“A War within Our Own Boundaries”: Lyndon Johnson’s Great Society and the Rise of the Carceral State Downloaded from https://academic.oup.com/jah/article-abstract/102/1/100/686903 by guest on 06 January 2019 Elizabeth Hinton Over the five summers of Lyndon B. Johnson’s presidency, the nation witnessed more than 250 incidents of urban civil disorder. The violence—termedriots by policy makers, journalists, and the public—swept American cities and resulted in the deaths of more than two hundred black Americans, thirteen thousand injured civilians and officers, and the destruction of billions of dollars worth of property. Beginning with the killing of an unarmed black fifteen-year-old boy by New York City police that sparked the Harlem riot in July 1964, the uprisings constituted a prolonged and sporadic conflict involving more than one hundred thousand black participants and law enforcement officials. By the close of the 1960s these uprisings—sparked not by white hostility to integration like earlier race riots but by the presence of exploitative and exclusionary institutions in black neighborhoods—constituted the greatest period of domestic bloodshed the nation had witnessed since the Civil War.1 Unprecedented in its fury and frequency, this disorder radically reshaped the direc- tion of Johnson’s Great Society programs, resulting ultimately in a merger of antipoverty programs with anticrime programs that laid the groundwork for contemporary mass in- carceration. The links that the fire of urban discord forged between the fighting of crime and the fighting of urban inequality were established as early as 1965, in the three pieces of legislation that represented the Johnson administration’s legislative response to the civil rights movement. In March of that year, the administration presented to Congress the Elizabeth Hinton is an assistant professor of history and African and African American studies at Harvard Univer- sity. I am deeply indebted to Heather Thompson and Eric Foner for their insights and mentorship. Heather in par- ticular has generously offered advice on numerous drafts of this article, and I am grateful for her challenges and en- couragement. I must also thank Ira Katznelson, Julilly Kohler-Hausmann, Khalil Muhammad, Donna Murch, Mae Ngai, and Vesla Weaver for advancing my thinking on this subject. Readers may contact Hinton at [email protected]. 1 These figures are compiled from Senate Committee on Government Operations,Riots, Civil and Criminal Disorders: Hearings before the Permanent Subcommittee on Investigations on Riots, 90 Cong., 1 sess., Nov. 1, 2, 3, 6, 1967; Lemberg Center for the Study of Violence, Riot Data Review (no. 1, May 1968); ibid. (no. 2, Aug. 1968); ibid. (no. 3, Feb. 1969); and Otto Kerner et al., Report of the National Advisory Commission on Civil Disorders (New York, 1968), 6, 35–108. Notable historical treatments in the expansive literature on the riots include Sidney Fine, Violence in the Model City: The Cavanagh Administration, Race Relations, and the Detroit Riot of 1967(East Lansing, 2007); Robert M. Fogelson, Violence as Protest: A Study of Riots and Ghettos (Garden City, 1971); Gerald Horne, Fire This Time: The Watts Uprising and the 1960s (Charlottesville, 1995); Michael B. Katz, Why Don’t American Cit- ies Burn? (Philadelphia, 2011); and Kevin Mumford, Newark: A History of Race, Rights, and Riots in America (New York, 2007). doi: 10.1093/jahist/jav328 © The Author 2015. Published by Oxford University Press on behalf of the Organization of American Historians. All rights reserved. For permissions, please e-mail: [email protected]. 100 The Journal of American History June 2015 Johnson’s Great Society and the Rise of the Carceral State 101 Downloaded from https://academic.oup.com/jah/article-abstract/102/1/100/686903 by guest on 06 January 2019 Policemen attack a man at 133rd Street and Seventh Avenue during the Harlem uprising in July 1964. Photograph by Dick DeMarsico. Courtesy Library of Congress, Prints and Photo- graphs Division. Housing and Urban Development Act, which subsidized private homes for low-income renters; the Voting Rights Act, which gave black Americans in the South the opportunity to participate in the electoral process as full citizens; and the Law Enforcement Assistance Act, which broke with two hundred years of national policy and established federal influ- ence over local police operations. Reflecting on these three bills, and on already-operating programs such as Job Corps, Head Start, and Youth Opportunity Centers, Johnson de- clared his hope that 1965 would be remembered not as the apex of American liberal re- form but rather “as the year when this country began a thorough, intelligent, and effective war against crime.” A new era in American law enforcement had begun.2 These and other measures blended the opportunity, development, and training pro- grams of the War on Poverty with the surveillance, patrol, and detention programs of Johnson’s newly declared “War on Crime.” This entanglement of Great Society policies al- lowed law enforcement officials to use methods of surveillance that overlapped with social programs—for instance, antidelinquency measures framed as equal opportunity initia- tives—to effectively suffuse crime-control strategies into the everyday lives of Americans in segregated and impoverished communities. In time, the entire spectrum of domestic 2 Lyndon B. Johnson, “Statement by the President on Establishing the President’s Commission on Law Enforce- ment and the Administration of Justice,” July 26, 1965, American Presidency Project, http://www.presidency.ucsb .edu/ws/?pid=27110. 102 The Journal of American History June 2015 social programs actively participated in national law enforcement, thereby pushing the boundaries of the carceral state beyond penal institutions. By the time Johnson’s Omnibus Crime Control and Safe Streets Act passed in 1968, the carceral state had already begun to metastasize into a vast network of social programs originally created to combat racial exclusion and inequality. In response to rioting, however, these programs had shifted in purpose toward controlling the violent symptoms of socioeconomic problems. Ironically Downloaded from https://academic.oup.com/jah/article-abstract/102/1/100/686903 by guest on 06 January 2019 and tragically, as antipoverty and anticrime initiatives became increasingly entwined, nei- ther the political coalition that privileged the “forgotten civil right” to safety nor the black activists who sought equality and full democracy realized the society they imagined.3 Scholars have recognized the role of the riots in mobilizing white backlash and the sub- sequent rise of conservatism, moving liberal sympathizers away from egalitarian policy, and precipitating the federal government’s retreat from progressive social reform. Yet the threat the uprisings posed to American law and institutions also needs to be understood as the central catalyst behind the punitive turn in twentieth-century domestic policy. Remembering Johnson’s presidency for its monumental civil rights legislation and social welfare initiatives, historians and political scientists tend to explain his embrace of the politics of “law and order” as an electoral tactic: a reappropriation of Barry Goldwater’s platform during the 1964 presidential contest and a necessary concession made to the emerging coalition of southern Democrats and western Republicans to secure the enact- ment of antipoverty and civil rights bills. Thus, Richard M. Nixon is usually credited for spearheading the War on Crime, even though he inherited an already-vibrant law en- forcement infrastructure created by the Johnson administration. Far from being ambiva- lent about crime control as a major aim of domestic policy, Johnson and his radical do- mestic programs laid the foundation of the carceral state, opening an entirely new plane of domestic social programs centered on crime control, surveillance, and incarceration.4 The turn toward substituting confinement for opportunity programs resulted both from the urgency created by the rising disorder and from the way that Johnson and allied policy makers understood urban citizens’ decision to respond to their conditions with 3 Works that similarly understand the carceral state as a network of programs strongly tied to the welfare state include David Garland, Punishment and Welfare: A History of Penal Strategies (London, 1985); David Garland, The Culture of Control: Crime and Social Order in Contemporary Society (Chicago, 2002); Michel Foucault, Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison (New York, 1977); Julilly Kohler-Hausmann, “Guns and Butter: The Welfare State, the Carceral State, and the Politics of Exclusion in the Postwar United States,” Journal of American History, 102 (June 2015), 87–99; and Loïc Wacquant, Punishing the Poor: The Neoliberal Government of Social Insecurity (Durham, N.C., 2009). 4 Thomas Byrne Edsall and Mary D. Edsall,Chain Reaction: The Impact of Race, Rights, and Taxes on Ameri- can Politics (New York, 1991); Lisa McGirr, Suburban Warriors: The Origins of the New American Right (Princeton, 2002); Michael B. Katz, ed., The “Underclass” Debate: Views from History (Princeton, 1993); and Michael B. Katz, The Undeserving Poor: From the War on Poverty to the War on Welfare (New York, 1990); Matthew D. Lassiter, The Silent Majority: Suburban Politics in the Sunbelt South (Princeton, 2006); Douglas S. Massey and Nancy A. Denton, American Apartheid: Segregation and the Making of the Underclass (Cambridge, Mass., 1993); Rick Perlstein, Nix- onland: The Rise of a President and the Fracturing of America (New York, 2008); Jill Quadagno, The Color of Welfare: How Racism Undermined the War on Poverty (New York, 1994); Sean Wilentz, The Age of Reagan: A History, 1974– 2008 (New York, 2008). Placing race at the center of her analysis, Vesla M. Weaver breaks from the dominant view and describes the rise of federal crime-control policies as a “frontlash” to the upheaval of the “second reconstruc- tion.” See Vesla M. Weaver, “Frontlash: Race and the Development of Punitive Crime Policy,” Studies in American Political Development, 21 (Fall 2007), 230–65.