Welcome to Week 13! In this module, we'll continue our discussion of civil rights, with a closer look on legislation, policy, and how the rhetoric of civil rights was employed by the state. We'll focus on President Lyndon B. Johnson's expansive legislative program, the "Great Society," and look at how civil rights was woven into Indian policy in the 1940s-1960s.
Poll #1:
Throughout this module, keep this question in mind: In your opinion, do laws have the power to change peoples' minds? Or, do people change the laws? Answer the embedded poll below, or access it here.
Three questions will guide this module blog post:
What did community organizers and policy makers agree was the biggest challenge facing American citizens after the passage of civil rights legislation? How did they try to fix it?
How did LBJ’s Great Society expand opportunities for citizens to participate in the political system?
What was the rationale behind the drive to “terminate” tribal status and abolish the Bureau of Indian Affairs?
Let's get started!
Part I: Philosophies and Ideologies Behind the "Great Society"
Civil Rights Legislation
Two landmark pieces of legislation were passed in the mid-1960s as a result of the efforts of civil rights activists. The first, the 1964 Civil Rights Act, was passed by Lyndon Johnson who argued that the bill was the most fitting memorial to President Kennedy. The act prohibited racial discrimination in employment, institutions like hospitals and schools, and privately owned accommodations such as restaurants, hotels, and theaters. It also banned discrimination on the grounds of sex. After signing this bill, Johnson supposedly remarked, “I think we delivered the South to the Republican Party.”
The second, the 1965 Voting Rights Act, was passed after Martin Luther King led demonstrators in a march from Selma, Alabama to the state capitol in Montgomery. When the marchers reached the bridge leading out of the city, state police assaulted them with cattle prods, whips, and tear gas. The violence perpetrated against nonviolent demonstrators was broadcast on televisions throughout the world.
President Johnson endorsed the Voting Rights Act, which prohibited discrimination in voting, outlawed education requirements for voting, and allowed federal registrars to enroll voters. The act also stated that the federal government has the right to oversee voter registration efforts and elections, especially in counties with strong records of discrimination. (In 2013, the Supreme Court repealed this aspect of the Voting Rights Act (Shelby v. Holder). After the passage of the bill, about 80,000 new voters were registered in a few months.
Poll #2:
Thinking back to the massive resistance to desegregation we explored in Module 22, consider the following question:
In your opinion, did the passage of the Civil Rights Act and Voting Rights Act reveal a change in the racial attitudes of most American citizens? Answer the embedded poll below, or access it here.
Lyndon B. Johnson's "Great Society"
LBJ had greater success than any president since FDR in putting across his legislative program. With Democratic control of both the House and the Senate, Johnson was able to enact far-reaching programs. These programs put a massive amount of funds into health services for the poor and the elderly, education, and urban development. These measures greatly expanded the powers of the federal government, expanding parts of the New Deal. However, unlike the New Deal, the Great Society was in response to prosperity rather than depression.
Johnson and Democrats believed that economic growth made it possible to fund ambitious new government programs in order to improve Americans’ quality of life. In 1964, Congress passed the Economic Opportunity Act. This act came to be known as the “War on Poverty.” It states:
“The United States can achieve its full economic and social potential as a nation only if every individual has the opportunity to contribute to the full extent of his capabilities and to participate in the workings of our society. It is, therefore, the policy of the United States to eliminate the paradox of poverty in the midst of plenty in this Nation by opening to everyone the opportunity for education and training, the opportunity to work, and the opportunity to live in decency and dignity.”
Civil rights agitation had resulted in the passage of the Civil Rights Act and Voting Rights Act, legally prohibiting discrimination in public institutions and accommodations and ensuring that all citizens had access to the vote. Addressing economic justice was the next logical step.
In fact, it was something that civil rights activists had been fighting for all along. Although it is not remembered this way, the March on Washington was for “Jobs and Freedom.”
The Economic Opportunity Act contained key programs that were designed to combat poverty and racial injustice in the US. These included:
Job Corps, providing centers of education, vocational training, and work experience for young people aged 16-21
Volunteers in Service to America (VISTA), a domestic version of the Peace Corps
Community Action Program, a program developed, conducted, and administered with the “maximum feasible participation” of residents of the areas and members of the groups served
Head Start
By 1966, Johnson also passed the Food Stamp Act, amended the Social Security Act to include Medicare and Medicaid, created the Department of Housing and Urban Development, and instituted major immigration reform.
"Freedom is not enough"
In his 1965 commencement speech at Howard University, LBJ explained his philosophy behind Great Society programs. It is quite significant that he delivered this speech at the commencement ceremonies of a historically Black university. The Voting Rights Act had passed just months before. In this speech, LBJ laid out the issues he saw facing African Americans after the passage of the Voting Rights Act:
“Freedom is the right to share, share fully and equally, in American society—to vote, to hold a job, to enter a public place, to go to school. It is the right to be treated in every part of our national life as a person equal in dignity and promise to all others…
But freedom is not enough. You do not wipe away the scars of centuries by saying: Now you are free to go where you want, and do as you desire, and choose the leaders you please. You do not take a person who, for years, has been hobbled by chains and liberate him, bring him to the starting line of a race and then say, ‘you are free to compete with all the others,’ and still justly believe that you have been completely fair. Thus is not enough just to open the gates of opportunity. All our citizens must have the ability to walk through those gates.”
Great Society policies and programs, like the Economic Opportunity Act, were geared towards providing that opportunity for all American citizens. [1]
The Black Family
At the heart of the War on Poverty programs and other governmental programs of public assistance during the Great Society was the understanding that the Black family had been broken down and needed to be corrected. In his Howard speech, LBJ argued:
“Perhaps most important—its influence radiating to every part of life—is the breakdown of the Negro family structure. For this, most of all, white America must accept responsibility. It flows from centuries of oppression and persecution of the Negro man. It flows from the long years of degradation and discrimination, which have attacked his dignity and assaulted his ability to produce for his family.”
Word Cloud #1:
Take a close look at the quote above. In your opinion, who within the Black family was Johnson particularly concerned about? And why? (Let us know what you think in the word cloud below. You can also use the word cloud to comment on what else you notice/wonder about Johnson's speech.)
The Moynihan Report
According to Johnson, it was the Black male breadwinner who was in danger. His “ability to produce for his family” had been damaged. Therefore, the family itself was damaged.
Johnson and other liberal policymakers and politicians based their arguments on an influential report by Daniel Patrick Moynihan, a social scientist, who published The Negro Family in 1965. Known as the “Moynihan Report,” this document argued that the source of the deterioration of the Black family was the position of Black men.
Moynihan argued that discrimination and unemployment, rooted in the legacies of slavery and segregation, impeded Black men’s abilities to support their families. When Black men “abandoned” their families, they left behind a “matriarchal structure” and its attendant “aberrant, inadequate, or anti-social behavior” which “perpetuated the cycle of poverty and deprivation.”
Thus, even though African Americans had won new legal and political rights, they were unable to take advantage of them due to the “tangle of pathology” that made up their communities. The Moynihan Report supported the dominant ideal of the male breadwinner, arguing that without this strong patriarchal presence, a “matriarchy” would develop and wreak havoc on society—creating a pathological issue. [2]
Poll #3:
Who do you predict will be most impacted by the way they were portrayed in the Moynihan Report? Unemployed Black fathers? Or, the Black mothers of the "matriarchy"? Answer the poll below, or access it here.
Breadwinner Liberalism
One of the underlying ideologies of the policies of the Great Society was the understanding of “breadwinner liberalism.” Supporters of breadwinner liberalism fell on the lefthand side of the political spectrum. They favored social progress through reforms enacted by the federal government. At the root of these reforms though was an understanding of the American nuclear family: male breadwinner/female homemaker.
We have already explored the ideology of male breadwinning. We’ve examined how welfare policies for women were geared towards those who don’t have a male breadwinner to support them (whether they be divorced, separated, or widowed). We examined the GI Bill and how it provided benefits in loans, education, and job training to male veterans, as the heads of the household. We assessed how this ideology was ingrained in social and cultural understanding of “protecting” the family and the nation from outside threats —moral or political.
This idea was deeply ingrained in the American understand of the “normal” nuclear family. Unemployment was viewed as the “single dominant problem of poverty in the US.” In order to solve that problem, it was men who needed to be employed. [3]
Moynihan and his peers argued that a strong economy was one “in which men made enough money that their women can stay home and raise their family.”
However, people were divided over the extent to which male breadwinners should receive assistance from the government. Some argued that breadwinners earned their places as the heads of families, and that their jobs and income were the products of individual effort.
This emphasis on “personal responsibility” ignored how the welfare state was specifically designed to support breadwinners—for example, through Old Age Insurance (Social Security) and the GI Bill.
People argued that “manhood” would be undermined by “dependency” on the government. If you needed help and you were a man, it was because of your own “failings.” This philosophy ignored the institutional blocks that had been ingrained in society for certain racial groups.
Furthermore, what does this kind of philosophy mean for women? Breadwinner liberalism assumes that women’s economic standing and security came only from marriage. This ignores women’s evolving relationship with work, and enshrines the ideal of the nuclear family into public policy in a way that doesn’t relate to many women’s actual experiences.
Part II: War on Poverty Programs and Policies
We’ve examined how the 1950s were known for their prosperity and heightened levels of consumerism. However, at the end of the decade, 22 percent of Americans (more than 40 million people) lived in poverty.
In Part II, we’ll explore some of the programs of the War on Poverty, the name for the Economic Opportunity Act, a law which called for a dramatic change in the relationship between the federal government and the nation’s poorest citizens.
Discovering "Poverty in our midst"
People “discovered” poverty through the televised portrayal of civil rights activists, as they entered some of the poorest parts of the nation. In 1962, sociologist Michael Harrington published The Other America which helped to bring poverty to the attention of Washington politicians and the American public.
Furthermore, even after the significant gains of the civil rights movement, there was still much to be done in terms of addressing persistent inequalities. Urban uprisings in Watts, Detroit, and Newark in the mid-1960s revealed the extent to which people were still struggling. The civil rights movement looked for ways to “make freedom real” for black Americans. Martin Luther King called for a “Bill of Rights for the Disadvantaged,” to mobilize the nation’s resources to abolish economic deprivation.
Appalachia and the War on Poverty
The history of the War on Poverty has specific ties to Appalachia. President Johnson declared the War on Poverty from Kentucky, to demonstrate the need for change and to show that his program could be a way to “save” the destitute people shown by the news crews and photographers which followed his tour through the region. As Jessica Wilkerson writes in her book, To Live Here, You Have to Fight, the picture of Appalachia which appeared in Life and other magazines was only the “starkest poverty and direst conditions in the region…gaunt and dirt-streaked faces, rags for clothes, and distended bellies.” [4]
Below, I've included three images from John Dominis’ 1964 story in Life. Pay attention to the way people are represented in these photographs, as well as the way they are described in the captions. You can view the entire gallery of photos from this shoot here.
Caption: “The most common sights around Appalachia were aging men and ragged urchins.”
Caption: "Youngsters lapped up a surplus- commodity supper of pan-fried biscuits, gravy, and potatoes at the Odell Smiths of Friday Branch Creek. The newspapers were pasted by Mrs. Smith in an effort to keep the place neat.”
Caption: “On a wintry afternoon in Line Fork Creek, a family trudged across a rickety suspension bridge over a sewage-polluted stream to its two-room shack.”
The photographs which appeared in Life ignored the middle-class and working-class neighborhoods, and instead captured a face for the War on Poverty to present the world. These kinds of images had a lasting impact, cementing a certain view of Appalachian life in the minds of the American public and future documentarians, photographers, and writers, who came to the region to document its extreme poverty. [5]
The War on Poverty did not succeed in eradicating poverty in the US. But, by 1974, the number of Americans living in poverty had been cut in half. Child poverty rates had dropped from 27 percent to 14 percent. The law poured $947 million into job training, youth employment, adult education, rural economic development, services for migrant farm workers, legal services, and other programs.
The notion of “opportunity theory” was a driving force behind the law. Sociologists Lloyd Ohlin and Richard Cloward had proposed that poverty, juvenile delinquency, and urban unrest stemmed from a lack of opportunity that could be remedied by redirecting young people’s energy away from criminal activities and toward projects to enhance community life.
However, the images of poor people as destitute victims did not quite match up with the active ways they endeavored to care for their communities.
For example, in her book, To Live Here, You Have to Fight, Jessica Wilkerson describes how Edith Easterling (pictured above) worked very hard to make her Appalachian community better before the War on Poverty. Known as an "unofficial social worker," Easterling saw the War on Poverty as a chance to “change politics as usual,” not a completely new opportunity that had been lacking, but perhaps just the resources needed to do what she had been trying to do all along.
Easterling, before being employed by the Appalachian Volunteers, a program funded by the War on Poverty, worked as a cook in a school. But she also worked tirelessly to improve her community: she helped her neighbors and kin fill out paperwork for Social Security and veteran’s benefits, read letters to illiterate neighbors, helped people apply for welfare benefits, drove people to polling places, and helped them fill out sample ballots.
Moreover, although the War on Poverty called for a change in the relationship between the federal government and the nation’s poorest citizens, Easterling understood that the relationship between the people and the state was an essential piece of citizenship.
Wilkerson recounts how Easterling grew up hearing stories of her grandparents who had “a relationship to the federal government,” including her grandmother’s Civil War widows pension, and “that their lives were better for it.” Wilkerson writes, “as they prospered, they shared what they had.” [6]
Thus, Easterling took her existing understanding of caregiving, citizenship, and activism, and applied it to the funds flowing into the region from the War on Poverty. Would Easterling and other active members of poor communities have agreed with "opportunity theory"?
Community Action Program
“Opportunity theory” was the logic behind the War on Poverty’s most controversial program, the Community Action Program. Thousands of community action agencies were funded across the US with the goal of fostering “bottom-up” revitalization of the country’s poorest areas. These federally funded agencies would engage the poor directly in the work of fighting poverty. In doing so, they would not emulate charities, but provide “a hand up, not a handout.”
This structure was designed as a way to make sure that African Americans, particularly in the South, would not be excluded. As we have seen from past modules, other government assistance programs which were administered at the state and local level were often rife with racial discrimination.
Many poor men and women took advantage of this program. They rehabilitated abandoned buildings, opened clinics, preschools, and community centers, cleaned up neighborhood parks, planted community gardens, and renovated public swimming pools. They also began to educate themselves about their rights under federal law, learning about newly-created programs and older programs they were entitled to access. In the process, millions of poor people became politicized.
However, the approach of involving the poor in planning services and programs to meet their own needs had other consequences. Johnson’s program was focused on “fixing” poverty by addressing the individual and/or cultural characteristics of a particular community. It did not reorganize the larger structures of economy and society.
This created a large potential for conflict and clash between poor people and government officials: The federal government did not desire a radical shift in power, or a critique of the way government operated. They believed that the problems lay more with the people than with the government anyway. The War on Poverty sought to encourage a philosophy of self-help. This was different from what poor people saw as their rights as citizens, and what they expected from governmental programs. [7]
When we consider the history of the 1960s, it is important to remember that the narrative isn’t just about “the people” organizing against “the government.” There is more of a gray area—as the people participated in these government programs and pushed back when they did not agree with the ideologies behind them.
Poll #4:
In your opinion, which of the following effects of the Community Action Program was more significant? The fact that many poor people were politicized through their participation? Or, that the institutional structures contributing to poverty weren't necessarily challenged through this program? Answer the embedded poll below, or access it here.
Aid to Families with Dependent Children (AFDC)
As mentioned, one of the impacts of the Community Action Program was that people became more aware of the existing programs of public assistance available to them. Aid to Families with Dependent Children (AFDC) was one of them. This is the same program we went over when discussing Social Security (it was initially known as Aid to Dependent Children). In the 1960s, the amount of people receiving aid from AFDC rose, from 3.1 million clients in 1960 to 8.5 million in 1970. Although this was cause for alarm for some people, it didn’t mean that more people had become eligible, just that more families who already were eligible were claiming their benefits.
The ideology behind AFDC was that single mothers could obtain financial benefits because they were not dependents of a male breadwinner, in order to support them to stay home with their children. In 1967, Congress introduced an amendment to AFDC that included a work incentive.
How did this amendment fit in with the ideal of a male breadwinner/female homemaker? While welfare administrators thought that encouraging poor single mothers to enter the labor force would keep costs down, anti-welfare conservatives had problems with AFDC in principle. They argued that receiving welfare enabled poor single nonwhite mothers to avoid work, and that enforcing low-wage employment would force mothers off of welfare rolls and into the workforce where they belonged. This was starkly different from the domestic “ideal” integrated into society at this time. Why should white mothers be expected to stay home and nonwhite mothers not allowed to do the same?
Senator Russell Long from Louisiana (pictured above) articulated this anti-welfare philosophy, by painting a specific picture of a welfare recipient as “that woman who just sits around the house and drinks Hi-Fi or Gypsy Gold wine all day while the children are out or in school.” [8]
Mothers who received AFDC benefits were clearly outside the male-breadwinner family wage system. The Moynihan Report also fed into this crisis over AFDC. Some argued that by providing cash aid to single mother families, AFDC undermined the black man’s role as breadwinner and head of household, and “perpetuated the matriarchal family.”
Social workers and activists rejected the idea of work requirements. They understood that the work that welfare recipients were able to get was low-wage, often with no benefits or protections in sectors like agriculture, food processing, domestic work, and restaurant work. Others argued that forcing single women to work outside the home would undermine their role as mothers (separating them from their children and depriving them of the choice to stay home).
Ultimately, liberals decided that the best solution to this problem would be to help fathers stay with their families or form families in the first place. Officials argued that putting men to work would create more male breadwinners and thus cut down on the need for welfare at all. Welfare rights activists, who we’ll examine in future modules, actually agreed with this idea. Black activists called for decent jobs for Black men, and demanded the right to stay home with their children, thus articulating a different tune from the critiques of the “happy suburban housewife” we discussed in Module 21.
Equal Employment Opportunity Commission
One of the ways in which the Great Society sought to encourage more access to jobs was through Title VII of the Civil Rights Act, which declared discrimination on the grounds of race, color, religion, sex, or national origin to be an “unlawful employment practice.”
In order to enforce this new law, the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission was formed, where workers could file complaints and sue employers for violating their right to fair treatment.
Two months after it began, the EEOC had received 869 complaints from North Carolina, the center of the southern textile manufacturing industry—more than from any other state. Black workers complained that they could not get jobs in the textile mills. The EEOC conducted hearings, which broke through the racial power structure of the South. At these hearings, Black workers found respect and sympathy while the white mill managers had to listen to their complaints. The EEOC began a publicity campaign to urge African Americans to apply for textile jobs, offering its support if they met resistance.
Black men who had gotten jobs but couldn’t move up in the mills used the weight of the EEOC to push through barriers. Between 1965 and 1971, over 1,200 class action law suits reached the courts, covering issues like separate seniority lists that locked Blacks out of good jobs, discriminatory hiring and promotion procedures, biased recruiting, segregated locals in union workplaces, and the use of testing and job requirements unrelated to job performance that excluded Blacks from competition.
Because of the efforts of local lawyers and civil rights groups, many Black people were able to find better jobs.
Corin Cannon, a 40-year-old African American mill worker, said,
“The best thing that has ever happened to black women in the South in my lifetime is a chance to be full-fledged citizens. And that comes from their work. You can’t even pretend to be free without money.” [9]
Immigration Act of 1965
The last Great Society change we’ll examine is the Immigration Act of 1965. Passed in the same context of the Civil Rights Act, and the belief that racism should not serve as the basis for public policy, it abandoned the national origins quota system of immigration, and established new, racially neutral criteria for immigration.
Instead of quotas based on nation, the 1965 Act instituted quotas based on hemisphere. The Western Hemisphere (North/South America) now had a quota of 120,000 per year, with no country maximum. The Eastern Hemisphere (Europe, Asia, and Africa) now had a quota of 170,000 per year, with 20,00 per country. In addition, minor children, spouses, and parents of US citizens could be admitted as non-quota immigrants.
Within the quota, the 1965 Immigration Act created a hierarchy of preference (not to be prioritized on the basis of race, sex, nationality, or place of birth):
20% visas to unmarried sons or daughters of US citizens
20% visas to spouses, unmarried sons/daughters of alien admitted for permanent resident
10% visas to professionals, people with exceptional ability in science/arts, anyone who benefits national economy, cultural interest, welfare
10% visas to married sons/daughters of US citizens
24% visas to brothers or sisters of citizens
10% visas to skilled/unskilled labor, not temporary or seasonal worker/for which there is a shortage of employable and willing people in US
6% refugees fleeing (a) persecution from (1) communist countries, (2) Middle East; unable or unwilling to return to country due to racial/racial/political persecution; (b) fleeing natural disasters
Thus, this wasn’t an open immigration policy, as it prioritized family reunification and jobs/labor. But it was seen as a triumph when it was passed, as it was more consistent with national ideologies of equality.
When the act was passed, politicians did not anticipate changes to the demographic makeup of the US. In 1965, the US was still predominantly white, and policymakers believed that there would continue to be a dominance in European immigration.
However, the new system led to an explosive rise in immigration from Latin America and Asia. In addition, the impact on immigration from Mexico was quite dramatic. The number of migrants who could legally move back and forth into the US was cut dramatically, resulting in a rise in illegal immigration and an increase in deportations.
Part III: Civil Rights Rhetoric and Indian "Termination" Policy
To conclude this module blog post, we'll examine mid-twentieth century policies which affected Native peoples' relationships with the government. These polices were known as "termination." Through legislation, the US government decided to hasten the process of Native assimilation by ending or "terminating" its relationship with Native nations. Termination policy aimed to dismantle tribal governments, dissolve tribal land holdings, and end federal services to Native people.
Supporters of termination in Congress argued that Native people were being held back by their relationship with the federal government. In 1947, Hugh Butler argued before Congress that Indians “from every tribe, in every state and in every community where Indians reside, have beseeched their representatives in the Senate and the House to pass legislation granting them equal rights of citizenship with their white neighbors."
Politicians consistently returned to the idea that the Bureau of Indian Affairs' (BIA), the governmental agency in charge of holding Native money and land in trust, forced them to live, as Hugh Butler claimed, in conditions of “racial segregation,” “inferior status,” and subject to “control by race legislation.” They argued that Native people were held back from living their lives unencumbered by federal oversight.
We can see this idea all throughout the policy debates and conversations in the media regarding Native people in the mid-century. Termination was framed as a positive step to get people out from under the government’s thumb, to not be held back by an ineffective and oppressive BIA, and move forward as “emancipated” citizens.
We really need to take Butler's claims with a grain of salt. It helps to consider termination policies in conjunction with the history of the way American policymakers were framing issues of poverty and welfare, as we examined in Parts I and II of this module blog post. Politicians wanted a way for Native people to be "unencumbered" by the government. But this idea was undergirded by a particular vision of "ideal" American family and work behavior.
Also...what else became "unencumbered" by the government through termination? Native land...
Looking back on termination policies, Philleo Nash, the Commissioner of Indian Affairs from 1961-1966, noted that termination itself was motivated by non-Natives wanting to do “right” by Native people. He wrote: “Many of the individuals that favored termination were well-meaning people. They believed that they were offering Indian people an opportunity to join mainstream society. They were doing this, not to Indians, but for Indians.”
However, he also notes that even with such lofty intentions, non-Natives could not understand a Native-centered (or Native-authored) solution to the problems they faced. The solution was to lift specific “restrictions” so that Native people could be more like whites, because that was ultimately held up as the pinnacle of self-sufficiency and progress. “The real tragedy is that many whites then and now still cannot comprehend that Indian people could want anything other than a white existence." [10]
Ruth Muskrat Bronson, a Cherokee activist and educator who was one of the founding members of the National Congress of American Indians, and served in a leadership capacity in that organization for many years, articulated this relationship between termination policy and guilt. She drew attention to the affects that this association could have on the lives of Native people and Native nations:
From an undated essay she wrote while serving as treasurer of the NCAI and consultant to the executive director:
“The average American is noted for his sympathy for the underdog. He is also apt to have romantic sentiment for the American Indian. These two admirable qualities, combined with a vague sense of guilt for having ousted the original inhabitant of a naturally rich land because of his own need for a new world, a heritage of guilt, too, for the long and shameful history of broken treaties with those he dispossessed, conspire to foster impulsive action, based on a desire to make amends but founded on superficial or inaccurate knowledge rather than on thoughtful study or familiarity with fact and reality. This is serious, indeed, for the Indian since it jeopardizes his very existence and unquestionably would lead to his eventual—literal—extinction."
Read the rest of the essay here.
Poll #5:
In your opinion, what was the main reason for the widespread support for termination policies among non-Natives? A desire to make amends with Native people (in other words, guilt)? Or, a desire to release Native land from trust protections? Answer the embedded poll below, or access it here.
House Concurrent Resolution 108
In 1950, a man named Dillon Myer took over as Commissioner of Indian Affairs. He was the former head of the War Relocation Authority, which had overseen the incarceration of Japanese Americans during WWII. Philleo Nash described Myer’s views on Native people: “He viewed Indians on reservations as temporary detainees. He sought to end this detention as quickly as possible. His policy was a form of expulsion.” [11]
Here is a quote from Myer which does a good job of summing up his perspective:
"The BIA should “not do anything which others can do as well or better and as cheaply. The Bureau should do nothing for Indians which Indians can do for themselves and we should lean over backward to help them learn to do more things on their own.” [12]
Myer’s whole philosophy was to get the BIA out of the lives of Native people.
To do so, the government identified those tribes which had made the most “progress” as eligible for termination. The list included the Six Nations of New York (Iroquois), the Potawatomis of Kansas, the Menominees of Wisconsin, the Flatheads of Montana, the Klamaths of Oregon, the Hoopas of northern California, and several smaller bands in southern California.
In 1953, House Concurrent Resolution 108 proposed ending federal relations with a number of those eligible tribes. The goal of the law was: “as rapidly as possible, to make the Indians within the territorial limits of the United States subject to the same laws and entitled to the same privileges and responsibilities as are applicable to other citizens of the United States, to end their status as wards of the United States, and to grant them all the rights and prerogatives pertaining to American citizenship.”
Throughout the entire termination period, which lasted into the 1960s, 109 cases of termination were initiated, which affected a minimum of 1,352,155 acres of land and 11,466 individuals. [13]
Overall, termination was disastrous for the tribes involved. After termination they were no longer eligible for healthcare from the Indian Health Service, they lost federal support of their schools, they were subject to state laws and taxes, and their land was no longer protected by federal trust status.
For example, the Menominees were fairly self-sufficient in 1950, with a tribal lumbering operation and sawmill that provided employment and paid for most of their community services. After President Eisenhower signed the Menominee Termination Act in 1954, the tribe had four years to establish their own municipal, educational, health, and other services previously provided by the federal government. After a deadline extension, the Menominees reorganized the tribe as a corporation to manage the lands and lumber mill formerly owned and operated by the tribe, and the reservation became a county of Wisconsin in 1961.
The tribal lumber industry lost vital federal contracts at a time of a nationwide slump in home building. They lost most of their real estate, because as a corporation, the Menominees owed taxes. Few individuals had cash to pay taxes, and many had to liquidate holdings or lose their property to tax sales. People who had never relied on government assistance had to apply for welfare benefits. Although in theory termination was supposed to save the government money, it ended up costing much more because state and local governments now had to provide funds for schools, welfare, and roads.
According to Menominee leader and social worker Ada Deer, “The hospital and the roads were closed. Our land became subject to taxation. A whole new county, Wisconsin’s poorest county, was created as a result of this.”
Public Law 280
Two weeks after Congress passed House Concurrent Resolution 108, it passed Public Law 280, which transferred jurisdiction over tribal lands to state and local governments in California, Oregon, Nebraska, Minnesota, and Wisconsin. Other states could unilaterally adopt it if they chose—until 1968, after which the consent of the reservation was required. The objective was to bring Native people under state authority. Although President Eisenhower requested that tribal leaders be consulted before the transfer of authority occurred, and various members of Congress introduced amendments to PL 280 over the next decade, none of those amendments passed. Public Law 280 threatened tribal sovereignty across the nation.
Native people saw Public Law 280 as a direct interference with tribal governments. States felt they could not take jurisdiction over reservations without some kind of subsidy from the federal government—or in lieu of that kind of support, the right to tax Native lands. Congress would not give the states power to tax the reservations. In many instances states would simply refuse to provide law enforcement over the reservations, leaving the tribe helpless and without any recourse.
In the reading by Helen Peterson assigned for this module, you'll read more about the impact of Public Law 280 on Native civil rights and tribal sovereignty.
Conclusion:
Community organizers and policymakers saw poverty as one of the biggest challenges facing American citizens in the 1960s, and sought to extend “opportunity” to all citizens.
LBJ’s Great Society allowed citizens to participate in the alleviation of poverty by utilizing new programs to challenge racial discrimination, or working with government officials who believed that poverty could be combatted on an individual level.
Termination policies were undergirded by the rhetoric of civil rights and equality, but as Native leaders like Ruth Bronson, Ada Deer, and Helen Peterson asserted, we should critically examine how that seemingly positive rhetoric undermined tribal autonomy.
Citations:
[1] For more on the 1965 speech and Johnson's affirmative action programs, see Ira Katznelson, When Affirmative Action Was White: An Untold History of Racial Inequality in Twentieth-Century America (New York: W.W. Norton & Co., 2005), 144-149.
[2] For more on the Moynihan Report and its impact on policy, see Marisa Chappell, The War on Welfare: Family, Poverty, and Politics in Modern America (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2010), 35-50.
[3] Jennifer Mittelstadt, From Welfare to Workfare: The Unintended Consequences of Liberal Reform, 1945-1965 (Chapel Hill; London: The University of North Carolina Press, 2005), 144-145. For more on the "normal" nuclear family and poverty policy, see Chappell, The War on Welfare and Alice O'Connor, Poverty Knowledge: Social Science, Social Policy, and the Poor in Twentieth-Century US History (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2001).
[4] Jessica Wilkerson, To Live Here, You Have to Fight: How Women Led Appalachian Movements for Social Justice (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2019), 42.
[5] Meredith McCarroll, Unwhite: Appalachia, Race, and Film (Athens, GA: University of Georgia Press, 2018), 83-85.
[6] Wilkerson, To Live Here, You Have to Fight, 41-68.
[7] Alyosha Goldstein, Poverty in Common: The Politics of Community Action During the American Century (Durham: Duke University Press, 2012), 19.
[8] Chapell, War on Welfare, 53.
[9] Nancy MacLean, Freedom is Not Enough: The Opening of the American Workplace (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2006), 88.
[10] Kenneth Philp, ed. Indian Self-Rule: Firsthand Accounts of Indian-White Relations from Roosevelt to Reagan (Boulder: University Press of Colorado, 1986), 135.
[11] Philp, Indian Self-Rule, 164.
[12] Quoted in Colin G. Calloway, First Peoples: A Documentary Survey of American Indian History 5th ed. (Boston: Bedford/St. Martin's, 2016), 457.
[13] Donald Fixico, The Invasion of Indian Country in the Twentieth Century: American Capitalism and Tribal Natural Resources (Boulder: University Press of Colorado, 2012), 96.
In your opinion, do laws have the power to change peoples’ minds? Or, do people change the laws?
I think it's some of both. The problem is some people don't always agree with laws that are put in place, but the longer they exist for, the more complacent people become because "that's just the way it is". For example, marijuana is illegal for recreational use in the majority of the country. People are so used to the "drugs are bad" narrative that they don't think to question it. Humans impact their surroundings, but their surroundings impact them. I believe that the way our society is structured has just as much impact on us as we do on the way our…
I really appreciated the discussion of how the interaction between laws and society. Most of us agreed that people change the laws rather than the other way around. This conversation is really interesting when we think about it in context of a specific law--like the Voting Rights Act. In this case we have a very significant piece of legislation, but maybe not a significant shift in the minds of everyone. However, over time, with the regulations in place, the VRA is/was an effective way of fighting against restrictions in voting. (Although a significant piece of it was rolled back in 2013). But do these safeguards change the minds of people? (I don't know. Probably not, right? Otherwise we wouldn't see…
In your opinion, do laws have the power to change peoples’ minds? Or, do people change the laws?
Laws definitely don't change people's minds. laws come from a majority vote, usually. If people don't like the outcome, they protest, before and after the election of laws, and/or become accustomed to it.
From previous module posts, we know that laws do not always change people. Referring back to the prohibition era, and the new forms of crime and moonshining that sprouted. Even today we see that with such drug laws that laws don't always change people. That's why I feel that people are the ones influencing laws at all times. When we go out to vote locally and go to precipitate in different levels of governance through community gatherings. When citizens pressure lawmakers and demand their changes for their fellow Americans. That is the image of people changing laws for what they believe is correct at the time.
In your opinion, do laws have the power to change peoples’ minds? Or, do people change the laws?
I believe people change the law instead of the law changing people's minds. The laws are created by people. They can oppose or disagree with the law, and that might not change their point of view.