The American History Series

Abbott, Carl Urban America in the Modern Age: 1920 to the Present, 2d ed.

Aldridge, Daniel W. Becoming American: The African American Quest for Civil Rights, 1861–1976

Barkan, Elliott Robert And Still They Come: Immigrants and American Society, 1920s to the 1990s

Bartlett, Irving H. The American Mind in The Mid-Nineteenth Century, 2d ed.

Beisner, Robert L. From the Old Diplomacy to the New, 1865–1900, 2d ed.

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Carpenter, Roger M. "Times Are Altered with Us": American Indians from First Contact to the New Republic

Carter, Paul A. The Twenties in America, 2d ed.

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Reichard, Gary W. Politics as Usual: The Age of Truman and Eisenhower, 2d ed.

Reichard, Gary W. Deadlock and Disillusionment: American Politics since 1968

Remini, Robert V. The Jacksonian Era, 2d ed.

Riess, Steven A. Sport in Industrial America, 1850–1920, 2d ed.

Simpson, Brooks D. America’s Civil War

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Weeks, Philip “Farewell, My Nation”: The American Indian and the United States in The Nineteenth Century, 2d ed.

Wellock, Thomas R. Preserving the Nation: The Conservation and Environmental Movements, 1870–2000

Winkler, Allan M. Home Front U.S.A.: America during World War II, 3d ed.

Wright, Donald R. African Americans in the Colonial Era: From African Origins through the American Revolution, 3d ed.

Like many books, this one took a long time—more than a decade—from conceptualization to completion. From the start, however, the working title and thesis remained unchanged. That the title Deadlock and Disillusionment still seems apt confirms that the interpretation that led me to propose this book to my then-publisher, Harlan Davidson, has held up over the succeeding ten years and more. Readers will judge for themselves whether they share my view, of course—but this belief has sustained me during the course of this long project.

For permitting me the luxury of this long gestation period—while I was diverted by successive administrative assignments, briefly retired, unretired, and have since been diverted again—I owe a tremendous debt of gratitude to my friend and editor, Andrew Davidson. It was Andrew who encouraged me when I suggested to him the idea of a “current political history” title for the American History series, to which I had earlier contributed a volume on mid-twentieth-century politics—and he stuck with me through years when surely he must have entertained doubts that the new volume would ever see the light of day. Thanks, Andrew, for your faith in my good intentions—and for your good-natured encouragement along the way. I hope you will feel at least somewhat repaid by the fact that the series, now part of John Wiley & Sons, again has a “current political history” volume.

I want to thank also four professionals whose help was invaluable in developing my manuscript into this finished work: Wiley senior project editor Julia Kirk and Emma Brown, who assisted with permissions for the images used herein; Wiley editorial assistant Maddie Koufogazos, for her great help in the later stages of the book’s production, and Janet Moth, a first-rate copy-editor.

I also extend heartfelt thanks to two fine historians who took time to read the manuscript and who offered very helpful comments that allowed me to improve it. Clayton Koppes of Oberlin College, my longtime friend, read most of this book in an earlier draft and offered numerous helpful suggestions as to both content and organization. It helped that these suggestions were couched tactfully so as not to break my spirit as I worked toward completion of the project. Bill Chafe of Duke University generously agreed to serve as a reviewer of the near-final product for Wiley and he, too, offered excellent suggestions to strengthen the final product. I appreciate his careful reading of the work, as well as his willingness to allow me to acknowledge him in this public way. I apologize to both of these scholars for not taking all of their suggestions, but I hope they will recognize the specific ways in which their ideas made the book better. For any remaining weaknesses, of course, I accept full responsibility.

Finally, I want to thank my life partner and best friend, Oswaldo Pena, for his unflagging support for this project as I gave endless weekends and evenings to its completion—especially in its final stages. I might somehow have gotten to the end of the project without his unflagging support, but it certainly wouldn’t have been as much fun.

Nineteen-sixty-eight was truly an annus horribilis in American history. Most distressing and disconcerting for the nation, two major political figures lionized by their supporters as the best hopes for achieving racial and social justice were gunned down within the short space of two months. The reverberations were drastic. The sniper shooting of 39-year-old civil rights leader Martin Luther King, Jr., in early April fanned a frenzy of frustration in heavily black urban communities across the country, producing riots in more than a hundred major cities that left thirty-nine dead and caused more than $50 million-worth of damage in already blighted neighborhoods. Two months later, Senator Robert F. Kennedy’s assassination in a Los Angeles hotel on the very night of his narrow victory in the California Democratic primary seemed to deal a final, dispiriting blow to millions of Americans—especially young, idealistic anti-war protesters and impoverished African Americans and Hispanics. While not producing the level of violence that King’s death had, RFK’s killing seemed to end any chance that the ever-deepening divisions and climate of escalating violence in the United States could be resolved by peaceful political means. Together, these senseless killings signaled the emptiness of political promise and an end to harmony and civility in American society. A mere two-and-a-half months after Kennedy’s assassination, the bloody riots that accompanied the Democratic nominating convention in Chicago provided confirmation that American politics—indeed, American society—would never be the same.

Despair and disillusionment were manifest throughout American society in 1968. Polls showed deep pessimism across the electorate where questions of the nation’s political future were concerned. At least for the previous generation and a half, since the advent of the New Deal—and largely because of it—Americans had grown comfortable in their faith that any social divisions or policy disagreements in the public sphere could be worked out via the ballot box. Voters could—and did—express their pleasure or displeasure for the governing party and then, with a mandate established at the polls, politicians could usually be trusted to work together and often across party lines to advance the public interest in directions that the majority of voters had endorsed. With the exception of the few years during which political and social harmony were riven by the stridency of McCarthyism, by and large those entrusted with the reins of power in Washington, D.C., including the leaders in both houses of Congress, had worked to find ways to compromise policy differences in the public interest, rather than concentrating on those differences.

Structurally, this political generation had been marked by orderly and civil transfers of power and a palpable sense of accountability to the public on the part of presidents and most members of Congress. Despite much gnashing of teeth among political scientists at mid-century about the lack of “a responsible party system,” in fact one party or the other had held simultaneous control of both the executive and legislative branches for twenty-eight of the thirty-six years following FDR’s victory in 1932. All of this—accountability, stability, public confidence in the political system, and the apparent valuing of the public interest over partisan self-interest (not to mention basic civility in the political arena)—was to change after 1968. Increasingly, the disillusionment of American voters would be obvious in their unwillingness to provide real mandates for either party. In the forty-eight-year period beginning in 1968, single-party control over the executive and legislative branches became a rare exception: in only twelve of those years were the White House and Congress controlled by the same party (the Democrats in 1977–1981, 1993–1995, and 2009–2011 and the Republicans only from 2003 to 2007). In other words, in nearly 70 percent of the twenty-three elections during this long era, the voting public consciously opted for divided—and, it could be argued, irresponsible—government. How could it not be expected that deadlock (or “gridlock,” as the media more often labeled it) would be the hallmark of American politics in these years?

Other forces contributed to deadlock, as well. As several political scientists have demonstrated, party polarization, both in the electorate and in Congress, steadily intensified beginning in the early 1970s. Accompanying this trend, perhaps as a side effect of a decline of civility in American society as a whole, was a loss of “comity” in government. This was most noticeable in Congress, where traditions of respectful language and procedures had helped to maintain positive relations across party lines. All of these changes greatly reduced chances for compromise on matters of policy. The resulting inaction in turn reinforced public disillusionment with politics and government, generally. Relations between the executive and legislative branches also frayed noticeably. Beginning with the “credibility gap” that opened up under Lyndon Johnson and worsened under Richard Nixon, culminating in battles over war powers, impoundment of appropriated funds, and—ultimately—impeachment, Congress stiffened its resistance to any further strengthening of the presidency. This institutional rivalry, too, served to slow down the wheels of government.

Most of all, however, such deadlock was the result of purposeful, continual imposition by voters of “checks and balances” to limit either party’s potential to govern effectively. At the same time, unrealistic as it might have been in the circumstances, the public continued to yearn for dramatic change—for a new era. Such yearning manifested itself repeatedly in presidential elections. Hopefulness for a major political turnaround was redolent in the presidential campaign themes of the era, from Nixon’s “Bring Us Together Again” in 1968 to Barack Obama’s “Change We Can Believe In” in 2008. This recurrent tension—the voters’ almost wistful searching for dramatic, meaningful political change, followed regularly (and usually quickly) by a knee-jerk correction of course that made it impossible for either party to “go too far”—was to produce four decades and more of deadlock and disillusionment in American politics. Whether this longstanding gridlock will one day pass or represents an irreversible negative transformation in American politics remains an open question.