Restless Giant: The United States From Watergate to Bush v. Gore (29 page)

Among the contemporary critics were labor union leaders. Assailing his firing of the PATCO workers, they also denounced his closeness to corporate interests, which rewarded him with lavish campaign contributions, and his successful opposition to a higher federal minimum wage, which stayed at $3.15 per hour throughout his presidency.
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Union membership continued to fall during his term, from approximately one-fourth of all employees to one-sixth by 1989. By the late 1980s, liberals were also blaming the president for the plight of homeless people, whose numbers rose from roughly 200,000 in the early 1980s to as many as 400,000 by the end of the decade.
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Like union leaders, advocates for African Americans and other minority groups had little use for Reagan. To be sure, as in earlier decades, they had a few things to celebrate—Reagan’s policies notwithstanding—in the 1980s. In 1983, Harold Washington was elected mayor of Chicago and Wilson Goode mayor of Philadelphia. Both were African Americans. In late 1983, Reagan signed a bill establishing the third Monday in January as Martin Luther King Jr. Day, a national holiday. In 1984, the Reverend Jesse Jackson became the first black American man to make a run for the presidency. In the same year,
The Cosby Show
first appeared, earning top ratings for the remainder of the decade.
The Oprah Winfrey Show
began its extraordinarily long and successful run in 1985. August Wilson, a talented dramatist, crafted a series of highly regarded plays in the mid- and late 1980s, including
Ma Rainey’s Black Bottom
(1985) and
Fences
(1986). Toni Morrison, already an acclaimed writer, published
Beloved
in 1987, an imaginatively rich novel about the evils of slavery. It helped her win a Nobel Prize for literature six years later.

Reagan, meanwhile, reluctantly concluded that it would be politically dangerous to try to end affirmative action, which by the 1980s had become cherished as a right within much of the corporate and educational world and which was zealously protected by liberals in the federal government bureaucracy. Federal officials continued to oversee set-aside provisions benefiting minorities engaged in government-sponsored construction projects. The survival in the Reagan years of programs such as these revealed that blacks—like other determined interest groups—could hold their own even in politically unfriendly times.

Many minority group leaders were especially pleased by two developments on the Hill late in Reagan’s second term. In an extended, vicious battle in late 1987, they coalesced with other liberals to bring about the defeat (58 to 42) in the Senate of the nomination of Robert Bork to the Supreme Court. Bork, a federal judge who had earlier been a law professor at Yale, was an outspoken conservative who had served as Nixon’s compliant solicitor general. He had also opposed the Civil Rights Act of 1964, affirmative action, and
Roe v. Wade
.
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This extraordinarily bitter confirmation struggle, which centered on Bork’s political and social views, not his qualifications—those were solid—featured mudslinging from both sides. It indicated that appointments to the Court, which was then deeply divided, were becoming highly partisan. Energizing ideologues on the right as well as the left, the fight led to a sharp intensification of inter-party warfare in Congress in the 1990s.

The second development was even more unambiguously pleasing to liberals—and to many others. In 1988, Democrats and Republicans set aside partisan battling to approve the so-called Japanese-American Redress Act (sometimes called the Civil Liberties Act). The measure offered an admission of wrongdoing to Japanese Americans for the relocation and incarceration that 120,000 of them had suffered during World War II. It also provided reparations of $20,000 to each of the 60,000 still-living Japanese Americans who had been interned, as well as to heirs of some others. When the Justice Department closed the books on this program in 1999, it reported that 82,210 payments had been made, totaling more than $1.6 billion.
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Notwithstanding these political victories, minority group leaders had little cause to celebrate during these years. Two highly publicized incidents of racist violence provoked especially lasting tensions. The first took place in June 1982, when Vincent Chin, a twenty-seven-year-old Chinese American draftsman, was clubbed to death in a Detroit suburb by two white autoworkers who thought he was Japanese—and therefore to blame for layoffs in the industry. The killers were convicted of second-degree manslaughter and sentenced to three years’ probation. Though one of the attackers was later found guilty of violating Chin’s civil rights—and sentenced to twenty-five years in prison—the verdict was thrown out on a technicality, and a later trial in 1987 resulted in his acquittal. The long-drawn-out, highly publicized litigation angered many Asian Americans, some of whom formed militant pan-Asian organizations to fight for better rights and protections.

The second act of violence aroused huge public controversy. It featured Bernhard Goetz, a slight, thirty-six-year-old electronics engineer. In December 1984, he found himself surrounded in a New York City subway car by four aggressive black youths who demanded money from him. Goetz, a white man, had earlier been robbed and injured by blacks. He pulled out a .38 caliber revolver and shot the four of them. One, wounded again as he lay on the floor of the train, became brain-damaged and paralyzed for life. At a trial in 1987, it became clear that all four of the young men had criminal records and that three of them had screwdrivers in their pockets. The jury (on which only two blacks served) accepted Goetz’s plea of self-defense and acquitted him of charges of attempted murder and assault. It convicted him only on charges of illegally possessing a firearm and sentenced him to eight months in prison. A local poll indicated that 90 percent of whites agreed with the verdict, as opposed to 52 percent of blacks. Many white Americans, traumatized by racial polarization and by an apparent epidemic of crime and disorder in the cities, regarded Goetz, the “Subway Vigilante,” as a heroic figure.
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African American leaders in the 1980s denounced Reagan’s general approach to race relations. Vetoing economic sanctions against South Africa’s apartheid regime in 1986, he conceded defeat only when Congress overruled his veto. Clarence Thomas, a conservative African American whom he appointed to head the EEOC in 1982, disappointed minorities who charged that under his leadership the agency was slow to challenge discrimination in employment. Like Reagan, Thomas opposed affirmative action. Minority group leaders especially lamented the low priority that Reagan gave to contending with problems that continued to afflict the inner cities, notably high rates of crime, poverty, and unemployment. Thanks to a spreading scourge of crack cocaine in the late 1980s, these problems may have worsened during the decade.

Despairing of progress in the North, throngs of black people had already been returning every year to the South, only to discover that Dixie, too, was not a promised land.
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Though court decisions mandating desegregation of public schools generally remained in force, progress toward the hotly contested goal of greater racial balance in schools was far slower than it had been in the 1970s. Resources for most inner-city schools continued to be inadequate. Gaps between the test scores of black and white children, while closing a little, remained large. Linda Brown, who had been the named plaintiff in the
Brown v. Board of Education
case of 1954, declared sadly on the thirtieth anniversary of the decision, “It was not the quick fix we thought it would be.”
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The Reagan administration’s major legacy in race relations, one that minority group leaders deplored, lay in its judicial appointments. For the most part the president did not play an especially active role in the nominee-selection process, but during the 1980 campaign he had said he would appoint to judgeships only those candidates who promoted “family values.” Zealously conservative Justice Department officials who took charge of the selection of nominees had no doubt where he stood. By the time Reagan left office he had appointed 368 district and appeals court judges, more than any other president. They were nearly half of all judges on these federal courts. The vast majority were conservative white males. Of the 368 appointees, seven were black, fifteen were Hispanic, and two were Asian.
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Reagan succeeded in turning the Supreme Court toward the right. Whereas Carter had had no opportunity to make an appointment at that level, Reagan had three. In 1981, he named Sandra Day O’Connor, an Arizona state judge, to be the first woman to serve on the Court. Though many on the Religious Right were unhappy with this choice—as a state senator in Arizona O’Connor had supported the legalization of abortion, and she had backed the ERA—the president was determined to select a woman, and the Senate confirmed her, 99 to 0.
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In 1986, when Chief Justice Burger stepped down, Reagan nominated Justice William Rehnquist, a Nixon appointee to the Court, for the post. The Senate confirmed him, but only after a struggle, by a vote of 65 to 33. At the same time, Reagan appointed Antonin Scalia, who was unanimously confirmed, to fill Rehnquist’s place. Scalia was America’s first Italian American justice. In 1987, after failing to get Bork (and a second nominee for the vacancy, Douglas Ginsburg) appointed, he chose Anthony Kennedy, who was confirmed in February 1988.
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These three appointees remained on the Court for many years. Though O’Connor (and to a lesser extent Kennedy) occasionally sided with liberals, Scalia and Rehnquist stood strongly on the right. As of 1989, the Court began to issue conservative decisions in hotly contested cases involving minority set-asides and racial balance in the schools.

Reagan’s liberal foes also damned his regulatory policies, which they said routinely favored corporate interests. Reagan tried to reduce appropriations for liberal federal agencies such as Housing and Urban Development (HUD) and Health and Human Services (HHS). He called for a “new federalism” aimed at reducing the size and scope of government in Washington and at returning regulatory authority to the states. One supporter of this new federalism exclaimed: “Thousands and thousands of white-collar workers [in Washington] . . . do nothing but shuffle paper and don’t do anything that’s of any value to anyone. And they get a pay increment, they get incredible benefits, for what? It’s just flab, it’s just waste.”
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Reagan’s often colorful denunciations of big government, like those of other conservatives since the 1960s, may have been popular with a majority of Americans. “The nearest thing to eternal life we’ll ever see,” he quipped in 1986, “is a government program.” Liberals, however, blocked his attempt to establish a new federalism and to weaken federal bureaucracies. The Department of Energy survived. Though Reagan managed to reduce federal aid to education in 1981, he made no serious attempt to carry out his politically perilous promise to dismantle the Education Department, which grew in size and influence in the 1980s. No highly controversial government program—for instance, affirmative action—or agency was terminated.

Still, Reagan clearly encouraged advocates of deregulation. In 1982 he signed a bill, little noticed at the time, that increased the amount of federal insurance available to savings-and-loan (S&L) depositors, from $40,000 to $100,000. Congress further authorized S&Ls to engage in a wide range of loans and investments, including junk bonds and other high-risk securities. Heads of S&Ls soon engaged in all sorts of bad deals; some stole from their institutions and stashed away millions. Though a few mid-level administration officials tried to stop these activities, Reagan and other top aides paid them no heed, thereby making a bad situation worse. In the late 1980s, many S&Ls collapsed, devastating depositors and necessitating a series of huge governmental bailouts. Estimates of the cost of these bailouts vary, but one reliable account set the amount by 1999 at $161 billion, of which $132 billion came from public funds.
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The S&L collapse was the costliest financial scandal in United States history.

Other scandals that stemmed in part from Reagan’s lax oversight of federal agencies marred his administration. Especially notable were revelations of high-level corruption in HUD, which a House investigation concluded was “enveloped by influence peddling, favoritism, abuse, greed, fraud, embezzlement, and theft.” A criminal investigation by an independent counsel lasted nine years and resulted in seventeen convictions and more than $2 million in fines.
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Nothing better revealed Reagan’s negative attitude toward governmental regulation than his approach to environmental policy. The president, who loved to tend to his ranch in California, considered himself a great friend of the outdoors, but he did not believe that the environment was seriously endangered, and he largely ignored scientific studies concerning acid rain and global warming. On one occasion Reagan blundered by saying that trees and other vegetation were a source of air pollution. Students at Claremont College greeted him with a sign tacked to a tree: C
HOP
M
E
D
OWN
B
EFORE
I K
ILL
A
GAIN
.
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