“NEW POLITICS” in “THE EDUCATION MYTH”
NEW POLITICS
Democrats and Opportunity in a Postindustrial Society
As the United States celebrated its bicentennial in 1976, political economic turbulence suggested the third hundred years in American history would be very different than the second hundred. Stuck in the doldrums of an economy marked by both sluggish growth and inflation, American industries faced a profit crunch, and employers’ efforts to increase profits by curtailing workers’ rights and sending capital elsewhere was undermining the family-based economic security many blue-collar workers had grown to expect just at the time that advances in civil rights and feminism meant women and people of color were getting greater access to those jobs. In both major parties, there were existential debates about the nation’s political future. On the Republican side, conservative Ronald Reagan, pushing tax cuts, fiscal responsibility, and less government as the response to the crisis, sought to challenge the moderate wing of the party. More and more Democrats, increasingly adhering to professional-class notions of meritocracy, responded ambivalently to the nation’s economic problems. While some Democrats sought new advances in social democracy, including resurrecting the right to a job, other, recently elected, Democrats represented a growing professional-class constituency, and instead sought to advance public education and limit big social interventions, even at a time of massive economic crisis.
It is fitting that sociologist Daniel Bell’s widely influential book The Coming of Post-Industrial Society was published in a new edition that presidential election year. Based on a series of essays written over the course of the 1960s and 70s (the earliest was written in 1962), Bell first brought them together in book form in 1973. In the foreword to the 1976 edition, Bell pointed out that he was forecasting a future, “an as if based on emergent features,” in which American society would be largely organized around service work, information, and the production of knowledge. What was “emergent” in the 1970s, Bell argued, were “the foundations of a vastly different kind of social structure than we have previously known.” The sociologist described a society in which a “knowledge class” was growing more powerful. Charting the shift beyond a society whose economy and ethics were driven by manufacturing, Bell pointed out that 65 percent of workers in the United States toiled in the service sector and 70 percent were projected to do so by 1980. As opposed to the service sectors of other societies in history (highly unequal societies with large numbers of poorly paid domestic workers, for instance), these services in the postindustrial society were increasingly built around knowledge construction (such as education) and other human services like healthcare. Importantly, this also meant an increased role for women workers, who disproportionately did service-sector work, and of course, constituted the majority of workers in the biggest single knowledge sector occupation in the United States: teachers.1
Finally, Bell, putting his finger on the transition within the Democratic Party, poignantly asserted that this society would be one built around, in theory, the principle of meritocracy: “A post-industrial society, being primarily a technical society, awards place less on the basis of inheritance of property (though these can command wealth or cultural advantage) than on education and skill.”2 Certainly one can see here why so many of the architects of the Great Society—especially Johnson, who clearly believed in the alchemical powers of education—had valued education’s ability to help the poor overcome their supposed deficiencies. Following this premise, a meritocratic society built on equal access to education and reward for skill-building would ensure every American was responsible for their own success or failure in acquiring a good job.
The Coming of Post-Industrial Society also made clear another problem that seems especially obvious today. This new order brought with it a growing political resistance to those left out of the knowledge economy: “Any new emerging system creates hostility among those who feel threatened by it,” Bell concluded. “The chief problem of the emerging post-industrial society is the conflict generated by a meritocracy principle which is central to the allocation of position in the knowledge society. Thus, the tension between populism and elitism, which is already apparent, becomes a political issue in the communities.”3 Some Republicans understood this: Kevin Phillips, writing in the New Republican Majority in 1969 had already highlighted how Republican populists were counterposing the GOP to a new establishment professional class emergent in the 1950s and 1960s.4
This chapter documents the political shifts of the 1970s, a decade that was perhaps more crucial than any other in the rise of the education myth. At the same time that blue-collar workers faced downward pressure on their livelihoods and more working people, especially women, joined the already low-wage service sector, increased access to higher education continued to produce more and more professional-class workers, who did comparatively better than those without college degrees. As this demographic became central in the party’s New Politics in the 1970s, Democrats’ commitment to broad political economic interventions, even in a time of dire economic crisis, wavered.
Social democrats did not simply capitulate, however. Indeed, senator and presidential candidate Hubert Humphrey, California representative Augustus Hawkins, activist Coretta Scott King, and others fought hard to reinvigorate the social democratic premise of the New Deal during the economic crises of the 1970s. By the end of the decade, however, the once robust promise of economic security had been critically diminished. In particular, the failure in Congress in 1978 of both labor law reform and, for the last time, a meaningful jobs guarantee represented crucial, resounding defeats.
President Jimmy Carter, a technocrat more responsive to the nation’s growing professional class, only ambivalently supported these reforms. Perhaps his most important achievement, in fact, was to elevate education to its own cabinet-level department in the federal bureaucracy. By itself, establishing a stand-alone Department of Education could have augured well for an expansion of American social democracy—had it been one important piece of advancing a vision of enabling freedoms that included a jobs guarantee, healthcare, and labor reform. In contrast to the promise of the Great Society, however, which envisioned some basic, though insufficient, level of security combined with additional educational opportunity, by the end of the 1970s, education was increasingly left alone to facilitate a mere chance at economic security. Indeed, by the decade’s conclusion, the myth that human capital was singularly responsible for economic opportunity had emerged at the center of American politics.
New Politics and the Rise of the Professional Class
The Democratic primary of 1972 represented a watershed for the party. Though the GOP had not achieved unified control of government since Roosevelt and the New Deal order shifted the trajectory of American politics in the 1930s, the Democratic Party coalition—middle-class liberals and working-class people—had been tenuous since the fractures that became evident in the election of 1968. With the Democratic Party facing both the brunt of the New Left’s anger over the Vietnam War and the anger of racial minorities against a color-blind liberalism that seemed incapable of ending institutional racism in the United States, Richard Nixon emerged to show how the GOP (mobilizing the nascent right-wing populism Phillips referenced in the Emerging Republican Majority) could feed off the resentment of the “great silent majority.”5 In response to the calls of young people, antiwar activists, feminists, and civil rights activists, the Democratic Party underwent a series of reforms in the years between the disastrous 1968 election and the election of 1972 to make the party more inclusive.
Some have argued that in the 1970s Democrats shifted toward the politics of radical “special interests,” losing white working- and middle-class voters who believed the GOP could better represent the “center.”6 It is true that the reforms leading up to the 1972 campaign empowered what was called the New Politics, and these reforms disempowered the traditional brokers, particularly labor leaders, who had been important in selecting Democratic nominees since World War II. The most important interest directing the shift in the party, however, was the growing class of white-collar professionals thriving in what Bell argued was becoming a postindustrial society. With the American economy increasingly relying on human services and technical knowledge, the locus of power in the Democratic Party was shifting toward a growing professional class. There are a number of different metrics we could use to highlight this shift, but perhaps the simplest is to examine the number of Americans with a postsecondary education. In 1940, about 7.5 million Americans aged twenty-five and above had attended at least one year of college (about 10 percent of the total population), and about 3.4 million were graduates. By 1965, those numbers had increased to 18.8 million (18 percent of the total population) and 9.7 million, respectively. By 1972, the respective numbers were 25.5 million (23 percent) and 13.4 million. And by 1976, 33 million Americans over the age of twenty-five had attended college (28 percent) and about 17.5 million had graduated.7 Further, in just the first six years of the 1970s, the number of white-collar workers increased by 3 percent each year, while blue-collar workers decreased by about the same percentage.8 Amendments to the HEA, first in 1972, which expanded grants to low-income students and barred institutions of higher education from discriminating against women, and in 1978, which expanded access to grants and federally subsidized loans, further increased access to college.9
It wasn’t only that more Americans were going to college. By the early 1970s, a greater percentage of college students were thinking about postsecondary education as a specific avenue toward a profession, and thus identifying as a “professional.” In 1973, for instance, New York Times reporter Iver Peterson recounted a trend called the “new vocationalism.” A “survey of campus correspondents,” he reported, showed “college students around the country are changing their tastes in studies away from many of the abstract and theoretical courses that were popular during the 1960’s and toward studies that teach ‘hard knowledge’ or that lead to professional training and a comfortable career.” Academic advisers pointed out that programs in “premed, prelaw, business, nursing, agriculture and the newly developing health-sciences and handicapped-training courses” were “swelling.” As Peterson pointed out, more students were consciously seeking out a professional path, as the “security” it offered “was a greater consideration today than it was five years ago.” The piece also suggested that as budgets got stretched in state legislatures during economic downturn, many lawmakers wanted students to “be devoted to studies that turn out men and women able to do the jobs that most need to be done.”10
It was in this context that Patrick Lucey, Democratic candidate for governor in Wisconsin in 1970, ran on the prospect of merging the UW campuses and the state college system. Appropriations on a per-student basis for the state university system had been much lower than for the four UW schools (Madison, Milwaukee, and the recently created Green Bay and Parkside), and both Lucey and other stakeholders argued that creating one streamlined system would be the best way to mitigate the pressure on the budgets of both systems in the 1970s. Recognizing the growing importance of higher education in the state, Lucey, as governor-elect, held a series of one-day hearings in December 1970 on important priorities for his agenda. “Creating a Responsive Higher Education System” was the first. And the way the Lucey administration described the hearings is illuminating: the new governor believed there was a “need to maintain, develop, and expand a higher educational system that prepares Wisconsin people for professional careers and allows for individual advancement,” including “the suitability of University and State University graduates for the Wisconsin and national job markets.”11
The state was facing both a major budget shortfall due to the 1970 recession and a continued demand to expand the university system, and Lucey sought to merge the state universities and the UW campuses. The governor proposed a bill to merge them in March, and on October 6, 1971, the state legislature approved it. Lucey signed it into law a week later. The new system included thirteen campuses and fourteen freshman-sophomore “centers,” and it was now the third largest in the nation. In large part the merger was about economizing (projecting to save $4 million in administrative costs), but Lucey also sought a common educational vision for the state. Clearly, the consolidation of the system occurred in the context of a demand from business for a more skilled work-force, though the Lucey administration did not view that as the only reason for the university system.12 The system’s new mission, which still guides the UW today, emphasized first and foremost, “the development of human resources” in a broad effort, with employment at its center, to develop citizens capable of operating in a complicated world:
The mission of the University of Wisconsin System is to develop human resources, to discover and disseminate knowledge, to extend knowledge and its application beyond the boundaries of its campuses, and to serve and stimulate society by developing in students heightened intellectual, cultural, and humane sensitivities, scientific, professional and technological expertise, and a sense of purpose. Inherent in this broad mission are methods of instruction, research, extended training, and public service designed to educate people and improve the human condition. Basic to every purpose of the UW System is the search for truth.13
The growing number of college-educated professionals, as historian Lily Geismer convincingly argues in her study of suburban Boston, believed that American society was a meritocracy in which they had succeeded. Since they had been able to access a professional career and individual success through the education system, so should everyone else. These professionals enthusiastically backed McGovern in 1972, and though their economic success in the job market had stemmed from federal support for roads, housing, and military-industrial development, they had no problem with efforts to shift away from the security-oriented politics of the New Deal order and toward market reform. Indeed, Geismer examines a program in Massachusetts called the Metropolitan Council for Educational Opportunity (METCO), which in the late 1960s and early 1970s bused a select number of African American children to mostly white suburban schools. The premise of the program hinged on the notion that better education was the key to alleviating the inequality that existed between whites and Blacks. Far from equalizing education on a systemic level, the gains of the limited number of children who could access METCO helped to give suburban professional-class liberals “a means to distinguish themselves as more open-minded than whites in the south or South Boston [and] made them even less willing to consider more comprehensive solutions to the interrelated issues of residential segregation and educational inequity.”14
Though progress on equalizing the quality of public education moved slowly but steadily from the Supreme Court’s modest push for “all deliberate speed” in Brown v. Board of Education II (1955) through the late 1960s, a series of conservative Supreme Court decisions in the 1970s sharply delimited the notion that the US education system was a real meritocracy or that it was likely to become more meritocratic. With four Supreme Court appointments during his five years as president, Nixon shifted the court in a much more conservative direction. In 1973, for instance, the court’s decision in San Antonio Independent School District v. Rodriguez determined states did not have any obligation to ensure poor school districts were funded at the same level as wealthy districts. The next year, in Milliken v. Bradley, the court struck down a metropolitan remedy to segregation in Detroit, arguing suburban school districts could not be forced to participate in a desegregation plan unless there was both an “interdistrict violation and interdistrict effect.” Since there was no evidence suburban school districts had committed discriminatory actions, the court argued, Detroit and other cities were therefore left on their own to redistribute resources within the district while excluding the much-better-resourced suburbs.15
Democrats gained a large congressional majority in 1974 as a result of Watergate and Nixon’s resignation, but some of the most important New Politics Democrats ushered in by that midterm election were committed to the meritocratic promise of education and particularly the optimism that new technology would bring new jobs.16 Well-educated professionals themselves, many of the Democrats elected that year shared the same ideology of the nation’s growing number of knowledge workers. For instance, it was 1974 when McGovern’s former national campaign director Gary Hart won a Senate seat in Colorado from an incumbent Republican.
Sociologists Barbara and John Ehrenreich characterized the problem of this growing professional class in critical terms. As they argued in a now famous article in Radical America in 1977, the educated professionals who represented the vanguard of the postindustrial society—what they called the Professional-Managerial Class (PMC)—did not have the same interests as the blue-collar manufacturing workers (and low-paid service sectors) whose livelihoods were under duress in the 1970s. The Ehrenreichs pointed out that as early as the beginning of the twentieth century, the class structure in the United States and other capitalist countries was not being divided, as Marx and Engels predicted in the Communist Manifesto, into a small number of capitalists and a large immiserated working class, but into an increasingly complex society in which “new, educated and salaried middle-class strata had appeared and were growing rapidly.”17
The Ehrenreichs argued that, rather than an aberration to be worked around, middle-class “technical workers, managerial workers, ‘culture’ producers, etc.—must be understood as comprising a distinct class in monopoly capitalist society.” The labor of these workers was built on knowledge (as Bell had argued), they were paid salaries instead of hourly wages, and most importantly, they were marked by the contradiction that while they did not “own the means of production, [their] major function in the social division of labor may be described broadly as the reproduction of capitalist culture and capitalist class relations.” Middle-class professionals thus shared a common economic interest as well as a “coherent social and culture existence” including “a common lifestyle, educational background, kinship networks, consumption patterns, work habits, beliefs.” This group increasingly served to mediate the class conflict that existed in American society: they were the social workers, psychologists, and teachers who served as “a force for regulation and management of civil society.” The Ehrenreichs concluded, in fact, that that the relationship between the PMC and working-class people was “objectively antagonistic.”18 Thus while the PMC might resent the greed of the capitalist class, they also often acted with “elitism toward the working class.”19 As Barbara and John Ehrenreich readily acknowledged, there were members of the PMC who consciously sought not to serve the interests of capital and to ally with workers. Broadly speaking, however, the growing number of professional-class Americans did appear to be pushing for interests different than many working people, connecting education specifically to a professional career and building their lives around the dubious principle that individual effort in the education system led to just economic and social rewards.
Noncollege-educated workers were clearly on a downward trajectory in the 1970s. Over the course of the decade, two million American manufacturing jobs were lost, and entire industries—like textiles and steel—shrank as national policymakers in both parties failed either to protect them from international competition or use microeconomic planning to reinvigorate them.20 As the historian Lane Windham has shown, workers tried hard to form new unions in blue-collar and nonprofessional service work but saw renewed resistance from employers at every turn, and were not as successful in their efforts to organize as workers in previous decades had been.21 The struggle in the Democratic Party in the 1970s, then, was about more than radical rights-based special interests versus labor power brokers. Instead, the competition was a fundamental struggle about whether the party and its leaders were going to advocate for policies that would prioritize technological development and the supposed meritocracy of education or, as Bell had argued for in his conclusion of The Coming of Post-Industrial Society, for a “just meritocracy” that would also include strong union rights, sustainable blue-collar livelihoods, the right to a job for every person who wanted one, and other social guarantees.
From Job Training to Jobs Guarantee
In 1968, Richard Nixon ran as a conservative alternative to liberal Nelson Rockefeller, successfully wresting away the Republican nomination by mobilizing the growing populist wing of the party. Though chaos in the Democratic Party over the Vietnam War redounded to Nixon’s benefit that year, his win also clearly represented a rightward shift in American politics. The Nixon administration helped advance a conservative version of the education myth by pushing for job training for workers, though without extending any of the already limited advances in economic security Democrats had sought in the Great Society.
Here the Nixon administration built on liberal support for direct federal investment in adult job-training programs that began in the 1960s. As early as the late 1950s many American politicians and labor leaders had grown to fear the impact of automation on jobs. In 1960, for instance, the US Senate established a permanent subcommittee—the Subcommittee on Employment and Manpower—to study the issue and recommend possibilities. Two years later, Kennedy signed into law the Manpower and Training Development Act (MDTA), which provided federal funds to retrain workers who lost jobs due to automation.22
Political interest in the problem of automation continued well into the 1960s. A. Philip Randolph, for example, worried about the impact of automation on African Americans, who often worked on the lowest rungs of the employment ladder, referencing the problem in his speech at the March on Washington in 1963. A little less than a year later, Congress established the National Commission on Technology, Automation, and Economic Progress. Chaired by Howard Bowen, economist and president of the University of Iowa, the commission also included Daniel Bell, UAW president Walter Reuther, and president of the National Urban League Whitney Young. The commission recommendations, reported to President Johnson in 1965 (and published in 1966), connected the relationship between technology, productivity, and the “substantial and persistent unemployment during the period 1954–65.” The commission was careful to point out that the overall impact of technology was positive, but it also unequivocally stated that automation reduced jobs. “It is the continuous obligation of economic policy,” the commission argued, “to match increases in productive potential with increases in purchasing power and demand.”23
How did the commission recommend doing so? Unsurprisingly, a commission in which social democrat Reuther played a major part called for the federal government to provide employment as a “last resort” in addition to a “family income” floor. But the report also helped advance a narrative of the importance of job training, arguing that lack of education, not technology, provided the biggest threat to the future: “Unemployment tends to be concentrated among workers with little education, not primarily because technological developments are changing the nature of jobs, but because the uneducated are at the ‘back of the line’ in the competition for jobs.” In addition to calling for direct job creation, then, the report also called for robust investment in compensatory education (then underway, of course, as ESEA had just been introduced by the administration), increased access to higher education, and “lifetime opportunities for education, training, and retraining, and special attention to handicaps of adults with deficient basic education.”24
The Great Society’s emphasis on job training and education were instituted with the notion that they could solve the deficiencies of the poor to help them overcome poverty, and the reality was a much thinner investment in economic security than Reuther, Young, and others called for in the commission. So while the Johnson administration pushed for policies around job training for the poor, just as had been the case with its investment in public education, the failure to ensure there were actually jobs available gave credence to the idea that since the federal government provided funding for education and job training, the poor only had themselves to blame if they could not find work.
As a conservative, Nixon had little appetite for major expansions of government programs, but he was more than willing to support job training. As was the case for his predecessor, focusing on the skills of workers was a palatable way to show evidence his administration sought to increase possible avenues toward economic security without altering the nation’s social structure. Under the influence of libertarian economist Milton Friedman (a contemporary of Theodore Schultz and Gary Becker), Nixon’s secretary of labor (another Chicago school economist named George Schultz) pushed to lower the minimum wage for younger workers and for a law that would automatically increase federal funding for job training when national unemployment moved above a certain threshold. The administration’s Philadelphia Plan also sought to broaden access to skilled work by forcing all-white building trades unions to hire a certain number of minorities in order to be eligible for federal contracts. Nixon did not want to create jobs outright, however: in 1970, he vetoed a bill that would have created forty thousand public service-sector jobs.25
A recession in 1969–70 gave Democrats, like New Jersey representative Dominick Daniels, space to push direct job creation back onto the political agenda. By December 1970, unemployment had reached 6.1 percent and persisted around that level through 1971.26 Under pressure from Democrats, Nixon reluctantly signed into law an emergency jobs bill in 1971. Two years later, Nixon and Congress compromised on another bill that reorganized the MDTA and OEO and decentralized job-training responsibilities from the federal government to local governments, called “prime sponsors.” In exchange, the Comprehensive Employment and Training Act (CETA) of 1973 also fulfilled Democrats’ growing calls for public service jobs.27
CETA was far from the jobs guarantee Rustin, Randolph, Reuther, and others argued for in the late 1960s. But as unemployment remained high—it increased from 5.1 percent in January 1974 to 7.2 percent by the end of the year—Congress was able to amend the law, now titled the Emergency Jobs Act of 1974, to include a reservoir of public service jobs and put direct job creation back in the political mainstream.28 Introduced by Representative Daniels in October, the bill was passed after the election of 1974, the post-Watergate election that had given Democrats a huge congressional majority. Signed into law on New Year’s Eve by Republican president Gerald Ford, the Emergency Jobs Act ultimately provided $2.5 billion for the direct creation of public employment.
More important, the bill rekindled an argument for the central role of a jobs guarantee and, thus, a dramatic expansion of American social democracy. Eli Ginzberg, chair of the National Committee for Manpower Policy, connected the bill to past efforts to ensure full employment in his testimony to Congress that October. The economist argued, “We have never seriously implemented the Employment Act of 1946. . . . I see the growing stress on public service employment as one of the critical areas by which Congress over a period of years can come closer to delivering on its 1946 promise.” Ginzberg criticized the direction of American politics in the 1960s, asserting that focusing on training “avoided the job issue” of ensuring everyone who wanted to work could do so.29 Similarly, the AFL-CIO’s representative at the hearings, Research Director Nathaniel Goldfinger, pointed to the necessity of public service jobs. Goldfinger, in fact, acknowledged that investment in job training “while important and necessary . . . must be followed by a job if it is to have any value. It compounds the problem to give training and hope to the disadvantaged and then throw them back into the morass from which they came.”30
Although the Emergency Jobs Act put direct job creation squarely back on the map, its impact on employment was minimal. By not establishing employment as a right for everyone, it allowed many “prime sponsors” to use federal funding to defray the costs of jobs they would have filled anyway instead of bringing new workers into the labor market.31 Compared to the Full Employment Act promise of 1945, the Emergency Jobs Act was quite limited. Still, recommitting to the principle that the government could create a reservoir of public service jobs helped to rekindle a bigger conversation about the future of social democracy in the United States.
No Guarantees
In 1976, the Democratic field for president was wide open. Social democratic Senator Hubert Humphrey (MN) was an early favorite but withdrew because of health concerns. With a slew of liberal candidates like Representative Morris Udall (Arizona), labor’s first choice Henry “Scoop” Jackson (Washington), and white supremacist George Wallace (Alabama), Georgia governor Jimmy Carter faced a crowded field. Carter ran as a Washington outsider who would restore honesty and dignity to the federal government. Indeed, the peanut farmer won the primary in part because of a national mood opposing Washington insiders (stemming from Watergate), and the fact that not enough voters coalesced around any other competitor in a crowded field.
Many unions did not see Carter as a candidate capable of reinvigorating the labor movement or social democracy in the United States. Once the primary was over, however, labor joined forces behind Carter.32 Though the AFL-CIO did not endorse McGovern in 1972, they came back around to supporting the Democratic candidate in 1976. The federation’s public endorsements, however, are telling in their lukewarm embrace of Carter himself. A late August statement from the AFL-CIO’s general board focused on the poor record of Gerald Ford and centered their endorsement around the Democratic Party platform. That platform sought a recommitment to social democratic programs, including economic planning and eliminating unemployment, extending collective bargaining rights to public employees, and repealing section 14(b) of the Taft-Hartley Act, which allowed states like Carter’s Georgia to pass its antiunion “right-to-work” policy. Although the AFL-CIO praised Carter’s commitment to racial justice, much of the argument for supporting him came down to his character and leadership abilities, not a record of social democratic vision or policy achievement.33
The National Education Association (NEA) and its members, however, embraced Carter and played a major role in helping him win both the nomination and a closely contested general election against Ford. For the vast majority of its existence the NEA had been primarily devoted to advancing the cause of education and lobbying for better salaries for teachers and other school personnel (including administrators). Only in the late 1960s did the NEA fully embrace the notion of its locals collectively bargaining. It did not expel administrators from its ranks until the early 1970s, and it never affiliated with the AFL-CIO.34 In fact, after the NEA established a Political Action Committee in 1972, Carter was the first presidential candidate the union ever endorsed. Having sought to elevate education in the federal bureaucracy since before the Civil War, the NEA and its members saw in Carter a candidate finally willing to place education on par with other cabinet-level priorities. The NEA and its locals were instrumental in turning out the vote for Carter in November.35
Doing so, both NEA leaders and rank-and-file members believed, would once and for all establish the professionalism of the teaching occupation. Indeed, since the onset of common schools in the nineteenth century, teachers had been expected by administrators and parents to act like professionals, but they were rarely treated accordingly.36 In the late nineteenth century, teaching provided, at least for women, both a status and salary that was higher than that for most other women workers. The price, however, was foregoing a family and often being left with nothing on which to retire. Indeed, there was a great irony in the teaching profession: for most of American history, many teachers clearly fit the PMC paradigm, enforcing notions of temperance and middle-class morality, and some helped discipline new generations of working people and stanching social unrest just as Horace Mann had hoped. And yet, it was largely during the times when teachers acted as working-class people did—organizing in unions, participating in demonstrations, and withholding their labor (or at least threatening to)—that they were able to win sustainable salaries, job security, and more control over their workday.37 Though the NEA certainly appreciated Carter’s racial liberalism, the promise of elevating the status of education was its major reason for backing him.
Democrats held enormous majorities in both houses of Congress going into the election of 1976, and so even though Carter beat Ford by a slim margin, he came into office with his party in the driver’s seat. Though Democrats had unified control of government for the first time since the Johnson presidency, Carter’s commitment to broad social democratic principles was limited, and the vision of the new generation of Democrats elected after Watergate was similarly limited. Organized labor believed Carter would work with Congress to pass a sweeping law to even the odds against the growing attempts by corporations to prevent workers from organizing. Many working people hoped Carter and Congress could strengthen the position of American jobs in an increasingly global economy in which capital much more systematically sought cheaper labor elsewhere.38 Public employee union leaders like Albert Shanker, president of the AFT, sought a federal law ensuring collective bargaining rights, including the right to strike, for all state and local workers.39 Social democrats such as Humphrey, California representative Augustus Hawkins, and civil rights activist Coretta Scott King tried to work with the new administration to finally guarantee every American the right to a job.40
Though the New Deal had prioritized families and the family wage, the fight for Humphrey-Hawkins and labor reform occurred during a moment in which feminists, welfare activists, and others had worked to disconnect economic security from the breadwinner model. Though they were not fully successful—and provoked a backlash of “breadwinner conservatism” in the 1970s and beyond—feminists had very much changed the parameters of how many Americans thought about jobs. Women workers were entering the workforce in large numbers in the decade, in part a consequence of the decline of manufacturing and pressure on male workers’ wages, but also because of equal opportunity enforcement stemming from the Civil Rights Act of 1965 and the Equal Opportunity Commission led by women’s rights activists. So too were Black workers breaking into jobs from which patterns of discrimination in the law and union-created seniority provisions had excluded them. Both groups were at the forefront of new organizing drives to unionize for greater economic security in the decade.41 Had a robust version of Humphrey-Hawkins and a labor reform bill been passed in the late 1970s, the United States may have been able to move forward with a broader and more inclusive version of social democracy.42 Anyone hoping Carter would commit to this path during his administration, however, would be sorely disappointed.
The effort for a jobs guarantee was already in the works when Carter was on the campaign trail. By 1976, persistent unemployment on a level Americans hadn’t seen since before World War II put the notion of a full employment policy—much more robust than the public jobs offered by CETA—at the center of the nation’s political agenda. The coalition that came together pushed for a bill with both a stronger version of economic planning and a robust government jobs guarantee. It included Humphrey, and importantly, African American social democrats (like King and Hawkins) who had seen unemployment ravage Black communities. In addition to labor leaders, the effort also included intellectuals like the economist Wassily Leontief, who by the 1970s was calling to resurrect the National Resources Planning Board, and economist Leon Keyserling, a veteran of the New Deal and key adviser on the Freedom Budget.43
Humphrey and Hawkins were, of course, the loudest congressional voices of the bill they sponsored. Hawkins, who had backed Upton Sinclair’s socialist bid for governor back in 1934, served in the California state assembly from 1935 to 1963, when he won election to the US House. The Democrat, representing a district that included the Watts neighborhood in Los Angeles, was heavily influenced by A. Philip Randolph. He had authored Title VII of the Civil Rights Act and was a cofounder of the Congressional Black Caucus (CBC). Connecting civil rights and jobs, in 1974 he proposed a federal jobs guarantee, in which anyone who could not get a job in the private sector would be entitled to a job at the prevailing wage rate, enforceable by lawsuit. Hawkins and the CBC saw a jobs program as paramount, particularly as the already substantial gap between white and Black unemployment had begun increasing in late 1973.44
Humphrey had been a decades-long supporter of civil rights, too, pushing for a greater commitment in the Democratic Party plank in 1948, and was crucial in breaking a filibuster of the Civil Rights Act in the Senate. Elected vice president in 1964, he garnered the overwhelming support of labor in the ill-fated campaign of 1968, after which he was elected to the Senate again in 1970. In 1975, the Minnesota senator had worked with Leontief and Senator Jacob Javits (R-NY) to develop a bill called the Balanced Growth and Economic Planning Act, which proposed a microeconomic planning process to reduce unemployment and strengthen American industry. Humphrey then threw his support toward a revised version of Hawkins’s bill. In 1976, he flirted with another presidential run. Instead, he made full employment his political priority in the nation’s bicentennial year.45
That March, Hawkins and Humphrey once again introduced a version of the bill, now called the Full Employment and Balanced Growth Act, to Congress. This version provided an enforceable jobs guarantee (at the larger rate of either the minimum wage or local prevailing wage), with a 3 percent unemployment goal within four years. Proposed as an amendment to the Employment Act of 1946, the bill also obligated the president to put together a full employment budget.46 The Federal Reserve and the Council of Economic Advisors would develop and implement the planning policies to ensure full employment, and the Department of Labor would establish an “Office of Full Employment” to ensure the unemployed had access to federally funded reservoirs of public service jobs.
As soon as Humphrey and Hawkins introduced the bill, Coretta Scott King and Murray Finley, the co-chairs of the Full Employment Action Council (FEAC), began working to mobilize the “wide support” that already existed.47 FEAC was the legislative arm of the National Committee for Full Employment (NCFE). Formed in 1974 with more than one hundred representatives of unions and other political organizations, NCFE’s board of directors included the president of the UAW (Leonard Woodcock, who had succeeded Reuther after his death in 1970); I. W. Abel, president of the United Steelworkers; and Roy Wilkins, the executive director of the NAACP, in addition to leaders from the National Organization for Women, Americans for Democratic Action, and Common Cause.48
Finley was the president of the Amalgamated Clothing and Textile Workers Union (ACTWU). Scott King, of course, was Martin’s widow, and she argued that Humphrey-Hawkins represented his legacy. King, murdered in Memphis in 1968, had become a highly persuasive advocate for both racial justice and for all workers for economic security by the end of his life: he had endorsed Randolph and Rustin’s Freedom Budget, and in February 1968 he announced the demand of an annual $30 billion investment in a jobs guarantee, a minimum income, and housing as part of the Poor People’s Campaign. Indeed, when King traveled to Memphis, he was working with other leaders from the Southern Christian Leadership Council (SCLC) to mobilize a sustained occupation of Washington, DC, to force Congress to recommit to social democratic change.49
In 1976, congressional Democratic leadership supported full employment policy and sought to make it a major campaign issue.50 Congressional hearings highlighted the proposal’s widespread support, and Senate hearings that May are especially illuminating. Humphrey expertly placed the effort to plan an economy in which everyone would have a job within the legacy of other social democratic advances, arguing for the promise of America’s founding in contrast to economists’ critiques about “market forces”:
There’s not a word in the Constitution about market forces, and . . . there’s not one word, may I say, in the Emancipation Proclamation about the market forces. But there are a lot of words about justice, fair play, compassion, decency. . . . The whole purpose of the Declaration of Independence doesn’t talk about market forces and that’s what this year is all about—life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness. You don’t pursue much happiness if you’re ground down in the dirt by so-called market forces. It says governments are instituted to secure these rights. How do you pursue happiness in filth and degradation and slums and unemployment and misery and sickness?51
Likewise, Hawkins argued, “The moral tragedy of current policies is that they deliberately create and countenance high levels of unemployment. . . . I think that we listen too darn much to some economists at least who are talking about inflation and the other problems who perhaps haven’t read the bill but who neglect to mention the physical, social, and psychological impact of the waste which is now being created by mistaken policies.”52
The bill had its share of critics, including some Keynesian economists who worried about inflation.53 Senator William Proxmire (D-WI), chair of the Senate hearings, also worried about inflation, for instance, while conservative economist Alan Greenspan testified that funding “nonproductive” jobs would hold back the nation’s economy. The Chamber of Commerce rekindled the argument made to stifle Senator James Murray’s Full Employment Act in 1945, arguing that the planning envisioned by Humphrey-Hawkins would stall “free enterprise.”54
Though the bill would have been unlikely to get Ford’s signature in 1976 (Ford faced his own challenge from Reagan, who mobilized the growing conservative populist forces on the campaign trail), some Democrats—particularly from urban areas and with labor ties—hoped to pass it in order to highlight a sharp contrast between their party and the GOP.55 Other congressional Democrats, particularly those elected in 1974, however, prevented the bill from a floor vote in either chamber. Many of these new Democrats felt politically vulnerable since they came into office following a unique election marked by the nation’s reaction to Watergate.56 Further, the wave of new Democrats in 1974 did not seek a vote on Humphrey-Hawkins because they likely saw themselves as more accountable to the growing numbers of professional-class voters—not at the precarious end of the labor market—who elected them. And, more recently elected Congress-people believed government action should be more limited. As a young Delaware senator named Joe Biden criticized Hubert Humphrey, “He is not cognizant of the limited, finite ability government has to deal with people’s problems. And I wonder whether Humphrey has the intestinal fortitude to look at some programs and say, ‘No.’”57
Still, Democratic leaders used the employment issue in the election of 1976, and with good reason, since polls in 1975 had almost 80 percent of the country supportive of “a federal program to give productive jobs to the unemployed.”58 The party platform in 1976 committed “to the right of all adult Americans willing, able and seeking work to have opportunities for useful jobs at living wages.” These efforts included the direct creation of public-sector jobs after the exhaustion of efforts to create jobs in the private sector.59
Carter was lukewarm to a jobs guarantee, however. Though he pitched incentives to create private-sector jobs on the campaign trail, he did acknowledge that public service jobs might have been necessary, agreeing grudgingly that “government should be the employer of last resort.”60 He stated that he “favor[ed] federally created jobs similar to the CCC and WPA during the depression years, particularly for young Americans who have an extremely high unemployment rate—in excess of 40 per cent for black young people.”61 Though African Americans represented a “decisive” vote in a very close election, his support for Hawkins’s proposal quickly diminished, in spite of the fact that both the CBC and prominent Black leaders like the Urban League’s Vernon Jordan had prioritized full employment.62 Carter’s commitment to the right to a job had always been under political duress, and his economic advisers—including CEA chair Charles Schultze—prioritized curtailing inflation over job creation.63
The new president’s initial budget proposal in 1977 sought dramatic increases in funding for public service jobs through CETA, but Carter continued to be cool to the notion of a jobs guarantee.64 Further, by 1977 the United States had experienced a rise of “business consciousness” from the Chamber, Business Roundtable, and other organizations that had grown increasingly confident in their ability to stymie social democratic reform.65 Business opposition ratcheted up a massive lobbying effort to defeat the bill following Carter’s election.66 But FEAC continued to push, holding a Full Employment Action week in 1977, for example, that brought out 1.5 million people across three hundred cities.67 Though unemployment fell over the course of 1977, it remained at about 6.5 percent at the beginning of the next year. Carter’s 1978 State of the Union address, however, made clear his distaste for anything approaching a jobs guarantee: “We really need to realize,” he argued, “that there is a limit to the role and the function of government. . . . Government cannot eliminate poverty or provide a bountiful economy or reduce inflation or save our cities or cure illiteracy or provide energy.” Though Carter offered the possibility of some public service jobs to reduce racial and age disparities, he argued for business incentives and tax cuts as the solution, making clear he would only support a Humphrey-Hawkins bill that did not guarantee a job or include economic planning.68
Ultimately, the bill was reintroduced, but in 1978 was amended by conservatives so that it provided very little beyond an unenforceable goal of reducing unemployment to 4 percent by 1983, and, later, at an unspecified time, to “full employment,” which was not defined. The bill also set goals for eliminating disparate unemployment rates based on race, gender, disability status, veteran status, and age. Finally, the law amended the Federal Reserve Act to instruct the Fed to take unspecified action in support of the goals of the Humphrey-Hawkins Act, but it also included a section on “overcoming inflation,” that also obligated the Fed to do the opposite.69
The administration’s congressional support for full employment is illuminating, as it implicitly blamed workers for unemployment and emphasized the importance of making workers more employable rather than ensure jobs existed as the 1976 version of Humphrey-Hawkins would have done. Labor Secretary Ray Marshall’s Senate testimony in May 1978, for instance, explained how the Humphrey-Hawkins Act of 1978 would allow the Labor Department to facilitate “such measures as training, improved coordination with private firms, public service employment, youth programs, improved labor market information, antidiscrimination enforcement, and limitations on the entry of undocumented workers. The general policies must be aimed at improving the employability of a variety of specific groups that have high unemployment rates.” Marshall went on to say that welfare reform and CETA reauthorization would be necessary to create the training and transitional public service jobs necessary to reduce the unemployment rate.70
Business interests, however, opposed even the watered-down version of the law for what it vaguely promised. Jack Carlson, the Chamber of Commerce’s chief economist, made explicit Marshall’s implication that the unemployed were in that situation because of their own inadequacies. Carlson argued that, rather than use government tools to create jobs, “our schools, training system, the transition from school to career job, and many other things must improve over long periods of time. One thing we can do to reduce unemployment is to make people employable.”71 Business Roundtable representative Lewis Foy also opposed Humphrey-Hawkins’s “overpromises” to be achieved by “national planning,” instead offering the Roundtable’s support for potential job-training programs in a reauthorized CETA.72
By May, the Chamber and BR were working to kill another major social democratic reform, also with the assistance of a lukewarm Carter administration: labor reform legislation. Initially, labor hoped for a repeal of Section 14(b) of the Taft-Hartley Act, which allowed states (like Carter’s Georgia, which did so in 1947) to pass laws allowing workers to benefit from a collectively bargained contract without paying for union representation costs. Instead, the AFL-CIO settled for a bill to make it harder for employers to intimidate workers in representation elections and to delay bargaining. The bill would have expanded the size of the National Labor Relations Board, increased penalties for companies that fired workers who organized, made union elections fairer, and mandated bargaining when employers didn’t do so in good faith. By the late 1970s, this reform was badly needed: unrepresented manufacturing workers in the South and in service industries (increasingly composed of women and African American workers as discriminatory barriers had been broken down) across the country tried to organize unions in large numbers, but employers’ tactics prevented a greater portion than in years past from winning union representation elections.73
Antiunion interests, like the Chamber, the Business Roundtable, and the National Right to Work Committee, mobilized an unprecedented effort to kill the bill. Republican senators led by Orrin Hatch (UT) and Richard Lugar (IN) filibustered in May and June 1978. Its proponents amended it to make it more palatable to senators on the fence, but even the watered-down version fell two votes short of breaking a filibuster. The Carter administration, which had publicly supported the reform, focused much more on negotiating the votes to get the Senate to ratify a treaty to return control of the Panama Canal to Panama than it did on getting votes for labor reform.74
In October, Carter signed the mostly toothless version of Humphrey-Hawkins into law. Coretta Scott King celebrated the bill, hoping its goals could be employed to make a difference. “This is indeed a great historical occasion, perhaps as significant as the signing of the Civil Rights Act of 1964 and the Voting Rights Act of 1965,” she argued. “Perhaps in the future, history will record that it may be even more significant, Mr. President, because I think it deals with an issue on a basic human right that’s the most basic of all human rights, the right to a job. And that is a central priority now of our economic policy with the signing of this act into law today.”75
King’s thinking, unfortunately, was largely wishful, and the right to a job would not really be a priority for either Democrats or Republicans for decades. Taken together, the first half of the Carter administration crushed any possibility of a renewed promise of American social democracy. Millions of private-sector workers, many of whom were nonwhite workers and women in precarious jobs, lost their best chance to gain real union rights. The universal expansion of public-sector labor rights was never seriously considered. And the promise of the right to a job foundered on the shoals of a set of unenforceable goals. Carter’s presidency represented the future of the Democratic Party: one that enabled capital while allowing possibilities for workers to wither.
In fact, perhaps the most consequential aspects of Carter’s economic policy were, first, a major tax reduction for capital gains (without any mechanism for ensuring these cuts would resurrect investment in American manufacturing) while raising the tax burden on the middle class and, second, appointing Paul Volcker to chair the Federal Reserve. In that office, Volcker severely restricted the money supply to show the federal government’s seriousness in wringing inflation out of the economy.76 Already high unemployment increased. American industries like steel hemorrhaged blue-collar jobs that had been the backbone of economic security for so many workers, and even when Carter worked to save jobs, as in the auto industry when he brokered a deal to bail out Chrysler, it came at the high cost of concessions.77 Indeed, by 1979, Carter had unequivocally turned away from the possibility of robust social democracy in order to fight inflation and advance the agenda of neoliberal economics.
In one other way, Carter’s administration represented the harbinger of Democrats future: in the second half of his single term in office, he finally signed into law a bill to meet the NEA’s calls for a stand-alone Department of Education, symbolically cleaving education from its connection to the promise of a more robust set of enabling freedoms. The Department of Education Organization Act highlighted the increasing shift toward human capital as the major avenue for working people to acquire what Carter had called, in his State of the Union address in 1978, the “chance to earn a decent living.”
Reorganizing Government, Reorganizing Priorities
Perhaps the most significant domestic achievement for Carter was the controversial creation of the Department of Education in 1979. Carter’s promise of a stand-alone department in 1976 had been an awkward fit in his campaign given his other pledges to limit government. “Generally, I am opposed to the proliferation of federal agencies,” Carter had admitted. “But a Department of Education would consolidate the grant programs, job training, early childhood training, literacy training, and many other functions currently scattered through the government. The result would be a strong voice for education at the federal level.”78
The federal Office of Education, after it was created in the 1860s, was quickly demoted to a bureau in the Department of the Interior, and in 1929, it was once again elevated to “office” status. In 1937, the increased role of the federal government in providing social services led a presidential commission to propose a Department of Social Welfare; instead, the Federal Security Agency was created in 1939. It took until 1953, however, when President Eisenhower’s Reorganization Plan No. 1 created the Department of Health, Education, and Welfare (HEW) for the federal government to have a comprehensive cabinet department devoted to social welfare. As Eisenhower pointed out, “Such action is demanded by the importance and magnitude of these functions, which affect the well-being of millions of our citizens.”79
Eisenhower’s remark illustrates the fact that American policymakers after World War II continued to view health, education, and other social welfare programs as part of one interrelated effort. When the Johnson administration was putting together ESEA, some had argued to elevate Education to its own department. Education Commissioner Keppel, however, opposed it and not just because conservatives feared greater federal control over education. Indeed, Keppel argued, “There was so much convergence between the Great Society’s education, health, and antipoverty programs that it made sense to house them under one umbrella department.”80
Even so, during the 1960s, liberal senator Abraham Ribicoff (D-CT) introduced legislation for a separate cabinet department, and in 1972, McGovern supported a cabinet department during his presidential run. Though Carter had promised to elevate education in 1976, he did not make it an immediate priority—likely because he knew the effort would face stiff opposition. As early as the campaign in 1976, Albert Shanker, for instance, pushed back against the notion of a separate department. Elected president of AFT in 1974, Shanker was clearly a social democrat. By the mid-1970s, he was not only advocating for teachers’ labor rights, but he was pitching a wide-ranging program of lifelong learning called “educare” and in 1975, Shanker supported a bill by Senator Walter Mondale (D-MN) and Representative John Brademas (D-IN) that would have funded an extensive program of childcare, prenatal care, and early childhood education.81
The Carter campaign in 1976 set up an education policy task force, featuring both Shanker and NEA president John Ryor, in addition to Keppel, former HEW secretary Wilbur Cohen, and other notables. At the very first meeting, Ryor advocated for the department proposal while Shanker opposed it. The AFT president worried that a separate department “might upset effective coalitions and produce less for all by creating new competition among former allies.” Cohen agreed with Shanker, pointing out the proposal would “delay any substantive progress because the turf fights involved would use up everyone’s energies; the issue would prevent new money for education.”82
After the election of 1976, the AFT sprang into action against the possibility of a separate department. While admitting it had “surface appeal,” Shanker argued that “rather than encouraging the traditional go-it-alone tendencies of many educators by setting education’s administration off by itself, we should launch a coordinated health, welfare, and education approach to the major problems our nation faces—poverty, equal educational opportunity, welfare, youth unemployment, and health security.”83
The NEA and its members pushed Carter hard the other way. In September 1977, the union established the Citizens Committee for a Cabinet Department of Education (CCCDE), a coalition of education, labor, civil rights, and business leaders. The proposal garnered wide support, including from the president of the National Congress of Parents and Teachers (NCPT) and the National School Boards Association. As NCPT president Grace Baisinger pointed out, “We must insure that this great priority of parents—the education of their children—is a national concern. The best assurance . . . that this will be met is a Department of Education with cabinet status.”84 The Citizens Committee also included Coretta Scott King (at that point, also advocating for a federal jobs guarantee); Vernon Jordan, director of the National Urban League; AFSCME president Jerry Wurf; UAW president Douglas Fraser; former US commissioner of education Keppel (who now supported the cabinet proposal); and Republican Terrel Bell (who would later be tasked by Reagan with dismantling the department).
The NEA asked members to write to Carter, and in the fall of 1977, the letters poured into the White House, calling on the president to fulfill his campaign promise. In September, Connecticut teacher Marilynn Parnell charged, “You have now been in office for almost a year and still we hear nothing solid or specific about the establishment of a separate Department of Education.” Massachusetts high school teacher Gerry McDonough wrote to Carter in October, “I do not believe that education has been receiving its fair shake, nor will it ever receive the attention it demands, while it is under HEW.”85
Carter called for a Department of Education in his January 1978 State of the Union, which he also recommended as a priority in a message to Congress on education on February 28. In the summer, Representative Jack Brooks (D-TX) introduced a bill to create the department in the House.86 Over the course of 1978, forces lined up in support and opposition to the proposal, sometimes connecting the bill’s necessity to economic opportunity. HEW secretary Joseph Califano, for instance, sent a letter to the Senate Committee on Governmental Affairs, officially agreeing with President Carter’s “judgment that education is a ranking domestic priority which requires visible, high level leadership of its own. That need is heightened by a perceptible decline in the quality of public schools, an inadequate level of basic functional skills for young people seeking employment.”87 NEA president Ryor full-throatedly supported the effort in Senate hearings, arguing, “Surely the education of our citizenry with its dramatic and profound impact on the productive capacity and future economic and social well-being of this Nation demands as much Presidential time and attention as the development of programs designed to physically transport our citizens and our goods.”88
The most important opponents of the proposed department were the AFT, the AFL-CIO, and their allies in Congress, who all opposed the effort on the grounds that public education should be connected to other aspects of the social democratic promise. The AFL-CIO Public Employees Department (with which the AFT affiliated) opposed the cabinet position as did the full AFL-CIO, which passed a resolution at its convention in December 1977.89 The same month, Shanker, highlighting the AFT’s push to connect childcare and public education, envisioned connecting education and job training to a wider social democratic vision: “If welfare is to become more work-related, unskilled adults will need skills to obtain and hold jobs—a huge educational undertaking for our schools. Day care must be readily available for their young dependent children. The AFT’s proposal that day care be combined with early education under the auspices of the public schools would gain new force.”90 Indeed, a broader social democratic vision capable of moving the United States beyond the limited, breadwinner-focused version of economic security that grew after World War II would clearly have required universal childcare.
New York Democratic representative (and founding member of the CBC), Shirley Chisolm referenced organized labor’s “vigorous support for equal opportunity and social justice” in pushing for civil rights legislation over the years. She concluded that “labor groups have carefully constructed coalitions around major national issues such as poverty, equal access to educational opportunities, as well as welfare and health assistance. Now, to thoughtlessly destroy these coalitions . . . in order to achieve the dubious goal of formation of a separate department appears a little foolhardy.”91
In 1978, the bill easily made it through the Senate, but it took until 1979 to get a floor vote in the lower chamber as the bill’s opponents leveraged the body’s packed schedule to delay a vote until the next session. Carter again called for a cabinet-level department, and after a bruising battle, the bill finally passed. A new version in the House escaped the chamber’s Government Operations Committee by a single vote on May 2, and the floor vote could not have been closer (210–206) that July. The conference committee worked into the fall to reconcile with the Senate, eliminating House amendments opposing busing and racial quotas. Unlike with labor reform in the Senate, Carter put significant energy into lobbying wavering House Democrats to pass the conference bill, turning enough votes to ensure it passed. In the end, seventy-seven Democrats opposed the bill, and thirty Republicans voted for it.92
The Gathering Storm
In several ways, President Jimmy Carter supported public education. He stayed true to campaign promises to advocate for much more federal funding in the budget: in his first term, he increased funding 60 percent above Ford’s last budget.93 And, the Department of Education Organization Act did what the NEA and its allies hoped it would do, elevating the political significance of public education in the United States. In an NEA press release issued after Carter signed the bill into law, newly elected president Willard McGuire compared the law to the 1862 Morrill Land-Grant Act in terms of its impact on shifting public support for education.94
But to what end? In The Coming of Post-Industrial Society, Daniel Bell had charted a course to navigate the emergent tensions of the 1970s, and he pointed out that equality of opportunity in education would not suffice. Even if educational opportunity could be equalized, and Bell was skeptical of that possibility, the United States would still fall short of constructing a “fair” meritocratic competition. Citing social science work on inequality, Bell argued there was simply too much luck involved in determining how one’s opportunities translated into social and economic outcomes. He concluded his masterwork by arguing for what he called a “just meritocracy” in which everyone’s social and economic needs would be taken care of, on top of which Americans would have opportunity for greater reward, though not at the expense of diminishing the basic needs of their fellow citizens.95
Establishing a stand-alone Department of Education could have represented one important strand of a significant expansion of American social democracy along the lines of a “just meritocracy”—had it accompanied other enabling freedoms that included a jobs guarantee, healthcare, and labor reform. But by only elevating education, the Carter administration contributed to the rise of the myth that education could, as if by magic, ensure access to economic security for those willing to get the right skills.
Other Democrats, however, continued to fight for broader social democratic possibilities even after the defeats of labor reform and a meaningful jobs guarantee. In 1980, Massachusetts senator Ted Kennedy entered the Democratic primary in a bid to unseat Carter. Though a long shot, Kennedy garnered support from influential political entities on the left. While the NEA enthusiastically endorsed Carter, for instance, the AFT endorsed his opponent. In part, Kennedy responded to Carter’s epic unpopularity, much of which, like his fruitless attempt to rescue American hostages in Iran, stemmed from the perceived failures of his administration. But Kennedy’s campaign was also premised on the effort to ensure all Americans had access to good healthcare and as a critique of Carter’s unwillingness to enforce the goals of Humphrey-Hawkins.96 Others on the left continued to advance different social democratic possibilities too. Lane Kirkland, president of the AFL-CIO, for instance, advocated a massive industrial program to revitalize American manufacturing in 1980.97
Kennedy won twelve states and around 38 percent of the votes cast in the Democratic primaries, both a major sign of weakness for Carter and a reminder that there was still a thirst in the US for extending broad enabling social and economic freedoms. In 1980, however, California governor Ronald Reagan capitalized on Carter’s politics of diminished expectations with promises to restore American prosperity by decreasing regulations and lowering taxes. Reagan, indeed, had a very different vision for America, and unlike Carter’s lukewarm, professional-class drift, engaged in an all-out war against social democracy. Even so, Reagan did not arrest the growth of the education myth; the notion that economic opportunity acquired through access to education could compensate for the loss of other social supports continued to grow more powerful during the California Republican’s administration too.
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