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FeedHey, Hey, LBJ
Swarthmore College made nice with its 1964 commencement speaker—but held its nose.
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Politics is a series of temporary alliances. And few alliances have been more temporary than that of Lyndon B. Johnson and Swarthmore College. Don’t be fooled by the enthusiasm of the woman with the sign in the photo above. When Johnson addressed the college’s centennial commencement in 1964, many who listened actually held their noses.
“Liberalism is the way of the future,” lamented Peter Passell, a Swarthmore junior, journalist and self-described radical who, that autumn, compromised himself by distributing Republicans-for-Johnson literature at area Barry Goldwater rallies. Yes, Passell assured readers of the Phoenix student newspaper that he would have preferred a far more radical choice. “[But] which is more likely to win over a reluctant Congress?” Passell asked. “The soothing platitudes of Lyndon Johnson pleading for a Great Society or a thousand pickets in Washington?”
Johnson was filling in for John F. Kennedy, who’d been invited before his assassination. But LBJ had his own goal: selling the “War on Poverty” announced at his January State of the Union address. In August, Congress would pass legislation creating Head Start, food stamps, work study, Medicare and Medicaid—all at a cost then forecast at $1 billion a year. (The Phoenix later fretted that the only result might be to “settle a federal bureaucracy onto the poor.”)
In his 15-minute speech, Johnson tied his plans to the historical good deeds of the Quakers who’d founded Swarthmore, then attacked the idea that poverty was beyond federal authority. “Does government subvert our freedom through the Social Security system, which guards our people against destitution when they are too old to work? Does government undermine our freedom by bringing electricity to the farm, by controlling floods or by ending bank failures?” Johnson asked. “The truth is, far from crushing the individual, government at its best liberates him from the enslaving forces of his environment.”
Then he was gone. As the crowd applauded, Johnson rode a waiting limo down the hill to his helicopter, waiting on the soccer field.
LBJ has been quoted as having said, “An honest politician is one who, when he’s bought, stays bought.”
It was actually Simon Cameron, Lincoln’s secretary of war—but it could have been Johnson, whose skill at political arm-twisting made him an effective Senate majority leader. “The greatest intelligence gatherer Washington has ever known,” according to historian Randall Woods. Johnson knew where every senator stood, his philosophy and prejudices, his strengths and weaknesses, and what it took to break him.
And he loved to give electric toothbrushes to friends. “For then I know that from now until the end of their days, they will think of me the first thing in the morning and the last at night,” he said.
Few politicians crossed LBJ. But such tactics wouldn’t work at Swarthmore, an institution pledged only to what it still describes as the “search of truth.”
The actual truth, of course, is endlessly debatable. Swarthmore’s idea is that the individual should constantly reconsider, apply and test what he or she believes. It’s not a mission that is likely to breed much respect for dogma or authority. Indeed, Swarthmore students have always crossed their professors and administrators, and been praised for doing so.
One example, related in the Phoenix in 1964, occurred during the 1921-40 presidency of Frank Aydelotte. A campus club had invited an African-American minister to speak and asked Aydelotte to join the group for dinner. Cross-racial socializing was unusual, so Aydelotte—concerned that the minister might be treated rudely by someone—proposed that the man dine at his house instead.
