A Freedom Budget for All Americans - MR Book Excerpt

A Freedom Budget for All Americans

By Paul Le Blanc and Michael D. Yates, Monthly Review Press
Excerpted and adapted from Paul Le Blanc and Michael Yates, “A Freedom Budget for All Americans: Recapturing the Promise of the Civil Rights Movement in the Struggle for Economic Justice Today” (New York: Monthly Review Press, 2013).

Inseparable from the goals projected by the historic 1963 March on Washington for Jobs and Freedom, the Freedom Budget for All Americans was advanced in 1966 by A. Philip Randolph, Bayard Rustin, and Martin Luther King, Jr., central leaders of the activist wing of the civil rights movement in the 1950s and ’60s.  It promised the full and final triumph of the civil rights movement.  This was to be achieved by going beyond civil rights, linking the goal of racial justice for African Americans with the goal of economic justice for all Americans.  Randolph, Rustin, and King – as we document in our book – from their earliest years as activists for social change, believed in the need for a society in which our economy would be socially owned, democratically controlled, and utilized to meet the needs of all people.  It can be shown that this socialist commitment was reflected in their strategic orientation to end racism.
The Freedom Budget proposal could be seen, and by some was seen, as being related to the twentieth-century liberalism that was ascendant in U.S. politics from Franklin D. Roosevelt’s New Deal to Lyndon B. Johnson’s Great Society.  But its dimensions and implications were far more radical.  It projected the elimination of poverty within a ten-year period, the creation of full employment, decent housing, health care and education for all people in our society as a matter of right.  This was to be brought into being by rallying massive segments of the 99% of the American people in a powerfully democratic and moral crusade embracing the civil rights movement, the labor movement, progressive-minded religious communities, students and youth as well as their elders. 
The defeat of this effort helped set the stage for an historic defeat for all of these constituencies.  The crises of the twenty-first century’s first two decades cannot be separated from these defeats – just as keys to the positive resolution of those crises may be found in an exploration of what the Freedom Budget was, where it came from, what it might have done, and why it was defeated.
This defeat was related, in part, to a well-financed and steady, and soon accelerating, conservative onslaught that culminated in the right-wing triumph of the Reagan-Bush years.  If the Freedom Budget had been successful, a majority of the voters would not have responded positively to candidate Ronald Reagan’s challenge to Democratic incumbent Jimmy Carter when the conservative hopeful asked the American people, at the conclusion of a televised 1980 debate: “Are you better off than you were four years ago?  Is it easier for you to go buy things in the stores than it was four years ago?”
The 1980s victory for “free market capitalism” (embraced by most conservative Republicans and by many Democrats in succeeding years) has – sadly – made things worse for the great majority of the people over the four decades that followed, although certainly not for the wealthiest and most powerful 1%.  Living standards, health, education, welfare, public transit, urban and natural environments, working conditions, job satisfaction, and more have dramatically declined.
For many U.S. residents back in the 1960s, this future was unimaginable.  Since the 1930s, capitalism had yet to face another global downturn, and the common wisdom was that there would not be another. U.S. politics had been more or less dominated by a relatively generous social-liberalism since the coming of President Franklin D. Roosevelt’s New Deal during the Great Depression, maintained to a significant degree by Republicans as well as Democrats. 
In 2008, many hoped the Presidency of Barack Obama would bring us back to that better, more hopeful, more generous world (personified in the minds of many by John F. Kennedy), and in a way that would be even more inclusive and more just than what had been possible in the 1930s and 1940s of FDR’s America.  Obama’s enemies cursed this darkly as “socialism” – and for some of his supporters, that “S” word seemed not so horrible after all.  But the realities of the Obama administration never matched his rhetoric, and even his rhetoric fell far short of what Roosevelt eloquently expressed during the Second World War as his vision of the post-war future of the United States, in the call for an Economic Bill of Rights.
The Radicalism of the Civil Rights Movement
In fact, the civil rights movement would not have been successful, to the extent that it was, without the active involvement of conscious and organized socialists. 
Jacquelyn Dowd Hall, in a survey of the scholarship covering the complex and multifaceted story of what she calls the “long civil rights movement,” has noted that both conservative and liberal defenders of the social-economic-political status quo have done much to dilute and “sanitize” what really happened.  Martin Luther King Jr. is presented as “this narrative’s defining figure – frozen in 1963, proclaiming ‘I have a dream’ during the march on the Mall.”  Selective quotes, repeated over and over and over, result in his message losing its “political bite”:

We hear little of the King who believed that “the racial issue that we confront in America is not a sectional but a national problem” and who attacked segregation in the urban North. Erased altogether is the King who opposed the Vietnam War and linked racism at home to militarism and imperialism abroad. Gone is King the democratic socialist who advocated unionization, planned the Poor People’s Campaign, and was assassinated in 1968 while supporting a sanitation workers’ strike.

For more, go to the TruthDig site at which this Monthly Review book excerpt first appeared. 

FDR Didn't Govern from 'the Center' -- Neither Should Obama

From alternet.org, another articulate voice calling on President-elect Barack Obama to govern in a progressive direction, not from the cautious, timid center:

Gray Brechin, "FDR Didn't Govern from 'the Center' -- Neither Should Obama":
We can't forget what bold and ingenious leadership can accomplish against the caution of low expectations in harsh economic times.
House Speaker Nancy Pelosi wasted no time cautioning Americans that they should not let their hopes run away with them just because the Democrats scored an electoral landslide. Calling herself a "proud progressive," Pelosi advised president-elect Obama's supporters to exercise the diminished expectations of political prudence: "The country must be governed from the middle," she said a day after his victory.

November marked the 75th anniversary of one of the least known relief agencies to come out of the New Deal -- the Civil Works Administration. At a time when the press regularly fuses FDR's jaunty image with that of Barack Obama's -- and when the president-elect himself vows to create 2.5 million new jobs within two years as "a plan big enough to meet the challenges we face" -- we should remember how much more one short-lived agency accomplished through the winter of another economic crisis.

The Speaker, whose father represented Baltimore as a New Deal Democrat, must know that Franklin Roosevelt did not govern from the middle. He chose a Midwestern social worker steeped in the Social Gospel movement at Iowa's Grinnell College to run his relief programs, Harry Hopkins knew that legions of impoverished Americans could not wait for the cautious policies of Harold Ickes' Public Works Administration to provide them with jobs. Neither could his boss.

On November 9, 1933 President Roosevelt issued an executive order creating the Civil Works Administration. He did so by moving $400 million ($6.4 billion in today's dollars) previously allocated to the PWA into the CWA account. A meeting of governors, mayors and other public officials six days later at Washington's Mayflower Hotel effectively launched the agency.

Five days later, Eleanor Roosevelt hosted a White House gathering to organize women's participation in the program. Three days after that -- with the Government Printing Office working round the clock to cut checks -- CWA workers shared wages of almost $8 million. On November 28, Hopkins created a Civil Works Service to employ white collar workers as teachers, surveyors, artists, nurses, librarians, musicians, and other public servants.

By December 7 -- less than a month after Roosevelt's executive order -- the CWA had two million Americans working on a vast array of socially beneficial projects. By January 18, employment had doubled to more than four million. U.S. population was then less than half of today's.

Hopkins likened the CWA workers to foot soldiers with the difference that, "The results achieved have been the reverse of those usually brought about by old-style wars." The CWA's work was, like the title of a famous William James essay, "the moral equivalent of war." As such Hopkins noted that "Hardly a community but can show some lasting benefit derived from Civil Works activities: a street paved, a school-house reconditioned, a nursery school installed, a new playground."

CWA workers toiled through a hard winter building and repairing 244,000 miles or roads, laying water and sewage mains, constructing 350 swimming pools and 4000 athletic fields. Their jackhammers broke frozen ground to make Newark's airport, one of a thousand built around the country. New York Park Commissioner Robert Moses set three shifts of CWA crews working around the clock to renovate Central and Prospect Parks. A team of artists painted frescos in San Francisco's Coit Tower while CWA orchestras and bands performed concerts free to the public. The agency employed as many as 50,000 teachers and built or refurbished 4000 schools to revive the nation's dying public education system. CWA workers restored historic buildings and launched the Historic American Building Survey which continues to meticulously record historic structures for the Library of Congress 75 years later.

Hopkins and Roosevelt intended the CWA only to bridge an emergency. It was terminated on March 31, but the Depression, unfortunately, was not. A year later, the more famous Works Progress Administration picked up where the CWA had left off, employing 8.5 million people in its seven productive years. Harry Hopkins ran that as well.

Hopkins hoped that "Long after the workers of the CWA are dead and gone and these hard times are forgotten, their effort will be remembered by permanent useful works in every county of every state." Alas, he was wrong, though as he predicted we "ride over bridges they made, travel on their highways, attend schools they built, navigate waterways they improved, do [our] public business in courthouses and state capitols which workers from CWA rescued from disrepair."

Unlike the WPA, the CWA left almost no markers to commemorate the achievements of four and a half months of heroic activity. We unwittingly take the achievements of the CWA -- like so much else of the New Deal -- for granted while the New Deal's eternal enemies echo the fable that federal workers did little but lean on their shovels. But as winter approaches, the CWA's record reminds us of what bold and ingenious leadership can accomplish against the caution of low expectations in harsh economic times. Indeed, it must.