THE COWBOY CHALLENGE

...Looked at in its broadest terms, the modern Establishment in America enjoyed a virtually undiminished influence from the time of its consolidation after tht Civil War right down to the beginning of World War II, roughly the whole seventy-year period from 1870 to 1940...

...The Northeast, as used here, encompasses the entire quadrant east of the Mississippi and north of the Mason-Dix-on line (and its rough extension westward), taking in the fourteen states of New England and the Great Lakes: Maine, New Hampshire, Vermont, Massachusetts, Rhode Island, Connecticut, New York, New Jersey, Pennsylvania, Ohio, Michigan, Indiana, Wisconsin, and Illinois...

...The President nods, seems to grow morose, and then bursts out with the idea that has been troubling him all along: "On and on and on...

...is the only thing they have to squeal-" but Nixon, warming to his subject now, won't be interrupted...

...in the shift of major-league sports franchises out of the Northeast to the South and West, and the creation of six new professional leagues by entrepreneurs of that area...

...It also encompasses almost precisely the area unique in this country for its economic dependence upon slave and subservient labor (black, brown, or red), not only the famous plantations of the South and their successors, but the ranches of Texas and the Southwest, and the fruit farms of California and Florida...

...It was this nexus that influenced the selection of Presidential candidates (between 1869 and 194S only two Presidents were born outside of the Northeast), that controlled the houses of Congress, that determined American foreign policy, that set the economic priorities and directions, that more or less created the cultural and moral standards, that determined who were to be the powerful and the powerless...

...This region, too, enjoys a certain cohesion, of climate, geography, culture, settlement, and history, but above all of economics and demography: this is the traditional manufacturing belt of America, the area that since the middle of the nineteenth century has been characterized by a band of heavy industry virtually unbroken from Chicago to Boston...

...The Establishment is dying, and so they've got to show that despite the successes we have had in foreign policy and in the election, they've got to show that it is just wrong, just because of this...

...There are some to be sure, who would like to divide this quadrant in half, creating some sort of "Midwest" that begins around the Pennsylvania-Ohio border-there is, alas, no evidence whatsoever that there are real distinctions between the two regions...

...They are having a hard time now...

...Here is the zone in which the average annual temperature is above 60 degrees, the average maximum temperature is 74 degrees...

...Slowly there grew up a rival nexus, based in the Southern and Western parts of the country that stand in geographical -and to a large degree cultural, economic, and political -opposition to the Northeast, specifically in the Southern Rim, the broad band of America that stretches from Southern California through the Southwest and Texas, into the Deep South and down to Florida...

...What he was groping toward, what those labels help to delineate, is the development of a cowboy power which has risen to rival the established power, the creation of a new cowboy counterforce to contend with the old yankee hegemony-in short, the cowboy challenge...

...They've just got to have something to squeal about it...

...The region that stands in opposition to this Southern Rim should be accorded some definition as well...

...Over the last thirty years, this rival nexus, moving on to the national stage and mounting a head-on challenge to the traditional Establishment, has quite simply shifted the balance of power in America away from the Northeast and toward the Southern Rim...

...Then just to make sure Dean appreciates the full dimensions of who this enemy is, Nixon enlarges: "There is a lot of Watergate around in this town, not so much our opponents, even the media, but the basic thing is the Establishment...

...history: the first with the consolidation of federal control at the turn of the eighteenth century, the second with the introducion of Jacksonian democracy in the early nineteenth century, the third with the expansion of Northern industrialism after the Civil War, and the fourth with the establishment of Rooseveltian welfarism in the 1930s...

...Slowly these words began to have a kind of currency, in financial circles at any rate, and then during the 1960s they came to be used by the New Left-particularly by the theoretician Carl Oglesby-in its attempt to understand and describe the workings of the "power structure" of America...

...But there is more than climatic unity to this area...

...Nixon sees himself as standing apart from all of this, obviously a newcomer, an outsider, a challenger, representative of a newer breed of people who, no matter how many deals they make with this Establishment, no matter how many times they rub shoulders with it, will never be a part of that world, for they come from a new place and they hold different values and they serve variant causes...

...This fact is of historic proportions...

...On Capitol Hill, L. Patrick Gray, Nixon's nominee to be head of the Federal Bureau of Investigation, is continuing his testimony to the Senate Judiciary Committee, before whom he has already disclosed damaging secrets that point suspicions directly to the White House...

...The textile firms of New York have picked up and headed for the South, the coal mines of Appalachia have been boarded up one by one, the dairy farms of New England have been deserted and left to lie fallow...

...Yankee," the invective which goes back to the days of the Civil War to describe Northerners in general, was naturally the word with which the new* comers responded, at least back home in the boardrooms and bars...

...In the area below this line are to be found all of the tropical and semitropical regions of the United States: the Florida beaches, the Deep South savannas, the Louisiana lowlands, the Texas and Oklahoma plains, the Southwestern deserts, the palmy California coast...

...the boundary line which runs along the northern hedges of North Carolina, Tennessee, Arkansas, Oklahoma, New Mexico, and Arizona, or, generally, the 37th parallel...

...On the eastern end, for example, it excludes the state of Virginia, despite the fact that it was a part, an important part, of the Confederacy and that in its northern half it has experienced much of the same rapid growth that the true Rim areas have...

...new opportunities . . . simplicity . . . primitive existence . . . the meeting point between savagery and civilization...

...The region includes all of the states of the Southern Confederacy (except Virginia), plus the two territories with greatest Confederate sympathy (Oklahoma and New Mexico), and that implies a cultural heritage that, of course, goes far beyond the simply military...

...in the development of serious cultural centers in such places as Los Angeles, Houston, Atlanta, and Miami, each with enterprises to rival those of New York's and to meet or surpass those of most of the rest of the Northeast...

...Dean, ever the second banana begins to chime in, "It kirkpatrick sale has been a writer and editor for more than 15 years, in this country and abroad...

...The accompanying article is from his new book, Power Shift (Random House...

...Similarly, the southern tip of Nevada is included in the territory cut by the 37th parallel, again an area that just happens to be of a piece with its southern rather than its northern neighbors: it is related by geography through the Colorado River system to Arizona and Southern California, by its mid-century patterns of growth to the spectacular boom cities like Phoenix and Los Angeles, and by its economy and culture-especially Las Vegas-to the rich world of Southern California, where most of its players come from...

...For Nixon, the Establishment is a distant and a foreign world, the world of New York and Boston and Newport and Grosse Pointe and Winnetka, the world of great wealth, high culture, nurtured traditions, industrial power, and political aristocracies, the world of "the soft heads" and "the media," the "liberal elite" and the "impudent snobs"-"the enemy...

...There have been only four major power shifts in U.S...

...Cowboy" was the epithet used by the Wall Street people who first ran up against some of the newly powerful Texas entrepreneurs, broad-rimmed hats and tooled-leather boots and all, when they started throwing their weight around in Eastern financial circles in the late 1950s and early 1960s -during the fierce battle, for example, between the Texas millionaires Clint Murchison and Sid Richardson and Pennsylvania's patrician Allen Kirby for control of the Allegheny Corporation and the New York Central Railroad in 1961...

...They are trying to use this as the whole thing...

...It is surely too soon to say from all of this, as Nixon tells it to Dean, that "the Establishment is dying," but just as surely that hyperbole is pointing toward a truth...

...On the western end, the Rim demarcation includes the mid-California region from the Bay Area on the south-despite the fact that San Francisco was an old-line center of wealth, with pretensions to "old aristocracy" and the like, and though much ink has been expended trying to make a dividing line between Los Angeles and the Bay Area...

...The idea of a "Southern Rim" in American economic and political life is not mere capriciousness, a paranoid's invention...

...The basic thing is the Establishment...

...And that's only a start...

...No matter what the time of year, there will probably be a dotted line running across the map from around the tip of North Carolina in the East, on out through Memphis and Oklahoma City, swerving down a bit to Albuquerque, and then up through southern Nevada and on to San Francisco...

...And in almost every sphere the conventional stability and dominance of the Establishment is deteriorating...

...And the Northeast under this kind of siege...

...Partly as a result of these migration characteristics, partly as a result of the common heritage they imply, the Southern Rim is also marked by a rough cultural unity...

...Taken loosely, that is meant to suggest the traditional, staid, oldtime, button-down, Ivy-League, tight-lipped, patrician, New England-rooted WASP culture on the one hand, and the aggressive, flamboyant, restless, swaggering, newfangled, open-collar, can-do, Southern-rooted Baptist culture of the Southern Rim on the other...

...The earliest migrations in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries moved almost exclusively westward from the East Coast, one broad wave sweeping southwest through Georgia and Alabama to the Gulf Coast and on up the Rio Grande, another moving due west through the Tennessee, Arkansas, and Red River valleys across the Texas plains and up against the Rockies...

...And such provincial areas as did manage to grow up at the same time-the San Francisco Bay Area, say, with its "upstart" A. P. Giannini, founder of the Bank of America, or New Orleans, prosperous through the Mississippi River traffic-were largely contained in their remoter regions and allowed to exert very little economic or political influence on a national scale...

...THE COWBOY CHALLENGE KIRKPATRICK SALE The rise of the Southern Rim In the Oval Office of the White House, shortly before two o'clock on March 13, 1973, Richard Nixon is near-ing the end of a long and rambling conversation with his counsel, John Dean, about ways to deflect the growing Watergate scandals that are just beginning to threaten his administration...

...In the winter this is normally the 60-degree line- temperatures south of it running from 60 degrees on up, north of it below 60 degrees-and in the summer it is usually the 80-degree demarcation...

...By the early twentieth century both of these waves had tapered off roughly in eastern New Mexico, but then came two final movements that completed the settlements, one pouring down into Florida from the Deep South states from the early 1920s on, and the other, made famous by the Okies, moving westward over the Rockies and into Southern California and the Central Valley in the later 1920s and 1930s...

...The rise of the Southern Rim marks a fifth...

...in the relocation of organized crime activities out of the wizened world of the Northeast to the newly hospitable centers of Los Angeles, Las Vegas, Phoenix, New Orleans, Hot Springs, Miami Beach...

...By the time of World War II the entire Rim area enjoyed an unusual homogeneity for "melting-pot America": it was marked not only by Southern-and overwhelmingly Southern white-settlement, but by the comparative absence of foreign-born immigration...

...in the extraordinary rise and growth of new cities like Anaheim, San Diego, Phoenix, Albuquerque, Dallas, Houston, Memphis, Jackson, Atlanta, Jacksonville, Orlando, stretching right across the southern part of the country, cities which have grown from sleepy cowtowns and frontier outposts into major commercial centers, among the most thriving in the land...

...Here a truly competitive power base took shape, built upon the unsurpassed population migrations that began to draw millions and millions of people from the older and colder sections of the Northeast to the younger and sunnier sections of the South and Southwest . . . upon an authentic economic revolution that created the giant new postwar industries of defense, aerospace, technology, electronics, agribusiness, and oil-and-gas extraction, all of which were based primarily in the Southern Rim and which grew to rival and in some cases surpass the older industries of the Northeast . . . upon the enormous growth of the federal government and its unprecedented accumulation of wealth, the great part of which went to develop and sustain the new areas and the new government-dependent industries, the new ports and new inland transportation systems, the new military and aerospace bases and the new water and irrigation systems . . . upon the political development of the Southern Rim and its growing influence in almost all national party organizations of whatever stripe, its decisive role in the selection of candidates of both major parties, its control over the major committees and much of the inner workings of Congress, and ultimately, from 1963 to 1974, its occupancy of the Presidency itself...

...No, I tell you this, it is the last gasp of our hardest opponents...

...Let those simple terms, then, stand for the complicated process that Richard Nixon barely conceptualized that mid-March day in the Oval Office...

...The President is now feeling himself very much the beleaguered hero under attack from a cruel press and a manipulated public, and angrily declares at one point, "Nobody is a friend of ours," later on reflecting more plaintively, "It will remain a crisis among the upper intellectual types, the soft heads, our own, too-Republicans-and the Democrats and the rest...

...All that began to change with the advent of World War II and its new technologies and priorities...

...Finally, the entire region from the Carolina coast to eastern New Mexico and from Oklahoma to Florida is the heartland of the Southern Baptist Convention and its offshoots-it is the most populous church today in every state from North Carolina to Texas-and there are additional strong Baptist representations in Arizona and Southern California as well...

...This is a President of the United States talking, and in the normal taxonomy of this country a President is regarded as a key part, if not the very center, of any "Establishment"-yet here is a President who plainly sees himself outside the Establishment, and, more than that, an enemy of that Establishment...

...There is also a rough populational cohesion as well, for before the modern migrations this area had a fairly uniform pattern of settlement, the movement sweeping almost due west from the South, spreading a human substratum from the Carolinas to California...

...its historical migrations have been either due west, through the Appalachians into Kentucky and West Virginia, or dead north along the coastlines...

...1975 by Kirkpatrick Sale...

...They got the hell kicked out of them in the elections...

...The riches of the Northeast are flowing to other sections of the country, producing "a pronounced shift of income" over the next fifteen years toward the Southern and Western regions, according to the Census Bureau, with particularly rapid growths for manufacturing operations in the South and below-average rates for "nearly every major industry in the Middle Atlantic region . . . for the next two decades...

...on the one hand, let us say, the type represented by David Rockefeller, Charles Percy, Edmund Muskie, James Reston, Kingman Brewster, John Lindsay, Richard Lugar, Henry Ford, Sol Linowitz, Bill Buckley, and Stephen Sondheim, and on the other the type personified by Bebe Rebozo, George Wallace, Lyndon Johnson, Billy Graham, Frank Irwin, C. Arnholt Smith, H. L. Hunt, Strom Thurmond, Sam Yorty, John Wayne, and Johnny Cash...

...in the rise within the Democratic party of figures like George Wallace, Pat Brown, Jr., Lloyd Bentsen, Fred Harris, Jimmy Carter, Robert Strauss, Terry San-ford, Reubin Askew, all of them from the Southern Rim and all among the new figures reshaping that party . . . in the flight of thousands of businesses and hundreds of major corporations out of the big cities of the Northeast into the aggressive new cities of the Southern Rim, draining the Northeast of at least forty of Fortune's top-ranked industrial firms in just the last ten years...

...They are going to lie around and squeal...

...The most obvious unity to the Southern Rim is climatic, and a look at any of those weather maps that the newspapers print helps to show why...

...the intellectuals," claiming they would never believe the Watergate burglars were acting alone, "they would have to paint it into something more sinister, more involved, part of a general plan...

...Congress of such men, over the years, as Allan Ellender, Sam Rayburn, Richard Russell, James Eastland, Wright Patman, Wilbur Mills, Chet Holifield, John Stennis, Sam Ervin, Carl Albert, John Rhodes, Howard Baker, Joseph Montoya, every one of them from the Southern Rim...

...Taken altogether, these characteristics of the Southern Rim define a remarkably consistent geographical area...

...The reason is simple enough: climatologically, topographically, and geologically, this region has much more in common with the south than in contrast to it (the real dividing line in California is not the Tehachapi Mountains but the Mokelumne River), and the area around San Francisco to the south (San Mateo, Santa Clara, and Alameda counties, for example) has been every bit as explosive a growth region as the southern part of the state and shares all its contemporary characteristics...

...The large urban centers are all decaying and losing population, some like Newark and Buffalo and Detroit and Gary turning into outright sinkholes...

...In practically every aspect of life, this country was dominated by a nexus of industrial, financial, political, academic, and cultural centers based in the Northeast, stretching from Chicago to New York, from Boston to Philadelphia, and associated with the names of Mellon, Carnegie, Rockefeller, Morgan, Ford, McCormick, Vanderbilt, and the like...

...the day before, Nixon issued a proclamation denying permission for his staff members to appear before the various Senate committees, pulling a blanket of "executive privilege" hard around him to withstand the increasingly bitter winds of Watergate...

...It will vary, of course, weather being what it is, but it is remarkable how consistently the temperature line cuts this same pattern...

...It hardly seems an accident, in fact, that there is indeed a cartographical line that sets off this area almost precisely...

...The railroad systems have deteriorated so rapidly, with nine major lines in bankruptcy by 1975 and others to follow, that the whole transportation infrastructure of the Northeast is facing collapse and the regional economy is seriously jeopardized...

...and its population growths of recent years have almost all taken place in the Washington environs as part of a suburban belt that relates to Maryland and the North far more than to Norfolk and the South...

...in the succession to power in the tight and potent world of the U.S...

...in the extraordinary investment of $55 million by H. Ross Perot, the Texas computer executive, who single-handedly kept the stock brokerages from collapsing in 1971...

...From these they moved gradually into academic and journalistic circles-economist Kenneth Boulding, for example, used "the cowboy economy" to describe the period of rapacious growth after World War II, political writer Milton Viorst analyzed the Northeast as "the Yankee's America," scholar William Domhoff described a "Jewish-Cowboy" financial group behind the Democratic party...

...This seems as appropriate a way as any to start to define the Southern Rim since it is to a great degree the climate that has given it its spectacular growth...

...That this is not some arcane geographical games-playing or a form of paranoia born in Richard Nixon's mind is easy enough to demonstrate...

...It is doubtful if Richard Nixon ever thought of the world in precisely these terms, as ably as they would have served him, but it just may be that his successor does: shortly after becoming President, Gerald Ford announced that, in settling the economic problems of America, he was not going to "act in cowboy fashion...

...This is, in short, America's sunbelt...

...Clearly, then, Richard Nixon is changing the usual definitions, is in fact pointing to a new conception of what the Establishment is and what its position has become in mid-century America, a conception which he no doubt had never fully articulated but which his highly developed political antennae told him was nonetheless quite real...

...Extend this line through Nevada and California to the Pacific, with just the slightest swing upward to embrace San Francisco, and the demarcation is complete...

...Now, traditionalists will have noted that this neat demarcation by the 37th parallel creates some divergences from normal geographical constructs...

...The entire area encompasses almost all the regions that have historically been the principal battlegrounds of the American frontier, from the Tennessee of Davy Crockett to the Texas of Sam Houston to the Arizona of Wyatt Earp, with all that this heritage implies (which, for Frederick Jackson Turner, for example, means "perennial rebirth . . . fluidity of American life...

...The terms are meant only in the loosest and most symbolic way, of course-flamboyant operators can be found in the Northeast, staid blue-bloods in the Southern Rim-but it is interesting that they even have an appropriate heritage in this very context...

...But one can see plainly that the Establishment is declining, and even a presidential coup cannot disguise that reality...

...and it is the land of the megalopolis, the vast urban clusters that show up on a population map as a mass of black circles again stretching almost without interval from Chicago along the Great Lakes on to Philadelphia and New York and up to Boston...

...Extraordinary...

...Dean, shrewd to detect and reflect the mood of his superior, soon joins in and begins berating with him "the press...

...in the emergence of new official stock exchanges in places like Miami and Los Angeles, flourishing at a time when the New York exchanges are floundering...

...There is a broadly metaphorical but rather apt way of describing these rival power bases, the one of the Northeast and the other of the Southern Rim, as the yankees and the cowboys...

...Still, Virginia is simply different in its basic climate and most of its agriculture from the pattern of the Southern Rim...

...Nixon understands, if only primitively, that there is in fact a new configuration of forces in America, to which he and his Presidency are joined, that stands in opposition to the traditional Establishment and is therefore a new component to be reckoned with in the equations of national power...

...And even the modern influx, though perhaps a half of it has come from the Northeast, has not changed this fixed character appreciably...

...This is the Southern Rim...

...The industrial importance of the Northeast is rapidly diminishing, according to the business-oriented Conference Board, citing figures to show that yankee industries accounted for 70 percent of all value added in manufacturing as recently as the late 1940s but "by 1971 this share declined to 51 percent" and was dropping with every passing year...

...The old money markets are no longer capable of supplying the capital needs of the Northeast or of the nation, and the brokerage houses that once served as the glittering jewels of Wall Street have been so badly tarnished that they are going under at the rate of more than fifty a year...

...there are between 250 and 350 days of sunshine a year, and frost, if it should come, does not descend before November...

...The evidence is abundant and rather wonderfully diverse, manifested, for example, in the takeover of the Republican Party by the new and generally conservative forces from the Southern Rim- Barry Goldwater, Ronald Reagan, Nixon himself-and the consequent displacement of Northeastern liberals, at least for the long decade between 1964 and 1974 . . . in the assaults by Southern Rim tycoons, Clint Murchi-son, James Ling, Nelson Bunker Hunt, Howard Hughes, and many colorful others, upon the citadels of Wall Street and the giants of Northeastern industry...

...The land south of that line takes in all of thirteen states -North and South Carolina, Georgia, Florida, Tennessee, Alabama, Mississippi, Arkansas, Louisiana, Oklahoma, Texas, New Mexico, and Arizona-and the southern and by far the most populous parts of two more states, Nevada and California...

...in the rising personal incomes of the people in the Southern Rim states which have been growing steadily while there has been a decline in the Northeast, and in the last decade the growth rates of the leading sunbelt metropolitan areas have been twice as high as in the leading coldbelt areas . . . and in such small facts as that the West Coast plans to build its own Statue of Liberty . . . that the Federal Reserve Board has established its first new bank in thirty-three years in Miami, Florida . . . that the national headquarters of the American Contract Bridge League is in Memphis . . . that Bergdorf Goodman, the fancy Fifth Avenue department store in New York, is owned by Carter Hawley Hale Stores of Los Angeles . . . and that Hebrew-National Kosher Foods, Inc., the most famous name in all of New York's delicatessen culture, is owned by the Riviana Corporation of Houston, Texas...

...There is a reality to this area, a climatic, historical, and cultural cohesiveness, that serves to set this broad band off from the rest of the country in many ways...

...Well, it has not disappeared, nor does it give any signs of doing so: the very fact that Nixon is no longer in that Oval Office and that he has been replaced by a man from Michigan is evidence enough that considerable power still resides in the Northeast...