Finally, a Great Speech for Biden – by MTG
Two Speeches Reflect How the Battle Lines of Today Were Drawn in 1964.
Stills from the Biden campaign video of parts of Marjorie Taylor Greene’s July 16 Turning Point USA talk accusing Biden of trying to do exactly what most Americans want done.
The most significant speech Lyndon Baines Johnson made during the 1964 presidential campaign was at the Jung Hotel in New Orleans in early October. It came three weeks after Barry Goldwater’s swing through Dixie and at a time when it seemed clear that white people across much of the Deep South were abandoning LBJ and his party to support the Republican nominee because they believed Goldwater to be a segregationist.
I immediately thought of that speech when I saw what Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene (R, GA) said in her Turning Point Action Conference speech on Sunday:
“Lyndon B. Johnson is very similar to Joe Biden. ... [LBJ had] big government programs to address education, medical care, urban [Greene pronounced the word derisively, presumably to be sure her rightwing audience knew that meant black people] problems, rural poverty, transportation, Medicare, Medicaid, food stamps and welfare, the Office of Economic Opportunity and big labor and labor unions.
Now, LBJ had the Great Society, but Joe Biden had Build Back Better, and he still is working on it—the largest public investment in social infrastructure and environmental programs that actually is finishing what FDR started, that LBJ expanded on, and Joe Biden is attempting to complete.”
The part of Johnson’s Jung speech that came to mind was when he departed from his prepared text to give what could only be characterized as a revival sermon. LBJ quoted what Texas Senator Joseph W. Bailey had once said to Sam Rayburn about the cause of the region’s plight. Bailey was originally from Mississippi (in his remarks, Johnson named neither Bailey nor the state), and he told Rayburn:
That, of course, was precisely what was being said in the Deep South in 1964—and what would be said implicitly in later years down to the present, to woo white people away from the Democratic Party. Johnson would have none of it. “It is time for all of us to follow the Golden Rule,” he said in New Orleans. “It is time for all of us to have a little trust and a little faith in each other, and to try to find some areas that we can agree on so we can have a united program.”
While New Orleans hardly qualified as the “belly of the beast” of Deep South racism—that appellation was the tightly held property of nearby Mississippi—Lyndon Johnson was in hostile territory. His political advisers warned him against saying anything on civil rights. As he had done when he insisted on highlighting the civil rights bill in his address to the nation five days after President Kennedy’s assassination, Johnson rejected the counsel. “I am going to repeat here . . . what I have said in every state that I have appeared in,” he told a huge, interracial crowd that met him at the train station. “As long as I am your president, I am going to be president of all the people.” In his speech at the Jung later that evening, LBJ made an impassioned plea to fellow southerners to change their racist course. Speaking of his vision for the American future, the president declared, “We are not going to lose that tomorrow in divisions over things of the past.”
Then, in the Jung speech, just before he departed from the prepared text, the President spoke to his fellow southerners: “The people that would use us and destroy us first divide us. . . . And all these years they have kept their foot on our necks by appealing to our animosities and dividing us.” Directly addressing what held the South back, Johnson proclaimed: “I am not going to let them build up the hate and try to buy my people by appealing to prejudice.”
Here was Lyndon Johnson at his finest, reflecting the best in America. And, for that brief shining moment in 1964—before he sunk the nation into a terrible war for which there was no good reason and before Watts would refuel the divisive power of yelling “Negro, Negro, Negro!” (or far worse) at election time—it was reflective of most of America outside the Deep South. “The New Orleans speech was courageous—and, most especially, courageous politics,” top aide Horace Busby said to Johnson afterwards. “Overnight, they [the press] are speaking of you—as once of FDR—as the ‘master,’ ‘the champ.’”
Polls indicate that today there is again overwhelming support for what FDR and LBJ did in social and economic policy—for all the policies and values that Greene derided and correctly said Joe Biden is attempting to complete.
And all the rightwing extremists are doing to combat them is to keep “their foot on our necks by appealing to our animosities and dividing us,” yelling “Negro, Negro, Negro!” (which they now replace with acronyms meant to sound like illnesses for which Big Pharma advertises cures, “CRT! DEI!” along with “Gay, Gay, Gay!,” “Trans, Trans, Trans!” “Feminist, Feminist, Feminist!” “Socialist, Socialist, Socialist!” (which is just a way to make what vast majorities of Americans want sound frightening), “Communist, Communist, Communist!” (it is to be doubted that there are more than a few thousand people in the United States who identify themselves as communists), “Woke, Woke, Woke!” “Ban books, Ban books, Ban Books!” “Whitewash History, Whitewash History, Whitewash History!” (they don’t say it that way, but that’s clearly what they mean), and so on.
NOTE: Portions of this essay are adapted from my latest book, The Times They Were a-Changin’ - 1964: The Year “The Sixties” Arrived and the Battle Lines of Today were Drawn, which is available in hardcover at independent and at Amazon, Barnes & Noble, and other online bookstores and as an e-book or audiobook.