| Book Review | The Journal of American History, 93.2

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| Book Review | The Journal of American History, 93.2 | The History Cooperative

Book Review

The Great Society and the High Tide of Liberalism. Ed. by Sidney M. Milkis and Jerome M. Mileur. (Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 2005. xxii, 490 pp. Cloth, $80.00, ISBN 1-55849-494-4. Paper, $24.95, ISBN 1-55849-493-6.)
A critical appraisal of the Great Society is long overdue. The essays collected in The Great Society and the High Tide of Liberalism try to put the Great Society into perspective, seeing it as both an effort to complete the New Deal's unfinished business (adding Medicare and Medicaid to the welfare state) and as a political reform movement that transformed liberalism—but not always for the better.	1
Lyndon B. Johnson's reputation undergoes some necessary rehabilitation in these pages. Johnson appears not just as a master legislative tactician, but also as a courageous visionary and moral leader. Nowhere was that more apparent than in the struggle over civil rights legislation. Just as important was Johnson's 1964 Great Society speech, which announced the transformation of liberalism from an ideology concerned with adding to citizens' material well being to an ideology preoccupied with the quality of life. Environmental legislation, Johnson later told Congress, should consider "not just man's welfare, but the dignity of man's spirit" (p. 150). The new liberalism was new, not simply a revision of New Deal aspirations and goals. It drew, several of the authors suggested, on the rights-based ideology of the civil rights movement and the more pessimistic liberalism of the Cold War.	. . .

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