Is This Time Different?
On March 15, 1965, before a joint session of Congress, President Lyndon Baines Johnson gave the most memorable speech of his political career. The subject was his plan to submit a voting rights bill.
“Our fathers believed that if this noble view of the rights of man was to flourish, it must be rooted in democracy,” he said. “The most basic right of all was to choose your own leaders. The history of this country, in large measure, is the history of the expansion of that right to all people.”
Use of masculine terms such as “fathers” and “man” rather than “founders” or “people” dates this remarkable oration. The full forty-eight-minute speech is at lbjlibrary.org.
And, he declared, “We shall overcome.” It is said that when Martin Luther King Jr. heard that, he wept.
Fifty-six years later, in this summer of 2021, the Supreme Court in a 6–3 decision has essentially completed its dismantling of the 1965 Voting Rights Act that began with a decision in 2013. A New York Times editorial concluded: “The current conservative majority . . . led by Chief Justice Roberts, shows no interest in thwarting this attack on democracy and protecting Americans’ fundamental constitutional right to vote. The ball is Congress’s court, and time is running out fast.”
One of the bills being considered, named after the great civil rights figure John Lewis, would recover some of what the court has dismantled. Republicans in Washington and around the country — the party that still claims its origins from the Great Emancipator Abraham Lincoln — are pressing to return the United States to an era long thought to be over.
The fate of equal rights is again at the forefront of our national politics, as it so often has been. Here are two precedents I encountered in just the past few weeks. Heather Cox Richardson, in her brilliant Substack column “Letters from an American,” tells of the 1879 effort by Democrats in Congress to prevent Black voting, and Geoffrey Cowan’s book Let the People Rule, about Theodore Roosevelt’s 1912 presidential campaign, describes in detail how TR contrived to prevent Black delegates from being seated at his Progressive Party convention.
American history is striking for patterns like this, on so many major themes. Reckoning with race is perhaps the most dominant. Black and brown accomplishment in politics, sports, the arts, and science (among other fields) does little to assuage the sense of injustice that those now known as BIPOC (Black, indigenous, people of color) feel so deeply. The just-released documentary Summer of Soul, about the Harlem Cultural Festival of 1969, is both a portrayal of musical genius and minority rage.
The battles over immigration and national origin are another of these great issues. The nineteenth-century ban of Chinese “coolies” from entering the country; the internment of Japanese nationals and Japanese-Americans during World War II; “No Irish or Italians need apply”; Jews are not welcome; and Mexicans are “rapists” are familiar tropes that still resonate enough to prevent reasonable progress on adding to what is, after all, a nation of immigrants.
And women, who comprise more than 50 percent of the population, are still not really equal to men, nearly 175 years after the gathering at Seneca Falls, New York, “to discuss the social, civil and religious condition and rights of women.” There has been tremendous progress on this matter in recent years, but misogyny, like racism, is ingrained in our past and present.
Even the Declaration of Independence, which maintains that “all men are created equal,” also denounces the “merciless Indian Savages whose known rule of warfare is an undistinguished destruction of all ages, sexes and conditions.”
As for warfare, the departure of American forces from Afghanistan after a twenty-year engagement with an undefeated Taliban, like the debacle of Vietnam, reflects lessons unlearned, which so undercut LBJ’s vision of a “Great Society” that President Joe Biden is trying now to revive. Biden’s Afghan withdrawal is already for him a sensitive topic. When questioned about it the other day by reporters, he was miffed.
Even the role of the United States Postal Service — the 250-year-old predecessor of the internet — is being reconsidered. As far back as Ben Franklin, postal delivery was considered essential as the only good way to communicate personal information and news. That is no longer the case, but the pace and reliability of the mail is not assured these days.
History is an easily overlooked guide to the future, especially for Americans. Over and over we confront the same issues — race, immigration, social justice, gender inequality and violence. (A spike in crime and gun sales is another recurring focus.) Recognizing these embedded traits for what they are — the downsides of our character — may be the way to finally deal with them.
