The Road to 1972

...Yet there is a huge "at risk" population hovering just above the poverty line...

...It was discovered, Hunt said, that ghetto costs were several times that in prime labor areas and taxes were high...

...These new towns would have their own schools, shops, clinics and hospitals, their own light industry and recreational facilities...

...This was also true of the ultra Left and COMMENTS AND OPINIONS antipolitical confrontationists in 1968...

...So it was that, in November 1968, the cover of the trade journal American Builder asked, "Who Really Gives a Damn About Housing...

...That would make it totally impossible to build a progressive majority in America, and it would feed the emotions which made George Wallace the most successful rightist demagogue in modern American electoral history...

...He told how the Watts Community Redevelopment Agency had come up with a plan for a 35-acre industrial park...

...All they do is talk, talk, talk...

...It is almost certain now that the "Development Decade" of the United Nations will end as a complete failure, and even with the prospect of increasing famine...

...It then proposes a pittance for housing, reaffirms catastrophic transportation and farm programs, and lets welfare rot...

...Even with its terrible disappointments, 1968 does show that such a majority coalition is possible—and the only way to get progressive social change in America...

...Eisenhower's conservative credentials, he goes on to suggest that his scheme will be carried out by private enterprise...

...He made FA COMMENTS AND OPINIONS extravagant promises to the poor, and particularly the blacks, which raised militancy and hope but, when he accomplished so little, incited anger...

...If the target of the Riot Commission is taken, then that rate must be doubled...

...So it is plain that the poor can become a force in their own right...

...then the economic omens could be conducive to a George Wallace...

...In April 1968, David Boldt wrote an article for the Wall Street Journal, "Industry in the Slums...

...This rightist trend need not prevail...

...they couldn't care less...

...On the one hand, there could be a bitter struggle between the have-litties and have-nots, the whites and the blacks, the organized and the unorganized, the poor and the ex-poor, for scarce jobs, housing, and education...

...Robert Kennedy did (which is why I supported him, joining the McCarthy campaign after his death...

...But before turning to the tactics of such an effort, let me suggest in broadest outline what I take to be the probabilities and tendencies of change as America enters the seventies under Republican rule...

...To be sure, there should be government support to black business, but that should not give rise to the illusion that the number of Negro companies which can succeed in the poverty market of the ghetto are going to pull up well over 20 million Americans by their boot straps...

...So I project that crying domestic needs will be unsatisfied even though the conflict in Southeast Asia, which destroyed Lyndon Johnson's Great Society at home, is decisively ended...

...and so on—and I quoted the famous opening passage of a Tale of Two Cities...

...Or, if there were an emergent movement of the democratic Left, these very same conditions could radicalize millions of Americans and persuade them to follow a new leadership calling for political realignment and innovation...

...Within this context, let me attempt to map out a democratic Left road to 1972...

...At the end of September, 30 Republican congressmen changed their vote in order to help the Nixon campaign and thus defeated a $20.000 ceiling on agricultural subsidies...

...There is something analogous to that insight (and much, of course, that is not) in the way Lyndon Johnson provoked such widespread hostility only four years after his landslide election...

...It is not exactly clear why the former Republican President thus adopts a solution which might have been borrowed from the European socialists...

...In one version of the scheme, there would be no vehicles on the surface level and all deliveries would be made underground...

...That means that the have-nots and the have-littles, the impoverished and the struggling, comprise the overwhelming majority of the population...

...It would take a foolish practical politician to try to resurrect the New Deal strategy, yet a majority coalition of the democratic Left has become, not simply desirable, but the only way to move the nation in a progressive direction...

...Hubert Humphrey, it seemed, might even come in third, behind the most powerful rightist (and even semifascistic) leader in recent American history, George C. Wallace...

...THERE ARE OTHER determinants of our public woes which will, at best, stay as bad as they are under Nixon...

...But at the same time, one must be critical of those who, sometimes in the name of radicalism, adopted modes of political language and shock tactics that were guaranteed to provoke the vast majority of Americans to anger and push them to the Right...

...There were some leftists who mistakenly then concluded that a Nixon victory would make it easier to win the Democratic party in 1972 than Humphrey's election...

...Addressing himself to the issue...

...At the same time, and without a lot of publicity, it was building a $65 million COMMENTS AND OPINIONS facility in the outskirts of Charlotte, which will employ more than 1,000 workers and make turbines for atomic electric utility plants...

...It is because the Republican party has a principled position in favor of such counterproductive policies that I feel the outlook for the early seventies is gloomy...

...If the nation were to honor the President's 1968 goal of housing for the poor, it would have to build 10 times more units for the poor in 10 years than it has built in the previous 31...

...This was a professional recognition of the importance of this new constituency...

...The rents are high, the public services run down, the labor force has been systematically undereducated through no fault of its own, etc...

...In the summer the Democrats and the Republicans measured up to times of tumult and tragedy by nominating two representatives of the old politics...

...Henry Ford's recruits would be back on the street...

...They thought that they were being discriminated against and the resultant backlash sentiment gave Wallace shocking support in the industrial North early in the campaign...

...The Hippie philosophy of "doing one's thing" is appropriate to a drop-out and even may have an integrity of its own...

...of slums and ghettos, he wrote, We shall never solve these problems simplyby tearing out vast areas of sub-standard dwellings and stacking people vertically in newhigh-rise apartment complexes...

...And the best point of con tact between the middle-class conscience con stituency and the politics of practical working...

...The Dixiecrats, who increasingly refuse to maintain their alliance with the liberals except when Congressional seniority is involved, should be given their walking papers, and the "loyalist" forces of the Chicago Convention, both black and white, should be recognized as the new South...

...This is probably COMMENTS AND OPINIONS one of the reasons why some of the most energetic, youthful blacks are insisting upon community action at the grass roots...

...However, it must be candidly recognized that the Northern ghettos are, to considerable measure, still unorganized...

...In the spring Martin Luther King, Jr., was shot down while fighting for the rights of sanitation men in Memphis, and Robert F. Kennedy was assassinated as he campaigned for the Presidency in California...

...After all, General Motors has the eighteenth largest GNP on the globe (at $20.2 billion in 1967, it ranked ahead of Argentina, Belgium, Switzerland and Czechoslovakia, among others), Ford is the twenty-third richest industrial power, Standard Oil of New Jersey the twenty-fourth, and General Electric, at the thirty-fourth position, has more of an output than Greece...

...It affirms that there must be socially conscious transportation and agricultural policy, and publishes detailed figures on the minimum requirements of human decency...

...They were activist and concerned with issues and, through the reform movement they helped bring to the Democratic convention, they won historic changes in the party structure—ending the unit rule, changing the mode of election of delegates, etc.—even though they lost the Presidential nomination and the Vietnam debate...

...But if the late moved back up toward 5 per cent, hiring the hard-core unemployed might mean turning away experienced workers...

...Washington admits that there must be a most dramatic break with the lethargic housing programs of the past...

...it is the best of times, if we have the audacity to hope and act, because it is possible to assemble a new majority, because there is a road to 1972 which runs toward the democratic Left...

...But at the last moment all the polls had to be revised, Humphrey nearly won the popular vote, and there were several hours in which it appeared that a Constitutional crisis was in the offing...

...This will mean a prolongation of the agony of the majority of the people of the world, a condition which might lead to another Vietnam...

...For even with the billions that will be freed for construction when the carnage stops in Vietnam, there is no sign that the Republican Administration and the conservative Congress will do anything li t commit the worst mss COMMENTS AND OPINIONS takes of their Democratic predecessors...

...WHEN FOUR YEARS of Republican rule end in January 1973, the United States of America is likely to be even more tom by internal crisis than it was in the last, shambling days of Lyndon Johnson's Administration...

...For when the moment of truth came, the Northern white workers, including many who were prejudiced, voted in line with their economic self-interest rather than their race hatreds...

...through massive, planned social investments see to it that no American, black or white, lives in a deteriorating backwater which is only attractive to cockroach capitalism and exorbitant gougers...

...Not the power structure...

...So he concentrated on a bread-and-butter appeal to workers and poor people, an anti-Wallace emphasis which strengthened his hold on the black vote, and an attempt to win back the McCarthy-Kennedy forces...

...One reason this point is not so widely understood comes, paradoxically, from the heightened consciousness of poverty...

...That Mayor Daley denied them the effective right to assemble, and encouraged the police to assault them—and even bystanders—in a sickening, fascistic show of force was of course an outrage...

...The Watts Citizens Committee, led by Ted Watkins, an Autoworkers Union activist, turned the scheme down...

...They were wrong, perhaps tragically so...

...They did not find this an efficacious way of saving their neighborhood, particularly if it was going to be financed with the help of "antipoverty" funds...

...That means that the road to 1972 moves through the winning of the Democratic Presidential election to a victory for the new majority...

...For if the Nixon record is only as bad as Eisenhower's in the fifties—unemployment, chronic in order to get price stability, growth at a snail's pace in the name of fiscal responsibility, etc...

...some people there had asserted their rights as against freeways and had to be put down by a federal law), made the beautification program even more of a joke than it had been, and struck a blow against wildlife...

...Therefore it is all the more clear, in assembling a new majority for 1972, that "kids" have to be treated as an adult political force which, for reasons of demography and economics, is likely to have an even greater impact on society as time goes on...

...In February 1968 Mr...

...And I make the optimistic assumption that the horrible war in Vietnam will be over and that a chastened America will not rush to make another such tragic commitment...

...But it would be a serious mistake to think, as some on the American Left have argued, that a radical failure to respond to the needs of the poor, the blacks, and the social sector generally will necessarily give rise to a progressive movement seeking radical solutions...

...Therefore the 1968 campaign makes even more compelling the point that the organized workers must play a major role in the creation of a now majority...

...The National Commission for a National Land Policy has advocated the construction of 25 new cities which would, in 40-60 years, reach populations of 1 million each...

...Until there is decisive evidence of a new trend, the Left must go where people are actually struggling to resolve the problems of their daily lives...

...And, even more pertinently, two-thirds of the families in America have less than the $9,191 a year required to maintain a "moderate standard of living" as computed by the Department of Labor (it used 1966 figures and, given inflation, the actual income would have to be higher today...

...more racism, more urban deterioration...

...But that united front is no longer really able to deliver a secure victory, for Wallace took the deep South, Nixon the border states, and Daley could not even deliver Illinois...

...Even more pertinent, the people of Watts were suspicious of a Southern Pacific Railroad plan which would have cut a five-block swath through the center of the community...

...class necessity is on domestic social and eco nomic issues...

...but it is a disastrous precept for those who want to change society by winning a popular majority to end the misery of the slums and ghettos...

...Building that unity is the central task of the democratic Left on the road to 1972...

...In Detroit, the federal government has successfully urged the auto industry, and Henry Foid in particular, to hire "unemployables" from the ghetto...

...and answered, "Not the cities...

...the deaths of Martin Luther King and Robert Kennedy...

...Second, the news of the disappearance of the American working class is premature...

...When the Housing Act was passed, many editorialists were pleased with this or that item in it but almost all agreed that it was most unlikely that these new ideas would really be funded...

...Yet if men are to control events rather than be subThis article, slightly adapted, forms the afterwordto a new paperback edition of Toward a Democratic Left, to be issued by the Macmillan Company, New York...

...To begin with, there has clearly been a vast expansion of the political power and influence of the college-educated, a phenomenon so striking that it might herald the appearance of a "new class...

...For instance, even though the most articulate and visible spokesmen of the black ghetto in 1968 were militants who scorned and detested the Administration, Hubert Humphrey received the overwhelming bulk of the Negro votes...

...Above all, college graduate activists must neither act, nor think, contemp tuously toward those who, through no fault of their own, were denied a higher education...

...If, as is certainly possible, the economic policies of the Republican Administration drive this vast mass to a civil war, rather than to a confrontation with the real power in the land, rightist demagoguery could have a field day...

...In the South, black voting strength increased tremendously, and one result was that the Democratic convention was forced to give more recognition to Negroes than ever before in history...

...ject to them—and that is a major goal of the democratic Left—it is necessary to try to discern the underlying trends that are at work in these various surprises and shocks...

...Not the suburbs...

...Under such conditions, there could be even greater incentives to fratricide at the bottom of the society since there could be militant movements disputing scarce goods...

...It does not take a seer to suggest that the Republican Administration of the late sixties and early seventies will not undertake such a sweeping reordering of social priorities...

...In this way some 5,000 jobs have been created at Ford with much celebration...

...And, though I was as surprised as the next man by the incredible, unpredictable events of 1968, I would argue that they corroborate the idea for building a majority party with a radical program...

...Yet the fact remains that in the campaign labor provided the best organized, most cohesive mass base for Humphrey, liberal congressmen and progressive social programs...

...At the University of Minnesota, researchers have been designing a new city that could be built on open land, a hundred miles from any other urban area, and could house 250,000 people at a cost of $4 billion...

...In saying this, I do not picture Richard Nixon as some kind of a rightist demon but as a moderate conservative in a time when basic problems cannot be solved without radical departures...

...Nixon was making the private-sector panacea for the solution of social problems a centerpiece of his campaign, that very private sector, as viewed in the business press, was indicating that it was not very interested beyond a token gesture here or there ("fire insurance" in the ghetto some cynics called these installations...

...In 1967, some 9,952 farmers had received $408 million —James O. Eastland, the impartial plantation owner on the Senate Agricultural Committee took in $211,364 that year—and this had helped, of course, to displace even more undereducated rural poor people who would soon be showing up on city relief rolls...

...but it is not...

...As one who worked in that movement, I feel that its greatest danger is a tendency toward self-righteousness and elitism, a lack of sympathy for those who view politics as a bread-and-butter necessity rather than as an idealistic avocation...

...It will, Richard Nixon promised in the 1968 campaign, give the subsidies to private business instead...

...If there is a certain disillusionment among this stratum as a result of the outcome of 1968, it is a major task of the democratic Left to win them back to political activism...

...They must be open and made inviting topeople of all races...

...For those who do not find employment locally, swift masstransportation should be created to take them to jobs in the cities...

...Meanwhile, the best children of the affluent were horrified by the war and disillusioned by all the broken social promises which it occasioned and their anger helped create an opposition that held a third of the seats at the Democratic Convention...

...To get an idea of how dramatic the break with the past must be, consider the shocking figures of the 1968 Report of the National Commission on Civil Disorder: in 31 years, the United States government subsidized 650,000 units of low-cost housing while in roughly the same period (34 years) it provided invisible supports, like cheap credit and handsome tax deductions, for the construction of more than 10 million units of middle- and upperclass housing...

...At the same time, the celebrants of American corporate virtue have recently been lavishly praising one of the causes of this tragedy: the multinational corporation...

...THE MAIN IMPACT of the conscience consti tuency was positive...

...However, in defense of Mr...

...they're headed for a decade of failure...

...Humphrey's surpris ing bid for power in 1968...

...and by early fall it seemed certain that a noncampaign was going to elect Richard Nixon by a resigned, unhappy acclamation...

...One other case should also be noted...

...there is a road to 1972 for the democratic Left...

...At some McCarthy rallies in the summer of 1968, I spoke of the extreme contrasts of the year—a vast outpouring of youthful sentiment in the mainstream and against the war...

...In the campaign of 1968 Richard Nixon formally promised the American people that he would step up the expenditure of federal funds for the creation and socialization of public crises while cutting back on the token programs that sometimes even helped a bit...

...But perhaps the most daring, radical idea was put forth by Dwight Eisenhower...

...Their investment had yielded a total of 870 jobs...

...And though the vote on the latter issue went against them, they could properly claim credit for having been a factor in changing their country's foreign policy...

...Under such circumstances, the emergence of a frightened and bewildered political agnosticism would be completely understandable...

...Trotsky said of the German Communists before the rise of Hitler that they infuriated all classes and won none...

...When a company goes into such a rotting neighborhood, the plants are small and the products simple (they are a cut above the sweatshops Watkins feared, but only a cut...

...It is the worst of times because we have lost brave leaders and the nation has moved to the Right...

...Foreign policy does not generally determine who wins or loses elections unless, as in the case of Vietnam, it upsets the internal equilibrium...

...Finally, 1968 gave the answer to those who urged the Left to break, for once and for all, with the corruptions of the Democratic party and to plant its own independent banner as a rallying point for the masses...

...Albert R. Hunt described the much-touted, government-supported, panaceato-end-panaceas--efforts to use the federal carrot to persuade the private sector to create jobs...

...What the Negroes must do is to change the definitions of economics—i.e...

...So I will only remark here that 1968 brought a further retreat in foreign aid and that the Republicans have promised to rely less on aid than on trade, which is rigged to the advantage of rich countries and therefore is a root cause of backwardness in the Third World...

...In much the same way as most Northern white workers refused the Wallace adventure on their Right out of a deep sense of the need to defend their economic and social position, so most Negroes rejected the ultramilitant appeals on their Left...

...It is, once again, clear that if General Motors is able to engage in international economic planning for its private purposes, the United Nations should be able to do so for public and social ends...

...There is therefore a consciousness of the need for social change which rises out of the very conditions of working class life...

...In the winter of 1968 the Vietcong Tet offensive subverted the credibility of both the American military and Lyndon Johnson himself and helped Eugene McCarthy to confound all the soothsayers in the New Hampshire primary...

...Should a developing country with foreign exchange difficulties object to such a calculus—which intensifies all the injustices of the international division of labor—then a multinational corporation could veto the decision of such a supposedly sovereign power...

...But a Johnson Administration, which was somewhat more sympathetic to such an approach than the Republicans are likely to be, could only legislate pathetic tokenism in this area...

...The trends will not decide which of these, the ugly or the hopeful, will prevail...

...That, I believe, is simply not going to happen...

...So, as it turned out, the opposition at the Chicago Convention was much too exclusively college educated and not at all repre , sentative of the other groups in America which need social change...

...As Sanford Rose described these world businesses in Fortune, "Carrying multinationalism to the logical extreme, a corporation will concentrate its production in the area where costs are lowest, and build up its sales where the market is most lucrative...

...Since Richard Nixon seems likely to follow the very worst of these trends, and to try to make the private sector ethical when it either doesn't want to or will act only when it can use public monies to institutionalize old injustices, the probabilities are that the United States will be in worse condition on January 20, 1972, than on January 20, 1968...

...But it is still significant that Eisenhower has some perception of the radical changes which present conditions demand...

...The big companies have for some time been working out schemes of international economic planning for private profit which have the profound, and incidental, effect of perpetuating the miseries of the excolonies...

...I wish that politics could be so logical and straightforward...

...At a time when there is so much official evidence of the utter inability of Adam Smith's invisible hand to solve systematic, ingeniously devised problems of man's conscious making, there is this resolute call to further privatize a government that has already done so much for corporations at the expense of citizens...

...And it is just as clear that a Republican America will not support such a minimal step toward global decency but, with its links and commitments to the private sector, will accentuate the worst trends abroad as well as at home...

...And it was this factor that dominated the politics of the in dustrial Northeast in Mr...

...Nixon proposed...

...The McCarthy campaign never really reached out to the poor, the blacks, or the white workers...

...For once the economic underworld was rediscovered, there were those who pictured the society as divided between the poor and the affluent...

...But these young people were not up for grabs...

...Yet an analysis by Robert C. Albrook in the August 1968 issue of Fortune put this happy development in a somber perspective: "With unemployment rates of below 4 per cent recently, job creation on a big scale may have been rational and profitable for a big company...

...Since this delusion has been announced as a leading idea of the Republican Presidency, it is worth analyzing...

...And the labor movement, the conscience constituency, the blacks and other poor groups, and the new South are, in any case, an incipient, dynamic majority—if they can unite...

...Watkins said, "What we don't need is a bunch of low-pay sweat shops that don't give a man enough incentive to get off of welfare...

...After hundreds of official speeches about the need for an integrated transportation policy, Congress in 1968 passed a law which enshrined the highways-over-all approach, mandated the Los Angelization of Washington, D.C...

...Yet by the fall of 1968 almost every practical pol in America, including many hacks, was proclaiming his loyalty to the "new politics...

...But then welfare was in its usually impossible state...

...It is this domestic reality which, short of another Vietnam or worse, will create the background of American politics in the coming period...

...And in November 1968, the roadbuilding industry was fighting furiously against new federal rules that would allow a modicum of public participation before decisions are made on highway design...

...What is needed is a new majority political coalition of the democratic Left capable of winning the Presidency in 1972...

...Meanwhile, many white workers and members of the lower middle class did not realize that the bold programs were more rhetoric than substance...

...He was almost immediately deserted or snubbed by 1Z his Southern allies, and his association with the Chicago machine was clearly costing him dearly...

...To some the appeal of Eugene McCarthy and the late Robert Kennedy in 1968 seemed to be a fad among the "kids" and not much else...

...But it is the precondition of even beginning to put our destiny under our control...

...The exact opposite reaction is possible and, with the frightening impact of George Wallace in 1968, that ugly alternative is already a part of reality...

...And in 1968, the people gave such a massive demonstration of their political identification with the liberal wing of the Democrats that, despite a disastrous Convention and a badly split party, Hubert Humphrey very nearly won in a three-man race...

...For in housing, transportation, agriculture, job generation, and welfare, 1968 corroborated the theme that Washington, while talking massive programs, has acted timidly and, worst of all, that there has been a real tendency for these inadequate programs to exacerbate, rather than alleviate, the miseries and inequities of the society...

...What I write here is neither star-gazing nor an exercise in academic futurism but an attempt to help the Left better transform the immediate future by better understanding the immediate past...

...Dick COMMENTS AND OPINIONS ens wrote in a conservative mood, yet his words define what confronts the democratic Left as the sixties end: "It was the best of times, it was the worst of times...

...The Riot Commission discovered that in 1967 in Newark, Detroit, and New Haven (three important centers of riot), the median percentage of ghetto inhabitants covered by federal programs in manpower, education, housing, community action and relief was one-third (similarly, the Council of Economic Advisers estimated a year or two earlier that two-thirds of those officially classified as poor get no public assistance...

...If these projections are at all accurate, they make diametrically opposed political developments quite possible...

...Big business refuses to go into the slums, or does so on a token basis, on sound "economic" grounds (if one understands that "economics" in America and in the world are historically designed to favor the rich against the poor rather than being a natural law...

...Not the rural areas...

...There were also prominent advocates of the capitalist conscience who had not bothered to consider that their nostrum would almost certainly wipe out all the labor-market gains of the war on poverty—and more...

...I disagreed with the political stance of most of the AFL-CIO unions in 1968 prior to the elections: support for the horrible war in Vietnam and for Lyndon Johnson, and then an alliance with the big city machines and the Southern establishment to obtain the nomination for Hubert Humphrey...

...But if 1968 dramatically revealed the mass potential of this new conscience constituency, it also defined its limitations...

...everyone's leaving them...

...Instead, hewent on,] the first essential of any realistic hous COMMENTS AND OPINIONS ing plan is to reduce the density of population by encouraging large numbers of people to relocate in new, more wholesome communities...

...If this positive aspect of the black-power ideology unites more and more Negroes in on-going organizations, that will be a major contribution to all of American life...

...In other words, massive job generation to do away with the Depression-like underemployment of the impoverished, and particularly the blacks among them, is simply not going to take place in the private sector even with federal subsidies...

...To get some insight into this process does not, as will be seen, guarantee that political victory can be calculated and planned...

...The machines are coming to an end in any case...

...The Commission also noted that welfare provides an aver COMMENTS AND OPINIONS age of one-half of what people desperately need throughout the nation and in some places gets down to 25 per cent of need...

...Or else, like the corporate interests who wanted to cut Watts to pieces, free enterprise was too interested in the worst possible way...

...But there is a danger that such activists will be taken in by "black capitalist" panaceas such as Mr...

...III So THE ECONOMIC and social perspective for the early seventies is not exactly cheering...

...The poor, and particularly the black poor, were in motion in 1968, but there were some ambiguities...

...The employees there, one might guess, will not be poverty-stricken...

...Another revealing report appeared in the Journal in October...

...Four big companies had indeed gone into the slums: Westinghouse, AVCO, IBM, and Control Data...

...Congress could begin to fund them any time it wants to, but there is little likelihood that the humane bills of Congressman James O'Hara and former Senator Joseph Clark will be acted upon by a Republican Administration and a conservative Congress...

...He thus increased the target of the White House Conference in 1966 by 20 per cent, but then the Administration and Congress had ignored that more modest proposal anyway...

...Therefore, when the war in Viet nam ends the effect of such a unity with a labor movement will be a basic task for the democratic Left...

...The assassin struck Robert Kennedy down before he had the chance to prove his case and candidacy...

...There are, of course, the millions of public-service, nonprofit occupations identified by the Automation Commission and re-emphasized by the Riot Commission...

...In its proposals for positive action, the American Builder had advocated such reforms as a national land policy and land bank, an end to unplanned and socially catastrophic highway construction, taking zoning power away from suburbs (it is primarily used to keep out the poor and the black), Congressional appropriations for programs Congress passes in principle, and so on...

...During the California primary, Mexican-Americans, led by Cesar Chavez of the farm workers, succeeded in turning out massive majorities for Robert Kennedy in their areas...

...Men will...

...Ironically, the architect of the Great Society announced at the same time that he was determined to fulfill Robert Taft's 1949 low-cost housing goals but did not mention that the nation had dropped 15 years behind that conservative Republican's expectations...

...When this Administration completes its term, the United States is likely to have more social problems than now...

...I have already set out a critique of this proposal (see DISSENT, January—February 1968), but some 1968 data are so vivid that they should be noted...

...Johnson put the seal of Presidential approval on the crisis figures about housing need and said that the country had to construct 26 million units in 10 years, 6 million of them governmentally subsidized and low-cost...

...It's not that Easy...

...Indeed, one of the reasons that Humphrey did so much better than expected—aside from his own determination— was that he veered in the direction of a new coalition once he began to run...

...His belated new politics almost carried the day...

...Elsewhere I have written about the many factors that keep the "other Americans" from developing a class consciousness and organization...

...It could, Rose says, "simply `take out' its dividends by raising prices on intracorporate sales proportionately" and thus nullify the local government's refusal to repatriate profits...

...If Negroes try to create their own entrepreneurial enclaves, they will run into the same bitter, racist facts of economic life...

...So it is crucial to understand the persistence of "old" (that is, one generation old) political motives in the midst of furious change...

...Therefore, during the year when Mr...

...Of the 100 corporate chieftains who met at Hot Springs, Virginia, to propose that the poor thus suffer to save the prosperity of the affluent, 80 per cent were estimated to be supporters of Richard Nixon...

...Needless to say, these new areas must not be just added enclaves of segregation...

...That, however, does not mean that such a development is easy or inevitable...

...I write this prediction less than two months before the scheduled inauguration of Richard Nixon and in the waning days of a year that has been disastrous for prophets...

...A factory is still a deeply alienating place and even though wages are up—but not as much as profits in the sixties—the typical worker has a tough time with debts, taxes, and the cost of living...

...And to do that requires that a black-led mass movement join in a democratic Left new majority...

...Hubert Humphrey won the Democratic nomination on the basis of the classic Rooseveltian united front: labor, the South, the big city machines...

...Westinghouse, to take a striking example, held a big press conference to publicize its Pittsburgh plant in a poor area, which would put 75 people to work...

...The New York Times rightly noted that the Johnson message was "essentially conservative...

...II ONE OF THE many myths propagated by Republicans in the political battles of 1968, and credited by far too many liberals, was the notion that our crises had intensified because Washington, with pretenses to omnipotence, had "done too much...

...This prediction takes on an almost sinister cast when one considers that the Business Council—that group whose ubiquitous, semiofficial power is attested by Gardiner Ackley —at its October 1968 meeting, proposed to combat inflation by raising unemployment to 5.5 per cent or 6 per cent...

...So the practicality of radically solving the urban crisis is not only obvious to intellectuals and planners but to a former Republican President as well...