Bill Boustany, “The Consensus,” American History Monthly (Dec. 1982)
… The 1950s were, in the words of the Karen Newton song, the time “when the USA became complete.” Alaska achieved its long-awaited statehood in 1946, followed by the District of Columbia in 1950 and the Bahamas in 1951, the last of which displaced South Carolina as America’s blackest state. The former Danish West Indies were too small to attain statehood on their own, but their future was under discussion even as the preparations for the Bahamas’ admission took place, and within two years afterward, they would enter the Union in an unprecedented way. In 1953, the voters approved an amendment to the Bahamas’ constitution that created the State of the Bahamas and Virgin Islands, with a single governor and a common slate of representatives and senators but two cabinets, two legislatures and broad local autonomy.
The Virgin Islands’ accession meant that only a few uninhabited guano islands still had territorial status, and the occasion was marked by much triumphalism. Democrat-Republican President Claude Martin, speaking in Charlotte Amalie on Accession Day with a 50-starred flag prominent in the background, praised the United States as “a nation of fifty great states and a hundred sixty million proud citizens, where all are equal under the law and none has any rights or privileges that others lack.” The first Virgin Island Senator – it had been agreed that, pending the next election, the Bahamas and Virgin Islands would each get one – entered Congress to thunderous applause, and the cities and towns threw lavish parades and fireworks displays.
At a time of unprecedented peace and prosperity, the majority of Americans believed that the triumphal tone was justified. Under the surface, however, the newly-completed United States was very much incomplete. The civil rights struggle had resulted in enormous gains for African-Americans and other minorities, and the campaign against Congo fever had brought in an unprecedented frankness in sexual and family matters [1], but by 1940 both had stalled, and the following decade saw little progress and even, in some places, regression.
The United States of the 1940s and 50s was one in which African-American culture – or, more accurately, the
several cultures of Africans in America – had entered the mainstream as never before, and in which black stories were considered part of the American story. The Civil War epic
Geechee Forever [2] was released in 1952 to wide acclaim, its characters achieved iconic status, and the number of Gullah words left untranslated showed how much they had already penetrated American English. The idea that the law should not give aid to white supremacy, and that African-Americans should have political rights and legal equality, was accepted by a broad majority of the national electorate, and several former Jim Crow states were now home to a thriving black professional and political class. But at the same time, in a few other states, private discrimination remained legal, black schools and municipalities were systematically underfunded and omitted from development programs, and legislatures were gerrymandered to dilute black political power.
The same dichotomy affected other aspiring populations. Native Americans had participated in the civil rights struggle and had also won gains; autocratic reservation chiefs were overthrown and replaced with democratic tribal governments, and the boarding-school system was replaced by locally based secondary schools and, on the larger reservations, even tribal colleges. But the reservations remained desperately poor and cut off from much of the nation’s infrastructure, and Indian Affairs bureaucrats often undermined the elected tribal administrations. Women, too, had achieved a strong presence in public and professional life during the Electric Age and could legally do anything men could, but it was still legal for employers to exclude them from certain jobs or dismiss them when they got married, and as the nation became richer and the social center of gravity shifted toward the suburbs, the ideal of stay-at-home motherhood was promoted heavily in popular entertainment and advertising.
And, for the most part, the country didn’t want to hear about it. The widespread perception was that the civil rights movement had won, and that there was nothing more for it to complain about; besides, the nation was exhausted from the civil-rights struggle and the cultural wars of the 1930s. The 1940s inaugurated an era of social and political conformism, widely known as “the consensus,” and those who challenged it would be reminded of the estimated 63,000 dead in the civil rights struggle and of the damage to social cohesion that had occurred during that time. Civil rights were part of the consensus, but only to the extent that they had already been won.
The result was that, as with the era following Reconstruction, the most racially regressive states – Florida, Virginia and Louisiana, and sometimes Arkansas – were able to erode some of the gains of the 1920s and 30s. They couldn’t return to the censorship, movement restrictions and political disenfranchisement of the Jim Crow era – all that was unconstitutional now, and the prohibition of it was enforced by Federal courts and prosecutors – but there were other, more indirect ways of shoring up the existing power structure. As other Southern states had done during the Progressive Era [3], these states replaced many elected officials with appointed ones, stripping black voters of the ability to control the counties in which they formed a majority. State budgets for education and health – the national health care system was largely state-administered – ensured that black communities were poorly served, and protests against these conditions were harshly suppressed…
… The consensus era was defined as much by material expansion as by papering-over of social problems. Industry continued to grow, coalescing around a social market economy in which works councils were the central organ of management and in which unions were broadly accepted as economic players. Both Farmer-Labor and Democratic-Republican administrations launched massive infrastructure programs: the 1940s, and to a lesser extent the 50s, were a free-spending time in which the government built national highways and high-speed trains, urban mass transit, hydroelectric dams and nuclear plants (the latter beginning in the mid-1950s), and airports, and subsidies were lavished on universities and flagship hospitals. Rising living standards and all-pervasive mass media encouraged the growth of a consumer culture, and the road and rail networks brought goods from throughout the world even to small towns.
Possibly the most characteristic development of the consensus era, however, was the rise of suburbia. Railroad suburbs had existed since the nineteenth century, but their expansion accelerated rapidly with the construction of highways and commuter railroads and the democratization of fiacre ownership, and by the mid-1940s, suburban growth and encouragement of home ownership were official policy. Huge neighborhoods of tract housing sprang up between 1940 and 1960, and millions of people took advantage of subsidized credit to move out of the cities.
The suburban tracts were within reach of the working class, and were greeted with enthusiasm by families tired of living in cramped apartments. But the early suburbs were criticized from both the right and left. On the right, the Democrats broke with Farmer-Labor and their own Republican coalition partners in condemning bedroom suburbs as soulless and lacking in sense of community. By this time, also, the Democratic Party in many states was closely identified with the evangelical Christianity of the Fourth Great Awakening [4], and the Social Church branch of evangelicalism, with its emphasis on health, environmental stewardship, shared cultural activities and a charitable mission [5], saw the atomization of suburban life as the antithesis of the Christian ideal. States and counties with Democratic administrations enacted regulations to promote an alternative model of suburban design with heavy emphasis on parks and sports facilities, scattered shopping districts, cultural amenities and local employment opportunities. One of the first of these was Sienna, Texas, outside Houston [6], and by the late 1950s, “Sienna-model” suburbs were springing up far beyond the South.
The left, too, had been influenced by the Fourth Great Awakening, often by alternative faith traditions such as Belloism and yoga, and they too joined in the criticism of tract suburbs as soul-destroying. On a more practical level, the left also decried suburbs as a means of preserving racial segregation. In the states where private housing discrimination remained legal, suburban developers often built restrictive covenants into their contracts of sale, and even in states where such covenants were illegal, middle-class African-Americans who remembered the civil rights conflict were hesitant to move into mostly-white neighborhoods. The result was that the people who’d never come to terms with the fall of Jim Crow moved out to the suburbs en masse, and created their own worlds there.
Atlanta in the 1950s is the iconic example of suburban segregation. In the city proper, which had a black mayor, the black and white middle and upper classes mixed freely. Office buildings were full of black bankers and executives, the municipal opera and theater showed African and African-American works to broad acclaim, and there was a small but growing number of interracial marriages. Surrounding the city, however, was a ring of suburbs under restrictive covenant, and there were few black employees to be found in the companies that had offices there. A couple of the suburbs in the ring were primarily black, but these were the exception, with most African-Americans preferring to stay in the city where the gains of the civil-rights era were secure.
There were places that didn’t follow the rule of integrated cities and segregated suburbs. In states where civil rights had been entrenched for a long time, such as the Carolinas and Mississippi, suburbs as well as cities grew into mixed middle-class communities, and the same was true of the Maryland outskirts of the State of Columbia where black and white government employees lived in roughly equal numbers and where biracial families were more common than nearly anywhere else in the country. But in much of the rest of the South, and even in many cities of the North and Midwest, the suburbs acted as a filter, attracting people who were uncomfortable with the previous generation’s social changes. By the end of the 1950s, the concentration of so many Americans into mutually exclusive worlds would have major political consequences, including a challenge to the consensus from all sides…
Frank Perini, Tent Meetings and Turkish Marriages: Gay America, 1880-1980 (New York: Janus Press, 1997)
… The sexual culture wars of the 1930s may have stalemated temporarily during the consensus era, but they never truly ended. The struggles during the 1940s and 50s were lower-key and smaller-scale, and often played out on the level of medicine, social science and administrative law rather than politics, but they went on, and in doing so, they set the stage for what would follow.
The root of change in the 1940s, as before, was the campaign against Congo fever. It has already been mentioned that the specter of Congo fever, on top of syphilis, resulted in an increased openness in discussing sexual matters, both between doctor and patient and in public discourse. [7] But the search for the Congo fever cytophage also generated intensive
study and documentation of sexual practices. It was known as early as the 1900s that Congo fever was transmitted sexually, and since the mid-1910s that it was more easily transmitted among gay men, but doctors wanted to know which specific practices were highest-risk, how common those practices were and the extent to which they might be alleviated by prophylactics.
The results of these studies, which began in the 1920s but increased in frequency after the cytophage was identified and its presence could be tested, came as a shock to many. This was not, as might be expected, due to the prevalence of sexual practices that were regarded as deviant at the time, but because of what was revealed about sexual abuse by people in positions of authority. This was the dark underworld of sex in America that, even more than the Turkish-bath scene, no one acknowledged or talked about – but now it was a matter of statistics, and those statistics created a sudden awareness of how much sexual practice was dictated by power within families and institutions.
This awareness, in turn, led to a subtle cultural shift: while sexual
responsibility remained an unquestioned value in a world with Congo fever, sexual
hierarchies were increasingly challenged. By the 1950s, child abuse had become a matter for serious investigation and unquestioned trust of those with authority over children was a thing of the past. Women rebelled against conventional psychology and marriage counseling that cast nearly every marital problem as their responsibility, and alternative guides to marriage, emphasizing the autonomy of both partners, gained in popularity.
Inevitably, the erosion of traditional hierarchies would affect perceptions of gay men and women. Already, in the early days of Congo fever, many had come to see responsible same-sex relationships as more worthy of respect than opposite-sex promiscuity, and advocates such as Theodore Roosevelt, before his death in 1931, argued that only public acceptance could lure gay culture out of the Turkish baths and into open committed partnerships. Outside cultural islands such as Manhattan, these arguments gained limited acceptance in Roosevelt’s lifetime, both because of religious opposition to homosexual practice and because it offended prevailing notions of masculinity. But now those prevailing notions were open to question.
The results were gradual, and in some cases frustrating. Several states had decriminalized same-sex relations during the 1910s and 20s, and a dozen more did so between 1940 and 1960. But most of the cultural shifts occurred on an individual level. The questioning of traditional hierarchies also called into question the notion that deviation from sexual norms was a sign of mental illness, which in turn meant that agencies and courts were more willing to allow same-sex couples to retain custody of children and more open to evidence that those children would not be harmed. And as that body of evidence increased, judges in many states also began allowing adoptions both within and outside what they now called “de facto families.”
Matters had not yet reached the point where legal recognition of Turkish marriages was practical – or, in many states, even thinkable. But by the early 1960s, “de facto families” summed up many people’s thinking about such relationships. The famous 1962 society-page report of an unofficial marriage ceremony involving daughters of two elite Manhattan families is often considered a turning point, albeit a premature one: the scandal that followed the story almost led to the newspaper’s closure, and ensured that no similar ceremonies would be reported until the 1970s. But at more prosaic levels of society, more people in same-sex partnerships were willing to make themselves known within their circle of friends or even in church, and this would, in time, have a profound cultural impact…
Caroline Konte, Unfinished Business: Civil Rights and the Mallory Era (Charleston: Atlantic, 2005)
… There were many reasons why the national consensus of the 1940s started to crumble in the following decade. By the later 1950s, the trauma of the civil-rights era had receded, and with it the reflexive resistance to social change that the trauma had instilled in many people. A new generation that had grown up since the fall of Jim Crow was ready to renew the protest, and the growth of television – 75 percent of American homes had a set by 1955, and up to 90 percent by 1960 – made the whole country witness to their marches. Also, unlike the Jim Crow era, the racially reactionary states weren’t able to keep African-Americans out of office entirely, and after the 1954 Supreme Court decision holding racial gerrymandering unconstitutional, an increasing number of black representatives from those states used the floor of Congress as a bully pulpit. Where the conventional wisdom of the 1940s had been that the civil-rights struggle had reached a successful conclusion, the 1950s brought a growing awareness that it wasn’t yet over.
The single greatest catalyst for the new civil rights era, however, would take place among the Native American rather than African-American population, and its opening moves would occur outside the realm of American politics. The American Indian Movement, which had formed during the reservation struggles of the 1920s and 30s, was by this time a pan-tribal civil rights organization with membership around the country, and its concerns included not only the legal status of individual Natives but that of their tribes. The consensus-era Congress’ unwillingness to listen to these concerns frustrated the movement’s activists, and after the Consistory was founded in 1953, many of them saw it as an opportunity to go over Congress’ collective head and internationalize their struggle.
The Consistory strategy was a controversial one; several factions of the AIM considered it quixotic and preferred to focus on self-help programs within the reservations and urban communities. But at the 1956 movement congress, the internationalist faction won out, and several of the larger tribes as well as coalitions of smaller ones set up offices in the Consistory and began seeking allies among the
mestizo nations of Latin America and countries emerging from colonialism. In March 1957, the Navajo Nation concluded a model treaty with Bolivia providing for joint agricultural and scientific products, preferential trade and mutual political support, and several others followed.
The AIM was sincere in wanting to build connections with indigenous peoples elsewhere, but its primary goal was to force Congress to pay attention, and it succeeded. The United States was less keen on the emerging post-Westphalian world order than many other nations: the notion of Native American tribes conducting their own diplomacy – some of it contrary to State Department policy – was disquieting, and the prospect of facing lawsuits in the Court of Arbitration even more so. The government couldn’t revoke the tribes’ treaty-making power without destroying the edifice on which federal-tribal relations were built, so it had little choice but to negotiate. Matters cascaded from there, and not only for the Native Americans: other minorities were emboldened to push into the breach they had opened, while reactionaries gathered to oppose what they saw as the demise of all they held dear.
The 1960 election would be a dress rehearsal for things to come. That year saw the AIM’s debut as a political party, and was also the first appearance of the Party for an American Restoration, an anti-civil-rights faction that was the ideological successor of the American Party of the 1920s. The American Party had been marginalized during the consensus era: rollback of civil rights went as much against the consensus as expansion of them, and the remnants of the Jim Crow coalition were too scattered and politically incoherent to win elections. But the growing concentration of anti-civil-rights voters in certain suburbs gave the party new life – it took control of several counties during the 1950s, and elected two Congressmen in 1956 and four in 1958 – and once the consensus was broken, it was broken from all sides. The 1959 convention in which the party changed its name - the new name symbolizing a desire to restore what it viewed as traditional values and social patterns – was marked with rhetoric that wouldn’t have been out of place in 1920.
Neither the AIM nor the Restorers would make a significant mark in 1960, and Farmer-Labor President Walter Carroll was easily re-elected with 335 of 641 electoral votes. But the 1964 election, coming after four years of Congressional stalemate and growing political pressure, would see all hell break loose. That year, the national Republican Party decided to support the Progressive and Farmer-Labor call for Federal legislation outlawing private racial and gender discrimination, as well as an act mandating “fair distribution” of subsidized educational and health services. This, in turn, provoked a crisis within the Democratic Party, which had run jointly with the Republicans at the national level since the 1930s but which was anxious to protect its right flank against the Restorationists. At a stormy convention which featured several fistfights, the Democrats voted to oppose new civil rights legislation (albeit also opposing the repeal of existing law) and to field a separate presidential candidate, prompting several state delegations to walk out.
This opened the field for a bruising fight between no fewer than seven parties: Farmer-Labor, Republican, Democratic, Progressive, Restorer, the AIM and the small American Socialist Party. And when the dust settled, all of them won electoral votes. The Restorers won Florida and Louisiana and snuck past the divided Democratic, Republican and Farmer-Labor electorate to take Alabama, although vote-splitting between them and the Democrats enabled Farmer-Labor to win Virginia and Arkansas. The Socialists won a narrow plurality in Sequoyah, where all seven parties had followings and where they were seen as the only faction not in bed with the oil industry, and played spoiler in delivering Kansas to the Republicans. And although Native Americans didn’t form a majority in any state, the AIM’s populism, strong support for civil liberties and left-environmentalist platform was enough to take Dakota and Montana and act as a spoiler in several other Western states.
Farmer-Labor would come out with the most electoral votes, but at 270 of 659, it was well short of a majority, and in a return to the days of coalition politics, it had to bring the Progressives and the AIM into the cabinet in order to secure the victory. But even this wasn’t enough for a majority in Congress – Farmer-Labor had lost many seats in the South, and the AIM had just two representatives and no senators – so the administration had to resort to a grand legislative coalition with the Republicans. This would become known as the Congress of Broken Promises, with the coalition unable to break a filibuster of civil-rights legislation in the Senate and its hoped-for economic and cultural initiatives stymied by the Republican leadership.
The weakness of the administration made it vulnerable in 1968, but both the Republicans and Democrats realized they would have to reunite their tickets in order to take advantage of that vulnerability. Talks began in the summer of 1967 and nearly faltered several times, but ultimately reached agreement: the Democrats would support the Republican civil-rights platform and moderate their anti-growth policies, while the Republicans would adopt an environmental plank and support decentralized administration of federal programs. To seal the deal, the joint candidate would be a Democrat for the first time in the history of the parties’ electoral union: the governor of Alabama, Margaret Mallory.
Mallory had originally been elected governor to finish her dead husband’s term, but had since been re-elected on her own merits. She was an evangelical from the Social Church tradition, a strong supporter of both environmentalism and civil rights, and she’d been one of those to walk out of the 1964 convention. She also had a proven ability to work across party lines, having built a legislative coalition of pro-civil-rights Democrats, black Republicans and Farmer-Labor representatives. Some of the negotiators had qualms about her being a woman and maintaining strict neutrality in the sexual culture wars (which, to conservatives, was tantamount to taking a side), but these were mollified by her effectiveness as governor and the moderation of her Social Church-inspired feminism.
Selling Mallory to the party conventions proved harder. There was, once again, a walkout from the Democratic convention, this time by those opposed to civil-rights expansion: the dissenting delegates called themselves “Real Democrats” like the opponents of the original Democratic-Republican union had done and pledged to support the Restorationists in November. A few Republicans also walked out, angered at a deal that they saw as giving too much away, but their defection was easier to contain, as they had no other place to go. In the end, both conventions acclaimed Mallory as their candidate, and the race was on.
On the campaign trail, Mallory would show some surprising dimensions. On domestic issues, she was a known quantity: she supported civil rights, clean air and water, managed growth along the lines of metropolitan Houston and Birmingham, and the small-town values of the Social Church. Her foreign-policy views, however, had never been tested, and she expressed a vision of Christian internationalism that was almost that of the Catholic Church or the Belloist ideal of a community of nations. Like nearly all American politicians, she was skeptical of post-Westphalianism, but she fully supported cooperation on issues that transcended borders, and favored American involvement in the Afro-Atlantic cultural region as well as with the United States’ geographic neighbors. She supported a strong military deterrent, including nuclear weapons, but pledged to elevate the Department of Peace, which had been increasingly assertive on the regional stage since the Second Washington Conference, to full partnership in developing American foreign policy.
For all Mallory’s support of armed pacifism, the campaign would be as stormy as 1964, and in fact more so. The summer of 1968 was a hot one, with clashes erupting at rival political rallies in the South and the industrial cities and the near-fatal shooting of a black Senate candidate by a Restorer fanatic in Georgia. Political rhetoric reached peaks that would have been shocking during the consensus era, and took on very pointed racial and gender dimensions: one back-bench Restorationist orator famously called Mallory “a whore of Satan who’ll encourage children to kill their parents and women to kill their husbands.” (Mallory, just as famously, replied “his wife and kids should give me a call.”)
But election day arrived eventually. The Restorers again took Florida and Louisiana and added Virginia, Arkansas and Arizona to their tally, but were crushed in Alabama and lost votes in several other marginal states. The AIM and Socialists both stayed in the electoral column and ran strongly in several states, and the Progressives won their Upper Midwest strongholds and California. But the minor parties hurt Farmer-Labor as much as Mallory, and with the administration as unpopular as it was, they weren’t enough to keep the Democratic-Republican candidate from taking 338 electoral votes and putting the election to bed. Just as importantly, the Restorers, Real Democrats and others opposed to civil rights failed to elect enough senators to sustain a filibuster.
The incoming Congress worked quickly, and by May, it had passed the Civil Rights Act of 1969, outlawing (with exceptions for religious societies and purely social clubs) private discrimination on the ground of race, sex, marital status, religious belief or national origin. The Fair Budget Act, setting guidelines beyond which state educational or health-care budget allocations would be presumed invalid, followed soon after, as did the Clean Air and Clean Water Acts, the Comprehensive Indian Civil Rights Act and the creation of the Department of Environmental Stewardship. And it wouldn’t be much longer before Mallory’s resolve to enforce the new legislation was put to the test.
On March 22, 1970, after the governor of Florida refused to enforce a court order desegregating a Jacksonville suburb, the president ordered federal troops into the state. This was the beginning of the last act of America’s civil rights drama, and the start of an era whose impact would be as much cultural as political…
Joseph Trudeau, An Unimagined Nation: Canada in the Twentieth Century (Toronto: Dominion, 1989)
In Wilfrid Laurier’s words, Canada is a country that works in practice but not in theory [8] – that is, a country consisting of separate nations with conflicting histories and values, but which somehow contrives to survive and prosper. This phrase is usually quoted in the sense that Laurier meant it: that Canada’s genius is in its people’s ability to maintain their differences but nevertheless live together day to day. But it also carries an implicit warning that any attempt to theorize Canada is doomed to fail, and possibly even to bring the country down.
Laurier’s political life was dedicated to finding the compromises that would enable Canadians to live together
without resorting to theory, such as the mutual climbdown on language laws that he and his One Canada Party brokered in the year before his death. [9] He seemed to understand this, as well, in his prescription for a constitutional charter of rights that would take contentious issues out of the political realm but not try to define what Canada was. And though he was a prophet without honor in his lifetime, the appalled horror with which most Canadians looked on the Imperial Party’s rule in Britain, and the growing influence of anti-Imperial refugees in Canadian political life during the 1920s, persuaded many of the wisdom of One Canada’s prescriptions. The Constitution Act 1930 would follow those prescriptions almost to the letter, allowing provinces latitude to set language policies but guaranteeing rights for minorities and replacing the common-law “implied bill of rights” with explicit protections for individual freedom of religion and conscience.
But any attempt to take cultural issues out of politics often ends up politicizing them on another level, and that was as true of the 1930 constitution as anything else. Most of the country considered the Constitution Act a more than adequate compromise, but for the Québécois nationalists, the conscription crisis and the language wars still rankled: they had considered Laurier’s solution a defeat rather than a compromise, and they thought the same way about the 1930 charter. At the same time, the Native tribes were left out of what was essentially a deal between Ottawa and the provinces, and they looked enviously at the freedoms their counterparts in the United States were winning during the tumultuous American civil-rights struggle.
In many cases, these grievances were handled through the sort of ad hoc measures that had always sufficed. Under Liberal governments, which were dominated by those Catholics who accepted the papal teaching that nationalism was a sin, Québec lived within the Constitution Act easily enough, and a series of provincial and federal laws largely ended the boarding-school system and increased local control of Indian reserves. But when the Rally for Québécois Independence led the province, it continually pushed the envelope on language and sovereignty issues, and in the reserves, land-hungry companies and tribal separatists both attacked the status quo from different directions.
Matters came to a head in the 1950s in a number of respects. The Canadian economy had become increasingly integrated due to the growth of mass media and improvements in transportation infrastructure, which led many Québécois to fear domination by Anglo-Canadian companies in Ontario. At the same time, the Native Canadians emulated their American counterparts in forming national movements, taking their grievances to the Consistory and, in the case of bands that had never made treaties with the government, seeking a ruling that they were legally entitled to do so. In some cases, the rights they claimed exceeded those given to provinces under the Constitution Act, and the nationalists in Québec were dismayed at the possibility that Indian reserves, including those on Québécois soil, might get privileges that were denied to them.
In fact, there was never a realistic possibility that the reserves would achieve their maximal demands. The fact that they were made, however, proved critical in the 1959 provincial election. The Rally parlayed nationalist anxiety into a decisive majority in the Legislative Assembly, and for the first time, made the ultimate threat: if the national government were to compromise its sovereignty over Indian reserves within Québécois territory, or if it were to make any concessions on language or cultural policy that were not allowed to Québec under the Constitution Act, it would vote to leave the confederation.
From the first, it was clear that the Rally’s primary aim was to use the threat of independence to wrest constitutional reforms from the government, including the right to restore province-wide restrictions on English and the ability to enact protectionist measures against Anglo-Canadian firms. But it was also clear that the new Québécois government was serious about declaring independence if these demands were not met. Those who had taken Canada for granted were suddenly forced to wonder whether the nation could survive if Québec left: would the Atlantic provinces become a dominion of their own, and might some of the western provinces also go their separate ways? Polls in the early 1960s showed a distinct increase in separatist sentiment not only in Québec but in British Columbia, which had increasing differences with Ottawa over Native policy, and even in the Métis settlements of Manitoba, which wanted the same land rights and recognition as a distinct culture that the Natives were demanding.
The ensuing period is often called the Crisis of the 1960s, although it was really a series of crises prompted by successive demands. For instance, after difficult negotiations, Ottawa was able to broker an accord under which Québec was permitted to require companies engaged in certain businesses to have local partners. Soon afterward, though, a dispute over residence rights in Northwest Territory reserves prompted Québec to demand control over immigration to the province. And in the meantime, other provinces demanded that they share in any privileges given to the Québécois.
This state of permanent crisis led Ottawa to believe that it had no choice but to attempt to theorize Canada: to seek agreement in defining the relationship of the confederation, the provinces, Native bands and other distinct populations. In 1966, after a scandal caused the Québécois government to fall and the ensuing election led moderates to gain ground, the prime minister called a conference of provincial and aboriginal leaders, party leaders and other prominent stakeholders to discuss a package of constitutional amendments. The conference met in Winnipeg in early 1967, and reported out a draft constitution that would have made Canada much like Switzerland: there would be a federal bill of rights which would include the right to use one’s mother tongue, but citizenship and immigration would be devolved to the provinces and in some cases to the tribes, and the provinces and territories would have nearly complete internal autonomy including substantial control over trade policy.
The Winnipeg Charter, as it was called, was endorsed by the prime minister and all the provincial premiers as well as most of the other participants, who thought it in keeping with the emerging international order. It would not, however, be endorsed by Canada’s voters. At a referendum in September 1967, the proposed charter went down to defeat both in Québec, where it failed by a narrow margin, and in the country as a whole. The electorate proved more federalist than the political class, and for a reason: it wanted to maintain the country that had worked in practice for so long.
The 1960s thus ended where they began, with resort to ad hoc measures, but now all sides were chastened enough to make them work. The Québécois government resigned the day after the referendum, and the Liberals retook control of the legislature shortly afterward. Nor were these the Liberals of the 1940s. The party leaders were still, at heart, Catholic internationalists, but its benches included a growing number of young secular candidates, many of them women, who wanted more cultural and social space than even liberal Catholic politics would allow. For them, language wars and battles over autonomy were distractions from the domestic issues they wanted to emphasize.
Under those circumstances, the immediate crisis could be resolved in a more limited way than had been contemplated before. In 1969, Ottawa and Québec agreed on measures that recognized the latter’s distinct status but, while also somewhat post-Westphalian, were largely symbolic. Québec’s legislature was renamed the National Assembly, it would be permitted to conduct its own diplomacy on cultural and trade matters, and it could choose to withdraw recognition from the British monarchy and thus leave the Commonwealth, but it would still be part of Canada with no greater internal autonomy than any other province. This, along with the fruits of the ongoing negotiations with the Native tribes, was reluctantly accepted by an electorate that had been shown a less palatable alternative, and after a while, most people ceased complaining. But the asymmetric federalism into which Canada had accidentally fallen did not please everyone, and the crisis of the 1960s would not be the last…
_______
[1] See post 4591.
[2] See post 367.
[3] See post 1273.
[4] See post 4591.
[5] I’m using the “
Bebbington quadrilateral” definition of evangelical Christianity: Biblicism, crucicentrism (emphasis on Jesus’ atonement on the cross), conversionism and an emphasis on expressing the gospel through social action. ITTL, there is a broad distinction between the Social Church, which emphasizes charitable activities, mission trips and political activism as part of the fourth branch of the quadrilateral, and the House Church, which eschews politics and is much less engaged with the world outside its community. There are exceptions, but the Social Church is descended from the churches that were on the right side of the civil rights struggle while most of the House Churches were on the wrong side. If you think of a Social Church congregation as a room full of Jimmy Carters, you won’t be far wrong.
[6] See post 5867.
[7] See post 4591.
[8] IOTL this was said by Stéphane Dion. It’s too perfect a quote not to exist ITTL, and given TTL Laurier’s role in the Québécois language wars, I gave it to him.
[9] See post 3741.