This is the introduction to a bonus edition of Checks and Balance, a weekly, subscriber-only newsletter bringing exclusive insight from our correspondents in America.
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Welcome back to our series of bonus Checks and Balance newsletters highlighting our coverage of America's semiquincentennial. This month's chapter covers the 1950s through the 1970s. As always, my colleagues have assembled an array of thoughtful reading, including a global look at America's civil-rights movement by one of its leading historians, a bleak assessment of the Vietnam war's strategists and more.
This month I'm writing about 1965, one of those years in which decades happened. Lyndon Johnson took office for his only term; Malcolm X was killed in upper Manhattan; John Lewis and Hosea Williams led marchers over the Edmund Pettus Bridge and were beaten by Alabama state police on Bloody Sunday. Dylan went electric; the Vietnam war raged; and Muhammad Ali beat Sonny Liston with a “phantom punchâ€. That's an embarrassment of riches, but I'd like to write about three things—a Supreme Court ruling and two pieces of legislation—that Americans are still fighting over today.
The ruling came first. On June 7th, in Griswold v Connecticut, the Supreme Court held that Connecticut's law banning contraception violated a married couple's right to privacy, which a majority of justices located in the 14th Amendment's due-process clause. That ruling, along with one seven years later that allowed unmarried couples the same rights, effectively legalised contraception. But its effects were far broader: the court cited Griswold in its rulings legalising abortion (Roe v Wade) and gay marriage, and banning anti-sodomy laws. In effect, it got the state out of people's bedrooms and underpinned a welcome recognition that consenting adults could live and love as they wished. Today abortion is no longer legal nationwide, plenty of conservative originalists still believe Griswold was wrongly decided and in Clarence Thomas's concurrence overturning Roe, he advocated reconsidering “all of this court's substantive due process precedentsâ€. At least one member of the current court seems quite open to returning government to the bedroom.
Two months after Griswold, Lyndon Johnson signed into law the Voting Rights Act of 1965 (VRA), which gave teeth to the 15th Amendment, which outlaws racial discrimination in voting laws. The VRA forbade literacy tests, poll taxes and other such methods that southern states had used to keep African-Americans from the polls, and it required jurisdictions with a history of racist practices to “preclear†any proposed electoral changes with the Justice Department. But recent Supreme Court rulings have eliminated preclearance and made it harder to challenge electoral changes that deny minority representation absent overt discriminatory intent. One of three pieces of landmark legislation to emerge from the civil-rights era (along with the Civil Rights Act of 1964 and the Fair Housing Act of 1968), the VRA is now effectively a dead letter, and the number of African-Americans in Congress may plummet.
Another two months later, Johnson enacted the Immigration and Nationality Act of 1965, which ended a federal quota system that restricted immigration from outside northern and western Europe. It prioritised skilled immigrants and allowed family members to join relatives in America. The bill's backers argued that it would not “upset the ethnic mix of our societyâ€, as Ted Kennedy, then a senator from Massachusetts, said. They underestimated how many people would take advantage of family reunification. In 1965 most immigrants to America came from Europe: 87% in all. Fifty years later the pattern had flipped, with 90% arriving from outside Europe. By January 2025 America's immigrant population had reached 53.3m, the highest number ever recorded. Then came Donald Trump, whose immigration policies have led to the first decline in the foreign-born population since the 1960s.
Liberals reading this account will gnash their teeth and conservatives will cheer, but they both miss the point, which is that political battles rarely end. Few victories or losses are final. The VRA, abortion and immigration all had opponents who organised, strategised and played the long game. So did civil-rights activists, though. The VRA was enacted just months after Bloody Sunday—but that was a century since the civil war ended, and it followed decades of protests and organising. That line about the universe's moral arc bending toward justice is bunk. The arc doesn't bend on its own. People bend it.
What stands out most to you about 1965? Write in with your view at checksandbalance@economist.com.
