Chapter Three: Into the 1960s
1960 saw the third of a series of small but sharp recessions that hit America in the midst of the prosperous post-war period. This was most heavily felt in areas dependent on exports of raw materials, particularly the still heavily-agrarian South and the coal fields of Pennsylvania, the latter struck hard by the recession. While the recession was short, GDP contracted by 3.9% in just ten months, and it was clear that it had had an impact. The election of Democrat John F. Kennedy to replace the term-limited Eisenhower was a tight race, but Kennedy in many ways blew it wide open when civil rights leader Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. was arrested in Macon, Georgia, leading a civil rights march. Kennedy leapt on that, calling multiple officials - including, to the surprise of many, the Governor of Georgia - to get him released. Kennedy's close victory over Vice-President Richard Nixon was close enough that it was contested in several states, but in his acceptance Speech, Kennedy made it clear that he felt it critical that he had to work with all Americans in order to advance the nation's interests, and that he felt that the 1960s would be a challenging time in America.
He was more right than he knew.
The election was focused on the economy and the growing geopolitical differences of the Cold War - a 1960 opinion poll found that over half of Americans felt that conflict between the United States and the Soviet Union was inevitable - but in many areas, one of the major issues was indeed civil rights. The President's powerful brother Robert relished the opportunity to make the election about civil rights, believing strongly that he could use this to pick up a vast share of the African-American vote, a number that was growing in most parts of America, including several huge states, including the key states of Illinois and Texas, were helped to go to Kennedy by the support of African-American voters in those states, with one of the key moments of that being the support of Vice-President Lyndon Johnson's campaigning in Texas by famed black war veteran Doris Miller, who was himself seeking election to the House of Representatives. (He was elected as a Democrat with a considerable majority, to the stunned shock of many Texas Democrats.) Kennedy's economic policy was sound, though his decision to continue to attempt to balance government budgets was against the advice of his economic advisors, who felt that tax cuts, which were eventually passed in any case in 1963, would be much more advisable to return the economy to growth. Perhaps most notable of Kennedy's early actions was the creation of the Peace Corps, which began in 1962, and his announcement of the plan by the United States to put a man on the Moon by the end of the decade. That goal, at first seen as madly ambitious, would be accomplished in May 1969.
The Cuban Missile Crisis of October 1962 would prove to be a turning point in the nation and not just that for Kennedy's Administration. The crisis, which saw more than a few people believe that nuclear war was very close to happening, saw a victory for the United States in a way - they got the Soviet Union to withdraw the SS-4 Sandal missiles that the Soviets had wanted to deploy in Cuba in return for the removal of American missiles from Cuba. This led to a rise in the approval rating of the President, but it also more importantly gave confidence that the United States could handle its own affairs in the world, which meant it could also do so at home if they wished to. This saw a sizable uptick in the number of movements to fight for civil rights, both in the South and elsewhere. At the same time, knowledge that the Soviets were working hard on advancing their technological advancements saw America begin many of the same programs, and true to form the Space Race, advancing science in aerospace industries and new ideas in many other fields led to spillover effects. General Motors' Vice-President John DeLorean commented in 1965 that "We will let no manufacturer of automobiles, anywhere on Earth, create a lead on us in the fields of design, technology and performance." America's utilities almost to a man invested heavily in the development of nuclear energy, and advancements in the fields of computer science, communications, electronics and manufacturing expanded significantly in the 1960s. Traditional brick and mortar industries began to introduce greater methods of automation and innovation, and while in this cases it caused job losses, it massively improved the profitability of many of these industries and allowed new development.
Martin Luther King's massive "March on Washington" on August 28, 1963, was another turning point in the civil rights movement. The March, which was entirely peaceful - not one arrest was made at it - was one of the largest protest marches in history, with a crowd of over half a million people - of which it was estimated a third were white or hispanic - marching through Washington to the Lincoln Memorial, where Dr. King gave his world-famous "I Have a Dream" speech. The march was impressive to all who saw it, and Dr. King's televised speech made him famous worldwide. It also was a poignant kick in the nuts to the Kennedy Administration in more ways than one. Dr. King and his colleagues in the SCLC had repeatedly called for Kennedy to issue a "Second Emancipation Proclimation", but Kennedy, mindful of the Southern Democrats he still had to deal with, refused to do so out of a need to continue to get work done. But leading up to the march, those opposed to the March - and in many cases indeed the idea of civil rights for all - massively overplayed their hand. J. Edgar Hoover made a massive political goof when he rejected the contents of a report he ordered on the march that discovered - against Hoover's beliefs - that the march had been infiltrated by communists. He then fired William Sullivan, who had authored the report. Sullivan, more than a little angered, then went on television on August 26 to explain the report, which made Hoover look like a complete fool. Hoover then got embarassed a second time when the march was peaceful, and then a third time on September 2 when the Washington Post ran a massive in-depth piece about Hoover's opposition to the civil rights movements and his directly contradicting the Kennedy Administration on its civil rights programs. That was enough for Kennedy, who fired the legendary FBI boss on September 15, 1963. Hoover's attempt to fight this was nailed again - this time by the loudly anti-segregation (though politically conservative) Chicago Tribune, which exposed the existence of COINTELPRO in a series of articles in 1964, which looked doubly bad against Dr. King's rising profile and his earnest attempts to keep the movements fighting for civil rights as peaceful as possible. Years later, it would be proven that Sullivan was one of the key sources to the Tribune's stories, and it became clear that the vast empire built up by Hoover both for national purposes and his own had gotten rather far out of hand.
On the transport front, the introduction of Japan's built-for-the-purpose Shinkansen high-speed trains just in time for the 1964 Tokyo Olympics was a stunner to American railroads, who had for some time held the belief in most cases that passenger trains were an uneconomic enterprise against competition from airliners, which could easily outrun any train. But some railroads thought otherwise - scenic roads like the Denver and Rio Grande Western and Western Pacific long held the belief that they could continue to make significant revenue through passenger service, and companies which were becoming reliant on fast freight services such as the New York Central and Erie Lackawanna felt that on middle-distance runs that they could be competitive with airliners due to the need to load the airplane at a farther-out airport and then move their way into the city itself, whereas most major cities had been built around their major train stations, and these stations had vast capacity and could easily be adapted to faster passenger train services. The 0 Series Shinkansen's operational speed of 130 mph and top speed of 150 mph was something no American railroad could match, though the Pennsylvania Railroad's Metroliners, which began operation in 1969, could nearly match it with in-operation speeds of 125 mph on the Northeast Corridor between New York and Washington, DC.
But it was the Erie Lackawanna which advanced the science, in a way few imagined.
The EL, formed by a merger in 1960, was blessed with one big advantage - it had the shortest route between New York and Chicago, crossing through northern Indiana and Ohio, branching to the cities of Cleveland, Columbus and Indianapolis rather running right through them, as well as being built south of the Finger Lakes of upstate New York, it has a lower gradient than the rival Pennsylvania Railroad's mountainous crossing of the Appalachians and was shorter than the New York's Central's congested Water Level Route north running parallel to the Erie Canal. Knowing this, EL invested its share of the Transport America funds in improving its trackage and signalling, with the EL installing cab signals west from New York, with the signals active from there to Youngstown, Ohio, by 1966. But that year, the power-wanting EL took a gamble which would end up making history.
Erie Lackawanna's motive power shops in Binghamton, New York, bought six examples of Union Pacific's massive General Electric-built gas turbines, which UP was retiring because of fuel costs. But EL that same year did a deal with Amerada Hess to supply the company with propane fuel, and bought new turbines from General Electric (who supplied them for peanuts in return for access to test data) and built new fuel tenders with stainless-steel containment compartments for the propane and traction motors to take advantage of the massive 11,000-horsepower turbines. Returned to service in the fall of 1968, they handled trains from Port Jervis, NJ, to Youngstown and Cleveland, OH, at speeds of over 80 mph in service, and as the cars used in the service were upgraded, so were the speeds. In 1970, the company made a last-ditch effort to see if its Lake Cities and Erie Limited passenger trains could work, and assigned two of the mighty turbines to them, geared for 100+ mph speeds. It also scoured many of the retired passenger cars around the country for good equipment. Thus done, the newly-outfitted trains began operations on Monday, March 2, 1970.
To the surprise of the company, the new trains proved to be much better patronized than the older ones. With the turbines only needing to be refueled once (this was done at Jamestown, NY), the train was able to make a astonishingly-quick schedule, covering the distance from Hoboken, NJ to Chicago in eleven hours and thirty minutes, an average speed of 85 mph including stops and the refueling. The train's high standard of service didn't hurt matters, and the substantially-increased ridership on the route that resulted from this convinced the company that there was hope in the route yet. Erie Lackawanna was bankrupt by 1973, but despite this its flagship passenger trains continued to advance services on the line, proving to some of the freight railroads that life remained in the old passenger train - and the move of the trains from Hoboken Terminal to Penn Station in New York itself added to the ridership, as passengers didn't have to use commuter services to get to their train. While other railways were having the same ideas, the advancing use of heavy-gauge rail, concrete ties, cab signalling and lower grades, all used to expand freight traffic capacity, were all also used to allow passenger trains to go faster. Many passenger trains from the railroads that maintained them - Erie Lackawanna, Rio Grande, Western Pacific, Rock Island, Santa Fe and Southern, among others - would soon find themselves with greater and greater amenities and higher speeds. EL's experiment with propane-fueled turbines was so successful that Santa Fe bought six of their own new from General Electric in 1973, and four more would be bought by Rio Grande and Rock Island for the California Zephyr which they and the Western Pacific operate.
The country was shattered by Kennedy's November 22, 1963, assassination - but what got attention the most was the subsequent discovery by now-President Lyndon Johnson that Kennedy had indeed written an executive order much like the one Dr. King had asked for repeatedly and spoken of on the Lincoln Memorial three months earlier, and one of his first major pushes was to get it passed into law. He rejected the executive order approach, instead using his legislative experience and the ability to use the Presidency as a bully pulpit to shove it through the house. It took a considerable amount of procedural trickery (one major holdup was that the chairman of the Senate Judiciary Committee, James O. Eastland, was very much opposed to any civil rights proposal and was not at all shy about saying so) to get the bill through, but regardless it did pass both houses, and was signed into law by President Johnson on July 2, 1964.
As ugly as the voting rights situation was before the Act, with the government now obliged to allow them to vote, the ugliness of the situation got out of hand. On March 7, 1965, a march organized by the SCLC and SNCC, led by John Lewis and Hosea Williams, to march from Selma to Birmingham, Alabama, was met just blocks into it by local law enforcement. The crowd of 2,500 marchers was attacked with clubs, bats, tear gas, bullwhips, dogs and rubber pipes wrapped in barbed wire. One of the dogs mauled a nine-year-old girl in the march, who later died from her injuries. Lewis was knocked unconscious, but was dragged to safety. TV crews got an eyeful, too - and one of the scene was that of Robert Evans, a white Pearl Harbor survivor, trying to talk reason to three police officers shortly before a cop armed with one of the rubber pipes smashed him in the face with it. Two days later, after a march to the Bloody Sunday site, two local policemen were involved with KKK members beating Rev. James Reeb and local actress Victoria Bennett. Both died of their injuries, Reeb two days later and Bennett two weeks later. The day after Bennett's death, Detroit homemaker Viola Riuzzo and Buffalo factory worker Casey Woodhouse were shot dead by Klansmen as they drove marchers back to Selma after the second attempt at a march. The deaths did nothing to stop voting legislation from passage, and the Voting Rights Act was passed into law on August 6, 1965. The two cops responsible for killing Rev. Reeb and Bennett were charged with murder, but the local authorities did not press it all the way to the limit. It didn't end up mattering, as both officers had only returned to duty days before their cruiser was struck by an eighteen-wheeler at an intersection in Birmingham on December 14, 1965, killing both instantly.
Even as the situation in America was troubled, it got worse abroad. President Kennedy's decision to get involved in Vietnam wasn't going well, and indeed the situation there didn't get better. Kennedy had been planning to begin pulling out of South Vietnam, but Johnson reversed that decision. The Gulf of Tonkin incident on August 2, 1964, ultimately was the spark that ignited the Vietnam War, a conflict that would do much to shape the coming times in America....
