Lyndon B. Johnson by Charles Peters

Author:Charles Peters [Peters, Charles]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 978-1-4299-4824-1
Publisher: Henry Holt and Co.
Published: 2010-07-29T16:00:00+00:00

7

The Great Society

It may have been hard to take Johnson’s ideas for the Great Society seriously when he first sketched them out to Dick Goodwin and Bill Moyers in the White House swimming pool in February 1964. The sight of Johnson’s large body in the water made Goodwin think of Moby Dick and Moyers of a polar bear. Now, however, with the War on Poverty and the Civil Rights Act of 1964 on the books and already being implemented, those grand ideas were becoming increasingly credible. And more, much more, was soon to come.

Johnson made federal aid to education his first priority in 1965. Determined to help poor students like those he had gone to school with in the hill country and had taught in Cotulla, he knew that he had to overcome Congress’s long-standing bias in favor of local control of elementary and secondary schools.

One reason for the opposition to the federal role had been a desire on the part of southern conservatives to preserve segregated schools. That factor had, however, been minimized by Brown v. Board of Education and the Civil Rights Act of 1964, which gave the attorney general of the United States the power to enforce the school desegregation called for by the Supreme Court.

Another stumbling block in the path of federal aid was religion. Catholic legislators from urban areas opposed any bill that did not include parochial schools, while Protestants from the rest of the country tended to be against any measure that helped such institutions. The Johnson administration decided to get around this obstacle by granting aid to students rather than to schools. This model had been accepted by Congress and the public in the case of the GI Bill, which had given World War II veterans allowances to cover their expenses whether they attended Ohio State or Notre Dame.

In Everson v. Board of Education, the Supreme Court had upheld this model as it applied to state aid for public and private elementary and secondary students in New Jersey. The GI Bill argument found a receptive audience on Capitol Hill, aided by the remarkable decline in anti-Catholicism that had occurred in the country since 1960, when it had been a formidable obstacle to John Kennedy’s nomination and election. The fact that Kennedy had never shown any evidence of being under the sway of the Vatican, and that the late president now enjoyed such enormous posthumous popularity, helped, as did the worldwide affection for the benign Pope John XXIII.

As a result, the bill passed the House and Senate by wide margins. In the Senate, the vote was an incredible 73–18. What made this margin so remarkable was the previous failure of similar measures to attract even the barest majority.

Johnson signed the bill in front of the one-room school that he attended as a boy, with his first-grade teacher, Katie Deadrich Looney, in attendance, along with some of Johnson’s pupils from Cotulla. Texas barbecue was served. A “corny, warm setting,” is the way Lady Bird described it in her diary.

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.