Liberal Intelligentsia and White Backlash

...Against this survey evidence, to be sure, one has the evidence of the elections, both the 1964 and the 1968 presidential elections having involved attempts to stimulate a backlash...

...All of those studies, incidentally, involve very small percentage differences...

...The situation is less favorable with respect to school integration but even here one-third of the white workers take the tolerant position...

...In general, the richer the suburb the higher the Wallace percentage...

...But that] when the dissenters collide with the lower middle class, they confront an unsure opponent, quick to anger, and not prepared to yield an inch...

...The responses among Southern whites are quite different, as may well be expected...

...If one did not make the regional separation but simply presented the overall figures for manuals and nonmanuals in the entire nation, the result would obscure the fact that the class differences do not appear in the nonSouthern states...

...In all that follows, the attitudes of the white working class and middle class will be contrasted (or, for the sake of stylistic variation, the white manuals and nonmanuals, the blue-collar and whitecollar workers) . Since the pattern differs in the South, we will consider first that threequarters of the white population living out side the South and the border states, those who live in the North, Midwest, and the Western states...

...The American liberal finds himself in a difficult world...

...The percentages favoring integrated schools were 35 and 64...

...In the case of the upper-middleclass white Protestants, the level of Goldwater support ran to 70 percent...

...There was, it will be noted, no reaction in the course of the intervening four years, with the long-term trend of recent years toward ever higher levels of tolerance continuing unabated...

...Lost from view was a small survey of the area's population, which indicated that 70 percent of it favored open housing...

...In both these areas, contrary to widespread alarm, there is very little difference between manuals and nonmanuals in their stated positions...

...Intolerance in the responses to the attitude LIBERAL INTELLIGENTSIA AND WHITE BACKLASH questions is also concentrated in the same communities...

...What about housing...

...Of non-Southern manual workers 79 percent and of the nonmanuals 81 percent said they should go to the same schools...

...It is also possible that in some localities there could be tensions that would reverse the national trend...

...Once again, despite the fervid assertions, the equivalent blue-collar group also shows that same high level of virtuous sentiment, in this case the figure being 89 percent...

...16-23...

...It was difficult to add up the results of that year's elections as evidence of the efficacy of hard-line, backlash campaigns and therefore the sounds of alarm again faded away...

...Such an account would have mayors Stenvig and Yorty of Minneapolis and Los Angeles figuring very prominently...

...Theodore White, for example, tells us that the "disturbance of spirit" felt by white workingmen in 1964 was "absorbed in the Goldwater vote...

...It might be, to repeat the previously mentioned objection, that the finding is "prebacklash...

...Even these attitudes are not constant, for in recent years they have shown the same tolerant trend found elsewhere in the nation...

...Yet demonstrations against open-housing marchers (once again in the notorious south side of Milwaukee) are presented as further proof of the sentiments of the entire population in that area...

...He found that many of the conventional judgments were unfounded or at least not as clearly and unambiguously supported as some have thought...

...In such a case, the literary intellectual has either submerged the evidence or, worse, failed even to see it...

...The percentages of blue-collar and white-collar respondents saying "no difference" were 72 and 71 respectively...

...and once again, the assumptions that liberal virtue resides in the middle class and that intolerance is disproportionately found in the working class are not supported...

...There is little point in making a priori stipulations as to what the evidence on that "day after" will or will not hold...

...Most of the Gallup presentations during the 1968 presidential campaign made no separation by region, thereby averaging in two divergent patterns...

...But the evidence above suggests the need for some restraint before jumping to a conclusion based on impressions or on a few spectacular or dramatic events...

...Such evidence, involving as it does a kind of behavior (as opposed to the mere expression of opinions to pollsters), is of a much "harder" character...

...Put somewhat differently, this means that older, small-town or rural, (and poorly educated) Southern women are less tolerant than young urban non-Southern (and collegeeducated) men...

...Among the high-income middle-class group, which for short we may call the upper-middle class, approximately half favored his candidacy...

...it showed rather an increase in tolerant sentiment in both groups, the respective figures then being 83 and 88 percent...

...Is it true, as John W. Gardner says, that: The collision between dissenters and lower middle class opponents is exceedingly dangerous...

...The overall result, mixing as it does two diverse orientations, would hide the lack of difference in those areas of greatest public concern...

...Whether "considering Wallace" derived from sympathy for him or from the absence of a more attractive alternative is not indicated in Lipset's presentation...

...They would then be combined so that the result would, typically, be singlescale scores rather than a number of percentages for each of the separate questions...

...And, as is well known, in both elections the white working class is supposed to have indicated its preference for those proffering backlash appeals...

...The Southern pattern would come through in the nationwide figure and suggest general, across-the-board confirmation for the "working-class authoritarianism" thesis...

...In assessing this "difference" it is worth remembering that as a result of migration the non-Southern manual ranks contain a somewhat larger percentage of white exSoutherners than do the nonmanuals...

...it was the "racist workers" and the virtuous (or "moderate") middle class...

...There is of course no way of discounting this possibility entirely—with regard to blue-collar workerswho are polled, or with regard to anyone else...

...It might be owing to competition for jobs, although rural blacks are in general located in different areas from the majority of rural and small-town whites, the former being found disproportionately in lowland plantation areas and the latter in the uplands and hill country...

...Once again we may ask, is that true...

...he is sincere, concerned about the pressing problems in the society, willing to see changes made, but he also is trapped by the inexorable dictates of the situation...

...That is all true enough, Wallace did score heavily to take approximately one-third of the votes there...

...The same question, when asked four years later during the 1968 election campaign, found 85 percent of the manuals and 84 percent of the nonmanuals favoring the open housing option...

...Here the difference between the manual and nonmanual vote for Wallace was a matter of four percentage points within the non-South populations...

...A review of "the nation's malaise" by any of these writers will dwell on an assortment of awesome backlash campaigns...

...Without these two special contributions, it seems likely that even this one-percent difference would disappear...

...Such selective perception and continuous misreading of the evidence gives rise to the alarm felt by liberal policy-makers and, in turn, provides the basis for "go slow" policies and "benign neglect...

...The only point omitted in White's account is that Wallace drew almost twice as high a percentage in the elegant north-side suburbs...

...Such misrepresentation of the sources of Wallace's 1964 strength is quite wide-spread...

...The location of the conflict, in most cases, is determined by urban social geography...

...In such cases, a range of questions would be used, some having high, some middling, and some low tolerance response levels...

...Intellectuals of a literary persuasion are compulsively hostile to systematic data presentations, preferring instead their own "free" and uninhibited associations stimulated by the New York Times accounts of the day's events...

...There was a period of quiescence and then again, slowly, the hypothesis reappeared in all its glory for its George Wallace flowering...

...Given the impressive agreement in liberal circles on the virtue of the educated and responsible middle class, it is not surprising to learn that 91 percent of the white-collar group favor equal treatment...

...Similar results have appeared from time to time, but not fitting in with dominant preconceptions, they have generally been ignored...

...The discrepancy between the two results may mean that some whites, particularly those in the manual ranks, subscribe to an equality position and to a "neighborhood autonomy" position at the same time...

...in the world view of liberal intellectuals, those persons who share decent and humane values form a tiny minority standing on the edge of an abyss...

...It might be owing to the influence of fundamentalist Protestant sects preaching the inferiority of the sons of Ham...

...The 1963 NORC question read as follows: "Do you think white students and Negro students should go to the same schools, or to separate schools...

...A majority of the white workers also take an equalitarian position on the housing question...

...The best one can hope for is that the threatening groups remain quiescent, that they not be aroused...

...One might haggle over the wording of the question and object that the "same income and education" phrase might obscure the "real" distribution of opinion...

...Of the non-Southern blue-collar workers, 9 percent voted for Wallace as against 8 percent of the equivalent white-collar workers...

...In this respect they exhibit all the perceptual biases and distortions that have been so amply documented in experiments in social psychology...

...The percentages favoring open housing were 72 among the blue-collar workers and 80 in the white-collar ranks...

...In that world view they are always standing there, the problem being that there are so few people who share those values and so many potentially powerful and, if aroused, dangerous groups present in the society...

...In some ways "backlash" is an inBibliographical Note This article is based on Chapter 11 of my forth coming book Class and Political Orientations in the United States (to be published by John Wiley & Sons, New York...

...But then, one might ask, where else could they occur...

...Taking the April 1968 question on equal job opportunities, the percentages of manuals and nonmanuals taking the tolerant position were 79 and 77...

...It may well come as a surprise, however, to learn that approximately the same percentage, 87 to be exact, of the blue-collar group also say Negroes should have an equal chance...

...In Dane County, which contains the state capital, the most elegant suburb, Maple Bluff, also had the more elegant level of Wallace support...

...People who find such responses difficult to believe, perhaps because they are somehow attachedto the idea that manual workers must be a repository of bias, will sometimes ask the question: howdo you know that they are really expressing their genuine feelings when they respond in the polls...

...A sizable minority of the white workers, some 39 percent, favored Wallace as did approximately one-third of the lower-income middle-class...

...The point, in short, is that literary–political intellectuals read their special preconceptions into the day's news...

...All this, however, is mere play as against RICHARD F. HAMILTON the most telling demonstration of the "workingclass racism" thesis: the vote for Wallace in the 1968 election...

...Again one may ask the question, is this true...

...The frustration of the voters in that election is indicated by one poll result which showed that 43 percent of the electorate were not satisfied with any of the three candidates who had presented themselves...

...But then, prior to the 1970 congressional elections, there it was once again...

...It seems likely that much of this Wallace vote came from those out to punish the Democratic "favorite son," a governor who had brought in a sales tax...

...And it would be a mistake to write these voters off as untutored arrivistes, since 22 percent of 228 that group had at least some college educa tion and another 42 percent had finished col lege or gone on for a higher degree...

...Put still another way, this means that there are a lot of other factors operating besides education to yield those handsome distributions...

...According to most political surveyors, the best available studies of the American electorate are those undertaken by the Survey Research Center of the University of Michigan...

...To summarize the evidence briefly: among the non-Southern whites there is immense support for equality with respect to jobs, housing, and educational opportunities...

...For he demonstrated pragmatically and for the first time the fear that white working-class Americans have of Negroes...

...It is correct that most incidents of blackwhite conflict occur in white working-class neighborhoods on the edge of the ghettos...

...If one compulsively rejects systematic evidence and has a trained, aesthetic disgust when faced with "data," with numbers, percentages, or correlation coefficients, then clearly that kind of contact with reality is never going to affect one's understanding...

...The evidence reviewed here indicates that the policy-maker genuinely concerned with equality and human decency has considerably more support for his initiative than he ever dreamed...

...In the antiseptic lanLIBERAL INTELLIGENTSIA AND WHITE BACKLASH 231 guage of the social sciences, this would be called "selective perception...

...One study that presented evidence challenging the conventional wisdom was treated as follows by two sociologists: "There is just too much independent evidence that prejudice toward Negroes is inversely associated with current occupational status for us to contemplate seriously the possibility that the zero order associations revealed by this data are substantively correct...

...that] as long as the dissenters are confronting the top layers of the power structure, they are dealing with people who are reasonably secure, often willing to compromise, able to yield ground without anxiety...

...Again, is it true...

...The "independent evidence" they then cite consists of three community studies and one very erratic sample of veterans...

...It is always possible that the long-term trend toward greater tolerance might be, or might already, since 1968, have been reversed...

...There is a striking congruence between these voting results and the attitudinal evidence discussed above...

...119, 1967...

...A question asked by the University of Michigan Survey Research Center in its 1964 election study does not contain that kind of clause...

...Only one-eighth of the Southern white uppermiddle class favored Wallace, most of them preferring Nixon...

...The overall levels of tolerance are considerably lower and there are also rather consistent and fair-sized differences between manuals and nonmanuals...

...One might sum it up with a modification of a current slogan: they are "telling it like it isn't...

...The Gallup results throughout the campaign showed the manual workers to be only a few percentage points ahead of the nonmanual categories in their level of Wallace support...

...Even in this case, were the nervous liberal once again to feel beleaguered, it should be noted that there are still some 45 percent of the blue-collar workers who are with him on this matter...

...Aren't they perhaps giving what they think are theproper or expected answers, while in their actualconduct they go by different, less attractive values...

...The conventional presentation, in other words, lends credence to the notion of working-class intolerance by averaging diverse regional patterns...

...One might add further details to this picture of the Southern Wallace vote...

...Are the liberals really as threatened as they imagine...

...This allows some methodological gains and a considerable degree of economy in the presentation of findings...

...Outside the South, there were no class differences on those issues which were presumably of key concern, manuals and nonmanuals alike showing very high tolerant—equalitarian percentages...

...The University of Michigan's Survey Research Center's 1964 election study shows only 20 percent of the non-Southern white workers supporting Goldwater in that election, a level of Republican sentiment well below normal levels...

...RICHARD F. HAMILTON...

...In the case of the NORC studies reported here, it would mean combining the questions on jobs, housing, and schooling (which showed either small or no class differences) with the questions on more intimate contacts (which did show such differences...

...When questions were asked about closer contacts, the amount of approval fell off sharply from the high levels indicated in the questions about job equality, housing, and equal schooling...

...The persistent dovishness of blue-collar workers in antiwar referenda is shown by Harlan Hahn in "Correlates of Public Sentiments about War: Local Referenda on the Vietnam Issue," American Political Science Review, December 1970, pp...

...It is a serious question, however, as to whether the actions of small minorities of counterdemonstrators (many of whom are not from the immediate area) speak for or express the feelings of the majority of white workers...

...Again, the RICHARD F. HAMILTON evidence provides no indication of a re action.* Not all the evidence is as positive as these results...

...This result comes from the same study that asked about the Negro with the same education and income moving in...

...The available evidence does not support that interpretation...

...Outside of the ghetto, his vote in that primary was lowest in white workingclass neighborhoods...

...In 1963, the National Opinion Research Center (NORC) asked a representative sample of the American population a question touching directly on what is presumed to be the central area of the black-white struggle, the matter of jobs...

...In this case the conventional wisdom would gain some support even if there were a separate presentation by region...

...The relationships indicated in the monthly polls were somewhat erratic, and in some cases the manual percentage even fell belowthat of some of the nonmanual groups...

...But, even in the South, there are some striking exceptions...

...Another tendency involves the magnification of small percentage differences...

...When it is a question of closer contacts, much less equalitarian sentiment is indicated and in these cases there are some larger differences between manuals and nonmanuals...

...Among relatively low-income middle-class groups approximately a third favored Goldwater...

...But when the same question was asked in April 1968, the result did not indicate a "backlash" or "reaction" at all...

...In the South the difference was again considerably greater...

...and these were, overwhelmingly, white workingman votes...

...In this case somewhat lower percentages disagreed, that is, took the tolerant position, the figures being 45 and 63 percent for manuals and nonmanuals respectively...

...His summary conclusion reads: "Socioeconomic status has no uniform effect of its own on attitudes toward the rights of Negroes...

...In those locations he took approximately two-fifths of the total as against less than one-fifth in the larger cities...

...it asks: "Which of these statements would you agree with...

...Rather than absorbing the "disturbed spirits," the Goldwater candidacy repelled hundreds of thousands of them...

...In order to have conflict one must have contact...

...Or, Negroes have a right to live wherever they can afford to, just like white people...

...The Wallace appeal, incidentally, was exactly the same in both the lower-middle and upper-middle-class segments...

...There are a number of reasons...

...RICHARD F. HAMILTON The evidence presented here is not entirely new...

...Clear, tangible evidence of this reaction appeared in support for George Wallace provided by the white working class...

...Another question deserving some attention is stimulated by this discrepancy between the evidence presented here and the productions of liberal intellectuals...

...Interpretations are passed around within a narrow circle of acquaintances...

...The job question reads as follows: "Do you think Negroes should have as good a chance as white people to get any kind of job, or do you think white people should have the first chance at any kind of job...

...One of the difficulties of survey research is that the day after one can always say—"That was yesterday...

...In great measure, the understanding that then comes to dominate has roughly the same basis as that of neighborhood or backyard gossip...

...And a second major source of "strain" for the white workers appears when blacks move into "their" neighborhoods, the housing areas immediately adjacent to the ghettos...

...Those people within that circle support and mutually reinforce each other so that in time their special understandings appear to be indisputable...

...Again, taking the words of the eminent commentator Theodore White, we learn that No less than 4.1 million [of Wallace's 9.9 million votes] came from the Northern and Western states...

...White people have a right to keep Negroes out of their neighborhoods if they want to...

...Why do the smaller Southern communities have the outlook they do...

...see also, Mildred A. Schwartz, Trends in White Attitudes Toward Negroes (Chi cago: National Opinion Research Center, Report No...

...Asked about objections to one's teen-age child dating a black boy or girl, the percentages with "no objections" fell to 6 and 13...

...In Wisconsin he scored heavily in the predominantly Italian, Polish and Serb working-class neighborhoods of Milwaukee's south side...

...These presentations characteristically show a very strong relationship and one is invited to translate the result back to the "obvious" implications for the poorly educated and the well-educated occupational groups...

...A 1968 statement read: "White people have a right to keep Negroes out of their neighborhoods if they want to, and Negroes should respect that right...

...The voting evidence shows much the same pattern, a very limited attraction to the Wallace appeals and essentially the same level of such interest indicated by both groups...

...This is an area in which, once again, there is fierce antiblack and necessarily antiequalitarian sentiment present...

...And what is showing up in this education– tolerance relationship seems to be that older people are less tolerant than younger people...

...It was a vote centered in smaller communities and middle-sized cities...

...The evidence reviewed here would indicate that they do not...

...And one should also bear in mind that the nonSouthern middle-class ranks gain a special edge in "liberalism" as a result of the disproportionate number of Jews present there...

...White working-class communities are broken up, property values suffer, hard-earned equities disappear or are seriously diminished, problems develop in the schools and intense racial hostilities result...

...For there to be conflict between upper-middle-class whites and blacks, one or the other of them would have to go on a long march or take a long bus ride...

...A discussion of the 1968 election by Seymour Martin Lipset and Earl Raab, which is based on Gallup data, shows results that are very similar to those of the Survey Research Center study...

...The percentages favoring integrated schools in LIBERAL INTELLIGENTSIA AND WHITE BACKLASH 1963, for example, (as compared to the 1968 figures cited in the previous paragraph) were only 21 and 49...

...The mistaken conclusion can, in some circumstances, give rise to the very eventuality one would ardently wish to avoid...

...The respective percentages approving of a Negro moving into their neighborhood were 55 and 63...

...The nonSouthern middle-class whites again indicate a commendable level of liberal virtue, 88 percent favoring such laws...

...The political sociologist Seymour Martin Lipset, for example, writing in Encounter later that year, claimed that Wallace "received his highest vote in the predominantly Catholic workingclass areas of Milwaukee...

...Some presentations have shown tolerance and intolerance by educational level (presumably a surrogate for or close equivalent to occupation...

...98-108...

...When asked about school integration a similar result appeared...

...712-19...

...It is in the South that one finds a relatively intolerant working class...

...1186-88, and in his "Dove Sentiments Among Blue-Collar Workers," Dissent, May—June 1970...

...Regrettably, his work has not gained the attention it deserves, and one result is that the conventional wisdom persists...

...or at least so it is said...

...How come...

...In 1963 the NORC asked the following question: "If a Negro with the same income and education as you moved into your block, would it make any difference to you...

...The evidence reviewed here covers events through November 1968...

...One might conclude that this was 1963, before the black revolution took on such aggressive form, before there were any serious demands made on the available supply of jobs, that is, before the white workingclass reaction had occurred...

...When one asks, however, about Peter Flaherty and Sam Massell, the mayors of Pittsburgh and Atlanta—both of whom beat back the established powers in their respective cities, fighting all the standard weapons in the backlash arsenal—the characteristic response is, who are they...

...The scenario of the Wall Street construction worker events is covered by Fred Cook in "Hard Hats: The Rampaging Patriots," the Nation, June 15, 1970, pp...

...nomenon in Wisconsin in 1964 see Michael Rogin, "Wallace and the Middle Class: The White Backlash in Wisconsin," Public Opinion Quarterly, Spring 1966, pp...

...A few thousand construction workers, following a scenario very similar to that of the motion picture Z, attack peace demonstrators on Wall Street, and for these intellectuals those few thousand become the "typical" blue-collar workers...

...Some ten years ago Charles Herbert Stember reviewed a large number of national studies in his book Education and Attitude Change (published by the Institute of Human Relations Press, New York, 1961...

...The same question was asked in April 1968, the percentages being 80 and 89 for manuals and nonmanuals respectively...

...In April of 1968 the same organization asked a somewhat different job question, this one reading: "How do you feel about fair employment laws—that is, laws that make white people hire qualified Negroes, so that Negroes can get any job they are qualified for—do you favor or oppose such laws...

...Taking their study of the 1968 election and examining the non-Southern white respondents and their political preferences, one finds that Theodore White's claim is not supported...

...The focus on the "competition for jobs" appears, therefore, to be misleading...

...There is no warrant for seeing the wall ofopposition suggested by Walinsky's remark...

...This study indicates that four-fifths of the Southern white workers hold an equalitarian position on that question...

...For additional evidence, see Herbert Hyman and Paul Sheatsley, "Attitudes Toward Desegregation," Scientific American, July 1964, pp...

...Speaking of that other remarkable event of the 1964 campaign, the appearance of George Wallace on the national scene, Theo dore White observes: .. . Wallace astounded political observers not so much by the percentage of votes he could draw for simple bigotry...

...These attitudes also vary considerably within the South, the lowest tolerance appearing in the Goldwater or Wallace states and the highest in the border states...

...Once again, the result did not match the grim prognostications of the professional alarmists and, in the face of some more positive results in the 1969 elections, the concern again faded...

...In any event, a majority of the manual workers who "considered" Wallace eventually rejected him so as to yield the 4 percent difference...

...Is it true, as Adam Walinsky puts it, that "There are now only two identifiable ethnic groups—blacks and those who hate them "? The white workers, so goes the sedulously repeated lesson, compete with blacks for jobs and hence are hostile to any moves that would tend to favor the latter...

...Where that has happened—as for example when open-housing marchers went to two upper-middle-class suburbs in Milwaukee— the receptions were similar to the marches to the south-side working-class areas...

...One fact that has been completely overlooked amidst the talk of a growing reaction is that Wallace's vote in the south side of Milwaukee was considerably lower both in percentage and in absolute numbers in the 1968 presidential election than in the 1964 presidential primary...

...But my own assumption would be that such a response bias is more likely to occur among middle-classrespondents, who are much more involved with current views preaching or assuming tolerance, than among blue-collar workers, whose milieumight be more supportive to a frank expression of intolerant attitudes...

...Where some conception of relative magnitudes was indicated the tendency still was to magnify the differences—as, for example, in 230 Theodore White's use of the adjective "overwhelming...

...and my chapter, "Black Demands, White Reactions and Liberal Alarms," in Re straining Myths and Liberating Realities (forth coming) . On the misrepresentation of the Wallace phe 232 destructible hypothesis...

...as by the groups from whom he drew his votes...

...In the South, by comparison, the traditional hypothesis is supported...

...The manual—nonmanual difference in Wallace support is a matter of one percentage point...

...Did they vote racist...

...Once again, the image of the 226 liberals as a beleaguered minority is not supported...

...But education is a poor surrogate for occupation, for the simple reason that education is very strongly related to age...

...Despite all the influences of the media, all the pressure of their labor leaders, all the blunders and incompetence of the Wallace campaign, they had voted racist...

...If these hostile groups were to be aroused (at one time the dangerous lowermiddle class was the problem, now there is also the dangerous white working class), the liberal minority would be unable to stem the reaction that would follow...

...Some data presentations make use of attitude scales...

...Throughout the 1964 election campaign commentators of all varieties were predicting it, regardless of the evidence of the pollsters, and only when the result was in did they, for a moment at least, desist...

...Despite this, the formulations tended to be categorical...

...These authors also added the percentage of those who "considered Wallace" in the course of the campaign and, looking at the "Total Wallace Sympathizers," came up with a larger difference, one of 12 percentage points...