American Experience; 1964; Interview with Jon Margolis, Author, The Last Innocent Year: America in 1964, part 3 of 5

So, if you're a housewife in February of 1964 and you don't think about what to watch on TV, why'd you have come across, tell me, tell me stuff like that, see you know. Well, according to one article that Betty Friedan wrote in the TV guide early in the year in February, you would have seen what something probably came to your life, you would have seen women in the kitchen and being mostly quiet and the- I did that the wrong way. Okay. I sort of said too much in my question. Okay. What happened in February of 1964? I am here in the magazine world. An article in TV guide by Betty Friedan about sort of playing off her book, which had come out a year earlier, The Feminine Mystique about The Feminine Mystique on American television

in which she pointed out that in- in- hit shows like, say, Bonanza, the men did almost everything except there was, you know, there was a wife or a mother in the kitchen baking pies. And the side from that, that's pretty much what women did on television. They quietly stayed in the kitchen and cooked and baked and probably had a little dust drag in their- in their apron- in their apron string. And that- and that was about it. They were- they were portrayed as a quiet, obedient little housewives, which of course a great many American women were because relatively few of them worked outside the home except of wives of very low income men. And so not only were they housewives, but they had kind of been brought up to think that this was what they were supposed to do. You were supposed to- if you were middle- or upper-middle-class woman, you go to college to learn a few things to be sure but mainly to find a husband who will support you.

And in those days, a man's income, often even a factory worker's income, could support a family, and the woman could stay home and cook and clean and raise the children. And that's what they were doing. And many of them were getting a little dissatisfied. Right. And- and why do you think that book- it's such an impact? Well because it's touched a chord. Clearly, they were all these women partly, it's because when you go to college, even if your mother and father say, go to college to find a husband, you're also going to learn a few things. And you're going to understand that- and at some point you're going to- wait a minute, I can do things also, can't I? Do I have- I mean, it's not that I love my children. I even like cooking, but why can't I be out there doing something else in the world and having more fun and- and having a more interesting life? And in a way, the education of women just as the education of everyone else was a subversive

activity. Education is a subversive activity. It gets people to thinking all sorts of thoughts that even the people who educated them don't want them to think. So and I- that's clearly what happened here. It was- it was telling that in 64, the- it sort of finally came out of the woodwork in a way. Well, again, I think it came out of the woodwork then in 64 because some of it was just happenstance because the book had come out a year earlier and she wrote these articles in 64. But also, you know, it was going to happen and it was going to happen. But I think- I think perhaps the other things that were going on in 1964, it was kind of a year of liberation, all sorts of people and groups and constituencies.

In many cases, constituencies that didn't agree with one another at all. But there was a certain similarity of the assertion of the self and the assertion of me and- not just me, but me and mine. And we're not satisfied, of course the civil rights movement may have been the key one here because it was the delayed, it was overdue. But- and people had started it before 1964, but it was coming into the big picture there because of the bill, because of the civil rights bill. Here was a whole group of people who finally had been- started saying, you can't treat us like this anymore. And now it's going to be put into legislation. We will not treat you like this anymore entirely. That set the stage for all these other people, women, conservatives, leftists, and just folks, young people- and young people.

The other thing was they were all these young people. There had never been so many young people in the world and they'd never had so much money. So they were doing all sorts- they were asserting themselves. And when you- when group A asserts itself, all the more reason for group B to start asserting itself and then comes, group C and before you know it, well there are 26 groups, but you have a whole lot of groups asserting themselves and women were one of them. When you said 26, why- Well that's the alphabet. And so, choices were being- Choices were being man and choices were being insisted upon. It's, I- this should be my choice. I'm not going to always do what you tell me. We talked about the sort of first meeting of the civil rights leader, right? What was happening within the movement in this year, you're talking about-

have choices, black women were making choices too. And they weren't always seeing themselves well represented. That's right. The civil rights movement, like almost everything else in American society, had been largely male dominated. Now there were some exceptions, and in 64 we saw that, Fannie Lou Hamer became a very well-known person that year, in her work with the Mississippi Freedom Democratic Party, and Ella Baker had always been an important person on what we might call the left of the civil rights movement. But they- What was she? She was a- she was in South- I'm not a Kenny Marstow. She was with- she was with King's organization and with SNCC. Oh, student nonviolent coordinating committee, and King's organization was the Southern Christian leadership.

Comments, and I think Ella Baker was with primarily the SCLC, but I may be a little confused about that, but she was- she clearly was never going to be satisfied, not never. She was not satisfied with the slow pace of progress, and she was not satisfied with the attitude, you might say, and here you have a very interesting distinction, and again, this- this applied elsewhere that year in- in other parts of society. There was one faction to the civil rights movement that was basically political. It wanted to pass the bill, it wanted to have concrete accomplishments, but there was another faction, and Ella Baker was part of this, that also cared about how it was done. Not just that, it was done, but cared about the process itself. They thought in the SDS radicals, who were mostly white, thought this, and in a way so to the young conservatives, that there was something in the way- the way things were accomplished, that it was- in addition to trying to accomplish something, you were expressing yourself. So the process itself became substantive, in some way, which in a way I think sometimes

still exists in some people. But there's a- there's a- so that split exists in- in- in how- in the methodology- right. But it's a pretty, it's a- it manifests itself in a pretty acrimonious and public, the schism between Malcolm X and Stanley, Stokely Carmichael on hand, and OK, and the other are being called an Uncle Tom, right? There's- all is not well. No, although it- most of this developed gradually and didn't really come to a head until later, fairly late in the year. But yes, the- at that point, even you had the- the language began to change. Some of the young Negroes said, please, we are now blacks.

And King was a little just, you know, he was uneasy about that. I think he finally went along with it, but he was uneasy about that. There was also a great division within the civil rights movement over the Mississippi- Free- Freedom Democratic Party, and- and what was done at the Democratic Convention. And again, you had the split between the pragmatists and the other people. I don't want to call them not pragmatic, because it wasn't that they were entirely impractical. But again, the- the process and the self, the truthfulness to the self, kind of hard to say that, became almost as important as- as- as the- as whether you accomplished the goal, Hubert Humphrey, in a meeting in- in Atlantic City, at the convention, begged Fannie Lou Hamer. He said, look, what everything that we're going to do.

And she said, you're telling me that what your- your power is more important than my people. You know, the- the poor Negroes of Mississippi. And he at that point did not have the presence of mine to say what they really need is to make sure that we get re-elected. But- but the fact that that was important to her and that he couldn't comprehend why it was important to her, because all he, you know, in his mind, we have to put this- this dispute to the sides so we can get on with the business of winning the election and beating Barry Goldwater and electing more pro-civil rights and pro-labor Democrats to Congress. And that wasn't the way she thought it all. Right, like- but we'll get back to her, I think, a little later. What happened in St. Augustine in April of 1964 with Mary Parkman Peabody? And then that seems- That was Mrs. Bush, and Mrs. Enducket Peabody, a very-

If that doesn't rattle, rattle. Well, there- there was that when there was a whole lot of establishment people went down to do- to- to- to- to get arrested- she gets arrested along with some rabbis and things like that. But it's not- it's not a single- It's not a single- The details of that ever- Yeah. It escaped me. Um- Um- Describe Johnson's State of the Union address? What priorities are we going to bear? Well, it was- as State of the Union addresses off- off- and not- usually are, it was kind of a laundry list of- of- of- of- of civil rights- of his agenda, his entire program- but basically it was civil rights and- and of course doing something about poverty. He- he- in- in- in this- he introduces the war on poverty. And uh- and he says it's our job- we- we have the power to end poverty in our society forever.

Which is- a pretty ambitious goal. Obviously it was very ambitious, because 50 years later it still hasn't happened. Um- why does he pick- um- Sergeant Shargeon-Shargeon becomes- How does he do it? What happens? Johnson- You're with Shargeon-Shargeon? We're with Shargeon-Shargeon-Shargeon-Shargeon-Shargeon gets a phone call one day, and the President A- and he's already the head of the Peace Corps. And of course he's- JFK's- and Bobby's brother-in-law. And um- and as Robert Kennedy once said when asked- but the Kennedy's- Shargeon-Shargeon driver, he said we think he's a great driver. Um- but they did not- it wasn't that they didn't get along. They got along fine. Um- he calls them- Johnson calls them up and he says okay I'm giving you this poverty thing. And Travis says who- what do you mean? Says you're going to be the head of my war on poverty. And Travis, I can't do that. I just got back from wherever he was somewhere in Asia. I don't even know what's going on and I'm busy.

I have a full-time job. Johnson doesn't make any difference, I've- I've announced it. He did that. He did that with the- with Russell too. He said I've already announced that you're on the war in commission. Um- he was- he was really shameless when he wanted something. And you know, Shriver could do nothing but, um- and at- part of the conversation is- and I'm forgetting the exact term and I want to make sure I get it right because otherwise it's- I don't want to be improper here but, um- Johnson said, uh- you've got the- you've got the ability and you've got the- you've got the energy. The question is, has- have you got the stones? And Shriver said, oh don't worry, I've got the stones because you didn't want to challenge Sergeant Shriver's stones, you know- Johnson, oh my God, you really get to it. Why didn't he pick Bobby Kennedy?

Why was Shriver the perfect choice? Well, Shriver was the perfect choice. First but he's an extraordinary, extraordinarily capable man and no doubt- that about his devotion and his- his, you know, he really cared about poverty. Um- and he was a Kennedy without being Bobby Kennedy. And Johnson wasn't gonna commit- wasn't gonna pick Bobby Kennedy to do anything. And including run with him, except he kept thinking, maybe I'm going to have to do that in order to get re-elected, which he really never did but it was part of the extraordinary insecurity which at one point led him seriously to think about not running. But he always worried that I'm going to have to take the little run as he sometimes referred to him, uh- in order to be re-elected, which was never true. And he knew what he had polling being done, all of her quails polling firm. He never was in any danger of losing to Barry Goldwater or anybody but you couldn't convince him that now. A smart politician always takes very favorable polling with a little grain of salt and you

always got to think I could lose because otherwise you're going to lose. Still, the idea that he- he would need any particular running mate to win the only way reason he could have lost is if there had been some extraordinary calamity or he himself had been caught, you know, stealing millions of dollars from the federal treasury or something quite bizarre like that. If the Bobby Baker- he hadn't been able to squash the Bobby Baker case and everything that is involved in that is really kind of a full board. I could have heard it pretty badly, but I still think he could have weaseled his way. He could have heard of it somewhat, I don't think the Bobby Baker case was ever a serious threat to him, although I could- although it was troubling and I could see why it scared him. What's revolutionary about the economic opportunity? Well, a whole bunch of things were revolutionary about it. First of all, the fact that it existed at all.

No other society in the history of the world that I know of, somebody might, some anthropologists might find one, has ever said, we're going to eliminate poverty in our society. So the extraordinary ambition of it was unique. The other thing that was unusual, and this came out of all these, what you could only call bull sessions in Sargent Shriver's living room and also elsewhere down at the ranch in Texas of these people, various public policy intellectuals around Shriver, people like- well, Moir's was part of it, other eye-ranging officials. What came out of it was so-called community action and was, again, not only a difference in substance, but a difference in attitude and process, that the poor themselves were going to be empowered to help them, to raise themselves out of poverty. The original plan, which some cabinet members had, was to levier tax on cigarettes and

use the revenue, which would have been a lot of money to finance a nationwide public works project. This was old New Dealiberalism, but LBJ didn't want to tax anything. After he was arguing for a tax cut, he didn't want to put a tax on cigarettes, cigarettes were the pleasure of the working man, and he just squelched that immediately when labor secretary Wurtz was one of the people who brought it up. Johnson just gave him a stare and a cabinet meeting, forget that. We're not going to do that. So we went to a new style liberalism, not labor union, FDR, put people, the thing you need to do with poor people is put them to work. This was, we're going to give poor people the tools to help themselves, to get themselves out of poverty. It was quite revolutionary, it was quite interesting, and it didn't work, although whether it would

have worked if it had been adequately funded, perhaps we'll never know. Who gets off an airplane at Kennedy Airport with a bunch of funny haircuts? February 1964, these four English lingers, known as the Beatles, whose records had already been ahead here, landed at Kennedy Airport. It was pandemonium, and it turns out that not only did they sing these very popular songs, they're kind of funny. How do you find America? We went to Greenland and Turn Left, which is pretty good, actually. They had already spawned a little industry. Some New York disc jockeys, one in particular guy named Murray Calcoun, who called himself

Murray the K, sort of warmed his way into the front of the crowd there at the airport, and he had become almost a one person beetle mania. I don't think the term quite had been invented yet, entrepreneur. And they also evoked a lot of opposition. There were people who thought they were terrible, there was a group in Detroit that had organized to stamp out the beetles, and I think it was Paul when asked that question, said, well, that's okay. We're starting a group to stamp out Detroit. So they had some wit, and they did scare a lot of parents, not that many, but some. What were the sort of prevailing morays that they were really upset at? Well, obey your parents. Get your hair cut. I mean, you had at this point, again, at some of these kids who for the first, there were

a lot of them, so they kind of understood without ever probably articulating it, we're a pressure group, because there were millions of us, because our parents started having children right after the war, and they also had more money than young people had always had. So they were being a bit rebellious. And they were also the first generation could be brought up in suburbia, in the well-ordered, comfortable life of suburbia, and therefore many of them were quite bored. And so they were beginning to rebel in sort of harmless ways, and one of those ways starting when the beetles started to become famous even before they got here, was boys stopped cutting their hair, going to the barber. They wore their hair sort of long like the beetles. You wouldn't even consider it that long anymore. And there were fights in households. You have to get a haircut.

I won't get a haircut. I mean, you know, that became kind of almost a public issue at that time. It's very subtle on the very, very top of your head, everyone's in a while, not you're not, anything you need to be concerned about. We could cut off the top of our head. Why did the beetles go and visit Cashers Club? That's a good... This was another part of the same phenomenon, although of course they were totally separate, totally desperate. But Cashers Clay, as he was then known, until the fight, also in February, I believe, with Sunny Liston, there was a certain similarity of a young wise guy asserting himself that appealed to the beetles, and I think one of the Clay's hangers on our managers invited

them to go to his training camp. They did. They went down there and they kind of all enjoyed themselves and had a good time. And then, of course, a few days later, was this extraordinary event, the fight, which everybody, everybody who knew anything about boxing knew that Sunny Liston would just wipe up the floor with young Cashers Clay. And of course, the opposite happened, not that it wasn't a total wipe-out, but in fact, young Cashers Clay beats Sunny Liston, who wouldn't come out of his corner for the... I think it was the sixth round, but it was right about in there. And Clay became champion, and then... And he said something, and then he became a black... He announced he was a black Muslim. He does Muslim, and his name was no longer Cashers Clay. His name was Muhammad Ali, and he said something very interesting, and I don't have the exact words in my head, but he said, I don't have to be the way you want me to be anymore. I'm free to be whatever I want to be.

And that was another part of this youthful and non-establishment or anti-establishment rebellion of people. That struck a nerve also, you know. Don't tell me... I don't have to be what you want me to be. Right. I don't have to be what you want me to be. He said, I don't have to be what you want me to be. And in a way, it was the same thing that the kids who were not getting their haircuts were saying. It was the same thing that people were saying in politics. It was the same thing women were saying. You've had this role cut out for me, but I don't have to play it anymore. I can play another role. Did Clay and Liston represent different visions of the black man in America? Well, actually, more, yes, but more directly and obviously, Liston and Floyd Patterson, whom he had...

That's that time. Yeah. Before... I mean, Patterson was clean-cut, hard-working, kind of a middle-class guy, even brought up that way, extremely likable, soft-spoken, sunny Liston was quite the opposite. He was described at the time by my late friend, Murray Kempton, as, and I can't remember the exact words, finally, the boxing world had a heavyweight champion that matched its own ethical and moral standards. He put it better than that, I forget exactly, but he was a thug from a poor and what we'd now call dysfunctional background. He'd been in trouble since he was street fighting long before he did boxing and he was rough and tough. There was a certain rough-humed dignity about him, but he was not... He did not have middle-class attitudes or values at all.

Oh, he was extremely glowered. He looked threatening, and I mean, he wasn't really a bad guy, unless he was crossed up. He meant no one any harm, but he did look threatening. He just looked threatening. And then Ali takes that to a whole other place. That's right. Then we have even worse, this other guy who comes along. But at least, I mean, if you're looking at it from the perspective of middle-class white America, we, because I guess that includes me, we were familiar with threatening, scowling black guys like Sonny Liston, who were quiet and solid, and maybe we were a little scared of them, but we know about them. Now comes this other guy who's not quiet, who does little couplets, who sort of sophisticated people.

Not exactly educated, but very clever and very natural intelligence, kind of off everybody's reservation, even before he announces that he's a Muslim, and people didn't know what to make of him. What was the New York Times nickname point you remember? Gaseous. Oh, Gaseous, I think he was... Was that the times I thought somebody else had meted that, but it could be. Yeah. He would have these little rhymes, he was always predicting in which round his opponent would fall, and he'd pick a rhyme for that round number, and he had made up other little couplets and he kept calling himself the greatest. I am the greatest. Which, as it turns out, he may have been. I'm trying to think, I haven't yet found a moment when SDS and why I kind of placed

a locate them in 64. I mean, an event to start. And then we flash back to the lawn at the Buckley House, and I don't know where the airport here on statement is drafted, it's something like that. Well, you could start with... There was a time when Gitlin and what's the name from California, Hayden, and some other people were getting together or trying to organize, I can't remember exactly when. Yeah. It's the one thing we haven't been able to do. Okay. I can probably...

It's... But imagine, if you will, that we've set them up just a little bit, okay. Take me back to both for Huron and Sharon, and I don't understand how they're different and how they're also sort of channeling some of the same impulse. Well, you had young people who were dissatisfied with both the young liberals who were dissatisfied with the Democratic Party and young conservatives who were dissatisfied with the Republican Party. Young people are always somewhat dissatisfied with the establishments that their elders create. I think that's probably inevitable and at least to some extent healthy. In this case, there was one similarity between the left and the right wing, young rebels, which is that they were both more individualistic.

They both espoused an attitude and policies which were more individualistic, less bureaucratic than their elders. The SDS people, the leftists, criticized the government and the welfare state for being too bureaucratic. The young college students where one of their slogans was, you know, do not staple fold or mutilate me because they all had... At State universities, they had to get these computer cards to get registered for their courses, which said, you know, do not fold stint, mutilate or staple. And you know, as though I'm being treated as though I'm not a person but a number. And of course, that was part of the conservative opposition to the New Deal, to begin with, was you're consolidating and classifying individuals as though we were commodities or pieces of information rather than a full human being.

So there was that similarity. The difference, of course, was in what each side wanted to do about it. The SDS people did not want to destroy the welfare state. They wanted to build on it and perhaps humanize it. The YAF people did want to get rid of the welfare state. Except, of course, they were not against government when it came to defense. They were for a much more aggressive attitude vis-à-vis the Soviet Union. In some cases, even at the risk of nuclear war, one very young, very conservative said, you know, in the Judeo-Christian tradition, life isn't everything. So if we do something and we all get killed, maybe that's acceptable. That was probably one of the more far-out examples there, but it went in that direction. Describe the two statements, which couldn't be a more graphic representation of the differences in philosophy and approach between the left and the right.

Well, the Port Huron statement, written largely by Tom Hayden, he kind of put it together, there was a very almost poetic evocation of not just political add to policy, but a sort of humanitarian, excuse me, humanistic view of life that politics and government are not in a way was in sync with LBJ's great side. He also was talking about that government and politics should do more than just bring prosperity and peace and make the trains run on time that they should also allow human beings to assert themselves, to satisfy themselves, to become, to reach their full potential as humans. The Sharon statement, which was written, does not have as a single individual author as discernible as Hayden, was much more political and much more, it was less poetic and less

you might say lofty, although rather well written, but it was more strictly political and it was a very articulate version and vision of very conservative policy proposals. And also one takes a long much less and much shorter, right? I mean, the language almost feels like it's subconsciously aping with a declaration of independent. That's right, there was a little of that, yes, and it used some of the same phraseology, but it linked in, which Jefferson, of course, quite deliberately did not, well, it linked in that in order to be a free individual, you had to have a free market economy, of course Jefferson didn't know that phrase, but he replaced property with pursuit of happiness. But it clearly, the YAF people assumed not only did you have to have a free market economy,

but the freer it was with the less government restrained on the wages one paid, the rules and regulations on borrowing and lending, than the freer we were as individuals. I sort of talked about the great society and that speech. Where did the idea for the great society come from? I think the scenes of that, well, the day was wonderful. Johnson invites Richard Goodwin and Bill Moyers to go swimming with him in the swimming pool. Now, when you swam with the president in the White House pool, it was as that used to be at least at the YMCA, one more no bathing suit.

It was skinny-dipping. Johnson, they swam a lot and they treaded some water and at some point, LBJ grabs the side so he doesn't have to exert himself and he explains to Moyers, and mostly to Goodwin, what he wants, we've put the Kennedy, we're putting the Kennedy program into place. Now I need the Johnson program and the Johnson program has to go beyond just the Kennedy program and it has to go beyond what we usually think of as political, something more grandiose right? He probably didn't use that term, but something more ambitious and you, Dick Goodwin, who's basically a Kennedy guy, I'm going to have you do this because you're a good writer and you're one of them and I'm going to go beyond them and he sort of offered some hints about this business of having a society which allows people to do more than just be wealthy and comfortable and earn a lot of money and take fancy vacations and have a lot of commodities

and goods. And Goodwin takes that from the swimming pool and works on it and takes it into Johnson not long before Johnson is going to go unveil all this and Johnson looks at it very quickly and says, that's it, you got it, that's exactly what I wanted. Goodwin, of course, petrified that Johnson's going to yell and scream and say, you didn't understand me at all. Johnson sort of first mentions the term, the great society, at a very, in a speech in Chicago to a very huge and very loud group of Democrats who were probably all half in the bag and they didn't pay any attention. But he then unveiled it seriously in a speech in Michigan, sometimes soon thereafter. The reaction was extraordinarily positive, although somewhat puzzled, but people were

very, including the general public. The polling showed that people were very, very supportive of this. What was in the end the wound cause of all of these trends that LBJ was trying to harness? The root cause was, I think, the fact that we were something of an affluent country with white America was something of an affluent country. One thing he was trying to do was end that qualification and that distinction. But I think he was trying to build on the fact that we were an affluent country and see where you could go from there. And again, so were some of the other people, even the people who kind of would disdain that. But if you look at the very conservative factions who were behind the gold water movement, on

the one hand they would say, we don't care about all that fancy fruit for, we're very practical. But there was also a kind of a humanistic ideology, which was part of their philosophy that also, and of course, they, part of them, tended to be quite religious and to also have a moral code that was indifferent to materialism, and even some of them who were not religious believed in tradition. The whole, one of the factions of the conservative movement that came out of the 50s was a not necessarily religious, but a real devotion to tradition for its own sake. And I'm forgetting the names of those scholars now, but they were there. How did affluence show itself in the culture?

How was it changing things in front of them? Well, one way was cars. Everybody liked fancy cars, and we had the Ford Mustang, a very fancy car by American standards, came out in April of 64, and it was very heavily promoted and heavily looked forward to and sold quite well, and it was designed for kind of younger people. Its style was as important as its performance. So clearly that was one way, cars and houses. People were buying houses. They were somewhat bigger, although they weren't big by today's standards. Let's get back to the car. It was designed as a second car. Right. It was, but cars before that were completely iconic, and made this first very specific. It was for a younger person, or perhaps it was for a second car in the family, and it

It was as much a statement. Its looks were as important as its driving, and the buyer was saying something about him or herself as much as buying a piece of transportation to get him from point A to point B. So it looked different from other cars. It was sportier looking than any American car. It was a muscle car. And it was a muscle car, yeah. You know, I was reading back up the bill, and I was sniffing like, could you just begin and tell me what was special about the muscle car? Well, the Mustang was sportier than any American car that had ever been created. It was designed to be for young people, or perhaps a second family car. And in buying one, a person was making a statement about him or herself as much as buying

a piece of transportation to get from here to there. And it was, what was, how did Ford and Leia Eccocca build that car? Well, they marketed it. Oh, they built it off, other, other... Not those specifics, but they figured out a market name. Right, right. They first figured out who, this was also may have been unprecedented. First they figured out who their, what their market was. Here's who we're trying to sell this car to. Then we'll design a car that those people will like. So it was one of the earlier examples, which is now prevalent in all sorts of businesses of focus groups and polling. And I don't know whether they, how extensively they did that, but they did do the basic idea was first you identify your market, then you decide what that market is, what will appeal to it, then you build the car for the market, instead of building what you think

is a good car and trying to get people to buy it. What was the, where did they get you, the Mustang, and what was, and what was the rest of the fare like? That the world's, the Mustang debuted at the world's fare in New York City, Queens, the old, the flushing meadow, flushing meadows right near Shea Stadium, which was the brand new ballpark for the fairly new New York Metz. It was a fairly major enterprise also, the fare. There were all sorts of high tech exhibitions there, countries and businesses, and there was a talking Abraham Lincoln put together by Disney with a new, a new method of getting a statue to talk, saying all sorts of things, some of which Lincoln apparently never really said, but there's a lot of mythology about Lincoln, I guess still. And the fare drew not such great crowds at the beginning because there were civil rights

demonstrations threatened by some of the organizations in New York, so that held the crowd down at the beginning. The, the big globe, the bathosphere did they call it, I'm not sure, it's still there. It's still there. No, no, that came, there had been a world's fare at that site, or decades earlier, but that globe comes from the 64 world's fare. Who was the average man? The average man was, kept his hair cut pretty short. If he was a white collar worker, he probably really wore a white shirt, so it had a white

collar. And if he was a blue collar worker, which was, of course, a great deal of the workforce back in those days, he probably really wore a blue collar, maybe gray. A great many industrial workers, especially in the good paying, highly unionized crafts, such as automobile, steel, that income supported a family. It was not a high income by our standards, but its buying power was sufficient for a typical family of four or five. The highest paid people in the country were physicians, doctors. They averaged $25,000 a year. The men in addition to wearing white shirts, they kept their hair cut pretty short. Men would have bangs, perhaps, also kept their hair cut pretty short. They wore skirts and dresses that maybe ended a little bit above the knee, but not very

high above the knee. People were, dress was fairly proper, slightly demure, we would probably now say. People smoked. Men and women smoked cigarettes. They were very, very likely to smoke cigarettes. Throughout the society, industrial workers, white collar workers, the rich, the poor, black, white, many people smoked cigarettes, including a lot of women. And does the circumgeneral come out with that? In the middle of the year, the surgeon general came out with the first report saying, without much equivocation, smoking cigarettes will give you lung, is likely to give you lung cancer. It is a cause of lung cancer. The tobacco companies were horrified and, of course, denied it, saying correctly, no one has established the medical scientific causal link that tells you how smoking cigarettes

can give you lung cancer. It was strictly epidemiology, it was statistical. It was unmistakable, but it was statistical. And at that point, the impact was not too great. It was not until later that the information about smoking and cancer really began to cut smoking rates. Right. A couple of minutes, and I just sort of don't want to do the civil rights debate in the Senate and in the Dirksen and all that, because it's too big. No, that would take a few minutes, yeah. Let's start out with that. Who were Schwerner, Goodman, and Cheney? James Cheney was a young man from the Shobakani Mississippi. Mickey Schwerner was a young, was from up here from New York. Young fairly left-of-center activist, very committed to civil rights, married already,

but he was only in his early 20s. Andy Goodman was even younger. He was getting out of high school. He was also from the New York area, also very committed to civil rights. He was one of those attracted by Allard Lowenstein and others organizing Freedom Summer in Mississippi which would attract and recruit white young white volunteers to go to Mississippi and help Negroes register to vote and teach them some other skills, have schools, and provide other social services. Why? Well, Mississippi, the entire Deep South was terribly segregated, and as we learn later in South Africa and other places, it's impossible to keep people down unless you also suppress

them in other ways. And Mississippi was the greatest example. The Mississippi Sovereignty Commission was, in a sense, a secret police force reporting to the state government, which kept tabs on what people were doing. And in rural counties, local law enforcement was allied with the Ku Klux Klan as a terrorist organization to scare, beat up, and if necessary, murder black people who had the temerity to think about, to think about the registering to vote. Much else actually going to do it, and there were cases including early 1964, a man was killed because he was going to testify against a white man who murdered a black man, a white state legislator, I believe he actually wasn't going to testify, he was going to run away to his brother up north, but the night before he left, he was murdered. So it was a terrorist situation, and if you went down to Mississippi and said, we're going

to help these people register to vote, you were taking your life in your hands, and the people were told that. There was, the people who organized this, Robert Moses and others, they were very candid. There was a one month or roughly training session at Oxford University in Ohio, first, and they were told, but these guys, Schwerner and Goodman had both gone down even earlier. They were sort of advanced, frock troops, and they went to this area, they actually went to this area near Nishoba County, but one of the places they went was to go to that area to a church, they were meeting with some people, they went there one night, the two of them, one young Mr. Cheney, who was a local, and they went to Philadelphia, Mississippi. They were stopped by sheriff's deputies, by police, law enforcement vehicles.

They were first let go and went through town, they were then followed, Cheney was driving out off the, ran off the highway, think he was escape, they were on a smaller side road, they were, the other car caught up with them, pulled them over, they were taken out of the car, they were murdered. They never were seen, or from again, they were supposed to call their main office, because it was known that if you went to those areas, you should be home before dark, they were not home before dark, they did not call. They were, they were, before they were let go, they were taken to a county jail for a while, and they were permitted to make one phone call, but then they were released, and then they, what did the police do when they released them, they picked off the, they picked off the

car, and which also included some, some sheriff's deputies. So the, the link between the clan and local, rural law enforcement, there was no difference between them. And what is the police did when they had them in front custody? Well, at first they put, they held them in jail for just a matter of a few hours, but they were not allowed to, to make a phone call, and then they let them go, but, but then alerted the, the clan as to where they were, and the clan also had vehicles equipped with blinking lights and sirens and all that. In fact, I think one of them was an official, the show of the county sheriff's deputies car, and, and the deputies themselves, and the deputies themselves, as I say, they were the same, and they were murdered, and it was June 21, 64. How does the nation respond, and they, so they go missing, how does the nation respond?

What does it put Johnson, what position does it put Johnson? Well, where he doesn't want to be, he's, the, the Civil Rights Act is, is pending, is, is being considered by the, by the Congress. Senator Eastland said it's a big fake. They probably just ran away, Senator Eastland of Mississippi, arch segregationist. Johnson asked to deal with J. Edgar Hoover, the head of the FBI, who called himself a state's rights man, was basically a segregationist himself, Hoover was not a hater, he was not a Ku Klunk's plan type, but his sympathies were with the White South. There was no FBI office anywhere in Mississippi. Had there been an FBI office in Mississippi, it's conceivable that this might not have happened. All you can say is it's conceivable, because had the FBI been alerted before they were killed and had an FBI agent, instead of just another off, a person from, from the Civil

Rights Organization called the perpetrators and said, where are those kids? Who knows what would have happened. So what is Johnson to have the, what's the box that Johnson's in? Well, he doesn't want to, he's got to, he's got to be true to the Civil Rights, keep getting the Civil Rights bill through, but he doesn't want to antagonize the White South any more than necessary. He does, but he has to enforce the law, he has to call on the FBI to try to find out what happened here. Where are these people and, and who, and, and if they were killed, who killed them? No, he, he doesn't, he's not happy about this, and then he has to deal with Mrs. Schwerner, who herself was something of a holy terror. She was a very left of center and very strong, wild person, and she didn't want to take any guff from anybody, and she was a little unrealistic and unreasonable about what she

thought, Johnson and Hoover and, and the Justice Department people, Nick Katzenbach, who's the Deputy Attorney General in charge of this, she regarded them all as part of the, the establishment, the centrist establishment, which didn't really care what had happened to her husband. They did care what had happened to her husband, they also cared about other things, true they were not single-minded as she was, but Johnson met with her and it was not a, it was not a happy meeting. Um, was this what Bob Moses predicted what happened, or was this what Bob Moses actually eat down and wanting? Well, it's hard to say that, ask him, well, sort of predicted, but he certainly was upfront and warning them that it might happen, and they were killed at the time that Moses was in Oxford, Ohio with the, with the larger group of volunteers were on their way to go.

But he did say some things that could be interpreted as meaning we know that America doesn't care if Negro kids get killed, because we've been getting killed for decades trying to register to vote. But if some of you white kids, and it unsaid but somewhat implied was, you know, kind of affluent, these were not, these were the sons and daughter, these were Ivy League or Swarthmore, Oberlin, you know, kind of students who were from upper middle class professional families, many of them, most of them. And you go down there and get killed, then the country will pay attention, now he never quite said that, and I'm, I'm going to stop short of saying that that's what he intended, but you, some of the things that he and others said imply that it may be what he intended. And you know what?

It may have been true. You can't dismiss it. Good. On that note, let's stop. Phase one. Really great. Phase two.