Counting Up Grievances
LEKACHMAN, ROBERT
Counting Up Grievances The Anguish of Change By Louis Harris Norton. 306 pp. $7.50. Reviewed by Robert Lekachman Despite the ambitious title, this volume is neither more nor less than a set...
...In 1966, by contrast, the doctors mustered a 72 per cent favorable vote and even the advertising folk managed to draw 21 per cent...
...On solid evidence, Harris projects that for the near future unions are more likely to adopt centrist than innovative attitudes to social and economic change...
...Still, a considerable amount of the information and a fair portion of the gossip he provides is fascinating...
...On rather less evidence, Harris seems to think that business leadership may become increasingly bold on consumer and environmental issues...
...While persuaded that their condition has been improving, blacks remain skeptical of the good faith and attitudes of the white majority...
...This may or may not be so, but whites as well as blacks now accept school integration and job equality as proper goals...
...In 1963, for example, 55 per cent of whites were convinced that black morals were lower than white morals...
...By 1971, "only" 40 per cent held to this conviction...
...With only trivial degrees of difference, unionists share the views of other Americans on drugs, demonstrators, law and order, hair styles, and the young...
...Ordinary people, increasingly skeptical of all establishments, are prone to believe both that their employers, teachers, doctors, merchants, and bankers treat them unfairly and that neither Presidents, Congresses or courts can be relied on to rectify their grievances...
...As a deep thinker, Louis Harris is no more impressive than the next pundit...
...One of Harris' more striking findings is the general loss of confidence in all manner of leaders and institutions...
...The main trouble," he begins, "with the racial problem in the United States is that most blacks and most whites as groups don't like each other...
...When asked whether they "have a 'great deal' of confidence" in doctors, financial leaders, scientists, military leaders, educators, psychiatrists, religious leaders, retail store operators, the Supreme Court, the Executive Branch of government, corporation executives, Congress, the press, people running TV, labor leaders, and advertising leaders, Americans sourly accorded the inhabitants of none of these categories a majority vote...
...With 48 per cent, doctors fared best and, with a mere 12 per cent, advertising leaders worst...
...In conclusion, I am tempted to utter one of those pundity deep thoughts that I began by deprecating...
...But on questions of wealth and power, as well as war and peace, union members are no further to the Left than the general population...
...blacks smell different, and blacks want to live off the handout...
...This is the speculation that right now in America there is a lot of inchoate radical feeling in unexpected places...
...Republicans who followed the Nixon-Agnew lead in 1970 and tried to whip up public outrage on such matters usually fared poorly in working-class districts...
...Reviewed by Robert Lekachman Despite the ambitious title, this volume is neither more nor less than a set of essays summarizing the Harris organization's continuing inquiries into the public's opinions on law and order, drugs, war and peace, race relations, and the quality of national leadership...
...The public played no favorites...
...On race relations, Harris' news is a mixture of good and bad...
...The four groups whose decline in prestige was most precipitous were financial leaders, military leaders, educators, and corporation executives...
...For its part, that majority tends to exaggerate the extent of recent progress toward racial equality, and to believe that blacks are pushing too hard "before they are ready...
...So one might interpret the very low voter turnout in the 1972 election...
...The best news on the labor front is the failure of the Scammon-Wat-tenberg "social issue" to hold up as a subject of special appeal to working men and women...
...In the absence of a generally acceptable politics of reform, this mass disaffection may register itself through an aversion to the political process...
...Long continued, voter cynicism opens the door to demagogic voices on both Left and Right...
...More encouraging is the finding that negative racial stereotypes, although prevalent in the land, are diminishing...
...As a writer, he indulges in far too much name-dropping of the "Bobby, Lyndon and I" variety, and has a somewhat exaggerated sense of his own importance...
...Similar shifts were registered in response to such statements as: blacks are less ambitious than whites, blacks laugh a lot...
...One thing is certain: The natives (myself included) are restless...
...What cost George McGovern heaviest in this group during his 1972 Presidential campaign was his support for "radical" income redistribution and his insistance that the Vietnam war was morally wrong...
...I await with a mixture of hope and fear the consequences of this emotional state...
Vol. 57 • February 1974 • No. 4
