Grand Expectations: The United States, 1945-1974 (107 page)

The Supreme Court, moreover, indicated that it would support such approaches to curb discrimination. The most important case,
Griggs
v.
Duke Power Co
. (1971), involved intelligence tests (and other expedients) administered by employers to determine the eligibility of workers for certain positions. Could such tests be used if the results differentiated between blacks and whites in such a way as to bar substantial numbers of blacks from better jobs? The Burger Court ruled unanimously that employers would henceforth have to demonstrate that such differentiating tests were essential, irreplaceable, and directly related to the jobs in question. If not, the tests were discriminatory. Even neutral tests, the Court ruled, "cannot be maintained if they operate to 'freeze' the status quo of prior discriminatory practices." After
Griggs
and other decisions, employers could protect themselves against charges of discrimination only by managing to show a statistical parity between the racial composition of their work forces and that of local populations.
⁴²

In supporting the Philadelphia Plan, Nixon seems to have acted in part to get even with unions, most of which had opposed him in 1968, in part to promote "black capitalism" that might attract African Americans to the GOP, and in part on the assumption that a key to progress in race relations rested in employment. This was a sound insight, for blacks had been shut out of many areas of the industrial revolution in the United States. If they ever hoped to make use of their legal rights (as established in the 1964 and 1965 civil rights acts), they had to have equal social and economic opportunity as well. Moreover, the new regulations in time made a difference, especially in government employment, where increasing numbers of blacks found places. For these reasons, the regulations aroused lasting controversy. Many employers and white workers denounced them as reverse or affirmative discrimination. Even the NAACP, perceiving the Philadelphia Plan as a political ploy aimed at breaking up alliances between blacks and trade unions, opposed it. It was ironic that such far-reaching definitions of affirmative action took root in a Republican administration.
⁴³

I
T WAS ALMOST AS IRONIC
that a movement to protect and sustain the environment enjoyed special legislative successes during the Nixon years. This movement had been building steadily for some time, especially since the publication in 1962 of Rachel Carson's eloquent
Silent Spring
. Carson, an experienced marine biologist, trained her sights against agribusiness interests that polluted the environment with toxic pesticides such as DDT. Dangerous chemicals, she wrote, built up in human fat, invaded water and mothers' milk, and became "elixirs of death." The springs would soon be silent. More broadly, Carson presented an ecological perspective, positing the interconnectedness of human beings and all of nature. People, she warned, must refrain from activities that upset the delicate integrity of ecological systems.

The many people who joined the legions of environmental activists in the next few years included some, such as Nader, who attacked corporate devils—in his case General Motors and the gas-guzzling automobiles that wasted resources and polluted the air. But they embraced a vision that went well beyond conserving natural resources and assailing corporate capitalism. It was a vision that combined a range of causes: enhancing opportunities for outdoor recreation, preserving the natural beauty of things, protecting the public health, battling pollution, stopping atomic tests, safeguarding wildlife and endangered species, regulating commercial development, curbing dam-builders, stemming population growth, and counteracting the drive for production and consumption that environmentalists blamed for blighting the planet. Some environmentalists were hostile to industrial growth itself. By the late 1960s the many Americans who embraced environmental visions were engaging in a broad-based popular movement for the first time in United States history. The number of people who belonged to the twelve top environmental groups jumped from 124,000 in 1960 to 819,000 in 1969 to 1, 127,000 in 1972. Polls indicated that millions more supported the goals of these organizations.
⁴⁴

The sources of the movement were varied, but they rested in part—like so much agitation for change at the time—on the unprecedented affluence of the postwar era. Prosperity greatly increased the number of people with the resources, education, and leisure to be concerned with such issues. Most environmentally active leaders were well-educated, middle-class people who were optimistic about the capacity of modern science and of governmental regulation to bring about change. Many, indeed, were driven by the same moral passions, high expectations, and rights-consciousness that inspired the civil rights and feminist movements. They dreamed of a world, apparently affordable and within reach at last, in which the quality of life would be enhanced for all.

Environmentalists had enjoyed modest successes during the New Frontier-Great Society years: a Clean Air Act in 1963, a Wilderness Act in 1964, a Clean Water Act in 1965, and an Endangered Species Act in 1966. In 1967 movement leaders coalesced to form the Environmental Defense Fund, a key lobby thereafter. In 1968 Congress approved a Wild and Scenic Rivers Act and a National Trails Act. Senator Edmund Muskie of Maine, Humphrey's running mate in 1968, was especially persistent in pushing for greater spending to aid municipal sewage treatment operations and in enlarging the role of the federal government in the control of water pollution.
⁴⁵

By the time Nixon reached office the environmental cause had grown stronger than ever, thanks in part to media attention given to Malthusian prophets of doom. Paul Ehrlich, a professor of biology at Stanford, published
The Population Bomb
(1968), which foresaw the starvation of hundreds of millions of people throughout the world during the 1970s and 1980s if population growth were not controlled. The book sold some 3 million copies in paperback. Barry Commoner, another biology professor, reaped fame at the same time by issuing apocalyptic jeremiads about the coming of nuclear disaster. In 1970 he was hailed on a
Time
magazine cover as the "Paul Revere of ecology." A year later he published
The Closing Circle
, an impassioned book that warned of the dangers of environmental pollution. In 1972 the Club of Rome, a loose association of scientists, technocrats, and politicians, produced
The Limits to Growth
. Employing computers to test economic models, the authors concluded that the world would self-destruct by the end of the century unless planners figured out ways to limit population and industrial growth and to expand supplies of food and energy.
The Limits to Growth
sold 4 million copies in thirty languages by the late 1970s.
⁴⁶

Nixon had little interest in environmental problems—indeed, he was bored by the issue—but he was savvy enough not to swim against the tide of reform, especially after a huge oil spill in Santa Barbara in early 1969 aroused national alarm. The result in the next few years was that he accepted a spate of bills, many of them passed by large bipartisan majorities. The most important of these laws, signed in January 1970, was the National Environmental Policy Act, which set up the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA). The EPA was empowered to require the filing of acceptable environmental impact statements before federal projects could be approved and more generally to enforce a range of guidelines. In February
Time
gushed that the environment "may well be the gut issue that can unify a polarized nation," and on April 22 throngs of people, including 10 million schoolchildren, gathered in communities to celebrate the nation's first Earth Day. Some 10,000 people flocked to the Washington Monument for twelve hours of revelry marking the occasion.
⁴⁷

Congress also passed other environmental legislation, including a measure that led to creation of the Occupational Safety and Health Administration (OSHA) in 1970, a Clean Air Act in 1970, a Federal Water Pollution Control Act in 1972, and an Endangered Species Act in 1973. (Nixon, fearing the costs of regulation, vetoed the water act but was overridden.) The air and water acts were tough against polluters, providing for specific goals and timetables and permitting little discretion in administration. The EPA, entrusted with the task of enforcement, was not to consider the costs of clean-up. The Endangered Species Act broke sharply from past practice, mandating protection of everything (except pest insects) above the microscopic level. By 1992 there were 727 species listed as endangered, half of them plants.
⁴⁸

The quest for environmental reform, as for affirmative action and other causes at the time, relied not only on federal bureaucracies but also on the courts. In time, environmental groups often managed to avoid the tedious and expensive business of litigation at the state level, bringing instead a single action in a federal court. Environmental groups benefited from two other key developments. First, judges tended to grant them "standing" in the courts, thereby permitting them to litigate even when they could not show themselves to be directly injured. Second, the Internal Revenue Service cleared the way for many environmental groups to receive nonprofit tax status. Prospects for lobbying and litigation—and for the practices of attorneys engaged in environmental law—brightened considerably.
⁴⁹

The surge of interest in environmental causes managed even to curb the onrush of irrigation projects and dam-building that the Bureau of Reclamation and the Army Corps of Engineers had enthusiastically undertaken, especially since the 1920s. LBJ had been a strong advocate of such projects, which were popular among commercial farmers and which brought huge amounts of water to California and other areas of the West. As early as the 1950s, however, opponents of such projects had begun to mobilize more effectively, citing the disastrous consequences—to flora and fauna, to water tables, to places of beauty, to native cultures, in short to the ecology of the Mountain West—of the enormous diversions of water involved. By the late 1960s they had developed significant political power. Thanks to the protests of environmentalists and others, Congress refused after 1972 to approve large new irrigation projects in the West. This was a remarkable turnabout from previous policy.
⁵⁰

After 1972 the surge of environmentalism receded a bit. Critics of doomsayers like Ehrlich and Commoner counter-attacked, citing errors in their assumptions and predictions. One hostile review of
Limits to Growth
was entitled "The Computer That Printed Out W*O*L*F*."
⁵¹
Other critics characterized environmentalists as privileged elitists whose self-interested opposition to growth and development would harm the working classes. "Some people," the black leader Vernon Jordan observed later, "have been too cavalier in proposing policies to preserve the physical environment for themselves while other poor people pay the costs." A popular labor union bumper sticker read,
IF YOU'RE HUNGRY AND OUT OF WORK, EAT AN ENVIRONMENTALIST
.
⁵²
Charges such as these manifested—yet again—the class and regional divisions that fragmented the nation.

Efforts to curb pollution also ran into serious obstacles, especially from business and corporate leaders. Indeed, the rise in regulatory activity and in paperwork incited greatly growing hostility to Big Government in the 1970s.
⁵³
More than 2,000 firms contested EPA standards within the next few years. The EPA, moreover, had been given an enormous regulatory burden: to oversee some 200,000 potential polluters. Economists and scientists working for the agency considered some of the goals and timetables to be unrealistic and resented being pressured into rapid action. Regulation moved slowly, fought at every step in the courts. By the late 1970s crusaders for pollution control were on the defensive, and Congress approved amendments that postponed deadlines for air and water standards.
⁵⁴

For all these reasons advocates of environmentalism, like many other crusaders for social change, did not achieve their high expectations. But they had hardly failed. On the contrary, the environmental movement, rooted as it was in the fertile soil of postwar affluence and concern for the quality of life, not only survived the counter-attacks of the mid-1970s and 1980s but also enjoyed considerable success in some ways—notably in improving the quality of air and water in the United States. Although embattled, it stood out as a legacy of the reform spirit of the 1960s.
⁵⁵

W
HILE LIBERALS COULD DERIVE
some satisfaction from the rise of feminism, affirmative action, and environmentalism between 1969 and 1972, they remained as hostile as ever to Nixon. Indeed, political polarization not only persisted but also sharpened under the watch of the new administration. Some of this was predictable, given the implacable social and political divisions that had arisen in the 1960s. Some of it, however, stemmed from activities of the Nixon administration, which proved highly partisan in many ways. Nowhere was this more clear than in the area of race relations.

On racial issues Nixon and his gruff and conservative Attorney General, John Mitchell, were moved mainly by political considerations. Despite rhetoric to the contrary, they were less interested in moderating interracial fears than they were in protecting themselves against the appeal of George Wallace, who was expected to run again in 1972. This meant placating conservative white voters in the South and border states and bringing disaffected Democrats—those who had shown enthusiasm for Wallace in 1968—into the GOP fold.