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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.

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.

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.

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 shows that amid the aspirations of the Great Society, the expectation that non-elderly welfare recipients should seek wage work became hitched to the demands of older Americans for care. Home care became a jobs program on the cheap. Senior activists won the Older Americans Act and Medicare. But rather than a middle-class entitlement, long-term care became more tightly identified with welfare when Medicaid turned into the chief means to obtain such services. Through manpower training and “New Careers,” the War on Poverty made AFDC recipients into home aides: poor mothers could become rehabilitated by caring for other poor, dependent, or incapacitated people. But civil rights, seniors, public sector unions, and welfare rights activists challenged the state over the nature and extent of social assistance. Their struggles would reshape home care again, this time through confrontations between state governors and county welfare offices; public sector unions and government employers; welfare mothers and mayors. This history illuminates the shift in the aim of the welfare state from providing security to the ending of dependency.

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.

Chapter three reviews the history of American federalism as a story of competition between compelling principles in tension with one another, stretching the legal framework in one direction and then overcorrecting in another. Visualizing operative federalism theory as a four-dimensional pendulum, the chapter describes it swinging freely over time among the independent federalism values—pointing to a favorite at one period in history and another in a different era. Ongoing uncertainty about how judicial doctrine should resolve these issues is reflected by the Court’s vacillating case law over this time period. Chapter three traces the swing of the pendulum through American history, casting its arc in terms of shifting theories about how best to balance competing values. Its fluidity reflects the combined forces of gradual ideological oscillation and occasionally violent tug of war as social events impact the evolution of interpretive federalism theory. The chapter begins with the difficulties that the pioneers of American federalism faced in deciphering what their new concept of dual sovereignty would mean in practice, from the national bank to the southern nullification challenges to the Civil War. Dual federalism emerged as the theoretical touchstone of the nineteenth century, establishing the classical idealism for which later dualist models would yearn. Even so, the challenges of jurisdictional overlap were clear as early as the Federalist Papers and the Constitutional Convention’s replacement of the Articles of Confederation. The chapter then explores federalism’s tug of war during the second half of American history, focusing on the twentieth century. It reviews the Progressive and Lochner eras, the Great Depression and the New Deal, the Civil Rights Movement and Great Society eras that led to the entrenchment of cooperative federalism under the Warren Court, and finally the New Federalism challenge under the Rehnquist Court.

We cannot directly infer from common property resource regimes the principles to govern great societies. Hayek has argued that there can be no social justice in great societies, but this view relies upon a mistaken theory of parliamentary legislation and a misunderstanding about the scope of social justice. In looking at the great transformation, we note that the political institutions of great societies rest upon an historical consolidation of authority that creates a fundamental pluralism of interests. The political institutions are representational democracies, Westminster systems or liberal constitutionalist. The most notable feature of the economy in the great society is the economies of scale associated with the division of labour. The household ceases to be the basic unit of production. Although there is a movement from community to association, the great society creates its own forms of interdependence

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.

This introductory chapter gives a broad overview of the book. It also lays out a framework for how to understand neighborhoods. They rarely have official status, and are instead cultural constructs whose very existence depends upon the ongoing investments (psychological and material) of residents. Neighborhoods are also constantly in flux. The chapter illustrates this by showing how the borders of the Mission have changed dramatically across the twentieth century. The chapter shows that neighborhood identity has been inextricably bound up with ethnic identity. Finally, the chapter argues that more histories should focus on smaller urban scales, rather than only on the municipal scale.

The chapter reviews policy development over time, arguing that the unique features of a single period of policymaking better explain policy history than macro politics models relating political inputs to policy outputs. From 1961–1976, the American federal government enacted hundreds of significant new public policies that dramatically expanded its scope and responsibility. The period effect associated with the Long Great Society is the most important determinant of changes in the productivity and policy direction of all branches of government since 1945. Changes in public opinion, partisanship, and ideology predict neither this era’s success nor the aggregate patterns of policy change outside of the period. A large and diverse cross-issue governing network—held together by a core of interest groups, long-serving legislators, and four successive presidents—enabled extensive liberal policymaking. Rather than a policymaking system responsive to public opinion or party control, what emerges is a single unique era driven by system-level changes in the governing network.

Neighborhood groups like the Mission Council on Redevelopment and later the Mission Coalition Organization were eager to collaborate with the SFRA. But under urban renewal law, the SFRA was unable to give neighborhood groups veto power over any specific plan. Primarily for this reason, neighborhood groups came out against the plan, eventually succeeding in blocking it. Soon thereafter, Mayor Joseph Alioto nominated the Mission for a grant under Model Cities, a Great Society program that funded neighborhood-based planning efforts. Thus was created the Mission Model Neighborhood Corporation (MMNC), a local planning authority. Collaborating with the SFRA, the MMNC built public housing, began social programs, and had a number of other successes. Though it was a multiethnic organization, it received some challenges from the Latino left, particularly a group called Los Siete de la Raza. However, the chapter argues that the ultimate failure of the organization is best explained by the Nixon administration's defunding of Model Cities.

By the 1960s the urban renewal program was well underway, and it was largely controlled by the downtown planning regime. The San Francisco Redevelopment Agency (SFRA) had cleared over 1,280 acres in the Fillmore (or Western Addition) neighborhood, displacing more than 13,500 people, mostly African Americans. As the built environment of the Mission District deteriorated, local institutions began to worry that the SFRA might be planning something similar for their neighborhood. They also worried that the coming BART stations might trigger speculative displacement. In response, a social service agency called the Mission Neighborhood Centers (MNC) produced a study of the Mission in 1960. The document identified problems with a deteriorating environment and inadequate services, but also identified strengths in the neighborhood's multiethnic character and longstanding institutions.

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?  

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.

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.