Reform’s Mating Dance: Presidents, Social Movements, and Racial Realignments

Presidents and social movements figure prominently in nearly every seismic shift in American political development and policy regimes. Ironically, they also regularly loom as rivals devoted to frustrating each other’s reform agenda, from Andrew Jackson’s open suppression of antislavery mailings in the South to Tea Party mobilizations against Barack Obama’s health-care plan. In this article, we focus on rare but crucial historical moments when the mating dance between these agents of change produced unprecedented breakthroughs in U.S. civil rights policy and race relations. Given the tenacity of racial subjugation in the American past and present, it is little wonder that generations of social scientists and historians have carefully examined the abolition of slavery in the 1860s and the civil rights revolution that dismantled many Jim Crow institutions a century later. Few of these scholars would question that social movements and presidents were pivotal actors during these realignments in racial governance. Yet we know precious little either analytically or empirically about the interactions of the American presidency and social movements or their role in shaping political change in the United States. How and why have collaborations between the presidency and social movements—however fraught and fleeting—proved capable of challenging the nation’s dominant racial structures? In what ways have these tense alliances between presidents and social movements reconfigured the partisan alignments, laws, and administrative structures that were forged on the racial realignments in the 1860s and 1960s? Existing scholarship provides few answers. This is perhaps a reflection of academic specialization. The respective literatures on the presidency and social movements rarely intersect, with specialists in one field largely unaware of or indifferent to the theoretical insights and research findings of those in the other.

We argue that both presidents and social movements have played leading roles in the development of major legal and policy innovations that recast race relations in the United States. More precisely, the uneasy partnership of these two forces has served as an important catalyst for advancing civil rights reform in key periods of American political development. As much as scholars have devoted scant attention to the relationship between the presidency and social movements, the few works that do probe the subject tend to emphasize the inherent conflict between a centralizing institution tasked with conserving the constitutional order and grass-roots associations dedicated to structural change.¹ Even presidents with large reform ambition have had to keep some distance from social movements and causes so as to avoid alienating the support necessary to secure a national consensus for their programs; at the same time, political insurgents have viewed alliances with presidents as a threat to their dedication to values that pose severe challenges to core American principles.² There is a hint of caricature here, with presidents cast as regularly indifferent, resistant, or openly repressive toward insurgent causes and social movements deemed too hamstrung by radical visions or noninstitutionalized tactics to engage effectively in the art of political compromise. In this article, we take stock of the conflicts and rivalries between these political actors, but we also want to reach beyond them to focus on key moments of American political development when executives and insurgents have needed each other. Presidents sometimes find themselves at the center of national crises where conserving the Constitution requires a redefinition of the social contract. Social activists sometimes seek to secure the rights of the dispossessed and to advance moral causes not merely by opposing the existing order of things but through a principled commitment to reconstituting it. Both presidents and social movements have the potential to be important agents of change during critical junctures of American political history, albeit typically from very different vantage points.

To grasp the tense yet essential relationship that sometimes has joined presidents and social movements, we consider it crucial to develop an analytical framework that emphasizes neither executive power nor insurgency but, rather, the fascinating interplay between them. In particular, our aim is to illuminate the dynamics that sometimes allow presidents and social movements to come together and to achieve...