The Great Society after Johnson:
The Case of Bilingual Education

Gareth Davies

Introduction

Historians considering the ideological direction of American politics during the 1970s have often taken for granted that troubled decade's strong rightward impulse, said to have originated in a reaction against Lyndon B. Johnson's Great Society and stewardship of the Vietnam War, grown amid the economic strains and political resentments of the Nixon years, and reached its full force with Ronald Reagan's election to the presidency in 1980.1 Certainly, that version of events has some force, especially if one focuses on presidential politics and elections. Having lost only two presidential elections in the third of a century that preceded Lyndon Johnson's landslide in 1964, the Democratic party won only one of the next six contests, and its successful candidate in the Watergate-influenced year of 1976 was Jimmy Carter, the quintessential post–New Deal Democrat. Millions of erstwhile New Deal Democrats either started voting Republican or ceased voting at all, reflecting the mood of alienation from liberalism and government that was subsequently captured so brilliantly in books by J. Anthony Lukas and Jonathan Rieder.2	1
But if one turns to the policy legacy of the 1970s, it becomes hard to sustain the contention that the decade was fundamentally conservative: It saw the legalization of abortion; a halt to capital punishment; important new regulatory regimes in the areas of environmental protection, consumer protection, campaign finance, disability rights, gender discrimination, and workplace safety; the index linking of Social Security benefits; the nationalization of public assistance for the elderly; the desegregation of southern schools; the creation of the federal Department of Education; and a new attentiveness to the claims of Native Americans and Latinos. If one were to base an account of the political history of the post–Great Society years on such examples, one would conclude that the reformist impulse of the 1960s retained and perhaps even increased its vigor during the 1970s.	2
With the prominent exception of Hugh Davis Graham, it is hard to think of a historian who has seriously considered the tenacity of the reform impulse during the 1970s.3 For help in addressing the issue, we need to turn to the social sciences, especially to the work of scholars who associate that period with fundamental changes in the American way of government; some indeed refer to a "new American political system." They impute to the new system characteristics that may explain the successes of liberalism during an age of disillusionment with government: divided government, a proliferation of "public interest" and minority-oriented pressure groups, the marked tendency of federal judges and administrators to endorse the constitutional and statutory claims of such groups, a decentralization of power within Congress, a new relationship between the federal government and the states, and a tremendous increase in the amount and intrusiveness of federal regulation.4	3
The present essay applies this way of understanding American politics during the 1970s to the case of bilingual education. In 1968 the federal government started—in a very subdued fashion—to encourage local school districts to instruct underperforming non-English-speaking children in their own languages. It was a tiny program, and its survival prospects must have seemed bleak when Richard M. Nixon entered the White House the following January. Yet federal interest in bilingual schooling not only survived, but burgeoned, during the Nixon-Ford years: by the mid-1970s the Department of Health, Education, and Welfare (HEW) was requiring school districts with large numbers of "language minorities" to institute bilingual remedies. I argue that the survival of the program owed much to a pattern that has interested historians, namely, the way Richard Nixon's quest for a "new Republican majority" sometimes took him in surprisingly liberal directions. The expansion of the program, however, owes more to a second dynamic that has interested historians less, but which is arguably more consequential, namely, the program's migration from the world of electoral politics to that of bureaucratic and judicial discretion.	. . .