Jones Beach and the Decline of Liberalism

By Charles Krauthammer

Take a drive out of Manhattan, first east, then south, and in about an hour you arrive at one of the most pleasing monuments to activist government to be found in America: Jones Beach, a magnificent ocean park built on a sandbar off the south shore of Long Island. Jones Beach opened 65 years ago, Governor Franklin Roosevelt of New York presiding. But the idea had erupted full blown from the mind of that public-works genius and master builder, Robert Moses. A few years earlier, arriving by boat on that desolate stretch of sand, he sketched on the back of an envelope the park you see today.

The wonder of Jones Beach is the way it was meticulously designed to serve the crammed and harried working classes of New York City, offering them the kind of ocean playground that until then had been open only to the rich. At a time when public beaches meant meager toilets in shabby wooden shacks, notes biographer Robert Caro, Moses sketched two enormous bathhouses a mile apart, with canopied terraces, vast swimming pools and even diaper-changing rooms. And in place of the barkers and hot-dog vendors of Coney Island, he decreed a serene, pristine boardwalk offering shuffleboard and paddle tennis, all at nominal prices -- no commerce allowed.

It was an enormous success. By the hundreds of thousands, workmen and their families poured out of the sweaty city to this marvel of a beach. You can still see it today. True, gone are the legions of sailor-suited college students picking up trash. Gone too, in this age of tort, the archery range and roller rink. But the rest is there, a grand beach park for yet another generation of working-class New Yorkers, with Hispanics and blacks now joining the original beach population of white ethnics.

At the time, writes Caro, designers and architects came from all over Europe to gaze at this wonder. An Englishman summed up their verdict: "The finest seashore playground ever given the public anywhere in the world."

Moses went on to build many more monuments. F.D.R. went on to erect social programs as promiscuously as Moses built state parks. But the point of such activism was plain: government was to produce something tangible, visible, usa- ble for the ordinary working-class -- now called middle-class -- American family. That was the theory of the New Deal, with its unemployment insurance, old-age pensions and assorted public works. That was the animating vision that allowed American liberalism to dominate national politics for four decades.

In recent years, faith in activist government has declined precipitously. The cause is not just Vietnam and Watergate but rather the fateful turn liberal activism took with Lyndon Johnson and the Great Society. Not content with the great middle-class programs like Medicare, Johnson launched a War on Poverty that has since poured trillions down a vast federal sinkhole, leaving little trace -- indeed coinciding with a dramatic rise in crime, homelessness and deviancy of every sort.

Bill Clinton's genius in the 1992 campaign was understanding the abiding power of the idea of activist government -- activism directed not, however, at the fringes of society but at the great middle that keeps it going. He campaigned for the "forgotten middle class." Forgotten, one might note, by modern liberalism. No matter. Clinton remembered.

Hence his national-service program, an echo of the G.I. Bill, aimed at working kids, who would repay their schooling with community service. Hence the crime bill he fought desperately to save, a $30 billion potpourri of prisons and cops, of therapists and social workers turned loose on the ordinary American's No. 1 nightmare: crime. Hence the piece de resistance of Clinton's activist vision: health care "that cannot be taken away." It addresses the quintessential middle-class fear: losing what you've got.

There is something valiant if archaic about Clinton's trying to resurrect activist government. Delivering the goods is far more difficult today. Government is broke. And the issue is not a bathhouse that can be built for a few hundred thousand dollars but a health-care entitlement that could cost trillions.

It is easy to admire the energy and drive behind Clinton's activism. Those skeptical of government's doing social engineering rather than bathhouse construction register a mixture of wonder and alarm at a President so fixed in a belief that runs against the tide of public opinion and the fiscal capacities of modern government.

But to succeed, Clinton must stick to his vision. The principal reason his ambitions for health care and crime met such resistance is that what started out as grand schemes to allay middle-class anxieties were increasingly seen as yet more remedial programs for the poor. Working people don't play midnight basketball. They go to Jones Beach. Build that, and activist government might once again become a going proposition.