The American Future (17 page)

Fannie Lou seemed like a rumpled saint to me, but then what did I know? I was nineteen, editing a reticently titled undergraduate magazine,
Cambridge Opinion.
In 1964 we had opinions to spare on pretty much everything from Harold Wilson to Wilson Pickett, but editorially we confined ourselves to a single topic an issue. Once a term the magazine would opine on, say, the State of Prisons or the Look of British Modern Art (for there was some) always solemnly, defensively, capitalized. This particular issue was to cover the trifling matter of the fate of the United States in an election year. My friend, co-editor, and business manager and I sailed forth on the MS
Aurelia
, which had been, not so very long before, a tender for U-boats, and had now converted into an Italian student liner. Scheduled to make the crossing in about ten days, roughly the same time it took Dickens a century earlier, MS
Aurelia
sailed straight into a frisky gale that played havoc
on obligatory efforts to promote Goodwill Among Nations: no stabilizers, no “Kumbaya.” As the ship wallowed in the trough, discarded streamers bearing uplifting internationalist messages bobbed away in the wake. A counselor patrolled the Games Room looking worried, asking if anyone had seen the Belgians. No one had. The remnant of scarlet Italian meals flowered the decks, much to the irritation of the Neapolitan stewards, who would halt before these small sad deposits and confront those who they thought might have been responsible, asking accusingly, “YOURS?” What the guilty parties were supposed to do about it was unclear, but aggressive swabbing ensued.

We thought we knew America, but what we actually knew was Malamud, Bellow, Baldwin, which was something else entirely. Beyond the elegant museums on Fifth and the tonier stretches of Park and Madison, where, if we played our cards right and affected an Oxbridge accent, we'd be sure to run into Holly Golightly, New York seemed lurid and jumpy. As the thermometer climbed into the nineties, sidewalkers slowed to a gasping shuffle as they made their way to or from Grand Central, dripping into their poplin. The city was gamely attempting to put on its welcome face as a World's Fair opened on Flushing Meadows. Modernist pavilions, steel and pine, celebrated the Achievements of General Electric or the dawning of the jet age. Much of it was free. Investigate the Charms of Norway, and a braided blonde would greet you hospitably proffering brisling on rye.
Takk
, Solveig. In the Ford Pavilion the brand-new, dangerously sexy Mustang was being unveiled by peppy young men in blazers. But out in swelterland, N.Y., the Long Island Expressway was a parking lot and drivers were aggravating their ulcers, leaning on their horns and getting testy with the kids.

The unsurprising truth was that although JFK had gone to his grave at Arlington, the wound that had ripped open the body politic on that merciless day the previous November obstinately refused to heal or even scar over. Robbed of the boyo Kennedy grin that somehow promised all would be well in America, much evidence to the contrary notwithstanding, the body politic had a lesion that had gone bad. The America that had loved Kennedy (and much of it had not) was doing its best to become reconciled to Lyndon Johnson, but it was having a hard time. Some of this was just East Coast nose-holding, an incredulousness that Camelot had fallen to a Texan from the banks of
the Pedernales with horse shit on his shoes. In the Century and the Knickbocker clubs, members didn't expect to see Pablo Casals showing up at 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue again anytime soon.

More serious were the apprehensions of black America. When Kennedy had gone down, their leaders initially thought that his civil-rights agenda had fallen with him; that that must have been the reason why he had been taken out. But although there was no love lost between Lyndon Johnson and Bobby Kennedy, for the time being still attorney general, the president had taken up the civil rights cause as if it had been his own crusade in the first place. He had even (between gritted teeth) helped launch Kennedy's Senate campaign in New York, introducing the man he detested as “dynamic,” “compassionate” and “liberal.” In the Senate, Kennedy figured to be less of a thorn in Johnson's side than in the Department of Justice. Leaning on whomever had to be leaned on in Congress, Johnson pushed through legislation that outlawed segregation in education and any public spaces: no more separate lunch counters, soda fountains, or schoolrooms. The Civil Rights Act became law on 2 July 1964. The story goes that as he signed the bill, Johnson said that the South would be lost to the Democrats for a generation.

Starting when, exactly? Not, Johnson hoped, in the upcoming election, in which he would be running against the conservative firebrand from Arizona, Barry Goldwater, who had been singing just the kind of music that yellow dog southern Democrats wanted to hear: that civil-rights legislation violated the sanctity of “states rights”—since the Civil War a euphemism for institutionalized racism. So although the president talked a good talk about “ending poverty and racial injustice in America,” it was uncertain just how far Johnson would go to enforce the new legislation. And there was an immediate issue not addressed by the provisions of the Civil Rights Act: black voter registration. The Fifteenth Amendment to the Constitution, ratified in 1870, had prohibited any obstruction to the right of citizens' voting based on race or color. (The Fourteenth Amendment had already made anyone born in the United States, or naturalized, a citizen.) And for a while, in the states of the defeated South, more blacks exercised their right to vote than whites. But all this changed with the election of 1876, in which the Republican Rutherford B. Hayes won fewer popular votes than his Democratic opponent Samuel Tilden, but managed nonetheless
to secure the electoral college. There was, however, a price to pay for President Hayes, namely the end of enforcing the Fifteenth Amendment. On his inauguration in 1877 Hayes shamelessly promised to protect black civil rights while knowing that he had agreed to withdraw all federal troops from the South. It would take almost a century for that betrayal to be reversed. In the meantime, blacks in the South, apart from suffering every kind of discrimination in the workplace and public places, had been kept off the voter rolls by spuriously complicated questionnaires designed to test their knowledge of the state constitutions with questions few whites could have answered. In Mississippi in 1963, just 7,000 blacks were registered out of an eligible voting population of 450,000. A supplementary Voting Rights Act had been promised, but black leaders less trusting than Martin Luther King weren't confident that the president would be willing to alienate what was left of his southern base by pressing too hard for the measure. Thus was born a campaign of practical action, the Mississippi Summer Project, known to those who became part of it as the “Freedom Summer”: a thousand volunteers, from North and South, black and white, working in a climate of violent hostility, to get African Americans registered in Mississippi and to test the power of the Civil Rights Act. In the third week of June, three of those volunteers—James Chaney, black and Mississippian; Michael Schwerner and Andrew Goodman, both Jewish and white from New York—were arrested in Neshoba County for speeding. Held briefly in jail in a small town called Philadelphia, and given a supper of spoonbread, peas, and potatoes, they were released and told to leave the county. Heading to Meridian, they never arrived. Two carloads of Ku Klux Klansmen caught up with them, shot the two Jews in the heart, beat Chaney to a pulp, and then shot him in the head.

Their bodies would not be found for months. The governor of Mississippi protested at the fuss, saying for all he knew the three could be in Cuba. But the ominous disappearance of the Mississippi Summer Project workers was taken, as intended, as a declaration of war on the Civil Rights Act by the segregationist South, including Democratic senators like the plantation-owning James Eastland. Unreconciled to what the president, whom they now wrote off as a race traitor, had done, most of Mississippi's Democrats declared their support for Goldwater. That defection gave civil-rights workers an opportunity to propose that the exclusively white delegation to the Democratic
party convention in Atlantic City be replaced by delegates from a newly founded Mississippi Freedom Democratic Party (MFDP), which, for the first time, would represent all the people of the state. At an impromptu convention in July, sixty-eight delegates were named, among them as vice chairman of the new party, Fannie Lou Hamer, a cotton picker from Ruleville, near Greenwood, the hub of the nascent civil-rights movement in the Delta. By the summer of 1964, she had already got used to the daily death threats made against her and her family for her temerity in getting blacks to the polls. Bullets came through her living-room windows. Forcibly sterilized without her knowledge when she was young, Fannie Lou's body had been violated again in Winona, Mississippi, after she had attended a Voter Registration Workshop. “We're going to make you wish you was dead,” the sheriff had said as Fannie Lou was savagely beaten. But though the slightly hooded eye we saw at Atlantic City was the result of one of these assaults, she never did wish that. Fannie Lou reckoned this was what Christians went through for the Lord's cause. And she went right on singing and being a regular nuisance.

In the third week of August, Fannie Lou Hamer took the long bus ride from the Delta to Atlantic City. I made the much shorter bus trip from New York. My bus was air-conditioned; Fannie Lou's was not. I could smell trouble, though, and dashed toward it. My friend and I were kitted out with press credentials: small blue plastic badges bearing, without a trace of irony (so we hoped), the legend CAMBRIDGE OPINION. How did we manage this? Through an Irish American political wizard, then assistant secretary of labor in the Johnson administration who also happened to be Daniel Patrick Moynihan. A Harvard sociologist (and, years later, senator for New York), Moynihan was an old friend of my Cambridge history professor, J. H. Plumb, who airily told me that if I really wanted to see the inside of American politics, then I should write “Pat” a letter. Sure, I thought, dismissing the possibility that two undergraduates would be taken seriously by the author of
Beyond the Melting Pot
, at the time the last word on the fate of America's immigrant dream. But what did I have to lose? From the coziness of my great-uncle Joe Steinberg's Brooklyn row house I wrote, “Dear Mr. Moynihan, do forgive the intrusion on your busy agenda but Professor Plumb wondered whether there was the slightest possibility that…” Faster than Road Runner,
back came a heavy cream envelope summoning us to an audience in Washington.

It was one of those blistering D.C. days when you expect to see camels bearing tourists down the Mall rather than buses. Heatstroke was a possibility just from crossing Pennsylvania Avenue to the Department of Labor, one of the neoclassical masonry monsters built at the turn of the last century to give American government an air of paternalist inevitability: outside, scalding limestone; inside, polished granite and gloomily stained walnut. The Department of Labor, then under one Willard Wirtz, had assumed an unexpected air of fresh importance following LBJ's declaration of a “war on poverty,” although an ominous conflict with North Vietnam was the immediate war on Washington's mind after American ships had been fired on in the Gulf of Tonkin. In the vapor of patriotic fury that had predictably followed, Johnson had used the occasion to secure a resolution from Congress giving him unprecedentedly broad and undefined war powers. There was something fishy about the whole business. Exactly what were those American gunships doing there anyway? my friend and I wondered out loud in a room full of Georgetown students. This turned out to be a bad idea. The students declared themselves invested with similar war powers, and came within an inch of using them on us.

So it was good to be welcomed by the outstretched hand of Daniel Patrick Moynihan. His face was the color of a summer carnation, in the middle of which was planted a roguish grin. He had been born in Oklahoma but had grown up in Hell's Kitchen in New York, where he shined shoes for quarters while his mother kept a four-ale bar. With his flashing dark eyes and cupid's bow lips, Pat looked every bit the fallen cherub who liked a nip now and then. (When he was ambassador in New Delhi legends spread of his breakfast treble Scotches followed by a freshening dip in the embassy pool, after which the Moynihan wits were razor sharp for business.) The voice matched everything else: a merry lilt that was so rolling and rounded it seemed to come from a mouth permanently filled with humbugs. We made our little speeches to him as he beamed back at us, our new uncle in the wily world of Washington, and then he told us that he was arranging for our press credentials to the convention, but perhaps it would be a good idea to go to the platform hearings of the party, then in full swing in a Washington hotel. What were those? we wondered. “Oh,” said Pat,
“that's where interested [he drawled this last word ironically] organizations make their views known to the party on whatever ails or inspires them, and then, from the fruit of such deliberations, a committee writes the party platform for the convention.” This seemed like a good idea. We were grateful, duly attended, listened to speeches on race relations and civil rights, education, labor conditions and reported back to our mentor. “How did you find it all?” he asked. Informative, we said, omitting the qualifier “numbingly” lest it seem ungrateful. I noticed a thick white document sitting on his desk bearing DEMOCRATIC PARTY CONVENTION 1964 on the cover page. “Is that a document I should read before the convention?” I cheekily asked our mentor. “Oh I suppose so,” he replied, flashing one of his most impish smiles, “it's the party platform.” Confused, I began the sentence “But I thought you said…” and never got to the end. The Killarney grin from the assistant secretary of labor assumed Cheshire cat dimensions.