Freedom to Discriminate: How Realtors Conspired to Segregate Housing and Divide America

FREEDOM TO

DISCRIMINATE

FREEDOM TO

DISCRIMINATE

HOW REALTORS CONSPIRED TO

SEGREGATE HOUSING AND DIVIDE AMERICA

GENE SLATER

Heyday, Berkeley, California

Copyright © 2021 by Gene Slater

All rights reserved. No portion of this work may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying and recording, or by any information storage or retrieval system, without permission in writing from Heyday.

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Names: Slater, Gene, 1949- author.

Title: Freedom to discriminate : how realtors conspired to segregate housing and divide America / Gene Slater.

Description: Berkeley, California : Heyday, [2021] | Includes bibliographical references and index.

Identifiers: LCCN 2021010218 (print) | LCCN 2021010219 (ebook) | ISBN 9781597145435 (cloth) | ISBN 9781597145442 (epub)

Subjects: LCSH: Discrimination in housing--United States--History--20th century. | Discrimination in housing--Law and legislation--United States. | Real estate agents--United States--Attitudes. | Real estate business--Moral and ethical aspects--United States. | African Americans--Housing--Law and legislation. | African Americans--Segregation--History--20th century. | United States--Race relations.

Classification: LCC HD7288.76.U5 S54 2021 (print) | LCC HD7288.76.U5 (ebook) | DDC 363.5/1--dc23

LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2021010218

LC ebook record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2021010219

Cover Photo: Ticky Tacky Houses in Daly City (1968), photograph by Robert A. Isaacs, courtesy of the San José Museum of Art

Endpapers: Home Owners’ Loan Corporation maps, from Robert K. Nelson, LaDale Winling, Richard Marciano, Nathan Connolly et al., Mapping Inequality, American Panorama, ed. Robert K. Nelson and Edward L. Ayers, https://dsl.richmond.edu/panorama/redlining.

Cover Design: Ashley Ingram

Interior Design/Typesetting: Ashley Ingram

Published by Heyday

P.O. Box 9145, Berkeley, California 94709

(510) 549-3564

heydaybooks.com

Printed in East Peoria, Illinois, by Versa Press, Inc.

10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1

If an individual wants to discriminate against Negroes or others in selling or renting his house, he has a right to do so.

Ronald Reagan, 19661

Restrictions and freedom are two facets of the same social factor. I must be restricted so that you can have freedom. Also, you must be restricted so that I may have liberty. The responsibility of government is to keep the restrictions sufficiently strong to assure to all equal freedom.

W. Byron Rumford, 19662

There are such things in the world as human rights. They rest upon no conventional foundation, but are external, universal, and indestructible. Among these, is the right of locomotion . . . the right which belongs to no particular race, but belongs alike to all and to all alike.

Frederick Douglass, 18693

CONTENTS

Introduction: Gettysburg 1964

Part One. Limiting Individual Freedom for the Common Good:

Early 1900s–Early 1920s

1. Progressive Reformers of Real Estate

2. The Public Power of a Private Club

3. It’s the Restrictions on Your Neighbors Which Count

4. Implementing Racial Exclusion

Part Two. Property Values:

Early 1920s–Late 1940s

5. Undesirable Human Elements

6. Shaping Federal Housing Programs

7. Reconciling the War against Hitler with a

New Racial Entitlement

Part Three. Freedom of Association:

Late 1940s–Late 1950s

8. Defending Racial Covenants

9. Recommitting to Segregation after Shelley

10. Using Freedom of Association to Intensify Segregation

11. The Idea of a National Conservative Party

Part Four. Freedom of Choice:

Late 1950s–June 1963

12. Struggling for an Ideology to Defend against Fair Housing

13. Creating a Standardized Ideology of Freedom

Part Five. A National Crusade in California:

June 1963–November 1964

14. A Constitutional Amendment to Permanently Protect Discrimination

15. Racial Moderation to Continue Segregation

16. Redefining Freedom and America’s Founding

17. A Battle between Two Visions of Freedom

Part Six: An Earthquake:

1965–1968

18. Reagan and the Realtors

19. Realtor Victories against Fair Housing

20. To Defeat the Realtors

21. An Ideology of Freedom for a National Conservative Party

Part Seven: American Legacy:

1969–

22. The Continuation of Residential Segregation

23. A Legacy for Civil Rights

24. Who Is Entitled to American Freedom

Acknowledgments

Sources

Notes

Bibliography and Works Cited

Picture Credits

Index

About the Author

Martin Luther King at March on Washington, 1963

L. H. Spike Wilson, President, California Real Estate Association, 1963

INTRODUCTION: Gettysburg 1964

The world has never had a good definition of the word liberty, and the American people, just now, are much in want of one. We all declare for liberty; but in using the same word we do not all mean the same thing. . . . Here are two, not only different, but incompatible things, called by the same name—liberty. And it follows that each of the things is, by the respective parties, called by two different and incompatible names—liberty and tyranny.

Abraham Lincoln, 18641

Alone in his room at the Willard Hotel, at midnight on the night before the March on Washington, as Martin Luther King weighed his aides’ often-conflicting advice on what he should, or should not, say the next afternoon, he had a specific, if almost unattainable, idea of what he wanted his speech to achieve. It needed to be a sort of Gettysburg Address, he had quietly told a Black journalist a few days earlier.2 To accomplish in a very different time and place what Lincoln had done almost exactly one hundred years before, King sought to persuade the vast majority of Americans, white and Black, that the nation’s purpose depended on the principle that all men are created equal, not as some vague generality but as the active task of government; that American freedom had not been accomplished at the Revolution but was a promise still to be fulfilled, a promissory note to which every American [is] heir;3 and that such freedom was inextricable, that the freedom of white Americans depended on that of Black Americans.

To make the parallels to Lincoln’s famous speech indelible, to enshrine the cause of civil rights in the noblest legacy of America’s past, King began by echoing the martyred president’s words. Standing on the marble steps of the Lincoln Memorial—the gleaming pillars, brooding statue, and late afternoon sun behind him; the banked microphones and hot, travel-wearied crowd before him—he offered his vision as the completion of Lincoln’s own: Five score years ago, a great American in whose symbolic shadow we stand today signed the Emancipation Proclamation. But one hundred years later the Negro is still not free.

King’s words and message drew on Lincoln’s: on the rededication of America to the nation’s unfinished work. He wanted to make those long-familiar phrases—engraved on the monument’s walls, recited by schoolchildren to symbolize the nation’s purpose—new and urgent, the business of today. We have . . . come to this hallowed spot, to make real the promises of democracy . . . that . . . this nation will . . . live out the true meaning of its creed: ‘We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal.’4

The power of King’s address would be borne out not only by the judgment of history—as the most important American speech of the twentieth century, second in our history only to Lincoln’s5—but immediately by the fears of those diametrically opposed to King’s ideas. The FBI’s assistant director of domestic intelligence immediately wrote to J. Edgar Hoover, We must mark him now, if we have not done so before, as the most dangerous negro of the future of this nation.6 To those committed to the racial status quo and to preventing government action that would change it, nothing was more dangerous about the civil rights movement than its enlistment of Lincoln and the Declaration of Independence and their claims on the vocabulary of American freedom.

What proved to be the most effective ideological response to the civil rights movement’s ideal of freedom was developed in these same months not by Southern segregationists, Republican politicians, or National Review intellectuals but by a source whose crucial role then is often forgotten today: the nation’s realtors. To perpetuate residential discrimination, realtor organizations helped create an opposite vision of American freedom from King’s. They made the right to discriminate the core of American freedom—while using the race-neutral language of the civil rights movement to insist on that right.

Thus, nine months after the March on Washington, Spike Wilson, leader of California realtors, invoked Lincoln too. This Fresno broker and president of his local Kiwanis Club quoted the Gettysburg Address in a campaign designed not to support King and the civil rights movement but to oppose them. Wilson’s vision of American freedom answered King’s in a 1964 ballot initiative that proved crucial to the future of both these visions.

Gettysburg 1964, Wilson called the battle over Proposition 14, a California constitutional amendment that would permanently ban the state or any city from ever limiting housing discrimination.7 Now we are engaged in a great war over civil rights testing whether equal rights for all can be achieved without losing freedom of choice, freedom of association and . . . private property rights, Wilson announced in launching the realtors’ campaign. We are involved in a great battle for liberty and freedom. We have prepared a final resting place for the drive to destroy individual freedom.8

Wilson’s message was designed to boost the morale of California’s forty thousand realtors—half of all those in the country—and affirm the noble purpose of those working on the front line in the campaign for Proposition 14. For brokers who might doubt the morality of opposing minority rights or worry that their efforts could be seen as self-serving or on the wrong side of history, Gettysburg 1964 made clear that the realtors’ cause was that of American freedom itself.

The realtors’ national association designed the California vote to be the turning point in their great war against fair housing laws across the country. If Californians say, ‘Yes, we want our full freedom restored!’ the people in other states will take heart and fight the same battle for freedom there, Wilson proclaimed. If they say, ‘No, we believe the privileges of minorities are more important than the rights of majorities,’ such laws will blanket the United States.9

The key to success, Wilson realized, was to challenge the idea of freedom at the heart of the civil rights movement. At a time when freedom as a domestic issue meant the struggle for equal rights—when news stories about freedom showed children attacked by police dogs in Birmingham—and at the height of support for civil rights, no prominent political leader would endorse Proposition 14 for fear of seeming racist. Republican presidential candidate Barry Goldwater, willing to vote against the 1964 federal civil rights bill, refused to take a position. Ronald Reagan, who campaigned for Goldwater and would run for governor of California two years later, was unwilling to support Proposition 14 until after it was approved. So controversial was the proposition that it overshadowed for Time magazine the piddlin’ contest of the presidential election.10 No state constitution, even in the deep South, had ever permanently protected discrimination. To win an overwhelming majority for such a measure—in a state whose voters had chosen a liberal legislature and a liberal governor who had made fair housing his highest priority— realtors had to counter King’s vision of freedom with their own.

The division between these visions was sharp and far reaching. For King and civil rights advocates, housing discrimination was the greatest obstacle to freedom outside the South.11 Denial of this right closed the door to many others. Being confined to a few, limited, tightly bounded neighborhoods created a sense of imprisonment that African Americans knew from lifelong experience. The evils of segregation and discrimination in housing [cause] segregated schools, segregated jobs . . . , and a segregated society, the NAACP spelled out, in bitterly opposing Proposition 14.12 Freedom, in this view, was clear and simple: a universal promise that government would secure rights for all Americans.

By contrast, realtors described freedom not as something to be achieved but preserved. Such traditional freedom, they claimed, had long included, at its very heart, the owner’s choice of whom to sell or rent to—the right to discriminate. This right had long preceded the American Revolution, realtors argued. That this right had never been mentioned until the civil rights movement threatened it only proved how fundamental it was. Being protected against discrimination was not a right at all but a special privilege. Militant minorities have organized and vocalized for equal rights, Wilson warned, until equal rights have become special privileges and this forgotten man lies neglected. He is the great, passive majority.13

A former Sacramento news editor, Wilson argued for the absolute rights of owners in terms of America’s promise to all. Proposition 14 carried the dreams, he said, of his great-great-grandfather James Wilson, a signer of the Declaration, and his mother, a Greek immigrant who came to America, like millions of others, for something promised only here . . . the rights and freedoms of individual American property owners.14

To appeal to the white majority while arguing that Proposition 14 was not against any minority, Wilson emphasized that realtors were in favor of the same rights for all races—the right of owners to discriminate: We’re trying to do something to help everyone—to protect their property rights. Realtors argued that they, not civil rights advocates, were the ones in favor of color-blind freedom.

Their campaign was not against minorities, realtors declared, but government oppression. Am I anti-Negro? By God I am not. I am their champion, Wilson insisted.15 By making state bureaucrats the enemy, realtors could be on the side of the underdog, the individual owner. Realtors therefore consistently referred to fair housing—laws prohibiting discrimination—as forced housing, compelling owners to sell or rent to whoever paid the full asking price regardless of their race or religion. Proposition 14 was thus not about race but the rights of the individual.16 That a Fresno real estate broker invoked the Gettysburg Address to answer Martin Luther King was neither surprising nor peripheral to the realtors’ campaign, but at its core.

The stakes could hardly have been higher. Residential discrimination was so intense and systemic that in the Bay Area—then as now one of the most liberal parts of the country—only 50 out of 325,000 new homes in the 1950s were sold on an open-occupancy basis without regard to race.17 Of six hundred brokers in Palo Alto, only three would even consider showing African Americans a home in a white area.18 Real estate boards systematically excluded every African American broker. Newspapers grouped real estate ads in columns marked restricted or unrestricted, determined not by the individual seller but the local real estate board. Far from being abstract arguments, these opposing visions of freedom would have direct, immediate impacts on where people could live—and would powerfully affect support for all types of civil rights.

For in describing American freedom as belonging to each individual separately, rather than as something shared, realtors undermined King’s fundamental political premise at the March on Washington. The future of civil rights, King recognized, depended on the shared recognition of a common stake, of white brothers [who] have come to realize that their destiny is tied up with our destiny . . . that their freedom is inextricably bound to our freedom.19 Realtors argued the opposite: Granting one group of citizens rights . . . necessarily takes away equivalent rights from the rest of the citizenry, as if this were simple arithmetic.20 If white Americans saw freedom in this atomized way, if granting rights to minorities did not strengthen but diminished their own, it would become almost impossible for the civil rights movement to challenge any type of racial discrimination in the North.

King recognized the dangers of the realtors’ ideology. Taking time away from pressing struggles in the South, he rushed to San Francisco and Los Angeles to inveigh against the dangers of Proposition 14. At a Freedom Rally in Fresno, a few miles from Wilson’s office, King warned what would happen if the realtors succeeded. If this initiative passes, it will defeat all we have been struggling to win.21 King’s terms echoed those of his speech at the March on Washington. But he was now defending his vision of freedom not against Southern defenders of Jim Crow but against Northern advocates of color-blind American freedom.

The results stunned politicians of both parties. Cast as racially neutral, the realtors’ idea of embattled freedom—freedom endangered by liberal government—resonated with the vast majority of voters. In the same election in which Lyndon Johnson defeated Barry Goldwater by the largest margin in American history, on the same state ballot where Goldwater received barely 40 percent of the vote, 65 percent supported Proposition 14.22

In a political message that would not be lost across the rest of the country, 75 percent of white voters supported the realtors’ initiative. Proposition 14 won by almost as wide a margin among union members, the longtime core of the Democratic Party, five to one, as among Republicans.23 Many white Californians who saw themselves as racial moderates, and generally supported the federal Civil Rights Act of 1964,24 found in the realtors’ vision of American freedom a nonracial reason, expressed in terms of the country’s deepest values, to oppose the extension of civil rights.

At the very moment when liberalism in America seemed most dominant, the realtors showed how conservatives could succeed. That the realtors’ idea of freedom had triumphed in a non-Southern state, a political bellwether for the nation as a whole, made California a megaphone. Proposition 14 showed how freedom could be used virtually everywhere to oppose civil rights and indeed liberal government itself.

Although Proposition 14’s legal influence would prove relatively short lived—state and federal supreme courts ruled it unconstitutional— the realtors’ campaign had a lasting effect on the nation’s political landscape. It propelled the rise of former actor Ronald Reagan, transformed the language of freedom in a way that became a template for modern conservatism, and contributed to the way that many, perhaps most, Americans understand freedom today.

King, who called passage of Proposition 14 a tragic setback for integration throughout the country,25 did not live to see a federal fair housing law. When Congress finally approved such a law days after his assassination, it was largely gutted by the memory of Proposition 14. No government administrative enforcement mechanism was provided. To this day, an estimated four million housing discrimination complaints each year go uninvestigated, and fair housing remains largely unenforced.26

In 1984, the Heritage Foundation looked back at what had been crucial to conservative success in dealing with civil rights: For twenty years, the most important battle in . . . civil rights. . . . has been for control of the language. . . . It is the rhetoric of civil rights that justifiably appeals to Americans’ . . . inherent sense of fairness. . . . Americans oppose . . . ‘segregation’ and ‘racism’; they favor ‘equality’ [and] opportunity. The secret to victory . . . has been to control the definition of these terms.27 The realtors had grasped that the essential word to redefine, the key to victory, was freedom. Eric Foner, a progressive historian and leading scholar on American freedom, similarly recognized the lasting importance of the realtors’ 1964 redefinition of this one key word.28

King’s warning about the impact of the realtors’ idea of freedom proved prophetic. His I Have a Dream speech is so widely celebrated and the origins of the realtors’ redefinition of freedom so little known, it is easy to forget which has generally dominated American politics since the 1960s.29

Gettysburg 1964 was a pivotal moment in a far larger story. It represented both the culmination of a sixty-year effort by the nation’s realtors to divide where Americans can live and a germinal moment in the rise of a conservative movement that would transform our politics. The nation’s polarization today is driven by an idea of freedom rooted in the history of residential segregation. This larger story shows the origins and features of an idea of freedom designed to divide America.

SEGREGATING AMERICA’S NEIGHBORHOODS

This book shows the deep connection between two features of our modern history that have rarely been looked at together: the establishment and defense of residential segregation in every city in the country, and the creation of a conservative idea of American freedom in the 1960s that has shaped our political debates ever since. Both were designed to divide Americans. Both reflected the work of the country’s organized real estate industry—the nation’s realtors—to sell homes, maintain their business practices, and define a particular version of the American dream. Tracing this work from the inside—from the industry’s own documents, many examined here for the first time—helps us see these two defining features of modern America in a new and holistic way.

Instead of the story of twentieth- and twenty-first-century America gradually reducing barriers, this account helps explain the opposite. It shows how America’s neighborhoods went from being racially mixed to intensely segregated, how racial and political divisions were systematically widened, and how new ideas of American freedom were invented to successfully counter those of World War II and the emerging civil rights movement. It spells out the power of those new ideas to continue housing segregation long after it officially ended and to transform America’s political parties, pushing the country further and further to the right. This is a story of innovation: of how the common good, community progress, the New Deal, freedom of choice, and individual rights were used to limit where Americans could live and to increasingly polarize the country.

Housing segregation, far from being a narrow issue whose impacts were as isolated as those it excluded, dramatically reshaped the country for all Americans. All-white neighborhoods were first created not in the South but in Berkeley, a mile from the University of California. Residential segregation was not the norm in American cities at the beginning of the twentieth century but a new marketing tool for early realtors to sell house lots. The realtors’ commitment to racial homogeneity drove their design of federal programs and—by financing only developments far from any minorities—the layout of every metropolitan area. The neighborhoods where most Americans live today, and who their neighbors are, are the result of that commitment.

Restricting the country’s vast free-market economy required enormous effort. To racially divide every housing market in America and patrol and enforce these boundaries, the real estate industry had to organize and police itself and enlist many of the country’s leading lawyers, economists, public officials, newspapers, universities, lenders, and courts. This racial system was so effectively organized that by 1960—long after the U.S. Supreme Court prohibited court enforcement of the racial covenants realtors had invented—African Americans remained excluded from 98 percent of new homes and 95 percent of neighborhoods.30

The realtors’ need to justify this racial system transformed America’s values. The residential system they created not only drew on existing prejudice but required and fostered it. Every white resident had to view any minority not as an individual but as a threat to his home, community, and the American dream. Inventing a scientific law that undesirable human elements depreciate property values, realtors built this axiom into vast federal programs.

When even the real estate industry’s own appraisers discredited this property-value axiom, realtors needed a new set of arguments to publicly defend this same racial system. To counter the civil rights movement’s argument that American freedom depended on treating people as individuals rather than as groups to be discriminated against, the real estate industry designed a counteridea of individual freedom as the right to a traditional community. This vision of color-blind freedom, placing the right to discriminate at the heart of American freedom, provided a road map for the rise of conservatism.

This book thus reveals, step-by-step, how the real estate industry constructed many of our most intractable divides—social, geographic, economic, and ideological. Modern American history is, in many ways, the story of these divides. Racially separate neighborhoods were not peripheral to the creation of today’s America but at its core.

THE LASTING POWER OF JUSTIFICATIONS

If this perspective seems unfamiliar, it may be because this history has not been told from the inside as a single narrative of what it took to create and perpetuate this new system. The myths realtors promoted to make this racial system seem inevitable are still widely accepted today. Most Americans, both Black and white, came to accept the realtors’ myth that American cities had always been racially divided, that segregation was normal, natural, and historical—not a twentieth-century invention to sell homes.

The realtors similarly explained residential segregation as simply a result of prejudice. But racism was just as intense at the beginning of the 1900s before residential segregation began. It took a newly organized real estate industry to invent and maintain organized segregation. If these had not been myths, realtors would not have worked so hard— would not have had to work at all—to stop minorities from moving into white neighborhoods.

In looking at segregation not as something normal but as a construct that had to be explained and defended, this history focuses on the justifications for dividing America’s neighborhoods: on how and why they were created, and their impact on where people lived and on America’s values. These justifications were not separate from this racial system but intrinsic to how it worked: how the real estate industry enlisted its own members and government itself to enforce segregation. The extraordinary effort realtors put into these justifications belies their claim that housing segregation was simply a result of racial prejudice.

The realtors’ central challenge, in fact, was how to continue segregation in the face of America’s changing values. Continuing racially divided housing markets depended, generation after generation, on transforming one American ideal after another to defend discrimination. Realtor leaders redefined progress, the Golden Rule, free markets, freedom of association, and, ultimately, individual freedom itself to keep neighborhoods segregated.

Such justifications helped realtors see themselves not as upholding white supremacy but as politically, ethically, and ideologically carrying out the American dream. With the rise of the civil rights movement, realtors urgently needed nonracial or, better still, antiracial arguments that spoke—as realtor leaders explicitly instructed their members—always about freedom and never about race. Realtors and the voters they sought to convince in states across the country wanted to be told, a dissident realtor recognized, that what we have been doing to the minority members in our communities is right—is accepted—is morally good.31

These justifications had a lasting effect. Housing segregation officially ended in 1968; realtor organizations no longer opposed fair housing. But if segregation of African Americans at each income level remains almost as intense as it was fifty years ago, this is a testament to the lasting political consequences of the realtors’ vision of freedom. Only strong government action could have overcome the economic and social forces realtors had long put in place—racially exclusive suburbs, organized prejudice, and informal discriminatory pressures. But strong governmental action is precisely what the political impact of the realtors’ arguments has long prevented. The popularity of the realtors’ appeal to individual freedom weakened not only the 1968 law itself but efforts to enforce it ever since.32

The realtors’ redefinition of American freedom has only become more important over time on issues far removed from housing or even race. The idea that freedom belongs separately to each individual—that freedom, like private property itself, depends on the right to exclude others—became part of our political vocabulary. The technique the realtors perfected, of identifying and elevating a single narrow right as American freedom itself, as an absolute without regard to the rights of others, could be tellingly employed on virtually any issue: gun control, abortion, contraception, gay marriage, or corporate campaign contributions. Our political debates today are driven by an idea of freedom created to defend all-white neighborhoods half a century ago.

How this happened, how a racial system that officially ended in the 1960s came to shape our politics today in ways that few Americans are aware of—this concern is at the heart of this book and the reason for its urgency.

OPPOSING IDEAS OF FREEDOM

This book, in fact, began as a question: Why is freedom used so regularly and insistently by conservatives to oppose civil rights? This question led in turn to others. How had freedom come to be used in this way? Had this always been the case? What did conservatives mean by American freedom that extensions of civil rights would violate?

At the heart of these questions is a paradox—one that haunts our politics and polarizes the country, but is rarely put in words. Americans from opposite ends of the political spectrum, who disagree about almost everything, agree that freedom is the country’s most important value. The natural assumption has been that those on opposing sides of our debates are talking about the same principle—that when Ronald Reagan, say, spoke of freedom, he was referring to at least the same general idea from the Declaration of Independence as Jimmy Carter.

Freedom to Discriminate shows that this assumption is wrong, that the differences between modern conservative and liberal views of freedom are neither incidental nor matters of emphasis. American politics over the last fifty years has been driven by two mutually incompatible visions of freedom.

This explains why, on issue after issue—immigration, voting rights, gender rights, policing, discrimination—what liberals see as essential freedoms, natural rights that any government should guarantee, seem to conservatives like deliberate attacks on freedom itself. Each side sees the other as threatening to destroy American freedom. These differences are not willful or perverse. They reflect that, to oppose Martin Luther King and the civil rights movement, the nation’s realtors created a new definition of American freedom that made the right to discriminate essential.

Why did the realtors’ redefinition of freedom offer a model for American conservatism as a whole—on issues far beyond neighborhoods or race? What differentiated their arguments from those of Southern segregationists, National Review intellectuals, and conservative politicians? The realtors’ internal documents show how they constructed their vision and thus the features that would make it successful far beyond their own fight against fair housing.

A central answer—and a key theme of this history—was that the realtors invoked individual freedom to maintain community conformity. Realtors used libertarianism to justify its seeming opposite, conformity to locally dominant beliefs. Here was a way to unite the two separate and competing strands of conservatism, to link libertarians and social conservatives in the defense of American freedom.

By defining as freedom what government seemed to be taking away from ordinary Americans, the realtors helped create a polarizing, transcendent view of what was at stake in American politics. This would provide a compelling reason, far beyond economics, for millions of union members, Catholics, and white ethnic Americans who had long been part of FDR’s coalition to see, in issue after issue, why they should define themselves as conservatives.

Timeliest of all, the realtors’ redefinition of American freedom offered a unifying ideology for something new in twentieth-century America: a national conservative political party. Such a party had first been proposed by Southern Democrats in the late 1940s as a way to protect Jim Crow. White Southerners would abandon the national Democratic party in return for a pledge from probusiness Northern Republicans to protect local racial customs.33 Republicans in turn would become a national majority. Goldwater’s success in the South made such a party possible. But a party devoted to limiting federal regulation of business and civil rights needed a publicly acceptable ideology that could work in both the North and the South.

The realtors’ vision of color-blind freedom, which had proven so successful in California, could unite Southerners, working-class Northern Democrats, and conservative and moderate Republicans in a new national majority party—one very different from the party whose congressmen had voted 80 percent in favor of the Civil Rights Act. Over time, the internal dynamics of such a party pushed it further and further toward those who most ardently embraced this vision as the only meaning of American freedom. The hyperpolarization of American politics is a natural result.

Yet the power, importance, and origin of these two opposite meanings of freedom are often unrecognized—as if both were the same fundamental value rooted in the country’s history. Partly this is by design. Realtors worked hard to portray their vision of freedom as not new at all. Wrapping their proposition in the language of the Bill of Rights, realtors explained that the owner’s right to discriminate had only been left out of the original Bill of Rights and Constitution because it underlay those documents; it was what the American Revolution had been fought for. This right to discriminate was therefore fundamental and absolute; no government could limit it. That the realtors’ vision of freedom has become so much a part of our political landscape is a measure of its success.

The use of the same word freedom has made it hard to recognize the deep-seated and intentional differences between these two visions. One vision has been based on the fundamental idea that freedom for all Americans is inseparable, that freedom for others is necessary to one’s own. To be a free society, a fair housing advocate argued, we cannot justify denial of this same right, which we enjoy, to any person by reason of his race or property.34 The other view rejected this basic premise and, in line with the realtors, saw freedom as a zero sum, an individual possession like private property itself. Granting rights to others would only diminish one’s own.

Each side has, naturally, seen its vision of freedom as freedom itself. Realtors and conservatives argued that they were truly committed to American freedom, while their opponents sacrificed freedom for equality.35 But this conservative motto assumed that freedom meant the same thing to both sides. The difference in modern politics, as on Proposition 14, is between those who believe in the inseparability of all Americans’ ability to exercise freedom versus those who do not.

Conversely, civil rights advocates and liberals have viewed realtors and modern conservatives as rejecting the obvious and long-standing meaning of American freedom from the Declaration of Independence. George Lakoff, a leading liberal expert on framing political ideas, attacked conservatives for having stolen the original, progressive meaning of freedom while denying that they have done so. What I am calling progressive freedom is simply freedom in the American tradition . . . the ideal of freedom which has been cherished, defended and extended over more than two centuries. What contemporary conservatives call freedom . . . is a radical departure . . . outside the mainstream of American history and American life today.36 For Lakoff, the conservative view of freedom was illegitimate. In the struggle over Proposition 14—and today—civil rights advocates and liberals had a similarly hard time responding to the realtors’ vision of freedom because it did not seem like freedom at all. They therefore dramatically underestimated the power of the realtors’ argument and why it would prove so influential.37

That these diametrically opposite views presumed a singular correct version of American freedom reflected what was at stake: who would successfully claim the meaning of this central word. Freedom was the high ground, as Eric Foner has long noted,38 the key asset to be seized.

Recognizing how opposite these visions are, and how the conservative vision was precisely designed to undermine that of the civil rights movement, can not only illuminate the past but also shape the future. It can provide us a way to change our political debates, by recognizing that the choices we face reflect two opposite meanings of American freedom—inclusive freedom, designed to equalize and balance rights, and exclusive freedom, based on the right to discriminate.

AN UNCLAIMED LEGACY

Yet if the realtors had such a significant impact on the conservative idea of freedom and ultimately the country’s political landscape, why is this so rarely mentioned or studied? One reason is that those on both sides of the battle over fair housing had little reason to talk about the realtors’ idea of freedom or its impacts. After they lost their battle over fair housing in 1968, realtors quickly sought to distance themselves from their past defense of racial segregation. Liberals and civil rights advocates, too, had little reason to want to talk about Proposition 14. They attributed this painful setback in the triumphalist story of 1960s civil rights gains to simple racial bias that might diminish over time, not to the positive appeal of an alternative vision of freedom. In the histories of civil rights struggles, the realtors’ arguments, and particularly their idea of freedom, have rarely been considered important in themselves.

Nor has the realtors’ ideological vision been featured in histories of modern conservatism. Such histories have largely taken a top-down perspective, focusing on conservative intellectuals and their relationships to the candidacies of Goldwater, Nixon, and Reagan. Later historians, taking a bottom-up approach, have studied Southern suburban segregationists and their role in the Southernization of the Republican Party39 and the grassroots activism of suburban homeowners in California stimulated by Proposition 14,40 without focusing on the realtors’ redefinition of freedom itself.

To the extent that the realtors’ vision of freedom has been considered, it has largely been discounted on two grounds: motivation and backlash. Proposition 14 opponents and most historians since have largely dismissed the realtors’ idea of freedom as only a cover for racism, as unimportant in itself.41 But while racial concerns and fears of change and loss drove the war against fair housing, opponents who underestimated the impact of realtors translating those concerns into a vision of freedom did so at their peril. They failed to recognize how compelling this vision was to vast numbers of voters, and its impact on American politics.

It has been equally tempting to centrist political analysts who deeply influenced Bill Clinton in the 1990s to see the vote on Proposition 14 as a backlash to excessive liberal and minority demands.42 The idea of backlash, however, ignores the long history of realtor resistance to racial integration, a history that goes back to the founding of the realtor movement in the early 1900s. As many historians have found, resistance by realtors in the 1960s was not to sudden extreme demands but to any potential change whatsoever.43

Moreover, the idea of backlash itself—with Proposition 14 often cited, along with George Wallace’s 1964 Northern campaign, as the defining early example—implies a natural, automatically occurring, popular reaction rather than one contingent on active agency. The Proposition 14 campaign, however, reflected realtors’ organized and deliberate efforts to arouse fears and emotions and to frame these in terms of loss of freedom. Without an initiative campaign, the quiet work of the state commission investigating complaints—eighty cases in its first eighteen months, including only two against homeowners—might well have continued without becoming the leading issue in California politics. In the two states, Colorado and Massachusetts, where realtor organizations cooperated with rather than led campaigns against fair housing, there was almost no controversy. If fair housing became by far the most divisive issue in California in 1964, it was because the realtors chose to make it so.

Indeed, throughout the last year of his life, when Martin Luther King repeatedly criticized the growing popularity of this idea of white backlash, he cited Proposition 14 as his prime example. This so-called ‘white backlash’ was not something that just came into being because of shouts of Black Power, or because Negroes engaged in riots in Watts. . . . The fact is that the state of California voted a Fair Housing bill out of existence before anybody shouted Black Power, or before anybody rioted in Watts.44 The chronology demonstrated the point King wanted to make.

Backlashing, as King called it, to emphasize its active, organized nature, was simply a new name for an old phenomenon:

Ever since the birth of our nation, white America . . . has been torn between . . . a self in which she proudly professed the great principles of democracy and a self in which she sadly practiced the antithesis of democracy. . . . This tragic duality has . . . [caused] America to take a step backward simultaneously with every step forward on the question of racial justice. . . . The step backward has a new name today. It is called the white backlash. But the white backlash is nothing new. It is the surfacing of old prejudices, hostilities and ambivalences that have always been there.45

In pushing for fair housing, civil rights advocates did not create such prejudice and fear, but rather exposed them.46 White opposition to fair housing was a reason not to stop such efforts but to continue them.

But in framing the realtors’ campaign in terms of past resistance to change, King sought to discount what made Proposition 14’s vision of freedom new and influential. Like many observers, he looked at the realtors’ argument through the lens of the past. To talk eloquently against open housing and . . . in the same breath . . . contend that they are not racist,47 King argued, simply masked the same long-standing premises that came into being to rationalize slavery.48 What made the realtors’ campaign new, however, was its claim to freedom. Their crusade for freedom recast the discussion King wanted Americans to have.

Yet despite the success of the realtors’ vision of American freedom, its history has rarely been studied. The most incisive scholarly analyses have focused on the immediate problems the realtors’ arguments posed for fair housing advocates, rather than their long-term impacts on American politics.49 Indeed, the very success of the realtors’ idea suggested that there was nothing to study, that this idea of freedom simply existed. The realtors had done everything possible to foster that impression.

As a result, the most fundamental divisions of our country—the idea of Black neighborhoods and white neighborhoods, that neighborhoods belong to a race, our polarized ideas of freedom—are taken for granted as if they were natural features of the country, rather than the result of enormous, deliberate efforts.

Indeed, as I wrote this book, what stood out from more than forty years of serving as a senior advisor on affordable housing for federal agencies, states, and local governments—of designing homeownership programs with realtors in South Central Los Angeles; advising on federal mortgage insurance programs and the assets of failed savings and loans; and helping design what became the Treasury’s program financing 110,000 homes for first-time buyers after the 2009 financial crisis— is how little of the history of residential segregation and its impacts is known not only by the general public but also by the leaders of the public agencies charged with improving our cities and housing.

Because this legacy is unclaimed and the impact of the realtors’ vision of freedom largely overlooked, this history can let us look at our current divides in a new light. For those concerned with housing segregation, it shows the central role and responsibility of the real estate industry— and how the ideology realtors developed to defend their role remains, so many decades later, the great obstacle to ending it. For those who have supported this conservative vision of American freedom, this book shows how and why it was created. For those disturbed by this vision, this history shows how it was constructed and the importance of offering a clear alternative, of not leaving the conservative vision unopposed.

Finally, this history shows that redefining the country’s highest purpose as the right to live in a conforming community challenges the very idea of a common, unifying vision of American freedom—Lincoln’s great purpose in the Gettysburg Address. This redefinition makes those who disagree not compatriots but enemies of freedom, only fellow conservatives freedom-loving Americans,50 and the protection of such absolute rights more important than democracy. By its terms, this idea of individual freedom, designed to justify divided neighborhoods, drives Americans further and further apart.

REALTORS AND REALTOR ORGANIZATIONS

Realtors were, and are, members of a private business trade organization, one of the oldest, largest, and most successful in the country. This organization consisted of local real estate boards, such as the Los Angeles Realty Board (LARB), and of statewide associations, such as the California Real Estate Association (CREA), joined together in the National Association of Real Estate Boards (NAREB). These names were changed in the 1970s because of the events described in this history. They are currently the Beverly Hills Greater Los Angeles Association of Realtors, the California Association of Realtors, and the National Association of Realtors. Officers at each level have always been elected annually.

The term Realtor was first used and trademarked in the late 1910s. For simplicity, members of organized real estate boards prior to that date are referred to as realtors or early realtors; organizations are referred to by the names they used from the 1910s through 1970. Although realtors were only a minority of all real estate brokers, they controlled 80 to 90 percent of all sales.

Although boards and associations had their own policies, all were subject to NAREB’s Code of Ethics and standards of practice. Positions were coordinated through the work of joint committees. Positions and views in this book described as those of realtors were those consistent across these bodies, and so referred to by spokesmen at the time. Individual members sometimes dissented quietly and, more rarely, openly, often with severe consequences for their ability to earn a living.51

That much of this history focuses on the relationship between California and national realtors reflects the state’s outsize role in NAREB’s membership and NAREB’s devoting its own resources to the battle in California, to making it Gettysburg. Similarly, this history often emphasizes discrimination in homeownership. Discrimination in private rental housing was just as severe; but while realtors played major roles in rental property management and ownership, in their arguments against fair housing they usually focused on homeowners and homeowner rights, for political and ideological reasons.

All realtor organizations today stress how different they are from their predecessors in dealing with fair housing. Fair Housing for All is on the letterhead of the California Association of Realtors. Committed to fair housing, the letterhead reads. We acknowledge the past as we fight for a more equitable future.52

This book plumbs the power of that past. It is a history of the concerted efforts of realtor organizations from 1903 to 1968 to organize and justify residential segregation, and the impacts of their decades of actions then on the divisions we face as Americans today.

Part One.

Limiting Individual Freedom for the Common Good: Early 1900s–Early 1920s

To grasp why in 1961 the realtors’ national president declared forced housing the greatest challenge facing America1—and why for realtors this was not hyperbole but simple truth—requires understanding the physical, economic, and racial world realtors had helped create. America’s realtors in the 1960s were agents not only of individual clients but of the system of real estate their predecessors established long before.

The beliefs that drove the realtor movement were set at the very beginning. These deep-seated assumptions—about organizing real estate, rooting out fraud, and creating segregation, all in the name of the public good—remained at the heart of all their views, and gave their vision of freedom in the 1960s its distinctiveness and effectiveness. Realtors, over time, changed the language they used to defend these deep values, but the purpose of their arguments remained the same.

Later realtors could talk about, and ardently believe in, freedom in ways that directly contradicted their prior actions—could sanctify owner rights after decades of using racial covenants to limit them—because freedom had never been a core value of realtors to begin with.

The realtor movement, from the beginning, sought to limit personal liberty in real estate for the common good. The idea that every man’s house is his castle is too deep-rooted in our institutions, it was lamented in the National Real Estate Journal in 1910. [W]e have carried this abhorrence of interference with personal liberty to an unwise extreme.2 Precisely because freedom had not been something realtors had spoken about or defended,