Penguin History of the United States of America (121 page)

None of this might have mattered very much if the American city had retained its economic vitality. Instead, for reasons already given, it was beginning to decay at its core, and the arrival of numberless unemployed blacks, who were in many cases unemployable (either because the job market was closed to them or because the demand for unskilled labour was shrinking fast), simply accelerated the decay. Furthermore, the inner city was already under deeply destructive pressure from various quarters. It was being torn down in all directions to make room for motorways, or to enable real-estate developers to make fortunes by putting up more and more gigantic office-blocks or, bitter irony, so that huge areas of monstrously ugly, dispiriting public housing could be erected with subsidies from the
federal government paid under the Housing Act of 1949. Ethnic neighbourhoods began to seem like islands under siege by the tide, or like fortresses isolated from each other by an invading army. If the enemy were allowed to encroach, the neighbourhood shops and small industrial concerns, which gave employment to many and satisfaction to all, would be the first to go. Then the private houses would be demolished, in larger or smaller numbers; those inhabitants who could would move out, hoping to reconstitute their lives elsewhere; and the blacks (or, in New York, the Puerto Ricans) would begin to move in, which would in turn be the signal for the final desperate scramble outwards to the suburbs. The blacks would not inherit a going concern, as the Italians had once inherited the Lower East Side of New York from the Irish, and they from the Yankees. Instead they would fall heir to a vast area of decaying housing, with decaying services and no prospects except of indefinite reliance on welfare. They were not even safe from direct economic exploitation, for many slum landlords continued to exact high rents while doing the absolute minimum of maintenance for their properties. No wonder that crime figures mounted rapidly, or that one of the most usual crimes was now arson. By the mid-seventies large areas of such places as the South Bronx in New York had, literally, been burnt out, and were being allowed to decay into wilderness once more: a wilderness disfigured by the rusting wrecks of cars, the blackened skeletons of shops, schools and houses, and acre upon acre of cracking concrete slabs.

Against conditions such as these the civil rights movement was largely helpless. Its achievements were of inestimable advantage to the black middle class: the number of blacks in professional occupations doubled between 1960 and 1974, and their place in society was increasingly unchallenged. But most blacks were not middle-class; indeed about half of them lived on, or below, or near, the poverty-line, the line below which, statisticians reckoned, their income was inadequate for the necessities of life. It proved exceedingly difficult to find effective means of helping them, though Lyndon Johnson talked of a war on poverty, and A. Philip Randolph proposed a ‘Negro Marshall Plan’, which would have involved the expenditure of $10,000,000,000 a year for ten years: but even the liberal Congress of the mid-sixties balked at the idea of expenditure on anything like this scale for such a cause (though at the same time it was voting much larger sums for the war in Vietnam) and after the election of Richard Nixon to the Presidency in 1968 it was clearly vain to hope for anything of the kind. Indeed, one of Nixon’s advisers tactlessly suggested that the time had come to practise a little ‘benign neglect’ of black problems. This outraged the black community, but outrage alone was not going to change anything.

The dilemma was most cruelly exposed in the last years of Martin Luther King. With the passage of the Voting Rights Act the first phase in ‘the Second Reconstruction’ was virtually complete: in political and legal terms blacks now were, or would soon become, formally equal to whites. But their social and economic deprivations were as bad as ever, and it was clearly
incumbent on the leaders of ‘the Movement’ to launch a second phase which would tackle the horrors of black life in the North. At first King tried to apply the Gandhian tactics which had proved so successful in the South, but they did not work. For one thing he had decided that the war in Vietnam was mopping up economic resources that should have been used to improve conditions at home; that it was killing a disproportionate number of black Americans; that it was hideously cruel; and that it might lead to world war. These considerations impelled the winner of the Nobel Peace Prize to denounce the war repeatedly; but in so doing he alienated the administration which was waging it. Lyndon Johnson was a vindictive man who never liked or trusted Martin King; he never again gave more than token countenance and protection to the activities of the SCLC. What this meant became painfully clear when, in 1966, King took his organization to Chicago and launched a series of marches through the all-white suburbs of that city, hoping to bring down the structure of
de facto
housing segregation there, for he reasoned that if the blacks could break out of the ghetto they might find decent jobs, houses and schools waiting for them. His concrete aim was to shame the city of Chicago into living up to its own open-housing ordinances, its own regulations which required, for example, that all rented property should be repainted once a year. He did manage to get a surprising number of concessions out of the city administration, and a large number of paper promises. But the spirit of willing compliance, essential for real progress, was lacking. Richard J. Daley, the mayor, was the last of the great city bosses. He was under no pressure from Washington to work with King. He knew that the black movement itself was splitting, as the younger activists turned away from King and non-violence to the phantasms of ‘Black Power’ and war on whitey – phantasms which blended all too well into the criminal violence in which the days of all too many young blacks were passed. He felt that his own political power in Chicago was challenged, and in any case he could hardly make concessions to the blacks when the whites on whom he depended politically were showing such bitter hostility to the marchers. The climax came when 200 marchers through the suburb of Cicero (Al Capone’s former lordship) were met with an incessant rain of bottles and stones: the inhabitants of Cicero, mostly Polish-Americans, saw the black demonstrators as embodiments and precursors of all the forces which were threatening their way of life: but for the protection of the police, and the National Guard, there would certainly have been killings. King withdrew from Chicago, to carry on the struggle elsewhere; then, on 4 April 1968, he was assassinated by yet another of the wretched, half-insane murderers who were so tragically common at that time.

King was killed in Memphis, Tennessee, by a Southern white, James Earl Ray, who was driven on by the racial tensions which had poisoned Southern life for so long; so it can be said that he was martyred in the cause to which he had brought such great gifts and victories. His death – the death of a devoted, wise and eloquent man, who had a sure grasp of the essentials of
the tragedy of his times, and who still had much to give his people, white as well as black – was a fearful loss. When the news of the murder hit the nation, 125 cities rose in an unparalleled outbreak of rage, grief and protest. It took 70,000 troops to suppress the rebellion; once more the people of the ghettoes fought, looted and burned; in particular they erupted across Washington, doing immense damage both to the city and to race relations. It was not a commemoration which King would have appreciated, nor did it do anybody any good, although Lyndon Johnson, with characteristic adroitness, used Martin Luther King’s death to push the Open Housing Act through Congress, as he had used Jack Kennedy’s to push through the 1964 Civil Rights Act. Riot, arson and looting are poor substitutes for a decent standard of living. This was soon so universally accepted that the poor black population began to sink back into apathy, even while the black middle class increased in numbers, prosperity and status.

The next ten years brought no more dramatic gains. It began to seem as if the Second Reconstruction had ended, like the first, with no more than partial success; it began to be feared that yet another century might run before a Third Reconstruction would at last give African-Americans everything in the way of hope and happiness to which they were as much entitled as their more fortunate white fellow-citizens. It was not very surprising that at the Howard University commencement ceremonies in 1978 Thurgood Marshall, once the leading counsel for NAACP, who had led for the plaintiff in
Brown
v.
Board of Education
and then became the first black Justice of the Supreme Court, commented in the grimmest terms on African-American prospects:

Be careful of the people who say, ‘You’ve got it made. Take it easy. You don’t need any more help.’ Today we have reached the point where people say, ‘You’ve come a long way.’ But so have other people come a long way. Has the gap been getting smaller? No. It’s getting bigger. People say we’re better off today. Better off than what?… Don’t listen to that myth that [inequality] can be solved… or that it has already been solved. Take it from me, it has not been solved.

Poverty and racism: America’s most urgent business was still unfinished.

Oh build your ship of death. Oh build it!
for you will need it,
for the voyage of oblivion awaits you.

D. H. Lawrence

Anyone trying to make sense of the story of the American people must notice, I think, that two themes persist. One is continuity: this is a nation which, born in the seventeenth century, has developed along one line ever since. The other is challenge and response: changing times have periodically required radical alterations in the organization of American life. The alterations have seldom or never come in time to avert great troubles, but come they have, so that the great experiment of American freedom has been enabled to continue. The Revolution, the Civil War, the Industrial Revolution, the New Deal, the Second World War: these were the stages by which the American people had evolved; the changes of course by which they avoided shipwreck.

By 1963 nearly two decades had passed since the last of these creative transformations had been completed, and it is far from surprising that then, and in the years since, the new order created during the Roosevelt administrations began to show its imperfections as well as its permanent value. Furthermore, the toils of the Cold War, though inevitable, and justified by results, as communism was eventually discredited and the Soviet Union disappeared, did to a large extent distort the natural evolution of American society, and exacted some monstrous sacrifices which will not be forgotten for a long time and may never be wholly made good. The tragedy of Lyndon Johnson was that while he clearly understood the need for new departures in American domestic policy, he did not accept the even more urgent need for a radical overhaul of foreign policy. Still less did he understand, as Martin Luther King did, that radical change at home – programmes to rescue the country’s poor from desperation, for instance –
were dependent on adjustments right across the board. He allowed himself to be imprisoned by the traditions and institutions of the forties and fifties and plunged the United States deep into war, disgrace, economic crisis and political disaster. Things got no better under his immediate successors. Not until outsiders captured the presidency in 1976 and 1980 – outsiders who, from very different points of view, despised the Washington establishment – did the United States begin once more to adjust to new times. The process was still incomplete by the end of the twentieth century; it was a very choppy one at times, even if the eventual outcome was on the whole beneficial to America; and the years between 1963 and 1974, the matter of this chapter, were a time of continual crisis.

It is not true that people learn nothing from history: they are marvellous at learning the wrong lessons. So it must seem, at any rate, to most students of America’s war in Vietnam. The story runs like a ghastly parody of the post-1918 tragedy. Once more the American people, mastered by illusion, went down the path to disaster behind leaders even more darkened than themselves. Once more disaster took the form of war; only this time the usual horror of international conflict was deepened by the fact that it was war in the name of an obsolete view of the world and of America’s duty in it against peoples who were of the most marginal concern to the real interests of the United States. Against these unoffending strangers America hurled her fullest might, with frightful consequences. The episode was the worst stain on the national honour since slavery.

America’s participation in the Indo-Chinese wars was a mistake with many roots, yet the most important single cause can be stated in a sentence. It was the failure to understand the nature and consequences of the great movement which dismantled the European empires. Obsessed with the Cold War, and imagining that all the rest of the world shared their obsession, American policy-makers and their supporters simply did not notice that reality was in large part organized round different concerns, and they forced such facts as could not be denied into their preconceptions, instead of modifying the preconceptions to fit the facts. In 1961 Soviet Russia and Red China were perceived as a united threat to the peace of the world and the liberty of the United States, and were likened to the German danger of the first half of the century. The steady divergence of Russian and Chinese policies was ignored, and when the two great communist powers began openly to quarrel experienced men could be heard warning that it was all a pretence to lull the West into false security. When either Russia or China showed an interest in a particular country or region, that was sufficient proof that an anti-American plot was hatching; and when, as in Indo-China, both powers showed an interest, it was self-evident that the United States was seriously threatened and must go actively to work to defend itself. The idea that a nationalist movement, such as that led against the French Empire in Indo-China by Ho Chi Minh, was exceedingly unlikely to let itself become the simple tool of Soviet or Chinese expansionism was often put forward,
but Washington paid no attention to such arguments (which were amply vindicated by events after 1975). Ho Chi Minh, said Washington, was a communist; he was therefore a tool of the Kremlin; he was therefore an enemy of the United States. The syllogism was as perfect in form as it was worthless in content. It served as a substitute for thought in exactly the same way that the Kellogg-Briand pact had so served in the twenties and thirties. Woodrow Wilson would have denounced it as a bad old balance-of-power calculation. Theodore Roosevelt, one would like to think, would have denounced it as a balance-of-power miscalculation. Like isolationism, it rested on a deep unwillingness to accept that the world was never going to dance at Uncle Sam’s every whim or share his every prejudice.