The Genius of America (19 page)

Roosevelt did not simply take these powers, nor was the Constitution amended to create them. Roosevelt persuaded the country, the Congress and the courts to accede to them. The members of Roosevelt's administration understood this critical element of American governance well. They saw their leadership task as winning broad support for their programs. “The New Dealers sought to effect a truce similar to that of wartime, when class and sectional animosities abated and the claims of partisan or private economic animosities were sacrificed to the demands of the national unity.”

This is an essential point. A number of Roosevelt's successors have complained that they could not get Congress to do what they wanted. Of course not. The president cannot change the law himself. Making laws is the task assigned to Congress. Indeed, the framers envisioned Congress as the primary branch of government and expected the president to keep an eye on it. It is the members of Congress, at least a majority of each house, who must accept the need for change. This requires that the members of Congress be convinced that proposed changes are necessary both substantively and politically. If either the president or the Congress fails to assert its role, the system doesn't work.

This requirement of consensus if there is to be change is central to our society. Majority rule of 50 percent plus 1 is not the goal the framers established for American democracy. As designed, America's representative government is intended to embed our factionalism in our government, particularly in its two legislative houses. That is the essence of American representation. As long as there are many and opposing voices, Congress cannot act. That is why compromise is so critical to progress. The idea, again, is to protect Americans' freedom by limiting even a majority faction from imposing its interests on others. Change only occurs when members of each house of Congress and the president can agree on the precise change, or when each house of Congress can override a presidential veto.

Roosevelt did not win every battle. He famously lost an effort to expand the Supreme Court so it would be more accepting of his efforts (which it ultimately became without enlargement.) But over time and overall, he was successful. With bipartisan support, every aspect of the economy came, at least temporarily, under some form of regulation. Millions of Americans were put to work directly by the federal government in programs such as the Civilian Conservation Corps and the Works Projects Administration. Permanent security nets such as Social Security insurance, federal deposit insurance, workers' compensation, disability insurance and unemployment insurance were all commenced. Finally, Americans successfully demanded limits on a vast array of business practices. Child labor, work hours, minimum wages, the right to organize, banking and security industry practices, the sale of foods and pharmaceuticals and many more subjects were addressed. And from these large governmental programs, democratically approved, the government itself grew enormously.

The growth in government continued even as the Depression waned. World War II thrust America, and the American president, into a leadership role in the world. At the same time, the large new domestic programs Americans had demanded required proper administration and enforcement. Who was going to implement these extensive new programs? Who was going to determine which Americans were actually eligible and which were not? Who was going to ensure that those who attempted to defraud the government were caught? Between 1930 and 1949, the federal expenditures and number of federal employees rose dramatically. Many of today's well-known agencies emerged or were greatly empowered. Among them were the Social Security Administration, the Securities and Exchange Commission, the Federal Reserve Board, the Federal Trade Commission, the National Labor Relations Board and the Food and Drug Administration. With them came what we now call the American Administrative State, the mass of congressionally created agencies within the executive branch of government that details and enforces programs enacted by Congress.

But perhaps the most important political legacy of the Roosevelt era was the attitude of Americans as they entered the postwar era. The crises of depression and war were behind them, but Americans maintained large expectations about government's capacity to resolve their problems. “The Great Depression and, on its heels, World War II, followed by the cold war, dramatically raised Americans' expectation of their government and especially of their presidents.” Under Presidents Harry Truman, Dwight Eisenhower, John Kennedy, and Lyndon Johnson, bipartisan coalitions of Americans supported programs for veterans, the poor, the elderly, racial minorities and women, federal aid for education, immigration reform and social insurance for the elderly and poor.

In the mid-1960s, some thirty years after Roosevelt took office, the New Deal consensus began to unravel. The country was increasingly divided. The Civil Rights Act of 1964 and the Voting Rights Act of 1965 created a racial schism in the electorate that Republicans used to propel their rise in the South.

Discord was everywhere. Not just as a result of the war in Vietnam but from the breakup of the consensus of Americans of all stripes on which the country's progress had been based for the last forty years. “The American home was divided,” President Johnson had proclaimed in announcing his decision not to seek reelection in 1968. The year 1968 is well recorded as one of the most discordant in our history. Toward its end, after a year of assassinations, protests and riots, Richard Nixon was elected president.

Nixon is most remembered for his foreign policy prowess and the Watergate scandal. But he played another important, but less remarked on, role. He was the transitional president from the Roosevelt age of expanded expectations and large consensus to the very different era of expanded expectations and an elusive consensus.

Because even as Nixon, the ever sharp politician, seized the divisions in the country to secure his election, he was also the last president to defend the large expectations Americans had of their federal government—and to expand its role into yet another territory: protection of the environment. Through the enactment of the Clean Air Act of 1970, the creation of the Environmental Protection Agency in 1970 and the passage of the Clean Water Act of 1972, American government entered even more prominently into the nooks and crannies of Americans' lives.

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OVERNMENT

Watergate had not yet befallen Nixon when he delivered his second State of the Union address. His first year had not been easy. His divisive campaign had succeeded, and he was now president, but his efforts did nothing to change Congress. It continued under Democratic control and was hostile toward him. The country was at war in Vietnam. Despite Nixon's strong interest and long experience in foreign policy, his campaign's “secret plan” to end the war in Vietnam had produced no evident results. Nixon had no plan for reuniting Americans. In fact, his southern electoral strategy aimed at winning southern Democrats by criticizing the growth of government and promising to reduce the reach of the federal government.

Additionally, Nixon had little real interest in domestic policy. “All you need is a competent cabinet to run the country at home,” he would say. His attention was on world affairs—“the great questions that concern world leaders at summit conferences,” he would label them. And there were many to be discussed: ending the war, détente with the USSR, opening relations with China. But things were not yet going well on any of these fronts. Perhaps that is what changed his focus from the “summits,” where he sought his greatness, to “the foothills,” where he knew Americans lived. “It is time,” he said in his second State of the Union address, “for all of us to concern ourselves with the way real people live in real life.”

And with that “discovery” of this evident political point, he set aside his announced commitment to state and local rights and embraced the environmental revolution and a new expanded role for the federal government.

Ours has become—as it continues to be, and should remain—a society of large expectations. Government helped to generate these expectations. It undertook to meet them . . .
    In the next 10 years we shall increase our wealth by 50 percent. The profound question is: Does this mean we will be 50 percent richer in a real sense, 50 percent better off, 50 percent happier?
    Or does it mean that in the year 1980 the President standing in this place will look back on a decade in which 70 percent of our people lived in metropolitan areas choked by traffic, suffocated by smog, poisoned by water, deafened by noise . . .
    These are not the great questions that concern world leaders at summit conferences.
    Restoring nature to its natural state is a cause beyond party and beyond factions. It has become a common cause of all the people of this country. It is a cause of particular concern to young Americans, because they more than we will reap the grim consequences of our failure to act on programs which are needed now if we are to prevent disaster later.

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As we look back from our own age of political strife and factionalism—a factionalism Nixon himself played a role in propelling—there is something almost poignant in Nixon's second State of the Union message. Ask Americans today what they most long for from their politics, and many will say words to the effect of “a cause beyond party and beyond faction . . . a common cause of all the people.” But at the level at which government operates, creating actual rights and obligations, such common cause is hard to find. While Americans may hope for a unified America, they fight over what should be common. During the forty-year consensus between FDR and Nixon, hopes were fulfilled because individual Americans demanded similar things from their government. Nixon's environmental push was the last hurrah of this era.

Much like the country itself, Nixon went in both directions at once. He ushered in one more major expansion of federal power, while warning that the government was “becoming increasingly unable” to satisfy Americans' expectations. On this point he was unquestionably right and foreshadowed the struggle to come. Nixon tried to lower these expectations: “It's time to have power go back from Washington to the states and to the cities of this country all over America.”

But as Nixon's expanded environmental policy illustrated, Americans were themselves of two minds. They were not opposed to an assertive federal government in areas where they wanted something done.

The problem now was that the consensus for change that had steered American politics for almost forty years had shattered. The sense of American unity which had allowed the country to act broadly against the Depression through the New Deal, against the Axis in World War II, against the Communists in the cold war and even against poverty and racism through the Great Society could not last forever. Americans' shared view of the common good had finally worn out.

What was left was a political stew of high expectations and divergent demands. Many American political leaders have “learned to their dismay that while people might claim to despise government, they also developed ever higher expectations from it.” Indeed, the demands took on new forms. The New Deal and World War II created a much broader sense of what the government was capable of. By the 1960s and 1970s, what emerged was a much deeper sense among many Americans of what they were entitled to. John F. Kennedy could feel this coming as early as 1961 when he pleaded with Americans, “Ask not what your country can do for you—ask what you can do for your country.”

But within a decade America was in the full flower (flower children were no doubt among the many instigators) of what historians now describe as “the rights revolution.”

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IGHTS
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Rights, what the framers would have called liberties, have always been an essential part of the American political tapestry. The right to participate in government was summed up in the revolutionary-era bumper sticker NO TAXATION WITHOUT REPRESENTATION. The right to pursue one's own interests was essential to the Constitution—indeed it was the energy the framers were harnessing in their complicated system of government, a system designed to allow action while preventing majority tyranny. And, of course, that government would not have been established at all were it not for the promise of a bill of rights intended to protect certain individual rights against any government actions.

From the Bill of Rights onward, Americans have amended the Constitution to expand the political rights of more and more citizens. These are civic rights. They include the rights to free speech, to vote, to a free press, to free worship, to trial by jury, to freedom from unreasonable searches and seizures. Through them, Americans are assured the opportunity to participate in the political process and freedom from arbitrary governmental action. The emphasis throughout these provisions is on keeping government out of the lives of Americans and giving Americans a voice in that government.

The Depression produced a new notion of rights. Economic rights, or what FDR was in 1944 to call a “second Bill of Rights,” “under which a new basis of security and prosperity can be established for all—regardless of station, race, or creed.” Among these were the right to a job with a living wage, the right to protection “from the economic fears of old age and sickness,” the right to medical care, the right to a home and the right to a good education.

Under FDR, working Americans were guaranteed minimum wages, maximum daily and weekly hours, unemployment compensation and a pension. Modest bank accounts were insured, and their investments were also protected to some degree from both downward business cycles and business skullduggery. And from these programs grew Johnson's Great Society, which promised civil rights and various benefits for the poor and elderly. None of these changes became part of the written Constitution, but the general principles behind them entered the Constitutional Conscience. Americans accepted that maintaining the Republic now required the fundamentals of these programs, although they argued over the details.