By David R. Henderson
The more I have studied government policy over the
last 40 or so years, the more strongly I have come to believe that whatever
problem you name, some government intervention—a tax, a subsidy, a spending
program, or a government regulation—was an important cause or, at a minimum,
made the problem worse. The evidence for this view is so strong that I think it
merits being called Henderson’s Iron Law of Government Intervention.
One instance of this law is the famous, or infamous,
Detroit riot of 1967. After the riot various pundits “informed” the public that
it had happened because so many of Detroit’s black inner-city residents were
poor and hopeless. That became the accepted explanation and, to the extent that
anyone remembers it, probably still is. But a close look at the record reveals
a much more interesting story—of a government’s police force oppressing people
who simply wanted to live their lives peacefully. This is not to say that the people
who rioted bore no responsibility—everyone is responsible for his own actions.
However, without the police force’s intrusion and without a previous federal
program that had destroyed a community, the riot probably would not have
occurred. And the evidence for this is hidden in plain sight.
During a five-day period in July 1967, 43 people were
killed during the riot in Detroit’s inner city. Shortly after that, President
Lyndon B. Johnson created the National Advisory Commission on Civil
Disorders—the so-called Kerner Commission, named after its head, then-governor
of Illinois Otto Kerner. (Kerner was later convicted of having taken a bribe
while governor and served time in prison.) The Commission was tasked with
determining the causes of that and other riots during the summer of 1967 and
with making recommendations to prevent such riots in the future.
Its 1968 Report of
the National Advisory Commission on Civil Disorders made a big splash, selling about two million copies.
The report stated that black poverty was a big cause of the Detroit riots, and
its recommendations for more government jobs and housing programs for
inner-city residents were explicitly based on that assumption. These
recommendations, plus the charge of white racism, received much of the
publicity at the time and are what most people took away from the report.
Publishers make a distinction between book buyers and book readers: The latter
tends to be a small subset of the former. That distinction seems to apply here.
It’s too bad that more people didn’t actually read the report. The Commission’s
own account of the details of the Detroit riot tells a story that is
fundamentally inconsistent with the Commission’s own conclusions and
recommendations. Here’s the report’s first paragraph on Detroit: “On Saturday
evening, July 22, the Detroit Police Department raided five ‘blind pigs.’ The
blind pigs had their origin in prohibition days, and survived as private social
clubs. Often, they were after-hours drinking and gambling spots.”
These “blind pigs” were places that inner-city black
people went to be with their friends, to drink, and to gamble; in other words,
they were places where people peacefully enjoyed themselves and one another.
The police had a policy of raiding these places, presumably because the
gambling and the unlicensed alcohol were illegal. The police expected only two
dozen people to be at the fifth blind pig, the United Community and Civic League
on 12th Street, but instead found 82 people gathered to welcome home two
Vietnam veterans. The police proceeded to arrest them. “Some,” says the
Commission report, “voiced resentment at the police intrusion.” Who’d have
thunk it? The resentment spread and the riot began.
In short the triggering cause of the Detroit riot, in
which more people were killed than in any other riot that summer, was the
government crackdown on people who were going about their lives peacefully. For
the rioters the last straw was the government’s suppression of peaceful, albeit
illegal, black capitalism. Interestingly, in its many pages of recommendations
for more government programs, the Commission never suggested that the
government should end its policy of preventing black people from peacefully
drinking and gambling.
This is par for the course. When a government
intervention helps cause a problem, even those people who recognize that the
intervention was somewhat to blame rarely call for an end to, or even a scaling
down of, such intervention.
The government’s fingerprints show up elsewhere in the
Commission’s report. Urban renewal “had changed 12th Street [where the riot
began] from an integrated community into an almost totally black one,” says the
report. It tells of another area of the inner city to which the rioting had not
spread: “As the rioting waxed and waned, one area of the ghetto remained
insulated.” The 21,000 residents of a 150-square-block area on the northeast
side had previously banded together in the Positive Neighborhood Action
Committee (PNAC) and had formed neighborhood block clubs. These block clubs
were quickly mobilized to prevent the riot from spreading to this area.
“Youngsters,” wrote the Commission, “agreeing to stay in the neighborhood,
participated in detouring traffic.” The result: no riots, no deaths, no
injuries, and only two small fires, one of which was set in an empty building.
What made this area different was obviously the
close-knit community the residents had formed. But why had a community developed
there and not elsewhere? The report’s authors unwittingly hint at the answer:
“Although opposed to urban renewal, they [the PNAC] had agreed to co-sponsor
with the Archdiocese of Detroit a housing project to be controlled jointly by
the archdiocese and PNAC.” In other words, the area that had avoided rioting
had also successfully resisted urban renewal, the federal government’s program
of tearing down urban housing in which poor people lived and replacing it with
fewer housing units aimed at a more-upscale market. Economist Martin Anderson,
in his 1964 book, The Federal Bulldozer, had shown many of the problems with urban renewal.
Even some of Anderson’s harshest critics at the time admitted that urban
renewal could be called “Negro clearance.” Indeed, at the time, an even blunter
term, also beginning with the letter “n,” was used.
But the Kerner Commission, even in the face of its own
evidence, refused to admit that urban renewal was a contributing factor to the
riots. Indeed, the Commission recommended more urban renewal. The Commission’s
phrasing is interesting, though, because it admits so much about the sorry
history of the program:
Urban renewal has been an extremely controversial
program since its inception. We recognize that in many cities it has demolished
more housing than it has erected, and that it has often caused dislocation
among disadvantaged groups.
Nevertheless, we believe that a greatly expanded but
reoriented urban renewal program is necessary to the health of our cities.
In short the commission’s antidote to poison was to
increase the dose.
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