The Civil Rights & Consumer Messages

In a logical follow-up to his messages on youth and crime, President Johnson last week sent Congress two more of his omnibus proposals for improving the quality of American life. While the crime message skimmed the cream from the 340-page report of his own commission on crime and offered altogether new suggestions for action (TIME, Feb. 17), the civil rights and consumer messages represented, in large measure, proposals that Congress had seen before.

The Administration's civil rights bill, in fact, varied little from the tough measure that died in a Senate filibuster last September. The only real difference was in the timing of the open-housing section. Recognizing that a period of education may be necessary to prepare the public for a total end to discrimination in housing, Johnson asked that discrimination in sales and rentals be banned in phases over the next two years. A scant 4% of the nation's dwellings, which are federally financed and already under various federal anti-discrimination regulations, would be covered by the act this year. Forty percent more, mostly big apartment houses and new suburban developments, would be added next year, and the remaining 56%, including single-family houses, would be covered in 1969.

Misinformation & Fear. Strong emphasis would be placed on education to counter what Johnson called "a cloud of misinformation and unarticulated fear" about the effects of open-housing legislation. The Secretary of Housing and Urban Development would be directed to exhaust every means of conciliation before taking a case to court. Other civil rights proposals, which by themselves would meet with general approval in Congress, would guarantee fair selection of Southern juries, give greater federal protection to civil rights workers, and broaden the authority of the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission.

Given the wide support for the rest of the package, some Administration advisers had urged Johnson to submit the open-housing measure separately, so that at least some civil rights legislation would have a good chance of passage this year. Not only will open housing face the same barrier in the Senate that it failed to hurdle last year; it will also have much tougher going in the new House. For House members, new as well as old, sensed the voters' "go slow" attitude in last fall's campaign, and have not noted any perceptible change since. Yet Johnson was determined that open housing be included, if only "because it is decent and right." Said he: "Injustice must be opposed, however difficult or unpopular the issue."

New Complexities. The civil rights bill and most other domestic proposals sent to Congress by the President this year have been aimed at minorities and the disadvantaged. The consumer message sought to aid all Americans. The President asked for bills that, among other things, would require lenders to state the true costs of loans ("The consumer should not have to be an actuary or a mathematician"), help make household products safer, minimize the likelihood of huge regional power failures, and ensure greater safety in the delivery of natural gas through the 800,000 miles of pipeline that stretch across the continent. Much has been done for the consumer, said Johnson, since Ulysses S. Grant signed the first consumer-protection law nearly 100 years ago; but much remains to be done to protect him from the "new complexities and hazards" of an advancing technology.

This file is automatically generated by a robot program, so reader's discretion is required.