Source: www.library.unt.edu/govinfo/usfed/years.html.
The relative absence of difference between the parties’ positions on economic policy meant that voting behavior on the part of the public was very different from what it is today. In recent elections partisan voting has been very strongly correlated with income: The higher a voter’s income, the more likely he or she is to vote Republican. This presumably reflects voters’ understanding that a vote for a Republican is a vote for policies that favor the affluent as opposed to the poor and working class. But the relatively nonideological nature of the Republican Party in the fifties, reflected in the way its members voted in Congress, was also reflected in public perceptions. During the postwar boom, voters evidently saw very little difference between the parties on economic policy, at least when voting in presidential elections. Table 3 compares the average voting patterns of white voters grouped by income level in presidential elections between 1952 and 1972 on one side and 1976 and 2004 on the other. In the more recent period there was a strong relationship between higher income levels and voting Republican. During the period from 1952 to 1972, the era of bipartisan acceptance of the welfare state, however, there was hardly any relationship between income level and voting preference. The one presidential election in which there was a large voting difference by income level was 1964, the year in which Barry Goldwater—a true movement conservative, and the harbinger of things to come—seized the Republican nomination. Other surveys show that in the fifties and sixties there was remarkably little relationship between a voter’s income and his or her party registration: The upper third of the income distribution was only slightly more Republican than the middle or lower thirds.
| Table 3. Percentage of Whites Voting Democratic in Presidential Elections, by Income group | ||
|---|---|---|
| Percentage Voting Democratic in 1952–1972 | Percentage Voting Democratic in 1976–2004 | |
| Poorest Third | 46 | 51 |
| Middle Third | 47 | 44 |
| Richest Third | 42 | 37 |
Source: Larry Bartels, “What’s the Matter with What’s the Matter with Kansas?” p. 13 (photocopy, Princeton University, 2005).
If the Republican Party of the fifties and sixties didn’t stand for economic conservatism, what did it stand for? Or maybe the question is better phrased as follows: What did voters who voted Republican think they were voting for?
To some extent they were voting for the traditional ethnic order. The Republican Party of the 1950s was, above all, the WASP party—the party of non-Southern white Anglo-Saxon Protestants, with the Anglo-Saxon bit somewhat optional. (Eisenhower came from German stock, but that didn’t matter.) During the 1950s, 51 percent of those who considered themselves Republicans were WASPs, even though the group made up only 30 percent of the electorate.[6] White Protestants had been the dominant ethnic group in the United States for most of its history, but the rise of the New Deal, with many Catholic union members in its base and with a large role for Jewish intellectuals, undermined that dominance. And much of the rest of the country was suspicious of the change. It’s hard now to recapture that state of mind, but as late as the 1960 election a significant number of Americans voted against Kennedy simply because he was Catholic.
More creditably, many Americans voted Republican as a check on the power of the dominant Democratic coalition. From the thirties through the seventies, Democrats commanded a much larger share of registered voters than the Republicans. Although this didn’t translate into a Democratic advantage in capturing the White House—between the 1948 election and the election of Ronald Reagan the Republicans held the presidency for four terms, the Democrats for three—it did translate into consistent Democratic control of Congress from 1952 on. This consistent control led to abuses—not gross corruption, for the most part, but petty corruption and, perhaps more important, complacency and lack of attention to popular concerns. Republicans became the alternative for those who valued some accountability. In particular, Republicans in the Northeast often presented themselves as reformers who would clean up the system rather than change it in any fundamental way.
In sum, between 1948 and sometime in the 1970s both parties accepted the changes that had taken place during the Great Compression. To a large extent the New Deal had created the political conditions that sustained this consensus. A highly progressive tax system limited wealth at the top, and the rich were too weak politically to protest. Social Security and unemployment insurance were untouchable programs, and Medicare eventually achieved the same status. Strong unions were an accepted part of the national scene.
This equilibrium would collapse in the 1970s. But the forces that would destroy the politics of equality began building in the 1960s, a decade in which everything went right for the economy, but everything seemed to go wrong for American democracy.
5 THE SIXTIES: A TROUBLED PROSPERITY
It was the best of times, it was the worst of times.
In economic terms the sixties were as good as it gets. In The Pump House Gang, published in 1968, Tom Wolfe wrote of a “magic economy” in which everything seemed easy. And by just about any standard, that’s the kind of economy America had in the sixties. The chaos and upheaval of that decade took place against the backdrop of the best economy America has ever had.
It was an economy that seemingly provided jobs for everyone. What’s more those abundant jobs came with wages that were higher than ever, and rising every year. At the bottom end, workers were much better off than they would ever be again: The minimum wage in 1966, at $1.25 an hour, was the equivalent of more than $8.00 in today’s dollars, far higher than today’s minimum wage of $5.15. By 1966 the typical man in his thirties was earning as much as his modern equivalent; by the time the great boom ended, in the early seventies, men would be earning about 14 percent more than they do now.[1] It’s true that family incomes were a bit less than they are today, because fewer women worked and the gap between women’s and men’s wages was larger. And because incomes were a bit lower than they are now, middle-class families lived in smaller houses, were less likely to have two cars, and in general had a somewhat lower material standard of living than their counterparts today. Yet the standard of living felt high to most Americans, both because it was far higher than it had been for the previous generation, and because a more equal society offered fewer occasions to feel left out. As MIT economists Frank Levy and Peter Temin have pointed out, the broad-based rise in income meant that a blue-collar machine operator earned more, in real terms, than most managers had earned a generation earlier. As a result more Americans than ever before considered themselves middle class.[2]
Economic security was also unprecedented. By 1966, 80 percent of the population had health insurance, up from only 30 percent at the end of World War II, and by 1970 the fraction of the population with health insurance surpassed today’s 85 percent level. Workers who lost their jobs despite the low unemployment rate were much more likely to receive unemployment insurance than laid-off workers are today, and that insurance covered a larger fraction of their lost wages than does today’s. And as Levy and Temin point out, rising wages across the board meant that even laid-off workers whose next job paid less than the one they lost found that within a few years they had recovered their previous standard of living.
6.
See John R. Petrocik, “Reformulating the Party Coalitions: The ‘Christian Democratic’ Republicans” (paper prepared for Center for Research in Society and Politics, Aug. 1, 1998), table 2.
1.
“Economic Mobility: Is the American Dream Alive and Well?” (Pew Economic Mobility Project, May 2007).