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This chapter tells the story behind the start of the global effort to eradicate smallpox. On May 19, 1965, the World Health Assembly (WHA) passed Resolution WHA18.38, which devoted the assembly and its administrative body (the WHO) to “the world-wide eradication of smallpox.” While previous assemblies had made similar such declarations in vague (and unfunded) support of the eradication program proposed by the USSR in 1958, this particular resolution had the political, technical, personnel, and financial backing of the United States, under the leadership of President Lyndon B. Johnson. The American commitment to smallpox eradication represented a step toward a Global Great Society: a liberal effort to engage the decolonizing Cold War world by manipulating the nonhuman world, including diseases.

Against a backdrop of 1960s urban strife and decline, some racial liberals used stories and images to conjure forth a utopian neighborhood future. As chapter 7 contends, this impulse surfaced most compellingly in works for children. In the bestselling picture books of Ezra Jack Keats or on the set of television's Sesame Street, the city neighborhood emerged as a multiracial peaceable kingdom, a Great Society achieved at the block level. Crafted with didactic intent, these portrayals were designed as models for an urban tomorrow in which the nation's painful racial legacy could be overcome through relationships forged on stoops and corners. However, various critics on the left would protest that such works ignored the structural roots of poverty while breezily universalizing the particularities of inner-city existence. Characterized by unresolved tensions between pungent realism and harmonious fantasy, these and similar texts signaled the possibilities and contradictions in a Great Society vision that sought urban redemption through neighborhood ties.

From the early 1930s, when Franklin D. Roosevelt created the New Deal during the Great Depression, to the mid-1960s, when Lyndon B. Johnson launched the Great Society during a much more affluent time, the pendulum of politics in America swung magisterially and seemingly inexorably to the left side. In the four decades following, the same pendulum swung to the right. The decades-long decline of liberal political fortune came in part because of social backlash. From the New Deal to the Great Society, there had just been too much equality, too much progressive social change, too much government, and too much disruption of settled manners, mores, and entrenched elites. There was bound to be growing resistance and the return to political power of the Republican side. While political movements are deeply affected in part by social forces, their fate is decided to some extent by whether they provide these social forces with effective rhetoric and voice.

Chapter 6 demonstrates the limitations of “black business activism” during the 1960s while focusing on urban renewal in Durham, North Carolina. Durham’s urban renewal program began in 1958, as a consequence of the Housing Act of 1954 and the state’s fledgling Research Triangle Park (RTP) initiative. The urban renewal program paved the way for an infrastructure that ultimately provided linkages in the physical landscape between RTP, the University of North Carolina, Duke University, North Carolina Central University, and North Carolina State University. Wheeler became the lone black member on the Durham Redevelopment Commission, the group responsible for administering the Bull City’s urban renewal program. I argue that, in part, Wheeler’s support for the federally funded urban redevelopment program fit within his own framework of how best to implement the gains already being won by the civil rights movement. The chapter also examines the “War on Poverty” in North Carolina in the context of Lyndon B. Johnson’s Great Society. It does so through trying to better understand Wheeler’s involvement with the North Carolina Fund (NC Fund), an antipoverty agency created by Governor Terry Sanford in 1963. The Fund became the model for President Johnson’s national reform agenda.

The epilogue contends that holism's story is one of neither complete success nor complete failure. While holistic understandings drifted into the culture in deep and important ways, capturing imaginations and motivating action, holistic projects did not remain constant. Instead, the 1960s version was an episodic moment in the long history of holistic thought, a period of high interest in one of the cycles of an old impulse that had very real consequences. Marked by the prosperity of the time, global cultural exchanges, new scientific and technological knowledge, shifting immigration patterns, and a medley of religious views, holists dreamed of achieving equality. Their communal ideals matched the exuberance of others who plotted to send a man to the moon; create a modern‐day Camelot; or rechart global relations through the United Nations, the World Federation of Churches, the international community of scientists, and the Peace Corps. Creating the Great Society seemed entirely possible. But this moment did not last. As the 1960s wore into the 1970s, the sensibility shifted to reflect a more individualistic era. Holists again manipulated and remade holism to meet new circumstances. Consequently, this anthology of ideas lost much of its communitarian drive and optimistic impulse in exchange for more personal, local articulations.

This chapter focuses on David Lilienthal when he returned to the US public eye. Businessmen who had long shaped and implemented domestic policy faced a grave crisis of legitimacy, and Lilienthal cast his lot with corporate executives desperately seeking a place in the Great Society. Corporate executives who had spent the early postwar decades wringing profits from international development, military, and Indian policy brought a distinctive perspective to insurgent demands for social justice, state action, and community control at home. Lilienthal belonged to a cohort of skilled institution builders, publicists, and political strategists who carried that lesson from the supposedly “underdeveloped” world to domestic business associations, government advisory boards, and community action programs of the 1960s. As far as these men were concerned, grand questions about the role of the private sector in public life had been resolved by the time the War on Poverty began, and the Great Society seemed an opportunity to consolidate their gains across domestic and international spheres.

During the 1960s, the public sector became a critical source of employment for African Americans. Lyndon Johnson's Great Society programs, often critiqued for lacking a jobs-creation component to combat structural male unemployment, nonetheless dramatically expanded the public sector. In Baltimore, civil rights activists built on the momentum of earlier equal-employment campaigns to win government jobs for black workers. Because most of the new positions were in the human services, black women outpaced black men in entering the government workforce. To be sure, African Americans were concentrated at the bottom of employment hierarchies. By the end of the decade, however, unionization improved the conditions of employment for most government workers. In a city undergoing rapid deindustrialization, unionized public-sector jobs helped many black families weather the storm and, in some cases, move up the economic ladder.

In the years after President Johnson’s 1964 landslide election, white voters in eastern North Carolina and the rest of the South grew disenchanted with liberalism. Helms recognized that racial backlash and the unpopular Vietnam War presented conservatives with their best opportunities in a generation. Helms’s pious incitement proved central to Republican victories in 1966 and 1968. The issues that most upset Helms allowed him to make the case against Democrats. He stoked viewer unease over black voters, the Great Society (especially the War on Poverty), the Watts riot, the black power movement, the Cold War, the Vietnam War, leftism at the University of North Carolina, and the sexual revolution. He defended literacy tests and portrayed African Americans as menacing. He transformed traditional U.S. isolationism into a rejection of cooperation and compromise with other nations. Helms, though, did not just criticize liberal efforts. He advocated the values of the small-town South as a conservative alternative. He played a role in building private schools and charities and proposed a private affirmative action plan. Helms’s solutions would leave local elites in control and keep out the federal government. Change in race relations would occur slowly if at all.

The three case studies in this chapter, in one way or another, challenge the general claims of this book. With the federal government’s entrance into education policymaking in the late 1950s, we see the nationalizing effects of events—in this instance, the launching of the Soviet satellite Sputnik—that do not involve an actual military conflict. In Johnson’s escalation of the Vietnam War, we see a president’s military policy dictated, at least in part, by concerns about consolidating peace-time domestic policy achievements. And in Bush’s efforts to privatize Social Security, we see how wars that once furnished substantial executive influence subsequently hampered the president’s policy agenda.

This chapter explores the complexities of international monetary power in the late postwar period by looking at the rise and fall of the Great Society, which was followed shortly by the demise of the Bretton Woods system. While the international community became concerned about the high rate of American economic growth in 1966 and 1967, the Johnson administration resisted calls to slow the economy and even introduced new expansionary policies. The reason for this is that the United States had registered a couple of strong years of balance of payments surpluses in the middle of the decade and had been able to pay back many of its international debts. This finding highlights that it was not balance of payments deficits per se that put an end to national growth experiments but rather the ability of foreign monetary authorities to leverage financial dependency.

The present chapter explores RAND’s development of analytical management techniques for military purposes and the diffusion of these methodologies from the military context into broader social welfare policy-making applications. It concentrates on three main issues, first providing a brief discussion of RAND’s history, focusing on the processes of intellectual production at RAND and the ways in which the creation of techniques there was shaped by a military context. Second, the chapter traces the dissemination of RAND’s systems methodologies from the corporation’s quasi-academic setting to the highest echelons of the U.S. national security structure. Finally, it examines where and how RAND’s methodological innovations diffused beyond the military establishment into programs of the “Great Society.” In general, the chapter traces the consequences of Cold War technical development for American democracy and argues that the widespread adoption of centralized, elitist policy making in the federal government may have contributed to the alienation many Americans feel toward the national government.

This chapter details events in Syngman Rhee’s life during and after his stint as president of the Korean Provisional Government (KPG). Topics covered include the four men who opposed Rhee in Beijing and Shanghai, as well as his perception of each of them; setbacks in Rhee’s diplomatic efforts with the United States at the Washington Disarmament Conference of 1921–1922; his impeachment by the Shanghai Provisional Government in March 1925; his decision to reshape the principles and direction of the Comrade Society of Great Korea to suit his needs, shifting its focus away from the importance of the Shanghai Provisional Government and placed instead on Rhee’s legitimacy as the sole leader of the Korean independence movement; and Rhee’s business ventures.

Ezra Taft Benson, as President Eisenhower's secretary of agriculture from 1953 to 1961, emerged as a leading spokesman for political conservatism on matters dealing with farming. After leaving that post in 1961, Benson felt compelled to expand his conservative agenda to other matters during the turbulent 1960s, specifically the threat of communism and the fledgling civil rights movement. A by-product of Benson's unrelenting concern with these issues was his willingness to entertain the possibility of national political office, culminating in two efforts in 1968. The first was an attempt by the so-called “Committee of 1976”--a John Birch front group to draft Benson as its third-party presidential candidate, along with South Carolina Senator Strom Thurmond as a vice-presidential running mate. When this effort failed, George Wallace, Alabama's pro-segregationist governor, actively sought Benson as his vice-presidential running mate on his self-styled American Independent Party ticket. This essay considers the following questions: Why did Benson feel compelled to thrust himself into the national political arena in a controversial, confrontational manner? What role did Benson's Mormonism play in this effort? How did Mormon leaders and the rank-and-file members react to Benson's presidential ambitions?  

This chapter focuses on President Lyndon B. Johnson's War on Poverty programs. Johnson, a Texan, acknowledged the extent of southern isolation. He dreamed of a Great Society that could take care of its own and all of its citizens could enjoy its freedoms and be the positive contrast to the threatening global spread of Communism. Johnson pushed his War on Poverty programs through Congress and opened up a whole new chapter of activism and local political involvement in the South.

This chapter explains the history of regulation in the United States. Since its founding, the United States has had alternating periods in which government was perceived as an essential partner in building a good society and periods in which government was seen as a hindrance. Each cycle lasts about a generation, and the latest antigovernment, neoliberal period is coming to a close. By way of example, the early 19th-century Mercantilist period witnessed the construction of the nation's basic economic infrastructure; the Populist/Progressive period at the end of the 19th century saw the establishment of the modern administrative state with the creation of the government institutions needed to combat concentrated corporate and industrial power; and the 20th-century's New Deal/Great Society era expanded economic and democratic participation for more and more citizens. Interspersed with those pro-government generations were three laissez-faire periods that experienced growing economic inequalities and democratic declines.

This chapter discusses how and why civil rights was a priority for President Johnson during his first two years in the White House. Within days of becoming president, after the shocking assassination of John F. Kennedy in Johnson's home state of Texas, LBJ signalled his overwhelming commitment to the civil rights cause. He met regularly with civil rights leaders to discuss legislative developments, the appointment of African Americans to key political positions, and the Great Society programs that benefited the African American community. The high point of his association with the civil rights movement came with the passage of two pieces of landmark legislation: the Civil Rights Act of 1964 and the Voting Rights Act of 1965. Chapter 4 discusses the part played by the Selma to Montgomery marches in Johnson's legislative plans and examines the high political cost of his commitment to civil rights after his overwhelming victory in the 1964 presidential election