You speak with wise tongue, oh mighty Richard. But then, who's listening?
Carl Jarvis
On 8/10/16, Richard Driscoll <llocsirdsr@xxxxxxx> wrote:
Carl:
The names have changed - and -
There is a new audience to listen to the speeches. (That is to say The
public has changed)
Richard
On 8/8/2016 11:23 AM, Carl Jarvis wrote:
Only the names have been changed...to confuse the public.
Carl Jarvis
On 8/7/16, S. Kashdan <skashdan@xxxxxxx> wrote:
On The Trail With George Wallace
Letter from Washington
BY RICHARD H. ROVERE
The New Yorker, Letter from Washington May 16, 1964 Issue
http://www.newyorker.com/magazine/1964/05/16/letter-from-washington-george-wallace?mbid=nl_Sunday%20Longreads%20(38)&CNDID=42301087&spMailingID=8955679&spUserID=MTM0Njk3NDMwNjU3S0&spJobID=922155003&spReportId=OTIyMTU1MDAzS0
May 8
All politics seem at the moment topsy-turvy. In Ohio, a man named
Kennedy
came close to winning a Democratic congressional nomination, partly, it
is
said, on the strength of the name he proudly bore and traded upon, partly
on
the strength of his record as a militant, articulate white supremacist.
He
died while the returns were still coming in. In the Indiana Democratic
primary, Governor Wallace, of Alabama, was the favorite of the
industrial
proletariat of Lake County, who also nominated an integrationist and a
Negro
physician for coroner of Gary. Senator Goldwater keeps slipping in
popular
support while gaining Convention delegates. Dr. Gallup’s latest
soundings
show Goldwater favored by fourteen per cent of his party’s rank and file,
as
against Ambassador Lodge’s thirty-seven per cent and Richard Nixon’s
twenty-eight. Harold Stassen was stronger in Indiana than Goldwater is
in
the entire country. Yet it now seems that Goldwater will go to the
Republican Convention only about ninety votes short of the six hundred
and
fifty-five needed for nomination. If he defeats Governor Rockefeller in
California next month, he will be only four short of the magic number,
and
it will be extremely difficult for the Convention to deny the nomination
to
a candidate favored by one out of every seven Party voters.
All things considered, Goldwater has been doing extraordinarily well. If
he
doesn’t get the nomination, he will be in a position to decide which of
his
rivals will get it. However, a conclusion that might be drawn from
recent
polls, official and unofficial, is that if Goldwater is serious about
the
Presidency and about his rightist convictions, he really ought to be a
Democrat. It is a bit late for him to do anything about this in 1964, but
it
is something he might be thinking about for 1968 or 1972. His appeal,
according to Governor Rockefeller and others who oppose him, is primarily
to
the "extremists" in the Republican Party. This is said to be even truer
of
Governor Wallace in the Democratic Party. Yet in Democratic primaries in
two
large and reasonably representative Northern states--Wisconsin and
Indiana--Wallace has attracted more than thirty per cent of the votes.
And
he may do a good deal better than that in Maryland ten days from now.
Apparently, there are many more Democratic than Republican extremists,
even
if due allowance is made for Republican crossovers, and, as a matter of
record, there are many more Democrats than Republicans. Indeed, one
statistician here, extrapolating Wallace’s primary showings, the
numerical
superiority of Democrats to Republicans across the country, and the
prevalence of segregationist and states’ rights views in the South, has
estimated that there are more Democratic extremists than there are
Republicans of all varieties. Among Northern Democrats, Wallace labors
under
many disadvantages that would not encumber Goldwater if he switched
over.
Wallace is an Alabama carpetbagger bent on mischief and ready for
insurrection, in which he has already had some experience. He breathes
rancor, his manner is at once cold and abrasive, and his speech is an
assault on the central nervous system. But what he has been advocating
up
North is just about indistinguishable from what Goldwater has been
advocating North, South, East, and West. (Senator Goldwater is not a
white
supremacist, as Wallace is, but Wallace has not been addressing himself
directly to the race question in his Northern appearances.) Where
Wallace
offends, Goldwater charms. He is innocent of rancor and about as abrasive
as
a jar of cold cream. He may appeal to extremists, and he may even be
one,
but he doesn’t look or sound like one. If he had chosen the right party
to
begin with, he would, one imagines, be running a lot stronger than
Wallace,
whose arrogance and virulence and contempt for the law must put off a lot
of
voters. Goldwater is modest and gentle, and has never been a sit-in or
stand-in demonstrator as Wallace was in Tuscaloosa last year. Goldwater
is
also much better known than Wallace. As a Democrat, he should be able to
hold the extremist thirty to thirty-five per cent of the Party and draw
support from other factions. As a states’-rights Democrat, rather than a
right-to-work Republican, he might find support in one section of the
populace that up to now has shown nothing but hostility toward
him--organized labor. Though Wallace has also offended the unions by
supporting right-to-work laws, he swept some working-class districts in
Gary
and Hammond with as much as sixty-five per cent of the vote.
Civil-rights proponents in both parties here are making all kinds of
efforts
to explain away the Wallace vote. Some, like Senator Humphrey, say that
the
only important thing about Wallace’s candidacy is that it has thus far
met
with defeat. These people point out that his Wisconsin and Indiana
opponents
got two-thirds of the Party vote, which, they say with unquestionable
accuracy, is a very large margin of victory in any political contest in
this
country. Others say that the primaries in Wisconsin and Indiana are not
to
be taken seriously, because in neither case was Wallace running against
a
serious candidate for the Presidency. Governors Reynolds and Welsh had
their
names put on the ballot only to oppose Wallace and to make sure that
regular
Party men will be seated as delegates in Atlantic City in August. In
Maryland, week after next, Senator Daniel B. Brewster will provide the
opposition for the same reasons. It is said that if President Johnson’s
name
were on the ballot in any of the states in which Wallace is campaigning,
the
vote for Wallace would be negligible--perhaps ten per cent. (In other
words,
two-thirds of the extremists would vote for Johnson.) Another argument
is
that the absence of the President’s name or that of any other national
figure turns the primaries into referendums on local issues. Thus, in
Wisconsin and Indiana it was the performances of the two governors that
were
being judged, and both governors were vulnerable. Organization Democrats
in
Indiana say that the Wallace vote was essentially a protest against a
new
two-per-cent sales tax that Governor Welsh supported. In a television
interview two days ago, Senator Brewster managed to discount one-third
of
the Wallace vote by saying that ten per cent of the voters are
permanently
aggrieved and can be counted upon in any election to support "any
nameless,
faceless man" who is represented to them as being in total opposition to
established local or national authority. The same day, the President, in
his
family-style news conference, resorted to the now familiar device of
figuring the extremist candidate’s percentage of the total Presidential
preference vote in both parties and suggesting that this is the true
measure
of his strength. By this means, the President brought Wallace down to
twenty
per cent (actually, it would be about eighteen), and said he hardly
regarded
this as an "overwhelming endorsement." If he had combined this approach
with
that of Senator Brewster on the chronic naysayers, the percentage could
have
been cut to a rather encouraging eight or ten.
Certain military and geopolitical strategists have from time to time come
up
with figures on the number of deaths that a society like ours might
regard
as "acceptable" in the first stages of thermonuclear war. By
"acceptable"
they mean "endurable." The figures always seem fairly high. As far as is
known, the social sciences have not advanced to the point of estimating
how
much bigotry or how widespread a response to demagogy a free and
normally
peaceable society can endure. Certainly the figure must be above thirty
per
cent; conceivably it could be above fifty per cent. Almost on the eve of
his
downfall ten years ago, Senator McCarthy, according to the polls, was
held
in good opinion by exactly half the country. But despite the current
efforts
of the liberals to discount the Wallace showing, the fact is that there
are
few, if any, of them who have not been astonished and dismayed by his
showing. None of them can point to a forecast of anything like so large
a
vote for him; he himself said he would "rattle the eyeteeth" of the
liberals
if he got fifteen per cent in Wisconsin, and that was probably an honest
estimate of what he expected. Nor, a couple of months back, was anyone
explaining that support of a racist in a Presidential primary wouldn’t
really have much to do with racism, that it would most likely reflect a
concern with local issues like sales taxes, or that a large part of it
would
be attributable to pure cussedness. The fact that the interpretations
were
not offered in advance of the events does not invalidate them. Some
believers in racial equality and brotherhood may have voted for Wallace
because they thought he had the better of the argument over the
relationship
between the federal government and the states. Many, one can be almost
certain, would not have voted for him if they had thought his candidacy
a
real threat to President Johnson’s. None of this diminishes the size of
the
vote that he actually got, or what appears to be its simplest
meaning--freely given approval, on a secret ballot, of a man primarily
known
as a believer in segregation, a doctrine he would carry to the point of
denying training in his state university to a single qualified Negro. In
many ways, a vote in a primary election has a significance larger than
that
of a vote in a general election. It is, as the right-wing publicist
William
F. Buckley, Jr., noted in a celebration of Wallace’s showing in
Wisconsin,
"an act of considerable decisiveness." Except for those who are
economically
dependent on politics--government employees and their families--voters
in
primaries are expressing conviction beyond the conventional call of
civic
virtue. There are high-minded campaigns to get people out to "vote for
the
party of their choice," but very few to get them to vote in their
parties.
The President and others may say that a twenty- or thirty-per-cent vote
for
Wallace is nothing to get alarmed about, nothing to make the teeth
rattle.
But there would be a deafening rattle of teeth if ever there were a
thirty-per-cent vote--or a twenty- or a ten-per-cent vote--for a
Communist
candidate in either a general election or a primary election, or even in
the
most unreliable straw poll. J. Edgar Hoover would submit an F.B.I. budget
at
least as large as that of the Defense Department. Congressmen would be
trampling one another in the rush to get anti-sedition bills into the
legislative hopper. The "issue" that would thus be created would
displace
all others. There might be slightly less havoc if a spokesman for a
black-supremacy movement made as much political headway among Negroes as
Wallace evidently has among whites, but there would be havoc enough. The
most striking thing about the Wallace performance is, of course, the
performance itself. But the next most striking thing is that it really
hasn’t
caused much alarm and appears unlikely to have much of an impact on
events.
This, too, is a surprise. It had been clear for months that the
increased
militancy of the Negro organizations and the agitation to codify and
establish by statute those "rights" that the courts hold are already part
of
the law (all the current legislation is really aimed at the elimination
of
civil "wrongs") would breed resistance in the North as well as in the
South.
Not many people thought in terms of a large primary vote for Governor
Wallace, but quite a few supposed that congressmen from northern cities
and
suburban districts would get a bit edgy when they learned that many
white
plumbers didn’t look forward to working side by side with Negro plumbers
and
that homeowners might come down on the wrong side when property values
and
human values were in conflict. The nonce word for this was "backlash,"
and
it was feared that it would endanger the civil-rights bill to which
President Kennedy gave the highest legislative priority last June. The
late
President and his brother were so fearful of this backlash that they
pleaded
with the liberal leadership in Congress not to send to the floor as
strong a
bill as the one it did eventually propose. On the evidence thus far
available, these particular fears were groundless. Most of the expected
reactions in time materialized, but a strong bill passed the House with
ease
and, despite Governor Wallace, is expected to pass the Senate more or
less
intact. If it should fail in the Senate, it will be not because of the
backlash or because of Governor Wallace but because the rules under
which
the Senate operates make it difficult for even a substantial majority to
prevail.
The size of the Wallace vote has shocked and surprised most people here,
which may demonstrate how far out of touch with reality Washington may
be.
On the other hand, the reaction may demonstrate a kind of political
sophistication that many thought was lacking in this community. It is a
serious problem for any society when disaffection rises to the point
where
twenty or thirty per cent of the people (there is really not much reason
to
suppose that bigotry and racial hatred are less widespread in the
population
as a whole than among Democratic voters) will lend their support to a
subversive figure. But there is plenty of evidence that sound policy and
prudent leadership can deal with problems of this sort. For reasons that
have to do with our whole history and outlook, we would almost certainly
become badly unstrung if there were suddenly a sizable Bolshevik
movement;
our years of isolation and inviolable nationalism have given us a
particular
horror of movements led by or associated with foreigners. But several
free
and flourishing societies in Europe have survived long periods when
Communist blocs commanded the loyalty of at least as many people as might
be
inclined to support Governor Wallace. The test is whether a large
minority
can so unsettle a majority or its leaders as to deflect the majority
from
its purposes. Thus far, nothing of the sort seems to be happening here.
The
civil-rights bill is not yet sure of passage, but it is closer to it
than
anyone thought it would be at the beginning of the year.
The Wallace vote remains a fact of certain significance, even though it
is
of uncertain consequence and perhaps of no direct political consequence.
It
cannot be stripped of all unpleasantness and made a mere expression of
pique, eccentricity, or generalized political frustration. It was a
large
vote for a man who stands for an ugly doctrine, even if he does not
proclaim
it in every speech, and it may somehow increase the prospects for racial
violence in the months and years ahead. It says something about the
nature
and force of bigotry in this period, however, that the most impressive
demonstration of it has been made in a vote, on ballots marked by
individuals. There is in the North no party of bigotry, and no organized
faction in either party. As far as is known, the organized groups
outside
the parties are feeble and are themselves torn by factionalism. And there
is
the topsy-turviness of the whole situation, which can lead some people
to
vote for a segregationist on one line and an integrationist on another,
to
favor a man because he is named Kennedy and because he is opposed to most
of
what the name is generally understood to imply. The bigotry exists and
is
alarming, but it seems a bit short of obsessive. If it can be released
and
contained in the voting booth, it can be endured, and we can count
ourselves
lucky.
