Chapter Twenty-seven

The 1960s

Overview:

• Major Gains: Botswana, Jamaica, southern United States
• Major Losses: Brazil, Burma, Greece, Uruguay
• Major Hiccups: Malaysia, South Korea, Turkey, most of Africa
• Overall Trend: Downward, from 33% of population (1959) to 26% (1969)

False Starts in Africa

On February 3, 1960, after a month of traveling around Britain’s African colonies, Conservative British Prime Minister Harold Macmillan spoke to the South African parliament in Cape Town: “The wind of change is blowing through this continent,” he said. “Whether we like it or not, this growth of national consciousness is a political fact.” Now that a leader of the Conservative Party was willing to accept colonial independence, change was inescapable. The remaining imperialists in Britain felt especially betrayed by MacMillan’s conversion. They had counted on at least one party standing by them. South Africa saw which way the wind was blowing and the next year voted itself entirely free of the British crown and the Commonwealth as an independent republic.

The sudden shift in the consensus meant that the Dumping of Africa went even quicker than the Scramble for Africa of the 1880s. On New Year's Eve, 1955, there were only 5 independent nations in the whole continent; ten years later, there were 38. In most cases, the colonial powers had spent the early 1950s denying that they would ever release their colonies, so they had never bothered to educate a native civil service or middle class, and often forbade natives to travel abroad to seek education on their own. In the Belgian Congo, for example, there was not a single African doctor, lawyer or engineer as late as 1955. Then, suddenly, there were dozens of brand new nations being cut lose with only the slightest preparations: a new flag, some fireworks and new shoulder patches for the native troops in the colonial army.

Unlike the colonies in the Western Hemisphere a century and a half earlier, almost all of these new African countries achieved their independence without wars. Only in Algeria did a revolt directly drive out the colonial occupiers during these years. Elsewhere, the independence process was either the end result of patient persuasion by local leaders, or at worst, a few riots.

In the British colony of the Gold Coast, for example, the independence movement took off after World War Two. In February 1948, police in Accra fired into a rally of native war veterans demanding pensions. This sparked five days of rioting and looting. Afterwards, the authorities felt the need to arrest someone, so they rounded up all the leaders of the local nationalist group, the United Gold Coast Convention, and held them for a month until they realized they had nothing to do with it. Caught in the net was Kwame Nkrumah, a former theological student and general secretary of the UGCC. An investigative committee that looked into the riots suggested a long list of reforms, so the British government granted the Gold Coast limited home rule with a constitution and a parliament elected by property owners.

Instead of accepting the compromise, Nkrumah organized strikes, boycotts and protests demanding the vote be extended to rich and poor alike, so he was arrested again. In the face of growing opposition worldwide, the British gave up and held elections via universal franchise in February 1951. When Nkrumah’s party won, the British reluctantly released him from jail, brushed him off and made him prime minister. In 1956, parliament petitioned the UK for independence, and they got it the next year under the name Ghana.

By the end of the 1960s, most of the colonial powers had set free any dependency that was big enough to take care of itself. Only Portugal clung to the old ways, but they paid the price with escalating colonial wars in any territory big enough to support rebel strongholds.

Thirty-six African countries became independent during the Dumping of Africa.① The departing colonial powers were democratic at home, and they tried to leave behind the framework of a democratic society by cooperating with local leaders to write constitutions and to hold elections before they left. However, in four of the new countries carved out of French West Africa, there wasn’t even enough native political organization for that, so the French just handed the keys over to the local nationalist group and left without holding or even planning elections.

Democracy didn’t take root immediately. In only 5 new African countries did democracy outlast the first national leader and see a second leader peacefully elected. In 3 countries, the First Leader was overthrown while ruling democratically; however, the most typical experience was that the First Leader stayed in the driver’s seat and gradually tightened his control until there was no lawful opposition left. This happened in 24 of the ex-colonies.

It’s worth pointing out that non-democratic is not necessarily unstable. Almost one-third -- 11 out of 36 – remained under the rule of their founding father for more than 15 years. Another 8 kept their original leader for over ten years.

On average, a newly liberated African country became a dictatorship 2.8 years after independence. 24 dictators were in place within 5 years of independence. Seven more took hold within 10 years. Only Gambia and Botswana remained democratic for any longer, but even those had some noticeably authoritarian tendencies and kept the same parties in power for over a generation.

Democracy and the First Leader (number of years after independence)

For the next 30-some years, most African countries pass beyond our horizon. They fell under various types of military and civilian dictators and don’t shine brightly in a history of democracy. Rather than drag you through the history of every failed democracy on the continent, let’s just look at a handful.

The history of Kenya was fairly typical of this era. As Kenya became self-aware during the waning days of the colonial era, political forces split between the Kenya African National Union (KANU) led by former Mau-Mau rebel Jomo Kenyatta, which wanted a centrally administered unitary state, and the Kenya African Democratic Union (KADU), which preferred a federation of ethnic homelands. The backbone of KANU was Kenyatta’s Kikuyu tribe, largest ethnic group in the multiethnic hodgepodge that was Kenya. KANU won 83 seats out of 124 total in the parliamentary elections of May 1963, the last year of British colonial rule. In June, parliament elected Jomo Kenyatta prime minister and voted to keep Queen Elizabeth II of England as head of state. Independence arrived December 12, 1963, and everyone celebrated.

Then, on June 1, 1964, Kenyatta got the parliament to declare Kenya a republic and make him president. On November 10, 1964, supposedly to promote national unity, KADU was officially dissolved and absorbed into KANU to form a single party. In 1966 Kenyatta was reelected president unopposed, and constitutional amendments the next year strengthened the presidency and gave him all the power he could possibly want. In October 1969, Kenyatta banned the last remaining opposition party, the Kenya People's Union (KPU), which had been formed by leftists who had been expelled from KANU. He arrested the KPU’s leadership and, a week later, called elections in which only KANU could participate. On 29 January 1970 Kenyatta was sworn in as President yet again.

By this time, Kenya was being thoroughly plundered Kenyatta’s Kikuyu cronies, called the Kiambu Mafia after Kenyatta’s home district. Government security forces harassed critics. Prominent rivals died mysteriously. In 1965, Pio Gama Pinto, co-founder of KANU, was shot down in his driveway. In 1972 a suspicious car wreck killed Ronald Ngala, the former leader of KADU. In July 1969, Tom Mboya, economic minister and co-founder of KANU, was heard discussing running for president against Kenyatta. Shortly afterwards, unknown assassins gunned him down on a city street. His funeral provoked angry demonstrations against Kenyatta, bloodily suppressed.①

“Kenya has become a nation of 10 millionaires and 10 million beggars,” said the popular member of parliament J. M. Kariuki, who was last seen alive in March 1975 among Kenyatta’s bodyguards in a hotel lobby. His body was later found in a thicket outside the city. As Kenyatta entered his dotage, he became a mostly ceremonial president who stayed away from governing unless a dispute needed to be settled. His lieutenants ran the country for him. In 1974, Kenyatta was reelected unopposed, and he ruled another four years before dying in 1978.

Despite the trail of bodies, Jomo Kenyatta was widely considered one of Africa’s better leaders, and Kenya one of Africa’s most efficient and enlightened nations. Sadly, this is probably true.

Prime Minister Milton Obote of Uganda was caught in a gold smuggling conspiracy in 1966, along with the deputy commander of the Ugandan Armed forces, Idi Amin. When parliament demanded an investigation into the matter, Obote suspended the constitution and promoted himself to president. He ruled by decree and had opposition leaders arrested. To reward his partner, Obote promoted Idi Amin to supreme army commander – a move that would come back to bite him in 1969 when Idi Amin ousted him and quickly became one of the most well-known, brutal and merciless thugs of the twentieth century.

Kwame Nkrumah’s rule in Ghana became increasingly communist in seizing and redistributing wealth and increasingly authoritarian in squashing dissent, although dissent was not much of a problem for Nkrumah. He was wildly loved. Many Ghanaians considered Nkrumah to be literally the Messiah, and pretty soon, so did Nkrumah. His official biographies began to note parallels with Jesus. In 1964, he pushed through constitutional amendments making his party the only legal political party in the country, although by that time, it was the only party that mattered anyway. In February 1966, while he was visiting North Vietnam and China, the Ghanaian military ousted him, probably with the connivance of American or British agents who didn’t want the Communists to pick up an ally and strategic base in Sub-Saharan Africa. After this, politics in Ghana became one military coup after another, with occasional tightly controlled elections that produced brief civilian governments, until the country came to be dominated by Flight Lt. Jerry Rawlings, who ruled intermittently as dictator between 1979 and 2001.

Gambia held out longer than most. Dawda Jawara, a large animal veterinarian who had traveled the countryside vaccinating cattle and making friends, led the nation into independence as leader of the People’s Progressive Party. He became the first prime minister when Gambia became self-governing under Queen Elizabeth, and then became first president when they ditched the queen and became a republic. He remained president for 30 years, which is normally a sign that something is rotten but most outside observers labeled his government democratic throughout these years. President Dawda Jawara was regularly reelected in open, multiparty contests, and the corruption that was so common in this part of the world stayed mostly at the street level in Gambia without reaching into the president’s office. However, in the end, even Gambia fell and became a dictatorship when Jawara was overthrown by the military in 1994.

The Exception

The south-central African country of Botswana is the only African country to have remained democratic since its independence in 1966. Called Bechuanaland in the old days, Botswana has had a very lucky history. It was not actually conquered by the colonial powers in the Scramble for Africa. Instead, the British were more worried about the Boer Republics at the time, so they made an alliance with the Tswana (Bechuana) people on surprisingly generous terms to keep the Boers from spreading in that direction. This meant that the Tswana got to keep their traditional homeland and self-government.

Because Botswana got to draw its own border, the inhabitants are mostly one people (80% Tswana) so the country never got into the endless cycle of ethnic rivalries and civil wars that destroyed so many other countries. Instead, their modern government has evolved rather calmly out of the traditional society of the Tswana.

It was a close call. The British briefly considered attaching Bechuanaland to South Africa, but when South Africa went down the sinkhole of apartheid, the Tswana refused to follow them. Then in 1947 Seretse Khama, the young hereditary king of the Tswana, married a white woman after studying at Oxford in England. This scandalized the South Africans who would not allow such an insult to their way of life to flagrantly exist right next door. The British colonial office needed South Africa’s gold and diamonds to pay off their war debt, so they caved on the issue and removed King Khama from the throne.

Seretse Khama lived in exile for a few years until the British finally let him come home. He settled on a large ranch as a private citizen but soon returned to politics, busily organizing an independence movement. When the British finally cut Botswana lose in 1966, the Tswana elected Khama as their first president.

President Khama ran Botswana for its first 14 years until he died in 1980. The fact the Botswana never became an outright dictatorship owes a lot to him. Elections have always been freely contested even though the Botswana Democratic Party has won all of them, overwhelming all its small communist and African nationalist rivals. Maybe because Khama had a double dose of political legitimacy, first as king, then as elected president, he never had any trouble being reelected, so he never felt the need to tighten his grip on the country beyond the constitutional limits. Khama refused to get involved in all the civil wars swirling through neighboring countries and he refused to let other people’s rebels operate from inside his country. His invested government revenues back into the infrastructure, and between 1966 and 1980, the Botswanan economy was the fastest growing in the world – although that might be because they started so poor and had nowhere to go but up.

His successor, a competent, unexciting technocrat named Quett Masire, ruled for the next 18 years, continuing Botswana’s stable growth. Their third president ruled for ten more years, by which time Seretse Khama’s son was old enough to take over as 4th and current president. Although power has never shifted from the ruling party to the opposition and presidents hold office for almost monarchial lengths of time, the 2014 Corruption Perceptions Index ranks Botswana as the least corrupt nation in Africa and the 31st least corrupt country in the world, ranking cleaner than almost all of Latin America, East Europe and Asia.

It has probably helped that even the best parts of the Botswana are marginal farmland on the edge of the Kalahari Desert that no one else wanted. In terms of natural resources, it occupies the safe middle ground - not so fabulously rich as to attract adventurers and looters from all over the world, but not so desperately poor that the people have nothing to bargain with and build on. Diamonds weren’t discovered in Botswana until after the colonial era, so the natives have been able to keep more of their national wealth for themselves. It hasn’t been a perfect distribution; the gap between rich and poor is especially wide, even by Third World standards. It has the world’s 3rd worst Gini Coefficient, which is used to measure these things. Even so, Botswana spends 21% of its government income on education, higher than almost all other countries in the world.

Cold War: Democracy on the Back Burner

Nineteenth century political theory would have divided the world something like this:

During the Cold War, political theory tended to divide governments this way:

In American political discourse of that era, it was generally agreed that, yes, free market democracy was good and totalitarianism was bad, but the middle ground was not nearly as clear. The debate over which regimes were the second greatest threat to civilization seemed to snag on the importance of property rights. The right wing – the "haves" – considered personal and property rights to be equal, bringing socialism and authoritarianism into moral equilibrium. Thus, a case like Chile, where a dictator overthrew a socialist in 1973, was seen as a lateral move rather than a step backward. On the other hand, the left wing – the "have-nots" – judged regimes more purely on personal rights, which meant that socialist democracy was morally equal to capitalist democracy. By this standard, the difference between totalitarian and authoritarian dictators was negligible, and supporting capitalist dictators like Batista in Cuba, Somoza in Nicaragua and Thiêu in Vietnam as the antidote to communist rebels like Castro, Ortega and Ho Chi Minh made no moral sense whatsoever.

Case by case, authoritarian regimes rose to power based on local circumstances, but overall, the trend towards oppression in the 1960s and 1970s was boosted by the corrupting influence of the Cold War, that long nuclear standoff between the Soviet Union and the United States. Both East and West preferred strong, stable regimes allied to their side and sworn to oppose the other rather than unstable democracies which might roll left or right without warning. And even if the Western democracies occasionally had moral qualms about arming thugs, they knew that any nation ostracized by the West stood a good chance of becoming a Soviet ally by default, so everyone had a strong incentive to blindly support their cronies, no questions asked.

The general trends in democracy, therefore, were downward. Most of the noteworthy upheavals of the 1960s ended up with countries falling out of the democratic column. The Second Wave gave way to the Second Backwash around 1962.

Peru

Peru cycled between junta and democracy throughout much of the 20th century. After the military dictator Manuel Odria allowed new elections in 1956, a sort of democracy took hold and Conservative Manuel Prado was elected president. In the 1956 elections, Peru had kept restrictions on which parties could run, but Prado legalized the leftist APRA, and set the stage for real democratic elections. As Prado was winding down his term in 1962, Peru held its first unrestricted multiparty election to pick his successor. The result was a three-way split between the charismatic intellectual Víctor Raúl Haya de la Torre, the former dictator Manuel Odria, and the committed democrat Fernando Belaúnde; however, no one had enough votes to claim outright victory, so the decision was thrown into Congress. When it looked like de la Torre would make a deal to give his votes and the presidency to Odria, army tanks crashed through the palace gate and took over the government. They seriously did not want Odria in charge again. About a year later, when tempers had had a chance to cool, the junta gave power back to civilians and held new elections in which Fernando Belaúnde came out far enough ahead to take office without a runoff.

Even so, Belaunde’s party did not have control of Congress. The government deadlocked. In October 1968 Belaúnde sold licenses to the International Petroleum Company (a subsidiary of Standard Oil) to drill in Peruvian oil fields, but there were so many irregularities in the contract that people got suspicious. This provoked a shake-up of the cabinet. Before that was settled, the army stepped in and took over the country again.

South Korea

For 13 years, Synghman Rhee had ruled South Korea as an iron fisted dictator. He had been installed by the Americans at the end of World War Two to turn the southern half of the peninsula into beacon of freedom and a bastion against Communism, and he never let them down – well, except in the beacon of freedom part. Early in his rule, Rhee crushed rebellion and dissent with bloody reprisals. When the North Koreans invaded the South in 1950, he had tens of thousands of left wing Koreans rounded up and shot so they would not be able to help the Communists. After the war, he allowed just enough organized opposition so he could claim to be democratic, but he never let power slip from his hands. Every election was rigged in his favor.

In March 1960, the opposition Democratic Party rallied a crowd of about a thousand people at their headquarters in the coastal city of Masan to protest Rhee’s recent reelection by a suspiciously large margin. The police broke up the rally with tear gas, and the protesters scattered and fled. Almost a month later, the body of a missing student protestor, Kim Ju-yul, washed ashore. The official autopsy said drowning, but angry fellow students forced their way into the morgue and found that his skull had been split open by a tear gas canister fired directly in his face. As the story spread, South Korea erupted into more protests. Soon it was learned that not only had the police killed Kim, it wasn’t even an accident. Their orders had been to shoot the canisters directly at students, and any bodies were weighted with rocks and thrown into the ocean.

Under pressure, Rhee quit in April 1960 and blamed all the corruption on his vice president, Lee Ki-Poong, who dutifully committed suicide with his whole family the next day. The CIA then flew Rhee off to exile in Hawaii. The Second Republic was established when the Democratic Party won the new elections in June, but the government never really found its footing. Protests by the left and right began to clash in the streets. Inflation and unemployment surged. On May 16, 1961, tired of the chaos, the army under Major General Park Chung-hee took control of the country.

Brazil

After a landslide victory in 1960, Jânio Quadros of the conservative National Democratic Union (UDN) became president of Brazil in January 1961, marking the first time in Brazil's history as a republic that power had been peacefully transferred to an opposition party after a free election. It was also the last time this would happen for 42 years.

Bustling with manic energy, Jânio Quadros had campaigned with a rat in a box and a broom to show how he would sweep away all the corruption in government. He installed a red/green traffic light in his waiting room to announce when he was ready for appointments. He was a notorious drunk and a womanizer. When asked why he drank, he answered, “I drink because it’s liquid. Had it been solid, I would have eaten it.” During his first year in office, Quadros banned gambling, cockfighting and bikinis, which pretty much runs counter to everything Brazil holds dear and spoiled the country for everyone. Then he established diplomatic relations with the Soviet Union and Cuba.

This drove a wedge between the president and the UDN majority in Congress. As a personal feud developed between Congress and President Quadros, he abruptly resigned in August 1961. No one really knows why he did this, but the most popular theory is that he was looking for an ego boost and was hoping to shock the nation into begging him to return to the presidency. His wild card was that Brazil elected its presidents and vice-presidents on separate ballots, sometimes from different parties, so without Quadros, the presidency would pass to someone even more feared by the anti-Communist UDN: Vice President João "Jango" Goulart of the leftist Brazilian Labour Party (PTB). Goulart was at that moment on a diplomatic trip to Communist China and would not be able to take charge right away. Congress, however, called Quadros' bluff and let Goulart have the presidency when he got back.

Congress kept the new President Goulart on a leash and squashed every leftist initiative he tried to introduce, a process helped along by the deal he had to make with Congress, which let Goulart become president only if he agreed to temporarily transfer some presidential powers to Congress; however, two years later in 1963, this deal was up for renewal. A popular referendum would decide whether to transfer those powers back to Goulart away from the hostile parliament. Brazilians overwhelmingly voted to re-empower the president, and Goulart now had the mandate to make major changes. He began to implement widespread socialist programs. This, of course, is exactly what the right wing had been afraid of all along.

As the president and congress pulled in opposite directions, it became obvious that the conservative military was gearing up to throw Goulart out. To derail the oncoming coup, a couple thousand leftist sailors of the Brazilian Navy went on strike in March 1964 to show their support for Goulart’s reforms. Their superiors arrested them all for mutiny, but President Goulart pardoned them over the objections of the military. Now several right-wing generals loaded their troops into trucks and set out to take over the capital and other strategic urban areas. By the time Goulart hurried to the capital to begin coordinating a resistance to this move, Congress had already drawn up a resolution in support of the coup. Goulart went into exile, and the military ran Brazil for the next couple of decades.

Turkey

Although Turkey entered the 1960s as a democracy, Turkish politics was split among angry extremes. Terrorist groups of both the left and right wings kept the country on the boil. Prime Minister Adnan Menderes tightened press censorship and tried to give special judicial powers to his cronies. Angry at continuous unrest among students and leftists, several junior officers in the Turkish army launched a coup in May 1960 against the democratically elected government; however, to calm the country, they appointed Army Chief, General Cemal Gürsel as president. Pleasant, relaxed and well liked throughout Turkey and NATO, Gürsel had not been involved in the coup and never really approved of it, so he returned the country to civilian rule as quickly as possible. However, the military regime wasn’t nearly as relaxed as it looked on the surface. In September 1961, just before power was returned to civilians, the ruling junta hastily hanged former Prime Minister Menderes, his foreign minister and his finance minister on a prison island in the Sea of Marmara so they couldn’t cause any trouble. A new constitution took effect in 1961, replacing the 1924 constitution.

Dominican Republic

Rafael Trujillo, a former soldier who had declared himself president of the Dominican Republic in 1930, was pretty much the archetype of a brutal Latin American dictator, piling up some 50,000 bodies until he was finally assassinated in a messy ambush in 1961. Because Trujillo ruled from behind the scenes, the official, public president of the Dominican Republic was Joaquín Balaguer, who now ended up actually running the country instead of just signing whatever Trujillo told him to. Balaguer loosened up much of Trujillo’s machinery of tyranny.

Free elections in December 1962 put the moderate leftist Juan Bosch in charge. Bosch had been bouncing around the Caribbean after being exiled by Trujillo a quarter century earlier, trying to drum up support for an invasion to oust Trujillo. After being sworn in as duly elected President in February 1962, Bosch tried dragging the Dominican Republic into the 20th Century with a new constitution that included all sorts of protections against discrimination and harassment for pregnant women, homeless people, unions, tenant farmers, and illegitimate children. He undid the special role the Catholic Church had in running the government. After only seven months in office, Bosch now had a lot of enemies and was ousted by the military in September 1963. The situation spiraled out of control until American troops ended up deployed on the island. It took a few years to get the country stabilized, but the people in charge weren’t going to risk democracy again for a long while.

Uruguay

After the economy of Uruguay went sour, students and workers went on strike. To crush the labor unrest, President Pacheco declared a state of emergency in June 1968. He rounded up dissidents and jailed them indefinitely without trial, intermittently torturing them into cooperating with government investigations. The Tupamaros, an organization of the far left that had been robbing banks to redistribute the wealth to the poor, started to feel the pressure as the government closed in, and now turned against human targets, kidnapping and assassinating vulnerable members of the ruling class. The government then unleashed covert death squads against anyone suspected of guerrilla sympathies. By 1972, the unmarked graves proliferated and the guerrilla threat was largely broken, so the president tried to rein in his soldiers. To bring the Army under control, President Pacheco tried to replace his defense minister with a more cooperative individual. The military, however, didn’t feel like cooperating, so they took over the government in 1973, and turned their full fury against the leftover leftists.

Greece

In May 1963 in Thessaloniki Greece, a leftist leader of parliament, Grigoris Lambrakis, was speaking at a large rally against NATO and atomic proliferation, when a pair of assailants scooted up in a small motorized three-wheeler and knocked him over the head. As they tried to ride off, the crowd closed in around them, dragged them from their vehicle and began to beat them senseless. The police who had watched the original assault with passive disinterest, now rushed in to save the assailants.

Lambrakis died of his head injuries several days later. At his funeral in Athens, a half million supporters rallied to condemn the government. Despite strong pressure from above to drop the case, prosecutor Christos Sartzetakis investigated and uncovered connections between the assassins and right wing extremists in the government, police and army. Faced with growing outrage over the murder, Prime Minister Konstantinos Karamanlis resigned and exiled himself to France.

With Karamanlis’ right wing National Radical Union in disarray and disrepute, the leftist Center Union under Georgios Papandreou eked out a slim victory in the parliamentary elections of November 1963; however, the right refused to give up and convinced the king to withhold approval for a leftist government until new elections could be held, hopefully giving the populace a chance to change its mind. The new elections in February only deepened the left wing win.

With leftists now running Greece, right wingers in the army began scheming. On April 21, 1967, Colonel George Papadopoulos and his clique of supporters took control. When no one was looking, they stationed tanks all over Athens and told the government to hand over power. The Colonels, as the junta was commonly called, then arrested anyone who might cause them trouble.

The Colonels also kept a close watch on the king, but in December 1967, King Constantine II escaped Athens to join royalist supporters in the navy and air force hoping to reestablish constitutional rule of law again in Greece. The junta, however, quickly arrested and replaced enough royalist officers to squash the countercoup. The royal family fled to Italy to outwait the junta, but after the Colonels had to put down another countercoup by royalist naval officers in 1974, the junta abolished the monarchy outright.

Malaysia

In the elections in Malaysia on May 10, 1969, members of the opposition Democratic Action Party (DAP) made surprising gains, so they staged a victory parade through the streets of the capital, Kuala Lumpur, on March 12. Ethnic Chinese were generally strong supporters of the DAP, and many of the celebrants drifted off the parade route into a Malay neighborhood to taunt and insult the locals. The next day, the ruling United Malays National Organization -- which had actually won the election, although not as decisively as it had hoped -- staged its own victory parade. More insults were exchanged, this time between Malay celebrants and Chinese bystanders. Before long, the whole mess had degenerated into an outright race riot. The government declared a state of emergency and suspended parliament for two years.

Malaysia went into a crisis and basically became a one-party state. In 1973 the National Front was organized to replace the Alliance Party, the ruling coalition. It is an association of ethnically based parties (Malay, Chinese, Indian) each looking out for the interests of its particular nationality by negotiating with other ethnicities in the coalition. Although regular elections continued, the opposition was severely handicapped. Free elections finally resumed in 2007 when the opposition People’s Pact made gains. They still lost, but it was the worst showing by the National Front ever.

The Voting Rights Act and Nixon’s Southern Strategy

Most Americans preferred not to think about race –as long as they were in the top race - but by the 1960s, the Civil Rights Movement had shaken their complacency. Massive peaceful protests paralyzed the South; sporadic riots burned through the black neighborhoods of Northern cities. Watching the ongoing unrest on television night after night had convinced America that something had to be done. For some, that meant clamping down on the protests, but more Americans were finally ready to equalize voting rights for blacks and whites alike. That meant it was time for politics.

Until this point, the American two-party system had really been a three-party system. In most of the country the Republicans were true to their Hamiltonian-Whig roots as the party of shopkeepers, bankers, doctors and other small town big shots, while the Democrats were still the Jefferson-Jackson populist party of huddled masses yearning to breathe free, along with some wretched refuse of the teeming shores tossed in. In the big picture, however, the two parties were almost alike because they both courted the uncommitted center where they might poach votes from their opponents. Both parties had progressive wings when that was the fashionable trend in politics (Theodore Roosevelt (R) and Woodrow Wilson (D) for example). They also had a similar share of conservatives. Both parties had isolationists and interventionists when it came to foreign policy. As the standard reference book for diplomats, The Political Handbook of the World , repeated in annual editions from the Thirties to the Sixties, “There are no fundamental differences between the major political parties of the United States.”

The third power bloc was the southern Democrats, and here’s where the big difference lay. In the South the two parties were stuck in the Civil War. Southern whites voted for the Democrats, and Southern blacks voted for no one. Black voters were sent home, harassed, fired or worse if they even tried. Obviously the Republicans, the party of Lincoln, had no viable voting base in the South. Elections there weren’t even a competition anymore, and the Democrats ran everything through handshakes and backroom deals. The national parties accepted this and left the South alone. As long as the national Democratic Party didn’t do something really stupid, like being nice to blacks, the Solid South was a guaranteed block of votes in their pocket.

Racism in the North was more casual and less rigid than the South, so huge numbers of southern blacks moved north early in the 20th Century to find better opportunities in the big industrial cities. Being immigrant ethnics and urban working class, these northern blacks found the Democratic Party to be more responsive to their needs. Blacks who were elected to the House of Representatives from the cities of New York, Chicago, Philadelphia and Detroit after 1930 were Democrats rather than Republicans. This created a bipolar disorder where one single party included almost all black officeholders plus the nation’s most diehard bigots, snubbing each other at all the party conventions. One of them would have to go.

Liberals had gained the upper hand in the Democratic Party during the Great Depression. This showed up in race relations in 1948 when Democratic President Harry Truman integrated the armed forces by executive order, and the Democratic Party put a firm commitment to equal rights in the party platform for the presidential election. Shades of 1860, this caused the Southern Democrats to bolt and set up their own party, euphemistically called the States Rights Democratic Party but more commonly nicknamed the Dixiecrats. This took the South out of the main contest this time. Hoping that this civil rights business was just a passing phase the Democrats were going through, the Dixiecrats returned to the party after the 1948 election, and hoped the party would stay quiet on civil rights for a while. They settled comfortably back into their old ways again, and when the popular general Dwight Eisenhower was elected president as a Republican in 1952 and 1956, the only states to vote Democratic were in the South.

At this point, neither national party was more committed to civil rights than the other. Both had their share of old-fashion bigots, but both had sometimes scored points for the good guys. Republicans like President Eisenhower and Chief Justice Earl Warren had helped move the civil rights agenda forward every bit as much as Democrats like Franklin Roosevelt and Harry Truman.

The Southern Democrats were split between hardcore segregationists who refused to budge on any progressive issues lest new roads, hospitals and schools somehow accidentally benefit Negroes, and moderates, who tried to sneak in a few improvements to elevate society as a whole without specifically directing any of that help towards Negroes. Because only one party existed in the South, these factions fought it out in Democratic state primaries, and the winner would be rubber-stamped in the November election. However, in the 1960s, a powerful leader of the moderate faction of Southern Democrats, Lyndon Johnson, became president by accident following the assassination of President John Kennedy in November 1963. This crude, jowly, arm-twisting old school Democrat from Texas surprised everyone when he decided to do everything in his power to end segregation and poverty in America via sweeping social programs. He established the Medicare and Medicaid programs in 1965, giving health care to the elderly and poor. Using all the clout he had built up from his years leading Congress, he pushed through the Civil Rights Act in July 1964 (prohibiting segregation in public accommodations) and the Voting Rights Act in August 1965 (removing all the barriers that white supremacists used to keep the blacks disenfranchised).

Horrified and infuriated conservatives accused Johnson of pandering for votes: Sen. Allen Ellender of Louisiana complained on the Senate floor in 1965 that quote “The bill is tailor-made to Martin Luther King’s demand for Negro control of the political institutions of the South”; however, Johnson knew that in pure political calculus, the Voting Rights Act was a loss for the Democrats.

"I think we just delivered the South to the Republican Party for a long time to come" Johnson sadly told an aide. The Southern Democrats immediately began shopping for a new home. In November 1964 the South stood out as the only region to vote for Johnson’s Republican opponent, in stark contrast to the massive landslide Johnson got from the rest of the country. In 1968, the South voted for a third party assembled around Governor George Wallace of Alabama who had sworn to keep segregation now and forever. This split the Democratic vote and gave the presidency to Republican Richard Nixon, who actively courted Southern white supremacists with his Southern Strategy, using code words and euphemisms to blame all the nation’s problems on blacks and their liberal enablers without actually putting it that bluntly. In 1972, former Southern Democrats joined the rest of the country in reelecting President Nixon by a national landslide, and after that the Republican Party became the new home for Southern conservatives. For the next generation, until 2008, no Democratic presidential candidate could snag even one electoral vote from the South without being a Southerner himself. The massive influx of Southern conservatives dragged the Republicans rightward. New progressives were scared off and joined the Democrats, while old progressive Republicans died off and weren’t replaced. Thus the two parties became more ideologically pure.

Youth Movement

Throughout the West, the 1960s saw the generation born after the Second World War coming of age. Because the birth rate had soared in the late 1940's compared to the deep plummet during the previous bad times, this was probably the largest and most cohesive single generation of the 20th century.

A new cycle of generational unrest (see 1830, 1848) was jump-started when the First World War chewed up an entire generation of Europeans – the so-called Lost Generation. Then 21 years after that finished, enough young men had come of age to fill out the armies again, so it was time to have a Second World War. Europe was quiet for a couple of decades after that, but 23 years after the shooting stopped, this new spike erupted in 1968. (And, skipping ahead, we’ll see another spike 21 years after this, in 1989.)

The precise causes which drew students into the streets varied from country to country. In the United States, the youth movement focused its energies opposing American involvement in the Vietnam War, while in France, student rebellion in May 1968 almost brought down de Gaulle’s government. In Czechoslovakia, an idealistic move towards a less repressive regime provoked a Soviet invasion, but worldwide, a common demand was for a voice in government. Most countries had a voting age of 21; the young wanted it lowered to 18, feeling that there were genuine generational issues that weren’t being addressed by the old men who ran the government. In the United States, the reasoning was pretty straightforward and typically framed in military terms. America was sending teenage draftees to fight a bloody, unpopular war in Vietnam, so the protesters insisted that old enough to fight should be old enough to vote. Elsewhere in the world, the students demanded more control over their own education and access to better entry-level jobs, so voting ages fell in countries at peace as well. The worldwide student protests ended up having an enormous effect. Before 1970, only a couple of countries – Czechoslovakia (1946), South Africa (1958), hardly model democracies – allowed 18 year olds to vote, but within five years, most influential democracies had lowered their voting age.

-- Matthew White

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① Between 1955 and 1970. Including North Africa but not Rhodesia.

② Mboya’s main influence outside Kenya is that he arranged foreign educations for promising Kenyan students, such as Barack Obama, Sr.

① Foreign policy, not the bikini ban.

① Fernando Henrique Cardoso, The Accidental President of Brazil: A Memoir.

② The other democracies of the Anglosphere were also bringing forgotten minorities into the democratic process. Aboriginal natives got the vote in Canada in 1960, and in Australia in 1962. (The United States had already given citizenship to American Indians in 1924.)

① Political Handbook of the World (McGraw-Hill Book Company, 1944) Page 178. Political Handbook and Atlas of the World (Council on Foreign Relations, 1967) p.302

② Bill D. Moyers, “What a Real President Was Like” Washington Post, Sunday, November 13, 1988

② Voting age lowered to 18

• 1970: United Kingdom, Canada, and Germany.
• 1971: Netherlands, United States.
• 1972: Finland, Sweden.
• 1973: Ireland, Australia.
• 1974: France, New Zealand, Dominica.
• 1975: Italy.