Historical Framework: The Decline of Faith in Government (Part 1)
“Rising Tide” by John Barry, is the definitive book on the history of the Mississippi River and particularly of the Flood of 1927. Mississippi and Louisiana were hardest hit and were devastated. However, their political leaders refused help from the federal government. Why? Barry says it was because they feared that if they let the Feds get involved with flood relief, they would then start meddling in other things and most specifically, they might try to undermine the Jim Crow caste system that was the bedrock of Southern society. Most definitely , whites did not want black children in the same classroom as white children. When JFK was assassinated, I remember many people in my community being pleased about it. Kennedy was a known “nigger lover”. He had forcefully integrated Ole Miss and the University of AL. In Oxford, 30,000 US troops were used to quell a riot that killed 2 and injured 300. https://www.npr.org/2012/10/01/161573289/integrating-ole-miss-a-transformative-deadly-riot
Johnson was a Southerner. Surely, he understood that Negroes were naturally inferior to Whites, were immoral, and unclean. Few self-respecting Whites wanted to share public restrooms with them. They did not want them to have any political power via the vote. When the Freedom Fighters came south to change this, one of their buses was burned by an angry mob and other Yankee adjitators were later murdered. The White segregationists hoped Johnson would halt, if not reverse the federal government’s encroachment on State’s Rights. Johnson, a Democrat from the Solid South betrayed them. He used his masterful political skills and connections to convince 46 of the 67 Democrats in the Senate to pass the 1964 Civil Rights Act. This was followed by subsequent sweeping civil rights legislation and agencies. It had taken almost 200 years for Southern slave owner Thomas Jefferson’s pronouncement that all men are created equal to be fully implemented nationwide in America. And what was the response of Southerners to this great achievement? They were so infuriated at the Johnson and the Democrats who voted with him that they abandoned the Democrat Party. In 1964, every senate seat in the former Confederate States was held by Democrats. Of those 11 states, only one has a Democrat representing them in the US Senate today.
Johnson did another thing that greatly diminished the support and respect for the federal government by many of its citizens. He granted the Military Industrial Complex its wish for a war in Southeast Asia. With the help of false reports from the National Security Agency, Johnson spun the Gulf of Tonkin incident into a justification for US involvement in Vietnam. In my opinion, Johnson’s decision to get the United States mired in a war in Southeast Asia was on par with Hoover’s decision to enact Smoot-Hawley Tariff Act (which was the catalyst for the Great Depression) as being the worst decision by any president in the 20th century. Nearly 60 thousand men were killed and over 300,000 wounded. The Vietnamese, who are now one of our allies and a great tourist destination, lost 3.5 million killed. Our involvement there led to the Khmer Rouge’s genocide where over 2 million Cambodian civilians were slaughtered. We ultimately lost the War. US prestige was greatly diminished in the eyes of the world and our government in the eyes of its citizens. In 1964, the public’s trust in government was at 77%. Six years later it had fallen to 54%. And then there was Watergate. When the Republican Senators told Nixon his lies and coverups would lead to his impeachment, Nixon resigned. Public trust in government fell to 36%. Carter’s inability to solve either stagflation or the Iranian hostage crisis drove trust down to an all time low of 27%. Reagan restored it to the low 40’s. By the end of Bush 41’s term, it hit an all-time low of 25%. When Clinton left office, it was in the mid-40’s again. Bush 43 got a huge boost from 911 peaking at 55%. I thought he was great initially – he turned out to be one of the worst presidents in the 20th century. Learning nothing from Vietnam, W got us into two “nation building” wars in the Middle East and left office with the world economy on the verge of collapse. American’s faith in government hit another all time low: 24%.
The distrust did not fall solely or even mainly on presidents. Tip, Newt, Rush and the Russians played increasingly signifcant roles.
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