For their presentations. They will speak for 10 to 12 minutes at the most, i will enforce that with an iron hand about their Current Research on president ial commissions and then the three of us will talk in conversation about the role of president ial commissions and political history. And i will reserve the last half hour at least for questions and comments from you and for us to continue talking. As you can tell todays session is being filmed by cspan so do with that information as you will. All right. Frank is going to go first and introduce yourself. Yeah, my name is frank popper. I teach city planning rather than history, although increasingly i take a historical approach to city planning. I do that at rutgers and at princeton. The reason im here is that nearly half a century ago i wrote a small book for the 20th century fund, now the Century Foundation in new york city on president ial commissions and its one of the very few sources, i think, on them and a couple of months ago dov dialed me up, dug my 49yearold book up and asked me to participate in this panel. Im fairly current on president ial commissions but i start well, i have a 49year head start i guess is the way to look at it. President ial commissions have a long history in the United States. In the late 19th century there were a couple of them on the philippines and theyve since Theodore Roosevelt had one on country life. There have been a whole bunch of others in a more modern period. They all essentially work the same way. The president appoints a bunch of notables who represent different opinions on the subject in question, they meet, they hire an executive director who hires a staff, the staff writes much of the report and eventually its released. The time spans can be as short as six months or as long as perhaps three or four years. I want to talk about president ial commissions as a form of National Literature. National literature at least to me has two kinds of meanings. One, its an Overall Record of the nations running concerns and big turning points. Running concerns would be things like race, the role of women, Public Health, the organization of the federal government. Big turning points might be, well, in the 19th century there was a filipino insurrection and eventually filipino independence and the United States had to decide how to arrange that or work with that. And more recently in terms of big turning points there have been commissions on pearl harbor, the kennedy assassination excuse me, the first kennedy assassination, three mile island, the challenger rocket disaster, 9 11, deepwater horizon not that long ago. These commissions, these running concern commissions give you a pretty good sense of how, among other things, the nations elite has changed. If you look at the early 20th century commissions there are very few women, there are very few blacks, there are very few latinos and the more recent commissions tend to represent them more and i think also they tend to have more people from the sun belt as the region grows and becomes more prominent in the national politics. Very few poor people are on president ial commissions and in truth not that many who you would say are middle class, either. Thats one kind of National Literature. Another way to look at National Literature is in the sense of National Touch points. Intensely meaningful cultural experiences that mark a generation, that mark the mark the country forever. And here one has things like the kennedy assassination commission, the 9 11 commission and these things are sometimes treated, not necessarily by politicians, but by people with shall we say a finer sense of the nations culture, more refined one, if you will, as actual pieces of National Literature that are revealing in the way that hamlet was revealing or the great gatsby is revealing. So, for example, the great novelist don dalillo in his novel libra the astrological sign describes the Warren Commission as follows, its the megaton novel that james joyce would have written if he had moved to iowa city and lived to be 100. Okay. The 9 11 Commission Likewise has occasionally gotten this sort of treatment. The great late harvard historian daniel aaron called it epic, not in the sense of an epic hype, but in the sense of an epic narrative. With the terrorist as grindel and without the sort of miraculous moccana, if you will, intervention to save the towers or the American People from the attack and the lesson is very clearly the people themselves will have to come up with a response and this is what the response should be. Like, okay. Two kinds of National Literature. Most literature, most books and poems, are what publishers call mid list. That is they may not have great circulations, they may not make great impact, but they sell year in, year out, the cumulative numbers are quite impressive, so sometimes are the cumulative profits. They form the background against which the 9 11 case can stick out. They are the baseline. The basic process is of negotiation for the literature, research it, actually writing it, editing it, marketing it. Problems of a more, if you will, mechanical nittygritty sort, but theyre actually as with most literature, as with most most human activities, they end with sort of unclear outcomes but clearly some positive ones, too. Basically in most of the commission cases come up with the sense that they accomplish things. They accomplish important things some of them, but they may not necessarily achieve great public acclaim or knowledge in so doing. Dov in his description of the Income Maintenance Commission has a wonderful, wonderful description of the mechanics of how that particular commission worked and how its politics worked from the inside and is going to do a terrific job, i know, because he recruited me. Thats why i know. The more recent history of commissions is, well, about what you would expect. Obama appointed a couple, most notably the one on the deepwater horizon disaster in the gulf. Then more recently trump made some noises about appointing Chris Christie head of an Opioid Commission to look at the nations difficulty with opioids. He also formed one with kris kobach, the secretary of state from kansas on Voter Suppression. The christie one never got off the ground and the kobach one crashed and burned pretty specifically. I forgot to say, by the way, that no president ever appoints a commission on a topic that is going well. The topic always has to be something that is not going well where there are serious conflicts and thats another reason why at least in my view they resemble literature. Literature likewise would go nowhere without conflicts and where you have conflicts you have literature and you have conflicts you have commissions and there is this overlap. As i say, the Trump Commission or the trump experience with commissions has been with much else with trump rather disruptive of previous pattern, but i did notice about a year ago in the Atlantic Henry kissinger writing an article featured on the cover about Artificial Intelligence and concluding that this is a very weighty problem that requires, guess what, a president ial commission to assess in terms of its likely affects and how the nation should respond. And this is sort of a return to form in the sense that Henry Kissinger writing in the atlantic, were back to the notables of the sort who usually are on these things. When i did my research on president ial commissions, all those years ago, i discovered that there was a sort of interlocking directorate and a lot of people at the time who were quite noticeable but never quite ran for Political Office at least quite yet at the time got appointed to multiple commissions. So the three commissions were scored by george meany the labor leader, g. Irwin miller the industrialist to van cummings not far from here and who else . Well, there were a couple more like that. They were very inward and very incestuous, not just within the Democratic Party but within the nations elite as a whole. Let me and, again, the kissinger proposal for a commission on ai is reverts to form in that sense. Now, some day i suppose there will be a Trump Commission or commissions about his years in power. Maybe somebody in the room although there arent that many of you will serve on it. More likely perhaps you or someone here will write about it, will chronicle it and if you do and you want to think in terms of literature, try shakespeares approach to richard iii. Thank you. [ applause ] thank you all for being here. Thank you to nicole, katie and leah who i know arent in the room for putting together this. Sorry, for putting together this conference. Now . Thank you to leah, nicole and katie for putting together this conference, my name is dov grohsgal i teach in the department of history at the Woodrow Wilson school which is our Public Policy school. Im primarily interested in the intersection of Public Policy and social movements specifically in the context of race and inequality. I first got interested in president ial commissions after stumbling into the archives of a late 1960s president ial commission created by Lyndon Johnson called the president s commission on income maintenance. The commission has been mentioned in the literature before by scholars like michael katz but no scholar has explored this particular president ial commission in depth. Lyndon johnson created the commission in january of 1968 and charged it with investigating, quote, any and every plan however in conventional to meet the income needs of all American People. In announcing the creation of the Commission Johnson said, quote, our challenge in the coming years is to extend human insurance and Human Dignity to persons who are not able to buy their own protection. The commission was to focus specifically on the possibility of instituting a universal basic income. Remarkably i would argue the idea of universal basic income was not quite a radical idea by the late 1960s, in fact, there was a broad consensus from across the political spectrum behind implementing some form of guaranteed income. That consensus included the likes of Martin Luther king jr. And milton friedman. Much of the interest in guaranteed income was driven by the realities of the historical moment. The war on poverty which was just four years old in 1968 had focused on the quote, long run creation of opportunities in employment, housing and education rather than on income transfer programs. But that approach failed to eliminate poverty which had been the expectation of Many Americans and the rhetoric johnson had used in commencing the war on poverty. Perhaps more importantly the war on poverty had also failed to resolve a stubbornly high poverty rate among minorities, especially africanamericans who in 1969 had a poverty rate of 32 compared to the white poverty rate which was under 10 . A number of factors had converged to keep africanamerican poverty rates high, the nexus of automation and migration was one of the central culprits. Automation in rural parts of the country had uprooted millions of africanamericans for decades who migrated to northern cities in search of jobs. In the cities, however, africanamericans face dim employment prospects. Automation had also changed the urban labor market. At the same time white city dwellers and employers left for the suburbs, depleting the urban tax base and shrinking the job market. The historian tom segru and others have written extensively about this phenomenon. He concluded, for example, for a large number of africanamericans the promise of steady, secure and relatively wellpaid employment proved illusive. When Richard Nixon was inaugurated in january of 1969 he decided to keep the president s commission on income maintenance in place and to provide it with more time and additional Financial Resources to complete its work. In other words, nixon pushed forward with the johnson Era Commission that focused on poverty, poverty policy and guaranteed income. That story is an important one, better told perhaps in another session. But the connection between the president s commission on income maintenance and the Nixon Administration is an important one in the inception of my project. I came across the commission in researching Daniel Patrick moynihans involvement in a major welfare reform proposal introduced by the Nixon Administration in august of 1969 called the family assistance plan. The proposal never became law due to congressional opposition but at its core was a guaranteed income even though nixon hesitated to call it that. As it turns out part of the basis for this proposed family assistance plan could be found in the work of the president s commission on income maintenance. What i found most interesting about the commission, especially in thinking about methods for doing american political history was its Investigative Approach in how it went about its work. Investigative processes have not generally been the focus of scholars who write about president ial commissions. They have instead focused on why president s appoint commissions in the first place and on commission recommendations. With less attention to how commissions reach their conclusions. Between january of 1968 and november of 1969 the president s commission on income maintenance visited 17 cities and towns across the country to conduct its investigation. In each location the commission convened local hearings and invited the poor, local officials, activists and advocates to testify about the circumstances and experience of poverty. In addition, commissioners physically visited the homes of the poor. What emerged in both of these settings in the hearings and during home visits was a set of interactions between commissioners, the poor and their advocates which were remarkable in three ways. First, given the opportunity witnesses made a case in front of commissioners for the value of their expertise about the lived experience of poverty. While at the same time challenging the professional authorities who had often dictated poverty policy. A welfare recipient named sanders testified at hearings in new york city, for example, that any new poverty policies would, quote, have no meaning unless welfare recipients participated in those changes. The commissions chairman an industrialist from chicago named benjamin hineman eventually said just reading about a problem and theorizing and thinking in an office is not enough to understand the problem. That approach did not, quote, convey the poverty or humanity and diversity of the poor. Instead poverty policy needed to be shaped by those who had experienced poverty firsthand. Second, witnesses challenged dominant narratives about dependency and recast themselves as able selfadvocates within a system that had created significant obstacles to mobility. For example, in quincy, florida, a predominantly africanamerican tobacco farming down in the northern part of the state a witness named bessey mae thomas told commissioners she was able to secure an increase in her payments through a persistent Letter Writing Campaign to the office. She said i kept telling them we couldnt meet our needs and they raised my assistance level. Witnesses through commissioners attention to their ability to survive even on scant resources. Third, by painting a bleak picture of the role of structures and systems in imposing the conditions that created cyclical poverty witnesses challenged commissioners ideas that poverty was the consequence of a series of individual choices. In quincy, florida, for example, where tobacco farms were the towns primary industry mostly africanamerican Agricultural Workers faced low wages and sporadic unemployment due to the crops short growing season. At the same time, however, owners punished workers who sought employment away from farms in months where there was no crop to cultivate. As a result families had to borrow from their employers to survive during the offseason. Walter gurley, a deacon and naacp activist in quincy testified that, quote, the poor man had to borrow the white mans money to try to keep his family alive and this is how he keeps him tied. He is in debt, the tobacco season doesnt last long enough for him to get out of debt where he is a free man. Other structural obstacles were found in out of touch job training programs, the concentration of the poor in inadequate schools and numerous other areas covered in the testimony of witnesses in all 17 cities and towns. In addition to the hearings there was another important component of the commissions investigative strategy. Commissioners visited the homes of the poor. The conditions in which many of the poor lived exasperated commissioners and created a sense of urgency about developing a solution. Commissioner epstein a harvard trained economist described the houses of the tobacco harvesters he had visited in quincy, florida. He reported, quote, we saw these unpainted wooden shacks of two or three or four rooms in which 12 or 14 people lived which had no windows, just shutters, no indoor water. Most of them did not have inside toilets. Living conditions, cracks in w