Sympathy for the Devil
--Richard M. Nixon[1]
Senator Kuchel’s speech of 2 May 1963 was truly riveting. “Described by Senate veterans as the most sweeping attack ever heard on the Senate floor against America’s right wing.” For a full hour, California’s Thomas Kuchel, the assistant Senate Republican leader, savaged and ridiculed the claims to patriotism by the vocal John Birch Society and other groups. Although Kuchel belonged to the liberal wing of his party, at a moment of apparent strength of the left-liberals nationwide, his courage in confronting the anti-democratic right should be underestimated. His grandfather was a founder of Anaheim, the very heart of Orange County--the national headquarters of the reactionary right. Kuchel had been appointed to his Senate seat in 1952 by Governor Earl Warren to replace Richard Nixon, who ran with Ike that year to become Vice President.
As if waking from a spell, fellow Republicans, like Colorado’s Gordon Allott, praised Kuchel’s courage. “These extreme right wingers…have been more damaging to the morale of the United States than anything else,” Allott chimed along. Kuchel detailed that he received an average of 6,000 letters a month from California constituents who had fallen “hysterically and emotionally, without reservations, for the unadulterated venom spewed by out-and-out crackpots.” One crackpot that he named specifically was former San Gabriel Valley Congressman John H. Rousselot, now the western state’s director of the John Birch society, the leading “fright peddler.” Rousselot responded immediately, repeating his claim that “Red Chinese troops are known to be in Mexico,” and reasserting the demand to expel the United Nations from U.S. soil.[2]
Kuchel’s courage was part of general thaw in the relentless repression that had been underway since Kennedy’s 1960 presidential victory, as though Nixon’s defeat had finally kicked some of the props from the anti-communist edifice. Protesters had been harassing the California hearings of the House Un-American Activities Committee for several years. The Civil Rights movement would reach its absolute apogee of national appeal by the 28 August 1963 March on Washington for Jobs and Freedom, in King’s epochal Dream speech. Organized labor, after a decade of participation in red-baiting and internal purges, now sought to position itself at the heart of the American mainstream.
But the spectacle of a Republican Senator holding Nixon’s former seat, denouncing Nixon’s wing of the party also heralds the onset of the great Thermidorian Reaction that Nixon orchestrated from that moment onward. In a strong sense, the “extremism” that Kuchel denounced never declined at all. It was just going through metamorphosis from its larval to its winged form. Kuchel had undoubtedly taken a cue from a major and highly-publicized “conference on Extremism” held a few weeks earlier, in late April, at the Ambassador Hotel.[3] Titled “Enemies of Democracy—Labor in the Forefront of the Fight for Freedom,” the conference was organized by the AFL-CIO’s Los Angeles County Federation of Labor, which had been purged of its left wing in 1949.[4] Headliners included Governor Pat Brown and the anti-Communist leader himself, AFL-CIO President George Meany. The bulk of the speakers were regional peacemakers such as the Reverend John H. Burt, president of the southern California Council of Churches and a leading activist in the Human Relations movement. In short, the conference was attempting to re-enforce the Liberal Center. While speakers criticized both Communists and the “ultra-right,” the emphasis was first on the “Intruders on the Left,” to use the title of an AFL-CIO pamphlet.[5]
On the surface, it might look as though the “extremists” were slowly becoming isolated. The growing optimism of the leading moderates is laudable and should not be dismissed. To some extent, they had succeeded in carving-out a civil public sphere of rational debate within a repressive atmosphere that had only stifled it for many years. But in retrospect, something much worse was underway. The years of repression had driven the democratic left and right underground and truncated the spectrum of legitimate debate. Only caricatures of the left remained now in the mainstream press, and so undemocratic were the extreme ends of the spectrum that now stood for “right” and “left,” that only a meatless “center” remained as the ideological core of legitimate political speech. Moderates clinging to the life raft of centrism were only advancing the process of hollowing-out democratic discourse. This process actually reinforced rather than relaxed the self-censorship of the American polity. Although no one could have anticipated the coming parade of assassinations and wreckage of urban rebellion, the ground was, ironically, being prepared for the rise of a new despotism, led by the master of political fear, Richard Nixon.
A cycle of political assassinations began on Dealey Plaza in November of 1963, that year. There has not been sufficient honesty about the place of urban black violence, but the pattern is very clear: white reactionaries fired the first shots in the terrorism of the Klan and the systematic police violence against people of color in the project to maintain segregation in the 1940s, 1950s and early 1960s, well before the formation of armed paramilitary black youths (“gangs”) in urban America. Considering that the assassinations of Jack Kennedy, Malcolm X, Martin Luther King, and Robert Kennedy were all right-wing attacks, against the Left, responsibility for provoking and legitimizing a turn to violence belongs squarely with the Right in the United States.
The idea of organized armed resistance was explicitly defensive and hypothetical during the militant phase of Malcolm X’s public career. During that period, that ended with his Haaj, his pilgrammage to Mecca, in 1963, he did much to spread the acceptability of violent struggle as an answer to police brutality. True to antique tragic form, Malcolm X was killed when he broke with the Nation of Islam’s intolerance and adopted the message that Islam was a universal religion that transcends race and cultural difference. The Black Panthers, formed in 1966, could easily claim legitimacy in the Black community, which by then had experienced more than a decade of white-on-black violence. The passage of the Civil and Voting Rights Acts were, while landmarks, only the beginning of the long legal struggle to implement them and fashion a more equitable society of racial fairness, a struggle that had become far advanced by the Age of Obama, but still not completed. In other words, the mainstream narrative of a “white backlash” against the upheavals of the and the Civil Rights victories, the Watts Rebellion, Newark and Detroit upheavals, urban mass violence that reached its apogee in 1968, has the story tout arriere: totally backwards.
The Black Panthers, founded in 1966, were crushed by the FBI’s COINTELPRO, “Counter-Intelligence Program,” by 1971, with the imprisonment and assassination of key leaders: Bobby Seale, [***and ]. Angela Davis remained free, and remained an inspiring portrait of revolutionary commitment within civil society, as she retired into the academy. The legendary Crips became the archetype of the scattered and intensely local armed territorial “gang,” which is really a socio-political formation specific to the late 20th century and early 21st centuries. It differs categorically from the relatively low-fatality “youth gangs” of the previous decades, as a heavily-armed, deadly and anarchic force within working-class communities, mostly of color.
Significantly, the first such gang formation on 76th St. near Fremont High School by 15-year old Raymond Washington was an attempt to continue the neighborhood-defense project of the failing Black Panther Party. He “was too young to participate in the Black Power movement in the 1960s,” writes gang geographer Alex Alonso: “He fashioned his street organization after the BPP militant style, sporting the popular black leather jackets of the time, clearly influenced by the slain BPP leader Bunchy Carter, who had lived on his street.
Nixon was the master of fear-and-reassurance politics, publicly proclaiming the principle that “people respond to fear, not love. They don’t teach you that in Sunday School, but it’s true.” His “Law and Order” campaign for the presidency in 1968 was built precisely on this inversion of Christianity’s most basic tent, the “new commandment” of Christ that all people should love one another, including their enemies. This radical stance toward peaceful coexistence threatens to overhaul any militarized society, from Augustan Rome to Global America, and the leaders deeply invested in the militarism of those societies unsurprisingly resist such messages with state power. Martin Luther King’s earthshaking nonviolent movement was a heroic implementation of Christ’s most radical message, and it is vitally important to identify Nixon’s central political principle as the exact opposite of King’s.[6]
Thermidor had arrived, institutionalizing the “extremism” that had Nixon had helped to promote throughout his Interregnum, between his eight year run as Vice President and his achievement of the White House as President of the United States for another six years. But Nixon did not labor alone to reap the rewards of all this fear. The dynamics of injustice and escalating state and collective violence from 1963 through the early 1970s always supplied him with an endless parade of horrors to attack, all apparently emerging from the great, mixed-race metropolitan centers. By pointing his finger at the threat of urban populations, Nixon built a regime that was tyrannical by the strict standards of the term: an anti-constitutional one that operated covert political police conducting domestic espionage and political assassinations.
Although the responsibility for Jack Kennedy’s assassination remains an open question, in any case, it—like Bull Connor’s attacks in Birmingham--provided the opening shot of the great reaction against the left in the United States. In California and Los Angeles, Liberals blithely celebrated the passage in Sacramento of the Rumford Fair Housing Act, which met an immediate hostile campaign for its repeal, led by the California Realtors Association, which was officially committed to the maintenance of racial residential segregation.
Slightly ahead of the national drive for Civil Rights laws, the California legislature in 1963 enacted the Rumford Act, named for one of the leading African American Assembly members, W. Byron Rumford (D- Berkeley). The Rumford Act “declared racial discrimination in housing to be against public policy and forbade owners of residential property including more than four units, or owners of any publicly assisted residential property, to engage in racial discrimination in its rental or sale.” Such a law ran counter to decades of real estate practices and the common sense of White property owners, who had been led to believe that the racial integration of neighborhoods guaranteed an immediate drop in property values. The California Real Estate Association, which in the 1930s had helped the Roosevelt Administration construct the Home Owner’s Loan Corporation’s “security maps” that redlined racially-mixed neighborhoods, led the attack on the Rumford law. Denouncing the new policy as “forced housing,” opponents raised the necessary signatures for a referendum repeal of the law. The measure passed overwhelmingly in November of 1964, most tellingly in the same year the U.S. Congress passed its sweeping Civil Rights law. The disrespect of this remarkable, electoral repeal of a Civil Rights law was both indicative of how far white Californians had to go before recognizing the basic tenets of equality. It also amounted to a major blow to the morale of the mainstream Civil Rights movement.
Observance of “extremism” exorcisms continued apace through the end of the decade, ironically giving more platforms for intolerant. In November of 1965 a student organization at Valley College (later renamed California State University, Northridge) sponsored a series of lectures on extremism. Their first guest was Barry Goldwater, Jr, whose political career had been launched the previous year during his father’s unsuccessful run for the presidency. Young Barry had relocated permanently to Los Angeles, promoting the wildfire of young conservatism that the 1964 campaign had inspired. “Does The Radical Right Hurt Conservatism?” the students asked. Goldwater rejected the question, probably because it seemed to impugn his own position. “Topics such as yours,” he said, “seem to say that anything that is not in some vague, undefined middle-of-the-road is extremism.” Unafraid to show his colors, he denied that the John Birch Society was extremist because it did not, he claimed, advocate violence. He drew the line at the border of the Ku Klux Klan, however.
The next speaker in the 1965 Valley College series was the suspended Los Angeles Police Department officer Michael Hannon, who had gained notoriety in August 1964 by participating in a “lie-in” to protest the meeting of the White Citizens Council at the Los Angeles Breakfast Club.[7] Responding to his assigned topic, “Does The Radical Left Hurt Liberals?” Hannon, a member of the Socialist Party, made a spirited defense of radicalism: “The radical left exists to articulate the needs and goals of the working classes, undiluted by the quest for money which the liberal needs to get elected.”[8] Hannon’s public civil disobedience had earned the ire of the avowed anti-radical Chief William H. Parker, who suspended him for “conduct unbecoming an officer.”[9] Indeed, Chief Parker had been operating the venerable “Red Squad” of political police detectives, founded during the first Red Scare of 1919.
The radical right was no mere bogey-man inflated by Centrist accusers in the “extremism” discourse. This would become abundantly clear in December 1967, when George Wallace mounted his white supremacist campaign for president on the American Independent Party label. At a large gathering of Wallace supporters, held at the Products Pavilion of the Orange County Fairgrounds, he welcomed the very zealots that Senator Kuchel had tried to nullify in his 1963 speech. “We believe in the separation of the races for Christian reasons,” one attendee explained to a reporter. Another praised Orange County because “The atmosphere is very discouraging to Negroes.” Then Wallace, surrounded by sixteen Alabama State Troopers, mounted the bulletproof podium and electrified the crowd with authoritarian visions: “If we could let the police run this country for two years,” Wallace boomed, “the streets would be safe.” Later, in the relaxed atmosphere aboard his DC-6, Wallace told disparaging stories about protesting “niggers,” prompting an aid to shake his head. As a reporter recounted: “’Ah don’ know,’ he said half-seriously, ‘This country needs a dictatorship, ah hope we can be it.”[10]
[Paragraph: THE REAGAN GOVERNORSHIP. Ronald Reagan succeeded where Nixon failed, in 1966]
Nixon’s competition with Wallace for the 1968 vote of the disaffected whites in the South, the so-called Southern Strategy, has been modified by Matthew Lassiter to read “Suburban Strategy,” cunningly calculated to drive to power in 1968 on the energy of fear, Nixon’s central tenet. Nixon’s campaigning in 1968 was remarkable in the annals of U.S. political history, as the last hurrah of whistles-top campaigning, in the old-style party organizations, before the reforms of the 1970s made parties more democratic and less deliberately led and rigged. Nixon had also make his own mastery of the media, calculating just the right messages to keep his opponent Hubert Humphrey on the defensive, which was not hard after the tumultuous 1968 Democratic Convention in Chicago, which make the Democratic party appear to the be hostage of urban disorder: helmeted youths battling helmeted Chicago police on the street. Mailer’s title, “Armies of the Night,” was precisely the vision that Nixon wanted to project of his opponents. He would bring Law and Order to a republic of white suburbanites who just wanted to get on with their American Dream.
[WATTS SECTION – IN DRAFT – APPROX 5 PAGES]
[Paragraph: BLACK CONGRESS, LA SPORTS ARENA, HUEY NEWTON BENEFIT, 18 FEBRUARY 1968. POSTER COPIES IN HUAC, “Subversive Influences” (1968)]
[Paragraph: Buffy Chandler, Otis Chandler, Franklin Murphy, and the LA Times, 1960-1970.]
[Page: Ruben Salazar story, through assassination, the one Chicano reporter, and one Black]
[2-3 pages: Roman Polanski, Sharon Tate, Charles Manson]
[2 pages: Strangling the Inner City in the 1980s and 90s. D.A.R.E., Hammer and the Rock (Nancy’s “caring” about kids helps advertise the dangerous ghetto), Daryl Gate Story. Dennis Hopper’s Colors (1988) “70,000 gang members, one million guns, two cops.”; Boyz n the Hood (1991); Menace II Society (1993)
[3 pages: 1992 Uprising]
[1] Quoted in Glassner (2010): xxxvi.
[2] John Averill, “Extreme Right Divides U.S., Kuchel Charges.” Los Angeles Times, 3 May 1963.
[3] Harry Bernstein, “L.A. Extremism Parley to Be National Model; AFL-CIO Plans Similar Conferences After Meeting on Communism and Far-Right,” Los Angeles Times, 28 April 1963.
[4] Kurashige (2008): 210-211.
[5] “Enemies of Democracy—Labor in the Forefront of the fight for Freedom,” printed program, Los Angeles County Federation of Labor Collection, Urban Archives Center, CSUN.
[6] Glassner (2010).
[7] “Negro Judge Criticizes 16 CORE Members,” Los Angeles Times, 1 December 1964, p. 24. The action, organized by the Congress On Racial Equality (CORE), took place in the parking lot of the Los Angeles Breakfast Club, 3201 Los Feliz Blvd.
[8] George Garrigues, “Hannon Says He’ll Back on Police Force,” Los Angeles Times, 19 November 1965, p. SF 8. By January of 1966, Hannon, who had been admitted to the State Bar, resigned from the LAPD and ran (unsuccessfully) in the Congressional primaries on the Democratic ticket. He remained active for some years thereafter as an advocate for leftist and antiwar groups. “Hannon Says He Will Quit Police Force,” Los Angeles Times, p. A12; Paul Beck, “Liberals Set Conference for Weekend,” Los Angeles Times, p. B3, names Hannon among the “Liberal and ultra-liberal Californians” discussing civil rights, labor, and war issues.
[9] Howard Hertel, “Hannon Hearing Erupts in Shouts—Chief Parker Angered by Questioning on Birch Society by Officer’s Attorney,” Los Angeles Times 14 July 1965, p. 3.
[10] Mary Reinholz, “On The Hustings with Wallace in California,” Los Angeles Times, 17 December 1967, p. B11.
This page has paths:
- Richard 37th: The Global Regimes of Los Angeles Phil Ethington
- Manna From Hell: Petroleum, Militarism, Counterrevolution, and World Wars Phil Ethington
- Narrative Essays Phil Ethington
