Edward Brooke won Massachusetts as a Republican and changed public housing

Try this as a trivia question. Who was the first African American elected to the United States Senate by a vote of the people?

If you answered with a Republican from Massachusetts, you win a prize, and you are in a small minority. The answer is Edward William Brooke III, who took the oath in January 1967. The word "popular" in that sentence is doing real work, so let me explain it right away. Two Black men sat in the Senate during Reconstruction, Hiram Revels and Blanche Bruce of Mississippi, but in that era senators were chosen by state legislatures, not by voters. It would take until 1966 for a Black candidate to win a Senate seat in a statewide election. And he did it in Massachusetts, in a state whose voters were overwhelmingly white, as a Republican, in the age of the Kennedys.

That alone would earn him a place in the story. But his record in the Senate is where it gets interesting for anyone who cares about housing, which is to say anyone who has ever signed a lease or a mortgage.

Before the Senate

Brooke was born in Washington, D.C., in 1919 and went to Howard University. He served in the Army in the Second World War, including time in Italy, and received the Bronze Star. After the war he went to law school at Boston University and settled in Massachusetts.

He ran for office a few times before he won. Then in 1962 Massachusetts voters elected him state attorney general, the first African American elected to that office in any state. It was the same year a Kennedy won the state's Senate seat. Think about what that means: Brooke won statewide, in an election where the top of the Democratic ticket was a name that every Bay State household knew, and he won as a Republican. He was re-elected in 1964 even as Lyndon Johnson carried the state by a huge margin and the Goldwater ticket collapsed nationally. A Republican who can win in that environment is doing something right. Voters seemed to trust him on the job.

As attorney general he went after corruption and organized crime, and he built a reputation for competence over theatrics. That reputation carried him to the Senate.

1966

In 1966 he ran for the Senate seat held by Leverett Saltonstall, a Republican who was retiring. He won the Republican nomination, then defeated former Governor Endicott Peabody, a Democrat, in November. He was sworn in in January 1967. And he served two terms, until January 1979.

You should know where he stood in the party. Brooke was a moderate in the New England tradition, and some conservatives liked him less than others did. He supported civil-rights legislation, he opposed some of the party's conservative nominees, and he was an early critic of certain Nixon administration decisions. He called on Nixon to resign during Watergate, one of the first Republican senators to do so. You can argue about where a Republican of that sort fits in the movement. What you cannot do is argue he didn't earn his votes.

The Fair Housing Act of 1968

The first big test came in 1968. The Civil Rights Act of 1964 had banned discrimination in public accommodations and employment, and the Voting Rights Act of 1965 had protected the ballot. But housing was a gap. In many places a Black family could earn the money to buy a house and still be refused the keys. Real-estate practices, neighborhood agreements and lenders' decisions steered people by race.

In the Senate, Brooke and Democrat Walter Mondale of Minnesota were the leading sponsors of a fair-housing amendment. It ran into a filibuster. Cloture, ending the debate, needs a supermajority, and the votes were not there until Republican leader Everett Dirksen of Illinois was persuaded to support a compromise. Dirksen's role in that period is covered in Everett Dirksen and the Republican votes that broke the 1964 filibuster and The Civil Rights Act of 1964 and the Republican Votes That Broke the Filibuster. After the assassination of Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. on April 4, 1968, the House moved quickly, and President Johnson signed the Fair Housing Act, Title VIII of the Civil Rights Act of 1968, on April 11, 1968.

Here is why a conservative should care about that law. The Fair Housing Act is, at bottom, a property-rights statute. It says that if you have the money and the credit, nobody can refuse to sell or rent you a home because of your race. That is the freedom to contract, and the right to own, extended to people who had been denied them. Brooke saw it exactly that way, I think: as the full application of the principles of the Constitution, not a departure from them.

The Brooke Amendment

Now to the second thing, the one that connects directly to the housing worries in your own household budget.

Public housing in the United States was built on a model in which tenants paid rent and the local authority collected it to cover operating costs. As the decades passed, two things happened. Costs rose. And the tenants, many of them elderly or poor, had incomes that did not keep up. Rents were climbing as a share of income, and some families were paying a huge fraction of their money just to keep a roof.

Brooke's answer, enacted in the Housing and Urban Development Act of 1969, is known as the Brooke Amendment. It capped the rent a public-housing tenant could be charged at 25 percent of the family's income. Run the numbers on a hypothetical household. Suppose a family has an adjusted income of $4,000 a year. Twenty-five percent of $4,000 is $1,000 a year, or about $83 a month. Whatever the building costs to run, the tenant pays no more than that. If the family's income falls to $3,000, the cap falls to $750 a year. The rent follows the income.

I should say plainly what the amendment did not do. It did not make the building cost less to operate. Somebody had to cover the gap between what tenants could pay and what the building cost. That somebody turned out to be the federal government, which began paying operating subsidies to local housing authorities. So the Brooke Amendment shifted the burden from the tenant to the taxpayer. Whether that was wise has been argued for half a century.

Later, Congress raised the share, and in the early 1980s, under the Reagan administration, the standard for tenant rent rose to 30 percent of income. The basic idea, that assisted rent is set as a share of income, survived and spread through housing assistance generally.

The conservative argument, fairly stated

Here is the strongest case against Brooke's amendment, stated as its critics would state it.

One, when tenants pay a fixed share of income, they have little reason to care about the building. If your rent does not change when the roof leaks, you have no stake in the roof.

Two, a cap tied to income can discourage work. If every extra dollar you earn raises your rent by 25 cents, that is a hidden tax on earning, stacked on top of the other taxes you pay.

Three, if the cap does not cover operating costs, buildings deteriorate. Many large public-housing projects fell into disrepair in the following decades, and some were torn down.

Four, a better answer might have been to let tenants own or manage their housing, the idea that Jack Kemp later championed; see Jack Kemp argued that growth could win the war on poverty.

Those are serious objections, and the history gives them some support. Public-housing high-rises had a bad record in many cities. A fair-minded person has to say so.

And here is the answer. The Brooke Amendment was written for a problem that was real in 1969: families being charged rents they could not pay. It did not cause the failures of public-housing design and management that came later, and abolishing the cap would not by itself have fixed them. The deeper problem, as any housing economist will tell you, is supply. Where building is restricted, rents rise and subsidies chase a short list of units. zoning may be the biggest price control you never got to vote on describes that mechanism, and if you want to see the cost of rent-setting rules in general, From Diocletian to Nixon, Every Price Control Ends the Same Way is a useful companion. Brooke's amendment helped tenants in the short term. A free-market answer to housing costs would also unlock construction. The two are not enemies.

The hidden tax in an income-based rent

The second objection above deserves a worked example, because it is the part of the design that economists and families notice most. Take a hypothetical tenant whose adjusted income is $20,000 a year. At a 25 percent rule, rent is $20,000 times 0.25, which is $5,000 a year. Now she takes extra hours and earns $2,000 more, bringing her to $22,000. Rent becomes $22,000 times 0.25, which is $5,500. The extra $2,000 of work cost her $500 more in rent, a 25 percent bite, before the payroll tax and the income tax take their share. If the rule were 30 percent, the bite on that same $2,000 would be $600.

That does not mean the rule is wrong. It means that when you design assistance that phases out as income rises, you create a steep slope in the place where a worker is trying to climb. Good policy designers know this, and the better proposals try to flatten the slope with longer phase-outs, savings accounts and ownership options. A conservative who ignores the hidden tax is not thinking, and a liberal who denies it exists is not thinking either. It is the kind of fact you can establish with a calculator and a lease.

A New England Republican tradition

Brooke belongs to a regional tradition that is easy to forget. For much of the twentieth century New England sent to Washington a group of Republicans who were frugal, skeptical of big government in the economic sphere and unafraid of civil rights. Margaret Chase Smith of Maine, whom you can meet in Margaret Chase Smith took on Joe McCarthy from inside her own party in 1950, was one of them. Brooke was another. Their voters did not demand ideological purity. They wanted honesty and competence, and they punished flash.

Is that a model for the whole party? Not exactly. A Republican in Texas or Tennessee runs in a different electorate than a Republican in Massachusetts, and the party's platform should reflect the broad coalition. But the example matters for one reason. A national party needs members who can win where the party is weak, and those members will not always agree with the base on every question. A party that treats them as heretics rather than assets will stay small.

The sensible approach is to measure them by the principles that matter most. Did he keep faith with the Constitution? Did he respect the taxpayers' money? Did he defend the individual's right to earn, own and speak? On the first and the third of those, Brooke's record is strong. On the second, he made some choices that conservatives questioned, as senators of every faction do.

Beyond housing

Brooke was involved in other national debates. In 1967 President Johnson appointed him to the National Advisory Commission on Civil Disorders, the Kerner Commission, which examined the riots of that period. As the only Black member of the Senate, he was in a position few other senators occupied. He also worked on consumer and health issues and served on key committees, and he held his seat until he lost in 1978 to Democrat Paul Tsongas.

After the Senate he stayed engaged in public life. He received the Presidential Medal of Freedom from President George W. Bush in 2004 and the Congressional Gold Medal in 2009. He died on January 3, 2015.

What he teaches

First, the party of Lincoln did not stop being the party of equal rights in 1965. Brooke and Dirksen were Republicans, and a very large share of Republicans in Congress supported the major civil-rights bills of that decade. The Parties Switched Story Meets the Record and What the Evidence Shows looks at the myth that all that changed overnight. Second, Republicans can win in blue states if they present competence and character. Third, help for the poor can be designed in conservative ways, with attention to incentives and local control, but it has to be designed.

An honest conservative will also say that Brooke's lesson cuts two ways. His rent cap shows that a well-intended rule can have costs that appear later, and his fair-housing work shows that equal rights in property are worth fighting for. Both are true. The task of the next generation is to keep the second and fix the first.

To read more about the Black Republicans who came before him, see A timeline of the Black Republicans who sat in Congress after the Civil War.

The bottom line

• Edward Brooke was the first Black senator elected by popular vote, and he won as a Republican in Massachusetts.
• The Fair Housing Act of 1968 protects the freedom to buy or rent a home regardless of race. That is a property-rights principle, and it belongs on the conservative side of the ledger.
• The Brooke Amendment limited public-housing rent to a share of income, which helped tenants and shifted costs to taxpayers.
• If housing costs worry you, look at your local zoning rules; building more homes helps every household, including those in subsidized units.
• Read the Fair Housing Act on Congress.gov and your city's public-housing authority report, and decide for yourself what worked.