Making a new Louisiana: American liberalism and the search for the Great Society in New Orleans, 1964--1974
Description
The search for the Great Society helped to make a new Louisiana by reconstructing public life in its largest and most important city. It proved pivotal to the complicated process of integration in New Orleans. Forces from the bottom-up fundamentally transformed those from the top-down. Local leaders and activists structured the impact of the Civil Rights Act (1964), the Economic Opportunity Act (1964), the Food Stamp Act (1964), the Voting Rights Act (1965), the Demonstration Cities Act (1966), and Urban Renewal. Those locals recast the fragmented and often experimental Great Society into their own image and used it to bargain for greater public influence and to expand the local welfare state. Invoking arguments rooted in inclusion, individualism, liberation, and growth, they translated American liberalism into the region's political vernacular. Programs involving community action, social services, job training, early childhood education, remedial education, legal services for the poor, Food Stamps, Model Cities, and Urban Renewal became tools of a much broader movement to open access to the city's racially divided political economy The complicated result suggests that 1960s era American liberalism was in no way a centralized phenomenon, but grew from enormously variant regional and local influences. In the South, the Great Society played a vital role in confronting the region's racial and economic inequality and its economic limitations. It produced the first politically legitimate, biracial southern liberalism, and it empowered a formidable new set of interest groups in the post-Jim Crow world An important part of that search for the Great Society was its forcing Americans to grapple with the public implications of their stands on race, inequality, and economic opportunity. By encouraging a state-based reconsideration of the African-American individual's role in society, it engendered a deep dialogue about civic belonging and the dilemmas of American individualism. Locally, its programs evolved into political expressions of psychoanalytical technique, cultural discomfort about equal opportunity, and racial uncertainties in defining full citizenship. The history of the search serves as a primer for understanding why Americans have seemingly deemed some citizens more deserving of America's abundance