Lily Geismer, "Don't Blame Us": Grassroots Liberalism in Massachusetts, 1960-1990"

 

When George McGovern won only the electoral votes of Massachusetts in the 1972 presidential election, it solidified the Bay State’s reputation as the unrivaled bastion of American liberalism.” With the outbreak of the Boston busing crisis just a few later, however, the state’s capitol earned the dubious reputation as the “most racist city in America.” How could the most liberal place in the country also be the most racist? Through an examination of the evolution of liberal grassroots political culture and identity in the period between 1960 and 1990, my dissertation aims to unravel the basic contradiction embedded in that question. The juxtaposition of the seemingly inconsistent events that defined Massachusetts in the 1970s reveals the ways in which many residents of this traditionally liberal stronghold came to define their political agendas and subjectivities differently at the local and national levels. I aim to both untangle that process and examine how it reshaped the political, spatial and racial landscapes of the state and the nation as a whole.

 

Commentators have also relied on the twin images of the 1972 electoral map and the violence of the Boston busing crisis to symbolize the failure of New Deal liberalism at the federal level. By placing these events within their broader historical context and focusing on the local rather than national level, I will complicate that appraisal. Most postwar political historians have interpreted the shortcomings of postwar liberalism by concentrating on the groups that broke away from the New Deal Coalition. Instead, my dissertation explores those people who never withdrew their commitment to the basic tenets of liberalism or their loyalty to the Democratic Party. I will ask in what ways did this constituency contribute to these contradictions in liberal ideology and policy? In what other ways how did they aim to resolve them? And how did they renegotiate the changing political and social landscape of the 1960s and 1970s? In doing so, I hope to provide alternative narratives of the history of postwar liberalism and the political culture of Massachusetts.

 

While many historians have exposed the role of liberal ideology in the construction of suburbia few have examined the role of suburbanization in shaping the contours of postwar liberalism. I will explore the ways in which many white middle-class residents in Massachusetts benefited and supported the same generous subsidies as many of their more moderate counterparts throughout the country and the ways in which it reshaped the ideology of liberalism at both the local and national levels. Emphasis on Boston’s outer ring provides a means to confront the equally misguided view of Massachusetts’s overwhelming liberalism by showing the ways in which many of its white middle-class citizens joined the opposition to high property taxes, affordable housing and school integration that shaped suburban political culture nationally. At the same time, my project challenges the assumption that homeowner politics are inherently reactionary and conservative. By uncovering the existence of a vibrant liberal political culture within a suburban setting, I will highlight moments when the efforts of grassroots activists, both inside and outside of the city, renegotiated and even emboldened the terms and meanings of postwar liberalism. I hope to reveal, therefore, that perhaps liberalism did not die at the end of the 1960s, but, rather, changed and transformed.

 

Situated at the intersection of scholarship on postwar politics, urban and suburban history gender and civil rights and with chapters issues such as fair housing and school desegregation, the antiwar movement, environmentalism, protests against highway construction, feminism, abortion and the politics of property taxes this dissertation to reperiodize, and recast the narrative of postwar liberalism and of American political history more broadly. I ultimately hope to suggest that Massachusetts liberalism should be examined less for the reasons that it stood against the tide of the nation and instead for what it represents about national politics in the postwar period.