Front Porch Politics: The Forgotten Heyday of American Activism in the 1970s and 1980s - Hardcover

Foley, Michael Stewart

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0809054825 ISBN 13: 9780809054824

Publisher: Hill and Wang, 2013

Synopsis

"Reading this book revives the spirit of civic action today for those who are unjustifiably forlorn about overcoming injustice."―Ralph Nader

An on-the-ground history of ordinary Americans who took to the streets when political issues became personal

The 1960s are widely seen as the high tide of political activism in the United States. According to this view, Americans retreated to the private realm after the tumult of the civil rights and antiwar movements, and on the rare occasions when they did take action, it was mainly to express their wish to be left alone by government―as recommended by Ronald Reagan and the ascendant New Right.
In fact, as Michael Stewart Foley shows in Front Porch Politics, this understanding of post-1960s politics needs drastic revision. On the community level, the 1970s and 1980s witnessed an unprecedented upsurge of innovative and impassioned grass roots political activity. In Southern California and on the Lower East Side of Manhattan, tenants challenged landlords with sit-ins and referenda; in the upper Midwest, farmers vandalized power lines and mobilized tractors to protect their land; and in the deindustrializing cities of the Rust Belt, laid-off workers boldly claimed the right to own their idled factories. Meanwhile, activists fought to defend the traditional family or to expand the rights of women, while entire towns organized to protest the toxic sludge in their basements. Recalling Love Canal, the tax revolt in California, ACT UP, and other crusades famous or forgotten, Foley shows how Americans were propelled by personal experiences and emotions into the public sphere. Disregarding conventional ideas of left and right, they turned to political action when they perceived, from their actual or figurative front porches, an immediate threat to their families, homes, or dreams.
Front Porch Politics is a vivid and authoritative people's history of a time when Americans followed their outrage into the streets. Addressing today's readers, it is also a field guide for effective activism in an era when mass movements may seem impractical or even passé. The distinctively visceral, local, and highly personal politics that Americans practiced in the 1970s and 1980s provide a model of citizenship participation worth emulating if we are to renew our democracy.

About this title

About the Author:

Michael Stewart Foley is the author of Confronting the War Machine: Draft Resistance During the Vietnam War, winner of the Scott Bills Memorial Prize from the Peace History Society. He has edited or coedited three other books and is a founding editor of The Sixties: A Journal of History, Politics and Culture. A native New Englander, he has taught American history at the City University of New York and, in England, at the University of Sheffield. He is now a professor of American political culture at the University of Groningen in the Netherlands.

Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.:

1
 

This Is the Dawning of the Age of Self-Reliance
The volatile political and economic conditions of the 1970s profoundly affected the way ordinary Americans thought of themselves and their country. A great many felt betrayed and forgotten. The country they were raised to believe in as the land of opportunity seemed to have dissolved into the land of dead ends. Worse, there was no familiar remedy. The government, exposed by Watergate and other scandals as corrupt, seemed to pursue policies more out of political expediency than out of concern for the average man or woman. As business exerted new influence, and as American cities catered more to investors than their own residents, many Americans with no prior activist experience instinctively turned to community organizing and to consumer and public interest advocacy—if only to try to regain control over their lives. On the national level, it was a lost opportunity for the two major parties. As Michael Kazin noted, the political allegiance of the “upset and forgotten” workingman “seemed up for grabs” in the 1970s. A candidate or party sounding like the movie Nashville’s Hal Phillip Walker or like Ralph Nader might have been able to form a New Majority that would have made Richard Nixon envious. But maybe it was not possible. More important, maybe it did not matter so much. What mattered was that Americans now felt that they were on their own, pushed out of their midcentury comfort and confidence to a new, unsparing frontier. Looking across the plains of American experience from the vantage point of their own front porches, they could see a variety of social, political, cultural, and environmental threats encroaching from different directions. They reacted passionately—sometimes out of outrage, or fear, or despair—and channeled that passion into the only avenue for redress that seemed promising: grassroots organizing.
Much of what one expert called the “government versus the people” culture of the 1970s was cultivated by Richard Nixon’s political operation. Certainly, Nixon’s handling of the war, of protesters, and of political opponents betrayed the public trust. After 1968, most Americans wanted the Vietnam War just to end, and Nixon won the presidency in part by pledging “peace with honor.” Instead, in his first year in office, he willfully deceived the public by creating the appearance of extricating the United States from Vietnam—via a policy of “Vietnamizing” (or de-Americanizing) the ground war and bringing GIs home—while secretly escalating the air war, expanding it beyond Vietnam into Cambodia. Not until the spring of 1970 did it emerge that American B-52s had dropped more than 108,000 tons of bombs on Cambodia over fourteen months, a campaign coordinated in the White House and with the knowledge of only a handful of National Security Council staff members, a few military commanders, and the pilots themselves. And then, of course, Nixon seemed to subvert his own carefully crafted de-escalation narrative by sending ground forces from South Vietnam into Cambodia. The nation erupted in fury, and not only on college campuses.
Just as important as Nixon’s secrecy and deception—at least in terms of the public’s trust in government—was the president’s treatment of his critics. In the same way that candidate Nixon had made political hay out of disparaging protesters of all types during the 1968 campaign, President Nixon wasted no time attacking anyone who dared to challenge his war policies, either by ridiculing them publicly or by spying on them illegally. As early as May 1969, when The New York Times reported that American planes were bombing targets in Cambodia, the White House used both the FBI and its own private surveillance team—the first “plumbers” hired to plug leaks—to place illegal wiretaps on the telephones of National Security Council staffers and several journalists. Five months later, following the October 15, 1969, Moratorium protest, when millions of Americans in at least two hundred cities across the country skipped work and school to participate in a wide variety of demonstrations against the war, Nixon famously dismissed them as a “vocal minority” whom he would ignore. Calling instead for “the great silent majority” of Americans to support his plans for winning the peace, the president questioned the patriotism of the Moratorium participants. “North Vietnam cannot defeat or humiliate the United States,” he said. “Only Americans can do that.”1 And in the wake of the Cambodian invasion, when a student strike spread to hundreds of colleges and universities across the country, Nixon again denounced the protesters, saying that even if he ended the war, these campus “bums” would find another issue to protest violently. Even after National Guard troops opened fire on unarmed Kent State University protesters, killing four and wounding fourteen, the White House blamed the protesters, sternly warning that “this should remind us all once again that when dissent turns to violence, it invites tragedy.”2
In 1971, Nixon’s assaults on the antiwar movement escalated. After a cascade of rallies and peaceful demonstrations brought hundreds of thousands of protesters to Washington in late April, the White House mobilized a joint military and D.C. police response to organizers’ threat to block streets and bridges all over Washington and prevent government employees from getting to work.
As the sun came up on May 3, 1971, military jeeps and other transports swarmed through Washington, tear gas greeted protesters and residents alike, and six Chinook helicopters landed on the Washington Monument grounds, dispatching 198 soldiers in what looked like a massive search and destroy mission. By 8:00 a.m., D.C. police had arrested two thousand protesters, and by noon they had rounded up seventy-five hundred. Police detained thousands in a fortified football field near RFK Stadium, where they “languished without benefit of arraignment.” Such tactics may have been illegal, but they helped keep Washington from being shut down.3 For mainstream America, however, the seemingly constant conflict grew tiring. The news never seemed good. The war labored on, and so did the division in the country.
Six weeks later, the leaking of the Pentagon Papers sparked another high-profile suppression of dissent. Officially known as the “History of U.S. Decision Making Process on Vietnam Policy,” the forty-seven-volume “Top Secret” report had been commissioned by Defense Secretary Robert McNamara in 1967 and completed in January 1969, as the Johnson administration left office. One of the report’s authors was Daniel Ellsberg, a former Marine and Pentagon staffer under McNamara and an ex-student of Henry Kissinger’s. After the Cambodia invasion, he turned unequivocally against the war and made multiple copies of the report in hopes that he could convince certain congressional officials to hold hearings. When Ellsberg found little interest in Congress, he turned to the reporter Neil Sheehan and The New York Times, which began publishing revelatory excerpts beginning on June 13. Over the next couple of weeks, the public watched a back-and-forth battle between a Nixon administration that seemed determined to hide something and the press. The White House turned to the courts to try to stop the Times (and later other newspapers) from publishing the Pentagon Papers, but the Supreme Court, on June 30, ruled six to three against the president.
Although the Pentagon Papers did not cover a single day’s history of Nixon’s handling of the war, the administration’s attempts to keep them secret only made many Americans think the president was continuing previous administrations’ deception. In the wake of the spring protests and Pentagon Papers revelations, one June public opinion poll showed that 61 percent of Americans now regarded the war as a mistake, and in July, 65 percent wanted the administration to withdraw “even if the government of South Vietnam collapsed.”4 So much for a silent majority of supporters.
By the time Americans learned that Nixon had directed that “plumbers” be sent into Daniel Ellsberg’s psychiatrist’s office—to find any dirt they could on Ellsberg—the president had bigger problems.5 The plumbers’ arrest during the June 17, 1972, break-in at the Democratic National Headquarters in the Watergate Hotel and Office Complex in Washington began a process that ultimately ended Nixon’s presidency. Not only did the Senate Watergate hearings (and the investigative journalism of The Washington Post’s Bob Woodward and Carl Bernstein) reveal the Committee to Re-Elect the President’s campaign of dirty tricks aimed at political opponents, as well as the administration’s illegal wiretapping of journalists and NSC staffers, but it made the president of the United States look, once again, as though he had something serious to hide. At the end of October 1973, following the “Saturday Night Massacre,” when Nixon’s order to fire Watergate special prosecutor Archibald Cox led the attorney general and his deputy to resign (only to see Cox fired, in any case, by Solicitor General Robert Bork), the president’s approval rating had plummeted to 23 percent. He never recovered. On August 8, 1974, soon after subpoenaed Oval Office tapes revealed Nixon’s participation in the Watergate cover-up—ordering obstruction of the FBI investigation of the burglary and discussing hush money payments to the burglars—he resigned.
In the aftermath of Nixon’s fall from power, it became common to blame Watergate for the collapse of belief in government. Stanley Kutler, the dean of Watergate historians, writes that “Watergate transformed and reshaped American attitudes toward government, and especially the presidency, more than any single event since the Great Depression of the 1930s, when Americans looked to the President as a Moses to lead them out of the economic wilderness.” When President Gerald Ford gave Nixon a full and complete pardon a month after his resignation, it “added a new element of cynicism.”6 Maybe so, but to view Watergate in isolation is to miss a much bigger picture. Watergate, like the proverbial tip of the iceberg, only hinted at the widespread abuse of power that permeated public “service” by the early 1970s.
Nixon’s resignation was followed, in the public’s consciousness, by wave after wave of revelations about the illegal spying on American citizens by the CIA, FBI, NSA, IRS, and local police in cities across the country. To civil rights and antiwar activists, the exposure of domestic spying proved what they had suspected all along. To most Americans, however, the truth was shocking. In the two years after Nixon’s resignation, congressional investigations led by Senator Frank Church (D-ID) and Congressman Otis Pike (D-NY) revealed a long list of stunning CIA and NSA abuses, including opening hundreds of thousands of pieces of domestic mail since 1956, listening in on thousands of overseas phone calls, and acquiring copies of millions of international cables—to and from ordinary Americans, and all without court-authorized warrants.7 The FBI was no better, but since it had previously enjoyed tremendous popularity in Middle America, news of its COINTELPRO (counterintelligence program) operations hit hard. COINTELPRO resonated with the public in large part because the FBI seemed to employ so many of the same tactics used against Ellsberg and the Democratic Party by the Nixon White House, but used them against American citizens in the civil rights, New Left, and antiwar movements. And particularly because the antiwar movement eventually attracted the participation of many Middle Americans, most Americans found COINTELPRO abhorrent. What most infuriated so many citizens was not only that the FBI had abused its public trust, but that six presidents had known about it. Thus, the Church and Pike Committees went beyond making the connections in the public’s mind between Watergate and the FBI’s abuses; Americans now knew that from Franklin Roosevelt to Richard Nixon, the FBI consistently forwarded political intelligence to the White House, and no president had ever asked the Bureau to stop.8
To make matters worse, a series of revelations also demonstrated that the abuse of power extended to police departments across the country. In particular, police “red squads,” special police divisions that targeted political dissidents, had engaged in widespread illegal behavior. At the most extreme, COINTELPRO documents confirmed that the FBI’s campaign against the Black Panther Party included facilitating the Chicago Police Department’s assassination of the twenty-one-year-old party leader Fred Hampton in 1969.9 Other newly exposed police misdeeds shocked Americans because they were evidently so routine. New York City police officers had files on 1.2 million people and 125,000 organizations, including on Mayor John Lindsay; Representatives Charles Rangel, Herman Badillo, and Shirley Chisholm; actor Dustin Hoffman; and women’s rights activists Gloria Steinem and Betty Friedan—hardly threats to American national security; under pressure, the department cut the files back to 240,000 people and 25,000 organizations. A year later, in 1974, as Nixon’s presidency collapsed under the weight of Watergate, the Chicago Police Department admitted that public pressure had led it to destroy files on 105,000 individuals and 1,300 organizations. In 1975, Los Angeles followed suit, planning to destroy more than 2 million files on 55,000 people dating back to the 1920s.10
The government’s betrayal of the American people seemed to know no bounds. Americans saw deceit and illegal behavior at every level of government—from Nixon to the FBI to the local police force—and many suddenly found themselves feeling alienated from mainstream party politics.
*   *   *
Watergate, COINTELPRO, and the fall of Saigon in 1975 may have left Americans wondering what had happened to their country, but these high-profile news stories did not, on their own, affect most people’s sense of personal security. It took their inability to pay the bills to do that. In the early 1970s, the two conditions—shocking news of abuse of (and disrespect for) authority and economic decline—existed side by side and sometimes intertwined. While intelligence agencies and red squads battled radicals, and an administration unraveled, and the Vietnam War came to an ignoble end, the economy—for a generation, a steady source of confidence—imploded. And a government that seemed no longer trustworthy appeared incapable of curing the nation’s economic woes.
Prevailing Keynesian economic thinking suggested that unemployment and inflation would never rise simultaneously, but in the early 1970s they did, and a new phenomenon—“stagflation”—appeared. American production dropped, foreign competition swelled, companies laid off workers and closed or moved operations, and the prices of goods and services climbed and climbed.
All of this caught President Nixon and the nation off guard. Nixon had entered the White House in 1969 interested far more in foreign policy than in domestic issues or the economy and, like most Americans, he expected the economy to continue to thrive. In a Gallup poll taken shortly after his inauguration, 40 percent of Americans listed the war as the “most important problem facing the country,” while only 9 percent identified it as inflation and the high cost of living.
But the country’s economic picture turned much gloomier in 1970, and critics blamed Nixon. At first, the president responded by attributing the economic deterioration to his predecessors—the excesses of funding the war and Great Society programs—and tried to use his position as president to persuade industry ...

About this edition

• Publisher: Hill and Wang
• Publication date: 2013
• ISBN 10: 0809054825
• ISBN 13: 9780809054824
• Binding: Hardcover
• Number of pages: 432