Disagreeing with Thomas Sowell on the sixties

(Guest Column from the 11 June 2006 op-ed page of the Pine Bluff Commercial.)

In his May 31st column criticizing liberalism in the 1960s ("Liberals are staying busy preserving their own vision of history"), Thomas Sowell tries to refute the recollection of a liberal political activist who is quoted as saying [to Sowell], "This country was about to blow up. There were riots everywhere. You can stand there now and criticize, but we had to keep the country together, my friend."

Sowell says it was instead people like Chicago Mayor Richard J. Daley who kept the country together during the riots of the '60s: "Even during the 1960s, riots were far more common and deadly in liberal bastions like New York City than in Chicago, where the original Mayor Daley announced on television that he had given his police orders to 'shoot to kill' if riots broke out."

Because of this, Sowell says, "the net effect was that Daley saved lives while liberals saved their vision." But it seems to me that the net effect of Sowell's comparison of rioting in New York and Chicago, and his quoting of Mayor Daley, is to give the wrong impression.

The 1969 Britannica Book of the Year, in an article on race relations, describes the contrast between Chicago and New York right after the April 4, 1968, murder of Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. in Memphis:  "In Chicago, angry blacks burned down blocks and, in the end, 12,500 troops were needed to bring the city under control.  In New York, a cool mayor kept violence to a minimum by walking the streets of Harlem three nights in a row, but many wondered if nonviolence was dead."

The yearbook says that on April 15, 1968, Daley called for police to "shoot to maim" looters as well as "shoot to kill" any arsonists.  It also reports that after complaints from civil rights activists, both orders were "subsequently modified."  The orders therefore represent failures on the part of Daley and the Chicago police, not successes.  And Daley's iron-fisted tactics failed again during the antiwar protests at the Democratic National Convention in Chicago in August 1968.

Sowell makes an issue of the fact that more congressional Republicans than Democrats voted for the Civil Rights Act of 1964 and the Voting Rights Act of 1965. But liberals and conservatives didn't fall neatly into Democrat or Republican affiliations in the 1960s.

Mayor Daley was famously a big-time Democratic party boss, while the "cool mayor" of New York mentioned in the Britannica yearbook was John V. Lindsay, a Republican who had his share of problems of his own making, but not when it came to the success of his liberal-minded riot control response in 1968.

Lindsay's career says a lot about what happened to the Republican party after the 1960s.  

When he was defeated in the 1969 New York Republican mayoral primary, Lindsay ran on the Liberal Party ticket and was re-elected to a second term.  Then he switched his party affiliation to Democrat in 1971 and made an unsuccessful run for the Democratic presidential nomination in 1972 [which went to George McGovern]. Of course, that was the year Richard Nixon—promising “law and order”—was re-elected in a landslide.

Lindsay's December 20, 2000, obituary on CNN's website quotes his reasoning for becoming a Democrat in 1971: "It has become clear that the Republican Party and its leaders in Washington have finally abandoned the fight for a government that will respond to the real needs of most of our people— and those most in need."

That is nearly a textbook definition of what liberalism is all about, and is also a fitting indictment of the Republican Party and its leaders in Washington today.

David Trulock is a writer and physicist who grew up in Pine Bluff in the 1960s and 1970s and recently moved back after living in Austin, Texas, for 17 years.