American Experience; 1964; Interview with Hodding Carter III, Newspaper Editor, part 3 of 6

Um, it's, you know, it's kind of a, he's in Michigan, University of Michigan commencement in May. And he announced his innate, he gives it a label. Why is the label important, and why was the idea of the great society important, Johnson? One of the great things about any set of ideas is to make a, uh, title or catch phrase which can catch hold, the new deal, the fair deal. The great society, I have no idea ultimately, you know, who came up with that phrase, but it incorporated his wishing to say to us, we ought to be as great as we say we are, and we ought to be a society that makes good on its promises to all of its people, and we can do it. We can do it. So it was perhaps the last time that anybody actually presented to the American people, the doability of things simultaneously, and nobody said it was impossible, a lot of

people said you shouldn't do it, but it was still seen as possible to have guns and butter and to do these things, absolutely repellent to a lot of people, but, um, God, that just frankly, that's what really blew me away. That whole succession of the great society, and where I was, and where an awful lot of Americans were, it offered such hope for so many people, and it was so complex, of course, that it was almost automatically set up to be called a failure, which is exactly what it wasn't, it just wasn't a success in its own terms, and that's not being cute, but it did was it empowered tons of people, gave them tools, gave them independence, gave them everything the conservatives said, it was a subsidy for folks who needed to have

some backing in their workplace and in their community, and those organizations of the great society provided a frame for many of the things that were to come. And Johnson needs to make it his, right? Well, of course it is, he is, I mean, that's a wonderful thing, I mean, he, the audacity, I mean, forget the audacity of hope, it was the audacity of saying, I will now fulfill, you know, Moses let us out of the wilderness, that's, you know, his son began the process, that's Harry, and now what I'm going to do is I am going to bring us into the kingdom, which we have always claimed was ours, and we shall be there liberated together. It was wonderful, God, it was wonderful. I still, I still get extraordinarily sad about the way the war consumed that as Lyndon became increasingly obsessed with the war, but in that 64, 65 period, 64 my God, I mean,

you know, it's just, now again, because he's Lyndon, because Lyndon looks like he's selling you something bad, even when he's the most, it was hard for some people to understand just how much he meant it, but he meant it. The civil rights business to come, he meant, he understood it, I mean, I'm tired of hearing the return over and over again to this end of the South, well, yeah, yeah, but I mean, whether or not he really thought it was going to mean the end of the South, he certainly knew the consequences to large degree, and he thought the consequences for America were well worth gamble. Let's talk about civil rights, I mean, he has a huge amount of the game, but for men, it's not the loose, by taking his presidency, you didn't go, Obamacare was a big, a big

load of dice. Yeah, but you see, there's something that you got to remember here is, unlike Obamacare, which is the nearest things where Frankenstein, Monster, I ever see get put together legislatively, and I mean that literally. The great society was the incorporation of a number of quite distinctly thought-to-things, and if you want to listen to some Kennedyites, most of them thought through by them if for Lyndon ever took it over, the fact that that's not true doesn't really matter because it's part of the myth, and that's fine. But he had not a on-the-ground piece by piece, but he had the vision of what was required. He knew what you had to do to break the public accommodation's question. He knew what you had to do to break the voting problem, and he did it with remarkable anybody who worked in the war on poverty, no coherence was not precisely its middle name,

but nonetheless, each of the programs had, in the best tradition of foundations, actually, most of those programs have been pre-tested in one place or another by Ford Foundation and others as to how they might work, and I'm giving forward to much credit. Anyway, they have been pre-tested in many instances, and then on top of that there was this now, finally, a groundswell decision for the first time by a large number of Americans outside the South, that it was intolerable, that they should be given a free pass anymore. There had been one too many killings by then, there had been one too many riots, and this is before Freedom Summer in 64, when it was, and so he was riding that on civil rights. On the war on poverty, he could, in all truth, argue that this was just the extension of where we had been going with what we had done in the 30s, postponed by the war, stopped

by reaction for a while, and now we are able to do it. It never hurts again, but there's very thing that liberated London, of course, empowered a supermajority, not before the Civil Rights Act, but nonetheless thereafter for many of the things that he was going to do in the Democratic Congress, I mean, suddenly you had this huge groundswell. How does he get it done? No, absolutely, because of course you had intact the same Congress that had faced Jack Kennedy down, but just made him go slow, because the man knew how to make every lever in the political system work.

He knew how to go to people and tell them, come on, let's do a little trading off here. You and I both know this is right. He could take advantage of the fact that there was a well-organized left in Congress in those days, pocket that, and then go to people like Everett Dirkson and say, it is time for us all to join together for history and for America, and to get on board conservatives who you would have thought would never do it. There's some irony in that, of course, that some of those, quote, conservatives were, of course, inheritors of a Republican party, which had always been the party of racial something, change we might call it, whatever, and there I just killed history with that one. That, some of the people he convinced to come along were, after all, not living in societies that found it alien to believe that you ought to do some things for the least of these are brothers who are black.

Not a lot, but he was able simply to reach across the table, and I was stunned. I was, now you understand, I was colored somewhat by the roaring reaction of my own area, so that I would have said, holy God, no way. It was a liberating moment, man. I cannot tell you how liberating it was to get that one out, because after that you could put the other pieces down, because you had broken the biggest shibboleth of all, which was, they're going to be in the same place as me. We are going to be here together, the Civil Rights Act of 1964 means what, that I am going to have to sit at the same, all of that. The Voting Rights Act, oh no, no, no, no, no, everything, of course, of course, everything, and of course, and the South had done a wonderful job since 54 of dragging it out in ways that were, in many ways, unthinkable.

This round versus board, which was a basic desegregation decision involving one set of things, but nonetheless seemed to be the death knell at the time for segregation as we knew it, and then South went into massive resistance and fought it out, so that you were just beginning to have some breakthroughs by 64 in some parts of the country, certainly not mine, and it required the passage. It required, frankly, finally, that perhaps not enthusiastic, given J. Edgar Hoover, but nonetheless, compassionate involvement of enough of the federal government to finally start forcing things through, that should have been forced through before. I mean, much of the bureaucracy had always been responsive to the southern barons, well now they had a government in place in the White House who said, you only think that those guys are tough, we're going to make this work, and that was helpful. How did your neighbors and friends in Greenville, how did they respond to what John said?

Now we've got to be really careful there. Ninety percent of all the white people in Mississippi and in the South, deep South, thought, oh my God, I mean, this is unbelievable, forget everything else, a man's property is his castle, what do you mean you're going to tell me who I have to serve, what do you mean? This is an assault on a basic American right, you reserve the right to preserve your place as you wish it. They were infuriated not merely by the fact that we were having integration by Fiat, but also infuriated by the propositional underlying, which was that there was a right to deny your basic right to the integrity of your ownership. I mean that there were things that went beyond property rights in the American lexicon of virtue, and at that point, of course, it didn't matter about the rest of the country.

You knew Mississippi was lost forever, and with the exception of Jimmy Carter it was, and that was it. Now, the other part of it nonetheless is that even some of those, and certainly the minority of others, understood that we had just been liberated. Because at that point, it was no longer some handful of white radicals, no matter how conservative we were, were attacking the system, or that black folks were attacking the system. It was that the system was saying, no, we have tolerated you forever. Now the federal government says, we're not winking at you anymore. The federal government is now saying this is meaningful. It's comparable to us in the West finally saying to South Africa, look, sorry guys, you're not part of the West. We know you've been using that thesis, but you're not.

And suddenly we're telling the South, we were being told in the South that wink, wink, no more. You've got to come through. That's great, and...