The Big Sort (13 page)

Looking back, we can see when post-materialist politics in the United States reached a point of no return. It was in the summer of 1965, when the silent revolution made quite a bit of noise.

Philip Converse, the grand political scientist at the University of Michigan, long puzzled over a curiosity of public opinion, an unexplained shift in the way Americans thought about themselves and political parties—all happening suddenly in 1965. Converse knew that beginning in 1945, American politics had entered an almost steady state of partisanship. People were loyal to their political party, even if neither party was particularly ideological. (Both Democrats and Republicans, after all, tried to recruit Eisenhower as a presidential candidate in 1952.) But the percentage of people saying they were Republicans or Democrats, not independents, remained high and stable. A Gallup poll taken in January and February 1965 showed levels of party loyalty among the highest since the question was first asked in 1945. Party allegiance was slightly lower in a poll taken in June 1965. But when Gallup published its poll in October 1965, the percentage of Americans who identified themselves as Republican or Democrat had "moved sharply downward."
²³
More accurately, it had dropped like a rock. Many Americans were abandoning political allegiances that had remained steady for two decades. And it had all happened over that summer. There's often talk about realignment of political parties. In 1965, there was a sudden
de
alignment, a mass withdrawal of support for
both
parties.

Converse hunted for demographic clues for why Americans were suddenly abandoning their old allegiances. Were new, younger voters accounting for the shift away from party identification? No, the change appeared in all generations. In fact, even if all the young people new to the voting rolls had declared themselves to be independents, it wouldn't explain the drop. The Democrats were losing control of the previously solid South, but the abandonment of party affiliation was a national phenomenon. The decline was marginally worse among Democrats, but both Democrats and Republicans were declaring themselves free of party attachment. Nor was this political shift a fad. The number of self-declared independents increased in 1966, and the trend "proceeded almost majestically" through the mid-1970s.
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Converse focused on party allegiance, but he could have easily expanded his examination. Scholars found the disruption Converse discovered in politics occurring across American society. The mid-1960s were a time when society began to unwind and fall about in loose coils, like fishing line spilled from a broken reel. Institutions that had been gaining members for hundreds of years suddenly stopped their advance and began to decline. Relationships and attitudes that had remained unchanged for generations became unhinged. And it all happened at the same time.

Harvard University's Robert Putnam wrote about the shrinking of longtime civic organizations in his 2000 book
Bowling Alone.
Putnam averaged the membership in thirty-two national groups, from the Moose to the League of Women Voters. He determined that the "two decades following 1945 witnessed one of the most vital periods of community involvement in American history." Then society swerved. The rates of membership in these groups "peaked in the early 1960s, and began the period of sustained decline by 1969." Putnam's iconic example of civic engagement was the bowling league, the communal beer and tenpin contests that mixed people from different neighborhoods and of different political leanings. In 1964, 8 percent of all American men and 5 percent of women were bowling league members. After the mid-1960s, people began to bowl alone.
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A daily newspaper was the most common source of information for eight out of ten households in 1964, a degree of market penetration that newspapers would never see again.
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At the same time, crime rates and divorce rates started to rise. "Beginning in about 1965," Francis Fukuyama wrote in
The Great Disruption,
"a large number of indicators that can serve as negative measures of social capital all started moving upward rapidly at the same time."
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Most mainline religious denominations had grown uninterrupted from colonial times, a two-hundred-year record of orderly expansion. That growth ended in 1965. Martin Marty, former dean of the University of Chicago Divinity School, described the year as the epicenter of a "seismic shift" in religious life. "From the birth of the republic until around 1965, as is well known, the churches now called mainline Protestant
^*
tended to grow with every census or survey," Marty wrote.
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After 1965, the mainline denominations stopped growing or began to shrink as people turned to independent or Evangelical congregations. The six largest Protestant denominations together lost 5.6 million members between 1965 and 1990.
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"At least ten of the largest (and theologically more liberal) denominations have had membership losses in every year after 1966," religious historians David Roozen and Jackson Carroll wrote in 1979.
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The decline of traditional mainline denominations wasn't the result of a political movement. There was no "religious right" in 1965 that called people out of these churches. Evangelical ministers concentrated on "otherworldly" concerns. In 1965, the Reverend Jerry Falwell was a Virginia preacher who professed to "have few ties to this earth ... Believing in the Bible as I do, I would find it impossible to stop preaching the pure saving Gospel of Jesus Christ and begin doing anything else, including fighting communism or participating in civil rights reforms ... Preachers are not called upon to be politicians but to be soul winners. Nowhere are we commissioned to reform the externals."
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Nobody led Americans out of mainline churches. They left on their own, and they began their decampment in 1965.

Everywhere, it seemed, Americans were abandoning traditional institutions. Polling firms soon discovered that underlying this social disruption was a concomitant decline in trust: 1965 was the year Americans lost their faith. In the two decades after World War II, people maintained a remarkable trust in government. Maybe this confidence was a defensive reaction to the pressures of the cold war or psychic residue from Great Depression solidarity and World War II success.
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In the late 1950s, eight out of ten Americans said that they could trust government to do the right thing most of the time, a level of faith maintained through 1964.
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By 1966, however, Americans' faith in government had been replaced with doubt. "From 1964 to 1970, there was a virtual explosion of anti-government feeling," Seymour Martin Lipset and William Schneider wrote. The 80 percent of Americans who had approved of government in the late 1950s had dropped to 33 percent by 1976.
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The lack of confidence spread beyond government. Faith in universities, medicine, major companies, and journalism all dropped during this period. People came to believe that government was run by the few. The percentage of Americans who trusted the federal government to do the right thing most of the time dropped from 75 percent of the population in 1964 to 25 percent just a few years later.
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The sense that government had gotten out of hand was entirely bipartisan. In 1964, a quarter of self-described liberals and three-quarters of conservatives said that government was too large. By 1972, however, a majority of both liberals and conservatives said that government was overgrown. They may have disagreed about other things, but on the question of whether government was thick and stupid, left and right found common ground.
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When Philip Converse had exhausted all the possible demographic reasons for America's sudden rejection of political party affiliation in 1965, he turned to the historical causes. Converse was skeptical that the events of the spring and summer of 1965 were "epochal" enough to cause such a massive shift in public opinion, but when he began reviewing the year, he was "somewhat mollified." He discovered the "density of events surrounding both Vietnam and race relations which was indeed almost overwhelming, and which I suspect might be shown more objectively to have stood out on the record even against the backdrop of a generally troubled time."
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Nineteen sixty-five was a hell of a year, and Vietnam and race relations were just part of it. The front pages chronicle a year that began with incredible ambition and triumph, only to end with riots, war, and the beginnings of deep cultural discord. At the movies, people could see both
The Sound of Music
and Roman Polanski's
Repulsion.
In short, the year held all the good that government could achieve as well as all the ways that American society had sundered.

President Lyndon Johnson's reach was unlimited. A compliant Congress followed his instructions to remake the country, from filling symphony halls to rebuilding broken highways in Appalachia. On January 8, Johnson considered the creation of a new health care program for the aged and for poor children of the "utmost urgency." The bill creating Medicare and Medicaid passed both houses of Congress by July, with half of the Republican senators voting for it. On January 9, Johnson announced he was "determined to eliminate barriers to the right to vote..." (At the time, the percentage of blacks registered to vote in Mississippi was smaller than it had been in 1899.) He signed the 1965 Voting Rights Act in August and immediately dispatched forty-five federal agents to the South to register black voters.

Earlier that year, in March, Johnson's Justice Department ordered all schools to desegregate, threatening to withhold federal funds from any district that didn't integrate its schools by the fall of 1967. On the first day of school in the fall of 1965, Gene Roberts of the
New York Times
reported that southern educators "said it was the biggest day of integration in the Souths history."
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On January 25, LBJ proposed a budget containing what the
New York Times
described as the "biggest expansion of domestic welfare and educational programs since the New Deal of the nineteen thirties."
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Two months later, Johnson signed the bill creating the Appalachian Regional Commission, the first, but certainly not the last, War on Poverty bill to reach the president that year. The first children entered Head Start in May. In 1965, "for the first time since the Great Depression, the federal government began to exert a strong and direct influence on the arts," wrote Julia Ardery, as Congress created both the National Endowment for the Arts and the National Endowment for the Humanities.
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Johnson could control Congress, but he couldn't contain the conflict in Vietnam or the American South. At the beginning of the year, fewer than 20,000 American troops were in South Vietnam. Every month brought an escalation in the war. In February 1965, U.S. planes attacked North Vietnam, and in June B-52S based in Guam began to carpet-bomb Vietcong positions. (In the first raid of the war, two B-52S collided in midair and crashed.) Johnson called up U.S. Army reserves in July and told the country it would assume the "main burden" of the war.
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Opposition to the escalating conflict stirred in 1965. The first "teachin" on college campuses took place that May. Poet Robert Lowell refused an invitation to the White House in June because of his "dismay and distrust" of U.S. foreign policy.
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In August, the
New York Times
reported "the burning of village huts at the hands of United States marines."
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Antiwar protests flared across the country in October; 10,000 people paraded in New York City. Attorney General Nicholas Katzenbach said that the Justice Department would investigate the march because "there are some Communists involved in it."
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(William F. Buckley, running for mayor of New York, called the protesters "young slobs," mocking "their epicene resentment over a gallant national effort to keep an entire section of the globe from sinking into the subhuman wretchedness of Asiatic Communism." The
New York Times
helpfully turned to
Webster's
to inform readers that "epicene" was defined as "sexless" or "effeminate."
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) A few days later, twenty-two-year-old David J. Miller became the first person to be arrested for burning a draft card. A draft counselor at Yale University told the
New York Times
in November that he had had appointments booked "every 20 minutes every day for the last month."
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During one week in late November, 240 American GIs died in Vietnam, and 25,000 people—"more babies than beatniks," according to the
New York Times
—demonstrated in the "March on Washington for Peace in Vietnam."
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The December military draft enrolled more than 45,000 men, the largest monthly total since the Korean War. By the end of 1965, more than 200,000 American troops were fighting in Vietnam.
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The civil rights movement was both brutal and triumphant in March 1965, as Alabama state police assaulted protesters crossing Selma's Edmund Pettus Bridge on what became known as Bloody Sunday. Three days later, Martin Luther King Jr. led a larger march across Alabama to the state capital in Montgomery. There were dozens of marches across the country made in concert with King's trek; for instance, 10,000 people joined Governor George Romney in a demonstration in Detroit. At the end of the month, Johnson "declared war on the Ku Klux Klan."
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In August, however, the shoulder-to-shoulder success of the Selma-to-Montgomery march was lost in the anarchy of the Watts riots. South Los Angeles was ablaze for days. The
New York Times
carried headlines about "gangs of negroes" and "youths run wild."
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There were more riots in Chicago and Long Beach, California. In November, Gene Roberts wrote a story headlined "Negroes Still Angry and Jobless Three Months After Watts Riot."
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