10 - The New Politics of Participatory Democracy Viewed through a Feminist Lens
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pp. 270-288
In this essay I examine the contribution of second-wave feminism to new forms of democracy and equality. To establish a foundation for my line of reasoning, I explore why a democratic mobilization to challenge female inequality was necessary and long overdue. Finally, I present a historic overview.....
Chapter 11 - Freedom from Ignorance?: The Great Society and the Evolution of the Elementary and Secondary Education Act of 1965
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pp. 289-319
The Elementary and Secondary Education Act (ESEA) of 1965 was a central component of President Lyndon Johnson’s War on Poverty and one of the key legislative achievements of the Great Society. This act marked the first major incursion of the federal government into K–12 education...
Chapter 12 - Medicare: The Great Society’s Enduring National Health Insurance Program
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pp. 320-350
A high official in the Johnson administration described Medicare as a “real jewel in the crown of the federal government.” 1 President Lyndon Johnson, who readily agreed, put Medicare in the company of the Social Security Act of 1935 and the Elementary and Secondary Education Act of 1965 as the most “comprehensive and constructive and beneficial” public...
Chapter 13 - Justices and Justice: Reflections on the Warren Court’s Legacy
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pp. 351- 364
In his trenchant review of a book on the Warren Court by Lucas A. Powe Jr., a professor of law and government at the University of Texas,1 A. E. Dick Howard quickly identified the gravamen of the Warren Court’s legacy...
Part IV - Legacies
Chapter 14 - The Great Society’s Civil Rights Legacy: Continuity 1, Discontinuity 3
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pp. 365 -386
Looking back today at the directions American society has taken since World War II, most scholars see the 1960s as a cultural and political watershed and emphasize the discontinuities that flowed from it.1 The subtitle of this essay on civil rights policy reflects this view and reads like a baseball score...
Chapter 15 - From Tax and Spend to Mandate and Sue: Liberalism after the Great Society
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pp. 387-410
The image of the Great Society retains a strong hold on the imagination of liberals and conservatives alike. To conservatives, the LBJ years were the moment of the Great Wrong Turn: unlimited expectations replaced limited government; maximum feasible participation quickly morphed into...
Chapter 16 - The Great Society and the Demise of New Deal Liberalism
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pp. 411-456
The domestic New Deal ended in the final years of the 1930s, victim in part of Franklin Roosevelt’s Court-packing plan, his executive-reorganization proposals, and his purge campaign—and also by the two-term precedent that made him a lame duck who would be gone by 1941. Predictions...
Contributors
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pp. 457-460
Index
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pp. 461- 490
Back Cover
E-ISBN-13: 9781613761328
E-ISBN-10: 1613761325
Print-ISBN-13: 9781558494930
Print-ISBN-10: 1558494936
Page Count: 512
Publication Year: 2005
