Hell Hath no Fury like an Electorate Scorned

An acquaintance of mine who works for a public college in New England plans to take November 4 off from work and drive students to the polls. She’s in her forties, and Obama has her and the students around her really, really excited.
The news media – mainly written by people too young to remember 1960 very well – are agog with enthusiasm about how Senator Obama has inspired young voters. That may well be as wonderful a thing as they say it is.
But I do remember 1960 – and its aftermath. Jack Kennedy had the kids rooting for him, too. I recall that even fourteen and fifteen year old youngsters were sporting Kennedy buttons and pictures and talking up the dynamic young candidate that year.
Their enthusiasm – and the machinations of some political bosses in Illinois and Texas – got the Kennedy Johnson ticket elected. The nation waited breathlessly to see what this new generation would bring to Washington and create in that city.
What a spate of Earth-shattering legislation poured out over the next ten years! We got Medicaid, Medicare, the Peace Corps, domestic volunteer programs, huge urban renewal programs, The Civil Rights Act of 1964, the Voting Rights Act of 1965, programs to end poverty in Appalachia and throughout the United States. Federal aid to education grew exponentially, there were Food Stamps for the hungry, stronger environmental protection, student loans and grants, The President’s Council for Physical Fitness -- a veritable cornucopia of benefits.
It is doubtful that Roosevelt’s New Deal gave us anything like as much. It was a heady time to be in Washington. We were going to end poverty and cure all the nation’s ills. We really believed. I, a life-long Republican, got carried along – with rare enthusiasm.
I voted for LBJ in 1964. There were large groups of Republicans for Johnson. Everett Dirksen, the hoary spokesman for a Conservative Republican Party would declaim of the once anathema civil rights legislation that it was, “an idea whose time has come!”
I was, I admit, a true believer. I brought charges against factories that would not integrate. I published photos of hospital waiting rooms that no longer had “white” and “black” signs, but they had carefully positioned potted plants to divide the races. We got rid of the plants. We were bringing in the Millennium.
Events and circumstances reared their ugly heads.
Seven, eight years after that fateful election (three, four years after LBJ’s landslide re-election in 1964) the nation was burning, American cities were surrounded by tanks and checkpoints, students were facing bayonets and screaming their rage. Some of the same kids who had been so enthusiastic in 1960 were now shrieking imprecations at the administration they had elected.
We marched on the Pentagon. (I marched, too.) Some of the placards that described the administration that had brought us Civil Rights, Medicare and anti-poverty programs were positively obscene.
Kids pulled back from politics. They dropped out and turned on in a wave of drug use that bedevils us today. (I have sat in high school parking lots recently and watched the drug deals go down between white, middle class kids. When I went to school, we didn’t know what the stuff was.)
Civil Rights didn’t quite work the way it was supposed to. The Black Panthers carried guns. Cities burned. Martin Luther King, Jr. was murdered – by whites. Malcolm X was gunned down – by blacks. Our black allies in the Civil Rights movement showed us the door.
Students, armed with Peace Corps experience and student aid, showed only contempt and loathing for the colleges they were supposed to benefit from.
An army came home from Vietnam confused and embittered. No cheers – just derisive chants of “How many babies did you kill?” It took decades to restore their morale.
Raging students shrieked, “Peace Now!!” with hate contorted faces in the exact, angry cadence of Hitler’s Nuremburg rallies. “Sieg Heil” and “Peace Now” became indistinguishable. I withdrew from a peace movement I had once supported.
The kids – the nation – felt betrayed. All these wonderful goodies the Kennedy/Johnson years gave us – and the Millennium was somehow delayed. Poverty, death, discrimination went right on. Kennedy’s mellifluous promises had not solved all our woes, assuaged all our grief. The electorate of 1960 did not forgive.
No matter who is elected this year, no matter what he promises; his administration won’t solve much either. I just don’t want to go through another spasm of outrage when these enthusiastic kids my acquaintance is driving to the polls figure that out.
Progress, social and political, is a long, slow process. As you vote, remember that.