Tapping the Resentment Vote
ROBERTS, STEVEN V.
NATIONAL REPORTS Tapping the Resentment Vote By Steven V. Roberts Although his roots are in the rural, red-neck South, George Wallace has a great opportunity to work his deviltry during this...
...George Wallace might be just the pyromaniac to set the match to the fuse...
...People see their taxes going up, and they see them going for one main thing?welfare...
...In a sense Wallace is right: They are the "forgotten little men" in this era of the highly visible and militant poor...
...At the same time the influx of poor non-whites, with its attendant social and economic dislocations, has placed an enormous strain on city budgets...
...So he brings out the fears of the lower middle class by evoking the threat of riots and muggings, and by attacking the "pseudo-intellectuals" who would shackle the police, thwart the generals in Vietnam, and redistribute the country's wealth...
...If a candidate like Nelson Rockefeller should hold Republican strength in rural and suburban areas while picking up support among dissident liberal Democrats, Johnson's simultaneous loss of lower-middle-class votes to Wallace could make the difference in states like Ohio, Pennsylvania and Illinois...
...We have to eliminate this as a local issue before it tears our cities apart...
...On the other hand, it is not surprising that McCarthy was given a fund-raising party in Manhattan recently by one of the Vanderbilts...
...The union chiefs who quit ada after it endorsed Senator Eugene McCarthy may well have trouble keeping some of their members out of the Wallace camp...
...and this growing gap has exacerbated unrest among the poor...
...You might even think the taxes are being put to good use...
...He touches something deep and unhappy in this country, something that could threaten the fragile order of our cities if ever it explodes...
...The answer is usually something like, "That bum...
...But that does not make life any easier for the cabbie, or the fellow who pumps his gas, or someone who works on the assembly line that made his car...
...The calamity would be even worse if he dealt away his crucial votes to the highest bidder for significant concessions on important social issues...
...Wallace's appeal outside the South was amply demonstrated in 1964, when he drew 30 per cent of the primary vote in Indiana, 34 per cent in Wisconsin, 43 per cent in Maryland...
...In a recrudescence of Social Darwinism that is even more artful than the original, Wallace both challenges the manhood of the voter and plays on his deepest anxieties about his social, economic and physical security...
...The lower middle class consists largely of hereditary Democrats who were weaned on the politics of labor unions, ethnic groups and big city machines...
...Similarly, the lower middle class is farther below the upper middle class than it used to be, and it is apparently feeling the same kind of resentment as the poor against those on the adjacent rungs...
...The signs are everywhere...
...According to this aide, Lindsay is convinced that whether or not the cities get more Federal help they must continue to devote much of their resources to helping poor blacks...
...NATIONAL REPORTS Tapping the Resentment Vote By Steven V. Roberts Although his roots are in the rural, red-neck South, George Wallace has a great opportunity to work his deviltry during this election year in the lower-middle-class white neighborhoods of the nation's large urban centers...
...As vice chairman of the President's Advisory Commission on Civil Disorders he pressed for a recommendation that the Federal government take over the nation's entire welfare program...
...The frustration within the lower middle class, though, is not solely the result of higher taxes for increased government spending...
...Today the city's welfare program serves more than 800,000 people, adding 14,000 new dependents every month...
...But Wallace's appeal is also rooted in the very structure of our urban centers, a structure that is not much easier to change than the gut feelings of one man for another...
...Yet as Timothy J. Cooney, a former New York housing official, emphasized recently in his resignation speech, the whole middle class has very little patience left for even the miniscule programs that do exist...
...And that was a long time ago in Steven V. Roberts reports on local politics for the New York Times...
...The significant fact now is that Wallace will probably be running in many of the 50 states next fall, and his mere presence could prove an enormously disruptive force no matter how many votes he wins...
...In the North, it is quite possible he would be a greater threat to the Democratic party...
...What is the Wallace attraction to the white working man, such people, to cite his list, as "barbers, beauticians, policemen, firemen, cab drivers, auto workers, glass workers, businessmen...
...These men are just as infected by the mass media and yearn just as heartily for the fruits of affluence as any other low-income group...
...In essence, then, George Wallace recognizes that the poor and the middle class are economic enemies...
...Essentially, the situation is this: City tax bases are being undermined by the emigration of industry to cheaper rural areas, and of middle-class residents to surrounding suburbs...
...It is there that he has his best chance of actually winning the electoral votes that could shift the election to the House...
...But with a top salary of about $158 per week, they are not able to afford many symbols of prosperity without a great struggle...
...Now if you can afford many cab rides, you can probably afford the taxes you have to pay in New York...
...In other words, it falls on precisely those who are least able to pay the mounting taxes...
...Despite the higher taxes, it enjoys a far higher absolute standard of living today than 30 years ago...
...While state and Federal allocations help to finance swelling city budgets, the heaviest burden still falls on the lower middle class, on the people who cannot escape their decaying neighborhoods...
...Ask a New York cab driver what he thinks of Mayor Lindsay...
...For his Presidential candidacy promises to further provoke a frustration and restlessness which has thus far surfaced only sporadically, in incidents such as the fierce opposition to Martin Luther King's Cicero, Illinois, open housing campaign...
...Wallace's campaign, even if it does not ultimately succeed in upsetting the major parties, will be a troublesome phenomenon...
...Add a dash of corny sincerity and you have an extremely potent brew...
...The garbage collectors on the picket lines echoed all the concerns of prosperous America: mortgages, real estate taxes, car payments...
...He's doing too much for them damn niggers...
...Lindsay is also deeply worried, the aide added, that he is losing support in the Jewish community, long a strong backer of welfare measures...
...American political history—before the urban riots, before black power, before war spending increased the threat of inflation and higher taxes...
...But this view will draw only limited support from traditionally conservative ethnic groups, from Italians or Poles or Ukrainians...
...Mayor Lindsay, for one, is aware of—and frightened by—this growing hostility to social welfare programs...
...This was clearly demonstrated during the recent New York sanitation workers' strike...
...But this nightmare is still a very long shot in the political future book...
...In the South, the polls agree, Wallace would probably hurt the renascent Republican party, which has thrived by shouting louder and more virulent conservative slogans than the Democrats...
...These prospects for November point up the massive shift taking place in the country's political alignments, led by the crack-up of the old labor-intellectual coalition...
...The cities have not even begun to make the kind of effort the plight of the poor demands...
...However, as Christopher Jencks and David Riesman note in the current issue of the Public Interest, the gaps between America's economic classes have widened considerably in this period...
...The poorest class is actually farther below the working or lower middle class now than in the 1930s...
...Of course, the ex-Governor of Alabama could seriously damage the nation's political process by winning enough states to deprive either major candidate of a majority in the Electoral College and throwing the election into the House of Representatives...
...Why do his calls for law and order, for an end to "pseudo-intellectuals," for a curb on welfare programs stir so deep a response...
...New York City, a prime example of this dilemma, faces a budget deficit of $400 million in 1968...
...It is this bitter resentment which is fertile soil for the Wallace campaign...
...Local government contributions for anti-poverty, housing, job-training and other programs have multiplied drastically...
...Politically, he benefits from the troubles of the two major parties...
...A Jewish cab driver in New York or a Polish steel worker in Gary who votes for Wallace has probably never voted for a Republican in his life...
...The city lost 1.2 million whites between 1950-65 and gained 1.1 million Negroes and Puerto Ricans, who now comprise 28 per cent of the population...
...Racism?rarely invoked, always understood—is an obvious and important factor: The lower middle class resents the threat of the blacks to their jobs, their neighborhoods, and their tenuous scraps of status...
...Where formerly stable areas have collapsed under the pressure of racial change, the tax base has been especially hard hit, causing landlords to abandon property and tenants rather than meet unbearably high real estate levies...
...One of his aides explained why: "The welfare issue has poisoned the atmosphere all around the country...
Vol. 51 • March 1968 • No. 6
