them. He frequently voted to improve and expand federal entitlement programs, the kind of “social legislation” he said upon Lyndon Johnson’s death would be the late president’s lasting legacy. This included a 1973 law that approved cost-of-living adjustments for Social Security benefits.57
When stagflation hit, Biden initially opted for the vigorous approach liberals had once taken to fight the Depression. His 1974 anti-inflation plan involved bailing out the construction sector, taxing excess profits of industry, and a huge standby public jobs program—it would not be the last time that decade he’d call on the government to put jobless Americans directly to work. That same year, he introduced a tax package aimed squarely at taxing the rich and the fossil fuel industry. Balancing the budget, he said, would have a minimal effect on inflation while potentially worsening the economy. “Biden is simply not very popular with free marketers and the oil interests quietly hate him,” wrote one newspaper.58
Yet a fiscal scold always lurked somewhere within Biden, coming closer to the fore as the recession worsened. By 1975, he was warning that deficit spending would run the economy further into the ground, and he reluctantly backed the first-ever resolution to impose a ceiling on federal spending.59 Within a few years, this reluctance would evaporate.
The country’s governing institutions were still wrestling with this recession when the furor over busing exploded in Delaware. In truth, the state’s busing “crisis” was really one part of a larger white, suburban rebellion against racial integration taking place around the country. And this itself was one piece in a larger story: the more-than-century-long struggle by the descendants of slaves to claim the full rights of American citizenship they were owed. That struggle had culminated in a nationwide mass protest movement in the middle of the twentieth century that extracted major concessions from the country’s corridors of power, including the 1954 Brown v. Board of Education Supreme Court decision that ordered the desegregation of public schools.
The Brown decision had, in theory, smashed the racist status quo, striking down the “separate but equal” doctrine that had made American apartheid legal and declaring it not only a sham in practice but a contradiction in terms. Ordered to desegregate “with all deliberate speed,” governments came up with a variety of tools to end racial separatism. Busing—the transportation of black and, sometimes, white kids to schools outside their neighborhoods—was one of these.
Once implemented, busing also proved one of the most contentious. This was especially so in the North, where racist attitudes were less overt but segregation was actually worse, owing to the decades of racist policies that had kept African Americans out of the suburbs. As historian Matthew Delmont has explained, it wasn’t so much the issue of shipping their kids off in school buses that infuriated Northern suburbanites. Twenty million kids took the bus to school by 1970, sometimes to farther-off neighborhoods for the express purpose of maintaining segregation. “With ‘busing,’ northerners found a palatable way to oppose desegregation without appealing to the explicitly racist sentiments they preferred to associate with southerners,” Delmont wrote.60
Wilmington was no different. While busing had been successful in a number of cities, by the time it came to Delaware, resistance was intensifying, and Biden—who genuinely cared about civil rights but perhaps cared more about being reelected—found himself in a bind.
Biden had deftly avoided the issue during his 1972 campaign while trying to placate busing foes. Announcing his run, he termed busing “a phony issue which allows the white liberals to sit in suburbia, confident that they are not going to have to live next to a black,” something that made “great discussions at cocktail parties but do[es] not change the direction of this country.”61
He threaded a perilous needle. On the one hand, he opposed redrawing school district lines for the sake of racial balance (a concept, he said, which “in and of itself means nothing”), maintained that “nobody supports” busing for that purpose, and wrongly insisted, as he would for years after, that Wilmington’s was a question of de facto, not de jure, segregation—meaning segregation that supposedly developed “naturally,” not as the result of explicit laws and policies. At the same time, he balked at voting to limit the Supreme Court’s power to deem what was and wasn’t de jure, and he refused to back a constitutional amendment banning busing. Such careful waffling got Biden through the election.62
Consequently, for his first two years in the Senate, Biden cast mostly pro-busing votes masked by anti-busing rhetoric. Two days before the twentieth anniversary of the Brown decision, he put his weight behind the single-vote defeat of the Gurney amendment, a measure that, by limiting busing to a student’s second-closest school, would have barred virtually all busing for the purpose of desegregation.63
Then the outrage started.
Incensed by this vote, local anti-busing groups began confronting Biden about the issue—in one instance for two hours as a hostile audience of hundreds interrupted and heckled him without pause. Nothing worked in this environment: not Biden’s insistence that he really did oppose busing, not his usual reminder that his liberal friends weren’t happy with him either, not even partially reversing course by repeatedly promising to back a constitutional amendment limiting busing.64
This anti-busing activism had been inflamed by a 1974 court order forcing Wilmington to desegregate its schools. In that year’s Milliken v. Bradley decision, a divided Supreme Court had ruled that suburbs could only be forced to participate in such actions if it could be proved that “racially discriminatory acts of the state or local school districts” had been “a substantial cause” of segregation, effectively insulating Northern cities from having to do anything about the problem.
Biden insisted that only de jure segregation needed remedying, but proving intentional racism in court was a tall order, as today’s activists and lawyers continue to find. Even proof didn’t necessarily matter: in the Milliken case, one mayor had placed his fondness for segregation on the record in print, and the Supreme Court still ruled there was no evidence of intentional racism. And contrary to Biden’s protestations that segregation in Wilmington was simply a “long-standing pattern of racial isolation,” not de jure segregation, it was one of the few cities that met the court’s stringent post-Milliken criteria.65
Nevertheless, for the next three years, Biden cast only a single pro-busing vote and nineteen against. He had, as the Wilmington Morning News put it, become a “born-again convert to anti-busing,” one who, like many such converts, “has embraced his new faith with an almost messianic zeal.”66
Ending his fence-sitting by August 1975, he compared busing to the quagmire in Vietnam and preemptively signed on to the anti-busing bills put forward by his Republican counterpart from Delaware, William Roth, with whom he teamed up.67 He was against segregated schools, Biden said, but didn’t support integrated schools as a matter of course either, because there was a “conceptual difference between desegregation and integration.” He elaborated:
If there were a gas station which served 50 people on a given day and 25 of them were white and 25 of them were black, you don’t shut down the gas station because it can’t prove that exactly half of the people who used the gas station toilet were from each race. What you do is make sure there is no sign on that gas station toilet which says “No Negroes.”68
Biden’s analogy made no sense; no one was talking about shutting down schools, and there was ample data proving that Wilmington schools were heavily racially imbalanced. But of course, that wasn’t the point. Biden often twisted himself up in such knots to justify what he was now doing.
Biden still claimed to oppose discrimination. “You shouldn’t hate black kids,” he said about
