Americans were stunned by the thought that they had lost the very charming, very charismatic president who gave American politics even within sophisticated Europe the reputation of a quite high level of sophistication itself.  But now Americans awakened to the realization that with Vice President Johnson now as the new U.S. President, that style was gone, very gone.  Instead Johnson gave off the appearance of being simply another Southern "good old boy."

But appearances can be quite deceiving!

With the assassination of the young President Kennedy in 1963,  actually in Lyndon Baines Johnson (LBJ) a quite sophisticated (in his own way) veteran of Capitol Hill politics now assumed the Presidency.  Lyndon Johnson's political goals were similar to Kennedy's: a Liberal Democrat who emphasized the importance of American civil rights and also one who understood that Communism was still the greatest threat to America.  However, his political strategy and style in addressing these challenges to America was drastically different.

At the time Johnson stepped into the American Presidency, "government" meant the Americans themselves.  The state did not rule.  The people ruled.  A formal government consisting of the people's representatives existed solely to service the people and their general will, as the people themselves directed these representatives (the power of the voting booth).  The economy belonged to the people as consumers and their private businesses that answered their consumer demands.  Educational policy belonged to the American families and their local school boards.   Health care belonged to the people and their doctors.

National government was largely left only to deal with international issues, as had been the intention of the original Framers of the Constitution, and had largely been the pattern since then.¹

Of course, the Great Depression and then World War Two had challenged deeply that view.  During that time period (the many years of FDR's presidency) the Washington political Establishment had taken a very commanding position in American life.  But those periods were considered merely temporary, necessitated by the extreme demands facing America in those days.  It was also expected, and indeed seemed to be the case, that when those emergencies were put behind the country, it would then return to national business as usual.

Thus it was that going into the new Johnson presidency, there was still little sense that the national government in Washington had any important role to play in the nation's domestic affairs.  True, there was the huge domestic program, Social Security, a pension fund for the elderly, managed by the national government.  But in this the Washington government was considered to be only the caretaker of this huge pension fund, not the owner of it.  Social Security too belonged to the people.

In any case, there seemed to be little reason under the new president for things to change in Washington, other than simply a different personality now living in the White House.  There were no earth-shaking national crises that required a dramatic shift in America's "business as usual."  True there were issues at hand, as always. Black civil rights was an issue needing national attention.  But Congressional politics, voicing the changing will of the American people on this matter, was supposedly quite sufficient to handle this matter.  And as far as foreign policy was concerned, the Cold War was still on, but not really much changed in character over the recent years.  And again, Washington's small but capable foreign policy teams in the White House and Congress seemed more than able to handle this challenge, as it had since the end of World War Two.

Thus it was that Americans, stunned by the tragic loss of President Kennedy, nonetheless carried on, expecting things to continue forward pretty much in a rather widely accepted traditional manner.

But actually, all this would all change – change drastically – during the five years of Johnson's presidency.  And this was because the new president brought to Washington politics a very different understanding of what "business as usual" was supposed to look like.

¹The 10th Amendment – the famous "Reservation Clause" – concludes the Bill of Rights: The powers not delegated to the United States by the Constitution, nor prohibited by it to the States, are reserved to the States respectively, or to the people.  This meant that unless the Constitution had specifically assigned powers to Congress to act in certain matters, all other political activities were reserved to the States and the people ... the federal counterbalance of the states in "checking" the powers of the national government – against the tendency of all ruling bodies to want to expand their powers at will.  But such checks on central (Washington, D.C.) power would be put aside during the Johnson years.

In Cold War terms, what Johnson was doing seemed at the time to make great sense. To win the ideological struggle with international Communism, America was truly going to have to shine.  It would have to conduct a war of its own on any American social blemish that the Communists might pounce on as a way of embarrassing America, thus advancing the Communist cause.  No more cruel treatment of racial minorities.  But also, no more pockets of poverty, of illiteracy, of poor health anywhere in America.

"Civil rights" thus began to take on a broader social definition – not just legal voting rights empowering individuals to move unrestrictedly in shaping their own personal destinies, but the rights of everyone in America to enjoy the full blessings of American citizenship, blessings placed in their hands by a caretaker government operating above them.  These were their "entitlements" as Americans.  And the political machine that Johnson directed in Washington D.C. was going to be a center of command that would bring this new system of social entitlements into existence.  This political machine was to be the means by which Johnson's Great Society would be built.

What Americans did not understand at the time was that they were handing their political powers, the basis of American democracy, over to a professionally-run state, which would then govern autocratically – because supposedly (at least as members of this autocracy themselves believed) this enlightened super-state was in a better position to deliver the goods for the Americans than supposedly they could do this for themselves.  Thus Americans began to find themselves falling into a state of dependency on the powers of Washington and its officers.

Tragically, this was the same understanding that ancient Republican Rome² moved to when it transferred the power of the people over to the efficiently-run Roman legions, with the presumption that this would not only better serve Rome, but would also better serve the Romans themselves.  And thus the Roman Republic had become the Roman Empire.  And with that, Roman society would fall into a moral laziness, one that even eventually infected the autocratic leaders that Rome looked to for correction and guidance.

What America did not know at the time was that they were about to make the same bargain with the powers-that-be in Washington.

On May 22, 1964, standing before students graduating from the University of Michigan, Johnson announced the particular details of his new Great Society program that he was about to launch.  He began by explaining how through invention and industriousness America had progressed over the generations to being a rich and powerful society … but how today

we have the opportunity to move not only toward the rich society and the powerful society, but upward to the Great Society.

More particularly he stressed, first of all, the importance of rebuilding an even stronger urban America – not only materially in the face of such challenges as offering housing for all, containing suburban sprawl, and improving urban infrastructure, but also in developing a stronger sense of community within urban America.  He claimed literally that we needed to rebuild the entire urban United States over the next forty years.

Secondly, the Great Society would look to the preservation of America's beautiful countryside – threatened by pollution, overcrowding and the disappearance of its fields and forests.

And thirdly, the Great Society would ensure that all young Americans were given the opportunity for a complete education, in high school and college.  This required better teacher training and the development of the love of learning among America's youth.

Those three items, urban development, protection of the countryside and the improvement of American education formed the heart of his New Society proposal.  And how was all of this going to be brought to fulfillment?

Johnson stated:

While our Government has many programs directed at those issues, I do not pretend that we have the full answer to those problems.

But I do promise this: We are going to assemble the best thought and the broadest knowledge from all over the world to find those answers for America.  I intend to establish working groups to prepare a series of White House conferences and meetings on the cities, on natural beauty, on the quality of education, and on other emerging challenges.  And from these meetings and from this inspiration and from these studies we will begin to set our course toward the Great Society.

The solution to these problems does not rest on a massive program in Washington, nor can it rely solely on the strained resources of local authority.  They require us to create new concepts of cooperation, a creative federalism, between the National Capital and the leaders of local communities.

Johnson would rebuild the Democratic Party around his Big Government vision (some would say "Big Brother" vision, as in the Orwellian understanding of the term).  Ultimately this would serve to deepen immensely a growing cultural split separating not just American Blacks and Whites, but also the very Christian middle-class and very Secular intellectuals.  It would also separate the rising generation of Boomers, and their Vet parents.

One side in this split, now represented by the Republican Party were the White, Christian Middle Class Vets, who would become very suspicious of this rapid growth of Washington's powers, seeing "government" taken from their hands and transferred to an unchecked Washington bureaucracy – and an equally activist federal judiciary.

On the other side of this split, now represented by the Democratic Party, were those social groups, the "minorities" (or later, "victim groups") as they saw themselves, whom the Great Society was especially designed to promote.  In particular the Democratic Party enlisted the voting support of Blacks, who clearly had fallen well behind White society in their ability to work themselves upward economically and socially.  According to the Democratic Party, Blacks would need a lot of "affirmative action," that is, special governmental support to compensate for and ultimately eliminate the disadvantages they experienced in their quest for social status and cultural importance.  They were "entitled" to such special treatment (federal government programs³) because of prejudice they and their ancestors had experienced at the hands of White racism, supposedly now identified with the "privileged" White middle-class Republican voter.  In taking up this line of racist thinking they conveniently overlooked the fact that it was young White males who fought and died by the hundreds of thousands in the 1860s (America's Civil War) so that their Black ancestors might be set free from the scourge of slavery.

But the category of "minorities" would come also to include women, some women anyway, at least those who tended to feel that the professional world (dominated by men) was more important for them and their futures than the traditional world of family – and thus would see men as their adversaries rather than as colleagues in life as they pushed ever deeper into the professional world.

To this list would also be added gays and lesbians, Hispanics, American Indians – and even intellectuals (professors, journalists, media celebrities), soon joined by college-aged Boomer youth very ready to undertake a great crusade against the "Establishment" of White, Protestant and "straight" males.

The second half of the 1960s would thus become a time of massive (and frequently quite violent) change in the very character of American democracy. "Democracy" would still refer to the ideal of whom the government served ("the people"), but it would no longer refer to the ideal of who it was that actually directed such service.  Government would take on the character of rule more by elitist decree and less by popular consent and active support.  Increasingly "the government" would become less and less the public will and more and more the will of professional politicians filling the growing ranks of unelected (and virtually unremovable) officials directing the very expensive and very expansive federal bureaucracy ... and the equally expansive (in terms of political-cultural scope) federal judiciary.

But supposedly such government by the legal and technical experts would "progress" greatly the democratic character of society.⁴  But Marxism-Leninism (Communism) also made the same claim.

And indeed, Johnson's Great Society program involved a distinct move toward Socialism and away from the Puritan-founded grass-roots democracy that had been the very political foundation of America, at least in the American North and West, and with the outcome of Civil War a century earlier, becoming finally the political ideal of all the country.

Now under Johnson's skillful political management, the Democratic Party would identify itself as the party of the "Liberals," meaning (in other social contexts such as that of Europe) the "Socialists."  Furthermore, most of Johnson's work would remain intact after his departure from office at the beginning of 1969, to the extent that the massive buildup of government officialdom in Washington, D.C., and the governmental financial debt that went with it, not only remained in place but would continue to grow in the years ahead – a social dynamic carefully defended and protected by the mass of political technicians making up this huge and unshakable Washington Establishment.

American intellectuals had been under fire during the 1950s as being questionably patriotic because they did not adhere closely to the American Middle-Class cultural system so dominant everywhere in the nation.  Now in the 1960s – with memories of World War Two and the considerable sacrifices that Middle America undertook to save the nation now fading from view – these alienated intellectuals saw their chance to retake what they thought was their natural position as national leaders.  Intellectuals now saw before them the rise of a newly emerging political culture, one directed not by middle-class citizenry but by professionals from the upper or "high-brow" reaches of American culture.  Not only were these American intellectuals detached from middle-class values, they were strongly opposed to them and sought their removal from the central position in the American culture that they had occupied for centuries.

Now a newly rising federal state provided a particularly useful place for them, as trained social managers, to put their new cultural revolution into effect (the nation's press and universities being additional platforms from which to conduct this same intellectualist revolution).

A result of this gathering social shift in the 1960s was a huge battle which also began to develop at this time in the various social science departments (sociology, economics, political science) of America's universities.  This battle pitted a body of rising "social scientists" against the old guard of professors who approached their subjects on a rather historical/philosophical basis.  This rising group of quite idealistic scholars were typically the younger members of the department, very optimistic about their "social science" that they intended to bring to the study of society, and very contemptuous of the old-fashioned approach to the subject pursued by the older members of the department.  These older professors had long approached the study of politics more as a matter of narrating historical events which offered not only a laboratory of social examples to draw lessons from but also moral or inspirational insights into political behavior in general.  But for the newly rising group, it was time to move past such an antiquated methodology.

The younger academics called themselves "Behaviorists," taking cues from the science of psychology which claimed to be making tremendous progress through the new behaviorist theory in putting human behavior under experimental laboratory analysis (with marvelous mathematically precise results that could be presented as statistical charts and graphs), and thus under better control by the doctors of psychology.

The young social scientists had the same vision: to approach the study of social dynamics from a rather clinical or experimental angle.  Obviously, however, no one can put an entire society under a carefully-controlled laboratory experimentation. So what they proposed to do was to uncover great social truths by conducting carefully-controlled experiments in small-group social behavior.  But how they exactly planned to expand small-group theory to serve mass-group theory (the dynamics are actually quite different) was never explained – nor for that matter ever discovered.  But these young idealists had not yet advanced to the stage of confronting such social reality quite yet.  In fact, they were not in a hurry to get there either!

Nonetheless, they were religiously certain that they would eventually uncover the truly scientific (purely "mechanical") principles of the behavior of whole societies, principles that would allow the doctors of society to better control society's dynamics – in order to institute proper political-social-cultural (even intellectual and spiritual) reform of society, the very kind of approach that Johnson's Great Society Program was calling for.  Indeed, these young and energetic academics were looking forward to the opportunity to become consultants, or even full-time directors in the building of this new Great Society.  They were quite certain that their new "social science" would allow them to manage society on a much better basis, ending the haphazard traditional approach which seemed to them to offer little of substance in the effort to perfect society.

These young Behaviorists took their inspiration from their ranks of young economists, already being trained and prepared to manage not only business firms or corporations but the financial and industrial systems of entire countries (and the rising international economic system led by American capitalism).  The young Behaviorists of all social studies fields were certain that they could soon achieve in their own social studies fields the goal of developing something equivalent to Samuelson's Economics, the economics textbook of the 1960s found in virtually every American university (and many European universities as well).  Samuelson's textbook was a virtual manual on good economic management. It offered charts, graphs, tables, algebraic formulae that seemed to cut through the mystery of wealth and its creation and distribution, making economics truly a science. Supposedly such precise, mathematically-derived insights into economic  behavior could finally solve not just the problems of the rise and fall of market trends, but the very matters of wealth and poverty themselves.  Economists (who flocked to Washington in huge numbers) were certain that they possessed the factual foundations to truly bring the Great Society into being – a society of vast prosperity and economic justice.

From the point of view of the other experts in the fields of the new social science, this could, and should, be done in their social-intellectual disciplines as well.  They were also going to make their contributions to the prosperity and justice that awaited the development of the Great Society.

And indeed, as it turned out, they would soon (very soon) have a front seat in observing exactly how all this new "science" was going to bring America to the state of social perfection.

³The Democratic Party's extensive government programming – which gave the multitudes of new government "experts" their jobs as well as their sense of political importance – made this army of technocrats also major supporters of the Democratic Party.  Republicans who came to Congress to cut back on the nation's massive governmental expansion would thus automatically find themselves opposed, even effectively undercut, by their natural opponents in Washington's technocratic "deep state."

⁴Actually, this was not a new interpretation of "democracy."  It paralleled quite closely Wilson's and FDR's understanding of the concept as well.

And the federal judiciary would also get drawn ever more deeply into this new political attitude.  Regional Circuit Court and national Supreme Court Justices would take up the cause of legal progressivism over the objection of a smaller group of "originalists" in the judiciary who were opposed to such a development.  Judicial activists would not merely sit in judgment of the proper application of the law, but move to reshape those laws, even laws properly passed by Congress and signed into law by the President, when various federal judges felt that circumstances warranted a more "progressive" application of those laws.

In short, the federal judiciary was becoming not only the Supreme Court but also the "Supreme Legislature" of the United States, with no known checks available to block such judicial overreach, except for (usually, Republican) Presidents to appoint more originalists to the bench whenever vacancies occurred.  Thus the battle in the U.S. Senate over confirming new presidential appointments to the federal judiciary would become increasingly bitter as America moved down the road of judicial activism.  The very idea of American democracy was at stake in those appointments.

With Representative Celler's success in undercutting the momentum of the Becker Amendment in the House, the Congressional effort to back the Supreme Court off its anti-prayer, anti-Bible-reading position in public education now moved to the Senate.  In March of 1966, the Republican Party's Senate Minority Leader Everett Dirksen of Illinois took up the cause by introducing in the Senate a constitutional amendment (the Dirksen Amendment) similar to the failed Becker Amendment.

In the time period since the failure of the Becker Amendment, Christian denominations had continued to struggle in deciding where exactly they stood on this matter of prayer and Bible-reading in their schools.

In general, the denominational leaders and national officials still seemed opposed to any such Amendment, continuing to claim that the Court was actually trying to protect the right of prayer and Bible-reading in America, not undercut that right. But clearly the Christian rank-and-file laity were seeing things quite differently.  Even the Baptists, with a long history of wanting to keep the affairs of religion and state entirely separate in order to protect their religion (not protect the state), found themselves drawn into this controversy as well.  At their 1964 summer meeting, delegates to the Southern Baptist Convention argued heatedly over the matter, finally finding a compromise – which probably resolved nothing on the matter.

Over the next months the issue simmered on the back burner, as other issues (civil rights, Johnson's Great Society Program, the Vietnam War) received most of the country's focus.  But by 1966, Congressmen were receiving so many letters of Americans still concerned about the matter of prayer and Bible reading in their schools that Dirksen (after having helped put much of the civil rights legislation through to successful adoption) turned his attention to this religious matter, he himself being a very strong believer in the importance of prayer in the life of America and its people.

Debate in the Senate followed typical Liberal-Conservative lines, as outside groups also lined themselves up for or against the Dirksen Amendment:

Nothing contained in this Constitution shall prohibit the authority administering any school, school system, educational institution or other public building supported in whole or in part through the expenditure of public funds from providing for or permitting the voluntary participation by students or others in prayer.  Nothing contained in this article shall authorize any such authority to prescribe the form or content of any prayer.

In September of 1966 it was time simply to bring the matter to a vote before the full Senate.  The results were 49 in favor (nearly all Republicansand most of the Southern Democrats) and 37 opposed (3 Republicans and the rest Democrats) to the amendment. ⁵  Failing by nine votes to gain the necessary 2/3rds vote for a constitutional amendment, the matter died.

But the moral-spiritual division that had developed over this this issue of prayer (and the place of God) in the development of America's future generations did not die.  It merely clarified how deeply the nation was split on a matter of fundamental importance to its very moral-spiritual character.

⁵Still to this day it is not clear why the Democrats are so readily opposed to the role of Judeo-Christianity in the life of the nation.

\Also at this same time another major shift in the American cultural profile was taking place, this one within the Black community.  Young Blacks were growing more radicalized as shifts in the racial status quo began to occur. Despite quite visible progress in getting a cultural shift moving in America – one attempting to make way for Blacks to come into full and equal participation in American society – it was never fast enough for young Blacks.  This rising group of young and quite militant Blacks was beginning to voice its deep hostility to the White society around it, a White society that it claimed was still standing in the way of Black development.

By 1965 that hostility was taking the form of attacks on White businesses in Black neighborhoods, even pillaging and burning them in demonstration of the outrage that was growing in their hearts against White injustice.  And the crime rate within Black communities began to skyrocket.  The social order seemed to be crumbling rather than improving with the government's efforts to better the lot of Blacks in America.

Idealistic or Liberal Whites could not understand this strange response of the Blacks to White efforts at reform.  They probably had never heard the term "the revolution of rising expectations."  They did not understand that people long compliant to oppressive authority do not automatically rise up to throw off their chains just because the oppression is great.

Idealists (such as, for instance, Karl Marx) however believed/believe religiously that this was how the noble human spirit would automatically and inevitably produce the great revolution that would one day usher in the class-less, state-less, totally egalitarian, totally voluntary society (voluntary with respect to a person's willingness to work hard for the common good).  As oppression worsened, people would begin to move automatically toward revolution, even violent revolution.

But things just do not work out that way in the real world.  People actually are quite able to accommodate themselves to their chains.  This is not a very noble picture of human nature.  But it is a realistic picture.  Action moving people to change things does not happen until the people begin to have reason to believe that change is possible.  They will not throw off the way they have learned to live with oppression until they are fairly confident that change, that some kind of release from the oppression, is possible.

Then once they see the system bending or cracking, they begin to become bolder in their push for change.  As the oppressing system begins to back down, they then easily become irate and indignant at the injustice of the way things were and impatient waiting for reform or change.  Once they finally see that things are moving in their favor, they then become defiant, even heroic in that defiance. That's when they finally become truly "revolutionary."  But not until then.

Thus the more that the White society began to accommodate Black interests in the 1960s, those interests began to gather momentum, until they became truly a storm of passion.  It was not because just at that point that oppression was just starting to get severe, but because at that point the severity of it seemed to be lifting.  Then all the impatience at the slowness of the process of change began to set in.  Then the anger mounted, then the violence picked up.  This was the phenomenon the Whites were observing, rising Black militancy in response to the Whites' honest interest in seeing an improvement in the Black situation.

But the Whites had no idea of why the more they tried to improve things, the more indignant and resentful the Blacks became.  It was just human nature.  But American Idealists had (and still have) very little accurate insight into human nature.  They had made man into a rational, loving man-God.  But this man-God was behaving neither rationally (as Idealists understand "rational") nor lovingly in the American streets as the 1960s rolled along.

The White effort to make sense of their Idealistic universe gradually took the form of either 1) a rising White self-hatred and the deep need to apologize for their ancestors having left such a horrible legacy of racism (the typical response of self-shaming Liberal intellectuals and Boomers), or 2) a rising White bitterness about the Blacks' inability to maintain a decent sense of law and order among themselves (the typical response of the Vets).  Political lines were beginning to be drawn up for battle as the situation in America worsened.

At the same time, America was now witnessing a deepening of the bitterness of Black America as high expectations for rapid progress in Black social development failed to be met immediately by the "system."  Young Blacks now turned on the system in anger, looting and burning the world immediately around them.  In 1965, the Watts section of Los Angeles was looted and burned, also involving thirty-four deaths in the accompanying violence, done so to the refrain of "Burn, Baby, Burn" ... with police sirens answering back in refrain as Black Power advocates were carted off to jail, either as self-sacrificing heroes or dangerous criminals, depending on which side of the ideological divide you found yourself on.

The arrest of a Black cab driver in Newark, NJ in mid-July of 1967 also set off a rampage by Blacks in that city.  Firebombs and looting degenerated into sniper shooting.  A curfew was imposed on the city, which slowly restored order.  But eleven people had been killed, 600 wounded or injured and whole sections of the city were completely gutted by fire.

When several days later a prescheduled National Unity Conference was held in that city, the language was one not of unity but of declared war.  Black power advocate H. Rap Brown urged the gathering to "wage guerrilla war on the White man."  Los Angeles Black Nationalist Ron Karenga stated "Everybody knows Whitey's a devil. The question is what to do about it."

Meanwhile, moderate Black leaders such as Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., Roy Wilkins, and Whitney Young, Jr. avoided the conference.

In late July, violence broke out in Detroit.  Learning from Newark, Detroit mayor Cavanagh immediately called in the National Guardsmen.  But seven thousand Guardsmen, complete with tanks and armored cars, could not restore order. Governor George Romney (who was understood to be a potential Republican candidate for the Presidential election in 1968) contacted President Johnson for assistance.  Johnson held back until Romney confessed before the public that he had lost control of the situation.  Then Johnson sent in U.S. paratroopers to retake the city, house by house, block by block, similar to a Vietnam military action.  When a week later the troops had brought Detroit back to order, forty-three people had been killed and over a thousand injured.

Meanwhile the violence spread to New York City where a 28,000-man police force with experience in riot control restored order to East Harlem after three nights of violence.  Two people were killed.

H. Rap Brown had in the meantime moved on to Cambridge, Maryland, and following a Black-power rally there, the town was subjected to looting and arson. Brown was arrested for inciting a riot.  As he was led away by FBI agents, Brown challenged: "We'll burn the country down."

Faced with this confusing and mounting crisis, Johnson appointed a study commission to investigate the root causes of the violence.  What it announced in its preliminary report in late February of 1968 indicated a situation of high expectations among the Blacks for extensive social reform, met with little practical chance that such improvements would actually come about quickly.  Also, the inner cities abandoned by White flight to the suburbs left Blacks who had migrated to the northern cities with no jobs and a rapidly deteriorating urban infrastructure. Educational levels were very low, with poor and dangerous schools able to provide no remedies.

It quickly became the assumption within Johnson's Great Society government that huge amounts of governmental money were going to have to be poured into the inner cities where Blacks had congregated to correct these problems of jobs, schooling and housing.  Clearly, Johnson's government had no expectations that the Black communities would be able to address or correct these social challenges themselves.  They would have to come to depend on government "assistance" – on a massive scale – if any serious improvement in the Black social situation were ever to occur.

And thus it was that Black society began to understand its rights as outlined by the Johnson Administration, and thus to begin to demand not only assistance but also compensatory action on the part of the national authorities.  Blacks demanded their rights be honored by those in power, not just rights to equal opportunity in the pursuit of their personal destinies, as Dr. King had expressed the dream, but rights to special advantages (affirmative action) and compensations (public welfare) for past wrongs, in other words preferential treatment or "entitlements." In this they would be joining the Boomers in their understanding of the role of the American government, and their sense of citizenship entitling them to be receivers from, rather than contributors to, the strength of the nation.

Sadly this would lead only to a form of social-cultural dependency on political favors and handouts, ones that would block a robust personal growth arising from the self-help that was historically typical of how Americans were supposed to work their way to success.  This kind of political dependency would slow rather than speed up the advance of Blacks in American society economically and socially.

But it did serve conveniently to give the federal state in Washington all the justification it needed to expand its social management programming "from above."  And it created a whole new category of professional "community developers" whose role was to help redistribute or divert the nation's wealth in the direction of their particular political constituencies.

It was the same game that urban bosses had played with immigrants coming to their cities in the late 1800s and early 1900s.  "Support us in power and we will support you in the way you live out your lives on a daily basis."  But now it was a game being played with America's "minorities" by the national bosses operating out of their offices in Washington, essentially played for the same reason that motivated the old urban bosses: to receive continuing political support from their political wards (their minority clients) so as to be able to stay in power, or better yet, so as to be able to expand their power bases.

It was an old political game that shifted locations simply in accordance with the fact of where American power was to be found.  As power shifted to Washington, so did all the old political dynamics shift along with it.  This was just crude power dynamics at work, not the scientific social management that the Behaviorists dreamed of.

Although this problem did not present itself in as dramatic a form as other events of the times, nonetheless a huge financial problem was brewing, one that threatened the health of the government and the nation.  By 1967 the amount of government spending involved in both Johnson's Great Society and his heavy military investment in Vietnam was outpacing enormously the government's income from all of its tax sources.  A huge deficit or government debt began to build up as a result.  In that year a Commission on Budget Concepts studied the problem and concluded that a proposed 1968 national budget was going to entail a (what was then huge) deficit of anywhere from $2 to $8 billion in size.

Using the justification of "rationalizing" the entire national or federal government budgeting process, including the Social Security budget, which at that time was largely self-running and not considered part of the national budget (or "off budget"), the Commission recommended integrating the Social Security budget with the regular operating budget of the federal government.  At that time the Social Security program, originally focused on retirement or pension benefits of Americans but in 1965 adding also Medicare (health insurance for the elderly) and Medicaid (health care for the poor, shared as a joint expense with the States), was actually running a huge surplus, taking in each year in the form of Social Security tax revenue more than it was spending for its various programs.  By combining the deficit-running federal budget with the surplus-running Social Security budget, the government's budget deficit built up by Johnson's programs could now be recast as being greatly reduced, or possibly even be shown as running a surplus.

Thus in January 1968, Johnson introduced the new unified budget.  Yet even with the inclusion of the Social Security surplus with the regular federal budget, Johnson was forced to admit that the new unified budget would still be running up a $8 billion deficit (the government's expenditures were turning out to be vastly greater than anticipated in 1967).  But the figure was a lot lower than it would have been without adding in the Social Security surplus.