Chapter 116: “Clouds in My Sunshine” - President Udall’s Fight for a Fair Deal for Native Americans; And, ‘Mo-mentum’ Comes to an End
Above: President Udall, in a very rare moment of anger during a private meeting over inclusion of Native American tribes in Medicare-for-All with “reluctant” Congressional Leaders in the White House (left); Navajo Protesters speaking out against many issues facing Native peoples, in New Mexico, c. 1977 (right).
“There's a cloud in my sunshine
Rain on my parade
My jeans go a hole in it
And my happy's got a sad” - “Clouds in My Sunshine” by Redbone
“We have a moral responsibility to these people. They were the First Americans. They were here before any of us, and frankly, I’m tired of them paying the price for our prosperity!” - President Mo Udall
“We will be known forever by the tracks we leave.” - Dakota Indian Proverb
If there is an area of policy during Mo Udall’s years in the White House that has left him better loved by history than by his contemporaries, it was undoubtedly his Administration’s policies toward Native Americans. Even more than his then-controversial enmity toward the fossil fuel industry and push for green, renewable energy, even more than his somewhat partisan success with Medicare-for-All, Mo’s insistence on equal rights and meaningful support for Native communities won him few friends in the nation's capital. For decades since the time of the New Deal, Native communities had been languishing, all but forgotten by mainstream America. While FDR’s support for tribal sovereignty had been a step in the right direction in the 1930’s, in the time since, the ups and downs of the nation were not shared by all. The “boom years” of the 1950’s and even President Kennedy’s storied “rising tide” failed to truly lift all boats. Throughout the 40’s, 50’s, and 60’s, rates of poverty, joblessness, and suffering remained much higher among Native Americans than among any other demographic in the country. By the time of the Great Recession and the bicenntennial ‘76 election, more than half of all American Indian children under the age of 6 lived below the poverty line. Approximately half of American Indian families headed by single mothers were in poverty, compared to the 36% average across all other backgrounds. With reports of rampant child abuse, unemployment, and drug and alcohol abuse, not to mention crime, on the country’s reservations, it should not be surprising that rates of alcoholism, tuberculosis, diabetes, pneumonia, and influenza were often highest there as well. To Mo Udall, something clearly needed to be done about this.
In his many years in Congress, then-Representative Udall had always cared very deeply about fairness and a better quality of life for Native people. Besides working with Native activist groups on environmental issues, his most prominent fights involving Native policy concerned the Federal government meeting its obligations to Tribes and their governments. This included ensuring that Tribal trust funds, supposedly managed by Washington to help tribes provide for their people, were left alone (as they were frequently drained by a Congress eager to find funding for programs without raising taxes). It also meant standing up for the land, water, and resource rights of tribes, especially against energy and mining companies who wanted to plunder the land for its potential yields. Finally, and most prominently, Udall believed that the time had come for Washington to provide comprehensive health care not just for some, but for all Americans, including Natives. The government had long promised quality healthcare to tribes in various treaties, but seldom, if ever even blushed about reneging on these promises. Since the earliest treaties between Tribes and the government (even going back to the Washington Administration), healthcare, if ever provided at all, was usually administered by the War and later, Health, Education, and Welfare Departments. Supplies were typically few and far between under this system, however. Udall pointed out, as a member of Congress in 1974, that the Indian Health Service (I.H.S.), founded in 1955 to provide quality health services to American Indians, was “criminally underfunded” and failed to adequately address the “scale and depth” of health crises on reservations. Mo’s convictions about fulfilling these obligations to Native tribes were shared by scarcely anyone in Congress. Often, he stood, in the words of future Cherokee Chief and Politician Wilma Mankiller, “completely alone in his fight”.
Once elected President of the United States, Udall continued to fight tooth-and-nail for Native Americans on a variety of issues, from tribal sovereignty to direct economic aid. These struggles continued to win him few allies on Capitol Hill.
Though few members of Congress would
openly express their apathy toward Native plight, the vast majority were more than content to let the issues lie, unspoken about and ignored. Few, if any of their (mostly) white constituents were concerned with the problems facing Native Americans. As the Great Recession depended in the mid-70’s, they became far more interested in making economic promises to people who looked like them, and would be more likely (able) and willing to vote for them. In what Mo considered the “ultimate act of cowardice and villainy”, the 94th Congress and President Bush allowed the Indian Health Improvement Act to expire in 1975, even after Mo had spoken out for its re-authorization. The press did not make great note of this, but Mo would never forget it. He considered this as the exact moment he decided to run for President himself.
Unfortunately, campaigning for the all-too-often voiceless did not get much easier from the Oval Office. One of the most exhausting uphill battles in the campaign to pass MoCare had been the President’s insistence that Native Americans be eligible for comprehensive coverage as well. Implementation of this sort of single-payer system would have to be mediated through the I.H.S. on reservations, and with the price tag on Medicare for All already steep, many members of Congress were eager to leave Indians out, by de facto draining funds that would be given to the I.H.S. Udall was livid. In one of the few moments that she had ever seen her husband get truly angry, First Lady Ella Udall recalled Mo furiously ordering “a certain Senator from Montana” out of the White House, after he admitted to “not worrying a fig leaf about the Indians, or their health.” Though Mo would ultimately succeed in getting Natives added to the Medicare rolls at last, his many fights were beginning to take their toll on him, and his famous popularity. By the time of the 1978 Midterms in November of that year, Udall’s “crusader” attitude on these and other issues was earning him a multitude of enemies.
Still, Mo refused to stand aside. He didn’t know how long he would be given the chance to make a difference and “do the right thing”, so by God, he was going to do it for as long as he could.
Over the course of his Presidency, Udall argued in favor of cultural-awareness and rehabilitation for Native Tribes, in addition to Federal recognition of their existence and sovereignty. Through the National Endowment for the Arts, Udall funded WPA-style programs to celebrate Native heritage, history, religion, and identity. Many of these exhibits and creations, such as films, plays, novels, paintings, and music preserved Native narratives and experiences, and headlined major events at the Kennedy Center and other high-class locations in Washington, D.C. Across the country, tribal governments were given federal funds through the Department of Health, Education, and Welfare to found new schools which would teach Native culture, preserve Native languages and customs, and provide career training and opportunities for young Native men and women. They also created new curriculum and standards for non-Native majority public schools to use which sought to recognize America’s dark history and horrible mistreatment of Natives, though these would not see the light of day and widespread implementation until much, much later. In total, over the course of his time in office, Udall’s efforts represented a “major shift” in Native policy, relations, and reality in the United States. Near the end of 1978, Udall signed into law the
Indian Child Welfare Act, a law which gave tribal governments a strong voice concerning child custody proceedings that involve American Indian children. The law sought to minimize, to as great an extent as possible, the removal of Indian children from their families, tribes, and cultures. After centuries of forced reeducation and attempted cultural genocide on the part of White America, Udall felt a law of this sort was “long, long overdue”. Despite the protests of several states, the LDS Church (who had their own programs of “Indian placement” to convert young Natives to Mormonism), and several social welfare groups, who argued that Indian children should be placed “wherever they are likely to see the most economic benefit”, the President knew that removing Indian children from their cultures effectively de-humanized them. The law was endorsed and nursed by numerous Native activist groups, shepherded through Congress by Mo’s keen eye for legislative process, and ultimately laid the foundation for the system of child care that is still in place today. Whenever Native children must be relocated from abusive or negligent homes, tribes have absolute, exclusive jurisdiction for handling cases where the children live on reservations, and concurrent, but preferential jurisdiction in cases where the child lives off of a reservation. If the child has no tribal family member to raise them, their next preference for placement is with another Native family of their tribe. The law, and Udall’s efforts to pass it, made him a further hero to First Americans and their supporters.
Though not all of the President’s initiatives were successful, (Former Vice President Ronald Reagan would infamously ridicule his First Americans Arts Initiative [FAAI] as “taxpayers propping up Eskimo Poetry”, and many of these new tribal schools still faced shortages and a lack of consistent funding over the decades that followed), this period would give rise to many glimmers of hope for Native Americans. Many tribes would adopt the label Udall helped to popularize, “First Americans” to describe themselves in future activism and political causes. They believed this notion struck a chord with mainstream America, and showed their desire to both rule their own destiny and finally be included as part of the rich cultural tapestry that was the United States. This time also marked the “coming of age” for future First American leaders, such as the aforementioned Wilma Mankiller and Winona LaDuke, both of whom spent time as social workers, teachers, and administrators in these “Tribal Schools” before going on to serve in a variety of roles as activists and politicians themselves.
In politics, as in physics, every action has an equal and opposite reaction. In the case of the fragile alliance between the Progressive and Conservative wings of the Democratic Party in the late 1970’s, such speedy, vigorous action on so many fronts on the part of the White House was bound to have unintended consequences. The first of these arguably came on April 8th, 1978, when Senator Joe Biden (D - DE) shocked the country, and the world, by officially coming out against the Nuclear Nonproliferation Bill submitted by California Senator and fellow Democrat John Tunney on behalf of the President. Biden claimed that his opposition to the proposed law was on account of its “stringent limitations on missile capacity”, which Biden feared would “hamstring” national defense. The true reason for his opposition was simple, however: he felt it was time to put a stop to the President’s free reign over the party. For a year and a half, Mo had enjoyed the relatively unanimous, rancor-less, and enthusiastic support of the moderate and conservative wings of his party. While they had given him the benefit of the doubt that he would moderate his tone and begin to govern by what Georgia Senator Jimmy Carter called “reasonable consensus”, Udall’s recent pushes for progressive stances as social issues such as abortion, Gay and Lesbian awareness, and continued civil rights “agitation” finally proved a bridge too far. The stagnation of what the White House hoped would be a popular Nonproliferation bill became a symbolic fight for less liberal Democrats, to show the President that he could no longer get things done without their support.
Mo was devastated. He had expected such a move at some point, but hoped it could wait until after the midterms. “All disunity in the ranks will do now is convince folks to vote Republican.” He told Stew. Unfortunately, the conservatives wouldn’t budge. The Nonproliferation Bill languished and eventually died in committee. Secretary of State George Ball and the President both worried what kind of signal that might send to the world, particularly Andropov’s Soviet Union and the People’s Republic of China, where the new Chairman, Hu Yaobang, was trying to convince his Politburo to relax some of the country’s oppressive, hard-line attitudes. For Carter, Biden, and their allies, it was a chance they were willing to take to regain some control in their relationship with the President.
Throughout the rest of the year, as the campaign for the midterms intensified, Communitarian and “Conservative” Democrats forced a number of concessions onto the party’s announced platform. These included promises to fund Family Credit programs (which offered tax incentives to heterosexual married couples in particular), tax credits to single mothers and an increase in AFP benefits to working families. For the rest of the year, Udall was unable to pass any further meaningful legislation, as folks in Congress shifted their attention fully toward defending their seats. This divide, between progressive and moderate-to-conservative Democrats was even reflected somewhat in Mo’s relationship with his Vice President, Lloyd Bentsen, with their weekly meetings growing shorter and more tense as the year went on. Udall was not the sort of man who expected universal agreement from his party. In fact, he liked to joke “If you can find something everyone agrees on, it’s wrong.” But he was also not one to bend on principles he felt were right. The result was an increasingly antagonistic relationship with some members of Congress, a problem which Mo vowed to change in the second half of his first term. He signaled this intention by announcing that at the end of the year, Stew, his own brother, would be resigning from his position as White House Chief of Staff in order to spend more time with his family and return home to Arizona. The true reason for this shake up, many Washington insiders knew, was that Stew himself believed that by stepping aside, perhaps a new Chief of Staff could start a new relationship with moderates in Congress from a clean slate. If Stew was right, this would help Mo take back his “Mo-mentum” and pass the legislation he, and the country, so desperately needed. Stew would step down on February 2nd, 1979, succeeded in his position by Ted Sorensen, former Chief Speechwriter, political advisor, and “intellectual blood bank” to President John F. Kennedy. While Sorensen was still seen as “a touch liberal” for many conservative Democrats, his experience and friendships in Washington seemed like they would serve Mo well. To doubly prove his new dedication to “cooperation” with Congress, the President even appointed Hamilton Jordan, a self-professed “good old boy”, and one of Senator Carter’s aides (and frequent campaign manager) as Sorenson’s Deputy. While the new situation was not ideal, the White House hoped that it would represent a new beginning for the second half of Mo’s term.
Above: Stewart Udall, shortly before his resignation as White House Chief of Staff, February, 1979 (left); Ted Sorensen, his successor (center); Hamilton Jordan, Deputy White House Chief of Staff (right).
Next Time on Blue Skies in Camelot: The 1970's - A Time of Marked Social Change
OOC: I want to dedicate this chapter to my younger brother. A dedicated student of history, he brought my attention to the specifics of American Indian Policy over the last several decades, as well as Mo Udall's history as a staunch advocate for their causes.
I want to quickly apologize for my LONG absence over the last several weeks, verify that both I and this TL are in fact, alive, and attempt to explain my whereabouts... 
