The Daily Signal - Amity Shlaes on the "Great Society," and How the 60s Still Affect Us

Episode Date: February 27, 2020

Amity Shales is the author of a new book, “Great Society: A New History.” On today's Daily Signal Podcast, she breaks down why the 60's were so radical, and how the policies were perhaps even worse for America than the New Deal was. We also cover these stories: The Justice Department is adding a new subdepartment to combat those who became citizens despite a background that should have disqualified them. New York’s 2nd Circuit Court of Appeals gave President Donald Trump an immigration victory in a blow to sanctuary cities, ruling Wednesday that money can be denied to states that fail to work with federal immigration officials.  Sen. Chuck Schumer of New York is asking Congress to allocate $8.5 billion of emergency funds to fight the coronavirus. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

This is the Daily Signal podcast for Thursday, February 27th. I'm Rachel Daldudis. And I'm Kate Trinco. Today will feature my interview with Amity Shlays, the author of the new book, Great Society, A New History. She'll break down for us why the 60s were so radical and how the policies of the time were perhaps even worse for America than the New Deal was. And don't forget, if you do enjoy this podcast, be sure to leave a review or a five-star

rating on Apple Podcasts and encourage others to subscribe. Now on to our top news. The Justice Department is adding a new sub-department to combat those who became citizens, despite a background that should have disqualified them. When a terrorist or sex offender becomes a U.S. citizen under false pretenses, it is an affront to our system, and it is especially offensive to those who fall victim to those criminals, said Assistant Attorney General Jody Hunt. The denaturalization section will further the department's effort.

to pursue those who unlawfully obtain citizenship status and ensure that they are held accountable for their fraudulent conduct. New York's Second Circuit Court of Appeals gave President Donald Trump an immigration victory and a blow to sanctuary cities, ruling Wednesday that money can be denied to states that fail to work with federal immigration officials. The ruling overturned a lower court ruling that stopped the administration's 2017 move to withhold grant money from the Edward Byrne Memorial Justice Assistance Grant Program, which dispenses over $250 million a year to state and local criminal justice efforts, Fox News reported. Of the ruling, a DOJ spokesperson said, via Fox News, today's decision rightfully recognizes the lawful authority of the Attorney General to ensure that the Department of Justice grant recipients are not at the same time thwarting

federal law enforcement priorities. The grant conditions here require states and cities that receive DOJ grants to share information about criminals in custody. The federal government uses this information to enforce national immigration laws, policies supported by successive Democrat and Republican administrations. As concern over coronavirus increases, President Trump is taking aim at the media's coverage of the disease. He tweeted on Tuesday, a nickname for MSNBC, low ratings fake news MSDNC, Comcast, and CNN are doing everything possible to make the coronavirus look as bad as possible, including panicking markets if possible. Likewise, they're incompetent, do-nothing Democrat comrades are all talk, no action.

USA in great shape. Senator Chuck Schumer of New York is asking Congress to allocate $8.5 billion, of emergency funds to fight coronavirus. In his statement released on Wednesday, Schumer said, This proposal brings desperately needed resources to the global fight against coronavirus. Americans need to know that their government is prepared to handle the situation

before coronavirus spreads to our communities. I urge Congress to move quickly on this proposal. Time is of the essence. This comes after the Trump administration asked Congress on Tuesday for $2.5 billion in funding to combat the disease. Project Veritas, the investigative reporting group headed by James O'Keefe, recently released a new video

featuring an ABC news correspondent, David Wright, discussing his political beliefs. Here's what Wright had to say to Project Veritas about ABC's coverage of Trump and his own politics. We don't hold him to account. We also don't give me credit for what things he does do. Would you consider yourself a Democrat Socialist? Yeah.

Like, what not? I'd consider myself a socialist. In a statement to deadline, ABC News said, any action that damages are reputation for fairness and impartiality or gives the appearance of compromising it harms ABC News and the individuals involved. David Wright has been suspended, and to avoid any possible appearance of bias, he will be reassigned away from political coverage when he returns. Next up, we'll have my interview with Amity Schlaise about the 60s.

Do conversations about the Supreme Court leave you scratching your head? If you want to understand what's happening at the court, subscribe to SCOTUS 101, a Heritage Foundation podcast, breaking down the cases, personalities, and gossip at the Supreme Court. Joining us on the podcast today is Amity Schlaes, the author of the new book, Great Society, A New History. Amity is also the author of The Forgotten Man, a new history of the Great Depression and Coolidge. She is a scholar at the King's College and chairs the board of the Calvin Coolidge Presidential Foundation and the Manhattan Institute's Hayek Book Prize. Amity, thanks for joining us. Glad to be here. So let's start at a 101 level. What is the great society and why were you interested in writing about it?

Imagine a period when everyone's feeling really idealistic and they want to change the world, improve the world, not just be good, be great. sounds like now, but actually it was the early 60s. So the only question in the early 60s with all this idealism was, should the federal government be the vehicle for getting to great or should the private sector? We chose the federal government, the public sector, and said, we're going to have a great society. We're going to change things through legislation. We all, of course, know that the 60s was an era of change. You write in your book, underlying the new American ambition was dissatisfaction with the pace of projects that have been launched in the 1950s. Civil rights law that had not desegregated, train stations or schools,

the construction of interstate highways that didn't seem to help the poor, urban renewal funding that could not meet the needs of all. What do you think was going on in the 50s that made society so right for change in the 60s? The 50s was the period of the military industrial complex, when we assume that government and companies work together, maybe with a third party at the table, that would be labor unions. So a bunch of smart people get together and plan the rate of growth. It was almost Soviet, this assumption of how economies work.

So one of the large projects was urban renewal where essentially you bulldoze the center of cities in the name of building new housing. Also sounds familiar, imperative of housing. And that was not particularly successful. We built giant new projects that people didn't like almost. from the get-go living stacked bunk-bud style instead of in their old homes as dilapidated as those homes had been. So that mindset of government and people working together, government spending to improve life commenced in the New Deal, even picked up in the supposedly capitalist 50s.

In the 60s, the components of the Great Society were city, countryside, classroom. So you want to imagine three areas of operation declared by President Lyndon Johnson when he officially said, we're going to have a great society. This is our motto. And these are the areas. Cities, countryside classroom. And was there any precedent in American history for dividing up the population in that way, looking at it that way? Not quite. I mean, in the New Deal, Franklin Roosevelt divided up the country.

He actually divided it into river basins. You think of the Tennessee Valley Authority is over the region of Tennessee or the other dams that were built in. That was a kind of weird way to divide a national economy. So politicians divide our lives up in strange ways. In strange ways, what was interesting about that, and this is, you know, an audience aware of federalism. The reason for the authorities regionally was they were over the states, but they weren't the federal government. They were sort of in between TVA and so on. So who's in charge of them?

The courts have to clarify that. And while they think, while we wait for jurisprudential clarification, guess what, we're in charge, the TVA or so on. So when you create a new entity, you buy yourself some time before it's all clear in the courts whether we actually have the authority to operate. And in the New Deal, many new institutions and authorities and commissions, that's what Progressives' took over. And it wasn't clear whether they were constitutional. But while we waited for that to come out, of course, they operated and changed the economy in Americans' lives. That's fascinating. You talk about in the Great Society about this bureaucrat who was involved in President Lyndon Johnson's administration's poverty initiatives. And this man, Michael Harrington,

had socialist sympathies. And you write that he and a friend of his would end memos with this line, which I was just really surprised to see. Of course, there is no real solution to the problem of poverty until we abolish the capitalist system. Do you think there were socialist motives in some of the great society programs? Were there other bureaucrats who had a similar mindset? What was kind of the role of socialism ideals in this? Michael Harrington was actually a wonderful man. He was kind of impish.

That was humor. And he was a true socialism advocate, a socialist, as he would say. He didn't last long in government, so he wasn't a successful bureaucrat. He was a firebrand they brought in for fun. But then you want to think about all the bureaucrats, that is the professional government employees and what they thought. They thought, well, this is still capitalism. We'll take the money from the capitalists and spend it. The government will spend it on a new program that makes America stable so we don't go communist.

That was the mental thought process in the period of the Cold War of, say, your standard, I don't know, department head in the federal government. So there you are. Michael was just brought in for fun, but some of his ideas did inform the Economic Opportunity Act, which was the Poverty Law of the Great Society. And the act created an office, which was led by Sergeant Shriver, the brother-in-law of the late president, that would be JFK. And a man who, too, wasn't communist, wasn't even socialist, but he did believe that all the things the church does, could be done better if the federal government multiplied the amount of money and did charitable work. So one of the, I think, fallacies of the great society, and that's what I try to show in my book, is what the church does, the government cannot do. To assume that what the church does the government can do, that's the fallacy.

The government cannot replicate the church. It's different. The church is very local, usually, no matter how centralized it is. and it does what people need on the ground. They need, oh, I, I the priest, I the minister, I the rabbi, see that shoes are necessary. Let there be shoes. That's very different from the federal government looking down and saying, here's what all American towns need will send the money. And that's what the war in poverty was.

So let's talk a little bit more about the war on poverty. You note that at the end of the war on poverty, which we're not really there, but it's been going on for four or five decades. It didn't eliminate poverty, but it created a new kind of poverty, a permanent sense of downtroddeness. How did this change the U.S.? Well, we had the assumption. If you go back and look at the Great Society, and this is Lyndon Johnson's baby, although in the Great Society book, I talk about John Kennedy and Richard Nixon as well. Johnson didn't say, we will make poverty better and more bearable, and the people who are poor will have food so they won't starve. That's not what he said. He said we will cure poverty, a different idea.

Well, that failed. Poverty was already curing away before the great society because of economic growth. The share of people who fell into the category called poverty was dropping. So we had maybe even up to 30 percent of people who were under the poverty line as established by the government, went down to 25, 2015. but poverty was never cured. The poverty share reduction slowed after the great society. And we kind of got stuck at 10. So people are sometimes poor.

It happens. The question is whether they have hope, whether they move with alacrity out of poverty, or whether they're always the same people. The problem now is that as a result of the creation of all these entitlements, We have people who are not only on food stamps. They may need them. We support that.

But what we don't support is they expect always to be on food stamps, and they expect their children to be on food stamps. And those children will insult anyone who dares to argue that a future of food stamps might not be good. So this idea that it is always yours and forever because you are owed is bad for the donor, bad for the fisc, but terrible, most terrible for the recipients. One of the chapters in your book is about GE, and I didn't know anything about this. The GE was apparently for a decade or so promoting capitalism and free markets to its workers. Can you talk about that? I just find it so hard to imagine a major company doing something like this. But GE is a cool company.

It's at the heart of American entrepreneurial culture, not only because of Thomas Edison. You know, a guy has an idea in a lab. He has a lot of ideas. most fail. One works. That's GE, but also through the interesting governance and leaders like Charles Coffin who co-founded GE with Edison and made it work financially and made it a national company. Gee's that, but it's also a big government servant. The government is its client. It funds the turbines that go to the Tennessee Valley Authority, TVA, right? That's an example of an institution that's kind of New Deal Strange. So it provides a

equipment to the space program. That's very important. NASA. So GE is both critical of government and dependent upon it. It's part of the military industrial complex. This one executive there, and let's remember his name, because he was special, Lemuel Bullware. I'll say it again, Lemuel Bullware, had this idea that the military industrial complex that

Ike described, President Eisenhower described, and that GE was part of, was wrong. and eventually too much government involvement would kill capitalism. The other executives at GE thought he was a fool. They were glad he was over 60 because they were looking forward to his retirement. They didn't want some right-wing propagandists walking around. They were cool people like the madmen on the television show. And they were all about marketing. And here was this guy saying capitalism, good, communism, bad.

It was way too primitive for them. Nonetheless, he was permitted to persist. He had a TV show, GE Theater. He mimographed little documents. We'll lose everything we cherish unless we fight for free markets. And actually, what happened to Lem Bullware, he hired an actor to spread his propaganda, to learn speeches about markets, to rail against the TVA, even because it was part of the government. They had bad fortune.

It turned out GE, this pristine model of capitalism, this company that was compared to, I don't know, is American, is baseball. was cheating that its executives were colluding with executives from other electric product companies, let's just say, to charge prices that were too high to the Tennessee Valley Authority. Now, you can't go around to being all sanctimonious about the Tennessee Valley Authority and then cheat it at the same time. So that kind of wrecked the whole free market propaganda campaign because GE was clearly just big cheater. They were just making money off the American taxpayer by overpricing to the TVA.

No question about it. This actually happened. GE executives were prosecuted by the Attorney General, who in the end turned out to be Robert Kennedy. They went to jail. The unions mocked them. One of the union leaders sent a GE executive while he was in jail, the board game Monopoly, to tease him for his awful behavior. and the actor was fired, and Lem Bullware went into retirement to Delray Beach and presumably his lazy boy, and everyone was sad.

Then came the great society of the 60s, everyone on the free market side that is, and did all the things that Bullware had warned against. One measure after the other, bigger involvement in schools, higher taxes, less freedom for business, dealing with poverty through the government instead of providing opportunity to workers. So Bullware was pretty sad. But as it happened, that actor was a little bit convinced. He had started out a rock-rib Democrat. But after a while, he was convinced by his own speeches and by his own reading. Bullware had him on a terrific reading course of Hayek, Hazlitt, and I don't know, Bastia. And he read and read all about free markets.

And he told his son he believed in it and he bought some GE stock. And when the 1964 election came, he was out of a job from GE. That was over. But he gave his speech for Barry. Goldwater called Time for Choosing. Of course, this actor was Ronald Reagan. This speech was straight out of the GE textbook of Lemuel Bullware. Reagan really believed it. Goldwater lost, but Reagan didn't give up on the ideas. So the investment that Bullware made, Reagan, of course, became Governor of California, then ran for president much later in 1980, became president. Imagine a 20-year lag on an investment,

which is what this was for GE. But it paid off exponentially. And here we are talking about Lem Bullware. So he wasn't forgotten. Lemuel Bullware of GE. Great name for a baby or a puppy. Yeah, no, that's a really, he's a fascinating character in the book. So when we talk about the 60s, we often talk about the Vietnam War. How did it play a role in the domestic policies or was it not really relevant to them? Oh, of course it was relevant. So you want to imagine a theater stage, right? And my actors in my book were Sarge Schreiber, the poverty czar, or Lyndon Johnson, or Walter Ruther, the great UAW leader, they're walking on the stage and acting. And in the background, you hear rumble, rumble, rumble, that's the war, right?

And the rumble gets louder and louder until you can't hear the characters. That's the way the war felt because the number of soldiers in Southeast Asia went from in the 50,000 range to in the 500,000 man range very quickly. And wow, that's a big change for the society. It certainly disquieted President Johnson. He's losing boys, as he put it. The conflict wasn't going well for the United States. But another way to look at the war in Vietnam is we believed in ourselves. We believe we were the best and the brightest.

That's the phrase that was used to describe the policymakers and generals who led the war in Vietnam. And they didn't really look at what was happening on the ground. We've discovered that now. They bombed the wrong way. They didn't understand the perseverance of the Viet Cong, the communist side guerrilla soldiers. It was a guerrilla war, not a bombing war. It wasn't like Germany. They were fighting the wrong war.

And one reason it took so long to recognize our failings in Vietnam was the arrogance of the intelligence of the leaders of Secretary McNamara of defense, who thought he had to be right because he was so smart. Well, there was a corollary on the domestic side. the leaders of the great society and the domestic side said, I've got to be right. I went to the right school. I'm a genius. Everyone knows it. I'm good looking. I might know the Kennedy's. I am cool. It's just as simple as that. So when you're that arrogant, you can do a lot of damage before you realize you're a fool or that a particular strategy is wrong. In the case of the war and poverty, what we're doing was giving political money, essentially, to left-leaning local groups who then would assail, say, the mayor of a town. Example would be Sam Yorty of L.A.

He was kind of a bantamweight Democrat, sort of like a rooster. Sorry, Roryt family, but that's how he seemed to be, you know, really good fighter. Democrat but conservative, didn't like the Kennedys. And he had his own poverty plan for L.A. L.A. wasn't doing so poorly. The police Department was too bigoted. It needed to be fixed. Many of the people weren't quite trained enough for the new tech jobs, same as today. And we had a terrible legacy of discrimination and abuse by the police in areas such as Watts. But you already had an honest hope that he could fix all that, particularly if he received federal money. He was promised by Lyndon Johnson, you know, and certainly it looked like he would get that money once the war and poverty was funded to the tune of

billion. What happened was not that. What happened was the war on poverty and the poverty czar, Sarge Shriver said, we don't like any of these Yordi operations or these Richard J. Daley operations in Chicago. We want our own kind of poverty office. We want to kind of look over and pick which poverty office we use. And the poverty czar and his staff looked past the extant projects of the mayors and basically created their own vessel. to receive the federal government money. Generally, vessels or institutions that were far to the left of what the voters had selected. Those were groups that basically wanted to do activism, would take the money and go sit in the mayor's office,

protest loudly, pick their own agenda, maybe focus on housing instead of jobs. The mayors were just appalled. This was, they'd supported Lyndon Johnson in 1964. Mayor Daley had elected Lyndon Johnson from his point. of you of Chicago in 1964 and Daly calls up the White House. And he's, does the president realize he's sending M-O-N-E-Y to subversives? Does the president realize that? Because Daly was conservative.

Johnson was conservative. That is, they operated within the Democratic Party machine, national or local. Wow. These are people who want to unseat me who elected him. Is he thought that through president? And actually, Johnson hadn't. Johnson was kind of, it said he made love. like other many chocolate chip cookies.

You know, he said, I want to have a poverty law. LBJ, I like that idea. FDR, my inspiring father, would have liked that idea. What the meaning of the actual legislation or how it was interpreted meant for the American city or our system of federalism that he hadn't thought through. And in fact, they kind of rained it back once they realized what the War on Poverty was doing.

The high point of the hilarity was a television show about the war on poverty. with, you know, the Supremes and so on singing in Detroit at a factory about youth empowerment. It was very ridiculous. And you want to imagine money flowing from actually the networks to support the government in the war on poverty, making a ridiculous TV show. And the lawmakers, when they saw it, people singing all about empowerment and war on poverty, the lawmakers when they saw it, I just want to throw up when I watch this.

They called the White House. I can't believe you're doing this. So you want to imagine kind of jingoism of the war on poverty going to the level of the absurd. Wow. I did not know any of that. That is, like, I kind of want to see that special now. You also mentioned that the 1960s still affect us, that they're catching up to us in our current day and age. How do you see that happening?

Well, it's not what I see. It's what the data does. So we committed in the Great Society to programs such as Medicare and Medicaid. We committed to large welfare spending, which we actually still are committed to, notwithstanding President Clinton and Congress's efforts. So it used to be we could afford those projects, but they're growing like crazy. So we are visiting by sticking to the Great Society's commitments, enormous taxes upon our children and grandchildren, higher interest rates, a darker future.

Because all the Great Society projects, the way they're structured, they grow with the economy. They're almost impossible to outgrow. That's also true, the New Deal projects. But when you compare the two progressive impulses of our past, 1930s New Deal, 1960s, Great Society, which costs us more? Great Society costs us more. People think New Deal was so socialist, but Great Society costs us. more. Why does it matter? Because even a little bit of socialism takes us towards a lot of socialism.

You know, you really can tip over if the state quota, as they say, is too much. If the government employs too many of the workforce, if the federal budget is too heavy, the economy has trouble eventually. In the course of writing this book, what facts or figures that you learned about surprised you the most or maybe were the most entertaining? Well, today we don't hear about unions. what is right to work? If we start a company, we tend to move it into a right to work state because we have less union rules upon us. Fewer union rules dominating the way we structure the firm. There's evidence for that and there's a chart at the end of the book.

But what is a private union? We talk a lot about public sector unions and teacher. What is a private union? A smaller share of the American workforce by far belongs to the private sector unions, the UAW, the United Auto Workers and so on. What I didn't realize until I looked at this book was, excuse me, at this period, was that the United Auto Workers and the other unions were mighty, mighty at the beginning of the 60s. They were a big part of the economy.

They were a big part of the Democratic Party. And a lot of these unions and union leaders were reasonable people. They helped to fight the war on communism. Walter Ruther, who's one of the characters in my book, the charismatic leader of the UAW was not a communist. He was basically a Scandinavian social democrat who loved American capitalism. His error was he thought America could afford social democracy forever. He wasn't a traitor. He was just wrong. Walter Ruther, R-E-U-T-H-E-R. And all the union leaders in the period expected the right to work to be repealed. That is currently in union law, a state can

opt out of heavy unionism by voting itself right to work. And then a firm may not have to have a union or it may choose among unions and workers may choose as well. That's important. Whereas a union state, it's pretty clear. The big strong union comes to your company. You have to accept it and negotiate with it. So naturally, union leaders didn't like the option of right to work. They want all America to be not right to work, to be union. They don't want an escape hatch, a natural experiment. proving them wrong. The union leaders, particularly George Meaney of the AFL-CIO, and also Ruther of the UAW, fought very hard to get right-to-work option repealed, to change a Taft-Hartley Act, which is the original law, so that every state was necessarily unionized. As it happened, President LBJ

supported that and promised it, but he got too tired. You asked before, what about the Vietnam War? one of the things that tired LBJ out was the Vietnam War, and therefore he never got to repeal of this right-to-work provision. And therefore, we did have a natural experiment that proceeded from 50 years ago to now. And what we saw is right-to-work states grow faster. People want to live them, just like low-tax states grow faster. People want to live in them, even if their climate is awful. People want to live there because they're freer. So that was an extremely valuable experiment.

and I never realized how valuable the right-to-work experiment was for the United States and that it showed us what we can get when we have a freer economy. Well, thank you so much for being on with us today. No, thank you. Okay, and again, the book is Great Society, A New History. I'm reading it now. It's really well-written, and it's a pretty gripping look at the 60s, so highly recommend it. And that'll do it for today's episode.

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