MPR’s Dan Olson reports from the Mondale Lecture Series. A panel of Democrats, led by former Vice-President Walter Mondale, remember the so-called, "fabulous 89th", the Congressional session where many of this country's most familiar social programs became law.
Now, thirty-five years later, many of these programs are facing Republican attempts to modify or even end them. Mondale, then a newly appointed senator, says the 89th Congress is best remembered for its civil rights initiatives.
DAN OLSON: Americans turning on the evening television news, March 7, 1965, saw pictures of Selma, Alabama police attacking peaceful civil rights marchers with billy clubs, tear gas, and bullwhips. The pictures helped increase public opposition to this country's far reaching system of racial segregation.
The changing public sentiment occurred as Lyndon Johnson and other democrats began to take control of the White House and Congress. One of them was Walter Mondale, a newly appointed United States Senator, filling out the term of Hubert Humphrey who had become vice president. Mondale says the 89th Congress is best remembered for its civil rights initiatives.
WALTER MONDALE: Above all, the 89th Congress will be remembered as the one that finally broke the back of official discrimination in America, with the adoption of the national voting Rights Act.
DAN OLSON: The act along with other laws ended literacy tests and poll taxes in states where officials tried to keep Blacks from voting. President Johnson and the like minded democrats including Mondale who controlled Congress. One enactment of a dozen and a half sweeping social programs, ranging from laws to control air and water pollution, to money for the Arts.
WALTER MONDALE: We enacted the landmark Medicare and Medicaid Acts to help seniors and the needy to have medical care hugely changing the availability of decent healthcare to millions upon millions of Americans.
DAN OLSON: Mondale's comments are part of a University of Minnesota lecture series where he's reflecting on 50 years of public service. In most of his lectures, Mondale has avoided direct criticism of President Bush and other Republicans. This time he called the White House's legislative agenda, a radical assault on progressive ideas.
WALTER MONDALE: Private Social Security investment accounts to cripple Social Security. Medicare coverage conditioned on private pharmaceutical insurance coverage, which will weaken Medicare. So-called block granting of the Medicaid program, which will relieve the federal government of responsibility, allowing states to back away from it.
DAN OLSON: The 89th Congress was Iowa Democrat John Culver first term as a member of the House. Even as Democrats were winning approval of historic social programs, the political tide was turning. Republicans Culver remembers rallied and criticized the Democrats for approving massive spending on domestic social programs. Also starting to worry voters was the human and financial cost of the increasingly unpopular war in Vietnam.
JOHN CULVER: The poverty program, I think, at its high tide was like 2.5 billion a year and actually, we were running 2.5 billion very soon each month in Vietnam.
DAN OLSON: In 1966, Culver says the political pendulum swung back. Nearly all the house Democrats elected two years earlier were defeated. President Johnson's attempt to placate both war supporters and opponents, with a so-called "Guns and Butter" spending program, failed. Urban race riots brought calls for law and order from many voters.
President Johnson declined to seek reelection, and Republicans won back a measure of power. Culver chided fellow liberal Democrats for backing away from a core party principle underpinning the 89th Congress, that the federal government can be a tool to promote progress and justice.
JOHN CULVER: The richest, most powerful nation in the history of the world still has 12 million children or one out of six living in poverty. This nation must never give up the dream of a Great Society for all.
DAN OLSON: John Culver, former member of Congress from Iowa speaking at the Mondale lecture series in Minneapolis.
Dan Olson, Minnesota Public Radio.
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