LBJ vs. the Nuclear Family
Fifty years ago, in 1966, a political revolution emerged in America that would have a massive impact on millions of families and marriages. The man behind it was President Lyndon Baines Johnson, who reached the White House amid a national tragedy but grabbed the reins of power quickly and purposefully, bent on transforming the country. Though he is lionized in popular culture these days, it is worth asking whether the celebratory tone accurately reflects the results of his revolution, at least in terms of his massive Great Society.
Earlier this year HBO transformed a hit Broadway play into a television special lauding Johnson’s 1964 campaign and early White House tenure. The riveting narrative begins with the 1963 assassination of President John Kennedy in Dallas, which catapulted Johnson into the White House and set him upon his momentous course. The program’s title, All the Way, comes from Johnson’s most memorable campaign slogan, “All the way with LBJ,” when he ran against Arizona’s Republican senator, Barry Goldwater.
Similarly, a play called The Great Society, which premiered in 2014 at the Oregon Shakespeare Festival, is heading to Broadway in 2017. Johnson is the star of that narrative as well.
The name of Johnson’s massive domestic agenda was taken from a now-forgotten British professor named Graham Wallas, who in 1914 outlined a series of domestic reforms he called the Great Society. Wallas’s slogan entered America’s lexicon as one of the country’s most famous political phrases and became inseparable from Johnson’s legacy.
In 1964 Johnson went to the University of Michigan to deliver one of the most consequential speeches of his presidency, unveiling the Great Society programs that would become the largest, most intrusive expansion of federal power ever.
“The challenge of the next half-century is whether we have the wisdom to use wealth to enrich and elevate our national life, and to advance the quality of our American civilization,” declared Johnson. “For in your time we have the opportunity to move not only toward the rich society and the powerful society, but upward to the Great Society.” The key word here was “upward,” for Johnson viewed his program as synonymous with progress itself.
The expansionist spirit of the Great Society made Franklin Roosevelt’s New Deal of the 1930s and the progressive-era initiatives of Theodore Roosevelt and Woodrow Wilson of the early 20th century appear relatively modest by comparison. Indeed, Johnson’s Ann Arbor revolution represented the most far-reaching legislative transformation in our history. How did it happen? And, looking back over the past half century, what were the results of Johnson’s vast promises? Is this a legacy that justifies the celebratory regard seen in the popular culture?
Johnson and his staff lost no time after Kennedy’s murder in designing their vast governmental expansion, to be financed by America’s post-World War II abundance of wealth and prosperity. “I am a Roosevelt New Dealer,” declared Johnson the day after the assassination. “Kennedy was a little too conservative to suit my taste.”
More at: https://www.theamericanconservative.com/lbj-vs-the-nuclear-family/