Grand Expectations: The United States, 1945-1974 (108 page)

Nixon and Mitchell sought especially to win over southerners who were bucking desegregation of the schools, an issue that rose again to the center of public debate after 1968. In that year the Supreme Court had indicated, in
Green
v.
County School Board of New Kent County, Va
., that it had finally lost patience with southern resistance. Striking down so-called freedom-of-choice plans, which perpetuated segregation, it placed the burden of proof on schools to come up with workable plans for change. "A dual system," it said, "is intolerable."
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Mitchell, however, sought to abet southern resisters by deferring guidelines, created by the Johnson administration, that would have terminated federal funding to segregated schools. Mitchell also opposed extending the Voting Rights Act of 1965, due otherwise to expire in 1970, on the implausible grounds that it was no longer needed. In August 1969, with schools about to open, HEW Secretary Finch sided with Mississippi segregationists who sought to postpone court-ordered desegregation. These and other actions highlighted the politically motivated Southern Strategy of the new administration and infuriated proponents of desegregation, including civil rights lawyers in the Department of Justice.

Nixon's efforts to put off desegregation of the schools ran up against determined and mainly successful opponents. The NAACP's Legal Defense and Education Fund brought suit that halted federal aid to segregated schools. Meanwhile, the Supreme Court rejected further obstruction of desegregation. In October 1969 it ruled unanimously in
Alexander v. Holmes Board of Education
, "The obligation of every school district is to terminate dual school systems at once and to operate now and hereafter only unitary schools."
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The enunciation of "at once" and "now" brought a few teeth, at last, to the doctrine of "all deliberate speed" that "Brown II" had set forth fourteen years earlier.
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In the 1968–69 school year 32 percent of black schoolchildren in the South had attended schools with whites. By 1970–71 the percentage jumped to 77 per cent, and by 1974–75 it was 86 percent. Nationally, the change was less significant. School districts continued to figure out ways to maintain de facto segregation. So did state universities, especially in the South. Still, the changes in Nixon's first term seemed promising: between 1968 and 1972 the percentage of students attending schools that were 90 to 100 percent minority in enrollment decreased from 64.3 percent to 38.7 percent.
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Having been rebuffed by the judges, Nixon resolved to counter-attack by naming a southerner to the Supreme Court when a vacancy arose in late 1969. His nominee, Clement Haynsworth, was a South Carolina federal judge. Liberals, however, fought back by airing reports that Haynsworth had a record of hostility to unions and civil rights. They also cited conflicts of interest in some of his rulings. Nixon fought tenaciously but to no avail. When the nomination reached the floor of the Senate, seventeen Republicans joined the majority of Democrats to defeat the nomination, 55 to 45. Mitchell snapped, "If we'd put up one of the twelve Apostles it would have been the same."
⁶⁰

The President then tried again, this time in January 1970, by nominating to the High Court G. Harrold Carswell, a former Georgia state legislator who had become a federal circuit judge in Florida. Carswell, however, suffered from greater liabilities than Haynsworth. As a legislator in 1948 he had said, "Segregation of the races is proper and the only practical and correct way of life. . . . I have always so believed and I shall always so act." Some of his judicial decisions had reaffirmed these beliefs. Nixon's advisers warned him that Carswell did not have a chance. The President nonetheless persisted until early April, when the Senate defeated him again, this time rejecting Carswell, 51 to 45. Pursuing the Southern Strategy to the end, Nixon called a press conference and stoutly defended his nominees. "When you strip away all the hypocrisy," he said, "the real reason for their rejection was their legal philosophy . . . and also the accident of their birth, the fact that they were born in the South."
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Having made his case, Nixon then nominated Harry Blackmun, a moderate from Minnesota, to the opening. The Court, however, persisted in pursuing a liberal course on matters of race. In March 1971 it rendered the
Griggs
decision that toughened affirmative action guidelines. A month later it decided, again unanimously, in favor of county-wide, court-ordered busing of students in and around Charlotte, North Carolina, as a means of achieving desegregation in the schools.
⁶²
The decision affected 107 schools and many thousands of students, of whom 29 percent were black. Many liberals were delighted, hoping that busing would compensate for racially separate housing patterns. Busing indeed helped Charlotte to maintain one of the most desegregated school districts in the nation.
⁶³

Elsewhere, however, court-mandated busing became one of the most controversial issues of the 1970s, provoking passionately contested reactions, especially in the North. Many of those who protested busing had moved to all-white or mostly white neighborhoods in part to ensure that their children would not have to go to class with lower-class blacks. (Some wanted to avoid blacks of any class.) Cherishing the creed of "neighborhood schools," they were outraged that judges and government bureaucrats—some of them people without children in the public schools—were telling them what to do. Indeed, the majority of Americans rejected court-ordered busing, damning it as a desperate and divisive approach to complicated problems. A Gallup poll in October 1971 revealed that whites opposed busing by a ratio of 3 to 1. Even black people disapproved, by a margin of 47 percent to 45 percent. The issue of "forced" busing, already volatile before 1971, enormously abetted public backlash thereafter, fomenting violence in Boston and other cities.
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Nixon was philosophically opposed to court-ordered busing. Moreover, he was quick to recognize the political advantage of catering to popular resistance. For these reasons he clamped down hard when officials in HEW and the Department of Justice tried to hasten desegregation. He wrote Ehrlichman, "I want you personally to jump" on those departments "and tell them to
Knock off this Crap
. I hold them . . . accountable to keep their left wingers in step with my express policy—Do what the law requires and not
one bit more
." Publicly, he declared his determination to "hold busing to the minimum required by law." Congress, he said, should "expressly prohibit the expenditure" for school desegregation of "any . . . funds for busing."
⁶⁵
In March 1972 he called for a moratorium on all new busing orders by federal courts until legal issues, then under appeal, could be resolved. Vigorous oppostion to court-ordered busing became a main theme of his campaign for re-election in 1972.
⁶⁶

Nixon's stand helped to tie up efforts for court-ordered busing between 1971 and 1974. Meanwhile, the retirements in late 1971 of Supreme Court justices John Marshall Harlan and Hugo Black enabled the President to add two more judges of his choice to the Court. His nominees were Assistant Attorney General William Rehnquist, a Goldwater Republican, and Lewis Powell, a Virginia attorney who had been president of the American Bar Association. Both were confirmed, thereby pushing the ideological bent of the Court to the right.

In 1973 and 1974, with popular feeling high against busing, the new Court rendered two key decisions that gladdened conservatives and depressed liberals. In the first in 1973,
San Antonio Independent School District
v.
Rodriguez
, the Court affirmed by a vote of 5 to 4 the widespread American practice of local financing of schools—a practice that resulted in large disparities in per student spending. The "right" to an education, the judges said in rejecting Mexican-American complaints, was not guaranteed by the Constitution.
⁶⁷
The second,
Milliken
v.
Bradley
, was announced less than a month before Nixon left office in August 1974. It involved schools in Detroit and its suburbs and was also decided by a vote of 5 to 4. In this case, as in the
Rodriguez
decision, all four of Nixon's appointees were with the majority.
⁶⁸
The judges overruled a lower court ruling in 1971 that had ordered the merging of school districts so as to promote metropolitan desegregation of predominantly black Detroit and fifty-three suburban districts, most of them white-dominated, outside the city. The suburban districts, Burger reasoned, had not willfully segregated or violated the Constitition. District lines, therefore, could be sustained, separating Detroit from its environs.

The
Milliken
decision was pivotal in the postwar history of race relations, for it badly hurt whatever hopes reformers still maintained of overturning de facto segregation of the schools and of slowing a dynamic that was accelerating in many American urban areas: "white flight" of familes to suburbs.
⁶⁹
Flight in turn eroded urban tax bases, further damaging schools and other services in the cities. A "white noose" was tightening around places like Detroit. Justice Thurgood Marshall, appalled by the Court's decision, declared, "Unless our children begin to learn together, there is little hope that our people will ever learn to live together. . . . In the short run it may seem to be the easier course to allow our great metropolitan areas to be divided up into two cities—one white, the other black—but it is a course, I predict, our people will ultimately reject. I dissent."
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Marshall was prophetic about the further racial polarization of urban areas in the future. Many black ghettos grew even more desperate, virtually isolating an "underclass" that lived there. By 1974, however, the judges were hardly alone in abandoning ghettos to their fate. The
Milliken
decision reflected the backlash that had grown since the mid-1960s and that Nixon, Mitchell, and others in his administration had done much to stimulate. For these reasons the cause of racial desegregation continued to stall in the early 1970s. Black leaders who seemed threatening, such as the Black Panthers, were silenced, sometimes violently. Other black leaders remained divided and demoralized. The civil rights revolution, which had inspired grand expectations in the 1960s, reeled on the defensive in the 1970s and thereafter.

R
ACIAL POLARIZATION WAS
but one cultural division that widened in the Nixon years. Ethnic and class conflicts also seemed to grow sharper, defying prophecies about the heat of the melting pot and resulting (many thought) in greater residential segregation of the social classes in the 1970s.
⁷¹
Here, too, deliberate actions by Nixon exacerbated tensions. Far from trying to muffle the resentments of many in the working and lower-middle classes, Nixon fanned their anxieties in the hope of drawing them, along with southern whites, to the Republican party. Hard-working and patriotic people, he said in 1969, were the "great silent majority" of Americans.
⁷²

No one was happier to pursue this strategy than Spiro Agnew, who emerged in late 1969 as one of the most visible Vice-Presidents in modern American history. Four days after a massive anti-war protest in October, he starting firing away at a wide range of enemies: "A spirit of national masochism prevails, encouraged by an effete corps of impudent snobs who characterize themselves as intellectuals." People promoting peace demonstrations were "ideological eunuchs." The press, he added two weeks later, were "a tiny and closed fraternity of privileged men" who engaged in "instant analysis and querulous criticism." Agnew, relying on speechwriters, relished high-sounding alliteration. He denounced opponents as "nattering nabobs of negativism" and as "hopeless hypochondriacs of history." He lamented that "a paralyzing permissive philosophy pervades every policy they [anti-war demonstrators] espouse."
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Although Agnew's primary targets were opponents of the war, he scattered shot more widely about, at one point taking aim at
Easy Rider
and Jefferson Airplane. Like Wallace in the 1968 campaign, he delighted in attacking self-styled experts, whom he blamed for encouraging permissiveness in American life. His targets included a host of people: opponents of school prayer, advocates of busing, hippies, counterculturalists, radical feminists, pushy blacks, spoiled university students, and intellectuals.

Outraged liberals and journalists countered Agnew's barrage with attacks of their own. But Agnew, egged on by Nixon, did not run for cover. Indeed, Nixon was developing tough tactics of his own. He was determined to destroy the most critical of his enemies, groups such as Weatherman and the Black Panthers. In mid-1970 he approved a plan devised at his instigation by Tom Huston, a young aide. The so-called Huston Plan would have increased funding for the CIA and the FBI and authorized these and other agencies to engage in a range of illegal activities, including covert opening of mail and much greater bugging and wiretapping. Only the opposition of FBI chief Hoover, who feared that the plan would damage the reputation of his agency (and who anticipated competition from Huston), prevented Nixon from going ahead with the plan. It was ironic indeed that Hoover, who had employed high-handed investigatory tactics for years, should have been the one to face down the President. Perhaps only Hoover, still a brilliantly self-protective bureaucrat, could have managed to do so.
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