Lyndon Johnson was interrupted by applause 53 times during his State of the Union address, but the cheers were mostly perfunctory and markedly partisan. Only once did he draw from his audience of Congressmen and Cabinet members, judges and generals a prolonged, spontaneous ovation. That was when he declared: “The American people have had enough of rising crime and lawlessness in this country.”
Increasingly, “crime in the streets”—an omnibus label encompassing all the wellsprings of urban unrest from ghetto riots to muggings in middle-class neighborhoods—looms, with the possible exception of Viet Nam, as the nation’s prime preoccupation in Election Year 1968. Predicted Vice President Hubert Humphrey: “Safe streets will be the No. 1 domestic issue, overshadowing taxes, inflation and all the rest.” Added a Humphrey aide: “Another summer of riots could really sink us next fall.”
In similar vein, the Rev. Dr. Franklin Clark Fry, president of the 3,000,000-member Lutheran Church in America, warned his pastors last week that “unless a massive improvement of the lot of Negro ghettos comes quickly,” the outlook is for “more destructive and bloody uprisings that are no longer going to be confined to the ghetto areas, but will be carried into white racial areas.” Noting the nihilistic mood among many Negroes, Fry added: “The present situation is comparable to Samson when he destroyed the Temple of Dagon and himself along with it. Like him, many black brothers, blind with rage, have their hands poised on the temple pillars, ready to start pushing.”
Troubled Waters. President Johnson can hardly overestimate the depth or complexity of the problem. Once he was able to mobilize a conscience-strick en nation behind civil rights measures designed to right long-standing wrongs. Now, after four summers of holocausts in the nation’s largest cities, concern over the Negro’s welfare has been largely replaced by consternation at the prospect of anarchy. Nothing more dramatically underscored this shift than the total silence that greeted Johnson’s State of the Union plea for several “vital” civil rights laws covering fair jury trials, enforcement of equal-employment opportunity and open housing. By contrast, he was applauded a dozen times when he spoke of curbing crime.
Noting that “Americans are prosperous as men have never been in recorded history,” the President added mildly that, nonetheless, “there is in the land a certain restlessness, a questioning.” He asked rhetorically: “Why, why, then, this restlessness?” He answered himself with an even greater rhetorical flourish: “Because when a great ship cuts through the sea, the waters are always stirred and troubled. And our ship is moving—and it’s moving through troubled and new waters, and it’s moving toward new and better shores.”
Coming from the bridge, that seemed a peculiarly euphoric position report. Even the modest program of social reform that Johnson outlined faces—as he knows only too well—serious trouble getting safely through a restive, frugally inclined Congress.
Turning to crime, Johnson listed a number of measures aimed at calming the roiled waters. Americans, he said, “recognize that law enforcement is first the duty of local police and local government.” He added: “The front-line headquarters against crime is in the home and in the church and in the city hall and the county courthouse and the statehouse—not in far-removed Washington.” But the Federal Government “can and should help the cities and the states in their war on crime, and this we shall do.”
He told Congress that it confronted “no more urgent business” than passage of his Safe Streets Act with a $100 million authorization, double the amount he requested last year. He called for a gun-control law to halt “the trade in mail-order murder” (an appeal that roused Robert Kennedy to his only applause during the 50-minute speech). To end “the sale of slavery to the young,” he called for a narcotics-control act that would impose harsher penalties for the sale of LSD “and other dangerous drugs,” and urged adding 219 agents to the present total of 639 in the Narcotics Bureau and in the Health, Education and Welfare Department’s Bureau of Drug Abuse Control. In addition, he asked Congress to authorize 128 more FBI agents, for a nationwide strength of 6,718.
Bolts on the Door. The President’s concern with lawlessness was further emphasized by the First Lady. At a White House luncheon for 50 women “doers” that was disrupted by an outburst by Eartha Kitt, she declared that it would be all too easy to “take the lazy path by merely sounding the alarm and putting extra bolts on our door.” Added Lady Bird: “I think more of us are tired of just being shocked and talking about it. There are things responsible citizens are doing in crime control, in prevention, in legislation.”
Before a Chamber of Commerce meeting in Yonkers, N.Y., Bobby Kennedy proposed a three-point attack on the “explosion of violence and crime” that is “spreading like a cancer across the land,” including more and better-paid policemen and greater attention to low-income neighborhoods. New York’s Mayor John V. Lindsay, whose police force is trying to cope with a 22.7% upsurge in major crimes in the past year, warned of an increasing “polarization” between affluent whites and impoverished Negroes and Puerto Ricans in U.S. cities.
Outlet for Rage. Martin Luther King last week set in motion plans for a massive march on Washington around April 1 that he has described as a “last, desperate try at nonviolence” and “an outlet for the rage in the ghetto.” But the time may have passed when King or anyone else can provide what he calls “an alternative to a long, hot summer.” The riot commission appointed by Johnson after last summer’s Detroit eruption has reportedly concluded that where normal channels for achieving change are choked off, Negroes have often found revolt the most effective way of getting attention from city hall and Washington.
In any case, police forces around the nation are operating on the assumption that the summer will be a sizzler. Some are improving their community-relations programs in hopes of lowering the temperature. Far more hope to equip themselves with a wide range of riot-control gear, from armored cars (some armed with flamethrowers) in Philadelphia and Los Angeles, to helicopters in Chicago. More than 3,000 local, state and federal police agencies have bought the Mace chemical spray gun, designed to disable a rioter temporarily.
Machine Guns & Lions. In Miami, one of several cities that recently launched “get-tough” campaigns, the tactics seem to be producing results. Since Police Chief Walter Headley launched his crackdown on the city’s violence-plagued Negro districts last Christmas, crimes have declined nearly two-thirds citywide, people have begun walking the streets after dark without fear, and nighttime church attendance has soared.
When Headley announced his campaign, civil rights leaders were alarmed that the emphasis would be more on Negro repression than on crime suppression. But the Rev. Thedford Johnson, pastor of St. John’s Baptist Church on the edge of Miami’s ghetto, for one, is satisfied that nothing of the sort has happened. “They holler about the shotguns and the dogs,” said Johnson, referring to the Negro leaders. “They could justify machine guns and lions if that’s what it takes to wipe out crime.”
More constructively, the Administration has been conspicuously successful in enlisting business support for programs aimed at rooting out the causes of crime. In addition, the Justice Department is computerizing its intelligence center, expanding its staff and briefing U.S. attorneys on ways to avert riots. Before trouble reaches the boiling point, for example, the attorneys are instructed to channel all intelligence to Justice, where the computer will be recruited to gauge a city’s mood. The Department is also financing four weeks of meetings at Virginia’s Airlie House to instruct 122 mayors and police chiefs on how to defuse a potential explosion. There, the city officials pool information not only on riot-control techniques but also on community relations programs.
With a weather eye for the coming summer, the National Guard—whose performance in such cities as Newark and Detroit demonstrated a woeful lack of training for such emergencies—and the Army have both been placing new emphasis on techniques of riot control since last summer. In the hope of making America’s cities less of a crucible in 1968 than they have been in the past four years, military experts have analyzed the layout of 100 trouble-prone areas, pre-positioned supplies in them, and drawn up contingency plans. They may well be needed.
More Must-Reads from TIME
- Inside Elon Musk’s War on Washington
- Why Do More Young Adults Have Cancer?
- Colman Domingo Leads With Radical Love
- 11 New Books to Read in February
- How to Get Better at Doing Things Alone
- Cecily Strong on Goober the Clown
- Column: The Rise of America’s Broligarchy
- Introducing the 2025 Closers
Contact us at letters@time.com